Russia under the Old regime

46

incorporated into the prince's domains, and not, as was the case with boyar land, turned over to female descendants. The black peasants were in every respect freemen, able to move anywhere; in the lovely phrase of the time, they had open to them throughout Russia 'a clean road, without boundaries'. The taxes they paid the prince were essentially a form of rent. Occasionally visited by a servant of the prince's household, they lived in their self-contained and self-sufficient communities. Like the boyars they were not the subjects of the prince but his tenants, and their relationship to him was of a private (economic) rather than public (political) nature.

From all that has been said about the appanage principality, it should be apparent that the public authority of the medieval Russian prince, his imperium or iurisdictio, was extraordinarily feeble. He had no way of compelling anyone except slaves and domestics to do his will; anyone else - soldier, peasant and tradesman - could abandon him and move from his principality to someone else's. Immunity charters originally issued to attract colonists had the ultimate effect of removing from the princes' jurisdiction a large part of the population living on lay and clerical votchiny. Whatever effective authority an appanage prince enjoyed, derived from his ownership of landed property and slaves, that is from the position which Roman law would have defined as that of dominus. It is for this reason that one can speak of Russian statehood acquiring from the earliest a decidedly patrimonial character; its roots lie not in relations between sovereign and subjects, but in those between seigneur and the bonded and semi-bonded working force of his domains. North-eastern Russia of the appanage period in many respects resembled feudal western Europe. We see here the same disintegration of the state into small and inward-oriented, quasi-sovereign entities, and the replacement of a public order by personal arrangements. We also find some familiar feudal institutions, such as immunities and manorial justice. Impressed by these similarities, N. P. Pavlov-Silvanskii argued that between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries Russia lived under a system which, minor differences notwithstanding, was feudal in the fullest sense of the word.' This view has become mandatory for communist historians, but it is not shared by the great majority of contemporary scholars unfettered by the bonds of censorship. As in so many controversies, the issue depends in large measure on one's definition of the critical word; and this, in turn, depends in the caSe at hand on whether one happens to be interested in finding similarities or differences. In recent decades it has become common practice to assign historical terms the broadest possible meaning so as to fit under a common rubric phenomena from the histories of the most diverse peoples and periods. Where the purpose is historical sociology, or the typology of historical institutions, it may indeed be quite useful to employ 'feudalism' loosely to mean any system characterized by political decentralization, private law and a natural economy employing unfree labour. Defined in this sense, 'feudalism' is a widespread historic phenomenon, and many societies may be said, at one time or another, to have gone through it. If, however, one wishes to determine what accounts for the immense variety of political and social formations in the modern world, then such broad usage is of little use. In particular, in order to learn why western Europe has developed a set of institutions found nowhere else (unless implanted by its immigrants) it is necessary to isolate those features which distinguish feudal western Europe from all other 'feudal' systems. Once this is done, it becomes apparent that certain elements of feudalism as practised in the west cannot be found elsewhere, even in countries like Japan, India and Russia, all of which had experienced long periods of collapse of central authority, the triumph of private law and the absence of a market economy.

The western feudal system can be reduced to three essential elements: 1. political decentralization; 2. vassalage; and 3. conditional land tenure. If we bear these elements in mind, we will find that they either were unknown in Russia or, if known, appeared in an entirely different historical context, producing diametrically opposite results. After Charlemagne, political authority in the West, theoretically vested in the king, was usurped by counts, margraves, dukes, bishops and other powerful feudatories. De jure, the status of the medieval western king as the sole anointed ruler remained unchallenged, even when feudal particularism attained its zenith; it was his ability to use the nominal power at his disposal that eroded. 'Theoretically, feudalism never abolished royal power: in practice, if one may say so, the great seigneurs placed royal power between parentheses.'8

The same cannot be said of Russia, and this for two reasons. In the first place, the Kievan state, unlike the Carolingian, had had no experience with centralized authority. Appanage Russia, therefore, could have no single figurehead king with an authentic claim to the monopoly of political power; instead, it had a whole dynasty of princes, petty and grand, each of whom had an equal right to the royal title. There was nothing here to place 'between parentheses'. Secondly, no boyar or churchman in medieval Russia succeeded in usurping princely authority; decentralization occurred from the multiplication of princes, not from the appropriation of princely prerogatives by powerful subjects. As will be noted in Chapter 3, these two related facts had profound bearing on