Russia under the Old regime

69

the royal household (dvortsovye); the latter are assigned to the households and carry special obligations for their support, but both belong equally to the sovereign and cannot even always be distinguished as to their duties. The Great Prince disposes of both in the same manner. Black lands can be assigned to the royal household, and those of the royal household can be transferred into black status. Both can be handed out as pomestia and votchiny, or turned over to sons, princesses, daughters, monasteries and so on. Our sources draw no distinction whatever between properties purchased by the prince, lands which he confiscated from private individuals, and his other properties, whose method of acquisition remains unknown to us. All this is called without differentiation, 'lands of the sovereign' {gosudarevy zemli) and is administered in accord with identical principles.14

The first attempt to separate royal from state lands in Russia was made by Paul I who created a Department of Appanages in charge of the Romanov family properties, income from which was used to support members of the imperial household. Under Nicholas I in 1826 this department was elevated to the status of a ministry (Ministerstvo Impera-torskogo Dvora i Udelov) which enjoyed the distinction of being exempt from control by the Senate and all other state organs, and responsible only to the emperor himself. In 1837 the Ministry of State Domains {Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennykh Imushchestv) came into being to administer state properties. Until then, revenues flowing from the two types of properties were pooled. Until then, too, Russian emperors felt perfectly at liberty to hand over or sell to private individuals vast state properties with hundreds of thousands of peasants. But even after these reforms, the distinction between crown and state properties was not strictly observed. The Ministry of State Domains had been created not to satisfy legal propriety, but because of dissatisfaction with the manner in which the millions of state peasants had been administered. Nicholas I, who established the two above-named ministries, never hesitated to shift peasants from imperial properties to state lands, and vice versa. The fact that until the early eighteenth century Russia had no national budget, and that what budget there was after 1700 remained until 1862 a closely guarded state secret, facilitated such practices.

In his capacity as votchinnik or seigneur of all Russia, the ruler of Moscow treated his kingdom much as his ancestors had treated their landed estates. The idea of state was absent in Russia until the middle of the seventeenth century, and even after its introduction it remained imperfectly assimilated. And since there was no notion of state, its corollary, society, was also unknown.* That which modern Russian renders by the

* Some scholars (e.g. John Keep in the Slavonic and East European Review, April 1970, p. 204, and Hans Torke in Canadian Slavic Studies, winter 1971, p. 467) see an emergent society in Russia as early as the late seventeenth (Keep) and even mid-sixteenth centuries (Torke). word obshchestvo (an eighteenth-century neologism), the language of Muscovite Russia expressed by zemlia. In modern Russian, this word signifies 'the land', but in medieval usage it meant income-producing property.15 In other words, it was mainly seen not as a counterpoise to the seigneur, the tsar, but as the object of his exploitation. The purpose of the patrimonial regime in Russia as anywhere else was to extract from the country all the income and the labour it had to offer. There was no notion of reciprocity, of the monarchy owing the country something in return. Giles Fletcher, an Elizabethan poet and statesman who visited Russia in 1588-9 and left what in many respects is the finest firsthand account of Muscovy extant, relates that Ivan iv used to compare his people to a beard or to sheep in that like them, to grow well, they required frequent clipping.18 Whether authentic or invented by English merchants, the metaphor accurately reflects the spirit behind the internal policies of the Muscovite government, or for that matter, of any government of the patrimonial or 'seigneuraP type. At a certain point in the history of Moscow, the patrimonial mentality, rooted in purely economic attitudes, became politicized; the votchinnik-landlord turned into votchinnik-tsar. The spirit remained the same but it acquired new forms of expression and a theoretical overlay. Evidence is lacking precisely when and how this transformation occurred. But there are strong indications that the critical period was the reign of Ivan in, when two concurrent events suddenly freed Muscovy and the principalities which it dominated from ties of external dependence, allowing north-east Russia for the first time to think of itself as a sovereign state.

One of these events was the dissolution of the Golden Horde. The system of succession prevailing among the 'White Bone' (descendants of Genghis Khan), with its complicated lines of seniority better suited to a nomadic nation organized into tribes than to an imperial power, caused uninterrupted internal conflicts. In the 1360s, the Horde was thrown into turmoil as packs of pretenders battled with each other for the throne; during the next twenty years, Sarai had no fewer than fourteen khans. Moscow exploited these dissensions by playing one party against the other. In 1380, Dmitry of Moscow dared even to resist the Mongols by force of arms. True, the khan he challenged was a Crimean and a usurper; true also, the victory which he won over this khan at Kulikovo Professor Keep rests his case on evidence of restlessness of the service class, but he concludes that its attempt to gain some freedom from the state did not succeed. Professor Torke's evidence indicates mainly that the sixteenth-century Russian government realized it could use the various social estates to help it administer the country. The idea of society as I understand it, and as it has been customarily defined in the west, entails recognition by the state of the right of social groups to legal status and a legitimate sphere of free action. This recognition came to Russia only with the reign of Catherine II.