Criminal liability for suicide in the law of pre-Petrine Russia

Veliev Artem Ernestovich ORCID: 0000-0003-3548-6461 PhD student, Department of Criminal Law, Volgograd State University 400062, Russia, Volgograd region, Volgograd, Universitetskiy ave., 100 aeveliev@ya.ru

Despite the efforts being made, Russia still remains one of the world leaders in the number of suicides per capita, which leads to the intensification of criminal law policy in the field of countering suicidal behavior. Meanwhile, despite the surge of interest in this topic, its historical aspects remain insufficiently studied, which especially concerns the pre-Petrine period.

Little is known about the attitude of the Slavs to suicide before the adoption of Christianity. In fact, the only reliable evidence of suicide is the so-called custom of wives dying during the funeral of their spouses described by a number of contemporaries.

So, in the Strategicon of Mauritius, written at the end of the VI-beginning of the VII century, among other information about the Old Slavic tribes, there is this: "The modesty of their women exceeds any human nature, so that most of them consider the death of their husband their death and voluntarily suffocate themselves, not counting being widowed for life"^{[1, p. 243]}.

In a later work by the Persian geographer Ibn Rusta, the funeral customs of the Slavs of the end of the IX century are described in a similar way: "When someone dies with them, his corpse is burned. Women, when they have a dead man, scratch their hands and faces with a knife... And if the deceased had three wives and one of them claims that she especially loved him, then she brings two pillars to his corpse, they are driven upright into the ground, then they put the third pillar across, tie a rope in the middle of this crossbar, she stands on a bench and ties the end (of the rope) around her neck. After she does this, the bench is removed from under her and she remains hanging until she suffocates and dies, after which she is thrown into the fire, where she burns" ^{[1, p. 293]}.

Although it does not follow from these testimonies that suicide was acceptable in other situations, in any case, it can be concluded that it was not an absolute taboo.

The perception of suicide began to change with the arrival of Christianity in Russia, according to the norms of which suicides who were in a sane state at the time of depriving themselves of life were ordered to be deprived of a funeral service. The canonical law of the Russian Church has received a negative attitude to suicide from Byzantine sources, which is confirmed by the circulation in Russia of many Nomocanon lists, where authoritative opinions about suicide can be found already in the earliest manuscript collections of the pre-Mongol period ^{[2, p. 67]}.

The negative assessment of suicide on the part of the clergy was also superimposed on the popular belief that those who died an unnatural death brought upon themselves the punishment of God, so they cannot be buried without sinning before God, who otherwise could send disaster to the entire community. And if, from the point of view of church canons, the consequence of such an act should only be a refusal to hold a funeral, the customs of that time did not allow for a simple burial of the body to the earth.

Evidence of this can be found, for example, in the teaching of Serapion of Vladimir, written around 1274: "And in our summer there is no evil: there are many troubles and sorrows, armies, famine, from filthy violence. But we will not change our evil customs in any way; now you see the wrath of God and command: if you bury a strangler or a drowned man, do not destroy these people, rake them out. Oh, the evil madness! Oh, little faith! Be full of evil fulfillment, we do not repent about it. The flood was not about the strangled man, nor about the drowned man, but for human untruths, and other executions beschisleny... O man, is this your repentance? Are you begging God that you have drowned or strangled yourself? Do you want to calm God's execution with this? Better, brethren, let us cease from evil" ^{[3, appendix, p. 14]}.

From the above passage it is clear not only that in Russia there was a practice of raking the mortgaged dead from the graves, but also that the clergy did not share such superstitions and tried to fight them.

D. K. Zelenin considered the burial of the dead in squalid houses (also known as bozhedomki or skudelnitsy) to be a compromise between the described ideas about burial^{[4, p. 95]}. In accordance with this custom, those who died an unclean death were not buried or buried in the ground, but instead were put in large pits, over which a wooden structure was built, and they fell asleep only on the Seventh — seventh Thursday after Easter. This practice is evidenced, in particular, by a charter granted in 1629 to the Arzamas Transfiguration Monastery by Patriarch Filaret, and subsequently also confirmed by Patriarchs Joasaph and Joseph, in which, among other things, when mentioning the collection of funeral duties from peasants, a special reservation is made: "and bury them those people over whom he is an early death, someone will choke on a bite, or someone will stab someone with a knife, or will be killed from a tree, or drown without bathing, or will die a poisoned death, and not poison himself, bury those at the church of God and have a funeral over them as over other Christians; and which person will get drunk on wine, or strangle, or be stabbed, or he will kill himself from the swing, or drown himself, or poison himself, or some other evil he will do to himself, and do not bury those of the church of God and do not sing a funeral over them, tell them to put them in poor houses, and bury them for hryvnia" (here and further highlighted by me)^{[5, p. 269]}.

Given the enormous importance of the norms of customs and canon law in the society of that time, as well as their certain similarity with some government regulations in Western Europe, the history of responsibility for suicide in Russia can be conducted starting with the practices described above.

It should also be noted that up to the XVIII century, sanctions for suicide remained the subject of canon law and legal consequences on the part of the princely and, later, the tsarist authorities did not entail. Thus, the first normative legal act issued by the secular authorities, which touches on the problems of suicide, is, apparently, the Church Charter of Prince Yaroslav, dated by various researchers in the range from the XI to the XIII century. This monument of law, however, provided for liability not in relation to a suicide, but in relation to his or her parents in cases where their actions became a reason for suicide. Despite the fact that the Charter was issued by the secular authorities, in fact it authorized the transfer of the right to decide on the punishment of parents for the suicide of their children to the exclusive competence of the church. So, regarding cases of coercion of children by parents to marry, Article 29 of the Lengthy version of the Charter states: "If the girl does not get married, then the father and mother will give by force. And what a girl does to herself, then the father and mother of the metropolitan are in fault" ^{[6, p. 191]}. A similar rule in a slightly modified form takes place in Article 24 of the Short Version of the Charter: "Even if the girl does not want to get married, but the father and mother will give by force, and what to do over themselves — the father and mother to the bishop in wine, and the story [the costs of preparing for the wedding] will be paid. So is the boy"^{[6, p. 169]}. A similar provision is enshrined in article 33 of the Short version, but here responsibility for the suicide of the offspring was established for those cases when suicide was committed, on the contrary, because of coercion to marry: "Even a girl wants to get married, and the father and mother will not give, and what to do, the bishop is the fault of the father and mother. So is the boy"^{[6, p. 170]}. Interestingly, in the Yaroslavl list of the Statute, the provision "to the bishop in guilt" in this, as in most other articles, there is an addition "and the prince executes", which is associated with the tendency to expand the princely jurisdiction in cases that traditionally belonged to the ecclesiastical court ^{[7, pp. 244-245] [7, p. 256]}. Nevertheless, in this case, it remains unclear how the prince could have carried out the punishment imposed by the bishop, given that this article, unlike most others, did not provide for property punishment.

In Russian science, it has been widely claimed that the term "murder", used in the monuments of the legislation of Moscow Russia, establishing responsibility for murder, also refers to suicide (see, for example, ^{[8, p. 18],[9, p. 74]}). However, with a more critical study of this thesis, it is necessary to state its fallacy. It is obvious that in the case of complete identity of murder and suicide in the legal consciousness of people of that era, suicide would have to entail the same legal consequences as the intentional deprivation of another person's life. Nevertheless, there is no information about the existence in Russian history of similar Western European secular trials over the bodies of those who died by their own hand or over persons who attempted suicide. In addition, given that the punishment for non-violent murder during the period under review was a vira, i.e. a monetary fine, punishment for suicide under the rules on responsibility for murder would simply be impossible due to the absence of the subject of the crime himself alive.

Dated to the middle of the XV century, the "Record of Murder", despite the frequent mention in the works on the history of criminal legal counteraction to suicidal behavior as a document equating suicide to murder (see, for example, ^{[10, p. 105],[11, p. 30]}), is a monument of procedural law at all, devoted, for the most part, to the issues of establishing the jurisdiction of certain categories of cases, and in itself does not contain any substantive legal regulation of suicide issues (as well as mentions of it in principle).

The erroneous attribution of the Record of murder to the number of sources containing norms aimed at preventing suicide, apparently originates in the commentary to Article 1 of the "Record", published in 1985 in the second volume of the collection of Russian legislation of the X-XX centuries edited by A. D. Gorsky: "Murder at the time under consideration was not understood not only murder, but also suicide (from his own hands will be lost), as well as sudden (without repentance of sins) death as a result of an accident"^{[12, p. 189]}. It should be noted that even here there is no question of the legal identity of the "Record" of suicide to murder, but this did not prevent confusion from arising, which found a prominent place in various publications on the relevant topic.

Thus, the claims of individual authors that the "Record" allegedly contained certain norms equating suicide to murder are not true. It was not possible to find such norms in other acts of the era in question. On the contrary, there are a considerable number of monuments of law, where a clear line is drawn between murder and death from other causes, including suicide.

So, in the Charter of the zemstvo Charter of the volosts of Malaya Penezhka, Vyyskaya and Sura of the Dvinsky district from 1552, various legal consequences between murder and "a simple case", i.e. death from causes that do not generate criminal legal relations, are directly established: "And not to find a person in which murder is murder, but will be a simple case, which is murder, someone will get lost from their hands, or get cold, or drown, or burn, or who will swim in water, or who will kill a man in a tree, or who will erase a cow, or kill with thunder, or whom an animal will eat, or who will poke a dead unknown person, and will search that artlessly, and they then show their favorite heads yes, they bury the dead, but there is no sale for them from anyone" ^{[6, pp. 230-231]}. The above norm introduces an exception to the rule on wild vira — a fine paid by the whole community in case of non-extradition to the authorities of a person guilty of committing murder.

Provided it was proved that the deceased died a nonviolent death, the community was not punished for finding a dead body within its lands.

This example is not the only one — similar regulations find a place in a variety of statutory instruments issued from the middle of the XV to the beginning of the XVII century and regulated local government in the relevant territories. So, N. P. Zagoskin, who studied and brought together the contents of fifteen charters, found parallel places dedicated to the release of the community from paying wild vira for the bodies of those who died from causes that do not entail criminal responsibility (including suicides), in twelve of them, namely: in Belozerskaya 1488, Pereyaslav fishermen 1506 of the year, the Artemonovsky camp to the peasants in 1506, the Kamensky camp to the beavers in 1509, the village of Vysotsky in 1536, Onega in 1536, the Ilmekhotsky camp to the borovniki in 1537, Perm in 1553, Afanasievsky and Vasilevsky villages in 1554, Borisoglebskaya Sloboda in 1584, Ustyuzhno-Zhelezopolskaya in 1614, and the Dvina era of Ivan IV^{[13, p. 51-53][13, p. 144]}.

In addition to the letters examined in the work of N. P. Zagoskin, a similar clause can be found in other sources of this kind. For example, in the charter granted to the abbot of the Vyazhishch monastery in 1510^{[14, p. 16]}, on the possessions of the Spaso-Evfimiev Monastery in 1551^{[15, p. 547]}, the above-mentioned charter to the peasants of the three volosts of the Dvinsky district in 1552^{[6, p. 230-231]}, issued no earlier than 1621 by decree of Mikhail Fedorovich, the code about the Yamskaya chase and the Yamsky settlements^{[16, pp. 105-107]}, etc.

Finally, it makes sense to say about another monument of pre-Petrine law, in which, although in passing, suicide is also mentioned.

During the years of Turmoil, under False Dmitry I or Vasily Shuisky (and possibly with the participation of both), a single code of laws was compiled, in which the normative acts issued after the release of the 1550 and 1589 Judicial Books were codified. Subsequently, the name "Consolidated Court Book" was assigned to him (see ^[17]).

In chapters 141-146 of facet 22 of this document, a ban was established on taking an oath with kissing the cross, both false (nakriva) and true (direction). The punishment for this offense was provided in the form of penance imposed on the sinner by the priest, with the prohibition of the latter to let the guilty into the temple, to commemorate on liturgies, go to their homes and take offerings. In order to motivate the priesthood to impose such a serious penalty, chapter 146 of the Judicial Code promises priests who have not fulfilled this duty the same fate as those who have sworn to kiss the cross themselves, the severity of whose sin is put on a par with heretics and suicides, who are waiting for eternal torment: "... if you become a priest, you come to the houses, or tell them to come to the church: you will receive the common torment yourself, the fiery hell, and the pitch darkness, you will become a heretic and a heretic, or someone will put it on himself, so he will strangle them from his hands, they will all receive the same flour at the second coming of Christ, do not repent without an answer, then they went to eternal torment, — and you, priests, calm them down, punish them and teach them, when you are told to knit and decide, do not be ashamed of your face from them"^{[18, pp. 358-359]}.A similar provision is contained in the Decree on the Kissing of the Cross of 1558, which, apparently, is the basis of the corresponding facet of the Consolidated Code of Justice: "If you, the priest, come to the houses of the company or tell them to go to church, then you will receive evil torment with them and a fiery geona and a pitch darkness, a mouthpiece and a heretic, or a strangler from their own hands, and they fall to death on their own hands; then they will all receive the three torments, and at the second coming they will not repent, without an answer they will go to eternal torment" (cit.

according to: ^{[19, p. 511]}; see also: ^[20]).

The Consolidated Judicial Code, apparently, has not been officially approved, but it is interesting in two aspects. On the one hand, it shows that suicide was considered not just as an act worthy of condemnation, but was also put on a par with the gravest sins, and in a source of law sanctioned by the supreme authority. On the other hand, the fact that in such a large-scale collection of government laws, the only mention of suicide is not associated with any secular sanctions, confirms that suicide, although socially reprehensible, was not prosecuted by the civil authorities.

In the future, the content of the Decree was also taken into account when drafting the Council Code of 1649 — norms similar in content found a place in Chapter XIV — however, in this edition there is no mention of suicides: the legislator limited himself to promises of eternal torment to those who directly violated the oath, without drawing parallels with the fate of other sinners.

Summarizing the above, we can conclude that in pre-Petrine Russia there never existed secular legal norms that would establish responsibility directly for suicide. Nevertheless, since the baptism of Rus, suicide has been a socially reprehensible phenomenon, which, among other things, was reflected in the regulations issued by the government. Independent secular responsibility for suicide will be established only as a result of Peter the Great's reception of Western European legal institutions, which will mark the beginning of a new stage in the development of legal means to counter suicidal behavior.