Russia under the Old regime

76

words have a common root, gos, derived from the Indo-European ghes, 'to strike', from which developed also many words in the European vocabulary having to do with the home and its antithesis, the outsider, such as the Latin kostis (stranger, enemy) and hostia (sacrificial victim), and the English opposites, 'host' and 'guest'.26 In documents of the Kievan and early appanage periods, gospodin and gosudar' were used indiscriminately to describe both ruler and proprietor, which is not surprising given the absence of any significant distinction between authority and ownership at that stage of Russia's historical development. There was one important exception to this rule, namely that the slave owner was invariably called gosudar. Towards the end of the appanage period a distinction developed; gospodin came to be applied to authority in the public sphere and gosudar in the private. The appanage prince was normally addressed by freemen as gospodin. Novgorod, too, called itself Gospodin Velikii Novgorod, meaning 'The Great Sovereign [Gity-State of] Novgorod'. Gosudar, on the other hand, came to be restricted to what in classical Greek would have been called despotes, and in Latin, dominus. The prince was gospodin of the freemen living in his appanage, whereas he was gosudar of his slaves. On their estates, ordinary votchina-owners were also addressed as gosudar even as late as the seventeenth century.

Such was the prevailing practice until Moscow rose to a position of national pre-eminence. It is a reflection of the proprietary character of princely authority in Russia that its tsars did away with that distinction and insisted on being addressed exclusively as gosudar. This custom was introduced in the early fifteenth century, and possibly represented a deliberate imitation of Mongol practices. Ivan m stamped his coins and seals with the title gosudar and demanded to be thus addressed. Upon the accession of Ivan iv gosudar became part of the formal title of the sovereigns of Russia, used in all official documents. It is obviously significant that the term for 'sovereign' in modern Russian should derive from the vocabulary of private law, from a word which had meant owner and particularly owner of slaves. Although we translate gosudarstvo as 'state' a more accurate equivalent would be 'domain'. The word 'state' implies a distinction between private and public, between dominium and imperium. Gosudarstvo carries no such connotation; it is dominium, pure and simple, signifying as has been noted, 'absolute ownership excluding all other appropriation and involving the right to use, to abuse and to destroy at will'.* Like other historians, in tracing the evolution of Russian monarchy

* As Leonard Schapiro indicates (Totalitarianism, London 1972, p. 129) the English 'state' and its counterparts derive etymologically from the Latin status which conveys the sense of ranking, order, establishment - in other words, a concept which implies law. These implications are missing from the concept gosudar*. we have concentrated on Moscow, because Moscow became the capital of a Russian empire and its history is the best known of all the principalities. But the patrimonial mentality and institutions were not confined to Muscovy; they were rooted in the appanage system and the whole geopolitical situation of north-eastern Russia. A literary work composed in 1446-53 in Tver (Slovo inoka Fomy) extols the prince of Tver in much the same language that thepublicistic literature of Moscow later applied to its ruler. It calls him tsar, gosudar, autocrat (samoder-zhets) and a successor to the imperial title, and refers to Tver as the new capital of the Orthodox faith.27 This fragment suggests that if events had gone otherwise historians might well have talked of Tver as the fountain-head of the patrimonial regime in Russia. It is in a mood of great confidence that in the middle of the fifteenth century Moscow began to gather the vast 'patrimony' to which it laid claim. In theory, Moscow expansionist drive had as its objective the assembly of all the land of Rus'; hence, most of Lithuania was included. But, as we have noted, so were Kazan, Astrakhan and Livonia, none of which had ever been part of the Kievan state. Given the absence of natural frontiers in this part of the world it would have been impossible even with the best of will to draw a boundary separating the land of Rus' from territories inhabited by other races and religions. There were Finns and Turks under Russian rule when the national state was only beginning to take shape. Later, other nationalities joined them. As a result, the building of the national state and the forging of an empire, processes which in the west were clearly separated both in time and space, proceeded in Russia concurrently and contiguously and became virtually indistinguishable. Once an area had been annexed to Moscow, whether or not it had ever formed part of Kiev, and whatever the ethnic and religious affiliation of its indigenous population, it immediately joined the 'patrimony' of the ruling house, and all succeeding monarchs treated it as a sacred trust which was not under any circumstances to be given up. The tenacity with which Russian governments, whatever their professed ideology, have held on to every square inch of land that has ever belonged to any of them is embedded in the patrimonial mentality. It is a territorial expression of the same principle by virtue of which Russia's rulers have refused voluntarily to concede to their subjects one iota of political power.*

* Amusing examples ot this mentality can be found in communist histories which treat the absorption of any territory by the Russian state in the past thousand years as an act of 'unification' (prisoedinenie). An identical act by another country becomes 'seizure' (zakhvat). Thus, for example, the Russian imperial government (which the same communist government had declared illegitimate in 1917) 'united' Turkestan with Russia, whereas Victorian England 'seized' Egypt.