Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2020 number

The article is devoted to studying the representations and legal rules that were the base of the family life of Russian empire’s regular army servicemen in the 18th century. The sphere of family life is one of the most important types of social practices, which are necessary to research the problems of everyday life’s history. Due to limited source base for this period the author considered it possible to bring for consideration materials from judicial investigative cases of soldiers’ crimes in relation to their family members. These cases stored in the Russian State Military History Archive (RGVIA) allow presenting views that guided the servicemen relationships with their wives, and how the crimes, committed by soldiers, were assessed from the current legislation’s point of view. The study of these archive materials led the author to the following conclusions. First, the military courts in Russia during the 18th century used the church law norms valid in previous periods in addition to the special legislation (Military Article) to verdict the family life’s crime cases. Second, not only the criminals themselves were convicted, but their victims, who turned out to be soldiers’ wives in the cases under consideration. Third, the guilty bore reduced sentences in comparison with the prescribed ones by laws for their committed crimes. These cases show that the rights of servicemen family members in Russia in the 18th century were poorly protected by legislative norms. Besides, we can see that even military servicemen kept traditional views about the style of family life supported and authorized at the legislative level by imperial state powers, although the regular army was used as the main tools for the transition to modern society in the country