LEGAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR VIOLATION OF THE FORWARDING OF POSTAL CORRESPONDENCE IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 19TH – AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Abstract

The article is devoted to legal liability for violation of the rules for forwarding correspondence in the second half of the 19th – at the beginning of the 20th century. In the second half of the 19th century in the Ukraine, an industrial society began to form, which contributed to the expansion, both quantitatively and qualitatively, of communication highways. This situation contributed to the increase of offenses in the field of forwarding correspondence and, accordingly, there was a need to improve sanctions for these offenses. The article shows that the three editions of the first criminal code of the Russian Empire ‘Regulations on the penalties of criminals and corrected criminals’ for 70 years made almost no changes to Chapter XI ‘Violation of Postal Statutes’ of Section VIII ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors Against Public Welfare and Welfare’. Material punishment for the subjects of the offense defined in the article was the main type for violating the forwarding rules. In addition, the bulk of fines for committed offenses were fixed. There is a discrepancy between the punishment and the severity of the offense. The amount of fines in some cases exceeded the damages by a hundred times. The authors proved that the main object of the offense was the fiscal interests of the state. Thus, eight articles out of nine of the relevant Chapter XI of the ‘Regulations on the penalties of criminals and corrected criminals’ provided for fines for encroachment on the state's postal revenue. This allowed the authors to put forward the hypothesis that there was a postal monopoly in the Russian Empire. It can be confirmed or refuted by comparing the conditions of operation of postal services and, in particular, the legal responsibility for encroachment on state profits, of other leading states of that time. Some inconsistent norms of Chapter XI of the ‘Regulations on the penalties of criminals and corrected criminals’ gave rise to ‘amateur’ perlustration. They interpreted the norm on the monetary reward of couriers for finding illegal transmissions in an arbitrary way.