Russia under the Old regime

THE GENESIS OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE IN RUSSIA

The Kievan state disintegrated in the twelfth century. Its collapse can be explained by the combined action of internal and external factors.

The internal factor was the inability of the ruling dynasty to resolve the issue of succession. Because there existed no orderly system by which Kiev and the provincial cities with their adjoining tributary territories, the volosti, passed from hand to hand upon the death of their rulers, the princes tended to develop a proprietary interest in whatever areas happened to have come under their control. Thus, what had been intended as a temporary and conditional right to exploit a given city and region transformed itself into outright ownership. The princely custom of bequeathing their sons cities and volosti in perpetuity must have been well established by 1097 when a conference of Kievan princes held at Liubech acknowledged the right of each prince to retain as property territories inherited from his father. This principle implied that princes were also at liberty to bequeath cities and volosti to their sons. The common dynastic ownership of Russia, though never formally abjured, thus ceased to be observed in practice.

The centrifugal force inherent in this process was aggravated by a concurrent external development, namely the decline of Russia's trade with Byzantium. In 966-7 the impetuous Prince Sviatoslav, in an argument over control of the only remaining Slavic group still paying tribute to the Khazars, attacked and destroyed the capital of the Khazar kagan-ate. By this foolhardy act he helped open the flood-gates through which at once poured into the Black Sea steppe belligerent Turkic tribes, until then kept in check by the Khazars. First came the Pechenegs. They were followed in the eleventh century by the Cumans (Polovtsy), an exceptionally aggressive nation who carried out such vicious attacks on the flotillas sailing from Kiev to Constantinople as eventually to bring this traffic to a standstill. Expeditions to dislodge the Cumans had little success; one such disastrous campaign, launched in 1185, is commemorated in the Song of the Host of Igor, the medieval Russian epic. In the middle of the twelfth century, Russian princes ceased to mint coins, which suggests they were in serious financial difficulty and that the economic unity of the country was distintegrating. To compound Kiev's calamities, in 1204 the Fourth Crusade captured and sacked Constantinople, at the same time opening up the eastern Mediterranean to Christian navigation. In other words, around 1200 there disappeared those particular circumstances which in the preceding four centuries had brought the territories inhabited by Eastern Slavs under a single authority.

The internal and external tendencies working independently but towards the same end unleashed powerful destructive forces, and caused the country to fall apart into self-contained and virtually sovereign