Russia under the Old regime

CHAPTER 3 THE TRIUMPH OF PATRIMONIALISM

The amalgamation of a welter of small, semi-sovereign political entities into a unitary state governed by an absolute king was accomplished in Russia by methods different from those made familiar by western history. As has been noted before, the appanage system differed from western feudalism in a number of respects, two of which had direct bearing on the course of Russia's political unification. For one, Russia had never had a single national sovereign (if one excepts, as one must, the Mongol khan); instead, it had a single royal dynasty divided into many competing branches. Secondly, the distintegration of national political authority occurred here not from its usurpation by feudatories, but from its apportionment among the princes themselves. For these related reasons, the establishment of a unitary state in Russia proved more complicated than in the west. There, it involved one basic task: cutting down to size the feudal usurpers and reclaiming from them on the monarch's behalf his theoretical but unexercisable powers. In Russia, two steps were required to attain the same end. First, it was necessary to settle in an unequivocal manner which of the numerous princes descended from the House of Riurik would become the exclusive possessor of royal authority-who would be Russia's 'monocrat' (edinoderzhets). After this issue had been resolved - and it had to be done by force because customary law offered no guidelines - then and only then could the victor turn his attention to the more familiar task of suppressing internal competitors and acquiring the status of 'autocrat' (samoderzhets) as well. In other words, in Russia the process leading from 'feudal' decentralization to unitary statehood required not one but two stages, the first of which pitted prince against prince, and the second, the triumphant 'Great Prince' against nobles and (to a lesser extent) ecclesiastics. In practice, of course, the establishment of 'monocracy' and 'autocracy' was by no means as neatly separated as these words might suggest. For the purposes of historical analysis, however, it makes sense to keep them distinct, because the striving for 'monocratic' authority,