Russia under the Old regime

18

control of nomadic Turkic and Mongol tribes which not only did not tolerate any agricultural settlements on their grazing territories, but themselves frequently carried out raids into the forest in search of slaves and loot. Until the end of the eighteenth century, when their superior political and military organization gave them an upper hand, the Russians were unable to penetrate the black earth zone in any significant numbers, and indeed were often themselves victims of aggression on the part of their steppe neighbours. In die sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was scarcely a year when Russians did not fight along their southern and soudi-eastern frontiers. Although Russian historians tend to depict these wars as defensive in nature, they were as often as not instigated by Russian colonist pressure. In die western parts, where Russians bordered on Poles, Lithuanians, Swedes and Germans, die situation was somewhat calmer, but even here, during this period, there was war approximately one year out of every two. Sometimes it was the westerners who pushed eastward; sometimes it was the Russians who took the initiative in their quest for access to ports or to the rich lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Military organization thus was a necessity, for without it Russian colonization, so essential to its economic survival, could not have been carried out.

This being the case, one might have expected Russia to develop early in its history something akin to the bureaucratic regime of the 'despotic' or 'Asiatic' kind. The logic of things, indeed, impelled Russia in this direction, but for a variety of reasons its political development took a somewhat different route. The typical regime of the 'Oriental Despotic' kind seems to have come into being not to meet military exigencies but from the need for effective central management capable of organizing the collection and distribution of water for irrigation. Thus arose what Karl Wittfogel calls the 'agro-despotism' common to much of Asia and Central America.15 Now in Russia there was no need for authority to assist in the extraction of wealth from the land. Russia was traditionally a country of widely scattered small villages, not one of latifundia, and it knew nothing of central economic management until the imposition of War Communism in 1918. But even if such management had been required, die county's natural conditions would have prevented its introduction. One need only consider the difficulties of transport and communication in Russia before the advent of railroads and telegraphs to realize that the kind of control and surveillance essential to an 'Oriental Despotism' was entirely out of the question here. The immense distances and the climate with its severe winters and spring floods precluded in pre-modern Russia the construction of a regular road network. In Persia of the fifth century Boa messenger of King Darius travelled along the Royal Road at a rate of 380 kilometres in 24 hours; in Mongol Persia of the thirteenth century government couriers covered some 335 kilometres in the same period of time. In Russia, after regular postal services had been introduced by Swedish and German experts in the second half of the seventeenth century, messengers crawled at an average rate of 6-7 kilometres an hour; and since they travelled only by daytime, widi luck and in the right season they might have made 80 or so kilometres in a 24-hour period. It required approximately 8 to 12 days for a dispatch from Moscow to reach one of the principal border towns of the empire, such as Archangelsk, Pskov and Kiev. For an inquiry to be answered, therefore, 3 weeks were needed.18 Towns and villages lying at some distance from the principal roads, especially those along the eastern frontier, were for all practical purposes incommunicable. This factor alone made it impossible to institute in Russia a tightly organized bureaucratic regime before the 1860s when railways and telecommunications were introduced.

The resultant situation presented an antinomy: its economic conditions and external situation required Russia to organize militarily and therefore politically in a highly efficient manner, and yet its economy inhibited such organization. There was a basic incompatibility between the country's possibilities and its needs.

The manner in which this predicament was resolved provides the key to Russia's constitutional development. The state neither grew out of the society, nor was imposed on it from above. Rather it grew up side by side with society and bit by bit swallowed it. The locus of original political authority was the private domain of the prince or tsar, his oikos or dvor. Within this domain the prince reigned absolute, exercising authority in the double capacity as sovereign and proprietor. Here he was in full command, a counterpart of the Greek despotes, the Roman dominus, and the Russian gosudar', that is lord, master, outright owner of all men and things. Initially, the population of the princely domain consisted mainly of slaves and other persons bonded in one form or another to the proprietor. Outside his domains, where the population was free and exceedingly mobile, the Russian ruler exercised very little authority at first, his power being confined largely to the collection of tribute. This kind of dyarchy established itself in the forest zone during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, at the same time when in England, France and Spain the modern western state was beginning to take shape as an entity separate from the ruler. From the solid base of authority furnished by their private domains, the Russian princes - gradually and only after having overcome massive resistance - spread their personal power over the free population living outside these domains. The princely dynasty of Moscow-Vladimir, which emerged as the country's leader, transferred the institutions and practices which it had initially worked out in