In the second place, "Why did Byzantine Constantinople go down to ruin? And why, on the other hand, did Byzantine Moscow survive?" Again Toynbee himself asks a question which is fatal to his thesis. "The key to both these historical riddles is the Byzantine institution of the totalitarian State,'"7 he triumphantly declares, but this does not seem any more convincing than "the class struggle" of the Soviet absolutists as a solution. Even from a purely methodological point of view, we can predict that Toynbee is exulting a bit prematurely at the beginning of his essay. He will not be able to keep his promise to open two different locks with the same key. Just as the absolutists, in trying to explain Russia's backwardness, appealed for help to the Tatars, so Toynbee must, like his debunked opponent, Wittfogel, in the end appeal to geography for help. Russia, he writes, "owed her survival in the early middle ages [according to the thesis, this sentence should end 'to the Byzantine institution of the totalitarian state'] to a happy geographical accident.'"8 Now we've got it again.
In the third place, and most importantly, how does the cultural hostility of Greeks and Romans help us to explain certain events in Russian history? For example, the enserfment of the peasants? And then their liberation? The Oprichnina revolution of Ivan the Terrible? And the Time of Troubles which followed it? The "new classes" bringing periodic catastrophe on the Russian aristocracy? And its equally periodic rebirth? The Russian political opposition? The Stalinist Gulag? And the attempts to de-Stalinize the country which followed it? The reader will agree that these events, and others like them, are the keys to Russian history. And a hypothesis which tries to derive them from the conflicts between John Chrysostom and the Empress Eudoxia, or between Pope Silverius and the Emperor Justinian, would hardly seem any more convincing than Wittfogel's attempt to explain them by the influence of the Tatars.
Notwithstanding that Toynbee's essay displays to the full his awesome erudition in regard to the conflicts between popes and emperors, it appears considerably less well-founded than Wittfogel's argument, and I frankly do not see any adequate basis for the haughty criticism to which Toynbee subjects his opponent. Rather, both of them give the impression of being helpless prisoners of the fatal bipolar model, which has deprived them of the possibility of following the concrete processes of Russian history, and of answering its concrete questions. They were simply more interested in global constructions than in the urgent problems of any particular national history. As a result, however, this particular national history has proved to be beyond the limits of the global models which they have constructed.
5. The "Patrimonial" Interpretation
Until recently, the lively competition between the "Tatar" and "Byzantine" interpretations has, for the most part, dominated philosophical-historical thinking about Russia in the West. However, with the appearance of Richard Pipes's book, Russia Under the Old Regime, which has apparently proved unusually popular,1'' this thinking has taken on a new dimension. A fundamentally new conception has emerged, rejecting from the outset the very thought of Russia as an "Oriental despotism."20 Instead, Russia is defined as a "patrimonial monarchy"—that is, a polity "where the rights of sovereignty and those of ownership blend to the point of becoming indistinguishable;"2' or, more precisely, a political structure run by its tsars much as
When, at the University of California at Berkeley, I recommended that my students read Pipes's book, it turned out that all 12 (!) copies available in the libraries were in use. I did not hear anything like this about any other book which I recommended.
Pipes writes that while "one might have expected Russia to develop early in its history something akin to the bureaucratic regime of the 'despotic' or 'Asiatic' kind . . . for a variety of reasons its political development took a somewhat different route. . . . [I]t knew nothing of central economic management until the imposition of War Communism in 1918. But even if such management had been required, the country's natural conditions would have prevented its introduction. One need only consider the difficulties of transport and communication in Russia before the advent of railroads and telegraphs to realize that the kind of control and surveillance essential to an 'Oriental Despotism' was entirely out of the question here" (Russia under the Old Regime, p. 20).
Ibid., pp. 22-23. Amazingly, Pipes's definition almost literally corresponds with another one already known to the reader. Only Marx had in mind precisely what Pipes is rejecting: "Oriental despotism." the primitive family is run by the paterfamilias. More than that, the very definition of despotism is subjected to revision. It is treated not as a distinct political structure, but as a "deviation" from normal monarchy, based not on tradition, but on force. The "patrimonial state," on the other hand, is said to be based on tradition ("the primitive family").
Here conflicts between sovereignty and property do not and cannot arise because . . . they are one and the same thing. A despot violates his subjects' property rights; a patrimonial ruler does not even acknowledge their existence. By inference, under a patrimonial system there can be no clear distinction between state and society in so far as such a distinction postulates the right of persons other than the sovereign to exercise control over things and (where there is slavery) over persons.. . . Classical 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 вс) and the Attalid state in Pergamum (c. 283-133 вс).[63]
Let us leave it to experts to judge the equivalence of the political structures of Ptolemaic Egypt and Attalid Pergamum (I'm afraid that they will hardly agree on this) and return, as Rabelais says, to our rams. First of all, let us state with relief that both Wittfogel's Tatars and Toynbee's Byzantines have, in Pipes's interpretation, ceased to be a "high model" (Wittfogel's term) for the Russian political structure. It is true that the reasons for which Pipes has demoted them are somewhat exotic. Neither the Tatars nor the Byzantines can boast of the patriarchal peace which, according to Pipes, must have reigned in the "primitive family" of the Russian patrimonial state. In neither case could matters have gone as smoothly and as naturally as they must have gone there. There was no one in Russia to throw down the challenge to the supreme property rights of the "father of the Russian family." Everyone was content with his family position. No wonder that "[t]he Muscovite service class, from which, in direct line of succession, descend the dvorianstvo of imperial Russia and the communist apparatus of Soviet Russia, represents a unique phenomenon in the history of social institutions."23 In a society saturated with the "patrimonial mentality,"24 the notion that property could belong to anyone other than the sovereign could never even enter anyone's head, it seems. Even the Hellenistic states have ceased, within a matter of some fifty pages, to serve as a "high model" for this unique phenomenon.