Russia under the Old regime

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The patrimonial system best defines the type of regime which emerged in Russia between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries and which, with certain lapses and modifications, has survived until the present. One can find no better description of the Muscovite system of government at the height of its development during the seventeenth century than that given by Julius Kaerst for the Hellenistic world:

[The Hellenistic state represents] a personal-dynastic regime which does not grow out of a specific land or people but is imposed from above upon a specific political realm [Herrschaftsbezirk]. Accordingly, it has at its side special, technically trained instruments of rule which originally also have not grown up along with the land but have become tied to the ruler of the dynasty by a purely personal relationship. They form the principal support of the new monarchical authority in the form of a bureaucracy, subordinate to the king's will, and of a body of battle-ready warriors... Political life not only concentrates itself in the persons of the rulers; it is actually rooted in them. A citizenry (demos)... as such does not exist at all... The people is the object of the ruling authority, not an independent bearer of some national mission.21

The history of the patrimonial system of government in Russia is the principal theme of this book. It rests on the contention that the essential quality of Russian politics derives from the identification of sovereignty and ownership, that is, of a 'proprietary' way of looking at political authority on the part of those who happen to be in power. Part I will trace the growth and evolution of the patrimonial regime in Russia. Part II will deal with the principal social estates and inquire why they failed to transform themselves from an object of public authority into a subject of public rights. Part III will describe the conflict between the state and that articulate element of society known as the intelligentsia as it unfolded during the imperial period and which led in the 1880s to the modernization of patrimonial institutions in which unmistakable germs of totalitarianism can be discerned.