The very "idea of state was absent in Russia until the middle of the seventeenth century. . . . And since there was no notion of state, its corollary, society, was also unknown," Pipes asserts.23 Moreover, according to him, "[bjecause there was no free market, social classes in the customary sense of the word could not arise."[64] It was all the more impossible that there should be political opposition in that primitive family. After all, what cause was there for opposition to arise, if the basic area of social conflicts—the struggle for property—was excluded in the nature of things?
In this patriarchal picture there is, of course, no room for Oprichnina revolutions and Stalinizations, for "Times of Troubles," de-Stalin- izations, and analogous political dramas. Sons, it is true, do not always obey their parents, but they don't try to change the structure of their family. They do not introduce local self-government or trial by jury; they do not call Assemblies of the Land; they do not try to carry out major reforms, and—what is most important—they do not make claims on the property naturally belonging to the head of the family. It is not surprising, therefore, that the entire Oprichnina of Ivan the Terrible is accommodated in Pipes's book in two paragraphs and has the character rather of an epic family chronicle than of a "revolution from above." In any case, it is noted that "[t]he method used [by Ivan the Terrible] was basically not different from that first employed by Ivan III on the territory of conquered Novgorod."27
In fact, as soon as we and the author pass from the free flight of abstract theory to earthly reality, we immediately enter a world which is precisely the opposite of what has just been described, a world boiling with ferocious struggle and competition—all of it over property, which, according to Pipes, was indistinguishable from sovereignty. And the author himself knows this. "The transformation of Russia into its ruler's patrimony required two centuries to accomplish. The process began in the middle of the fifteenth century and was completed by the middle of the seventeenth," he writes. (In the middle of the seventeenth century, therefore, "the idea of the state" might be supposed to have disappeared from the face of the Russian earth; instead, for some reason it arose precisely at this point, by Pipes's own account.) "Between these dates lies an age of civil turbulence unprecedented even for Russia, when state and society engaged in ceaseless conflict, as the former sought to impose its will and the latter made desperate attempts to elude it."28
The meaning of this unending conflict consisted precisely in the fact that "in order to fashion their empire on the model of an appanage domain—to make all Russia their votchina . . . the tsars had to . . . put an end to the traditional right of the free population to circulate: all landowners had to be compelled to serve the ruler of Moscow, which meant converting their votchiny into fiefs." In Pipes's interpretation, "Outright property in land . . . was to give way to tenure conditional on royal favour."[65] Here is indistinguishability of sovereignty from ownership for you, when in practice it took two centuries of "civil tumult" and finally "a social revolution imposed from above" to take the property away from its owners.
The author agrees, thus, that there was no such thing as a "patrimonial state" in Russia before the seventeenth century. On the contrary, it turns out that from the beginning of the existence of Russia as a state, in the centuries which Pipes calls "the time of civil tumult," before "the crown . . . expropriated society,"[66] "ownership of land and rendering of service" were "traditionally separated in Russia." Furthermore, in it there existed a strong and proud aristocracy who "took great pride in their ancestry and consciously separated themselves from upstart service families."31 And even the state itself "had to honour the system or risk the united opposition of the leading houses of the realm."92
Thus, for Pipes the "time bomb" explodes a century later than for Wittfogel. It is not only a matter of chronology, however, but one of the character of the "explosion" and of what stood behind it. For Wittfogel, as we know, the fuse to this bomb was laid by the Tatars, who brought Chinese models of Oriental despotism to Russia, and thus Sinicized the country. According to Pipes, it was a conspiracy of the "patrimonial state," on a national scale, against society. It is true that, as he says, this state did not exist before the middle of the seventeenth century, but this did not prevent it from intriguing and conspiring as long ago as the middle of the fifteenth century. This treacherous state "neither grew out of society, nor was imposed on it from above. Rather it grew up side by side with society and bit by bit swallowed it,"33 until it brought "the process of expropriation [of society] to its conclusion."34 Just as Mikhail Katkov, the famous right-wing publicist of the 1860s, saw "Polish intrigue" in Russia's every misfortune, so Pipes seems to detect a sort of "patrimonial intrigue" behind her woes.
This intrigue, as we know, consisted in transforming the whole country into a gigantic royal domain, so that no patrimonies, no privileges, and no courts other than the tsar's could exist in it. Everything had to belong to the tsar. Everyone had to serve him directly, as his household servants and serfs did. "They are all slaves and just slaves, and no one is more than a slave," as V. O. Kliuchevskii tersely summed up the contents of Ivan the Terrible's revolutionary manifesto—his first letter to Prince Kurbskii.
There is no doubt that Ivan the Terrible thirsted after this. That in the name of this he made Russia dance with his Oprichnina revolution is undisputed. But the history of the Russian state is not reducible to Ivan the Terrible. There was a time before him and a time after him—a time to gather stones, as the Preacher says, and a time to cast them away.
The fact remains that, during the absolutist century of the Muscovite state, the so-called Government of Compromise suddenly introduced local self-government and trial by jury in Russia, and, in addition, called something like a national parliament—the Assembly of the Land. It not only did not try to destroy the privileges of the bo- yars, or attempt to stop the process of peasant differentiation leading directly to the formation of a bourgeoisie (such was Lenin's opinion, and in this department, after all, he is undeniably an authority), it in fact furthered this process.
In the 1760s, the Russian government, in the "Manifesto on the Freedom of the Nobility," guaranteed to the latter the privileges of a corporation, one of which was the privilege of not serving that government. In the 1780s, the government guaranteed the nobility the inalienability of its property. In the 1860s, it again returned to the old, just forgotten experiment of the Government of Compromise, and again, as in the sixteenth century, introduced local self-government and trial by jury. It is true that the final step was not taken at this time. The Assembly of the Land was not called, and Russia was in a fever for another half-century, until in 1906 it was summoned in the shape of the State Duma. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia thus again returned to the position from which Ivan the Terrible's Oprichnina revolution had toppled it in the middle of the sixteenth. Unfortunately, it was not for long. A new Oprichnina revolution, this time under the guidance of Vladimir Lenin, again locked it up in the prison of autocracy. Such were the essential facts of this stormy, contradictory, and tragic history.
But let us forget all of this for the moment. Let us agree with Pipes that "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."37' We then have before us a Russia which no longer knows an aristocracy, alodial tenure, and private patrimonial property, and is fully transformed into a "patrimonial state" in which sovereignty and ownership are indistinguishable. "The system we have described was so immune from pressures from below that, in theory at least, it should have perpetuated itself ad infinitum," Pipes writes. "The great patrimonial states of the Hellenistic world with which the Muscovite state had much in common collapsed not from internal causes but as a result of conquest. The same held true of the related regimes of the 'oriental despotic' type in Asia and Central America."3B