Russia under the Old regime

FOREWORD

The dieme of this book is the political system of Russia. It traces the growth of the Russian state from its beginnings in the ninth century to the end of the nineteenth, and the parallel development of the principal social orders: peasantry, nobility, middle class and clergy. The question which it poses is why in Russia - unlike the rest of Europe to which Russia belongs by virtue of her location, race and religion - society has proven unable to impose on political authority any kind of effective restraints. After suggesting some answers to this problem, I go on to show how in Russia the opposition to absolutism tended to assume the form of a struggle for ideals rather than for class interests, and how the imperial government, challenged in this manner, responding by devising administrative practices that clearly anticipated those of the modern police state. Unlike most historians who seek the roots of twentieth-century totalitarianism in western ideas, I look for them in Russian institutions. Although I do make occasional allusions to later events, my narrative terminates in the 1880s because, as the concluding chapter points out, the ancien regime in the traditional sense died a quiet death in Russia at that time, yielding to a bureaucratic-police regime which, except for a brief interval, has been in power there ever since.

In my analysis, I lay heavy stress on the relationship between property and political power. This emphasis may appear odd to readers raised on western history and accustomed to regard the two as distinct entities. (Except, of course, for economic determinists, for whom, however, this relationship everywhere follows a rigid and preordained pattern of development.) Anyone who studies the political systems of non-western societies quickly discovers that there the lines separating ownership from sovereignty either do not exist, or are so vague as to be meaningless, and that the absence of this distinction marks a cardinal point of difference between western and non-western types of government. One may say that the existence of private property as a realm over which public authority normally exercises no jurisdiction is the thing which distinguishes western political experience from all the rest. Under primitive xxi