Crimes and punishments

Many notions that regulated relationships between people in tribalism were transferred to the state. First of all, it's ascribed to the notion “crime”, which according to Russkaya Pravda was interpreted as “offence” that causes certain money and moral damage.

Russkaya Pravda knew the following types of crimes:

- crimes against a person (murder, injury, beating, contumely, assault);

- crimes against property (arson, robbery, unlawful use of another's property, defacement of monuments);

- crimes against morally and family (rape, debauchery, polygamy, illegal divorce);

- crimes against church (witchcraft, church theft e.g.);

- crimes against state (transfer to the enemy's side, all crimes against prince and his property, prince's administration).

System of punishments according to Russkaya Pravda was rather simple and included the following types: wholesale pillage and fines.

Reparation of damages was also exercised with the help of fines, which were called: golovnichestvo, urok, refund of stolen things.

Giving over to wholesale pillage was the extreme penalty according to Russkaya Pravda. The main point was in expulsion of the offender and his family from the community and confiscation of his property in favour of the community. Later, the wholesale pillage was meant as a physical reprisal and the confiscation of the property. This punishment was imposed in three cases: for murder at a robbery, for horse stealing and for arson.

Another punishment was wergild - a fine that was put only for a murder. Wergild was a money ban in favour of prince. It's important to point that Russkaya Pravda didn't provide death penalty. But it didn't mean that it wasn't done on practice. First of all, feud existed in Kievan Rus’ for a certain period of time. There also existed an article that allowed killing a thief in case he was captured at night, on the locus delicti or in case of resistance from his side. If the thief had been killed tight up or beyond the yard where he committed the crime - the murderer was a subject of a punishment.

During the rule of Vladimir Svyatoslavovich for criminals there was determined a death penalty, but not for long, as its application negatively affected prince's revenues.

Russkaya Pravda begins with an article prescribing the degrees of kinship within which blood vengeance is permissible ('a brother may avenge [the murder of] his brother, or a son his father, or a father his son, or a brother's son or a sister's son [their uncle]) [3, 84].