Russia under the Old regime

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their promise. While willing to concede its population considerable economic opportunities, civil rights and intellectual liberties, the monarchy insisted on retaining its monopoly on political authority. The patrimonial idea, even if truncated, survived behind the facade of the imperial state, and only the most perceptive observers who refused to be deceived by the mirage of 'historical trends' realized this fact - among them Speranskii, Ghaadaev and Gustine. Why the imperial government failed to take the final, decisive step and 'cap the edifice', as it was euphemistically called in the nineteenth century, is a complex problem that will be discussed in the proper place. Suffice it to say that it firmly refused to share political power with society; and even when finally compelled in 1905 by revolutionary events to grant a constitution it yielded more in form than in substance.

Incomplete reform injected a fatal contradiction into the relationship between state and society in Russia. For reasons of national power and prestige, the population was encouraged to educate and enrich itself, to develop a public spirit, to come - when asked - to the aid of 'its' government. At the same time it was expected to tolerate a paternalistic regime which acknowledged for itself no restraints or norms, and not only excluded the citizenry from participating in the formulation of laws but forbade it under severe penalties openly to contemplate any such participation.

Such was the main source of the tension which underlies the course of post-Petrine Russian history. An older system which for all its limitations had been at least consistent was abandoned in favour of something half-old, half-new. This arrangement steadily deprived the rulers of Russia of the power they had once enjoyed without giving them in return any of the benefits of liberal and democratic government.

The ultimate outcome was the erosion of royal power and, in as much as royal power was in Russia the only source of legitimate authority, general political disorganization. In order to divert the attention of the elite from politics, the monarchy amply gratified its material wants. Catherine the Great in effect divided the Russian empire into two halves, each of which she handed over for exploitation to one of the two constituent elements of the service class, dvoriane landowners and bureaucrats. The two groups were allowed undisturbed to exploit the country as long as they delivered to the crown its quota of taxes and recruits, and refrained from meddling in politics. Russia was now for all practical purposes farmed out to private interests. As a price for maintaining autocratic prerogative under conditions where it no longer made sense, the crown had to surrender most of its title to the country.

The resulting arrangement was curious in the extreme. The formal powers of Russia's sovereigns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries