Criminal law on perjury in pre-revolutionary Russia

Modern criminal law of perjury is a result of a long evolution of regulations, judicial and investigative practices, and criminal law doctrine. The first rules for liability of the false accusation before the court had resulted in the payment of one hryvnia to a representative of prince's power appeared in an ancient legal monument - ''Russkaya Pravda'' (Russian Truth). But a little later the role of evidence increases, which results in more severe penalties for giving false testimony. Thus, Article 50 in the Sudebnik (Law Book) of 1497 established a significant fine for failure to take the stand. Many provisions of the Sudebnik of 1497 were accepted and developed in the following Sudebnik of 1550, which was supplemented with a new article on the research question: the establishment of trade execution of witnesses for perjury, which consisted in beating them with a whip in the market place. The next stage in the development of legislation is connected with the emergence of county charters, which also mentioned perjury. The need for further improvement of legislation led to the Council Code of 1649, which is the first Russian printed systematic law that included provisions relating to all spheres of law. By the beginning of Peter I's reforms the pre-revolutionary Russian legislation provided for a system of rigid sanctions for perjury, which included both monetary and corporal punishment, not to mention death penalty. During Peter I's the reign, on purely formal grounds the law excluded from witnesses a rather wide range of people, considering them a priori incapable of telling the truth. The Code of Criminal and Correctional Penalties of 1845 considered a separate offense the witness's refusal from swearing in (Art. 239), sentencing them with a detention for a period of three weeks to three months. The judicial reform of 1864 was the most important component of the Great Reforms of the 1860s, which created not only a perfect system of justice, but also concerned reforming some legal institutions. It should be noted that the law of the time, the Statute of Criminal Procedure of 1864, did not contain any definition of perjury, so establishing this basic concept and crimes connected with it was the matter of the court. The Criminal Code of 1903 fixed liability for perjury, forgery or giving false evidence to the court, etc. We conclude that perjury in all the historical periods of Tsarist Russia was a punishable offense, the differences were, by and large, only in types of punishment. Perjury was a risk to justice. Therefore, perjury was regarded primarily as a crime against justice, and the fact that a religious oath made before court was broken classified it as a religious crime.

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