Russia under the Old regime

THE PARTIAL DISMANTLING OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE

were as impressive as ever, and tsars determined to accomplish anything specific could not be deterred; they could legislate at will, create, reform and abolish institutions, declare war and peace, dispose of state revenues and state properties, raise or ruin individual subjects. But their grip on the country at large and their ability to intervene in its day-to-day affairs was tenuous and declining. The history of Russian politics of the imperial period is filled with incidents indicative of the inability of the sovereigns to have their will on fundamental policy issues. It is as if they were captains of a ship in full command of crew and passengers but without much say about the ship's operations or course. The pattern so often noted in the lives of Russian monarchs (Catherine 11, Alexander 1 and Alexander 11) - from liberalism to conservatism - was due not to the absence on their part of genuine desire for reform but to the realization which dawned on each as he or she accumulated experience that they simply lacked the capacity to lead their empire where they wanted and that the best they could hope for was to keep it from sliding into chaos. 'Autocracy' increasingly came to stand for a negative quantity, namely the exclusion of society from political decision-making; it ceased to mean the crown's control of the country. Paradoxically, by their insistence on the monopoly of political power Russian autocrats secured less effective authority than their constitutional counterparts in the west:

Such is the general scheme of the changes which occurred in the structure of the Russian state and in its relationship to society during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. We shall now take a closer look at the circumstances in which these developments took place. Even more than the western monarchies of the early modern age, Moscow was organized for warfare. No European country had so long and exposed a frontier, such a mobile population expanding outward in search of land and promysly, and such vast territory to garrison. The principal resources of the empire were channelled into military purposes. When we say that in the second half of the seventeenth century, 67 per cent of all the tiaglo people lived on land of secular proprietors (p. 104), we are saying in effect that two-thirds of the labour of the country went directly for the support or 'feeding' of the military. This figure becomes even more impressive if one considers that the bulk of the moneys which the crown secured from taxes as well as from its properties and business activities was also devoted to these purposes.

Despite this immense outlay, the results were far from satisfactory. During the seventeenth century evidence accumulated that Russia's traditional manner of waging war ceased to be effective. At this time, the core of the Russian army still consisted of cavalry manned by boyars and dvoriane. This force was supported by commoners serving on foot.