Russia under the Old regime

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and primogeniture the most. Primogeniture survived feudalism in western Europe for two reasons. One was the growing familiarity with Roman law; Roman law knew no conditional ownership and tended to sweep aside the many restraints imposed by feudal custom on the eldest heir, transforming what had been intended as a kind of trusteeship into outright ownership. The other was the growth of capitalism which enabled the younger sons to earn a living without necessarily inheriting a share of the parental estate. Primogeniture, however, never struck root in Russia because here all the necessary conditions for it were missing, including knowledge of Roman law and opportunities in manufacture or trade. It has been a firm principle of Russian customary law to divide all property in equal shares among male heirs, and all attempts to change this tradition by the government have met with failure.

Upon the death of a north-eastern prince, the realm was apportioned among his sons, each of whom received his share or udel. Exactly the same practice was followed on private estates. Udel is customarily rendered in English as appanage, a term borrowed from the vocabulary of French feudalism. Alexander Eck, a Belgian medievalist, is quite correct in criticizing this usage on the grounds that while the terms udel and appanage both refer to provisions or 'livings' made by the sovereign for his sons, the French institution was only a lifelong grant which reverted to the treasury on the holder's death, whereas the udel was hereditary property, held in perpetuity*. Unfortunately, 'appanage' has become so deeply entrenched that it does not seem feasible to try to replace it.

The appanage which a Russian prince inherited from his father became his patrimony or votchina which, once the time came to draw up his last will, he in turn subdivided together with any acquisitions he himself might have made among his own sons. The practice led to a relentless diminution of the north-eastern principalities, some of which, in the end, were reduced to the size of small estates. The age when such subdividing took place - from the mid-twelfth to the mid-fifteenth century -is known in the historical literature as the 'appanage period' (udel 'nyi period).

One of the recurrent hazards of historical study is the difficulty of distinguishing theory from practice, and this is nowhere truer than in the case of Russia, where ambition always tends to run far ahead of the available means. Although in theory the principality belonged to the prince, in reality no appanage ruler had either the money or the administration to enforce a proprietary claim. In medieval Russia, effective ownership over land and any other natural resource (as distinct from theoretical ownership) was established exactly as Locke and other classical theorists imagined it, namely by 'removing' objects from the 'state of nature' and 'mixing' with them one's labour. Nine-tenths of the typical