Toward Eastern Europe

The first country other than the ones just listed to acquire a state, or something like it, was Russia. Its construction got under way when Peter I the Great assumed effective power; conversely, those regions which did not prove capable of developing states soon found themselves eclipsed and overtaken by their neighbors.

Russia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is perhaps best characterized as a developing patrimonial empire ruled by a tsar whose position, thanks to the conquest of new land, was becoming increasingly absolute.^[306] He was surrounded by a hereditary nobility which drew its political and economic power from the lands that it occupied, whether as allodial, hereditary estates, known as votchiny, or in the form of the feudal fiefs or pomest'i which began to be created under Ivan III from the 1470s on. As in other countries, the subject population was overwhelmingly rural. But whereas in most of Europe west of the Elbe this population was steadily moving toward ownership over the land and greater personal liberty, in Russia development proceeded in the opposite direction. Dur­ing the first half of the seventeenth century whatever freedom of move­ment the serfs still possessed was gradually taken away; those who gave shelter to fugitives could be made to pay compensation to the owner. Soon a situation was created in which serfs could be bought, sold, and rented out as individuals or in groups with or without the lands on which they lived and worked.

The opening of a series of great wars against more developed countries to the west - first Poland and then Sweden - from 1632 on increased the tsar's dependence on his nobility and led to the Sobornoe ulozhenie of 1649.^[307] Given the immensity of the trackless Russian wastes and the frequent absence of navigable rivers, the development of towns had always been slow.

Thus the vast majority of the country's population (perhaps 90 per­cent) was reduced to a condition little better than that of chattel slaves. Except when they were sold or banished (in theory landowners were forbidden to kill their serfs; banishment therefore served as an equivalent to a death sentence), they could expect to live and die on their masters' estates. Whatever development of the state that could have taken place in Russia was thereby arrested for over two centuries. Government failed to acquire a persona of its own, which is the essence of what took place elsewhere; instead the country was run by a partnership between the tsar, who to the middle of the nineteenth century was able to speak of his ‘‘fatherly solicitude,” and the nobility. The latter composed perhaps 0.5 of the total population and only they were considered eligible for any kind of position in the government, whether civilian, military, or ecclesiastical.

Having succeeded in making half of Russia's population into their personal property, the nobility by and large allowed itself to be controlled by the tsar - though not without the occasional revolt by boyars who refused to see that the world around them was changing. An important early step was taken in 1682 when Tsar Theodore II ceremoniously burnt the Books of Precedence in which the nobility's traditional titles had been recorded, thus establishing his own freedom to employ them as he saw fit. Between 1712 and 1714 the work of enserfment was completed by Peter the Great. The old distinction between votchiny and pomest'i was abol­ished. From now on, all land was to be held conditionally and in return for service, so that the very word for noble was replaced by dvorianin or imperial servitor.⁴ A whole series of new titles such as count and baron were imported from the West. Depending on the number of serfs they possessed, nobles were divided into grades ranking from one (the highest) to fourteen. The six upper ones were hereditary, the remainder merely

For a brief account of these reforms, see E. V. Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great:

Progress Through Coercion in Russia (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1993), pp. 186-93. personal. A nobleman could serve the tsar by entering into one out of four distinct hierarchies, i.e., the army, navy (newly created by Peter), the civilian administration, and the court. Promotion from one rank to an­other was delegated at the lower levels but further up it was strictly controlled from the top. In practice it goes without saying that not even a genius of the caliber of Peter I could supervise every member of a machine which, toward the end of his reign, was made up of 5,000 officers, besides an unknown number of civilian bureaucrats. Hence the system amounted to a vast network of patronage shot through, from top to bottom, with corruption.

The creation of a system whereby all noble titles were socially and etymologically derived from the court also enabled Peter to do away with the old boyar's council, or duma, as the highest institution in the realm. Its place was taken by an appointed senate which concentrated judicial, administrative, and legal-consultative functions in its own hands. Nine colleges, or boards, each one under a president and bearing collective responsibility to the senate, carried the burden of government work at the highest level. Below them the country was divided into eight adminis­trative gubernias or regions; each of which was later divided into provin­ces and districts. A peculiarity of the system was that the existing maze of prikazy, or agencies, run from Moscow and responsible for a variety of often conflicting functions, was not abolished; however, gradually they and their staffs were taken over by the new governors. The latter transmit­ted the tsar's power throughout an empire which, by West European standards, was already inconceivably large (6,500,000 square miles in 1700) if so sparsely populated that entire regions were little better than wilderness.

Aided by this administrative system, Peter was able to impose new taxes. The old land tax was replaced by capitation, or poll tax (first on households, then on individuals) and quitrent. In contrast to the West, a commercially underdeveloped economy offered few opportunities for indirect taxation; they were, however, imposed both on salt and on that other indispensable prerequisite of Russian life, vodka. Then there were corvees and, to complete the burden, payments in kind. Government officials as well as troops in transit had to be quartered and fed, and transportation in the form of horses and carts provided for them. As in other old regime countries, the nobility and the upper grades of the church were exempt from all but some indirect taxes. The rest of the population, including also the townspeople, paid and paid: as an imperial decree put it, not even the village idiot, the blind, the badly crippled, and the senile were to be considered exempt.

By 1725, government expenditure, which in 1700 had stood at 3.5 million rubles, had reached almost 10 million. Much of this was spent by Peter to build a new capital, and not a cheap one either; the site selected was marshy and before building could begin had to be drained by en­gineers especially imported for the purpose from Holland. However, the bulk of the money was used to fund a military machine which, during his reign, increased its size from the low tens of thousands to about 200,000 men and was thus on par with those of other major countries. These, moreover, were Western-style forces. Beginning already around 1640 the old pomest'e cavalry, designed for fighting the Tatars and other semi- nomadic peoples, had been giving way to other troops. First to appear on the scene were the strel'tsy or palace guards. Having risen in rebellion in 1698, they were forcibly suppressed and their leaders executed, some by Peter's own hands, and were replaced by a regular army consisting of disciplined infantry, cavalry, and artillery regiments.⁵ They were com­manded by members of the nobility - though individual noblemen could be found serving in the ranks as well - and manned by serfs who were called up on the basis of so many per hundred persons in each village and usually served until they died by combat or disease. The necessary arms and equipment were manufactured in government-owned factories that began to be established around the middle of the seventeenth century and were greatly expanded during Peter's reign. Managed by foreign experts with a labor force consisting of conscripted serfs, throughout the eight­eenth century they provided the army with equipment roughly as good as that of its Western opposite numbers.

A few years before his death Peter also took the last step toward absolute government by bringing the church under his own control. Always on the lookout for additional revenue, the tsar had appointed no successor when Patriarch Adrian died in October 1700. An ‘‘Overseer'' by the name of Yavorsky was, indeed, selected; but real power was in the hands of the newly established Monastery Bureau whose head, Ivan Mushin-Pushkin, was not a clergyman but a secular nobleman. While these measures enabled Peter to siphon off a considerable part of the church's wealth during what proved to be a twenty-year interim period, it still remained to put the reform on a regular footing. This was made the task of Feofan Prokopovich, previously archbishop of Pskov and an exceptionally well-educated person, who in 1718 replaced Mushin-

For the rise of the Russian army, see R. Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 151ff.

Pushkin as overseer and from now on worked hand in hand with Peter himself.

In 1721 Feofan published his Spiritual Regulation, a document which for the next two centuries was to form the bedrock of the Russian Orthodox Church.^[309] The situation whereby ‘‘simple hearts” considered the patriarch co-equal with the tsar had become intolerable and had to be remedied. To correct it the patriarchate itself was abolished - if one anecdote is to be believed at the point of a steel dagger wielded by Peter, who was, at six and a half feet, a formidable threat. Its place was taken by a collective leadership in the form of the Most Holy All-Ruling Synod with a standing equal to that of the senate. Though the synod itself was made up of clergymen, real power was now in the hands of a layman carrying the title of ober-prokuror - in this case, as in others, importing foreign terms into Russia's developing bureaucracy had interesting results. To emphasize their standing as government officials the members of the synod were paid salaries, though this formed only a small part of their income, as was the case of other government officials of equivalent rank. The church's lower members lost their tax-exempt status. Numerous new prayers were introduced to celebrate Russian victories and the so-called table holidays invented to commemorate important events in the tsar's life; indeed, so close was the relationship between empire and official religion that, until the second half of the nineteenth century, leaving the state religion constituted a criminal offense.

At the time Peter died in 1725, a political entity that, for lack of a better name, can only be called an autocratic empire was in place. Unlike contemporary states, it did not possess a civil society. As the governor of St. Petersburg noted in 1718, Russia at the time did not even have a term corresponding to the French assembly. Explaining the meaning of ‘‘an unsupervised meeting'' to the capital's inhabitants proved a matter of considerable difficulty; and indeed, it was expected that such meetings would take place only occasionally. So small was the number of books in circulation that Peter personally censored each one that was published, nor were there any printing presses in existence except for the three government-owned ones.^[310] Not that it mattered, for well over 90 percent of the population consisted of downtrodden, illiterate serfs. So far were they from forming ‘‘society'' that when one or another was killed his death was often treated as a civil question, to be settled not by putting the murderer on trial but by compensating the owner for the loss suffered. With the partial exception of a tiny class of merchants, themselves or­ganized into guilds that carried administrative burdens as well as fiscal ones,⁸ whoever was not a serf was ipso facto a secular or ecclesiastical government official. Peter III, at a later date, even tried to force officials to wear uniform, but this met with resistance and had to be abandoned.

As we saw, the emergence of the state in other countries owed much to the internal cohesion and discipline of their rising civil services. The first forms of government, written down by Peter personally and modeled upon the Swedish ones, were laid down in 1718-19. Toward the end of the eighteenth century the Russian administration, like that of other states, was starting to develop regular procedures which governed entrance, remuneration, promotion, and similar matters.⁹ However, the Russian administration operated behind closed doors. Affairs which in other countries were discussed freely enough were treated as state secrets - a tradition which was maintained throughout the tsarist period, carried on into the Soviet Union that succeeded it, and is only now being dismantled. This as well as the arbitrary tradition emanating from the emperor down - as late as 1850, an old regulation which authorized officials to dismiss their subordinates without having to give a reason was reaffirmed - prevented the one most important element of the modern state, i.e., its bureaucratic esprit de corps, from emerging. Where it did emerge it was aimed not so much at serving a nonexistent state as at operating like a society of thieves and fleecing the people, if possible with the tsar's consent but if necessary behind his back. Beginning already with Peter the Great it sometimes pleased Russian tsars to present themselves as (God-appointed, to be sure) stewards of the people for whose welfare, both physical and spiritual, they carried the responsibility. However, the accession of each new one usually served as an occasion to reconfirm the ‘‘autocratic'' nature of the regime - to remove all doubt, Alexander I in 1799 even enacted a special law which put the entire imperial family outside, and above, the normal framework of civil and public law. For these emperors to follow Frederick II and assume the role of a servant of an impersonal state would have been logically absurd even if this idea had occurred to anybody.

Russia's comparative backwardness during this period did not prevent it from becoming an increasingly prominent actor in the international system, albeit one that was regarded as barbaric by most of the rest. Possessed of a modern bureaucracy, a modern army, and modern arms, the tsar proved more than a match for his enemies to the south and east,

⁸ For details on the merchant, or posad, estate, see J. Michael Hittle, The Service City: State and Townsmen in Russia, 1600-1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 97-167. ⁹ See Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, pp. 285-6. i.e., the Turkish and Persian empires and the various Tatar khanates. The former two lost huge tracts of territory and were to continue to do so right up to the last years of the nineteenth century. The latter were reduced to the status of third-class opponents and protected, if at all, from Russian power mainly by distance, terrain, and the simple fact that they possessed nothing that the tsar and his nobles, now slowly adopting Western ways, considered worth having. In the West, too, Russian power made itself felt. The victory won by Peter himself over Sweden's Charles XII does not need recounting. The next decade saw Russian forces successfully en­gaging the Poles over Belarus; when the Seven Years War broke out in 1756, its forces found themselves fighting a Central European state, i.e., Prussia, for the first time. Throughout the 1770s and 1780s Russian strength in Europe continued to grow, mainly at the expense of Poland.

The climax of these developments was reached in the years after 1792. Having gained the lion's share in the third and final partition of Poland, Russia sent its forces to join the various coalitions which arrayed themsel­ves against Revolutionary France; soon they found themselves operating in places as far from home as Switzerland and the Adriatic. Their role grew even larger from 1806 on when Napoleon's victories over Austria and Prussia left Tsar Alexander I as his only opponent besides Britain. Reflecting the French triumph at the Battle of Friedland in particular, the Treaty of Tilsit (1807) all but excluded Russia from Poland. However, it did not prove lasting: within five years of its signature Russia was being subjected to a massive French invasion. While the details of the campaign do not concern us here, its importance in breaking the power of the Grande armee is a matter of record - of a force of 600,000, less than a third ultimately returned. Another two years passed and the Russian army, having played a key role in winning the Battle of Leipzig, entered Paris. At the Congress of Vienna, Alexander played the role of a primus inter pares. Between one dance and the next, he and his fellow rulers proceeded to dictate the fate of Europe.

At this time the Petrine political - if that is indeed the correct term - system was still basically intact. To be sure, the eighteenth century had seen some changes. Already Empresses Anne (1730-40) and Elizabeth (1741-61) had raised the age at which nobles had to enter imperial service, originally fixed at fourteen, to twenty-five; in 1762 obligatory service was abolished by Peter III. In 1782-5 Catherine II ended con­ditional ownership over estates, turning them into private property, in­cluding also the right to will them to whomever the owner chose instead of to the oldest male, as previously. With many landowners choosing to lead an absentee life in Moscow and St. Petersburg, there began to appear a class of people who, however few they might be relative to the total population, were neither serfs nor officials nor officers nor ecclesiastics: in short, the nucleus of a civil society. Among this elite, liberal ideas from the West, their absorption made all the easier by the fact that Peter and his successors had compelled some of their subjects to study abroad, began percolating. After 1771 permission was even given for people to publish and read books other than government-produced ones, though none that had not been censored in advance. Both Catherine II and Alexander I at the beginning of their respective reigns played with liberalism,^[311] but both soon found out that to do so was to put the regime at risk. The upshot of the ‘‘one step forward, two steps back” game played by the government was the Decembrist Revolt of 1825 mounted by aristocratic officers who had been exposed to French ideas. Failing to take hold, it was brutally suppressed by troops loyal to the tsar's brother, Prince Nicholas Pav­lovich.^[312] Soon afterwards he ascended the throne as Nicholas I, thus confirming the rule of the knout for another generation.

From then until the end of the reign Russia was put on hold, so to speak. While the West was undergoing the tremendous upheaval euphe­mistically known as industrialization, which in turn led to repeated out­breaks of revolutionary violence in 1830 and 1848-9, social and econ­omic change in the gigantic empire to the east proceeded at a glacial pace. Its ruler, Nicholas I, was almost as tall as his illustrious ancestor; but there the resemblance ends. Though still undergoverned by Western stan­dards, Russia's bureaucracy was expanding.^[313] So were the regulations that governed its behavior: in the Code of Law of 1832 they occupied no fewer than 869 paragraphs, many of them concerned with the forms of deference to be shown by dvoriane of inferior rank to their superiors. For the first time a line was drawn between offenses directed against the tsar's person and those which concerned state employees - a mixed blessing, as Nicholas himself pointed out when he distinguished between the German nobility, which served ‘‘the state,'' and the Russian one, which served ‘‘us.''^[314] In 1837 a Ministry of State Domains was created so that court officials were no longer ex officio ministers and state revenue was no longer the same as the emperor's personal income. In this way Russia was brought to the point which, in England, for example, had been reached between 150 and 300 years earlier.

In time these reforms might have led to autonomy and the emergence of a state - known in Russian as obshchestvo, an eighteenth-century neologism - separate from the person of the ruler. Nicholas, however, recognized the threat. As individuals, the members of the aristocracy were powerless; as army officers and administrative officials they represented a danger. By setting up a new organ of personal government known, appropriately enough, as His Majesty's Own Chancery and not subject to any control except his own, he nipped this threat in the bud. Internal controls were tightened, also by the construction of a political police apparatus under one of his own aides-de-camp as related in a previous section. These measures enabled Nicholas to act as Europe's gendarme, sending troops to suppress democracy and nationalism - in this period, they usually marched hand in hand - wherever they appeared. The empire also continued to acquire new territories, mainly at the expense of the Turks who were being defeated once every generation on the average. The campaign of 1829 brought Russian troops all the way to the gates of Constantinople where only a combination of plague and protests on the part of the powers obliged them to withdraw. As the Battle of Sinope (1853) was to show, by mid-century the tsar's navy was capable of blasting the Ottoman fleet out of the water any time it chose to do so.

Behind the imposing facade of the so-called Nicholas system, the structure whose foundations had been so well laid by Peter the Great was starting to crack. In Britain, the first mechanized spinning machines began operating around 1760; from the 1830s on Western economic and technical growth - itself made possible by the framework which the state provided - far outstripped that which even the most powerful command structure in history could achieve. The production of power, iron, and coal soared. With them came better communications, better transport, and, perhaps most important of all, the kind of sustained technological progress that made running forward as fast as possible a condition for keeping up: in Britain, e.g., the number of new patents registered each year increased twenty times over between 1650 and 1850.^[315] Largely deprived of these advantages, Russia wallowed in its own backwardness more than ever - between 1830 and 1860 its GNP, which at the earlier date had accounted for 24 percent of that of the leading five European powers combined, declined to less than 20 percent.^[316] By 1850 Britain was producing 2 million tons of pig iron a year, France, 400,000 tons, and Russia, with a population almost as large as that of both combined, a mere 227,000.¹⁶ The results became painfully evident during the Crimean War (1854-6). ‘‘The war that refused to boil,” as it has been called, saw British and French troops operating at the end of a long maritime line of communications; in the person of Lord Raglan it was also commanded by some of the worst blunderers in the whole of military history. Yet even so the allies were able to hold off, and ultimately defeat, the forces of Holy Russia on the latter's own soil, a feat which they crowned by storming Sevastopol. For the tsar's empire the writing was on the wall - not only were the Western troops better armed than the soldiers of Holy Russia but the latter's organization, transportation, and supply systems had all failed.¹⁷ Russia had either to reform, or to turn into the next Turkey and be divided among the other powers.

With the accession of Alexander II - incidentally the first Russian ruler in 130 years to occupy the throne without having to stage a coup of some sort - the time for change arrived. Beginning with Catherine the Great, various Russian rulers had questioned whether the system whereby the great majority of the population were the personal property of a small minority was, in fact, compatible with the existence of a modern state and contemplated the abolition of serfdom.¹⁸ Catherine herself had moved no fewer than 20,000 villages out of the church's domain and into that of the treasury; her successors made timid attempts to cut back the number of those in private ownership, whether by refusing to assign new lands to individuals or by passing legislation that facilitated emancipation.¹⁹ Still, in the end she, her son, and her two grandsons all shrank back in the face of expected opposition on the part of the dvoriane, and it was only when the Crimean War was over that the die was finally cast. With the separ­ation of the judiciary from the executive in 1861-4 arbitrary government was brought to an end in at least one crucial respect. A uniform code of law and a system of independent courts, staffed by lifelong judges whose decisions not even the tsar could overturn, were established - reforms that brought Russia to the point that Prussia, for example, had reached between about 1760 and the publication of the Allgemeines Landesrecht in 1795. Most important of all, over 40 million serfs were emancipated

¹⁶ For more detailed figures, see J. Blackwell, The Beginnings of Russian Industrialization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

¹⁷ See J. S. Curtis, Russia's Crimean War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979), for the details.

¹⁸ See J. G. Eisen and G. H. Markel, ‘‘The Question of Serfdom: Catherine II, the Russian Debate and the View from the Baltic Periphery,” in R. Bartlett, ed., Russia and the Enlightenment (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 125-42.

¹⁹ On the origins of the reforms that led to the liberation of the serfs, see R. A. Zaionchovsky, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia (Gulf Breeze, FL: International Academic Press, 1978), pp. 4-81. either from private ownership or from that of the crown. For the first time they were given an independent legal persona, including the right to own property.

To be sure, there were limits to how far even Alexander II was prepared to go. Though subject to judiciary review in ordinary matters, the Third Department - which changed its name to the Department of Political Affairs - retained the right to isolate and banish persons considered dangerous to the regime without having to state its reasons publicly and without appeal.²⁰ At the lowest level, the peasants continued to be governed by communal law. Theoretically they were free to live wherever they chose; in practice they remained bound to their communities by the need to repay the treasury for the value of the land which they had acquired, often at exorbitant rates. Still, from 1870 on sufficient social mobility was created to make possible some movement from the coun­tryside into the towns. This and the firm foundation provided to private property in turn helped industry to take off- between 1848 and 1896 the number of industrial workers rose from 220,000 to 1,742,000.²¹ Funded by the treasury, a gigantic railway-building program was launched, thus knitting together a vast continent and permitting its resources to be exploited. From the 1890s on it was followed by an equally spectacular expansion of heavy industry in particular, much of which was also state- financed and served the state's needs. While the overwhelming majority of the population continued to live on the land where its per capita income was abysmally low, by 1913 these reforms had made Russia into the world's fifth largest economy after the United States, Germany, Britain, and France. They had also restored its position as Europe's largest, if certainly not the most efficient, military power.

Under these circumstances a civil society, numerically small (as late as 1900, less than 1 percent of the population had attended high school) finally emerged; its liveliness is indicated by the fact that the number of political and literary periodicals increased from about twenty at the death of Nicholas I to seven times that figure thirty years later. However, in Russia, building industry and acquiring large-scale property were still very much a function of persuading the government to give assistance in the form of tariffs, subsidies, and loans.²² Hence for the most part the intelligentsia - a term which first became popular during the 1860s - consisted of educated persons who were not property-owners, such as

²⁰ See R. Hinsely, The Russian Secret Police (New York: Hutchinson, 1970), for these and other aspects of arbitrary government in Russia during this period.

²¹ Figures from E. H. Carr, TheRussianRevolution (NewYork: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965), vol. I, p. 15.

²² On the connection between the state and Russian industry in this period, see L. Kochan, The Making of Modern Russia (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, Books, 1965), pp. 155-7. doctors, lawyers, teachers, low-level officials, and students: briefly people with everything to gain and nothing to lose.^[317] Some of the members of the intelligentsia - including, notably, a handful of aristocratic men and women - leaned toward anarchism. Many more were liberals who ad­mired the West and wished to emulate it, whereas others still were Slavophiles who rejected modernism and tended to look back nostal­gically at a pristine, pre-Petrine Old Russia where people were devoted and government was a combination of Orthodoxy and paternalism.^[318] Whatever their ideas, very early on they began to clash with the authori­ties, demanding reform, while claiming that their education and concern for social questions entitled them to a share in government. In fact the question of democratization, which by establishing a parliament and political parties would have enabled these people to vent their energies, was repeatedly considered by the last three tsars. Yet in the end none of them could bring themselves to grant a constitution - as Alexander II himself reportedly said, he would have done so ‘‘that very day” had he not been convinced that it would result in ‘‘Russia falling into pieces.”^[319]

Its political aspirations frustrated, the intelligentsia set up various opposition circles. Numerically they were too weak to achieve anything; hence they turned to an alliance with ‘‘the people” as did the various ‘‘Will of the People,” ‘‘Way of the People,” ‘‘Return to the People,” and ‘‘Revenge of the People” - all movements that were made up of a handful of intellectuals. Regularly broken up by the police, which mistook their radical talk for active subversion, just as regularly they reemerged. Each successive group tended to be better organized and more resolute than the last. From revolutionary talk they passed to bombings and assassin­ations, the most important victims being Tsar Alexander II (1881) and Prime Minister Stolypin (1911). By the 1890s several Marxist-oriented factions had arisen, the most radical of whom were to become Lenin's Bolsheviks. Even before 1914 the propaganda of these groups was mak­ing some headway toward radicalizing the masses, particularly in the towns. Although trade unions were prohibited, a few were set up anyway.

In 1904-5, the weakness of the tsar's rule was signaled by Russia's defeat in the war against Japan as well as the abortive revolution that followed it.^[320] Last-minute attempts to broaden the regime's support by way of democratization soon faltered; in the end it was World War I which, by drastically reducing their already low living standards and turning them into cannon fodder, made the Russian masses ripe for revolution. The Communist polity established after 1917 did away with the last vestiges of patrimonialism - henceforward individuals no longer owned their houses, let alone entire countries. But at the same time it made everybody into a servant of the state, not out of necessity and in time of war as in Western, liberally minded countries but permanently and as a vital part of the official ideology. Instead of a clear line being drawn between the private and the public, which elsewhere was the very essence of political modernization, the former was swallowed up by the latter. In theory and to a considerable extent in practice as well, not an action could be taken nor a thought remain in anybody's head that was not state- mandated.

In Russia, the decisive factor that both made possible the construction of a successful centralized polity and prevented it from turning into a full- fledged state was the conscription of the nobility combined with the ‘‘privatization” of the rest of society, most ofwhich consisted of serfs. Not so in Poland, which during the later Middle Ages reached the point where it was the nobility, the szlachta, which dominated the crown instead of the other way around.^[321] Partly this success was made possible by sheer numbers: at 7 percent of the population, the szlachta was more numerous and more influential than anywhere else. The first critical step was taken in 1374 under the terms of the Pact of Kosice, also known as the Polish Magna Carta but destined to launch the country on a course very dif­ferent from that of Britain. As the throne was being contested between King Louis' daughter and his wife, the nobility put its weight behind the former. In return they were able to insist that its members should be taxed at no more than two groschen a year - a sum so small that it was soon no longer worth collecting - and that no other taxes should be passed without their consent. On top of this, justice and coinage were to remain under their own control; and, most important of all, the hitherto hered­itary monarchy was made elective so that future candidates could take up office only with the nobility's agreement and after having submitted to the conditions imposed on them.

These developments caused political authority in Poland to pass into the hands of the high nobility. Its main organ was the Privy Council; in 1493 the latter was transformed into a senate with 100 members. The senate in turn became the upper house of the parliament or Sejm whereas a lower house, numbering 150 and also known as Sejm, was occupied by the lower nobility. In 1505 enacting laws became the sole privilege of the Sejm; having already obtained the right of habeas corpus in 1434, the Polish nobility was now the most emancipated in Europe, possessed of what they pleased to call aurea libertas and what did, in fact, yield golden fruit for the largest of them. From then until the country's demise at the end of the eighteenth century some 200 meetings of the Sejm were held, all of them dominated by the Act of Nihil Novi (No Innovations) which was also adopted in 1505. As in Russia, the first use to which the nobility put its rule was to enserf the peasantry. In 1518 the latter were forbidden to appeal from seigneurial to royal courts; from now on, Polish landow­ners could not be called to account even for killing their serfs.

In 1572 the death of the last representative of the great Jagellonian dynasty led Poland into an interregnum that lasted three years. The opportunity was used to transfer the right to elect kings from the senate to the Sejm as a whole. In theory it was elected by the entire nobility. In practice it became the stamping ground of fewer than 300 wealthy families, who treated the lesser nobility as their retainers and extended their influence over entire districts - the top ninety landowners, for example, possessed an average of 1,000 hearths each. Once they had passed through the Sejm’s doors all members were considered equal. Formally in 1652, but in practice much earlier, they adopted the liberum veto, an arrangement which gave each one the right to veto not only the bill under consideration but also all other acts adopted during the session.^[322] To ‘‘safeguard those freedoms which our ancestors won through bloody combat,'' as one nobleman put it,^[323] the members claimed the right to attend meetings armed, on horseback, and accompanied by their retainers - who were sometimes so numerous as to be grouped in ‘‘regiments.'' These pro­cedures contributed little toward good order during the proceedings. Often they degenerated into brawls with delegates throwing books and drinking cups at each other and hiding under benches to avoid them. Still, at any rate, it turned the sessions into a spectacle well worth watching.

The second half of the sixteenth century was also the period when, to use a phrase coined by a famous historian, Europe was divided.^[324] Whereas, in the West, populations expanded, towns flourished, and the first large-scale capitalist enterprises made their appearance, the wide open lands of Eastern Europe - Prussia and Poland above all - turned themselves into the granaries of this developed West. As had also been the case in Prussia, but to a far greater extent, this development worked in favor of the Polish nobility - especially, as always, the higher nobility - and against the towns. During the Middle Ages the latter had been quite as advanced as Western ones, developing flourishing handicrafts as well as an intellectual life second to none. Now they were transformed into nothing but entrepots for the grain trade where foreign ships - first German and Dutch, later English - loaded their cargoes, thus laying the foun­dation for their subsequent decline.^[325]

The events of 1572 having turned Poland into an aristocratic republic (Rzeczpospolita), from then on its throne came to be occupied by a succession of noblemen, some native and others foreign. Among the latter were an heir to the French throne, an elector of Brandenburg, several Swedish (Vasa) princes, and two electors of Saxony, to say no­thing of a string of unsuccessful candidates including, at one point, Ivan the Terrible. Once elected, all remained entangled in the politics of their native countries. Closely bound by the coronation oaths imposed on them by their Polish subjects, none of them succeeded in establishing dynasties that lasted more than two generations. While other countries were busily transforming royal institutions into state-owned ones, in Poland there was no royal chancery; no royal bureaucracy; no attempt to centralize taxation (just two noble families, the Radziwils and the Potockis, between them were able to match the resources of the crown itself); and scarcely any royal judiciary except for a weak system of appellate courts which, of course, applied only to the nobility and to nobody else. Nor was the condition of the army any better. Like their aristocratic counterparts elsewhere, but with greater success, the Polish nobility resisted military modernization. Absent either a bureaucratically managed ministry of war or a large number of fortified cities, they could not follow the universal trend toward more infantry, artillery, and en­gineers operating in disciplined formations. Instead they stuck to cavalry - the Polish lancers' reputation for valor preceded them - each member of the gentry being, in fact, his own commander and bringing his under­trained, underequipped, disorderly, and often drunken retainers with him.^[326]

During the second half of the seventeenth century, the Poles, though they lost control of the Baltic littoral to Prussia's Great Elector, Frederick William, were still able to score impressive victories over Russia (which was even more backward) and Turkey (albeit more Austrian than Polish troops took place in the relief of Vienna in 1683). However, the wars of the period caused the population to fall from 10 million to perhaps 7 million.³³ After the death of the legendary soldier Jan Sobieski in 1696, things began falling apart. The Great Northern War of 1700-21 ended by turning the country into a virtual Russian protectorate. Having beaten the Swedes, Peter the Great took Livonia for himself. Formal limits were imposed on the size of the Polish army, while the employment of Prussian officials who might have turned things around was explicitly prohibited. By the 1760s, though Poland still controlled a territory larger than that of France and a population comparable to Britain's, the national army could muster only 16,000 men. In addition, individual nobles had their own private armies, e.g., the Czartoryski family 3,000-4,000 men, the Potockis 2,000, and the Radziwils (father and son) perhaps 15,000. While Prussia as the smallest of the powers possessed 150,000 disciplined regulars, the Poles were barely able to muster one-third of that number in toto. As Frederick II put it in a characteristically barbed phrase, Poland had become ‘‘an artichoke, ready to be eaten leaf by leaf.''³⁴ The first partition took place in 1772 and cost the country almost 100,000 square miles (almost 30 percent of its territory) as well as 4,500,000 people (35 percent of the population).

Spurred by the imminent threat to their existence, the Poles under King Stanislaw II Poniatowski (1764-95) finally started enacting reforms inspired by the ideas of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Washington among others. After the United States, Poland in 1791 became the second country in history to adopt a written constitution. The liberum veto was abolished, albeit only for an experimental period of twenty-five years. This enabled Poniatowski to set up the first modern cabinet, which in turn soon led to a reform in the tax system and to the creation of the nucleus of a modern army including, in 1765 and 1774, the first officer school and artillery school respectively.³⁵ By 1790 the number of regular

XV-XVIIIe siecles,” in W. Biegansky, et al., eds., Histoire militaire de Pologne: problemes choisis (Warsaw: Edition du Ministre de la defense nationale, 1970).

³³ For some figures, see E. Fuegedi, ‘‘The Demographic Landscape of East-Central Europe,” in Maczak, et al., East-Central Europe in Transition, p. 57.

³⁴ Figures and quote are from J. Lukowski, Liberty's Folly: The Polish-Lithuanian Common­wealth in the Eighteenth Century 1697-1795 (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 34.

³⁵ On the officer school, see E. Malicz, ‘‘Die Rolle des gebildeten Offiziers im Europa des 18. Jahrhunderts: die Polnische Ritterakademie in den Jahren 1765-1794,” Zeitschriftfur Ostforschung, 38, 1, 1989, pp. 82-94. troops had grown to 65,000; the beginnings of a diplomatic corps and a Ministry of Public Education (Komisja Edukacji Narodowei, the first in any country with responsibility for two universities and eighty high schools or gymnasiums) had also been established. It is true that legis­lation aimed at emancipating the serfs never got anywhere; one writer, Tomasz Dluski, even proposed that anyone who suggested such a measure should have his sanity examined in court. Still, even in this field sufficient progress was made on the initiative of private noblemen to make Poland attractive to half a million immigrants from neighboring countries.

Though the obstacles they met were enormous - in the 1780s, the Polish enlightened class numbered 2,000 persons at most - these reforms, had they been given the opportunity to develop, might conceivably have turned Poland into a modern state. In reality they raised the ire of neighboring rulers who feared that their own subjects would become infected - as the Prussian ambassador, Ewald von Hertzberg, put it, his country could not hope to defend itself against ‘‘a populous and well governed nation.” In the eyes of Catherine the Great, the goings-on in Warsaw had ‘‘outdone all the follies of the Parisian National Assem­bly.”³⁶ Thus the reforms, instead of achieving their purpose and saving Poland, helped bring about the second and third partitions which took place in 1793 and 1795 respectively. Significantly, what resistance the invaders encountered was not coordinated by the government, whose heads, led by the royal family itself, were the first to flee into exile; instead it took the form of popular rebellions led by the likes of Tadeusz Kos- ciuszko and Henryk Dabrowski, both of them members of the nobility and graduates of the Warsaw officer school. Wiped off the map, Poland was to undergo various transformations. First Napoleon established the so-called Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Then the Russians, returning after 1812, established ‘‘Congress Poland” as a sort of protectorate. However, after the abortive rebellion of 1863-4 the very name of Poland was erased; in its place there appeared the ‘‘Lands of the Vistula.” An independent Polish state was resurrected only in 1918 when two of the occupying powers (Germany and Austria) had been defeated and the third (Russia) undergone a revolution which would be followed by the destructive civil war of 1918-19. As has been remarked, Poland was like a canary that had swallowed three cats.

The contrasting fates of Russia and Poland illustrate, each in its own way, both the expansion of the state and the consequences of failing to adopt its institutions. In Russia the construction of a state apparatus

Both quotes are from Lukowsky, Liberty’s Folly, p. 253.

proceeded mainly by imitation and often at the hands of Western experts, both civilian and military, specifically imported for the purpose. This state without a state - a better term is hard to find - enabled the country to hold its own internationally and to develop internally, albeit at the ex­pense of conscripting the nobility and enserfing most of the population, and then only up to a point. When history, propelled by the steam engine, passed that point, the country saw itself left behind by its competitors. Though some changes were made, it was a question of too little too late. In the end the Revolution broke out and swept away the entire antiquated apparatus as well as killing hundreds of thousands of its members.

In Poland, to the contrary, the nobility refused to follow the example of either West or East and enter into a partnership with the monarchy - to the point that, to this day, the Polish term for state is panstwo, ‘‘a thing of nobles.” Legally emancipated, and possessed of relatively enormous economic and military resources, it aspired to govern by assembly in its own name and on its own behalf. The result was that the monarchy was weakened, the bureaucratic organs of government remained embryonic, civil society remained confined to a very small number of educated urbanites, and a proper state failed to appear at all. This failure to achieve political modernization had to be paid for by the disappearance of the country for over a century - a fate which elsewhere overtook only non­European polities, and not even all of those. In the words of the Polish national anthem:

And yet is Poland not lost.