306 constituted an important step toward a centralized court system. All crimes of a political nature were left to the adjudication of the Preobrazhenskii prikaz, thus making that prikaz an important instrument for the absolutist regime. It had jurisdiction throughout the country, and all central and local administrative organs were subject to its authority. N. B. Golikova, who investigated the activities of this new prikaz, therefore described it as the first really centralized administrative organ in Russian history. According to Golikova, the creation of the Preobrazhenskii prikaz also marked an advance in judicial administration, since it was a specialized court dealing with political crimes.**^ An attempt to codify the legislative materials, which had become so dispersed during the second half of the seventeenth century, was made in 1700. The intention was to publish a legal code that would apply equally to all administrative and judicial institutions. A commission referred to as the Palata o Ulozhenii was appointed and charged with the task of integrating the legislative acts {imennye nkazy, novoukaznye staPi, boiarskie prigovory) promulgated during the second half of the seventeenth century into the Code of 1649." Thus, the prikazy were instructed to submit their collections of ukazes to the commission, since these, together with the old law code, were to constitute the sources for the new code.^- By 1701 the commission had succeded in editing all the chapters of the Code of 1649 and integrating into it the legislative acts that had been submitted by the prikazy. Very characteristic of the philosophy behind this reform was the manifesto drawn up to accompany the new law code; according to it, the aim of the reform was that “the administration of justice should, in all types of cases, be equal for people of all types of ranks in the Muscovite realm, from the highest to the lowest, end, however, the new edition of the laws was never put into effect. A new legislative initiative was taken in 1714, at which time an ukaz was promulgated to the effect that the Code of 1649 was to be reviewed and supplemented by the ukazes published since that time, “so that the administration of justice will be the same throughout the realm.” The judges In the ” 13 N. B. Golikova, Politicheskie protsessy pri Petre I (Moscow, 1957), 9, 14, 20. Aside from political crimes, however, the prikaz was responsible for law and order in Moscow and for the leadership of the Preobrazhenskii and Semenovskii regiments. For a summary of the tasks of the Preobrazhenskii prikaz, see N. P. Eroshkin, Ocherki istorii gosudarstvennykh uchrezhdenii dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (Moscow, 1960), 97—99. V. N. Latkin, Zakonodatel'nye kommissii v Rossii v XVIII st. (St. Petersburg, 1887), 1—18. D. PoLENOV, Materialy dlia istorii russkogo zakonodatel’stva (St. Petersburg, 1865), 24, which states that the commission on the laws, in order to solve the task assigned to it, maintained more or less constant contact with thirty-two different prikazy. Bogoslovskii, IV, 242.
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