Containing the Spectacle of Punishment: The Russian Autocracy and the Abolition of the Knout, 1817-1845

Abstract

In 1817, Russian authorities apprehended six Tatar brigands in the port town of Feodosiia in the Crimea. Convicted of murdering seventeen people and of stealing from and desecrating a Christian church, the six were sentenced in April by the local civil and criminal court to punishment by knout–the harshest instrument of corporal punishment used in Russia. The knout consisted of a stiff thong of rawhide fastened by a bronze ring to a braided leather whip of approximately three and a half feet in length; this apparatus was attached to a wooden stick of two and a half feet that the executioner wielded. Following the knouting, the court authorized the executioner to rip out the nostrils and brand the faces of the Tatars, who were then to be dispatched into eternal exile at hard labor in the mines of eastern Siberia. Because the local court deemed these criminals especially dangerous, and because their apprehension and conviction ostensibly reinforced Russian leadership in the province, the court decreed that the knouting of the criminals be carried out in a variety of locations across the province, rather than in a single place.