Abstract
<jats:p>The article is devoted to determining the significance of the system of fines (blood and sales) in the Old Russian state of the X–XV centuries. It turns out that the system of fines mentioned in the Russian Pravda did not refer to measures of responsibility for offenses against person and property, but was a kind of payment for justice, a revenue article of princely justice, which monopolized the arbitration of interpersonal and interclan conflicts. In this context, the abolition of blood vengeance and the transfer of the dispute to princely arbitration is proposed to be seen as a transformation of various traditions related to conflict resolution that existed among the Slavs and Russians even before the vocation of Rurik and the Christianization of the East Slavic population. It is also emphasized that princes abolished blood revenge not because it totally threatened society, but because the settlement of conflict with a view to preventing blood revenge as the extreme of its development was practically entirely relegated to princely jurisdiction; the measures of liability were not vires and sales, but compensation for the damage caused, which the victim and members of his family-clan group received as a result of the hearing of the case by a court of princely or manorial justice. The article also examines other forms of responsibility reflected in the sources of law of the period under study. According to the author, they were not a prototype of modern punishment, but were due to the tradition of neutralizing the person who tried to calm the ancient collective, by means of his isolation. Such forms included: flow and plunder, expulsion, imprisonment.</jats:p>