Russia under the Old regime

CHAPTER 5

The system we have described was so immune from pressures from below that, in theory at least, it should have perpetuated itself ad infinitum. The crown's monopoly on political authority, its ownership of nearly all the landed, commercial and industrial wealth, its tight grip on the social classes, and its ability to isolate the country from unwanted foreign influences all seemingly combined to assure perpetual stasis. One can see no way that the Muscovite population could have altered the system had it wanted to; and, as has been indicated, it had excellent reasons to dislike changes. The great patrimonial states of the Hellenistic world with which the Muscovite state had much in common collapsed not from internal causes but as a result of conquest. The same held true of the related regimes of the 'oriental despotic' type in Asia and Central America.

Yet in Russia the patrimonial system did experience significant change, though it was change induced, in the first place, from above, by the government itself. The reason why the Russian monarchy found it necessary to tamper with the closed and self-perpetuating system which had cost it so much trouble to establish has mainly to do with Russia's relations to western Europe. Of all the regimes of the patrimonial and oriental-despotic type, Russia was geographically closest to western Europe. Furthermore, as both a Christian and a Slav country, she was culturally the most sensitive to western influences. She was the first, therefore, to become aware of the inadequacies of her rigid, regulated system when confronted - especially on the field of battle - with the more flexible and 'scientifically' managed institutions of the west. Russia was the earliest of the non-western countries to undergo that crisis of self-confidence which other non-western peoples have experienced since; a crisis caused by the realization that inferior and odious as it may appear, western civilization had discovered the secrets of power and wealth which one had to acquire if one wished successfully to compete with it.