Russia under the Old regime

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watch one another. Shopkeepers and artisans were particularly keen to note and denounce any attempts of their neighbours to conceal income.

So the state watched its subjects, and the subjects watched one another. The effect of this mutual surveillance on the collective mind of Russian society can be readily imagined. No one could allow someone else in his group or caste to improve his lot because it was as likely as not done at his expense. Self-interest required social levelling.* The Russian was required to denounce and he was eager to do so; indeed, in the early eighteenth century, the only legitimate way a serf had of gaining freedom was to turn in a landlord for concealing peasants from census-takers. Under such conditions, society could neither develop any sense of common cause nor undertake joint resistance against authority. A kind of police mentality impressed itself so deeply on the state apparatus and the population, that later on attempts of enlightened rulers like Catherine 11 to eradicate it fell far short of success.

No one was allowed to escape the system. The frontiers of the state were hermetically sealed. Each highway leading abroad was blocked at frontier points by guards who turned back travellers unable to produce the proper authorization, a document called proezzhaia gramota obtainable only by petition to the tsar. A merchant who somehow managed to get away abroad without such papers suffered the confiscation of his belongings; his relatives were subjected to torture to elicit information on the reasons for his trip, and then exiled to Siberia. The Code of 1649 provided in Chapter VI, Articles 3 and 4, that Russians who had gone abroad without authorization and then, upon their return, were denounced for having done so, had to be questioned as to their motives; if found guilty of treason they were to be executed, but if making money was their purpose, then they were to be beaten with the knout. The principal reason for such draconian measures was fear of losing servitors and income. Experience indicated that Russians familiar with foreign ways did not wish to return home. 'Russians must not serve together with men of the king [of Poland] because they will be deceived', was the opinion expressed by Ivan Golitsyn in the seventeenth century. 'After

* This is what Andrei Amalrik has to say about contemporary Russians {Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1384? (London 1970), p. 33): 'Despite the apparent attractiveness of the idea of justice, if one examines it closely, one realizes that it represents the most destructive aspect of Russian psychology. In practice, "justice" involves the desire that "nobody should live better than I do" (but not a desire for the much-vaunted notion of equalizing wages, since the fact that many people live worse is willingly accepted)... As I have observed myself, many peasants find someone else's success more painful than their own failure. In general, when the average Russian sees that he is living less well than his neighbour, he will concentrate not on trying to do better for himself but rather on trying to bring his neighbour down to his own level. My reasoning may seem naive to some people, but I have been able to observe scores of examples in both village and town, and I see in this one of the typical traits of the Russian psyche.' one summer spent together in the service, the following summer we won't have left even half of Russia's better men - not only boyars, of whom there will remain behind only those too old to serve and those who don't want to - but of the poor, not one man vvill remain.'" It was never forgotten that of the dozen or so young dvoriane whom Boris Godunov had sent to England, France and Germany to study, not a single one chose to come back.

Great difficulties also confronted all foreigners who wished to enter Russia. Frontier guards were under strict orders to turn away any foreigner lacking an entry permit; it was absolutely impossible to come to Muscovy on one's own initiative to practice a trade or vocation. Even those who had the necessary documents were narrowly limited in their choice of residence and length of stay. Natives were discouraged from establishing contact with visitors from abroad:

All conversations between [Muscovite] Russians and foreigners exposed the former to serious suspicion not only concerning their loyalty to native religion and customs, but also their politics. According to contemporary accounts, perhaps exaggerated, a foreigner could not stop on the street to look at something without being taken for a spy.19

Perhaps nothing conveys better the attitude of the Muscovite state towards its population than the fact that until January 1703 all domestic and foreign news in Russia was deemed a state secret, jtyews was carried in reports called kuranty (from the Dutch krant, meaning newspaper), which the Office of Ambassadors prepared on the basis of foreign sources. They were for the exclusive use of the tsar and his top officials; all others were denied access to this information.