The criminal regulation of suicide reached its highpoint in imperial Russia during the first half of the nineteenth century. Local authorities began to investigate suicides as a matter of routine, and reports flowed into the central bureaucracy in St. Petersburg, where they would ultimately form the basis of the first statistical studies in Russia of crime and mortality. The legal prosecution of suicide and attempted suicide likewise became a standard practice, and the rubric appeared in the annual statistical reports on judicial activity that began to be published in 1834. Both of these developments were encouraged by legal codification. After almost two centuries of failed projects, a digest of criminal laws was enacted in 1835 followed by a revised penal code in 1845. Though suicide was not formally decriminalized, its legal status and punishment changed fundamentally. The 1845 code no longer defined suicide as a form of murder, and it was henceforth to be punished with a combination of civil and religious penalties. At this time, the legal prosecution of suicide began a slow process of decline.

In some respects, these developments parallel the pattern found in Western and Central Europe.