Land, Tenure, and Assemblies: Russia in the 16th and 17th c.€¦ · Web view[Chapters 12 & 13...

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12 Land, Tenure, and Assemblies: Russia in the 16th and 17th c.

Russia from the late fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries expanded greatly, especially under Ivan IV “the Terrible” (1547-1584). His rule encapsulates Russia’s image as a “despotic,” tyrannical regime, displaying notorious brutality towards individuals and communities. He reportedly boiled men alive and fried them “in special man-sized frying pans.”1 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.2 The “phenomenon of service landholding is one of the fundamental bases of the theory that Muscovy was a patrimonial state.”3 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.4 This meant that “estates…were defined by their obligations, not their rights.”5 This dependence was the cause of the subservience that, for many scholars, distinguished Russia from the West; it not only foreclosed a constitutional trajectory, 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, tsars began convoking Assemblies of the Land with large attendance. No less than eight of them even elected a tsar, when dynastic lineage failed—an inconceivable function for the English or French parliaments.8

Εven in studies that have strongly questioned the despotic interpretation of the Russian regime, this paradox is typically left unexplained. These 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

1 Kivelson (1997, 656).2 Martin (1995, 365).3 Weickhardt (1993, 677).4 Floria (2000, 14).5 Halperin (2002, 502).6 Hellie (2000, 12), Alef (1983, 34), Poe (2002, 474-5).7 Keep (1957, 100), Hosking (2000, 305).8 The lords of the English Parliament forced Edward II to abdicate, however, in 1327, with more instances a century later.

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the servitude consolidated by Ivan IV, ensconcing “despotism.”9 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”10—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 Kollman, far from an absolutist autocracy, Muscovy was controlled by clans of aristocrats that limited the crown’s powers, echoing the findings on French and Spanish absolutism.11 Tsars had to govern with them, requiring consensus to secure implementation.12 Further, the judicial system also displayed a balancing between local communities and central structures, with equality laying in the application of the law, if not its content.13 For Valerie Kivelson, similar autonomy can be discerned in the seventeenth-century provincial gentry, which succeeded in pursuing family-focused interests even against central encroachments, in ways that parallel findings on the role of family networks in the West.14

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 “façade.”15 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.”16 Moreover, much revision consists in showing how Russia was “like England” or France in some respects, for instance, full property rights. Yet it leaves unaddressed the broad imposition of service and dependence, which critics view as evidence of patrimonialism and, effectively, backwardness.17

Here, by contrast, I show how England was like Russia precisely on this element that causes most difficulty for the non-despotic reading, service to the state. In Parts 1 and 2, service emerged as the necessary condition for constitutional emergence in England and its variation helped explain different outcomes in the West. From the perspective of this book, therefore, representative activity under a ruler asserting his power through service is not paradoxical. Representative activity when service and conditional relations are tightened is exactly what the preceding argument has led us to expect. Even if Russia seemed more “medieval” on this count compared to its Western contemporaries,18 it did so on the dimension, service, that produced constitutional governance in an earlier stage in the West. Even if one does not accept the book’s argument about the 9 Pipes (1994, 525-6).10 Weickhardt (1993, 665), 1994).11 Kollmann (1987).12 Ostrowski (2006, 217-8, 224-5).13 Weickhardt (1992).14 Kivelson (1996). See also Rowland (1990).15 Ostrowski (2002, 539-40), Poe (2002, 480).16 Kollmann (1987, 8).17 Pipes (1994), Poe (2002).18 Kivelson (1997, 635).

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necessary connection between the two, it must be conceded that service is at least not sufficient to explain despotism, as some Russian scholarship claims, since service was so pervasive in the period that generated parliament, so cannot by itself preclude it.

Moreover, the disjuncture between ideology and practice is also what one would expect on the basis of 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 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. It is thus not surprising that “the adjective “free” or “at will” (vol’nyi) signified disorder and disturbance, disruptive willfulness.”19 The rhetoric was extreme precisely to counteract that. The incentives on the tsar to terrorize those within his reach increased the more he could not subdue those out of reach, the boyars and princes, helping explain the subservient behavior of those present.

Ultimately, the preceding analysis helps synthesize the varied explanations Russian scholars have offered for the divergence with the West. Differences are few at the micro-level of daily practice; they become salient at the aggregate level of polity-wide institutions, as some historians 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 “*rational” judicial and political culture, or enserfment prevailed.20 This is ultimately what needs to be explained.

This book has argued that the West 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. After all, medieval English kings raised three to four times per capita taxes than their French counterparts, as chapter 6 has shown, so they were hardly more “limited.” If that is so, then the differing Russian trajectory could 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 population 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 the one observed in late Hungary. 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, congruent 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.

19 Kivelson (2002, 484).20 Kivelson (1996, 9-15, 151-6, 276-8), Kollmann (1987), Kollmann (2012, 425-6), Weickhardt (1993, 678).

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Since no alternative mechanisms were deployed to provide regularity and inclusiveness, especially of the most powerful, the representative activity that did emerge did 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.”21 It is possible that even if state capacity had been sufficient, Russians might not have wanted to develop along similar lines to the West, setting other values as paramount. Instead, comparison is used for analytical purposes, to test whether some conditions deemed necessary can be identified in this case. Moreover, although historians insist on very careful comparisons and will reject them if isomorphism is not evident, this study applies a looser strategy, by looking at similarities, rather than identity, in form and function.22 Democracies today operate across regions with great variation, yet they still form part of a recognizable category, as long as certain relations hold. The same standard is applied here to the historical past.

12.1Conditional Land Rights and Second-Best Constitutionalism

Just like rulers from medieval Europe to the early American state, the numerous Russian princes from the fourteenth century granted conquered land conditionally to military men, creating a service class that evolved over time, the boyars.23 When these fragmented principalities were gradually absorbed by Muscovy, the princes and their servitors transferred allegiance to Muscovy’s prince (who eventually was named tsar).24 Servitors acquired land either allodially (as votchina) or conditionally (as pomest’e). Boyars were distinguished by gaining allodial rights that guaranteed inheritance, thus establishing a power base. The group was fluid, ranging from a couple dozen families in the early fifteenth century, to 29 boyars in 1613, to close to 150 by 1690.25 The boyar nobility retained a powerful position in the governance of the realm, as the tsar had “to rule the country in consultation” with them.26 “Almost every Muscovite decree begins with the redolent phrase ‘the tsar decreed and the boyars confirmed.’”27 Although older scholarship assumed this was empty rhetoric and the power of the tsar was absolute, recent works have made a compelling case for their role. The following sections support this view.

The increasing independence of the boyars since the fifteenth century, in fact, led Russian tsars to build a new class of servitors, the dvoriane, frequently

21 Note this objection in Ostrowski (2004, 135).22 Brown (1983, 81-3), Kollmann (1987, 185).23 Frymer (2017).24 The title of the highest rank was Grand Prince; the title “tsar” was established in 1547, by Ivan IV (the Terrible). 25 Martin (1995, 245), Crummey (1983).26 Poe (2006, 437, 460).27 Kivelson (2002, 492).

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referred to as gentry and more directly dependent on the ruler than the boyars.28 This move was an attempt to halt the “grave abuses” of the entrenched elites.29 It was also, according to historian Anne Kleimola, a protection device against a populace that blamed the elite, not the state, for local corruption and abuse.30 But the incapacity to control elite behavior is a symptom of state weakness.

The dvoriane were “less clannish” than the boyars, a trait that will be shown to be central and which only enhanced the tsar’s capacity to control them.31 They received about half of the land that Ivan III (1462-1505) confiscated after he conquered Novgorod, which amounted to about 81.7% of total cultivated land, retaining the rest for the royal household.32 From the 1490s, these Muscovite cavalrymen replaced the Novgorodian landowners, by acquiring lands with peasants whose taxes paid for their military service.33 The lands were pomest’e and were distinguished from votchina, the hereditary lands held by the boyars.34 Pomest’e land could not technically be sold. Eventually, it could be effectively inherited, as long as the heir assumed military service,35 but if a servitor died without heirs, the land returned to the Treasury, as did the Ottoman timars and the lands held by tenants-in-chief in England.

Although the gentry pomest’e were thus similar to Western fiefs, some scholars draw a sharp distinction. The two types differ of course and this study cannot do justice to full historical complexity It can however challenge the key logic that specialists have invoked to claim that they are not comparable: according to historian Richard Pipes, Russian fiefs were established under apparently strong tsarist rule, at the height of monarchical centralization, whereas Western fiefs are viewed as emblematic of the age of “feudal decentralization.”36 Yet, 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, and which had political effects precisely because of that. Many historians even consider England as a more faithful instantiation of feudalism.37 High levels of concentration in the hands of and dependence on the crown was the feature that enabled the social change that shaped regime-type in England. The “mutual contract” observed also on the continent did not suffice to ensure the royal capacity to enforce service, as I have argued.

As the English case would lead one to expect, this dependence on the tsar shaped how local governance evolved in this period. The dvoriane secured through petitions—the same mechanism observed in the West—the right to governance by 28 Keep (1957, 105), Hosking (2001, 92-6), Kivelson (1996).29 Martin (1995, 409).30 Kleimola (1977, 28).31 Pipes (1974, 92).32 Pipes (1974, 93).33 Hellie (2006a, 382). See also, Ostrowski (2006, 225).34 Pipes (1974, 92-3), Graham (1987).35 Weickhardt (1993, 664, 677-8), Ostrowski (2006, 231).36 Pipes (1974, 100).37 Reynolds (1994, 480, and more extensively 323-395), Kaeuper (1988, 153), Bartlett (2000, 202), Hollister (1976, 99-106).

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local councils of elders, the guba, in the 1530s. This servitor class thus effectively managed local government at the behest of the tsar: it was responsible for law and order in the provinces, had control over the local population’s mobility, the distribution of service lands, the gathering of taxes, the mustering of local military forces and the certifying of servile contracts.38 These innovations were part of a larger program of reassertion of authority over land that preceded Ivan IV, including land surveys and the introduction of coins of uniform units and weight throughout the land from the 1530s.39 These were ensconced by the centralization of justice: the state became “the exclusive agent of sanctioned violence (corporal and capital punishment, judicial torture) and eliminated private blood violence.”40

By “the mid-sixteenth century almost the entire population owed substantial obligations to the state.”41 Russian agents were locally selected and unpaid, with personal liabilities if they failed in their obligations, just like English sheriffs and other royal agents in the medieval period. Russian historians debate whether this experiment was genuinely democratic or a “sham” masking state extension; but it has strong similarities the medieval English context that generated the most robust Western European parliamentary structure—at least the case needs to be made that differences were consequential.42 Even the “scattered landholding” of the Moscow elites, which is seen to have “exacerbated the service-induced rootlessness of the gentry,” resembles English patterns, where estate fragmentation was initially a key mechanism of undercutting noble power, suggesting landholding fragmentation does not suffice to explain divergent Russian outcomes.43

In this setting, it is unsurprising that service emerges as key also for the representative activity observed in Russia. That the gentry was the critical actor in the assemblies that began to be called in the 1550s, far from a paradox, is the main prediction of the argument advanced here. These Assemblies of the Land (later named zemskii sobor) were first called 1549 due to war and ended in 1653.44 Depending on the criteria of social composition, about 15 to 60 assemblies are believed to have been held.45 They had no formal procedure, elections or quotas; “sometimes the instructions requested that as many representatives as desired should come.” Despite this, they took radical political action: tsars were elected in those Assemblies, occasionally with particularly broad representation, including black peasants, as when Mikhail Fedorovich was elected in 1613, ending the Time of Troubles. Remarkably, no ruler had yet been elected in England or France (as opposed to the Holy Roman Empire).

That this practice originated in the violent rule of Ivan IV, though a paradox, has been muted because Western historians mostly questioned the portrayal of the 38 Martin (1995, 385).39 Bogatyrev (2006, 253), Martin (1995, 404-405).40 Kollmann (2012, 25).41 Zlotnik (1979, 244, 250). Some of these were converted into monetary fees; Martin (1995, 313).42 Kivelson (1996, 144-5), Morris and Strayer (1940, 49, 149).43 Kivelson (1994, 199), Kivelson (1996, 87), Prestwich (1990, 60).44 Brown (1983, 78), Pipes (1974, 107). The term zemskii sobor was invented in the nineteenth century; Brown (1983, 90), Hellie (1987).45 Brown (1983, 79, 82, 84).

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period in Soviet scholarship as that of an “estate-representative monarchy.”46 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; society was stratified in terms of “ranks,” instead, which defined positions vis-à-vis the tsar, without establishing a corps.47 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.”48 However, these criteria—obligatory service and, as will be shown below, lack of corporative status for representatives—could be repeated almost verbatim about England, as Parts One and Two have shown. In fact, in England it was local communities that paid the expense of their representatives, causing bitter disputes—again indicating higher coercive powers in the English case.49 These points cannot either, therefore, serve to account for the differential outcomes in the Russian case.

Nor is the absence of popular representation definitive. Some scholars have dismissed many Russian assemblies due to the absence of non-nobles,50 but as we have seen in England, the Commons were only present in a third of the meetings before 1307, in the critical period of emergence, and important decisions were taken in their absence—ignoring the majority of sessions where nobles alone were present stymies any explanation of parliamentary emergence. Without the systematic compellence of the nobility, the English Parliament would have gone in the direction of France and Castile, where the Third Estate predominated. Likewise, the absence of “corporate chambers” is also not at odds with the early stages of English development: as seen, the English houses of Lords and Commons only solidified in the fourteenth century as a result of common burdens, as they did in Russia by 1649.51

Russian Assemblies were in fact 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.52 The most consequential differences with England were two and both reflect variation in ruler power. First, Russian tsars were weaker compared to medieval English kings in compelling their strongest domestic competitors (the boyars and princes), even though tsars were strong, even tyrannical, over lower groups;53 they were after all elected.54 As my argument predicts, resulting institutions were thus less robust. Moreover, even the classes attending were not taxed, indicating ruler weakness but also removing a major incentive observed in England.55 The capacity to impose taxation on the upper 46 Brown (1983, 78-81).47 Bogatyrev (2006, 254-5).48 Pipes (1974, 107).49 See chapter 4.50 Brown (1983, 81).51 Keep (1957, 102), Ostrowski (2004, 115, 116) and chapter 2.52 Hellie (1987, 229-231), Kivelson (1996, 198), Brown (1983). 53 Martin (1995, 415). The two service groups were deeply divided; Martin (1995, 280-3), Farrow (2004, 34-6).54 See Ostrowski (2004, 118-9, 129-30) for the assembly analysis.55 Kollmann (1987, 185).

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strata was catalytic in the English case, but absent or weak in others. Although fiscal pressures were dominant in a ruler’s calculus, the power relationship over those attending was more critical.

Tsars could thus not extend the pattern of governance achieved with the gentry across society, especially on the most powerful, and to sustain it over time. Instead, this produces second-best constitutionalism: some elements of constitutionalism are present, but it is not fully inclusive, as in England. It excludes those with jurisdiction over considerable parts of the territory, restricting the reach of the regime.

Second, attendance was severely affected by problems that reflected weaker infrastructural powers to compel especially powerful subjects to be present at the center—the key advantage observed in the English case. Since attendance is widely seen as a right demanded from below, failure to secure it seems to support the assumption that Russian actors lacked a conception of such rights. Instead, understading why attendance was low and haphazard highlights the infrastructural weakness of the Russian regime. In England, kings relied on a robust, polity-wide system of counties organized around a court under royal coordination and command, which, as we’ve seen, was predicated on strong royal enforcement powers. By contrast, the members of the Assembly of the Land were “either drawn from whichever members of the service ranks happened to be in Moscow at the time or chosen by local government officials.”56 The selection of candidates “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. It is little wonder these governors had difficulty finding delegates and often encountered resistance from the pool of potential candidates.”57 That resistance was, as we have seen, not weaker in England. Communities bore the cost and, although it was no less acrimonious, the process still provided a steady stream of representatives, because royal enforcement was more effective.

The claim of tsarist weakness, however, goes against widespread stereotypes. What evidence supports it? Revisionist scholarship has made an extensive case, 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, ironically, the mass enserfment of peasants by the gentry. These in turn precluded the institutional fusion between the different instruments of governance observed in England and the supra-local collective organization of the gentry. The limited organization of collective responsibility

56 Ostrowski (2004, 117).57 Ostrowski (2004, 117). Ostrowski ascribes the choice to governors, whereas Kivelson 1996, 198) notes that for the gentry the selection was of “the best” representatives from that class, a principle that differs little from English practice. Though we tend to think of elections as more democratic, they were in fact more efficient in collecting information than entrusting to an outside administrator. The key is that they are generally held when institutional control by the ruler is stronger and can prevent overly threatening outcomes.

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above the local level in Russia was part of a broader pattern of difference with the West, and will be examined more fully in the next chapter.

12.2 Indicators of Ruler Weakness

12.2.1Weak control over society, especially the boyarsThe 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 mentioned earlier.

This revisionism notes that despite the autocratic façade, underlying power dynamics were very fragmented.58 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.”59 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 confirmed in the following section.

In Russian historiography, however, power is instead often assessed through property rights. The assumption of tsar despotism focuses on a posited lack of full property rights for the servitor classes, even the boyars. Pipes, the major advocate of this line, advanced two claims in support: property rights depended on service and rulers curtailed them through arbitrary restrictions and confiscations. Service exemplified the regime’s character as unfree and absolutist. In “no other European land was the sovereign able to make all non-clerical landholding conditional upon the performance of service to him.”60 Absolutism is identified with total control of economic resources: “It was the combination of absolute political power with nearly complete control of the country’s productive resources that made the Muscovite monarchy so formidable an institution.”61

Pipes’ argument was powerfully countered by Wickhardt, who, as mentioned, established the similarities with English Common Law in some key forms of property.62 Two further problematic assumptions afflict this position from the perspective of this book: that conditionality and service necessarily imply strong enforcement powers and that service is a regressive trait. Treating service as regressive assumes a teleological understanding of Western development, progressing away from conditional service to “freedom” and “absolute property 58 Kollmann (1987, 146-180).59 Kivelson (1994, 198), Keenan (1986), Crummey (1983). Cf. Bogatyrev (2000, 221).60 Blum (1961, 169). Similarly, Pipes held that it “had profound implications for the future course of Russian history. It meant nothing less than the elimination of private property in land;” Pipes (1974, 93).61 Pipes (1974, 94).62 Weickhardt (1993), Weickhardt (1994).

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rights:” Muscovy’s opposite trajectory thus implies strong, even arbitrary central powers. Muscovite rulers indeed encroached on the more “absolute” rights observed up to the 1400s, to assert more conditional ones based on service across all groups. Such a change does indicate increasing powers for the ruler, though it exhibited both local and temporal variation. This may have made Russia “backward” compared to Western early modern developments, but it cannot explain or define “despotism.”63 It certainly is not enough to adjudicate the question of the power balance with the leading social group, the boyars.

To re-assess this, the conditions under which conditional service was imposed must be examined first, to show the societal strength tsars were initially faced with. When Muscovite tsars embarked on the “regressive” imposition of land-based conditional service on their elites in the late 1400s, the boyar group had levels of freedom unparalleled in the West, especially England. Just as English nobles, they were major landowners,64 but unlike them, if a boyar died without male heirs, his land did not revert to the Treasury, but could go even to his daughters, according to the Russian law code of the early twelfth century;65 it was therefore a form of allodial, absolute property. Boyar land could be freely sold. A boyar clan member could repurchase a relative’s sold votchina land within forty years (although this dampened sales).66 This practice was not exclusively eastern and “patrimonial;” it was also common in the West, where it was called retrait lignager.67

Although almost all boyars performed military service, this was not a tenurial obligation as in England. They served to gain income, albeit bound by concerns of honor.68 They were closer to modern state citizens than to the English tenant nobility, having an obligation to make some contribution to the state but free to move. They were allowed by customary law to serve any prince; they could even serve a foreign ruler, such as the Great Prince of Lithuania, a right affirmed in treaties. They could leave a prince through the right of renunciation (otkaz).69 This displays a transactional, contractual structure that was inconceivable in the English or French monarchies.

It is no accident, therefore, that 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 facing (and subduing) formidable independent princes.70 The tsar was also challenged by the appanage princes, who, though family members, had large retinues that provided independence.71 Even Pipes concedes this: “Behind the façade of monopolistic and autocratic monarchy

63 See discussion in Kivelson (1997, 235).64 Kollmann (1987, 37-46).65 Weickhardt (1996, 5).66 Hellie (2006a, 384).67 Pipes (1974, 93), Baker (2002, 262), Dawson (1940). 68 Kollmann (1999).69 Pipes (1974, 47).70 Bogatyrev (2000, 18).71 Crummey (1987, 110-4), Martin (1995, 333-4, 364).

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survived powerful vestiges of the appanage era…Annexation was often a mere formality…”72

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: the de facto existence of such rights was what tsars were combatting.73 Just as in France, it was the fragmentation and initial strength of social groups that elicited absolutist rhetoric; this is the normative/empirical inversion theorized in this book. Boyar liberties began to be curtailed during the period of state consolidation under Ivan III, in the 1470s, who treated departure as treason, worthy of confiscation.74 This only approximated default conditions in the West. Documentation became required from the chancery as necessary for travel; it could be refused and the rank of the boyar lowered without it, which would damage his career. But free departure remained a right until the 1530s.75

Tsars employed other tools, moreover, that look thoroughly 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 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.77 Enforcement remained difficult: as boyars often avoided the obligation, a “stream of decrees threatening dire punishment” was issued.78 This was probably why Ivan IV drastically increased the size of the Duma.79 The number of boyars called rose from 12 to 50, admitting newcomers who were far less experienced and thus more dependent.80

Limitations on land transfers and confiscations by tsars are, however, the major indicators of state arbitrariness in this literature, as in much property rights scholarship.81 Tsars indeed restricted transfers to monastic institutions in Russia. 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, as the church is a perpetual organization, so this concerned tax enforcement.82

72 Pipes (1974, 89).73 Poe (2002, 482).74 Farrow (2004, 34), Kleimola (1977, 26-7).75 Pipes (1974, 88). 76 Kosto (2012)77 Dewey (1987).78 Pipes (1974, 89).79 A sharper increase ascribed to weakness occurred in the late 1600s; Poe (2006, 451).80 Martin (1995, 372-3, 381).81 Pipes (1994), Poe (2002), North and Weingast (1989).82 Martin (1995, 404).

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Weickhardt has noted that confiscations were hardly absent in England.83 In fact, it was precisely because medieval restraints were undercut by the pervasive practice of uses and trusts over the following centuries, as already described, that Henry VIII confiscated two-thirds of English monastic lands after the 1530s and sold them off to private buyers within ten years. The Dissolution of the Monasteries involved about a fifth to a quarter of the land of England:84 it was the most extensive reallocation of landed property since the Norman Conquest and probably one of the largest in Europe. The initial pretext, moreover, was not legal title but religious conformity, assiduously pursued by Cromwell’s “visitations” from 1535—an arbitrary motive. Moreover, to prevent the lands from reverting to the founders’ heirs, Parliament was enlisted to pass the “Suppression of Religious Houses Act” of 1535, which reverted land to the Crown, except on payment of a fine. Only the revenues of lay holders of monastic offices and pensions were preserved.85 The English state did not respect property rights more; it was far more effective in surgically suppressing them, according to need. This is also seen in the Enclosures, briefly discussed in chapter 7, which expropriated the land rights of large sections of the population over centuries, eventually with parliamentary approval.86

By contrast, existing data, though incomplete, suggest that expropriations of land were actually quite limited in Russia, despite contrary impressions. Studies suggest, as Weickhardt shows, that less than 3 to 4 percent of landowners faced confiscation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.87 Yet English kings in the period of parliamentary emergence confiscated lands of about 44% and 31% of recorded nobles in the century before and after 1250 respectively, as seen in chapter 6.88 It was precisely this capacity of the crown that mobilized the nobility to collaborate and solve its collective action problem—enabling representative institutions. Conversely, it was the greater comparative weakness of the tsar that made centralized exchange less structured. Confiscations, after all, may mean arbitrariness, but they may also mean greater anomie in society.

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.89 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.”90 The observed “power” of tsars had more to do with the lack of institutionalized barriers than to the tsars’ effectiveness in

83 Weickhardt (1994, 532).84 Baker (2003, 709).85 Knowles and Knowles (1976), Woodward and McIlwain (1995), Youings (1971). 86 Polanyi (1944).87 Weickhardt (1994, 533).88 See table *.89 Kleimola (1977, 28).90 Mann (1984, 188).

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controlling society. But this institutional absence was the result of weakness, as argued here. In England, its presence flowed from royal strength, at least initially.

This is strikingly displayed in an episode widely invoked to prove exactly the opposite, the Oprichnina. This was a state policy implemented in 1564 by Ivan the Terrible, whereby he split the country in two to confront the boyars, placing half under his direct control.91 He confiscated land from boyars and dvoriane alike. Moreover, “Ivan’s henchmen, the notorious oprichniki, among their many barbarous acts ‘collected as much rent from their peasants in one year as usually was collected in ten years’…The result was that ensuing censuses found up to 85 per cent of the heartland of Muscovy, especially around Moscow and Novgorod, abandoned…”92 Tax collection plummeted after the 1560s to less than a tenth in Novgorod, “once the wealthiest region in all the Russian lands.”93 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.94 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 seem to have been confiscated, although the evidence is not clear-cut.95 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.96 This reign of terror, as typical, stemmed from weakness (although “paranoia” is also detected97), not strength.98 The greater the weakness and threat, the more the resort to violence and cruelty.

12.2.2Poor taxing capability of tsarsThe episode I have described as one of weakness actually culminated a

decades-long effort to strengthen the state. The striking rise in taxes, at least in nominal terms, is an indicator of this. The rate per taxable area unit rose 7 times in the first half of the sixteenth century, and revenue from one region, Novgorod, rose 4 times in the same period, according to some studies.99 This regime hit peasants particularly hard, hence amplifying the tyrannical image of the regime. So, an

91 Bogatyrev (2006, 259).92 Hellie (2006b, 293-4). 93 Martin (1995, 414-5). 94 Bogatyrev (2006, 257).95 Farrow (2004, 35).96 Crummey (1987, 162).97 Pipes (1974, 100).98 “Ivan's excesses, reportedly involving boiling men alive and frying them in special man-sized frying pans, raised violence to an elaborate and gruesome art, but the bread-and-butter cruelty of officially prescribed punishment is also stunning;” Kivelson (1997, 656), Staden and Esper (1967). For Ivan’s paranoia, see Hellie (2006b, 293).99 See the studies cited by Martin (1995, 405-6).

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increase there was, concomitant with the rise of state power I’ve suggested was the necessary condition for institutional emergence. However, this does not amount to strong taxing capability; 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.

Although existing measures of these variables are speculative, they establish a baseline that can be revised by further historical research. Premodern GDP on a broad comparative basis was estimated by Angus Maddison, though in many cases the figures simply extrapolate from more recent benchmarks.100 According to these estimates, Russia had about half the GDP per capita of its Western counterparts and only reached the Ottoman Empire in 1700. For tax revenue, the only cross-country study that has included Russia provides figures for the seventeenth century. These suggest that Russia’s tax revenue per capita was only 13 percent of what England, 8 percent of what the Netherlands raised and a third of what France did (but double what the Ottoman Empire did).101 It would need to raise about 8 times as much to reach English levels of per capita taxation, when its per capita wealth was only half. Extraction seems therefore considerably less than what was possible.102

Although these figures require extensive historical confirmation, which for some periods may simply not be possible, historical evidence supports at least the claim of limited extraction. The Russian tax system after the fifteenth century is mostly known through immunity charters, the prevalence of which attests the limits of tax extraction, as we've seen in France.103 The most privileged status was enjoyed by the nobility and Church in particular, due to special terms secured during feudal wars of the fifteenth century.104 Unlike in England, military service land was tax exempt.105 Whether immunities were increasing or not in the early sixteenth century has been the topic of unresolved historical controversy.106 However, new immunities were phased out after the 1530s, when strong state-building efforts were underway, as would be expected from the logic of this book.

Further, the seventeenth century continued the pattern of declining incidence of taxation, despite common views of it as the “height of monarchical centralization.”107 Another distribution of court land and “black lands” to the servitors exacerbated state weakness. These lands were the major source of tax revenue; court lands were directly under the control of the tsar, whilst black lands

100 I use the older data, as the more accurate recent estimates by the Maddison Project do not include Russia.101 Karaman and Pamuk (2013). I thank Kivanc Karaman for kindly sharing the data. 102 For an earlier period, pre-1400, one might contrast this with the striking finding of historian Janet Martin, that the fur trade (the most important economic resource) probably equaled the tribute paid to the Golden Horde; Martin (2004). A full GDP estimate of course would need to include all economic activity, of which trade was one part. 103 Dewey (1964), Froianov (1986), Kashtanov (1971).104 Floria (2000, 18), Kollmann (2002, 31-3).105 Kivelson (1996, 46).106 Dewey (1964).107 Pipes (1974, 100).

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were populated by peasants that the tsar could freely grant to private proprietors.108 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 [tax-paying] peasants living in self-governing communities.”109 The claims about monarchical centralization thus belied the massive privatization of state land observed on the ground. By the late 1650s, 67% of the households subject to fiscal and other obligations (tiaglo) were under boyar and dvoriane land and 13% in the hands of the church; the crown controlled only about 9%. Four out of five Russians “ceased to be subjects of the state,” a condition formalized in the Code of 1649.110 Collection was inevitably undermined: albeit increasing, it remained far below the levels that could be supported by the wealth of the country. In England, not only were the peasants taxed, but the nobles themselves were liable as well, undercutting their wealth more deeply than in Russia. The incapacity to impose broadly-based state taxation emerges again as a symptom of an absolutist rhetoric which conceals, but actually reflects, infrastructural weakness.

12.2.3Mass enserfment of peasants by the servitor class Within social science, especially economic history, no feature of the Russian

regime has encapsulated its assumed despotism (and economic stagnation) more than the re-imposition of serfdom.111 This occurred in the seventeenth century, just as it was definitively abolished in the West, where the peasantry acquired increasing freedoms after the Black Death.112 In Russia, by contrast, scholars have drawn a bleak picture of oppression: 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 of 1649 forbade peasants “to lodge complaints against landlords unless state security was involved (when they were required to do so)”, thus depriving them of the right to testify in court in civil disputes. It also recognized them as chattels, making them “personally liable for debts of bankrupt landlords.”113 This went far beyond the regulations of the code of 1497.114

This sounds despotic indeed, but what explains it? A conventional economic thesis 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.115 Labor scarcity, however, normally entails greater bargaining power for laborers, not enserfment; the economic logic is incomplete here, as the economic historian Robert Brenner noted long ago.116 So, did government intervention impede the clearing of economic forces instead?

108 Blum (1961, 93).109 Pipes (1974, 104), Blum (1961, 93).110 Pipes (1974, 104).111 Brenner (1976), Aston and Philpin (1985), Robinson and Torvik (2013).112 Weickhardt (1993, 678).113 Pipes (1974, 104-5).114 Ostrowski (2006, 230).115 Domar (1970).116 Brenner (1976).

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In fact, slavery removed persons from tax-paying rolls, so it was unwanted by the state.117 The Code was implementing servitor landlord interests, not any “statist” agenda of the tsar; such extreme provisions reflected the power of the class they benefited.118 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.”119 The state had to cede such rights to lords as it was itself unable to protect the peasants of the gentry from the depredations of the boyars and the church: the latter would simply encroach on the workers of less powerful servitors and deprive them of their revenue.120 The trend was longstanding. The government began to repeal the right of some peasants to move on St George’s Day in the 1580s. “In 1592 this prohibition was extended ‘until further notice’ to all peasants.” The purpose was to ensure that the peasants in the lands of the provincial servitor class remained stable, since the servitors could not render military service in the absence of peasant rent-payers.121 It should be noted that this infringed on a freedom, to voluntarily change lords once a year,122 that was inconceivable for the villein population in England in the period of parliamentary emergence.

These measures are deemed authoritarian, but they were little different from those applied in England at an earlier period of labor scarcity, triggered by the Black Death. After the 1340s, royal statutes regulated the peasant labor force in England, especially the Statute of Labourers of 1351.123 In just the decade following enactment, 664 royal officials were appointed for the enforcement of the statute and their work was closely integrated with that of the justices of the peace.124 Detailed local studies have shown an “exceptional” level of enforcement of the statutes across regions.125 Yet scholars emphasize how the statute failed to constrain wages or to suppress labor flight completely.126 In fact, the famous “Brenner debate” pitted social conflict theory, which highlighted labor flight and rebellion, against price theory, which saw the decline of serfdom as a response to economic crisis. Although the latter was unable to explain the divergence between East and West, the former seemed more promising. After all, the Peasant Rebellion of 1381 suggested bottom-up activism.

But specialist scholarship has undercut many assumptions of social conflict theory. Evidence of peasants fleeing manors and thus of “seigneurial reaction” cannot be tied to repressive landlord practices: it comes from estates that don’t show such repression. Peasants were fleeing to different manors of the same

117 Hellie (2006b, 295).118 Kivelson (1994, 200).119 Kivelson (1996, 649).120 Kivelson (1996, 649). 121 Hellie (2006b, 296).122 Graham (1987, 31).123 Putnam (1908), Given-Wilson (2000), Palmer (1993b).124 Putnam (1906, 527).125 Poos (1983, 50).126 Penn and Dyer (1990)

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estate.127 In fact, the remarkable variety of economic conditions and social responses to the demographic crisis in the two centuries after 1350 in England has precluded any single economic hypothesis from accounting for the elimination of serfdom.128 It is thus remarkable that this long academic debate also never acknowledged a fundamental background condition: that these changes were occurring within perhaps the most advanced judicial system in Europe.

Legal historians filled this gap. Disagreement exists on the relative role of centralized courts vs. local structures, such as justices of the peace, which had gained in independence.129 But all accounts testify to a remarkable machinery of courts, cental and local, which regulated labor, free and unfree, drawing on practices already established before the plague. Labor mobility was regulated through an institutional network at the county and the parish level. Such effectiveness was secured through the pre-existing integration of subjects down to the level of the village in the machinery of royal law enforcement, through processes described in chapters 2 and 3.130 Successive laws were subsequently passed in Parliament, some of which survived into the eighteenth century. Though enforcement was not perfect, the restrictions on labor movement were effective enough to still require a frontal attack in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.131 They were only removed from the statute books “after heated debate” in 1814.132

In other words, the extensive institutional infrastructure in England, predicated on royal enforcement, permitted the relative control of labor through laws and regulations; in Russia, such infrastructure was lacking 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 been deprived of extra-economic means of coercion by the expanding state.133 So, the same restrictive measures in the two cases appear as regulations in one case and slavery in the other.

It is not as if the goal in Russia was to create serfdom: the word serf was not even mentioned in the Russian code of 1649; it only specified what happened to peasants who flee.134 Russian tsars were simply less able to depersonalize coercion through law. But again, coercion responds to weakness. 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 mostly constrained by the Crown and Church, which was critical in preventing Eastern European outcomes.135 English regulations did not necessarily mean that peasants had greater freedom of movement, despite their freer status; rather, it meant greater 127 Raftis (1964, 156–7, 170–1), Bailey (2014, 79).128 The literature is incisively covered by Bailey (2014), who introduces novel empirical evidence and arguments.129 Palmer (1993a) ascribes a greater role to central government than Musson (2000).130 Poos (1983).131 Smith ([1776] 1981). 132 Bennett (2010, 7). 133 Wood (2002).134 Hosking (2000, 308).135 Lachmann (1985, 360).

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compliance with the tenurial regime, less poaching from weaker landlords, and a relatively more effective regulation of labor, all which made the re-establishment of serfdom in England both less necessary and less possible. And this is because the crown had more power over the most powerful.

12.3Consequences of Ruler Weakneess: Institutional Fragmentation and Strong Kinship Structures

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 two key conditions, as we’ve seen. First, kings achieved an institutional fusion of judicial and fiscal functions which consolidated parliament. Further, kings forced the powerful sectors of society into concerted action in response to high service and taxation demands, thus solving their collective action problem. The following section traces the divergent Russian outcomes, arguing that weak state power suffices to explain them. Whether local actors had constitutional preferences or not, whether cultural or other factors in any case pushed in a different direction, the capacity was absent to implement them.

Lack of institutional fusion between the Duma and the occasional assemblies

Chapters 2 and 3 showed the importance of institutional fusion for the emergence of the English Parliament and the inhibiting effects that separation of the judicial and political functions had in the early period of institutional formation in the French case. As in France, in Russia, the de facto separation of powers between the Duma and the Assemblies of the Land prevented one mechanism that could consolidate these political institutions on an enduring basis. Since no alternative mechanisms transpired, institutional development eventually atrophied. The underlying condition was weak state control. Though other factors surely contributed to the decline of representation in Russia (assemblies were not called after the 1650s), the necessary condition observed in the West was also absent.

The tsar’s council, the Duma, exemplifies the “absolutist” character of the Russian regime for the “statist” approach. Yet this judgment invokes traits that have striking similarities with English practice. For instance, Duma attendees did not have corporative status; they received instead “personal invitations,” which Richard Pipes dismissed as a sign of the illiberal, controlling character of the regime.136 However, an individual summons for the nobility was a European practice, as seen.137 England was distinguished by the higher control of the crown 136 Pipes (1974, 107), Brown (1983, 86-88).137 Russian practice may even draw on Norman antecedents; Pipes (1974, 106). That the Duma’s competence and role were undefined Poe (2006, 460) also does not distinguish it from early Western institutions.

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over this selection, as it was only late in time that some families gained a customary, but not legal, right of parliamentary attendance.138

Further, although the Duma was only attended by boyars, this again did not differ from the West, where early assemblies were dominated by the nobility—certainly those that prevailed, like England.139 As we saw, where towns were dominant, as in France and Spain, the estates either withered or did not become fully representative. Moreover, the boyars had similar roles to the nobility in the West: they participated in decreeing some of the most significant acts of the government, law codes, foreign treaties, and other precedent-setting measures.140 Boyars also served as judges in the 1600s and they handled petitions as in England, by staffing the petitions Chancellery.

The Duma, like all premodern royal councils, also had official judicial functions.141 The tsar was actively involved in cases, from the late fifteenth century. Conforming to the pattern discerned throughout this book, land disputes were the main source of at least surviving lawsuits already from the fifteenth century.142 And as elsewhere in Europe, the ruler’s justice was “one of the highest privileges that could be bestowed upon a subject.”143 Tsars were expected to adjudicate cases, but as business increased they delegated, either to their sons or to boyars, who held separate courts, the latter since 1497.144

The power dynamics involved in boyar judicial service are not clear.145 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.146 In any case, the basic building blocks are not that much apart from England, down to the judicial service of the nobility. However, although the nobility was conscripted to judicial service, as crucially in England, institutionalization appears considerably weaker, as boyars were called on an ad hoc basis.147 Consequently, unlike in England, the Duma did not serve as a privileged locus of centralized judicial activity on a regular basis.

The truly representative institution, however, were the Assemblies of the Land, introduced above, that drew broader social groups. These were not tied to the Duma or to regular judicial business, as representative meetings were in the English

138 Powell and Wallis (1968).139 Attendance was not fixed and varied by occasion; Crummey (1981), 1987, 12-3, 103-5).140 “Other, less important decrees, such as kormlenie (‘feeding’), votchina, and pomest’e grants, judicial immunities, local agreements, etc., were clearly the prerogative of the ruler alone;” Ostrowski (2006, 225).141 The Duma became an appellate court in 1649; Davies (2006, 469).142 Kleimola (1975, 8).143 Kleimola (1975, 10-11). The judicial role was still central in the lawcode of 1550; Kivelson (1996, 234).144 Kleimola (1975, 13, 15).145 Kivelson (1996, 231-2).146 Chancelleries (prikazys), by contrast, were staffed with servicemen “because nobles scorned such routine activity;” Graham (1987, 30).147 Kleimola (1975, 13).

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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.”148 Bellicist theories would attribute the meetings to these pressures. However, it was “the “non-taxpaying social groups” that were originally summoned.149 When taxation was discussed, in 1615 and 1618, it was at the end of the Polish-Muscovite war (1605-1618) and it certainly did not guarantee the consolidation of the Assemblies, as they were eclipsed three decades later.150 Nor did the renewal of war in 1654 lead to their recurrence. Military pressures do not suffice to produce representation—unless a regular pre-existing institutional structure is there to manage them.

The other common hypotheses advanced by some Russian historians also fail explain the eclipse of representative activity. That delegates “were called as a matter of service obligation (and sometimes viewed said service as onerous), not as a matter of ‘right,’” as in some accounts, would in fact predict stronger outcomes and, in light of this argument, accounts for why there was any representative activity at all.151 Far from land being held through service accounting for why no common law ‘ancient custom’ or law of resistance existed,152 we’ve seen that it was precisely the common frame of obligations derived from land-holding that coordinated English elites in articulating such rights—which they did to a more restrained degree than on the continent in fact.

The most common explanation 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.153 I examine this in the next chapter, bringing the Ottoman Empire into the comparison.

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