Russia under the Old regime

THE PARTIAL DISMANTLING OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE

between private and common good. Such, for example, was the purpose behind his practice of attaching explanations to imperial decrees from the most trivial (e.g. an ukaz prohibiting the grazing of cattle on the boulevards of St Petersburg) to the most weighty (such as the decree of 1722 changing the law of imperial succession). No monarch before Peter had thought such explanations necessary; he was the first to take the people into his confidence. In 1702 he launched Russia's first newspaper, Vedomosti. This publication not only made a major contribution to Russia's cultural life; it also marked a dramatic constitutional innovation, for with this act Peter abandoned the Muscovite tradition of treating national and international news as a state secret.

These and related measures posited a society functioning in partnership with the state. But this assumption was not thought out, and herein lies the central tragedy of modern Russian politics. It was not necessary for Peter and his successors to take their people into confidence, to treat them as partners rather than as mere subjects, to inculcate in them a sense of common destiny. Numerous regimes of the patrimonial or despotic type had managed to carry on for centuries without taking this drastic step. But once it had been decided that the interests of the country required the existence of a citizenry conscious of its collective identity and of its role in the country's development, then certain consequences inevitably followed. It was clearly contradictory to appeal to the public sentiments of the Russian people and at the same time to deny them any legal or political safeguards against the omnipotence of the state. A partnership in which one party held all the power and played by its own rules was obviously unworkable. And yet this is exactly how Russia has been governed from Peter the Great to this day. The refusal of those in authority to grasp the obvious consequences of inviting public participation generated in Russia a condition of permanent political tension which successive governments sought to attenuate sometimes by loosening their reins on the realm, sometimes by tightening them, but never by inviting society to share the coachman's seat. With the idea of the state came the notion of political crime, and this, in turn, led to the establishment of the political police. The Code of 1649 which had first defined crimes against the tsar and his realm under the category of 'Word and Deed' offences had not as yet created special organs to ferret out political dissenters. At that time the tsarist government relied on denunciation by private citizens for information concerning seditious activities. The disposal of such cases was entrusted to individual prikazy; only the most serious ones came before the tsar and his Duma. Peter continued to rely heavily on denunciation; for example, in 1711