Consequences of Ruler Weakness: Institutional Fragmentation
The Russian regime therefore shared many features with England especially; it differed on dimensions reflecting weaker ruler powers. Weakness produced the observable “despotism” as a coping mechanism, but it also precluded the key necessary condition for an enduring constitutional regime.
In England, strong state capacity enabled an institutional fusion of judicial and fiscal functions which consolidated Parliament. It also forced the powerful sectors of society into concerted action in response to high service and taxation demands, thus solving elite collective action problems. The following section traces the divergent Russian outcomes, arguing that weak state power suffices to explain them, similarly to France. Regardless of whether local actors had constitutional preferences or not, the capacity was absent to implement them.The “absolutist” character of the Russian regime in some Russian historiography (the “statist” approach) is exemplified in the tsar’s council, the Duma. Yet this judgment selects institutional traits that have striking similarities with English practice. For instance, Richard Pipes noted that Duma attendees did not have corporative status; they received instead “personal invitations,” dismissed as a sign of the illiberal, controlling character of the regime.[1371] However, an individual summons for the nobility was also a European practice, as seen.[1372] England was distinguished by the higher control of the crown over this selection, as it was only late in time that some families gained a customary, but still not legal, right of parliamentary attendance.[1373]
Further, although the Duma was only attended by boyars, this again had parallels with the West, where royal councils did much of the governing. As we saw, early assemblies that survived were dominated by the nobility, like England, and where towns were dominant, as in France and Spain, the estates either withered or did not become fully representative.
The boyars had similar roles to Western nobilities: they participated in decreeing some of the most significant acts of the government, law codes, foreign treaties, and other precedent-setting measures.[1374] The Duma, like all premodern royal councils, also had official judicial functions.[1375] The tsar was actively involved in cases from the late fifteenth century. The ruler’s justice was “one of the highest privileges that could be bestowed upon a subject.”[1376] As in Western cases, land disputes were the main source of at least surviving lawsuits from that time.[1377] As business increased, tsars delegated cases, either to their sons or to boyars who held separate courts, the latter since 1497.[1378]This institutional proliferation undercut the dynamics of functional layering and fusion we have seen to be critical. Boyars also served as judges into the 1600s and appeared in the petitions Chancellery, as in England.[1379] Generally, however, chancelleries (prikazys) were staffed with servicemen “because nobles scorned such routine activity.”[1380] The power dynamics involved in boyar judicial service are not clear. Was this service imposed or a privilege sought by the Russian upper nobility? We do know that the gentry petitions of 1648 requested their removal, so they must have been using the posts for personal enrichment. Tsars called boyars to service on an ad hoc basis,160 though; as numbers of boyars serving seem unavailable, it is not possible to directly compare levels of service and relative powers to compel. Nonetheless, the common pattern of similar practices at the micro level occurring in cases with different institutional outcomes is observed here too.
The representative institution, however, was the Assemblies of the Land, introduced above, that drew broader social groups.
These were not tied to the Duma nor to regular judicial business, as representative meetings were in the English Parliament. They were thus irregular and also ad hoc, like the French Estates-General. They were convoked “on issues like war, dynastic succession, and peace.”161 Bellicist theories would attribute the meetings to these pressures, but the bargaining logic does not explain observed patterns. In fact, it was the “non-taxpaying social groups” that originally supported the meetings.162 When taxation was discussed, in 1615 and 1618, it was at the end of the PolishMuscovite war (1605-18). Nor did the renewal of war in 1654 lead to their recurrence; about three were held after 1681 and they ceased thereafter.[1381] Military pressures do not suffice to produce enduring representation - unless a regular pre-existing institutional structure integrated representative activity.The eclipse of such activity has received various explanations by Russian historians. One has been already addressed, that delegates “were called as a matter of service obligation (and sometimes viewed said service as onerous), not as a matter of ?right.’”[1382] But this in fact explains why there was any representative activity at all from the perspective of this account. Another is that land being held through service explains why no common law “ancient custom” or law of resistance existed, as it presumably inhibited the freedom and power of landholders.165 However, we’ve seen that it was precisely the common frame of obligations derived from landholding that coordinated English elites in articulating such rights - which they did to a more restrained degree than on the Continent. English common law was the product of dependent landholding.
The most common explanation for the lapse of representative institutions among Russian historians, however, is that there was no collective consciousness in Russia, that social actors lacked corporate identity as estates, in contrast to the West.166 I examine this in the next chapter, bringing the Ottoman Empire into the comparison.
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This chapter has shown that conditional rights to land underlie what many see as a paradox in Russian history, a spate of representative activity under highly centralizing rulers. This was generated in response to demands for justice that differed little from Western cases. However, Russian state capacity was shown to be comparatively weaker, enabling it to compel systematically only the lower nobility, thus generating the pattern of second-best constitutionalism observed in Hungary, Poland, Castile, and elsewhere. Many traits of the regime traditionally interpreted as indicators of strength, even arbitrariness, emerge rather as symptoms of infrastructural weakness. Most crucially this is seen in the incapacity to aggregate judicial activity systematically at the supra-local level. This meant weaker territorial anchoring in the localities, as the next chapter discusses. The building blocks of social interaction were similar; it was their organization by the state that differed.