Russia expanded greatly from the late fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, especially under Ivan IV “the Terrible” (1547-84). His rule encapsulates Russia’s image as a “despotic,” tyrannical regime, displaying notorious brutality.
He reportedly fried men “in special man-sized frying pans.”[1275] During his reign of terror, known as the Oprichnina, Ivan slaughtered over 3,000 people, exiled 190 princes, and devastated regions with confiscatory taxation.
Moreover, he consolidated a feature of the Russian regime widely accepted as definitive of its patrimonial and despotic character: obligations flowing from service upon all social classes, even the elites. The “phenomenon of service landholding is one of the fundamental bases of the theory that Muscovy was a patrimonial state.”[1276] Secular landholders owed not only military service; they even had the “obligation to ?build’ palaces for the grand prince and [houses] for the district officials and governors,” including lords holding immunities.[1277] This meant that “estates... were defined by their obligations, not their rights.”[1278] This dependence caused the subservience that, for many scholars, distinguished Russia from the West. It not only foreclosed a constitutional trajectory,5 it even prefigured its communist future.6 This “statist,” despotic view confirms the perceptions of early modern visitors, who relayed both the tsar’s tyrannical behavior and subjects’ servile response.It causes “astonishment,” therefore, especially in such scholarship, that this period also saw unprecedented (though not enduring) representative activity in Russia.7 From the 1540s, Ivan IV himself began convoking Assemblies of the Land with large attendance. No less than eight of them even elected a tsar when dynastic lineage failed8 - an inconceivable function for contemporary English or French parliaments. Even in studies that have strongly questioned the despotic interpretation of the Russian regime, this paradox is typically left unexplained.
Revisionist studies have, however, explored other remarkable parallels with Western practice. On many dimensions, center-periphery relations, land rights, demands for justice, petitions, the judicial system itself, traits we have observed in England and elsewhere in the West, also appear in Russia. For instance, the development of property rights in Russia has been conventionally seen as “exactly contrary to its course in Western Europe”; independent rights in the early period were replaced by the servitude consolidated by Ivan IV, ensconcing “despotism.”[1279] However, as the legal historian George Weickhardt has strikingly shown, some land rights in Russia in the seventeenth century closely “approached that of the English ?fee simple,’... the most unqualified type of ownership in Anglo- American common law”[1280] - in ways very similar to those explored in the previous chapter for the Ottoman Empire.
Other scholars further uncovered a social and political life in historical sources that parallels many Western early modern patterns. According to Nancy Kollmann, far from an absolutist autocracy, Muscovy was controlled by clans of aristocrats that limited the crown’s powers, echoing historical findings on France and Spain.[1281] Tsars had to govern with them, requiring consensus to secure implementation.[1282] Further, the judicial system also displayed a balancing between local communities and central structures, with equality lying in the application of the law, if not its content.[1283] It even abolished capital punishment before the West.14 For Valerie Kivelson, similar autonomy can be discerned in the seventeenthcentury provincial gentry, which succeeded in pursuing family-focused interests even against central encroachments, in ways that parallel findings on family networks in the West.15
Critics of this revisionism, however, such as Donald Ostrowski and Marshal Poe, point out that it does not explain the contrast between its own findings and the “despotic” image conveyed by Western contemporaries, except to present this discourse as a “facade.”16 Indeed, Kollmann describes the “persistent emphasis in Muscovite sources on the sovereign’s exclusive autocratic power” as “striking, given that the boyars [the highest serving elite] also held real, albeit not institutionalized, power.”17 Revisionism also leaves unaddressed the broad imposition of service and dependence, which critics view as evidence of patrimonialism and, effectively, backwardness.18
Here, by contrast, I show how Russia was like England precisely on this element that causes most difficulty for the non-despotic reading, service to the state.
In Parts I and II, service emerged as a necessary condition for constitutional emergence in England and its variation helped explain different outcomes in the West. From this book’s perspective, therefore, representative activity under a ruler asserting his power through service and conditional relations is not paradoxical but what the preceding argument has led us to expect. One does not need to accept the book’s argument about the necessary connection between the two to admit that service is at least not sufficient to explain despotism.Moreover, the disjuncture between ideology and practice is also predicted by the normative/empirical inversion identified throughout the book. Though power was being asserted under the late Ruriks in unprecedented ways, it was comparatively much weaker than in medieval England. Society was much more loosely controlled by the tsar; in fact, freedom was initially greater at points than in the West, as I will suggest. Even Russian serfs could change lords once a year,[1284] a freedom unthinkable for their English counterparts, who inherited their condition for life down the male line (like Russian slaves) and could be sold with the land.[1285] It is thus not surprising that “the adjective ?free’ or ?at will’ (vol'nyi) signified disorder and disturbance, disruptive willfulness.”[1286] The rhetoric was extreme precisely to counteract that. The incentives on the tsar to terrorize those within his reach, this argument suggests, increased the more he could not subdue those out of reach, especially the boyars and princes, helping explain the subservient behavior of those present.
Ultimately, the analysis presented in this book helps synthesize the varied explanations Russian scholars have offered for the divergence with the West. Differences between the regions are fewer than expected at the micro level of daily practice; they become salient at the aggregate level of polity-wide institutions, as some have argued.
Either political culture remained at the personal level, eschewing the impersonal, bureaucratic traits of Western monarchies, or Russia lacked the “established social groups and solidarities” that allowed the West to move towards a more modern political culture, or enserfment prevailed.22 But these differences have yet to be explained.This book has argued that England in particular differed in the more effective supra-local organization of subject participation, which was predicated on state strength - not on greater limits on central authority, as conventional narratives have it. If that is so, then the differing Russian trajectory would be due to ruler weakness. Yet so much evidence militates against this view. What this chapter will argue instead is that what appears as evidence of overpowering rulership in Russia, even serfdom, is the result of weaker control over the most powerful social groups.
To support these claims, I first explain the land regime and relations between the tsar and elite groups, to show how the representative activity that did occur depended mainly on conditional relations with a newer, less powerful elite based on service - producing second-best constitutionalism, similar to Hungary and Poland. Then I present evidence for three indicators of ruler weakness - weaker control over the boyar nobility and society more broadly, poor taxing capability, and mass enserfment - in order to explain the outcomes observed, congruently with the predictions of this account. Absent effective control over the most powerful elite, neither institutional fusion could occur between judicial and fiscal functions nor could collective action be coordinated at the supra-local level. Since no alternative mechanisms were deployed to provide regularity and inclusiveness, especially of the most powerful, the representative activity that did emerge could not consolidate or define the regime.
It should be emphasized that no teleology is assumed in this account, nor that, by not developing representative institutions, the Russian regime somehow “failed.” Even if state capacity had been sufficient, Russians might not have wanted to develop along similar lines to the West, setting other values or traditions as paramount.[1287] Instead, comparison is used for analytical purposes, to test whether some conditions deemed necessary can be identified in this case. Moreover, although historians perform very careful comparisons and will reject them if isomorphism is not evident,[1288] this study applies a looser strategy, by looking at similarities, rather than identity, in form and function. Democracies today operate across regions with great variation, yet they still form part of a recognizable category, as long as certain relations hold. An equivalent criterion is applied here to the historical past.
12.1