Classic examples of patrimonial regimes are to be found among the Hellenistic states which emerged from the dissolution of the empire of Alexander the Great, such as Egypt of the Ptolemies (305-30 BC) and the Attalid state in Pergamum (c. 283-133 BC). In these kingdoms, founded by Macedonian conquerors, the ruler controlled all or nearly all the productive wealth. In particular, he owned the entire cultivated land which he exploited partly directly, through his personal staff using his own labour force, and partly indirectly, by distributing estates on service tenure to his nobility. The Hellenistic king was often also the country's principal industrialist and merchant. The primary purpose of this kind of arrangement was to enrich its sovereign proprietor. Rather than seeking to maximize resources, the emphasis lay on stabilizing income, and to this purpose the government often set fixed quotas of goods which it expected to receive, leaving the remainder to the inhabitants. In extreme cases, such as Hellenistic Pergamum, something close to a planned economy seems to have come into being. Because there was no free market, social classes in the customary sense of the word could not arise; instead there were social estates organized hierarchically to serve the king and tending to ossify into castes. There was no nobility with defined rights and privileges, but only ranks of servitors, whose status depended wholly on royal grace. The bureaucracy was powerful but it was not permitted to become hereditary. Like the nobility, it owed its status and privileges to the king.80
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The patrimonial system best defines the type of regime which emerged in Russia between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries and which, with certain lapses and modifications, has survived until the present. One can find no better description of the Muscovite system of government at the height of its development during the seventeenth century than that given by Julius Kaerst for the Hellenistic world:
[The Hellenistic state represents] a personal-dynastic regime which does not grow out of a specific land or people but is imposed from above upon a specific political realm [Herrschaftsbezirk]. Accordingly, it has at its side special, technically trained instruments of rule which originally also have not grown up along with the land but have become tied to the ruler of the dynasty by a purely personal relationship. They form the principal support of the new monarchical authority in the form of a bureaucracy, subordinate to the king's will, and of a body of battle-ready warriors... Political life not only concentrates itself in the persons of the rulers; it is actually rooted in them. A citizenry (demos)... as such does not exist at all... The people is the object of the ruling authority, not an independent bearer of some national mission.21
The history of the patrimonial system of government in Russia is the principal theme of this book. It rests on the contention that the essential quality of Russian politics derives from the identification of sovereignty and ownership, that is, of a 'proprietary' way of looking at political authority on the part of those who happen to be in power. Part I will trace the growth and evolution of the patrimonial regime in Russia. Part II will deal with the principal social estates and inquire why they failed to transform themselves from an object of public authority into a subject of public rights. Part III will describe the conflict between the state and that articulate element of society known as the intelligentsia as it unfolded during the imperial period and which led in the 1880s to the modernization of patrimonial institutions in which unmistakable germs of totalitarianism can be discerned.
CHAPTER 2
In the middle of the seventh century, when the Slavs were in the course of penetrating the Russian forest on their eastward migration, the Black Sea steppe fell under the control of the Khazars, a Turkic nation from Inner Asia. Unlike the other Turkic groups of the time the Khazars did not pursue an exclusively nomadic mode of life centred on cattle breeding, but settled down to cultivate the soil and to trade. The main artery of their commerce was the Volga, which they controlled as far north as it was navigable. Using this route, they shipped luxury goods obtained from the Levant to trading posts in the forest populated by Ugro-Finnic peoples where they exchanged them for slaves, furs and various primary and semi-finished raw materials. By the end of the eighth century, the Khazars established a powerful state or kaganate extending from the Crimea to the Caspian and northward to the mid-Volga. At this time, the ruling elite, probably under the influence of Jewish colonists from the Crimea, were converted to Judaism. The kaganate's military power shielded the Black Sea steppe from Asiatic nomads, and enabled the early Slavic migrants to gain a precarious foothold in the black earth region. During the eighth and ninth centuries, the Slavs in the steppe and adjoining forest paid tribute to the Khazars and lived under their protection.
The little that is known of Eastern Slavs during this period (the seventh to ninth centuries) suggests that they were organized into tribal communities. The prevailing agricultural technique in the forest zone, where most of them resided, was 'slash-burn', a primitive method well suited to the conditions under which they then lived. Having made a clearing in the woods and hauled away the logs the peasants set the stumps and brush on fire. The ashes deposited after the flames had died down were so rich in potash and lime that seeds could be sown directly on the ground with a minimum of soil preparation. The soil treated in this manner yielded a few good harvests; as soon as it became exhausted, the peasants moved on to repeat the procedure in another
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part of the endless forest. This method of cultivation demanded constant movement and undoubtedly helps explain the remarkable rapidity with which the Slavs spread throughout Russia. 'Slash-burn' remained the prevalent technique of farming in Russia until the sixteenth century, when under the combined pressure of the state and its landed servitors the peasants had to settle down and go over to the three-field system. It continued, however, to be practised in the remoter areas of the north well into the present century.
A characteristic feature of early Slav settlements was the construction of stockades. In the steppe, these were built of earth, in the forest of wood alone or in combination with earth. Such primitively fortified places served the members of the communities scattered in near-by clearings as common defensive centres. There were hundreds of such tribal stockades all over early Russia. The tribal communities combined to form larger social units, known by a variety of names, such as mir, whose connecting link was the worship of common gods.* An agglomeration of miry formed the largest socio-territorial entity known to early Eastern Slavs, plemia, of which the chronicles identify by name a dozen or so. As in tribal groupings elsewhere, authority rested in the patriarch, who enjoyed virtually unlimited power over the other members of the tribe and their belongings. At this stage in their history, the Eastern Slavs had neither institutions nor officials charged with the performance of judiciary or military functions, and therefore nothing approximating statehood even in its most rudimentary form.