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century as a result of western intellectual influences; but by this time the country's political ideas and practices were fully set.
Another item of evidence in favour of the contention that the Muscovite state apparatus evolved out of the domainial administration of the Muscovite princes has to do with the way Russian officials were paid. In the appanage principality, on the relatively infrequent occasions that a member of the prince's dvor had to perform duties outside the domain, (e.g. on black lands), it was assumed that his wages would be provided for by the population. Such payments, in money and kind, were called kormleniia (literally, 'feedings'). The system was retained by the tsars of Moscow. Officials of the prikazy and of other offices located in the city of Moscow and serving directly under the sovereign, were paid out of the tsar's treasury. But no funds at all were allocated for the provincial administration whose members received kormleniia in the form of regular contributions as well as fees for particular services rendered. This system, too, survived until the time when Peter 1 introduced regular salaries for state officials; however, since financial difficulties compelled Peter's immediate successors to suspend salary payments, the post-Petrine bureaucracy once again reverted in large measure to living off the land.
Thus, both in its organization and manner of rewarding its civil service the Muscovite state followed practices of the appanage principality - a fact strongly indicative of its domainial antecedents.
Further evidence for this thesis can be found in the failure of the Russians to distinguish either in theory or in practice among three types of properties; those belonging personally to the monarch, those belonging to the state, and those belonging to private persons. During the appanage period private property in land was recognized in the form of votchiny. But as will be shown in the next chapter, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Moscow monarchy succeeded in eliminating alodial holdings and making secular land tenure a form of possession conditional on state service. It is only in 1785 under Catherine 11 when Russian landholders secured clear legal title to their estates that private property in land came once again into being in Russia. Given this background it is not surprising that the kind of distinction drawn in France since the late Middle Ages between the properties of the king and those of the crown came to Russia very late:
Neither in the appanage of Moscow, nor in the Great Principality of Vladimir in which this Muscovite princely line establishes itself, nor in the Muscovite state do we find the slightest indication of the presence of state properties as something distinct from the properties of the prince. Moscow knows only the landed properties of the Great Prince, not those of the state. The properties of the Great Prince are divided into black ones and those of
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the royal household (dvortsovye); the latter are assigned to the households and carry special obligations for their support, but both belong equally to the sovereign and cannot even always be distinguished as to their duties. The Great Prince disposes of both in the same manner. Black lands can be assigned to the royal household, and those of the royal household can be transferred into black status. Both can be handed out as pomestia and votchiny, or turned over to sons, princesses, daughters, monasteries and so on. Our sources draw no distinction whatever between properties purchased by the prince, lands which he confiscated from private individuals, and his other properties, whose method of acquisition remains unknown to us. All this is called without differentiation, 'lands of the sovereign' {gosudarevy zemli) and is administered in accord with identical principles.14
The first attempt to separate royal from state lands in Russia was made by Paul I who created a Department of Appanages in charge of the Romanov family properties, income from which was used to support members of the imperial household. Under Nicholas I in 1826 this department was elevated to the status of a ministry (Ministerstvo Impera-torskogo Dvora i Udelov) which enjoyed the distinction of being exempt from control by the Senate and all other state organs, and responsible only to the emperor himself. In 1837 the Ministry of State Domains {Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennykh Imushchestv) came into being to administer state properties. Until then, revenues flowing from the two types of properties were pooled. Until then, too, Russian emperors felt perfectly at liberty to hand over or sell to private individuals vast state properties with hundreds of thousands of peasants. But even after these reforms, the distinction between crown and state properties was not strictly observed. The Ministry of State Domains had been created not to satisfy legal propriety, but because of dissatisfaction with the manner in which the millions of state peasants had been administered. Nicholas I, who established the two above-named ministries, never hesitated to shift peasants from imperial properties to state lands, and vice versa. The fact that until the early eighteenth century Russia had no national budget, and that what budget there was after 1700 remained until 1862 a closely guarded state secret, facilitated such practices.
In his capacity as votchinnik or seigneur of all Russia, the ruler of Moscow treated his kingdom much as his ancestors had treated their landed estates. The idea of state was absent in Russia until the middle of the seventeenth century, and even after its introduction it remained imperfectly assimilated. And since there was no notion of state, its corollary, society, was also unknown.* That which modern Russian renders by the
* Some scholars (e.g. John Keep in the Slavonic and East European Review, April 1970, p. 204, and Hans Torke in Canadian Slavic Studies, winter 1971, p. 467) see an emergent society in Russia as early as the late seventeenth (Keep) and even mid-sixteenth centuries (Torke). word obshchestvo (an eighteenth-century neologism), the language of Muscovite Russia expressed by zemlia. In modern Russian, this word signifies 'the land', but in medieval usage it meant income-producing property.15 In other words, it was mainly seen not as a counterpoise to the seigneur, the tsar, but as the object of his exploitation. The purpose of the patrimonial regime in Russia as anywhere else was to extract from the country all the income and the labour it had to offer. There was no notion of reciprocity, of the monarchy owing the country something in return. Giles Fletcher, an Elizabethan poet and statesman who visited Russia in 1588-9 and left what in many respects is the finest firsthand account of Muscovy extant, relates that Ivan iv used to compare his people to a beard or to sheep in that like them, to grow well, they required frequent clipping.18 Whether authentic or invented by English merchants, the metaphor accurately reflects the spirit behind the internal policies of the Muscovite government, or for that matter, of any government of the patrimonial or 'seigneuraP type. At a certain point in the history of Moscow, the patrimonial mentality, rooted in purely economic attitudes, became politicized; the votchinnik-landlord turned into votchinnik-tsar. The spirit remained the same but it acquired new forms of expression and a theoretical overlay. Evidence is lacking precisely when and how this transformation occurred. But there are strong indications that the critical period was the reign of Ivan in, when two concurrent events suddenly freed Muscovy and the principalities which it dominated from ties of external dependence, allowing north-east Russia for the first time to think of itself as a sovereign state.