Indicators of Ruler Weakness

The claim of tsarist weakness, however, goes against widespread stereo­types. What evidence supports it? Revisionist scholarship has concurred on this front,^[1313] but three indicators can only be examined here: the tsars’ weak control over the boyars; their poor taxing capability, especially over the most powerful social actors; and, paradoxically, the mass enserfment of peasants by the gentry.

12.2.1 Weak Control Over Society, Especially the Boyars

The question of the power balance between the tsar and society, espe­cially the boyars, goes to the heart of the long-standing debate on whether Russia was a despotism. The brief treatment below cannot exhaust the question. Rather, key issues raised in the historiography will be addressed through the insights of this account, supporting the revisionist interpretation.

This revisionism notes that despite the autocratic faςade, underlying power dynamics were very fragmented.^[1314] In this view, drawing on the groundbreaking work of Edward Keenan, “the real ruling force in the Kremlin” was “a network of interconnected patriarchal boyar clans.”^[1315] The main implication of such a condition, according to the conventional metric applied in this study, is that the tsar would not be able to tax the boyars and other powerful groups. This is shown in the next section.

In Russian historiography, however, tsar despotism is derived from a posited lack of full property rights for the servitor classes, even the boyars.

Service may have made Russia “backward” or “medieval” compared to contemporaneous Western conditions, but it cannot explain or define “despotism,” since it mirrored the period of parliamentary emergence in England. Treating service as a regressive trait assumes a teleological understanding of Western development, progressing away from condi­tional service to “freedom” and “absolute property rights.” Pipes’ argu­ment was in fact powerfully countered by Weickhardt, who, as mentioned, showed how key forms of Russian property were similar to English common law forms.^[1318] Moreover, the restriction of more “abso­lute” rights (observed up to the 1400s) in favor of more conditional ones based on service cannot inform us about the power balance with the leading social group, the boyars, pace Pipes.

Instead, tsars imposed conditional service in the late 1400s when the boyars had levels of freedom unparalleled in the West, especially England. Just as English nobles, boyars were major landowners,^[1319] but unlike them in the early period of parliamentary emergence, their land was allodial and thus could be freely sold. A boyar clan member could repurchase a relative’s sold votchina land within forty years.^[1320] Although almost all boyars performed military service, this was not a tenurial obligation as in England.

Unsurprisingly, the rhetoric applied was absolutist and extreme: faced with such centrifugal forces, ideology becomes a tool to bend a recalcitrant social reality in a more centralized mold. The term gosudar, master of slaves, spread as Muscovy was subduing formidable independ­ent princes.^[1323] The tsar also faced the appanage princes, who, though family members, had large retinues and autonomy.^[1324] Even Pipes con­cedes this: “Behind the faςade of monopolistic and autocratic monarchy survived powerful vestiges of the appanage era... Annexation was often a mere formality.”^[1325]

The implications of such weakness are important. They explain why the tsar would not acknowledge law-making authority in another body, another major argument of the despotist thesis:^[1326] the de facto existence of such rights was what tsars were combating. Just as in France, absolutist rhetoric aimed to counter the fragmentation and initial strength of social groups, as the normative/empirical inversion suggests. Measures that appear autocratic were mild by comparison. Ivan III, in the 1470s, treated departure as treason, worthy of land confiscation.^[1327] But confiscation was the penalty for a simple felony in England; treason was brutally punished.

Tsars employed other tools, moreover, that look familiar given the preceding account. They started extracting oaths for service, as well as security deposits in case of breach of oath - again, requirements hardly different from those in early Western monarchies and inevitable in a process of asserting sovereignty over new territories.⁷⁶ Critically, how­ever, in a trait that later I show to also reflect comparative weakness, tsars had to rely on the collective responsibility of kinship groups to ensure compliance with such oaths, given the strong clan structure of the boyars.¹¹ Enforcement of obligation remained difficult: as boyars often avoided service, a “stream of decrees threatening dire punishment” was issued.⁷⁸ This was possibly why tsars drastically increased the size of the Duma.⁷⁹

As noted in the previous chapter, the major indicators of state arbitrari­ness in this literature,^[1329] as in much property rights scholarship,^[1330] are limitations on land transfers and confiscations. Tsars indeed restricted transfers to monastic institutions.^[1331] But so did English kings, especially Edward I through the Statute of Mortmain, at the height of parliamentary consolidation in the late 1200s. Land bequeathed to a monastery paid no inheritance taxes to the state in both cases; the Church is a perpetual organization, so these restrictions concerned tax enforcement.^[1332]

As Weickhardt has noted, confiscations were also hardly absent in England.⁸⁴ The Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII in the 1530s, as we have seen, was one of the largest confiscations of property in Europe.⁸⁵ The initial pretext was religious conformity - an extra-legal motive, for which Parliament was enlisted.⁸⁶ The unparalleled English capacity to appropriate land is also seen in the Enclosures, where land rights of large sections of the population were privately expropriated over centuries, eventually with parliamentary approval.⁸⁷ But expropriation was also widely prevalent in the period of parliamentary emergence, as seen in Chapter 6: kings confiscated lands of at least 44 percent and 32 percent of recorded nobles in the decades before and after 1250 respectively.⁸⁸ It was precisely the greater capacity of the English crown to threaten its most powerful subjects that mobilized them to collaborate and solve their collective action problem - enabling representative institutions.

By contrast, existing data, though incomplete, suggest that expropri­ations of land were quite limited in Russia. Landowners had at most a 4 percent chance of confiscation in the eighteenth century, according to some studies at least.⁸⁹ Despite the rhetoric and violence, the overall capacity of tsars to regularly compel their most powerful subjects was weaker. This is strikingly displayed in an episode widely invoked to prove exactly the opposite, the Oprichnina. In 1564, Ivan the Terrible split the country in two to confront the boyars, placing half under his direct control.⁹⁰ He confiscated land from boyars and lower servitors alike. Moreover, Ivan’s henchmen “collected as much rent from their peasants in one year as usually was collected in ten years,” resulting in up to

85 percent of the area being abandoned.⁹¹ This was the classic exemplar of tsarist tyranny.

However, Ivan’s retreat from Moscow was generated by fear - of court intrigue, of foreign relations failures, of danger to his family.⁹² It was the incapacity to control most boyars that elicited the move. The public part of the kingdom, the zemschina, was ruled by the boyar council and was out of his control. More service than boyar land seems to have been confiscated, although the evidence is not clear-cut.^[1333] Many of the exiled princes were able to return. The critical point is that the tsar was unable to control a substantial part of the polity, so Muscovy “found itself with two admin­istrations, two armies and two separate groups of territories” - one controlled by the tsar, another by the boyars.^[1334] Tax collection plummeted after the 1560s to less than a tenth in Novgorod, “once the wealthiest region in all the Russian lands.”^[1335] This reign of terror, as typical, stemmed from weakness (although “paranoia” is also detected⁹⁶), not strength. The greater the weakness and threat, the more the resort to violence and cruelty.

A key reason why, despite such facts, the image remains reversed - with Russia considered far more arbitrary than premodern England - is that ruler action, deeply expropriatory as it was, took place in a central insti­tutionalized setting in England, whereas in Russia it involved extra- institutional action of the tsar against individuals, thus appearing more arbitrary. As Kleimola notes, repressive measures did not target classes as a whole, but were mostly atomized.⁹⁷ The observed “power” of tsars had more to do with the lack of institutionalized barriers, which allowed them to use violence against individuals, than to their effectiveness in control­ling society. This encapsulates the definition of despotism in the seminal treatment by Michael Mann: it is the “range of actions which the elite is empowered to undertake without routine, institutionalized negotiation with civil society groups.”⁹⁸ But institutions were absent due to royal weakness. In England, their presence flowed from royal strength, at least initially.

12.2.2 Poor Taxing Capability of Tsars

The episode I have described as one of weakness, the Oprichnina, actually culminated a decades-long effort to strengthen the state. The striking rise in taxes in the intervening period, at least in nominal terms, is an indicator of this. The rate per taxable unit rose seven times in the first half of the sixteenth century and similar increases in revenue are estimated for one region, Novgorod, according to some studies.⁹⁹ These increases hit peas­ants particularly hard, hence amplifying the tyrannical image of the regime. They also involved a restriction on the widespread exemptions that shaped the Russian tax regime, especially for secular landlords: “the turn of the sixteenth century brought a fundamental restructuring of the norms governing” immunities.^[1336] The spike in taxation is congruent with the rise of state power I have suggested was a necessary condition for institutional emergence. However, it is not adequate to prove strong state capacity overall, which enables institutions to survive; this can only be established on a relative and comparative basis. Extractive capability is relative to the wealth of the country and to the extractive rates of other countries.

Historical evidence at least suggests limited extraction. The Russian tax system after the fifteenth century is mostly known through immunity charters, which indicate weak infrastructure, as we’ve seen in France.^[1337] The most privileged status was enjoyed by the nobility and Church in particular since the feudal wars of the fifteenth century.^[1338] Unlike in England, military service land was tax exempt.^[1339] Further, by the seven­teenth century taxation declined, despite claims that that was the “height of monarchical centralization.”¹⁰⁴ Lands that were the major source of tax revenue included court lands that were directly under the tsar’s control and “black” lands populated by peasants that the tsar could freely grant to private proprietors.¹⁰⁵ However, by “the early seventeenth cen­tury black lands had almost disappeared from the heartland of the Moscow state, and with them vanished most of the independent [tax­paying] peasants living in self-governing communities.”¹⁰⁶

The claims about monarchical centralization thus belie the massive privatization of state land observed on the ground. By the late 1650s, 67 percent of the households subject to fiscal and other obligations (tiaglo) were in boyar and dvoriane land and 13 percent in the hands of the Church; the crown controlled only about 9 percent. Four out of five Russians “ceased to be subjects of the state,” a condition formalized in the Code of 1649.¹⁰⁷ Tax collection was inevitably undermined: despite local increases, it remained far below the levels that could be supported by the wealth of the country. In England, not only were the peasants taxed, as we have seen, but the nobles themselves were liable as well, undercut­ting their wealth more deeply than in Russia. The incapacity to impose broadly-based state taxation underlies again an absolutist rhetoric which conceals infrastructural weakness.

Comparative data are highly speculative and only available for a later period, yet they establish a baseline that can be revised by further histor­ical research. According to extrapolations by economist Angus Maddison,^[1340] Russia had about half the GDP per capita of Britain in 1700 (610 to 1,250 1990 Geary-Khamis dollars). Data on taxation start­ing in 1700, by Karaman and Pamuk, suggest that Russia’s tax revenue per capita was only 7 percent of what England raised, 3 percent of what the Netherlands raised and 14 percent of what France did (but 78 percent of what the Ottoman Empire did).^[1341] It would thus need to raise about seven times as much to reach English levels of real per capita taxation. Though taxation doubled in the next fifty years, it still fell behind Western states. Extraction seems therefore considerably less than what was pos­sible, although, as suggested above, revenue in 1700 was possibly less than earlier.^[1342] Russian state capacity, though rising before representa­tion emerged, was weak relative to European and especially English standards.

12.2.3 Mass Enserfment of Peasants by the Servitor Class

Within social science, especially economic history, no feature has exem­plified Russian despotism (and explained its economic stagnation) more than the expansion of serfdom^[1343] in the seventeenth century,^[1344] while Western serfdom declined after the Black Death. Russian scholars have drawn a bleak picture of oppression: in the Code of 1649, among “the hundreds of articles defining the power of landlords over their peasants there is not one which sets on it any limits.” The Code even recognized peasants as chattels, making them “personally liable for debts of bankrupt landlords.”^[1345]

This sounds despotic indeed, but what explains it? A conventional economic logic attributed Eastern serfdom to the poor labor-to-land ratio: the need for a military force and the scarcity of labor over extensive lands forced the state to use coercion.¹¹⁴ Labor scarcity, however, normally entails greater bargaining power for laborers, as it did in the West after the Black Death, not enserfment, as Robert Brenner noted.^[1346] So, did “a central coercive authority” keep “lords from competing for labor” instead, as North and Thomas claimed?^[1347]

In fact, the Code was implementing servitor landlord interests, not any “statist” agenda of the tsar.^[1348] It was “gentry landlords and urban com­munes [who] agitated for increasingly active state intervention in enfor­cing these norms, recovering runaways, penalizing those who harbored fugitives, and closing loopholes for escape into border regiments and frontier towns.”^[1349] The state ceded such rights to the gentry as it could not prevent the boyars and the Church from encroaching on gentry lands and their peasants. Without rent-payers the gentry could not render military service. Competition was thus not suppressed by the state in Russia; rather, contracts (between gentry and peasants) were being vio­lated by the powerful - a market failure the state tried to correct. Again, power over the most powerful emerges as a vital conditional for optimal outcomes.

That such power was deficient in the Russian case is suggested by a typically overlooked difference with England. Outright slavery in Russia usually removed persons from tax-paying rolls, so was unwanted by the state, whilst many serfs had been “converted into slaves” by the 1670s.^[1350]9 Serfs in any case were taxed through their lords.^[1351] English villeins and serfs, some of whom could be among the wealthiest members of their communities,^[1352] were instead taxed directly and increasingly so after the Black Death.^[1353] Despite stiff resistance to innovations like the Poll Taxes of 1377-81,¹²³ English kings could circumvent the lords and access all subjects directly. As seen in Chapter 6, they raised more per capita in taxation in this period.

The English infrastructural advantage also undergirds what scholars have described as the failure of the “seigneurial reaction” in England, a major theme in the “Brenner debate”: English lords, deprived of extra-economic powers, tried to coerce serfs and villeins after 1348, by allying with the state to pass laws regulating wages.¹²⁴ Regulation failed, however, and serfdom ended because of peasant resistance, culminating with the Revolt of 1381.^[1354] Russian lords by contrast succeeded, in this logic.

First, it must be pointed out that the “seigneurial reaction” was highly effective initially, but typically when the crown was strong. Nominal wages did rise but this happened before the second Labor Statute (1351). Its “failure” is moreover judged against its unrealistic stipulation that wages be fixed at levels lower than those of the 1330s. In fact, under most of Edward III and Henry V, both assessed as strong rulers,^[1355] real wages and income appear, remarkably, stationary, even at some points declining,^[1356] or at least growing at a slower rate than GDP per capita,^[1357] while the population halved. Enforcement lapsed especially under and after the weaker Richard II (though other factors of course contributed). The “exceptional”^[1358] level of enforcement in the 1350s and 1360s tran­spired not least because those charged with enforcing the Statutes were often magnates and gentry who stood to gain by it, serving as justices of the peace (JPs). JPs are widely viewed as exemplifying the surrender of royal justice to local elites, leading to corruption.^[1359] Dissenting views have emphasized the importance of strong royal rule in sustaining the new judicial institutions at times.^[1360] Either way, the peace commissions they administered applied royal law^[1361] and were aided by 664 royal officials appointed to enforce the Statutes.^[1362]

Moreover, even when English royal power waned, serfdom was being transformed through royal institutions. By 1381, the main concern was “civic, not tenurial, freedom,” as landlords could mobilize a “new public jurisdiction”: since the royal ordinance of 1349, “everyone �?physically capable’” under 60 had to “serve or be imprisoned.”^[1363] Some historians even speak of a “second serfdom.”¹³⁵ Serfdom thus receded not because workers had “sufficient power,”¹³⁶ but because the royal judicial infra­structure in England permitted the relative control of labor through laws and regulations. In Russia, such infrastructure was weaker in the six­teenth century and personal forms of domination prevailed. It’s not just that the courts managed social relations more consistently in England; it is also that English lords had weaker levels of extra-economic means of coercion due to the expanding state.^[1364] So, restrictive measures with the same intent in the two cases appear as regulations in one case and serfdom in the other.

These successive laws, moreover, were passed in Parliament at a time when the Commons, as we have seen, were gaining in power, meaning that higher levels of cooperation could be expected than in Russia, despite resistance.^[1365] That in England serfdom did not prevail is surely related to its capacity to regularize restrictions on labor movement through polity­wide laws that were so effective they still required a frontal attack in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations four centuries later.^[1366] They were only removed from the statute books “after heated debate” in 1814, yet workers could still be criminally prosecuted for breach of contract through master­servant laws until 1875.^[1367] England did not forgo coercion; it regularized it through law.

Finally, overt coercion was avoided in England due to another conse­quence of state strength: demographic pressures were occurring in perhaps the most articulated and well-enforced systems of land tenures. The “decline of serfdom” meant the upgrading of villein (unfree) tenures into contractual ones, either life tenancies or leases for years. This ultimately led to copyhold tenures that were gradually incorporated into the common law system, as we’ve seen.^[1368] As historian Mark Bailey has argued in his reassessment of serfdom’s decline, villeins were already quite enmeshed in royal courts, despite being formally excluded,^[1369] and manorial courts, which handled their cases, were increasingly reflecting common law practices.¹⁴³ Whether manorial courts enforced the interests of the lords¹⁴⁴ or were dominated by the far more numerous peasant elites,¹⁴⁵ the tenurial transition in England resulted in the expansion of a far more efficient organization of production, enabling the creation of larger farming units.¹⁴⁶ Economic growth, coupled with the more “subtle forms of social control”¹⁴⁷ existing institutions provided, made the re-establishment of serfdom in England both less necessary and less possible.

After all, Russian policy did not aim to create serfdom: the word serf was not even mentioned in the Code of 1649, which only specified what happened to peasants who fled.¹⁴⁸ Russian tsars were simply less able to depersonalize coercion through law, because the state had inadequate power over the most powerful and therefore also a weaker judicial infra­structure. Whereas in Russia the boyars were the major threat who could poach servitor peasants, in England, as the sociologist Richard Lachmann pointed out, the landlords were relatively more constrained by the crown and Church, at least after the Black Death.^[1370]

12.3