Before feeding evil, that punishment for “Pravda Ruska”

Abstract

Relevance of the research topic: The criminal law of modern Ukraine has its origins in customary law and princely legislation, and in the judicial practice of the times of Kyivan Rus. In Yaroslav the Wise's Pravda Ruska, these sources of law allowed the legislator to formulate the definition of crime and punishment in the first national legal code. The purpose of the article is to reveal the correlation between crime and punishment in the times of the ‘Pravda Russkaya’ and the criminal legislation of modern Ukraine. Familiarity with the provisions of the ‘Pravda Russkaya’ allows us to conclude that it knew and actually operated with the legal features that define behaviour as a crime, and the totality of which gives the concept of corpus delicti. The achievement of this goal was made possible through the use of a set of methods of scientific cognition, in particular, dialectical (for comprehensive knowledge and the main types of crime and punishment), formal legal (to establish the content of legal provisions and analyse the practice of their application), comparative legal (to study the correlation between the law of Kievan Rus and modern domestic legislation. The author also analyses the correlation between the concepts of the death penalty as a punishment under the Rus' Pravda and blood revenge as a custom of the primitive system. Based on the results of the study, the author concludes that Yaroslav the Wise's Rus' Pravda makes the first step towards the legislative implementation of the rule of law, effective protection of individual and collective interests of people, and regulation of social processes in our modern state.