The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area 29 ments in general, and the death penalty in particular. For instance, one of the greatest authorities on the new age and author of the celebrated work The Spirit of the Laws, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, wrote: “Experience shows that in countries remarkable for the lenity of their laws, the spirit of the inhabitants is as much affected by slight penalties as in other countries by severer punishments. If we inquire into the cause of all human corruptions, we shall find that they proceed from the impunity of criminals, and not from the moderation of punishments.”15 According to the assertions of outstanding and acknowledged specialists in the sphere of criminal law, the first work that decisively rejected the application of the death penalty was the famous work by Cesare Beccaria entitled On Crimes and Punishments, published in Tuscany in July 1764, at that time without revealing the place where it was printed or the author’s name. The appearance of this book was described by specialists as a bomb for 18th-century society that would blow a significant part of the criminal institutions of the day to smithereens.16 Beccaria affirmed that the “death penalty is not a right and cannot be such. It is a war of a whole nation against a citizen whose destruction they consider as necessary or useful. But if I can further demonstrate that it is neither necessary nor useful, I shall have gained the cause of humanity.”17 Since then, the issue of the death penalty has been investigated by the highest-calibre academics, specialists in crime detection, psychologists, philosophers, and novelists; has been debated repeatedly in legislative assemblies; and has been resolved with the aid of practical experience. Analysing the course taken by these debates and discussions, Professor N.S. Tagantsev wrote at the beginning of the 20th century that the voices of the advocates of the death penalty were fading away, that the amount of current literature on the subject was declining, which was a sign that the issue had lost significance, while opponents of the death penalty were not encountering serious scholarly opposition, so that the death penalty was now more reliant on tradition than conviction. A recent attempt by the Italian school of anthropology to come out in defence of the death penalty for “born criminals” was, Tagantsev wrote, the final outburst, lacking in practical significance.18 The second half of the 19th century and the 20th century were influenced by this innovation in criminal law. Thanks to the unprecedented efforts of thinkers and politicians in individual countries of the world, abolition of the death penalty began in 15 16 Charles-Louis de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book 6, Chapter XII, in Anthology, Vol. III, pp. 114-115. See V.D. Spasovich, Uchebnik ugolovnogo prava, Vol. 1 (1st edition) Parts 1-2 (St. Petersburg, 1863), in Anthology, Vol. IV, p. 685; A.F. Kistyakovskii, Elementarnyi uchebnik obshchego ugolovnogo prava s podrobnim izlozheniem nachal russkogo ugolovnogo zakonadatel’stva (Kyiv, 1875), in Anthology, Vol. IV, pp. 710-713; N.S. Tagantsev, Russkoe ugolovnoe pravo, 1st general part, Vol. II (St. Petersburg, 1902) (Tula, 2001), pp. 241-242. 17 18 C. Beccaria, O prestupleniyakh i nakazaniyakh (Moscow, 1995), in Anthology, p. 162. Tagantsev, op.cit., note 16, p. 242.