Justice of the Rus

Impact

Parts of the law were issued with specific goals in mind, such as to settle social unrest in and around Kiev in 1113. For the most part, these goals appear to have been met. More broadly, the Justice of the Rus furthered the development of state power, princely authority, and law and order in Kievan Rus.

The accumulation of legal articles and the specificity of many of them also led eventually to an increasingly unwieldy document, internal contradictions, vagueness, or other problems. Kievan Rus itself fragmented during the twelfth century, further undermining the effectiveness of the law. In the thirteenth century, the Rus lands were devastated and conquered by Mongol-Tatar hordes and did not regain full independence until the late fifteenth century. Even before this time, Novgorod, Pskov, and the Dvina Land—relatively unharmed by the Mongols—had issued their own legal charters.

By the late fifteenth century, however, Russia had been reborn in new guise, as the principality of Moscow rose from obscurity to near-complete domination over all of the old Rus lands. With this new political reality came the need for a new body of law. Thus in 1497 the Muscovite grand prince Ivan III issued a new Sudebnik (legal code). His grandson Czar Ivan IV (“the Terrible”) issued a revised Sudebnik in 1550. Alongside innovations, elements of the Justice of the Rus were preserved in both. The new Sudebniks sought to establish laws suitable for an increasingly powerful and centralized state. Both also promoted the ongoing enserfment of the formerly free Russian peasantry. This trend would climax with the publication of Russia's next great law code, the Ulozhenie of 1649.