The same cannot be said of Russia, and this for two reasons. In the first place, the Kievan state, unlike the Carolingian, had had no experience with centralized authority. Appanage Russia, therefore, could have no single figurehead king with an authentic claim to the monopoly of political power; instead, it had a whole dynasty of princes, petty and grand, each of whom had an equal right to the royal title. There was nothing here to place 'between parentheses'. Secondly, no boyar or churchman in medieval Russia succeeded in usurping princely authority; decentralization occurred from the multiplication of princes, not from the appropriation of princely prerogatives by powerful subjects. As will be noted in Chapter 3, these two related facts had profound bearing on
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the process of building royal power in Russia and on the character of Russian absolutism. Vassalage represented the personal side of western feudalism (as conditional land tenure represented the material). It was a contractual relationship by virtue of which the lord pledged sustenance and protection, and the vassal reciprocated with promises of loyalty and service. This mutual obligation, formalized in the ceremony of commendation, was taken very seriously by the parties concerned and society at large. Violation of its terms by either party nullified the contract. From the vantage point of the development of western institutions, four aspects of vassalage require emphasis. First, it was a personal contract between two individuals, valid only in the course of their lifetime; on the death of either it lapsed. Implied in it was personal consent; one did not inherit the obligations of a vassal. Hereditary vassalage appeared only towards the end of the feudal era and it is considered to have been a powerful factor in feudalism's decline. Secondly, although originally an arrangement between two individuals, through the practice of subinfeudation vassalage produced a whole network of human dependencies. Its by-product was a strong social bond linking society with government. Thirdly, the obligations of vassalage were as binding on the stronger party, the lord, as on the weaker, the vassal. 'The originality [of western feudalism]', writes Marc Bloch, 'consisted in the emphasis it placed on the idea of an agreement capable of binding the rulers; and in this way, oppressive as it may have been to the poor, it has in truth bequeathed to our western civilization something with which we still desire to live.'9 That something, of course, was law-an idea which in due time led to the establishment of courts, first as a means of adjudicating disputes between the parties involved in the lord-vassal relationship, and eventually as a regular feature of public life. Constitutions which are at bottom only generalized forms of feudal contract, descend from the institution of vassalage. Fourthly, the feudal contract, beside its legal aspect had also a moral side: in addition to their specific obligations, the lord and vassal pledged one another good faith. This good faith, imponderable as it may be, is an important source of the western notion of citizenship. Countries which had no vassalage or where vassalage entailed only a one-sided commitment of the weak towards the strong, have experienced great difficulties inculcating in their officials and citizens that sense of common interest from which western states have always drawn much inner strength.
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What do we find in Russia? Of vassalage, in its proper sense, nothing.* The Russian landowning class, the boyars, were expected to bear arms but they were not required to do so on behalf of any particular prince. There was no trace of mutual responsibility in the prince-boyar relationship. In the western ceremony of commendation the vassal knelt before his lord who cupped his hands in a symbolic gesture of protection, lifting him to his feet and embracing him. In medieval Russia, the corresponding ceremony involved an oath ('kissing the cross') and the kowtowing of the servitor to the prince. Although some historians claim that the relations between princes and boyars were regulated by a contract, the fact that not a single document of this kind has come down to us from Russian (as distinct from Lithuanian) territories raises grave doubts whether they ever existed. There is no evidence in medieval Russia of mutual obligations binding prince and his servitor, and, therefore, also nothing resembling legal and moral 'rights' of subjects, and little need for law and courts. A disaffected boyar had no place to turn to obtain satisfaction; the only recourse open to him was to exercise the right of renunciation and leave for another lord. Admittedly, free departure -the one 'right' a boyar may be said to have enjoyed - was an ultimate form of personal liberty, which, on the face of it, should have promoted in Russia the emergence of a free society. But liberty not grounded in law is incapable of evolution and tends to turn upon itself; it is an act of bare negation which implicitly denies any mutual obligation or even a lasting relationship between human beings, f The ability of boyars arbitrarily to abandon their princes forced the princes to behave arbitrarily as well; and since, in the long run, it was the princes' power that grew, the boyars had much occasion to regret their prized 'right'. Once Moscow had conquered all of Russia and there were no more independent appanage princes to whom to transfer one's loyalty, the boyars found that they had no rights left at all. They then had to assume very heavy service obligations without obtaining any reciprocity. The endemic lawlessness of Russia, especially in the relations between those in authority and those subject to it, undoubtedly has one of its principal
* Vassalage did exist in Lithuanian Russia. Sometimes princes and boyars from the Volga-Oka region, making use of the right to choose their lord, placed themselves under the protection of the Lithuanian Great Prince, and entered with him into contracts which made them vassals. An example of such a contract between Great Prince Ivan Fedorovich of Riazan, and Witold, the Great Prince of Lithuania, from c. 1430, can be found in A.L. Cherepnin, ed., Dukhovnye i dogovornye gramoty velikikh i udeVnykh kniazei XIV-XVI vv (Moscow-Leningrad 1950), pp. 67-68. In north-eastern Russia, such contracts seem to have been unknown. t This the Russians and their subject peoples found out at great cost to themselves after 1917. The generous promises made by Lenin to the peasants, workers and national minorities, allowing them to seize control of the land and industries and to exercise the unlimited right of national self-determination - promises utterly extreme in their libertarian scope but undefined in law and unprotected by courts - in the end produced the very opposite result.
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sources in the absence of the whole tradition of contract, implanted in western Europe by vassalage.