Criminal law issues in the «Russkaya Pravda» («Russian truth») by Pavel Pestel

The article analyses the criminal law related provisions of the «Russkaya Pravda» («Russian truth»), a constitutional project created by one of the leaders of the «Yuzhnoye obshchecstvo» («Southern company») Pavel Pestel. P. Pestel expressed a number of ideas that later were subsequently embodied in modern criminal legislation and criminal law theory. Pestel proposed a definition of crime with a notice that not any deed against the law should be called a crime, but only ones committed voluntarily. When giving characteristics to crime, he defines the quality and the level of crime. The quality refers to the violated rights and obligations while the level has to do with the amount and the kind of the malice. Depending on the quality, Pestel divided crimes into two main groups: those which infringe on existence and those which infringe on the wellbeing of the state or its parts. Depending on the crime’s characteristics, Pestel pro posed a new structure of the criminal law consisting of twenty chapters. Its main idea lies in the statement that penalties must not be assigned arbitrarily. With regards to this statement Pestel formulated six penalty rules, some of which are relevant up to this day. For instance, rule one states that penalty is not revenge and must be adequate to the crime, rule two says that the society and the government have no right to apply capital punishment to the criminal, as they have means to save the state and its citizens. Only honest citizens have a right to kill the criminal violating their life as they have no other means to get saved. Rule three proclaims equal penalties for every social group, rule four states that penalty must be inevitable, public and applied as soon after the crime’s commitment as possible. Rule five says that the penalty must never be cruel; rule six defines a group of deeds that shouldn’t be punishable, such as suicide.