| President Vladimir Putin on Saturday met with Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov, whose department celebrated its 280th anniversary on that day. The head of state congratulated all Russian prosecutors on the holiday and in the conversation especially noted that throughout the history of Russia the prosecutor’s office has played and now continues to play a special role as “a universal instrument for ensuring the interests of the state and an element responsible for the efficient functioning of the entire system of state institutions.” “Today, when the nature of society and the nature of the economy are changing,” the president said, “the functions of the prosecutor’s office naturally need to be clarified, and that’s exactly what we did in the new Criminal Procedure Code.”
This law, as is known, will come into force this coming summer, and according to it law enforcement agencies will be able to initiate criminal cases only with the approval of the prosecutor's office. Mr. Ustinov himself, after a meeting with the president, noted that the new status of his department would greatly improve the quality of the investigation. According to Mr. Ustinov, over the past year alone, prosecutors canceled 310 thousand illegally initiated criminal cases and registered more than 136 thousand hidden crimes.
Noting what a huge amount of work now lies with prosecutors, the head of the Prosecutor General's Office said that during the year his subordinates supervised almost 3.4 million criminal cases, filed more than 300 thousand claims for damages in civil proceedings (more than half of them in the interests of society and the state), changed and repealed 118 thousand illegal legal acts.
The prosecutor's office was founded in Russia on January 12, 1722. Its main task was to monitor compliance with laws by officials at all levels. The first prosecutor was one of Peter I's associates, Pavel Yaguzhinsky, who also served as president of the Senate. Introducing Yaguzhinsky to the senators, the emperor said: “Here is my eye, with which I will see everything. He knows my intentions and desires. Whatever he wishes, you do, and even if it seems to you that he is acting contrary to my and the state’s interests, you, however, do it and, having notified me about it, wait for my command.”
Using the support of Peter, Yaguzhinsky, to the best of his ability, tried to reduce arbitrariness, bribery and embezzlement, which caused acute discontent among officials, young and old. Slanders rained down on Yaguzhinsky one after another, but Peter trusted him: “What Pavel examines is as true as if I had seen it myself.” After the death of Peter, Yaguzhinsky was sent first to oversee the Polish Sejm, and then as ambassador to Berlin.
Yakov Shakhovskoy, who held the post of Prosecutor General for only a year and a half under Elizabeth, proved himself to be a courageous fighter against corruption and abuses. Upon taking office, he noted: “The insatiable greed of self-interest has reached the point that some places established for justice have become marketplaces of covetousness, partiality has become the leadership of judges, and indulgence and omission have become the encouragement of lawlessness.” He was not afraid to make a number of orders that limited the income of one of Elizabeth's favorites - Pyotr Shuvalov, who led a fierce struggle against the prosecutor. Shuvalov's machinations were unsuccessful, but Shakhovsky's prosecutorial career ended with the death of Elizaveta.
Peter III preferred to see his close associate Alexander Glebov in an important government post. Under him, the prosecutor's office became the most powerful intelligence service of the empire; the Secret Expedition, which was in charge of counterintelligence and the fight against the opposition, was subordinate to it. Glebov's career was short-lived - his rare ability to work was mainly aimed at increasing his own wealth: in his free time from prosecutorial work, he managed to found a number of factories in Finland, take over a number of wine farms in the Arkhangelsk and Irkutsk provinces. Catherine II tolerated him for only a year, noting “that she could not satiate him.”
Under Alexander I, the powers and independence of the prosecutor's office were sharply limited. First, the Secret Expedition was liquidated, and with the formation of the ministries in 1802, the prosecutor's office became a division of the Ministry of Justice, the head of which was also appointed as the prosecutor general. Dissatisfied with this situation, Prosecutor General Alexander Bekleshov resigned.
His first successor, who combined two positions, was Gabriel Derzhavin, who not only noticed Pushkin, but also tried to fight against violations of laws and embezzlement: he managed to achieve the removal from office of the Kaluga governor Lopukhin and a number of judges. This did not go unnoticed for Derzhavin. In one of his reports, he wrote about himself: “... I have made many villains for myself, who will not fail to denigrate me in every possible way and bring me into disfavor.” At first, Alexander said that he “would not betray” his chief lawyer, but already in October 1803 - a year after Derzhavin’s appointment - the emperor sent a letter in which he asked him to leave the post of minister. When asked about the reason for his dismissal, the poet-prosecutor received a sincere answer: “You serve very zealously.”
In the 60-70s. In the 19th century, Pyotr Aleksandrov, who resolutely spoke out in defense of freedom of trial, and Sergei Andreevsky, who in 1878 refused to support the state prosecution in the trial of the terrorist Vera Zasulich, shone in the prosecutor's office. Among the pre-revolutionary prosecutors general, we should highlight Dmitry Nabokov (the grandfather of the famous writer), who in the 80s managed to maintain the independence of prosecutorial supervision in the face of increasing pressure from the gendarmes and local authorities, and the exceptionally honest Sergei Manukhin, who, after his resignation, was entrusted with the investigation of the circumstances by Nicholas II execution of workers of the Lena gold mines in April 1912.
However, among the prosecutor generals there were also people like Ivan Shcheglovitov, who freely interpreted election legislation, and Alexander Makarov, who was prone to the brutal suppression of civil liberties (being the chief of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, he said after the “Lena” execution: “So it was, so it will be.” ).
Before the revolution, the authority of the prosecutor's office was quite high. Prominent lawyer Anatoly Koni wrote: “The history of the Ministry of Justice provides many examples of the energetic struggle of provincial prosecutors against local abuses. This struggle was not always successful, but its very emergence had a beneficial effect, not to mention those cases when its consequence was senatorial revisions that rushed like thunderclouds across the landscape, affected by legal drought.” Pavel APTEKAR
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