With the paterfamilias finally heading his "primitive family," we might expect that "civil tumult" would come to an end forever in Russia, and that an orderly and sedate family life would begin. But after its victory, the "patrimonial state" begins to conduct itself in a highly mysterious manner. "It is only in 1785 under Catherine II when Russian landholders secured clear legal title to their estates that private property in land came once again into being in Russia," Pipes observes.37 Let us make an elementary calculation: if alodial tenure, private patrimonial property, and aristocracy, which had just ceased to exist in the second half of the seventeenth century, arise again in the second half of the following century, then for how many years—even fully agreeing with Pipes's conception—do we still have the "patrimonial state"? It turns out all of a sudden that what is being spoken of is not at all "Russia under the old regime," as the title of Pipes's book suggests, but only one piece of its history.
This is but the beginning of the confusion, however. For the time set aside for Pipes's "old regime" in Russian history will inevitably, like Balzac's peau de chagrin, get smaller and smaller, until finally it disappears altogether. "In the second half of the seventeenth century, of the 888,000 households subject to tiaglo [tax] in Russia, 67 per cent stood on land held by boyars and dvoriane [nobility] . . . and 13.3 per cent on that held by the church," Pipes says.
In other words, 80.3 per cent of the tiaglo households were under private control. The crown owned outright only 9.3 per cent. . . . For all practical purposes then, by the end of the seventeenth century four out of every five Russians had ceased to be subjects of the state, in the sense that the state had relinquished to their landlords nearly all authority over them/'"
Let us continue with our arithmetic. If by the end of the seventeenth century, four out of five of the children of the paterfamilias had escaped from his control, how many years of the "patrimonial state" are left? Fifty? Alas, its situation is even worse than this. For, contrary to Pipes's assertions, the Muscovite state never succeeded completely in eliminating alodial property. It is true that the traditional clan patrimony perished under the assault of the Oprichnina revolution and the autocracy established by it, partly being replaced by fiefs (pomest'ia). But, simultaneously with the abolition of the traditional patrimonial estate and its replacement by pomest'e, evolution of the pomest'ia into the new patrimonial estates of the service gentry took place. In his last work, the late A. M. Sakharov describes the process as follows:
The pomest'e gradually became more and more adapted to the interests of its holder, and revealed more and more elements of patrimonial tenure. With time, there arose the so-called "earned patrimonies." This concept, it seems, was first used in a ukase of 1572, where the clan patrimony was contrasted to the "patrimony given by the sovereign." The beginning of the sale of vacant pomest'ia as patrimonies, with the sole condition that the buyer had no right to transfer them to a monastery, dates from the same period. The practice of selling pomest'ia as patrimonies subsequently became widespread in the first half of the seventeenth century, along with the granting of pomest'ia as patrimonies as a reward for service. Furthermore, after the "Time of Troubles" [that is, at the beginning of the seventeenth century], a definite norm was established: an "earned" patrimony was one-fifth of the regular size of a pomest'e. The treasury's need for money and the effort to gain a firmer base of support in the nobility were the causes of the transformation of pomest'ia into patrimonies, which constantly increased over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. '4
Russian history is left with not a single decade for the "patrimonial state." There is simply nowhere left to stick it. And, along with it, the "patrimonial-conspiratorial" model of the Russian historical process falls into oblivion. Out of this fundamental contradiction between theory and reality there apparently flows such a massive series of factual contradictions by the author with himself that, in analyzing Pipes's book, my students asked me whether the author himself had read over his own text before sending it to press. I will cite only a few examples. On page 86 we read: "The extension of the domainial order on the country at large was nothing short of a social revolution imposed from above. The resistance was commensurate." On page 173: "Sovereignty in Russia had been built on the ruins of private property, by a ruthless destruction of appanages and other votchiny." And, between these two passages, on page 172: "The Russian state grew and took shape without having to contend with entrenched landed interests—an absolutely fundamental factor in its historic evolution" (my emphasis).
On page 85, we read that "state and society engaged in ceaseless conflict" over the course of two centuries (from the middle of the fifteenth to mid-seventeenth), this conflict being required for the destruction of the boyars' patrimonies, and on page 172 that, "During the three centuries separating the reign of Ivan III from that of Catherine II the Russian equivalent of the nobility held its land on royal sufferance."
How can we reconcile the absence of entrenched landed interests with the "unending struggle" for their extirpation? Or the strong patrimonial boyardom, of which the author himself says that the Duma which it created was "in the fourteenth, fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth century . . . pronouncedly aristocratic,"4" with tenure of land on royal sufferance? How, in a country where even the ideas of state and society could not exist, could the state and society wage a struggle to the death against each other over the course of centuries? Why did the "patrimonial state," which had for so many years conspired against private property, suddenly begin to destroy the results of its entire intrigue? I was not able to answer these legitimate questions for my students.
As the reader may have noticed, my role in criticizing Russia Under the Old Regime has been minimaclass="underline" the author himself, without outside help, has destroyed his "conspiratorial-patrimonial" thesis by, to use his own expression, "swallowing it bit by bit."
Of course, Pipes is not obliged to follow the logic of Wittfogel, or Toynbee, or A. N. Sakharov, or anybody at all, but his own logic he must follow. And, as strange as it may seem after so much self-contradiction, a logic can be discovered to which he still adheres. Alas, this is the familiar logic of the bipolar model, which he so decisively debunked in the theoretical introduction to his book. "The distinguishable characteristic of la monarchie seigneuriale was that 'the prince has become lord of the goods and persons of his subjects,'" Pipes writes, quoting Jean Bodin, with whom he agrees that "in Europe there were only two such regimes, one in Turkey, the other in Muscovy, although they were common in Asia and Africa."4'