Legal responsibility for violation of legislative norms by service personnel of gold mining enterprises in Siberia at the end of the 19th - early 20th century

The author analyzes the problem of the degree of legal responsibility of gold mining enterprises service personnel in pre-revolutionary Russia for the implementation of their direct liabilities. The research is performed on the example of employees of Siberian gold mines, which were the largest economic industry of the province. The chronological framework of the study covers the period from the end of the 19th to early 20th century, when the formation of labor legislation in Russia began, and the regulatory acts appeared not only for regulating the legal position of workers, but also to determine the degree of legal responsibility during their professional activity. For that task, the author actively used archival sources. During the research, the author comes to a conclusion that the service personnel of gold mining enterprises in Siberia had the wide range of direct liabilities. The author casts doubt on belief that the service personnel was guilty of the most accidents at work places. Due to the statistics used in this article, the proportion of employees’ guilt of accidents at work was insignificant. However, the service personnel was responsible for some accidents at work. From the author’s point of view, the accidents took place because the vast majority of mining employees did not have sufficient knowledge in mining and other types of legislation, and were so-called «practitioners» that had a big working experience, but had no special education. Ignorance and failure to keep basic safety standards were often the reasons for accidents in the process of gold mining. Generally, the employees of medium and lower grade (foremen, keepers of mining operations, work-assignment clerks and other) took over the safety during the work and, therefore, the responsibility before the law, while the number of managers of enterprises and mining engineers, who had taken upon responsibility for carrying out the works, was insignificant. It should be noted that the service personnel of the gold mining enterprises, as well as at any other industrial sector of pre-revolutionary Russia, was legally weak protected in case of any accidents and carried out full legal responsibility. It should not go unspoken that at such time there were no special laws to protect the interests of the service personnel in the case of judicial proceedings. Thus, as many pre-revolutionary authors noted, mining employees were almost defenseless in the face of Themis.