claim to the crown heritage; and even when violating the principle in practice, they did not challenge its general validity. A fifteenth-century Spanish jurist stated succinctly western Europe's feeling about 'seig-neuraP or patrimonial government: 'To the King is confided solely the administration of the kingdom, and not dominion over things, for the property and rights of the State are public, and cannot be the private patrimony of anyone.'9 As for the sanctity of private property, it was axiomatic in western political theory and jurisprudence in the Middle Ages and afterwards; and although periodically abused, it was never seriously questioned until the spread of socialist doctrines in modern times. One of the standard criteria used in western thought for distinguishing a legitimate king from a despot was that one respected his subjects' properties while the other did not.
In Russia such objections to domainial rule were unknown. In a series of letters which he wrote to Ivan IV from his refuge in Lithuania, Prince Andrei Kurbskii, a prominent boyar, assailed the entire notion of the state as votchina. But a recent analysis of the Kurbskii-Ivan correspondence has thrown such doubts on its authenticity that it can no longer be depended on as a source.10 Under the economic conditions prevailing in medieval and early modern Russia the institution of private property could not count on secure grounding either in custom or positive law; and the ignorance of Roman law presented formidable obstacles to its introduction from the outside. No distinction, therefore, was drawn between the king in his capacities of proprietor and sovereign. As Moscow expanded, new territorial acquisitions were at once attached to the Great Prince's private patrimony and there they stayed. In this manner the Russian monarchy emerged directly from the seigniory of the appanage principality: that is, from what had been originally an arrangement for economic exploitation, operating largely with slave labour.
The domainial origin of the Russian state is reflected in the origins of its administrative apparatus. Unfortunately, the Moscow fire of 1626 destroyed a large part of the archives of the central administration, which makes it difficult to determine when and under what circumstances it had been created. Still, enough is known strongly to suggest that it evolved directly from the offices originally charged with the management of the appanage prince's private domain. The dvor of the Moscow prince served for a long time - probably until the middle of the sixteenth century - in a double capacity as the management of the princely estates and the administration of the rest of the principality. 'Until the reforms of the 1550S-1560S,' writes a leading authority on the subject, 'general control over the whole system of local administration [of Muscovite Russia] was exercised by none other than the offices of the prince's household (dvor)... which concentrated in their
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hands almost all the basic branches of the state administration then in existence.'11
Especially striking is the evolution of the executive bureaux of Muscovite administration, the prikaiy. The term prikaz has its etymological roots in the language of the appanage domain: as noted, prikaznye liudi (men of the prikaz) (p. 45), were those domestic slaves and dependants who performed administrative functions on large domains, princely as well as private. Prikaz was the name of an office headed by such an official. With some possible minor exceptions, the earliest Muscovite prikazy seem to have been constituted only in the second half of the sixteenth century, that is a good one hundred years after Moscow had become the capital of an empire. Until that time, the administrators serving the prince - the steward (dvoretskii) and the putnye boiare - continued to carry out public administrative functions outside the prince's domain, as needed. As other appanages were conquered and annexed to Moscow, the dvory of the deposed princes were transported and reestablished in Moscow as new administrative entities: thus there appeared in Moscow special bureaux to administer Riazan, and Novgorod, and other areas. Each of these regional prikazy was a separate government, as it were, with complete authority over the territory entrusted to its charge. A similar arrangement was made in the sixteenth century for the conquered principality of Kazan, and in the seventeenth for Siberia. Thus, side by side with purely functional bureaux there appeared in Moscow bureaux formed on the territorial principle. This kind of administration prevented any region of the realm from developing organs of self-government or even a sense of local political identity. As Paul Miliukov says,
At the very inception of our institutions, we run into an immense difference from the west. There, every region constituted a compact, self-contained whole, bound together by means of special rights... Our history has failed to work out any lasting local ties or local organization. Upon their annexation by Moscow, the annexed regions at once disintegrated into atoms out of which the government could form any shapes it desired. But to begin with it was content to isolate each atom from those surrounding it and to attach it with administrative links directly to the centre.12 All of which, of course, had profound bearing on the absence in tsarist and imperial Russia of any effective regional loci of power, able to stand up to central authority.
To replace the local administrations transported to Moscow, the dvor of the Moscow prince opened branches in the main cities of the conquered principalities. These exercised both private and public functions, exactly as had been the case with the prince's own dvor inside the appanage principality. Under the pressure of expanding business, result-
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ing from Moscow's uninterrupted territorial growth, the household administration of the Prince constituted itself into the Bureau of the Large Household (Prikaz Bol'shogo Dvortsa), the first prikaz about which there is solid information and certainly the most important. Even so Moscow expanded at such a rapid rate that the task exceeded the capacities of the domestic staff of the Prince. In time, therefore, a rudimentary state administration began to emerge, separate from the household. The first to detach itself was the Treasury {Kazennyi Prikaz)", subsequently, other officials formed their own bureaux as well.13
Through its evolution, the Muscovite administration retained strong traces of the old domainial system of administration out of which it had grown out. Like the appanage puti (p. 45), the Moscow prikazy were organized in accord with the sources of revenue rather than according to some principle of public responsibility. And the reason for this was that, just like the management of an estate, they were set up to extract goods and services. As before, too, each prikaz had assigned to it its own means of financial support, and each continued to dispense justice to the people within its competence. These relics of the appanage period remained embedded in the Russian system of government until the time when Peter I, following western examples, introduced the principle of administrative rationalism and created a national budget.
In the west, the machinery of state administration also grew out of the apparatus managing the royal estates. But what is striking about Russia is how late domainial institutions transformed themselves into public ones. In France, the differentiation was completed by the fourteenth century; in Russia it only began in the eighteenth. This lag assumes considerable importance if one bears in mind that these two countries began to constitute themselves into national states at approximately the same time, i.e. around 1300. Secondly, in Russia the distinction between the domainial and the public spheres always remained very vague, and this fact could not but influence the conduct of the administration. Western feudalism created a number of institutions (courts, curia regis, Estates General) which by the mere fact of having separate identities from the king's household administration strengthened the sense of a public order. Sir Thomas Smith, a sixteenth-century English constitutional theorist, put the matter very well when he described sovereignty as resulting from the fusion of the king and the nation occurring when Parliament was in session. In Russia, the state administration came into being not because of a recognition that prince and state were things apart, requiring separate institutional expression, but rather because the prince's household staff no longer could handle the whole job. Recognition of the separate identity of ruler and state - natural to any country with a feudal past - came to Russia only in the eighteenth