Council code and the socio-political evolution of Russia in the second half of the 17th century

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the place of the Sobornoje Ulogenie Code in the evolution of social institutions in Russia by studying the legislative activity of the government and administrative practices. The purpose of the study is to find out where the gap lay to a greater extent, and where the continuity can be traced in the system of state building and law - between the law of the 1620s-1640s. and the Code, or between the Code and the law of the second half of the XVII century. It is concluded that the continuity can be traced to a greater extent between the law of the 1620s-1640s. and the Council Code, which inherited from the previous legislation a set of legal norms that were revised and generalized in the new code of laws. The legal norms of the Code and new decree articles, including the concept of a crime against the state, a ban on the reception of fugitives, and the reconstruction of settlements, adopted in the second half of the 17th century, were formed by reworking the previous legislation. The evolution of the system of state building and the legal registration of the social class structure of society in the second half of the 17th century was of a discrete nature. Many essential segments of law in the Code are declarative and lack legal and technical tools: the proclaimed indefinite investigation of fugitive peasants could not be effectively implemented without an established system of state investigation, which arose only in the 1660s. The vast majority of articles of the Code were significantly changed in the legislation of the second half of the 17th century; these changes affected the norms describing the estate-class structure of society, including the forms of exercising the rights of the ruling elite to serfs, the rights and status of townspeople and other categories of taxable people.