Conditional Land Rights and Second-Best Constitutionalism

Just like rulers from medieval Europe to the early American state,²⁵ Russian princes from the fourteenth century granted conquered land to military men, creating a service class that evolved over time, the boyars.

The increasing independence of the boyars and acquisition of new land since the fifteenth century led Russian tsars to build a new class of servitors, frequently described as gentry and more dependent on the ruler than the boyars. They were cavalry owing military service to the tsar and are estimated to have reached about 17,500 in the mid-1500s.^[1294] Their lands were termed pomest'e and were distinguished from the her­editary votchina of the boyars.^[1295] Pomest'e land could not technically be sold.

The new military servitors were “less clannish” than the boyars,³⁴ a crucial trait that only enhanced the tsar’s capacity to control them, as discussed in the next chapter. They received about half of the land that Ivan III (1462-1505) confiscated after he conquered Novgorod, which amounted to about 82 percent of total cultivated land, retaining the rest for the royal household.³⁵ From the 1490s, these Muscovite cavalrymen replaced the Novgorodian landowners; they were granted lands with peasants whose taxes paid for their military service.³⁶ This move aimed to halt the “grave abuses” of the entrenched elites.^[1296] It was, according to historian Anne Kleimola, a protection device against a populace that blamed the elite, not the state, for local corruption and abuse.^[1297] But the incapacity to control elite behavior typically indicates state weakness.

Although the gentry pomest'e resembled Western fiefs, some scholars draw a sharp distinction. The two types differ of course, and this study cannot present their full historical complexity. It can, however, challenge the logic that specialists have invoked to dismiss comparability: according to historian Richard Pipes, Russian fiefs were established under appar­ently strong tsarist rule, at the height of monarchical centralization, whereas Western fiefs exemplify “â€?feudal’ decentralization.”^{[1298] [1299]} Yet, as in the Ottoman case, this assumed contrast conceives of feudalism as frag­mentation - i.e. it assumes that the French or German versions of feudal­ism were definitive. It ignores the English version, where fief-granting was administered by a highly centralized crown, as noted in the previous analysis.4⁰ High levels of concentration in the hands of and dependence on the crown were the features that shaped regime type in England.

As the English case predicts, dependence on the tsar shaped how local governance evolved in this period. The gentry secured through petitions - the same mechanism observed in the West - the right to governance by local councils of elders, the guba, in the 1530s. This servitor class thus effectively managed local government at the behest of the tsar: it admin­istered law and order in the provinces, controlled mobility and the distri­bution of service lands, it collected taxes, mustered military forces, and certified servile contracts.^[1300] By the 1550s, land surveys and uniform coinage and weight measures were being promoted throughout the land.^[1301] Justice was also centralized by the early 1500s: the state became “the exclusive agent of sanctioned violence (corporal and capital punish­ment, judicial torture) and eliminated private blood violence.”⁴³

By “the mid-sixteenth century almost the entire population owed sub­stantial obligations to the state.”⁴⁴ Russian agents were locally selected and unpaid, with personal liabilities if they failed in their obligations, just like medieval English sheriffs and other royal agents. Russian historians debate whether this experiment was genuinely democratic or a “sham” masking state extension;^[1302] but it strongly resembles the medieval English context that generated the most robust parliament, as described in Parts I and II. Even the “scattered landholding” of the Moscow elites, which is seen to have “exacerbated the service-induced rootlessness of the gentry,”^[1303] resembles English patterns, where estate fragmentation was initially a key mechanism of undercutting noble power.^[1304] Landholding fragmentation thus cannot help explain divergent Russian outcomes.

Service emerges as key also for Russian representative activity. The assemblies that emerged in the mid-sixteenth century mainly involved the gentry who were most dependent on the tsar. Far from a paradox, this is the main prediction of the argument advanced here, illustrating second­best constitutionalism. These Assemblies of the Land (later named zems- kii sobor) were first called in 1549 due to war and ended in 1653.^[1305] Depending on the criteria of social composition, about fifteen to sixty assemblies are identified. They had no formal procedure, elections, or quotas; “sometimes the instructions requested that as many representa­tives as desired should come.”^[1306] Despite this, they took radical political action: they elected tsars, occasionally with broad representation that included black peasants; Mikhail Fedorovich was thus elected in 1613, ending the Time of Troubles.

The paradox of representative practice in the violent rule of Ivan IV has been muted because Western historians mostly questioned the portrayal of the period in Soviet scholarship as that of an “estate-representative monarchy.” Instead, the assemblies were presented simply as an instru­ment of the tsar, mainly because no estates existed in Russia, no legally recognized corporative entities with established rights.^[1307] As Pipes argued, “Participants in [assemblies] were considered to be performing state service and received pay from the treasury; attendance was a duty, not a right.”⁵¹ Yet again, however, as we have seen, these traits defined English practice. In England, the state even forced communities to cover the expense of representatives, causing bitter disputes - again indicating higher royal powers in England.⁵² These points, therefore, cannot account for the differential outcomes in the Russian case either.

Some scholars have dismissed many Russian assemblies due to the absence of non-nobles,⁵³ but this is also not dispositive.

Russian assemblies were rather typically attended by the “members of the middle service class,” which depended on the tsar for its land, with “church officials, merchants, advisers to the tsar, civil administrators, and in the seventeenth century, townsmen” also attending.^[1310] The most con­sequential difference with England was, I argue, instead the variation in ruler power. Russian tsars were weaker compared to medieval English kings in compelling especially their strongest domestic competitors (the boyars and princes); tsars were after all elected.

Weaker infrastructural powers meant that attendance overall could not be compelled - the key advantage observed in the English case. There, as seen, kings relied on a robust, polity-wide system of counties organized around a court under royal command with strong enforcement powers. By contrast, Russian assembly members were “either drawn from which­ever members of the service ranks happened to be in Moscow at the time or chosen by local government officials.”^[1311] Candidate selection “had to take into consideration not only who was of the appropriate service rank as well as who did not have other service obligations at the moment but also who had sufficient wherewithal to afford the expenses involved with travel to and from Moscow, not to mention living there for the duration of the Assembly sessions.

Since attendance is widely seen as a right demanded from below, failure to secure it seems to support the assumption that Russian rulers simply suppressed it. Instead, the previous account has illuminated the obliga­tory component of representation in Western cases, especially England. This makes it easier to attribute the low and haphazard attendance in Russia to the infrastructural weakness of the regime.

12.2