I
FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION
On its publication in 1974, Russia Under the Old Regime was well received; subsequently, although this had not been my intention in writing it, it has been adopted in many college courses on Russian history. At the same time, the book's central thesis aroused lively controversy, and this for at least two reasons.
Russian historical scholarship both before the Revolution and since, has followed the positivistic tradition which demands that the scholar focus on a narrow, precisely defined subject and rely on primary sources. Broader historical questions are left to philosophers and publicists. As a result, the historical literature has hardly any works by professional historians that attempt not only to trace but also to interpret the course of Russian history. The very appearance of such a work was therefore bound to stir debate.
Controversy was further aroused by the argument of continuity between the political practices of Muscovite and late Imperial Russia (1878-1905) on the one hand, and those of the Soviet Union on the other. The thesis displeased alike communist historians and their opponents, anti-communist nationalists, who, for their own disparate reasons, contend that October 1917 marked a fundamental break with Russia's past.
In the present volume, the link between tsarism and communism is merely hinted at. Some reviewers criticized me for not developing the theme, and, more specifically, for drawing a continuous line between the repressive policies of the late nineteenth century and the Leninist-Stalinist regime, without paying attention to the constitutional interlude that separated them. In response let me say that it was not possible in a single volume to pursue the parallels between Muscovite patrimonialism, the police institutions of late tsarism, and communist practices. The subject required separate treatment. This I have subsequently provided in The Russian Revolution, published in 1990, and the forthcoming Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. The argument suggested in"this volume is amplified in these two books which, together with it, combine to form a cohesive whole. xix
FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION
Space limitations preclude my dealing with specific criticisms directed at Russia Under the Old Regime. Of these, the most weighty challenged my contention that the Muscovite variant of absolutism differed fundamentally from the absolutism of early modern Europe. I found that the analogies drawn by some scholars between the two types of monarchial rule rested on a formalistic interpretation of juridical documents, with minimal attention to living reality-the reality which so struck and shocked Western visitors to Moscovy. If a future historian were to apply such formalistic methodology to Stalin's regime, he might well conclude that it did not significantly differ from those of the contemporary West since it too had a constitution, a parliament, and guarantees of human rights.
Russia Under the Old Regime is soon to be published in translation in Moscow. The author hopes that it will encourage Russian historians, recently freed from the fetters of censorship and ideological control, to abandon their traditional self-restraint and examine their country's past in a bolder, more comparative, more philosophical manner. For the purpose of true history is not only to learn what happened but also to understand why. Richard Pipes March 1992 xx
FOREWORD
The dieme of this book is the political system of Russia. It traces the growth of the Russian state from its beginnings in the ninth century to the end of the nineteenth, and the parallel development of the principal social orders: peasantry, nobility, middle class and clergy. The question which it poses is why in Russia - unlike the rest of Europe to which Russia belongs by virtue of her location, race and religion - society has proven unable to impose on political authority any kind of effective restraints. After suggesting some answers to this problem, I go on to show how in Russia the opposition to absolutism tended to assume the form of a struggle for ideals rather than for class interests, and how the imperial government, challenged in this manner, responding by devising administrative practices that clearly anticipated those of the modern police state. Unlike most historians who seek the roots of twentieth-century totalitarianism in western ideas, I look for them in Russian institutions. Although I do make occasional allusions to later events, my narrative terminates in the 1880s because, as the concluding chapter points out, the ancien regime in the traditional sense died a quiet death in Russia at that time, yielding to a bureaucratic-police regime which, except for a brief interval, has been in power there ever since.
In my analysis, I lay heavy stress on the relationship between property and political power. This emphasis may appear odd to readers raised on western history and accustomed to regard the two as distinct entities. (Except, of course, for economic determinists, for whom, however, this relationship everywhere follows a rigid and preordained pattern of development.) Anyone who studies the political systems of non-western societies quickly discovers that there the lines separating ownership from sovereignty either do not exist, or are so vague as to be meaningless, and that the absence of this distinction marks a cardinal point of difference between western and non-western types of government. One may say that the existence of private property as a realm over which public authority normally exercises no jurisdiction is the thing which distinguishes western political experience from all the rest. Under primitive xxi
FOREWORD
conditions, authority over people and over objects is combined, and it required an extraordinarily complex evolution of law and institutions which began in ancient Rome for it to be split into authority exercised as sovereignty and authority exercised as ownership. It is my central thesis that in Russia this separation occurred very late and very imperfectly. Russia belongs par excellence to that category of states which in the political and sociological literature it has become customary to refer to as 'patrimonial'. In such states political authority is conceived and exercised as an extension of the rights of ownership, the ruler (or rulers) being both sovereigns of the realm and its proprietors. The difficulty of maintaining Dais type of regime in the face of steadily increased contact and rivalry with a differently governed west has brought about in Russia a condition of permanent internal tension.
The format of this book precludes thorough documentation. By and large, I confine my references to direct quotations and statistical facts. But any specialist will readily recognize how deep is my debt to other, uncited historians.
I should like to express my appreciation to Professor Leonard Schapiro who has read the manuscript and given me the benefit of his advice. Richard Pipes London, 6 March 1974 xxii
CHAPTER 1
Patriotic Russian historians notwithstanding, when the Lord created mankind He did not place the Russians where they happen to be today. In the earliest times for which we have any evidence, the heartland of Russia - the forest zone in the middle of which lies the city of Moscow -was populated by peoples of Finnic and Lithuanian stock, while areas adjoining to the east and south were inhabited by Turks. The Russians first migrated into this territory towards the end of the first millennium of the Christian era. Until then, together with the rest of the Slavs, they had inhabited a region whose boundaries cannot be determined even with approximate precision but which is believed to have lain north of the Carpathian mountains between the Vistula or Oder to the west and what is today Belorussia in the east. Little is known of Slav prehistory. Archaeological artifacts, which cannot be attributed to any specific ethnic or even racial group, linguistic fossils and ethnic names of long defunct nations such as are found in early histories and travellers' accounts, have generated a great deal of theory but concrete evidence is flimsy in the extreme. All that can be said with reasonable certainty is that the early Slavs were nomadic cattle grazers organized into clans and tribes, and that they had neither political nor military forms of organization. Their neighbours to the west and south were die Goths; in the north and north-east they touched on Lithuanian territories. The Venedi or Veneti mentioned by Pliny the Elder and Tacitus were apparently Slavs. This old name is preserved in the German 'Wenden', a now extinct nation of Western Slavs, and 'Venaja', the modern Finnish word for Russia. Other names applied to them by foreign writers were Antae and Sclaveni. The Slavs seem to have called themselves Slovene or Sloviane, which most likely derives from slovo, 'the word', to signify people with the gift of speech, in contrast to Nemtsy, die 'dumb ones', the name given by Slavs to all the Oder Europeans, and, more specifically, their German neighbours. In the age of the Roman Empire, the Slavs lived in central Europe in