ABSTRACT
The persecution of witches in Russia started only in the early modern period, i.e. later than in Western Europe. Since the Middle Ages, Eastern European codifications of church law contained rules concerning the prosecution of magic, some of them secular laws and rules taken over from the Byzantine. Unlike in Western and Central Europe, in early modern Russia and Poland politically motivated accusations of magic directed against high-ranking members of the governing elites played an important role. The surviving documentation suggests that in Ukraine, 198 trials for sorcery/witchcraft took place between the 16th and the 19th centuries. In Russia, there were no mass witch hunts like those in Western Europe. As Ukrainian law demanded severe penalties for witches, the relatively low number of death penalties and other severer punishments points to a conspicuous difference between legal regulation on the one hand and milder judicial practice on the other hand.
