Russia under the Old regime

50

What do we find in Russia? Of vassalage, in its proper sense, nothing.* The Russian landowning class, the boyars, were expected to bear arms but they were not required to do so on behalf of any particular prince. There was no trace of mutual responsibility in the prince-boyar relationship. In the western ceremony of commendation the vassal knelt before his lord who cupped his hands in a symbolic gesture of protection, lifting him to his feet and embracing him. In medieval Russia, the corresponding ceremony involved an oath ('kissing the cross') and the kowtowing of the servitor to the prince. Although some historians claim that the relations between princes and boyars were regulated by a contract, the fact that not a single document of this kind has come down to us from Russian (as distinct from Lithuanian) territories raises grave doubts whether they ever existed. There is no evidence in medieval Russia of mutual obligations binding prince and his servitor, and, therefore, also nothing resembling legal and moral 'rights' of subjects, and little need for law and courts. A disaffected boyar had no place to turn to obtain satisfaction; the only recourse open to him was to exercise the right of renunciation and leave for another lord. Admittedly, free departure -the one 'right' a boyar may be said to have enjoyed - was an ultimate form of personal liberty, which, on the face of it, should have promoted in Russia the emergence of a free society. But liberty not grounded in law is incapable of evolution and tends to turn upon itself; it is an act of bare negation which implicitly denies any mutual obligation or even a lasting relationship between human beings, f The ability of boyars arbitrarily to abandon their princes forced the princes to behave arbitrarily as well; and since, in the long run, it was the princes' power that grew, the boyars had much occasion to regret their prized 'right'. Once Moscow had conquered all of Russia and there were no more independent appanage princes to whom to transfer one's loyalty, the boyars found that they had no rights left at all. They then had to assume very heavy service obligations without obtaining any reciprocity. The endemic lawlessness of Russia, especially in the relations between those in authority and those subject to it, undoubtedly has one of its principal

* Vassalage did exist in Lithuanian Russia. Sometimes princes and boyars from the Volga-Oka region, making use of the right to choose their lord, placed themselves under the protection of the Lithuanian Great Prince, and entered with him into contracts which made them vassals. An example of such a contract between Great Prince Ivan Fedorovich of Riazan, and Witold, the Great Prince of Lithuania, from c. 1430, can be found in A.L. Cherepnin, ed., Dukhovnye i dogovornye gramoty velikikh i udeVnykh kniazei XIV-XVI vv (Moscow-Leningrad 1950), pp. 67-68. In north-eastern Russia, such contracts seem to have been unknown. t This the Russians and their subject peoples found out at great cost to themselves after 1917. The generous promises made by Lenin to the peasants, workers and national minorities, allowing them to seize control of the land and industries and to exercise the unlimited right of national self-determination - promises utterly extreme in their libertarian scope but undefined in law and unprotected by courts - in the end produced the very opposite result.