In his recent survey of Russian history from 1676 to 1825 Simon Dixon writes that “there is no full-scale study of any eighteenth-century court”.^[1] That is happily no longer the case, if we stretch the meaning of court to include a special tribunal. In The Rack and the Knout Evgenii V. Anisimov, author of several major works on the period, presents the fruit of years of research into the dealings of one of the empire’s most important institutions, namely the Secret Chancellery, or Chancellery of Secret Inquisitorial Affairs (here: KTRD), originally set up in 1718 by Peter I to prepare the case against his renegade son Alexei. Anticipated earlier in the reign by the better known Preobrazhenskii prikaz,^[2] and briefly suspended from 1726 to 1731, it lingered on until 1762, to be succeeded by a Secret Expedition that applied rather less sinister practices.
This massive study is based primarily on the relevant archive holdings in RGADA, supplemented by a comprehensive coverage of the numerous (but usually brief and journalistic) studies published from the 1860s onward; the total bibliography runs to over 800 items. The files on many dozens of cases are here carefully scrutinised for evidence as to what was perceived as political (anti-state) crime, the procedure for investigating delators and those unfortunates whom they denounced, and the penalties imposed. These ranged from the most excruciating forms of capital punishment, through flagellation with the knout, followed by exile with or without hard labour (katorga), to – in the case of privileged servitors – temporary relegation from court society to their estates. Torture, which inflicted gross physical mutilation, was a standard feature both of the investigation (rozysk) and the penalty. Not many suspects were acquitted; but rewards, pecuniary or otherwise, were given to those relatively few delators whose charges were found to be substantiated. This was (at least until 1762) a pre-modern, pre-rational age and the real threats to state security (in contemporary terms, threats on the life or health of the Sovereign, insurrection or treason; in bureaucratic jargon, “the first two points”) were neither assessed nor dealt with efficiently – let alone in conformity with natural justice. As Anisimov makes abundantly clear, in this pre-Enlightened era Russia was ruled despotically; the will of the Autocrat was the sole source of law; previous decrees were as yet uncollected, often contradictory, and largely unknown; and officials devoid of legal training were neither capable of interpreting the law nor authorised to do so. Needless to say, the whole enterprise was enshrouded in secrecy.
It is thus wrong, although a scarcely avoidable error, to approach this judicial system with modern notions based on the rights of the citizen-subject or the merits of non-violent conflict resolution. At the time what mattered was adherence to bureaucratic formalities and precedents, hierarchical subordination, and above all a superstitious reverence for the person of the Sovereign, seen as a semi-divine figure embodying the highest interests and aspirations of the Orthodox community (= society).
One would have relished more from the author’s pen on the psycho-social aspects of criminal justice in Petrine and post-Petrine Russia. There is scarcely a trace in these pages of late twentieth-century Western thinking about early modern penology, with its “Foucaultian” anthropological approach, which some practitioners have admittedly taken to excess.^[3] Instead this work, which was evidently written during the “era of stagnation”, stands in the best traditions of the pre-revolutionary “juridical school”, and that is certainly nothing to be ashamed of.
Apart from the ‘failing’ just mentioned, there are two other shortcomings in Anisimov’s approach. One is a reluctance to situate the “exceptional justice” dispensed by the security organs in the context of law enforcement generally, so that we are left in the dark just how special it was. After all, we know that the Senate, provincial governors and voivodes were all hard at work in these years ordering criminal offenders to be knouted and exiled, just as the Holy Synod was cheerfully meting out condign punishment to Old Believer “heretics”, sectarians and religious apostates; and it was a rare landowner who did not chastise his serf dependants, usually in the stables; as is well known, in 1760 Elizaveta Petrovna allowed them to be sent into Siberian exile instead of being given as recruits. Anisimov refers quite frequently to criminal cases (which were not rigidly segregated from political ones), but one needs clearer and more systematic treatment of the institutional interrelationships, along with a comparison of the procedures and penalties employed. Moreover, the KTRD was not the only exceptional tribunal in the land: the 1716 and 1720 Military and Naval Statutes set up courts-martial and other judicial bodies which regularly sentenced men in the armed forces to equally cruel penalties, such as running the gauntlet, for even minor infractions of the disciplinary code.^[4] Professor Anisimov might well respond that all this would require another book: point well taken!
Another shortcoming, no doubt explicable in terms of the work’s gestation, is the absence of a comparative dimension: how were similar threats to the absolutist order handled in other European states? This, too, is admittedly a task for the future. But to assess the KTRD’s operations properly, one has to look abroad. So far as I am aware, it had no contemporary European equivalent, so that we would need to go back to the days of the Inquisition.^[5] This of course involved the ecclesiastical along with the state authorities in the mechanism of repression, but dealt with some of the same kinds of cases (notably, witchcraft) as the KTRD. And then there are the “oriental despotisms” (Wittfogel), such as the Chinese…
A similar point might be made in regard to the Russian borderlands. Notwithstanding the centralism of the absolutist order, there were variations in the way officials acted in, for example, the Baltic provinces, the Hetmanate and the cossack regions. It is conceivable that the case of Yevgraf Gruzinov, an ex-guards officer beaten to death by order in 1801, may have had more to do with his Don cossack background (and desire for greater autonomy) than with the whims of the emperor Paul.^[6] The latter ruler would have deserved more attention than he gets here, since his reign was marked by the increased use of exceptional legal procedures. However, Anisimov does grant us an occasional look ahead to the early nineteenth century, where necessary, just as he refers back to the Muscovite antecedents.
These niggling criticisms should not detract from appreciation of the author’s signal achievement. For the lay reader the particular “charm” of this volume will probably lie in the extensive citations from case material, which allow one to picture the milieu inhabited by a host of colourful individuals from all social classes who had the misfortune to be embroiled in these tribunals’ proceedings, whether as suspects, witnesses, or – above all – delators (izvetchiki). They expressed themselves in vivid if archaic vocabulary (whose meaning is explained). One run-of-the-mill example must suffice:

On 11 May 1725 the KTRD, permitting some prisoners in the SS. Peter and Paul fortress prison to attend a service in the cathedral, specified: “the defrocked cleric (rosstriga) Yakov Nikitin shall be allowed up to the church, since he wants to confess, and stand in the porch, and if the church doors are closed he may be [allowed] in the church and to stand close to the doors, but do not let him close to the other prisoners, and do not let him say anything.” (292)

One can almost visualise the officers and their fine ladies looking nervously over their shoulders at the unfortunate Yakov clanking his chains behind them.
Without an index it is hard to reconstruct the narrative of the actors in these historical dramas, for the records have here been sliced up for analysis according to the successive stages of their ordeal. Such a thematic approach is of course quite logical, but apart from the inconvenience mentioned it leads to a good deal of repetition.
Proceedings were normally instituted by denunciation. Eighteenth-century Russia was a fear-ridden society in which neighbour spied on neighbour and domestics on their masters: “every word by a seignior, wherever it was spoken – in the fields, in the toilet, at table, in bed with his wife – was listened to and remembered, sometimes noted down, by their servants” (192). The populace unthinkingly accepted such conduct as the norm, and there was no lack of situations that gave people an opportunity to get their own back on rivals or enemies. It was an offence to discuss, even in the most innocuous terms, the character or conduct of any member of the ruling dynasty. Especially exposed to danger were unfortunate copyists who missed out a word when transcribing the Imperial title, for this immediately aroused suspicion of subversive intent; LeDonne calls this “voodoo behaviour, attributing to an inanimate object the life of its subject”.^[7] The so-called “Sovereign’s words” (slovo i delo Gosudarevo) might typically be uttered by a peasant worsted in a drunken brawl or a soldier scourged for some petty offence. Anyone hearing the phrase was duty bound to help arrest all those involved, including witnesses, who were hauled off to the dreaded KTRD. Failure to denounce was also a crime, and so too was delation without due cause. The subtleties of the situations in which people often found themselves are explored here with discernment. The pressure of routine police work deflected the authorities from devising intelligent means of countering genuine threats. A preventive policy seems to have originated with Catherine II, who introduced the (enduring!) practice of asking for reports on public opinion (251); the habit of spying on the (diplomatic) mail, however, was older.
The investigatory process began with formal questioning (rasspros) of the prisoner, conducted under the threat of torture, which was however applied if his statement was not thought credible. The authorities did try to establish the truth, but were hampered by the coercive methods they used. The accused had to prove his innocence in ignorance of the delator’s allegations, and only a confession was regarded as convincing proof. Officials arranged confrontations between the parties and witnesses, and if these showed the charge to be false the case would be closed – but with penalties inflicted on any prisoner deemed to have told an untruth. One interesting feature, which deserves elaboration, was that delators were traditionally the first to be tortured (i.e., knouted) (345); this was presumably designed to deter false allegations. In recent years the whole question of denunciation has become a subject of keen historical enquiry, and Anisimov’s findings add materially to our knowledge of it.^[8]
Not every reader will have the stomach to face chapter 7 (391-464), which explores in grisly detail just what was meant by the terms in the book’s title. Yet this information is historically important. Students of early modern penology will appreciate the care taken here to specify the precise circumstances in which physical violence was applied and its various degrees. Formal rules were adhered to, but in the nature of things the victim’s survival depended on the will (and skill) of the “professional” zaplechnyi master who inflicted it. So torture was essentially an arbitrary as well as an inhuman practice, and it was applied liberally to individuals innocent of any serious offence, who had not been properly tried. Whether the KTRD’s methods were more cruel than those applied elsewhere is beside the point; more significant was the ability of some victims, mainly from the privileged classes, to obtain easement of their lot by bribing their tormentors.
Was this perhaps a factor in bringing about the institution’s decline? Anisimov does not consider this possibility, but instead points out, reasonably enough, that the initiative in penal reform lay with the relatively enlightened Catherine II and a half-dozen close advisors who, having read Beccaria, were far ahead of the rest of their compatriots; moreover, it is her much decried consort, Peter III, who deserves the credit for abolishing the KTRD early in 1762. Even Elizaveta Petrovna (1741-61) took some hesitant but not negligible steps towards humanisation of justice, although her motives were of a different order than her successors’; they were reflected in a code drafted, but not implemented, in 1754.
Anisimov does not offer a systematic appreciation of these endeavours and tends to downplay the significance of the changes initiated in 1762. It is clear, however, from the relatively few cases he cites from the later eighteenth century (Pugachev and associates, Vinsky, Novikov, Radishchev…) that the ethos underlying the protection of state security had changed and that the successor institution’s social impact was considerably slighter, even if there was also a degree of continuity in its methods. “It was not until 6 April 1775, after suppression of the Pugachev revolt and the execution of the rebels, that capital punishment was de facto replaced by the knout” (521). But it was – and later something was done to attenuate harsh penal sanctions in the military, too.
The last chapters of the book lead us through the sentencing procedure in political cases, the various ways in which the death penalty was administered, the exile system, and the Sovereign’s prerogative of mercy. We are reminded that the miserable creatures condemned to tread the Siberian trakt, which for the most serious offenders led to the Nerchinsk silver mines, had previously been knouted and branded – i.e., so gravely mutilated that a good many succumbed; one quarter of those sentenced to this penalty had their nostrils torn. Remarkably, some who survived learned the use of folk medicinal cures to heal these terrible wounds, even to the point of carrying out skin grafts (577). Typically, when the authorities found out they ordered the men to be branded again. As late as 1846 the Medical Council issued a detailed instruction on branding which “gives one the horrific sensation obtained from reading Franz Kafka’s The Execution” (583). The enforced implication of medical practitioners in the administration of barbarous penalties is a topic that deserves attention by historians of science. Last but not least, Anisimov directs attention to the practice – which diminished over the years – of confiscating on behalf of the Crown the property of convicted (political) offenders. This is important in the context of the controversy as to how far the Imperial Russian state order should still be seen as “patrimonial”, ultimate ownership being vested in the ruler.
How many victims were there? By twentieth-century standards the figures seem trivial: in 1732-3, the best documented years and a time of heightened repression, the KTRD sentenced 395 individuals; of these 17 went to the scaffold and 133 suffered the knout, of whom 80 were then sent into exile; most of the remainder got a whipping (716, Tables 1-2). However, the statistical data, as Anisimov wisely warns us, are very defective, and to gain a proper picture we would need data for all sentencing agencies. Manstein’s figure, often repeated, of 20,000 opponents exiled under Anna Ioannovna is clearly exaggerated (as has indeed long been known); the KTRD investigated only one tenth as many cases in that decade, involving perhaps 6,600 individuals. For the eighty-year span 1715-1790s, Anisimov calculates, about 49,000 people were arrested in connection with security matters (680) – this out of a population numbering about 36 million at the end of the century.
“It would be hypocritical”, he states in his introduction, “to believe that, when working on this book, I did not think about our country’s recent past” (10). Exercising proper scholarly restraint, he waits until the final page before offering some thoughts about long-term continuities. It would be hard to show a direct link between the violent excesses of the Petrine and Stalinist states, and this is not his contention. Rather an indirect link, in bureaucratic habits of mind and in popular attitudes toward authority, may have existed – although other factors, such as totalitarian ideologies and modern technologies, are clearly involved as well. Far more productive than a long-range inter-generational approach is, as already indicated, an “inter-cultural” one within the same approximate time-span, and here Anisimov’s magisterial study will surely point the way to future researchers. They would be well advised to take due account of the writers of the anthropological school, who in turn should stop ignoring Russia and Eastern Europe. Having said this, and paradoxical as it may seem, Anisimov’s catalogue of brutality and injustice is a major contribution to the literature on the never-ending struggle to respect human rights world-wide.