Russia under the Old regime

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countries, feudalism provided the womb within which gestated the modern state.12

The Russian appanage prince, lacking vassalage and conditional land tenure, was at a great disadvantage compared to the western king. It was only on his private domains that he was master. It is, therefore, quite natural that he had an obsession with accumulating real estate. He bought land, traded it, married into it and seized it by force. This preoccupation had the consequence of transforming the more ambitious of the appanage princes into ordinary businessmen, strengthening in their mind the already well-developed proprietary instincts.

Because of this background, once the ideas of'state' and 'sovereignty' finally came to Russia (this occurred in the seventeenth century) they were instinctively perceived through the patrimonial prism. The tsars of Muscovy looked upon their empire extending from Poland to China with the eyes of landlords, much as their ancestors had once viewed their minuscule appanages. The proprietary manner of regarding the realm and its inhabitants impressed itself very deeply on the mind of Russian rulers and of their service class. When nineteenth-century emperors, men thoroughly western in their upbringing, adamantly refused to grant their country a constitution, they were behaving not unlike ordinary property owners afraid to jeopardize their title by some legal precedent. Nicholas n, Russia's last tsar, was by temperament ideally suited to serve as a constitutional monarch. Yet he could not bring himself to grant a constitution, or, after having been forced to do so, to respect it, because he conceived absolute authority as some kind of a property trust which he was duty-bound to pass intact to his heir. The patrimonial mentality constitutes the intellectual and psychological basis of that authoritarianism, common to most of Russia's rulers, whose essence lies in the refusal to grant the 'land', the patrimony, the right to exist apart from its owner, the ruler and his 'state'. The qualities characteristic of the internal development of early Russian statehood - an unusually wide gulf separating those in political authority from society, and a proprietary, patrimonial manner of exercising sovereignty - were intensified by a shattering external event, the Mongol conquest of 1237-41.

From the time they had first settled in eastern Europe, the Slavs had learned to treat nomad harassment as an inescapable fact of life. Indeed, by the early thirteenth century they had even managed to establish a modus vivendi with the once dreaded Cumans, with whom they now married and joined in common military ventures. But then they always had the forest where they could retreat in case of an emergency. The nomads rarely ventured into it for any length of time, and the Slavic settlers