Peter the Great, along with the fruits of European civilization, transferred cruel European laws to Russia. His famous Military Articles, a compilation of Saxon rights and constitutions, contain 100 types and subtypes of crimes subject to the death penalty. True, purely special military crimes occupy an important place in this law. But it, as a mandatory law for civil courts, also speaks of all general crimes. Without going into detailed calculations, we will focus on more unimportant crimes subject to the death penalty. A list of them will give an idea of the historical situation of the death penalty in Russia at the beginning of the 19th century. Such crimes include: a) idolatry, witchcraft, gun conspiracy; b) bribing a sorcerer to harm another; c) failure to report blasphemy heard; d) the third blasphemy of God, even if it did not involve blasphemy in the proper sense, but occurred only out of frivolity; e) abuse of judges, resistance and opposition to them; f) unauthorized occupation of another apartment by someone dissatisfied with the allocated apartment; g) gatherings, at least not for bad purposes, but for drawing up a general petition; h) challenge to a duel and even taking part in it as seconds; i) reckless murder; j) assassination attempt
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to suicide; k) sodomy; m) incest; n) tearing down nailed down decrees.
After the publication of the military regulations, few laws appeared that established the death penalty for new crimes. Thus, Peter the Great confirmed the law on the death penalty for embezzlers and those who extort bribes from the people through oppression. This law was reinforced by the execution of three commissars: Artsibyshev, Baranov and Volotsky. During the reign of Catherine I, two laws were issued: the first was the death penalty for self-mutilation, with the aim of avoiding military service; the second, published in 1727, was prohibited under penalty of death. Mohammedans should convert other foreigners to their faith, such as: Mordovians, Chuvash, Cheremisov, Ostyakov, Votyakov, Lapps, etc.
Russian legislation, with the publication of Military Articles and the aforementioned additional decrees, actually exhausted all types of crimes that, according to the concepts of that time, could be imposed with the death penalty. After this, there was no possibility for legislation, even according to the concepts of that time, to follow the path of increasing the number of crimes threatened with the death penalty. If the laws of 1703, 1704 and 1705 they threaten the death penalty for cutting down one oak tree in a reserved forest, for selling rhubarb by a private individual, for allowing foreigners to go abroad without escorts with travel documents, for selling salt by contractors in violation of the prescribed rules - what else could be done to apply the death penalty.
This was the situation in which our legislation on the death penalty was when Empress Elisaveta Petrovna ascended the throne. Soon after her accession to the throne, she gave a personal decree to Field Marshal Lassius that death sentences in the army should not be carried out without submission for her approval. This decree has not reached us, or at least has not yet been found and made public. There is a reference to it in that famous decree of 1748, which also extended the rule to the entire population. So the first step in the abolition of the death penalty was that the Empress legitimized that not a single death sentence could be carried out without her approval. For 10 years, Empress Elizabeth did not approve a single death sentence. But fate
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yes the sentenced remained unresolved: they languished in painful anticipation in prisons. In 1753, the Senate, either by inspiration from above or on its own initiative, presented a report to the Empress, in which, pointing out the unusual accumulation of prisoners sentenced to death in prisons, and the need to determine the fate of both those already sentenced to death and those who might be sentenced in the future, it asked to approve the following rule in the form of a general resolution: all those sentenced within 10 years in death penalty and those subject to similar sentences in the future, punished with a whip, having their nostrils torn out, be exiled to Siberia for hard labor. Thus the visible abolition of the death penalty was accomplished.