Russian Path Dependence: A People with a Troubled History

Advance praise for Russian Path Dependence Anyone who wants a more than a trivial understanding of the constraints that limit and direct Russia’s economic and political development today must read Hedlund’s book. Many specialists invoke the legacies of Russia’s past to support their analyses of its contemporary behaviour without being specific about ‘cause and effect’. Hedlund is specific – and highly compelling – as he uses the logic of neoclassical economics properly placed in the logic of Russian political institutions over many centuries. He breaks new ground in taking the theories of Nobel Laureate Douglass North to the case of Russian economic performance. William E. Odom Sir Winston Churchill said on Russia at the outbreak of the Second World War: ‘It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’ His colourful words could still be repeated 60 years later, after the collapse of the Soviet empire. Hedlund’s book gives a bright answer to the enigma. His exciting analysis of the thousandyear-long Russian history based on institutional theory explains the roots of the Russian anomaly. The reader will understand how this country could attain such peaks in arts, science and military power during the last two centuries, while at the same time suffering from the misery of living conditions and despotic political systems. La´szlo´ Szamuely Stefan Hedlund is one of the few professional economists to acknowledge the importance of history in shaping economic behaviour. This approach is especially valuable in the case of Russia where the ‘burden of the past’ is a major factor influencing politics as well as economics. Richard Pipes Russia is an enigma only to those who insist that its politics and economics are guided by Adam Smithian democratic free enterprise. Stefan Hedlund rigorously demonstrates that they are mistaken. For more than a thousand years Moscow has embraced ‘patrimonialism’, authoritarianism, reliance on the secret police, rent granting, and state managed business. The intrinsic Pareto inefficiency of this ‘Muscovite’ model has kept Russia backward, and dependent on oversized armies, while its leadership has remained steadfastly in denial, beguiling many in the West who remain ever hopeful that the Kremlin’s future isn’t hostage to its past. Hedlund however shows that nothing fundamental has changed, nor is it likely to until politicians stop pretending. Steven Rosefielde

Russian Path Dependence

Russia’s transition to a market economy has been tortuous to say the least. However, this book argues that the arguments and counter-arguments that pitch shock therapy against gradualism are wide of the mark and quite pointless. Indeed, the reasons for the warped outcomes can actually be traced back through the long sweep of Russian history. Decisions made in the distant past can fully influence policy-making in the present. Hedlund’s thesis can thus be seen as influenced by the ‘path dependency’ theories of Paul David among others. Stefan Hedlund is author of a number of books on Russia including Russia’s ‘Market’ Economy and Ideology and Rationality in the Soviet Model – both also published by Routledge. He is based at the Department of East European Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden.

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1 Growth and Crisis in the Spanish Economy, 1940–1993 Sima Lieberman 2 Work and Employment in Europe A New Convergence? Edited by Peter Cressey and Bryn Jones 3 Trans-European Telecommunication Networks The Challenges for Industrial Policy Colin Turner 4 European Union – European Industrial Relations? Global Challenges, National Developments and Transnational Dynamics Edited by Wolfgang E. Lecher and Hans-Wolfgang Platzer 5 Governance, Industry and Labour Markets in Britain and France The Modernizing State in the Mid-twentieth Century Edited by Noel Whiteside and Robert Salais 6 Labour Market Efficiency in the European Union Employment Protection and Fixed-term Contracts Klaus Scho¨mann, Ralf Rogowski and Thomas Kruppe 7 The Enlargement of the European Union Issues and Strategies Edited by Victoria Curzon-Price, Alice Landau and Richard Whitman 8 European Trade Unions Change and Response Edited by Mike Rigby, Roger Smith and Teresa Lawlor 9 Fiscal Federalism in the European Union Edited by Amedeo Fossati and Giorgio Panella 10 European Telecommunications Liberalisation Edited by Kjell A. Eliassen and Marit Sjøvaag 11 Integration and Transition in Europe The Economic Geography of Interaction Edited by George Petrakos, Gunther Maier and Grzegorz Gorzelak 12 SMEs and European Integration Internationalisation Strategies Birgit Hegge 13 Fiscal Federalism and European Economic Integration Edited by Mark Baimbridge and Philip Whyman 14 Financial Markets in Central and Eastern Europe Stability and Efficiency Edited by Morten Balling, Frank Lierman and Andy Mullineux 15 Russian Path Dependence Stefan Hedlund

Russian Path Dependence

Stefan Hedlund

First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” # 2005 Stefan Hedlund All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-203-00042-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0–415–35400–5

Of all the burdens Russia has had to bear, heaviest and most relentless of all has been the weight of her past. Tibor Szamuely

Contents

Preface

xi

Part I

Introduction 1 History matters

1 3

Part II

The setting

21

2 Stationary bandits

23

3 Successor states

45

Part III

The lock-in 4 Lords of all Rus

71 73

5 The only true Christians

101

6 The patrimonial state

125

Part IV

The path dependence

157

7 The apogee of patrimonialism

159

8 Failures to break out

190

9 Back to Muscovy

222

x

Contents

Part V

Breaking with the past?

261

10 Another time of troubles

263

11 Muscovy reconstituted

284

12 Achieving credible commitment

307

Notes References Index

332 373 385

Preface

When I think back on all the work that has gone into writing this book, there is one thing in particular that is striking. Perhaps it was just as well that I did not quite realize what it was that I was getting myself into. Economists often think that taking a long perspective means going back 10 or 20 years in time. My own cheerful ambition was to grapple with some twelve centuries of Russian history, and to distill from this undertaking some novel patterns and conceptions. Perhaps it is not so surprising that the final product of my labours has turned out to bear little resemblance to the original ambitions. Work was begun in the fall of 2000, during a sabbatical semester at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian Studies. I came there with the declared intention of writing a book about the deeper roots of Russia’s perennial agricultural problems. In a sense, it was intended to form the central part of a triptych, where the two flanking pieces would have been made up of two previous books of mine that dealt with problems in Soviet agriculture.1 My principal inspiration for that work was drawn from Jerome Blum’s classic treatise on Lord and Peasant in Russia, which covers the period from the ninth to the nineteenth century.2 The general idea was to recast his story in a mould that would be made up of neo-institutional theory, and the general ambition was to identify institutional patterns of collectivism that had tended to be replicated over the centuries. While I did remain convinced both of the centrality of relations between peasants and landlords and of the tendency for fundamental institutions to be replicated over time, as I got myself more and more deeply immersed in the early history of Rus I came to realize that the scope of the undertaking would have to be broadened. Thus, a study that had begun with a rather narrow focus on one specific dimension of the institutional make-up of early Russia gradually came to encompass the full range of such institutional peculiarities that marked the formation of Muscovy as a whole. Without ever formulating it as such, I gradually evolved a working hypothesis that would come to form the backbone of the study in its final format. The core of that hypothesis suggested that those institutional patterns that emerged in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Muscovy harbour

xii

Preface

most if not all of the keys necessary to unlocking the fabled mystique that would come to surround subsequent Russian developments. The rather obvious implication was that a theory would have to be formulated to explain just how such fundamental institutional patterns could persist over so many centuries to come. During my time at the Davis Center, I benefited greatly from discussions with numerous colleagues, in formal seminars as well as in less formal corridor talks. To mention but a few, Richard Pipes generously read my early drafts about Russian history, which to a professional historian must have been a rather tedious undertaking. Marshall Poe served as an always inspiring mentor on Russian medieval history, and weekly sessions of ‘economists’ coffee’ provided regular opportunities to exchange views about Russia and the Russian economy with Abe Bergson, Joe Berliner, Barney Schwalberg and others. I owe them all, but none more so than Marshall Goldman, whose warm and always helpful personality contributes so strongly to making the Davis Center such a great place to be. Upon leaving Harvard I had produced a pile of draft chapters for a book that was still looking for its main points. Returning to the humdrum duties of teaching at my home university in Uppsala, I had to shelve for some time all ambitions of continuing to look for those points, and for the associated theory. Meanwhile, as Vladimir Putin’s first term in office was unfolding, I was becoming increasingly convinced that the troubles of Russian economic reform had been due not so much to the Soviet system as such, nor even to faulty policy advice by the adherents of the Washington Consensus. The real key would have to be sought in the deeper recesses of Russian history. In thinking along such lines, I bore with me a passage from Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work, where he suggests that the fate of the Italian South might harbour some important lessons also for the Third World and for the former communist states of Eurasia: ‘Without norms of reciprocity and networks of civic engagement, the Hobbesian outcome of the Mezzogiorno – amoral familism, clientelism, lawlessness, ineffective government, and economic stagnation – seems likelier than successful democratization and economic development. Palermo may represent the future for Moscow.’3 While there can be little doubt that Russia is in many ways very different both from the Mezzogiorno and from the Third World, there also was something very tantalizing about this suggestion. Might it be the case that the formation of Muscovy had been associated with the formation of a distinct set of norms, or of a ‘social capital’, that would remain basically intact for centuries to come? To suggest that history might matter in this very longterm and truly fundamental sense was provocative indeed, and the need to develop a supporting theory was becoming rather pressing. It was filled with the ambition to formulate such a theory that I arrived at Hokkaido University’s Slavic Research Centre, one very wintry day in December 2001. During the three months I spent as a visiting scholar at

Preface

xiii

the SRC, I had plenty of time and excellent library resources to set about completing the first draft of a book that by now was clearly aimed at mapping out a long-term Russian path dependence. From an academic point of view these were very satisfying months. In addition to my work in Sapporo, I also was given the opportunity to present some of my thoughts at seminars in Tokyo and Osaka, led by Masaaki Kuboniwa and Sadayoshi Ohtsu. An outline, or a pilot study of sorts, of the book that was now beginning to take shape was presented at the SRC ‘Winter Symposium’ in January 2002.4 During my work on the latter, I also had a long series of productive e-mail exchanges with Peter Rutland, who strove hard to curb my enthusiasm over Russian specificity. It was not only academically, however, that my time in Japan was rewarding. The cold temperatures and the massive amounts of snow that characterize Hokkaido in the winter contrasted pleasantly against the warm hospitality of my Japanese hosts and colleagues. In particular, I must express my sincere thanks to Shinichiro Tabata, who never tired of helping me out, and to his wife Tomoko, who in addition to many pleasant conversations also treated me and my wife to a wonderful Shabu-Shabu. The third and final spurt of work was undertaken in the autumn of 2003, during a one-month stay in Washington, DC, that was sponsored by the Kennan Institute. During my stay, I also enjoyed the hospitality of George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies. I am most grateful to the institute’s director Jim Goldgeir for having me in as a guest, to its former director Jim Millar for making so many extra-curricular arrangements, to Carl Linden and Peter Reddaway for numerous stimulating exchanges of views, and to them all for being such good friends. Last but certainly not least, I have a list of friends and colleagues who deserve special mention. Michael Ellman, Dan Goldberg, Bill Odom, Richard Pipes, Steve Rosefielde and La´szlo´ Szamuely all took time to read the manuscript in full, in some cases even in several versions. Their suggestions and criticisms have been of great value. I am deeply in their debt, and shall willingly waive any rights to shift responsibility for remaining errors and/or shortcomings onto their shoulders. This said, it only remains to say a few final words about the dangers of trespassing. While the book does contain quite a bit of historical narrative, it should be clearly stated that it has no ambition of contributing to original historical research. All the sources used are secondary, and familiar to experts in the field. Any claims to originality will refer to the use of historical narrative as an illustration of the theoretical arguments on path dependence. Whatever merit there may be in the latter will now be left for the readers to judge. In good old Russian tradition, the author will hope for milost. Uppsala in May 2004 Stefan Hedlund

xiv

Preface

Notes 1 Hedlund, Stefan (1983) Crisis in Soviet Agriculture, London: Croom Helm; and Hedlund, Stefan (1989a) Private Agriculture in the Soviet Union, London: Routledge. 2 Blum, Jerome (1964) Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century, New York: Atheneum. 3 Putnam, Robert D. (1993) Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, p. 183. 4 That study was subsequently published in the SRC’s publication series (Hedlund, Stefan (2003) ‘Can They Go Back and Fix it? Reflections on Some Historical Roots of Russia’s Economic Troubles’, Acta Slavica Iaponica, Tomus XX). It is recycled here with kind permission of the editors.

Part I

Introduction

1

History matters

The very notion of ‘Russia’ has long been associated with the colourful imagery of the Moscow Kremlin, majestically stretched out along the winding Moskva river. The gilded palaces and cathedrals that rise above its towering red walls long stood as symbols of the powers that once ruled the Russian lands. It was within these walls that a long line of illustrious Muscovite grand princes and tsars resided, and it is in one of those cathedrals that they have all been laid to rest. It also was on these Kremlin grounds that the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Moscow had his palace, from the inception of this office in 1589 until 1700, when the last of the Patriarchs died, not to be replaced. When Peter the Great, perhaps the most illustrious of all the Russian tsars, proceeded to transform old Muscovy into a modern Russian empire, he symbolically also ordered the building of a new capital city, to be named in honour not of himself but of the apostle Peter. Despite this powerful religious marker, the symbolism of modern St Petersburg would be vastly different from that of Byzantine Moscow. Tsar Peter’s new ‘Window on Europe’ was built from scratch. It was laid out in straight lines, with much open space, and it would be illuminated by an eerie light, the famed White Nights. The salons of its numerous palaces would be homes to the dancing aristocracy and the debating intelligentsia that figure so prominently in the great nineteenth-century Russian literature. Most spectacular of them all, the Winter Palace of the Romanovs, stretched out along the Neva river, would be home to the imperial family. Their remains in turn have been laid to rest straight across the river, in the PeterPaul Cathedral on the grounds of the fortress with the same name. In the Soviet era, when the seat of power over the Russian lands was returned from St Petersburg to its original abodes, the Moscow Kremlin and its adjacent Red Square again became the main symbols of the state and its ideology. Defined by the splendid St Basil’s Cathedral at one end and by the Historical Museum at the other, Red Square was to be the main stage upon which the Communist Party of the Soviet Union displayed its power. No student of the Cold War could avoid being exposed to the classic twice

4

Introduction

yearly Pravda photos of the Politburo members lined up on top of the Lenin mausoleum. On 1 May, the international holiday of working men and women, they stood there to review passing tens of thousands of demonstrators orderly calling for miru mir, ‘peace to the world’. On 7 November, the anniversary of the Great Socialist October Revolution, their mission was to review passing units of the Soviet armed forces, including rows of tanks and missiles that were always on the ready to enforce the pax sovietica, wherever such needs might arise. It was political theatre in the fullest sense of the concept, deliberately orchestrated to glorify and legitimate the Soviet system as a whole, including its internationalist ambitions. In particular, the line-up of stern elderly men on the mausoleum roof was believed to serve as a public manifestation of shifts in internal power relations; those who moved closer to the centre were thought to be rising stars, and vice versa. While Western Kremlinologists were busily seeking to interpret the significance of such signs, inside the mausoleum chamber the embalmed corpse of the ‘eternally living’ Lenin was keeping an ever-watchful eye on his disciples and successors. All of this, it might be argued, has now been relegated to the pages of the history books; some even might argue that it has been passed to the dustbin of history. The symbols and rituals of the Soviet order, of Imperial Russia and of distant Muscovy will remain as inspiration for good stories, of a country that once was marked by quaint aberrations from European ‘normalcy’. Over and above such entertainment value, they have, however, ceased to be of any relevance to current and future Russian developments. We are now looking at a ‘new’ Russia, at a modern European country that is busily engaged in the tasks of building a liberal democracy, based on market economy and on the rule of law. Red Square has become a tourist attraction. The Moscow Kremlin houses an elected president, and the Winter Palace in St Petersburg has become a museum. Russia is no longer preoccupied with her at times grim and tumultuous history. On the contrary, in a symbolic break with her past, the ‘new’ Russia instead desires to become a member of the European Union, perhaps even of NATO. What prompted the writing of the present book was a strongly felt need to challenge such interpretations, to argue that any country or any political leadership that seeks to break completely with its own history is simply asking for trouble. Economists in particular are well advised to accept that historical tradition is a matter of fact, to be taken into account and dealt with rather than be simply ignored. If this can be shown to be true in a general sense, it must be even more so in the case of Russia, where generations of intellectuals have been simply obsessed by brooding over the role of their own past. In order to set the stage for presenting this argument in greater detail, we shall resort here to another set of imagery, one that is politically more contemporary than those presented above. Moving along the winding Moskva

History matters

5

river, a few miles upstream from the Moscow Kremlin we arrive at the subsequently famous Moscow White House, which in the Soviet days was a dreary home to the then little known Supreme Soviet of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet republic, the RSFSR. Situated opposite the classic Hotel Ukraine, at the point where the Kutuzov and Kalinin Prospekts are joined by a bridge across the river, during three turbulent days in August 1991 it was at the focus of world attention. With the Moscow Kremlin serving as the basis of power for a self-appointed junta of putschists that had sequestered Mikhail Gorbachev, the White House became a rallying point for the democratic opposition. No image has been so intimately linked with the failure of the August coup as that of a defiant Boris Yeltsin climbing on top of an armoured car that was parked at the entrance to the White House. Flanked by his main KGB bodyguard, the subsequently notorious general Alexander Korzhakov, and by a number of subsequently well-known members of the team of young Russian reformers, Yeltsin challenged the Soviet hardliners into a chicken race that could well have ended in disaster for all of those concerned. Once it became clear that the junta was about to blink, and that the armed forces would not obey its orders, this more than anything else was the image that would stand as the symbol of the victory of Russian democracy. Freed from the shackles of Soviet power, Russia was now indeed about to become a ‘normal’ country. As the first popularly elected Russian leader ever, President Boris Yeltsin was to stand not only as the symbol but also as the guarantor of success in that laudable ambition. Two years later, with the Soviet Union gone, with Mikhail Gorbachev out of power, and with Boris Yeltsin in turn ruling from the Kremlin, the White House again would be at the focus of world attention. During a few turbulent days in late September and early October 1993, it was the stage of an armed insurrection by members of the Supreme Soviet. Following a tense standoff, the president finally ordered tanks to open fire on the building and the rebellious parliamentarians were forced to surrender. Although his image as a knight in shining white armour had been tarnished by the bloodshed, and by the unquestionably unconstitutional means that had been used to suppress the insurrection, Yeltsin did retain his standing as the guarantor of Russian democracy, and of success for the project of ‘systemic change’ in a broader perspective. In the years to follow, that image would crack and crumble, and when he finally chose to step down prematurely, on the very last day of the millennium, Boris Yeltsin was generally regarded as a spent force. Even worse, the much-vaunted reforms that he had championed were at best dead in the water. A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, great transformations had taken place within the old ‘Soviet Bloc’. Former ‘satellite’ states in Central Europe, such as Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, had successfully completed their respective ‘transitions’ to democracy and market economy.

6

Introduction

Even more strikingly, the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had managed to do the same. All are presently members both of NATO and of the European Union. Moving into his Kremlin office, Russia’s second president, the former KGB operative Vladimir Putin, would be looking at a political landscape that was marked by painful needs of reappraisal. The mighty Soviet empire that he once had served was no more. Both the trade association of the Soviet Bloc, the COMECON, and, more importantly, the Warsaw Pact had collapsed. The territory of the former Soviet Union itself had been fragmented into its 15 constituent republics, and the majority of the latter looked with great suspicion on all proposals for renewed integration with Russia proper. As Moscow’s military might was melting away, its influence over world affairs was being correspondingly diminished. At the time when Putin took office, cynics might well have questioned whether Russia was capable even of meeting the two minimum requirements of the nightwatchman state, namely those of maintaining domestic order, and of providing defence against external aggression. The renewed quagmire of the second Chechen war, very much of Putin’s own making, provided ample illustration of the sorry state of the armed forces, and the pervasive criminalization of the economy brought home to what extent the government’s traditional monopoly on the use of force had been both privatized and decentralized. Both must be seen as serious threats, albeit from very different quarters, to Russian statehood as such. While it would be going way too far to speak of a Hobbesian war of all against all, it was clearly beyond doubt that the Russian state at the time of Yeltsin’s departure was in deep trouble. President Putin’s campaign for a strengthening of the ‘power vertical’, the vertikal vlasti, would hence be geared into addressing high priority problems like rampant corruption and vicious internecine strife between a variety of ‘clans’, regional as well as sectoral. Of all the problems that he needed to face, however, by far the most important was to be found in a different dimension. It rested in a whole set of grave structural problems that beset the Russian economy. Here it was not quite so obvious that the solution rested in securing more power for the Kremlin. Viewed as a group, it was true that all of the formerly socialist economies had gone through transition-related recessions that made a mockery out of the early visions of rapid successes. This said, it was also and more sombrely true that the Russian case had been particularly bad, causing some analysts even to speak of a ‘hyperdepression’. Why was this? How could it be that the removal of a grossly malfunctioning economic system had led not to immediate improvement but rather to even deeper economic problems? Most importantly, how could it be that Russia, which after all had received by far the lion’s share of both economic and political support from abroad, had turned out to be one of the worst performers?

History matters

7

Given the heavy focus of the Russian reformers on matters of economic reform, it is not surprising that economics and economists have been placed at the forefront of the debates on what went wrong. Ex post, there has been much finger-pointing and there have been many attempts made at shifting the blame. Inter alia, these have resulted in real turf wars between financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Without going into detail on the various aspects of such at times rather venomous exchanges, we may note that there are good reasons why economics in particular would be insensitive to the highly specific conditions that marked Russia’s attempted economic transition. The core assumptions of economic theory, as taught in all graduate schools and shared by all professional economists, relate to the theory of general equilibrium, as presented in a classic model by Kenneth Arrow and Ge´rard Debreu. In this model there is room only for individual actors responding to price signals by making quantity adjustments. There are no firms, organizations or states. Nor is there any room for consideration of ideologies or cultural values. It is an essentially mathematical model, and as such it can generate powerful results. It must, however, be used with care and common sense. Over time, the Arrow–Debreu model has been complemented by numerous additional building blocks. To mention but a few, there have been elaborate theories built around the role of firms, of property rights, and of information. Without in any way departing from the core assumptions, all of these have added more realism to economic theorizing. With the exception of institutional theory, of which we shall have more to say in subsequent chapters, they have, however, left the dimensions of history and culture largely outside the model. Textbook economics in particular has been essentially ahistoric, assuming that rational economic actors will always be ready to let bygones be bygones. When Boris Yeltsin launched his reforms, he appointed a team of reformers who were not only overwhelmingly economists. They also were overwhelmingly convinced of the merits of textbook economics. Any suggestions that Russia might be a special case, with more complicated needs than those which may be captured in neat mathematical formulae, would be simply brushed off. In the world of metaphorical illustrations that marked the media debates in particular, much reference would symptomatically be made to the world of medicine. Seeking to defend their economic policies, Russia’s reformers would resort, for example, to explaining that in cases of TB the cure is always and everywhere the same, irrespective of the patient’s culture, race or religion. Equally symptomatic was the fact that the master slogan of the project as a whole, that of ‘shock therapy’, was borrowed from the field of psychiatry. Viewing themselves as medical practitioners, Russia’s ‘young reform economists’ proceeded to apply their standard textbook cures to what they saw as

8

Introduction

standard textbook problems: to deregulate prices, stabilize the budget, curb inflation, get the property rights ‘right’, etc. It may be noted here that there has been a dimension of intradisciplinary debate on these matters, revolving around the appropriateness of the IMFinspired emphasis on austere monetary policy. Critics such as Joseph Stiglitz, the former chief economist and vice president of the World Bank, have argued, for example, that emphasis instead should have been placed on Keynesian fiscal expansionism. While there has been much academic merit per se in such debates, we shall argue that they have all essentially missed the point, which concerns the protracted historical absence in Russia of the institutional framework that makes up a functioning market economy. If those institutions are indeed missing, it will not make much difference if emphasis is placed on monetary or on fiscal policy. The outcome in any case will still be seriously warped. In keeping with this approach, we shall argue at length, in following chapters, that the real roots of the economic problems that befell Russia in the days of Boris Yeltsin were lodged not so much in Communism and in Soviet economic planning, but rather in the deeper recesses of Russian history. This certainly is not to say that the Soviet system as such had no share in the blame for all that went wrong. The point is that it too was a function of deeper historical patterns, more so than it was a product of the teachings of Karl Marx et consortes. Simply put, we shall argue that history does indeed matter and that the assumption of the Russian reformers that they could start with a clean slate was fundamentally flawed. In pursuing this argument, we shall have to distinguish between three different levels of analysis that will be marked by different degrees of controversy. On a superficial and largely trivial level, it is clearly the case that history matters in the sense of having to consider resource endowments, the quality of the infrastructure and the state of technology that is embedded in available production facilities. Here the legacy from the defunct Soviet Union was one of decades of ‘mis-industrialization’, of the creation of industries that under a competitive market regime, based on consumer sovereignty, would be rendered instantly obsolete. Simply assuming that free markets would be able on their own to meet the massive needs of retooling and resource reallocation that were implied by the transition from plan to market economy was a trivial mistake that would have far reaching implications. On a more substantial level, we shall argue that history matters also in the sense that organizations have been built and investments made in skills that are designed to reap maximum benefits from the existing rules of the game. Here we shall argue that there was a legacy of organizational adaptation to games of influence and rule evasion that stretched much further back into Russian history than simply to the Soviet era. Here the perils facing the reformers also were much greater. The very thought, for example, of undertaking sweeping deregulation in a situation that is marked by deeply entrenched

History matters

9

preferences for redistributive over productive activities is tantamount to courting disaster. Failing to realize this simple fact was a not-so-trivial mistake that would have even more serious implications. The most complex and hence also the most controversial level of the argument is the one where history is held to matter in the more profound sense of having produced fundamental social norms and moral values concerning matters like private property, individual initiative and responsibility, and the role of the state in a broader perspective. Here the time span arguably is measured not in generations but rather in centuries, perhaps even in the longue dure´e of Fernand Braudel and the French Annales school. Here it will also be argued that it is far from clear, based on the current state of knowledge, that we know how to devise policies that may successfully alter norms and values that constitute obstacles to desired institutional change. Since the latter really goes to the very heart of the argument that will be laid out in subsequent chapters of this book, and since matters relating to ‘culture’ long were conspicuously absent from the mainstream of social science theorizing, we shall make a small digression here, to look at some of the problems that are bound to arise when we do introduce factors of a cultural nature as explanatory variables.

Culture matters? There was a time, in the 1940s and the 1950s, when cultural studies and emphasis on culture in general did belong to the mainstream of the social sciences. This was the time of scholars like Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Edward Banfield and Seymour Martin Lipset, to name but a few. Their efforts produced a large and important literature, which inspired many to think about some of the really fundamental issues in human development and interaction. In the 1960s and the 1970s, interest in such endeavours dropped off. Some scholars were driven by political correctness into cultural relativism, which places serious limitations on thinking about culture as an explanatory variable. Others strove to put their theories into a more strictly formalized setting, thus achieving increased theoretical sophistication at the cost of a dulling of previous sensitivities to the importance of cultural differences. In the 1980s, for a host of different reasons, culture began to make its way back into the academic community. Scholars like Francis Fukuyama, Lawrence Harrison, Robert Putnam and Samuel Huntington led a charge that would produce a great deal of counter reaction. It soon became all too obvious that the search for cultural explanations of differences in economic development was, is and most likely will remain a highly sensitive matter. In the summer of 1998, Harvard University’s Academy for International and Area Studies began planning for a major symposium to bring these issues out into the open. Held in the spring of 1999, under the title ‘Cultural

10

Introduction

Values and Human Progress’, it resulted in a published volume of papers with the programmatic title Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress.1 In his introduction to that volume, Harrison clearly recognizes the problems that are involved in pursuing a cultural approach: ‘Culture is difficult to deal with both politically and emotionally. It is also difficult to deal with intellectually because there are problems of definition and measurement and because cause-and-effect relationships between culture and other variables like policies, institutions, and economic development run in both directions.’ Having noted the validity of such obstacles, he nevertheless proceeds to emphasize that these are problems that we must approach and deal with, and that for one very simple reason: ‘If some cultural values are fundamental obstacles to progress – if they help explain the intractability of the problems of poverty and injustice in a good part of the Third World – then there is no alternative to the promotion of cultural change.’ 2 Many scholars will no doubt hold that this approach is both pretentious and intimidating. To suggest that countries in the Third World may be locked into persistent underdevelopment because of cultural values does challenge political correctness, and it does pose tremendous methodological problems. It is so much easier, then, to focus on narrow technical problems, where partial solutions may be led into evidence according to the highest standards of academic rigor. Yet, as the history of development economics in particular has shown, irrespective of their academic rigor and elegance partial solutions will often turn out to be no solutions at all. While the position that is taken by Harrison and the other members of the Harvard team may be controversial, it is surely in that direction of increasing boldness that the social sciences must now be moving, if we are to avoid the increasing practical irrelevance that is bound to follow from increasing specialization and methodological refinement. Here we may usefully listen to what Mancur Olson once had to say about preferring to approach the really big issues: ‘Many researchers have . . . an instinct for the capillaries and there is some work in the journals that, even when right, is hardly worth bothering about. Just as the great fighter is looking for the jugular, so the great scientist is looking for areas where there can be a breakthrough – for areas where strong statements are in order.’ 3 Though certainly not aspiring to reach the ‘jugular’ levels that drew Olson’s attention, the present study is based on similar presumptions. Recalling from above our claim that much of the debate about Russia’s failed transition has been off the mark, simply because of a failure to consider the weight of a variety of historical legacies, we shall return to the dimension of basic economic theory. Since neoclassical economics leaves no room for taking into account variables of a ‘cultural’ nature, it follows that all countries and all cultures will simply have to be taken as being one and the same.

History matters

11

From this, in turn, will follow the exclusion of a whole range of potentially important explanatory variables, namely those that might help advance our understanding of why differences in economic development have shown such resilience over time. Basic economic trade theory, for example, would predict that open borders should lead to factor price equalization, and thus to a narrowing of development gaps, which hardly has been the case in the real world. On the contrary, as Olson notes, free markets have proven grossly inadequate in achieving equalization of marginal returns across national borders. In his view, the ‘sums lost because the poor countries obtain only a fraction of – and because even the richest countries do not reach – their economic potentials are measured in the trillions of dollars’.4 Big question marks thus remain suspended in mid-air. If we turn to look, more specifically, at the accumulated experience of such economic reform policies that were pursued by the formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union in the 1990s, we shall find some particularly striking evidence of theoretical shortcomings. Although all were presumed to have emerged out of the same system of socialism and planned economy, their respective track records have been widely divergent. While some countries, notably so those in Central Europe and in the Baltics, have made the grade, others have failed rather miserably. Russia, regrettably, must be firmly placed in the latter category. This pattern is striking not the least since at the outset of the attempted ‘systemic change’ it was widely believed, above all so by the adherents of the ‘Washington Consensus’, that from an economic policy point of view all countries were and are indeed the same. It thus followed, rather logically, that economic reforms could be devised according to the principle of ‘one size fits all’. As we have noted above, Russia’s ‘young reform economists’ would show particular devotion to this warped understanding of the world. To take but one of many examples, in February 1992, Pyotr Aven, then minister for foreign economic relations, clearly stated the government’s attitude: ‘There are no special countries from the point of view of economists. If economics is a science, with its own laws – all countries and all stabilization plans are the same.’5 Aven’s pronouncement bore an eerie and symptomatic resemblance to a previous statement to the same effect, made at an October 1991 World Bank conference in Bangkok. There, Larry Summers, then chief economist at the Bank, laid it out plain and simple: ‘Spread the truth – the laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere.’6 Pronouncements of this kind are important in the sense that they reflect the real reason why the approach of the Russian reformers was to be so flawed. In a sense it goes to the very heart of what economics is all about, or, rather, what it is not about, namely ‘laws’ that may be subjected to controlled and

12

Introduction

replicable experiments. This simple insight has been succinctly stated by Jozef van Brabant: ‘Unlike legal principles (with their normative laws) or objective findings (as in physics), an economic law can exist only through human activity’.7 More than a decade after the introduction of shock therapy we have ample evidence to demonstrate that van Brabant was right in cautioning that the matters at hand were not quite so simple. As Stiglitz and others have explained, in great and eloquent detail, the Russian economy at the beginning of the 1990s was marked by such structural and institutional idiosyncrasies that simply allowing free rein for the market forces could not but lead to failure.8 Recognizing that countries and cultures are essentially different, and that this may have serious implications for the pursuit of economic policy, does, however, raise a number of serious methodological questions. Above all, it calls for some rather careful definitions regarding both the nature and the relevance of alleged differences. We shall thus have to leave the general realm of culture, and look more specifically at the Russian case.

Dimensions of Russian ‘difference’ To simply state that Russia is different is easy enough. Anyone who sets out to study Russian history in general, or to follow the debates about the role of Russian tradition in particular, will come away with two rather troublesome impressions. One is a growing sense of hopelessness over all the grand attempts at reform that have been undertaken – only to meet with persistent reversal. The other is exasperation over the eternal Russian soul searching, over the seemingly endless and at times highly emotional debates about what in some sense might be the true nature of Russia. Given that the ambitions of all the great Russian reformers have been consistently aimed at emulating Western models and practices, there is an obvious link between these two dimensions. If a government is bent on pursuing policies of reform that are based on norms and values that a large part of the population, or at least of its intelligentsia, hold up to be morally unjust or unsound, then the prospects for success will be correspondingly diminished. It is for reasons of this kind that it becomes so particularly important, in the Russian case, to incorporate the cultural dimension also into any discussion of economic policy. The really ‘big’ questions that have been asked by Russian intellectuals may at first seem quite impossible to operationalize. Does Russia belong to Europe or to Asia, or should she staunchly defend her position as a sui generis, a special case that is neither Asian nor European? Is it a problem that Russia missed out on Renaissance, Reformation and Counter-reformation – those deep mental transformations that shaped the rest of Europe? That is what the ‘Westernizers’, the zapadniki of the nineteenth century, would have us believe.9 Or should we perhaps follow the opposing school, the Slavophiles,

History matters

13

in holding that Russia’s failure to emulate Western culture actually is a valuable asset, to be treasured rather than discarded? Looking for answers to questions such as these is clearly beyond the scope of this book; perhaps it is even beyond the scope of rational discourse as such. As an illustration, we may recall a few lines of famous poetry by the nineteenth-century Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev: ‘With the mind alone, Russia cannot be understood. No ordinary yardstick spans her greatness. She stands alone, unique – In Russia one can only believe.’10 The relevance, from our point of view, of discussing problems of Russian difference lies not in the debates about Russian tradition as such. Whatever merit there may be in the variety of arguments that have been put forth, we shall prefer to focus on two matters of fact that are beyond controversy. The first is the simple observation that during the centuries when recorded Russian history was taking shape, the objective conditions that determined the direction of state building were fundamentally different from those that faced other Europeans. Any standard text on world or European history, such as William McNeill’s The Rise of the West,11 will tell us readily that conditions on Europe’s eastern frontier, not the least under the Mongol onslaught, were such that the Muscovites simply had to develop an institutional structure that was radically different. The second matter concerns the fact that debates of the kind just referred to have been raging for so long, and continue being important to this very day. If this had not been the case, if the responses to the initial set of objectively different external conditions had not become so deeply entrenched over time and resulted in such severe problems with Russian self-perceptions, then the whole question of ‘difference’ might indeed have been relegated to the pages of journals on cultural history. As it is, however, and as we shall be arguing at length in the following, Russian brooding over whether or not to emulate ‘European’ models and values was to become a real problem, with far reaching implications for the pursuit of ‘Westernizing’ reforms. In the midst of Boris Yeltsin’s much-vaunted attempts at transforming Russia into what he liked to call a ‘normal society’, Richard Pipes still could find much of the old remaining in place: ‘The sense of isolation and uniqueness bequeathed by Orthodox Christianity unfortunately survives. Presentday Russians feel themselves to be outsiders, a nation sui generis, belonging neither to Europe nor Asia.’ 12 As a small aside, we may note that Russia is certainly not alone in experiencing problems with her self-image. The neighbouring Japanese also have a history of agonizing over the true nature of their country. Beginning, perhaps, with the Meiji restoration in the mid-nineteenth century, such debates are still ongoing. From the 1960s and well into the 1980s the nation was simply engrossed in what is known in Japanese as nihonjinron, or ‘discussions of the Japanese’.13

14

Introduction

Although the prolonged recession of the 1990s has served to accentuate problems that relate to a variety of peculiarities of the Japanese system, the nature of those problems is very different from those that are facing Russia. The post-war era clearly demonstrated that problems of Japanese specificity at the very least did not preclude the country from transforming herself into a market-driven economic superpower. If anything, this aside will serve to demonstrate that countries can be different in very different ways. Returning to the case of Russia, and maintaining our economic policy point of view, we shall argue that there are good reasons to bring problems relating to Russian self-images into the process of economic analysis. First and foremost, it should be realized that the deeply rooted sense of being different, of needing a special path of sorts, has brought great unease over Western influence. This has been especially true for economic policy prescriptions that are derived from essentially Western realities. The latter observation applies to some of the most fundamental building blocks in a functioning market economy, such as the role of private property or the balance between impersonal monetary exchange and the reliance on networks of blat and other forms of highly personalized obligations. As a recent case in point, concerning the problems of private property relations, we may recall the much-publicized adoption, in the fall of 2001, of a Russian Land Code that finally allowed private property in land. Given all the well-known problems of collectivized agriculture, and of previously failed attempts at introducing family farming, this really should have been a major step forward. As it turned out, however, the Code was marked by such restrictions on agricultural land that it could be said to apply in full to only about two per cent of the country’s land mass.14 In a longer historical perspective, that outcome was not entirely surprising. The notion that land has not been made by man and thus should not be owned by man has deep roots in Russian tradition. As Pipes puts it, ‘the seemingly inexhaustible profusion of land prior to the nineteenth century impressed on the Russian peasant the conviction that the soil, like water and air, was res nullius which God had created for everyone’s benefit and which, therefore, could not be owned’.15 While this type of outlook has been typical of many primitive societies, in the case of Russia it survived into the early twentieth century, when it was reinforced by the introduction of the fuzzy Bolshevik notion of ‘people’s property’. As will be argued below, mental constructs of the kind involved here are simply bound to create serious moral – and thus also political – obstacles to privatization. Failures to realize the importance of such institutional impediments will by necessity lead to policy failures.16 With respect to the problems of blat and rule evasion, it has also been rather striking to witness the resilience of the old Soviet network economy, surviving well into the process of market reform under Yeltsin. Based on survey data from the ‘New Russia Barometer’, Richard Rose even finds

History matters

15

reason to characterize the real outcome of Russia’s attempted systemic change as that of an ‘anti-modern society’.17 The importance of the latter observations lies in illustrating that private property and free market prices, while certainly necessary, are not also sufficient for a functioning market economy to emerge. For a market economy to work properly, we also need autonomous decision making, such that producers maximize profits without considering possible preferences by higher administrative bodies, and that consumers maximize utility without second thoughts about social obligations. This additional requirement underscores that if marketizing reform is to successfully alter the behaviour of economic actors, it will have to address not only technical problems that relate to changes in formal legislation. Even more importantly, it must also deal with problems that are embedded in a variety of norm systems. The latter challenge may be seen as something of a Leitmotif for the present book as a whole. A second consequence of Russia’s feelings of being different relates less to the institutional matrix as such and more to practical policy. Even a cursory glance at Russian history will reveal a number of points where feelings of being backward have resulted in perceived needs to achieve rapid catch-up, which in turn have triggered spurts of forced economic development. In present-day jargon, one might say that a long series of Russian rulers, from Peter the Great (or even Ivan the Great) through the end of Soviet rule, have repeatedly succumbed to the temptation of using shock and command methods in order to produce rapid economic advances. At times, such spurts of great activity have also been quite successful in producing shortterm gains. There is nothing really remarkable about the latter. As Olson points out, ‘from the time of Hammurabi if not of Sargon, and in China, Europe, and Mesopotamia as well as in the Middle East and South Asia, there have been innumerable periods of economic progress under strong autocrats’. Of far greater importance is the fact that ‘many of the most remarkable periods of economic progress over the course of recorded history appear to have occurred in relatively nonautocratic, or somewhat democratic, jurisdictions that have soared ahead of the absolutist regimes around them’.18 What we must keep in focus here are the broader implications of opportunity costs, of collateral damage to society at large, and thus also of sustainability. In this less merciful light, the experience of Russia’s past drives for economic growth comes across as uniformly depressing. Stalin’s policy of forced industrialization, based on mass collectivization of agriculture, is a particularly stark illustration, but it is far from alone. Having said all this, we still have not progressed much beyond presenting an image of persistent troubles in the Russian past. The question that remains to be answered concerns the relevance of that story for the present. More specifically, we must ask how choices made in the past may be shown to

16

Introduction

have an impact on current-day decision making. This becomes especially important if we are faced with a negative impact. In the following, we shall argue that historical influences are indeed important, and in some cases even decisively so. Putting the matter rather bluntly, our main analytical ambition will be to show, as noted above, that the problems that befell Boris Yeltsin’s much-vaunted economic reform attempts in the 1990s had roots that extend several centuries back into Russian history. This analytical focus will serve to play down the importance of the Communist epoch as the main culprit in seeking to explain the failures of ‘systemic change’. Instead it will highlight those kinds of more fundamental problems that have characterized so many previous Russian attempts at emulating the West. In pursuing this line of argument, we shall enter into the realm of the theory of path dependence.

Path dependence As originally developed by economists, the theory was focused on problems of technological change, on explaining how early choices could result in situations where producers are locked into sustained use of technologies that are clearly inferior to emerging alternatives.19 Perhaps the most important results of this approach have been the notion of multiple equilibria and the associated analysis of factors determining paths that lead to inferior positions.20 Since the problems at hand, however, concern not narrow issues of obstacles to technological change, but rather a wide spectrum of impediments to positive societal or institutional change, we shall have to adapt the theory somewhat. In a broader sense, briefly alluded to above, we are faced here with explaining why economic differentials between countries, and between regions within countries, have shown such resilience over time. In a plea for his own economic theory of institutions, Douglass North states the analytical challenge that is involved in seeking such explanations: ‘Wouldn’t the political entrepreneurs in stagnant economies quickly emulate the policies of more successful ones? How can we explain the radically different performance of economies over long periods of time?’ 21 While North has been far from alone in pointing at the needs for new theoretical departures, he has been perhaps the most outspoken in stressing the shortcomings of traditional neoclassical economics: ‘The disparity in the performance of economies and the persistence of disparate economies through time have not been satisfactorily explained by development economists, despite forty years of immense effort. The simple fact is that the theory employed is not up to the task.’22 It is here, we shall argue, that the cultural dimension becomes so important. To be more specific, by ‘culture’ we shall understand a whole range of informal, mainly norm-related factors that underpin the formal rules. In the success story, such variables serve to support the evolution of good

History matters

17

rules and good solutions. In our case, they serve to produce a consistently adverse selection of inferior institutional equilibiria. In a more general sense, this approach is already well established across the social sciences. In political science, for example, much useful work has been produced around the notion of ‘social capital’. According to Robert Putnam, one of the more prominent contributors to the field, social capital captures ‘features of social organization, such as trust, norms and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated action’.23 Prior to Putnam and other political scientists, it was sociologist James Coleman, in his book Foundations of Social Theory, who began theorizing around this concept, finding that ‘social organization constitutes social capital, facilitating the achievement of goals that could not be achieved in its absence or could be achieved only at higher cost’.24 Even economists and economic historians have been known to display ambitions along these lines, for example by introducing notions such as ‘economic flexibility’25 or ‘social capability’.26 By going beyond the boundaries of the previously dominant economic concepts of physical and human capital, these approaches point us in the direction of looking for underlying institutional causes of multiple equilibria, causes that may push societies into inferior equilibria where they are unable to make full use of their economic potential, as indicated by Olson above.27 If, for example, we are faced with a track record of economic policymaking that is marked by adverse selection, defined here as persistently failing to break out of an inferior position, then we may have a case of persistent bad luck. More likely, however, we are faced with strong path dependence, where failures to seize opportunities for positive change reflect obstacles to change that are deeply embedded in the institutional matrix of the society at hand.28 It is factors of this latter kind that we shall have in mind when arguing that culture matters. Perhaps the strongest case for a cultural approach towards the issue of why some countries have become rich and others have stayed poor has been made by historian David Landes, inter alia in an article with the striking title ‘Culture Makes Almost All the Difference’.29 Since approaches of this kind at times may come dangerously close to determinism, or to policy defeatism, it must be stressed that there is a vital analytical distinction at play here. For example, when Putnam shows that the level of social capital in southern Italy, also known as the Mezzogiorno, is very low, and we know that social capital may be difficult to augment or enhance, he is simply bound to attract accusations of seeking to condemn the region as a whole to everlasting backwardness. Such accusations must, however, be seen as seriously misdirected. The whole analytical point of the path dependence approach, of which varying levels of social capital form a vital component and illustration, is to indicate how and where effects of institutional lock-in may have occurred. The

18

Introduction

conclusion, in a given case, may well be that we are faced with great difficulties in finding ways out. Even if such difficulties should appear to be extreme, it nevertheless is not the same as saying that there is no way out. What path dependence implies is that potential reformers will have to be careful in formulating policy proposals. Above all, it is imperative to break with the simple understanding that all countries are the same, and that the same economic policy will have the same results across all cultural contexts. Only by explicitly taking into account and seeking to address path dependent structures, formal as well as informal, that stand in the way of suggested reforms, may there also be hope for progress. From the economics point of view, Paul David argues that the increasing focus on mathematical modelling and the associated inattention to matters of causal explanation ‘has impoverished modern economic theory’. Instead he makes a plea for ‘historical economics’, which would be aimed at ‘understanding the reasons why particular sequences of events in the past are capable of exerting persisting effect upon current conditions’.30 This also may be seen as a programmatic statement of sorts, from one of the early pioneers of the theory of path dependence. Importantly, he goes on to argue that ‘more attention will have to be devoted to learning about the cognitive models [people] call upon when interpreting their society’s visions of its past and forming expectations about its future. Even for economists, then, mentalite´ matters.’31 Noting that the notion of mentalite´ is taken from Braudel and the Annales school, we have come full circle here, back to stating that history matters. It now only remains to show how, and what the implications may be.

Purpose and outline of the study Summing up this rather lengthy introduction, the purpose of the following chapters may be defined, in a more general sense, as that of seeking to address the problem of persistent economic underperformance. Our understanding of ‘underperformance’ again shall be in line with that suggested by Olson above, i.e. institutional shortcomings that result in a failure to reach a country’s full economic potential, and by ‘persistent’ we shall understand a time span of several centuries that stretches into the present. It also should be repeated that this understanding of underperformance is quite consistent with episodes of even superior performance in, say, GDP growth.32 In support of this argument, we shall build a theoretical apparatus that has strong institutional components but also encompasses elements from the theories of rational and constitutional choice. This ambition will proceed in a stepwise fashion, whereby the theory is expanded and refined as we move along. The undertaking in this sense deviates from the more traditional approach of having a ready-made model that is applied to a suitable set of empirical data.

History matters

19

Our point of departure is not prima facie that of building theory, but rather a genuine desire to find out what it is that has caused the persistent reversals, over the centuries, of attempted Russian reforms. Although it does have claims of a more general applicability, the theory that is to be presented in subsequent chapters will hence be customized to meet the special needs that are thus implied. The results that we shall seek to lead into evidence may be largely said to revolve around the absence of the rule of law. This should not be taken as tantamount to telling a story of several centuries of primitive dictatorship. On the contrary, it will be argued that both state-building and economic policy-making in Russia have been traditionally hampered not in the main by repression alone, but rather by strongly entrenched norms against the imposition of formal rules and of impartial enforcement mechanisms. The resulting preferences for personalized relations have been present at all levels, and they have effectively precluded not only the formulation of a Lockean social compact. Even more importantly, they will be shown also to have equally effectively precluded the state from shouldering the responsibilities of impartial third party enforcement of rules and contracts. Based on such assumptions, we shall present as logical consequences a number of well-known peculiarities of the Russian tradition. The absence of enforceable and legitimate formal rules of the game will, for example, by necessity lead to a warped understanding of the notion of rights in general and of rights to property in particular. Similarly, the absence of stable legal regulation would have to result in the famed Russian bureaucratism, in the insatiable requirements for various bumazhki, for torrents of paperwork of all kinds that may protect the backs of exposed bureaucrats. In the resultant jumble of puzzled and often contradictory rules and regulations, it was in turn logical to expect that enforcement must be arbitrary in nature, thus reinforcing the power of the bureaucracy. The laudable albeit failed ambitions of a series of reformers to emulate or at least imitate European legality must and will be seen against this background. Given these ambitions, we now have in front of us three fairly separate tasks, all of which are of quite some magnitude. The first is to map out how Russia came to be locked into an inferior institutional arrangement, the second to explain how this lock-in could persist and result, over the centuries, in serious economic underperformance, and the third to explore how the lock-in might perhaps be broken, such that the Russian economy can both attain and sustain its economic potential. Approaching these tasks will necessitate us taking a rather long historical view. The book will thus be organized according to a chronological perspective. In Part I, we provide an outline of the general setting. We begin, very loosely, with the formation of Kievan Rus, in the middle of the ninth century. While this is thought to have been something of a golden age for the early Slavs, at least for a couple of centuries or so, it is also a period of which

20

Introduction

very little is known. It will thus serve more as an introduction to the story than as serious evidence in itself. Greater importance will be attached to the following account of two potential successor states. Lithuania and Novgorod will be presented as cases of what ‘Russia’ might have become, had it not been for the triumph of the rulers of Muscovy.33 The starting point for the argument as such will be found in Part II, which details the rise to power of the Muscovites, including their victory over Novgorod and the long stand-off against Lithuania. It is argued that an institutional lock-in resulted from a combination of such formal rules of the game that evolved under the pressure of dealing with the Mongols, and of such informal norms that were instilled mainly by the Orthodox clergy. The outcome was a ‘patrimonial’ state that in all its basic institutional dimensions would be preserved intact for centuries to come. Part III deals with the imperial era, from Peter the Great onwards, arguing that the famous reforms of the latter may be seen as the apogee of patrimonialism and as the real origins of the subsequent Soviet command economy. This part of the book also explains how the path dependence came to be so deeply entrenched, and why the long series of post-Petrine reformers, including Catherine the Great and Alexander II, would fail in bringing to completion their no doubt laudable ambitions. It concludes by arguing that the transformation of the Russian empire into a Soviet Union represented a broad reversal of all such partial reforms that had been implemented, and thus in an effective return to the institutional format of distant Muscovy. In the concluding Part IV, we first deal with the Yeltsin and Putin regimes. In the former case it is argued that the much-vaunted reforms that were known as ‘shock therapy’ or as ‘systemic change’ in reality represented a set of path dependent responses, whereby deregulation and a general rollback of the state produced a resurgence of distant Muscovite practices. In the latter we outline the real challenges that faced Putin on his assumption of power. The task of looking beyond Putin is reserved for the final chapter of the book, where we shall see what social science theory may have to say about the prospects for a sustained institutional transformation, entailing a decisive break with the Muscovite legacy. That discussion will revolve largely around the interplay between formal rules and informal norms that is so crucial to institutional theory. Perhaps the most important conclusion to be reached is that time must now enter the analysis as a crucially important variable, to displace the initial beliefs in quick fixes and instant changes that were associated with the world of shock therapy. If it is to be successful, fundamental institutional change will always have to be designed for the long haul. Of all the lessons we may learn from the Russian past, this surely must be one of the most important.

Part II

The setting

2

Stationary bandits

Towards the end of the previous chapter, we introduced the notion of ‘historical economics’. It was suggested there as an approach that may help us understand the reasons why events in the past may be capable of exerting a persisting influence on the present. Without seeking in any way to claim that this in itself represents a novel addition to existing bodies of theory, we shall proceed here to argue that it does shed important light on the conditions that prevail in the borderlands between the humanities and the social sciences. To be more specific, it provides an important bridge between the traditional disciplines of economics and history, a bridge that is somewhat different from that already existing in the form of economic history. Where the latter is aimed, in a broader sense, at applying the tools of economic analysis to problems that are lodged in the past, ‘historical economics’ would be more specifically concerned with explaining matters of causation over the long run, and that is precisely what the present study is all about. As an illustration of this point, which at first may seem rather construed, we may use the notion of ‘comparative statics’. In economics, this refers to the standard approach of comparing two equilibrium states, without paying much attention to how the economy moved or was moved from one state to the other. While there has been much valuable work produced by such means, the approach does tend to leave out a rather important set of problems, namely those that relate to patterns of persisting underperformance. This certainly is not to say that economics as a whole has been unconcerned with matters of dynamics. The point is that there has been insufficient attention paid to the full range of such factors that in various ways may influence processes of historical change. As originally suggested by Paul David, in connection with his proposed theory of path dependence, the notion of ‘historical economics’ symptomatically comes across as a caution to fellow economists that more attention will indeed have to be paid to matters of long-run causation. David specifically emphasizes that if we are to avoid producing ‘just another pretty ‘‘theory bubble’’ ’, emerging new theories and models must be blended in with solid empirical illustrations: ‘Ultimately, the success or

24

The setting

failure of non-equilibrium dynamic model-building in economics, and the recognition or rejection of path-dependence as a property of resource allocation processes . . . will depend on the production of detailed persuasive examples.’1 In particular, as was noted in the previous chapter, he stresses the need to focus on the ‘cognitive models’ that are used by actors in interpreting their environment and in shaping expectations about the future. Thus he also highlights the need to incorporate into the analysis such cultural variables that have figured so prominently above. If we transpose this reasoning onto the field of more traditional historiography, an approach of comparative statics may be understood as comparing two sets of observations that are taken from different historical contexts. If the comparison results in striking similarities, such that important institutional features appear to have been reproduced from the past into the present, it may be argued that we have also discovered a line of causation over time. It will then still remain, however, to come up with a theory to explain how that causation runs. The whole point of the theory of path dependence, as it was developed to explain how the process of technological change may be locked into a specific path, was to provide precisely such a theoretical framework. In its original formulation by Brian Arthur, it was rigorously modelled and as such fully acceptable to the best of the economics journals. Once we move into the realm of broader societal change, it will be necessary to accept less rigorous standards of formal modelling. The added needs to consider matters like cultural values and cognitive models, where existing knowledge is less amenable to precise mathematical formulation, imply that the methodology will have to rest more on interpretation and less on formal modelling. This in itself does not imply reduced theoretical ambitions, only that the theory will have to be applied in a manner that is somewhat different from that of traditional economic analysis, namely along the lines that are suggested by Paul David’s ‘historical economics’. What may be derived from these general remarks is a need to be more specific about methodology. The task that is to be addressed in subsequent chapters of this book, that of setting out to look for historical roots of problems that have been carried over into the present, may be said to involve three fairly separate undertakings. The first is that of specifying what we are looking for, and of suggesting a suitable theoretical framework. The second involves finding a point of departure, where the institutional matrix that is to be studied below was shaped, and the third is to explain the process of causation over time, i.e. to define the path dependence. Before we proceed to the chronological account around which this book as a whole is organized, it may be of some value to comment briefly on each of these three undertakings.

Stationary bandits

25

Looking for roots If we begin with the need to define more precisely what we are looking for, we have already indicated that an important ambition of the present study is associated with investigating a protracted absence of the rule of law. For this purpose, we shall have to focus on the dimension of state-building, with particular emphasis on the associated process of legal regulation. More specifically, we shall be looking at the link between economic development and the resulting demands for institutional change in these dimensions. The theoretical approach will borrow from Mancur Olson’s classic distinction between ‘roving’ and ‘stationary’ bandits, a distinction that may be best illustrated by way of his own favoured ‘criminal metaphor’ of organized crime.2 A crime syndicate that gains full control over its turf will soon enough come to realize that the incentives it faces have also been radically altered. Since crime reduces the production possibilities of those actors from which the syndicate steals, continued crime will have a direct impact on how much it may be able to extract over time. The rational criminal will thus decide to cease his own criminal activity, and to make sure that competing criminals are kept off the territory. In return for providing this service of security, he will demand protection money. A rudimentary state, with powers to tax, has come into being. Expressed in more theoretical terms, a ‘roving’ bandit will have a ‘narrow’ interest in stealing. While the negative effects of his crime will be spread evenly over all of those concerned, the gains from any specific criminal act will accrue to the bandit in full. Thus formulated, crime will always pay and no organized society will be possible. A world of such roving banditry would come close to the horror vision of Thomas Hobbes’s war of all against all. What the criminal metaphor serves to illustrate is that once a bandit becomes stationary and acquires security of tenure, he will also experience a transformation of interests, from ‘narrow’ to ‘encompassing’. A stationary bandit with encompassing interests will realize that crime, or predatory taxation, has a negative impact on his own possibilities to extract in subsequent periods. As a result, he will be faced with a clear incentive to optimize the rate of extraction over time.3 Taking the metaphor one step further, we may draw an important line of distinction between a successful crime syndicate and a stationary bandit that transforms itself into a successful state. Where the former fails to progress beyond monopolizing and thus controlling disruptive violence, the latter also will engage in providing such ‘public goods’ that serve to enhance production possibilities on the controlled territory. For every autocracy that starts off as a stationary bandit, there will come a point where the autocrat has to make a strategic choice. In one direction lies kleptocracy, which over time will produce such erosion of the basis of the system that in the end it collapses. Haiti under Duvalier provides an extreme

26

The setting

illustration of this case of a failed parasite. In the other direction we may find the pursuit of market-friendly policies and the provision of marketenhancing public goods, activities that Olson presents as the real keys to successful stationary banditry. There are two good reasons why this approach is particularly well suited to explaining the early history of what would come to be known, only later on, as ‘Russia’. The first relates to the fact that it was Viking raiders and traders who organized the first state on the territory of the Eastern Slavs.4 That state was Kievan Rus, or Kievskaya Rus. Their arrival as truly roving bandits provides an excellent illustration of one of Olson’s main points: ‘Most of the autocratic governments in history have in fact arisen from such seizures and conquests, and to a great extent their behavior is explained by modeling them as rational, optimizing, stationary bandits.’ 5 The second reason to look at the formation of Kievan Rus from a perspective of roving versus stationary banditry lies in highlighting the substantial set of problems that the Vikings would encounter in their ambitions to become stationary. While it is true that they did settle down and that their ruling elite would over time be blended in with the Slavs, their ambitions to engage in state building would founder on a failure to supply important public goods, such as legal regulation and impartial enforcement. Given our overriding ambition of explaining the absence in Russian history of the rule of law, this dimension of early formative influence does assume a great deal of importance. Logically, it will thus also play an important role in our subsequent account of the formation of Muscovy. Turning now to our second undertaking, that of explaining how and when the process of path dependence was started, we may note that the task of finding a point of departure has been an important problem in many if not all previous attempts at mapping out centuries-long institutional path dependencies. As a prominent illustration, we may recall Robert Putnam’s previously cited book Making Democracy Work, where it is elegantly argued that the current institutional divide between the industrialized north and the southern Mezzogiorno of Italy has roots that stretch all the way back to the thirteenth century. While the account does provide ample and striking documentation of current differences between the ‘criminal capitalism’ of the south and the ‘social capitalism’ of the north,6 the reference to historical roots forms a case of what we referred to above as comparative statics. Putnam places his main emphasis on measuring and explaining the role of social capital in current-day Italy. His observations on early roots are certainly striking, but they are also devoid of any attempt at mapping out the dynamics over time. When it comes, moreover, to possible explanations of how the thirteenth-century roots were determined, the reader is simply left knowing that the roots of social capital are ‘lost in the mists of the Dark Ages’.7

Stationary bandits

27

In a more general sense, there are good reasons indeed to explain why it may be difficult to find a point of origin for a process of socio-economic change, be it positive or negative. It is not only that we run the risk of getting caught in a spiral of infinite regress: for every cause that we may find, there will always be prior causes that will also have to be taken into consideration, and soon enough we shall have run out of recorded history. Even more importantly, in the social sciences as a whole we also have to consider methodological objections to claims of having found a point of origin. In the following, we shall argue that in the Russian case we do have a confluence of such special circumstances that we may indeed speak of a point of departure. This claim should not be seen as tantamount to having identified a tabula rasa, a clean slate on which the new order could be written down. On the contrary, as we shall argue below, there were important historical legacies that combined with exogenous events to form a set of very special conditions and responses. Our understanding of a point of departure shall be that we have a point in time where a specific institutional arrangement was produced and locked in, subsequently to become strongly path dependent. More specifically, we shall argue that this point in time is associated with the emergence and rise to great power of Muscovy, in the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. Our third undertaking, that of mapping out and analysing how the Muscovite institutional matrix could become so resistant to subsequent reforms that it would be carried over into the present, will form the mainstay of our discussion in subsequent chapters. For this simple reason, we shall abstain from further comments here. In the remainder of the present chapter we shall be concerned with the history of Kievan Rus, which predated Muscovy by some three centuries. Our ambition is not to present a broad historiography, but rather to look at some specific dimensions of institutional development, dimensions where those legacies emerged that would contribute to the subsequent lock-in. The first of these is linked to the fact that this was the period when relations between Byzantium and the Russians in spe were intimate, including lively trade as well as important cultural influence; the adoption of Orthodox Christianity is paramount on the latter count. In the subsequent transition from Kiev to Moscow, trade would plummet and the distance to Byzantium would increase, geographically as well as mentally. As a result, much of the early influence that was not completely forgotten would be remembered only in a warped form. The latter would be of major importance to the formation and legitimation of Russian autocratic government. The second reason to include an account of the history of Kiev concerns the troublesome evolution of relations between the Rus and their neighbours to the east. Subsequently famous (or infamous) tribes like the Pechenegs, and even more so the Polovtsians (Cumans in Latin), would strike deep into Rus territory, and would even succeed in raiding Kiev itself.8 The Rus in turn

28

The setting

would undertake punitive raids into the steppe, preferably when many of the men were known to be on distant expeditions. Neither side would ever gain the upper hand. The nomadic intruders would be invariably forced to withdraw, and the Rus would not succeed in scoring any decisive victories. These never-ending struggles would have important formative influences not only on Kievan Rus, but even more so on Muscovy. The last, and most important of our institutional legacies may be derived from the failure of the Vikings to become successful stationary bandits, in the sense of providing such public goods that are normally associated with successful state building. The main reason for this failure was linked to their formation of a highly peculiar form of dynastic rule. The strong focus on trade implied that members of the ruling elite failed to develop any real links to the territory as such. As a result, there never emerged any real demands for legal regulation of the kinds that served to produce separation of powers in Western Europe. There would, for example, emerge neither property rights in land nor separate empowered estates that might have stood up to the princes. In our subsequent account of how Muscovy evolved an institutional matrix that would become strongly path dependent, we shall place much emphasis on these three dimensions, on the fading of Byzantium, on the security problems along the eastern borders, and on the needs to reshape the dynastic order. We shall, however, also maintain that there was nothing inevitable about this outcome. In order to illustrate the latter point, the following chapter will show that out of the original Kievan stationary bandit there would emerge not one uniquely determined but rather three widely different successor states. In his grand expose´ over Russian cultural history, James Billington starts out by paraphrasing Charles Dickens: ‘Reduced to its simplest outline, Russian culture is a tale of three cities: Kiev, Moscow, and St Petersburg.’ 9 From his cultural perspective, these are the three quintessential and interrelated faces of Russia. In our ‘tale’ of long-term evolution, the perspective will be more of a comparative one. Kiev will be viewed as the origin, and Moscow will appear, together with Lithuania and Novgorod, as ‘successor states’. Our use of the latter concept is certainly debatable. When Muscovy rose to power, Kiev had long since perished and, as Marshall Poe puts it, tracing a link between the two in a sense ‘is a bit like thinking Aachen succeeded Rome in the era of Charlemagne’.10 While it would be more technically correct to speak of different states that emerged within the Eastern Slav settlement area, the notion of different ‘successors’ will be helpful here in showing that the line of progression from Kiev to Muscovy and onwards to Russia was not the only one possible. Above all, the following chapter will present Novgorod as a striking contrast, as a case of a stationary bandit that did evolve an ‘encompassing

Stationary bandits

29

interest’ in building market-friendly institutions and in providing what Olson has referred to as ‘market-augmenting government’, more specifically defined as ‘a government powerful enough to create and protect property rights and to enforce contracts, yet constrained so as to not, by its own actions, deprive individuals of those same rights’.11 Muscovy would fail in both of these respects, and in the end she would defeat Novgorod – by military force, rather than by commercial achievement. With these latter observations, we have moved well ahead of the chronological narrative. Let us thus return to Kiev, to see how the lives of the Byzantines and of the Eastern Slavs would be affected by the arrival of the Norsemen in their long boats.

Viking raiders and traders Any attempt at writing the history of Kievan Rus will be marred by the fact that available sources are so few and so fragmentary that the dividing line between fact and fiction at times tends to be somewhat fluid. The main source, upon which much if not all subsequent historiography rests, is a document that is known as the Primary Chronicle, or the Povest vremennykh let.12 While the story that is told there is well written and rather exciting, its academic value has been subject to serious doubt. Following a quick sweep through the Biblical story of creation, the chronicle provides lengthy accounts of the arrival of the Eastern Slavs in the Dniepr area and of their amazing adventures up until the year 1116. It is also in this document that we may find the celebrated passage describing how the Slavs issued a call for Rurik, presumably a Swedish Viking prince, to come and rule over them: ‘Our whole land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us.’ 13 The tale of Rurik, whether true or not, is important in focusing our attention on the conditions under which a set of scattered settlements of Eastern Slavs could evolve into the loose federation that would come to be known as Kievan Rus. The real trigger was the advance of Islam, which served to block the traditional trade routes to the West from the eastern part of the Mediterranean. As a result, traders instead began to exploit the Russian waterways, leading from the Gulf of Finland down to the Black Sea and further on to Constantinople. Although the detour was a substantial one, the gains to be had from continued trade with Constantinople were so great that it was well worth the extra effort. It is here that the Swedish Vikings enter the picture.14 Known in Russian as varyagi, from which the English ‘Varangians’ has been derived, there is plenty of etymological evidence to suggest that it also was they who were the original ‘Rus’. Although the latter was long disputed by patriotic Soviet historians, it is now fairly well accepted that the ruling elite of Kievan Rus was indeed composed of Vikings, or Varangians.15

30

The setting

The legendary call for them to come and rule over the Slavs may be seen as an ex post justification by the winners of how they had succeeded in establishing what essentially must have been a pure protection racket.16 It is beyond doubt that they did indeed conduct major trading expeditions all the way down to Constantinople, and it seems reasonable to accept that in that process they enlisted support from the local Slavs. Their legendary ferocity would have made it hard for the sedentary Slavs to put up any effective resistance.17 The trade route that was thus placed under ‘protection’ would be known as the ‘route from the Greeks to the Varangians’ – the former being the Byzantines and the latter the Vikings – and it was to form the backbone of early Rus society and economy.18 Between the ninth and the eleventh centuries in particular this trade was lucrative indeed. This also was the time when most of the major Russian cities were founded. At one end of the route was the great city of Novgorod, of which we shall have more to say in the following chapter. According to the Primary Chronicle, Novgorod was founded by the legendary Rurik in 862, but there is little substantial evidence to support that claim. At the other end was the even greater city of Kiev. Allegedly founded in 882, it was to form the centre and capital city of Kievan Rus. Here we have more substantial evidence to say that the alleged founder, the Varangian prince Oleg, may actually have been a historical person. Irrespective of what we may choose to think of their respective founders, it is a fact that both Novgorod and Kiev would rise to great prominence, thus illustrating just how lucrative the new trade route really was. By the time when Grand Prince Oleg is presumed to have died, in 912, Kiev had already risen to become one of the largest cities in Europe. For about a century more it would remain a great power. According to some, its rapidly growing splendour and wealth placed it on equal footing even with Byzantium.19 The peak of its glory was reached in the rule of Grand Prince Yaroslav, in 1019–54.20 It is certainly tempting at this point to engage in a little counterfactual speculation, namely to suggest that Kiev might perhaps have developed into the metropolis of a modern European state. The main importance, and theoretical relevance, of that speculation lies in providing a frame of reference, or a yardstick of sorts, against which we may judge what did happen, both in Kiev and in subsequent Muscovy. Had Kievan Rus been able – and indeed allowed by external circumstances – to proceed along a positive path of institution building, might we then perhaps have been able today to map out a story similar to the one that is laid out in The Rise of the Western World? In that work, Douglass North and Robert Thomas provide an illustration of how successful institutional change over several centuries served to produce what we know today as societies that are built on democracy, market economy and the rule of law.21 The reasons why Kiev would fail to develop along that route may, as we shall see below, be largely ascribed to exogenous shocks such as the crusades

Stationary bandits

31

and the Mongol Storm. It would, however, also be due to important endogenous factors that served to erode the state from within. Using the story of North and Thomas as a yardstick of institutional success, we shall present Kiev here as a stationary bandit that failed, and we shall argue that the running of the protection racket as such had much to do with this outcome.22

Running a protection racket The first task to be undertaken by the early Varangian rulers was that of expanding the realm under their control. For this they were eminently well suited. The Primary Chronicle offers a veritable catalogue of how their work proceeded, by one tribe per year, thus successively expanding the area from which they could extract tradable tribute.23 In order to consolidate the conquests, fortified cities were built that were manned by Varangian garrisons. Conquest as such was, however, not of primary interest to the new rulers. In stark contrast to other cases of Viking invasions, where the Norsemen would settle and claim titles to the land, in the case of Rus they came, in the words of Richard Pipes, ‘not as landlords but as merchant adventurers’.24 Their main ambitions were geared into trade, and trade should be understood here as an activity that was never far removed from plunder and warfare. Somewhat cynically, one might say that the Varangians were flexible in their pursuit of material gain. Having secured control over the territory, they proceeded to introduce a system for the actual collection of tradables. Initially, this was based on a mixed pattern of either povoz, meaning that the subdued tribes brought the tribute themselves, or poludie, which meant that the prince and his retinue made a tour of the land to collect ‘dues and taxes, tributes and tolls’. Soon, however, there emerged a more structured system of tax administration that was based on old trading posts, known as pogosti. In each district a special official was made responsible for the collection and timely transfer to Kiev of levied taxes.25 Throughout the winter season, the administration of the grand prince was busy not only with tax collection, but also with commissioning boat construction. It is rather easy to visualize the seething activity that must have marked the banks of the Dniepr in spring, when Kiev, serving as a staging area, was preparing for the annual expedition to Constantinople.26 While the route that led from Novgorod to Kiev was under safe control by the Varangians, the onward journey was fraught with dangers.27 There would be attacks by hostile tribes, there were cataracts where boats would have to be carried over land, and there were wars to be fought with the Byzantines, over the rights to trade. All of these were tasks that put a premium on the skills of the Varangians, acting not as traders but as warriorbandits. They would also be mainly successful, both in keeping the danger from nomadic raiders within tolerable limits and in imposing their conditions on the Byzantines.

32

The setting

The latter in particular is well documented. Following some initial conflicts, relations between the Rus and the Byzantines settled down to serious and no doubt mutually profitable business. For about three vibrant centuries, Kievan traders were welcome guests in Constantinople. During their stay, which normally lasted for six months, they were treated as welcome guests of the Emperor. They even enjoyed housing in the suburb of San Mamo, which included free board and baths. From the Emperor’s point of view, the traders were official representatives of a friendly court at Kiev.28 This said, there can be little doubt that such hostilities that did take place must have been highly unwelcome to the Byzantines. Already in 860, the people of Constantinople received a first lesson in what could be expected from close encounters with the Viking ‘traders’. On that occasion, Askold and Dir, two former associates of Rurik, the legendary founder of Rus, are said to have suddenly attacked the city with 200 boats.29 In 907, Grand Prince Oleg mounted another expedition for the same purpose, only this time it was composed of an even more sizeable number of boats, accompanied by a land force. According to the Primary Chronicle, ‘Oleg sallied forth by horse and by ship, and the number of his vessels was two thousand’.30 Assuming that each boat carried 40 people, it must have been a fearsome horde that descended upon the Byzantines. The attackers did succeed in plundering the surrounding areas, but found the defences of Constantinople itself to be forbidding.31 They then changed mode and accepted instead to conclude a treaty, by which they were awarded huge tribute and extensive rights to future trade. That treaty was to be renewed in 911, shortly before Oleg’s death. The main reason that is held to have prompted Oleg’s attack is rather interesting. The prominent Russian nineteenth-century historian V. O. Kluchevsky argues that the real reason behind all the attacks on Byzantium, from the first raid in 860 until the last expedition in 1043, was to restore by force trading relations that had been disrupted.32 This view is supported by George Vernadsky, who draws a parallel to the Byzantino-Hunnic war in the fifth century, which was prompted by a Byzantine refusal to open Danubian markets to the Huns.33 Further support for that theory is provided by the fact that following each attack treaties on renewed trade were concluded. The contents, moreover, of the 907 and 911 treaties were ‘so favorable to the Russians that no Byzantine Emperor of this period would have agreed to sign such documents without being compelled to it by a military defeat’.34 This understanding of armed conflict as a part of an ongoing negotiating process will figure also in our subsequent account of Muscovite struggles with the Mongols. Turning now to the task of providing security against raids by hostile neighbours, it may be of some use to begin by making a few brief reflections on the natural environment in which early Kievan Rus emerged. Having a previous tradition of sedentary agriculture, the Eastern Slavs would settle mainly in the forested zone that borders on the Pontic steppe.

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While that steppe at present forms an important agricultural zone, the Slavs of the time did not have the technology (such as heavy ploughs) that was necessary to till the grasslands. The forest zone in contrast offered soft soils, which could be tilled by classic slash-and-burn techniques. Trees could be easily felled, simply by girdling the bark with an axe.35 While the forest zone thus became Rus territory, the steppe would be home to a sequence of nomadic peoples. There were good reasons why relations between the sedentary Rus and the neighbouring peoples of the steppe would come to be so troubled. As the latter discovered that simply living off their herds was not sufficient to cover all their needs, they were forced to interact somehow with their neighbours on the periphery of the steppe. This is where the real trouble began. In a trading situation, as Geoffrey Hosking points out, the nomads would be at a serious disadvantage, having little to offer that the settled peoples could not produce by themselves. This simple fact, which he sees as ‘crucial to the history of Eurasia’, explains why relations at times tended to become so violent: ‘only by honing their military skills and raiding adjacent civilizations could pastoral nomads provide properly for their own way of life’.36 Interaction between the Rus in the forest zone and the peoples of the steppe thus came to be marked by constant raiding and counter-raiding. As Charles Halperin puts it, in his classic work about Russia and the Golden Horde, warfare between the Rus and their steppe neighbours became ‘a simple fact of Russian life’.37 Up until the arrival of the Mongols, in the thirteenth century, it essentially constituted one long protracted stalemate, where sudden eruptions of hostilities were interspersed by long periods of friendly and mutually beneficial interaction. During these centuries, the Rus by necessity would develop intimate knowledge of the culture of their neighbours. This is not to say that there was any form of cultural influence; there is no evidence that the Kievans borrowed any political institutions from that side. It does, however, mean that they learned what to expect, and thus could be reasonably expected to play tit for tat. Halperin captures the essence of their formative experiences: ‘For every steppe alliance, there was a steppe war; for every peaceful business transaction, a raid on a caravan; for every act of friendly cooperation, one of violent hostility.’ 38 There are good reasons to dwell on these experiences, reasons that are linked to subsequent Muscovy’s broad expansion into the steppe region, which would bring increased confrontations with the peoples of that region. Kluchevsky even comes close to sentimentalizing about the consequences of these later struggles for expansion: ‘Every year during the sixteenth century thousands of the frontier population laid down their lives for their country, while tens of thousands of Moscow’s best warriors were dispatched southwards to guard the inhabitants of the more central provinces from pillage and enslavement.’ 39

34

The setting

According to other calculations, in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, around half of all available armed manpower had to be sent south to guard the steadily expanding steppe frontier,40 thus draining not only the fiscal but also the labour resources of the state. In Russian historiography, the image of the peoples of the steppe has been understandably negative, marked by exaggerations of conflicts and by an ‘ideology of silence’ concerning periods of friendship and cooperation. Since religious Orthodoxy called upon the Rus to be ‘implacable foes of the pagans and Muslims of the steppe’,41 it is fair to assume, on this count alone, that some creative silence would be called for. Returning now to the main task of the protection racket, that of conducting and protecting trade with Constantinople, we may note that the Varangians did succeed for some time in securing a steady stream of quite substantial revenue. Assuming that no less than 500 boats would be involved, Vernadsky presents some tentative calculations on the annual volume of this trade, which he puts at ‘not short of ten thousand tons’, about half of which would have been slaves.42 The latter incidentally also reflects the commercial importance of the constant warfare with the nomads of the steppe, where prisoners either could be held for ransom or be simply sold as slaves. An important consequence of the lucrative trade was the influx of money. This was important not only in the sense of leading to a general monetization of the Kievan economy, and to resources being made available for monumental construction works. It also had important implications for relations between the princes and their subjects. The basic system by which the princes rewarded their boyars was by awarding kormlenie. Literally translated as ‘feeding’, it implied a right to levy tribute on a specific territory. Part of that tribute would be passed on to the prince, but the remainder could be kept by the boyar, to cover his own needs. Since this system would be of major importance to developments in Muscovy, it may be worthwhile to elaborate briefly here. In a situation where the prince is short of funds, but still has a need to remunerate officials in his service, it does make sense to resort to kormlenie. In practice this could mean that an official was installed as mayor, or posadnik, in a town. In return for administrative service, and for accepting the obligation to mobilize troops when need be, he would receive a right to extract tribute from the territory under his control. While it was fiscally expedient, in our following account of Muscovy it will be shown that the system is also prone to serious problems of venality and corruption. In Kievan Rus, such risks were mitigated by the growing importance of trade. Although the commercial relation with the Byzantines could be seen as something of a private enterprise of the grand prince, the sheer size of the undertaking meant that both boyars and merchants would be invited to join, and thus also to share in the proceeds. As a result of this extra source

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of revenue, they failed to develop any real dependence on exploiting the land. Their pursuit of commercial gains from trade may in this sense be said to have prevented the emergence of such hierarchical dependencies that would be so characteristic of subsequent Muscovy.

Reluctant state builders Viewed from our previous perspective of roving versus stationary banditry, the early rulers of Kievan Rus come across as being only partly successful. Having arrived as truly roving bandits, the Varangians did meet the first criterion for a successful transformation, namely that of securing control over a specific territory. They also did succeed in producing a reasonably market-friendly regime, in the sense that the economy was monetized and based mainly on trade. When it came to the more specific tasks of state building, they would, however, be less interested and hence also less ambitious. Pipes draws a parallel here to the great merchant enterprises that developed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, such as the Hudson Bay or East India companies, which were ‘founded to make money but compelled by the absence of any administration in the area of their operations to assume quasi-governmental responsibilities’.43 The parallel is compelling, in the sense of highlighting the role of the Varangians as reluctant state builders. Their heavy focus on deriving revenue from trade did imply at least a rudimentary need to become stationary. They would have to secure control over the territory, both in the sense of collecting tradables and of providing security against foreign incursions. Their ambitions, however, would not go much further than that. Instead of setting up a traditional hereditary monarchy that might have evolved into a feudal order, the grand princes of Kiev chose to adopt a system of lateral succession, which was common amongst the peoples of the steppe. There, succession went from brother to brother, and only when the fourth brother died could the eldest son of the eldest brother take his turn as leader. Succession to the leadership was thus possible only as long as one’s father had been a leader.44 In the first stages of Kievan development, political succession concerned lordship over the land as a whole. When a prince died, it was not simply a question of settling the order of succession, which would be determined via fierce struggles amongst the sons of the deceased. It also meant that the dependent territories ceased to pay tribute, leaving as one of the very first tasks of a new prince to reimpose tribute. The real turning point in the development of Kievan Rus came with the death of Yaroslav the Wise, in 1054. Coming to realize, only on his deathbed, that he had failed to groom a successor, the grand prince is portrayed in the Primary Chronicle as having pleaded with his sons to keep the peace between them.45

36

The setting

Instead of designating his eldest son as successor, in his will he divided the lands between five sons and a grandson, so that each got a territory. This act would have important consequences, first and foremost among which we may find the implied communality of dynastic rights. It was not only that the patrimony went to all of his male offspring as a group. There was also a clear understanding amongst the latter that when the eldest son died he would not be succeeded by his son, but rather by the brother who was next in line of seniority. The implication was that there would evolve amongst the ruling elite not a sense of individual fiefdoms, but of a collective patrimony. Kluchevsky refers to this as a ‘rota system’, and he provides a detailed account of all the problems that it would cause.46 Whether this really was a case of influence from the practice of lateral succession amongst the peoples of the steppe is unclear. Halperin is careful not to indicate any direct borrowing, but also feels a need to add a small caveat: ‘It is perhaps significant that the only other known examples of this practice are among nomadic Inner Asian peoples.’ 47 Nancy Kollmann is somewhat more to the point, arguing that the Rurikides ‘possibly adopted the practice of collateral political succession from their Khazar or Bulgar partners in trade and politics; it was used in Turkic steppe empires’.48 At this point we may usefully recall what was said above about the value of ‘historical economics’, and of the need to consider the cognitive models that are used by actors in interpreting their environment and in forming expectations about the future. The failure of the Kievans to develop a more traditional feudal order, with vassals that would be intimately linked with their respective areas, also would have important implications for the mentalite´ of the ruling elite. Commenting on their peculiar mode of succession, Hosking questions the validity of the ‘usual interpretation’. He argues that available texts are so fraught with ambiguities that it is not quite clear what Yaroslav intended, ‘except that he regarded Kiev not as a simple unitary realm, but as a federation ruled over jointly by members of the dynasty according to some notion of seniority’. Knowing that the system of lateral succession had originally emerged amongst nomadic peoples does, however, provide an important insight into the very foundations of the political culture that was associated with Kievan Rus. If the princes had kept their main wealth in land, and had thus been dependent on extracting rent from that land, the ‘rota’ system of succession would have been impossible to maintain. As Hosking puts it, ‘it would have been impracticable for them to keep switching from one domain to another’. From these observations, he derives his own clue as to why Yaroslav may have thought that the system would work: ‘Where mentalities remained tribal rather than patrimonial, and the main revenues came from commerce and tribute, it is possible to imagine that it might work as conceived.’ 49

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What all of this boils down to is a serious conflict between two principles. One is that of an ideology or a mentalite´ that envisions the land as a whole as the joint property of the ruling dynasty, to be ruled and exploited by them according to the principles of seniority that were laid down by Yaroslav. The other is that of ambitions by individual members of the dynasty to step out of line, to lay claims to private property and thus to transform the essence of the mentalite´ from tribal to patrimonial. As subsequent events would show, the Kievans would never be able to fully resolve that inherent conflict. Assuming that the purpose of Yaroslav’s arrangement had been to preserve the strength and integrity of the state, it must be deemed as a failure. It effectively prevented the emergence of a vertical line of succession, which might, perhaps, have served to enhance the stability of the state, and it set the stage for vicious fraternal feuding. Although the latter was nothing new as such, from now on the focus of the struggles for power would be different. It would no longer be a question simply of who would be grand prince of Kiev, but also of how all the ranking relatives were to be placed in line for succession.50 In the first couple of generations after Yaroslav it would not be hard to keep track of the pecking order, but as the number of princes grew and as nephews could become senior to uncles, there emerged a serious conflict of principle between seniority by age and seniority by genealogy; a man could be twice the age of a rival and still be one generation further away from Yaroslav. There also emerged serious problems with children of princes who died before they had secured promotion to a territory. Such children (known as izgoi ) would be outcast and allocated minor sustenance only. It is not hard to understand the inherent instability and frustration that would mark this order. Over time, the ‘rota’ system was simply bound to produce increasingly bitter feuding over rights to the better parts of the common heritage. When we read in Russian sources about the constant wars that were waged with the peoples of the steppe, it should be noted that these conflicts in many cases really were civil wars amongst the Rus, where different sides chose to call in help from the outside. Thus, both Poles and Hungarians, together with Varangians and even the vilified Polovtsians, would frequently appear not as attackers but as parties in internecine struggles between the rulers of Rus. As a result of this constant feuding, the Kievan state was eroded from within and thus became increasingly vulnerable to such truly hostile raids by the surrounding nomadic peoples that could result in large numbers of Slavs being carried off as slaves. The practice of involving outsiders in their internal struggles also would come to mark the early history of Muscovy, when the Mongols would play a successful game of divide et impera, always being ready to join one prince in laying waste to his neighbour’s cities.

38

The setting

Legal regulation The failure of the Kievan rulers to engage in serious state building was manifested above all in a failure to provide by far the most important of all public goods, namely that of legal regulation. It is true that the rapid expansion of trade did produce demands for the above-mentioned treaties with the Byzantines. Designed to regulate the further conduct of trade, they were the first acts of formal legal regulation in Kievan Rus. While the documents as such have survived, very little is known about the surrounding process. Above all, it is unknown to what extent there was outside influence on the formulation of those texts. It is thus difficult to say anything of substance about a possible legal culture of the time. Similar problems pertain to the Russkaya Pravda, the first real law code of Kievan Rus.51 Believed to have been introduced in the twelfth century, its origins are unclear, its contents mainly represent codification of customary law, and one may even question to what extent it really does represent law. Daniel Kaiser, for example, bluntly notes that ‘In its earliest form, the law of Rus is hardly law at all’.52 Others have similarly underscored that we should be careful not to overestimate the importance of this law code. In his foreword to a collection of Russian laws from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries, Richard Hellie clearly states its limited ambitions: ‘In the first centuries, Kievan Russian law had few pretenses, and was concerned primarily with the most rudimentary, disinterested conflict resolution, with protecting officials and their moveable property, and with generating income for officialdom.’ 53 The first point is unremarkable. Like most other cases of primitive law, the Pravda sought to preserve order in the land. It not only stipulated fines for crimes like killing, assault and theft. It also limited the number of people who could seek vengeance, provided for banishment of the worst evildoers and tried to provide norms for harmony in a multi-ethnic society. What might be noted is the ordering of claims in resolving conflicts over debts: first came the prince, then foreigners, then out-of-town merchants and only last the local creditors. This clear focus on princely interest in foreign commerce provides yet another illustration of the fundamentally commercial nature of Kievan Rus. The ambition to generate income for officialdom is also fairly straightforward. Expenses for public works such as bridges, walls and road repair would have to be met, the needs of the military, such as horses and weaponry, would have to be provided for, and officials in the service of the state would have to be paid. The really interesting parts of the Pravda are those that seek to support and protect officialdom. This is so primarily because this is where we may find rules not only on private property as such, but also on the ordering of different types of property. Most importantly, there is no indication whatsoever that anyone claimed title to the land.

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Since the rulers did not form any real attachment to landed properties, they also would fail to develop any ‘clear distinction between their public and private functions: they ruled their realm and disposed of its wealth without distinguishing the one activity from the other’.54 The general absence in the Pravda of clauses concerning property rights in land illustrates that this factor of production was so plentiful that it was an essentially free good. As such, there is nothing remarkable about this. The very same held true in the early stages of Western European development. The difference lies in subsequent developments, in the fact that in the latter case population pressure would lead to changes in the relative prices of land and labour, which in turn would prompt the introduction of property rights in land. In their previously cited account of the rise of the Western world, North and Thomas logically focus on these market-driven influences on the institutional order as the real driving forces. In Kievan Rus there would be no parallel to that development. The economic interests of the princes and their boyars remained closely related to trade. Such exploitation of the land that did take place by the ruling elite was based on bonded labour, as evidenced by the numerous paragraphs in the Russkaya Pravda that concern slavery in its various forms. Kluchevsky even speaks of the ‘immense proportions’ of slavery, and he notes that for three centuries this human cargo was the main export from Rus. The slave trade was so lucrative that there is no evidence at all of landowning amongst the elite before the eleventh century, and when it does acquire marked proportions, in the twelfth century, it is directly linked to human bondage. Since land was plentiful and labour in short supply, the ownership of land could be directly derived from the ownership of slaves.55 All in all, these legal documents provide us with a reflection of Kievan Rus that has very little to do with the normal understanding of a ‘state’. Hellie frankly notes that ‘stateness’ in the tenth century consisted of little more than tribute collecting, within a society that was ‘probably often tribal, certainly almost always consensual, and relatively fluid concerning the flatness of the social pyramid’.56 In thus reducing Kievan Rus to the stature of a loosely organized commercial federation of boyar-merchants, we should bear in mind that it nevertheless did produce some rudimentary forms of legal and political institutions. Given all our reservations, it remains a fact that the Russkaya Pravda would serve as the fundamental law of Rus well into the sixteenth century.57 It is also true that there did emerge in Kievan Rus a popular representation of sorts that was known as veche. Since the latter institution would come to play a truly important role in Novgorod, a few words may be warranted at this point. The exact roots and nature of communal peasant institutions has been the topic of long-standing and at times heated debates amongst scholars of Russian history. Without in any way seeking to enter such debates, we may note that from an outside point of view it was seen as preferable to deal

40

The setting

with the community as a whole, rather than with individual peasant households. This at the very least was clearly the case with respect to the administration of justice. The Russkaya Pravda quite explicitly imposed a collective obligation on the community to investigate serious crimes. If the perpetrator could not be found, a collective fine would have to be paid. It is also rather clear that peasant communities would assume joint responsibilities for a variety of ‘public works’, such as fencing, and that they would jointly stand behind clan members in conflicts with other clans. Such practices are well known from many other cultures as well. What is less clear is the question of whether the peasant community in Kievan times would also be made jointly responsible for tribute levied from above. Given the paucity of information, that matter will probably never be resolved.58 What we do know is that in subsequent Muscovy the practice of ‘joint responsibility’, known as krugovaya poruka, would become an important feature of village life. It would include criminal and fiscal obligations imposed from above, as well as intricate systems for solving internal problems. We shall thus have reason to return to these problems at length in later chapters. Remaining with Kievan Rus, it would seem reasonable to assume that even in the absence of extensive obligations from above there would still be a need for peasant assemblies of some sort to decide on the allocation of burdens between households. Originally, such assemblies were known as verve, but gradually that term was replaced by the subsequently prevailing mir, which in Russian denotes both ‘peace’ and ‘world’. While the mir shall figure prominently in subsequent chapters, as a fundamental institution in the organization of village life, and in defining relations between the village and the outside world, when it comes to popular representation in the cities we instead shall use a term that came into use in the emerging trading towns of Kievan Rus, namely that of veche. To the extent that the veche may indeed be seen as a popular representation, that role would emerge neither as a consequence of deliberate policy by the rulers nor as the result of demands from below. Whatever democratic or republican political institutions that may have emerged in Kievan Rus, did so as a result of the internal weakening of the ruling elite, and thus of the central power. We shall have reason to return to that process in a moment.

Decline and fall of Kiev The final collapse of Kiev was an event of major historical significance. It would leave a power vacuum with lasting implications for the arrangement of forces in the region as a whole, and it would effectively separate subsequent Muscovy from the economic and cultural orbit of Central Europe and of the Mediterranean world. What brought about these fateful outcomes was a combination of internal weakening and two exogenous shocks, both of which struck Kiev in the first half of the thirteenth century.

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The first was the fourth crusade, in 1203–04, which culminated in the looting of Constantinople by the Venetians. This traumatic event was important in two respects. It would cause lasting hostility by the Orthodox world as a whole towards the Catholic powers of the West, and it would lead to the effective exclusion of Rus from the lucrative Mediterranean trade. Profits from the latter would instead serve to propel the northern Italian citystates onto their path of rapid growth, so important for the emergence of Western Europe as a cradle of democracy and market economy. The second shock, which brought about the final collapse, was the ‘Mongol Storm’, the sudden onslaught of the fearsome Mongol hordes that descended upon the Volga-Oka region in 1237.59 In 1240, before proceeding further west, they utterly destroyed an already seriously weakened Kiev. It would take a very long time before the latter would once again rise to anything resembling a great city.60 Against this background, there may seem to be little point in pursuing our previous speculation about a path of development that might have transformed Kiev into the centre of a modern European state. It would seem hard indeed to conjure up a set of circumstances under which Kiev might have been able both to resist the Mongols and to remain in the Byzantine trade. The point lies in another dimension, in providing a frame of reference for our following discussion of the widely different paths that would be chosen by the three successor states. Above all, it serves to highlight the importance of those institutional legacies that would be so variably dealt with. The most important item on this list surely must concern the peculiar system of political succession that emerged amongst the early rulers of Kievan Rus. Accepting that the introduction of property rights in land was one of the main driving forces in Western European development, the absence of this institution must be seen as a defining factor of Kievan Rus. It not only formed a vital component of the ‘rota’ system of princely succession; it also would be the main reason for the demise of that system. The lack of distinct ties to specific territories implied that the members of the rotating dynasty found little need, or indeed reason, to interact with such local polities that otherwise might have served to produce republican or even democratic political institutions. This lack of princely interest in local affairs certainly had a positive side, in the sense that there did not emerge any hierarchical structures or indeed feudal oppression. For the peasantry in particular (excluding the slaves), this order of things was rather beneficial. Although they did not have formal titles to their land, they were subject to no restrictions on movement and likely could live as fairly free men, enjoying the fruits of their own labour. By the end of the Kievan period the bulk of all land presumably was still in the hands of the free peasant communes.61 The downside of the arrangement, however, was that the absence of a forum or even a need for serious political exchange also precluded the

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The setting

formulation of constitutional choices on a political order. The princely dynasty in that sense was floating freely, suspended over the territories from which it extracted tribute. The rather fuzzy nature of the games for power that were to follow upon the death of Yaroslav may also be reflected in the fact that successive editions, or ‘redactions’, of the Russkaya Pravda are marked by a total absence of rules on political succession. During the twelfth century, Kievan Rus entered into a process of accelerating decentralization. The onslaught of the crusades had resulted in a reorientation of trading patterns in the Mediterranean, which clearly favoured the emerging city-states in what is presently northern Italy. As a result of this process, Byzantium was thrown into economic decline, and the land of Rus was reduced to a ‘commercial backwater’.62 To the rulers of Rus, this implied that incomes would increasingly have to be derived from domestic activities, which in essence meant agriculture and small-scale manufacture. By thus raising the importance of landownership, and of extracting rent from the land, the commercial glue that had kept the Kievan federation together was coming apart. While Kiev did retain its symbolic importance as capital city, and as residence of the Metropolitan, who was the head of the Orthodox Church, the other cities in the federation were gaining more and more independence. As we shall see below, this was particularly true for Novgorod, but it also applied to Galicia-Volhynia in the southwest and to Vladimir-Suzdal in the northeast. In a further round of decentralization, the lesser cities in the rotation scheme in turn would be forced to witness how their peripheral areas, the prigorody, began to break free and to invite their own princes to act as rulers. As the supply of eligible candidates for the latter posts was growing steadily, the process of fragmentation soon acquired a steady momentum. It was this gradual weakening of the central power that made room for the veche. As increasing numbers of princes were appointed to remote areas of the realm, little copies of the court at Kiev were multiplying, and while the princes were largely transitory phenomena, moving as they were between territories, the emerging town elites had firm territorial roots. This rise in prominence of the old trading towns placed the princes in a weak bargaining position. In order to make sure that if need be they would be able to raise sufficient troops to defend their territories, it became increasingly important to maintain a good working relation with the veche. While the very emergence of this fundamental political institution was important enough in its own right, we should note that its main prerogative was that of deciding on whether or not to mobilize for war. In Kievan times, it never managed to secure for itself any form of legislative capacity. That would come later, and only in Novgorod. By 1169, the power of Kiev had declined to the point where a coalition of princes from the northern Volga-Oka region, led by Prince Andrei Bogolyubskii of Rostov-Suzdal, not only raided the city. They also added insult

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to injury by appointing a junior member of the family to be its new prince. The grand princely title was shifted to Vladimir in the north, from whence it would not return. This effective transfer of power may be seen as something of a defining moment for what would come to be known as Muscovy. In the following chapters we shall see how the tiny town of Moscow would gradually rise above and eventually absorb Vladimir, to include both the grand princely title and the see of the Metropolitan. While the formation and rise to great power of Muscovy did represent a major achievement, we must remain careful in viewing Moscow as a direct successor to Kiev. As we have noted above, the very notion of a straight ‘transition’ may to some extent be seen as a construction. It is not only the case that the composition of Muscovy would be very different from that of Kiev. We also must consider that when Moscow did rise to power, Kiev had been long gone and much of the territory of the former Kievan Rus was under Lithuanian control. It is in precisely the latter fact, moreover, that we may find an important dimension of cultural influence that adds to the ‘tale of three cities’ as told by Billington. Given all that has been said above about historical economics and the importance of cognitive models, it seems warranted to conclude this chapter with some reflections on one of the most important legacies that was left by Kievan Rus for its successors to grapple with. That legacy may be loosely defined as the underlying ideology of the dynastic order. One of the core arguments that has been pursued above is that the rulers of Kievan Rus never did succeed in creating a constitutional order for their state. It originated as a loose federation of traders, and when trade with the Byzantines began to decline they failed to produce a replacement mechanism that could hold the realm together. As the need for some kind of order was becoming ever more acutely felt, the focus of the Rurikides instead came to be aimed at the territory as a whole, on a dream of a common land, the russkaya zemlya. Kluchevsky places great emphasis on this ‘awakening in the community at large of a solicitude for the Russian land as a whole, this birth of a common territorial cause which it was incumbent upon each man to support’.63 By far the most important implication of this dream of a common land was its associated understanding of communal dynastic rights to the land as a whole. As we have noted above, the conflict between communal rights and individual aspirations for private rights never really could be sorted out.64 While the notion of votchina did denote private property, as inherited from your father, in the cognitive models of the ruling elite votchina also came to be understood as rights to the land as a whole, and thus also to power over the land. Knowing that the fusion of power and property would come to be a truly defining factor of subsequent Muscovy, it is important to note that the origin of this phenomenon may be found in the peculiar rules of succession and of

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The setting

communal dynastic rights that came to be known as the ‘patrimony of Yaroslav’. Kluchevsky sees it as truly formative: ‘This constituted the fundamental factor of the particular period – the factor to which were directed all the otherwise heterogeneous, divergent, and often mutually antagonistic aspirations of the boyars, clergy, capital towns, and other social forces of the day.’ 65 Needless to say, a state that is built on a dream does not stand much of a chance of survival. Above all, it will not be able to meet the challenges of such institution building that is necessary to support an increasingly sophisticated economic and political system. Turning now to look at the different courses that would be charted by those to whom power devolved, as Kiev was declining, we shall see not only how very different courses would be charted, indicating that there was nothing conclusive as such about the failure of Kiev. Even more importantly, we shall see how the dream or the myth of the russkaya zemlya, the Russian land, would live on, and how it would keep on producing trouble.

3

Successor states

With Kiev effectively gone, the land of Rus had been deprived of its centre and capital city. In its place there would emerge what we have referred to above as three essentially different successor states. Lithuania would join forces with Catholic Poland, and as a result be disqualified from running as a true heir to the mother-city of Rus. Novgorod would preserve all the right credentials, but end up being utterly destroyed by Muscovy. Moscow would rise, against all odds, to become the centre of an eventually global superpower. Although historians normally frown upon the practice of counterfactual speculation, there may be some analytical merit in viewing all of these as possible future Russias. That merit would lie in bringing out just how remarkable it was that Moscow would rise to such great power, effectively eclipsing and absorbing the other two. By contrasting the initial conditions of the three, we will be led to consider important differences in their respective development potentials. Such differences relate not only to geographical location, which includes the harshness of the natural environment as well as proximity to markets and major trade routes. A factor of perhaps even greater importance is that of proximity to societies from which cultural borrowing could be seen at the very least as a realistic prospect. The relevance of the latter qualification may be underlined by noting that while Kiev had a lively exchange both with the Byzantines and with the peoples of the steppe, there was observable cultural influence only from the former. The nomadic culture of the latter was quite simply too different for it to have any real impact on the sedentary culture of Rus. Or so, at least, it is believed. When the Muscovites proceeded to build their state, they did so not only in a remote and largely hostile geographical location. They would also be forced to interact rather closely with another people – in this case the Mongols – whose culture was so different that the scope for cultural borrowing was limited indeed. If we thus accept that the Muscovites were faced with tremendous problems and that they had no real role models to emulate, it should come as

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The setting

no surprise that their institutional solutions would have to be rather peculiar in nature. The surprise, rather, lies in the unquestionable successes that they would score. In his classic article about ‘Muscovite Political Folkways’, Edward Keenan chooses to focus on the aspect of achievement, rightly warning his readers against being taken in by what he calls the ‘deprivation hypothesis’, i.e. all those developments in Western Europe that Russia opted to stay out of: ‘The deprivation hypothesis has little explanatory power with regard to the political culture that did arise in Muscovy, nor does it address the question of why that culture was – despite features that Westerners might consider unattractive or ‘‘deficient’’ – so effective and, apparently, so admirably suited to Muscovy’s needs.’ 1 The latter point stands in close agreement with one of the core assumptions of this study as a whole, namely that the institutional lock-in that occurred in Muscovy was the result of a series of rational choices made by the Muscovite rulers. Keenan argues that the survival, and even vigour and demographic vitality of the Slavs, could be assured by ‘a remarkably congruent and tenacious set of practices and attitudes’, and concludes that ‘the creation of a distinctive and strikingly effective political culture in the hostile and threatening environment that was the womb of Russia’s political culture was that nation’s most extraordinary achievement’.2 In a similar vein, Marshall Poe concludes a study of the much-publicized and remarkably negative Muscovite imagery that was produced by contemporary Western travellers, such as Sigismund von Herberstein and Giles Fletcher, by highlighting the fact of the unquestionable achievements of those same Muscovites, in a ‘singularly inopportune environment’. Noting that the grand princes, supported by a tiny boyar elite, were faced from the very beginning with ‘the unenviable task of knitting together an expansive, poor, sparsely populated region of far northeastern Europe and mobilizing it for constant defense against a host of aggressive neighbors’, Poe underlines that ‘not only did the Russians survive, they prospered, creating in the span of a bit over a century an empire that stretched from Archangelsk to Kiev and from Smolensk to Kamchatka’. Even more importantly, he also emphasizes the tenacity over time of the institutional solutions that were once generated to deal with the highly specific problems of the time: ‘By almost any standard, Muscovite political culture proved to be quite durable, lasting in its pristine form for almost two centuries and, according to the opinions of some continuity theorists, well into modern times under one guise or another.’ 3 Rounding off the argument, there can be little disagreement about the rational foundations of what Poe calls the ‘logical adaptive strategy that permitted the Muscovite elite to build an empire under the most trying of conditions’.4 What does remain to be addressed is a question that may also

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be taken to represent the main analytical challenge of the path dependence approach as a whole. How could it be that a set of highly specific institutional arrangements that had emerged under a set of highly specific circumstances could show such durability over time? To put it more specifically, how was it possible for the core features of the institutional matrix of Muscovy to remain largely intact long after the time when such arrangements may have been rational, and to the great detriment of future generations? Looking back at five centuries of Russian development, from the height of Muscovy to the reforms of Boris Yeltsin, one is certainly prone to be awed by military might and territorial expansion. Viewed from this perspective alone, the history of Russia is one of unquestionable achievement. From a somewhat different perspective, there may, however, be good reasons to view that same history as a classic case of keeping score in the wrong game, i.e. of taking pride in achievement without considering what we have referred to above as sustainability and opportunity costs. With respect to the former, we may advance three striking cases of state collapse, namely at the end of Muscovy, at the end of the Russian Empire and at the end of the Soviet Union. Although there are many other instances in world history where states have collapsed, some even for the better of the peoples concerned, these Russian cases stand out due to the serious upheavals and protracted suffering that was to follow. On the latter count, we shall argue that a systematic focus over time on extraction and mobilization of resources, coupled with serfdom and a host of other impediments to the freedom of mobility and initiative, would have to result in what economists would call an inward shift of the production possibility frontier. In plain language, it implies that there have been substantial opportunity costs involved in maintaining the system. Thus taking into account the price that has been paid and the type of society that has resulted, the achievements of Russia’s post-Muscovite rulers come across in a somewhat different light. The frame of reference that will be used when we proceed to argue that the history of Russia has been one of gross resource mismanagement will be that suggested by North and Thomas in their previously cited history of The Rise of the Western World, i.e. of marketfriendly institutional change that encompasses a transformation of mental models and of the ability of the state to make a credible commitment to upholding the rule of law. Proceeding here to look in more detail at the contrasting cases of Lithuania and Novgorod, we have two potential successor states that were located close to major trading centres, and that bordered on trading cultures that – in contrast to the Mongols – were sufficiently similar for cultural borrowing to be at least a distinct possibility. Viewing both of these as potentially viable future Russias, we may expand our field of counterfactual speculation by envisioning a process whereby Rus could have developed into a multitude

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The setting

of minor states reminiscent of Germany before Germany was invented, i.e. before Bismarck. Provocative as they may be, such thoughts do find support in the natural environment of the forested Volga-Oka basin: ‘On the face of it, nature intended Russia to be a decentralized country formed of a multitude of selfcontained and self-governing communities. Everything here militates against statehood: the poverty of the soil, remoteness from the main routes of international trade, the sparsity and mobility of the population.’ 5 Had decentralization been the actual outcome, it follows that a great many other things would also have been very different. A path of continued fragmentation of Rus, into ever-smaller principalities, would have effectively precluded the formation both of Russian autocracy and of Russian Empire, indeed perhaps even of a Russian nation. The future architecture of Europe might then never have come to be marked by a division into two halves, subsequently to form hostile blocks. There is little point in taking the speculation any further than that, having probably already invited a host of critical commentary. Irrespective of realism, it does, however, serve to highlight the importance of what Moscow did succeed in achieving, namely an effective preclusion of any evolution towards fragmentation, or indeed pluralism. As we shall see in the following chapters, the chosen path of centralization instead would provide the basis for an empire to be. Turning now to look in more detail at the cases of Lithuania and Novgorod, we shall bear in mind these speculative scenarios. By seeking to avoid dismissing out of hand all possible alternative developments, we shall maintain the analytical contrasts that are thus provided. Perhaps in that process we shall also succeed in enhancing our understanding of Muscovy. Let us begin with Lithuania, which presents the most distinctive opportunity for development into a competing future Russia.

A Catholic Rus? Given the important role that would be played by Lithuania in the subsequent affairs of Rus, it should be noted that the Lithuanians did not form part of the original realm. They were not part of the original family of Eastern Slavs, nor did they follow their neighbours in adopting the Orthodox faith. Remaining pagan and divided, their rise to power would begin only following the collapse of Kiev. At about the time when the Mongols arrived from the east, the Lithuanians banded together in an effort to conquer the neighbouring territories of Rus. At first their attempts met with mixed results, and there followed a period of anarchy. By the fourteenth century, however, the Mongols went through a period of internal power struggles that served to weaken their grip over the lands of Rus. This provided an opportunity for the Lithuanian

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grand princes to successfully expand their reach into the western parts of old Kievan Rus. Their expansion was begun in the rule of Gediminas (1316–41), with the capture both of Kiev and of a number of other Orthodox Rus principalities that had been weakened by the Mongol Storm, such as Volynia, Polotsk and Turov-Pinsk. (The latter two make up much of what is currently known as Belarus.) Galicia meanwhile was joined with Poland. In 1363, and again in 1368, Gediminas’ son Olgert led his forces in two decisive battles against the Golden Horde, thereby effectively terminating Mongol rule in that region. He also made advances in the north, annexing several principalities, threatening Novgorod and on three occasions actually attacking Moscow itself, though never being quite successful in the latter ambition. Following this sweeping expansion, about nine-tenths of the territory of the grand principality of Lithuania was Rus, and roughly three-quarters of the population was Rus – and Orthodox. In essence, this was a Rus state, adopting the Rus language, legal system, administrative structure and military organization. Intermarriage amongst princes and nobles was common.6 Perhaps this Western Rus state could have become the eventual Russia, an outcome that would have drastically altered the future course of Europe as a whole. An important obstacle was the rival influence of Poland, which represented Catholicism and thus – in some sense – Europe. After considerable vacillation, the grand princes of Lithuania finally decided to exchange their claims to the Orthodox Patrimony of Yaroslav for union with Catholic Poland. A formal change in course was announced already in 1386, in the form of marriage between Grand Prince Jogaila of Lithuania and Queen Jadwiga of Poland. As a result of this marriage, Jogaila converted to Catholicism and took the name Wladyslaw II Jagiello. Although his decision did represent a crucial step, on a road that would lead to deep separation between the Lithuanian and Muscovite parts of Rus, in its initial stages the loose personal union did leave much of the institutional structures of the respective states intact. A complete merger would not be on the cards for another couple of centuries, and when it finally did happen it was in response to developments in Muscovy. The increasingly bellicose posture of Tsar Ivan IV, seeking to expand Muscovy into the Baltic region, caused growing apprehension amongst all of Muscovy’s western neighbours. With the Union of Lublin, in 1569, Poles and Lithuanians responded by formally joining together into one state. At the peak of its power, in the early fifteenth century, the Polish– Lithuanian union was the largest territorial state in Europe. Having defeated the Teutonic Knights at Gru¨nwald (Tannenberg), in 1410, it even controlled the approaches to Riga. For a brief period of time, it encompassed lands that

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The setting

stretched from the Baltic in the north and almost down to the Black Sea in the south. Ideologically as well as militarily, it was a formidable rival and enemy of Muscovy, and so it would remain until the mid-seventeenth century. Following a protracted period of standoff, with varying fortunes of war, the forces of Muscovy finally gained the upper hand. The turning point came with the treaty of Pereyaslavl, in 1654, by which Tsar Alexei managed to enlist Cossack support for a campaign against Poland–Lithuania. As a result of this war, which lasted until 1667, the hotly contested city of Smolensk was brought into the Russian fold, as was all of left bank Ukraine and parts of Lithuania itself. Following these advances, the areas that once had been western Rus had been rejoined with its northern parts, which by then also included defeated Novgorod. While this reunion did represent the long-sought reconstitution of the patrimony of Yaroslav, it was not without complication. In a powerful illustration of the importance of cultural transformations, the incorporation of what is presently known as Ukraine into Muscovy brought in its wake a host of serious conflicts. Given our previous emphasis on the importance of cultural factors such as norms and values in determining institutional change, we shall find ample reason in the following chapters to return to these issues, from the secular as well as the religious angles. Returning here to the case of further developments in Poland–Lithuania, after its having been defeated by Alexei Mikhailovich and the Cossacks, we have an illustration not only of how religion could be associated with an eventually democratic process of state building. The merger between Lithuanian Rus and Poland also brought important secular change to the former, being exposed to Polish aristocratic tradition and being drawn into rather than striving to move away from Europe. The long-run effects of the deep cultural transformations that resulted may be illustrated by the fact that today both Poland and Lithuania are members of the European Union. Their involvement in the affairs of Rus would leave behind a legacy that is still to be observed, not the least in the Uniate Church of Ukraine, and perhaps also in the very existence of an independent Ukrainian state. For themselves, however, that story has now been brought to an end and it will not be pursued further here. Turning instead to the next of our three successor states, that of Novgorod, we shall find a more direct line of progression and thus also a better illustration of what a future Russia might have looked like.

Lord Great Novgorod In a formal sense, the political history of Republican Novgorod may be said to have begun in 1136. That was the year when the local elite capped a lengthy process of growing self-rule by proclaiming full independence,

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assuming for their city-state the rather pretentious name ‘Lord Great Novgorod’ (Gospodin Velikii Novgorod). As a symbolic manifestation of their landmark decision to formally opt out of the Kievan rota system, they even expelled the resident Prince Vsevolod from the city, requiring him to take up residence out of town. Although the symbolism of the latter gesture was powerful indeed, and would be remembered as such, in reality it may not have been all that dramatic. Some scholars think that even after the declaration of independence, the princes retained a modest residence in town.7 As we shall see below, there is plenty of other evidence that similarly supports gradual evolution as a more realistic interpretation of Novgorod’s path towards independence. Given its status as something of a little sister to the mother-city of Kiev, Novgorod was slower in its development, and would not achieve real prominence until at the beginning of Mongol rule, in the mid-thirteenth century. This fact reflects one of the perhaps most important differences between the two cities, namely that while Kiev would develop via its trade with Byzantium, Novgorod would rely for its growth mainly on relations with the Hanseatic League. Their respective ways of responding to the implied needs for institution building would also be fundamentally different. In contrast to Kiev’s loose federation of merchants, Novgorod was to follow a path leading the city itself and its immediate surroundings to become the centre in an extensive colonial trading empire, based on a refined legal infrastructure that was designed to support the commercial activities. At the time when Muscovy began its rise to power, the Republic of Novgorod covered a vast area. Extending from the Gulf of Finland in the west to the foothills of the Urals Mountains in the east, it also reached far into the natural resource-rich northern regions that stretch along the shores of the White Sea and the Arctic Ocean. This colonial hinterland was to provide a plentiful supply of tradables, mainly in the form of furs, wax and honey, all of which were of great value in the Baltic trade.8 Noting, moreover, that it almost completely surrounded Muscovy, we may understand why, in the thirteenth century, Novgorod was in almost full control over trade from both Rostov-Suzdal and Vladimir, which by then had grown into important commercial centres, supplying not only furs but also large quantities of timber and fish.9 A central part of the explanation for the city’s spectacular growth lies in active promotion of its trading relations in the Baltic. In the early stages this meant itinerant Swedish traders, as well as representatives of Novgorod taking their wares west on their own ships. Gradually, however, the Baltic trade was taken over by merchants of the Hansa and the Rus ceased their travels to ‘beyond the sea’, as it was then known. The Hanseatic League opened its first trading station in Novgorod by the mid-twelfth century, coincident in time with the beginning decline of Kievan trade with Byzantium. Known as the Gotland Yard (Gotskii dvor), it was

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The setting

operated by traders from Visby, on the Swedish island of Gotland. By the end of the century, traders from Lu¨beck opened a second yard, known as St Peterhof (Nemetskii dvor). Over time, the Lu¨beckers would completely take over and effectively monopolize Novgorod’s western trade.10 Given the subsequent importance of this trade, we should note that Novgorod never did become an actual member of the League. Like Stockholm and London, it was merely an associate, albeit an important such. Nor was it ever transformed into a true Hansa trading town. Though German could be heard spoken in the streets, there was no truly bilingual urban community. On the contrary, the foreign traders were kept in strict seclusion, to prevent contamination of the locals. When the Mongols suddenly descended on the lands of Rus, Novgorod succeeded in keeping the new enemy off its territory. That was important enough, in the sense of avoiding the havoc that was wreaked on so much of the remainder of Rus. From a long-run perspective, however, it was of even greater importance that as trade with the Byzantines was being diverted and/or disconnected, the Novgorodians could continue to prosper from their trade with the Hansa. By having thus secured both the (relative) independence and the steady flow of resources that was needed to chart their own course, the rulers of Novgorod were in pole position. They could proceed to undertake those tasks of successful stationary banditry that the Kievans had failed to bring to completion. By far the most important feature of this development, from an institutional point of view, lies in the introduction of a contracting system for the ruling princes.

Building republican institutions The real essence of the ‘republican revolution’ that secured the city’s full independence in 1136 was a unilateral declaration that henceforth the people of Novgorod would reserve the right to choose their own princes. While this decision did represent a formal break with Kiev, in reality it was no more than the culmination of a rather lengthy process of gradual disengagement. The fact that Novgorod did develop more slowly than Kiev should not be taken as evidence of its being in some sense more backward. The city’s early cultural development may be reflected in the writing of the important First Novgorod Chronicle, which dates back to the tenth century,11 and we may add that a form of self-government from Kiev was obtained already in 997. Its location at the northern end of the ‘route from the Greeks to the Varangians’ constituted an obvious source of steady revenue. Architectural evidence in the form of major building projects illustrates that serious accumulation of wealth was begun already in the eleventh century. A case in point is the construction, in 1045–50, of the magnificent St Sophia Cathedral, which is still standing. Built to replace a wooden structure from

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989, which had subsequently burnt down, it was designed to emphasize the religiously important link to the St Sophia in Kiev, and thus to the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. The early eleventh century is also held by some historians to be the time of writing of some parts of the law that went into the Kievan Russkaya Pravda. As the story goes, the people of Novgorod offered staunch support for ‘their’ Prince Yaroslav in his struggle for the Kievan throne. As a reward, according to the Novgorod Chronicle, in 1016 he ‘gave unto them a law’ and ‘signed unto them an ordinance’.12 Historians differ on how to interpret this event. While George Vernadsky believes that this law was used as a basis for the ‘Short Pravda’, constituting the first part of the Russkaya Pravda,13 Kluchevsky sees it as mere decoration, as a simple pretext for inserting the text into the Novgorod Chronicle under the year 1016: ‘We may therefore ignore it.’ 14 What may have been the real case need not concern us here. What is important for our purpose is the fact that important privileges were being granted, in the form of a clearly articulated division of political powers between the prince and the ruling class of boyars. Henrik Birnbaum summarizes the essence of the new contract: ‘The Novgorod boyars were now specifically recognized as outside the prince’s jurisdiction and were, moreover, given control over the major administrative districts of the town, the kontsy.’ The prince on his part retained jurisdiction over the remainder of the free citizens of Novgorod, who were organized according to a different system known as sotnya, or ‘hundreds’. The importance of the moment, moreover, could not have been given a more powerful statement: ‘The erection of the St Sophia Cathedral symbolized the agreement reached between the prince and the boyars.’ 15 The underlying process that produced this vital agreement on division of powers may be found in the fact, referred to in the previous chapter, that while the princes were heavily involved in protecting their joint dynastic interests in Kiev, the boyars had local roots, and in Novgorod they were now becoming both prosperous and influential. Towards the end of the eleventh century, the aspirations of the boyars for even more power over their own affairs led to the introduction of a new institution of government, that of posadnik, or a lord mayor of sorts, who in reality was the head of the boyars. In response to this further curtailment of his power and authority, the prince assumed full control over all ship movements on the river Volkhov, and had himself a new residence built south of town, at Gorodishche.16 The latter also would be the place to which Prince Vsevolod retired, when expelled from the city in 1136. While the latter year did represent what Birnbaum calls ‘a definite turning point in the distribution of governmental responsibilities’,17 as noted above it should not be viewed as a truly decisive break. The power and influence of Novgorod’s princes had been waning already before that time. Richard

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Pipes, for example, finds that ‘there are grounds for believing that as early as 1125, if not earlier, they were invested as well as removed by the veche’.18 The normal order of government in the times before 1136 was that Novgorod was ruled by a prince together with the posadnik and a military prefect, known as tysyatskii, who was appointed at the very end of the twelfth century. As both of the latter were nominated by the prince, a new prince would also mean new heads of the local administration. Thus, when a prince departed the posadnik would also resign, and the city would be without government. As the turbulence in Kiev grew worse, the Novgorodians at first took to electing their own interim posadniki, and to demand from the next arriving prince that he should simply confirm their choice. The first instance of this occurring was right after the death of Vladimir Monomakh, in 1126, when according to the Novgorod Chronicle ‘the men of Novgorod did award the office of posadnik unto one of themselves’.19 This interim right for the Novgorodians to elect their own posadnik would be gradually transformed into a permanent right, and it would be extended to cover not only the tysyatskii but also the local bishop, who from 1136 was elevated to Archbishop (vladyka). The latter had normally been consecrated by the Metropolitan in Kiev, before taking up duties in Novgorod. From the mid-twelfth century (the first case being in 1156) he would first be elected from amongst the local clergy, and only then sent to the Metropolitan for consecration. Having thus effectively arrogated to themselves the rights to elect their own civil, military and religious leaders, the people of Novgorod, as a crowning achievement, also began insisting upon written service contracts with their princes. Coming to form the true hallmark of Novgorod’s political system, the latter also would offer a rich source of written documentation about the system. The earliest surviving copies date from 1264 and 1270. Their contents would be repeated in all subsequent treaties, with only minor alterations.20 While the basic reason for the Novgorodians to want to have a prince at all was linked mainly to the need for military defence, there was also a certain judicial component involved; it was thought that an outsider might be better placed to adjudicate serious domestic differences. Surviving treaties show that contracts would be carefully drawn up. The veche went to great lengths in order to prevent the hired princes from exercising any real power, or indeed from settling down inside the city.21 Before a prince could enter into service, a treaty would be concluded both by oath (kissing the cross) and by contract. The basic provision of this agreement was that any functions performed could be performed only in conjunction with the veche, or with relevant officials elected thereby. The veche, on the other hand, was perfectly free to introduce legislation or to conclude treaties on its own.

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The prince had authority only whilst in the city, and he could not dismiss any local official without cause. Symbolically, as noted above, his residence was located outside the city. Economic matters were subject to particularly minute regulation. The prince was precluded from owning land on the territory of Novgorod, he was allowed to participate in foreign commerce only via local merchants, and he was explicitly forbidden from closing the Hansa yard or attempting to appoint to it officials of his own. Princely remuneration for services rendered according to these contracts took two forms. One was the performance of certain legal functions, for which fees could be charged, and the other was the allocation of lands, from which rent could be extracted. The latter, though, was temporary only. At the end of his tenure, the prince would have to surrender all lands that had been at his disposal. Needless to say, these were transformations that could occur only at a time of weakness for the central power. There would also be several subsequent attempts made to abolish the unilaterally declared privileges. With the passage of time, however, the new order was becoming grudgingly accepted. In 1196, Grand Prince Vsevolod of Suzdal reached a permanent agreement with the other princes of Rus, saying that the people of Novgorod would thenceforth be free ‘to take unto themselves a prince wheresoever it might seem unto them good’.22 In addition to this special princely arrangement, and perhaps even more so, it is the powers that were vested in the veche that provide the rationale for calling Novgorod a republic. Membership in this assembly was extended to all adult male citizens, and decisions were taken by acclamation, which at times could result in serious difficulties. There are many surviving stories of opposing parties meeting on the Great Bridge across the Volkhov, where agreement would be reached the hard way. The veche, however, was not the only seat of power. In the thirteenth century, the boyars moved to consolidate their growing power by introducing a separate Sovet gospod, a ‘Council of Lords’ that was designed to function as an executive branch of the legislature. Represented in this body were the highest city officials (posadnik and tysyatskii), past and present, plus the elders (starosti ) of the five city districts, the kontsy. Normally it came to around 50 people.23 Formally, the council’s main function was to prepare matters for discussion in the veche, but given the way in which the latter worked it was clearly amongst the council’s men that real power was exercised. Ready proposals were placed before the veche members, who were supposed to respond by saying yes or no. Most likely, there also was substantial lobbying in the streets beforehand. In modern parlance, one might say that lobby groups and civil servants had the legislators cornered. Finally, and given all that has been said and written about the Novgorod veche, we should note that this was not the only centre of power in the principality. The five city districts, the kontsy, or ‘ends’, had their own vecha,

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The setting

albeit less important than the central one. As had been the practice in Kievan Rus of old, even the minor towns of the realm, the prigorodi, also had their vecha. The latter, though, were effectively ruled by posadniki who were appointed by the central Novgorod veche. By the mid-fourteenth century, this layered structure of popular representation would give rise to separation of one part of the commonwealth – that of Pskov – from the main body of Novgorod. The creation of Pskov as an independent state would be important primarily in offering a rich body of surviving evidence of legal developments. This merits a small digression.

Lord Pskov Pskov and Novgorod had much in common. Both were among the oldest cities in Rus, and both were heavily involved in Baltic commerce. As republican institutions began to evolve, the people of Pskov were fully entitled to participate in deliberations in the Novgorod veche. Formally, this may have been tantamount to equal rights, but in practice there developed a sense that the interests of Pskovian commerce were being disregarded. As a result, demands for independence began to grow. In 1347, those demands were met, in a treaty by which Pskov was recognized as an independent ‘younger brother’ of Novgorod. The future course of ‘Lord Pskov’ (note the absence of ‘Great’) in many ways would resemble that of Novgorod, with the only major exception being a continued religious subordination to the Archbishop. To mark the event, the rights of the new city-state were codified in a special Judicial Charter, which was confirmed in 1397.24 There was a total of 120 articles, believed to have been composed between 1397 and 1467, when the charter was adopted in a revised and expanded form. As an image of society at the time it is important, and as a source of information about the evolution of legal thinking it is even more so. Compared to the Russkaya Pravda, and the Kievan society portrayed therein, Pskov emerges as very different and positively so. The legal system had advanced from the early dyadic state to an at least partly triadic one, where state officials were given an active part in resolving conflicts. Richard Hellie places particular emphasis on the role of documentation, and on the formulation of rules for archives and for the presentation of documentary evidence. He also presents as Pskovian additions a set of rules on property, contract and inheritance law, as well as on the state of the peasantry.25 Kaiser similarly underscores the advances of legal regulation, by noting that whereas ‘homicide and assault occupied much of the contents of the Russkaya Pravda, the Pskov Judicial Charter barely mentions them, concentrating instead upon property law and judicial procedure’.26 Such advances that were recorded in Pskov obviously must have been under way also in Novgorod, the ‘elder brother’, but there the documentary

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evidence is thinner. We do have surviving records of a Novgorod Judicial Charter, assumed to have been equal in length to that of Pskov, but of the actual text only a fragment has survived.27 Without going further into the legal matters, we may note Hellie’s general characterization: ‘Pskov and Novgorod represented the most advanced state of late medieval law in northern Rus. They were its northwestern branch. Simultaneously there developed a northeastern branch, in Moscow. By all appearances, Muscovite law was more ‘primitive’ than that in Pskov and Novgorod.’ 28 The reasons that may explain this widening gulf between Muscovite and Pskovian/Novgorodian jurisprudence are intimately linked with the broader process of socio-economic change. As will be seen in the following, developments in Muscovy under the Mongols in no way, form or shape were such that demands for more sophisticated legal regulation would be generated.

The rise of oligarchy Thus far we have presented an image of Novgorod as something of a marketoriented popular democracy that was firmly built on the rule of law. While not entirely wrong, especially not if viewed in the context of the time and the neighbourhood, this image will nevertheless have to be qualified somewhat. In particular, we must look more carefully at the question of division of powers. The point to be illustrated here concerns the interaction between shifting political realities and such underlying institutional arrangements that had emerged to support Novgorod’s trade with the Hansa. Following the destruction of Kiev, the last vestiges of even formal subordination of Novgorod to the mother-city were ended. In its place there would follow a protracted period of economic dependence on the rulers of the Golden Horde, based at Sarai on the lower Volga. In the case of Muscovy, that dependence would be associated with a full suppression of all remnants of Kievan republican institutions. Not so in Novgorod. The reasons why the Mongols stopped short of attacking Novgorod, choosing instead to veer south for Kiev, may have been chiefly associated with the weather, with spring thaw making marshes impassable.29 To the populace, however, it seemed like a miracle, and it coincided in time with the appointment of Alexander Nevskii as prince of Novgorod. Nevskii managed to negotiate an agreement, by which Novgorod recognized the overlordship of the Mongols and accepted an obligation to pay an annual tribute. In return, the city was spared the fate of so many other towns of Rus that were devastated in these years. Throughout the harsh times of the following ‘Mongol Yoke’, Novgorod would not have to accept any permanent garrison of Mongol troops, nor would any Mongol officials be allowed to enter without being invited.

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Having only just succeeded in warding off this threat from the east, Prince Alexander turned around to face fresh enemies from the west. In 1240 he met and defeated a Swedish army by the river Neva, thus earning his famous surname ‘Nevskii’, and in 1242 he met and defeated the fearsome Teutonic Knights on the ice of Lake Peipus. (The latter also has been the subject of a wonderful film by Eisenstein, titled, simply, Alexander Nevskii.) Strengthened by these achievements, in 1246 Alexander was made grand prince of Novgorod, and in 1252 he also became grand prince of Vladimir. With these appointments, Nevskii had effectively assumed responsibility (with the approval of the Khan) as the nominal head of all Rus lands under Mongol control. Against this background, it is hardly surprising that the rule of Alexander Nevskii would represent a reassertion of princely power in Novgorod. In times of mortal danger the boyars would have been foolish not to rally behind their powerful prince, and once the dangers had been staved off they would logically be in his debt. Of greater importance, however, is the fact that the underlying institutional structure showed such resilience that despite the reassertion of princely power, which could well have brought about serious political conflicts, the city nevertheless succeeded in ‘reaching and maintaining a high plateau of power, wealth and stability’.30 Following the death of Alexander, in 1263, the local elites began to reclaim their powers, and from the beginning of the fourteenth century the principality of Novgorod no longer recognized any rule by princes. There would be formal recognition of outside sovereignty, such as that of Grand Prince Mikhail of Tver, in 1304–19, but the real exercise of power would rest with local political bodies. In essence, the latter meant the increasingly oligarchic boyar elite. Accepting the rule of Alexander Nevskii as an exception, we may return to our previous understanding of gradual erosion of the status of the princes. Over the period from 1095 until 1305, Novgorod had a total of no less than 58 princes, making for an average tenure of no more than 3.6 years. With such rapid turnover, there would not be much realistic chance for outside princes to assert any real power. Thus, Pipes arrives at a plausible conclusion, shared also by some Russian historians, that ‘by 1300, Novgorod no longer had any princes at all and had turned into a democratic republic in the full sense of the word – the only one in Russian history until the 1990s’.31 The subsequent transformation of Novgorod into a fully blown oligarchy took place mainly over the course of the fourteenth century, when the political institutions of the city-state went through a process of steady subdivision. Most importantly, the former office of posadnik was transformed into a form of collective leadership, known as posadnichestvo, which was headed by a chief lord mayor, a stepennyi posadnik. At first being made up of six members, including one from each of the five kontsy together with the lord mayor, a century later it had grown to include dozens of officials.32

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To this image of growing bureaucratization, we may add that the traditional portrayal of the veche as a ‘huge assembly of thousands of city dwellers, merchants and boyars, all standing and voicing their opinions in the best tradition of democracy and openness’, may be something of an idealization. Based on evidence from his own extensive excavations at the site, the Soviet scholar V. L. Yanin arrives at an estimate of a membership in the range of 300–500 people, which then would have been representatives of the wealthiest townsmen.33 His evidence mainly derives from the limited size of the space in which the veche is said to have held its meetings, with delegates being seated, but it also finds support in a German source from 1331, which refers to the governing body of Novgorod as 300 ‘golden belts’. This said, it should be noted that the veche did hold its meetings in full view of the public, so that shouts of censure or acclamation could influence the work of the legislators. Yanin’s views are certainly not without critics, but that we shall leave for others to pursue. The important point is that we have a rather clear image of growing power and influence of the boyars, which does merit talking of a shift from democracy to oligarchy. Adding to the problems, the fourteenth century also was a time of great upheavals. The middle of the century saw the outbreak of the Black Death, and in 1359 followed the death of Khan Berdibek, which led to a couple of decades of serious internal crisis within the Golden Horde. It was this latter development that provided room for the successful advances of Lithuania into the western parts of Rus. To the rulers of Novgorod, the waning power of the Mongols was a mixed blessing. Faced with the same sense of opportunity as the Lithuanians, Muscovy also decided to move against the Horde. In 1380, Grand Prince Dmitrii of Moscow, subsequently to be known as ‘Donskoi’, met and defeated a Mongol army at Kulikovo on the Don. Following this epic victory, which in reality was highly inconclusive, Dmitrii also moved to stem the growing power and influence of Poland– Lithuania. In the winter of 1386–87, less than a year after the personal union of Grand Prince Jogaila and Queen Jadwiga, he attacked and defeated Novgorod. Having been let down by his presumed Lithuanian ally, Lord Great Novgorod had to accept harsh and humiliating conditions, including the payment of a large fine and the installation both of a Muscovite governor, a namestnik, and of Muscovite tax collectors, chernobortsy. This proved to be the beginning of the final period in Novgorodian history, representing a steady downhill slide that would end in a decisive attack by Grand Prince Ivan III in 1471. Before proceeding to look in more detail at that slide, we should note that despite all the problems listed, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries also were a time when Novgorod reached the real peak of its glory. This was the time when the principality, in the words of Birnbaum, would constitute

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The setting

a ‘scene of a pulsating urban life, complex sociopolitical activities and tensions, and a booming, productive economy. It was the hub of a far-flung, largely international trade and the center of a flourishing, many-faceted culture.’ 34 Against this background of distinct economic successes, it may seem somehow ironic that the commercial orientation of Novgorod also harboured the seeds of its own eventual demise. By abstaining from allocating any substantial resources to the maintenance of a strong military force, the city-state would come to be marked by a rather curious combination of economic might and military weakness. In the end, it would prove to be unsustainable.

The end of Novgorod Throughout the centuries of rapid economic growth, the rulers of Novgorod managed their situation of military vulnerability by playing a successful balancing game. By seeking to influence domestic politics in both Muscovy and Lithuania, and by always leaning cautiously away from the stronger of the two, they sought to neutralize their more powerful neighbours. Over time, however, that balancing act became increasingly complicated. The growing might of both Muscovy and Lithuania produced serious internal divisions at home, concerning what might be a proper policy. Vernadsky refers to the increased feuding between factions amongst the boyar class as a struggle between ‘rye-bread eaters’ (pro-Moscow) and ‘wheat-bread eaters’ (pro-Lithuania).35 While the more affluent amongst the boyar elite felt that independence was best protected via closer links with Lithuania, which was a constitutional monarchy of sorts, the poorer classes preferred the security of cheap grain from the east. To the clergy, moreover, the fact that Lithuania had become Catholic made the choice an easy one. In the first century after 1136, the balancing was successful. Then things began to change. The first sign of serious trouble came with the attack by Dmitrii Donskoi, in 1386–87. Then there was a period of relative calm, but in 1456 a renewed conflict with Moscow resulted in a pitched battle for the wealthy town of Rusa. Defeated, the Novgorodians again had to accept harsh conditions. In addition to monetary reparations, the Novgorod veche was prohibited from offering refuge to any political enemies of the grand prince in Moscow. By the latter stipulation, the vital notion of ‘treason’ was entered into the picture. To the Novgorodians, the treaty of 1456 was seen as oppressive, and it would not be long before an influential group of boyars again began to approach the Lithuanians with pleas for help. At the beginning of 1471, following a variety of intrigues, these ambitions resulted in a treaty being signed with Casimir IV, at the time king of Poland and grand prince of Lithuania.

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To Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow this was a clear casus belli. The treaty with Poland–Lithuania was seen as open treason, and the very thought of Novgorod being converted to Catholicism was apparently unbearable. Later in the year Ivan led his Muscovite forces in a short but successful campaign, supported by now independent Pskov, which totally overwhelmed the Novgorod defences. Ignoring his treaty obligation, Casimir failed to offer the promised support.36 In this first round of the showdown, the conditions imposed by Muscovy were still fairly mild, including reparations, a cancellation of the treaty with Casimir IV and a repetition of the main clauses from the 1456 treaty. In essence, Novgorod was forced to renounce Casimir and to recognize Ivan III. In return it was allowed to retain its republican institutions. While these political consequences may appear to have been quite within reason, many parts of Novgorod had been subjected to such devastation by the Muscovite forces that there was much lingering resentment. The following years would witness a long series of disturbances, to be followed by renewed repression. The process reached a climax in 1478, when Novgorod was annexed to Muscovy. Barely two years later, at the beginning of 1480, Ivan III learned that the boyars in Novgorod yet again were conspiring with Casimir and the Mongols, in order to produce a joint attack on Muscovy. Once the latter threat had been foiled, of which we shall have more to say in the following chapter, he turned to implement several years of systematic purges, first of the Novgorod boyars and then of the wealthier merchants. In 1494, the process of suppression was concluded. The Hansa yard was closed, its merchants arrested and their wares confiscated. Thus the window on Europe was slammed shut, and so it would remain for quite some time to come. Muscovy had willingly deprived itself of a source of great income. Reflecting the fact that this was a serious blow also to the Hansa, Pipes quotes from a 1628 meeting of the League where it was stated that ‘all of its great European commercial establishments were based on the trade with Novgorod’.37 Although the Hansa yard would reopen 20 years later, following harsh negotiations, then it would be under new and less market-friendly management. This also was the time when Muscovy began developing an acute sense of xenophobia, leading to sealed borders and to strict regimes being introduced for those foreigners who were admitted into the country. In his previously cited survey of writings by contemporary Western visitors to Muscovy, Poe finds numerous accounts offering fairly much the same image.38 In the words of one seasoned traveller, ‘when foreign ambassadors reach the frontier they must declare their business and then wait until the ruler of the country is notified of their arrival and sends the governor of the province instructions for receiving and entertaining them’. Some envoys would complain of being held at the border for inordinate periods, others even of being ‘held like a prisoner’.

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Once they had been cleared to enter the country, almost all foreigners would find themselves for the duration of their stay under strict supervision: ‘From the moment they crossed the border to the moment they departed the country, most visitors were in the constant company of commissioners, the pristavy.’ The authorities would make their utmost to keep their visitors apart from the local population, in sequestration wherever possible, and there are many accounts of foreigners believing ‘that Muscovites bore a duty to spy for their sovereign’. In their ambitions of preventing any form of unauthorized contacts, the authorities also were assisted by the fact that Orthodox commoners believed visitors to be ‘unclean’, and thus to be avoided: ‘Several envoys claimed that frightened peasants ran away from foreigners and considered contact with them impure. Many more reported that they would not be allowed to enter Russian churches because the Muscovites believed their places of worship would be defiled by foreign contact.’ Although many of these restrictions would be relaxed in the second half of the seventeenth century, the feelings of suspicion, and the corollary needs for control over both foreigners and subjects, would remain as important hallmarks of Russian autocracy. Rounding off the discussion, we should note that while Novgorod did evolve an institutional structure that had much in common with contemporary developments in Western Europe, there was no interest whatsoever in emulating that culture as a whole. Based on extensive reading of medieval chronicles from Pskov and Novgorod, Thomas Noonan argues that the famed Mongol Yoke actually had very little to do with the subsequent isolation of Russia from the West. Given our previous emphasis on the importance of cognitive models, and of the underlying ideology of communal dynastic rights to the Kievan land that was implied by the notion of a ‘patrimony’ from Yaroslav, this argument is worth pursuing. In Noonan’s period of survey, from 1100 until 1350, Novgorod was not under the ‘Yoke’ and hence unconstrained by any Mongol domination. Given that the republic would thus have been free to choose its own foreign orientation, it is interesting to note that the chroniclers showed virtually no interest at all in what was happening in the neighbouring Baltic area, or indeed in countries like Sweden and Denmark. The standard of reference throughout was that of the ‘Russian land’, the russkaya zemlya, which figured so prominently towards the end of our previous chapter. What characterizes that land is Orthodoxy. Noonan finds strong evidence to support a view of the ‘politically disunited Russian lands’ as being nevertheless united by a common religious bond: ‘This sense of religious unity transcended political differences and separated the Russian lands from adjoining non-Orthodox areas.’ From this evidence he proceeds to draw an important conclusion, namely that we should be careful in presuming that Novgorod’s strong focus on

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trade with the West also implied ‘some willingness to borrow and adopt Western ways’. The city’s relations with the Baltic up until 1350 ‘suggest very strongly that it was religion and not the Mongol Yoke which created the divergence between medieval Russia and the West’.39 Against this background, it is not so surprising to learn that the rulers of Novgorod, despite having escaped the ‘Yoke’, also would be suspicious of their foreign visitors, or that merchants operating the Hansa depot would find themselves pretty much isolated from the local population. What does remain to be explained is why within this common mental universe of Orthodoxy and near obsession with the russkaya zemlya, Novgorod and Muscovy would proceed to develop such different institutional structures. Since this is of fundamental importance to our argument at large, it may call for a little parallel illustration.

An Italian parallel As we have presented it above, the real hallmark of Novgorodian development was that of strongly export-led economic growth, supported by a process of market-friendly institutional change, which in turn included republican institution building. Thus defined, it forms a striking parallel to the simultaneous emergence and rise to great prosperity of a number of northern Italian city-states, such as Genoa and Venice. It was the ‘commercial revolution’ that took place there, towards the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries, which laid the foundations for what would come to be known as market economy: ‘Western wealth began with the growth of European trade and commerce which started in the twelfth century in Italy.’ 40 As striking evidence of this fact we may also note that much of the vocabulary used in present-day economic discussions is of Italian origin: summa, saldo, conto, budgetto, banco, firma, credit, etc. The triggering factor was the crusades, and the associated decline of Muslim and Byzantine naval power in the eastern Mediterranean.41 While this served to open markets for highly lucrative long-distance trade from the West, it also presented presumptive traders with considerable problems. While there was much profit to be had, there would also be substantial transaction costs. Once the goods had arrived at the port of destination there would, for example, be problems of verification, handling and contract enforcement. In a study of different institutional responses to this exogenous change, Avner Greif compares two groups of traders that operated in the same environment, trading similar goods with the use of roughly similar naval technology. One was traders from Genoa, the other a group of Jewish traders that had migrated from Baghdad to Tunisia and were known as Maghribi. While both groups would expand their areas of activity to include Constantinople, their ways of doing so would be fundamentally different.

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The Maghribi responded by forming coalitions that involved other traders from the same group. Based wholly on informal systems of mutual information sharing and collective economic punishment, this solution did not involve any formal organization building, nor the entering into contract with traders from without their own group.42 The Genoese, on the other hand, ‘ceased to use the ancient custom of entering contracts by a handshake and developed an extensive legal system for registration and enforcement of contracts’.43 Customary law was codified, permanent courts were established and bills of lading were introduced. Above all, the city assumed responsibility to act as a formal enforcement organization, designed to make the threat of collective retaliation credible: ‘After the authorities had declared that a certain area was a devetum, any merchant found there was subject to legal prosecution.’ 44 In the coming two to three centuries northern Italy would develop rapidly and succeed in amassing great wealth. Meanwhile, the Maghribi would vanish from the scene altogether. Though unwilling to draw any firm conclusions, Greif indicates that their respective degrees of success may have been determined by the collectivist focus on norms versus the individualist focus on rules. He also finds it ‘intriguing’ that while the Maghribi solution resembles that of many present-day developing nations, that of Genoa forms a model for the developed West.45 Since the issue of collectivist norms and economic success has such obvious relevance to the case of Russia, we shall have reason to return to that issue in subsequent chapters. Here we shall proceed on the Genoese track, and note that in order for the Italians to successfully respond to the challenge that was implied by the opening up of long-distance trade, they also needed to have ‘a political system that could enable them to cooperate in fostering economic growth’.46 Returning to our previous use of the analogy of the stationary bandit, we may proceed in Mancur Olson’s tracks and note what ‘almost everyone agrees’, namely that ‘whatever the form of government, economic progress tends to occur in societies in which there are clear incentives to produce, invest, and engage in mutually advantageous trade’. The problem lies in determining under what conditions those in power will have ‘an incentive to use their power constructively’.47 The implication is that our stationary bandit must not rest content with optimizing his rate of extraction over time. He must also come to the realization, spelled out in Olson’s notion of ‘encompassing interest’, that he stands to gain personally from providing such public goods that will enhance production possibilities on the territory under his control. By far the best illustration is that of establishing and upholding the rule of law. This was the real key to the successes of the Italians, and it was something that emerged spontaneously, in response to the needs of the merchants. In another study, Greif concludes that ‘the history of the Italian city-states of the late medieval period is that of endogenous emergence of political systems

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explicitly aimed at advancement of the economic interests of those who established them’.48 This also is where we are approaching matters of great relevance to our Novgorodian case. The cases chosen by Greif are Venice and Genoa, which were by far the most successful of the Italian city-states of the time. Both were ruled by oligarchies, which elected political leaders who were subject to the law. Neither had any constitution or even formalized separation of powers, being guided instead by customs and precedents. Both also were dominated by clans, having produced a long history of weak power and political instability. The solution that was found by Genoa was to introduce an outside official, known as podesta`, or simply ‘power’. Charged with military, judiciary and administrative functions, he would be on contract for a year and would receive his payment ex post. The latter was important in guaranteeing that he would not be corruptible by factions amongst the clans. Instead, ‘he could credibly be impartial and retaliate against people who broke the law, rather than against a faction as a whole’.49 The Venetians chose a different approach. Retaining their old ruling Doge, they instead proceeded to create such detailed restrictions on his exercise of power that the incentives to warring clans of capturing the Dogeship could be radically curtailed. With no spoils to redistribute, their focus instead would be aimed at supporting this important office. In the social sciences, notably so in the literature on constitutional choice, the role of the state as a third party enforcer of contracts and property rights has attracted substantial interest. Particular importance has been attached to the ability of the ruler, or the government, to make a credible commitment to fulfilling this important task, a challenge that takes us into a variety of constitutional techniques of binding. What is shown by the Italian examples is that powerful mercantile interests may serve to produce sustainable solutions, even under conditions of oligarchic rule: ‘The political organizations of Genoa and Venice that crystallized during the twelfth century – the podesteria and the Dogeship – were endogenous, self-enforcing organizations.’ 50 Placing these examples into a much broader perspective, we may look at evidence produced by J. Bradford De Long and Andrei Shleifer on European city growth before the industrial revolution. Based on regression analysis of the links between urban growth and the type of ruler in Western Europe from 1050 until 1800, they conclude that ‘strong princely rule is systematically associated with retarded urban commerce’.51 Returning now to look at the case of Novgorod, we may identify some striking resemblances. As was the case in Venice and Genoa, we have a prehistory of feuding clans that produced weak power and instability. We have an exogenous change, in the form of foreign commerce with the Hansa, and we have an endogenous emergence of organizational responses that constitute a mix of the Italian ones.

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Like the Genoese, the Novgorodians chose to employ an outside prince to serve on short-term contract. Like the Venetians, they laid down detailed restrictions to prevent his office from becoming an attractive target for capture by rivalling clans. Their achievement was a legal system that was marked by full equality before the law. City magistrates were directed by a judicial charter to ‘dispense equal justice to all, be he boyar, middle class burgher, or a lower rank burgher’.52 Perhaps most importantly, the rulers of Novgorod managed to introduce what De Long and Shleifer hold up as the real key to economic success, namely the security of property. In stark contrast to their Muscovite fellows, Novgorod merchants would not have to worry about ‘the possibility of arrest, ruin or execution at the command of the ruling prince or the possibility of ruinous taxation’.53 The strength of their institutional arrangements may also be reflected in the fact that where the Genoese needed an outsider to maintain the balance between the clans, the Novgorodians would gradually wean themselves off such needs and assume on their own the provision of vital public goods such as impartial law enforcement. Since both Novgorod and Muscovy had their roots in the commercial federation that was Kievan Rus, both also may be said to have had the same vaguely defined initial conditions. Yet their paths would be so very different. In the former case, the local rulers succeeded in maintaining the commercial culture, and in replacing the destabilizing rota system with a set of republican institutions that were rooted in the rule of law. In the latter, they would opt for the construction of a warrior state rather than a trading state. The resulting needs for resource extraction, rather than wealth creation, under conditions of severe natural constraints, would have important consequences for the formation of the state as a whole. Lands that fell under Muscovite control were incorporated into an increasingly autocratic system that would effectively remain in place until the early twentieth century, when it was replaced by a communist dictatorship. It would be marked both by strong princely rule, and by a policy of expropriation of land that was coupled with forced deportations (vyvody). In the following chapters it will be argued that the main issue at stake here concerns not only property rights, but also individual rights in a more general perspective. On this count, Pipes even goes so far as to say that ‘the city-state of Novgorod, which at its height in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries encompassed most of Northern Russia, granted its citizens rights which equaled and in some respects even surpassed those enjoyed by contemporary Western Europeans’.54 Recognizing that the rise of Muscovy would not have been possible without the fall of Novgorod, much as the formation of a Russian empire would not have been possible without Ukraine, we are led to ask if the destruction of Novgorod really was a forgone conclusion.

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Many historians have tended to accept the eventual fate of Novgorod as inevitable, and perhaps that is the correct interpretation. Wedged in between the increasingly powerful principalities of Muscovy and Poland–Lithuania, it may very well have been only a question of time before it would have to succumb. Adding weight to this argument, we may also recall from above that by the time when Novgorod was overwhelmed by Muscovy, her republican institutions had largely degenerated into a ruling oligarchy, and feuding within the elite had served to weaken the state. While all of this is certainly both true and relevant, we are still left with the fact that right up to the annexation by Muscovy, Novgorod did feature a vibrant economy and a flow of foreign trade that was of great importance to the Hansa. Nor should the increasing power of the oligarchy be taken as a sign of roads ahead being closed. The Italian cases illustrate that merchant-friendly oligarchy whilst being highly conducive to economic success at the very least did not preclude the eventual establishment of democracy. It is particularly relevant to note that De Long and Shleifer included in their category of ‘good’ government not only constitutionally limited government, but also merchant-ruled city-states. Perhaps it thus is the case that despite Novgorod’s worsening security situation we should place more emphasis on the fact that other institutions of fundamental importance, such as those that supported commerce, demonstrated surprising resilience. The simple fact, for example, that following his annexation of Novgorod, Grand Prince Ivan III would undertake sweeping confiscations of land and mass deportations of the Novgorodian elite, indicates the presence of institutions that were perceived by Muscovy as vital threats to its insistence on autocracy and on keeping its western borders sealed.55 Our main hypothesis is that the commercial interests of the Novgorod boyars served to produce institutional change that went much further than in old Kievan Rus. Perhaps most importantly, with the steady growth of markets, subsistence agriculture would be replaced by cash cropping and by the establishment of large estates that were geared into hunting and trapping.56 Both of the latter were sensible adaptations to adverse natural conditions. As a whole, the natural environment of Novgorod was unfavourable to the pursuit of agriculture. The bulk of the land was made up of lakes and marshes, with only about 10 per cent being suitable for cultivation. Soils, moreover, were of inferior quality and the growing season was short. It was thus logical to rely on imports of food from the central parts of Russia. As the boyars began developing their large estates, there also followed demands for a system of property rights in land, making it possible even for urban merchants to set themselves up as private farmers. On the eve of the conquest, some 60 per cent of the land was private property, the rest

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being divided between Church and state. The fact that even women were entitled to hold property, in an otherwise distinctly patriarchal environment, provides an important further sign of sophistication.57 Against this background, one is tempted to speculate that maybe Novgorod’s fate could have been averted. Perhaps the political strategy that it pursued was one that really could have won out, had it only had a little help from its friends. We might note here what Charles Halperin has to say about the common image of Novgorod’s valiant stance against the Golden Horde, as being often ‘idealized and badly distorted, its reputation for staunch resistance resting on an uncritical interpretation of a single episode, the census under Alexander Nevskii’.58 Instead of viewing Novgorod as a bastion that held out against overwhelming odds, we might perhaps be better off following his insistence that on the eve of the Mongol conquest, ‘Novgorod had already perfected the strategy for maximizing its independence that it would use with modifications throughout the Mongol period.’ 59 Similarly, we might accept Birnbaum’s emphasis on ‘viewing the statecraft practiced by the political leadership of the republic, no matter how corrupt, as a measure of the level of civic awareness and civilization in general that Novgorod had attained by that time’.60 Viewed from this perspective, the image of political balancing that has been presented above may need to be modified somewhat. Although it is true that Novgorod was wedged in between two mutually hostile powers, it was not quite a position of neutrality, or even of true balance. In reality it was Muscovy that held the upper hand throughout. With few exceptions, the Novgorodians chose to elect as their princes those who at the same time were also serving as grand prince of Moscow. The pro-Lithuanian faction that certainly did exist in Novgorod should thus be seen more as an opposition movement than as a real alternative. The very thought, for example, of standing up to Alexander Nevskii when he was on good terms with the Golden Horde would have been tantamount to suicide. Thus we can accept the peaceful taking of a census, referred to above, as a sign that the Mongol census takers were protected by Nevskii, who in turn was accommodated by the Novgorodians. After all, as Halperin puts it, ‘If there had been opposition in Novgorod the Tatars would have sent an army, not civilian headcounter.’ 61 Maybe it was the case that skills developed over more than two centuries in dealing with feuding princes within the Kievan rotation scheme were easily transposed to deal with the similarly feuding princes of northern Rus, albeit the latter game would be complicated by another layer of intrigues in relation to the new masters at Sarai. In line with this argument, we should not be surprised to learn that the Novgorod veche had decided already in 1335 to officially acknowledge the grand prince of Moscow as the leader of all Rus, and as a defender against

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Lithuanian intrusions, or that in 1346 the Novgorodians accepted him as their own suzerain prince.62 The defeat in 1387 certainly must have added further burdens, but perhaps it was not really that decisive. We may round off the argument by listening to the words of Birnbaum, addressing the question of whether the 1478 annexation of Novgorod by Muscovy served to fundamentally change the course of Russian history. Recognizing all the internal problems that have been described above, he maintains that the actual outcome was ‘by no means the only conceivable’. Had the Novgorodians ‘been able to defeat Ivan III on the banks of the Shelon River in 1471, perhaps with the help of their Polish–Lithuanian ally, the course of Russian history may well have been entirely different’.63 This certainly is not the place to pursue such counterfactual speculations, but the suggestion does serve to illustrate one crucially important point, namely the vast institutional differences that had emerged between Novgorod and Muscovy. At the time of the final showdown it would have made little sense indeed to speculate about the potential for Muscovite democracy and market economy, not to mention the rule of law. Returning again to the study by De Long and Shleifer, we may find conclusions drawn that point eerily in the direction of what will be said in the following about Muscovy. Ruling princes ‘saw the legal order as an instrument of control rather than as a constraint on their actions’. They lived in ‘parasite cities’, which were ‘centers of neither trade nor urban industry but instead the homes of bureaucrats and the favored dwelling places of landlords’. And under their rule, property was always legally insecure: ‘Subjects do not have rights; they have privileges, which endure for only as long as the prince wishes.’ 64 Recalling what was said above about keeping score in the wrong game, we may note that the formation of Muscovy as a centralized state under strong princely rule may not have been the best thing that could happen to the Russians: ‘The rise of an absolutist government and the establishment of princely authority are, from a perspective that values economic growth, events to be mourned and not celebrated.’ 65 With these observations, we shall close our account of the general setting out of which Muscovy emerged. What we have sought to accomplish, with the help of some counterfactual speculation, is to highlight what will be presented in the following as the really pivotal question. Seeking to understand what it was that made Muscovy so different, we shall be led to ask what it was that effectively precluded its princes from joining forces with Novgorod in building a successful commercial republic based on the rule of law. To that endeavour we shall now turn.

Part III

The lock-in

4

Lords of all Rus

There are a good many different reasons to be impressed by the emergence and rise to both wealth and power of Muscovy. Some we have touched on above. Others will be added in the following. Whilst we are busy writing the history of these achievements we must not, however, forget our previous emphasis on the price that would have to be paid. The core of our argument will be that the formation of Muscovy, and the associated introduction of strong princely rule, represents the starting point for a several centuries’ long process of negative path dependence, defined here as a persistent inability to undertake such reforms that the country’s economic potential could have been fully realized. Quite in line with the previously cited findings of De Long and Shleifer, the Muscovite court would proceed to evolve a political system that acted as a serious drag on urban growth and thus on the emergence of such institutions that might have stimulated sustained economic growth. As Mancur Olson would have put it, the chosen economic model was far from market-friendly and the ambitions of government were not of the ‘market-augmenting’ kind. Since the study of failure really ought to be more informative than that of success, the Russian example holds great promise of advancing our understanding of the theories of path dependence, and of institutional change in a more general perspective. So, to repeat our question from the end of the previous chapter, what was it that set Muscovy on its negative path? In traditional Russian historiography, the harshness of nature has figured prominently as an explanation of the country’s special path. One example is James Billington’s The Icon and the Axe, which places heavy emphasis on the role of nature, and on the forest in particular, in shaping Russian cultural history.1 Another is Richard Pipes’s Russia under the Old Regime, which devotes its first chapter to the consequences for the early Russians of having to deal with an inhospitable natural environment.2 Another formative factor, which has attracted even greater attention, is that of religious Orthodoxy. The fact that Kievan Rus adopted Christianity from Byzantium, rather than from Rome, has been seen as the root cause of a great many of the fundamental traits that have tended to set Orthodox Russia apart from Catholic, and later also Protestant, Western Europe.

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Both Billington and Pipes deal extensively and fascinatingly with such influences, and there are plenty of other sources, too numerous to even mention here, which do the same, thus reflecting the importance of the topic. While there is much to be said for such approaches to the problems of Russian specificity, it remains a fact that they can never tell more than part of the story. There are many other places in the world – notably so Canada – where nature is just as harsh as it is in Russia, and there are many other cultures that have embraced Orthodoxy, including that of Greece, the cradle of democracy. If these are indeed to be seen as formative factors in the emergence of the institutional matrix of Muscovy, it thus follows that something more must be added, something that would be not only necessary but also sufficient for specificity to emerge. Below it will be argued that it was a peculiar confluence of two sets of events that served to produce the institutional lock-in. One was a set of formal rules and organizational structures that emerged in response to conditions prevailing in the region where Muscovy took shape. The other was a set of informal norms that evolved to rationalize and support those organizational choices. With respect to the sources of influence for these two sets of events, we shall follow Donald Ostrowski’s suggestion that the Muscovites borrowed a set of rules from the Mongols and a set of norms from the Byzantines: ‘My hypothesis in this book is that the secular administration was heavily Mongol influenced and the ecclesiastical administration was heavily Byzantine influenced.’ 3 Although this will take us into the dangerous minefields that surround questions of Mongol influence on Russia, it will also bring an important benefit. It will serve to highlight what lies at the core of our institutional approach, namely vital patterns of interaction between rules that may be imposed by decree and norms that are embedded in culture and may change or be changed only gradually. It will be argued below that the main part of the ‘something more’ that served to produce the institutional lock-in resides in the formulation of what Billington has referred to as ‘Muscovite ideology’.4 This construct will be understood below as a set of values and beliefs that would prove inimical inter alia to emulating the commercial culture that was so characteristic of Novgorod. In our following presentation it will be argued that this ideology did not emerge in a vacuum. On the contrary, it was in important respects to be deliberately produced by the Muscovite clergy, as a sort of counter-ideology to Mongol rule. In contrast to the latter, moreover, it would be long-lasting indeed. We shall begin here by looking at the emergence of those formal rules and organizational structures that were to form the basis of the Muscovite system, and at the possible influence of the Mongols on that process. The following

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chapter will then proceed to deal with Orthodoxy, and with the formulation of the ‘Muscovite ideology’. In Chapter 6, these features will be combined into a more theoretical framework, seeking to define and evaluate what Pipes refers to, in his above-cited book, as the ‘patrimonial state’. First of all, however, we shall look at the consequences for the people of southern Rus of being relocated from Kiev. Where the rulers of Novgorod could proceed to build their independent republic simply by gradually disengaging from Kiev, those who would build Muscovy had to do so in a situation where the point of gravity in Rus was being gradually shifted from the south to the northeast. As this process involved shifting not only the seat of political power but also the density of the population, we are faced here not with evolution but with a vastly more complicated process of transformation. It was in this context that constraints implied by the harshness of nature, and by the resultant problems of poverty, would become operational and thus also acquire formative influence.

Consequences of relocation Given our previous reservations about the notion of a ‘transition’ from Kiev to Muscovy, the process must be seen as rather drawn out, driven in the main by the decline and growing insecurity of the heartlands of old Kievan Rus. Being locked into a process of steady internal weakening, due mainly to the logic of the rota system, the Kievans were ill prepared to deal with their next ordeal, the arrival of the Polovtsians, yet another tribe of barbarians storming in from the east. During the better part of both the eleventh and the twelfth centuries, fierce struggles were being waged against these new arrivals, who in a 1096 raid actually managed to penetrate into the very streets of Kiev. Noting that many of the battles fought would form the stuff for subsequent tales of heroic deeds, we may guess that they also had a grim side of relentless destruction. An immediate consequence was that the Slavs were forced to retreat from whatever inroads they had made into the steppe, where arable lands fell out of cultivation and pastures were turned over to wild animals. Beginning with the middle of the twelfth century, a rapid debasement of the currency also reflected that vitally important trade routes to Byzantium were being disrupted. To the population at large, flight was increasingly seen as the only way to escape hardship – or being carried off into slavery. The exodus took two main directions. One stream led towards the west, back to the Western Bug and the Vistula area from whence the Eastern Slavs once had come. Another went to the northeast, towards the Volga-Oka area where colonization had been ongoing for some time, albeit on a small scale, as settlers moved out from Novgorod and Smolensk.

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The actual magnitude of this shift of population has been the subject of some debate. Vasilii Kluchevsky characterizes the dual outflow of population from the heartlands of Kievan Rus as ‘the central fact distinguishing the beginning of the second principal period of our history, just as the beginning of the preceding period was distinguished by a movement of Eastern Slavdom from the Carpathians towards the Dniepr’.5 To others, the very idea of ‘an almost wholesale migration of the population of the middle Dniepr region to the upper Volga’ has been seen as ‘unacceptable’.6 What actually may have been the case cannot be determined. Available demographic data from the period simply offer too little in the way of hard evidence.7 We shall thus have to let the matter be as it may. Even if it did not result in wholesale depopulation, there can be little doubt that a substantial movement of people did take place, and that the centre of gravity in the land of Rus was thus beginning to shift.8 As a result, the building of Muscovy would have to proceed under external conditions that were considerably more difficult to master. Above all, the Slavs who migrated north would have to cope with a natural environment that was seriously hostile to any plans for continued sedentary agriculture. The indigenous peoples of that region had been well adjusted to their natural environment, pursuing agriculture only as a supplementary occupation. The failure of the future Russians to follow their example would have serious consequences: ‘Their heavy reliance on farming under adverse natural conditions is perhaps the single most basic cause of the problems underlying Russian history.’ 9 Another important dimension of the shift towards the northeast concerns the location of the new centre of power. At the time when Kiev was entering into its process of terminal decline, the Volga-Oka region was specked by a multitude of minor principalities, amongst which Rostov, Suzdal and Vladimir were the more prominent. Moscow still had not been really heard of. The city gets its first mention in available sources in 1147, at the time being little more than an insignificant stop on the road between Vladimir and Kiev. A good many observers have expressed surprise at the subsequent rise to such prominence of precisely this remote little ‘wooden settlement built along a tributary of the Volga, with shabby walls not even made of oak’.10 Part of the explanation may be linked to the shrewd policies of its princes, but that obviously cannot be the whole story.11 Far more important was its strategic position in the system of waterways, which not only brought revenue from trade. Being located in what Kluchevsky refers to as ‘the middle’, Moscow would have two additional advantages. It would be the first stop on the road of migration from the declining southern parts of Rus, and it would be placed behind the larger principalities to the north and east, which offered protection from attacks by a variety of enemies. Both of these latter factors contributed to a rapid influx of population, which in turn brought increasing tax revenues for the princes.12

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In addition to such economic benefits, the geographical position of Moscow, and thus of Muscovy as a whole, also would have important implications for military security. At first, the absence of physical barriers to expansion would prove to be a major asset, allowing Muscovy to undergo, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, an unparalleled territorial expansion. With that expansion of the realm, however, also followed increasing problems in providing security against raids by hostile tribes. We may recall here from Chapter 2 above what Kluchevsky had to say about the sacrifices involved in the annual dispatch, in the sixteenth century, of ‘tens of thousands of Moscow’s best warriors’13 to safeguard the country’s southern frontier. With the needs to mobilize ever larger military forces to deal with ‘the crafty robbers of the desert’14 also followed a need to finance the upkeep of such forces. In a situation of general poverty, this would act not only as a serious drain on the resources of the state. Even more importantly, it would influence its institutional development. The latter problem was touched upon briefly in the previous chapter, where we pointed at a contrast between Novgorod’s evolution into a successful trading state and Muscovy’s path towards a warrior state. Here we shall pursue that same line of argument. Choosing to deal with the threats from the nomads of the steppe by way of expansion, Muscovy would come to be locked into a spiral of ever growing needs for outlays on the military: ‘At all stages, vulnerability and poverty have required devoting a large proportion of the wealth of land and population to the provision of armed forces and to the creation of a cumbersome official class for administration and the mobilization of resources.’ 15 These needs, moreover, would have to be met in a situation that was marked by two serious complications. While the disruption of trade with Byzantium placed the rulers of Muscovy in a situation of chronic shortages of money,16 the harshness of the natural environment placed serious limits on the abilities of the peasantry to engage in surplus production. The solution, as we shall see below, would be to offer military land grants, representing a further development of the previously mentioned system of kormlenie. The general poverty of the land also led to internal security problems, in the sense that in the first centuries of development in northeastern Rus none of the princes would be able to amass sufficient resources in order to conquer and dominate the others. Failing this, relations between the multitude of small principalities that made up early Muscovy instead would be marked by constant feuding. For those who would transform that region into an empire, all of these were problems that had to be addressed. High on the agenda was the need to consolidate the land. That task, moreover, would be approached within a broader framework of being totally absorbed by the thought of resurrecting the ‘patrimony of Yaroslav’, i.e. of reconstituting the whole of old Kievan

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Rus under one leader. The old Kievan dream of the russkaya zemlya, the ‘Russian land’, thus was coming back to haunt the Muscovites. The rulers of Muscovy would eventually be successful in all of their ambitions. They would succeed in ‘gathering the lands’ of Rus, in defeating both Lithuania and the Mongols, and in transforming initial poverty into striking wealth. By the mid-fifteenth century, Moscow probably was one of the largest cities in Europe, and its architectural splendour impressed all visitors.17 Reaching that elevated position would, however, be a rather drawn-out affair. As so often is the case, things would get worse before they could get better.

The emergence of appanage Russia In the previous chapter, we saw how Novgorod’s evolution out of Kievan Rus was associated with a gradual opting out of the rota system and with the introduction instead of a set of republican institutions. Although the eventual outcome in the case of Muscovy would be autocracy, the path leading there would be a crooked one, proceeding via a rather remarkable intermediate stage that would come to be known as the ‘appanage’ system. As a starting point for this path we may recall the previously mentioned events of 1169, when a raid by a collection of princes from the north, led by Andrei Bogolyubskii of Rostov-Suzdal, sacked Kiev and removed from the mother-city the grand princely title. The subsequent rise to prominence of Bogolyubskii’s own principality also led to an important transformation in status. Dropping out of the ‘rota’ system, it acquired instead the character of votchina, of personal, inalienable property of his princely family. Adding further fuel to the fire, Bogolyubskii also broke with another old tradition of newly appointed princes, namely that of appointing close relatives as posadniki of the junior towns in his province. Having first driven his brothers into exile, he retired to his childhood home in provincial Vladimir. This was a move that may well have been calculated to alienate the elites in places like Rostov and Suzdal, at the time the prominent towns of the principality. Unsurprisingly, his behaviour earned him many enemies, resenting his ambition to become what the chronicle refers to as an ‘autocrat over all the land of Suzdal’.18 Following Bogolyubskii’s assassination, his principality was thrown back to the familiar old pattern of Kievan feuding. The cause of the feud was a classic genealogical dispute between younger uncles and older nephews, where the elites of Rostov and Suzdal backed the latter while those of Vladimir preferred the former.19 The winner in these struggles was Vsevolod III, who would rule Suzdal from 1176 until 1212. By the time of his death, the federation of RostovSuzdal, now with Vladimir as its capital city, had grown from a ‘remote

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barbaric region of the north’,20 to assume the leading position in all of Rus. Even more importantly, it had acquired the status of an independent, heritable province. This was the first really decisive blow against the Kievan rota system as a whole. After the death of Vsevolod, which occurred shortly before the arrival of the Mongols, the principality reverted to the old system of lateral succession. Up until the last quarter of the thirteenth century brother would follow brother on the grand princely throne in Vladimir. Behind this fac¸ade of reversal, however, crucially important changes were under way. From the common votchina, minor provinces were being carved out, to become the separate and permanent property of individual princes. In the Kievan period, when the ruling princes were focused mainly on commerce and never really developed any sense of property in specific territories, the various districts of the land were known as volosti or nadyelky, both of which may be translated as ‘allotments’, reflecting the temporary nature of tenure. In the northeast, the growing focus on extraction of land rent would cause this to change. The new minor provinces that were being formed there during the early thirteenth century instead came to be known as udely, or ‘appanages’. Since that term normally refers to land or other sources of revenue being set aside by a ruler for the upkeep of his children, what we have here is something of a revealing misnomer. In a limited sense, the growing practice of carving out appanages did represent the emergence of at least some idea of private property rights. More importantly, however, it took place within a larger framework where the appanage princes were being treated as dependants, as close relatives or even as children of the grand prince. As we shall see below, that essentially would also be the view of the latter. The initial impact of this change in landholding custom was that the previous circulation of princes between principalities came to a halt. As princes were becoming stationary, they also began assuming rights to determine, in their wills, how their patrimony should be divided between heirs. This in turn would lead to a transformation in the understanding of votchina. What had once been accepted as common dynastic property could now be passed on vertically within proprietary families. The practical implications for the stability of the political order would be far reaching. In extreme cases, some princely families could actually become extinct. In the absence of common protection for all members of the dynasty, it would be up to each family to fend for itself. Even in the more general case, however, the new order would be highly detrimental. After the death of Vsevolod, his votchina was subjected to an increasing number of subdivisions. Piece by piece appanage lands were carved out of the common body, and the principality entered a phase of internal divisions that were even more disruptive than the preceding feuding in Kiev.

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In the latter case, the number of territories had been kept proportional to the number of eligible adult princes (and some minors). With the end of the rota system, there was no outer limit to subdivision. As the individual appanages grew smaller and smaller, the wealth and stature of the princes was correspondingly reduced. Compounding the problem, the end of the rota system also brought an end to the sense of common interests amongst the princely families. While the Kievan period had certainly been marked by its share of feuding and backstabbing, it had all taken place within the general framework of common rights to rule the lands. Now that sense of communality was dissipating. As time passed, the once proud and powerful sovereigns of well-defined principalities were reduced to impoverished landlords with scattered holdings. Finding little if any grounds on which to wield power over others, they increasingly retired into their own little worlds, not caring much for what might be called the public good. The typical appanage prince no longer had much influence outside his own homestead; he was a gosudar, a lord of the manor, only in relation to his slaves. Given all the negative consequences that would follow from this new system of landholding, it is important to maintain our previous focus on rational actions. Given the circumstances, there were at least two good rational reasons, both suggested by Kluchevsky, which may help explain why it came into being. Beginning with the natural environment, we may note that settlement in old Kievan Rus was concentrated to a fairly compact area dominated by a single great river basin, that of the Dniepr. Northeastern Rus by contrast was made up of extensive swamps and a multitude of minor rivers and streams, which produced a dispersal of settlement into numerous and largely unconnected strips of dry land. While the Kievan area had been marked by a variety of close relations, which bound the various settlements together and thus greatly facilitated the establishment of central power, in the northeast the geography was simply tailor-made for division and subdivision. It produced a system where the appanage princes had little contact, indeed little possibility of contact with each other: ‘This was the geographical basis of the appanage system – a basis which helped less to strengthen the new order of life than to destroy the old one.’ 21 The second explanation concerns the legitimacy of the princes and is perhaps a bit less obvious, though still quite compelling. If the natural environment provided the format for the new order, it was colonization that provided the idea. When the Kievan state emerged, the princes entered into a ready-made social order where their power was derived from the provision of defence and the maintenance of order. They could not claim to be creators or founders. One might say that the community had come before the prince.

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In the northeast the situation was reversed. Here the appanage princes were allocated virgin lands, which they proceeded to clear and settle with peasants arriving from the outside. It seems reasonable to assume that they would look upon those lands as their own creations, thus promoting a distinct sense of personal property: ‘The idea of a prince as the personal owner of his appanage was the juridical outcome of his significance as its first settler and organizer.’ 22 Commenting on these arguments, Pipes notes that the princes of the northeast enjoyed a degree of power and prestige that their counterparts in Novgorod and Lithuania could never aspire to. From our previous perspective of cognitive models, the outcome of this new form of princely power and self-image must be seen as truly important: ‘A kind of proprietary attitude thus surfaced on the northeastern frontier. Penetrating all the institutions of political authority it gave them a character fundamentally different from that found in any other part of Russia, or, for that matter, Europe as a whole.’ 23

Working with the Mongols It was under such conditions of poverty and increasing fragmentation, coupled with growing princely ambitions of being lords over their own private domains, that the Mongols suddenly arrived on the scene. Proceeding to introduce a centralized system of extracting tribute and of demanding total obedience, they would cause a fundamental transformation in the formal rules of the game.24 Their arrival was both sudden and devastating. Although the people of Rus had long experience of dealing with the peoples of the steppe, they had no way of anticipating what these new masters-to-be would be capable of. In a few short years, the majority of Rus was subdued, and its history shifted onto a different track. In the following, we shall look at a number of important processes that were to unfold during the time of Mongol domination. Above all, we shall note that the formation of a system of Russian autocracy, or samoderzhave, would proceed apace with a growing practice of close princely interaction with the Mongols. Few if any problems in Russian historiography have given rise to such heated debate as the question of the ‘Mongol Yoke’, or the tatarskoe igo, as it is known in Russian. Given the paucity of available sources, it does not seem likely that consensus will be reached any time soon, if ever.25 Such being the case, this hardly is the place to even summarize the host of scholarly arguments that have been fielded over the past couple of centuries.26 The importance of the matter does, however, call for us at the very least to outline a few overall patterns that will serve as background for the following discussion.

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The Mongol Yoke By far the most controversial aspect of the ‘Yoke’ has concerned the degree to which the princes of Rus cooperated with and were influenced by the Mongols. Here the only really solid evidence is that which is embedded in the Russian language. Noting, for example, a total absence of Mongol words in all matters dealing with agriculture tells us that there was no interaction at all in this field. As long as they received their taxes and other dues, the khans would care little about peasant affairs amongst the Rus. In sharp contrast, there is a wealth of borrowed Mongol words in everyday matters that have to do with money and trade. To mention but a few examples, commonly used words like dengi (‘money’), tamozhnya (‘customs’) and kaznachei (‘treasury’) all have Mongol roots: denga, tamga, kazna.27 Noting this unquestionable linguistic evidence, we may perhaps conclude that the Muscovites did learn from the Mongols such traits that are normally associated with the Levantine way of doing business: dishonesty and an adversarial attitude to transactions, coupled with the absence of any needs for outside enforcement or the dissemination of information.28 (Both of the latter, as we know, were crucial in the evolution of market economy in Western Europe.) An even more controversial dimension is that of political culture in general, and the practice of extreme cruelty in particular. Here we must note that many Russian commentators stand accused of being less than impartial. There has been a strong tendency to vilify the new masters, and to externalize essentially Russian problems by shifting the blame. In the words of Charles Halperin, one of the leading Western authorities on the Mongols in Russia, the very mention of ‘the Tatar Yoke’ tends to conjure up ‘images of barbaric Asiatic nomads engaged in cruel oppression and parasitic exploitation. . . . The consensus of traditional Russian historiography, both Imperial and Soviet, is entirely consistent with this simplistic vision.’ 29 Originally introduced by the old clerical chroniclers, whose Christian beliefs prompted them towards presenting the Muslim Mongols in a negative light, this negative bias had a resurgence under Catherine the Great. To enlightened thinkers of her time it was convenient to blame the Tatars, as the Mongols are known in Russian, for some of the less desirable aspects of their own history. While many Russian historians will deny that there was any influence at all from the Mongols, this should not be taken as tantamount to arguing that there was no impact. On the contrary, it has been often underlined that the imposition of Pax Mongolica may actually have prevented the feuding princes of Rus from completely annihilating both each other and their land. To mention but one example, the prominent Russian nineteenth-century historian N. M. Karamzin frankly concludes that ‘Moscow, in fact, owes its greatness to the khans’.30

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No matter what we may choose to think about various forms of more sinister cultural influences, it is a fact that there did evolve between the khans and the princes of Rus a practice of close everyday cooperation. Whether within this framework there also was cultural borrowing, such that the Rus learned important Mongol practices, has been a more contentious issue. While few would doubt that they did take over the highly efficient Mongol postal service, the yam, there is less agreement when it comes to things like administrative and military affairs. Perhaps the issue may be resolved by simply applying common sense, as suggested by Ostrowski. We know that the Mongol army was ‘the mightiest war machine of its time’. Assuming that the military leaders of Muscovy failed to borrow from their ‘superior strategies, tactics, and weaponry’ would make them appear ‘not only ignorant but obstinate’. Similarly, we know that the Mongol empire was ‘the largest and most efficiently run empire of the time’. Arguing that the Muscovites did not copy their administrative techniques ‘tends to denigrate their abilities (as though they were incapable of doing so)’.31 Perhaps such simple logic will not convince all of the experts in the field, but for the moment we shall let that issue rest. What is important for our purpose is the fact that the actual practice of cooperation, be it forced or voluntary, did represent a major transformation in the strategic behaviour of the princes of Rus. As will be argued below, this transformation in turn must have been accompanied by a transformation of norms. Pipes chooses to highlight precisely the latter, by suggesting that perhaps the issue of Mongol influence ‘can be resolved by conceding that the Russians did not emulate the Mongol political system, since the institutions of a nomadic empire built by conquest and maintained by military power were not suitable for an agrarian population. But the Russians certainly did adopt Mongol political attitudes: for by serving as Mongol agents they became accustomed to treating their people as vanquished subjects, devoid of any rights. This mentality outlived Mongol rule.’ 32 In the more general perspective of casting the Mongols as good or bad, the very fact that they did succeed for an extended period of time in administering a vast empire, and in mastering the subtleties of international diplomacy, must be taken into account. At the very least, we should avoid presenting them as simple barbarians or as roving petty robbers. The truth realistically would seem to be closer to Halperin’s insistence that at its height the Golden Horde was ‘a delicately balanced symbiosis of nomadic clans and sedentary bureaucratic elements’.33 What is referred to here as the ‘Golden Horde’ was that part of the original Mongol empire of the great Chingiz Khan that was left as heritage, or ulus, to his son Juchi and his grandson Batu.34 From their capital at Sarai, on the lower Volga, the khans of the Horde would control the lands of Rus from 1240 until their rule was formally terminated in 1480. (The reality, as most often is the case, was one of gradual erosion rather than abrupt termination.)

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One of the basic facts that would determine the general attitude of the Mongols towards Rus was that they had ‘conquered nearly all of Asia, and achieved what all Inner Asian steppe empires had dreamed of, control of the continental caravan routes from China to Persia’.35 Thus finding themselves in a position to tax the highly valuable flows of trade along the Silk Road, it is understandable that they never developed much of an interest in the land of Rus. They could find little in that remote forest region to warrant an outright occupation. This indifference should not be taken to mean that the Rus were left alone. Far from it. The wooded zone was sufficiently close to the steppe for the Mongols to stage frequent raids, which at times could be extremely devastating. The point is that Rus was ‘simply peripheral’ to the interests of the Golden Horde, and that its position within the Horde became an ‘anomaly’, which in contrast to other areas under Mongol control was never made part of the Mongol ulus.36 What the Mongols did require from Rus has been summarized by Ostrowski, based on ‘various decrees and ordinances, as well as descriptions in the Yuanshi’, in a list of eight demands that would be placed on local ruling elites in general.37 In addition to the obvious demand for taxes, they would require provisions for their own army, conscription of support troops, and support for the yam. More specifically, census lists would have to be drawn up and hostages be offered.38 In order to secure that conditions were met, a representative of the Khan would have to be accepted, and the princes would have to make a personal appearance at the court of the Khan. Turning now to look more closely at how the princes of Rus would respond to the imposition of Mongol rule, we shall see that it was the last item on that list, the appearance by the local princes at the court of the Khan, which would have by far the greatest influence on the further processes of internal feuding amongst the Rus.

Tax collectors for the Mongols While the details of Mongol rule over the lands of Rus remain a subject of considerable debate, there is wide agreement that it was begun by drawing up census lists, known in Russian as chislo, which served as the basis for deciding on taxes and recruits. There are records of this taking place in the Kiev region as early as in the 1240s, and that it was undertaken in VladimirSuzdal in 1257 and in Novgorod in 1259.39 The next step was to send special representatives, known as baskaki, who would be responsible for the extraction of taxes, the conscription of recruits and the maintenance of order. According to some scholars, these officials were subsequently replaced by absentee administrators, known as darugi (or darogi ). Based at Sarai, the latter would rule by sending special envoys, known as posoly, with orders and instructions.

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Ostrowski suggests a different interpretation, arguing that the Mongols actually implemented a system of dual-circuit administration that they in turn had copied from China. According to this interpretation, while the baskak was akin to a military governor the darug was more of a civil servant. In Muscovy, that system would subsequently be replicated with a namestnik in the role of baskak and a volostitel as darug. Both of the latter, moreover, would be supported by kormlenie.40 Neither interpretation contradicts what is of crucial importance to our argument, namely that during the fourteenth century the baskaki were withdrawn and their duties taken over by Rus princes. This fundamental transformation may have been the result of serious uprisings in the 1260s and 1270s, but it may also have been a simple assessment of cost efficiency. Perhaps the bureaucracy in Sarai had become so efficient, and the princes of Rus so reliable, that withdrawal to Sarai was motivated. Irrespective of reason, the delegation of responsibility was to play an important role in the rise to power of Moscow. It would, however, not be the only way in which the impact of Mongol rule would actually serve to support the ambitions of the Moscow princes. In order to appreciate the full extent of de facto Mongol support, we must also consider the broader framework of their rule.41 Although the khans took little interest in how the princes of Rus managed their internal affairs, they did insist, as noted above, that new princes must make an appearance at their court in Sarai. The reason was that the Mongols reserved for themselves the right to determine who would be princes of what cities. Such rights would be granted via a special patent, known as yarlyk. Prospective princely candidates would thus be forced to travel to Sarai, and sometimes even to Karakorum in Mongolia, where they would have to engage in complex palace intrigues, the outcomes of which at times could be lethal. Such travels were undertaken by over a hundred princes of Rus, some of whom would not return. Given the dangers involved, there even emerged a practice of drawing up wills before leaving. It is not clear whether the Mongols really had any strategy in making decisions on to whom to give their support. Halperin notes that there could often be ‘seemingly contradictory results’.42 Perhaps they simply played ad hoc, supporting whomever might be seen as useful at a certain time. What is quite clear, however, is that amongst the various princes of northern Rus it was the Muscovites that turned out to be the most successful. The sources again are so scant that we cannot tell exactly which of the early princes made the largest contribution. As the most likely candidates, Ostrowski suggests Ivan I and Semen the Proud. In the years 1332–50, these two undertook no less than 12 trips to Sarai, where they had opportunity to observe first hand the administration of the Khanate.43 Prince Ivan I, also known as ‘Kalita’ or ‘the moneybag’, was by far the most outstanding of the early Muscovite princes. His nickname was derived from skills in raising money, which he did in the main by levying tolls on the

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various trade routes that passed through his domain. Far more important than such skills, however, were his close relations with the Khan. According to Kluchevsky, no prince ‘more often went to pay his respects to the Mongol potentate than did Ivan Kalita, nor was he ever aught but a welcome guest, seeing that he took care never to come empty-handed’.44 The fortunes that by various means found their way into Ivan’s moneybags were put to good use not only in pleasing the Khan, but also in expanding the borders of the principality. At first it went peacefully. By means of diplomacy, treaty, colonization and outright purchase, Moscow was busy incorporating the neighbouring appanages. The defining moment arrived in 1327, when the population of Tver rose against the Mongols and massacred their tax collectors. This was not the first time that a Russian town rebelled against the Mongols, nor would it be the last. Similarly, there was nothing unique in the fact that other Russian towns would be called in to assist in repressing the insurrection. What does make this particular incident so important is that Tver and Moscow at the time were two of the leading towns in the region. Under a scheme of divide et impera, maintaining the balance between them really should have been a key priority for the Mongols. When Ivan Kalita found out that the grand prince of Tver had sided with the rebellious he at once left for Sarai, where he was tasked by the Khan to lead a punitive expedition. With support from the prince of Suzdal, and from the Mongols, Ivan managed to lay such waste to Tver that it would take the city half a century to recover. According to George Vernadsky, ‘the land was mercilessly looted and thousands of Tverians captured’. Some 2,500 of the latter would be sent as slaves all the way to China, where they were presented as a gift to the emperor.45 For Ivan Kalita, the destruction of Tver not only meant the elimination of a key rival. It also brought vital rewards for the service rendered. As the Khan at first was understandably reluctant about favouring Moscow, he gave the title of grand prince to Alexander of Suzdal. It was only following the death of the latter that the honour went to Kalita, and then with serious restrictions: Tver, Suzdal and Ryazan were excluded from his sphere of authority. After his death, the latter three would even be upgraded to grand principalities in their own right.46 The grand princely title, however, was only part of the game. Of even greater importance was the fact that Ivan Kalita was placed in charge of tax collection from all of Rus. This not only gave him unrivalled power and influence. It also offered wide latitude for manipulation and enrichment. As Halperin points out, it would not be a question of simple embezzlement, which was regarded by the Mongols as a capital offence: ‘Rather than pilfering from petty cash, the princes manipulated the allocation of the tax burden. They exempted the crown lands from paying tribute altogether and made up the difference by demanding more from their peripheral appanages.’ Even better, as the Mongol grip eventually began to slip and

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the expected tribute fell to a mere fraction of the original impost, the Muscovites simply ‘continued to collect the old amount and pocketed the difference’.47 As a crowning achievement for the early Muscovites, in 1328 the Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church decided to move his see from Vladimir to Moscow. (It had been moved from Kiev to Vladimir in 1299, in order to escape the violence of the Mongols in the south.) Given the subsequently crucial role that would be played by the Orthodox Church, in support of Muscovite autocracy, the importance of this move would seem hard to exaggerate. Moscow had now assumed the combined role of both secular and spiritual leader of Rus. Symbolically, Ivan Kalita expanded his title to ‘Grand Prince of Moscow and all Rus’, the addition being a direct imitation of the Metropolitan’s ‘of Kiev and all Rus’. Nominally, Ivan was still grand prince of Vladimir, but the two were set in a steady process of unification. Although the Mongols really should have worried about the rise of Moscow, they appear to have been more concerned about the rise of Lithuania, under Grand Prince Gediminas. As a result, the previously devastating practice of frequent Mongol raids on Moscow was halted. This relative peace would last for a period of 40 years, from the destruction of Tver until the first Lithuanian attack on Moscow, in 1368. Meanwhile, the power of the principality grew substantially. After the death of Kalita, in 1341, the princes of Rus joined together in a more organized union, under the personal leadership of Simeon the Proud. Its initial purpose was to coordinate the payment of taxes, but over time it would reflect the increasing hegemony of Moscow. In 1353, when Grand Prince Ivan II was granted full judicial authority over all Rus, he in effect assumed the role as the Khan’s plenipotentiary, to serve as a proxy government of sorts over the Mongol-controlled parts of Rus. The next step in the programme of building Muscovy would be for the princes of Moscow to seek to become rulers in their own right. This would entail three important tasks. One was the shunting aside of all relatives that might lay competing claims to the throne. Another was to ‘gather the lands’ of Rus under Moscow’s control, and the third to break the stranglehold of the appanage system. By far the most important of the three, the latter would be achieved by way of an intriguing combination of skill and luck.

Building autocracy As we may recall from our discussion on the Kievan rota system, there was considerable tension between the overriding emphasis on common dynastic rights to the votchina, and powerful individual ambitions to claim hereditary tenure to certain possessions. Under Prince Bogolyubskii, the latter ambitions were translated into the practice of carving out udely. While the

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notion of a common votchina was not entirely abandoned, the sphere in which it applied was thus greatly reduced. Though it would soon become apparent that the practice of constant subdivision of land between heirs had seriously negative effects, economically as well as politically, it would not prove easy to actually break the spiral. In retrospect, it is interesting to see the way in which that task was approached. Since the creation of appanages was intimately linked to questions of succession, there is on this count a plentiful source of evidence. Historians have access to a long series of wills, where princes exercise their rights of division of property between heirs. For the period from Ivan Kalita to Ivan III, spanning the whole rise to greatness of Muscovy, no less than 16 such documents have survived. To these we may add several scores of treaties signed to regulate mutual relations between co-inheriting princes. The image that transpires from these sources has several dimensions, but by far the most important is the intimate relation that was established between power and property. Given that appanages were held as private property, and that princely succession was regulated not by law but by bequest, the provisions that were made in a will would determine not only property relations but also the distribution of power amongst the next generation. The general aim in carving out appanages was to achieve the best possible results for the heirs, rather than for the state or the territory. The estate would thus first be divided into different categories of property. Then each heir was allocated one slice from each category: there might, for example, be one robe, one horse, one village and one part of Moscow. Most importantly, there was no legal distinction made between movable and nonmovable property. As Pipes points out, citing the nineteenth-century Russian historian Boris Chicherin, ‘princely testaments and treaties from this era were couched in terms of civil law, exactly like private testaments’. Princes would dispose of their realms as if they were landed estates, making no distinction between private assets and those belonging to the state.48 The outcome over time was a division of the territory into such a multitude of small and scattered strips of land that proprietors would be at a loss when it came to describing their total possessions. One of the keys to the subsequent successes of the Moscow line of princes was that they managed to break with this practice. From Ivan Kalita onwards, they began to diverge from the principle of equal shares in awarding appanages, preferring instead to give a disproportionately large share to the oldest son. In Kalita’s will, preferential treatment according to seniority was only slight, but by the time of Dmitrii Donskoi, who died in 1389, it had grown considerably. In his will it was stipulated that the eldest of five sons would contribute one-third of the tribute due to the Mongols. Presumably that also reflected the relative value of his inheritance.

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Proceeding to Vasilii II and Ivan III, both of whom also had five sons, we may find the eldest receiving by far the lion’s share. In the first case, the priority allotment was 14 of the most important towns, leaving only a dozen of the minor towns for the others to share, and in the second there were 66 towns left to the eldest, with only 20 left for the four younger. The son of Ivan III, the future Vasilii III, would have to put up more than 70 per cent of the Mongol impost.49 While this growing practice of concentrating property into the hands of one heir was vital, and did reflect a skilful policy, it was not the whole story. Some luck would also be needed. Two further reasons that helped strengthen the princely house of Moscow were that it never branched out into collateral lines, and that the senior prince normally also was the last surviving amongst the brothers. These mere coincidences would allow succession to occur in a descending line, for so long that it would come to be accepted as the ‘ancient custom of the land’.50 The first and only real challenge to the growing practice of vertical succession came when relatives refused to acknowledge the future Vasilii II as legitimate heir.51 The result was a protracted civil war that Vasilii managed to win only by enlisting thousands of loyal Mongols into his service. Even if we take into account that these were generally rough times, his methods nevertheless appear as rather extreme. He adopted ‘knout, mutilation, and other refined tortures to punish his adversaries; arbitrarily increased his already almost unlimited power, and deliberately disregarded laws that had hitherto governed the conduct of princely affairs’.52 As Vernadsky puts it, his rule represented the first real steps towards Russian autocracy: ‘In it the foundations, both ideological and material, were laid for the Tsardom of Moscow.’ 53 With this achievement, the right to the throne had been transformed into a hereditary privilege of the family of Vasilii II, also known as the Danilovichi,54 and the ground had been prepared for Vasilii’s son, Ivan III, who would set Muscovy on its course towards great power status. Rounding off this part of the account, it should be noted that the successful ‘gathering of the lands’ and the associated breaking of the appanage system had taken place in highly turbulent times, under conditions that took a serious toll on the resources of the lands. Following the death of Dmitrii Donskoi, the suzerain throne of Rus went to his son Vasilii I, who would spend the coming 36 years seeking to expand his father’s realm. Several new principalities were added, and he managed to stand his ground against both Mongols and Lithuanians. The price, however, was high. When he died, in 1425, Muscovy had been exhausted by the constant struggles. It was in this seriously weakened condition that the crisis surrounding the succession of Vasilii II would erupt, throwing the state into a protracted bloody civil war that was marked by much domestic intrigue and by further

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raids by Mongol bands. Putting it all together, it is a rather distressing image that transpires. In the years from 1228 to 1462 northeastern Rus lived through no less than 90 internal feuds and 160 external wars. This undoubtedly must have left some rather important impressions. Being ‘reared amid perils from without and disasters from within’, the people may eventually have come to realize the need for ‘some durable political and governmental system if ever it was to rid itself of chaotic appanage rule and Tatar enslavement’.55 The man who would deliver this much sought-after order was Grand Prince Ivan III. It was under his long rule, extending from 1462 until 1505, that the grand principality of Moscow was transformed into Muscovy, later to be known as the first centralized state on the territory of Rus. It was he who finally cast off the Mongol Yoke, and it was on his watch that the independence of Novgorod was brought to a final conclusion. It is small wonder that he would also come to be known as Ivan the Great. In addition to achieving a stunning territorial expansion, which transformed Moscow from a remote village into the centre of a sprawling empire, Ivan the Great also implemented a programme of institutional change that would fundamentally alter the very nature of the state. The mainstay of that programme was the imposition of a lifelong obligation of service to the grand prince, later the tsar. Intentional or not, his de facto enserfment of the nobility would have two important corollary effects. The first was an effective suppression of all rights to private property in land, hereditary or otherwise, and the second a subsequent enserfment also of the peasantry of Rus. As these transformations would produce two of the most important defining characteristics of Muscovy, we shall take a closer look at how they were implemented.

Redesigning the state By far the most important symbol of the Muscovite rulers’ ambitions for power was their claim to personal ownership of the land as a whole. Looking simply at surviving diplomatic documents, it is clear that from Ivan III onwards the grand prince of Moscow would claim all of Rus as his personal votchina, i.e. as his personal patrimony by right of heritage from distant forefathers. Knowing that a good part of the original Kievan Rus, including the heartlands around Kiev itself, had by then been incorporated into Lithuanian Rus, it is not surprising that the Lithuanians found such claims hard to accept. They would also put up fierce resistance. In the period from 1492 until 1582, a total of 40 years were devoted to strife between these two halves of Rus.56 In the following chapter, we shall see that the Muscovite Orthodox Church would find good reasons to support and legitimate the patrimonial claims by the Moscow grand princes, and that in such ambitions the clerics would

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be quite successful. Knowing that this new ideology of power would come to be generally accepted, we still have not addressed the question of where this rather peculiar idea as such may have originated. Ostrowski holds that it was borrowed from the Mongols, who in turn had it from the Chinese, where it had resulted from the ‘equal-lands’ reforms under the Tang Dynasty (618–907).57 As they were not a sedentary people, it seems logical to assume that the Mongols never developed any principle of land ownership of their own, and that they may have simply borrowed one from the Chinese. The following step in the chain, namely that of onward borrowing by the Rus, may seem less obvious, and may probably in any event never be proven either way. It does nevertheless remain a fact that in the fourteenth century the grand princes of Moscow became infused with the idea of being personal proprietors of the land as a whole. The conflicts arising from such claims would come to mark, in the most fundamental of ways, the emergence of Muscovy. Since opposition would be forthcoming not only from without, but also from powerful circles within the state, we shall begin by looking at the reduction of both boyars and appanage princes to the status of ‘service nobility’.

The creation of a service nobility Returning to the practice of awarding land grants in the Kievan period, we may note one crucially important feature. From the beginning, it had been clearly understood that when a boyar left the service of a prince he could keep his land. The principle of votchina did cause problems amongst the princes, as the notion of dynastic rights conflicted with desires for private property, but provisions in the Russkaya Pravda clearly indicate that all land granted to boyars was in absolute ownership, irrespective of continuation of service. In the appanage period, princes would continue the old practice of awarding land as grants of personal property, but now the implications were different. While there was little money, there was plenty of vacant land. Thus the relation between the princes and their retainers increasingly came to be dominated by private landownership, rather than by direct remuneration for service rendered. This transformation entailed a strengthening of the boyars, at the expense of the princes. Servitors who in the past had been entirely dependent on one prince, the grand prince of Kiev, or on lesser princes who owed allegiance to the latter, now were free to choose with impunity whom they wanted to serve. They could hold land on the territory of one appanage prince whilst serving another, and they could switch allegiances as they saw fit. Customary law clearly guaranteed the latter right, even to the point of allowing entry into the service of a foreign ruler, such as the grand prince of Lithuania.58 In princely treaties of the time we may find a standard

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phrase being employed, saying that ‘the boyars and servitors who dwell among us shall be at liberty to come and go’.59 While that choice could be exercised at a moment’s notice, leaving the prince stranded, say, at the outset of a battle, he in turn had no right to respond by confiscating land he had granted to the defecting servitor. On the contrary, numerous treaties explicitly forbade such confiscations.60 The real key to understanding the rise to greatness of Ivan III lies in his successful reversal of these trends towards increasing freedom for the boyars. He would not only curtail their traditional rights to departure without forfeiture of land. In a second step, he – and even more so his successors – would succeed also in transforming their previously absolute rights to land into a system of conditional tenure, to be known as pomestie. Beginning with the former, we may note that the ambition of interfering with the boyars’ rights to free departure had begun on a small scale already in the 1370s, when Muscovite appanage princes resorted to personal harassment and to looting the estates of departing boyars. The first documented case of an actual violation of rights to property dates from 1375, when a boyar who defected to Tver had his estates confiscated.61 A century later, Ivan III increased the pressure. In 1474 he set an example by taking action against an appanage prince in Tver, whom he suspected of failing loyalty. The prince in question, a certain Daniel Kholmskii, was compelled to take an oath that neither he nor his children would ever leave Moscow service. That oath was witnessed by the Metropolitan, together with another boyar, and a further eight boyars were forced to put up 8,000 rubles in bail, which would be forfeit in case the oath was ever broken.62 Apparently satisfied with the outcome of this scheme, Ivan would repeat it on subsequent occasions, at times demanding upwards of a 100 guarantors. Its main effect was to introduce amongst the leading strata of the boyar class a system of overlapping collective responsibilities, whereby individual defection would lead to collective punishment. We shall return to this innovation at greater length in Chapter 6 below. Other ways of achieving the same end could be to simply refuse a departing boyar his certificate of service, or to issue one that placed him at a lower order than was rightfully his. Given the importance to the boyars of their own internal system of ranking, that of mestnichestvo, in both instances his career would be adversely affected. Cases have also been recorded of pressure being applied by Moscow on other appanage princes, compelling them – sometimes even by force – into returning boyars that had departed. While measures of this kind were all designed to inhibit the propensity of boyars to depart, the territorial expansion of Muscovy would, by its very nature, provide important support from another quarter. After the conversion of Lithuania to Catholicism, any boyar seeking to depart in that direction would immediately become apostate, and his estates liable for confiscation. Following the subsequent defeat of Novgorod, and the rapid

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absorption of the remaining principalities, all ways out of Muscovy had been effectively closed. The right to free departure would be honoured on paper as late as 1530, but in actual practice it had been abrogated several decades previously. While the boyars retained their technical right to free departure, there was simply no place left to go that was not under Muscovite control. The combined outcome of these various processes was that the rulers of Muscovy succeeded in establishing the principle of compulsory service for all nobles. The fact that enforcement was still weak – in itself nothing new in the tradition of Rus – was a problem to be overcome. Their real achievement was that the institutions of service and landowning had been brought together. Turning now to the second step in the programme, that of conditional land tenure, we again are looking at a gradual process, to be played out over a rather long period of time. Again we are also looking at two essentially different stages. While the first represents a transformation in the conditions under which land was granted, the second entails an extension of full service obligations also to existing hereditary votchina lands. An important part of the background to these changes was related to Muscovy’s expansion into the steppe. As it brought increased confrontation with the peoples of that region, now chiefly the Tatars, this expansion also implied mounting needs for outlays on the provision of military protection. In the appanage days, military servitors had been rewarded out of three different sources: they could be given money, they could be awarded hereditary land grants, and they could be offered temporary kormlenie. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, these sources proved inadequate to support the swelling ranks of both the bureaucracy and the military. As they began looking for new sources of revenue, the rulers of Muscovy could find only one real asset, namely vast stretches of newly acquired territory that was only partly settled and cultivated. Here an entirely new concept began taking shape. By settling these areas with military servitors, the latter ‘would become converted into a landowning class, and so act as a living rampart against raids from the steppes’.63 While this pragmatic approach was important in the sense of turning landholding into the basis for a system of national defence, it would also have important consequences for the very notion of landownership. This was the time when the previous practice of offering temporary kormlenie, without rights of tenure, was being transformed into the granting of pomestie land.64 It is not entirely clear where the grand prince found inspiration for this important move. Ostrowski holds that it was borrowed from the Mongols, who had taken over the Muslim practice of iqta, the origins of which in turn are unclear.65 While others may dispute such influence, it seems less contentious to question the use of the term ‘conditional’. Ostrowski’s conclusion is that the relation as such could not have been marked by reciprocity: ‘It is clear from the loyalty oaths that service princes

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made to the grand prince during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that their commitment to him was unconditional for life, and that there was no reciprocal obligation on the part of the grand prince.’ 66 To bolster his case, he cites a previous study by Horace Dewey, which shows a conspicuous absence of limitations on grand princely rights of meting out punishments for service princes falling short of their obligations.67 Since rights that were withheld from the service princes are not very likely to have been granted to their dependent holders of pomestie, we are probably correct in seeing it as a one-way relation: service was being demanded and lands granted without any conditionality involved. This assumption in turn points us in the direction of what was by far the most important dimension of this ‘reform’, namely the effective inclusion of all servitors into the household of the prince. At the court of an appanage prince, there were two kinds of servitors. One was the free military servitors, the boyars, who would be offered kormi i dovodi, i.e. sources from which they could freely extract their living. The other category was household servitors, such as stewards, clerks, grooms, gardeners and workmen. Some of the latter were slaves, or kholopy, but there were also free men, or at least semi-free men. While all household servitors were provided with land to cultivate, free men would have tenure only for so long as they served. Being technically free to leave, they would still be unable to acquire land of their own and were thus reduced to semi-free status, ‘servitors not wholly under bond’ as it was known.68 As both categories were expected to serve, and as both were receiving lands from the same prince, they in effect became members of the same household.69 At the top of the pyramid, the household of the grand prince in essence became a proto-state of sorts, absorbing all that might otherwise have developed into a society. Knowing that the Russian name for ‘household’ is dvor, it is symptomatic that the Muscovite gentry would come to be known as dvoryanie, as householders. With the groundwork thus being laid, Ivan the Great would proceed to implement a broad-based transformation of landholding custom in Muscovy. The main impetus to that process was provided after the defeat of Novgorod, with the introduction of a dual policy of forced deportations (vyvody) and conditional land grants. The latter were now also being officially referred to as pomestie.70 There were obvious political reasons behind both of these measures. Mass deportations would serve not only to root out the remaining pro-Lithuanian forces that had been causing much trouble. Lands thus vacated could then be handed over to landless dvoryanie, who in turn would serve as a counterweight to the equally troublesome landowning Muscovite boyars. From this time on, the substitution of pomestiya for votchiny became an overriding policy ambition. To some extent, pomestiya were granted out of existing state lands, but for the most part it was a question of distribution

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of conquered land. As the territorial expansion of Muscovy at the time was massive, and as systematic confiscations of votchiny were undertaken in every newly conquered territory, the share of pomestie land in the total was expanding rapidly. The final blow to the votchina system was dealt under Ivan the Terrible. Given the great paucity of information about this man, and the great diversity of opinion when it comes to his mental stability, we shall not enter into argument here concerning his possible motives for undertaking various measures. Suffice it to note that in 1556 he issued an edict that formally extended the service obligation to cover also votchina land. Although this represented a mere formalization of long-established practice, the symbol as such proves that practice had developed far in the direction of a total merger between these two technically different systems of landowning. During the rule of Ivan the Great, Muscovite land policy came to rest on the fundamental principle that land must not be separated from service (zemlya ne dolzhna vykhodit iz sluzhby).71 For that reason, it was logical not only to see holders of votchiny being required to serve, but also that restrictions were imposed on the sale of votchiny, which might otherwise be transferred to persons unfit for military service. By laws of 1562 and 1572, the rights to alienate a votchina ‘either by sale, exchange, or any other process was practically annulled’.72 Even the donation of votchiny to monasteries was explicitly prohibited, and if anyone tried to sell his votchina in order to evade the service obligation he could be whipped ‘without pity’ and be forced to hand over the property in question to the intended buyer without compensation.73 With these final measures, the transformation of the once proudly independent princes and boyars of Rus into a service nobility had been completed. Their status of dependence, and their complete lack of rights to property in land, would remain as defining characteristics up until the mideighteenth century. For the Grand Prince, it now only remained to deal also with the peasantry.

Enserfment of the peasantry In the early days of appanage Rus, the peasants still had complete freedom to move and to take new lands into possession. Although the princes considered all appanage land to be votchina, the peasants saw it differently. From their perspective, as we have noted above, all land was given by God and could be owned by nobody. Their sense of ‘property’ was related to cultivation: this land is my land because I have crossed it with my plough. As the pressure on the appanage princes increased, from a grand prince who was hard put to find resources to cover his own growing needs, the finger was being pointed ever more clearly in the peasants’ direction. In

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order to secure sufficient labour resources for a maximum extraction of rent from the land, their freedom to move would have to be curtailed. Since the bulk of the peasantry were still practising slash and burn, they were, however, crucially dependent on having that freedom of movement. Once the soil in one location had been exhausted, they would need to move on to claim new lands, thus leaving their old masters without labourers. Since nearly everything that had to do with land at this time revolved around either the payment of taxes or the rendering of service, we must distinguish here between three essentially different categories of land holding.74 The personal domains of the princes were known as dvortsovye zemli, or ‘court lands’. Based mainly on exploitation by slave labour, they were obviously outside the tax/service requirement. A second category was known as ‘white lands’, a term denoting that they were exempt from paying taxes. Here we could find the possessions of the nobility, whose obligation was to perform military service, but also lands belonging to the Church. (We shall have more to say about the latter in the following chapter.) It was the third category, that of chernye zemli, or ‘black lands’, that formed the real basis for the princely economy. It was from the chernye lyudi, the ‘black peasants’, that they could extract taxes in kind that would be partly or wholly passed on as tribute to the Mongols. (For simplicity, the black lands will be referred to below as state lands.) In its early stages, the actual system of extraction was operated via the semi-autonomous peasant commune, at the time known as volost. The prince would impose a tribute on the collective as a whole, leaving it for the volost officials to apportion the obligation between the member households. Given the scattered nature of the volosti, this was a rather logical administrative solution. As long as they were living on black lands, the peasants in every respect were free men, able at any time to pack their belongings and move on. As de facto tenants of the prince they were liable to pay rent, but they were not subject to any other form of effective authority. Once the princes began awarding land to their servitors, be it votchiny or pomestiya, this equation was set to change. Though the exact relation between state and private lands is impossible to ascertain, Jerome Blum maintains that ‘down into the sixteenth century’ it seems probable that the total extent of the former exceeded that of the latter.75 By the end of that century, however, the practice of land ‘privatization’ had expanded to the point where state lands remained only in the frontier regions. For the peasantry, this was an unhappy transformation. As state peasants they had been free to manage their own affairs. As private peasants they would find such rights being severely circumscribed, and most obviously so in the realm of volost self-management.

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The first blow was dealt when the appanage princes began making land grants without consideration for volost boundaries, thus placing some communities under several masters. The new landlords then began interfering in the internal affairs of the peasants. First their agents would simply bypass the elected volost officials. Then they would have them appointed, often from amongst the slaves of the prince, and in the end all authority over peasant affairs was vested in servants of the prince’s dvor. This gradual destruction of communal authority on private lands, combined with the shrinking extent of state lands, brought an effective end to the volost as an independent peasant organization.76 On a parallel and considerably more sinister track, the princes also were abandoning to the private landlords substantial rights of jurisdiction over the peasants. Some early examples may be found already in the twelfth century. Surviving charters show that monasteries were given rights both to collect taxes and to levy fines on people living on their lands. Perhaps towards the end of the century such immunity rights were awarded to private landlords as well. In the Mongol period, the granting of immunities became an institution. Around 500 charters have survived, giving private landlords a variety of privileges that ranged from tax exemptions to judicial powers.77 Partly this transformation was a practical adjustment, reflecting the scattered holdings and the inability of the appanage princes to supply judges for the growing number of private estates.78 Partly it may also have been a conscious policy of using tax exemptions as an incentive to attract peasant settlers. As Pipes points out, however, the latter policy also would have a negative side effect: ‘Immunity charters originally issued to attract colonists had the ultimate effect of removing from the prince’s jurisdiction a large part of the population living on lay and clerical votchiny.’ 79 To the peasants, the effective removal of princely jurisdiction meant that they would be fully at the mercy of their landlord. In Kiev there had been a right of appeal to the princely court. In Muscovy there would be no such thing. By the middle of the sixteenth century it had been generally accepted that judicial and police powers over the peasantry had been delegated from the tsar to the landlords. A century later this general acceptance would also be reflected in law: ‘The silence of the Law Code of 1649 on the juridical relation between the lord and the peasants who lived on his land bears meaningful witness to the complete acceptance by the central government of the principle of seigniorial jurisdiction.’ 80 We may draw a striking parallel here to the way in which the extension of the service obligation to cover votchina land, reflected in the 1556 decree, also had been a fact already a century before the formal act, in that case by the mid-fifteenth century. In a similar fashion, we may see the policy of enserfment of the peasantry being implemented much in the same way as that which had served to eliminate the boyars’ rights of free departure. In both cases there was an

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early history of harassment, followed by a removal of options, and in the end a fait accompli, without any legal grounds ever being formulated. While the driving force in the former case had been a need to prevent boyars from deserting their military service obligations, in the latter it was a need to prevent the toiling peasants from deserting the land. No other factor contributed so much to the emergence of serfdom as did the everpresent labour constraint. Explicit recognition of this fact may be found from the mid-thirteenth century onwards. In the previously mentioned princely treaties, peasants were deemed as so important, both from a fiscal and a military point of view, that the rulers would agree with one another not to take peasants from the realm of the other, be it by force or by offering better conditions, nor to allow any of their servitors to do so.81 Though such agreements were not directly aimed at curbing the peasants’ rights to free movement, they did seek to do so indirectly, by precluding the market forces from stimulating movement. The fact, however, that such agreements would be routinely repeated over the span of two centuries does serve to illustrate that they were rather ineffectual. The temptations involved in luring away the neighbour’s peasants quite simply must have been too large to resist. The introduction of more direct restrictions on peasant rights to free departure began as a logical contractual agreement, stipulating that they would be free to leave only after the agricultural season had come to an end. In the previously mentioned City Charter of Pskov, from 1396, St Philip’s fast (14th November) was specified as the time of legal departure; in the course of the fifteenth century it became increasingly common to use St George’s Day (25th November). In the 1497 Sudebnik, the peasants were explicitly granted rights of departure during a period of two weeks around the latter date. The only restrictions were that they would first have to pay their debts, and if they had resided less than four years in a house provided by the landlord, they would have to repay (on a falling scale) the costs of building that house. Reality, however, was often different from the law. As in the case of departing boyars being subjected to harassment, there were many ways in which a landlord could preclude his peasants from exercising their rights. One way could simply be to make himself unavailable to receive the otkaz, the legal note of intention to depart, thus forcing the peasant to stay another year; if he left anyway he would be considered a runaway. Other measures could range from high exit fees to physical violence and actually chaining those who wished to leave.82 Overall, however, it would not be until the mid-sixteenth century that effective pressure was applied. The reasons were intimately linked to a massive depopulation that left the central and northwestern areas of the land half-deserted. Land cadastres undertaken between 1581 and 1592 showed ‘many villages deserted and reverting to forest, arable land converted into

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pasture, churches which once had reverberated with chant standing empty and silent’.83 With the peasantry in flight, the entire basis of the economy and thus also of the military was crumbling. Harsh measures would have to be applied, and so they were. It began already in the 1550s, with decrees prohibiting the state peasants from moving, thus protecting the interests of the princely treasury. For peasants living on private lands, the increasing hardships also meant increasing indebtedness, which in turn meant that they could not legally depart. Since landlords would be liable for any taxes not paid by departing peasants, they had obvious additional incentives to join in the effort of suppressing movement. Things rapidly developed to the point where the only legal way out would be to accept offers of better conditions from other landlords, who would then proceed to pay exit fees, debts and tax arrears. This form of induced labour movement was known as vyvoz, or ‘exportation’, and it became increasingly common as the general situation deteriorated. Though offering short-term gains for the peasants, it added both instability and a favouring of the rich landlords that brought the system even closer to collapse. For the peasantry as a whole, the situation was becoming unbearable. Since any complaints about maltreatment would have to be addressed to courts where the landlords were presiding, the prospects of receiving justice were slim indeed. For increasing numbers, simple flight became the way out. They could escape either to other landlords, who would gladly shelter them, or to the new lands. The first direct assault came in 1580, with a decree temporarily suspending the legal right to free departure around St George’s day. The prohibition concerned peasants of all categories, and was to remain in force until further notice. In the coming two decades, the ban would be lifted and reimposed several times, but in 1603 the vacillation was over. Though the illusion of a pending lifting of restrictions would be maintained, the peasants had been effectively tied to the land, and would so remain until the abolition of serfdom in 1861.84 As the system of enforcement was weak, and as landlords had powerful incentives to lure peasants away from other landlords, these restrictions were far from sufficient to stem the rising tide. No doubt it was the increasing frequency of illegal departures that prompted the above-mentioned land cadastres. Using these lists as official proof of legal residence, in 1597 a decree was issued stipulating that any peasants having run away after 1592 (the year of completion of the census) could be captured and returned to their landlords. If they had managed to escape before that time they would be safe, for the time being.85 In the following years, the statute of limitation on the capture of runaways would be repeatedly revised, and in the law code of 1649 it would be removed

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altogether. The ulozhenie prohibited anyone from harbouring runaways and stipulated that they be sent back irrespective of when they had managed to escape. This was the final confirmation of the introduction of serfdom. Among the several hundreds of articles that served to define the power of landlords over their peasants, there was not one which set on it any form of limits The 1649 code recognizes peasants as chattel, by making them personally liable for debts of bankrupt landlords, forbidding them to lodge complaints against landlords unless state security was involved (when they were required to do so) and depriving them of the right to testify in court in civil disputes.86 With these final measures of repression, the formal dimension of the Muscovite system had been completed. Both the nobility and the peasantry had been deprived of their traditional rights to free movement, as well as of any rights to property or to due process. The grand prince of Moscow had succeeded in enforcing his full rights as lord, or gosudar, of his votchina as a whole. All of northern Rus had been transformed into his personal dvor. The real puzzle here lies not so much in the emergence of the Muscovite system as such. Many of the very special kinds of institutional arrangements that emerged in Muscovy have been given quite rational explanations. By far more daunting is the question of why these institutional arrangements would remain in force for so long, long after the time when many of the unfavourable circumstances had ceased to be binding. It is at this point that we shall bring into play the role of the Orthodox Church, as a factor providing that extra ingredient which would be necessary for an institutional lock-in to occur and to be sustained so far into the future.

5

The only true Christians

One of the more remarkable features of the Soviet Union was that it lacked an associated nationality. Although the English-speaking world would talk of ‘the Soviets’, that notion lacked any correspondence in Russian (or in German or French, for that matter). The real ‘Soviets’ had nothing to do with ethnicity. They were administrative organs, deriving their names from Lenin’s once celebrated worker councils. At the same time, however, it was equally incorrect for the German- or French-speaking parts of the world to refer to citizens of the Soviet Union simply as ‘Russians’. The Soviet Union in effect was a state without nationality, consisting of nations without states. At the age of 18, Soviet citizens were required to determine their nationality, which was then entered into their domestic passports. There were just over 100 different census nationalities to choose from. If both parents were of the same nationality, then the matter was settled, but in cases of mixed marriages there was a genuine choice to be made. Some of these nationalities, such as Ukrainians or Uzbeks, would have Soviet union republics named for them. Others, such as Tatars or Chechens, would have to settle for autonomous republics within a Soviet union republic, and most would quite simply be left without. From a modern European perspective of nation-states, this was a strange creation indeed. There were, however, good reasons to explain how and why the matter of nationality came to be so confused. According to its own self-image, the Soviet Union was not a state like other states. It was a project, a vast undertaking that was designed to ‘build socialism’. According to this logic, it also followed that the Communist Party, being placed in charge of the construction, had to be guaranteed a ‘leading role’. Both of these fundamental principles were explicitly written into the Soviet Constitution.1 Given this primacy of ideology, of being engaged in building a specific political system, it was perhaps not so strange after all that problems of nationality came to be pushed well into the background. If the anticipated world revolution had indeed succeeded, then all nation-states would have been overthrown, to be replaced by an international brotherhood of workers. Framed in such terms, it is tempting to view the nationality problems of the Soviet era as being conditioned by Marxism–Leninism. But would that

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really be correct? Although it is clearly the case that much of the fac¸ade was of modern vintage, we shall argue that the lack of a clear correspondence between nation and state was of deeper historical origin, reflecting a fundamental problem of identity that runs through the whole of Russian history. As Dostoyevsky once put it, to be Russian is to be Orthodox.2 In the present chapter we shall take a closer look at the implications of that statement, of the fact that being Orthodox, or pravoslavnyi, would become tantamount to being Russian. There is a multitude of other illustrations that may be advanced to support this observation. We may, for example, note that the Russian word for ‘peasant’, krestyanin, is derived from the Russian word for ‘cross’, which is krest. The implied understanding of Russian peasants as Christians first and Russians second was clearly reflected in official rhetoric. As late as in the nineteenth century, officials addressing peasants in the countryside would not be paraphrasing Shakespeare, speaking to ‘friends, Russians, countrymen’. They would say pravoslavnye. And we may note that it would not be until the beginning of the twentieth century that it would be legally possible for a Russian to leave the Orthodox Church.

To be Russian is to be Orthodox Before we proceed, it should be clearly recognized that the question of influence by Orthodoxy on Russia’s longer-term development is a huge topic, the details of which we cannot hope to even survey here.3 We shall thus have to limit our ambitions. As in the case of the similarly contentious issue of influence from the Mongols, we shall rest content with indicating some very general patterns, which will be of importance to our discussion below. First of all, it is a fact that Rus was amongst the last of the European nations to accept the Christian faith, leaving it for the Lithuanians to be the very last. The time of the symbolic ‘baptism’ is normally given as 988, when Grand Prince Vladimir is said to have accepted the Orthodox faith for himself and for his people.4 One important consequence of the late arrival was that the clergy of Rus would be initiated at a time when most if not all of the really fundamental internal Church debates had been largely settled. What Rus received may thus in essence be seen as a finished product, with little if any remaining ambition to seek additional answers to the big questions. It has been said that Rus received the dogma, without the previous inquisitiveness of the Byzantines. Perhaps this may also help explain why Russian Orthodoxy came to be marked by such powerful intolerance of other religions. Although the Christian Church as a whole has certainly not been known for its tolerance, the Russian case nevertheless does stand out. There it was not simply a matter for the clergy. There society as a whole would be locked into a distinctly Manichean view of the world. From Moscow’s horizon, it would be a

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clear-cut case of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, of the Orthodox being pitted against the unbelievers.5 A second and intimately related consequence of the timing may be derived from the process of growing animosity between the eastern and western parts of the Christian Church. At the time when Vladimir accepted his baptism the Church was still united, but for reasons that we shall not go further into here a serious crisis was in the making. The final split occurred in 1054, incidentally also the year when Yaroslav the Wise died and the Kievan rota system was introduced. An immediate result of the crisis was that the Patriarch in Constantinople and the Papacy in Rome issued mutual excommunications. Although the actual background to these dramatic gestures may have been related more to problems of personalities than to the theological issue as such,6 we should not forget that the fear of God in those days was serious business. Excommunication surely was not to be taken lightly. One of many consequences that were to follow from the separation between ‘Greeks’ and ‘Latins’ was that the Orthodox and the Catholic worlds would be transformed into two mutually suspicious and at times outright hostile blocks or spheres of influence. In the subsequent struggle of faiths, Muscovy would be locked into waging the battle of the losing side. This in turn would have important implications both for the Muscovite self-image and for its impressions of the ‘enemy’ in the West. From a strictly theological point of view, the enemy was the Catholic Church and the Pope in Rome, but as Rome to the Muscovites was being reduced to a largely mythological concept, there was to be an interesting transfer of roles: ‘Ill-equipped to evaluate the theological issues, Muscovy equated Rome with the hostile knightly orders of the Baltic and the growing power of the Polish–Lithuanian kingdom.’ 7 It is of particular importance here to note that the line would be drawn not against the Muslims to the east but against the Christians to the west. In its eastern orientation, Muscovy first would be busy cooperating with the Mongols, and then with expanding its realm to actually incorporate Muslims, Shamans and assorted pagans alike. In its relations to the west, however, there would evolve a distinct sense of xenophobia. From our previous account, we may recall how the end of the fifteenth century marked the introduction of a policy of closed borders, under which all foreigners from the west were held to be contaminated. Even in republican Novgorod, being heavily dependent on trade with the Hansa, suspicion and fear of contamination led to a policy of isolating as far as possible the German merchants. It was realized that some foreigners, such as ambassadors and specialists of various kinds, would have to be tolerated even as residents, but their presence was seen by the rulers as a necessary evil, a necessarium malum, as Marshall Poe puts it in his previously cited book about the impressions of foreign travellers to Muscovy.8

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Churches that had been visited by foreigners would be swept. Anyone who had come into physical contact with one of the unbelievers would immediately resort to washing his hands. It has even been said that Tsar Mikhail, the first of the Romanovs, had next to his throne a golden jug and a basin in which he would symbolically wash his hands after having received foreign ambassadors.9 A third and somewhat different consequence of the choice of Orthodoxy was that Rus, and subsequently Muscovy, would be effectively locked out of the intellectual traditions of classical antiquity. Though Western monks would have little sympathy for their heathen heritage, they did maintain the necessary language skills in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Thus they also indirectly made sure that the sources of classical learning would always be available. In Byzantium there had been a dual ambition of teaching the texts of Christendom whilst maintaining education in logic, mathematics and other sciences. In the transition to Rus, however, that ambition got lost. Since the single language to be used in mission amongst the Slavs was Church Slavonic, constructed for the purpose by Kyrillos and Methodios, the effective outcome would be that of closing the window on the past. One consequence of thus being closed out from reading the classics was that of blocking all rational, scholarly endeavours. Up until the eighteenth century, Russia would be marked by a total absence of secular education. Few of even the princes would be able to read and write. From this followed a position of great strength for the churchmen. Working in an environment of general illiteracy and superstition, they would be the only ones able to write the chronicles, and to formulate the ideology that would be needed once Muscovy had cast off the Mongol Yoke and could proceed to make it alone. These latter observations will form the mainstay of the present chapter. We shall outline how the clergy came to assume a vital role as producers of ideology for the secular authorities, and how the very legitimacy of the state came to rest, for centuries to come, on essentially religious notions of authority. This said, it becomes important to note, as does Richard Pipes, that even those who may thus be seen to have represented an intellectual elite were sadly lacking in refinement: ‘The worldly corruption of the Russian clergy was furthered by its ignorance. Little literary work was carried out except for some rudimentary chronicle writing and hagiography. The Russian clergy was unbelievably ignorant.’ 10 Given the important role that was to be played by this group, it is of perhaps even greater importance to note that Muscovy was very far from being a theocracy. In Byzantium there had been a finely attuned division of roles between the Emperor and the Patriarch that was known as ‘symphony’. The Emperor was in charge of secular matters, and the Patriarch of spiritual ones, and the line of division was carefully balanced.

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In the transition to Rus that division was lost: ‘In Muscovy the two were even more closely intertwined without any clear commitment to the theoretical definitions and practical limitations that had evolved in the long history of Byzantium.’ 11 Our understanding in the following shall be that while Orthodoxy did provide a fundamental ideology, which would be of great importance in the evolution of norms amongst the population at large, executive power would remain firmly in the hands of the princes. Crucial matters such as appointments would never be delegated to Church authorities. Turning now to take a closer look at some specific issues of possible Byzantine influence on the formation of Muscovy, we shall proceed in three fairly separate steps. Following a brief presentation of the early Orthodox Church in Rus, we shall devote the main part of our attention first to its adaptation to Mongol rule and then to its subsequent struggle to create an effective counter-ideology.

The early Church of Rus We should perhaps not be surprised to find that the old chronicles of Rus devoted much attention to the circumstances surrounding the fateful choice by Vladimir of Orthodox Christianity. In the Primary Chronicle, some rather fanciful stories are told about how he sent out emissaries to investigate both Islam (with the Volga Bulgars) and Catholicism (with the German Knights), finding neither to his liking. In the end it was the overwhelming beauty of the ritual in Orthodox Constantinople that decided his choice.12 Although the fiction is rather good, and as such has been often cited, it should probably be seen as intended in the main to glorify the Greek faith at the expense of the competing Muslim and Catholic faiths. Vladimir’s real reasons were more likely derived from pure Realpolitik, from the fact that in 988 the Byzantine Emperor was facing serious internal opposition. Deciding to appeal to Kiev for help, he promised the grand prince as reward the hand of his sister Anna in marriage. As the thought of marrying into the Byzantine court apparently appealed to Vladimir, he came to the rescue. In the following year, after some complications, he received both Anna and a baptism. While the main reason behind the choice of Orthodoxy may thus have been a worldly one, Vladimir did take his new mission as protector of the faith quite seriously. He ordered churches to be built, established bishoprics and founded clergy-run schools for the children of the nobility. In 996, Kiev’s first stone cathedral, the Church of the Holy Mother of God, also known as the Church of the Tithe, was completed. Following this event, Vladimir awarded the Orthodox Church its first statute, granting it status as the official Church of Rus.13 All of this was a true transformation, for a man who according to the Primary Chronicle had been known to have seven wives and 800 concubines.

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For his deeds as a man of God, Grand Prince Vladimir would be subsequently canonized as a saint. In addition to such fanciful chronicle entries, however, not much is known about the early role of the Orthodox Church in the lands of Rus. What little evidence we do have is contained mainly in princely statutes and treaties. Spelling out a variety of rights and duties, these must be seen more as sources on what the Church was intended to do rather than as evidence of what it really achieved. By far the most important in this category is the Church Statute of Vladimir. The main message of its rather short text was to provide a list of cases where jurisdiction was transferred from secular to Church courts. These rules would remain in force until 1551, when a Church synod adopted the Stoglav, the ‘Hundred Chapters’. They were also given strong backing by the grand prince. Anyone found in violation, be they close relatives or important officials, were given ample warning: ‘[M]ay they be cursed in this age and in the next by the seven ecumenical councils of the holy Fathers.’ 14 A document of similar albeit not quite equal standing is the subsequent Church Statute of Yaroslav, believed to have been compiled in the reign of Yaroslav the Wise. A more ambitious document, it sets out to define areas where the Church was given jurisdiction also over laymen. This was ‘a new sphere of activity, since it was a sphere in which she was less concerned with the saving of souls than with the supervision of temporal matters approximating closely to tasks of the state’.15 The latter extension implied that the Church was assigned a supportive task in building a social order and in maintaining political stability in the land: ‘In short, she was charged with the organization and supervision of the family order, the religious order, and the moral order of the period.’ 16 Noting that the Church had thus acquired jurisdiction in areas of what we would call family and community law begs the thorny question of Byzantine influence. While it is a fact that the transfer of such jurisdiction to the Church did have Byzantine roots, it is also the case that few Byzantine laws can be found to have served as models for the 54 articles contained in Yaroslav’s statute. It has been suggested that the clerics had simply ‘usurped’ and implemented old East Slavic norms. As Richard Hellie notes, however, there must have been Christian influence of some sort, for ‘pre-Christian Slavs would hardly have thought of forbidding them to marry non-Christians or forbidding wives to watch pagan amusements’.17 By the end of the thirteenth century, Yaroslav’s statute had been replaced by Slavic translations of Byzantine texts such as the Nomocanon and the Kormchaia kniga. This, however, was still far from conclusive proof that the society of Rus at large had emulated the norms of Byzantium. On the contrary, and of great importance to our subsequent argument, we are left with the image of a Christian clergy that is waging a harsh uphill battle, and is not making a great deal of progress.

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One of the main ambitions of the clerics was to combat old marriage and burial customs, seeking to introduce instead such norms that were prescribed by the Church.18 In this endeavour they encountered great resistance. The traditional norms of native religions were firmly entrenched, and the best that could be achieved was a form of dual belief-system, to be known as dvoeverie. Daniel Kaiser notes that much of the Russian native religions would remain unaffected centuries after Vladimir had imported the new religion: ‘The frequent bleating about rape, fornication, adultery, and bigamy – offenses definable only within the context of uniform marriage procedures – underlines the ineffectiveness of the Christian assault on customary practice. Not surprisingly, the clerics had similar difficulties with notions of divorce and incest.’ 19 Hellie offers a similar view of the progress of the Church: ‘We know for a fact, however, that much of the East Slavic population remained preChristian until at least 1350, and even in some instances until at least the middle of the seventeenth century.’ 20 This poor progress should be viewed against the background of such economic and judicial support that was provided by the princes of Kiev. In addition to the transfer of jurisdiction, we might also mention the tithe, established in an oath taken by Grand Prince Vladimir shortly after the completion of the Church of the Tithe. The obligation of paying tithe was subsequently spread to all Rus lands, most likely coinciding in time with the early growth in Church landholding. Although the latter would become important only in the fourteenth century, the first cases of land grants to monasteries were registered already in the twelfth. Another way of providing economic support, also introduced at the time, was by assigning to the bishops special rights to oversee the various measuring devices that were being used in trade within town limits, a service for which they could charge fees.21 In order to complete the picture of princely support for the early Church of Rus we must also note its judiciary powers. The mandate for the Church to fight paganism was clearly formulated, and special Church courts were given competence to rule in matters relating to marriage, burial customs and morals in general. Princely support was unequivocal. The statute of Vladimir threatens ‘eternal damnation’ for anyone seeking to violate Church rights to conduct trials or to interfere with Church people ‘in all towns and in those parishes and districts where there are Christians’.22 All such support notwithstanding, in its first centuries of struggle with native custom the clergy could claim little success. As Kaiser puts it, the ‘old lure of large kinship configurations, traditional community celebrations and customs gave way before the Church’s soldiers only slowly. Whatever other changes may have occurred in medieval society, much remained unchanged despite the clergy’s best efforts.’ 23

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This must be seen as a failure not only for the clergy, but even more so for the ruling princes. While their acceptance of Christianity may have been explained by religious motives, and while it certainly had foreign policy aspects, there was also an important dimension of domestic policy involved. Their strong financial and legal support would seem to indicate that ‘the princes were also interested in erasing the competing loyalties of traditional social structures’.24 Hellie even goes so far as to say that Church law ‘tried to give the Orthodox Church control over all ideology in Rus and outlawed all competitors’.25 Accepting that the princes did indeed attempt to use the Church as an instrument with which to create an ideologically homogeneous basis for their rule, it is important to note that inheritance law was kept entirely out of the field of Church jurisdiction. Since power was transferred mainly by ways of drawing up wills, this was far too important a tool to be abandoned to the Church. In all other dimensions of what we might refer to today as state-building, the Church was placed in focus, and in its first centuries of work amongst the Rus it did not score a great many successes. Paradoxically, it would not be until after the arrival of the Mongols that the Orthodox Church in Rus would enter into its Golden Age, and that Christianity would begin to make real inroads amongst the population at large.

Patronized by the Mongols In its initial reactions to the arrival of the Mongols, the Church was understandably hostile. As the new arrivals were pagans (converting to Islam only in the fourteenth century), they would have to be resisted. Thus, in the period from the first assault in 1237 until 1252, the Church would have plenty of harsh words to say about the unbelievers.26 Though the evidence is scant, it may also have actively encouraged opposition to the invaders in areas that were still disputed, such as Galicia and Volynia. The initially hostile attitude was soon to change, however, and this for two very good reasons. The first was a consequence of the fact that the Byzantine Emperor John III chose to follow a policy of accommodation. As Donald Ostrowski points out, the practice of both alliances and marriages between the Byzantine and Chingizid dynasties not only ensured that this policy would be continued: ‘This long-term Byzantine–Qipchaq alliance also helps to explain why no specifically anti-Tatar ideology developed in Byzantium.’ 27 As it became clear that the Patriarch in Constantinople had also decided to cooperate with the new masters, the Church in Rus retreated to a policy of denial, presented by Charles Halperin as an ‘ideology of silence’.28 Throughout the fourteenth century, the Church of Rus would be marked by a policy of ‘ecclesiastical acquiescence to Mongol rule’ that had been initiated by Metropolitan Kirill in the 1250s, ‘when he and Alexander Nevskii

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agreed on a policy of cooperation with the Mongols’. As an obvious symptom, we may note that no ‘chronicle entry that has an anti-Tatar bias can be dated to the period between 1252 and 1448’.29 A second and perhaps even more profound reason behind the policy of accommodation may be derived from the strikingly tolerant attitude that had been shown by the Mongol Empire, ever since Chingiz Khan, towards all other faiths and religions. In the case of Rus, this would entail a range of tangible material benefits. The khans not only allowed their new subjects freedom of religion. They also offered tax exemption for all Church lands, and exemption from military service for all Church people. To round off the bargain they even laid down a death penalty for any official seeking to interfere with those privileges. As a result, the Church in general and monasteries in particular would be transformed into major landowners.

Landlords with tax exemptions While there can be little doubt that the power of the Church was growing as a result of Mongol patronage, it is more difficult to arrive at the extent and distribution of the material basis for that power. According to (suspiciously) unison accounts by a number of foreign travellers who came to Muscovy in the sixteenth century, the Russian clergy may have owned one-third of the land.30 According to Jerome Blum, this may have been a fair representation of conditions in some parts of the centre of Muscovy, but in other parts of the realm the share of land in the possession of monks could be as little as a few per cent: ‘The fact of the matter seems to have been that the holdings of the Church were a much smaller proportion of the total arable in Russia than they were in England at the time of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.’ 31 Even accepting this qualification we are still left with a Church that was accumulating great wealth, and thus also great power. Following Blum, three things seem to be fairly clear.32 First of all there was strong growth over time in the number of monasteries. At the beginning of the twelfth century there were perhaps 20 such establishments. At the end of the thirteenth century there were 100, and at the end of the seventeenth century over 350. Second, there was a distinct concentration of holdings. While the overwhelming majority of all monasteries had only modest amounts of land, there were a few giants that together held the lion’s share of all monastic property. Data from the second half of the seventeenth century show that 34 monasteries held two-thirds of all monastic land. Third, and from our point of view most importantly, there was substantial growth in clerical landowning after 1550, when the reign of Ivan the Terrible

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produced escalating political repression. The monastery of Volokolamsk, for example, which was established in 1479, acquired nearly all of its land after 1550. There were several ways in which monasteries could acquire land. While these did include straight purchases and foreclosures on mortgages, by far the most important was through gifts and legacies. The largest single donors were the princes of Moscow, who found reason to trade wealth for clerical support of their autocratic ambitions. Boyars, however, could also be found donating large estates. The reasons for the latter were a mixture of piety and insurance: ‘Laymen were convinced that masses and prayers of the monks for the dead were the best guarantees of a contented afterlife.’ 33 Given such expectations, it was only natural that there evolved over time a practice of making lavish gifts not only of land. Cash, jewellery and other valuables would also do, in the hope that the effectiveness of prayer would increase with the value of the gifts. There were even cases where men who died without having made dispositions in their wills would be ‘saved’ by their heirs, making up for their ‘forgetfulness’ by transferring part of the inheritance to the clerics. Shifting to a more ‘political’ source of donations, we may note that people who took monastic vows would have to part with their material belongings. As political repression increased, the monasteries became not only a refuge for the persecuted but also a place where the rulers could send oppositional individuals for detention. As many of those who were thus sent to monasteries would be well to do, the Church began to accumulate serious wealth. The growth in monastic landholding reached a peak during the political and economic crises of the latter part of the sixteenth century: ‘Many votchinniks, to preclude the loss of their land through economic disaster or royal confiscation, gave their property to monasteries in return for life tenancies of all or part of the land they donated, or of some other land owned by the monastery.’ 34 The image that is taking shape here is one of growing affinity between the grand prince of Moscow and a fairly small number of truly large monasteries, where many of the most influential members of the clergy no doubt would be found. In addition to the sheer volume of donations, the economic strength of the large monasteries also was enhanced by the fact that they did not practise subdivision. By far the most important dimension of this process lies in the impact on the clerics of their growing involvement in running what in essence became large business enterprises: In a typical Russian abbey of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the monks lived not within their walls but in the towns and villages belonging to them, where they supervised the agricultural and commercial activities and promysly of their chapters. The majority of Russian monks were not even ordained as priests.35

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The growing wealth of the Church was simply bound to produce an ambivalent relation to the princely authority. While operating in their clerical capacity, priests and monks were subject to archbishops, but in their capacity as landlords they were subject to the jurisdiction of the local prince. In the end, it would be the latter subjection that carried the day: ‘In sum, clerical land in Russia was every bit as decentralized and dependent on secular authority as was lay landholding, and therefore politically just as impotent.’ 36 Throughout the sixteenth century there was a great deal of ambivalence on both sides. Being forced to watch how the Church was amassing large estates that were not paying taxes, the secular rulers must have been sorely tempted to impose restrictions, and so they did, but not in any conclusive way. While Ivan the Terrible did seek to limit the acquisition of land by the Church, and even suggested to the Church synod in 1551 that Church lands might be expropriated, he himself at the same time was the single largest donor of both land and other riches – perhaps in an ambition to atone for his truly frightful crimes. On their part, the clerics were caught between a rock and hard place. On the one side, religious morals should have called for compassion and a negative attitude towards human bondage. On the other, economic interests called for policies to secure labour for their growing estates. As Pipes notes, the outcome of that conflict of interests was not a flattering one: ‘No branch of Christianity has shown such callous indifference to social and political injustice.’ 37 It is a fact that monasteries were amongst the first to petition the crown for the previously mentioned charters fixing the peasants to the soil. From a moral point of view, this may have been deplorable, but from a business angle it made perfect sense. The larger abbeys had grown into estates that were quite indistinguishable from boyar votchiny. At the peak of its power, the St Sergius Monastery of the Trinity had 100,000 peasant ‘souls’ cultivating estates that were scattered over 15 provinces.38 It is important here to note that the Church in Rus had a very peculiar form of jurisdiction. While it had authority over all of Rus in religious matters, it had authority over all people on Church lands in all matters. People on Church lands, moreover, included not only the clerics but literally all of those living there.39 The rapid increase in Church landholdings thus also meant that clerical jurisdiction multiplied several times over, and gradually penetrated the extremes of the Russian territories. On the local level, the clerics would thus quite simply become masters in their own right, ruling according to their own laws in their own courts: ‘Granted immunity from secular interference by special agreements with the ruling princes, Church lands became minor principalities where canonical texts presumably dominated judicial procedures.’ 40

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A venal compact? Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Muscovite Church became so deeply immersed in pursuing its secular interests that it ‘ceased to uphold Christianity in any but the most primitive magic-ritualistic sense’. Even in the latter respect it found it difficult to resist shortcuts. In order, for example, to compress their interminable services, ‘Muscovite churches and monasteries adopted the practice of mnogopenie, which had several priests or monks chanting successive parts of the liturgy at the same time, with resultant bedlam.’ 41 Given the increasing tensions that arose between the religious and business interests of the Church, there was bound to be growing dissent and opposition to the accumulation of wealth. The consistently and finally winning side was that which denied the existence of any conflict between wealth and monasticism. The process was brought to a head in 1503, when a special Church synod was convened in Moscow. Leading the challenge was a monk by the name of Nil Sorski (1433–1508). Originally of peasant origin, Nil had gone to the Holy Land and to Constantinople shortly after its fall, continuing to holy Mount Athos in Greece. There he had been introduced to the central message of ‘hesychasm’, the seeking of an inner light, an inner spiritual life that was free from external discipline and constraints. This challenge to the prevailing order he brought with him when he returned home. Proceeding to a place on the Sora river, beyond the White Lake (Beloozero), he founded a monastery that became a centre for hesychast teaching. Those who gathered around him would be known as ‘the brethren from beyond the Volga’, or simply as the Trans-Volga Elders, and the message that they were spreading said that the life of a monk should be poverty, prayer and solitude.42 In 1480 Nil left his monastery, to live in solitude in the wilderness as one of Russia’s most famous ascetic hermits. His example and his teachings together had a profound effect on the new monasteries that were being established along the northeastern frontier, and it was not well received by the representatives of established Orthodoxy. Appearing before the synod in 1503, Nil not only called upon the Church to renounce its wealth and resort to living on alms. He even succeeded in having Ivan III propose that all monastic land should be secularized and that the monks be forced to live in poverty and by their own labour. Rejecting all such ideas, the majority of the delegates instead succeeded in producing a statement in support of Church landowning. With the successive deaths, shortly after the synod, of both Ivan III and Nil Sorski, and with a series of persecutions of Nil’s followers, the period of open challenge to monastic landowning was brought to an end. For the grand princes, that did not mean that the issue as such was settled. The

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conflicts that were brewing within the Church did require a difficult choice to be made. While there must have been great temptation in secularizing Church lands, and in thus capturing the revenue streams from those lands, such a move also would have meant decimating a powerful clerical establishment that was providing valuable ideological support for the autocracy. The sixteenth century as a whole would be marked by princely vacillation on these important issues. By far the most important champion of the winning side was a certain Joseph Sanin (1440–1515), a man of upper-class origins who served as abbot of the Volokolamsk monastery. With the support of other important ecclesiastics, such as Zosima, the Metropolitan in 1490–94, he had begun to advocate the introduction of Byzantine Caesaropapism. His argument was that the tsar was God’s representative on earth. Thus men must obey him in all matters.43 Joseph of Volokolamsk also was the leader of those who supported monastic wealth accumulation. Subsequently known as ‘Josephites’, they held that the riches could be used not only for good work but also to help in attracting people of high birth for the good cause. At the synod in 1503, it was Joseph who delivered the winning argument. The clergy’s increasingly open support for the autocratic ambitions of the rulers was not well received by the landed nobility. The princely clans in particular resented the ambitions of the grand prince to rise above his equals, some of whom were even his genealogical superiors. To them it would have been preferable to continue the old type of oligarchic rule, where the grand prince was merely a primus inter pares. While the representatives of the landed nobility would find little grand princely sympathy for complaints of this nature, they were more successful in arguing that the growth in landholding by the monasteries constituted a serious threat to their own economic interests. Being exempt from paying taxes, the monasteries would be able not only to purchase land of good quality but also to attract peasant settlers. While the rulers would not be slow in realizing that a poorer nobility would mean less tax for the princely coffers, in the first half of the sixteenth century they nevertheless failed to impose effective restrictions. Although Ivan III had not shied back from confiscating Church lands in Novgorod, he did refrain from doing so in Muscovy proper. It was not until the 1570s and the 1580s that more resolve was being shown. As a result of this hesitant policy, monastic landholdings continued to grow. Both Ivan IV and his son Fyodor II made large donations of land and villages, as did Boris Godunov and Tsar Mikhail. Monasteries also were allowed, in direct contravention of the law, to expand their holdings by purchases and by foreclosures on given mortgages.44 Summing up the experiences of the close alliance that emerged between monks and rulers during the first half of the troubled sixteenth century,

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Billington speaks of a possible ‘venal Machiavellian compact’. On the one hand, the monks would keep their wealth, they would gain freedom from the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and they would receive as prisoners those who were advocating monastic poverty. On the other, the tsar would receive ecclesiastical permission for divorce and propagandistic support for the position that ‘though he be in body like all others, yet in power of office he is like God’.45 Against this highly conspiratorial interpretation Billington suggests an alternative version, which is more complicated than an outright deal of venality. Accepting that the victory of the Josephites and their subsequent influence over the court was ‘a direct result of reverence for monasteries and the monastic ideal’, it also follows that while there was a striving for increased wealth, men still sought to dedicate it to God: ‘They wanted power but also monastic sanction for its exercise.’ 46 Irrespective of reason, the emerging fusion between princely and clerical interests would have substantial consequences for the evolution of the Muscovite state. By blurring the line of division between the monastery and the outside world, the increasing influence of the victorious monastic party brought a new confusion of authority: ‘The tsar became a kind of archimandrite-in-chief of all the monasteries, and the monasteries in turn began to serve as prisons for the tsar’s political opponents.’ 47 In addition to this impact on the legitimation of power of the Muscovite rulers, the blurring of division also served to increase the mutual flows of influence of norms and of morals in general: ‘The asceticism and discipline of the Josephite monasteries began to be applied to civil society; and the corruption and vulgarity of the frontier people made ever deeper inroads into the cloisters.’ 48

Pending doom While the increasing commercialization of the Church was important in bringing serious friction both within the Church and in relations between the Church and the secular authorities, it was not the only cause behind the subsequent upheavals. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, the outside world was undergoing such traumatic changes that the role of the Russian Church would be cast in an entirely new light. The roots of the latter process must be sought in a late fourteenth-century Balkan milieu, marked by the advance of Islam from the south and by what Billington refers to as ‘anguish among Orthodox monks at the final decline and fall of Byzantium’.49 What caused the apocalyptic sentiments of threatened Balkan monks to be transmitted to distant Muscovy was the incursion of the Turks into the Balkan peninsula, where they overran the kingdoms of Serbia and Bulgaria. The defeat of the Serbs at Kosovo Pole, in 1389, was a particularly traumatic

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event that would give rise to a virulent Serbian national myth of sacrifice, of spilling Christian blood in defence of Europe against the infidel Turks.50 Feeling that the end was indeed drawing near, Orthodox monks saw no other way to turn but to the grand prince of distant Muscovy. With them on their travels north they would take not only a potent mixture of messianic hopes and apocalyptic prophecies. They would also transplant the ideology of the two great Balkan kingdoms. In its golden age under Tsar Dushan (1331–55), Serbia had offered something of a dress rehearsal for a Muscovy that was still to come. Military expansion was linked to a rapid inflation of pretensions by the tsar, who would call himself autocrat and Emperor of the Romans, a successor to Constantine and Justinian. In these ambitions he drew on the support of heavily patronized monasteries such as Mount Athos, and he even summoned a Church council to establish a separate Serbian Patriarchate. During their much longer period of independence from Byzantium, the Bulgars had developed an even more striking forerunner of subsequent Muscovite ideology. Portraying Trnovo as yet another ‘New Rome’ that had supplanted both the old original and the ‘Second Rome’ of Constantinople, their chroniclers produced a legend of succession that was to be transplanted en bloc into rising Muscovy. When this ideological universe was transported north, in the fifteenth century, its bearers would arrive in a state that was in serious upheaval, thus being able to offer little resistance to what Billington refers to as an ‘infection’. His distinction between the two great periods of external influence from the south is rather striking: ‘Unlike the Southern Slav influx of the tenth century, which brought the confident faith of united Byzantium, this second wave in the fifteenth infected Russia with the bombastic rhetoric and eschatological forebodings that had developed in Serbia and Bulgaria as they disintegrated before the advancing Turks.’ 51 An important step on the road from Kosovo Pole to Moscow was taken in 1390, when a Bulgarian monk from Trnovo by the name of Cyprian was appointed Metropolitan of Moscow. Under his leadership, Muscovy began receiving streams of migrants from the Balkans, all arriving with the same message. It was now up to the grand prince of Moscow to act as the very last bastion of the true faith. It was a heady mixture that was thus administered. Politically it was marked by the strongly anti-Latin sentiments that had prevailed in Byzantium, and theologically it was infused by the anti-scholastic views of the hesychasts, preaching withdrawal from the worldly and the seeking of an inner truth. It would have a major impact on the Muscovites, above all so on their views of the surrounding world. In order to understand the mechanism of transmission, we must note that the Balkan monks brought with them not only a hatred for Roman

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Catholicism, but also memories of the close alliance between monks and princes that had prevailed in their old kingdoms. For them it was quite natural to seek out the Muscovite princes, and to enlist their help in combating the Latins. This brings us over to the really crucial component in the creation of Muscovite ideology, namely that of the self-appointed role of the clergy as producers of its actual contents.

Churchmen and ideologues There were good reasons why the turn of the fifteenth century would be a time of such commotion. The Muscovites had in fresh memory a number of truly important events. In short chronological order, there had been the fall of Constantinople, the annexation of Novgorod and the formal end of the Mongol Yoke, all nicely rounded off by the closure of the Hansa Yard and the sealing of all borders to the West in general. Preceding all of these events, however, was perhaps the most important catalyst of them all, the Church Council of Florence, held in 1437–39. There the eastern part of the Christian Church met and pleaded with its western relative for support against the growing threat from Islam. During the lengthy deliberations, the Papal side stood firm in its demands that help would be rendered only on condition that the Eastern Church accept the supremacy of the Pope. In the end the Orthodox delegates saw no other way but to do so, and with this the Council was concluded. In retrospect, Florence may be seen as the real watershed. When Metropolitan Isidore returned home, having served as Moscow’s delegate to the Council, he was severely chastised for having succumbed to the Papal demands. Angered by the implied betrayal, the Muscovite Church won the support of Grand Prince Vasilii II for a decision to oust the Greek cleric, who then became a Catholic in exile.52 The main importance of this decision lies in the fact that it was taken without prior consent by the Patriarch in Constantinople. The same would hold true when at a Church Council in 1448 a native Russian by the name of Iona was chosen to replace Isidore as Metropolitan. While these actions may be seen, at first glance, as an effective break not only with the Patriarch but also with the remainder of Orthodoxy, closer inspection will reveal that it was ‘not so much a break as a rearrangement of relations’. Most importantly, the Church in Muscovy would continue its recognition of jurisdiction by the parent Church in Constantinople. The latter was clearly shown in 1451, when Grand Prince Vasilii II sent an official letter to the Byzantine Emperor. While it may be seen as simply providing information about a fait accompli, it also stated that ‘our Rus Church, the holy Rus Metropolitanate seeks and requires blessing’ from the Byzantine Church.53 Placed into context, this event may be seen as rather typical of conflicts at the time.

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The epic 1380 battle of Kulikovo, for example, may in practice have been little more than an attempt by Dmitrii Donskoi to renegotiate the contract, at a time of Mongol weakness. Although it would be hailed by Russian chroniclers as a great victory, in reality it was nothing of the sort. Two years later, the Mongols would be back to sack Moscow and their grip over Rus was in no way loosened. Returning to the conflict between the Metropolitanate in Moscow and the Patriarchate in Constantinople, that issue in a sense really was resolved in 1453. Following some rather ineffectual military support from the West, Constantinople was forced to surrender to the Ottoman forces. With that event the history of Byzantium was brought to an end. The ‘Second Rome’ had fallen. In 1458, the Patriarch would persist in his formal resistance by excommunicating the Muscovite Metropolitanate, choosing instead to appoint a Metropolitan in Kiev, but by then it really was too late to have any real effect. From the Muscovite perspective, the fall of Constantinople was unquestionable proof of God’s disapproval of the Florentine union. Moscow was thus confirmed in its role as the last bastion of the true faith, and in some circles there appears to have emerged strong feelings of being the only true Christians in the world.54 If we add to this that the Orthodox calendar would come to an end in 1492, which marked a full 7,000 years after Creation and thus also the end of history, the clerics were bound to become agitated.

Creating a virtual past In addition to such religious frenzy, the Orthodox clergy was also beginning to feel the weight of growing princely irritation over their tax exemptions. The expropriations of Church lands that had been undertaken in Novgorod, following its annexation, had served warning of harder times that might lie ahead. As a combined result of such developments, a number of representatives of the clergy began approaching the secular authorities. Their message was virulent, and it would have repercussions for centuries to come. The real mainstay of their ambitions was to promote the grand prince of Muscovy as the new protector of the Church, to replace the Byzantine Basileus, and to define his authority in the same terms as those that had been applied to the latter. As Donald Ostrowski puts it, this would entail ‘the creation of a virtual past that designated Muscovy as the true inheritor of Kievan Rus, as well as of Byzantium’. In addition, this new virtual past also would have to ‘deny Muscovy’s status as the inheritor of the Tatar Khanate of Qipchaq’.55 Now the latter task in particular became important. The days of accommodating the Mongols were over, as was the ideology of silence. Following the appointment of Metropolitan Iona, in 1448, the Mongols would be relentlessly held up as the ‘enemy’ and there would be no efforts spared in

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seeking to cement continuity from Byzantium. The real centrepiece of the latter ambition would be the subsequently famous theory of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’. Exactly where this idea originally came from is not entirely clear, but it is commonly attributed to a monk from Pskov, by the name of Philoteus (Filofei ), who is said to have advanced it in a letter to Grand Prince Vasilii III, in 1511. The most frequently cited lines read as follows: ‘Two Romes have fallen, a third stands and a fourth there shall not be.’ 56 The notion of Third Rome was by far the most pregnant manifestation of such millennial expectations that abounded in Muscovy at the time. Byzantine messianism had presented Constantinople as both the ‘New Rome’ and as the ‘New Jerusalem’.57 Now, Moscow was set to be even holier than Byzantium itself, and the implication for its grand prince was clear. It was up to Third Rome to liberate Second Rome – Moscow would have to capture Constantinople.58 Given the important role that this theory would play in the further development of Russian Orthodoxy, we should note that the worldly powers were reluctant to even touch it. The reasons are mainly straightforward, and thus illustrative of the real place of Muscovy. If Grand Prince Vasilii III, or for that matter his son Ivan the Terrible, had accepted at face value their implied role as protectors of the true faith, they also would have accepted the obligation to liberate Constantinople, and that was a task for which Muscovy most certainly was not ready. The clergy, however, would not be deterred. Increasing their efforts, they began in all manners available to seek to instill in the secular leadership a sense of responsibility as caretakers of the Church. In another celebrated story that was produced at about the same time, presumably by a Serbian e´migre´, the ambition was to glorify not Muscovy as such but its long line of princely rulers. Drawing on an old Balkan tradition of compiling synthetic genealogies, in support of Serbian and Bulgarian claims against Byzantium, this Tale of the Great Princes of Vladimir of Great Russia traces a genealogy that goes back not only to the Roman Emperor in person, but even further back, to Biblical times.59 As the story goes, in his old age Caesar Augustus appointed his brother, a certain ‘Prus’, to rule over an imagined kingdom on the Vistula. Since Augustus was related, via Antony and Cleopatra, to the Egyptian descendants of Noa and Shem, this Prus had an ancient lineage indeed. It was from him that the long line of the Rurikides in turn were said to be descended; ‘from Prus the fourteenth generation was the great lord Rurik’.60 As if this were not enough, there also emerged a myth alleging that in the time of Grand Prince Vladimir Monomakh, who was the last of the really powerful rulers of Kiev, the Byzantine imperial regalia had actually been transferred from Constantinople to Kiev. According to this legend, Monomakh had planned to overthrow the Byzantine Emperor, Constantine Monomachos. Upon learning about this,

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Constantine dispatched to Kiev an Archbishop bearing a crucifix made out of wood from the True Cross and the Emperor’s own cap, gold brimmed and with a crown of carnelians.61 Having thus made peace, the Emperor also had implicitly recognized the grand prince of Kiev as his equal. According to subsequent legend, the cap he had sent was used at the coronation of Vladimir Monomakh, as a symbol of his being the first divinely crowned Tsar of all Rus. Taken together, these and other legends of a similar kind certainly had at least the potential of seriously distorting the self-image of the Muscovite rulers. The fact that they tended to play fast and loose with the facts may deserve some fleeting mention. The story of Prus not only lacks credulity as a whole. It was also filled with erroneous historical detail.62 The story about the cap of Monomakh on the other hand may be deflated by noting that Emperor Constantine died when Prince Vladimir was merely two years old. The actual cap does exist, however, and may have been a gift to Ivan Kalita from the Khan in Sarai. Known as the Shapka Monomakha, it was used in the coronation of Ivan the Terrible and may still be seen in the Kremlin Armoury museum.63 Leaving the question of historical veracity, we must turn now to look at a far more complicated issue, namely that which relates to how these various stories were received by secular rulers. Given the importance of this matter, we shall restrict ourselves here to presenting evidence concerning some aspects of the output that did find fertile soils. The more analytical points will be left for discussion in the following chapter.

Reception by the Tsars The notion of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’ provides a good starting point. We know for a fact that it would be of crucial importance to the clergy. As it would be incessantly repeated in the churches, we may perhaps infer that it had an influence also on the more general body of believers.64 But what may the secular rulers really have thought? In retrospect it has been tempting to fit into this theory much of the subsequent Russian patterns of expansion and messianism, up to the point even where the Third International of the Bolsheviks has been portrayed as a direct extension of the Third Rome of Muscovites. An important problem with such interpretations is that no official documents have survived to indicate that Vasilii III actually absorbed the message that was allegedly sent to him by the monk from Pskov.65 In fact, it would not be until the establishment of the Moscow Patriarchate, in 1589, that we may find it used in writing to support Muscovite claims. In an effective performance of debunking, Marshall Poe shows that the doctrine of Third Rome ‘was ignored by secular authorities, who were uninterested in its imperial implications, and it was later banned by clerics, who recognized it as an article of the heretical Old Believer faith’. Almost

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entirely forgotten by the mainstream of Russian culture, it would be rediscovered only in the 1860s, when the writings of Filofei were first published. From there on it would gain ever-wider recognition in circles that were advocating various forms of ‘missions’ for Russia.66 What we do know from surviving sources is that the princes of Muscovy were almost obsessed with their claims to patrimony, to votchina. It seems reasonable therefore to assume that they would be most receptive to anything that would serve to strengthen such claims. From this perspective, while the theory of a Third Rome may have been a bit wide of the mark, the legends about genealogy would have fitted hand in glove. By transcending simple property rights, the notion of votchina had more to do with the self-image of the ruler. When Kluchevsky portrays the new pretentiousness of Ivan III as ‘a position less actual than assumed’,67 this tallies well with what we know about previous princely claims to votchiny, which often had little basis in actual facts on the ground: votchina was something very different from what we normally understand as property rights in land. Princely claims to votchina may thus be seen as an area where flattery by way of legends such as those described above could easily produce delusions of grandeur. We have a striking illustration in the fact that in contacts with Western courts Ivan III actually began referring to himself as Gosudar vseya Rusi, or as ‘Lord of all Rus’. This he did even in relations to PolandLithuania, which still incorporated a good part of the territory of the former Kievan Rus. The first occasion of the latter was in 1494, when he insisted that a treaty of that year should include his elevated title.68 The increased pretentiousness of Ivan the Great became noticeable towards the end of the fifteenth century, when the grand prince was demanding to be treated with ever-greater respect, both at home and internationally. His annexation of Novgorod surely must have added its part to the new sense of stature, but it was not alone. The formal termination of the Mongol Yoke, in 1480, offered the grand prince a sense of being master in his own house, and the previous fall of Constantinople had left open the question of Byzantine successorship. Without going too far into the more analytical dimensions that will be approached in the following chapter, we may note that claims to be treated with more respect had been circulating for some time, although largely confined to within the Muscovite administration. A closer look at the various components of regal salutation may reveal some of the reasons for hesitation. Beginning with the claim to be ‘Gosudar’, we may note its dual connotations: ‘As Muscovy rose to prominence, Ivan III developed a vocabulary of address that reflected both his status as the ‘‘master’’ (gosudar) of his Russian ‘‘patrimony’’ (votchina) and as the ‘‘sovereign’’ (gosudar) of a great independent principality.’ 69 The issue of grand princes being seen as masters of their votchiny also has a more sinister dimension, in that being gosudar originally was linked to

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being a master of slaves, or kholopy. Citing the way in which even princely nobles would speak of themselves as kholopy when addressing the tsar would become an important part of the argument that Muscovy was indeed a despotism. We shall return to that issue in the following chapter. Claiming to be a gosudar in relations to other powers in the region was less of a problem. ‘Gospodar’ is a word with common Slavic roots, also appearing both as ‘gosudar’ and as ‘gospodin’. Variously translated as ‘Lord’ or as ‘Sovereign’, it was used by the Grand Prince of Lithuania and it formed part of the name of ‘Lord Great Novgorod’ (Gospodin Velikii Novgorod ). As the territory of Muscovy was expanding, it was not surprising that Ivan III would claim it for his part of the realm as well.70 A far more contentious issue is that of claims to Byzantine heritage, which formed the mainstay of the clerical agenda. In Russian historiography much has been made of the fact that in 1472 Ivan the Great married a certain Sophia Paleologa who was a niece of the last Byzantine Emperor. The question of her possible influence on subsequent developments in Muscovy has inspired much scholarly controversy. To some extent this reflects the fact that her introduction at court also was the source of much commotion. Following the fall of Constantinople she had after all gone to live in Rome, where she was converted to Catholicism and exposed to many dangerous Latin influences. It was disturbing that the marriage had been arranged in close cooperation with the Vatican, which was hoping for an alliance against the Ottomans. Many also resented the fact that she brought with her to Moscow an entourage of both Greeks and Latins. Sophia has been presented as an intruder, as a ‘Greek sorceress’, and as a generally bad influence on the grand prince, who was thus estranged from his boyars. Baron Sigismund von Herberstein, who visited Russia as Holy Roman ambassador in 1517 and again in 1526, and is generally held to be an astute witness, reports having been told by boyars about her great influence on the by then deceased Ivan III. These images would hold great sway over Russian historians through the end of the nineteenth century.71 Many of the accusations that were levelled at her we may safely discount. As Kluchevsky notes, ‘it is difficult always to distinguish mere suspicion or prejudice due to ill-will from actual observation’.72 Suggesting, for example, that she had a hand in finally throwing off the Mongol Yoke is even a trifle absurd, since that really had been in the making for quite some time before her arrival. What does remain a fact is that this was indeed a time when Muscovy began adopting outwardly, in diplomatic documents, a tone of voice that previously had been reserved for internal use only. Perhaps it really was the case that the marriage to Sophia provided the grand prince with historical justification for assuming the Byzantine imperial title. Any attempt to pursue that form of speculation is greatly complicated by the fact that the Russian word ‘tsar’, which would become the official title of the rulers of Muscovy from the mid-sixteenth century, had previously been

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reserved for the Byzantine Emperor and the Mongol Khan. With both of these having been defeated, one might presume that the grand prince in Moscow would no longer feel any restraints in having himself elevated to that stature. To Kluchevsky, this interpretation is quite convincing. Finding both of the previous seats of power vacant, and having won historical justification via his marriage, from that period onwards he was in a position to regard himself as the sole remaining ruler in the world who was at once independent and Orthodox – the sole remaining ruler who approximated to the type of the Byzantine Emperors and was at the same time supreme over the Rus which hitherto had owned only the sway of the Tartar Khans.73 As further evidence of this self-aggrandizement, we may note that he also took to presenting himself under the Church scriptory form of ‘Johannes, by the Mercy of God, Emperor of All Rus’, to which he would then proceed to add, as historical justification, a long string of geographical references: ‘and Grand Prince of Vladimir and Moscow and Novgorod and Pskov and Tver and Perm and Ugra and Bolgari and the rest’.74 The very fact, however, that several decades would pass before the grand prince in Moscow would officially assume the title of tsar that was vacated by the Byzantine Emperor and the Mongol Khan does reflect that there were lingering hesitations. To these as well we also return in greater detail in the following chapter. In the world of symbols, however, the assumption of heritage was faster. From the end of the fifteenth century onwards the crest of the Byzantine double-headed eagle would be imprinted on all seals affixed by the ruler of Moscow on his documents of state. Interrupted in the Soviet period, that practice would be reinstated by Boris Yeltsin. Perhaps the most important indication of how seriously Ivan the Great really took his new international stature may be found in an incident that began in 1486, with the arrival in Moscow by a German knight by the name of Nicholas Poppel. The reason for his visit was linked to a brewing conflict with Poland–Lithuania. Seeking to hedge against another war, Ivan III was trying to build diplomatic alliances and for that purpose had approached the German Emperor.75 Poppel had been sent to Moscow to get acquainted with the situation. Upon returning home he spoke so well to his Emperor, Frederick III, about the future prospects of Muscovy that in 1489 he was sent back with a concrete offer. The grand prince would give one of his daughters in marriage to a nephew of the Emperor, and in return he would receive a royal crown. Since the latter would have meant inclusion into the Holy Roman Empire, it would have been a major boost in both the status and the security of Muscovy.

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Ivan the Great nevertheless refused the offer, and the reasons given offer interesting insights into his mental universe. Since there was a great deal at stake, his response may not be taken as idle self-glorification. It rather reflects genuine puzzlement by the fact that some strange German prince, whose stature was unknown, could have the temerity of offering a crown to the ‘Gosudar of all Rus’, who was descended well-nigh from the Lord himself: Touching on what thou hast said unto us concerning the kingship, we, by the grace of God, have been Emperors of our land from the beginning, and from our earliest forefathers, and do hold our commission of God himself, even as they. Therefore we pray God that He may grant unto us and unto our children to be Emperors of our land forever, even as we are now, and that we may never have need to be commissioned unto the same, even as we have not now.76 The efforts that had been made by Joseph of Volokolamsk, to push the Muscovite prince in the direction of such divine authority that is implied by Caesaropapism, had finally borne fruit, and strange fruit it was. We may only guess at the thoughts that must have run through the head of the Holy Roman Emperor, when confronted by this rebuffal from a strange ruler of an obscure principality at the edge of the civilized world.77 When Ivan III died, in 1505, the evolution of Muscovite ideology was in full swing, and it would continue under his successors. It was Ivan’s son, Vasilii III, who received the famous letter from Pskov, setting out the theory of the Third Rome, and it was in his reign that Muscovy underwent massive territorial expansion, transforming a federation of tiny principalities into the nucleus of an empire still to come. The high point of Muscovite glory would be reached under Ivan IV, who ironically also would be its main agent of destruction from within. Although both his father and grandfather had been increasingly inclined to calling themselves Tsar of all Rus, Ivan IV was the first of the Muscovite princes to actually receive this title in an official coronation ceremony. The latter was designed to invoke the full weight of claimed Byzantine heritage: Following his Josephite teachers, he used Byzantine texts to justify his absolutism and Byzantine rituals in having himself crowned in 1547 with the Russian form of the old imperial title. His sense of imperial pretense, formalistic traditionalism, and elaborate court intrigue all seem reminiscent of the vanished world of Constantinople.78 An integral part of the ceremony was the legend of Vladimir Monomakh, and his presumed reception of the Byzantine regalia. By thus recalling how the sovereigns of Kiev and Constantinople had once entered into a joint rulership of the Orthodox world as a whole, the Muscovite Tsar could now

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be simultaneously presented as both the political and the ecclesiastical successor to the Emperor of Byzantium. For the latter purpose, Ivan IV also found it important to have his newly assumed title confirmed by a written benefaction from the Hierarchy in Council, which was headed by the Patriarch of Constantinople. Significantly, the legend of Monomakh was included in the latter text.79 Following his coronation, at the age of 17, the new tsar was ready to deal conclusively with the Mongols. In 1552 his army overran the Khanate of Kazan, and in 1556 it took that of Astrakhan, thus establishing direct contact with the Caspian Sea. Following these victories, Ivan IV would claim the new lands as his votchiny, i.e. as lands that had been passed down to him via generations of his forefathers. This was done despite the fact that no Rus had ever set foot there other than as visitors, and trembling such at that. The efforts of the clerics to present the Muscovite tsar as a protector of all Orthodox Christians reached a culmination of sorts in 1561, when a Church synod appended to its resolutions an epistle from the Patriarch of Constantinople acclaiming Ivan IV Tsar i Gosudar of Orthodox Christians in the entire universe.80 The growing pretensions of the Muscovite tsar also were reflected in his troubled relations to the other half of the original Rus, that of Poland– Lithuania. In a 1563 peace treaty, Ivan IV not only arrogated to himself the title of Tsar of all Rus. His boyars also made sure that the treaty would include the full genealogical claims of lineage back to Prus and Rurik.81 While Ivan IV may be remembered for his outrages in suppressing all remaining opposition from the landowning nobility, and for his imprisonment and subsequent murder of Metropolitan Philip of Moscow, he also stands out, in Billington’s words, as the ‘supreme codifier of the Muscovite ideology’. It was on his command that the clerics produced the massive Book of Degrees of the Imperial Genealogy, which ‘carried to new extremes the blending of sacred and secular history’.82 The wholesale hagiography that was laid out in this work reflected that the image of the Muscovite tsar had gone into total disconnect with any form of surrounding reality. Billington also sees it as being translated into a form of behaviour that was beyond any previous limits: ‘[H]is passion for absolute dominance over the ecclesiastical as well as civil sphere represented Caesaropapism in excess of anything in Byzantium, and has together with his cruelty and caprice led many to compare him with the Tatar khans, with whom he grappled so successfully in the early years of his reign.’83 With this we shall conclude our account of how the Orthodox Church came to be an important producer of ideology, in support of the autocratic ambitions of the Muscovite rulers. In the following chapter we shall bring the two dimensions together, to map out how rules that were brought into play by the Mongols would mesh with old Byzantine norms that were propagated by the clergy. It would prove to be a heady brew indeed.

6

The patrimonial state

By the mid-seventeenth century Russia had essentially found its form, a form that would be preserved – in all its fundamental respects – for more than two centuries to come. In a more limited sense, it may even be argued that the very same form was preserved throughout the Soviet period and into the Yeltsin era. Noting this tremendous staying power of the old Muscovite order, we are prompted to look for some very special institutional arrangements. In the previous two chapters it was outlined first how the Muscovite rulers succeeded in erecting the formal structure of an autocratic system, and then how the clergy strove hard to imbue that structure with a virulent ideology. Proceeding now to look at how the final product came to be so long lasting, we shall take as point of departure the expansion of the grand princely dvor to include, as disenfranchised householders, both boyars and appanage princes. This approach recalls Max Weber’s definition of the ‘patrimonial’ state: Where the prince organizes his political power – that is his nondomainial, physical power of compulsion vis-a`-vis his subjects outside his patrimonial territories and people, his political subjects – in the same essential manner as he does his authority over his household, there we speak of a patrimonial state structure. . . . In such cases, the political structure becomes essentially identical with that of a gigantic landed estate of the prince.1 In the following we shall use patrimonialism as a sort of prism, through which we shall view and hopefully also better understand the formation of Muscovy. In so doing, we shall return to Richard Pipes’s previously cited study Russia under the Old Regime, where the argument as a whole revolves around presenting old Russia as a patrimonial state. Comparing with the case of a primitive family that is run by a paterfamilias, Pipes presents as the true hallmark of the patrimonial state its complete fusion of sovereignty and property rights. This, moreover, he views

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as a sui generis, as a regime in its own right, rather than a corruption of something else. Where a despot, for example, will violate the property rights of his subjects, a patrimonial ruler will not even acknowledge their existence. The core conclusion is that 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. In a patrimonial state there exist no formal limitations on political authority, nor rule of law, nor individual liberties.2 These observations certainly do not preclude the introduction of a bureaucratic apparatus, even an efficient such. The very fact that the sovereign is in command of the country’s total resources provides the basis for a policy of extensive mobilization. As was noted in Chapter 2 above, Russian historical development unsurprisingly has been marked by recurring episodes of great activity and high economic growth. The point is that such results will be achieved by way of what would come to be known in the Soviet period as ‘command-administrative methods’. To cite another German classic, we may recall what Ludwig von Mises had to say, already in 1922, about the prospects for ‘economic calculation’ under a collectivist regime. In his words, the suppression of free market exchange would mean the ‘abolition of rational economy’.3 In a more recent work, Pipes returns to the line of distinction between sovereignty and property, only now to place it into the context of ancient Roman jurisprudence, where the notion of absolute property, or dominium, first emerged. Being firmly convinced of the needs to respect private property, the Romans also would be strict in setting limits for the exercise of power, or imperium. Thus, for example, Cicero would argue ‘that government could not interfere with private property because it had been created in order to protect it’, and Seneca would hold that ‘to kings appertains the power over all, but property belongs to individuals’.4 In the case of Muscovy, such considerations would be rendered completely out of place. While the following discussion will remain focused on the importance of separating sovereignty from property, it will also seek to broaden the perspective somewhat. The really crucial questions to be asked will concern the ability, or indeed willingness, of the Russian state to devise a set of enforceable and commonly accepted rules of the game that are applicable in equal measure to all, rulers and subjects alike. The relevance to economic policy, and to economic activity in general, lies in highlighting the substantially different incentive effects that are produced by simple commands, as distinct from generally accepted and credibly

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enforceable rules. In short, we shall be interested in the suppression of economic rationality, in the sense intended by von Mises. This takes us into the realm of institutional theory.

Building Muscovite institutions In the previous chapter, we borrowed from Donald Ostrowski an approach that separated the dimension of formal rules, copied from the Mongols, from that of informal norms, or ideology, with roots in Byzantium. The usefulness of this type of approach may also be reflected in a model developed by Ja´nos Kornai, to explain the emergence of the socialist economic system. His argument, very briefly summarized, is presented in biological terms, where the taking of one step leads to another, then a third, etc. More specifically, the introduction of a monopoly on power leads to the suppression of private property, which in turn eliminates market exchange, which produces a distinct quantity drive, etc.5 We shall have reason to return to this model in greater detail in Chapter 8 below, where we proceed to look at the building of the Soviet economic system. It may, however, be usefully introduced already at this early stage, for the simple reason that its underlying logic has so much in common with that of our institutional approach. Kornai’s main argument is focused on the parallel introduction of a powerful totalitarian ideology, which in a sense provided the system with a purpose and a will of its own. Without this system of norms, the formal introduction of new rules regarding power and property relations would not have resulted in the very special case that was the socialist economic system. In line with the biological analogy, he views the combination of rules and norms as that of ‘body and soul’.6 In institutional theory, as presented by Douglass North, we still have a fundamental line of distinction between formal rules and informal norms. While the former may be changed by decree overnight, the latter change, or may be changed, only gradually, if at all. To these we shall now also have to add the role of enforcement mechanisms, designed to make sure that the rules are upheld.7 The analytical power of this rather simple institutional triad is derived from two basic assumptions. First, it is the norms that provide legitimacy for the rules. Laws that are generally considered to be unjust will, for example, be harder to enforce than those which agree with commonly held value systems. Second, enforcement mechanisms must be credible. Tax evasion will, for example, not only be inversely related to the probability of getting caught. A widespread belief that others are getting away with skipping on their taxes will likely also lead to an adverse transformation of norms concerning rule obedience, such that the very basis of the tax system is eroded.

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From these assumptions we may derive some core conclusions regarding the implementation of institutional change. Most importantly, as North pointed out in his 1993 Nobel Prize lecture, any attempt at institutional change that departs too far from or fails to alter existing systems of norms will simply be bound to fail, or to produce powerful backlash effects.8 The dynamic implications will receive further attention in the following chapter, where we proceed to investigate the problems of path dependence. Here we shall remain with the causes that served to produce an institutional lock-in, and thus also a starting point for the path of dependence. In the institutional triad that was outlined above, the formal rules may be seen as the policy dimension of the institutional matrix of a society as a whole. The informal norms will capture what we may refer to as the ‘political culture’ of the system, defined here as responses by the population at large to policies pursued by the rulers, and enforcement will capture such institutions that are normally associated with the rule of law (or, as it were, with the police state). Since the case at hand involves analysing the creation of an essentially new social order, we shall begin by looking at the policy dimension, at the setting of new rules of the game. In so doing, we shall bear in mind that the real essence of the patrimonial state, as presented above, was that of a fusion of property and sovereignty, which in turn led to a fusion of state and society. Could this have been the result of formal policy measures?

Setting the rules of the game From our discussion in Chapter 3 above we may recall that the Muscovite system emerged on a track parallel to that which simultaneously produced a set of market-friendly republican institutions in Novgorod. Both had as their point of origin Kievan Rus and the laws that were laid out in the Russkaya Pravda. As we may further recall, the latter code of laws was to remain as the fundamental law of the various lands of Rus well into the sixteenth century. In the case of Pskov/Novgorod, as reflected in their respective City Charters, it developed into an increasingly sophisticated product. A strongly exportoriented economy produced demands for legal regulation that served as a driving force in a more general process of positive, i.e. market-friendly, institutional evolution. Here we shall proceed to look at the Muscovite parallel, which was to follow a strongly divergent path. The first stop of some real significance on that path was the law code of 1497, the Sudebnik. Variously presented as ‘the first genuine law code of Muscovite Rus’ and as ‘the first national law code of Russia’, its total of 68 articles bear eminent witness to the persisting influence of the old Russkaya Pravda. ‘Upon a superficial first reading’, writes Horace Dewey, ‘the Sudebnik sounds disappointingly like a simple listing of court fees, or of payments

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to be made to various litigants.’ 9 In a similar vein, Daniel Kaiser notes that the period separating the Russkaya Pravda from the late fifteenth-century Sudebnik was ‘juridically stagnant’.10 Both authors, however, agree that historians of medieval Russian law have ‘treated the growth of the law somewhat cavalierly’, that ‘the illusion of stagnation is belied by careful examination of the legal sources’, and that the Sudebnik was marked by ‘more than a desire to raise revenue’. To Dewey it at least represents ‘a definite advance from the brazenly mercenary manner in which justice was meted out under the appanage princes’.11 It is clear that even in those parts of Rus that were under domination by the Golden Horde there was an ongoing legislative process. Much of this labour went into chronicle compilation and copying of the Russkaya Pravda, but there is also evidence that the law itself underwent at least some significant alterations. Kaiser points at a half-dozen illustrations, which we shall not go further into here.12 Summing up such progress that had taken place from the Russkaya Pravda, Kaiser notes that ‘Medieval Russian law developed notions of sanction, evidence, and a judiciary, none of which had been prominent in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.’ 13 Perhaps the most important impression concerns the evolution of the judicial process, where the judiciary ‘began to assume an ever more aggressive stance in litigation and in punishing social offenders’.14 This transition from a dyadic to a triadic legal system, introducing what economists would call third-party enforcement, carried in its wake the emergence of a large judiciary bureaucracy, the behaviour of which would not be entirely without problems. As Dewey notes, the code ‘makes repeated injunctions against extra payments to judges and specifically forbids bribery yet contains nothing whatsoever by way of implementing those prohibitions’.15 The introduction of special clerks (dyaki) into the courts may be taken as a sign of a desire by the grand prince to trim the power of the previously allpowerful boyar judges. Still, the absence of sanctions against individuals being guilty of bribery also indicates a lack of will to curb that source of income. The overall impression of legal development in Muscovy is strongly marked by the growing centralization of the state. The grand prince assumes for himself increasing powers to sit in judgement over the subjects of the realm, at the expense of both boyars and lesser princes. To Kaiser, the legal structure that was codified in the Sudebnik was ‘a pyramid of courts in which the power of decision was vested in few hands. The pinnacle of justice consisted of the grand prince’s own court, or that composed of members of his immediate family.’ There was some dilution of power, in the sense that a number of select judges would be admitted to the highest level of authority, the ‘boyar court’ (boiarskii sud ), but the latter were all selected from within the service elite.16

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An important consequence for the grand prince of thus concentrating judicial powers in his own hands was that he would have to bear the costs of supporting a growing bureaucracy, and there would be little money indeed at his disposal for defraying such costs. The solution, as we may recall, would be kormlenie, of which we shall have more to say below. All told, the Sudebnik of 1497 stands as monument of sorts over the rise of Muscovite autocracy. It has a distinct ambition of seeking to legalize the growth of central authority, and its prefatory article symbolically refers to the grand prince as being not of Moscow but of ‘all Rus’ (vseia Rusi). In actual practice, however, its clauses provide a reflection more of a desire of things to be than of things as they really were. As Dewey notes, it would often be completely disregarded and in reality was mostly a symbolic document. General illiteracy was one reason, and the chaotic conditions that followed after the death of Vasilii III, when the infant Ivan IV was grand prince, certainly did not help.17 As a symbol, however, the Sudebnik does illustrate the width of the gulf that had opened up between Muscovy on the one side and Pskov/Novgorod on the other. In its mainly control-oriented clauses we can find not even a trace of all those developments towards a commercially oriented republic that mark the City Charters of the latter. By far the most important reason, we shall argue, that may explain the divergent paths of jurisprudence in Muscovy and in Pskov/Novgorod lies in their equally divergent experiences of commerce in general and of foreign trade in particular. Since this in turn will have to bring the Mongols back into the picture, we shall make a small digression. Novgorod not only managed to keep the Mongols off its territory. Borrowing a phrase from George Vernadsky, the city’s rulers also managed to convince the masters at Sarai that they had more to win from collecting golden eggs than from killing the hen that was laying them.18 Not being traders themselves, the khans would always be eager to tax the profits arising from trade, and in Novgorod they saw a rich source: ‘Not only did the Mongols not cut off Novgorod from her Western trading partners in the German Hanseatic League, but they gave tax exemptions to Hanseatic merchants entering Russia through Novgorod and passing through Suzdalia (perhaps on their way to Sarai).’ 19 While Mongol rule may thus have provided both support and additional profits for Novgorod’s traders, Muscovy would reap none of these benefits, at least not for some considerable time to come. Although there has been much controversy over the longer-term impact of the Mongol Yoke on Muscovy, there is general agreement that the first onslaught was devastating in the extreme.20 Charles Halperin sums it up as ‘devastation, extermination, and extortion’.21 Although many settlements did escape destruction, hidden and dispersed as they were in the forests, those that were unfortunate enough to get in the way of the advancing Mongol juggernaut would often be simply razed

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to the ground and the inhabitants butchered. This was a war of terror, designed to leave no pockets of potential resistance in the rear. From amongst the survivors, and from cities that had been less harshly dealt with, the attackers would then proceed to remove labourers and skilled artisans, who were sent to assist in the building of Mongol cities in the steppe, or simply sold as slaves.22 The combined effect was to shatter the very foundations for internal commerce. Several of the large cities had been utterly destroyed, and would take a long time to recover. The removal of artisans from the remainder in turn meant a cessation of all crafts. For those peasants, moreover, who might have been able to engage in surplus production, the implication was that there would be little or no urban demand. Given the overwhelming importance of the peasant economy, the latter restriction must be seen as particularly serious. After the initial onslaught followed demands for tribute, and for the conscription of recruits for the Mongol armies, both of which added further weight to burdens that were heavy already. The only real point of light in this grim scenario is that in due time there would be not only economic recovery but even powerful such. As a good stationary bandit, the Khan realized that he needed to optimize extraction over time. Following the completion of the initial ‘Storm’, Mongol raids would thus be designed to wreak calculated rather than general devastation, the intent mainly being to influence the balance of power between the Rus principalities. From Moscow’s perspective, it was of particular importance that the Mongols redirected the Urals fur trade. Having previously run from east to west, via Novgorod, it would now instead be drawn from north to south, via Ustiug and Moscow to Sarai. Much profit would thus be shifted from Novgorod to Moscow. As a general pattern, the Golden Horde also would encourage domestic trade on its territory, all of which contributed to the recovery of the Volga–Oka area.23 The first signs of recovery came about half a century after the attack, and a full century later a surge in urban building activity provided clear evidence of economic growth. Moscow in particular was doing well, erecting new walls and numerous other stone buildings.24 The shortage of hard facts makes it impossible to say much either about the true extent of the recovery or of its sources. Some have pointed at an agricultural revival,25 others at a surge in trade, bringing revenue from tolls and tariffs.26 It is fairly clear that by the end of the fourteenth century both the grand prince and the Metropolitan had serious wealth, but how widely that wealth was spread we do not know. Evidence of demographic recovery in particular conflicts with knowledge of the outbreak of the Black Death in 1350. All in all, these are matters best left for others to discuss.27 What must lie beyond dispute is the fact that there was a period of about a century when life for the Muscovites must have been extremely rough.

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It was during these times of extraordinary hardship that Muscovy went through its ‘appanage’ period, to be broken only by the gradual emergence of Moscow as the centre of a Muscovite autocracy. Given the adversity of the situation, the institutional choices that were made by the early princes of Moscow do come across as having been quite rational. Not only may there have been rational reasons behind the emergence of the appanage system, as argued above. Even more so, there were good reasons for the rulers to implement a policy of forceful resource extraction. It is hard indeed to see that any other form of policy would have allowed both survival and the subsequent rise to prosperity. The real problem with a strong focus on extraction lies in its adverse consequences for other aspects of institutional development. Here we may usefully recall what was said in Chapter 2 above, about keeping score in the wrong game. It is a fact, for example, that beginning in the early sixteenth century the Muscovites proceeded, more or less from scratch, to build what would become a surprisingly effective bureaucracy. Based on extreme centralism, it would impose a system of detailed controls over a rapidly expanding territory. As Edward Keenan notes, it was the ‘increased effectiveness of the bureaucracy that eventually made possible those increasingly significant levies upon the agricultural population upon which a growing military establishment came to depend in later times’.28 The point is that these achievements would not be without cost. An immediate consequence of the imposition of a structure that was aimed at extraction, rather than at stimulating trade and production, was the corollary need to suppress the free movement of both nobility and peasants alike. From this in turn would follow the removal of all such individual rights, both to property and otherwise, which might have served to inhibit the effectiveness of resource extraction. An important dimension of that process was the suppression of all republican institutions, which mainly meant the veche. There has been controversy both around the status of this institution before the arrival of the Mongols, and around the role of the latter in its suppression. It is a fact that there were cases of uprisings that were associated with this assembly, but that in itself is no proof that it really bothered the Mongols as such.29 What we do know is the final outcome. In sharp contrast to Novgorod, in Muscovy it simply disappeared. What is also known is that one of the very first actions taken by Ivan III following his conquest of Novgorod was to shut down its veche and to order that the famous bell used to convene it be shipped to Moscow. According to Pipes, this ‘emulated Mongol behavior in central Russia two centuries earlier and symbolized the end of self-rule. Democratic institutions built up over centuries vanished in no time’.30 At this point of potential controversy we may pause to distinguish between influence and impact. Perhaps the Muscovites really did borrow from the

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Mongols a set of rules and practices. Perhaps the ‘Yoke’ simply had an impact, in creating the preconditions necessary for such rules and practices to emerge out of a domestic context. Perhaps, and this certainly is the more likely version, it was a mixture of the two. Irrespective of its possible sources of influence, we do know that the imposition of a vertical command structure, designed for resource extraction, would bring in its wake serious collateral damage to other aspects of the institutional matrix of that society. One such was the effective suppression of all rights to due process, a move that would set the course for the longer-term development of Russian jurisprudence. Roots of subsequently pandemic problems may be found both in the growing centralization of the dispensation of justice to the court of the grand prince, and in the clear indications of growing corruption of the judiciary that may be found in the Sudebnik. Of equal importance was the effective suppression of monetary exchange that followed from the system of kormlenie, and from its successor pomestie. Although officials working in and around the centre of power would be paid in money out of the treasury, the remainder of the steadily expanding bureaucracy and military establishment would be expected to ‘feed themselves from official business’ (kormiatsia ot del).31 In both of these cases, the outcome would be a transformation of fundamental norm systems, in such a direction that the line of division between state and society was gradually dissipated. Since these are effects that lie at the very heart of patrimonialism, we shall return to them at greater length in a moment. First, however, we shall round off our discussion of the formal rule system by stressing once more that there were rational reasons involved in its creation, reasons that should be seen as responses to highly irregular circumstances. The key, as suggested by Keenan, lies in realizing that ‘the Muscovite state focused its energies on strictly limited objectives’. Those objectives were ‘the preservation of military and political order – or, more precisely, the avoidance of political chaos’.32 In that limited sense, as we have repeatedly noted, they were quite successful. As Marshall Poe puts it, the solutions that were produced by the Muscovites ‘provided the Russian elite with a remarkably economical way to stabilize, unify, and mobilize their subject peoples and far-flung territories’. More specifically, he argues that they succeeded by ‘solving or at least ameliorating four problems that had faced every early modern kingdom – the problem of faction, the problem of wealth, the problem of mobilization, and the problem of conflict resolution’.33 First, and probably most important, was the general acceptance of the principle of one ruling dynasty. While rulers in the European monarchies would be constantly plagued by tensions with nobles wanting to share power with the monarch, the Muscovites succeeded in producing a contract

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that would allow them to simply ‘get on with the business of empire building’.34 The reasons for accepting one ruling dynasty again may have been rational enough. Following a ‘prolonged, bitter, and destructive civil war in the middle of the fifteenth century’, which was marked by ‘incessant and mutually destructive conflict’, the leaders of the military clans may have become ‘convinced that political stability in their homeland could be assured only by their acceptance of a single and undisputed dynasty whose legitimacy was unchallenged and whose members were in an ultimate sense above factional strife’.35 The second achievement was that of producing a mechanism by which the rulers could ‘extract resources from the population almost at will’.36 Where most European monarchs were forced to enter into complicated negotiations with a variety of estates on the provision of money for the Crown, the Muscovites did not even have to ask. As the tsar was generally accepted as titular owner of the realm, they could simply take. A third and corollary achievement was the introduction of unlimited personal service obligations. In times where money was chronically short, it did help to be in a position of being able to simply command even the upper reaches of the nobility into service. Poe’s fourth point, on providing a means for conflict resolution, essentially means that the Muscovite autocracy was spared the emergence of such varying social groups with agendas of their own that presented constant threats to the legitimacy of European monarchies at the time. As a supreme arbiter, the grand prince was above the very thought of challenge. Having thus summarized what was indeed a set of real achievements, we must also maintain our focus on the collateral damage. Recalling the ‘genetic’ programme for constructing a socialist economic system that was suggested by Kornai above, we may say that by the end of the sixteenth century the Muscovites had successfully put into place the first two of his building blocks, namely those of establishing a monopoly on power and of suppressing private property. What remains for us to look at is the other half in the fusion of ‘body and soul’, namely that of installing into the system a powerful driving ideology. It is in this context that the ambitions of the Russian clergy will assume pivotal importance. Running on an essentially parallel track, they would be striving hard to introduce what Donald Ostrowski referred to above as a ‘virtual past’. Turning now to look at the impact of such efforts, we shall recall from the previous chapter not only the contents of the message but also what was said about its reception. We must bear in mind that piecing together an image of the output is one thing. Attempting to say something about how it may have been received is something altogether different. No truths will ever be found. The best we can hope to do is to outline a set of responses that fit in with observable behaviour.

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From an analytical perspective it is also important to bear in mind that norms may not be changed easily by direct action. Thus, we may rephrase somewhat our question from the end of the previous section. To what extent may (assumed) mental transformations be explained as the result of deliberate formal policy measures? The answer will form something of a Leitmotif for the remainder of this chapter.

Transforming the mental universe Once we leave the world of observable rules and move into that of norms or value systems, we immediately run into a host of analytical trouble. For starters, we should recognize that the line of division that has been drawn above, between rules and norms, does represent a bit of a construction. In reality, the borderline will be rather fluid. In the words of North, we may envision ‘a continuum from taboos, customs, and traditions at one end to written constitutions at the other’.37 In the following we shall maintain our definition of the formal rules as representing policy and thus being imposable by decree. We shall, however, also make a distinction between two different sets of rules. One represents rules that are designed to solve problems in the interaction between economic actors. These we shall refer to as ‘enabling’ legislation. The other is made up of rules that are commands, designed to prohibit or to elicit actions from below, in accordance with dictates from above. Again we are looking here at a continuum rather than a dichotomy. Even the most perfect of ideal democracies will feature a host of commands from above that constrain activities by the citizenry, and even the most brutal of dictatorships will have some rules that regulate interaction between the subjects. In overall terms, however, the respective ends of the continuum may be taken as illustrations of a fundamental difference between the rule of law and the rule by law.38 By far the most important implication of this distinction relates to our previous view of norms as the providers of legitimacy for the rules. Let us assume that rules devised to be enabling stand a greater chance of receiving legitimacy than those which are simply commands from above. It then follows that the lower the proportion of enabling versus command-oriented rules, the lower the chances for the judicial system as a whole of being perceived as legitimate in the eyes of the citizenry. Mental models Before proceeding along these lines, we shall have to say a few words about the nature of the amazingly complex phenomenon that we have referred to as ‘norms’. The role of social norms in a democratic, market-oriented setting has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. One of many examples has been to show how a deliberate introduction of norms against some

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forms of collectively irrational individual behaviour may be cost-effective. Campaigns such as ‘Keep America Clean’ will yield better results in reducing littering than merely relying on regimes of stiff enforcement of regulations. In his aptly titled book The Cement of Society, Jon Elster provides a range of insights into just how complex these issues are.39 He not only draws an important line between moral norms that are goal-oriented, and social norms that are unrelated to the outcome of given actions. He also demonstrates that not all existing social norms are collectively rational, and that not all social norms that would be collectively rational have actually been introduced. We shall have reason to return to these matters in the following chapter. Let us simply accept for the moment that societies that are lucky enough to possess a good set of norms will do better than those that do not. It then follows that we must distinguish between norms that are in agreement with democratic and market-friendly policies, and those that are not. While the former would represent the repeatedly cited success story of North and Thomas, the latter presents us with the challenge of understanding how and why economic differences between countries may persist over long periods of time. Accepting, moreover, that Russia has indeed been persistently underperforming, our task in the following shall be to look for the evolution of such norms that stand firmly in the way of the introduction of marketfriendly rules, and of credible third-party enforcement of such rules. While the collection of such norms may be said to form an ‘ideology’, that concept represents a field even more complex and contentious than that of norms as such. We shall thus not even attempt any form of general definition here. We shall, however, have a few words to say about how individuals deal with decision making under uncertainty by forming mental models of their surrounding world. In an article written together with Arthur Denzau, North moves into the realm of cognitive psychology, to argue that ‘the diverse performance of economies and polities both historically and contemporaneously argues against individuals really knowing their self interest and acting accordingly. Instead people act in part upon the basis of myths, dogmas, ideologies and ‘‘half-baked’’ theories.’ 40 In this interpretation, ‘institutions’ remain the formal and informal rules of the game, while ‘mental models’ are ‘the internal representations that individual cognitive systems create to interpret the environment’, and ideologies become ‘the shared framework of mental models that groups of individuals possess’.41 In the following, we shall view norms as operating on two essentially different levels. On the macro level, we will understand ‘norms’ in the broadly defined everyday sense of norms that are prevalent in all societies, to encourage some types of behaviour and discourage others. On the micro level, ‘mental models’ will capture the individual internalization of such

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norms. The notion of an ‘ideology’ will be understood as a representation of broadly shared mental models. The latter presents particular problems not only in being difficult to measure. Mental models also form examples of what Elster refers to, in another work, as ‘states that are essentially by-products’.42 The very idea, for example, of ordering someone to be spontaneous or courageous may serve to capture the essence of the problem. From a more general policy point of view, policy makers will often find themselves in positions where the attainment of stated goals will require individuals to reach states of mind that are beyond willing, i.e. that can arise only as by-products of other actions.43 We shall have much more to say about this vital dimension of norm systems when we proceed, in the following chapter, to look at how the path dependence evolved. Here we shall return to the specific case of Muscovy, and to the notion of a specific ‘Muscovite ideology’. In order to set the stage, we shall begin by looking at three different approaches. Muscovite ideology In Billington’s interpretation we are faced with a clearly policy-driven process: ‘The ideology of Muscovite tsardom, which took shape in the early sixteenth century, was a purely monastic creation.’ He sees the monks in particular as the real agents of change: ‘In sacred history, as in iconography, Muscovite monks succeeded in ‘‘transforming an imitative craft into conscious national art’’. Increasingly, lives of saints and sacred chronicles tended to identify the religious truth of Orthodoxy with the political fate of Muscovy.’ 44 Designed to influence the secular rulers, the contents of the ideology thus being produced had clearly specified objectives: The monastic literature of the late fourteenth and the fifteenth century moved increasingly into the world of prophecy – developing two interrelated beliefs that lay at the heart of the Moscow ideology: (1) that Russian Christendom represents a special culminating chapter in an unbroken chain of sacred history; and (2) that Moscow and its rulers are the chosen bearers of this destiny.45 For a substantially different approach, we may return to Keenan, who actually claims that ‘this political system . . . had no ideology, in the more modern sense of the term’. His point is that the specific culture of neglasnost, of ‘commitment to a practice of hermetic silence’, that marked the Muscovite court precluded any open formulation of operative principles or rules to govern political relations.46 The fact that there was indeed a steady flow of statements, which were taken by contemporary Western observers as signs of a distinctive Muscovite

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ideology, is held up as something essentially different. Thus ‘much, if not all, of the literature traditionally considered to have voiced ‘‘official autocratic ideology’’ was in fact but another expression, in high style, of useful myths that the oligarchs purveyed to outsiders in the vernacular: we are but the quivering slaves of an almighty tyrant’.47 Noting that Keenan simultaneously devotes much energy to analysing what he variously refers to as ‘political culture’ or as ‘Muscovite political folkways’, it follows that he is operating on two different levels. On one we have boyars actively seeking to influence the mental universe of foreign observers, on the other their own mental universe is being transformed, albeit without any distinct agent of change. A third way of looking at the phenomenon of Muscovite ideology is suggested by Halperin, whose focus is aimed at the cult of the ruler, in combination with the previously mentioned myth of the russkaya zemlya, the ‘Russian land’. Based on a detailed analysis of literary works produced to celebrate the victory of Dmitrii Donskoi over the Mongols, in 1380, he arrives at an unorthodox conclusion: ‘Shorn of that patina of Christianity not integral to it, the Zadonshchina becomes, purely and simply, a pagan paean to the Russian Land within a largely secular and partly steppe context.’ 48 The strong general focus on ‘lands’ that marked the Kievan period is seen as representative of a cult of the earth, of the ‘Moist Mother Earth’, which forms the real ‘wellspring of Russian paganism’. By fusing this cult of the land (kult zemli) with an equally pagan cult of the clan (kult roda), we arrive at a view of Kiev, the ‘Mother of Russian Cities’, as the rightful possession of Grand Prince Oleg, who is of the right rod.49 Recalling from above what tremendous importance the myth of the zemlya, and the associated notion of votchina, would have for developments both in Kievan Rus and in Muscovy, it is of particular importance to note Halperin’s claims that by the end of the fourteenth century there had occurred a successful translatio of the combined myth of the land and the ruler from Kiev to Vladimir–Suzdal in general and to Moscow in particular. Thus, by the first decade of the fifteenth century, the ‘first period of Muscovite ideology had drawn to a close’.50 Tsars and autocrats In the following we shall attempt to reconcile these three essentially different perspectives by maintaining a distinction between norms that are changing and norms that are being changed. In the former category we may find the Muscovite rulers’ ambitions of presenting themselves as rightful proprietors of the land of Rus as a whole. This first stage must go to Halperin. Pagan roots or not, the myths of the land and of the rightful ruler of that land stand out as truly formative for the early phase of Muscovite growth. While the Mongols did provide support by

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recognizing the genealogical principles of Rus,51 the subsequent acceptance of the Danilovichi as the holders of the right to rule surely must have been facilitated by the already existing ideology, or ‘shared mental models’ of the land and the ruler. The second stage represents the attempts by the clergy to actively implant into the secular rulers their own notion of the grand prince of Moscow as a political and ecclesiastical successor of the Byzantine Emperors. Here things get a bit more complicated. The specific aim of their message was for the grand prince to assume the Byzantine titles of Emperor and Autocrat, or basileus and autokrator, which in Russian would be rendered as tsar and samoderzhets. The former had its share of complications. Etymologically, the Russian word tsar is probably derived from the Latin Caesar, which also has produced the German word Kaiser. To the Muscovites, however, it would have different connotations. While the Holy Roman Emperor would be known as tsesar, tsar would be used both for the Byzantine basileus in Constantinople and for the Mongol khan in Sarai.52 Wishing to promote the former link, the mission for the clergy was ‘to destroy the image of the khan as tsar’. Following the fall of Constantinople, the matter not only became acute. At the same time it also ‘provided a solution: the basileus versus the khan’.53 To the secular rulers, however, the khan would remain the tsar for some time yet to come, thus making it hard even for the grand prince of Moscow to call himself by that title. As the Mongols would refer to him as belyi tsar, or ‘white tsar’, that title sometimes was used. There also were sporadic occasions when the grand prince did usurp the full title, but these would be special cases.54 It was only with the coronation of Ivan IV, in 1547, that the grand prince officially assumed the title of tsar, which would then remain in use until Peter the Great had himself crowned imperator, in 1722. The long vacillation may be explained not only by fear of displeasure from Sarai; the last remnant of the Golden Horde, the Great Horde, had after all been defeated already in 1502. The real reason again may have been genealogical. When Ivan IV finally did assume the title of tsar, he essentially laid claims to being a successor not to the Byzantines but to the Chingizids, the true descendants of the great Chingiz Khan, who were the only ones that rightfully could claim the title.55 Two further points, both of which have been noted above, will serve to illustrate that the mental universe of Tsar Ivan IV was still secular rather than Byzantine. First, it is symptomatic that following the conquests of Kazan and Astrakhan, in 1552 and 1556, the tsar chose to claim these entirely new territories as his personal votchina, thus considerably extending the reach of the old myth of the zemlya. Second, in dispatching his 1557 letter to the Patriarch in Constantinople, requesting acceptance of his assumption of the title of tsar, Ivan IV cited

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as justification precisely these recent conquests. In 1561, however, the Patriarch used the legend of Monomakh as grounds for formally accepting Ivan IV as tsar.56 Turning now to the even more contentious issue of the title as samoderzhets, or autocrat, we are also approaching a fundamental dimension in the formation of the patrimonial state. While being an autokrator in Byzantium had meant no more than being free from outside control, in Muscovy it would come to entail having unlimited authority also within the realm. It thus takes on far greater importance than the issue of being tsar. Timing also is important here. In the previous chapter it was argued that the appointment, in 1448, of a native Russian as Metropolitan marked the beginning of a distinctly anti-Mongol slant in Church writings, the purpose being that of creating a ‘virtual past’ where only Byzantine models and values were featured. To the secular rulers, it was the end of the fifteenth century that would be the time of challenge and change. Following the annexation of Novgorod, in 1478, and the effective termination of the Mongol Yoke, in 1480, the rulers of Muscovy found themselves in a wholly novel situation. Previously, they had derived all needed authority from the khans, via the yarlyk, the formal patent that confirmed the right of princes to serve as such. Now they would have to come up with something of their own, and they would have to do so in a situation of rapid territorial expansion, which placed steadily growing demands on the authority of the central power. It was in the midst of this truly formative period that the clergy were pushing hard for them to assume responsibility as autocrats and as protectors of the Church. Above we saw Billington assigning a pivotal role to the clergy. Similarly, Ostrowski makes it quite ‘clear that neither the practice of centralized authority nor the theory of autocratic rule came to Muscovy from the Qipchaq Khanate, since neither that practice nor that theory existed in the Khanate’. Instead it was the case that ‘autocratic theories entered Muscovy from Byzantium through the written culture of the Church. From the late fifteenth century on, the theoretical justification of the Muscovite ruler’s authority over society derived from Byzantium.’57 Accepting this source and medium of influence, it becomes even more important to note that the records show a striking delay in actual impact. While the Metropolitan in Moscow began addressing the grand prince as samoderzhets already in 1492, it would not be until 1591 that this title was used in official secular correspondence with the outside world, and until 1598 that it was used also domestically.58 Perhaps the reason behind the slow acceptance by the secular rulers of Byzantine heritage may again be explained by rational reasons. On the one hand, the clergy were acting in a clearly self-serving manner, seeking to protect their landed estates from expropriation. Since the landed boyar elite was not enjoying the same privileges, one may assume that some of them, at the

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very least, would have looked unfavourably at the new posture of the Church. On the other hand, it may also be reasonably assumed that the rulers did not look favourably on the increase in power for the Church that would follow from adoption of its proposed system of Byzantine norms. At this point we must digress briefly, in order to summarize some of the events that marked relations between Church and state in the crucial sixteenth century.

Ivan the Terrible as Khan Much of the confusion that surrounds the person of Ivan IV stems from the fact that his first decade-plus in office, from 1547 to 1560, really may be seen as a time of serious reform. Beginning already in 1549, he called a zemskii sobor that was charged with revising the 1497 Sudebnik. In the following year it produced the Tsarskii Sudebnik, a considerably more sophisticated legal product.59 In 1551, the new tsar proceeded to call a Church Council that was directed to prepare a similar overhaul of church courts and church administration. The result, the previously mentioned Stoglav, or ‘100 chapters’, finally replaced the old Church Statute of Vladimir. The following years saw the emergence of Russia’s first standing musketeer army, the streltsy, and of specialized departments of the central government, such as the pomestnyi prikaz, which dealt with service land, the posolskii prikaz, to deal with foreign affairs, and the razryadnyi prikaz, for military affairs. It was also at this time that the English under the famous Richard Chancellor, who was looking for a northeastern passage to India, arrived at Arkhangelsk. The tsar was so pleased to see them that he offered substantive trading privileges, which led to the founding of the Muscovy Company and a brief spurt in trade between England and Muscovy. Thus far it really is difficult to see any reasons why Ivan IV would subsequently come to be known as ‘the Terrible’. On the contrary, a superficial glance at the measures briefly summarized above might lead us to believe that the state was set on a path towards successful stationary banditry, including export-led growth and evolving market-friendly institutions. The turn for the worse came in December 1564. Without prior warning the tsar suddenly left Moscow and retreated with a small retinue to an old summer residence at Aleksandrovskaya sloboda. From there he sent a letter to those remaining in Moscow, accusing them of treason, conspiracy and oppression. Following pleas from visiting delegations, he agreed to return on two conditions. One was that he be given a free hand to punish all traitors, and the other that he be allowed to partition the land. Once these conditions had been met, the tsar returned and proceeded to unleash the wave of terror that would earn him his epithet ‘the Terrible’.

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Few issues in Russian historiography have aroused so much speculation as the question of why Ivan did this. What we do know is that in the years 1565–72, the realm was divided into two parts. One part, the oprichnina, was placed under direct control by the tsar and his handpicked henchmen. The other, the zemshchina, remained under control by the boyars. In ‘his’ part, Ivan IV introduced a system of completely unbridled terror, practised by his personal black-clad guards, the oprichniki. Purges fell on all leading boyar families, including the tsar’s own relatives. Unspeakable bestialities were committed, on many occasions by the tsar himself. Eyewitness accounts from Western observers, such as Giles Fletcher, speak of truly gruesome behaviour and of a total devastation of the land. The rapidly escalating cycle of violence peaked with the utter destruction of Novgorod, in 1570. In the following year, for good measure, a spectacular raid by the Crimean Tatars laid waste to much of the southern parts of Muscovy and even succeeded in setting Moscow itself on fire. Some 150,000 prisoners are said to have been carried off.60 Perhaps this finally convinced Ivan that the terror of the oprichnina must be stopped. By then, however, it was very late in the day and much damage had been done. It has not been easy to find a rationale that might explain all this apparently senseless destruction. Some have seen it as a pure vendetta against certain circles within the elite. Others have presented it as a rational move to limit the disruptive power of the boyars, thus seeking to strengthen the autocratic state. Throughout, the brutal and at times highly erratic behaviour of the ‘terrible’ tsar has also been seen as caused by his mental condition, for which there may be at least some justification.61 In a novel approach, Ostrowski suggests an interpretation that is grounded in strife within the secular elite, finding itself divided over how to handle the growing influence of the Church. He sees the clergy pulling in one direction, succeeding in the process in winning for its cause a faction of the boyar elite. Meanwhile, other members of the secular elite were pulling in the opposite direction, leaving the tsar stranded in the middle, seeking to ‘improvise a consistent synthesis of Byzantine and Mongol’.62 This interpretation fits in rather well with our previous presentation. We may think in three steps. First the clergy seeks to introduce a new set of public norms. Then we find that parts of the elite have adjusted their private mental models to agree with the new set of norms, and in the third stage conflicts arise as other members of the same elite cling to their old mental representations of non-Byzantine norms. The main gist of Ostrowski’s argument is that amongst the secular authority that was represented by Ivan IV and those boyars who remained loyal to him, Muscovy continued to be seen as a successor not of the Byzantine Empire or even of Kievan Rus but of the Mongol Qipchaq Khanate.63 In this interpretation, the oprichnina comes across as a form of separate steppe Khanate being established within Muscovy. It becomes logical that the tsar demanded a promise of non-interference by the Church and its

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allied boyars in his separate realm, and that he would accept as members of the oprichnina a large number of foreigners, both Tatars and Germans, who would have no allegiance to the Church.64 The view of Ivan IV as distraught, seeking to escape from a seemingly hopeless position, is also supported by other evidence, such as his queries of possible asylum in England or his announcement of a desire to assume the soon-to-be vacant throne in Poland. By far the most important, however, is his staging of a mock abdication in 1575. Suddenly deciding to demote himself to mere Prince of Moscow, he instead bestowed the title of ‘Grand Prince of All Rus’ on a certain Simeon Bekbulatovich, formerly khan of the Kasimov Khanate. The irony of it all, as Cherniavsky points out, lay in the reversal of roles.65 While Bekbulatovich was a true Chingizid, and thus a rightful claimant to the title as khan/tsar, he would be cast in the role as Byzantine. Ivan IV, however, who was a Rurikide and thus a rightful claimant to the Byzantine heritage, would see himself as a Chingizid tsar. Viewing the whole affair as a ‘parody of Muscovite-steppe relations’, Ostrowski draws a parallel to the practice of powerful Mongol emirs like Nogai and Mamai, who, not being Chingizids themselves, would rule by appointing puppet khans that were of the true blood. Perhaps Ivan IV responded to the Byzantine agitation of the clergy by evolving an affinity with these illegitimate but powerful Mongols.66 In the end, however, all of this proved to be a ‘last-ditch and futile effort’ to stem a rising tide of clerical influence: ‘The Church had gained the ascendancy in political theory by coopting the symbols of secular authority and by redefining the very nature of the authority of the tsar himself. ’ 67 The ‘mental models’ of the elite would eventually come to be shared, but before proceeding to that stage we must backtrack somewhat.

The boyar Duma The formation of an autocratic system was not simply a matter of relations between the Church and the tsar. As Ostrowski notes, ‘In Muscovy, as elsewhere, no matter what the theoretical justification for the power of the ruler was, that person ruled only with the permission of the ruling class of which he was part.’ 68 In order to understand how those who might have issued an effective challenge to the emerging autocratic system instead could become incorporated into that system, we shall have to look at the role of the men who surrounded the grand prince at his court, namely the boyars and the lesser princes. In Kievan times, the role of the grand prince had mainly been that of a primus inter pares. He would consult with the members of his personal guard, his druzhina, who would be at liberty to come and go. With the increasing centralization of power to one family, and with the closing of all

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possible exits, a new modus vivendi had to be found. The solution would be the emergence of the ‘boyar Duma’. Given the subsequent importance of this body, we may begin by noting that its members were ‘men with a hereditary right to participate in the council of the grand prince’. They constituted the heads of those clans that had such rights, and they were never very many. Numbering fewer than ten until the late fifteenth century, they were at most 16 until the late 1540s.69 The formation of these men into a distinct elite of ‘political families’ took place in the fourteenth century. The mechanism was an increasingly complex system of ascertaining rights of seniority. By the late fifteenth century such rights were entered into special genealogical books that were compiled by the Muscovite court. In the early sixteenth century, all those who were thus pedigreed would become members of the very special system of mestnichestvo, which regulated precedence amongst the elite. Nancy Kollmann sees the emergence of these practices as truly formative, arguing that because ‘in the fourteenth century, the grand prince and the boyar families worked out a system to regulate relations among themselves, the Muscovite political system may be said to have come into being in that century’.70 In the early stage of their association, the grand prince and his boyars together formed ‘a warrior band, united in the quest of booty and benefit; they regarded what we call their ‘‘state’’ as private property to be exploited’. They would not be much concerned with ‘service in public institutions in the cause of an abstract such as the common good’. It was rather a question of pursuit of ‘self-interest by waging war, by taxing the population and transit trade, and by exploiting forest products’. Thus defined, the goals of the early Muscovite political elite also explain the focus on commerce and the rudimentary nature of early Muscovite administration, which was mainly charged with collecting the Mongol impost. In a striking parallel to Pipes’s characterization of Kievan Rus as being akin to the East India and Hudson Bay companies, Kollmann argues that the ‘Danilovichi ruled their land more like a merchant company than like a territorial monarchy’.71 In the fourteenth century there probably had still been free access for new boyars to join, but by the early fifteenth century the elite as such had been formed. Over time, it would expand somewhat and it would change its internal composition. As a result of the ‘gathering of the lands’, many lesser princes came to serve the grand prince of Moscow, where they would be blended in with the boyars. Still, between 1408 and 1462 the elite expanded by no more than four families.72 The period that followed after 1462 would be marked by Ivan the Great and the turbulence surrounding his territorial expansion. In the time leading up to 1525 there would be many new families added, but many would also die out, and of those eligible for boyar rank several did not have any presence. This also was the time when a new hereditary rank, that of okolnichii, was

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added. The elite as a whole, however, would remain small. When Ivan IV came to power, in 1533, there were only 12 boyars and 3 okolnichii attested.73 By the mid-fifteenth century there would also be a third rank added, that of dumnyi dvoryanin. The origin of this group may be found in the previously mentioned group of household servitors that were known as slugi pod dvorskim. Most were free men, but they could also be former slaves of the grand prince. This group is of particular importance since it ‘provided the nucleus of the Russian gentry and the chief support of the tsar in his conflict with the boyars’.74 What we are looking at here is the formation of a powerful political class with strong vested interests in the maintenance of the system. Though there was only a small number of people represented at court, these were the heads of clans that would encompass larger numbers of people, all being busy watching out for their own interests in climbing towards the coveted rank as boyar. It was this political elite that Ivan the Terrible subjected to the terror of the oprichnina. As a result, many were killed. Some clans even became extinct. Many had most if not all of their votchiny confiscated. All were forced to acquiesce as the service obligation was extended to cover not only pomestie but also votchina land. A practical consequence of the oprichnina was that the last vestiges of remaining votchina land were rooted out. This may have been a side effect of political repression, but it may also have been intentional. Jerome Blum, for example, in his classic study of peasant–landlord relations, claims that ‘Ivan knew very well what he was doing’.75 One motive, however, does not have to exclude the other. Two geographical facts explain why they may well have coincided. When the oprichnina was established, it was drawn up not as a contiguous territory but rather to resemble the old scattered holdings of the appanage princes. Its core areas would still be located in the central parts of Muscovy, which also was where the remaining strongholds of boyar votchiny were located, the latter being a consequence of the previous policy of granting pomestiya primarily in the conquered areas. With mass expropriations thus followed not only an uprooting and scattering of the nobility. It also had the effect of finally eradicating private ownership of land. The boyars of the great pedigreed clans had been served a warning of what was to come already in 1550, when the tsar decided to settle a total of 1,064 ‘boyar sons’ (deti boyarskie) on pomestiya around Moscow. Many of the latter were impoverished dvoryanie; some even were descendants of slaves. It was they who would turn out to be the winners. As a result of the terror of the oprichnina, the relations of power were permanently transformed, in the favour of the autocracy and its servitors. As Pipes puts it, ‘the future belonged not to the boyars but to the dvoryanie’.76 This also was the time when many foreign travellers, some of whom would even take up residence, began arriving in Muscovy. As Poe notes, in his

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previously cited book about these foreign observers, their accounts have left a big mark on subsequent Russian historiography. Needless to say, there are many horrific accounts of what happened during the oprichnina: ‘The envoys were clearly shocked by Ivan’s behavior and understood it to be beyond the pale.’ 77 Far more important, however, are their accounts of more everyday life at the court, accounts that have been taken as a reflection of how deep into submission the nobles of this ‘rude and barbarous kingdom’ had sunk.78 Some of the visitors would note that humiliation of the nobility was a regular part of court ceremonies. Others were shocked to see that nobles and clergy alike were subject, just like commoners, to corporal punishment for the slightest of offences. Almost without exception the foreigners were shocked to find that even the noblest would humble themselves before the tsar. Some would note that Muscovite legal protocol required petitioners to refer to themselves as ‘slaves’, or kholopy. The envoys also witnessed Russian nobles prostrate themselves before the tsar, and touch the ground with the forehead, as a result of which ‘many of them have calluses on their heads’.79 Against this background, it should come as little surprise that by the early sixteenth century Grand Prince Vasilii III could be heard proclaiming that ‘All are slaves’ (Vse kholopy).80 But was that really the case? Had the Muscovite nobility really accepted, without struggle, such demotion into complete submission? Let us turn to look at the matter from a somewhat different perspective, that of enforcement mechanisms.

Self-enforcing institutions Proceeding to this third leg in the institutional triad, we shall recall what was held up above as the really crucial feature of the patrimonial state – the fusion of state and society – and seek to answer ‘why in Russia – unlike the rest of Europe to which Russia belongs by virtue of her location, race and religion – society has proven unable to impose on political authority any kind of effective restraints’.81 An immediately tempting conclusion might be that the system of repression has been so effective throughout that no challenges have ever stood much chance of success. While it is true that the political police, in its various shapes, does have a long and prominent track record, this surely cannot be the whole explanation. In the following we shall argue that the absence of effective demands for a Russian Magna Carta may be better explained by the formation of selfenforcing institutions that have served over time to preserve the patrimonial nature of the state. As a starting point, we shall return to the role of law in Muscovy, and we shall recall what was said above about the distinction between

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enabling versus command-oriented legislation: the higher the proportion of commands, the slimmer the prospects for the system as a whole of gaining legitimacy. Rule by law from above In the words of Thomas Owen, ‘the various codes of laws issued from 1497 onward, indicated the vigor with which the tsarist bureaucracy sought to regiment society by means of statutory compulsion and restriction. The law functioned as an administrative device, not as a set of rules to be obeyed by state officials.’ 82 To Pipes, the case of Russia ‘resembled rather the ancient oriental monarchies where royal officials typically dispensed justice as part of their administrative obligations’.83 Even more pointedly, Billington argues that law in old Russia was used exclusively in the punitive sense. It provided specific rights for the agents of the autocracy to punish ‘without mercy’ all forms of challenge to the ‘sovereign honor’ of the Muscovite state: ‘Unable to understand, let alone deal with the changes taking place about them, Russians resorted to violence and clung desperately to forms and distinctions that had already lost their meaning.’ As an illustration he holds up Russia’s first printed law code, the Sobornoe Ulozhenie of 1649, which ‘was elaborately and rigidly hierarchical and gave legal sanction to violence by explicitly denying the peasantry any escape from their serfdom and by prescribing corporal – even capital – punishment for a wide variety of minor offenses. The knout alone is mentioned 141 times.’ 84 What we are seeing here is worlds apart not only from the success story told by North and Thomas. It also stands in stark contrast to the case of Novgorod. Recalling what was said above about the more general role of princes and merchants in the pursuit of market-friendly economic policy, based upon enforceable rules, we have a powerful illustration of our previous distinction between the rule of law and the rule by law. Muscovy would experience recovery from the initial devastation of the Mongol onslaught. There would be a return to commerce and there would be growing wealth. Yet, despite Kollmann’s depiction of the merchant nature of the early Muscovite elite, there would emerge no demands for legal regulation of the ‘enabling’ kind. On the contrary, some of the country’s most important transformations would be implemented without any rules at all being introduced. There was never any law passed to revoke the boyars’ customary right of transferring to the service of another prince; it was just that in the end there was only one prince left to serve. Similarly, there was never any law passed to introduce serfdom for the peasantry; they were simply prohibited from leaving their places of residence.

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Given that such fundamental transformations could be implemented without any form of legal regulation, other than pure restrictions, it appears logical to assume that the judiciary as a whole would fail to win legitimacy. If it is normally up to ‘society’ to demand the introduction of enabling legislation, and of constitutional constraints on the exercise of power from above, then these are tasks that were not even approached. The legislative powers of the Novgorod veche found no parallel in Moscow. Such laws that were issued there were met by passive acceptance, and by the evolution of a variety of techniques of rule-avoidance. Generally lax enforcement and a corrupt judiciary made the latter even more preferable. Pipes provides part of the answer to (his own) question of why Russian society failed over the centuries to demand enforceable rules: ‘The state neither grew out of the society, nor was imposed on it from above. Rather it grew up side by side with society and bit by bit swallowed it.’ 85 In the following we shall understand ‘society’ to be composed of two broad categories: those around the autocrat who ruled together with him, and those below who were subjected to that rule. Essentially, this means boyars and princes on the one hand, and peasants on the other, leaving the Church as a separate case. After the reign of Ivan the Great neither of these categories would offer any resistance whatsoever to the institution of patrimonial autocracy. While the peasants would be repeatedly drawn into at times very bloody rebellions, these were never directed against the tsar. Accepting the central message of the Church, that the tsar was God’s representative on earth, they would rebel either against evil advisors or to replace a presumed usurper with a rightful tsar.86 Similarly, while at times there would be intensive struggles within the boyar elite, such struggles would always be for position within the hierarchy, never against the institution of autocracy as such. On the contrary, as we have noted above, the tsar would function as a supreme arbiter whose judgement was not to be questioned. In sharp contrast to developments in other parts of Europe, in Muscovy there would never emerge any oppositional political philosophies. While Montesquieu, for example, may indeed have drawn much inspiration for his Esprit des lois from Muscovite realities, the Muscovites would produce no philosophes of their own. As Poe suggests, ‘the ideological hegemony of tsarism was so profound that even its basic precepts did not require explication’.87 Observations of this kind have led many to characterize Muscovy as an ‘oriental despotism’,88 and to speculate about the presence of an inner drive for slavery amongst the Russians. Such ideas have also been supported by the undisputable fact that many Russians who were freed from slavery would not hesitate to sell themselves back into that same condition.89 More recent titles, such as The Slave Soul of Russia,90 will serve to illustrate that the image of Russia as a habitat of long-suffering subjects of an oppressive

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system has been projected not only by the travellers of old. The crucial question, then, becomes to what extent we may accept such impressions as credible reflections of actual realities. Rights to demand mercy If we begin with the political culture of the court, there can be little doubt that the factual observations are correct. The boyars would refer to themselves as ‘slaves’ when addressing the tsar, and they would kowtow. The Russian formula for regal salutation was tsariu, gosudariu i velikomu kniazu . . . [name] biet chelom, kholop tvoi, ‘To the Tsar, Sovereign and Grand Prince . . . [name], your slave, makes obeisance’.91 This phrase was used not only in addressing the sovereign. It was the standard written formula to address superiors ‘in all manner of documents throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’. The phrase used to denote ritual prostration was biet chelom, ‘to strike the forehead’, which likely was derived from the Chinese kou tou. We may also note that for good measure both tsar, gosudar and grand prince are being used. As Poe points out, however, we should be wary of accepting such evidence at face value. A more likely interpretation is that this simply came to be seen as polite address, as a way of ‘humbly greeting’. With the increasing stature of Ivan III followed demands for more respectful treatment, and the court of the khans provided the only role model. Again, there may also have been more rational reasons involved, others than simply bowing to superior authority. We may think in four steps. To begin with, following the organizational changes that have been described above, the Muscovite nobility had been deprived of all platforms from which an effective challenge to the autocracy could have been issued. There were no guilds or estates, indeed no autonomous sphere whatsoever that was not de facto part of the dvor of the grand prince.92 Even if they had actually wanted to do so, it would thus have been difficult for them to demand change. Adjusting to this simple fact, boyars and service princes would proceed, in our second step, to discover that the emerging order was not without benefits of its own. By accepting formal subservience to the ‘absolute’ ruler, they would not only be guaranteed peace, in the sense of not having to fear a return to bloody civil wars. They would also find that the tsar could act as a provider of a steady stream of effortless incomes. The third step is somewhat more sombre, reflecting what might happen in the case of dissent or even the smallest hint of disloyalty. According to the infamous law on ‘word and deed’ (slovo i delo), all subjects were required under penalty of death to report immediately any form of criticism against the tsar.93 As was the case with so many other important transformations of Muscovy, the formal dimension would be slow in coming. The law on

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‘word and deed’ was formally introduced only in the code of 1649, and then it would be yet another few decades until a special political police was established to enforce it. What really made the system work was a dual set of mainly informal collective responsibilities, which had been imposed on the population of Muscovy as a whole at a much earlier stage. One obligation was to vouch for the loyalties of others; the other called for all suspicious and/or slanderous behaviour to be immediately reported. The roots of such obligations may be found in the old Kievan system of ‘krugovaya poruka’, which imposed on peasant communes joint obligations for matters both criminal and (probably) fiscal. Whatever questions may pertain to its early stage, ‘none can doubt that the system’s application became greatly intensified under the Mongols, and that the Russians took over some Mongol methods of coercion’.94 What Dewey refers to as ‘political poruka’ implied a system of holding others liable for someone’s conduct, via elaborate forms of suretyship that included both oaths and fines. Though the early roots may be obscure, in Muscovy such obligations reached an ‘apex as a refined and well-articulated system’.95 As we may recall, the first major applications occurred under Ivan the Great, when boyars were required to offer bonds against disloyalty. Such demands would increase substantially over time, with regard both to the number of bondsmen required and to the fines that would have to be paid in case of defection. Under Ivan the Terrible there were cases of suspected boyars having to put up literally hundreds of surety bonds, together being liable for fines of up to 25,000 rubles.96 To this system of internalized mutual control was added an everexpanding obligation to report and denounce. What had originally been an essential part of all inter-princely treaties, where the parties agreed to inform each other of all possible threats and disloyalties, was now set to undergo important change. The increasing centralization of power to the grand prince implied that the obligation to inform and denounce would no longer be confined to two parties. It would become a duty for all of their subjects to ‘inform against anyone who spoke to them in any way detrimental to the interests of the grand prince, his wife, his children or their lands’.97 Although it was thus being embedded into a system of overlapping webs of responsibilities for the loyalty of others, and of the ever-present practice of denunciations, the boyar elite nevertheless was made up of people who possessed both wealth and real power. No doubt they would be able to tell their own self-professed status as ‘slaves’ from that of the real kholopy that they could observe daily. Here we may recall Keenan’s image of how the boyars would foster myths about their own slavery and of the divine ordination of the tsar. Noting that this was all ‘plainly fictional’, Poe ‘is forced to conclude, then, that the court and its servitors were knowingly participating in a kind of political theater,

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a play in which the star acted out the role of ‘‘master’’ and they acted out the roles of ‘‘slaves’’ ’.98 As Elster would readily tell us, however, one cannot consistently preach a message without gradually also being somehow affected by it.99 What we have here may be seen as a classic case of cognitive dissonance, producing an alteration of the mental models of the participants. The end result would surprise outside observers: ‘Most Europeans simply could not believe that the Russians possessed an ethos in which service to the tsar was the honorable obligation of every subject.’ 100 In the mental universe that was evolving amongst the Muscovites, service to the tsar ‘was precisely the condition that preserved their freedom and dignity’. They would look upon a man without a master as ‘a poor creature indeed, for he was subject to the violence and insults that predatory humans were so wont to inflict on their fellow men. But a man in service – particularly in service of the tsar – was protected by the strength of his master and shared in his lord’s dignity.’ 101 The image that is transpiring here is one of a self-enforcing system of patrimonial rule, where all those participating in and around the court had strong vested interests in its continuation. May we realistically expect that any of these actors would stand to gain from the introduction of credibly enforceable rules? As Poe puts it, ‘What well-treated ‘‘slave’’ would question the will of his ‘‘master’’?’ 102 While the evolution of patrimonial norms was certainly important, we must not forget the supporting role of good old material interest, which takes us back to what has been said above about kormlenie and about the judiciary. By far the most important consequence of the heavy reliance on kormlenie as a way of supporting both the military servitors and the rapidly expanding bureaucracy, was the implied consequences of extreme personalization.103 In strictly formal terms, there did exist elaborate restrictions on how much a kormlenshchik would be entitled to demand from those ‘feeding’ him, and there were possibilities to complain, which sometimes might lead to a replacement being made. The very fact, however, that kormlenie appointments would be made for short terms only, for two or three years at the most, reflects that there was a constant pressure from boyars desiring an opportunity to ‘feed themselves’. Faced with such demands, the grand prince would even have to apply a system of rotation in office.104 Thus assuming that kormlenie in practice could offer good opportunities for personal enrichment, it follows that the system as such also served to erase the line of division between private and public, in turn suppressing all sense of rights for those who were charged with the actual ‘feeding’. They became parts of the household of the kormlenshchik, who in turn formed part of the household of the grand prince.

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This also may be seen as the real root of what Pipes refers to as the ‘notorious venality of Russian officials’. As long as the grand prince received his share of what the kormlenshchik managed to squeeze out of the peasants, he would not be much concerned with how much was taken in total or with how the surplus was used.105 In actual fact, it was built into the system that officials would have to steal in order to have sufficient resources with which to defend themselves against the predations of others.106 Such limitations that did exist would be easily evaded. In order to make sure that voevody returning from lucrative Siberian posts had not exceeded ‘reasonable levels of extortion’, the autocrat would have pickets organized along the main road leading back to Moscow. These would search the returnees and their families and confiscate any surplus: ‘To avoid them, enterprising governors returned by back roads, stealing home like thieves in the night.’ 107 Here we may recall what has been said above about the link between enforcement mechanisms and the evolution of norms that serve to support the formal rules. In the case at hand, it should be rather obvious that the judiciary did not stand much chance of winning for itself any form of legitimacy, and that this in turn would have a serious impact on underlying systems of legal norms. As ‘justice’ was reduced to an instrument in the hands of those in power, who in turn would be wielding that instrument as a tool for personal enrichment, the subjects would be reduced to bribery and to pleading for mercy rather than demanding rights. In explaining why the use of gosudar should not be understood in its literal meaning of ‘owner of slaves’, Poe offers an argument that proceeds along these very lines. Knowing that Muscovite legal practice required owners of real slaves to feed and care for their bondsmen, it seems reasonable to assume that the same would hold for ‘ceremonial’ slavery. The implied contract would be based on a peculiar form of reciprocity: ‘We have suffered as required for you, now, if you please, do your part and protect us.’ Though in no ways bound by law to do so, ‘in the course of everyday affairs it was to be expected that the ‘‘master’’ would show mercy’.108 The essence of the matter is that the nobility would accept service in return for a ‘right’ to demand mercy, which might or might not be forthcoming. The main mechanism of enforcement would not be due process, but simple selfinterest from the master of the ceremonial slaves: by pushing his subjects too far he would damage his own material interest. Chattel deprived of all rights For the peasantry in particular, which after all made up more than 99 per cent of the population, the process of decentralization of jurisdiction to private landlords meant a total abandonment of all forms of rights. With growing pressure from above, their traditional forms of ‘krugovaya poruka’ would

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produce some highly special institutional arrangements, designed to ensure collective survival rather than individual welfare. In describing this system, Keenan offers the image of a floor through which no household could sink, and a ceiling above which none could climb. Via periodic redistributions of land, the village council made sure that the ratio of arable land to the changing supply of able-bodied labour was adjusted to ensure maximum output. In addition, it would also require that ‘strong’ families accept to care for the weak, for example by taking in cripples or by having sons marry old widows.109 Though the exact nature of impact has been much debated, there can be little doubt that these various forms of authoritarian intervention must have made heavy inroads into peasant norm systems. There would be much resentment against other households, there would be little sense of property, and there would be a complex attitude towards authority in general. Pipes places particular emphasis on the latter: ‘Totally lacking in legally recognized personal rights, the peasant regarded all authority as by its very nature alien and hostile. He complied when confronted with superior strength, especially if it was applied decisively. But in his mind he never acknowledged the right of someone outside his village community to tell him what to do.’ 110 Along similar lines, Keenan outlines the components of a negative ‘Muscovite view of man’, arguing that the Russian peasant ‘had a ‘‘low’’ opinion of man, was ‘‘fearful’’, rather than ‘‘hopeful’’ about man’s potential weakness, destructiveness, and danger to the vital interests of the social group, and, as a consequence, treated others, and himself, in a manner that we might term ‘‘authoritarian’’ ’.111 The intrinsic strength of these authoritarian norm systems is also borne out by the Russian historian Boris Mironov, who argues that they would be carried over well into the Soviet period: ‘The regulating principles of familial and communal life were institutionalized not only in the peasants’ social, economic, and familial relations with the commune, but also in their ideal, ethical outlooks, and value systems.’ 112 Importantly, he also argues that many of the ‘drawbacks of the commune as a social organization – its repression of initiative, absorption of the individual personality, traditionalism, collective responsibility, and so on – were, from the peasants’ point of view, its benefits’. We thus have an institutional arrangement that is being reproduced over time not only by compulsion from above but also by demand from below: ‘The authoritarianism of the family and commune found external support in Orthodoxy and autocracy, while internally it rested on the ignorance and, most important, the ethical outlook of the peasantry.’ 113 In addition to the internal problems of ‘krugovaya poruka’, there would also be the added obligations of ‘political poruka’. Peasants in general would be under obligation to spy on their landlords, and to denounce any

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form of anti-government words or deeds. Those living in border areas would have similar obligations with respect to foreigners. Failure to report ‘traitors’ trying to enter the country would lead to accusations of treason.114 While the former would add further estrangement between peasants and landlords, the latter would reinforce xenophobia. The role of the Church was to rationalize and legitimate in the eyes of the peasantry these various forms of onerous obligations from above. This it did along two parallel tracks. One was by effectively propagating the notion of the tsar as a ‘bolshak of all Russia, created by the Lord to give him orders and to take care of him’. Viewing the tsar a ‘well-intended father of all his subjects’, the peasant gave him ‘credit for all that was good and blamed whatever went wrong on either God’s will or on the landlords and officials’.115 The other ambition served to instill a deep sense of fatalism and resignation in the face of violence from above. The legend of the martyrdom of Boris and Gleb forms perhaps the best illustration of how endurance, or terpenie, could become a celebrated national virtue of the Russians. Rounding off our account of the emergence of the patrimonial system, we have seen the formal structures of autocracy emerge as rational responses to realities of the time. We have seen the Orthodox clergy create an ideology to rationalize, legitimize and entrench that system, and we have seen how the judiciary was corrupted far beyond the point where it could act as a credible enforcer of rules and rights. Before we proceed to look at how the further development of this system would come to be path dependent, we shall note that it failed to achieve sustainability. During the ‘time of troubles’ (smutnoe vremya) that lasted from 1598 until 1613, the whole construct was about to unravel. The Muscovite state collapsed, and for some time it did appear that Muscovy would pass quietly into history, there to join a great number of other vanished European states. As if by some miracle, however, the Muscovites did manage to pull themselves together.

Collapse and restoration In 1583, the population of Novgorod was estimated at only 20 per cent of what it had been at the middle of the century. Vast areas of the land had been completely depopulated. Between 80 and 90 per cent of all arable land in the Moscow, Novgorod and Pskov regions was fallow. Accounts from previously cited foreign travellers such as Giles Fletcher and others are corroborated by figures from cadastres drawn up at the time.116 This also was the year when the Livonian war could be finally brought to a conclusion. Having begun in 1558, as an attempt to gain access to the Baltic ports, that war had turned out to be a real disaster. Going rather well at first, it served to provoke into action Lithuanians, Poles, Swedes and Danes, who saw their economic interests being threatened. The latter altered the fortunes

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of Muscovy, producing devastation that was far worse than that of the oprichnina. In the end the war was concluded for the simple reason that Ivan the Terrible no longer was able to drum up troops and taxes. Meanwhile, the political elite had suffered its share of Stalinist repression: ‘It was a period of denunciations and false accusations, of confessions (with a few courageous refusals to confess), of ‘‘conspiracies’’ and show trials, of executions and mass reprisals. If an individual incurred Ivan’s distrust, not only the victim died, but in some cases his wife, sons and daughters, servants, friends, supporters, and in a few instances even his livestock perished with him.’ 117 Following the death of the ‘terrible’ tsar, in 1584, the reins of power passed into the hands of his feeble-minded son Fyodor, whose comparatively brief reign (1584–98) would come to be dominated by a shrewd brother-in-law, the famed Boris Godunov.118 One of the lasting contributions of the latter was that during a visit to Moscow by the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church in 1589, he managed to receive permission for the Metropolitanate of Moscow to be elevated into a Patriarchate of all Rus. This represented what Ostrowski calls ‘the high water mark for Church (Byzantine) influence’.119 As the realm of the new Patriarchate included Poland–Lithuania, it would also have repercussions for the ongoing struggle between the two halves of old Rus. When Fyodor died, as the last of the line of Rurikides, Godunov managed to be elected tsar, and he did prove himself to be an able ruler. At first there actually were some signs of improvement, but beginning in 1601 there followed a string of famines and when Boris died, in 1605, the state was on the verge of collapse. Peasant rebellions, such as that of Ivan Bolotnikov, and struggles for the throne that were backed by foreign powers combined to warrant the image of a ‘time of troubles’. In 1609 the Swedish army entered Moscow, and in 1610 the Polish army took its place, each in support of different pretenders for the throne. In 1610, the Muscovite state for all intents and purposes finally did collapse. The fact that Muscovy not only would recover, but would even proceed to build a powerful empire, represents one of the great feats in Russian history. The means by which this was achieved proceeded via a mobilization of both troops and financial resources from the new provinces to the east. In 1613, another zemskii sobor could be called, at which it proved possible, though it may have been close, to elect Mikhail Romanov as new tsar. The election of Mikhail was of particular importance in that it brought back onto the stage his father. Once an important political figure, he had fallen out with Boris Godunov, and as a result had been forced to take monastic vows. Part of the ‘time of troubles’ he spent as a hostage/prisoner in Poland. Following his release, Mikhail appointed him Patriarch and in effect co-ruler.

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Under the name of Filaret he would operate what really amounted to an independent parallel court. Under his influence, the Orthodox Church would become fully and finally integrated into the power system of an Empire to be. For the clergy this represented the culmination of a long uphill struggle. Following the establishment of an independent Moscow Patriarchate, it now also had a Patriarch with real clout at court. The key to the successes of the Romanovs rested in a reconstitution not only of the state but of the whole of Muscovite ideology, and of the power system that went with it. By far the most important symbol of this reconstitution may be found in the great collection of laws, the Sobornoe Ulozhenie, which was enacted in 1649, under Tsar Alexei. Here we may find the main principles of both autocracy and serfdom, as well as that of poruka, being laid out in great detail. This law code would remain in force until 1830. During the two intervening centuries there would be many challenges to the modus operandi of the state and its ideology, but there would be no fundamental change. The path dependence had become firmly entrenched.

Part IV

The path dependence

7

The apogee of patrimonialism

The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia for just about three centuries. In that time, the country underwent a series of outwardly spectacular transformations. It built an empire, it finally entered the community of Europe, and it developed an enlightened intelligentsia that proceeded to produce music and literature of high and lasting value. Underlying these transformations were major waves of reform, designed to break out of the mould that had been fashioned by the rulers of Muscovy. Great tsars like Peter I, Catherine II, and Alexander II would all go down in history as champions of ambitions to modernize and perhaps even Westernize Russia. For all their efforts, however, the outcomes would be rather disappointing. In a book with the telling title The Agony of the Russian Idea, Tim McDaniel sums up a track record of persistent failure: ‘Reform in Russia: over the centuries it has always failed, sometimes to be replaced by a reactionary regime (Alexander III’s reversal of Alexander II’s ‘‘great reforms’’ of the 1860s and 1870s), and sometimes culminating in the collapse of the system (1917 and 1991).’ 1 In his historical account, McDaniel shows how repeated attempts at breaking out of a bad equilibrium consistently led the system to revert to its original institutional position. Each such failed undertaking, moreover, was accompanied by high social costs and a protracted period of disorder, or smuta. Taking that account into the present, it is similarly striking how the failure of Yeltsin’s reforms would be accompanied by massive impoverishment and widespread social apathy. Looking back at these patterns of persistent reversals, it is tempting to claim that we have indeed found support for our hypothesis of a deeply rooted path dependence. It is after all a fact that the Muscovite model did prove, in all its fundamental respects, to be stubbornly resistant to change. Tempting as it may be, however, such superficial evidence must be seen as clearly insufficient. For the argument to be convincing, we also must take a closer look at some of the theoretical underpinnings. In the present chapter it will be argued that Russia’s path of development, from the collapse of Muscovy onwards, was to be constrained by factors that

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had emerged before the time of troubles. We shall attempt to show the nature of those constraints, and to indicate the mechanisms by which they were communicated over time. While the repeated failures to break out do indicate the strength of the constraints in question, it will, however, also be argued that there is nothing here that indicates inability to change. Recapitulating our story thus far, we have seen the Muscovite system emerge under Ivan the Great and be refined under Vasilii III. Under Ivan the Terrible it was pushed into serious crisis, ending in total collapse. While the reasons had much to do with the Livonian war, the real driving force was provided by internal crises within the autocracy and in its relations to the peasantry. The tsar and his boyars had not yet found a working mode of government. Nor had the state fully come to terms with the Byzantine message of the clergy. Given the uneasy coexistence of Church and state that marked the sixteenth century, it is of particular importance to note the role of the former in rallying such support that the time of troubles could be brought to an end. Issuing appeals for the formation of a national militia to drive out the infidels, Patriarch Germogen provided important moral leadership. Against all odds, it proved possible to recapture Moscow and to call the zemskii sobor that elected Mikhail Romanov in 1613.2 While the Church may thus be seen, from this perspective, as the factor that saved Russia, we must not forget that other options may well have been both available and viable. Reflecting the factional struggles that were raging within the boyar elite during the time of troubles, both Poland and Sweden figured as potential partners in alliances that would have brought outside rulers to Moscow. (If realized, such proposals would have been in good tradition of the legendary call for the Varangian prince Rurik to come and rule over the Rus.) In 1610, serious negotiations were conducted with the Polish king, concerning the formation of a personal union, and in 1612 a zemskii sobor that was convened in Yaroslav entered into negotiations with Sweden for Crown Prince Karl Philip to become ruler of Russia. There also was an offer by England to establish a protectorate, and there would be several subsequent attempts by Denmark to establish dynastic relations with the house of Romanov.3 Given the previous example of personal union between Poland and Lithuania, the potential for a deal with the Polish king does come across as a tantalizing option. What finally made this outcome impossible was a public announcement by the Patriarch, that there must be no oath of loyalty taken to a Roman Catholic ruler.4 Though his intervention was not the only obstacle facing the negotiators, it surely must have been decisive. It provided clear evidence both of the deep hostility of the Orthodox clergy towards Catholicism, and of the fact that the balance of power between the Church and the boyars had shifted decisively in favour of the former.

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Noting that Muscovy was thus bent on managing its own affairs, without any outside involvement from the West, one is led in turn to wonder why it was not possible for those convening at the zemskii sobor in 1613 to demand a Russian version of the Magna Carta. The state after all had collapsed and would need to be rebuilt from scratch. Theoretically, at the very least, it should have been possible to elect a new tsar based on a contract of power sharing. Instead, as we know, the state was reconstituted as a full-scale replica of the old order, only this time with an even stronger position for the Church. In the following we shall proceed to see how that reconstituted Muscovite system in its turn would drift towards a second series of crises, almost leading to a second collapse, and how Peter the Great would undertake a second reconstitution, achieving what Richard Pipes calls ‘the apogee of tsarist patrimonialism’.5 In keeping with our theory of path dependence, and in contrast to widespread imagery of Peter as a ‘liberal’ reformer seeking to emulate Western experience, we shall argue that by the time of his death the Russian state still had not deviated in any fundamental respects from the basic institutional arrangements of Muscovy. Most importantly, the political order remained incompatible with the evolution or introduction of such enabling economic institutions that could have generated self-sustained economic growth. The post-Petrine period would present a mixed image. On the one hand it would be associated with a gradual erosion of patrimonialism that did serve to transform the state. On the other, it would be marked by a persistent failure, despite numerous attempts, to introduce solid constitutional foundations for a new order. By the latter half of the nineteenth century there would be a growing realization not only of pending catastrophe. Even more importantly, the autocracy would be locked into a sense of inevitability, of a basic inability to undertake such action that might perhaps have prevented the anticipated outcome. The twentieth century would – accordingly – open with events that brought about a third collapse, and, we shall argue, a third reconstitution of Muscovy, this time by Lenin in the colourful guise of Marxism. To complete the picture, in 1991 that construct in its turn would collapse, leaving for us to speculate over whether the post-communist reconstruction that has been undertaken under the Yeltsin/Putin governments represents a final breakout – or simply more of the same.

Making the path dependent One may certainly take exception to this rather brutal way of presenting Russian history. It may be legitimately argued, for example, that the image of cyclical failures is derived from historical determinism, provoking impressions of a Russia that is simply incapable of change. In order to ward off such unfortunate impressions, we shall argue below that reversals are triggered

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by path dependent responses that may be viewed as a form of ‘revealed institutional preference’.6 The basic assumption is that we have a number of occasions over time where reform is both desired and attempted, and where from a theoretical perspective change most certainly could have resulted. If we accept that individuals do have a basic freedom of choice, it follows that their repeated failures to carry such reforms to completion must be explained as consequences of underlying preferences that were incompatible with the suggested changes. From this perspective, the cyclical patterns outlined above may be viewed as cases where such preferences are being repeatedly revealed. Logically, they may then also be observed and analysed. This approach will be relevant mainly for our discussion of events at and around the court, which after all was where basic decisions on reform were taken. The broader image of path dependence will, however, also have to include explanations of the mentalite´ that emerged amongst the peasantry, and amongst other classes that were being effectively excluded from the inner circles of power. Unless those latter dimensions are included, it will not be possible to discuss in full the problems of implementation and of feedback mechanisms. In order to capture these various effects, we shall deviate from the standard neoclassical assumption of general equilibrium, and of market forces striving in that uniquely determined optimal direction. By allowing instead for multiple equilibria, we shall also allow for the possibility of paths of change that lead to inferior equilibria, and for the possibility of inferior equilibria that are being preserved as positions of institutional lock-in. In accordance with the principle of methodological individualism, the ‘system’ as such will be seen as composed of rational actors who are faced with changes in the rules of the game. On every occasion of reform ‘failure’, it is thus implied that it is their rational actions, rather than some external force of compulsion, that lead to inferior equilibria being established or preserved. It is in this sense that actors are understood to be revealing preferences for a certain set of institutional arrangements, which may be suboptimal. Implied in these assumptions on how path dependence may arise we also may find an important theoretical challenge, namely to investigate how and to what extent such stubbornly reform-resistant preferences may be altered by deliberate policy. This challenge we shall leave for discussion in our final chapter. At this point we shall merely add that the understanding of an ‘inferior’ point of equilibrium is in keeping with our previous perspective of opportunity costs and sustainability. It corresponds to an institutional arrangement that is (a) market-contrary, thus leading to suboptimal economic performance, and (b) incompatible with good government, thus leading to repeated cases of state collapse. Attempted ‘reforms’ will be understood, from this

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perspective, as attempts made from above to introduce rules and enforcement mechanisms that are designed to uphold individual rights. In these formulations there is nothing that comes even close to determinism. On the contrary, we allow for rational utility and profit maximizing behaviour. If this can be shown to lead to persistent adverse selection of inferior equilibria, then we must logically look for explanations that are embedded not in outside compulsion but in individual preference orderings that lead to certain types of collectively irrational responses. Essentially, this boils down to a traditional problem of social order, of which we shall have more to say below. More specifically, we shall be looking for dimensions of the institutional matrix that serve to produce the consistent reversals. Recalling the institutional framework that is suggested by Douglass North, two kinds of forces may be seen to drive a path dependence that is based on ‘bad’ or inefficient institutions. One relates to the formal rules in the payoff matrix, and the other to the informal norms that serve to rationalize and legitimate actions taken in response to those rules.

Increasing returns Beginning with the formal rules, it is assumed in the general case that changes in the payoff matrix will prompt actors to respond by forming organizations that maximize the benefits from the new order. The opening up of new markets will, for example, lead to the formation of firms and organizations that are geared into exploiting gains from those markets. Path dependence will arise if such organizations feature increasing returns. The same logic holds in a case where incentives prompt the formation of clearly suboptimal structures and organizations: ‘The increasing returns characteristic of an initial set of institutions that provide disincentives to productive activity will create organizations and interest groups with a stake in the existing constraints.’ 7 In the case of Muscovy, the formation of the boyar Duma, and of its complicated relations to the ruler, have been presented above as rational responses to external conditions that were created by the Mongols, under a prevailing set of severe natural constraints. Here we shall advance a number of reasons that explain how and why that arrangement came to be so strongly path dependent. To begin with, it is clear that those who became members of what Nancy Kollmann refers to as the ‘boyar elite’ had obvious incentives to invest in becoming better at playing the given game. This assumption holds even in the highly unlikely case where some of them may have realized that they were playing a game that was negative for the collective as a whole. In one of his favoured illustrations, North emphasizes that if the payoff matrix in a society is such that it rewards negative behaviour, then rational

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actors will have an incentive to invest in becoming better at such behaviour: ‘The kinds of skills and knowledge that will pay off will be a function of the incentive structure inherent in the institutional matrix. If the highest rates of return in a society are piracy then organizations will invest in knowledge and skills that will make them better pirates.’ 8 To the boyars of Muscovy, the choice was an easy one. As Robert Crummey puts it, ‘Muscovy offered an ambitious man no other options.’ In theory, he could decide to simply opt out and remain at his estate, but in practice that was not an option, and not only because it probably would not have been allowed in the first place. Given the formidable centralization of control over resource allocation that marked Muscovy, being away from Moscow would mean fading into oblivion and thus into poverty. The latter effect was reinforced by the fact that the private estates were still practising subdivision of the land between heirs into ever-smaller parcels. The only real counterweight to such poverty-inducing fragmentation was the granting of new lands that went with service. There was also the possibility of collecting bribes and fees, but the land question was the one that really tied the boyars to service.9 A second factor that would make the boyars think twice before opting out was their heavy investments into the system of mestnichestvo. Their welldocumented obsession with receiving correct ‘places’ (mesta) in the pecking order reflects not only the rewards that would be derived from climbing. As we shall see below, it would also feed into norm systems, offering increases in status and ‘honour’ (chest). Rather than opting out, members of the boyar elite had every incentive to maintain restricted access, and to insist on clear lines of demarcation between ranks within the elite. Inducement for younger generations to accept their places in line was provided by knowledge that more or less all of those who came from pedigreed families, and who lived long enough, also would make it to the top.10 Finally, we must also bring into the picture the crucial role that was played by marriage politics. Under a political order that was based not on laws but on kinship, it was imperative to think carefully about matchmaking. While marriage into the royal family itself would be the highest prize of all, the more everyday formation of alliances within the elite also would rest heavily on making the right matches.11 As an important illustration, we may note the growing practice amongst the Muscovite elite of keeping women in seclusion. Known as terem, this practice has sometimes been attributed to the Mongols, but as Donald Ostrowski has pointed out, there are a number of reasons why this connection must be rejected.12 The obvious explanation rests in a desire to prevent ‘natural’ causes from determining marriages. Given the overriding importance of marriage into the royal family, it follows that tsars who married several times would wreak havoc on the system. With every new marriage, a new set of in-laws was brought into the

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inner circle, where they would have to wrestle for positions with those already present. As Edward Keenan puts it, it was ‘during the process of betrothal of an heir or royal daughter that one heard the thud of limp bodies in the Kremlin’.13 It is somehow symptomatic that Ivan the Terrible would consciously break the rule of restricted marriages. In addition to his other ways of cracking down hard on the boyar families, he also upset the general rules of the game by marrying six times, on each occasion bringing new claimantrelatives of the bride into the picture. Burnt by this experience, seventeenthcentury tsars took to marrying women from obscure families, thus preventing royal marriage from becoming a focal point of boyar infighting.14 Given both the gains and the risks that were involved in playing these games, it is not surprising that the boyar elite would develop patterns of internal cohesion and control that over time became strongly path dependent. Noting that ‘Muscovite political traditions probably would have undergone radical change if they had allowed new social classes ready access to the elite’, Kollmann rejects previously held views that in the times from Ivan the Great through the rule of Ivan the Terrible there was a ‘social revolution’. Although new families were admitted, this did not bring any changes in the rules: ‘Rather, political traditions were maintained as the elite evolved.’ 15 Recalling our question from above, concerning the absence of demands for a Russian Magna Carta, we may find part of the answer in her emphasis on the basic unity of interest that emerged between the tsar and his boyars. Following Pipes in arguing that the Weberian ‘ideal type’ of patrimonial rule ‘also seems to reflect Muscovy’s political principles’, she finds that this ‘revised interpretation of sixteenth-century political life has the virtue of explaining the ‘‘failure’’ of boyars to act as an aristocracy’.16 Most importantly, she also emphasizes that the system was being sustained not only on demand from below: ‘If consensus was achieved by boyars’ selflimiting practices, it was also cultivated by mediating forces at the court – namely by the Metropolitan and by the grand prince himself. ’ 17 By the early seventeenth century, as Crummey puts it, ‘the Russian nobility wore the harness of service like a well-trained horse’.18 Recognizing all the good material reasons that they had found for accepting that harness, it remains to ask just how strong the path dependence had become. From a purely theoretical perspective, there was nothing to say that the old order, no matter how well entrenched it had become in strategies of seeking material gain, could not have been replaced by a new set of strategies. This after all was a case of coinciding interests, not of bonded slavery that was upheld by brute force. All that would have been needed for change to occur was a rearrangement of the payoff matrix, such that outside ventures would have been perceived as more attractive than continued service. The increasing returns characteristic of the existing order do indicate that it would have taken substantial payoffs from alternative options for strategies to be altered, but there is nothing to say that such change was inherently

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impossible. What did add serious complications was the fact that acting in accordance with a set of given rules over time also will have an impact on the informal norm systems of the actors in question.

Mental models This recalls the second of the two factors indicated by North as driving forces in a negative path dependence: ‘The subjective mental constructs of the participants will evolve an ideology that not only rationalizes the society’s structure but accounts for its poor performance. As a result the economy will evolve policies that reinforce the existing incentives and organizations.’ 19 In the following we shall assume that it was this latter factor, more so than that of increasing returns to the organizational structures, which would make the system so resistant to change. The dual emphasis that is placed by North on the evolution of norms, and on the formulation of policies that are derived from those norms, takes on particular importance here. Feedback effects from the pursuit of certain types of policies will add further strength to the path dependence. At this point we may recall what was said in Chapter 1 above about the controversial role of culture as an explanatory variable in the social sciences. As an illustration of the role that is or may be played by culturally embedded norms in determining economic performance we may return to our previous parallel between the merchant republic of Novgorod and the merchant citystates of northern Italy. In one of his cited articles on the opening up of long-distance trade in the Mediterranean, Avner Greif places much emphasis on the role of cultural values in determining the different strategies chosen by two groups of traders, the Maghribi and the Genoese. Noting that the former preferred collectivist solutions, while the latter were more individualist, he also indicates another parallel of great importance. Referring to studies of contemporary societies, where social psychologists have shown strong correlation between societal organization and per capita income, Greif makes a distinction between current-day developing nations that tend to be collectivist societies, and developed Western countries that tend to be individualist. In the former case, social structure is ‘segregated’, implying that individuals interact within groups where enforcement is left to informal arrangements. In the latter, social structure is ‘integrated’. People interact across groups, and enforcement mechanisms are formalized.20 Since everything we have said thus far about Muscovite development tends to fall into the category of segregated informal structures, this approach has obvious relevance to our argument as a whole. Taking the parallel one step further, we may also note that North’s previously presented concept of ‘shared mental models’ has much in common with Greif ’s suggested definition of ‘cultural beliefs’ as ‘the ideas and thoughts common to several individuals that govern interaction’.21

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The mechanism by which such mental models or cultural beliefs may contribute to path dependence proceeds via expectations: ‘Past cultural beliefs provide focal points and coordinate expectations, thereby influencing equilibrium selection and society’s enforcement institutions.’ 22 Putting it more specifically, new organizations will not be formed unless actors expect to gain, and since such expectations will in turn depend on cultural beliefs, we have a constraint on the trajectory of possible change. These observations take us back to the previously mentioned realm of problems of social order, which, we shall argue, is where the real roots of Russian path dependence may be found. In the previous chapter we made passing reference to Jon Elster’s theories on the role of social norms. It was noted, rather obviously, that societies lucky enough to possess a good set of such norms may be expected, much like those lucky enough to possess a good set of institutions in general, to show better performance than those less fortunate. Here we shall proceed to look at that issue in somewhat greater detail, and to argue that norms may contribute strongly not only towards good performance, but also to the formation of an institutional lock-in. What sets ‘social’ norms aside from the host of other norms that imbue various societies is the fact that they, according to Elster, ‘provide an important kind of motivation for action that is irreducible to rationality or indeed to any other form of optimizing mechanism’.23 As illustration of this point, he notes as ‘one of the most persisting cleavages in the social sciences’ the opposing lines of thought that are associated with the homo economicus of Adam Smith and the homo sociologicus of Emile Durkheim. Where the former is assumed to be guided by instrumental individual rationality, the latter is driven by social norms. Where the former will always be seeking Pareto improvements, the actions of the latter are ambiguous: ‘Social norms do coordinate expectations. They may or may not help people achieve cooperation.’ 24 These observations have a great deal of relevance to what has been said above about general versus multiple equilibria. Elster formulates his task as follows: ‘I shall discuss two concepts of social order: that of stable, regular, predictable patterns of behavior and that of cooperative behavior.’ 25 Noting that the parallels in economics would be the achievement of equilibrium and of Pareto optimality, he argues that social norms may ensure predictability outside equilibrium, and that cooperation thus can lead to Pareto-inferior outcomes. Recognizing this role of social norms, we have arrived at a point where we may have a stable equilibrium that does result from cooperative behaviour but must nevertheless be characterized as inferior. The reason derives from the fact that where rationality is essentially conditional and future-oriented, social norms either are unconditional, or, if conditional, not future-oriented. In plain language, this implies that our previous assumptions about rational actions must be modified somewhat. Actions that are dictated by

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social norms will not be rational in the sense of seeking to achieve goals that are consistent with self-interest. Engaging in vendetta forms a good illustration of actions that are outright self-destructive. Since the formation of such norms will have important consequences for what has been said above about multiple equilibria, we shall expand the argument somewhat. Elster’s general definition of a norm is ‘the propensity to feel shame and to anticipate sanctions by others at the thought of behaving in a certain, forbidden way’. It becomes a social norm when it is shared by other people and is partly sustained by their approval and disapproval. It derives its power from the ‘grip on the mind’ that follows from the strong emotions that will be triggered in the case of violation.26 The role of social norms in promoting ‘stable, regular, predictable patterns of behavior’ is similar to Greif ’s assumption about how ‘cultural beliefs provide focal points and coordinate expectations’. The main point, however, lies not so much in the promotion of equilibrium as in the possibility of achieving inferior equilibria, and in the likelihood that cognitive dissonance reduction will contribute towards path dependence by enhancing the ‘grip on the mind’. Here we may bring into the picture Albert Hirschman’s classic theory on Exit, Voice and Loyalty.27 His basic assumption is that individuals who are faced with decline in the performance of firms, organizations or states will have a choice between Exit, which is defined as leaving an organization or ceasing to purchase a product, and Voice, which captures efforts to elicit improvement. In cases where deterioration is due to temporary reasons, the latter option will be clearly preferable. Based on these assumptions, Hirschman shows how system managers of various kinds have successfully engaged in promoting a sense of Loyalty, which makes individuals delay the choice of Exit beyond the point where individual short-term utility maximization would have dictated such action to be taken. The system will thus be given some additional time, in which it may – perhaps – recover and improve. A classic example of how such feelings of Loyalty may be promoted is that of degrading initiation rites common amongst student fraternities. Having made a heavy investment in order to become a member, the student will be slow in perceiving such signs of decline that under other circumstances would have prompted his or her leaving. Cognitive dissonance thus triggers behaviour that deviates from what would have been dictated by narrow selfinterest. In the case of Muscovy we may think of serious decline in numerous senses: the growing impoverishment of the nobility, the repeated crises in its relations to the court, wars that were going badly, a peasantry in flight – even state collapse. From a perspective of instrumental rationality, all of these might have prompted a strategy of Exit, in the form of a challenge to the system of autocracy. Instead, however, boyars showed surprising Loyalty, even to the point of standing by the tsar when their fellow boyars were being demoted, expropriated and murdered.28

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In seeking to explain this seemingly irrational behaviour, we may recall what was said in the previous chapter about self-enforcing institutions. Over and above the simple fact that the autocracy was perceived as a source of steady material gain, which could be effectively exploited via the formation of certain types of organizations and systems of rules, the boyar elite also evolved over time systems of norms that would preclude any form of challenge even when the material benefits were dissipating. Based on their heavy investments in the system of mestnichestvo and in the practice of marriage politics, Hirschman’s model would predict cognitive dissonance reduction leading to a distinct sense of Loyalty, which effectively precluded Exit. From Elster’s perspective, we may point more specifically at the emergence of powerful social norms regarding the sense of honour that came with service, and at the implied imperatives to assist in repressing any fellow boyars who might be suspected of taking actions to disrupt the system. The theoretical challenge is to understand how collectively irrational norms, such as those prescribing denunciation as a means to preserve honour, could become internalized, perhaps even to the point of becoming unconscious. Here we may refer to Greif ’s recognition of a class of moral enforcement mechanisms, defined as ‘enforcement based on the tendency of humans to derive utility from acting according to their values’. In tacit keeping with Hirschman’s theory of Loyalty, he suggests the ‘development of distinctive value systems as individuals attempt to find moral justification for their behavior through cognitive dissonance’.29 These theoretical arguments fit hand in glove with what was said above about the mentalite´ of the boyar elite in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Noting that the ‘obligation to serve itself did not come into question’, Crummey maintains that ‘service to the state provided the nobles, including the most aristocratic, with their raison d’eˆtre, their source of self-esteem’.30 The very same may also be captured in what Marshall Poe referred to, in our previous chapter, as an ‘ethos of service’. With this we may conclude our account of how path dependence emerged in the institutional matrix that defined the autocracy and the boyar elite. In the following, we shall proceed to include other groups of actors, notably so the Church but also the peasantry and members of other social classes that would emerge as the old system of patrimonialism was gradually eroded. As we have noted above, the latter will have to be included into the picture for the very simple reason that they represent the other end of the policy process, that which responds to policy changes and thus determines the fate of attempted reforms. Here it only remains to note that for all its successes in evolving institutions – formal as well as informal – that were designed to support the system, and that did make possible an impressive growth in both power

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and territory, the Muscovite autocracy failed miserably in achieving sustainability. In the end, both the economy and the state itself broke down. Proceeding now to look at developments during the seventeenth century, we shall see how the system as such was reconstituted, and how this unreformed Muscovite system would prove capable in its ‘second life’ of a continued projection of power. While the latter did secure a continued territorial expansion that was nothing short of stunning, it also carried a heavy price. As Muscovy transformed itself into a Russian Empire, it in a sense also sowed the seeds of its own demise and eventual destruction.

A ‘long century’ Using a phrase that is common amongst historians, Russia’s seventeenth century may be seen as a ‘long century’. Starting with the death of Tsar Ivan IV in 1588, it would end only with the death of Emperor Peter I in 1725. The intervening decades offered a breathtaking journey, from the collapse of Muscovy via solid reconstruction to a second series of crises that well-nigh caused another collapse. For the Church in particular, this long century would mark a process of precipitous decline. Having emerged out of the time of troubles at the very peak of its power, it would enter the Petrine era in a state of serious internal upheavals, with far-reaching implications for the cohesion and stability of the state. This combined crisis of both Church and state was to form an important background to the subsequent reforms of Peter the Great. Although we ended the previous chapter by pointing at the effective merger of state and Church that took place under the joint leadership of Tsar Aleksei and Patriarch Filaret, here we shall retain the line of distinction and proceed along two parallel tracks. Since it was the state structures that broke down during the time of troubles it may be logical to begin at that end.

Unreformed reconstitution With the election of Mikhail Romanov as tsar, the stage was set for a fullscale reconstitution of the old system. Having neither the political support nor the financial resources to launch a determined programme of his own, the new tsar proceeded carefully. By appointing boyars from rivalling camps, he demonstrated that his main ambition was for stability, consensus and reconciliation. In the words of Crummey, ‘the extent to which Tsar Mikhail’s council was aristocratic in composition, and the care with which genealogical seniority was recognized, suggest that the new regime was consciously trying to rebuild the shattered sixteenth century elite’.31 Influence from the tsar’s archconservative father and de facto co-ruler probably also played a role in allowing genealogy to determine new appointments for the boyar Duma.

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While the boyar elite was thus being rebuilt, it was done without any form of changes in the basic rules of the game. Unsurprisingly, this attempt at recreating a sixteenth-century elite under seventeenth-century conditions would meet with severe difficulties. To begin with, the growing complexity of state administration implied that boyars who of old had been exclusively military men now would also have to become career bureaucrats, assuming leadership of the new ministries, the prikazy. The resilience of the old order was manifested in the fact that this important diversification of tasks failed to produce a division into separate military and civil service estates. Instead there emerged ‘a new type of servitor, the man who served both on the battlefield and in his office’.32 This not only presaged the melding of all servitors into one single group that would result under Peter. It also made ‘heredity a cumbersome principle for regulating advancement’,33 thus providing a further cause of future changes in the system of service. The main driving force that resulted in growing bureaucratic complexity was the seemingly never-ending wars, which imposed needs to engage in further and steadily more elaborate forms of resource extraction. While it did prove possible to reach an early peace with Sweden, at Stolbovo in 1617, relations with Poland would remain complicated and costly. The war of 1617–18 had brought the Poles up to the very walls of Moscow. Though the city itself was not taken, Smolensk and some other areas to the west had to be ceded. In 1632–34, seeking to exploit Polish weakness during the 30 years’ war, Tsar Mikhail launched a determined effort to retake Smolensk. The failure of that undertaking created something of a trauma. Recalling the disastrous outcome of the Livonian war, it brought home that taking on the organized armies of the western neighbours was something entirely different from grappling with the nomads to the east. When Mikhail died, in 1645, he left for his son Aleksei Mikhailovich a state that was in dire need of military modernization. Seeking to raise the funds necessary to undertake such a project, the new ‘administration’ proceeded to tighten the enforcement of tax collection and to introduce a new tax on salt. Popular discontent with these measures was aggravated by the fact that the responsible ministers earned a reputation for personal greed and corruption.34 The brewing crisis was brought to a head in June 1648, when attempts by the people to petition the tsar for redress escalated into full revolt, including the looting of homes of prominent figures and the actual lynching of three cabinet members. For several days the Kremlin was under veritable siege. This revolt had two important outcomes. One was the introduction of a special chancery, known as the chelobitnyi prikaz, which was to receive future petitions from the people. The tsar apparently had been so taken by the riots that he decided never again to receive a petition in person. This was not auspicious for future relations between the autocracy and its

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subjects. Geoffrey Hosking even suggests that the year 1648 ‘marked the moment when the Muscovite state ceased to base its cohesion on a putative personal relationship between the tsar and all his people’.35 The other outcome was of even more fundamental importance. Realizing that a new code of laws was needed, Tsar Aleksei decided to call another zemskii sobor. The result of its labours was the previously mentioned Sobornoe ulozhenie, presented in 1649, which codified in great detail the full set of such control measures that had evolved over the past couple of centuries. It is symptomatic of the culture of jurisprudence at the time that the new law failed to even mention the word ‘serf’. Having no ambitions whatsoever of laying down any rules or definitions of bondage, it merely established a set of elaborate penalties that were designed to constrain the traditionally free movement of the peasantry. In thus effectively signalling the final triumph of serfdom as the basis of the rural economy, and hence of the state as a whole, it also established a system that was completely lacking in legal regulation of rights and privileges. While the peasants would be required to pay taxes, they would not be recognized in any other way as actors in their own right. This important transformation represented the completion of a process that had been long in the making, driven by increasingly vociferous complaints from the nobility. In 1637, representatives of the poorer strata of the local nobility had appealed to Tsar Mikhail to stem the flight of the peasantry, by repealing the five-year statute of limitation on reclaiming fugitives.36 Their compelling reason for making such appeals was that the ongoing drain of labour resources was threatening the very basis of existence for the landed gentry. Without labour to work the lands, their estates would be rendered worthless. Since this in turn would make them incapable of paying taxes, the autocracy also had a stake in resolving the issue. Shaken by the events of 1648 it finally yielded. With the ulozhenie, the Russian peasantry was conclusively bonded and would so remain until the abolition of serfdom in 1861. In addition to this effective albeit indirect introduction of human bondage, the ulozhenie also brought legal codification of the previously largely informal practices of denunciation and of krugovaya poruka. Representing important driving factors in the path dependence, these burdens would be applied equally to the peasantry and to other strata of Muscovy. In that sense, they may even be seen as important defining factors of the Muscovite state and of Muscovite society at large.

Demise of the boyar Duma While the adoption of the ulozhenie did mark a peak of strength for the Muscovite autocracy, the second half of the 1640s also marked the beginning of renewed crisis for the boyar Duma. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the members of that body had formed an elite group whose existence was based on hereditary rights. Restricted access had served both to

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maintain the ‘honour’ of the boyars, and to preserve their function as a consultative body. In the seventeenth century, that was all set to change. For the century as a whole, membership in the Duma increased fivefold, bringing its total by the beginning of 1690 to no less than 151 members.37 This inflation of honours effectively served to destroy the Duma from within, in the process also destroying the very foundations of the political system as such. It was not simply that its sheer size would make it impossible for the Duma to function in any serious advisory or consultative capacity. The growing number of members who from a social point of view simply did not belong also served to dilute the honour and distinction that had come with being a boyar, thus leading to a serious crisis within the boyar elite. From a constitutional point of view, it is of particular importance to note that this erosion of the foundations of the political system was associated with weak rather than with strong rulers. In the reign of Mikhail, who after all was charged with reconstituting the state, Duma membership was kept to between 28 and 39, which was still a reasonably small number. The real transformation began after his death. The first step was taken under Aleksei, when the Duma was ‘deliberately opened up for new members irrespective of social origin’.38 Partly these new men would be specialists on military and diplomatic matters. Partly they would be friends of the tsar, who simply enjoyed their company. As a result of this change in policy, by 1652 the Duma had increased to 60 members. From there on until the death of the tsar, in 1676, it would remain at between 60 and 74. Since Aleksei remained a strong ruler, the ongoing erosion of the Duma did not pose too much of a problem. It would be under the following regimes of weak tsars that the boyar elite was turned into ‘a caricature of its former self. Not only did they inflate the number of Duma members, but they also destroyed its image as a group of servitors.’ 39 These observations provide powerful illustration of just how weak the formal foundations were on which the political system of Muscovy had been built. The first major surge in Duma membership came in the latter half of the 1670s, as Tsar Fyodor II needed to win support for his rule. By the time of his death, in 1682, membership had reached almost 100. Then it really exploded. During the first four days of her regency, Peter’s elder half sister Sophia promoted no less than 18 new men, and by the time she was ousted the Duma had all but ceased to function. Over the century as a whole, nearly one-fifth of the Duma members did nothing but attend court ceremonies. After 1676, that proportion rose to nearly one in three. In the words of Crummey, ‘the appearance of a large number of courtiers who served only decorative functions signified the decay of the Muscovite tradition of a working nobility’.40 This image of a deepening crisis for the boyar elite stands in stark contrast to their path dependent Loyalty to the system as such. Despite the fact that

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‘behind the secure hierarchy of rank lurked the very real danger of disgrace and its consequences’, they failed to take any action that might have established a balance of power. Part of the reason was that good material interest still called for strategies of getting as close as possible to the centre of power. The rules of the game that they had created offered the boyars secure rewards from simply accepting their place in line: ‘In short, seventeenth-century Duma members played a game whose formal rules made it difficult to lose.’ 41 Assuming, however, that it was the associated system of norms rather than mere material interest that kept the boyar elite glued together, it follows that the introduction of growing numbers of social outsiders into the inner circle would pose a real threat. It was dangerous not only in the sense of diluting honour and of thus creating strife within the elite. The fact that far too many of the new men were nothing but parasites also had the effect of discrediting the boyars as a group in the eyes of the tsar and many of his subjects.42 Before proceeding to look at how Peter the Great would approach and deal with this crisis of the boyar elite, and thus of the very foundations of the country’s political and social order, we shall backtrack somewhat. It is time to pick up the other strand of crisis, namely that of religious upheavals within the Church. Compared to the crisis of the state structures, it was to prove a far more serious challenge.

The great schism For the Orthodox Church, the ‘long’ seventeenth century would follow a pattern similar to that of the state structures. Experiencing great strength at the outset, as time wore on it found itself embroiled in ever-more serious conflicts, which towards the end of the century threatened to literally tear it apart at the seams. This development becomes all the more striking if we recall the previous string of successes of the clergy, both in warding off threats of having its estates expropriated and in securing, under Boris Godunov, the establishment of an independent Russian Patriarchate. With the election of Mikhail Romanov as tsar, the Church won unprecedented influence over the state. Being appointed ‘Great Sovereign and Patriarch’, Mikhail’s father Filaret was given complete authority over all territories and functions that lay within the realm of the Church. Based on these powers, he became something of a senior partner in a duumvirate that ruled Muscovy in 1619–33.43 During this time, he was also in firm control of the upbringing of the young tsarevich Aleksei, who accordingly would be exposed to the full weight of the message that the clergy had sought to propagate throughout the sixteenth century. It was in the midst of this time of political and religious strength that the Church was struck by a series of powerful religious challenges, external as well as internal. From without, it had to deal with increasingly disturbing influences not only from the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic

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Counter-Reformation in Europe. Even more serious was the challenge from the Uniate Church to the south, which had accepted, with the 1596 Union of Brest, the supremacy of the Pope in return for retaining its Greek liturgy. The internal challenge derived from widely held beliefs that the time of troubles had been a punishment from God, for having strayed from the true path. Harking back to the religious fervour that had followed in the wake of the Council of Florence and the fall of Constantinople, such beliefs led to feelings of uncertainty and foreboding. In some quarters, they would even be mixed in with Byzantine apocalyptic expectancy. By the late 1630s, the authorities had to deal harshly with a spread of teachings that the end of the world was at hand and that the Antichrist was already ruling.44 The real core of these various challenges to religious Orthodoxy lay in Russia’s increasingly complicated relations to the West, in ‘the ever more shrill and apocalyptical Muscovite insistence on the uniqueness and destiny of Russia’, which would have to be aligned somehow with the increasing influence of the West. The result, in the words of Billington, was that ‘in the course of the seventeenth century, Russians seemed to trash about with increasing desperation. Indeed, the entire seventeenth and the early eighteenth century can be viewed as an extension of the time of troubles.’ 45 While it remains true that Tsar Aleksei did call a zemskii sobor to introduce Russia’s first printed law code, which would remain the basic law of the land until 1833, this did not imply that he was prepared to base his rule on laws or even ‘to speak in the language of the chanceries rather than the chronicles’. On the contrary, following the adoption of the ulozhenie, the tsar would embark on a programme of ‘xenophobic distraction’ that included discrimination of foreign merchants and calls for mobilization against Poland, which in the end made war inevitable.46 Following the conclusion of a treaty with the Cossacks, at Pereyaslavl in 1654, Muscovy launched a campaign against Poland that led to the capture not only of Smolensk. It also incorporated all of left-bank Ukraine and – for some time – large parts of the remainder of old Western Rus. Although the war would drag on until 1667, and in the end would result in smaller territorial gains than had been won during the first successful years, it did represent a major achievement. The ‘patrimony of Yaroslav’ had finally been reunited. Kiev, Novgorod and Moscow again belonged to one family of rulers. In a deeper sense, however, this achievement recalls what was said above about keeping score in the wrong game. In a situation where the state was already embroiled in a deep internal crisis that was fuelled by outside ideological influence, it did not make a whole lot of sense to incorporate vast areas that could only serve to aggravate the crisis of identity. That problem was compounded by the fact that the new tsar was a very pious man, who would be highly susceptible to destabilizing influences from clerical feuding. Following the crisis of 1648, Aleksei sought out for spiritual leadership a monk by the name of Nikon, ‘in whom the theocratic answer to Russian disorder found its last and greatest exponent’.47 With him Nikon brought the

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asceticism of the monasteries in the Trans-Volga region that had played such a crucial role in the upheavals of the late fifteenth century. His influence on the tsar, and thus on the future course of the country, would be shattering. Rising first to become Metropolitan of Novgorod, in 1652 he was appointed Patriarch. For the coming six years he would serve as ‘the virtual ruler of Russia, using the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the printing press to extend the program of ecclesiastical discipline he had developed at Novgorod’.48 His initial support from the tsar, with whom he had regular Friday meetings, was such that when Aleksei left for the front in the Polish war he handed over the reins of power to his Patriarch, who proceeded to establish a virtual theocracy. Filled with ambitions to cleanse the faith, Nikon introduced a series of reforms that were designed to return the Church to its Greek roots. Resistance to these reforms produced a movement of ‘Old Believers’, whose challenge from below produced a split within the Church that came to be known as raskol, or as the ‘great schism’. Part of Nikon’s own subsequent undoing was derived from a troublesome personality, which served to estrange him not only from the clergy but even more so from the tsar. By 1658 the attitude of the latter had cooled to the point where Nikon played out a dramatic albeit futile gesture of resignation and retreat to a distant monastery. The tsar was unimpressed and allowed the Patriarch to remain secluded. In 1666, Aleksei decided to call a Church Synod to settle the issue of reform. Although Nikon had fallen from grace, and would be called before the Synod only to accept his resignation, the bulk of his programme for reform was accepted. Reactions by the Old Believers would not be slow in coming. To some, the very calling of a Synod in 1666 recalled all the number magic of the Biblical Book of Revelation, where ‘666’ was seen as the apocalyptic sign of the Beast. Adding to the already prevailing sense of pending doom, such symbolism provided justification for those who had prophesied that the world would come to an end in that year. Viewing Aleksei as the Antichrist already come to power, many of the Old Believers fled to the southern parts of the country, where for a long time to come they would form a hotbed of insurrection. Others sought death as the only way out: ‘To keep themselves undefiled by contact with the Antichrist’s agents, whole congregations, at the approach of soldiers or officials, would shut themselves inside their wooden churches and set them alight in defiant acts of self-immolation.’ 49 Yet again others resorted to armed resistance. Beginning in 1668, at the Solovetsk monastery by the White Sea, there followed a series of violent rebellions that would require substantial military forces to be deployed. Adding to these problems, there also was the rebellion of Stenka Razin, a Don Cossack and a skilled military commander who seized the opportunity of state weakness and would cause the army a great deal of trouble before his

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capture in 1671. The fact that Tsar Aleksei would die only days after the fall of Solovetsk, in 1676, also was taken by many as final proof of God’s displeasure. There were good reasons to explain why an essentially religious conflict could have such far reaching repercussions for the state as such, leading not only to massive outbreaks of violence but also to a real crisis of authority and integrity. Billington justifiably characterizes the Church Synod as a coup d’e´glise, comparable in importance to the Bolshevik coup d’e´tat that was to follow 250 years later.50 To Marc Raeff, the main reason behind the crisis was that ‘in Muscovy, religion served both as a cultural underpinning of the regime and as a principle in terms of which Russia was able to define itself as a nation’. Given this fundamental importance of religious Orthodoxy, and thus of the Church as an organization, it should come as no surprise ‘that any challenge to or conflict involving the rituals and teachings of the Church had profound repercussions on the political and cultural life of the nation and struck at the very roots of Muscovite national identity and spiritual unity’.51 Billington offers an even harsher image of what he calls a ‘monastic state’, claiming that already at the time of its rise to greatness, in the fourteenth century, Muscovy had resembled ‘an expectant revivalist camp’. In stark contrast to the common image of its subsequent achievement of both power, wealth and territorial expanse, he holds up a mirror image of a disoriented beast: ‘Russia was a primitive but powerful religious civilization, fatefully lacking in critical sense or clear division of authority.’ 52 Summing up the several centuries of troubled relations between Muscovite Church and state that have been described above, we may conclude that the final victory of the clerics also harboured the seeds of the eventual demise of the Church, religiously as well as economically. The impact that they had under strong Patriarchs like Filaret and Nikon did produce much theocratic power, but it also produced the schism that well-nigh destroyed the Russian Orthodox Church from within. Most importantly, by first constructing a system of theocratic power over the state and then proceeding to destroy that construct from within, the clerics also succeeded in shaking the very foundations of the state. It would be up to Peter the Great to deal with both of these problems.

Peter the Great Perhaps the most important of all strands of continuity that led from Muscovy into the Petrine era was that of incessant warfare. In previous chapters we have seen how the formation of Muscovy was marked by the constant threats that emanated from the rapidly expanding borderlands to the east, and we have placed great emphasis on the institutional implications of having to resort to policies of forced resource extraction simply in order to secure survival.

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Moving into the seventeenth century, it was somehow symptomatic that the first real crisis to face Tsar Mikhail would be defeat in the war against Poland, and that the first major task to be undertaken by Tsar Aleksei would be linked to pressing needs to raise money for military reform. The age of Peter the Great must be seen against this background. During almost the entire span of his rule Russia would be at war. Knowing that the war against Sweden in particular would represent a tremendous trial of strength, it is not surprising that many if not most of the actions undertaken by this reforming tsar would be designed to strengthen the country’s war-fighting capabilities. In that narrow sense, the outcome of his efforts was a great success. When Peter had himself crowned Emperor of all the Russias, in 1722, Sweden had been conclusively defeated. With the exception of the Napoleonic war, the Russian Empire no longer would be involved in constant struggles for survival. In a broader sense, however, it would be simplistic to view the reforms of Peter the Great as being aimed only at winning a war. The other side of the tsar, that of the liberal reformer, was associated with sweeping ambitions of modernizing Russia, of breaking with the country’s Byzantine past and of bringing it into the family of European nations. In modern parlance, one might say that Peter sought to implement fundamental systemic change. Viewed from that more comprehensive perspective, his achievement no longer comes across as the same unqualified success. Maintaining our previous focus on the evolution of economic policy, we shall argue that the Petrine era in important respects actually would represent completion and refinement rather than abandonment of the fundamental institutional structures that had emerged in Muscovy. Raeff attributes Peter’s economic policies to the then prevailing principles of mercantilism: ‘Not only did the government provide most of the purchasing power and investment capital, but it also set rigid standards of production, dictated methods of manufacturing, and made available a good part of the labor force by attaching serfs to mines and factories.’ 53 In the following, we shall take this argument a step further and present the reforms of Peter the Great as designed to create Russia’s first true command economy, long before that notion would enter into common use. This approach also will provide an important bridge between Muscovy of old and the allegedly future-oriented order of the subsequent Soviet Union. In keeping with our previous focus on the interplay between formal rules and informal norms, we shall begin by looking at Peter’s refinement of the service order, and then proceed to the broader institutional implications of his ambitions of modernization.

Refining the Service Order The beginning of the Petrine era may be dated to 1682, when Fyodor II died childless. In tragic keeping with familiar old patterns of marriage politics, the

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question of succession evolved into a bitter struggle between the families of the two wives of Aleksei, the Naryshkins and the Miloslavskiis. Being merely 10 years old at the time, Peter became witness to the wholesale murder of his own relatives at the hands of those of his elder half sister, Sophia, who was appointed regent. This traumatic childhood experience surely must have had an important formative impact on the young tsar, who was exiled together with his mother to the village of Preobrazhenskoe. Following his own 1689 coup against the regency of Sophia, Peter would proceed to crush once and for all the very foundations of the boyar elite. While much has been made of the fact that he forced them to shave their beards and adopt German dress, the real target of his attack was the whole complex of rules and norms that had bound the boyar elite together. The old system of mestnichestvo had been abolished already in 1682, towards the very end of the reign of Fyodor. For good measure, the registry books containing all the details of genealogy and service had been simply burnt. The ease with which this change was implemented indicated that the system had survived itself. Weakened by their own internal strife, the boyars were in no position to resist. No doubt disgusted by the swelling of the Duma ranks by scores of incompetent parasites, Peter demonstrated a firm resolve to eradicate that body as such. By 1693, he had virtually ceased to appoint new members to the boyar Duma, and in 1711 he announced its complete abolition. In its place he introduced the Senate, which would remain in place until the end of the Russian empire. An important reason behind Peter’s attack on the boyar Duma was derived from his ambition to impose a streamlined universal service obligation, going far beyond what the boyar Duma had been able to muster. The formal culmination of that ambition was reached in 1722, with the introduction of the ‘Table of Ranks’ (Tabel o rangakh). Representing a life-long, allencompassing obligation of service for all Russian males over the age of 15, this innovation brought the previous system of mandatory service to a high point of refinement. Its main impact was to strengthen the performance of the system by breaking the role of kinship in determining career patterns within the boyar elite. Promotion would now be determined instead by merit, as decided by the new office of the Herald Master. To Pipes, this was ‘one of the most important pieces of legislation in imperial Russia’.54 It also may be seen as a predecessor of the subsequent Soviet nomenklatura. The Table included a total of 14 ranks, covering both the military and the civil service, and it was clearly stipulated not only that all nobles irrespective of genealogy would have to begin from the bottom and work their way up. Even more important was the fact that commoners who had distinguished themselves would be offered equal opportunity with the nobility of rising

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within the ranks. Hereditary nobility would be awarded upon reaching the eighth rank from the top, with first being the highest. While there can be little doubt that promotion by merit and a broadening of the basis for recruitment did serve to improve the short-term quality of the service system, there would also be a price to be paid over the longer term. What Peter succeeded in doing, long before Trotsky invented the term, was to draft the population as a whole into one vast labour army: ‘The man in service, whether noble or commoner, military or civilian . . . was in fact nothing more than a pawn of the administration who could be moved about at will and assigned any task, in keeping with the needs of the moment and without regard to the man’s personal preferences, native region, or family ties.’ 55 As would be amply documented under the subsequent Soviet command economy, the price to be paid for introducing effective mechanisms of forced mobilization may be measured in a sharp fall in the efficiency of resource utilization. While Peter did succeed in mobilizing vast labour resources, he did so at the price of suppressing all potential for the emergence of a market for labour, that might have led to improved allocative efficiency. Compounding this damage to the long-term development potential of the Russian economy, Peter’s ambitions of refining the service order also had the effect of preventing the emergence of an innovative managerial elite. As modern industries were being built, driven by the needs of the military for uniforms and weaponry, boyars and merchants could have been allowed to set themselves up as private entrepreneurs, driven by a desire for profit. The granting of special charters of rights and privileges for much-needed foreign specialists provided a model that could have been extended to domestic entrepreneurs as well. The autocracy, however, would remain focused on central control and would thus be loath to accept any form of initiative from below. New industries were founded at state expense and then farmed out to designated servitors. If the latter performed well, they would be allowed to retain hereditary rights to ‘their’ enterprises. If they did not, they could be both punished and dispossessed. Whatever was left of their output, once the state had purchased – at fixed prices – what it desired, could be sold on the open market. As support for these new ventures, the state first pursued a policy of pressing into service non-attached labour such as convicts, vagrants, prisoners of war and prostitutes. When that proved insufficient, it switched to allocating whole villages of serfs, thus creating a new class of ‘possessional’ ( pripisnye) serfs that eventually would grow into a working class. Summing up the principles upon which this policy of industrialization rested, Pipes draws a parallel to the old Muscovite tradition of granting pomestiya that were linked to service, underscoring that Peter ‘treated his entrepreneurs as he would ordinary dvoryanie, that is without the slightest regard for their personal interests or wishes’.56 Although the new entrepreneurs did enjoy tax exemptions, and in some cases would succeed

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in building great fortunes, their activities depended wholly on the good will of the autocracy. The same held true for the emerging class of peasant entrepreneurs that began setting up small businesses. Although such ventures could at times be quite successful, and bring the serf ‘owner’ much revenue, they operated at the complete mercy of their landlords, devoid of any form of rights. As a final touch to the system of universal service, in 1723 the estates of serfdom and slavery were officially amalgamated, reflecting that the status of the peasantry had been degraded to the point where it was effectively indistinguishable from slavery.57 While the underlying command approach to resource mobilization did permeate all aspects of the Petrine command economy, it found no more striking illustration than in the building of St Petersburg, the new capital that was designed to open a ‘window on Europe’. Given the remote and largely unsanitary location that had been chosen, it was clear that few if any members of the elite would willingly give up their comfortable lives in Moscow. In 1712, the tsar resolved that problem by simply ordering a thousand nobles from the most outstanding families and a similar number of merchants and artisans to make the move. In order to secure conformity with his vision of the new city, Peter also issued strict instructions on dimensions and fac¸ades of the new residences that were to be built, leaving only internal decoration to the discretion of the inhabitants. While the actual expenses would have to be met out of their own pockets, the new settlers were provided with a supply of labour and building materials. For the latter purpose, annual orders went out for 40,000 peasants to be mobilized from all parts of the country. The project as a whole bears an eerie resemblance to what would happen in the subsequent Gulags of Joseph Stalin. Those who were thus forcefully conscripted would be driven in gangs over distances of hundreds of miles. They would have to carry their own tools and food. They would usually be under military escort, and sometimes loaded down with chains to prevent desertions. The price to be paid was frightful: ‘Despite these precautions, so many escaped that according to recent estimates, Peter in no one year secured more than 20,000 men. Of this number many died from exposure and disease.’ 58

Body and soul With this grim illustration we shall leave the formal dimension of the service order and proceed to the broader aspects of modernization. In our previous discussion of Muscovy, we advanced Kornai’s metaphor of ‘body and soul’ as an illustration of the role of norms in supporting systems of formal rules. Here we shall proceed along that same perspective, to argue that the building of a Petrine command economy was associated with crucially important attempts at achieving mental redescription.

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First and foremost, Peter’s declared ambition to break decisively with the country’s Byzantine past would have important implications for the role of the state. This was the time when the notion of separating the crown from the state began to take root. The tsar spoke of ‘the common good’ and ‘the benefit of the whole nation’, and he actively sought to promote a sense of connection between private and public good. The ambition for modernity and rationality found its most concrete manifestation in a new and more professional bureaucracy that was copied from the Swedish college system. With the generalnyi reglament, the ‘general regulation’ of 1720, the multitudes of old Muscovite prikazy were replaced by – initially – nine administrative colleges that were organized on functional rather than geographic or simply historical lines. If the tasks and formal structures of this new college organization may be seen as the ‘body’ of the Petrine system, its ‘soul’ rested in a new philosophy of government that was based on what Raeff calls the ‘concept of the active, creative, goal-directed state’.59 Seeking to fill the state with a sense of purpose, the autocracy tried to enlist its subjects for the cause. In so doing, however, it also would reveal underlying preferences for control and centralization that stood in vital contradiction to the ambition of eliciting participation from below. Vital contradictions Recalling our previous discussions of the stationary bandit, it may be said that Russia under Peter the Great had reached a point where crucial decisions would have to be made. The autocracy had achieved security and could count on long-term tenure. Under these circumstances, it could have opted for market-friendly economic policies, and accepted responsibility for the provision of ‘market-augmenting’ public goods, such as enabling legislation and legitimate mechanisms of enforcement. One part of Peter’s programme did indicate that a fundamental change in attitude was under way. The publication of Russia’s first official newspaper, the Vedomosti, was part of a new policy of increased freedom of information that also included translations of foreign works, albeit mainly on matters of technology. Equally important was the tsar’s new practice of attaching explanations to imperial decrees; if the subjects understood why new laws were issued, they might also be more inclined to follow them. While these and other similar aspects could have led to a successful transformation of subjects into citizens, which in turn could have included the formulation of a Russian Magna Carta, other parts of Peter’s programme served to demonstrate that fundamental path dependencies remained to be overcome. The real crux of the matter was that any serious ambition of breaking with the really important legacies of Muscovy would have had to include the granting of individual rights. Since this in turn implied that individuals

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would have had to be allowed certain areas where private initiative and participation could be meaningfully played out, it follows that Peter had reached an important crossroads. His policy choices demonstrated quite clearly that the autocracy was not prepared to accept the consequences of reduced control: ‘The central institutions of the state were assigned positive tasks and given the monopoly of authority in practically all areas of Russian life. Little was left to the autonomous initiative and action of individuals and of constituted groups.’ 60 Raeff presents as a paradox the fact that Peter’s reforms, while resting on the need to elicit creative energy from the population, also failed to make meaningful room for such initiative. Focusing only on the formal dimension, he argues that the failure of the service nobility to take private initiatives was no surprise, ‘since their one overriding concern was the immediate profit to be gained by winning the sovereign’s favor and thereby securing bonuses for meritorious service’.61 This path dependent outcome, which Pipes calls ‘the central tragedy of modern Russian politics’, was determined by an autocracy that failed to understand the implications of its own new venture: It was clearly contradictory to appeal to the public sentiments of the Russian people and at the same time deny them any legal and political safeguards against the omnipotence of the state. A partnership in which one party held all the power and played by its own rules was obviously unworkable.62 Again, however, we shall argue that path dependence rested more strongly in the underlying systems of norms than it did in the formal rules of the service order. Importantly, this also would be where Peter’s reforms produced their greatest and most damaging effects. In our discussion of the pre-Petrine era, factors like mestnichestvo and marriage politics were held up as vital determinants in the evolution of such norms that maintained cohesion, or ‘shared mental models’, within the boyar elite. As the formal rules around which these practices had evolved were being changed, the boyars would have to find a new rationale for their actions and existence. As we have mentioned above, the system had been eroded already before Peter’s time. Mestnichestvo had been abolished under Fyodor, and Sophia had decreed the emancipation of women from their seclusion in terem, thus reflecting the declining importance of marriage politics. From this perspective, the Petrine reforms may be seen merely as a coup de graˆce for the old order. With merit being placed before blood, and with servitors being shunted back and forth over the country, patterns of both local and familial bonds of allegiance were disrupted. The effect was to destroy the whole meaning of such social norms that had served to define the old boyar elite. Adding insult to injury, the opening up of

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career paths for commoners that was implied by the Table of Ranks also meant that the formerly proud members of the boyar elite would have to adjust to a situation where growing numbers of social outsiders were being offered equal opportunity of advancement. In order to really drive home this message, the tsar even took to ridiculing the very culture of marriage rituals, for example by staging a mock marriage between two of his court dwarfs.63 Adding that Peter also introduced secular education for the sons of the nobility, we may agree with Raeff that his ‘service obligations imposed a new discipline – education, lifelong service, and standardized personnel policies’. Being well accustomed to the ‘harness’ of service, the boyars did adjust even to this new situation. As had been the case with the boyar elite of Muscovy, the ‘nature of state service and its attendant cultural requirements ultimately determined the ethos and social function of the Russian imperial elite’.64 Proceeding now to investigate the nature of this new ‘ethos and social function’, which was to form the basis for the new political order, we shall recall what has been said above about the third dimension of the institutional triad. In the general case of positive institutional change, credible and legitimate enforcement mechanisms assume the role of supporting such norms of legality and cooperation that in turn support systems of market-friendly formal rules. In the case of Russia under Peter the Great, these links would evolve in a very different direction. Enforcement without legitimacy Having made the path dependent choice of not allowing either participation or initiative from below, the autocracy also had indicated in which direction its role as enforcer would have to evolve. The general absence of enabling legislation implied a need for enforcement mechanisms that were purely punitive, and thus stood little chance of winning legitimacy in the Weberian sense. Recalling what has been said in previous chapters about the different incentive effects of commands versus enforceable rules, we thus again have a situation where the successful building of a mighty military and the resultant territorial expansion must be seen as a case of keeping score in the wrong game. Most importantly, there was substantial collateral damage to fundamental economic institutions. Since the basic principles of forced mobilization and state monopolies remained market-contrary, it is not surprising that enforcement mechanisms also would show strong path dependence, notably so in a continuation of old Muscovite favourites such as krugovaya poruka and denunciation. The former not only remained embedded in the imposition of fiscal burdens on the peasantry. It also would form the basis for Peter’s new standing

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army. Beginning in 1705, the rekrutchina introduced annual call-ups of peasants, who would be required to serve under the colours for the remainder of their life. Selection was made either by the landlords (in the case of private peasants) or by the communal assembly, and service was guaranteed by krugovaya poruka. If a soldier failed to report for duty, or if he deserted, neighbours would have to supply a replacement.65 The role of denunciation would prove to be even more important, linking back to familiar old problems of corruption under the system of kormlenie. With the growing emphasis on resource extraction, the tsar was presented with mounting problems of making sure that resources extracted by his officials did not simply disappear into private pockets: ‘As the state’s need for revenue grew and the government’s participation in economic activities increased, the lack of honesty on the part of the officials became a critical problem.’ 66 The response was worked out on two different levels. At the centre of power, the autocracy sought to ‘limit the danger of the abuse of authority by having the chief officials keep an eye on each other and thus increase the channels of information available to the monarch’.67 For this purpose it not only produced a set of detailed and rigid rules for the conduct of public affairs. It also insisted that all business must be transacted only in the proper offices and under constant supervision. Recalling the old Muscovite system of political poruka there was nothing really novel in this. At the level of local administration, a special corps of supervisors was created that were known as fiskaly (‘fiscals’). Their assignment was to uncover, report and eliminate any and all forms of malpractice and corruption: ‘The fiscals became a corps of government spies and agents with a well defined position in the official hierarchy, and yet outside the regular chain of command, being subject only to the Chief Fiscal and to the Senate.’ 68 Denunciations were encouraged by the fact that fiskaly sometimes would be awarded part of the property of those whose misdeeds they reported.69 For the purpose of controlling the population at large, Peter also proceeded to refine the already existing legislation on ‘words and deeds’ by introducing a separate political police. According to Raeff, the Preobrazhenskii prikaz was set up to ‘ferret out, prosecute, and punish all those suspected of political subversion’ and it proceeded to become ‘notorious for its ruthlessness and brutality’.70 According to Pipes, moreover, it ‘seems to have been the first institution in history created to deal specifically and exclusively with political crimes. The scope of its operations and its complete administrative independence mark it as the prototype of a basic organ of all modern police states.’ 71 This fundamental institution of control based on all-pervasive denunciation would remain as an important hallmark of Russian society in the coming centuries. It would assume grotesque dimensions under Stalin and be scaled back only following the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev. Its main impact was to breed strong social norms of distrust, which in turn would

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produce the kinds of behaviour and attitudes that have been so brilliantly depicted in inter alia Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. Peter the Great himself set an important example by treating even the noblest of the noble as common serfs. Although he did put an end to the practice of demanding that servitors refer to themselves as slaves of the tsar, he did not end corporal punishment, which was ‘applied indiscriminately to dvoryanie and commoners: a boyar or a general was lashed with the knout exactly as the meanest serf ’.72 Being a large and powerful man, Peter not only liked to show his displeasure by beating his associates. He is also said to have been capable of decapitation by a single blow with the axe. The Marquis de Custine even reports that ‘He has been seen in a single evening to strike off twenty heads with his own hand, and has been heard to boast of his address.’ 73 The upper class would be exempted from corporal punishment only in 1785, when Catherine the Great introduced her Charter of the Nobility, of which we shall have more to say below. The overall effect of the strong focus on coercion and control that marked the Petrine command economy was to produce an important paradox. Given that the tsar himself showed such enthusiasm for the kind of public spirit that marked the Swedish model he sought to emulate, it is striking to note that his own actions served to drastically weaken the prospects for any potential institutional movement in that direction. The paradox lies in the fact that Peter’s insistence on control effectively negated his own ambitions of breaking the old patterns of personalization that had bred so much corruption: ‘The result of such enfeeblement was to reinforce and invigorate the patron–client networks which took the place of institutions. Modernization reinforces archaism; increasing state control meant entrenching personal caprice.’ 74

Shared mental models? In order to illustrate the importance of this point, we shall recall again one of the main points made by Douglass North in his 1993 Nobel Prize lecture, namely that any attempt at institutional change that departs too far from existing systems of norms will be bound to fail, and may even produce powerful backlash effects. The outcome of Peter’s programme for ‘modernization’ of Russia would provide an eminent illustration of these dangers. On the former count we may note a conclusion that is reached by the legal historian Claes Peterson, in his definitive work about the Swedish antecedents to Peter’s judicial and administrative reforms. Noting that the Russians did modify in several respects what they borrowed, he maintains that with respect to fiscal reform in particular ‘it is obvious that the Russian reformers sought to introduce the Swedish system without any consideration to the fact that the social preconditions for such borrowing did not exist in Russia’.75

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On the latter, we shall argue that Peter’s attempt at systemic change was damaging not only in the sense that the introduction of formal ‘modernity’ failed to achieve the desired result. Far more important was the fact that while some groups would understand and absorb the new rules, others would find them incomprehensible and perhaps even morally repugnant, thus producing violent backlash effects against both the reform and its instigator. In several important respects, this would set the course for postPetrine developments. Raeff sees the introduction of the Swedish college system as a particularly important catalyst, arguing that throughout Peter’s regime these new agencies ‘created supposedly for the sake of greater efficiency, acted as a barrier between the ruler and the ruled. Communication and the passage of information between them were nearly impossible, and this led to mutual ignorance, suspicion, and eventually to a dramatic break.’ 76 By thus introducing a set of lines of division between different groups of actors, Peter effectively blocked the achievement of ‘shared mental models’. The institutional matrix of Petrine Russia instead would be marked by the emergence of seriously conflicting sets of norms. Complicating the matter even further, it was not simply a question of contradictions between ‘the ruler and the ruled’. By far the most important dimension where different sets of mental models went into serious disconnect was that of relations between Church and state. In a situation where the Church was already seriously weakened by the Great Schism, and by the various forms of Exit that had been undertaken by the Old Believers, the reins of state were placed in the hands of a man who was the very opposite of the pious Aleksei. Peter the Great wasted no time in showing his negative feelings for the Orthodox clergy. Early in his reign he took to organizing rowdy drinking parties, known as the ‘Most Drunken Synod’, where he and his friends engaged in various ways of ridiculing the Church. His call for the boyars to shave their beards also may be seen as highly symbolic in attacking the very imagery of icon art. It was clear that the old times of effective co-rule between tsar and Patriarch had come to a definite end. When Patriarch Adrian died in 1700, Peter served further warning of things to come by choosing to appoint in his place ‘a locum tenens, a learned but spineless Ukrainian divine’. The running of Church properties and other worldly affairs was entrusted to a special monastery prikaz, and from 1701 onwards monasteries were required to give up all their revenues in return for fixed salaries.77 The culmination of Peter’s anti-clerical policy came in 1721, with the dukhovnyi reglament. Following the 1720 introduction of the generalnyi reglament, which had transformed the state administration, this ‘spiritual regulation’ was to serve as the basic constitution for Church and clergy until the fall of the empire.

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Its most important formal content was the introduction of a Most Holy Synod, to replace the Patriarchate. Led by a lay overprocurator, this new organ would serve to effectively integrate the Church into the state and thus also to provide it with a new role to play. It became ‘primarily an organ of the state for policing the people’s conduct and of educating them to be obedient subjects’.78 Having once been the masters of vast landed estates that were ruled according to Church laws, the clergy were now reduced to the status of hired hands of the autocracy, on whose financial support all their spiritual and educational activities had to depend: ‘Naturally, this led to a further decline in the position of the clergy. The government used them as instruments of political repression and control, which undermined the moral and spiritual function of the priests.’ 79 The radical decline in moral authority of the Orthodox Church not only reinforced the movement of the Old Believers. It also created ample room for a variety of mystical societies and explains the ‘sympathetic reception given in Russia to Freemasonry, the Jesuits, and to various pietist sects’.80 Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this process was the ease with which the autocracy succeeded in breaking the influence of the Church over the affairs of the state. When Peter the Great set out to break the last remnants of Church power, it no longer had any ability – or perhaps even will – to resist: ‘The coup de graˆce was dealt a victim so drained of all vitality that it hardly twitched; there were no protests, only silent submission. No Church in Christendom allowed itself to be secularized as graciously as the Russian.’ 81 At the end of the Petrine era, the Russian state had been essentially secularized. The grip of the clergy had been broken, and the previous hostility towards the West had been replaced by a desire to learn, manifested above all in the tsar’s Great Embassy in 1698–99. Inspired by what he saw in the countries visited, Peter proceeded to harness his subjects behind his project of empire building: the bureaucracy was modernized, industries were built, and a blue water navy was constructed. His unquestionable successes in empire building should not, however, be confused with successes in what is known today as state building. The effective incorporation of the Church into the state, and the associated degradation of the clergy, implied that the empire was being built on grounds that were just as muddy and unhealthy as those on which the new capital St Petersburg was being erected. Recalling all that has been said above about Orthodoxy as the factor around which Muscovy had been defined, and all the problems that had resulted when the main tenets of Orthodoxy were being challenged from within, it follows that Peter’s ambition of substituting instant rationality and modernity represented a perilous project. The main part of his legacy would rest in precisely this dimension. While modernity was embraced by a tiny elite in and around the capital, fissures developed in its relations to the surrounding world: to the provincial

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nobility, to the emerging new classes of merchants and entrepreneurs, to the nascent intelligentsia that was being educated, and above all to the broad masses of Orthodox peasant-serfs, many of whom regarded the reforms as the work of the Devil. Over time, these fissures would broaden into cracks and eventually the empire as a whole would come tumbling down. There was a distinct logic to this movement. If we accept that there had emerged powerful social norms of suspicion and distrust of all authority, then it should come as no surprise that subsequent rulers would seek solutions in terms of ever-tighter mechanisms of control and enforcement from above. Reflecting the path dependent nature of these processes, it is even less surprising that many Russians have been prone to drawing parallels from Ivan the Terrible via Peter the Great and onwards to Joseph Stalin, or, indeed, that Stalin would explicitly ‘rehabilitate’ both Ivan and Peter. The following two chapters will serve to outline the evolution of that path dependence.

8

Failures to break out

Turning now to look at the post-Petrine period, we shall have to change analytical tack. So far, we have been concerned with how the Muscovite system was formed, and we have argued that the Petrine era in many ways represented its real peak. Now, our focus instead must be aimed at centuries of attempted reforms. Knowing that the outcome of those reforms would be meagre indeed, and that the Muscovite system would remain largely intact well into the Soviet era, it might be tempting here to follow Edward Keenan’s suggestion to ‘traverse the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at quick march’.1 An important reason why one should not succumb to that temptation is that it would defeat the whole purpose of the path dependence approach. While it is true that the centuries that followed in the wake of the death of Peter the Great did fail to produce sustainable reform, that in itself cannot be taken as support for the mainstay of Keenan’s continuity theory, namely ‘the apparent fact that few essential new elements were introduced into Russian vernacular political culture during this period’.2 On the contrary, it may well be argued that no other period in Russian history stands out as being so rich in attempted systemic reforms and achieved cultural transformations. If nothing else, the vast literature that has been produced about imperial Russia does reflect that these were times of great importance. The real challenge that we shall now proceed to address lies in explaining how it could be that so many attempted – and implemented – changes in the formal rules of the game could meet with such persistent reversals, and, even more importantly, how those undeniable successes in achieving enlightenment and Westernization that produced the cultured intelligentsia of the nineteenth century could fail to produce effective demands for a broader reformulation of relations between the autocracy and its subjects. Given all that has been said in previous chapters about the link between incessant warfare and policies of forced resource extraction, it seems logical to start our investigation in a dimension where the post-Petrine era did represent something essentially new. The transformation of Muscovy into an empire had served to remove the constant threat of extinction by foreign

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invasion. Why then should the nobility accept the hardships of lifelong service? Or, indeed, why should the autocracy rely on the services of often incompetent noblemen, when a professional apparat could be built to do the job? The gradual erosion of patrimonialism that was to follow from this new sense of security provided almost laboratory-like conditions for testing what has been said above about path dependent responses and revealed institutional preference. The analytical challenge lies in explaining why this important external change failed to bring about a fundamental internal rearrangement of the institutional matrix.3 The fact that both tsars and influential advisors of the time would demonstrate strong conviction of the needs to undertake reform makes the process of post-Petrine adjustment even more revealing of underlying obstacles to change. To be more specific, our understanding of a process of positive institutional change shall be one that would have included vital transformations such as an evolution of the autocracy towards a system of rules-based power sharing, an evolution of the service order in the direction of increased competition and private enterprise, and an evolution of urban commerce to include such rights and charters that formed the sine qua non of the evolution of market economy in Western Europe. The fact that none of this would come about indicates that the evolution of the system as a whole no longer was determined mainly by outside pressure, as had been the case when Muscovy evolved its original policy of forced resource extraction. On the contrary, the process of post-Petrine adjustment would serve to indicate the presence of important obstacles to change that represented internalized path dependencies. Simply put, we shall argue that the institutional matrix of Muscovy had become firmly entrenched both in formal organizational strategies and in informal norm systems. Seeking to substantiate this argument, we shall proceed in three steps. First we shall look at the immediate process of adjustment, spanning the time from the death of Peter the Great, in 1725, until the accession to power of Catherine the Great, in 1762. While this was a period when the nobility did succeed in advancing its position, at the expense of the autocracy, it also was marked by a striking absence of formulated alternatives to the eroding old order. It thus may be seen as a curious half-way house. Our second and far more important step will be to look at the era of seriously intended reforms that was initiated by Catherine the Great. Beginning with her Enlightenment and culminating in the ‘Great Reforms’ of Alexander II, it included assaults on some of the core features of the old institutional matrix. Given that the pressure for reform mainly emanated from above, from the autocracy itself, the absence of positive and sustainable transformations can be explained only as the result of endogenous factors of resistance. The concluding section will round off by showing how the death of Alexander II in a terrorist bombing produced a radical reversal of the

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reform process. Inspired by arch-conservative advisors, Alexander III began his rule by introducing emergency legislation that in turn set the course for the Bolshevik coup d’e´tat in 1917. This radical change in course made it clear that for all their good intentions, the radical reformers of the Russian Enlightenment had failed to break out of the mould that was formed in Muscovy. The fact that so many reforms really were attempted during the period at hand nevertheless remains important in the sense of demonstrating what has been pointed out repeatedly above, namely that path dependence is something very different from a complete inability to change. The partial successes that were achieved in moving away from the Muscovite model do illustrate that a more consistent policy of reform might perhaps have resulted in a profound and sustainable transformation. The challenge lies in pinpointing where the real obstacles to completion were lodged. In the following we shall seek to map out a number of contradicting trends that marked the era of post-Petrine reform, leading up to 1881. On the one hand, we shall see that the formal rules of the institutional matrix did undergo substantial change, and that the cultural transformation that had been initiated by Peter the Great did continue. On the other, we shall argue that the subsequent reversals were caused by obstacles that resided not only in organizational path dependencies but even more so in deeply rooted mental models that stood in sharp contradiction to the suggested reforms. The core of the argument will be designed to show how the process of formal adjustment led to increasing divergences in mental models amongst different groups of actors. As some of these groups began articulating demands for further change, the autocracy responded by resorting to increasingly sophisticated means of repression. Since the latter in turn would affect the further evolution of mental models, the path was set for the violent upheavals that would mark the beginning of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most controversial dimension of this argument is that it points at the existence of a solid bridge between the old Muscovite order and the subsequent Soviet system. There is certainly truth in the conventional view of the policies of Lenin and Stalin as a drastic break with the imperial past, but only in a limited sense. While the Bolsheviks did interrupt a number of positive processes that were under way at the turn of the century, in the following chapter we shall argue that from a longer-term perspective it was those very developments that represented the real deviation. Whether that deviation from Russia’s previous path of long-term development really could have achieved sustainability is a matter of some controversy, which we shall have to bypass for the moment. Here we shall merely note that once the colourful guise of Marxism–Leninism is removed, it will transpire that the Soviet system really did represent, in all its fundamental institutional respects, a return to old Muscovy. If this core argument can be accepted, it will remain to figure out why all the well-intended reform attempts that marked the post-Petrine era failed to

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achieve the envisioned results. The answer to that question will have a great deal of relevance also to present-day debates about the failure of Yeltsin’s reforms and of the prospects for Putin and his successors to achieve a real breakthrough. Bearing these reflections in mind, let us return to eighteenthcentury St Petersburg.

The age of the nobility In stark contrast to the powerful rule of Peter the Great, the opening phase of post-Petrine adjustment would be marked by weak rulers, allowing much room for the nobility to look out for its own interests. In their textbook on Russian history, The Making of Modern Russia, Lionel Kochan and Richard Abraham tellingly refer to this period as ‘The Age of the Nobility’.4 Perhaps one might even go so far as to speak of an interregnum. In the years 1725–62 there would be a succession of no less than six tsars on the Russian throne. Given that the previous history of Muscovy had been marked by strong tsars and grand princes, who on the whole enjoyed very long periods of tenure, this did represent something of a break. The outcome would not be a repetition of the ‘time of troubles’, nor even of the mounting disorder under Fyodor. On the contrary, Russia after Peter would remain remarkably stable. It would, however, mean a critical lack of leadership, at a time when vital changes could perhaps have been implemented. Above all, it would allow the nobility to reveal their true preferences with respect to the fundamentals of the system as such. The formal reason that produced the lack of strong leadership was part of the legacy from Peter the Great. Following the death, under mysterious circumstances, of tsarevich Aleksei, the tsar had issued a decree reserving for the ruler the right to designate his own successor: ‘to whom I will, to him I shall give my throne’.5 In a system that rested on men rather than on rules,6 and where succession had been determined by blood, this was a perilous step to take. When Peter died without having mentioned a name, the stage was set for trouble. In a process that was reminiscent of the role of the Praetorian Guard in imperial Rome, it would be up to those who controlled the Guards regiments in St Petersburg to select new rulers. Their choices would bring three women, two of whom were foreigners, as well as one infant onto the throne. In the words of Kochan and Abraham, these were ‘the palmiest of palmy days for the favourite, the intriguer, the lover, the instigator of the midnight coup d’e´tat and palace revolution, the politician of the bedchamber, the king-making Guards and the assassin’.7 During these years of drift, the nobility would succeed in throwing off its formal service obligation and it would defeat all attempts by the growing bureaucracy at extending control over the serfs, which represented its main if not only real asset. It would not, however, seek to introduce a new political

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order. Symptomatically, no one even seems to have thought of calling a zemskii sobor, or of otherwise engaging in a process of constitutionalism.

Erosion of the autocracy The immediate actions taken under Peter’s successors were designed to restore in three important areas the status quo ante Peter. All represented areas where the autocracy at the very least had shown foresight and ambition of moving towards more effective and market-friendly economic institutions. The subsequent reversals were path dependent responses that returned the system to its pre-Petrine institutional format. The first case was that of seeking to introduce money wages. If this reform could have been sustained, it would have laid important foundations for a subsequent system of market economy. Over and above the direct benefits that would have followed from increasing monetization of economic activity, it also would have introduced a movement away from the old patterns of personalization, implying important albeit gradual adjustment of both norms and modes of behaviour. As it turned out, however, it never could be fully implemented, even under Peter’s own rule. Following his death, the return of chronic shortages of money meant that the state had to revert to its familiar old patterns of nonmonetary compensation. Thus, the system of government would remain permeated by all those problems of bonds of allegiance and corruption that for so long had been associated with kormlenie and pomestie. In another ambition of stimulating market-oriented enterprise, Peter had decided in 1711 to abolish royal commercial monopolies in all commodities but grain, vodka, salt and tobacco. As a result, Russia did enjoy – for a short while – something that at least looked like free trade. It would not be long after his death, however, before the monarchy had reclaimed its commercial monopolies and things went back to normal.8 Perhaps most importantly of all, Peter had sought to break with the old Muscovite practice of subdivision of land between heirs that had proven so economically devastating. For this purpose he had introduced in 1714 an Entail Law that called upon landlords to designate one of their sons (not necessarily the oldest) as sole heir to the land. If consistently implemented, this law would have had substantial and positive long-term effects on economic performance. It did, however, also produce a growing number of angry disinherited sons, many of whom became Guards officers. In 1730, the law was repealed and fragmentation again became the rule.9 As part of the process surrounding the Entail Law, Peter also had stopped the granting of new pomestiya, and amalgamated existing pomestiya with votchiny into one single category of landed estates.10 Perhaps he did intend to introduce heritable property rights in land, a move that would have drastically altered the course of Russian history.

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The repeal of the Entail Law was, however, not the only factor that worked to block any potential movement in the direction of a more efficient utilization of land. The very notion of security of tenure also remained weak. The overall practice of arbitrary expropriations and mass deportations had become such essential features of the system that in 1729 the Russian government actually established ‘a bureau that must be unique in history, namely a Chancery of Confiscation (Kantselariya konfiskatsii)’.11 While all of these were important in securing that business would continue being conducted in ways familiar before Peter the Great, it was the nobility’s attack on the service order that provided the real break with the attempted modernity and rationality of the Petrine era. In the rule of Empress Anna, in 1730–40, three important changes were made that seriously eroded both the letter and the spirit of the Table of Ranks. This, moreover, was done without in any way seeking to replace it with a more market-friendly system. The first counter-reform was the establishment, in 1731, of a military academy, the Corps of Cadets. Created at the behest of the nobility, in a no doubt laudable ambition of securing education for its children, it showed that Peter’s ambitions of introducing rationality via Western-inspired education had borne fruit: ‘After Peter died there was no talk of turning back, of giving up on efforts to educate the children of the service nobility in European science, technology, arts and letters. European culture henceforth became a prerequisite for membership in the ruling elite.’ 12 While the Corps of Cadets would indeed serve the purpose of furthering the formation of a professional elite, educated in Western ways, it also had a more sinister side. By allowing its graduates to move directly to commissioned rank, either in the army or in the bureaucracy, it effectively spared the rising generation of nobles from having to compete with commoners for promotion from the lower ranks. This change not only diluted the quality of recruitment. It also brought an at least partial return to the old world of ‘honour’ that had been associated with senior positions within the boyar elite. Noting, moreover, that the Herald Master showed great reluctance in actually conferring nobility upon those whose origins were subject to doubt, we have two powerful factors adding to an already growing cleavage between the rulers and the ruled. The second change, introduced in 1736, was a limitation of service from life-long to merely 25 years. Although 25 years was still a long time, the very introduction of an outer limit was vital in the sense of introducing into the mentalite´ of the nobility at the very least the possibility of finding other sources of income than that of serving the tsar. The third change, stipulating that if a father had two sons one would be freed from service altogether,13 would add force to this potential mental transformation. Following the death of Empress Anna, in 1740, the throne first went to her infant nephew Ivan VI and then to Peter’s daughter Elizabeth, to whom ‘the cares of State were non-existent. Her days she devoted to relaxing

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en de´shabille´; her nights to lovemaking and dancing and masquerades’.14 These indeed were strange times, and there is justification for the malice that has been directed at the way in which the ladies allowed Russia to be ruled by bedside favourites. This being the case, it is also true, however, that actual developments present a more complicated picture. It is a fact, for example, that despite the lack of firm domestic leadership there was no weakening of Russia’s international position. On the contrary, Russian diplomacy would play an important role in the carve-up of Turkey and in the Seven Years’ war, as well as in the three-stage elimination of Poland. Nor did these years of internal political drift in any way inhibit the ongoing process of cultural Westernization of the nobility. Towards the end of the century, the by then French-speaking Russian court would compare favourably with any other European court in splendour as well as in sophistication. The roots of the real problems that beset the early phase of post-Petrine adjustment may be reflected in the stark contrast that emerged between the new security of the state and the deep sense of bewilderment that came to mark the nobility. From our presentation in the previous chapter we may recall that the ‘effect of Peter the Great’s reign was to tear Russian society apart, leaving behind a legacy of uncertainty and insecurity that ultimately led to an identity crisis among the Russian elite’.15 While members of the nobility would be keen not only on education but also on taking part in and sponsoring all the new manifestations of culture that were beginning to transform the ethos of the elite, it was not an easy process. Lurking beneath the surface there would remain doubts and brooding about whether they really did belong to Europe, or if being Russian also meant being essentially different. Such brooding would come to form something of a hallmark for the country’s famed nineteenth-century intelligentsia, and in some sense it is still going on. In a more practical dimension, the cultural uncertainty also was associated with great economic and even physical uncertainty. While the latter stemmed from the continued arbitrariness of local administration in particular, the former reflected the continued absence of any serious alternative to state service. On both counts we may see the still-pervasive role of serfdom, and the fact that ‘the tradition of personalized authority would have prevented the equitable application of fixed legal norms (or rules of common law), had any existed’.16 From a standard neoclassical economics perspective, deregulation should have led to a growth of markets and thus to improved economic efficiency. In the Russian case, however, the nobility would cling to the service order long after the abolition of the formal service obligation. In so doing, they also would prolong the absence of markets and of effective competition. There are good reasons to explain why this would be the case, reasons that again may be derived from the theoretical perspectives outlined in the previous chapter.

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An early illustration was provided when a small group of nobles sought to impose conditions on the incoming Empress Anna, a niece of Peter the Great. Those who offered her the throne were a group of would-be oligarchs in a body known as the Secret Privy Council. Established in 1727, it had been designed to override the Petrine Senate as the country’s highest judicial and administrative organ. In a continued ambition of imitating Swedish practice, the council attached to its offer conditions similar to those imposed on the Swedish Crown by the Swedish nobility after the death of Charles XII. Without consent by the council, the Empress would not be allowed to marry or to appoint an heir, to make war or agree on peace, to levy taxes, bestow estates out of state lands or dispose of state revenue, to grant senior rank in the army or the bureaucracy, or to deprive a nobleman of his life or estate without due process.17 In short, the proposed contract may be seen as an attempt to transform the autocracy into an oligarchy with at least some forms of legal regulation. Perhaps it could have led to a revival of Novgorodian antecedents, and to an eventual evolution from oligarchy into both democracy and a rules-based market economy. What served to block such potentially positive change was resistance from within the ranks of the nobility, above all so from the provincial nobles. There were those who would have preferred movement in the direction of what Marc Raeff calls a ‘well-ordered police state based on autonomous institutions and a stable system of rules and regulations’.18 While the introduction of the Petrine Senate did represent an attempt at creating such order, its poor track record also showed that the preconditions necessary for successful implementation were lacking. In keeping with their path dependent tradition of personalization, the bulk of the members of the imperial entourage saw as threatening any form of movement in the direction of autonomous bodies representing institutionalized order: ‘Only in the absence of such an institution could the sovereign’s favourites hope to maintain their own power through their influence over their monarch.’ 19 Having at first agreed to the proposed conditions, when she arrived in Moscow for her coronation Anna found that circumstances allowed her to renege on the agreement. Supported by the Guards, she simply shredded the list and proceeded to rule as an autocrat in her own right. In the following years, with its leaders discredited, the Secret Privy Council went into demise. Originally intended to serve as a body for planning and coordination, it had developed instead into an arena for classic boyar infighting. While the succession crisis of 1730 did represent an attempt from the side of the nobility to introduce constraints on the autocracy, it was a rare and feeble exception to the rule. Richard Pipes sees it as one of ‘only three significant attempts, each a century apart, on the part of the service elite to stand up to the monarchy and restrain its unlimited power’.20

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The first was the previously mentioned attempt by a group of boyars, during the ‘time of troubles’, to strike a deal with the Polish Crown. The last, similarly futile attempt was to be known as the Decembrist revolt, undertaken by a group of disgruntled Guards officers in 1825. All three shared one crucially important feature: in each case, the effort was led by a small group within the topmost elite, having drawn inspiration from Western aristocracy but failing to win any form of support from their own. What these three cases serve to illustrate yet again is the vital role of personalization, of fearing a regime of rules because it might constrain your opportunities, but also being ever-fearful of a movement towards oligarchy, where a few of the most powerful families might gain undue personal influence. In this sense, as Pipes puts it, the ‘political philosophy of the mass of dvoryanstvo was not all that different from the peasantry’s; both preferred unlimited autocracy to a constitutional arrangement, seeing behind the latter manipulations of private interests acting for their own benefit’.21 Aside from these exceptions, being so revealing in their own right, it remains true that up until the events of 1905 and 1917 change in Russia was consistently initiated from above. The era of Catherine the Great would provide splendid illustration of this fact.

The creation of a leisure class The first steps on the road towards true reform, or at least attempted such, were taken in the brief reign of Catherine’s husband Peter III. Although his rule would span no more than the first half of 1762, these were months of great activity. It was on his watch that the Church estates were finally expropriated, and it was he who finally emancipated the nobility from its service obligations altogether. Seeking to stimulate economic growth, he also repeated Peter I’s decree from 1702, inviting foreign specialists to settle in Russia on favourable terms. An important reason for calling Peter III a liberal tsar was his decision to abolish the secret police, a gesture that was typical of incoming liberal tsars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Given the heavy emphasis that has been placed in previous chapters on the role of supervision, self-enforcing mutual control, and – above all – denunciation, this was a potentially important step. The fact, however, that there would also emerge a pattern of initially liberal tsars gradually becoming convinced of the needs to order the discreet reintroduction of a political police reflects that we are confronted here with a core element of the path dependence. For all her initial enlightenment, for example, Catherine the Great would end her days as a repressive autocrat, frightened by the example of the French revolution into curtailing many of the freedoms that she herself had pioneered. From an analytical perspective, the pendulum movement between liberalization and the subsequent reintroduction of repression must be seen as

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highly damaging. Given our previous emphasis on the role of enforcement mechanisms in determining the evolution of mental models, it is not only the case that the introduction of repression will lead to a reduction in legitimacy, and thus to an erosion in the role of formal rules. Far more important is the fact that with every disappointment there will follow a deeper entrenchment of expectations for future failure; we may recall here what was said in the previous chapter about the role of ‘focal points’ in determining cultural norms and values. In our following discussion of the slow and tortuous process of moving towards legal regulation and impartial enforcement that was begun under Catherine the Great, we shall see how the process as a whole would be marred and eventually defeated by systems of social norms that attached positive utility to the practices of denunciation and rule evasion. Given all that has been said and written about the importance of trust in building modern societies,22 we may conclude that the resultant effect of promoting pervasive distrust on all sides forms the real core of Russia’s negative path dependence. The consistent refusal by the autocracy to grant enforceable individual rights reflects a failure to achieve credible commitment, which in turn leads to a preservation of the path dependence in mental models. Before proceeding to look more closely at that process, we shall return to the emancipation of the nobility, which constituted by far the most important of the liberalizing actions of Peter III. With the exception of times of war, nobles would now be allowed to retire both from the military and from the bureaucracy. Recalling the old Muscovite rules on freedom of movement for the boyars, the Russian imperial nobility was explicitly allowed to travel abroad and even to take up service with foreign powers. From a purely formal perspective, this may be seen as a total removal of the service order as such. Having emerged under great pains over several centuries, and having been brought to a peak of refinement under Peter the Great, it only took a few decades for it to be completely abolished. Unsurprisingly, these formal changes would have little impact on the realities of service to the tsar. Kochan and Abraham conclude that in 1762 ‘there was quite an exodus from St Petersburg, and the following decades saw the growth of a sizable class of provincial nobles’.23 Though the actual truth of the matter is far from clear,24 this interpretation does fail to make proper distinctions concerning who it was that left and what they chose to do instead. According to Raeff, there is still no proof that nobles returned in large numbers to the land and their country estates once state service ceased to be obligatory in 1762. It is clear, however, that the acts of 1762 and 1785 encouraged the landed nobility to make more frequent and extended visits to their residences in the countryside.25

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There is a distinct risk here, that an excessive focus on the formal emancipation decrees that were promulgated under Peter III and Catherine II will lead us to look for abrupt changes. Perhaps it is better to follow Robert Jones, in arguing that the service requirements of Peter the Great had begun to erode already under his two immediate successors. By allowing noblemen to take unpaid leave of absence, at a time when their services were no longer needed to the same extent, the state could save considerable outlays. That fiscal expedience was the main motive is also underscored by the fact that no formal right to such leave was codified. If need be, the policy could easily be reversed.26 In a similar vein, when Anna decided, in 1736, to relax the formal service obligation to 25 years, it was understood that many of those who were then released would take up provincial service positions. When Peter III proceeded to grant full freedom, it was done in the understanding that few would actually desire to be free: ‘As the nobility had matured under the tutelage of the state, the compulsion to serve had been ‘‘internalized’’ to such an extent that external compulsion was no longer necessary.’ 27 This understanding of the ‘emancipation’ of the nobility not only allows for a more gradual process of adjustment. By placing emphasis on a reduced need for service nobles from the side of the autocracy, we also may downplay the apparent role and ambitions of the latter in demanding freedom. If it really was more a case of being made redundant than of securing rights to pursue alternative undertakings, then it also becomes easier to understand why so few of the emancipated nobles would proceed to derive proper economic advantage from their new freedom from service. Given that the spread and increasing variety of cultural pursuits had made country life more attractive, the option of simply retiring may also have become more attractive. The outcome in any case was the emergence of a separate society of provincial nobles, who would proceed to evolve their own institutions and cultural values. They would not, however, proceed to form a distinct estate pursuing economic ventures independently of the crown. It is in this dimension that we may find the main importance of the postPetrine erosion of the service order. Despite the ambitions for uniformity that were implied by the Table of Ranks, divisions within the nobility continued to play an important role. In the hearts and minds of its leading members, ancestry continued to serve ‘as a basis for pride, pretension, snobbery and social discrimination’.28 It is also striking how much effort went into seeking to secure the formation of a closed estate based solely on ancestry. Although the autocracy consistently refused to make any concessions of that kind, two important social rifts were bound to open up. One went between old and new lineage, and the other between rich and poor. What went missing in these crossing rifts was any sense of common interest that might have galvanized the nobility as a whole against the autocracy. Those who did achieve high rank, or chin, ‘tended to regard governmental affairs

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as their private domain and often had little sympathy for the aspirations of other nobles to share some of that power’.29 An important economic reason behind the nobility’s failure to seek proper economic advantage from its increasing freedom may be derived from its continued poverty, which in turn was explained by a number of institutional factors linked to the inefficient utilization of land. The institution of serfdom was obviously crucial here, but subdivision and the continued absence of urban markets also played important roles in conserving a poorly performing system. As Pipes underscores, we should be wary of taking as representative the world of the fabulously rich consorting in the salons that has been so brilliantly depicted inter alia by Tolstoy in War and Peace. Behind such elegant fac¸ades, we will find that the ‘vast majority of Russian dvoryanie at any time in history lived at the bare subsistence level or on a standard that made them indistinguishable from peasants’. For these people, it was simply impossible to ‘dispense with the monarchy’s favors; it alone had the jobs, the pomestiya and the serfs needed for its survival’.30 Given what has been said in previous chapters about the impact of the harshness of nature on the institutional development of Muscovy, one might have thought that expansion of the empire into new areas of abundant and fertile lands should have served to relax an important exogenous constraint. If we look simply at output performance, it may well be true, as Arcadius Kahan argues, that in the second half of the eighteenth century ‘Russian agriculture made substantial progress’.31 Many of those nobles who retired to their estates did take more effective command and strove with some success to introduce new techniques. On the whole, however, developments throughout the nineteenth century would show that such progress was grossly inadequate in keeping up with the growing population pressure. From a systemic point of view, moreover, it is important to note that it would be the old Muscovite system based on serfdom that was implanted into the new areas, rather than the reverse. The absence of any substantial improvement in the productivity of Russian agriculture shows that the institutional constraints had become endogenized. Much as the new security of the empire failed to alter the service order, the increasing availability of fertile lands thus failed to alleviate the poverty of the landlords and the associated hardship of the peasants. The image of utter destitution amongst broad sections of the nobility that had been presented by sixteenth-century travellers like Herberstein remained largely relevant even after the times of Peter the Great: ‘The great majority of imperial dvoryanie remained destitute. Their incomes were so small that they could not educate their children or afford any of the amenities associated with aristocratic life to which they now began to aspire.’ 32 In order to put some numbers on these rather sweeping statements, we may use a standard set by Kahan, seeking to calculate the costs to the Russian nobility of living up to the demands of such education and amenities that

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went with the new ideals of ‘European’ life. According to his calculations, a noble family seeking to meet these demands in a very modest way would need to have at least 100 ‘souls’ (male serfs).33 According to figures from a census undertaken in 1762, the year when the nobility received its formal freedom, 51 per cent had 20 serfs or less, and an additional 31 per cent had between 21 and 100 serfs. While more than four out of five could thus be classified as poor, only three per cent had more than 500 serfs, which might qualify as being rich. Those with more than 1,000 serfs, who were the truly wealthy, represented a tiny one per cent of the nobility as a whole.34 To this image we may add that the nobility as a whole in turn represented a minute proportion of the overall population. The 50,000 nobles that were listed in the census made up no more than 0.6 per cent of the male population of the empire.35 Together they were listed as having 3.8 million serfs,36 but since only about three per cent were above poverty, we are talking of a very small elite indeed, thus making factors of social control and the evolution of norms within that elite all the more important. Amongst the poorest strata of the nobility, having very few or no serfs at all, it could even come to the point where they would have to till their own lands. In so doing, they would forfeit the exemption from taxes that was the only real privilege of the nobility, and thus be relegated to the status of ordinary serfs. Such fates would not be much different from those Muscovite peasants of old who sold themselves into slavery in order to escape debt. For those few amongst the nobility who did have enough land and serfs to live off the proceeds, the causes of continued voluntary subordination were a bit more complicated. At a casual glance, one might have thought that they should have been able to set themselves up as independent actors, to create a sphere from which an effective challenge to the autocracy could have been issued. Several factors, all of which were path dependent, spoke against such a development. By far the most important was associated with the investments in skills and the formation of alliances that had been necessary for success under the mandatory service order. Since this accumulation of human and social capital had taken place at the expense of learning such skills that would have been necessary for running successful agricultural operations, there was a double reason for the nobles to remain locked into service. The way in which the nobility was rewarded for service also helped reinforce the path dependence. From the times of appanage Russia throughout the period of granting pomestiya, landholding patterns had been marked by fragmentation. The higher-ranking nobles would have plots of land scattered over so many provinces that they would be hard put to identify them all. In consequence, the typical village would be subordinated to the wills of multiple landlords; having one single landlord was a rare exception. This not only made for inefficiency, in the sense that absentee landlords would have to depend on numerous and often dishonest stewards (mostly

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serfs themselves) for the running of their various estates. The absence of concentrated holdings also removed any possibility for the nobility of developing attachment to certain areas; symptomatically, there are no vons in the history of the Russian nobility. Taken together, these factors explain why it is not really possible to speak of the emergence of a Russian aristocracy in the Western sense of the word. The rewards that the nobility received from the autocracy, in the form of more land and serfs, were given in utter disregard for the problems of fragmentation, and their own repeal of the Entail Law did little to break with this trend. Amongst the nobility, the social norms of service and of equal allotments proved to be far stronger than any considerations of economic efficiency. Moreover, since equal allotment also applied to titles, over time there would be growing numbers of even pedigreed princely families living in absolute poverty.37 As a final factor reinforcing the attraction of being in service we may add the constant turmoil that marked the rural areas, and the ever-present danger of peasants simply running away, thus leaving the estates without labour. From the sixteenth century onwards, the landlords came to depend ever more on assistance from the state in capturing runaways. It is highly symptomatic of this trend that one of the main demands that produced the ulozhenie of 1649 was to regulate such procedures. While all of these factors combined to make the formal side of the service order path dependent, we shall maintain our focus on the informal norms, or the mentalite´ of the service nobility as the dominant factor. While the ethos of service had developed over centuries, there was no alternative ‘honour’ to be won by attempting to pursue alternative occupations. Accepting that social norms associated with the service culture remained dominant, we also may presume that the choice of remaining in voluntary service was greatly simplified by the fact that those who did retire would be prohibited for life from appearing at Court.38 Against this background, it is not surprising that over time the upper layer of the Russian nobility would transform itself not into an entrepreneurial elite but rather into the dancing, duelling and gambling ‘leisure class’ that forms such a familiar theme in Russian nineteenth-century literature.39 One of the least desirable qualities of a service noble had been that of taking private initiative. Once they were allowed, and indeed required to do so, it was not surprising that this stymied quality would take time to develop and to be associated with a new sense of ‘honour’. The general absence of any form of entrepreneurial spirit that marked the emancipated class of former service nobles was clearly reflected in its educational choices. For all the efforts of Peter the Great in creating a professional intelligentsia versed in matters of military and administrative use, such as mathematics, engineering and navigation, the actual outcome would be a

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class of idlers happily absorbing all forms of elite culture but abhorring the more practical sides of education and its applications. Raeff is quite to the point in his portrayal of this class: Now, the striking thing about both nobles and commoners in the service elite was that they showed interest only in the broader cultural aspects of Peter’s program; these made the program attractive and won it welcome from some segments of Russian society. Young civil servants showed no interest in technology or finance – indeed, they showed a positive lack of interest. The vast majority avoided these subjects as much as possible.40 The provincial nobles in particular appear to have retreated into complete idleness, thus faulting the expectations of Anna and Peter III that emancipation from state service would lead to a voluntary assumption of provincial responsibilities. Disappointment on this count was clearly expressed, inter alia, by Count Jacob Sievers, the leading proponent and implementer of Catherine’s provincial reform. In his opinion, the provincial nobles had ‘been loafing since 1762 and have all but lost interest in the public good and in their duty to their country’.41 The process of cultural Westernization of the Russian nobility may in this sense be seen as a mixed blessing. While it did result in outstanding cultural achievements, of lasting value to European culture as a whole, it was not without cost. As Pipes notes, ‘what culture gained politics lost; the genius which went into literature and art shied away from humdrum affairs of government.’ 42 Given the rigidity of the Table of Ranks, there would be no way for educated young nobles to be recruited into such high office that might be compatible with their qualifications. Being loath to compete with upwardly mobile commoners for advancement from the lower orders, those who could afford to do so found it more appealing to simply opt out, to spend their life in the cultural salons rather than in the government colleges. The consequences for Russia’s longer-term development should be measured not only in a loss of talent that might have gone into improving government. Much as the members of the leisure class left it to the bureaucracy to run the state, they also left it to their serfs to run both agricultural and other enterprises. As a consequence of the latter choice, some serf entrepreneurs would amass great wealth and in some cases even become serf-owners themselves.43 It was, however, a poor substitute for a true entrepreneurial elite. A century after the emancipation of the nobility, when serfdom was finally abolished, the continued absence amongst the nobility of any form of serious interest in learning how to run modern efficient agricultural operations would come back to haunt them as a group. At a stroke of the pen, they were placed in a situation where they could no longer simply command,

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but instead would have to interact economically, calculating costs and revenues and keeping books. Noting that most of the nobles did not ‘know how to count roubles and kopeks, and indeed scorned doing so’, Pipes characterizes their postemancipation predicament as ‘the ultimate vengeance of serfdom’, and proceeds to underline its political implications: ‘Whatever hope there might have been that the dvoryanstvo would develop into a politically active class vanished in 1861. The emancipation of serfs was a calamity for the landlords’.44 Even more importantly, the way in which emancipation was implemented also would prove to be a calamity for the peasantry, thus paving the way for the massive outbreaks of violence that came to mark the turn of the century. With this, however, we have taken a few steps ahead of our story. Let us thus backtrack a bit, and return again to the times and policies of Catherine the Great.

Enlightenment and attempted reforms If the initial stage of post-Petrine adjustment may be seen as marked by short-term expedience, allowing the nobility to look out for its own narrow short-term interests, the second phase that began with Peter III was of more fundamental and long-term importance. Marking the beginning of a seriously intended process of seeking to introduce into Russia a system of enforceable rules and rights, it also would serve to illustrate just how powerful those obstacles were that stood in the way of such ambitions. It is somehow symptomatic that the real start of the process would be associated with Catherine the Great. Being of German descent, she brought with her to Russia a strong inclination towards law and order, which she found sadly lacking in her new land. The circumstances surrounding her accession to power would, however, be indicative of ambitions that were not wholly consonant with the rule of law. Catherine’s way to the throne was indirectly cleared by her husband, Peter III. Shortly after his accession to power, in 1762, he made an attempt to impose personal rule, based on what Raeff refers to as ‘a coterie of favorites and their prote´ge´s (most of whom were foreigners, either Germans or natives of Holstein, of which Peter III was duke)’.45 Fearing that this would be a particularly ‘volatile and repressive’ government, aiming to curtail their newly won freedoms, many of the leading nobles were prepared to take extraordinary measures. It was in this situation that Catherine managed to organize a coup against her husband.46 She succeeded mainly because ‘she feigned concern to preserve (or restore) the institutional authority of the Senate, that creation of Peter the Great’s around which opposition to the rule of cliques and favorites invariably crystallized’. Having first condoned the murder of her husband, she then proceeded to rule as an autocrat in her own right, albeit behind a

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Potemkin fac¸ade: ‘In a stroke of political genius, Catherine II never renounced the avowed aims of her coup and worked hard to keep up the appearance of regularly functioning state institutions.’ 47 What is reflected here really may be seen as something of a core dilemma in relations between the autocracy and the nobility. From the Senate of Peter the Great onwards there would be constant conflicts around the variety of bodies that were introduced, secretly as well as openly, to serve in a coordinating function for policy making and implementation. The role of favourites would form an important part of such conflicts, but at a more fundamental level it really was about the presence or absence of firm rules of the game. In her personal life, Catherine the Great would not be much different from the previous empresses of the century. Her sexual licence included dozens of ever-younger lovers, and she became a favoured target of satirical writers and cartoonists. What did make her different was a compelling interest in affairs of the state: ‘Never did she allow private concerns to clash with public. Like Frederick the Great, or Peter, or Joseph II, or Maria Theresa, Catherine saw herself as an enlightened despot of the eighteenth century, identifying her own well-being with her people’s.’ 48 Catherine did not allow bedside favourites to assume any prominent roles outside her personal life. Even the illustrious counts Orlov and Potemkin were kept on a short leash. By thus taking politics out of the bedroom, she did take an important step on the road towards politics based on legal regulation. The fact that she had become Empress of ‘one of the most unenlightened and barbarous frontier areas of Europe’,49 also makes her achievement in creating a refined Russian intelligentsia all the more impressive. Yet, for all her enlightened instincts and for all her regular personal correspondence with people like Voltaire and Diderot, Catherine nevertheless would remain a dedicated autocrat. Her rule would represent continuity from Peter the Great in the sense of pursuing a public dialogue on the needs for participation, whilst in reality persistently refusing any form of real power sharing. With the notable exception of Alexander II, her successors would be similarly loath to even seriously contemplate a system of law-based rule. The contradictions inherent in this process would, in due time, result in terrorism and – eventually – revolution.

Towards legal regulation An important, if not the most important, consequence of Catherine’s rather lengthy rule was that of bringing Enlightenment to Russia. It was in her time that the efforts of cultural Westernization that had begun under Peter the Great were brought to full fruition. Catherine herself was almost passionate about this project. She supported the proliferation of schools and modern teaching techniques. She encouraged influence from foreign thinkers like

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Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau. She allowed private printing presses and publishing houses, and was generally enthusiastic about both theatre and literature. From our perspective, it was of particular importance that her favoured readings included Montesquieu’s L’E´sprit des Lois and Beccaria’s Crimes and Punishments. When the Empress decided, in 1767, to call a legislative commission to provide advice on the compilation of a new code of laws, her liberal ‘Instruction’ (nakaz) to that commission drew heavily on thoughts put forth in these works.50 There were good reasons for Catherine to call a law commission. Following the reforms of Peter the Great, the last major compilation of laws, the ulozhenie of 1649, had been rendered largely irrelevant. Several commissions had been appointed to draft a new code, without producing much result. Catherine marked a new departure not only by showing more determination. She also set a new standard, by ordering that her commission be elected by the new social ‘orders’ that were in the process of emerging. Delegates would represent both nobility and urban merchants and artisans, together with Cossacks, state peasants and even non-Russians. The only ones wholly excluded were serfs and clergy.51 This was an important step to take. According to Raeff, ‘the very way in which the electoral procedures were applied caused an awakening of consciousness among certain ‘‘orders’’ of society’.52 Given that the autocracy had previously been very careful not to allow any form of autonomous organization, such as the formation of closed estates, with her law commission Catherine the Great opened up an entirely new field of opportunity. Yet again, however, the way in which the nobility in particular chose to exploit a given opportunity would be strongly revealing of underlying negative path dependencies. The ‘petitions’ that were submitted to the commission showed, perhaps more than anything else, how fuzzy the self-image of the nobility was. Seeking to produce a codification of its own position, it displayed considerable confusion and ambiguity, which on the whole reflected how rude its awakening was. Two things, however, were fairly clear. One was a strong demand for security against the arbitrariness of the bureaucracy, and the other a striking absence of demands for a charter to spell out individual rights and privileges. Although a charter of the latter kind was already in force in the Baltic provinces, the commission’s deputies took a firm stance against any notion of drawing up and submitting to the Empress a proposal for such a code in Russia proper: ‘Here again we encounter the same paradox as before: the ruling elite seems to have preferred relations based on a personalized form of ultimate authority to a system based on a legal code and impersonal relations.’ 53 What is beginning to transpire here, as the real core of Russia’s institutional matrix, is a strong aversion to the very notion of formal rules and

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impartial enforcement mechanisms. It was firmly entrenched not only in formal organizations that had been built to exploit the absence of rules, and in skills that had evolved amongst the players in such games. Even more so, it was entrenched in systems of norms that served to rationalize this as a superior and just system. In the emancipation manifesto of 1762 it was clearly spelled out that, in the words of Jones, ‘social pressure, the desire for esteem and fear of disgrace’, would take the place of physical compulsion. Peter III expected that his servitors would ‘seek the service eagerly and will continue it as long as possible . . . those who will not perform any service will lead purposeless lives. . . . We will not allow such people any access to Our court, nor will We tolerate their presence at public assemblies and festivals.’ 54 By having thus internalized the ethos of service, the nobility also had paved the way for the autocrat to continue in the role as supreme and unchallengeable arbiter and mediator. The outbreak of war with Turkey in 1768 caused Catherine to prorogue the plenary sessions of the law commission, thus releasing its members to report for military duty. It would not be reconvened, perhaps because its deliberations had been taking an overly liberal and critical tone on social issues. Its subcommittees, however, were allowed to continue working and in 1780 the commission’s secretariat produced a ten-volume digest of existing law.55 While the latter may be seen as a poor substitute for the envisioned new law code, it would be wrong to call Catherine’s commission a complete failure. Its most important achievement by far was that of setting into motion an intellectual process of thinking about legal matters in general, and about the needs for a constitution in particular. Montesquieu’s work, rapidly translated into Russian, ‘became for a whole generation of Russians a manual of statesmanship’, and Catherine’s printed and widely disseminated ‘Instruction’ served to familiarize the Russian elite with current political and social ideas. This intellectual stimulus was ‘of greater consequence for the future course of Russian history than any code could ever have been’.56 As we shall see in a moment, that intellectual process would be kept alive over the coming century. Eventually it also would generate transformations that were of great importance indeed. This said it remains true that the reign of Catherine the Great failed to produce much in the way of concrete results. The law commission produced no law code, and the increasingly liberal economic policy failed to produce truly market-friendly institutions, such as banking or private property. For all her good intentions, and for all the vitally important mental transformations of the time, a truly cynical verdict would point at paper money (the assignaty) and smallpox vaccine as her only tangible achievements. A crucial factor putting a damper on Catherine’s initial liberalism was the famed rebellion of Yemiliyan Pugachev in 1773–75. Upheavals and revolts amongst the serfs were certainly nothing new as such. Much as Aleksei

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Mikhailovich had been forced to deal with Stenka Razin, and Peter the Great with Bulavin, it was somehow given that Catherine II would be dealt her share of peasant outrage. Still, ‘her’ uprising ‘exceeded in scope and terror any peasant uprising of the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries’.57 The Pugachev rebellion was different partly in being associated with a somewhat different motive than on previous occasions. Over and above more ‘traditional’ grudges over the increasing burdens of oppression, peasants had become convinced that in the wake of the emancipation of the nobility there also would follow emancipation of the peasantry. Thus, it was somehow symptomatic that Pugachev claimed to be Peter III, returning to complete his programme of reforms. The demands that he put forth were mainly familiar ones: an end to the landowners, a division of their estates, a restoration of the ‘true’ monarch and of the ‘old faith’, and an end to the recruitment levies. The real novelty of the event lay in the very violence of it all, in the fact that the government was confronted with the ‘far more terrifying threat of social war’, with the danger that the ‘outcast and downtrodden of Russian society’ might rise against ‘the establishment’.58 When Pugachev could finally be caught, following the release of regular troops from the war with Turkey, things really had changed. The nobility had been thoroughly frightened: ‘Landlords were convinced – rightly, as subsequent events were to show – that at the slightest sign of weakening of state authority the muzhik would take the law in his own hands and once again murder and pilfer as he had done in the Pugachev day.’ 59 But it was not only the nobility that had caught fear. Where the previous pleas of the nobility had failed, the Pugachev revolt succeeded. It led ‘the state to alter its policies, to treat the nobles as partners of the state even when they were not actually enrolled in state service’.60 Following the end of the rebellion, Catherine came to realize that her initial ambitions of ruling without the nobility would not be possible to implement. This realization provided the background to her introduction, in 1785, of a Charter of the Nobility. In this document she not only repeated the host of rights and privileges that had been spelled out by her murdered husband Peter III in 1762. She also took some extra steps, of great importance for the further evolution of legal and other norms. Symbolically, the dvoryanstvo charter was the first occasion on which the very notion of private property appeared in the Russian language. Given her German background, Catherine simply had the German word Eigentum directly translated into sobstvennost, which still remains in current use. Beyond such symbolism, it also made a more fundamental contribution in stating that a ‘noble will not be deprived of his property without due process of law’.61 Recalling that the latter had been an important part of the list of ‘conditions’ initially agreed to by Empress Anna in 1730, we have here perhaps the most important of all the formal changes that were attempted in the

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eighteenth century. Since the practice of due process stands in stark contrast to the ingrained habit of personalization, Catherine the Great did seek to mark a radically new point of departure. Following her death in 1796, there was a brief interlude and reversal. Her son Paul proceeded to undo as much as possible of his mother’s achievements. He reintroduced the secret police, cracked down on foreign publications and foreign travel, and abolished all the newly won rights of the nobility, to the point even of subjecting them to taxation like ordinary peasants. For good measure, he also banned women from the throne of Russia ‘for ever’, and ordered his mother to be buried together with her murdered husband. In 1801, he in turn was murdered in a coup, led by the governor-general of St Petersburg and condoned by his son Alexander. As tsar, Alexander I again started out in true liberal fashion, abolishing the secret police and reintroducing the previous range of rights and freedoms that had been curtailed by his father. He also would show determination to continue along the tracks towards greater bureaucratic efficiency that had been laid by Peter the Great. Already in 1802, he thus announced the replacement of the remaining colleges by a new structure. In contrast to the old ‘collegial’ format, his new ministries were to be based on clear functional responsibilities and led by ministers with considerable power and authority. Where Peter’s reforms had dealt exclusively with the central bureaucracy, Alexander would follow Catherine’s example also in seeking to improve local administration. Her provincial charter of 1775 had divided the country into a number of guberniyas, which were led by governors and elected councils.62 Alexander strove to upgrade the quality of this local administration, and to make it more directly subordinate to the new ministries. Above all, however, he resumed the process of constitutional reform that had been initiated under his grandmother. As point man for this process he selected Mikhail Speranskii, the son of a village priest who would win fame as one of Russia’s most distinguished jurists. Filled with inspiration from the Enlightenment philosophes, he worked out a proposal for a division of powers that would separate the executive from the legislature and the judiciary. The legislature, moreover, would be elected on a property franchise.63 If Speranskii’s proposal had been realized, it could have set Russia on a course towards constitutional monarchy. This clearly was something that the tsar would not willingly accept. Aside from the ministerial reform, all that eventually came out of the Speranskii commission’s work thus was a State Council, whose members far from being elected instead would be appointed by the tsar, to serve as his advisors on legal matters. From a purely formal perspective, the rule of Alexander I in no fundamental way would deviate from the previous tradition of fuzzy boundaries for the exercise of power. The State Council was given no legislative capacity, and while the tsar did allow the formation of a Council of Ministers, he

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would not allow them to meet as such, continuing instead to insist that each minister report personally to him. Although Speranskii may thus be said to have failed in his main ambition, the work that was undertaken by his commission had ‘taught Russian jurists an important lesson: they saw the need for establishing legal standards, for formulating principles on which a legal system could be based, principles which in turn could serve as guidelines for social and economic modernization’.64 It was indicative of the effects of this ‘teaching’ that work on replacing the largely irrelevant ulozhenie of 1649 would continue even in the subsequent repressive regime of Nicholas I. In 1832, following a brief period of disgrace, Speranskii was ready to present a Complete Collection of Russian Law, the Polnoe sobranie zakonov, and in 1835 a digest of that collection, the Svod zakonov, was added. While the importance of this effort should not be understated, it also and more importantly was the case that ‘the logical next step, that of formulating a truly useful and comprehensive legal code, was never taken. No such code was ever promulgated in imperial Russia.’ 65 The subsequent ‘Great Reforms’ of Alexander II must be seen in this latter light. Following the reign of Nicholas I, of which we shall have more to say in a minute, Alexander did come onto the scene as a great liberal hope, and as the best prepared tsar ever to ascend the throne in Russia. It was he who finally took the step of emancipating the serfs, in 1861, and with his 1864 zemstvo reform he continued the process of improving local administration. Most importantly, the latter year also brought a culmination of the process of attempted legal reform. For the first time ever in Russian history, Alexander’s rightly famous judiciary reforms provided for a corps of truly independent judges. It allowed for trial by jury in cases of serious offences, and for the right to counsel, leading to the emergence of a corps of trained Russian lawyers. From a purely theoretical perspective, this reform really had the potential for achieving a sustainable separation of the judiciary from the executive power. The fact that in all its main respects Alexander’s legal reform would be short-lived again serves to illustrate that there were powerful countervailing forces at play. The real core of the problem lay in the autocracy’s inconsistent approach. Throughout the process of increasing legal sophistication that was begun under Catherine the Great, it actually and symptomatically worked against its own professed interest. In the words of Thomas Owen, ‘the tsarist bureaucrats who refashioned Russian political institutions in the 1860s and 1870s carefully avoided imposing constitutional restraints on the autocratic state. The reforms thus demonstrated the government’s minimal accommodation to the principle of the rule of law.’ 66 By consistently proving its unwillingness, perhaps even its inability, to accept any form of constitutional arrangement that might have constrained

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its own exercise of power, the autocracy produced a total estrangement of those constructive forces that might have assisted in achieving a peaceful transformation to a law-based state. Since, however, it was the autocracy itself that had set in motion the process of forming new estates, which proceeded to formulate new ideas and new agendas, it eventually would have to deal somehow with the growing appetite for further change that was emerging from these estates. Absent any form of readiness to enter into serious dialogue, it would remain only for the subsequent tsars to resort to repression.

Enforcement absent legitimacy At this point we may usefully recall what has been said above about the failure, throughout the centuries, of Russian society to impose any form of restraint on political authority. Simply stating that the autocracy refused to yield is clearly insufficient. Its position after all did not rest in the main on draconian repression, but rather on acquiescence by those groups that might have produced a serious challenge. In order to understand why this was so, we again must focus on the peculiar relations between state and society that grew out of Muscovite patrimonialism. In our previous discussion of the boyar elite it was argued that its cohesion was derived from the evolution of self-enforcing institutions that were based on social norms prescribing service, political poruka and denunciation. By promoting a set of shared mental models amongst the elite, that process did provide for stability, albeit at the price of reduced economic efficiency. It did not, however, provide for any sense of ‘society’, in the way of promoting ideals or concepts with which the broader population could identify. That role was played by Orthodoxy – as we have noted above, being Russian also implied being Orthodox. Perhaps the most important consequence of the reforms undertaken by Peter the Great was that of effectively destroying Orthodoxy as a common bond for the Russian nation as a whole. It was in its place that Peter sought to introduce his notion of the bien public, of a common allegiance to the good of the state. As we have noted above, however, time would show that there was an important contradiction here. Seeking to elicit participation from below whilst at the same time working hard on perfecting a streamlined system of universal service was bound to produce increasing problems. From an institutional perspective, the main effect of the ‘age of the nobility’ was that of producing tiny fissures in the fac¸ade of the patrimonial system. As Jones puts it, the ‘strict identity between membership in the nobility, service to the state, and privilege that had been forged by Peter the Great had begun to deteriorate by the 1760s’.67 Under Catherine the Great, those fissures would open into cracks, extending deep into the very foundations of the state. The catalyst for this process, as Raeff notes, was her attempt to create a state that rested on partly empowered estates.

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The needs to hold periodic elections for the new bodies that were being formed also implied needs for ongoing meetings and discussions, where different interests would produce and formulate different agendas. Since the autocracy was not ready to accept the full consequences in terms of power sharing, it was thus actually promoting opposition to its own rule: ‘We see signs of new feelings of security, strengthened by new guarantees of individual rights and property contained in legislation promulgated by Catherine but ignored by her underlings.’ 68 By introducing a set of partly new rules of the game, the autocracy also triggered a process of mental reorientation. If it had been consistent in its ambitions of placing more emphasis on legal regulation, that process might have evolved in a direction supportive of the rule of law. Catherine’s Charter of the Nobility could then have come to serve as something of a Russian Magna Carta. Symptomatically, however, no effort would be made to provide credible enforcement, even on paper. There simply was ‘no code of law to enforce respect for these ostensible rights’.69 As the autocracy reserved for itself the right to continue in the role as supreme mediator and arbiter, itself remaining suspended above the law, the new estates that were emerging could find no partner with whom to interact. The provincial nobility in particular, retreating to their landed estates, might equally well have emigrated: ‘Far from feeling that they were part of the ruling class, the provincial nobles felt cut off from the state . . . they could do nothing but complain and appeal to the empress.’ 70 Instead of producing a homogeneous society, based on a set of shared mental models, the process of reform that was initiated by Peter the Great and enhanced by Catherine the Great thus actually served to produce sets of radically different mental models, which in turn led to the formation of different sub-societies with little if any mutual understanding and/or interaction. The real core of this process was linked to the continued absence of relevant legal regulation. By failing to produce a uniform code of laws to uphold, the autocracy not only failed to provide an institutional framework within which the emerging demands for further change could have been channelled into constructive effort. It also effectively precluded the formation of an independent judiciary. There would thus remain no alternative to arbitrary rule by the autocrat, and arbitrary implementation of her orders by the bureaucracy. In order to clarify this image of the Russian state being broken up into subsocieties with highly differing agendas and mental models of their respective surrounding worlds, we shall take a closer look at three groups that would be of particular importance for nineteenth-century developments. One of these was made up of the increasingly isolated world of the private peasants, the serfs, whose owners during the time of Catherine succeeded in reaching an effective stalemate with the autocracy: ‘Catherine resisted the nobles’ demands for preferment that would have sacrificed the interests

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of the state and of other classes, and the nobles in turn resisted every attempt to curtail their prerogatives, especially their authority over the enserfed peasantry.’ 71 The other two groups were the merchants, who might have been expected to form a dynamic entrepreneurial group, gradually evolving middle-class values, but failed to do so,72 and the intelligentsia that would come to place such a heavy mark on Russia’s nineteenth century. Symptomatically, following the Petrine reforms the Orthodox Church no longer merits attention as an actor in its own right. The serfs and their owners Catherine the Great had arrived in Russia with a strong distaste for serfdom, and to her credit she did succeed in easing the lot of peasants in the Baltic provinces and of Church and factory serfs in Russia proper.73 Her main problem concerned the status of serfs on private lands. As we have mentioned above, in the decades after the death of Peter the Great the nobility had successfully warded off all attempts by the bureaucracy to extend control over the private peasants and it would jealously continue that fight. It is thus important to note that the emancipation of the nobles in 1762 was ‘accompanied by the reaffirmation of their rights over their serfs. All crimes except murder and robbery came within the landowner’s jurisdiction.’ A number of further decrees in the 1760s even extended this power, to include ‘the right to send criminal or delinquent serfs into Siberian exile as settlers, or to periods of penal servitude in Siberia. To serve in the army was another form of punishment.’ 74 Given that the serfs were liable to pay taxes, this being the only sense in which they were distinct from slaves, and that landlords had been made liable for their fulfilment of such obligations, the threat of peasants simply running away was a very real one, as was the threat of peasants going on rampage, murdering and raping their oppressors. For these various reasons, Russian serfdom would prove to be so much more difficult to abolish than, say, American slavery. Technically, it might have been possible for the autocracy to simply order the landlords to accept the full consequences of their demands for increasing rights over their serfs, but that proved to be a dead end. Always fearful of the peasantry, the Russian nobility was unprepared to accept full responsibility for maintaining the serf system: it needed the state as a shield. Without this shield the provincial nobility, tradition-bound, distracted by state service obligations, impoverished, and culturally backward, would not have been able to survive. Hence it accepted its subordination to the state and its lack of corporate autonomy.75

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When Catherine introduced her Charter of the Nobility there had been plans for a simultaneous introduction of a Charter for the state peasants, but that came to naught. Perhaps she simply feared arousing unwarranted expectations amongst the private peasants. The problems of the latter were too complex, and too deeply intertwined with the very foundations of the system as such. In the end, Catherine would simply confess herself to be defeated by serfdom: ‘Wherever you touch it, it does not yield.’ 76 Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, there was a steadily growing realization that serfdom represented a problem that the state could ignore only at its peril. While serious discussions on how to resolve it were conducted in the regimes of both Alexander I and Nicholas I, it would not be until in 1861 that the matter was finally approached, and then it would prove to be too little, too late. Again recalling our institutional perspective of interaction between rules and norms and mechanisms of enforcement, a vital effect of the repression that was applied to the peasantry was that of producing a mentalite´ that was completely alien from that of the state. Serfs had no rights whatsoever. They could at times engage in profitable enterprises, but always under the arbitrary rule of their landlords. In their world, in their famed mir, the tsar was elevated to a mythological figure and for the state there was simply no place at all. The reason behind this development in turn was a consequence of the persistent failure by the autocracy and the nobility to produce any form of agreement on how to regulate their internal relations: ‘The Manifesto of Peter III had destroyed the formulation that the serfs serve the nobles and the nobles serve the state, which had traditionally been accepted as the justification for serfdom.’ 77 Absent a new form of contract, both sides remained locked into their path dependent Muscovite emphasis on rule evasion that was embodied in kormlenie, pomestie, poruka and denunciation. Against this background, it was not really surprising that attempted modernization in practice would entail ‘intensifying some of the most archaic aspects of Russian society, including serfdom, joint responsibility, the introverted village community, and the dependence of the peasants on patronage’.78 While the nobility was busy absorbing vital parts of a cosmopolitan European culture, albeit constrained by remaining norms of the service order, the peasants living on their estates were relegated to a primitive existence, devoid of any form of modernity. They ‘inhabited an egalitarian universe whose culture was parochial, whose decision making was consensual, and whose paramount priority was survival in adverse conditions. The mentalities generated by these very different life situations were so different as often to be mutually incomprehensible.’ 79 Although many nobles were aware of the problems that were brewing here, they would prove quite incapable of addressing them in a constructive

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fashion. As the same may be said for the autocracy, the two sides in a sense were locked into something of a Greek tragedy. In the end, the peasant problem would prove to be the undoing of both. The merchants In the history of Western Europe, it was not only the nobility but perhaps even more so the urban population of merchants and artisans that played a role in successfully constraining the power of the monarchy. Beginning with medieval Magdeburg law, urban residents would win for themselves a set of rights and privileges that were captured in the classic expression Stadtluft macht frei, city air makes free. With the exception of the previously described cases of Pskov and Novgorod, Russia would produce no parallel to this crucially important development. Everything that has been said and written about the absence in Russian tradition of a bourgeoisie, or of a solid middle class, may be derived from this fact. Over the centuries, as Pipes puts it, ‘Moscow could not tolerate privileged sanctuaries from which a genuine urban civilization might have developed because they violated the kingdom’s patrimonial constitution.’ 80 The energy and ruthlessness with which the institutional arrangements of Pskov and Novgorod were eradicated, following their military defeat by Moscow, indicates that the rulers of Muscovy sensed the dangers to their rule that were inherent in city air making free. Cities, in Russian tradition, not only were few and far between. Recalling what was said in Chapter 6 above, about ‘Princes and Merchants’, they also were overwhelmingly oriented towards military and administrative functions. While it is true that Russia never did succeed in producing a strong merchant class, which in turn might have produced a bourgeoisie and thus demands for democratic development, this should not be taken to imply that there also was a general absence of trade. On the contrary, the very poverty of agriculture made for a long and strong tradition of supplanting agricultural activities by a range of commercial activities. All and sundry would gladly engage in seeking profit wherever it could be found. What made this development so particular was the strongly commandoriented policy of the autocracy, which was intensified under Peter the Great. All mineral use would be controlled by the Mining College. Forests came under the Admiralty or the Manufacturing College, and the right of nobles to trade in products originating on their estates was regulated by the Commerce College.81 The general absence of a market-friendly economic policy not only reinforced the weak role of money, for which there was little need under a command regime. It also stymied the growth of entrepreneurship by fostering instead a growth of state monopolies: ‘In practice, any product which

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entered into commerce became the subject of a state monopoly. It is difficult to conceive of a practice more fatal to the entrepreneurial spirit.’ 82 The main victim of this path dependent focus on control and resource extraction was the class of urban merchants and artisans. Far from being granted charters and privileges, they would be incorporated into the general service order under conditions no different from those pertaining to other bearers of such obligations in money and/or labour that were jointly referred to as tyaglo. The principle was simple. Those who did not serve instead would have to pay taxes. It was only in the latter sense that Russian cities were made distinct from the countryside. By late Muscovite times, the urban community, the posad, had become a legal entity for fiscal purposes. In accordance with the ingrained principle of krugovaya poruka, its members were made collectively responsible for the payment of taxes and other dues. If anything, the urban population was even worse off than the rural serfs. Where merchants in Western Europe flocked to the cities to enjoy profitable trade under special privileges, members of the Russian posad would have to face competition from outside traders – such as Cossacks and state peasants – who were exempt from paying tyaglo. Being legally prevented from leaving the posad, its members would go to considerable lengths in order to find a way out, including that of selling themselves into slavery: ‘Apparently the status of a slave (which carried with it exemption from all state obligations) was preferable to that of a shopkeeper or an artisan – a telling commentary on the conditions of the Russian middle class.’ 83 Under such conditions, it is not surprising that capitalism failed to take root in Russia. Absent both money and legal regulation to protect property and contracts, there remained little more than extraction and primitive barter. The impact on human capital development and on the evolution of norms is reflected in the fact that such liberalizing decrees that were issued under Peter III and Catherine II had so little effect. An important illustration is that of the City Charter, which was issued by Catherine concurrently with her Charter of the Nobility in 1785. Although highly ambitious in formal terms, in that it ‘granted the Russian urban population for the first time in history the right to form corporations and elect its own officials’, none of this meant much in practice: ‘In effect, the city population remained split and the merchants and artisans continued to live in isolation from the rest of society.’ 84 The intelligentsia Given that neither the nobility nor the merchants were in any position to effectively constrain the autocracy, there remained only one group to attempt the task, namely the celebrated Russian intelligentsia. The seeds for this

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subsequently so important group had been sown by Peter the Great, with his heavy emphasis on organized secular education. By the early nineteenth century, the founding of universities and the general nourishment provided by the Enlightenment polices of Catherine the Great had created an entirely new situation of potential compromise and deal making. For many of the newly educated Russian nobles, it was the war with Napoleon that provided the real watershed, bringing close encounters with Europe that would leave lasting impressions: ‘The fact is that Alexander’s campaign against Napoleon had unintentionally given decisive impetus to a new generation of thinking Russians. They were the sons of those of the eighteenth century who had read the philosophes and drunk of the waters of the Enlightenment.’ 85 In contrast to their fathers, these young men had actually seen the West and they had been inspired by the early liberalism of the tsar. What set them off into opposition was the subsequent withdrawal of Alexander I into his own world of brooding and mysticism. Following 1812, and the responsibilities implied by Russia’s participation at the Congress of Vienna, he appears to have become more and more convinced that further reforms would represent grave dangers to the state. Witnessing this transformation, which was so contrary to their own expectations, the liberal members of the intelligentsia would move away from and assume an increasingly hostile stance towards the autocracy: Not for nothing did Herzen say that only in 1812 did the veritable history of Russia begin. To put it another way, 1812 was the last occasion when all educated Russians shared a common view of their society and its needs, the last opportunity perhaps for reform to be bestowed from above and welcomed from below.86 Russia’s nineteenth-century intelligentsia has been remembered, and justly so, for its outstanding contributions both to the arts and to the emerging field of social criticism. For our purpose, however, it is more important to focus on its increasing isolation from the state, on the social ‘fissures’ that were beginning to open into cracks, and on the split within that would give rise to the famed ‘Westernizing’ and ‘Slavophile’ camps.87 An important reason behind the failure of these educated and talented young people to become prominent entrepreneurs or statesmen again may be derived from our previous arguments about path dependencies, in norms as well as in organizational structures. Kochan and Abraham put it quite explicitly: ‘Many young Russian nobles turned to social criticism because they were incapable of anything else.’ Remaining in voluntary service was unattractive because its discipline was ‘petty to the point of absurdity. It also reeked of corruption and oppression’. Commerce, on the other hand, was ‘even less attractive: they were brought up to squander wealth, not invest it, and only the greatest of them were able

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to find a market valuation for their labor which they found anything but insulting’.88 Perched on the fence between the autocracy and the provincial masses, they became angry young men, seeking a mission for themselves but not being allowed to find one in the service of the state: ‘Unable to find a meaningful active role in Russian society, the members of the intelligentsia were finally driven into revolutionary action.’ 89 The strongly path dependent reason for the exclusion from the sphere of public policy of these potentially supportive intellects was rooted in the historical role and self-image of the autocracy: In the final analysis, the source of all authority and of all favors remained the arbitrary and unchallengeable personal power of the autocrat. Such a situation served to undermine the very raison d’eˆtre of legal and bureaucratic order. It also was the root of the failures of many attempts at fundamental political reform and the search for a Rechtsstaat.90 Symptomatically, the Westernized representatives of the intelligentsia would find it particularly hard to accept that both Poland and Finland could be granted constitutions, while Russia proper did not qualify. In 1817, an elite group of nobles, representing the ‘scions of the aristocratic families’, decided to form a Union of Salvation that set for itself the task of achieving the abolition of serfdom and the introduction of a constitutional regime.91 Following a number of internal disagreements, some members of this group eventually reached the conclusion that the Emperor must be killed, and proceeded to plan accordingly. While the untimely death of Alexander I, only months before the planned regicide, did cause some confusion, in December 1825 his successor, the young Nicholas I, was faced with open insurrection in Senate square in St Petersburg. Although the attempted coup collapsed, and very few rounds were actually fired, the action that had been taken by the ‘Decembrists’ would live on in memory as a myth to inspire future rebels. Even more importantly, this ‘horrible and extraordinary plot’ against his elder brother would have a major impact on the new tsar. His regime would evolve a strange bunker mentality, to be described by the Marquis de Custine as ‘the discipline of the camp – it is a state of siege become the normal state of society’.92 The political police The immediate reaction of Nicholas I was to back away from any potential ambitions of ruling together with the nobility. Shocked by the fact that sedition had spread amongst its ranks, he decided to create his own personal chancellery, which was to form the mainstay of his regime. Amongst its various sections there was one controlling promotions, another that was

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charged with continuing the legislative work of Speranskii, and yet another that maintained the search for a solution to the problem of serfdom. By far the most important, however, was its Third Section, headed by General Benckendorff. Convinced of the need to apply firm measures of repression, he had managed to convince the tsar, in the aftermath of the failed coup, that the country needed a well-organized political police, with a broad mandate: ‘Foreigners, dissenters, criminals, sectarians, writers – any exponent of ideas would come under its supervision.’ 93 Benckendorff proceeded to build an organization that consisted of two parts. Its real core was a rather small group of maybe 30–40 employees, serving as the hub in a vast network of paid informers who ‘frequented salons, taverns, fairs, and other public gatherings and reported any specific information they had picked up as well as their general impressions of the public mood’. Attached to this secret police there also was a uniformed nationwide Corps of Gendarmes that was several thousand men strong.94 The Third Section represented continuity with the past not only in its reliance on spying and denunciation. Like the Preobrazhenskii prikaz of Peter the Great, it also was exempt from supervision by other government agencies, reporting directly to the tsar himself.95 It was a judicial body with vague responsibilities but with powers of its own to punish and exile. Its role in upholding the laws of the land may be reflected in a statement once made by Benckendorff: ‘Laws are written for subordinates, not for the authorities.’ 96 The ideology of Nicholas’s regime was poignantly phrased by his Minister of Education, Count Uvarov. In a circular letter, produced in 1833, Uvarov formulated what would become something of a slogan for the regime: the people must be educated in the spirit of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality’.97 Given that the Orthodox Church had been weakened beyond recognition, and that the inclusion into the Empire of large nonOrthodox populations, made the question of nationality problematic, it all really boiled down to defence of the autocracy, plain and simple.98 Uvarov’s slogan was intended ‘to serve as an ideological dam that would hold back all critics of the existing order’, and he made no qualms about his limited ambitions: ‘If I can succeed in delaying for fifty years the kind of future that theories are brewing for Russia, I shall have performed my duty and shall die in peace.’ 99 As time wore on, and as the ‘government’s ideological bankruptcy became more and more evident’,100 it was also becoming clear that the autocracy had allowed no groups or estates to emerge that could perhaps have taken remedial action. This was despite the fact that the regime was fully aware of the dangers inherent in allowing things to deteriorate further. In 1842, for example, Nicholas told the members of his State Council that ‘Serfdom, in its present form, is an evil obvious to all; but to touch it now would of course be an even more ruinous evil.’ 101 A similar view was

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expressed by Benckendorff himself, calling serfdom a ‘powder magazine under the state’.102 The regime’s increasing reliance on repression also brought into focus the need for legal regulation, not only of censorship but also of the whole category of offences that were known as crimes against the state. The problem as such was certainly not new. From above we may recall that both denunciation and political repression, as embodied in ‘political poruka’, had been prominent features ever since the old Muscovite laws on ‘words and deeds’. The novelty lay in the fact that society had undergone such profound change. The emergence of new, Westernized estates had caused the old fears of all things from the West to be replaced by a growing appetite for Western ideas. The associated erosion of previous self-enforcing institutions of control offered serious new threats to the autocracy. The new code of laws that was presented by Speranskii in 1832 did include a Criminal Code, dealing with crimes against the state, but since it had done little more than arrange in an orderly fashion already existing and partly irrelevant statutes it was immediately deemed inadequate. The task of drafting a new, systematic Criminal Code first went back to Speranskii, who died before it was completed. Finally presented in 1845, the new code became, in the words of Pipes, ‘a milestone in the historical evolution of the police state’. Its third and fourth chapters, dealing with political crimes, constituted ‘a veritable constitutional charter of an authoritarian regime’.103 Pointing at a number of important parallels between the law of 1845, and subsequent Soviet legislation of 1927 and 1960, Pipes argues that one ‘is justified in saying, therefore, that Chapters Three and Four of the Russian Criminal Code of 1845 are to totalitarianism what the Magna Carta is to liberty’.104 The contrast between this draconian code of criminal law and the subsequent set of liberal judicial reforms that were enacted by Alexander II somehow captures the essence of the dilemma of reform in the nineteenth century. While the autocracy did come to increasing realization of what eventually would have to be done, it also proved incapable of divesting itself of those very means of repression that formed some of the main obstacles to a liberal development. Even so, there was nothing inevitable about this development. As we shall see in the following chapter, the nineteenth century was marked by such fundamental transformations of mental models, and of expectations for the future, that the twentieth century might well have turned out to be an era of true reform, bringing Russia closer to Europe.

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In the early twentieth century, it really did look as though Russia was finally poised to break with its past, and to join the rest of Europe. The economic policies of Sergei Witte, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, had led to a broad economic upswing, including a stable currency and international creditworthiness. Following the traumatic events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ in 1905, moreover, Tsar Nicholas II could be persuaded into accepting such fundamental constitutional reforms that the Russian Empire essentially was on its way towards democratic institution building. Further and even more important support for an optimistic interpretation could be found in Pyotr Stolypin’s grand project of agrarian reform, launched in 1906. Speaking to the Third Duma, more than two years later, he would explain the main purpose of the programme as follows: ‘The government has placed its wager, not on the needy and the drunken but on the sturdy and the strong – on the sturdy individual proprietor who is called upon to play a part in the reconstruction of our Tsardom on strong monarchical foundations.’ 1 Contained in this classic statement was a marked ambition to undertake a true rearrangement of the microfoundations of the country’s institutional matrix. By allowing households to opt out of the village community, and to receive their shares of the communal land as consolidated holdings in private property, Stolypin aimed at nothing less than a complete breakup of the deeply conservative structures of the traditional mir.2 Given Russia’s long heritage of serfdom, of krugovaya poruka and authoritarian social relations, and of persistent agricultural underperformance, this assault by implication also entailed a challenge to the very foundations of the still overwhelmingly rural Russian state. Success would have been measured not only in a strengthened role for private property, and thus in a transformation of relations between the autocracy and its subjects. Major gains in agricultural productivity, derived from improved organization and the introduction of modern techniques of cultivation, also would have allowed for a shrinking of the relative size of the primary sector in the Russian economy. The latter would have been particularly important in the sense that resources then would have been transferred into

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the secondary sector on market-oriented grounds. Given the deeply rooted legacy of forceful extraction of resources from the rural sector, a legacy that would be tragically continued under Stalin, this in itself would have represented a truly important transformation. Overall, one might say that the real prize for which Stolypin was batting was that of institutional change geared into achieving sustainable economic growth. Thus presented, the tasks that were implied by his wager on ‘the sturdy and the strong’ hardly could have been more important. Given the broad stakes that were involved in the period as a whole, it is not surprising that there has been much discussion on whether these various processes of reform, from Witte to Stolypin, really might have led to a more ‘European’ Russia – had it not been for the outbreak of the Great War and the subsequent victory of Lenin and his Bolsheviks. Since we know what the actual outcome would be, the discussion as such at first may appear somewhat academic. Alec Nove, for example, certainly has a valid point when he concludes that ‘the question of whether Russia would have become a modern industrial state but for the war and the revolution is in essence a meaningless one’. Although a simple extrapolation of statistics might produce a promising picture, to him that would entail both ‘conjuring out of existence’ the complications of the march towards war, and assuming that the autocracy would be able to adjust: ‘There is no need to assume that everything that happened was inevitable because it happened. But there must surely be a limit to the game of what-might-have-been.’ 3 Nove rests his case with a poignant quote from Alexander Gerschenkron, who maintains that ‘industrialization, the cost of which was largely defrayed by the peasantry, was in itself a threat to political stability and hence to the continuation of the policy of industrialization’.4 We shall have no quarrel with the basic point of this argument. Seeking to engage in counterfactual speculation with the aim of proving a thesis in either direction does appear to be a bit pointless. Perhaps it was the case that the ‘democratic parenthesis’, as the post-1905 development has sometimes been known, really could have led to a fundamental and sustainable institutional transformation. Perhaps the process as a whole was doomed by endogenous factors to be short-lived anyway. What is of greater importance for our purpose is the fact that the period at hand nevertheless does represent a broad and fundamental deviation from the long-term path dependence that has been outlined in our previous chapters. As such, it also must be seen as potentially fruitful in shedding light on the nature of the path dependence. Above all, we yet again must bear in mind that an institutional lock-in is something very different from sheer determinism. The main thrust of the present chapter shall hence be devoted not to speculation per se on what could have been. Our primary aim instead shall be to map out what did happen, and this from two different perspectives. The first

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section of the chapter will deal with the attempted breakout, seeking to identify at what points in the chain of attempted transformations that various processes of positive change were halted. If we can identify where it was that reforms fell short of achieving sustainability, then we shall also have learned something important, not only about Russia but about institutional theory as such. In the second section we shall approach the much broader issue of the nature of the Soviet order. As we are all well aware, Russia’s twentieth century would be marked not by advances towards democracy, market economy and the rule of law, but rather by the imposition of a new – outwardly utopian – system. Following our previous line of argument, it will be argued below that once all the fanciful outer trimmings of Marxism–Leninism have been removed, we really are looking at a striking return to old Muscovy. This, we shall argue, represents an important case of what we have referred to above as revealed institutional preference. Given that the Bolsheviks came to power without any economic programme of their own, over and above the urge to hang on to power, the institutional arrangements that emerged will be seen as determined mainly by endogenous forces, driven by preferences that had deep historical roots. Before proceeding to look more closely at how that later process played out, we shall, however, see what may be learned from the attempted breakouts that were undertaken in the nearly four decades spanning the time from the death of Alexander II until the Bolshevik coup d’e´tat. Our account will be associated mainly with the ambitions of three great reformers: LorisMelikov’s proposals for cautious constitutional reform, Witte’s policy for rapid industrialization, and Stolypin’s implementation of fundamental agrarian reform.

Reforms that could have been? In the previous chapter, we ended our story by outlining how the assassination of Alexander II brought about an effective end to the Great Reforms, signalling instead the start of what has been known as the ‘Great Reaction’.5 It is certainly not our ambition here to challenge that image. There can be little doubt that the traditional view of Alexander III as a forceful and repressive tsar does rest on solid grounds. It is also true that the swing in policy fits well into our previously outlined pattern of a pendulum movement between reform and repression. We shall, however, seek to complicate the story a bit, by showing that fluke events also played into the game, reinforcing a swing that might perhaps otherwise have been milder. The bottom line here concerns the deeper impact of the legal reforms that were implemented under Alexander II. Although the spectacle of the Zasulich trial did mark an important turning point, in the sense that the tsar withdrew support for his own legal reform

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and allowed military tribunals to take over, the process as a whole would not be that easy to reverse. This is where Count Loris-Melikov enters the picture.

Loris-Melikov’s ‘Constitution’ As W. E. Mosse points out, Alexander’s judicial reform had generated two by-products that were of major importance. One was that ‘many idealistic young men, possibly the cream of Russian officialdom’, had flocked to participate in its implementation. In their subsequent careers, these young men would branch out into various parts of the bureaucracy, causing it to be ‘permeated to a degree with a spirit of legality and judicial impartiality, and a repugnance for arbitrary executive action’.6 With the other effect being the emergence of a bar of practising lawyers, having a professional stake in upholding the new system, the tsar effectively had created a constituency for the cause of further legal reform. There had emerged important groups of people with vested interests in the law as such, rather than in playing the traditionally path dependent game of personal influence with the tsar. Phrased in terms of institutional theory, they formed organizations and networks to exploit the new rules, and they began a process of mental reorientation to support and rationalize their organizational choices. This potentially important transformation of mental models amongst parts of the policy establishment was given added weight by the fact that Alexander II, perhaps still under the influence of his old tutor Mikhail Speranskii, pursued a policy of what might be called coalition government (if the notion of ‘government’ as such can be accepted here). Amongst his ministers the tsar not only had conservatives but also ardent liberals, who wanted to see further reform. Perhaps one might even bring into the picture Alexander’s amorous exploits. His long-standing relation with the young Catherine Dolgorukaya, who bore him four children, also brought about a polarization of the court.7 Recalling the dangers of marriage politics in old Muscovy, and especially so the turmoil that was created by the multiple marriages of Ivan the Terrible, the fact that Alexander in effect operated and commuted between two families and two courts was simply bound to produce important consequences. While those who disapproved of his demeanour would gather around the Empress and the morally upright tsarevich, whose coterie envisioned a reign of ‘impeccable conservatism, probity and morality’, others would gather in the salon of Dolgorukaya, which thus became a hotbed not only of moral tolerance but also of more broadly liberal thinking. For those who championed the cause of further reform, the – very real – possibility of young Catherine one day becoming Empress held out a – perhaps less real – promise of also winning the Emperor himself for their cause. The psychological strains that followed from the mounting hostility between his two courts increasingly caused the tsar to withdraw to his

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personal life. In a political environment where autocracy was still the name of the game, and where the tsar’s person thus had a crucial role to play, such a withdrawal would have been damaging under the best of circumstances. In the latter half of the 1860s, and perhaps even more so in the 1870s, it was outright ominous. Alexander’s association with Dolgorukaya coincided in time with the first two open attempts on his life, in 1866 and in 1867. As these were followed by a broad wave of terrorism, aimed at high officialdom as a whole, the predictable response was increasing repression. Then, beginning in 1875, there was the rising wave of pan-Slav agitation. Triggered by popular uprisings against Turkish rule in the Balkans, it eventually prompted Russia to go to war with Turkey. As the situation deteriorated, it was decided that special governorsgeneral, with near-dictatorial powers, should be introduced to rule the major cities of Russia. One of the men thus appointed was Count Loris-Melikov, a former war hero who proceeded to undertake his tasks with great dexterity. Convinced that mere repression would not be sufficient, Loris-Melikov worked out a strategy of cooperation with the local zemstva and of taking seriously the grievances of his subjects. Winning much success and acclaim with this policy, in 1879 Loris-Melikov was appointed to head a special Supreme Commission to which he was allowed to hand-pick the other members. From this platform, he undertook to resume the Great Reforms of the 1860s. To the great dismay of the conservatives, there was talk of allowing elected representatives to take part in the formulation of new laws, and the word ‘constitution’ came into frequent use.8 Following the death of the Empress, in May 1880, Alexander II proceeded to make young Catherine his morganatic wife, thus considerably strengthening the hand of those liberal reformers who had gathered in and around her salon. With the parallel cessation of open acts of terrorism, the general political climate also was shifting from repression towards reform. Briefly put, one might say that Loris-Melikov was in pole position, poised to relaunch the process of judicial reform. In early February 1881 a cautious programme was drawn up and accepted by the tsar in draft form. Wishing to make his new wife Empress, Alexander apparently felt a need to win popular support. With a gesture of carefully balanced political concessions he hoped to win the hearts of the liberals, without completely alienating the conservatives. For all its cautious wordings, the programme nevertheless might have been important – had it only been allowed time to result in further mental transformations, and in a further entrenchment of new strategies. As Mosse rightly puts it, a ‘decade of reform under the aegis of Loris might well have altered the face of Russia as the earlier Great Reforms had done’.9 As it turned out, however, that was not to be. The programme was to have been finally adopted at a meeting of the Council of Ministers that was called

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for 4 March 1881. Unfortunately for Loris-Melikov and his liberal associates – and even more so, perhaps, for Russia itself – the life of the ‘tsar-liberator’ was ended by a terrorist bombing on 1 March. Although we should indeed be wary of taking counter-factual speculation too far, it may be quite seriously argued that these three days were to have an important impact on the future course of Russia. If the terrorist had been delayed, and the decree formally accepted by the tsar, that action not only would have provided further encouragement for the proponents of reform. It also would have made it more complicated for Alexander III to reverse course. At a meeting of the Council of Ministers on 8 March he was symptomatically still undecided on the matter of what to do with his father’s final project. By the end of April, however, he was succumbing to the increasingly vociferous agitation of above all Konstantin Pobedonostsev. Following a meeting on the 28th April, it was obvious that the game of reform was over for now. Loris-Melikov and his associates tendered their resignations, and Dolgorukaya left the country with her children: ‘Thus terrorists and Pobedonostsev in unholy alliance had defeated the liberal bureaucrats. Possibilities of peaceful constitutional evolution had been foreclosed.’ 10 From an institutional perspective, this really was a most unfortunate turn of events. The formal rule changes that had been implemented by Alexander II in the first half of the 1860s had triggered a rearrangement of organizational strategies, and an associated transformation of norms in the direction of judicial impartiality. This represented the first case in Russian history, following the destruction of Novgorod, where a serious alternative was emerging to the path dependent game of personalized rule and arbitrary enforcement. With continued support from the autocracy itself, it might well have resulted in a sustainable transformation of one of the most important parts of the country’s institutional matrix. Against this background one may easily agree with Richard Pipes in condemning the activities of the Russian terrorists and their supporters: ‘Thus on Russian ‘‘progressive’’ opinion there rests a very heavy responsibility for sabotaging the only attempt made in the country’s history to have the government confront its citizenry on equal terms.’ 11 Needless to say, the activities of the terrorists in turn were conditioned by the refusal of the autocracy to allow further reform, or even options for meaningful participation from below. This was a fact that makes the role and reformability of the upper levels of the power establishment take on an even more crucial importance. We shall return to this in a moment.

Witte’s economic boom Even given the fact that Alexander III did come down on the side of Pobedonostsev, and proceeded to implement his reactionary policies, we are still left with the fact that the last decade of the nineteenth century did witness

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a tremendous economic upswing. As noted above, this upswing has traditionally been associated with the name of Sergei Witte. Although there can be little doubt about his achievements, we nevertheless shall take a few moments to map out the immediate prehistory of his programme. In the midst of the onsetting reaction against the Great Reforms, there also was an ongoing parallel process of increasing fiscal sophistication. Already in 1860, the state had announced its ambition to support the emerging industrial ventures by forming the country’s first State Bank. Charged with overseeing the emerging commercial banks, it assumed a ‘role as the keystone of the Russian credit system’.12 During his subsequent tenure of the finance portfolio, in 1862–78, the liberal Count Reutern managed to introduce a number of further technical improvements, such as a consolidated budget, a single treasury and a system of centralized accounting and auditing.13 All of these measures were important in their own right, in the sense of representing significant technical breaks with the previous path dependence on personalized and non-monetized command activity. What they failed to do, however, was to address a more fundamental dilemma that rested in Russia’s pursuit of an active foreign policy. Playing the role of ‘Gendarme of Europe’ that had followed from the involvement of Alexander I in the alliance against Napoleon also had meant assuming a burden of military expenditure that really was beyond the means of Russia’s backward rural economy. With the subsequently growing reliance on foreign credits to finance above all railway construction, this burden was compounded by the added weight of foreign debt service. For these reasons, Reutern sought valiantly to discourage the tsar from getting involved in war in the Balkans. Following the conclusion of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78, and his own resignation, Reutern would be proven right. The printing of paper money to finance the war had nullified all previous attempts at stabilizing the currency, and foreign borrowing had led to a 50 per cent increase of the debt. In the first half of the 1880s, 32 per cent of average annual expenditure went to the military and a further 30 per cent to debt service. In the decade from 1879 to 1888, the ruble depreciated by an average of 38 per cent per annum.14 The growing volume of Russian securities that were floated abroad also produced increasing vulnerability to speculative attacks, which proved highly destabilizing. In 1887, Reutern’s successor as Minister of Finance, N. K. Bunge, was faced with a record low for the ruble and in his turn saw no other way out but to resign. The next man in line, I. A. Vyshnegradskii, would prove to be of an altogether different quality. Trained as a railway engineer, he also was a man of affairs and a shrewd operator on the stock market: ‘With him, for the first time, a capitalist had entered the charmed circle of the high bureaucracy.’ 15 Convinced that stabilization of the currency was an imperative need, Vyshnegradskii proceeded to formulate and implement a policy that would secure this goal. The key was an improvement of the balance of

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trade, which would allow the buildup of a gold reserve that was sufficient to back the currency. In the first two years of his tenure, Vyshnegradskii was helped by good harvests that coincided with high demand on the European markets. To this good fortune he added a policy of ruthless collection of tax arrears, which forced the peasants into maximum sales of exportable grain. In 1891, he also introduced a consolidated tariff, which would have the combined effect of raising revenue and of discouraging imports. As a result, the balance of trade more than quadrupled, from an annual average of 68 million rubles under Bunge’s tenure to no less than 311 million rubles, and the gold reserve more than doubled, to reach 581 million rubles in 1893.16 When 1891 also brought widespread crop failures, leading to famine in many provinces, Vyshnegradskii demonstrated his firm resolve in maintaining exports. To him is attributed the classic statement that ‘We will be underfed, but we will export’ (Ne doedim, no vyvezem).17 His slogan would remain in memory as a symbol of one of the most basic dilemmas of Russian economic policy. When, in the following year, Vyshnegradskii suffered a stroke and was forced to resign, he left behind a dual legacy. While Russia’s financial position was headed for great success, the peasant economy had come to ‘full collapse and ruin’, as it was put in an official report from the time.18 During his time in office, Sergei Witte would make much of the positive side of this legacy. Most importantly, he continued the efforts of his predecessors to stabilize the currency. Via a daring coup on the Berlin stock exchange in 1894, he succeeded in discouraging further speculative attacks, and in the last years of the century he won the tsar’s personal support for introducing full convertibility, in the process effectively bypassing opposition from those members of the State Council who refused to accept the associated devaluation of the ruble. Of perhaps equal importance, and by far more memorable, was Witte’s support for railway construction. Having managed to convince the tsar that ‘Russia’s only hope of remaining a great power lay in the development of heavy industry and modern communications’, in the years 1892–1900 he could make sure that two-thirds of government expenditure went to support economic development.19 Most of this went to rail construction, which in turn, of course, was the main consumer of the products of heavy industry. The building of the Trans-Siberian Railway in particular was of great importance in spreading market relations, and in thus increasing the monetization of the Russian economy, outside the capital.20 It also formed part and parcel of Witte’s policy of careful commercial penetration of the Far East, where Russian interests inevitably would come into conflict with those of Japan. The real pivot of his policy was lodged, however, not in foreign policy as such but in the fact that convertibility of the currency formed the key to securing sufficient foreign credits. For this reason, Witte was forced to

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maintain Vyshnegradskii’s policy of imposing heavy burdens on the peasantry, something that in the end would prove to be the undoing of his programme as a whole. As we have noted above, a compilation of some simple macroeconomic statistics will tell a story of tremendous successes. Economic growth following the imposition of the tariff in 1891 was spectacular. In the last decade of the century, industrial production as a whole more than doubled. The output of pig iron trebled and the total mileage of railway track increased by nearly three-quarters. By 1900, Russia even had bypassed the USA to become the world’s largest oil producer.21 Behind this happy fac¸ade, however, there were numerous remaining problems. The growth record was highly uneven, both over time and between sectors, with the rural economy in particular remaining in dire straits. Measured against Russia’s rapid population growth, moreover, we get a picture where Russia, ‘despite her very considerable growth was not making much headway in catching up with the more advanced powers’.22 Calculations of industrial progress measured per capita show that over the period 1860–1913 Russia actually fell behind Italy, to occupy last place amongst the ten leading world powers.23 The problem of economic backwardness, and of the associated perceived need to ‘catch up’, was certainly not a new one. In the midst of his reforms, Peter the Great had nurtured illusions that Russia would need the advice and assistance of the West for some time, maybe a generation or two, after which the country would be able to make it alone: ‘We need Europe for a few decades, and then we must turn our back on it’.24 Two and a half centuries later, Khrushchev would still ‘talk boastfully but vainly’ about catching up with and overtaking (dognat i peregnat) the USA. As Mosse concludes, well in line with our claim of persistent Russian economic underperformance, the ‘rate of Western technological progress remained faster than the Russian; the hope of catching up definitively proved illusory’.25 In his famous treatise on Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, Gerschenkron argues, as ‘the main proposition’ of his essay, that due to the very nature of backwardness, attempts by backward countries to undertake rapid industrialization will by necessity produce results that are different from those recorded in the already more advanced countries. Differences in both speed and character of industrialization will be derived from the application of different institutional instruments (i.e. formal rules), as well as from the intellectual climate (i.e. informal norms) in which industrialization was undertaken.26 With particular reference to the ‘abysmal economic backwardness of Russia’, he lays out a pattern of development that is well in line with what we have argued in previous chapters. Moved by military interests, the state assumes ‘the role of primary agent in propelling the economic progress’. Given the ebb and flow in military needs, this in turn imparts a ‘peculiarly jerky character’ to economic development. In times of intensive development,

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great burdens will be imposed on the population and ‘severe measures of oppression’ will be necessary to prevent flight into distant frontier regions. The outcome will be a cyclical pattern of economic development, which forms a pendant to our previous presentation of a cyclical or pendulum pattern in economic reform: Precisely because of the magnitude of the governmental exactions, a period of rapid development was very likely to give way to prolonged stagnation, because the great effort had been pushed beyond the limits of physical endurance of the population and long periods of economic stagnation were the inevitable consequences.27 Thus it was that the rapid spurt of development in the 1890s was followed by a depression in the first years of the 1900s. The burdens on the peasantry had proven to be overwhelming, and a period of great disorder followed. Once order had been restored, there would follow another spurt of rapid development, beginning in 1909, which in turn would be interrupted by the Great War.28 Thomas Owen clearly recognizes the dilemma that rested in Russia’s pursuit of a foreign policy it was unable to sustain out of its own resources: ‘It is one of the many ironies of Russian history that, as the tsarist empire gained influence in European political life by virtue of its diplomatic and military achievements, it gradually fell further behind Europe in terms of economic development.’ 29 For all his successes, by 1900 Witte himself would find reason to warn the tsar of the broader dangers that were involved in the country’s race against the industrialized powers: ‘It is possible that the slow growth of our industries will endanger the fulfillment of the great political tasks of the monarchy. Our economic backwardness may lead to political and cultural backwardness as well.’ 30 While Witte had claimed that in the end all would benefit from his reforms, such benefits could only be of a long-term nature. In the short term there were no obvious winners – outside of a rather small circle of favoured investors and industrialists. It goes without saying that the plight of the peasantry was greatly aggravated, and it is a fact that crop failures and famine around the turn of the century would play an important role in the drift towards revolution.31 Compounding the problems of the rural sector, the gentry also were to be found amongst the losers. Over the period 1862–1905, their landholdings fell from 87 million to 50 millions desiatinas.32 The large estates in particular were severely hurt by the loss of serf labour, and the general inability of the landowners to shift from serf to market operations has been mentioned above. To this was added the impact of the tariff of 1891, which made agricultural machinery more costly, and the fact that Witte had neither sympathy nor cash to spare for the complaints of the gentry.

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In the cities, the emerging class of workers, consisting mainly of former peasants and of part-time peasants, were forced to accept their share of the burdens. With cheap labour and high tariffs being the keys to industrialization, it would only be for a small ‘aristocracy of labour’ in a few lucrative industries to win tolerable living conditions. For the remainder, times were hard and there were no unions to champion their cause: ‘Poverty and ill health aggravated by the wholesale consumption of vodka were widespread, the barracks of tenements in which especially seasonal workers were housed, appalling.’ 33 All in all, it was an explosive situation. While Witte’s personal undoing was linked primarily to political infighting over the approaching war with Japan, the disastrous end to his economic boom was derived, as noted by Gerschenkron above, from conflicts that arose within Russian society, as a result of the policy of industrialization itself. Although the chain of events that was played out around the turn of the century should thus be viewed as parts of a gradual and longer-term process, it is not possible to ignore the political implications of the debacles that took place in 1905.

Bloody Sunday and the Stolypin reforms The aftermath of the Russo-Japanese war bore eminent witness to one of the most widely accepted ‘laws’ of Russian historical development, namely that where victory in war brings entrenchment of the old system, defeat triggers sweeping reform. An important effect both of the Crimean War and of the war with Japan was to place the country’s economic backwardness in the limelight, and thus to trigger massive spurts of reform. To aggravate matters, the traumatic military defeats against Japan occurred in the midst of an already unstable situation, where it was probably too late for the autocracy to save itself via marginal concessions, such as that proposed by Loris-Melikov. The real cataclysm arrived in 1905, on Sunday 9 January (Old Style), when around 150,000 mainly unarmed demonstrators marching peacefully in a series of columns converged on the Winter Palace, there to demand that the tsar receive a petition calling inter alia for a constitution. Although it is unclear exactly what happened in the fracas, it is clear that the military fired live rounds into the masses, killing at least 130 (the official count) and most likely many more; some have claimed upwards of a thousand. What followed in the wake of this ‘Bloody Sunday’ would come to be known as the ‘revolution’ of 1905.34 Severely shaken by the rapid spread of strikes and violence, by further disasters in the war against Japan, by the famed mutiny on the Potemkin, and by the return of terrorism (the latter even would include the murder of Grand Duke Sergei, an uncle of the tsar), Nicholas II was forced to retreat. With his rightly famous ‘October Manifesto’, he ever so reluctantly granted a

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range of civil liberties, as well as the holding of elections to a new State Duma with powers to approve further legislation.35 Although the autocracy would proceed, in February and in April 1906, to issue a set of Fundamental State Laws, which in various ways amended and restricted the rights it thus had granted,36 and although the first two Dumas would be abrogated and the third reelected under rigged election rules, this nevertheless was an important experiment in democratic rule.37 Above all, it showed that important groups in Russian society had undergone vital mental transformations, in the direction of supporting the increasingly vociferous claims for a constitutional development. It was also symptomatic that following the Bolshevik coup d’e´tat in October 1917, the country nevertheless could proceed, in the midst of war and revolutionary turmoil, to hold elections for the Constituent Assembly that would meet in January 1918. It is all too easy to note that the eternal vacillations of the Provisional Government under Kerenskii effectively paved the way for the Bolsheviks, and that following its first vote, which was lost by the Bolsheviks, the Constituent Assembly was shut down by their Red Guards. The simple fact that we know what did happen tends to obscure what from a theoretical perspective was of far greater importance, namely the powerful influence that enforceable laws may have on the evolution of mental models. The main conclusions to be drawn from the events that unfolded in 1905–17 surely must concern the dimensions of such less visible progress, rather than those of the more tangible setbacks. From an institutional perspective, it was of particular importance that change was under way in formal rules as well as in informal norms. While it would certainly be going too far to say that a more astute policy by Kerenskii would have been successful in blocking Lenin, and thus in paving the way for a movement towards democracy, it is equally unacceptable to ignore that Russian society in the first decade of the twentieth century was in the midst of a whole series of potentially important transformations. If we look at the period from 1881 to 1917 as a whole, it is clear that increasing repression did form an important hallmark, as did the continued support for the autocracy as such. Witte, for one, certainly would have got nowhere with his policies had he not been careful in kowtowing to the tsar. Nor would he probably even have reached his elevated position had he not been a true believer in the merits of autocracy. This had clear implications for his economic policy, in the sense that ‘even Witte, the most energetic proponent of state-sponsored industrial progress, proved no less reluctant than his predecessors to relinquish the regime’s legislative and administrative control and to tolerate a genuinely free market’.38 At the same time, however, it was also symptomatic that steadily growing segments of Russian society, notably so the emerging class of professionals, would refuse to support the government precisely because it relied so heavily on men who were bent on repression.

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This latter being the case, we shall argue that by the turn of the century the main problem facing Russian reformers no longer rested primarily in the autocracy. In a limited sense, Richard Wortman is right in pointing out that the judicial reform of 1864 constituted ‘a major anomaly in the tsarist system of government’, such that for the ‘Russian autocracy to accept an independent judiciary required that it betray its essence and cease to be the Russian autocracy’.39 In a broader sense, however, we shall argue that this represents an overly static interpretation. One of the main points in our previous presentation has been to show that the Russian autocracy could be maintained for so long not because of draconian repression alone, but due to the evolution of path dependent self-enforcing institutions amongst the upper levels of the nobility. The effect was to make them part and parcel of the game, simply because their strategies depended on the presence of an autocrat to act as arbiter. With a gradual erosion of such mental models there also would have followed a gradual dissolution of the autocracy. Similarly, we shall argue that not even the oblomovshchina of sloth and obstruction that marked such large sections of the bureaucracy, and that has been so brilliantly depicted by Goncharov, Gogol and others, stands out as the main impediment to change. The seeds of enlightenment that had been sown by Catherine the Great evidently had germinated. Under Alexander II, they succeeded in producing an important drive for greater legality and impartiality. It was certainly true that the main part of the bureaucracy remained locked into its self-enforcing path dependence, which inter alia called for the raising of high walls to keep out potential new entrants. It is also true that they did succeed in obstructing many potential changes for the better that were proposed by liberal elements at the top.40 More importantly, however, the growing constituency for constitutionalism, even within the bureaucracy, illustrated that the path dependence could perhaps have been broken, had the process only been granted sustained support from above. What we must conclude, then, is that the real failure of the Witte–Stolypin reforms rested in the fact that budding political transformations failed to deliver such economic results that the process of change could have received broad-based support. This goes to the real core of the reformability of the autocracy. In the absence of positive economic results, neither the autocracy nor the bureaucracy would find reason to alter their strategies and to transform their mental models. So, what was it, then, that prevented the economic upswing from achieving sustainability? The main reason, we shall argue, rests in the fact that although Witte’s economic policy was decidedly market friendly, in the technical senses outlined above, it also harboured within its own design a problem that remained strongly path dependent. Like Peter the Great had done before him, Witte relied on a form of economic shock therapy that was designed to achieve instant modernization. He relied almost exclusively on the state as an engine

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of growth, and on forced extraction of resources to support state monopolies that were given added protection by high tariffs. Although the short-term results in both cases were impressive indeed, they also would produce similar effects of driving a wedge between the ‘modern’ and the ‘backward’ sectors of the economy. In Witte’s case, ‘the new industries had been grafted artificially on to a slowly evolving native structure integrated into the rural economy’.41 What effectively would put an end to Witte’s industrial upswing was the path dependent inability of important groups of new economic actors to respond properly to the increasingly market-friendly rules that were being issued. As Pipes notes, when the government began, in the 1880s, to promote large-scale industrial development, ‘native entrepreneurship once again showed little inclination to commit itself ’. In overall terms, this was due to the fact that ‘Russia had missed the chance to create a bourgeoisie at a time when that had been possible, that is on the basis of manufacture and private capitalism; it was too late to do so in an age of mechanized industry dominated by joint-stock corporations and banks.’ 42 The absence of a Russian middle class, or more properly of a class of merchants and industrialists that would have been able to shoulder and drive a process of modern economic development, must, however, be seen as composed of two parts, where one was considerably more complex than the other. The simplest part to overcome was that of education: ‘Russian capitalists – rich landowners and merchants alike – were too ignorant of the techniques of modern investment to be able to initiate the kind of financial operations which were required.’ 43 While exposure to the new conditions of market economy would have resulted in learning by doing, and indeed to some extent did so, the more complex dimension was lodged in attitudes and mental models that were strongly path dependent. As Owen notes, ‘most members of the landed gentry, the civil and military bureaucracy, and the professions (law, journalism, medicine) evinced strongly anti-capitalist attitudes, despite their differences of opinion on other questions’.44 The merchants in particular were locked into their old world of personalized rule-evasive behaviour: ‘The Russian merchant, although shrewd and diligent, relied more on intuition and the aid of loyal friends and relatives than on rational calculation and an understanding of trends in the world market’. Partly, this again was a reflection of poor education: ‘Doubleentry bookkeeping, bills of exchange, and forecasts of economic trends remained mysteries to the ordinary merchants of the Russian provinces outside the ports of the Baltic and Black Seas.’ Vastly more important, however, than such technical backwardness was the associated ‘reliance on other hallmarks of their traditional culture: secrecy, cheating, and evasion in dealing with strangers’. Path dependence rested in the fact that such techniques ‘proved more likely than honesty to

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win a tidy profit in the absence of a modern banking system, of strong legal guarantees of the right of private property, and of governmental policies favorable to commerce and industry’.45 In line with our basic understanding of the preconditions for institutional change, we shall argue that introducing the formal rules that are embodied in money, property and a generally market-friendly policy, while certainly necessary, would not be automatically sufficient for progress to take place. The associated norms also would have had to be altered, and that could only have been the result of a rather lengthy process of adjustment. Since the powerhouse of positive change was made up of a small circle of liberal policy makers and a small stratum of progressive merchants and industrialists, operating in the midst of a society that was still predominantly agrarian, it all really boils down to whether or not agrarian change was possible. An economic take-off in the rural sector not only would have created expanded markets where merchants employing modern techniques would have enjoyed a competitive edge. It also would have increased the supply to the nascent industrial sector of labour that was less firmly moored in the old world. Achieving agrarian change, however, was a tall order indeed, particularly so after the massive disappointments that had followed in the wake of the inconclusive emancipation of 1861. By the turn of the century, the Russian countryside was still in the grip of the old mentalite´. It was particularly important that ‘until the beginning of the twentieth century, the concept of private ownership of land was confined to the relatively small upper and middle classes, for the peasantry held land communally and refused to acknowledge it as the legitimate object of private ownership’.46 It is for these various reasons that Stolypin’s programme for land reform takes on such pivotal importance. As with Witte’s programme above, we shall begin by noting that his policy had an important immediate prehistory, which in this case revolves around changing attitudes towards the land commune, the mir. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, this the most traditional of all Russian institutions formed an object of veneration not only for Slavophile intellectuals, but also for high officialdom and for the autocracy itself. It was broadly hoped that its communal nature would prevent a spread of dangerous Western social problems. Towards the end of the century, however, such hopes were giving way to a growing realization that change in some form would have to be implemented.47 A first step was taken in 1899, when joint responsibility for the payment of taxes, one of the most important components of the krugovaya poruka, was abolished for communes where land was held in hereditary tenure. In 1903, the same step was taken for repartitional communes. In 1904, accumulated arrears on taxes and redemption dues were cancelled, and in early November 1905, two weeks after the October Manifesto, it was announced that

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redemption dues for 1906 would be halved, and that from there onwards they would be cancelled altogether.48 While these steps were important in alleviating the fiscal burdens on the peasantry, and in removing an important external reason for the krugovaya poruka, they still left two crucially important issues unresolved. One was the question of property rights, and the other the problems of scattered strip farming. Both really went to the core of age-old social relations within the mir, and both would come to form important targets for Stolypin’s reform. Following the uprisings of 1905, the mir came into serious disrepute. Some accused it of having failed to stem the tide of violence; others even held it responsible for igniting the conflagration. Proposing its total dissolution no longer was seen as extreme. By teaching the peasants the virtue of private property, it was hoped, by some, that they might also be taught to respect the property of the gentry. A peasantry whose own property rights, as Gerschenkron puts it, ‘had been trodden underfoot throughout the history of serfdom’,49 surely could not be realistically expected to respect the property of others. The following years would see the powers of the mir being curtailed, as two further dimensions of the krugovaya poruka were removed. One was the rights of the commune to control whether peasants should receive domestic passports, and the other its right to impose forced labour on those who failed to meet communal obligations. Having been appointed prime minister at the time of dissolution of the First Duma, in July 1906, by November Stolypin had secured from the tsar an imperial decree that provided for wide-ranging changes in land legislation. Introduced at first as an emergency measure, it would be approved by the Duma only in 1910, the year before Stolypin’s assassination. Given that the agrarian crisis had a number of different dimensions, and that there were great variations between regions in, say, the practice of repartition, it follows that changes in the land law also would have to be somewhat complicated. The details of these matters we shall leave for others to consider.50 The basic thrust of the reform was entailed in the decree of November 1906, which specified that any member of the mir who so wanted would be entitled to have his allotment of land converted into private property, and that, where appropriate, his scattered strips be consolidated into one plot. The years that passed between 1906 and the outbreak of war, or indeed of the revolution of 1917, would see substantial transformations, not only of the Russian countryside as such, as scattered strips of land were consolidated into family farms, but even more so of social relations within the Russian peasantry, as its stronger elements opted out of the community. It also was true that productivity was on the rise, due both to an increased use of fertilizer and to the spread of improved techniques of cultivation.51 Viewed as a whole, however, the progress of the reform was rather inconclusive.52 Out of an estimated 12 million households in 1906, a decade later

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no more than two million had succeeded in securing conversion titles (2.8 million had applied), and of these more than a million took place in 1908–09. Assuming that about one-quarter of the households in 1906 had already been members of non-repartitional communes, it follows that in 1916 about 40 per cent of a then estimated 15 million households were enjoying hereditary tenure.53 On closer inspection, moreover, it transpires that amongst those who had separated there were two main groups to be found. One was made up of those who knew that they would stand to lose from the next repartition, and the other of those who were bent on migrating, either to Siberia or to the emerging industrial centres. What Lazar Volin refers to as the ‘hard core’ of ‘middle peasants’ apparently showed little interest. Stating that the latter ‘did not augur well for a speedy end to the mir’,54 he makes a splendid understatement of the seriousness of the case. The path dependent refusal of the ‘hard core’ of the Russian peasantry to break with their ingrained communal ways of life, including the krugovaya poruka, also would come to form the truly ‘hard core’ of some of Russia’s most traumatic experiences in the twentieth century. Noting that ‘Overwhelmingly, Russian peasants rejected the very premise of Stolypin’s agrarian reform’, and that ‘nearly every peasant, communal or not, continued to practice strip farming’, Pipes concludes that there simply was no ‘agrarian revolution’, before that of the Bolsheviks. The main reason was that ‘Communal peasants were unshakable in the belief that the only solution to their economic difficulties lay in communal appropriation of all privately held land.’ 55 It was also symptomatic of the path dependence that while the Bolsheviks were busy carrying out their urban revolution, in a country where 80 per cent of the population were peasants, the latter took matters in their own hands by restoring the mir and by having the Stolypin peasants brought back into the community. Although the Bolsheviks’ 26 October ‘Decree on Land’ had explicitly prohibited expropriation of land from ‘ordinary peasants and ordinary Cossacks’, that provision was to be totally ignored, as communal peasants proceeded to ‘seize the land belonging to their fellow peasants along with that of the landlords’. The result was that ‘in no time at all, the peasants wiped out much of the achievements of Stolypin’s agrarian reform: the communal principle swept everything before it’.56 In this sense, the allegedly progressive ‘Great Socialist October Revolution’ in actual fact was deeply regressive, bringing back both authoritarian social relations and conservative techniques of cultivation. An important reason for the Bolsheviks not to immediately oppose this process was a familiar one. The commune performed for them ‘the same functions that it had under tsarism – namely, guaranteeing fulfillment of obligations to the state’.57

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Soon enough, however, it would transpire that the Bolsheviks and the peasants had very different views of how the more fundamental relations between town and countryside should develop. Throughout much of the 1920s, the Party would remain divided on the question of how to deal with the ‘middle peasants’, who formed the hard core of the mir. It would only be with Joseph Stalin that the issue was conclusively resolved.

The Bolsheviks in power Turning now to map out in greater detail how the Bolsheviks proceeded to establish their ‘Soviet’ system, we shall recall from our earlier presentation Ja´nos Kornai’s model for the emergence of the socialist economic system. Based on a genetic analogy, his approach was to argue that once a couple of fundamental steps have been taken, the rest of the programme will simply proceed to install itself. Those crucial first two steps are the introduction of a monopoly on power and of an ideology to rationalize and support that power. Taken together, they were said to represent ‘the body and soul’ of the system.58 In the following, we shall take some exception to the claims for generality – or even genetic predictability – that are encompassed here. The experience to date of China, for example, would seem to indicate that Communist power and state ownership are not inherently incompatible with high growth and global market integration. Similarly, the different experiences of Russia and of the Central European states in dismantling the system after 1989– 91 would indicate that different backgrounds of cultural tradition also must be taken into consideration. The main relevance of the model lies in the fact that it does fit in well with how the Soviet system was established. In so doing, it also highlights a number of important links between power and property relations and the associated role of informal norms – of ideology, or even of culture, if you wish – in determining economic performance. For these reasons, our presentation below will follow a format that combines Kornai’s ‘genetic’ steps with our model of institutional change. As mentioned above, the focus will be aimed at showing how a range of ‘Soviet’ institutions were established that for all intents and purposes represented a reassertion of institutions that once had emerged in Muscovy. While there was certainly much parallel influence from Marxism–Leninism, we shall argue that such influence was mainly superficial. The core elements of the institutional matrix remained path dependent. The tragedy for modern-day Russia was that institutions which in some sense may have been rational in the fourteenth through the sixteenth, or even the seventeenth centuries, would prove to be rather out of place in the twentieth.

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Reconstituting autocracy The first steps that were taken by the Bolsheviks, following their victorious coup d’e´tat, may be seen as an amalgam of two separate policy agendas. One was a subjective desire to entrench their own power, and the other an objective need to deal with those pressing economic emergencies that resulted from the ensuing civil war. Together they would combine to form what was known as ‘War Communism’. Since the latter of the two represents the formation of the economic dimension of the Soviet system, we shall leave it for the moment and focus here on the more purely power-oriented programme. The first step in Kornai’s chain, that which constitutes the trigger for the remaining steps to be installed, is the establishment of a monopoly on power. So it clearly was in the case of the Bolsheviks. Although there were some initial complications, arising from the fact that both the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries, the SRs, refused to recognize the October coup as legitimate, Lenin proceeded skilfully and ruthlessly to build his power base via organs controlled by his party. Despite the public rhetoric about ‘All power to the Soviets’, the real linchpin of that power would be the Sovnarkom, the ‘Council of People’s Commissars’, which implemented the will of the Bolshevik Central Committee. None of its decrees, moreover, would acquire the force of law until signed by Lenin. As Pipes puts it, these practices would have been entirely understandable to a Nicholas I or Alexander III. The system of government which the Bolsheviks set in place within two weeks of the October coup marked a reversion to the autocratic regime that had ruled Russia before 1905: they simply wiped out the twelve intervening years of constitutionalism.59 The fact that in the November elections to the Constituent Assembly, the SRs won as much as 40 per cent of the votes, against the Bolsheviks’ 24 per cent, did not pose much of a problem. Following the first day of intense debates, the session was simply shut down by the Red Guards, never to reassemble again. Nor would Lenin be deterred by continuing complications in elections to the soviets, or by political strikes called by his opponents. Ruthless manipulation, combined with the show of force when necessary, would win the day. By the summer of 1918, the process was essentially completed: ‘Thus ended the autonomy of the soviets, the right of workers to their own representation, and what was still left of the multiparty system. These measures, enacted in June and early July 1918, completed the formation in Russia of a one-party dictatorship.’ 60 It certainly was not an easy process. Following the collapse of the imperial autocracy, and of the subsequent Provisional Government, the country as a

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whole essentially was put up for grabs. Pipes uses the old Russian notion of duvan to capture the ensuing process of plunder. Borrowed from the Turkish, via a Cossack dialect, it refers to such division of spoils that took place following Cossack raids on Turkish or Persian settlements.61 In the autumn and winter of 1917–18, all of Russia became the object of duvan. We have noted above how the communal peasants were busy taking over private lands, both from landlords and from other peasants. Similar processes took place in industries, whose empowered workers proceeded to loot ‘their’ enterprises, and even in the armed forces, where troops helped themselves to the contents of regimental depots. Viewed from an institutional perspective, the impact was just as devastating as that of the return to autocratic power: ‘The notion of national or state property thus disappeared with that of private property, and it did so with the encouragement of the new government.’ 62 In stark reflection of the fusion of sovereignty and property that is implied by patrimonialism, the duvan applied not only to material belongings but also to the state as such. In the winter of 1917–18, Russia began tearing itself apart, thus effectively nullifying 600 years of historical expansion: By the spring of 1918, the largest state in the world fell apart into innumerable overlapping entities, large and small, each claiming authority over its territory, none linked to the others by institutional ties or even a sense of common destiny. In a few months, Russia reverted politically to the Middle Ages when she had been a collection of self-governing principalities.63 Although it really may have been a case of touch and go, where the Bolsheviks at some points came very close to losing everything, in the end, as we know, they would prevail. Once they had gained the upper hand in the struggle for a monopoly on power within the state, their logical next step was to create a monopoly on power for the Party leadership within the Party. With the 1921 prohibition against factions, it was made clear that no dissenting voices or platforms would be tolerated.64 All decisions would be taken in unanimity, subsequently even to the tune of ‘stormy, prolonged applause’ (burnye prodolzhitelnye aplodismenty), as it would be rendered in Pravda. Libraries have been filled with incisive analyses of the anatomy and functions of the power system that was thus constructed, and which would retain fairly much the same shape until undermined and effectively dismantled by Mikhail Gorbachev, in the latter half of the 1980s. A particular bone of contention in such writings has concerned whether it is warranted to call it ‘totalitarian’. Much ink has also been spilled over whether it represented a betrayal of the true ideals of the revolution. Such aspects we shall happily leave for others to continue debating.

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In the following it will be argued that by far the most striking aspect of the construction of Soviet power rests in the distinctive parallels that may be drawn back to Muscovy, and to the subsequent evolution of Russian imperial autocracy. Maintaining our previous perspective of path dependent responses and revealed institutional preference, we shall argue that those various processes of duvan that were just described would result in an effective suppression of all those deviations from the longer-term path dependence that were discussed in the first part of this chapter. While everything was up for grabs, the Bolsheviks snatched – and successfully held on to – autocratic power. Proceeding to rule the country by decree, they wasted little time in taking a further important step in reverse. By rooting out the very notion of private property in the means of production, they blocked all trends towards corporate capitalism, producing instead a renewed fusion of power and money that effectively restored Soviet Russia to the wellknown patrimonial format of old Muscovy. To Kornai, that step follows logically from the seizure of power, in order to prevent challenges that might emanate from a private sphere. In our following discussion of the economic dimension of the Soviet system, we shall argue that the return to patrimonialism had far broader implications, representing a reassertion of organizational strategies and associated sets of norms that had never been fully supplanted by the drive towards individual rights and judicial impartiality that had fuelled the Great Reforms. Remaining for the moment in the political dimension of reconstituted autocracy, we shall be wary of the hair-splitting that has been involved in the mainly terminological debates about totalitarianism, or about autocracy versus oligarchy. Seeking to avoid such arguments, our analytical focus shall be aimed at the more technical and hopefully less value-laden notion of ‘unaccountable government’. Implied here is a failure of the government to make a credible commitment to the rule of law, which captures – better, perhaps, than the notion of autocracy – the relevance of the state for the performance of the economy. The purely formal dimension of the programme was fairly straightforward. As we have noted above, the Bolsheviks put a rapid and conclusive end both to the elected State Duma, to the emergence of a multiparty system, and to the growth of autonomous organizations, such as labour unions or the zemstvo movement. Significantly, this ambition also included institutions favoured in their own propaganda, such as the Constituent Assembly, and worker-peasant control via the soviets. Nor did they waste any time in making it clear that the movement towards increased constitutionalism would be terminated. Already on 7 December 1917, the Bolshevik government issued its ‘Decree No. 1’, which said that old laws would be observed ‘only insofar as they had not been repealed by the Revolution and did not contradict revolutionary conscience and the revolutionary concept of justice’. Thus, says the Russian

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jurist Alexander Yakovlev, ‘the theoretical grounds and the political and moral justifications for the Great Terror . . . were laid down’.65 While these formal dimensions may certainly have been necessary in order to establish and sustain Soviet power, the main impact of the Bolshevik programme must be traced on a more fundamental level, namely in the recreation of such self-enforcing institutions amongst the higher levels of the power establishment that once had guaranteed the sustainability of the Muscovite and the imperial autocracy. Partly this would be a consequence of the above-mentioned fusion of ‘body and soul’, to which we shall return in a moment. Remaining in the dimension of formal rules, the suppression of all autonomous organizations, both within and without the Party itself, may be seen as a reassertion of the old refusal of the autocracy to allow separate estates. As a result, all subjects once again would be returned to a position of complete dependence on the ruler, however defined, whose power could not and would not be contested in any form of open formal proceedings. Enhancing this reversal was the introduction of deliberately confused lines of division between Party and state hierarchies. In Soviet administrative theory it was said that the ‘Party leads but does not govern’ (rukovodit no ne upravlyaet). This confusion would be particularly prominent in matters concerning internal Party work. It was, for example, never codified how many members there were to be in the Politburo, nor how they were to be selected and admitted. Adapting to this new set of circumstances, actors once again would have to formulate strategies for personal advancement and enrichment that were based on the absence of rules and impartial enforcement. Being faced with a return to fluidity and arbitrariness, they again would have to invest in skills in playing the traditional games of autocracy, i.e. seeking personal favours and building coalitions to derive maximum benefit from closeness to the ruler. Whether the Communist leadership merits being labelled as an autocracy or as an oligarchy really is beside the point here. The core of the system rested in the fact that the effective ruler – be it politburo, central committee or autocrat – reverted to the role of acting as arbiter between competing interests within the new service nobility. Viewed from this perspective, it was of particular importance to note that the introduction of Bolshevik power also implied the reintroduction of a broad service obligation. The famed Soviet nomenklatura not only represented an effective continuation of the Petrine Table of Ranks. As we shall see in a moment, the wide discretion it allowed to sundry potentates, within a largely demonetized system, also would be eerily reminiscent of the old system of kormlenie. Rounding off our account of the formal dimension of power, we shall note how Joseph Stalin would take the emulation of old tsarist practice to the point even of ruling via his own personal chancellery. As a modern-day replica of

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the secretariat of Nicholas I, he introduced a separate apparatus of command and control that would report to him personally and to him alone.66 Where the last of the tsars had remained autocrats in the sense that they would rule via their ministers, being wary of allowing them to meet as a government, Stalin would completely bypass all open structures of government. His secret chancellery was a major step in reverse, somehow representing the epitome of unaccountable government. Body and soul Before proceeding to look at the formation of the formal economic dimension of the Bolshevik system, we shall have to look also at the informal ideological underpinnings of their power. Again recalling Kornai’s genetic system, to him it was the simultaneous introduction of an encompassing state ideology that set the socialist system aside from any old dictatorship. By infusing the system with a ‘will’ of its own, the ideology combined with the power monopoly to form the ‘body and soul’ of the system. In our previous account of the role of Orthodoxy in the emergence of Muscovy, we placed much emphasis on how the Orthodox Church took it upon itself to formulate a fundamental state ideology. As the grand princes were busy casting off the ‘Mongol Yoke’, Orthodox monks were striving to fill the void that was left by the Khans. The substitute they offered was a set of religious norms that emphasized submission to the autocracy and superiority of the Muscovite ruler over all other rulers in the world. When Peter the Great proceeded to suppress this role of Orthodoxy, and to integrate the Church into the state, it followed that he would also need to find and formulate a new rationale both for the autocracy and for the state as such. This imperial ambition, as we may recall, would be based on seeking to instill a new sense of rationality. Speaking of the bien public, the tsar sought to elicit participation and initiative from below. As he would also be bent, however, on preserving autocratic power in its fullest sense, that ambition harboured serious internal contradictions. Over time, those contradictions would generate serious tensions within the state, reflecting the absence of a social contract. Although the autocracy would stubbornly refuse, up until the early twentieth century, to enter into any form of serious dialogue, it could do little about the fact that seeds once sown by Catherine the Great were beginning to germinate. When the Bolsheviks came to power, they were faced with a serious challenge. The thoughts of Montesquieu had been translated into a rudimentary division of powers, and the Russian state had acquired a formal constitutional foundation, however fragile. Setting out to legitimate their own power, Lenin and his men would have to deal with this broadening process of constitutionalism. And so they did. By deliberately placing itself in the role of the Orthodox Church, the Communist Party in effect reconnected with the Muscovite tradition. Espousing

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religious atheism, the Party demanded from the Soviet citizens that they should believe instead in the creed of socialism and in the superiority of that system over all other systems in the world. Looking merely at the dimension of symbolism, it is easy enough to find support for this interpretation. The icon imagery of Politburo members that was displayed on all solemn occasions, and the processions that were held in Red Square, before the iconostasis of the Lenin mausoleum, combined to form an Orthodox ritual. The all-pervasive Cult of Lenin, of the deceased Leader who was claimed to be ‘eternally living’ (vechno zhivoi ), also was deliberately permeated with a distinctly religious flavour.67 On the individual level, the very notion of being a ‘Soviet Man’, a sovetskii chelovek, would borrow much from the previous emphasis on being Orthodox, or pravoslavnyi. To a ‘Soviet Man’ the modern clergy of Party ideologues would ascribe a certain set of desirable qualities, preeminent amongst which was submission and unquestioning loyalty to the Partystate. Those who were found to be wanting would end up in serious trouble. Expulsion from the Party would serve as a modern-day replica of excommunication from the Church, the main difference being that the full consequences of the former were to be felt already in worldly life. Perhaps the most symptomatic of all was the Party’s return to old-style Muscovite xenophobia. Although the country’s borders to the outside world had never been quite open, not even in the most enlightened days of reform, they were now to be as hermetically sealed as had been the case towards the end of the fifteenth century. The attitude towards foreigners, especially so to those from the contaminated West, again would be marked by the very same fears and suspicion. Permission to travel abroad would be granted only to the very trustworthiest, and then only with hostages left behind.68 Going further than his secular Muscovite predecessors had ever done, Stalin even would bring back the old theory of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’, and use it to support the Party’s international ambitions. The traditional role of the Orthodox Church as the sole caretaker of the true faith, and its implied responsibility to defend and spread that faith, was now to be usurped by the Communist Party, claiming for the rulers in Moscow a special responsibility for the ‘toiling masses’ in the world.69 This transfer was so successful that in 1984 even the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl would explain that the Russian ‘drive for expansion and . . . belief that Mother Russia will bring salvation to the world’ could be traced to the idea of ‘Moscow as the Third Rome, after Byzantium’.70 While there can be little doubt that these various forms of parallels with old Muscovy were quite deliberately introduced, the role of Soviet ideology would be considerably more complex than simply providing a new brand of opium for the toiling masses. Most importantly, the ambitions of the Communist Party would be much further reaching than had ever been the case with the Orthodox Church. Where the Church had always been content

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with remaining in the spiritual dimension, never laying any claims whatsoever to worldly power (money was a different matter), the Party would be single-mindedly focused on power, perhaps even on power per se. In Muscovy, as we may recall, the Orthodox Church had served as a largely self-appointed propaganda arm of the autocracy. Although it did receive much material compensation for such services, there was never any doubt about its effective subordination to the worldly power. In the Soviet Union, things would be different. There was continuity in the sense that the Party did produce a state ideology to rationalize and legitimate the autocracy, and to support its ambitions. It also remained true that the Party received much material compensation. Entirely novel, however, was its complete arrogation of power over the state. The latter transformation would have important implications not the least for the role of ideology. Where Orthodoxy had served mainly to instill passive acceptance, Marxism–Leninism would set higher goals. Reflecting its clearly instrumental use, in the early stages the Party’s output of agitation and propaganda, the notorious agitprop, would be deliberately tailored for a dual audience. Briefly put, some ‘Soviet Men’ would be more equal than others. The common slogan of the ‘worker-peasant state’ was representative of the dividing line that was drawn between a backward peasantry and a progressive working class. The very same symbolism also could be found in the famous 1937 statue by V. I. Mukhina, Rabochii i kolkhoznitsa (‘Worker and Kolkhoz Woman’), which stood at the entrance of the VDNKh exhibition in Moscow and which also served as the logo of Mosfilm. The peasantry not only was seen to be in need of leadership by the more advanced workers. The kolkhoznitsa also was symbolic of mythical Mother Russia. What really went on in the minds of those who were on the receiving end of this agitprop is beside the point here. What is clear is that when it was addressing the peasantry, the Party chose to portray Lenin as a traditional Russian saint and a martyr. Although nominally atheistic, the message was strongly religious in both form and content. As one of many illustrations we may note the subsequently ubiquitous ‘Lenin corner’, the leninskii ugolok, which was introduced at an exhibition in Moscow in August 1924. Clearly modelled on the krasnyi ugolok, the ‘red corner’ of the traditional peasant hut, it conveyed to the peasant masses that they were now expected to worship a new set of icons. That message also was explicitly driven home in the 1925 film Ego prizyv, by Ya. Protazanov, where the young worker Katya is shown putting the portraits of Lenin and Marx alongside the icons in the room of her babushka, with the approval of the latter. When communicated to the peasantry, the effective message of the Cult of Lenin was that they now had a new God and that the Party would be the interpreter of His will. All that really was required from them was passive acceptance of this fact. All else would remain as it had always been. The

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bottom line of it all was that the peasantry did not constitute an active part of the Bolsheviks’ vision of the future. (When they subsequently did emerge out of the myth and onto the arena of practical politics, the showdown, as we know, would be frightful.) Turning to address the workers, the Party had an altogether different and far more virulent message. They were to be the ‘builders of socialism’. Joining hands with the Party, the leaders of the working class and of the technical intelligentsia were tasked with the creation of an entirely new society, based on ‘scientific socialism’. While the parallel crisis of world capitalism did add force to the Marxian predictions of a collapse of capitalism and a transition to communism, the Bolshevik programme would transcend such simple rationality. Now the message no longer was based on myths in the distant past, such as that of a direct lineage between the Muscovite ruler and Caesar Augustus. Now the ambition was to create a virtual future, in which the ‘Soviet Men’ would be transformed into higher beings. If the Bolsheviks really had been successful in that latter endeavour, they also might have been able to create an entirely new economic system. As Nove points out, however, the implications of that challenge were quite substantial, and hardly realistic: If one assumes that the ‘new man’, unacquisitive, ‘brilliant, highly rational, socialized, humane’, will require no incentives, problems of discipline and motivation vanish. If it is assumed that all will identify with the clearly visible general good, then the conflict between general and partial interests, and the complex issues of centralization/decentralization, can be assumed out of existence.71 In actual practice, the Bolshevik programme of creating new men would be based not on carrots and vision alone. It also featured a big stick, in the form of a reintroduction of the police state, complete with terror, camps, denunciations, sealed borders and domestic passports preventing free movement. The mainstay of this ambition was a revival of the security police, the Okhrana, of the late imperial days. In good tradition from Peter the Great’s Preobrazhenskii prikaz, which also was introduced without a formal ukaz, the main instrument of the Bolsheviks’ subsequent ‘Red Terror’ was born in virtual secrecy. Barring a two-sentence announcement that the Sovnarkom had introduced an ‘Extraordinary Commission to fight Counterrevolution and Sabotage’, little was known at the time of this subsequently infamous organization.72 Led by Feliks Dzerzhinsky, and known simply as the Cheka, it soon enough would claim for itself judiciary powers to prosecute and summarily sentence that went far beyond its original mandate. Emulating the uniformed Gendarmerie of the ‘Third Section’ under Nicholas I, by the spring of 1918 it also had acquired its own boievoi otryad, an armed wing consisting of six

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companies of infantry with cavalry and armoured support. In the Second World War, the elite troops of the NKVD symptomatically would play a role similar to that of the Hitlerite Waffen SS. Throughout the Soviet period, the Cheka – in its various shapes and guises – again would come to form a state within the state. Like its various predecessors, it acquired sweeping powers to violate the integrity of the subjects, and it would be accountable only to the men in the Politburo; perhaps not even to that elite group as a whole. As a result, Soviet society came to be permeated by much the same ‘political poruka’ that had played such an important role in old Muscovy. Much as the princes of Moscow had demanded that boyars put up sureties against defection, new Party members would have to be recommended by members in good standing, who would accept to act as sureties against defection and/or other forms of disloyal behaviour. Similarly, denunciation again became an explicit obligation. ‘Soviet Men’ were required to report to the authorities any form of disloyal ‘words and deeds’ coming to their attention, or face the consequences. During the most paranoid phase of Stalinism, they would be exhorted into vigilance not only against foreigners, but to see spies and enemies everywhere. Even in the late period of Brezhnev rule, it would not do to be seen associating with foreigners in the absence of a trusted ‘overcoat’. As Western scholars and businessmen could hardly fail to note, their Soviet colleagues would always be under such supervision, not only during foreign travel, but in all encounters with foreigners. Much as there has been a vast debate on the question of totalitarianism, there has been a considerable difference of opinion when it comes to assessing the impact on the citizenry of living in a world where the output of Party agitprop was everywhere to be seen and heard. One way of approaching the problem has been via anecdotal evidence, provided, for example, by the famous jokes of the ubiquitous Radio Yerevan. The essentially dual reality in which the Soviet citizens were living could, for example, be reflected in the case of a patient entering a hospital demanding to see an ear-eye specialist, an ukho-glaznik. Informed that there is no such specialization, he is requested to describe his ailment: ‘Well, I keep hearing one thing, but I see something completely different.’ From a more scholarly perspective, it is hardly surprising that Jon Elster, in his studies of the subversion of rationality, has been fascinated by Alexander Zinoviev’s work Yawning Heights, which offers a brilliant depiction of the everyday absurdities of daily life in the Soviet Union.73 It is in this dimension of split realities that we may find the principal difference between the role of the Church in old Muscovy and the role of the Party in the Soviet Union. That difference may be illustrated by recalling the ending of George Orwell’s famous dystopic novel 1984.74 Held to be a particularly difficult case, the novel’s hero, Winston Smith, is taken to the dreaded ‘Room 101’ in the basement of the Ministry of

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Truth, where he is subjected to individualized torture (in his case: rats eating at his face). Constantly repeating that the purpose of the Party’s exercise of power has no other motive than power in itself, the torturers make it quite clear that simple submission will not be enough. Smith will not be released until he genuinely loves Big Brother. When he finally is released, and the novel ends, that objective has been reached. Smith discovers that he really does love Big Brother. While it is probably true that many, perhaps even many millions of the Soviet citizenry really did love Joseph Stalin (viz. the scenes at his lying in state), it is questionable if any of those who emerged alive from the basement of the Lubyanka also came away with real love for the autocrat. It is here that we may find a truly important distinction between religion and ideology. The official faith of Orthodoxy that bound the Muscovites together, and that rationalized the rule of their secular leaders, was built on true faith. When, for example, the Church leaders imposed demands for changes in the ritual of that faith, they produced dissidents en masse – such as the Old Believers – who would not be strangers to dying for their faith. In sharp contrast, the official faith of the Communist Party was built on a political ideology, which, despite its religious format, could never be the real thing. This distinction goes to the very heart of Elster’s previously presented notions of ‘states that are byproducts’, or ‘willing what cannot be willed’. By becoming a frequent Church-goer, an individual may produce religion but not faith. In seeking to impress, he may display foolhardiness but not courage. Accepting that the latter represent states of mind that are beyond willing, it follows that outside pressure to display such qualities may result in seriously warped outcomes.75 Faced with commands from above that are associated with severe penalties, the individual will resort to faking the desired qualities. If he does not love Big Brother but is required to do so, he will be subjected to severe psychological strain. If revealing such strains will result in severe repression, then the predicament grows even worse. Much of the key to the successes of the Soviet control apparatus rested in the way in which it proceeded to deal with the consequences of such faking. Realizing that they would never be able to instill in the citizenry a true love for Big Brother, the representatives of the Soviet ‘thought police’ would rest content with achieving what is sometimes known as ‘pluralist ignorance’. While it was acceptable for single individuals to experience a stark contrast between what they heard the Party say and what they observed in their own everyday lives, it would not be acceptable for them to share such experiences with other citizens. In order to achieve a compartmentalization of discontent, the organs of control introduced an effective division of responsibilities. While it was up to local Party committees to make sure that there were no unacceptable exchanges of views in the workplace, the KGB was charged with preventing

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that from happening in public places. What might be going on in the private homes of the citizenry, around the famed kitchen tables of the dissidents, was largely and safely ignored. The impact of this essentially satisficing strategy may be best seen from Albert Hirschman’s previously cited perspective of Exit, Voice and Loyalty. In his original formulation, a discontented individual could react to decline in performance either by leaving (Exit) or by protesting (Voice). Given that the latter option would leave the producer or the organization leadership some time in which to improve, he noted how various mechanisms of Loyalty have been developed that serve to delay the choice of Exit.76 Seeking to apply this model to Soviet reality, we immediately run into trouble, in the sense that neither Exit nor Voice were openly available options. There were no competing producers to turn to, and leaving the Party was just as unthinkable as leaving the country. Similarly, resorting to open protest would lead to immediate repression. Given that Soviet power thus served to effectively block both Exit and Voice, Hirschman’s model would predict a dangerous build-up of discontent. On closer consideration, however, we may find that the Party did apply a more sophisticated form of Hirschmanian thinking. By allowing a retreat into parallel economic activities, such as private plots or work in the second economy, it effectively allowed the citizenry a ‘soft Exit’ that would capture some productive energy and allow some self-satisfaction. Similarly, the encouraged practice of writing individual letters of complaint to Pravda, or appearing in person to complain to local Party authorities, offered a ‘soft Voice’ that would defuse much discontent.77 The crucial implication of this reasoning applies to the mechanism of Loyalty. Here we may first clear away two small minorities. One was those who really did develop a true love for Big Brother, and the other was those who did risk open protests, as a result of which they would be persecuted and subjected to forced Exit, either to Siberia or to the West. For the remainder, representing the overwhelming majority of the population, everyday life would be marked by a need to deal with the Party’s demands for conformity. For those who were far from the centre of power, such demands would be lax and the ‘soft options’ of Exit and Voice would be sufficient to dissipate much potential discontent. As the individual moved closer to the centre of power, however, the pressure would intensify. Experiencing a growing gap between Party pronouncements and observable realities, and being compelled into an increasingly active support for the official line, the individual no longer would find the ‘soft options’ to be sufficient. In order to deal with growing cognitive dissonance, it would be necessary to deploy mechanisms of rationalization that represent a distinctive version of Soviet-style Loyalty. It was in this fashion, we shall argue, that the Communist Party succeeded in replicating the self-enforcing institutions that once had supported the Muscovite autocracy. Again it was the case that the service nobility could

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find no alternative way of securing their material well-being. Only by kowtowing to the Party, and by developing skills in playing the games of influence with the autocracy, would they be able to secure a stream of material benefits. Again it also was the case that their official servility before the Party represented a way of winning ‘honour’, which resulted in a joint responsibility, a krugovaya poruka, for the suppression of any peer who might seek to disrupt or challenge the system. Much as the boyars of old probably did not have much love to spare for people like Ivan the Terrible, the Soviet service nobility may not have loved their Big Brother. The important point, however, is that they were all in the same predicament of being dependent on the autocrat, and of being forced into rationalizing that dependence as a form of honour, to the point even of denouncing their peers to the authorities. The existence of ‘dissidents’, who stood up for higher moral norms, could only serve to intensify the needs to engage in rationalization. Thus the self-enforcing institutions of patrimonialism could be brought back, albeit in the ‘modern’ guise of Marxism–Leninism.

Mechanisms of coordination Turning now to the third step in Kornai’s chain, that of ‘mechanisms of coordination’, it was certainly true that once they had suppressed both money and private property, the Bolsheviks would have to come up with some visible mechanism to replace the ‘invisible hand’ of Adam Smith. The formal dimension of that replacement mechanism would be found in the colossal bureaucracy of central planning, the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of which have been analysed to the hilt. Here again we shall seek to find roots that are related to our previous presentation of various path dependencies. We shall argue that the return to essentially non-monetized command activities would be associated with the revival of a whole set of other familiar old traits of the patrimonial state, such as pomestie, kormlenie and krugovaya poruka. Before proceeding to look at these in more detail, we shall, however, bring into the picture also the fourth step in Kornai’s programme, that of a distinctive ‘quantity drive’. Given that the managers of enterprises in the socialist economy would find themselves in a situation where both status and material benefits were directly related to the size of operations under their control, and where inputs needed to increase that size came at no cost to themselves, it is logical to conclude that they would develop an insatiable appetite for more inputs. Analysing the variety of strategies that were deployed in the resultant wrangling for resources also would come to form an important topic for study by Western Sovietologists. Of greater importance from our perspective is the longer term of path dependent repetition. Looking at the Soviet experience as a whole, and at the Stalinist period in particular, it is striking how explicitly five-year planning

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would be focused on forced resource extraction in order to enhance the country’s war-fighting capabilities. Somewhat pointedly, one might say that the Soviet Union did not have a military-industrial complex. The Soviet Union was a military-industrial complex.78 This parallel becomes particularly pronounced if we note the rationale that was put forward by Stalin, in order to legitimate his economic policies. By actively promoting a return to Muscovite xenophobia, he instilled into the Party and into the subjects at large a fear of foreign invasion that was highly conducive to the reintroduction of policies of maximum resource extraction. The following statement, made in 1931, was marked by eerie foresight: ‘We have fallen behind the advanced countries by as much as fifty to one hundred years. We have to overcome this lag within ten years. Either we accomplish this, or we perish.’ 79 If nothing else, this statement illustrates that one should be wary of claiming that there was no real content in the fears of being attacked. Much as the Muscovites of old had had good reasons indeed to fear foreign invasion, in 1941 the Soviet Union would be subjected to a devastating attack by Nazi Germany. Whatever one may choose to believe about Russian or Soviet expansionism and/or aggressiveness, such experiences did facilitate the propagation of mental models of being surrounded by hostile powers. The autocracy’s long-standing hesitance to embrace liberal reform could be legitimized by reference to the European threat: ‘The elite might discuss liberal reforms, and they might even create actual democratic institutions (the Dumas). But when push came to shove, their fear of Western invasion and domination drove them back to the autocratic state and its unique mobilizational power.’ Although outside observers would be inclined to speak of paranoia, from a subjective Russian perspective it may very well have been the case, as Poe puts it, that ‘the Europeans were always coming’.80 Even more important than the question of whether this was a matter of paranoia or of legitimate fears, is the fact that the emphasis on forced mobilization and resource extraction would be maintained even in times of peace. In previous chapters, we have pointed at the recurring urge to ‘catch up’ with the European powers, which resulted in spurts of growth and a ‘jerky’ pattern of development. The means that were deployed in order to reach that elusive goal were the old familiar ones of constantly seeking to mobilize ever more resources. In Soviet economic reform rhetoric, there would be much emphasis placed on the needs to abandon this policy of ‘extensive growth’, and to switch instead to a policy of ‘intensive growth’, which envisioned improved resource utilization rather than simple mobilization and duplication. The obvious complication was that undertaking such a shift would have required the introduction of a set of market-friendly economic policies that were based on consumer sovereignty and preference. Noting that this was obviously not within the realm of permissible thinking, we again have a case of keeping score in the wrong game.

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While it is certainly true that the command economy did succeed in producing sufficient armaments to halt the Nazi German onslaught, and that Russians in 1960 were materially better off than they had been in 1920, the pivotal question is what conclusions should be drawn from such observations. Here we must be wary of speaking with the benefit of hindsight. Although it is no longer controversial to say that the Soviet economic model simply did not work, at least not anywhere near market-driven production possibilities, we must not forget that central planning was long held up as a viable alternative to free markets, and not only by Soviet propagandists. As late as 1992, the CIA was still in the business of claiming that Soviet economic growth had produced a dollar GDP that was two-thirds of that in the USA, and a per capita living standard that was close to the European mean.81 Against this background, it is not so hard to accept that the Russians may indeed have believed that they were keeping score in the right game. Returning to our historical perspective, we may conclude that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had succeeded, much like the autocracy of Muscovy of old, in building an economic system that was eminently suited to mass mobilization for the purpose of total war. As we shall see in a moment, moreover, it had done so with a far greater degree of sophistication, allowing Moscow to reach the status not only of a regional Great Power but of a global Superpower. Before proceeding to substantiate that claim, we shall look briefly at how the first stages of Bolshevik economic policy unfolded. Above we noted that the early phase of War Communism could be seen as an amalgam of political preferences and pressing economic emergencies. It was against this background that the new Soviet government proceeded to formulate its alternative set of ‘mechanisms of coordination’. Faced with the need to provide food for their Red Army, and for the cities that were under their control, the Bolsheviks proceeded to introduce a policy of forced requisitioning of foodstuffs from the peasantry that would be known as prodrazverstka. Claiming that the cause of the food crisis was due to hoarding and speculation by rich peasants, they also would create support for such forced procurements by introducing special ‘committees of the poor’, known as kombedy. Officially, these committees were designed to further class struggle amongst the villagers. In actual practice, they were nothing but a cynical return to the old obligation for serfs to spy on and denounce their landlords. Lenin’s subsequent reversal of policy has created a great deal of confusion when it comes to the true motives and ambitions of the Bolsheviks. His 1921 decision that forced requisitioning would be replaced by a tax in kind signalled the end of War Communism and the start of the New Economic Policy, the NEP, which was to bring the peasantry in particular so much temporary relief. Some have argued that this represented normalization,

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and that the eventual return to force and terror must be blamed on Stalin. We shall argue that the NEP was no more than a tactical retreat.82 When Stalin proceeded to implement his mass collectivization of the Soviet peasantry, he de facto restored the old system of serfdom in toto. The organizational model that was chosen for the kolkhozy bears this out quite clearly. The simplest parallel rests in the structural division of lands into communal fields and private plots, which reflected the old division into manorial land and hereditary ‘private’ holdings. The main difference was that the Soviet ‘landlord’ no longer would be content with requesting three days per week of labour on his fields. Even more importantly, the kolkhoz system was based on a broad re-imposition of the krugovaya poruka. It was not only the case that all members of the collective would be held jointly responsible for state delivery quotas. The kolkhoz management also would be empowered much in the same fashion as the old mir. It would decide, for example, on the allocation of labour, and on who was to receive internal passports. This effective reintroduction of serfdom in the Soviet countryside was matched by a parallel process in the cities, where the Party did not waste much time in setting out to nationalize first the banks and then all private industries. The main point of the exercise was to expropriate the country’s productive assets, and to place them firmly in the hands of the state. This again represented an effective reconnection with old path dependencies. As we may recall from previous chapters, the autocracy had remained focused throughout the centuries on central control, rather than on stimulating market-oriented initiative from below. For all his talk of participation and of the bien public, Peter the Great had relied wholly on the apparatus of the state as an engine of growth. New industries were founded at state expense and then farmed out to designated servitors. If the latter performed well, they would be allowed to retain hereditary rights to ‘their’ enterprises. If they did not, they could be both punished and dispossessed. Whatever was left of their output, once the state had purchased at fixed prices what it desired, could be sold on the open market. When Stalin proceeded to undertake his forced industrialization, he would effectively reconnect with this heritage. The state expropriated all the means of production, and appointed servants to run its ‘enterprises’. Having taken its due, it allowed trade in the surplus on markets with varying degrees of legality, aptly presented by Aron Katsenellenboigen as markets of different ‘colors’.83 The general suppression of all rights to property in the means of production implied a return to patrimonialism, which was to reproduce familiar old patterns of illegality and networks of corruption. The venality of the bureaucracy in particular would bear an eerie resemblance to those conditions that had prevailed under the tsarist nineteenth-century bureaucracy. Resources extracted by the state again were put up for grabs.

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Having suppressed monetary exchange, the Party resorted to remunerating its loyal servants by offering kormlenie. Local Party bosses in particular would be able to line their own pockets in much the same way as the kormlenshchiki of old. For itself, it reserved properties of various kinds that recall the landed estates of the monasteries in Muscovy. The way in which military commanders would be allowed to use recruits as free labour, at times even hired out to enterprises needing labour, also recalls the old system of ‘allocated’, or pripisnye, serfs. Linking back to what was said above about ‘body and soul’, the system as a whole also would be permeated by a Soviet-style sense of Loyalty that rationalized and legitimated even outright predatory behaviour. Repeating that the underlying rationale of the system was extraction, much more so than production, we shall conclude by returning to our previous claim that in undertaking forced extraction the Soviet system reached a higher degree of sophistication than its predecessors. The key, as presented by Mancur Olson, rested in simultaneously expropriating all productive assets and reserving the right to determine the rate of accumulation. The outcome not only was a high rate of investment, at the expense of consumption, but also an increase in extraction by adding all non-labour income: ‘In the long history of stationary banditry, no other autocrat had managed to do this.’ 84 A more technical explanation derives from a distinction between marginal and inframarginal taxation. In a system of optimal extraction individuals would face regressive tax rates, such that they are taxed heavily in the first bracket and not at all on their marginal income. While this would provide strong incentives for extra effort, it would also be impossible to introduce in a democratic setting, where all must face the same tax schedules. Those at the bottom would simply not have enough to survive. To Stalin, that was not a problem. With basic wage rates set very low, and no alternative employment opportunities being offered, the implied tax rate on low incomes was very high. To the strong, however, who were able to exert themselves, bonuses and perks of various kinds were offered. Perhaps the best illustration of Olson’s model is that of Soviet agriculture. After putting in a day of labour for the collective, at little or no income, the peasants were allowed to continue working their private plots, and earn tax-free income. Hence exertion could be maximized. A similar conclusion may be reached by approaching the question of how a country that was able to put men into space and to achieve nuclear parity with the USA could, at the same time, fall so short of providing a decent material standard of living for its subjects. The key, as presented by Russian military analyst Vitalii Shlykov, rested in pursuing a policy of ‘guns and margarine’, or of pushek i maslo. His point is that by deliberately trading down the quality of consumer goods, the Soviet leadership could maintain both standing armed forces and a steady output of cutting edge armaments that secured its Superpower status.85

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What in turn made it possible to gain at least passive acceptance from the population of this way of sidestepping the classic choice between guns and butter may only be explained by taking into consideration the evolution of mental models that rationalized and legitimated the underlying logic of the system, namely that of resorting to forced extraction in order to enhance the country’s (defensive) war-fighting ability. As a final piece of evidence in support of this interpretation, we may note the distinct militarization of the economic vocabulary as a whole that was originated with Trotsky’s project of ‘militarization of labour’. In the words of Isaac Deutscher, ‘It was Trotsky who first systematically applied military terms, symbols and metaphors to civilian economic matters and thus introduced a fresh, vivid style in the Russian language, a style which later became ossified into a bureaucratic mannerism and spread to other languages.’ 86 While the credit for eloquence must go to Trotsky, what he dressed up in a new garb of ‘terms, symbols and metaphors’ was the same old policy of forced mobilization taken to extreme. Resources would be mobilized and thrown onto new fronts. Shock workers would storm designated targets. Heroes would be decorated. Spies and saboteurs would be shot. And the subjects at large were expected to keep score in this game of militarized competition, rather than in that of producing goods and services that might enhance their material well-being. The most striking evidence of all is that this peculiar system would survive, largely unchanged, for decades after the end of the Great Patriotic War.

Reforms that never were Following the death of Joseph Stalin, in March 1953, the Soviet Union was thrown into a leadership crisis. The autocrat had refused to groom a successor, and the old principle of heredity was no longer applicable. In the absence of constitutional rules on succession, the outcome was a period of bestsarstvie, or ‘tsarlessness’, where various heirs apparent would seek to fight their way to the top. The deliberate confusion of lines of demarcation between the Party and state hierarchies added its share, placing an even greater premium on skills in playing the traditionally path dependent games of personal influence. Emerging victorious from the struggle for power, Khrushchev embarked on a cautious policy of de-Stalinization. Appearing before the twentieth Party Congress in 1956, he delivered his subsequently famous secret speech, outlining to a stunned audience a selection of crimes committed by the Party under Stalin. That speech had two main effects. In Central Europe it gave rise to hopes that the Soviet system might be abolished, hopes that were to be drowned in blood during the Hungarian revolt. At home, it paved the way for a little thaw, the most important manifestation

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of which was the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Viewed from a more fundamental perspective of attempted institutional change, of seeking to address the various path dependencies that have been outlined above, it is true that the following three decades would be marked by a whole series of attempted reforms. Several of these would receive a great deal of attention in the West, particularly so when the theory of ‘convergence’ was in vogue. As a case in point, illustrating how superficial these reforms were, we may recall the much-vaunted ‘Liberman reform’. Originally suggested in a 1962 article in Pravda, authored by a then little known engineering professor from Kharkov by the name of Yevsei Liberman, following the ouster of Khrushchev in 1964 it would become the official policy of the new Brezhnev–Kosygin regime. While Liberman would be designated as ‘Man of the Year’ and have his face displayed on the front page of Time Magazine, the main thrust of the reform that was undertaken in his name amounted to little more than manipulation of the system of plan indicators. Although such manipulation did achieve some marginal improvements, the system as such was to remain intact. Nove perceptively refers to the Liberman reform as ‘the reform that never was’.87 That same verdict may be applied to all of those reforms that were undertaken in the time from Stalin’s death until the collapse of the Soviet Union. On no single occasion would reformers even seek to achieve fundamental and sustainable institutional change.88 On the contrary, we shall argue that all of our previously described path dependencies would remain in force. To be more specific, we may point at five different strands of continuity. First of all, it clearly was the case that autocracy remained the name of the game. Despite the rhetoric and expectations of assorted convergence theorists, the Soviet government remained unaccountable and above the law. The judiciary in particular remained subject to Party control, being effectively reduced to the practice of what was known as ‘telephone justice’. With unaccountable government and arbitrary enforcement thus remaining intertwined, there was little hope for the kind of impartial third party enforcement that is so crucially important to functioning market economy. Second, the continued refusal to allow private property rights in the means of production implied that the basic features of patrimonialism also would remain in place. Actors who could have become entrepreneurs, and who could have gone on to evolve skills in productive economic efforts, instead remained focused on honing such skills that were needed in strongly personalized political entrepreneurship, i.e. in playing for favours and influence in order to receive allocations of much-needed material goods. Third, in a situation where economic policy remained generally marketcontrary and rule-evasive, vast opportunities were bound to arise for personal advancement and enrichment. This clearly was most pronounced

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amongst those who were high up in the political food chain. The Central Asian cotton affairs and the associated scandals that surrounded the Brezhnev family make up a case in point. In modern jargon, such activities would be known as ‘rent seeking’. Here we shall prefer to remain with ‘kormlenie’, reflecting that the government was actively involved in allowing its subjects to line their own pockets primarily via influence rather than via work for wages. The reality that was hiding behind Katsenellenboigen’s previously cited ‘coloured markets’ was marked by a host of activities in what Gregory Grossman once termed as the ‘second economy’.89 The common denominator of all such activities was that they rested on personalized, influence-related relations, thus effectively blocking the emergence of such impersonal exchange, resting on impartial third party enforcement, that forms the basis of a functioning market economy. The investments that were made in skills at playing that game in turn would be translated into mental models that made it all remain strongly path dependent. Fourth, as we have noted in our above discussion of the introduction of norms that were designed to produce ‘Soviet men’, the krugovaya poruka also would remain important, and especially so when it came to the dimension of political poruka. Our fifth and final strand of path dependence relates to the quantity drive and the urge to catch up. In previous chapters, we have seen how this drive had led over the centuries to repeated spurts in growth that were followed by stagnation and even decline, as the country’s resources were exhausted. So it again would be under Brezhnev, in the ‘period of stagnation’, the period zastoia, which preceded the final collapse of Soviet power. Towards the end of the Brezhnev era, CIA analyst Gertrude Schroeder could summarize the experience of the post-war process of attempted economic reforms as that of being on a ‘treadmill of reforms’.90 Throughout this process, the mental models of the ‘Soviet Men’ and their unaccountable leaders would remain strikingly path dependent. There would be no (open) questioning of the absence of market pricing, of capital markets, or of private property – even of property as such. The absence of money made sure that crucial concepts such as budget balance were largely unknown, and foreign trade monopolies made sure that domestic producers were kept in blissful ignorance of conditions on the world market. By the early 1980s, fossilization of the Soviet system had reached such a state that the once dreaded Superpower had become an object of open ridicule. A particularly memorable moment arrived on 7 November 1982, when the ailing old men in the Politburo lined up on top of the Lenin mausoleum to celebrate the 65th birthday of the ‘Great Socialist October Revolution’. One look at their sorry appearances would have been sufficient to understand why the French journalist Michel Tatu would choose to speak of the ideology of this gerontocracy as le marxisme-se´nilisme.

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What made the ridicule so biting was related, however, not so much to the poor physical condition of the old men in power, as to the increasingly decrepit condition of the Soviet economy. Perhaps most memorable of all was the increasingly popular way of presenting the ailing Soviet superpower as an ‘Upper Volta with nuclear missiles’.91 The last act in the drama of Soviet economic ‘planning’ was begun on 11 March 1985, when Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Although he did come to power with a clear mandate to undertake change, his time in power would provide striking illustration of Tocqueville’s classic dictum, that ‘the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually the one when it begins to reform itself ’.92 Whether it really was Ronald Reagan’s lavish funding for the ‘Star Wars’ programme that eventually broke the back of the Soviet superpower need not concern us here. Even if we were to assume that Gorbachev did have other motivations for seeking de´tente and arms control, it remains a fact that by then the Soviet economy had exhausted all economic potential for remaining in an escalating arms race against America. For all his great successes in foreign policy, and in pursuing glasnost at home, it also remains a fact that Gorbachev’s economic reform policy, his much-vaunted perestroika, ended in what may only be called a total failure. Though there were many different reasons to explain this outcome, one really stands out. The men who were in charge of undertaking much needed reforms never really could bring themselves to questioning the main principles of the system they had helped to build. Noting that the mental models of the men who were in charge of reform under Gorbachev thus remained strongly path dependent, we may recall what was said above, about the crucial role of the autocracy in promoting and protecting reform in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Accepting that neither Witte nor Stolypin would have been possible without the strong backing of the tsar, the absence of a real political drive for market-friendly reform must be seen as an important reason behind the failure of Gorbachev’s reform. Speaking at his first Central Committee plenum as General Secretary, in April 1985, Gorbachev had promised to revitalize socialism, and that ambition would remain in focus. As late as in the autumn of 1989, when the Central European economies were in full transition to democracy and market economy, Leonid Abalkin’s Soviet economic reform commission would still be committed to demonstrating the superiority of socialism. One may certainly argue that ideological statements of the kinds made by Gorbachev and Abalkin must be seen within a broader political context, where public statements may not always be revealing of true intentions. Irrespective of such qualifications, however, it remains a fact that this last stage in the continuing drama of Soviet economic reform in no fundamental

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way would be different from the ‘treadmill’ that was in operation under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. This said, we should be wary of arguing that it was a time of no change at all. Gorbachev’s time in power certainly did bring about many changes, which again would receive out of proportion attention in the West. Like Liberman, Gorbachev would have his face displayed on the cover of Time Magazine, only now designated not as Man of the Year but as Man of the Decade. While there were good reasons indeed for some of the attention, chiefly that which earned the Soviet leader his Nobel Peace Prize, there also were expectations for other transformations that were clearly unrealistic. Recalling what was said in the first part of this chapter, about the mental transformations that were under way in the latter part of Russia’s nineteenth century, we may place Gorbachev into a more realistic context. On the one hand, his policies of glasnost and of cautious democratization did serve to produce important mental re-orientation and to stimulate growing demands for further change in the direction of democracy and market economy. On the other hand, however, much as the last tsars, the last Soviet leader would remain insistent on retaining autocratic power and on blocking a full transition to market-friendly policies. Refusing to face the people in an open election, he had himself appointed president, and despite all the rhetoric on economic reform he persisted in refusing to accept the fundamentals of a functioning market economy, such as private property, capital markets and free-market pricing. The outcome thus again would be one of gradual mental deviations from the longer-term path dependencies, deviations, however, that were prevented from reaching full maturity. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, it not only was beset by powerful centrifugal forces that would continue well into Russia’s post-Soviet existence. Moscow also had been effectively bankrupted. In December 1991, Soviet foreign debt went into default and Boris Yeltsin had to appeal to the G7 for help. The odds for him to succeed in reconstructing Russia as a modern European state did not look too favourable.

Part V

Breaking with the past?

10 Another time of troubles

Having come this far, it is time to address what surely must be the focal question in any discussion of historical experience, namely to what extent the story of the past is relevant also for the present, and indeed for the future. In the preceding chapters we have argued, rather vigorously, that Russian historical development has been marked by powerful patterns of path dependence, by which institutional solutions that emerged in distant Muscovy have been reproduced over time. Here we shall bring that story into the era of post-Soviet Russia, and we shall add some more theory that may help decide whether we really are witnessing a ‘New Russia’, or if the post-Soviet experience simply represents more of the same. The core of our argument will be that for all their outward appearances of radical departures, in a more fundamental institutional sense the Yeltsin and Putin regimes have been manifestations of deep-rooted continuity rather than of change. Seeking to substantiate that argument, we shall begin this chapter by addressing what constitutes the main challenge to any continuity theory, namely that of large discontinuities that seemingly belie the underlying thesis. For good measure, Russia’s twentieth century offered two such cases, both of which were rather spectacular. First there was Lenin and his Bolsheviks, who set out to break with tsardom and to build a radically new futureoriented order. Then there was Yeltsin, who set out to break with Communism and to build a ‘normal society’, which against the backdrop of Russian tradition also would have been something of a radically new order. Below we shall make a brief comparison between these two cases, this in order to show that in two highly important respects they were very similar. First, they were associated with a complete collapse of the old order, and with radical ideological swings in an opposite direction. Second, despite the radical ideological about-faces, both cases also present important institutional continuities that fit in well with our argument on path dependence. This said, we must recall a caution that has been underscored repeatedly in previous chapters. We are not seeking here to show the presence of one allencompassing Russian path dependence that applies to all aspects of the country’s historical progression. On the contrary, our main hypothesis is

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that despite at times truly important transformations in some dimensions of the institutional matrix, there have been a few core aspects that have been persistently carried over and that appear to be highly reform-resistant. The bulk of this chapter will be devoted to an overview of the imperial collapse that occurred in 1991, and to a mapping out of some path dependent responses to that systemic shock. The following chapter will then proceed by looking at the collapse of the Yeltsin-era reforms that was epitomized in the financial meltdown in August 1998, and at the agenda for stability and further reform that was subsequently launched by Vladimir Putin. The final chapter will conclude the argument. It will bring in some more theory, and it will seek to outline what it would take for Russia to break with its past, and to venture forth onto a fundamentally different path towards a ‘normal society’.

Swings of the pendulum In the previous chapter it was argued that the Soviet era in several important respects represented a reconstitution of institutional patterns that had emerged in old Muscovy. The logical implication of this argument is that the real deviation from Russia’s long-term patterns of path dependence was associated not with the ‘revolution’ of 1917 but rather with the processes of mental redescription, or of transformation of social and other norms, that had begun with the Enlightenment under Catherine the Great. By the early twentieth century it was an open question whether those mental transformations were sufficiently broad and forceful to result also in a corresponding and sustainable transformation of the formal rules and of the necessary enforcement mechanisms. The October Manifesto and the subsequent experiment with popular representation illustrated that it was indeed possible, in a formal sense, to break away from the centuriesold dominance of indivisible and unaccountable autocratic power. We do know that the experiment failed, and this is not the place to revisit the debates on why. The main point to be made here is that when Lenin and his Bolsheviks assumed power they proceeded not to dismantle centuries of tsarist autocracy, but rather to repress every attempt that had been made by successions of well-intended reformers to transform that autocracy into a constitutional order. In that sense, Lenin was a deeply reactionary force. It is certainly true that the Bolshevik programme also incorporated a number of features that did agree – at least rhetorically so – with their claims to be progressive and future-oriented. That, however, does not contradict the fact that they resurrected all of the main pillars of the Muscovite system, as they have been presented above. What gave the ‘Great Socialist October Revolution’ its flavour of a truly radical new departure was a phenomenon that is also firmly rooted in the Russian past. As anyone who is familiar with Russian cultural history will immediately note, there is a striking parallel between Lenin and Yeltsin,

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in the sense that both were possessed by a determination to undertake a complete break with the past, and to start with a clean slate. This recalls what the Russian semioticist Yurii Lotman has said about a Russian binary logic of oppositions. Where Western tradition has given rise to pluralism, power sharing and argumentation, Russian Orthodox tradition has rested on posing absolute alternatives, with no room for compromise. Where there is no neutral zone, man has to take sides, and the winning side must be the absolute victor. After having fully crushed his opponent, the victor thus also seeks to radically annihilate the past. Lotman’s conclusion is well in line with our theory of path dependence: ‘True forward movement requires coming to terms with, and not simply rejecting, the past, for absolute rejection leads only to fruitless cycles of negation.’ 1 The very same may also be derived from the institutional perspective that forms the mainstay of the present study. It may, for example, be useful here to recall what Douglass North had to say in his 1993 Nobel Prize lecture. Arguing that it is the ‘admixture of formal rules, informal norms, and enforcement characteristics that shapes economic performance’, and that the informal norms usually will change only gradually, he arrived at an important conclusion: ‘Since it is the norms that provide ‘‘legitimacy’’ to a set of rules, revolutionary change is never as revolutionary as its supporters desire, and performance will be different than anticipated.’ 2 It is from precisely this perspective that we may view the full paradox of the Bolshevik ‘revolution’. Under the impression of Catherine’s Enlightenment, social critique and legal reform had combined to produce a gradual transformation of norms, which by the early twentieth century might have been sufficient to ‘provide legitimacy’ for a new set of formal rules. We again must be wary here of arguing that had it not been only because of 1914 and 1917, then Russia would have been able to cross the threshold into Europe. Still, from an institutional perspective it must be the case that matters were indeed moving in that direction. The Bolsheviks put an abrupt and effective end to all ambitions of transforming the formal rules of the institutional matrix in a direction of what we may refer to as European ‘normalcy’. During the Soviet era, members of the service nobility again were forced into playing path dependent games of influence, where the prizes to be won again were the familiar ones of kormlenie and pomestie. Both they and the population at large were compelled to readjust their expectations and their mental models accordingly. When North delivered his Nobel Prize lecture, Russia was in a position where the formal rules of the Soviet system in their turn had been abruptly dismantled and where it was highly questionable in which direction norms and mental models would be moving. Simply telling the Russian electorate that they were now living in a liberal free market democracy obviously was not sufficient for all at once to adjust their behaviour accordingly.

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Although North spoke in the midst of mounting evidence that Russian economic reform was headed for serious problems, and that Russian society was in deep crisis, in circles where they really should have mattered his warnings carried little weight. Key advisors and policy makers, both inside and outside Russia, remained convinced that the problems of the Russian past had been finally relegated to the past, and that a ‘new’ Russia was indeed about to emerge. Against such regrettably wishful interpretations, dissident voices were raised arguing that Yeltsin represented a fundamental continuity with the Soviet past, in the sense that he was repeating the Bolshevik approach to societal change. Commenting on the haste that was implied by shock therapy, for example, the prominent Hungarian economist La´szlo´ Szamuely asked a rather pertinent question: ‘Does it not resemble Stalin’s famous slogan: Let’s fulfill the five year plan in four years?’ 3 In a similar vein, American political scientist Juliet Johnson juxtaposed a statement by Lenin from State and Revolution, with a quote from one of the leading foreign economic advisors to the Russian government. While to Lenin the task had been ‘to smash the old bureaucratic machine at once and begin immediately to construct a new one’, in 1992 the received wisdom was that ‘there is an abyss between a command economy and a market economy . . . first the old system must be destroyed . . . then the foundations of the new market economic house must be built on the other side of the abyss’.4 By far the most systematic and damning critique of the Yeltsin era as a whole has been laid out in The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms, where Peter Reddaway and Dmitry Glinski take the parallel between Lenin and Yeltsin to its logical conclusion, branding the underlying ideology of the Russian reformers as ‘market Bolshevism’.5 That very same strand of critique is also, symptomatically, picked up by Joseph Stiglitz, in his scathing attack on the proponents of the ‘Washington Consensus’. Noting that ‘the modern critique of utopian social engineering was based particularly on the Bolshevik approach to the transition from capitalism to communism’, and that ‘the shock therapy approach tried to use many of the same principles for the reverse transition’, Stiglitz suggests a striking paradox: It is almost as if many of the Western advisors just thought the Bolsheviks had the wrong textbooks instead of the whole wrong approach. With the right textbooks in their briefcases, the ‘market Bolsheviks’ would be able to fly into the post-socialist countries and use a peaceful version of Lenin’s methods to make the opposite transition.6 While there is much more to be said about the activities of Russia’s ‘young reform economists’, and of their foreign advisors, for the moment we shall prefer to remain focused on the underlying long-term patterns of

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path dependence. Assuming that it is no longer controversial to view the outcome of the attempted transition to liberal democracy and market economy as a failure, we may recall Tim McDaniel’s previously cited verdict over the Russian past: ‘Reform in Russia: over the centuries it has always failed.’ 7 There is certainly no shortage of other sources expounding a similarly gloomy attitude to the weight of Russian history. As Tibor Szamuely once put it, in his grand expose´ over the nature of the Russian tradition: ‘Of all the burdens Russia has had to bear, heaviest and most relentless of all has been the weight of her past.’ 8 To reiterate what was said above, however, there is nothing deterministic about this view. No matter how heavy the burden of the past might have been, developments in the nineteenth century did show that deviation was possible. Exactly how long it would have taken for those deviations to result in a fundamental and sustainable change in course we shall never know, but neither must we succumb to the temptation of thinking that change is somehow intrinsically impossible. The truly fundamental question concerns just what it would take for such change to be possible. That question we shall leave for discussion in the final chapter of this book. Here we shall proceed to look at the collapse of the Soviet order, and at the path dependent strategies of readjustment that were deployed in reaction to that shock.

Imperial collapse When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, and Russia embarked on its publicly charted course towards liberal democracy and market economy, there was a general mood of optimism and positive expectations. It was commonly believed that once the debris of the Communist system had been cleared away, there would be no remaining obstacles to success. As we now know, it would not prove to be quite so simple. As shock therapy was being implemented, two important things were becoming clear. First, it soon became rather obvious that simple deregulation would not be enough. The ambition of implementing ‘systemic change’ would require something more. In recognition of such experiences, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) would subsequently resort to dividing the progress of the transition economies into initial phase and second phase reforms, where the former represents the simple steps and the latter captures more complex institution building.9 Second, and far more ominous, it transpired that the ideologically driven campaign against what two prominent insiders referred to as ‘the grabbing hand’ of the state,10 was inflicting a great deal of collateral damage, effectively destroying any prospects for achieving accountability and credible commitment. As these latter points are of crucial importance, they shall figure prominently in our subsequent argument.

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At a World Bank conference in the spring of 1994, marking a low point of pessimism about Russia’s future, Jeffrey Sachs portrayed the country as being caught in something of a graveyard spiral that risked ending in state failure: Several simple examples of immediate relevance to Russia illustrate the risks of state collapse. The Russian state is threatened by at least six types of contagious antisocial behavior: a flight from the ruble, tax evasion, criminality, regional separatism, foreign debt overhang, and panic by government creditors.11 Using a suggestive parallel from the world of astronomy, the transition from Soviet power to post-Soviet Russia might be compared to that of a Red Giant collapsing into a Black Hole. Where the Red Giant of the USSR had exuded both power and influence over nearly half of the earthly globe, the Black Hole of post-Soviet Russia would prove capable of sucking in tens, not to say hundreds of billions of dollars in aid, credits and investments – without having much to show in return. The implosion was so rapid and so spectacular that many outside observers found it hard to accept, preferring instead to believe in fanciful alternative explanations about statistical illusions and hidden successes. It would not be until after the financial meltdown that struck Moscow in August 1998 that Western compulsive optimism also could undergo a transformation. Massive financial losses combined with perhaps even more stinging losses of political prestige to form a powerful backlash of mutual recriminations. We shall have more to say on that count in the following chapter. Here we shall proceed to argue that for all the accounts of foul play that have been associated with the Yeltsin regime, the truth of the matter remains that the real problems had begun already on Gorbachev’s watch. Towards the end of the previous chapter we quoted Tocqueville’s classic warning, that the most dangerous moment for a bad government usually is the one when it begins to reform itself. In eerie resemblance to the fate of Nicholas II, Mikhail Gorbachev similarly would find himself caught up in a process of attempted reforms that was rapidly slipping out of his hands and increasingly threatening his own position. Although he would be spared the horrors of war, and indeed of being murdered together with his family, like Nicholas, Gorbachev would preside over an eventually fatal erosion of the foundations of the state. For all their initial acclaim, especially so from foreign audiences, his twin policies of glasnost and perestroika acted as catalysts in producing a renewed ‘time of troubles’ that would end with the collapse of both the state and the regime. In stark contrast to the previous ‘times of trouble’ that had surrounded the collapse of Muscovy and of Imperial Russia, when Boris Yeltsin proceeded to reconstitute his state he would have to accept a drastic reduction in territory.

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Where Mikhail Romanov had succeeded in reconstituting Muscovy as a whole, and where Lenin had ‘lost’ only the country’s western periphery (Finland and the Baltic states, together with part of Poland and Bessarabia), Yeltsin’s Russia would be rolled back – in its western parts – to within borders that had prevailed roughly at the time of the death of Ivan the Great, in 1505. Early hopes that a Russian empire of sorts might be resurrected behind the fac¸ade of a ‘Commonwealth of Independent States’ quickly proved to be illusory. Without Ukraine in particular, there could be no Russian empire, and the post-Soviet leadership in Kiev certainly was not going to acquiesce in Moscow’s ambitions of reining in the breakaway republics. This effective erasure of nearly five centuries of territorial expansion provides a measure of the catastrophe that befell Moscow in 1991. In the following, we shall look at the process of implosion and breakup from the same perspective of a duvan that was used in the previous chapter, to capture the collapse of the tsarist empire. Although on this occasion the consequences were far less spectacular, there is great similarity in the way in which Russia was subjected to parallel processes of territorial fragmentation and of widespread looting of state property. What would come to be known as ‘spontaneous privatization’ in essence was a reflection of the fact that the assets of the state once again were put up for grabs. Similarly, the famed ‘sovereignty parade’ illustrated that the constituent parts of the state – now nominally a federation – once again were seen as trophies to be had by local political elites. This perspective is important above all in directing attention at what tends to happen in a situation where a regime collapses and where there are no other institutions available to carry the business of the state forward. A looting spree Beginning with the dimension of plunder, we may note that the process of looting state properties had several dimensions, where the most spectacular was linked to the sudden integration of Russia into the global market for capital flows. The rapid disintegration of all types of Soviet authority effectively created a vast open field for various forms of criminal activity. In her study of the Thieves’ World, Claire Sterling shows that this was to provide a bonanza not only for Russian actors. Once the Berlin wall had come down, international crime syndicates simply raced east to exploit what they saw as a wide range of opportunities: ‘Where Western governments tended to see Russia as a basket case, the big syndicates saw it as a privileged sanctuary and a bottomless source of instant wealth.’ 12 An important reason behind the sudden eruption of international criminal interest not only in Russia but in all areas east of the Brandenburger Tor was that of laundering dirty money, especially drug money. As Sterling puts it, ‘the entire Soviet Bloc had become an enormous washing machine for

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dirty money, rapidly replacing familiar ones elsewhere, arguably the largest, safest, and most profitable ever invented’.13 A particularly ominous dimension of such laundry operations was that of providing a linkup between Russian organized crime figures and their colleagues on the global crime scene. The world of international organized crime certainly was not born with the collapse of the Soviet bloc. It already featured a host of ‘traditional’ actors of great repute, ranging from the Sicilian Mafia and the US Cosa Nostra, to the Colombian drug cartels, the Japanese Yakuza and the Chinese Triads. The introduction into that world of the Russian Mob, also known as the ‘thieves’ world’, or the vorovskoi mir, now was set to add even more flavour to problems that already were overpowering law enforcement agencies worldwide.14 As Russian crime figures began setting up shop in the USA, US officials found increasing grounds for concern about the impact on US law enforcement. By 1997, FBI director Louis Freeh gave open voice to such concerns, stating that Russian organized crime represented ‘the greatest long-term threat to the security of the United States’.15 A couple of years later, journalist Robert Friedman could present an amply documented study, titled Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob has Invaded America, that detailed the activities of Russian crime syndicates in the USA.16 While there is certainly much more to be said about the global dimension of organized crime, including the contribution of the Russian mob, our focus must remain with the domestic Russian implications. In particular, we shall have to remain focused on the role of the state, and on the consequences for the further development of the socio-economic system of a state that no longer functions properly, even according to minimal standards. It is easy enough to be fascinated by the more ‘traditionally’ criminal dimension of the plunder: Twenty billion dollars’ worth of raw materials alone were exported illegally from Russia in 1992: petroleum, timber, titanium, cesium, strontium, uranium, plutonium. Thousands of crooks and swindlers were involved, native and otherwise, many of them loners. But the big player was the Russian mafia and its foreign partners.17 Without seeking in any way to diminish the gravity of such plunder, we shall argue that the duvan also had a more ‘systemic’ dimension that in a longer-term perspective would have even more serious consequences. Putting it simply, it was not only representatives of the criminal underworld but even more so representatives of the highest echelons of power that went on a looting spree. Anticipating that Gorbachev’s perestroika might end in failure, and that the political upheavals might lead to a collapse of the system, important groups of actors began preparing for a post-Soviet existence. Included here

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were representatives of both the Party and the KGB, who began using their international contacts to move capital out of the country. The scale of that project was impressive: ‘From 1989 to 1991, the KGB first chief directorate funneled at least 60 metric tons of gold, 150 metric tons of silver, 8 metric tons of platinum, and from $15 to $50 billion in hard currency abroad, according to Russian investigators.’ 18 Looking at these numbers, it is hardly surprising that by December 1991 Russia for all intents and purposes had been bankrupted. With Russian foreign debt in default, and with President Boris Yeltsin appealing to the G7 for help, the outside world was placed in a real predicament. Recalling that Lenin had begun his construction of Soviet power by defaulting on tsarist Russia’s foreign debt, the G7 governments responded to Yeltsin’s plea for help by sending in what Richard Layard and John Parker refer to, in justified criticism, as the ‘debt collectors’.19 The subsequent wrangling over how to handle Russian foreign debt service would have far-reaching implications for the overall relation between Russia and the West. While the massive outflow of capital was seriously detrimental in the short term, there was nothing to say that it would also have to have serious longterm implications. If Boris Yeltsin had managed to put Russia’s economic house in order, the capital flows surely would have returned. The fact that this was not to be underscores not only that there was something seriously wrong with the economic policies of the various Yeltsin governments. Perhaps even more importantly, it showed that the Chinese had been right in retaining capital controls. What really served to produce the subsequent mayhem of Russian capital flight would not, however, be linked to technical shortcomings such as a premature liberalization of the capital account. The real drive behind the looting spree that provided capital for flight was produced by expectations from a broad range of actors that the system was indeed on the verge of breaking down. For officials and common criminals alike, it was a situation of seemingly limitless opportunities. According to some sources, a select group of Politburo members and officers of the KGB first chief directorate had begun their preparations already in 1984, i.e. even before Gorbachev’s accession to power. By 1986, they were in full swing building the new infrastructure of banks, trading companies, stock and currency exchanges, and corporate shells that would be of pivotal importance in attracting foreign business and investment. The formation of joint ventures in particular was of great help in establishing links with foreign investors and business partners. By 1992, an estimated 80 per cent of all joint ventures included KGB officers.20 While the representatives of high officialdom were busy at their end, those of the criminal underworld would find a niche of their own, where their special entrepreneurial skills could be deployed: ‘If not every lawbreaker is a Mafioso, however, the mafia swims among them like a great predatory

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shark, recruiting some, exacting payoffs from others, frightening off every rival eyeing its prey.’ 21 The peak of the crisis arrived in the winter of 1991–92, when serious fears of actual starvation in Russia prompted foreign governments to send emergency food aid, much of which would be diverted or simply stolen. To a large extent, this crisis was an artificial one. Criminal interference with transport and marketing produced a breakdown in official supply chains, which in turn generated a real boom in the black market: With relaxation of government supervision and the legacy of an active underground economy, shortages provoked an explosive growth in the black market. Looting by managers and workers diverted output to the black market, while Russian mafia conspired in this process or instigated shortages on their own.22 Such patterns of predatory behaviour that had been established by the time the Soviet Union collapsed would, needless to say, come to assume a dominant influence over the way in which the subsequent processes of liberalization and privatization unfolded. The appetite for criminal gain had been wetted, and the ‘sharks’ were protected by friends at the highest levels of authority. We shall return to the details of that story in a moment.23 Territorial fragmentation Turning first to the other dimension of the duvan, that of territorial fragmentation, it must be recognized that the breakdown of the Soviet Union was considerably more benign than the breakdown of the Russian empire had been. Above all, barring the Chechen tragedy there would be no civil warfare to produce millions of casualties and massive material destruction. This said it does, however, remain a fact that the Soviet collapse would produce both political and economic consequences with dire and lasting implications. The main challenge to the union authorities was that of dealing with centrifugal forces that threatened to tear the country apart. This task was complicated by the fact that such forces were fuelled by a combination of ethnically defined separatism, as in the Baltic republics or in Georgia, and more purely economically motivated ambitions of republican elites to take over their own territories. In 1991, Gorbachev tried hard to find a negotiated solution, but to no avail. His proposal for a new union treaty that offered decentralization to the point of all but effacing all central authority would prove to be too little too late. Thomas Graham summarizes the essence of the predicament in which the Party’s last general secretary found himself: Gorbachev could have used force to preserve the country, but that would have derailed his reform effort. Thus, Gorbachev was faced with a

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genuine dilemma, a choice he did not want to make, between the reform necessary to maintain Soviet power and the union threatened by that very reform. By refusing to choose, Gorbachev sealed his fate.24 Emerging victorious from the showdown, Yeltsin would have to deal with problems that he himself had helped set in motion. In order to win independence for his own Russian Federation, he had actively encouraged challenges to Moscow as the seat of the union authorities. Now it was the seat of federal authorities that were besieged by centrifugal forces of an even greater complexity. The Russian Federation was (and is) composed of 89 federation subjects, many of which were bent on securing their own independence. During the first years of Russia’s post-Soviet existence, the federal centre would have to devote much time, energy and resources to dealing with such challenges. One extreme case was that of the republic of Chechnya, representing ethnic separatism in the form of an armed and bloody insurrection that is still going on. The other extreme was Tatarstan, which engaged in highly successful bargaining for far-reaching fiscal privileges and exemptions. Ranged between these two extremes, numerous other regions and republics were seeking – and winning – a plethora of concessions and privileges. The practical consequences of the constitutional chaos that followed have been far-reaching. On the legal front, it would remain true even under Vladimir Putin that federal and republican/regional legislation on many counts were at great variance with each other. Even constitutional law, which really should have been harmonized, would still be marked by major areas of conflict. On the economic front, there were similar problems in the area of ‘fiscal federalism’, i.e. of seeking to establish a set of commonly acceptable and enforceable rules on matters regarding taxation and subsidies. All of this is well in line with our argument on path dependence, which predicts a preference for bargaining and influence over transparent and enforceable rules. As had been the case in old Muscovy, regional elites under Yeltsin would receive their pomestiya from which they could derive kormlenie. As had been the case under the grand princes, attempts would certainly be made to curb the most excessive abuses of assigned kormlenie, but there is abundant evidence to show that Yeltsin’s Moscow would not be much more successful in such endeavours than its Muscovite predecessors had been. The link between kormlenie and venality apparently is a very powerful one.

Path dependent responses Let us return now to the overall perspective of responses to the collapse of the Soviet system, and let us recall the radical swing of the ideological pendulum that was associated with the transition from a Soviet to a post-Soviet order. As Yeltsin and his reformers were bent on completely eradicating

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all vestiges of the old system, it is perhaps not so strange that they would also be imbued with a belief that a new system could indeed be simply installed, much in the way that new software is installed on your hard drive. In a more general sense, this was a rather simplistic way of going about complex societal reconstruction. There can be little remaining controversy on that count. More specifically, however, we also shall argue that the failure of the Russian reformers to recognize the importance of the legacy of playing games of influence was their greatest single mistake. By placing their wager on instant liberalization and sweeping privatization as tools with which to build a functioning market economy they paved the way for precisely that plethora of rent seeking and asset grabbing activities that would figure so prominently in subsequent accounts of how the reforms were ‘hijacked’. In the following we shall focus on the nature of the various underlying processes of path dependence that combined to produce the failure of Yeltsin’s reforms. We shall do so, moreover, based on the same rough fivefold categorization that has underpinned our previous account of the emergence of path dependence, i.e. unaccountable government, patrimonialism, kormlenie, krugovaya poruka and the perceived need to catch up. Boris I Unaccountable government has been one of the main themes in our previous discussion. We have seen Russian autocracy emerge in the context of Mongol domination, and we have seen it become strongly path dependent over time. At the same time, however, we have also seen it become seriously eroded, to the point even where at the beginning of the twentieth century it was possible to envision at the very least a cautious movement towards democracy and constitutionalism. Following seven decades of reconstituted autocracy, now in the shape of Soviet Communism, Mikhail Gorbachev presided over a process of renewed erosion that in many respects was similar to that under Nicholas II. By deleting from the Soviet constitution its infamous sixth paragraph, which had guaranteed the Party a ‘leading role’, he paved the way for a multiparty system, and by allowing various forms of cooperation in the economy he eroded the position of the state as sole engine of growth. Without going into further parallels, we may simply note that in both cases the process would end with a coup d’e´tat and state collapse. In the turmoil that followed the failed coup of August 1991, there was little to prevent Boris Yeltsin from proceeding to cast himself in the role as guarantor of Russian democracy. That very image also was projected by leading outside advisors, such as Jeffrey Sachs who portrayed the Russian president as a ‘democratic lightning rod of society’.25 Actual events, however, soon enough would reveal that Yeltsin’s own view of the presidency was much closer to that of traditional Russian autocracy than it was to Western-style democracy.

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The uneasy coexistence that came to mark relations between the executive and the legislature in the first years of his rule again is reminiscent of the ‘democratic parenthesis’ in the final years of Nicholas II. Much as later historians have aimed justified criticism at Stolypin, for his way of using unconstitutional means to deal with the unruly Duma of his time, future historians likely will have harsh words to say about Yeltsin’s way of ordering tanks to open fire on the Supreme Soviet, in October 1993.26 At the core of this comparison we may find the traditional refusal of the autocracy to engage in any form of serious power sharing, and the equally traditional refusal to be bound by any form of enforceable external constraints. So it would be with Boris Yeltsin, from the very outset. Appearing before the crucially important seventh Congress of People’s Deputies, in October 1991, he secured not only a right to rule the country by decree over the coming year, but also his own appointment as prime minister. (The alleged reason for demanding such rights was that there would be a need for decisive policies to implement a host of much-needed legislation.) It was highly symptomatic that there would be no talk of calling new elections for the legislature. The since so vilified Supreme Soviet might thus have acquired a democratic mandate, and come to present a serious challenge to the power of the autocrat.27 If it hadn’t been for the fact that Moscow Mayor Yurii Luzhkov was probably even more suited for the part, one might have cast Boris Yeltsin in the role as a latter day Grand Prince of Moscow, a Velikii Knyaz Moskovskii. It was not simply a question of how Yeltsin reserved for himself the role as autocrat of all the (remaining) Russias.28 Even more importantly, his actual exercise of that power would bring back memories of how the tsars of old had ruled via their ministers, barring the formation of true government by effectively reserving for themselves the role of prime minister. In his book Perestroika under the Tsars, which has been repeatedly cited above, W. E. Mosse points at the tremendous staying power of autocracy even throughout the final decades of the empire: First and most important was the autocratic power. No Miliutin or Loris, no Witte or Stolypin could have pursued his policies without the constant backing of the tsar. The tsars selected their reforming ministers, often non-bureaucrats from unorthodox backgrounds. They maintained them in office in the face of frequently bitter criticism and opposition – but would dispense with them on occasion.29 So it clearly would be under Yeltsin as well. No Gaidar or Chubais would have stood any chance of pursuing their policies without his backing. Those whom he chose to back certainly did come from unorthodox backgrounds. They would be kept in office despite at times severe criticism, but would also be kept constantly aware of the fact that they could at any time be dismissed, should the president find it in his interest to do so. The parade of fired

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prime ministers that marked Yeltsin’s last years in power reflected his total disregard for the costs that were inflicted on the country by the resulting political turmoil. The impact on the pursuit of economic reform in particular would be damaging in the extreme. Yeltsin’s leadership style not only promoted arbitrariness and short-termism, from officials who were bent on making hay while the sun was still shining. It also effectively drove home the message of exclusion of the legislature from all aspects of government policy. Acceptance of the federal budget would be the only arena where the people’s representatives had a real chance of making their voices heard. Logically, that also would become an arena for spectacular political battles, adding further damage to the process of attempted reform. It is both lamentable, and somehow symptomatic of the evolving relation between Russia and the West, that leading Western policy-making circles would feed into this path dependent game of autocratic rule. For all the public emphasis that was placed on the need to support democratic institution building in Russia, when it came down to practical policy the West would find unaccountable rule by decree to be an excellent expedient. As it was once put by Walter Coles of the USAID, ‘If we needed a decree, Chubais didn’t have to go through the bureaucracy.’ 30 The inevitable companion of such expedience again was venality. While the scandals that would come to mark relations between Russia and the IMF served to show that it was not only a Russian problem, it surely was Russia that suffered the most. Unaccountable government and its close associate, that of arbitrary law enforcement, once again would triumph over the drive towards legality and impartiality. In retrospect, the ‘Boris-and-Bill’ show that was regularly put on television by spin-doctors in both capitals may be seen as a symbol of sorts of American support for the reconstitution of Russian autocracy. Old Boris may have been a crook, but he was our crook. The family Given everything that has been said above about the path dependent nature of Russian autocracy, it follows that achieving accountability really should have been the main priority of the reformers. This not only should have conditioned the formulation of enforceable rules regarding relations between the legislature and the executive. Even more importantly, it should have called for addressing the age-old problem of patrimonialism, of the effective fusion of power and property. At a casual glance, one might be led to believe that the latter really was a task that was taken seriously. No other part of the attempt at ‘systemic change’ was held up to be so crucially important, and given such high priority, as that of undertaking rapid mass privatization of the means of production. On closer inspection, however, it transpires that the real reasons

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behind the ambition to privatize were pointed in a somewhat different direction. By far the most important motive behind Russian privatization was related to domestic politics. Simply put, it was hoped that by transforming the Russian population at large into stakeholders, the reforms could be made irreversible. To this we may add that in its ideological relations to the West, the Kremlin was supposed and indeed implicitly required to demonstrate conclusively the superiority of private property. In consequence of such priorities, the architects of the privatization programme would not seek to hide the fact that their main objectives were indeed political, rather than economic. An important consequence of this formulation of essentially political goals of privatization was that speed came to be seen as the main indicator of success. Irrespective of the longer-term consequences, one had to strike while the iron was hot. In a much-quoted statement, Richard Layard would hail Russian privatization as being the ‘fastest in human history’.31 Within this framework of haste, it was not surprising that little if any effort would be made to put into place even rudimentary safeguards against – predictable – excesses by well-placed insiders. Fancy diagrams depicting the rising share of private ownership in Russian industry served to reinforce the grossly mistaken belief that adequate legal institutions would simply proceed to install themselves, in the wake of facts already established on the ground. The obvious risk that insiders with large ill-gotten gains would be able to block all attempts at ex post rectification was not taken very seriously.32 The consequences for the evolution of the troublesome relation between power and property again would be damaging in the extreme. On the face of it, the centre of power in post-Soviet Russia came to be lodged in the Kremlin, in a presidency that after the adoption of the new constitution in December 1993 was to wield far-reaching powers. Behind the scenes, however, real power over the fate of the nation was dissipated within the loose network of economic interests that came to be known as ‘the Family’. During his time at the Moscow embassy, Thomas Graham symptomatically won international repute by portraying Russian politics as a struggle between various clans, over which Boris Yeltsin resided in splendid isolation.33 As they began amassing great fortunes, the men who gathered around Boris Yeltsin came to be known as ‘oligarchs’. Against the background of our preceding account, they might have been more correctly referred to as dvoryanie, as members of the grand household of the autocrat. Although they did at times wield great influence over Russian politics, which might merit using the notion of ‘oligarchy’, they never had any real basis of power of their own. The subsequent fates of tycoons Berezovsky, Gusinsky and Khodorkovsky would drive that message home rather conclusively.

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Yet again in eerie resemblance to the days of the tsars, the main role to be played by the president of Russia was that of acting as an arbiter between the various clans that emerged both within the bureaucracy and in the world of business-cum-politics. This was to be the real source of his power, and it was bought at the price of distributing a steady flow of pomestiya. It was positions within ‘the Family’ that determined who would be the fortunate recipients of lucrative stakes in the nickel smelters, the telecoms and the oil companies that formed the real prizes in the programme of privatization. The infamous scheme of ‘loans-for-shares’ that unfolded in the autumn of 1995 would provide the ultimate illustration of how prominent members of the modern-day Russian service nobility were allowed to help themselves to the juiciest pickings out of the Kremlin’s bargain basement.34 To the public at large, the much-vaunted programme of mass privatization soon enough came to be known as prikhvatizatsiya, a play on words reflecting a general belief that a few well-placed insiders had succeeded, in cahoots with prominent Kremlin officials, in committing what would come to be known, alternatively, as the ‘crime of the century’ or as the ‘greatest robbery in the history of mankind’.35 Interviewed in the Financial Times, in the autumn of 1996, Boris Berezovsky would even brag about how he and six other fellow oligarchs jointly controlled more than half of the Russian economy.36 Whether that was actually true or not is beside the point. The statement as such reflected a reality where a few favoured dvoryanie had been granted vast pomestiya, in return for which they were required to serve the autocrat, mainly by securing his re-election in 1996. It may be both amusing and illuminating here to recall from our previous account how those nobles who did take seriously the 1762 abolition of state service obligations, and chose to retire rather than continue in voluntary service, would be banished forever from appearing at court: ‘We will not allow such people any access to Our court, nor will We tolerate their presence at public assemblies and festivals.’ 37 Under Yeltsin, those who were fired or otherwise removed from posts in his service were likewise expected to remain in loyal readiness to assume other service posts. Those who did choose to make a true exit – like general Aleksandr Korzhakov or tycoon Boris Berezovsky – would indeed be banished from appearing at court, with all the associated consequences. Given the prominent role that was played by the privatization programme, it was rather natural that this also was where Western involvement would be at its most intense. Much of the financial aid that was made available for Russia would in practice be handed over to the Big Six accounting firms, for services rendered in preparing specific privatizations,38 and the main focus of the foreign advisors would be aimed at assisting the Russian privatizers. Needless to say, this type of involvement was simply bound to produce a host of subsequently well-publicized problems of moral hazard.

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Suffice it to note here that in September 2000 the US Government moved to seek an indictment against Harvard University. The lawsuit called for $40 million in damages, for activities undertaken by Harvard economists on contract from USAID to provide advice for Russia’s privatization programme. The nearly 100 pages of listed accusations provide sordid reading indeed. (When this is written, that lawsuit has still not been resolved.) ‘Feeding’ the family Much as the ambition to introduce private property via mass privatization would be hijacked by prominent insiders, the preceding ambition to introduce functioning money and prices via instant liberalization would give rise to massive rent seeking, facilitated by insufficient liberalization. At a casual glance, it did appear as though sweeping liberalization had indeed been undertaken. On 2 January 1992, around 90 per cent of all consumer prices and 80 per cent of all producer prices were freed from government fixing. Behind that official image, however, there was a partly hidden reality in which prices for a number of strategically important goods remained controlled. The most important example was that of oil, which during the spring of 1992 was sold domestically at prices corresponding to merely one per cent of the world market price.39 It does not take much imagination to guess at the fortunes that could be made by those who were allowed to pocket the extra 99 per cent. According to one source, those who were allowed to capture the windfall made about $24 billion in that year alone, corresponding to about 30 per cent of Russia’s GDP.40 The reality that lies behind all the subsequent theoretical debates about the causes and impact of Russian rent seeking essentially may be seen as a reversal to the age-old practice of kormlenie, of allowing officials to ‘feed’ themselves rather than pay them wages out of the treasury. The venality and corruption that had always been associated with such practices soon enough would come to assume (or retain) pandemic proportions. Amongst the more anecdotal evidence, we may note how Boris Yeltsin chose to remunerate his personal tennis coach, Shamil Tarpishchev, by forming a national sports centre. Instead of being funded in cash, up front and visibly, the sports centre was allocated raw materials out of state inventories, which it could proceed to sell abroad. The list is said to have included, inter alia, 100,000 tons of rolled aluminum, 500 tons of titanium, 50,000 tons of fuel oil, and 400 tons of cement – all by special presidential decree. What is reflected here is a deliberate policy of rewarding favoured officials not via public salaries in cash, but via roundabout schemes whereby they would be allowed to enrich themselves at the expense of the public purse. This applied not only to oil, or to exports of other controlled commodities. It also applied to imports, where certain goods could be purchased at

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‘special’ exchange rates, which allowed for lucrative reselling on the liberalized domestic market. In a more general perspective, the growing importance of kormlenie was directly related to the failure in achieving rapid macroeconomic stabilization. With escalating inflation there also followed constant troubles in relations to the IMF, which demanded that inflationary financing via money printing be curtailed. Faced with such demands, the Russian government would resort to familiar old patterns of rule-evasion.41 Persistent deficits in the federal budget would be covered via the issuing of a plethora of money surrogates, such as the notorious kaznacheiskie obyazatelstva; via mutual offsets of taxes due for government liabilities, known as vzaimozachety; or via simple refusals to honour budget obligations, to be known as ‘aggressive sequestration’.42 All of this gave rise to the subsequently monumental problem of ‘non-payments’, or neplatezhy. In a narrow technical sense, it was true that the increasing incidence of barter and other non-monetary media of exchange pointed towards a ‘re-demonetization of the Russian economy’, and that this represented a ‘serious reversal of market reform’.43 It was also true that the mounting problem of non-payments of wages and pensions was associated with a striking persistence amongst the population at large of Soviet-era survival strategies that rested on non-monetized and non-market activities.44 In a broader perspective, however, this was not so much a problem of technical shortcomings in policy formulation and implementation. On the contrary, it may be seen as a manifestation of fundamental norms regarding the right of the ruler to reward loyal servants, at his discretion, with incomes and properties out of the state coffers. One of the most important illustrations of how kormlenie came to be used under Yeltsin may be found in the system of ‘authorized banks’ (upolnomochennye banki) that was introduced late in 1992.45 Formally, there was nothing terribly wrong with granting a select number of commercial banks the right to handle payments out of the federal budget (and out of local budgets). As it turned out, however, it was obvious that the contract also included an implicit permission to engage in purely predatory practices. One way would be that of simply ‘parking’ payments for some time, allowing the intermediary bank not only to use the amount for speculative purposes free of interest, but also to capture the windfall from rapid inflation between the time of receipt and the time of releasing the payment to its destination. Another way could be to accept a payment in official rubles, and to pass it on in the form of a veksel, which would be cashed at an outrageous rate of discount.46 By thus allowing a few select commercial banks to ‘feed themselves’ (kormyatsya) on the country’s financial system, the government made it possible for them to amass vast financial wealth. This in turn would come in handy when the time came to start operating Russia’s subsequently infamous financial markets. The kormlenie that was made available there

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would be even more fattening than that previously offered to the authorized bankers, and in the end, when the pyramid schemes collapsed, it would be the population at large that was left with the liabilities. In conclusion, we again also may bring in the West. There can be no more spectacular illustration of selective kormlenie than that of credits made available by the International Monetary Fund. These ‘credits’ would increasingly be awarded for the very simple purpose of supporting Yeltsin’s power, and they would be used accordingly. Although the IMF has persisted in vehemently denying any abuse of its funds, the Russian Central Bank itself would admit to the State Duma that it had operated a slush fund in Jersey, via which it would channel funds that really should have remained in the open.47 Exactly what happened to those funds, and who may have pocketed the gains, still remains to be found out.48 Krugovaya poruka The fourth of our five previous strands of path dependence, that of krugovaya poruka, is not quite as easy to trace into the period of ‘transition’. The demise of the Communist Party in the last years of Gorbachev’s rule had removed the basis for requiring that officials act as sureties for the loyalty of their peers. Similarly, his policy of glasnost had led to a scaling back of both the powers and the influence of the KGB, thus removing both the fears of repression and the implicit obligations to denounce.49 All of this was certainly healthy, and potentially important in breaking with a particularly nauseating part of the old path dependence. To this suspension of political poruka, we may add that the fiscal sphere had been similarly purged of joint responsibilities and of the powers that had been offered to, say, kolkhoz management in regimenting the lives of its members. This said, however, the previously mentioned staying power of Soviet-era survival strategies reflects that there was still some considerable way to go before Russian households could be modelled as the ‘economic men’ of neoclassical economic theory. Having lived in a society where the state was deeply distrusted and seen as both intrusive and oppressive, the subjects had developed skills in looking after themselves. Richard Rose and Ian McAllister refer to this survival strategy as ‘household privatization’, and they find it to be strikingly persistent: The absence of any influence by income or other variables on sustaining welfare suggests that the capacity of Russian households to get by depends on idiosyncratic characteristics of families best identified by anthropological studies rather than categorical attributes relied upon by bureaucratic officials and social scientists.50

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Catching up? The one really big difference between Yeltsin’s Russia and its long string of predecessors, lies in the near-total abandonment by the Gaidar government of all ambitions at keeping up with the other great powers and superpowers. Above we have argued that an important strand of Russian path dependence rested in the urge to maintain a foreign policy that was beyond what domestic resources could reasonably support, and in the deployment of command methods of forced mobilization to resolve that dilemma. When Yegor Gaidar launched his policy of shock therapy, its real linchpin was that of a sweeping cancellation of state orders. The expectation was that Russian industries would be forced to respond by shifting to market economy, i.e. to produce goods and services that could be sold for good money on real markets. Realizing, however, that civilian demand would be unlikely to sustain the production of weaponry, Gaidar’s policy also implied abandoning the centuries-old focus on maintaining the country’s war-fighting capabilities. Knowing, moreover, that the famed ‘Military-Industrial Complex’, the MIC, had formed the real backbone of the Soviet economy, accounting for maybe 30 per cent of recorded peacetime GDP,51 it should come as no surprise that simply giving up on sustaining it would have far-reaching consequences. Over the years 1991–98, the output of the MIC would drop by more than 80 per cent, leaving massive excess capacity.52 In the ideal world of neoclassical economics, with fungible capital, perfect information and zero transaction costs, undertaking a re-allocation of resources from military to civilian purposes should have met with little or no problems. In actual practice, however, the Russian ambitions of konversiya would run into a host of trouble, the simplest of which is fairly straightforward. There are few consumer gadgets around that look like a Typhoon class nuclear submarine or an SS-20 ballistic missile. Nor would there be much of a civilian market for SUVs looking like T-80 main battle tanks. Achieving a successful retooling would have needed much time, and even more investment. Above all, however, it would have needed a well-balanced and credible industrial policy that was designed to facilitate a massive reallocation of resources, ranging from labour and capital to research and development. As the latter would not even be seriously discussed, the outcome was fairly easy to predict. As the commanding heights of the old Soviet command economy ground to a halt, and as new industries failed to emerge in the place of the MIC, Russian GDP began plummeting. In 1992, the first enchanted year of ‘systemic change’, GDP fell by 19 per cent, and during the period leading up to the crash in 1998 it dropped by a cumulative total of about 40 per cent. Even worse, the volume of fixed capital investment dropped in 1992 by as much as 40 per cent, and for the period as a whole by more than 80 per cent, reflecting that the depression would not be a temporary one.53

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Placing the Russian predicament into an international context, we may also note that over the 1990s, the Chinese economy more than doubled, while that of South Korea grew by 60 per cent and that of the USA by 30 per cent, all according to World Bank purchasing power parity (PPP) estimates.54 The full implications for the global order of this tectonic shift in the distribution of economic power are still not clearly visible. Above all, it is not yet clear if and to what extent Russia will be able to recover. The main conclusion to be reached, against the background of what has been said above about the longer-term path dependence, must concern the true challenge that was implied by ‘systemic change’. Seeking to implement shock therapy, the Russian reformers set for themselves a far more daunting task than simply undertaking deregulation and stabilization. In order to achieve real success, defined here as sustained institutional change, they would have had to complete a broad transition from a system that had always relied on the state as an engine of growth, driven by ambitions of sustaining its war-fighting capabilities, to a system where growth instead was generated in the market place, driven by consumer preference and purchasing power. As it turned out, they would be successful in pushing the state out of its old familiar role, but not in stimulating market forces to step into the void. Despite the government’s pursuit of broadly market-friendly policies that were designed to introduce functioning money and secure property rights, economic actors would not respond with Schumpeterian creative destruction. Faced with a choice between productive and redistributive activities, Russian entrepreneurs would show an overwhelming preference for the latter. The ideologically driven assault on the state as a ‘grabbing hand’ not only deprived the Russian economy of its engine of growth. It also removed all effective restraints on predatory and rent-seeking behaviour. As Adam Smith would have gladly told anyone willing to listen, there is absolutely nothing to guarantee that simple self-interest and short-term utility maximization will lead to socially optimal or even acceptable outcomes. On the contrary, as North points out, the alternative may well be Hobbesian anarchy: ‘Indeed, a neoclassical world would be a jungle and no society would be viable.’ 55 Perhaps the Russian shock therapists would have been well advised to put aside The Wealth of Nations, and to begin reading instead what Smith had said previously, in his Theory of Moral Sentiment. With these final remarks about the importance of moral and other norms for a functioning market economy to be at all possible, we have come to the point where it remains to address the question of what came after Yeltsin. Would Vladimir Putin represent an end to the modern-day time of troubles and a new departure, towards a ‘New Russia’? Or would his regime just prove to be more of the same?

11 Muscovy reconstituted

In the aftermath of the financial meltdown, Western attitudes to Russia underwent a dramatic transformation. As noted above, investors had sustained heavy financial losses, and experts of various kinds had suffered perhaps even more damaging losses of prestige. The most immediate consequence was a veritable stampede of foreign businesses choosing to leave the country, simply because they could no longer make ends meet. The strong ruble had made foreign exports to Russia almost invulnerable to domestic competition, and the boom on the financial markets had generated great wealth for operators in that sector. With devaluation and default those boomtown days came to an abrupt halt. What was to follow was a combination of two only partly separated processes. In some quarters there was a hunt for culprits, an ambition to find someone to blame, someone who was responsible for having ‘lost Russia’. In other quarters there was growing concern that the backlash would cause the West in general and the USA in particular to abandon Russia, to decide that the country was simply not worth bothering about any more. In order to prevent such an outcome, some began producing imagery of a pending doom that was not much different from what the witch hunters conjured up. The transformation in public imagery was so swift and so profound that one might have wondered if perhaps there were two different countries out there, both of which were called ‘Russia’ but where there were no other points in common whatsoever. Paradoxically, there was amongst some Russia-watchers both before and after 1998 a distinctly ‘Russian’ tendency to go for the maximum, to conjure up either complete bliss or total doom. Had he still been alive, Yurii Lotman no doubt would have had much to say about this. In the following we shall not be much concerned with the short term. Far too much of Russia-watching in the Yeltsin and Putin years has already been focused on the short term, on fluctuations in key macroeconomic indicators and in the relative political fortunes of various ‘clans’. Our ambition will be to look beyond Putin, to focus on the question of where Russia might be headed not over the coming months but over the coming years or even decades.

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Given all that has been said above about path dependence and about path dependent responses to attempted reforms, what we are approaching here in a sense may be seen as the main theoretical synthesis of the book as a whole. With the addition of some more strands of relevant theory, we shall have the tools necessary for addressing what must be one of the most important questions of our time. Did the remarkable recovery that marked Putin’s first term really represent a fundamental break with the past, or will it turn out to have been just one more fluctuation? The main burden of addressing this question will be left for the following and final chapter of the book. Noting that the answer will have a major bearing on the future not only of Russia but by implication also of the global security system, here we shall mainly be concerned with providing background for that discussion. We shall take a look at Putin’s agenda, as it unfolded in his first term, and we shall present a number of important reasons to express concern about the sheer magnitude of the problems that will have to be somehow overcome. The main purpose of the latter exercise will be to show that the problems facing Russia’s present rulers are such that even under the best of scenarios we cannot hope that the short term will bring anything better than damage control. This is a rather important point to make, in the sense that it will show just how naı¨ ve it has been to prescribe and harbour faith in a variety of quick-fix solutions. Russia’s woes are clearly not of the kind that may be quickly fixed. We must think here instead in terms of long-term societal reconstruction, a line of thought that from a policy point of view also agrees well with the main tenets of institutional theory, as it has been presented above. Before proceeding, we shall, however, have a few brief words to say also about the drastic swings in image-making, this for the very simple reason that changing moods in the media do tend to have a substantial impact also on policy-making. When Yeltsin set about reconstituting his Muscovy, his agenda was heavily influenced by the neoliberal currents of the time, and when the torch was passed to Putin he in turn would have to deal with a backlash against the Yeltsin era. In both cases, moods of the time were blended in with path dependent expectations and mental models serving to interpret what the future might bring. In neither case would it be possible to make successful policy based on a tabula rasa.

Collapse and comeback In the years that passed between the Soviet collapse and the subsequent collapse of Yeltsin’s reforms, there was no end to the enthusiasm that surrounded Russia’s entry into the world of capitalist triumphalism. Book titles such as The Coming Russian Boom, written by prominent insiders, reflected a seemingly unshakeable conviction in core policy circles that

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shock therapy really would bring about a rapid and successful ‘transition’ to market economy.1 Based on a conviction that no more than five years would be needed, after which all aid programmes could be phased out,2 US involvement in particular would be taken to levels that were both unprecedented and ill-advised. By early 1999 the tide had turned. No doubt burned by the default, one Western banker could sum up the general mood on the financial markets in the following rather poignant way: ‘After this, Western investors would rather eat nuclear waste than buy Russian debt.’ 3 Following years of having been at the focus of constant attention from Western governments and international financial institutions, Russia suddenly was looking at a transformation to outcast status that promised to be traumatic indeed. The nature of that transformation was captured by a writer in The Economist, very much in line with the style of that important business journal. Having long aspired to become a member of the ‘G7’ club of the world’s wealthiest nations, Moscow now faced a risk of being relegated to a ‘P7’ club of financial pariahs, where it would have joined the ranks of countries like Sudan, Liberia, Congo and Somalia, ‘poor, war-ridden places, some barely existing as states’, which had borrowed money from the IMF and failed to repay their debts.4 It was not only within the business community that emotions were running high. From a more general perspective, former CIA analyst Fritz Ermarth pointed at what many feared might be the real implication of the meltdown: ‘What if the Russians simply cannot make it?’ Ermarth worried that it was the very notion of ‘civilization’ that was at stake: What if the post-communist experience of Russia means that the ‘selfevident’ truths of Jefferson and Lincoln are not for all people but only for some? The perils of nuclear and other junk emanating from Russia are frightening enough. But the grim possibility at stake in the Russian experience – that civilized self-government is not for all people – is more frightening still.5 A particularly important reason to worry about the prospects should Russia indeed fail to recover was linked to the potential implications for the global security system. As Tom Graham would underline, mounting Russian frustration over the drastic changes in the global distribution of power and influence might well prompt the men in the Kremlin to assume ‘a spoiler role in world affairs, simply as a way of demonstrating that it continued to matter, regardless of the consequences for itself ’.6 There was a clear danger here that a future Russia that was no longer able to add constructive input to international conflict resolution might instead retreat, for example, to using its role in the United Nations for purely obstructive purposes. Since there is no way in which Russia may be deprived

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of the power to veto, such a development would effectively paralyze an already seriously weakened UN. We shall have more to say about worries of this kind in a moment. Here we may simply note that in the first couple of years after the financial meltdown, it was the blame game that dominated all public discussion about Russia. Fuel for the fire certainly was not found lacking. There was the case of the Swiss company MABETEX, which was accused of having offered serious bribes to high officials in the Kremlin, perhaps even to Boris Yeltsin himself. There was the maze of scandals that had surrounded the Bank of New York, where Russian actors were accused of having laundered billions of dollars, and there was the whole issue of IMF involvement in Russian affairs, which included numerous allegations of moral hazard and of IMF funds having ended up in the wrong places. On the US side the blame game would coincide in time with the presidential election campaign in the autumn of 2000. The Russian debacle offered Republican politicians a golden opportunity to damage the electoral prospects of Vice-president Al Gore. His previous participation in the high profile Gore–Chernomyrdin commission would now be turned into a major liability. Amongst other things, it would be recalled how the Clinton administration had been embarrassed previously by leaks from the State Department and from the CIA, detailing how politically ‘incorrect’ reports from the US embassy in Moscow had been shredded,7 and how the Agency had been chastised by the White House for being overly candid about alleged corruption by Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.8 As a crowning piece of the political assault, shortly before the election an all-Republican congressional committee, chaired by Representative Christopher Cox (R.-Calif.), presented an amply documented 255-page report, to be known as the ‘Cox Report’. In its own words, it detailed ‘How the Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise and Failed the Russian People’.9 Once the election was over, it transpired just how much of the onslaught had been driven by domestic politics. As the Bush administration moved into the White House, Russia was shifted firmly onto the back burner. Media interest dropped off, and the State Department even made a point of rubbing it in. By abolishing its Russia desk, it demonstrated that Russia would henceforth be counted as just another East European country. The events of 9/11 would cause that stance to be transformed somewhat, but even then it would be a transformation in form much more than in substance. From the US point of view, Russia quite simply had ceased to be an object of major concern. Before we abandon the topic of political fallout from the crash of 1998, it should be noted that the backlash was to include serious recriminations on both sides. While outsiders were busy fielding accusations of how Russian officialdom had been corrupt and perhaps even in cahoots with representatives of the criminal underworld, Russians began countering with allegations

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of how the West in general, and Western intelligence services in particular, had conspired to finish off what remained of Soviet industrial and military capabilities. No matter what the Bush White House might have thought about the importance of Russia, it was a fact that substantial damage had been done to US–Russian relations, and that will not be easily remedied. By now, however, we have moved way outside the realm of our own story. While there can be little doubt that movers and shakers on both sides of the fence must accept their shares of the blame for some of the murkier sides of the Russian debacle, we shall leave for others to assess the full impact of such activities.10 Let us turn instead to look at the turnaround, at how Russia against all odds and expectations would abandon the company of the ‘P7’ and join instead the rather more illustrious company of the ‘G7’, which would then proceed to be renamed the ‘G8’. Did this really imply that Russia had become one of the eight leading industrial nations of the world? When Vladimir Putin’s first term in office was drawing to a close, the pendulum had indeed swung back to the previous sense of euphoria. The Russian economy had not only recovered from the crash. It had gone from basket case to star performer. Following the hyperdepression of the Yeltsin years, Putin could look back at four years of steady growth in GDP. He could point at a budget that was in steady surplus, and at an impeccable record on debt service. Above all, he could show foreign investors that the Russian stock exchange once again was the best performer in the world. By October 2003 it had gone into a sustained overdrive, scoring repeated all-time highs. From a political point of view, it also was rather startling to watch how the constant political turmoil of the Yeltsin years had been replaced by stability, and how a climate of cooperation had emerged between the legislature and the executive. Important legislation that had long been stalled by political gridlock could be railroaded through a pliant Duma. Riding high on the wave of economic success, the president also could derive satisfaction from approval rates in the 70–80 per cent interval. Given that this tremendous turnaround had taken place within the span of merely three to four years, one must seriously consider what conclusions should be drawn. Either it must have been that things had not really been all that bad in the Yeltsin years, and that Putin was able to simply reconnect with a development that was fundamentally sound. Or we must conclude that Putin’s recorded successes were largely ephemeral, and that the underlying process remained fundamentally unsound. One really cannot have it both ways. Before we proceed to address that question, it might be amusing here to make a very brief digression concerning the choice of Yeltsin’s successor. Given our emphasis on Muscovy as a frame of reference, it was rather striking to note how Putin’s appointment brought back memories of how the Muscovite autocracy was reconstituted towards the end of the real ‘time of

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troubles’. Then, as would be the case in the final years of the Yeltsin troubles, there had also been a controversy-ridden search for a suitable candidate. The Yeltsin entourage certainly did not go all the way to considering foreign appointees, but they did go through a lot of trouble. Most importantly, once Putin had been selected, however that decision was made, Russia was left with a leader that the warring clans believed they would be able to control. Young Mikhail Romanov had been selected from one of the minor families, and young Vladimir Putin was selected from the backbenches of the KGB. One of the most important questions that would come to mark Russian politics in the first years after Yeltsin’s retirement unsurprisingly would be to what extent Putin really was in the grips of various clans. Amusing parallels aside, let us return now to the pivotal question of whether or not the Putin recovery will turn out to have been ephemeral. It does not take much imagination to realize that this is a perspective of more than idle academic importance. The damage that was done to the Russian economy and to Russian society in the Soviet era was bad enough, and it was further compounded by the predatory policies of the Yeltsin era.11 If the recovery that was associated with Putin’s first term does indeed turn out to have been a short-lived phenomenon, and the Russian economy resumes its slide into growing backwardness and obsolescence, then we must anticipate some very serious consequences indeed. Before proceeding to look at what Putin set out to achieve, we shall take a few moments here to look at some of the main causes for such concern, and to underscore yet again that we must be wary of thinking in terms of quick-fix solutions.

Causes for concern Let us assume that we all share a desire for Russia to develop in the direction of a stable, democratic and prosperous society, with an accountable leadership that is capable of behaving in international affairs with foresight and responsibility. The ‘causes for concern’ that will be listed in the following should be understood not as idle predictions of doom and gloom but rather as factors that may make it difficult to attain those goals, and in some cases perhaps even present risks for movement in opposite directions. For the sake of clarity, we shall divide the account into what may be referred to as the hardware, the software, and the security dimensions of Russia’s process of post-Soviet adjustment. The first will capture the ability of the economy to provide welfare and to be integrated into the world economy. The second relates to the development of human capital, understood here both from the welfare point of view and as a constraint on growth prospects. The third is the dimension of global security, in a time without a Soviet superpower.

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The hardware If we begin with the prospects for a sustainable long-term recovery of the Russian economy, we at once move into a dimension where history matters in the crudest possible sense. No matter what one may think about the possibilities of starting a process of policy formulation with a tabula rasa, it will not be possible to assume out of existence such restrictions that reside in available infrastructure and production facilities. In the Russian case, these restrictions are of some considerable magnitude. The capital stock that was left behind by the Soviet Union was on the whole decrepit and the embodied technology of ancient vintage. Much of the explanation may be related to the growth strategy that was pursued in the Soviet period. While it was associated with very high levels of capital accumulation, it also resulted in a great deal of what we have referred to in the above as ‘mis-industrialization’. The apparent paradox that rested in being able to send men into orbit around the earth whilst being unable to produce decent consumer goods really was no paradox at all. The shoddy quality of civilian production was directly related to the path dependent preference for mobilization of resources to support the country’s war-fighting capabilities. More specifically, this strategy resulted in the formation of a capital stock that was able to produce top-notch military hardware, at the cost of severely downgrading the quality of its civilian components. Putting it simply, the non-military part of Soviet manufacturing industry was not designed to produce goods that could be sold for real money on real markets. Add to this that the hyperdepression of the Yeltsin era in turn led to a drop in fixed capital investment by about four-fifths, and the outcome will have to be rather sordid. At the outset of Putin’s economic recovery, Russian production potentials not only embodied obsolete technology. The actual production plants also were in a rather sorry state of disrepair. The numbers are telling. During the 1990s, the average age of Russian capital stock increased from 10.8 to 17.9 years, or by close to one year per annum, reflecting the almost complete absence of new investment. More specifically, the share of the Russian capital stock that was less than five years old, and could thus be considered modern, dropped from 29.4 to a mere 3.9 per cent, while that being older than 20 years and thus clearly obsolete increased from 15.0 to 34.9 per cent.12 By the time Putin took over power, the average age of Russian plant and equipment was roughly three times higher than the average for the countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). As a result of the depressed economic situation, about half of all available capacity was idle, and of the latter about two-thirds was estimated to have been degraded beyond the point of no return.13 Although the first term of the Putin presidency did bring substantial increases in fixed capital investment, it must be noted that such increases

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took place from a very low level, and that the bulk of new investment was aimed at modernizing the country’s energy complex. Even if the increase in investment intensity, defined as fixed capital investment in relation to GDP, did increase during Putin’s first term, it still remained way too low to have any substantial impact, at least outside the energy complex.14 The conclusion will have to be that unless there is a substantial and sustainable increase in capital formation it is inevitable that increasing sections of an already decrepit capital stock will sink into irrevocable obsolescence. In some cases we may perhaps even anticipate actual physical collapse. The seriously warped nature of investment patterns during the first years of the recovery also provided a worrisome indicator about possible future outcomes. The danger was that a continued preference for investment in the energy complex would lead to the emergence of a distinctly dual economy. On one side there would be a powerful sector of energy and other raw materials exports. On the other we would find an equally powerful sector of luxury construction and service provision that absorbs the export revenues. The middle ground of manufacturing would be reduced to scorched earth. Since it is precisely that middle ground which generates the institutions of a functioning market economy, we shall have reason to return to this problem in the following chapter. The legacy from the past, however, did not relate to production facilities alone. Equally or perhaps even more worrisome was the accelerated degradation of the country’s physical infrastructure. Vital structures such as power grid, pipeline network and rail systems were all in need of serious investment.15 Once we turn to look at the longer-term prospects for a Russian economic recovery, this dimension will simply have to be included. No matter how much private oil companies invest in drilling and in upgrading existing fields, if the pipeline grid collapses so will the value of their investments. The needs on this count are simply staggering. According to calculations by former economics minister Yevgenii Yasin, restructuring and modernizing Russia’s infrastructure would require investment of about $2.5 trillion over the coming 20 to 25 years, a quarter of which would have to come from abroad.16 Although others have come up with lesser needs, we are still talking of numbers that are clearly beyond reach, even under the most optimistic of scenarios. As a simple illustration, we may note that in the record year 2000 Russia had a trade surplus of $61 billion, or more than twice the size of the federal budget for that year. The investment needs that are implied by Yasin come to almost $100 billion annually, over a couple of decades and for infrastructure alone. While experts squabble over exactly how many tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars will be needed in order to restore reasonable quality of service, there can be little doubt that over the near future little more than damage limitation can be realistically achieved.

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The software Turning now to the ‘software’ dimension of the recovery, we may begin by noting that the ongoing degradation of Russian human capital has been manifested in a whole range of different areas, from brain drain to massive impoverishment and a full-scale public health disaster. All of these point at implications for the longer term that will not prove easy to deal with. If we begin with the question of brain drain, we may first note how serious problems of funding in the Yeltsin era served to denude the country’s traditionally well-staffed facilities for research and higher education.17 This problem may then be compounded by the warped nature of the domestic labour market. We may speak here of an internal brain drain, whereby talented young people opt out of higher education and move into highly paid jobs of dubious productivity, ranging from bodyguards and casino staffers to unofficial taxi drivers and shuttle traders – not to mention the lure of prostitution, trafficking and rackets of various forms. The longerterm costs of this process will be measured not only in lost output, but even more so in an adverse transformation of basic norms and values. Looking at future growth prospects we also must take into account the conditions of poverty and squalor under which tens of millions of Russians seek to make a living. It is a rather well-established fact in economics that increasing inequality will hamper growth,18 and there is plenty of empirical evidence to show that Russian developments in the post-Soviet era have been rather extreme.19 As Jacques Sapir has underlined, the ‘level of income inequality is not a moral issue but is instead a concern for the nation’s development dynamics’.20 Exactly how many Russians have been reduced to living at or below the poverty line is a matter of some debate, depending on definitions and on the continuous adjustment for inflation. In the 1990s, the number tended to be in the vicinity of 40–45 million, or about 30 per cent of the population.21 Without otherwise moralizing about the Kremlin’s striking callousness with regard to the suffering of its own people, it bears noting that these are the real losers, apparently deemed by the Kremlin to be expendable. One year into the recovery, Sapir still placed Russia in the dismal company of countries like Colombia, Mexico, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, all of which ‘are experiencing social unrest or even civil war’.22 Although the post-crash recovery did lead to rising wages and pensions, it also produced increasing inequality. Summing up the results of four years of economic growth, Stanislav Menshikov would conclude that income inequality had ‘broken all records’.23 By far the most sombre component of the ‘software’ dimension is that which relates to the general health and demographic vitality of the Russian population. When Boris Yeltsin left the Kremlin, the natural population growth was negative to the tune of nearly 900,000 per year, representing an annual drop in population by about 0.6 per cent.24

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Demographic forecasts, moreover, indicate that in the period leading up to 2050 the Russian population may drop to between 70 and 110 million. Noting that the 1989 census came up with a figure of 147 million for the Russian republic, the worst-case scenario for 2050 would represent more than a halving of the population.25 By way of comparison, it may be noted that the US Bureau of the Census predicts a rise in the US population from today’s 228 million to about 400 million by 2050.26 Based on trends in technological developments, moreover, those 400 million Americans in all likelihood also will be on average more productive than will the 100 million Russians. The gravity of the matter may be even further enhanced by adding that the outcome not only will be a reduction in population, which is a problem that affects most of Europe. Far more serious is the fact that we may also predict an increasingly warped population pyramid. There will be relatively fewer children, fewer able-bodied males and more old women. In any normal and stable society that would represent a serious problem. In Russia, given the high incidence of hard manual labour, it will be even more so. Against this grim background, it is hardly surprising that President Putin found reason, in his July 2000 address to the Federal Assembly, to note that ‘if the present trend continues, the survival of the nation will be threatened. We are faced by the real threat of becoming an enfeebled nation. Today, the demographic situation is the most worrisome.’ 27 Rounding off this account of compounded damage to the Russian economy and to Russian society at large, we may also note the impact on public health that must follow from a further crumbling of the ‘social infrastructure’.28 Here we will find not only the poor quality of elementary health care, and of clearly disastrous shortcomings of care in maternity wards, but also more mundane things like poor upkeep and repair of central heating systems. In a cold climate, even brief periods of insufficient heating of circulated water will cause poorly insulated pipes above ground to freeze and burst. There is already plenty of evidence regarding the outcome on the latter count. People living in cold and remote areas are subjected to protracted periods of very low indoor temperatures. Adding that many also suffer from malnutrition, the combined effect will be a serious degradation of physical health standards, which will aggravate even further an already serious crisis in public health.29 All in all, while there may be some difference of opinion as to how much of this has been caused by the ‘reforms’ of the Yeltsin era,30 no one can seriously deny that the picture as such is indeed grim. It thus becomes imperative for the Russian government to move from alarmist words to remedial action, and to do so without further delay and obfuscation. Again, however, the magnitude of the problems is such that over the short to medium term even under the best of scenarios little more than damage control may be realistically expected.

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Global security Turning now to the international dimension of Russia’s crisis, we must begin by distinguishing between facts and speculation. The facts of the matter relate to the global reconfiguration of economic power that took place in the 1990s. What was referred to in the previous chapter as ‘tectonic shifts’ consisted of two separate processes. One was the implosion of the Soviet Union and the subsequent Russian hyperdepression. The other was the parallel process of high growth not only in the USA, but even more so in China. The combined outcome was a fundamental restructuring of the global security architecture. Where the Cold War had been dominated by two and a half superpowers, engaged in triangular power games, the new millennium heralded an age of unipolarity. Boosted by its advances in information technology and in the associated ‘revolution in military affairs’, the USA had forged so far ahead of its former rivals that its lead seemed quite unassailable. From the Russian point of view, this transformation was made even worse by the fact that its old position as senior partner to the Chinese had been reversed. While Russian GDP had been roughly cut in half, the Chinese economy had more than doubled.31 Accepting Steven Rosefielde’s argument, that all considerations of security policy must depart from changes in the configuration of economic power, what we have here are the makings of potentially serious confrontations ahead.32 More specifically, we must anticipate that Russia’s diminished capabilities will have a great deal of impact on the position and behaviour of other strategic players. An important arena where this transformation may be played out is in the Far Eastern region. Backed by the strong performance of its economy, the Chinese military establishment was able during the 1990s to emerge as a serious player on the global security arena. Via a vigorous arms trade with Russia, it added top of the line Russian conventional weapons systems to its inventories, and via presumed industrial espionage on US capabilities it developed a new generation of vastly improved intercontinental ballistic missiles. As Rosefielde puts it, ‘Chinese military-industrial advances haven’t been lost on Kremlin security professionals. They know that Beijing is testing a new series of vastly improved intercontinental ballistic missiles, and is on the cusp of crossing the threshold to high tech self-sufficiency.’ 33 If the Sino-Russian gap in economic performance and military capability continues to widen, it can hardly fail to have serious consequences for the region as a whole. Rosefielde warns about its destabilizing influence: ‘Absent continuously improving Russian resource terms of trade and radical reform, its tendency to demobilize will hand China the economic and military lead in the decades immediately ahead, threatening the stability of Northeast Asia.’ 34 Graham agrees that a ‘collapse of Russia’s power in its Far East would likely spark a destabilizing contest for that region’s rich resources

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among China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States’.35 Wayne Merry is even more to the point when he states that ‘China is replacing Russia as the linchpin of Asia’, and concludes that the USA ‘must take into account this momentous transformation in Asian affairs’.36 What the actual outcome will be in large measure has to depend on how the men in the Kremlin choose to deal with their superpower hangover. If they do decide to gracefully accept degradation to status of no more than a regional great power, then the current crisis will remain a largely Russian problem. If they do not, then there will be two rather troublesome scenarios to consider. On the one hand we have what Graham referred to above as the ‘spoiler role’. There are a number of good reasons to worry about the prospects for the global security system of a Russia that continues to demand being treated as a great power, with global reach and aspirations, but is no longer able to meet the obligations that come with such status. As Graham underlines, Russia’s slide in power and influence is already well under way: ‘With the exception of the states of the former Soviet Union, few countries now treat Russia with the respect that they once reserved for the Soviet Union.’ 37 More specifically, Russian economic weakness has been manifested in reduced influence over matters like Kosovo, Iraq, and the Middle East, where the USA has emerged as the sole remaining superpower. Any further decline in such influence may prove hard indeed to handle. The other scenario is one where it is decided that Russia must recapture its former superpower role. A decision by Russia to remilitarize its economy would be dangerous in the sense that it might trigger a region-wide arms race, which in turn would have to involve also the USA. The essence of the problem, as Rosefielde frames it, lies in how members of the General Staff perceive their options: The leadership and the Genshtab could lose sight of Russia’s long term systemic vulnerabilities, adopting policies with unintended consequences. Instead of using arms control treaties to constrain Chinese capabilities, Russia, by rearming to Soviet levels, could precipitate an arms race Russia is bound to lose and encourage aggressive engagement that puts the world at risk in the period 2010–2025, without solving its long term security problem thereafter.38 The reason why such a development would be fraught with even greater dangers than the arms race that marked the Cold War in turn lies in the fact that China may be expected to play a rather different strategy than did the USA: ‘Whereas the United States winked at Soviet ballistic missile reloads, and a multitude of other treaty violations, Beijing could respond tit for tat drawing India, Pakistan and the United States into the steeple chase.’

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It should be noted that we are still concerned here with the political dimension of choice by the Russian leadership. Whether and to what extent it actually would be technically possible for Russia to venture down the road of remilitarization is an altogether different matter, which we shall have to leave for the following chapter. What makes the two scenarios just referred to so analytically important is that they would agree so well with our main theme of path-dependent responses to systemic shocks. For example, if Russia is indeed to emerge on the global arena as a responsible player, and to avoid assuming the ‘spoiler role’, it follows that the men in the Kremlin must break with an important dimension of their legacy from the past, namely the deeply ingrained urge to pursue a foreign policy that the country’s resources cannot sustain. If Moscow does persist in attempting to play a global role that is overly ambitious relative to its capabilities, that choice not only will have a serious impact on the country’s economy. It also will produce adverse political fallout. Similarly, if Russia is to avoid falling into the trap of remilitarization a choice must be made to break away fundamentally from the Soviet legacy of ‘structural militarization’. That in turn implies that a switch must be made from the centuries-old strategy of undertaking forced mobilization of resources in order to strengthen the country’s war-fighting capabilities. Instead, a growth strategy must be formulated that rests on consumer sovereignty and enforceable rights to private property. The latter in particular indicates where the real core of Russia’s problems lies, namely in the need to finally and conclusively extricate the country from centuries of path dependent autocratic government, and to build instead an order that substitutes the rule of law for the rule of men. It is only by making a credible commitment to upholding individual rights in a broad sense that the Russian government may succeed in breaking with the legacy of personalization of both power and economic relations. There is certainly nothing to say that any of these interrelated tasks is intrinsically impossible, but neither should they be viewed as matters of simple fine-tuning, amenable to quick-fix solutions. If the ‘truths of Jefferson and Lincoln’ are finally to become valid also for Russia, it follows that the country’s current leadership must engage in some real soul searching. It will not be sufficient for Putin and his men to rid themselves of superpower hangover and to readjust the country’s stance in foreign and security policy to what can be reasonably and responsibly sustained. Based on what has been said in preceding chapters, a successful restructuring of the economy and a transformation of the predatory strategies of its business elites can be achieved if and only if the government assumes a more active and constructive role in upholding the rule of law. These matters will make up the core of our discussion in the following chapter. Here we shall turn to look at what Putin set out to achieve, in the first term of his presidency.

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Putin’s agenda In previous chapters we have placed much emphasis on the historical role of Russian autocracy. We have seen it emerge as a rational solution to highly specific conditions facing the early Muscovite rulers. We have seen it be transformed over time into a major impediment to the introduction of market-friendly economic institutions, and we have argued that perhaps the most important single task facing any Russian reformer is that of achieving accountability in government. It is against precisely this background that we must view Putin’s first term. It is certainly true that a new sense of political stability and a more businesslike atmosphere came to mark relations between the Kremlin and the Duma. It is also true that this was conducive to the passing of much-needed legislation on, say, tax and land reform. By far the most important question to be asked, however, concerns whether these positive short-term developments may also be construed as a new departure, as indications of a fundamental break with the path-dependent mode of autocratic government. In order to set the stage for a more careful consideration of this matter, we shall proceed here to look briefly at five essential dimensions of Putin’s agenda. A punitive agenda The first dimension concerns the strongly punitive nature of the rhetoric, and indeed also of the initial actions of the new man in the Kremlin. Behind his oft-cited proclamation of a need to establish a ‘dictatorship of the law’ there lurked a distinct ambition to rehabilitate the old KGB and to re-empower its domestic successor, the Federal Security Service (FSB). Knowing the president’s own professional background, and the general ethics and morals that marked his previous place of employment, it was not really surprising that human rights advocates like Yelena Bonner found reasons to express open warnings of a pending Russian police state.39 Particular cause for concern could be derived from the fact that throughout Russian (and Soviet) history the ‘organs’ in their various shapes and forms had always assumed a prominent place, and constituted perhaps the most efficient part of government. Fears that a return to such conditions might be on the cards were fuelled early on, by a number of symbolic statements from Putin to the effect that the old KGB had no reason whatsoever to regret or apologize for its past actions.40 Equally alarming was the fact that Putin’s early actions as president were clearly aimed at strengthening the organizational role of the FSB. His appointment policy in particular brought increasing numbers of retired KGB/FSB generals to prominent positions not only within central government, but also as regional governors and as board members in the biggest monopolies. One observer even went so far as to portray the FSB as a corporate political party in the making.41

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Viewed against this background, there were good reasons to express concern when the FSB was granted formal rights to investigate anonymous tips, the dreaded anonimiki that had formed such an integral part of Stalinist repression. As previously mentioned, it was considered a major step forward when Mikhail Gorbachev put an end to this practice, back in 1988. In consequence thereof, it must be considered an even more important step in regress when Putin had it restored, early in 2001.42 Perhaps most importantly, the reintroduction of anonymous tips risks bringing back all the problems of political poruka, and of the poisoning of social relations that must follow from the practice of anonymous denunciations. At the very least, it will not be conducive to the building of trust in individuals, or indeed in government agencies, that are outside the extended network of friends. By far the most troublesome dimension of Putin’s punitive agenda was his launching of the second war in Chechnya.43 Gross violations both of human rights and of international treaties to which Russia is committed have been amply documented in numerous reports by reputable organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Doctors without Borders.44 The conduct of the Russian armed forces in Chechnya has also been subjected to harsh criticism by Russian human rights advocates like Sergei Kovalev, who served briefly as human rights commissioner under Yeltsin.45 In stark contrast to Yeltsin’s war, however, this time round the reactions from foreign governments were muffled at best, and from the Russian public at large the proclaimed cause of dealing once and for all with the Chechens met with broad support. Although such support tended to weaken with the increasing stream of Russian casualties,46 there would be nothing resembling the broad mobilization of discontent that faced the Yeltsin regime. The near-total absence of serious political criticism against Putin’s war in Chechnya also could be seen as a reflection of the broad successes that were scored in the second dimension of his political programme, that of achieving an emasculation of all effective political opposition in the Duma. The party of power All new administrations will have their own slogans, and so it was with that of Putin. His preference was for a strengthening of the ‘power vertical’, the vertikal vlasti. The image it conjured up was one of a strong executive, which functions according to military principles of command and control. Power should flow along clearly defined paths that originate in the Kremlin and that extend across all sectors and all regions of the country and its economy. In a limited sense, this could be seen as an improvement over the agenda of the previous administration. Where Yeltsin had ruled in a rather unpredictable manner, lashing out ad hoc at problems that emerged to annoy him,

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Putin sought to introduce an element of order and predictability. Compared to the ideal of a functioning market economy, however, unaccountable order that is imposed from above is far from the same as genuine credibility and a lengthening of the time horizon for productive investment. The Kremlin’s ambition to create a ‘party of power’ became obvious soon after Putin’s appointment as prime minister, in August 1999.47 Known alternatively as ‘Unity’ or as ‘The Bear’ (Yedinstvo/Medved ), this new creation would surge ahead in the polls, and its astounding success in the December Duma elections would be a major triumph for the Kremlin spin-doctors. Less than six months after its creation, and before it had even held its first party conference, ‘Unity’ came to within a percentage point of actually beating the Communists. In its campaign to promote the party of power, the Kremlin launched a particularly vicious assault on its main rival, the ‘Fatherland/All Russia’ party that was associated with political heavyweights like Moscow mayor Yurii Luzhkov and former prime minister Yevgenii Primakov. Via thinly veiled threats of legal prosecution, and an effective use of compromising materials, the famed kompromat, it not only demolished any hopes of success for that party in the Duma election. It also effectively dissuaded both Luzhkov and Primakov from running against Putin in the subsequent presidential election. Strengthened by the performance of ‘Unity’ and by his own appointment as acting president, Putin opened the new political season by striking a bargain with the Communists in the Duma. While this move did cause some initial resentment from some of the non-Communist parties, it would soon transpire that a whole new set of rules of the game was being laid down. Parties that might have provided effective political opposition would find it to be in their own best interests to join with the party of power in a broad coalition of support for the Kremlin. Summing up developments in Russia’s ‘managed democracy’ during 2002, Peter Rutland noted that the State Duma was effectively controlled by a propresidential ‘coalition of four’, which together held 235 of the 450 seats.48 Following this merger of the main non-Communist parties into one bloc, it would be up to an increasingly fatigued and irrelevant Communist opposition to join hands with the remaining liberal and right forces in maintaining the fiction of pluralism and democracy. The Duma elections in December 2003 served to complete the Kremlin’s ambitions of reducing the legislature to an obedient rubber stamp. As Rutland frankly notes, this was perhaps the most important parliamentary elections of the past decade: ‘Ironically, the elections mattered because they signalled the demise of competitive democracy in Russia. The election shattered the tripartite structure of Russia’s political system (liberals, communists and traditionalists) that had arisen during Boris Yeltsin years.’ 49 Where the elections in 1999 had been a rather messy affair, resulting in an assembly that still needed considerable ‘managing’, this time round the ‘party

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of power’ won a landslide victory. Renamed ‘One Russia’ (Yedinaya Rossiya), it secured the qualified majority of seats needed to change the constitution at will (winning 304 out of 450 seats). The Communist Party won no more than 52 seats, and both Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces failed to clear the five per cent hurdle. Rounding off the picture, two nationalist parties – ‘Motherland’ (Rodina) and the ‘Liberal Democratic Party’ each won 36 seats. The main conclusion to be drawn from these events is a rather simple one. It is evident that the Kremlin was focused not on creating a working forum for political dialogue, but merely on putting into place a set of Soviet-style ‘transmission belts’ for the implementation of its policies: ‘The December 2003 elections essentially completed the reconstruction of an authoritarian political system in Russia. Elections play a part in this system, but only as a vehicle for bolstering the legitimacy of the state.’ 50 From our longer-term perspective, one might even argue that Putin’s introduction of the ‘power vertical’ was not much different from the oneway communication that was once introduced by Peter the Great, when he began talking of the bien public. Throughout, the focus has been on commands from above with little or no room for participation from below. In a superficial sense, Putin surely comes across as being much different from his predecessor. Under Yeltsin, the Kremlin had imposed its will in a haphazard and unsophisticated fashion. As Rutland once put it, ‘Yeltsin does not seek a dialogue with society: he seeks to browbeat it into compliance with his own populist rhetoric.’ 51 Under Putin, the ambition would be for greater predictability but it would remain based on demanding obedience from below. The regional barons Where both the punitive agenda and the taming of the Duma were measures designed to strengthen the Kremlin’s power and influence in a more general sense, the third dimension of Putin’s programme was more specifically targeted, seeking to rein in the powers of the country’s increasingly independent and wilful regional barons. In further contrast, it also would be more directly based on formal legislation. Immediately following his inauguration as president, Putin initiated a series of bills that were railroaded through a pliant Duma. The first was a projection of the punitive agenda, calling for a division of the country into seven ‘federal districts’ the boundaries of which largely and ominously coincided with those of the existing military districts. Out of the seven men (no women here) who were appointed by the Kremlin as federal prefects, five came from various security services (two from the KGB, two from the regular military and one from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the MVD). All were given seats on the Security Council, and in good Russian tradition all are to report directly to the head of the presidential administration.

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A second bill was introduced to revamp the upper house of Federal Assembly, the Federation Council. Created under Yeltsin, that body was composed of two representatives from each of the 89 federation subjects (presidents or governors, together with the heads of the local legislatures). By calling for these ex officio representatives to be replaced by appointed deputies, the bill not only deprived the regional leaders of an important voice in federal legislation. Perhaps even more importantly, it also deprived them of immunity from prosecution. In a set of less effective bills, the president also was given powers to dismiss regional leaders and to disband regional legislatures. There was a call for harmonization of regional and republican laws and constitutions with their federal counterparts, and for a reform of the tax system that was designed to strengthen the federal position. On neither count, however, would there be much concrete result. On the contrary, the picture that emerged was one of a continued primacy for the rule of men over the rule of law. Here, moreover, it would be men on lower levels ruling with little or no regard for legislation from above. Most significantly, despite all the ominous noise that surrounded the appointments of the federal prefects, when faced with the realities of daily power plays in their respective regions they would come up rather short. The more powerful amongst the regional barons would either ignore or simply co-opt the Kremlin’s appointees. As a case in point, Daniel Treisman advances the president of Tatarstan, Mintimer Shaimiev, who allegedly treated Putin’s representative as he would a waiter: ‘First he listens attentively, then he orders his favorite dish.’ 52 Similarly, governors and presidents would respond to the bill on harmonization of laws by happily yielding up such laws that they could well do without, whilst holding on to and even adding laws that support their own positions. By December 2001, ‘after 18 month of work, the Kremlin had to admit that 72 per cent of Bashkortostan’s laws still violated federal ones – even more than had been the case at the start of the process. Both Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, meanwhile, have refused to withdraw their controversial claims to sovereignty.’ 53 While these latter observations did serve to play down the initial fears of a pending Russian police state, or of an otherwise authoritarian form of rule by an omnipotent Kremlin, they could not be construed as evidence of a contrary development indicating that there is good hope for Russian democracy, or indeed for the rule of law.54 It is important that both the punitive agenda and the taming of the Duma may be seen as the very opposite to a true dialogue with society, or of a credible commitment to a Lockean social contract. If we accept that shared mental models form a sine qua non for success in the latter respects, it must follow that Putin was not even trying to generate progress. On the contrary, he remained content with playing opaque and path dependent games of power and influence to which the population at large would not be invited.

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Control over the media The latter point brings us to the fourth and thus far perhaps also the most ominous dimension of Putin’s strivings to strengthen the ‘power vertical’, namely his ambition to extend control over the media, particularly over central television. Exactly what has been going on here has been difficult to tell, for the very simple reason that the campaign against the media also constituted a campaign against two of the Putin Kremlin’s least favoured oligarchs, Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, both of whom had major media holdings. The campaign against Gusinsky began already in the summer of 1999, largely due to differences over the choice of successor to Yeltsin. Gusinsky responded by allowing his media outlets, chiefly the private NTV television network but also the daily Segodnya and the weekly Itogi, both influential liberal publications, to launch a campaign of criticism against the war in Chechnya, and to promote Putin rivals Luzhkov and Primakov. The peak of the process was marked only days after Putin’s presidential inauguration, when the headquarters of Gusinsky’s media empire was raided by heavily armed tax police. Following a brief period of standoff, Gusinsky was arrested and placed in prison for a couple of days, after which he chose to emigrate and to give up his media holdings. Meanwhile, Berezovsky was similarly driven by threats of prosecution and imprisonment to abandon his stake in the ORT central state television network, and in the end also to choose voluntary exile. He would subsequently claim that Putin had given him a choice of being a ‘political prisoner or a political e´migre´’.55 While the Kremlin’s campaigns to drive Gusinsky and Berezovsky out of politics, and eventually also out of Russia, did meet with a great deal of sympathy from a variety of quarters, they also included less palatable attacks on the editorial staffs of the respective media holdings. The final round in the battle over NTV was played out at Easter time 2001. Following an announcement by Gazprom that it had taken over the company and appointed a new board of directors, journalists staged a series of protests that ended with an ultimatum. Those who refused to sign a declaration of loyalty to the new management would be let go. As a result, most of the station’s prominent newspeople left for TV6, a local Moscow cable network that would then in its turn attract the anger of the Kremlin. While the affairs that surrounded the attacks on NTV and TV6 may not have been entirely illegal, they did suggest that freedom of speech in Russia was under serious threat. The involvement of notorious oligarchs, whose standing in the eyes of the general population was very low, was unfortunate in the sense that it overshadowed the more ominous dimension of increasing intimidation of truly independent investigative journalism. As evidenced by the heroic efforts of journalists like Andrei Babitsky and Anna Politkovskaya, any form of non-sanctioned coverage of the conduct of

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the armed forces in Chechnya rapidly became anathema.56 The same would come to be the case with coverage of corruption, albeit more gradually so. By 2002, Treisman could note that the ‘administration’s intimidation of the press is also taking its toll: reports in the mass media of high-level corruption are now extremely rare’.57 In the words of one Duma member, moreover, in Russia of today ‘there is freedom of speech, but not in prime time’.58 While the Kremlin’s media policy did not serve to completely suppress the freedom of speech, which was probably not deemed necessary anyway, it again is warranted to say that it has been moving in the opposite direction to that needed for a constructive dialogue with society. The strikingly high approval rates that President Putin has been enjoying for himself certainly should not be taken as a sign that the Russian population at large also approves of the way in which the country is being run. In good old Russian tradition, the tsar is loved while his officials are hated. Nothing really new in that. Eradicating the oligarchs? The fifth and final dimension of Putin’s opening programme, that of seeking to rein in the power of the previously notorious ‘oligarchs’, also was the one that would remain the most inconclusive. The opening rhetoric certainly was powerful enough. Towards the end of his campaign for the presidency, Putin served warning that all businessmen would be kept ‘at equal distance’ from the Kremlin, and that the ‘oligarchs’ in particular would be eradicated ‘as a class’. Given that Stalin had once used the latter phrase with respect to the ill-fated kulaks, there probably were some initial fears amongst the ‘magnificent seven’ as to their own personal future prospects. As subsequent events would show, however, the bark (at first) was worse than the bite. While Gusinsky and Berezovsky would indeed be eliminated from the ‘class’, its remaining members – and a few new additions – would be allowed to continue enriching themselves. The Kremlin did put an end to open boasts about appointing presidents at will, or of controlling half of the Russian economy, but that was hardly the same as breaking the previous oligarchic stranglehold over Russian politics or indeed over the Russian economy. What was and still remains at stake is something vastly more important than a simple suppression of open interference in politics, and of open criticism of the Kremlin. The real challenge to Putin was that of breaking up the whole complex of relations that had intertwined the members of the Yeltsinera ‘family’, and on this count it was doubtful in the extreme if it was possible during Putin’s first term to speak of any progress at all.59 On the contrary, in good keeping with path dependent tradition, President Putin continued to function as an arbiter between warring clans. The evolution of relations between the state and the business elites had two interrelated dimensions. One was the continued use by the Kremlin of the law

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as an instrument of power, to be used selectively against political opponents. As both oligarchs and other major players in the game would come to realize, the heavily armed tax police would not be an entirely impartial enforcer of the country’s tax codes. It was also symptomatic that in its battles for influence over NTV and ORT, the Kremlin went the roundabout way of having Gazprom and Lukoil take charge by calling in bad debts. The impact on any potential ambitions of moving towards transparency and the rule of law should be rather obvious. The other side of the coin had the business elites in their turn using similar types of means against each other. An important legacy from the Yeltsin years rested in what we may refer to as a simultaneous privatization and decentralization of the state’s traditional monopoly on the use of force. Lethal violence and threats thereof, together with the infamous surveillance activities of the old KGB, had quite simply entered into the business world as normal components of daily life. Putin would show little if any interest in curbing such activities. It is presently far from clear that this unfortunate situation can be rectified in a way that is consistent with a simultaneous building of democratic institutions.60 In a poignant comment, a prominent Russian political analyst agreed with Peter Reddaway that events under Putin actually represented deterioration rather than improvement: ‘In reality, the oligarchs and the major companies hire the armed and judicial organs of the state, in order to resolve their business problems.’ As a result, ‘In the final analysis, the structure of political power and the economy that took shape in the last years of Yeltsin’s presidency has not undergone any serious changes’.61 Putin’s role as arbiter between warring clans was clearly demonstrated already in the summer of 2000, at a meeting between the president and a group of prominent business leaders. The outcome of that meeting was a tacit contract of sorts. While Putin did give his assurance that there would be no general review of the outcomes of the privatization process, he did not rule out that specific cases might have to be looked into. The message was clear. Those who accepted to fall into line, and to stay out of politics, would be allowed to keep the proceeds of their previous predatory activities. Others would have to take their chances. In the following years, attention would increasingly be aimed at Mikhail Khodorkovsky. As CEO of Yukos, one of Russia’s largest and by far the most successful oil company, he pushed hard not only for a revitalization of the Russian oil industry but also for the introduction of transparency and accountability in Russian business circles. His rewards were lavish. Yukos stock went ballistic and in the 2003 edition of its list of billionaires in the world, Forbes Magazine ranked Khodorkovsky as number 26, with a private fortune of $8 billion. The mounting power of the energy complex, and of its young executives, was to prove something of a mixed blessing. While it did generate massive revenues for the Russian state, it also had two ambiguous consequences.

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One was that it gave rise to growing friction in relations to the Kremlin, and the other that it attracted a great deal of interest from foreign oil companies. The common denominator was that of shifting power both over domestic and foreign policy into the hands of privatized Russian oil companies. Growing links with foreign oil majors would make them harder to control, and their investment resources would give them control over pipeline diplomacy. The first big deal was struck by BP in February 2002. Given that BP had previously been rather ill treated by the very same partner it now decided to team up with, some regarded this as a risky move.62 The money that was involved, however, was so big that others simply had to follow. What really triggered the showdown in the summer and autumn of 2003 was the move by ExxonMobile, announcing that it was planning to put up maybe $25 billion for a 40 per cent stake in the newly merged YukosSibneft. The Kremlin’s attack on Yukos, and on Khodorkovsky, was begun on 2 July, when Platon Lebedev, a major shareholder in Yukos, was arrested and taken to the KGB’s infamous Lefortovo prison. The initial market reaction was highly negative, with Yukos stock dropping 20 per cent. As there were no further events, however, the conflict was being viewed as no more than a part of the upcoming election season. The real watershed came on 25 October, when Khodorkovsky himself was arrested. In the following months it became increasingly clear that the Kremlin was quite serious about its assault. As Khodorkovsky remained in prison, the planned – and almost completed – merger between Yukos and Sibneft fell apart and ExxonMobile was reduced to a passive onlooker. After Putin’s landslide re-election as president, in March 2004, Khodorkovsky still remained incarcerated. Sitting in his shared cell in the Matrosskaya Tishina prison he could take delight in a private fortune that according to Forbes Magazine had by now grown to $15 billion, but he must also have been experiencing increasing worry about his own future prospects. At the time of writing, it is still unclear exactly how the whole affair will unfold. The bottom line, however, surely must be that the traditionally path dependent preference for influence games over enforceable rules, and for the use of the law as an instrument of power, still remains the name of the game.

The tsar is back in the Kremlin As Vladimir Putin embarked on his second term as president, it was becoming clear that Muscovy had once again been reconstituted. The collapse of the Soviet Union had given the system a nasty shock, and for some time during the 1990s there was an open window of opportunity. It was far less radical than the process of reforms that marked the years 1905–17, which after all had represented the very first attempt in Russian history at introducing a constitutional order. Still, some parts of the attempted ‘systemic change’ did challenge the path dependence.

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If it had been more carefully implemented, the drive for privatization might have dealt a serious blow to patrimonialism, and if there had been more resistance to Yeltsin’s increasingly autocratic ambitions, the political system might have evolved into genuine power sharing. Above all, there was an emerging generation of young Russians who were versed in the world of the Internet and who might have become the bearers of a new set of values and aspirations. By late spring 2004, however, one would have to conclude that the Muscovite system had survived yet another time of troubles. As an uncrowned Tsar Vladimir I, with a symbolic replica of the famed Shapka Monomakha, the cap of Vladimir Monomakh, sitting on his shelf, Putin could look forward to a rule that was not much different from that of the tsars and grand princes of old. The constant ambiguities on whether or not privatization would be ‘revisited’ illustrated that the patrimonial fusion between power and property remained in force. The reduction of the Duma showed that power would remain unaccountable, and the severing of all links with the Yeltsin-era ‘family’ illustrated that the tsar yet again would be ruling as a true and traditional autocrat. Although he may remain concerned about the bien public, like Peter the Great he may not be expected to tolerate any form of twoway communication or indeed any form of challenge to his power. To oligarchs and bureaucrats alike, the message again was loud and clear. Those who kowtow may count on continued kormlenie and further allocations of lucrative pomestiya. Others will have to take their chances. To foreigners, moreover, there was an even louder message of rapidly rising xenophobia, manifested in a growing frequency of hate crimes and a harsher attitude towards alien elements in general. By far the most important component of this resurrected Muscovite order is that the stability of the country remains so intimately linked to one person. If Putin were to suddenly disappear, the system in all likelihood would immediately revert to vicious internecine struggles between its various constituent elites. With this rather dismal verdict over the outcome of the post-Soviet ambitions of Russian democratic institution building, let us turn now to sum up the more theoretical arguments on path dependence and to see what conclusions may be drawn for the future.

12 Achieving credible commitment

Halfway through Putin’s first term, Daniel Treisman took issue with the growing optimism about a ‘New Russia’ being in the making: Many observers think Vladimir Putin is remaking Russia. In fact, although the faces may have changed, Putin’s Russia is more like Yeltsin’s than is generally recognized. Oligarchs still reign, war in Chechnya rages on, and most of Putin’s innovations are superficial. Meanwhile, most of what is new in Russia – the growing economy and Putin’s popularity – owes little to the president’s policies.1 The main point to be derived from this statement is that the economic recovery that followed in the wake of the 1998 crash had little if anything to do with actual policies being implemented by the Kremlin. This also explains why our previous chapter had so little to say about the economic dimension of Putin’s first term. Briefly put, the initial stages of the recovery could be wholly explained by the drastic devaluation of the ruble, and by the subsequent rise in oil prices.2 With imports being priced out of the market, and with billions of petrodollars gushing in, it was hard indeed for the Kremlin to go wrong. The key question that remains to be addressed is whether this powerful kick-start would also be conducive in catapulting the Russian economy onto a trajectory of self-sustained growth, based on consumer sovereignty and the golden rule. Most immediately, that was a question of whether the economy would be capable of weathering both a stronger ruble and lower oil prices. On a more fundamental level, however, it was about sustainable structural and institutional change. The latter at once takes us back to the core of what this whole book has been about, namely the institutional preconditions for good economic performance. In previous chapters we have argued that over the centuries the Russian economy has been persistently underperforming. We have linked this underperformance to a strong preference for autocratic rule, which has precluded

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the formation of a society that is separated from the state by a set of individual rights, and we have argued that this type of rule has been sustained by a set of self-enforcing social norms. The practical outcome has been what Gerschenkron referred to as a distinctly ‘jerky’ pattern of economic development. Repeated crises have led to repeated spurts of rapid economic development, all of which have been driven by state-led forced mobilization of resources. By far the most important question to be addressed in this concluding chapter concerns whether it is likely, or even reasonable to argue, that following the renewed time of troubles under Yeltsin Russia is now about to finally break free from its path dependent pattern of development. More specifically, we may ask if Russia is well on her way towards liberal democratic government, based on functioning market economy and the rule of law. If the answer to that question were to be affirmative, it in turn follows that we must also question whether that break with the past will prove to be sustainable. Given everything that has been said in previous chapters about the path dependent fusion of power and property, our first criterion for attaining success is rather obvious. We may recall here what Mancur Olson chose to refer to as ‘market-augmenting government’, more specifically defined as ‘a government powerful enough to create and protect property rights and to enforce contracts, yet constrained so as to not, by its own actions, deprive individuals of those same rights’.3 This goes to the very heart of what credible commitment and third party enforcement is about, and it points firmly at the role and responsibility of government, rather than at free or liberalized markets per se. In a comment on the post-crash recovery, Jacques Sapir also underscores precisely this vital observation: One of the most important lessons learned from the 1998 crash is that there is no market economy without rules and institutions, and there are neither rules nor institutions without a strong and well-funded state. Placing the State and market in opposition to one another has been the single biggest mistake made by policy-makers and advisors during the last ten years.4 In the following we shall consequently have much to say about the role of the state as a credible and impartial third party enforcer of rules. We shall bring into play some more theory, and we shall again contrast Russian developments with our previous examples of institutional development in northern Italy and in England. In conclusion, we shall attempt to point at what it would take for Russia to finally embark on a course similar to that which we have associated above with the Rise of the West.5

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Government in focus Once we place government in focus, it follows that we shall also have to consider the receiving end of government policy-making. While we shall maintain our emphasis on Olson’s call for ‘market-augmenting government’, we shall thus also have to consider how actors may be expected to respond to various policy plays. In keeping with everything that has been said in previous chapters, we shall make a distinction between how changes in the formal rules may lead actors to change their strategies, and under what conditions such changes may also produce mental redescription or a transformation of norms. Let us begin by looking at the limits to adaptation, or to imitation of success by others, that have been mentioned briefly in previous chapters. Limits to adaptation ‘The central puzzle of human history’, writes Douglass North, ‘is to account for the widely divergent paths of historical change.’6 That puzzle is particularly disturbing to economists, whose traditional tools of analysis would lead to predictions of convergence rather than divergence. As countries trade goods, services and factors of production, prices should become equalized and inter-economy differences should be ironed out. Given that trends in the real world fail to comply with such predictions, it follows that we must reconsider the theory. In order to drive that point home, we need to look no further than at postwar developments in the Third World. Despite decades of immense efforts to achieve convergence between North and South, income differentials between the rich and the poor have actually tended to grow. During the 1990s, which was a time of rapid growth in the industrialized world, the GDP of the world’s poorest nations, encompassing 500 million people, actually declined by 10 per cent.7 So, what is it, then, that accounts for societies experiencing long-run stagnation or even absolute decline in economic well-being? In our previous discussion, we have cited Olson’s suggestion that poor countries are poor simply because they are endowed with bad institutions and pursue bad economic policies.8 While this may be accepted easily in a static sense, it is more provocative in a dynamic perspective, where ‘competition would weed out inferior institutions and reward by survival those that better solve human problems’.9 Again observing that the latter has not tended to be the case, we also may recall Avner Greif’s pivotal question: ‘Why do societies fail to adopt the institutional structure of more economically successful ones?’10 Our answer to the latter question has been to point at the evolution of institutional structures that become path dependent over time. While specific elements of such structures may well have been optimal at the outset, their failure to adapt to changing circumstances has served to produce increasing

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inefficiencies. Before proceeding to look in more detail at that argument, we shall have an important point of caution to recall. Throughout every discussion of path dependence there runs a danger of lapsing into determinism, or of presenting arguments in a way that invites criticism of having committed such a sin. For that very reason, we have been careful throughout this book to underscore, repeatedly even, that our understanding of path dependent responses and of ‘revealed institutional preference’ is fundamentally different from that of a simple inability to change. In his own presentation of the theory of institutions and of institutional change, North is similarly careful to guard against accusations of determinism: If, however, the foregoing story sounds like an inevitable, foreordained account, it should not. At every step along the way there were choices – political and economic – that provided real alternatives. Path dependence is a way to narrow conceptually the choice set and link decisionmaking through time. It is not a story of inevitability in which the past neatly predicts the future.11 Accepting that throughout Russian history there have indeed been a number of occasions where choices were being offered, and where the path dependence could have been broken, partly or wholly, we must ask what it is that has produced such persistently negative selection of inferior solutions. In previous chapters we have suggested a partial answer to that question, in terms of an overriding preference for security over material well-being. More specifically, we have argued that over the centuries Russians have sought to enhance the war-fighting capabilities of their country by deploying methods of forced resource extraction, which in turn has led to a reduction in overall production possibilities. If we assume that this choice has been wilfully made, then it may perhaps no longer be warranted to speak of a failure, or even of keeping score in the wrong game. Arguments of the latter kind are important in highlighting that the institutional arrangement may well have been rational at the outset, under conditions of severe security threats and poor resource endowments. Over time, however, the focus on resource extraction and the associated suppression of markets and entrepreneurship became increasingly anachronistic. With steeply rising opportunity costs, the security arrangement needed to be transformed. The fact that we have observed so many reformers, with at times very good intentions indeed, underscores that there has been a growing realization of the needs to undertake institutional change, defined here as seeking improvements in the performance of the economic system. It is also the case that on several occasions major deviations from the path dependence have indeed resulted, which could perhaps have won sustainability.

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In order to explain the systematic reversals that followed in the wake of every such laudable attempt at reform, we may return to the previously cited success story about The Rise of the Western World. In that work, North and Thomas showed not only how institutions emerged to support productive activity by economic agents. Via a process of learning, the latter also evolved a set of norms that were supportive of a democratic system. The key to those successes rested in adaptation, in continuously transforming institutions in order to reinforce positive progression. It is in this context that it becomes relevant to recall our previous discussion of notions such as ‘social capital’ or ‘social flexibility’. As North puts it, ‘an adaptively efficient path . . . allows for a maximum of choices under uncertainty, for the pursuit of various trial methods of undertaking activities, and for an efficient feedback mechanism to identify choices that are relatively inefficient and to eliminate them’.12 The presence of ‘social flexibility’ may be understood here as abilities by individual actors to respond to changes by evolving competing strategies, and by states to devise and enforce rules that may discover and weed out solutions that are inefficient. It is particularly important here that the latter applies not only to unsuccessful economic solutions, but even more so to political organizations that act as drags on development, or even as purely predatory structures. Although writing about problems in an entirely different context, Vincent Ostrom offers insights that may be put to good use here as well: From a long-run perspective, economic stagnation has political and social roots and reveals failures of cooperation, coordination and organization. Pathological institutions often are the result of a human propensity to make great experiments which generate monumental failures because of the perpetrator’s unrealistic assumptions concerning knowledge, information and incentives.13 In a comment to Ostrom’s portrayal of ‘pathological institutions’, Thra´inn Eggertsson suggests that the roots of the problem may lie at a considerably deeper level: ‘However, long-run economic failures also may reflect an inability to experiment at all – a social paralysis where institutions thwart economic progress and trap communities at levels of low income.’ 14 Is it perhaps the case, as Eggertsson hints, that there may also be instances of ‘pathological path dependence’, where public policy is powerless: The strong version of path dependence can be compared to the discovery of debilitating genes in specific human groups, and the implications for structural policy are devastating. [. . .] If one were to select the single most important policy implication of the new institutionalism, it is the notion of reform-resistant path dependence that endures for centuries.15

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Norms and mental models Since this formulation does indeed come close to determinism, we must be extra careful here about definitions and about path dependent responses. Recapitulating the main tenets of our presentation thus far, we may recall what has been said in previous chapters about the role of history. Accepting that history is basically about contingency, we have suggested two different approaches to understanding how path dependence may emerge. With regard to path dependent strategies that have evolved in response to certain sets of formal rules, it is clear that they may indeed be altered in response to exogenous changes, provided that actors find it profitable to do so. The problems that are involved here are mainly technical and straightforward, revolving around matters like increasing returns, transaction costs and information feedback. While it must be accepted for a fact that situations of at times very powerful lock-in may occur, there is absolutely nothing in the theory to suggest that proper policy will be powerless by assumption in breaking out of a bad equilibrium. Our second approach has been considerably more complex, and the implications are not as clear. Arguing that strategies that evolve in response to certain formal rules will also result in processes of mental redescription, which may serve to reinforce a possible path dependence, we at once encounter problems that reside at or perhaps even beyond the boundaries of what the social sciences may predict and/or explain. If it is the case that a bad equilibrium, or a powerful institutional lock-in effect, has resulted from mental models that promote and legitimate socially disruptive or even destructive behaviour, such as rent seeking or state capture, then it is far from clear that we also know how to devise a proper policy that might rectify the problem. While it is easy enough to say, for example, that the solution rests in achieving credible and impartial third party enforcement, knowing what is broken does not necessarily imply that we also know how to fix it. North for one will readily tell us that our theoretical basis for making serious policy recommendations on this count is quite insufficient: ‘Third party enforcement means the development of the state as a coercive force able to monitor property rights and enforce contracts effectively, but no one at this stage in our knowledge knows how to create such an entity.’ 16 If there is anything to be said for the existence of ‘pathologies’ in the institutional matrix of any given society, the place where we must look surely is in the dimension of norms, or of mental models that may be beyond the reach of deliberate policy. Given that this again takes us dangerously close to cultural determinism, we shall have to address these issues somewhat more systematically. In his account of the role of social norms as the ‘cement of society’, Jon Elster points at a ‘persisting cleavage’ in the social sciences. On one side we have Adam Smith’s homo economicus, who is supposed to be guided by

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instrumental rationality. On the other is Emile Durkheim’s homo sociologicus, who is driven by norms. Where the former is constantly looking for new opportunities, being ‘pulled’ into the future by prospects of rewards, the latter is ‘pushed’ from behind by ‘quasi-inertial forces’. To the former, history simply does not matter. To the latter, history is everything.17 While it is obvious that no ‘men’ actually alive will ever come close to being perfect representations of either of these stereotypes, it is important to note that the evolution of mental models over time may indeed be oriented towards one or the other of these extremes. In order to illustrate, we again may recall Greif’s previously cited study of differences between Genoese and Maghribi traders in the Mediterranean around the eleventh and the twelfth centuries. Arguing that the two represent a distinction between individualist and collectivist norms that bears an eerie resemblance to the present-day difference between rich and poor in North and South, he points at how different responses to similar challenges resulted in sharply different growth trajectories. The common challenge was that of solving the problem of mounting transaction costs in long-distance trade. The respective solutions would be based on formal rules and on informal norms. The Genoese were individualists. They built a system of formal rules and impartial enforcement mechanisms that was integrated into a vertical social structure. As a result, there was a limited need for social sanctions amongst individuals. Over time, as investments were made in honing skills needed for the pursuit of individualist strategies, norms evolved to support and reward individualism. The Maghribi, in contrast, were collectivists. Representing a Jewish minority within a Moslem society, they looked for solutions within the group. Their society became horizontal and segregated, resting on powerful social sanctions against actors breaking the largely unwritten rules. Their solution was cost-saving, in the sense of doing without investments in building the formal institutions and organizations of an integrated society, such as courts of law. The price instead would have to be paid in the longer term, in the evolution of powerful norms against individual initiative.18 Transferring these insights to the case of Russia, we again have a segregated society that is based on horizontal norm-driven informal institutions. Our previous account has emphasized the absence of formal mechanisms of impartial enforcement, indeed even the absence of a clear distinction between state and society, and we have presented social sanctions based on the maintenance of ‘honour’ as the glue that kept the autocracy together. Seeking to understand the failure of the Great Reforms of Alexander II, which somehow symbolizes the protracted absence of the rule of law in Russia, we may begin by recognizing that the rule of law represents a collective good, with all the associated problems of provision. As the great pioneer of theories on collective action, Olson sums it all up rather nicely: ‘So logic tells us that the collective good of law and order, like

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other collective goods, can never be obtained through voluntary collective action in really large groups.’ 19 (Perhaps it may not need underlining that simply decreeing the rule of law from above stands even less of a chance of success.) Reflecting on how Boris Yeltsin’s economic reform programme could end in such failure, Olson also effectively deflates the naı¨ ve belief in deregulation as a panacea: ‘Some enthusiasts for markets suppose that the only problem is that governments get in the way of the market and that private property is a natural and spontaneous creation.’ This view he brands as ‘unquestionably and drastically wrong’. The reason given goes to the very heart of the matter: ‘Though individuals may have possessions without government, the way a dog possesses a bone, there is no private property without government. Property is a socially protected claim on an asset – a bundle of rights enforceable in courts backed by the coercive power of government.’ 20 These statements yet again indicate where the real roots of the Russian predicament lie, namely in the path dependent absence in Russian tradition of a state that is willing, ready and able to shoulder the role as a legitimate guarantor of the basic rules of the game, and in the equally path dependent evolution of organizational responses and mental models that push economic actors in the direction of exploiting the opportunities for gain that are offered by rule-evasion. Recognizing that the rule of law will not come about by itself, and that authoritarian rulers are unlikely to introduce it from above by decree, we may recall a previously cited question from Richard Pipes, namely ‘why in Russia . . . society has proven unable to impose on political authority any kind of effective restraints’.21 That question is important above all in the sense that it is only by making a credible commitment to upholding the law that the state may also hope to achieve a corresponding transformation of mental models. We may illustrate by recalling our previous account of Olson’s classic comparison between the ‘narrow’ and ‘encompassing’ interests that mark, respectively, roving and stationary banditry.22 Lacking security of tenure, the roving bandit will have a short time horizon and a narrow interest in maximum extraction. No individual calculation of costs and benefits will prompt him to voluntarily abstain from crime. While the gains are obvious and tangible, the damage that he inflicts on the production possibilities of the economy as a whole will be spread evenly over all. The simple conclusion will be that crime pays. The way out of this Hobbesian war of all against all is opened up as the bandit becomes stationary and acquires more security. He will then begin to experience an encompassing interest in optimizing extraction over time. Simply put, he will discover that there is a direct and tangible link between damage inflicted on the production possibilities of the actors under his

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control and the tax base from which he may extract future rents. By taking too much today, he will have less to extract tomorrow. With the passage of time, all stationary bandits, and all autocracies, will arrive at a point where they have to choose in which way to proceed. In one direction lies continued kleptocracy, which in the end will lead to systemic collapse and state failure. Haiti under Duvalier would be a good illustration. In the other lies the virtuous path of market-friendly institutional change and the provision of market-enhancing public goods, both of which will lead to expanding production possibilities and thus to a broadening of the tax base. At the top of the list of such public goods we will find enforceable property rights. Breaking out of a bad equilibrium will require a transformation of such maximizing strategies that have been based on rent seeking and other forms of unproductive activities. This, however, will not happen unless actors can be convinced that they will be allowed to retain earnings from productive activities. In a more general sense, this represents a problem that is known in economic policy as ‘time inconsistency’. Time-inconsistent policies arise when actors recognize that policy-makers have incentives to deviate from their declared policies, and to do so at a point where actors have already borne the costs of adjusting to a new policy initiative. If actors expect that such deviations will occur, they will adjust their decision making accordingly and the result will be a suboptimal outcome. In order to find a way out of this predicament, we may agree with Kenneth Shepsle that the core of the problem is derived from what he refers to as ‘a potential conflict between optimality and discretion’. If the policy-maker, or the autocrat, could somehow credibly restrain himself from exercising discretionary power, then cooperation would lead to optimal solutions: ‘The ability to disable discretion in a convincing fashion is one thing I mean by credible commitment.’ Seeking to achieve such credible commitment, we may in turn proceed along two different routes. One is that of ‘imperative’ commitment, which entails some form of deliberate coercion to disable the government’s discretionary power. The other is ‘motivational’ credibility, which implies that all parties will desire for their own reasons to honour the commitment.23 Commenting on a hypothetical ruler’s choice of strategy, North implicitly returns to what David Haddock has referred to as the ‘sovereign’s paradox’, i.e. the ‘sovereign’s tradeoff between revenue from unanticipated confiscation of resources and the size of the future tax base’.24 On the one hand, the ruler ‘may be able to structure the game so that it is in both his and his constituents’ interests to abide by the rules’. This would be motivational credibility. On the other, he ‘may find that further wealth accumulation can only be realized by binding himself irreversibly (such as giving over rights and coercive power to constituents or their representatives)’, which would be imperative credibility.25

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The main difference between the two lies in the dimension of successful internalization of norms. ‘Imperative’ credibility may be the result of voluntary binding, as in the case of Ulysses and the Sirens, or it may come about following demands from below that are backed by force or by a credible threat of force. In both cases, the ruler is constrained into acting against his own short-term interests. ‘Motivational’ credibility will, on the other hand, result from an arrangement that is structured to suit the short-term interests of all actors, including the state. Being incentive compatible it will also be self-enforcing, and thus conducive to the formation of supportive norms. In order to further illustrate the crucial interplay between changes in the formal rules and adaptation of norms, we shall take a closer look at the case of England. An important reason why it is such an excellent illustration rests in the fact that it is also a very special case.

A standard of reference In the early stages of economic development, transactions were overwhelmingly carried out within a small community of actors possessing intimate knowledge of each other. Enforcement was informal and transaction costs in general were low. There was little need for a polity to emerge. As the market expanded, particularly with the introduction of long-distance trade, things changed. Transaction costs began to mount and the need for third party enforcement became a serious constraint on the further expansion of trade. What North refers to as the ‘crucial watershed in development’, arrived when actors began to seek ways of binding their governments. The triumph of the English Parliament in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–89 forms a classic example in the sense that it rested in a successful ‘shackling of the arbitrary behavior of government with respect to property rights’. Such shackling, however, could not have been successful if undertaken only in terms of imposing formal rules. Unless it had been backed up also by a set of shared mental models that supported the contract, it would have remained a mere formality. As North specifically underlines, the real key to success was that the mental models of the actors at the time were ‘equally context specific’. The main reason why the revolution could achieve such ‘glorious’ results was that it occurred in the midst of an evolving intellectual tradition (Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and the Scottish enlightenment) that was clearly supportive of the demands that were put forth. The outcome was very tangible: ‘The incentive structure not only encouraged the evolution of a legal structure such as the law merchant, and the growth of science, but also the development of military technology that led ultimately to European hegemony.’ What makes the case so special is that these ‘conditions were not duplicated in Spain, Africa, China, Latin America, or elsewhere’.26

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From the perspective of norms, we may advance the absence in English tradition of a written constitution as a powerful reflection of how deeply engrained the rule of law would become in the mental models of successive generations of English people. Reflecting on precisely this latter fact, the Russian jurist Alexander Yakovlev presents a rather dismal prediction for his own country: It would be more exact to say that in [England] a statutory constitution was never adopted, but that nonetheless the constitution exists because it is written in the culture, it exists (and this is most important) in real norms of social behavior. It is a living law, law as an integral part of culture. Would it ever be possible to realize something at least relatively close to this in Russia? 27 We should be wary here of understanding this example as one of institutional dichotomy, of a firm dividing line between successes and failures. On the contrary, in keeping with our previous emphasis on multiple equilibria we shall view institutional arrangements as a spectrum of diverse possibilities along which countries will be ranged. England may be seen as a special case in the sense that it was placed at one end of that spectrum. Over time it would come to serve as a positive role model for others to imitate and emulate. At first, it is true, the example spread only to the Netherlands and then slowly to some other countries in northwest Europe.28 Most notably, perhaps, it failed to be replicated in both Spain and Germany. Its subsequent power of attraction, however, was quite substantial. The institutional structure that had been established by the English would become path dependent in a positive sense, generating increasing institutional sophistication.29 As we now know, it would be emulated in countries that were much further afar than the Netherlands. Still today, however, despite jubilant proclamations of the end of history,30 representative government and functioning market economy remains for many countries of the world a regrettably elusive goal. Noting North’s observation, that the English case ‘clearly separated the Western European experience from the rest of the world’,31 we also have a key to the real difference between ‘imperative’ and ‘motivational’ commitment. Where the former is within reach of deliberate policy, with or without threats of force, the latter can only be the result of an evolution of supportive mental models. Most importantly, it would have to entail an internalization of norms of trust in the ability of other actors – notably the state – to honour commitments made.32 This is where our distinction between state and society must enter the picture. North clearly recognizes what is at stake: ‘The key to success is the establishment of a viable polity that will support and enforce such institutional constraints and at this stage in our knowledge we know very little

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about such an institutional framework.’ 33 Such knowledge that we do have tells us how the supportive norms evolved, but this clearly is not the same as also knowing how to replicate the success. What does transpire, however, is that time is the critical dimension. Given that norms may be internalized only via a protracted period of learning, of observing, for example, that it is indeed rational to trust in commitments made by the government, it follows that working arrangements of credible commitment may be realized only over long periods of time. The right to private property forms something of a sine qua non for such reasoning to be at all meaningful. North underscores that ‘the issue of the enforcement of property rights is central to credible commitment and a major historical stumbling block to realizing the potential gains from trade’.34 Others have been even more specific. Citing Jeremy Bentham to good effect, Pipes notes that being assured of a right to the fruits of your own labour has fundamental implications for the law as such: ‘Property and the law are born together and must die together.’ 35 The ancient Romans were well aware of the needs to draw a firm line between power and property, between imperium and dominium. They built their state to reflect such insights, and Western tradition owes them a great debt for doing so. It is, for example, in Roman law that we may find the fundamental and still applicable definitions of what constitutes property, known then as dominium: it must be lawfully obtained, exclusive, absolute and permanent. Logically, the Roman view of property also had important consequences for the role of the state. Cicero, for example, would argue that since the state had been created to protect the private property of its citizens, it had no right to infringe in any way on that property. The philosopher Seneca also drew an important line between the power that is held by kings (imperium or potestas) and the property that is held by individuals (dominium or proprietas).36 Remaining with our previous perspective of The Rise of the Western World, it is of particular importance to note that the old Roman rights to property would be specifically included in the De´claration des droits de l’homme et de citoyen of the French revolution, as well as in the subsequent Napoleonic Code of 1804. In the latter document, French law removed all feudal limitations on ownership and returned almost verbatim to the Roman definitions: Property is the right to enjoy and dispose of objects in the most absolute manner, provided that one does not make use of it in a manner prohibited by laws or regulations. No one can be forced to give up his property unless it is for the public good and by means of a fair and previous indemnity.37 It is against this background that we may view Olson’s caution, that property can be defined only in relation to a government that is ready and

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able to enforce that right. It is also in this context that we may recall one of the main motives behind Stolypin’s grand attempt at agrarian reform, namely that by granting the peasants legal guarantees to their own property, they might also be taught to respect the property of others (i.e. of the landowners). What it all comes down to, then, is whether a specific government is indeed both ready and able to shoulder that responsibility. To North, it is a question either of hoping for a ‘good’ government or of putting into place some credible constraints: ‘Establishing a credible commitment to secure property rights over time requires a ruler who exercises forbearance and restraint in using coercive force, or the shackling of the ruler’s power to prevent arbitrary seizure of assets.’ 38 As we have noted above, however, the political dimension of establishing a ‘viable polity’ or an active society must also be included in the picture. Barry Weingast rightly notes that a desirable shackling of the ruler’s discretionary power requires not only ‘institutions that limit and define the legitimate boundaries of state action’. To be successful, it will also require a ‘set of shared beliefs among citizens who react against the state when the latter attempts to transgress the boundaries defined by those institutions’.39 For the latter to be at all meaningful to discuss, it must also be the case that those citizens do believe themselves to have rights against their rulers. With such insights, we are back to the whole complex of social norms versus rational action that was briefly discussed above. As rational actors will be oblivious of the weight of history, they may be expected to let bygones be bygones and to respond in constructive manners to rational public policy. If, on the other hand, actors are mainly norm-driven they will be obsessed with history and will perceive all new policy initiatives through the focal lenses that are provided by their historical experience. In the extreme case, they will be simply oblivious to any reasoning that is based on futureoriented instrumental rationality. In that case, which comes close to that of pathological path dependence, we are prompted to ask whether it will be at all possible to devise an arrangement whereby the government succeeds in making a commitment that is credible. The way out of such a seeming impasse may be found by noting that the problem is one of degree rather than of principle. As we have noted above, no real-world ‘men’ will ever be either fully rational or fully norm-driven. It thus follows that the degree to which time-consistent policies can be successful will hinge on the degree to which actors are driven by norms or by instrumental rationality. In his celebrated study of Democracy in America, Tocqueville argued that the norms or mental models of democracy evolved as a byproduct of the efforts that went into the constitutional process. Elster logically discusses these suggestions at length, as they fit well into his own presentation of states of mind that are essentially by-products.40 This approach also is

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consistent with the views put forth by North and others, that the success stories may be very special cases, with limited general applicability. The success story hinges on the evolution of positively path dependent mental models. Returning to Greif, internalized norms serve as ‘focal points’ coordinating expectations that make for successful cooperation, which in turn enhances the legitimating role of the mental models. The mirror image is one where internalized norms provide obstacles to cooperation, and to the ability of the government to make credible commitments, which may result in an inability to experiment at all and thus to move society forwards. The main implication for the Russian case is that successful institutional change may be expected only over the longer term, and only under the leadership of a number of successive governments that persist in demonstrating their commitment to reform. Over the longer term it is, for example, quite possible that the introduction of formal rights to property will serve to produce demands from the holders of those rights for better government, defined here as a government that may credibly commit itself to protecting property. The challenge over the short and medium term is that of persistence, of consistently staying on the right path. It will not be sufficient for the government to ‘exercise forbearance and restraint’. It must also be ready and willing to encourage political movements that seek to bind the government into upholding the law, whilst cracking down hard on the practices of ‘crony capitalism’. The main threat to such a positive development may be captured in the above-mentioned ‘sovereign’s paradox’, in the temptation for government to use its power for its own short-term interests. That threat will be directly related to the incidence of norm-driven behaviour, which increases the needs for persistence and consistency in securing a necessary transformation of mental models. We shall return to the prospects for the future on that count in the conclusion of this chapter.

Back to the Russian case Returning now more specifically to the Russian case, we may recall that the imperial autocracy remained insistent up until the beginning of the twentieth century on being above the law. By consistently refusing to accept any form of constitutional constraints on its exercise of power, it not only set clearly defined limits for the process of reform. It also actively contributed to the split in Russian society that would lead to so much trouble. The mental models of the two sides, of the rulers and the ruled if you wish, were simply bound to evolve in an antagonistic fashion. When Tsar Nicholas II issued his famous October Manifesto, and then proceeded to promulgate the Basic Laws of 1906, this certainly represented an important phase in Russian history. It was, however, something very

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different from the English case. Although the autocracy did tolerate a popularly elected Duma, and did allow the issuing of laws that provided for a range of rights and freedoms, it was a one-sided contract that had been issued under duress. As subsequent events would show, the autocracy reserved for itself the right at any time to walk away from commitments made. Stolypin, for example, would not shy back from using unconstitutional means to repeatedly abrogate the newly created State Duma. What was sadly lacking was accountability. In contrast to the English case, but in keeping with Russian tradition, the autocracy could persist in refusing to allow the formation of empowered estates that might have made specified claims on the ruler. Absent enforceable individual or corporate rights, the constitutional experiment that was introduced in 1905–06 instead came to rest on the goodwill of the autocrat, on the exercise of ‘forbearance and restraint in using coercive force’. As we now know, that was to be a poor foundation indeed. Skipping over the Soviet interlude, which featured little in the way of individual rights or government accountability, we may proceed to Boris Yeltsin and to the constitution for the Russian Federation that was introduced by referendum in December 1993. Although this act was generally and justifiably hailed as a truly important step on the road towards Russian democracy and the rule of law, we shall argue that the way in which it was introduced in several important respects would turn out to be outright counterproductive. Still retaining the case of England as a standard of reference, we may highlight one crucially important difference. Where the Glorious Revolution had been a revolution from below, seeking to impose constraints on the ruler, the Russian constitution was introduced from above, following what was essentially a coup d’e´tat by the president. Since it was he who had not only initiated the process, but also brought it to completion, over the heads of a suspended popular assembly, it is perhaps not so strange after all that the final document would fail to produce any effective constraints on his own exercise of autocratic power. No matter how one chooses to allocate blame for the bloody events of early October 1993, two facts remain incontrovertible. One is that in suspending the Supreme Soviet, the move that triggered the subsequent bloodshed, the president clearly exceeded his authority. No matter how communist or otherwise illegitimate the constitution of the RSFSR may have been, the very fact that the president placed himself above its letter was a rather inauspicious starting point for the introduction of a democratic constitution. The second fact tells us that in the weeks following the shelling of the Moscow White House, the Kremlin would be hard at work undertaking a substantial rewriting of the draft constitution that had been on the table before the crisis. The document that was placed before the people in December 1993 thus not only was a far more centralized product than had been previously envisioned. Even more importantly, it had been produced very much according to the president’s own preferences.

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In stark contrast not only to the case of England, but also to those of France and the USA, the actual writing of Russia’s first-ever democratic constitution (accepting 1906 as a very special case) included no ‘framers’, nor any other representatives of the people. The rewrite in particular was undertaken by the Kremlin itself, reflecting that this was to be Yeltsin’s constitution, much more so than it would be Russia’s.41 Compounding the problems of legitimacy of this important document, it also most likely could be adopted only by resorting to election fraud.42 No matter what one chooses to think of the latter, and no matter how impeccably democratic one might argue that the actual text of the constitution is, three important arguments may be advanced to say that it failed to achieve the ideal of such shared mental models that an effective and credible shackling of the ruler could be attained. First of all, Yeltsin’s personal demeanour in the years following the introduction of ‘his’ constitution would provide ample illustration of how he continued to view himself as being above the law. As had been the case with the tsars of old, the main source of his power was derived from acting as an arbiter between rivalling clans or groups of boyars. Since all of the latter apparently found it to be in their own best interests that the autocrat did indeed assume that traditional role, the contract was a stable one, reflecting the path dependent persistence of political poruka and of shared mental models of rational subservience amongst the modern-day boyars. Yeltsin hence could realistically expect that any attempt at challenge from below would be effectively repressed by horizontal peer control. Second, the electoral process would continue being marked by gross manipulation and perhaps even by further cases of outright fraud. The campaign to re-elect Yeltsin in the spring of 1996 stands out as having been associated with such a long series of shenanigans that it could hardly fail to influence negatively the perceptions of the electorate. While Western governments and international organizations would stumble over each other in their ambitions to declare that Yeltsin’s re-election had indeed been both free and fair, Russians would fail to be convinced that elections do constitute a meaningful instrument in determining their own country’s future development. Third, and perhaps most important from the point of view of promoting a set of more broadly shared mental models that are supportive of democracy and the rule of law, we may recall the persistent failure of a succession of Yeltsin-era governments to make timely payments of wages and pensions. Over and above all the specific damage that it did to predictability, this blatant breach of trust could hardly fail to bring home to the subjects at large that the social contract remained unenforceable, that the government was able and ready at any time to simply walk away from its side of the bargain. The process as a whole underscores how important it is to distinguish between the formal trappings of democracy and its actual contents. It is

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certainly true that post-Soviet Russia has by now proven itself capable of undertaking a long series of elections at various levels, elections that according to most observers have been at least reasonably free and fair. That, however, is very far from the same as saying that Russia has also successfully introduced democratic government. In a functioning democracy, be it parliamentary or otherwise, it is via elections that the distribution of power and influence over the country’s future is determined. In the Russian Federation, it has been the other way around. It has been the distribution of power and influence that determines the outcome of elections, thus reducing the latter to little more than charades, designed mainly to impress the outside world. Yeltsin’s re-election certainly does not stand alone as evidence of this. The 1999 and 2003 Duma elections may be placed in the same rather sordid category, as may the 2000 and 2004 presidential ‘elections’ of Vladimir Putin. What is of particular importance here is the fact that in the Western European tradition democratic rights have tended to be granted in return for a commitment by thus empowered estates to provide funds for the autocrat. Throughout Russian (and Soviet) history, as we may recall from previous chapters, the latter need never arise. By claiming rights to all property, the autocracy was able to extract its needs without entering into any form of negotiations. The nobility, moreover, never seriously attempted to impose a contract, preferring instead to hone its skills in playing for favours and personal influence. In Yeltsin’s Russia, the situation was only nominally different. Although the process of reform did produce a formal set of property rights, as well as a process of formal legislation on the federal budget, in actual practice the state would persist in securing its needs for finance via games of influence with the leading oligarchs. While the expenditure side of the budget could be controlled via a policy of aggressive sequestration, shortfalls on the revenue side were made up by applying ad hoc pressure on selected cash cows.43 In both cases, substantial damage was done to any hopes of the emergence of a credible commitment to upholding contracts and the rights to property. Like the boyars of old Muscovy, the oligarchs of the Yeltsin era were kept in a state of constant insecurity. They were constantly reminded that they would be allowed to keep the spoils from their predatory activities only for as long as the autocrat saw fit to grant such privileges. The frequently recurring worries about a re-nationalization of privatized assets not only had a negative impact on the very notion of secure property rights. Such worries also served to bring home the continued primacy of personal influence over the rule of law. Here we may usefully recall everything that has been said in previous chapters about venality and corruption as being the inevitable companions of kormlenie and krugovaya poruka. There has certainly been no shortage of stories about how Yeltsin’s cronies were allowed to line their own pockets. From a more fundamental perspective, however, the core of the problem

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concerns the centuries-old need to secure an effective protection of the state and of its judiciary from ‘capture’ by the executive and by the business elites. In both respects, events in the Yeltsin and the Putin years have provided clear evidence of the power of the path dependence. Despite a decade or more of happy talk about struggles against corruption, when Yeltsin left office the Russian economy remained mired in a broad host of problems that may be summarized under the caption of ‘state capture’. At a 1998 conference, the then ubiquitous George Soros had noted that first ‘the assets of the state were stolen, and then when the state itself became valuable as a source of legitimacy, it too was stolen’.44 Two years later, a team of World Bank and EBRD experts could present a detailed picture of how Russian economic actors had successfully captured the ‘commanding heights’ of the Russian state, including the Central Bank and the State Duma.45 The scholarly literature on Russian corruption, theoretical as well as empirical, is quite substantial and this is not the place to pursue that track any further. Suffice it to note that regularly undertaken surveys indicate continuing problems of a rather disturbing magnitude.46 What is brought out by these and other related sources,47 is that the problem of Russian corruption is both great and vastly more complex than some of the Panglossian transitologists and Russia pundits would have us believe. In the midst of the post-Yeltsin recovery, even Putin’s own economic advisor, Andrei Illarionov, could be found to worry about ‘levels of corruption, the scale of which is beginning to surpass even the levels of the last decade. At that time, corruption was amateurish, but now it has become institutionalized.’ 48 In order to understand how the Yeltsin era could degenerate into such a cabal for predatory elites we may return again to the role of the state. Using Olson’s previously outlined perspective of banditry, we may capture the essence of Yeltsin’s policies as a transfer of effective control over the country’s natural resource base out of the Military-Industrial Complex, the VPK, and into the hands of a set of predatory oligarchs. Where the Soviet government had been a stationary bandit with an encompassing interest in securing the integrity and performance of the VPK, under Yeltsin the stationary bandit broke down into a host of roving bandits with narrow interests in lining their own pockets, no matter what the implications. The general insecurity of tenure that followed from this retrogression was reflected in a drastic shortening of the time horizon for capital investment and in an equally drastic curtailment in the provision of vitally important public goods, ranging from law and order to public health and other components of both physical and social infrastructure. One of the most tangible results, however, was that the hyperdepression hurt different sectors of the economy very differently. While manufacturing industries suffered dramatic losses in output, both the energy complex and various forms of spot market trading did relatively well.49 The growing prominence of the primary sector

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of the economy even caused one Russian economist to speak of a process of ‘primitivization’. Here we may also recall our previous caution about the dangers of an increasingly dual economy. In order to illustrate the potential implications for the longer term, we may borrow from Oliver Williamson’s discussion of governance and the distribution of transactions. Suggesting a three-part division into spot-market trading, long-term contracting and hierarchy, he argues that neither spot-market nor hierarchical transactions will need much support from the judiciary: ‘Disappointed spot-market traders can easily limit their exposure and can seek relief by terminating and turning to other traders. And internal organization is its own court of ultimate appeal. By contrast, transactions in the middle range can be difficult to stabilize.’ 50 Williamson’s main point is that a failure to organize the judiciary in ‘an informed and uncorrupted manner’ will lead transactions in the middle range to gravitate towards one or the other of the polar extremes: ‘The upshot is that the quality of a judiciary can be inferred indirectly: a highperformance economy (expressed in governance terms) will support more transactions in the middle range than will an economy with a problematic judiciary. Put differently, in a low performance economy the distribution of transactions will be more bimodal – with more spot-market and hierarchical transactions and fewer middle-range transactions.’ 51 Speaking with Olson, one might characterize Williamson’s middle-range segment as production that is ‘property-rights intensive’. His point in seeking to introduce this notion is that ‘the familiar expression capital intensive obscures the crucial role of enforceable rights’.52 For our purpose, it is of particular importance to underline the generally higher degree of institutional sophistication that is required by such transactions, as compared to spot markets and trade within hierarchies. The simple logic of the argument is that increasing gravitation towards the extremes of the bimodal distribution of transactions will be associated with a reduced pressure for such reforms that support ‘property-rights intensive’ production. While the Russian energy barons will be quite capable of handling their own contract enforcement, if need be with the assistance of ‘Comrade Kalashnikov’, the small start-ups will be left to fight their own battles against corrupt officials and criminal racketeers. As a result, the economy risks being trapped in a low-performance equilibrium with a poorly functioning judiciary. Summing it all up, we may conclude that of all the tasks that were to be faced by Vladimir Putin as president of the Russian Federation, none could have been more important than that of reintroducing a government with an encompassing interest in the future of its own country. If the Russian economy were indeed to be catapulted onto a trajectory of sustained growth, it was quite simply imperative that the influence of the roving bandits be broken. The combined effect of continued capital flight

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and persisting obstacles to foreign investment would be nothing short of disastrous. Remaining with Olson, we may view this task as that of recreating a stationary bandit. Entailed here would have been not only the optimization of extraction over time and a lengthening of the time horizon for productive investment. Of even greater importance was the provision of such public goods that are required for a sustainable development based on consumer sovereignty and the rule of law to be at all possible. The latter, we shall argue, is where the really fundamental choices would have to be made. This yet again takes us back to everything that has been said in previous chapters about the role of norms in supporting desired changes in behaviour. Let us recall in particular our insistence that norms may change only gradually, and that in some cases they may not even be possible to change at all by direct policy. These observations are strongly supported by Ronald Inglehart. In an article about the relation between trust and democracy, he notes that ‘There is no institutional quick fix for the problem of creating trust and social capital’, and that we should be wary of placing too much faith in the formal trappings of democracy: ‘Democratic institutions do not necessarily produce interpersonal trust.’ Taking the argument into the realm of economics, he is also surely correct in noting that ‘interpersonal trust is essential to the cooperation with strangers that is a prerequisite for large-scale economic organization, on which modern industrial economies are based’.53 Linking back to Williamson’s argument on the bimodal distribution of transactions, and to Olson’s notion of ‘property-rights intensive’ production, we shall claim to have identified here the acid test for success in breaking Russia’s path dependence. Let us sum up the argument.

Commitment and credibility If all people really had been rational economic men, always on the lookout for opportunities and always ready to let bygones be bygones, then economic policy-making would indeed have been reducible the world of textbook models. In such a world, there would have been no reason to question one of the most fashionable beliefs amongst the transitologists of the 1990s, namely that democracy, market economy and the rule of law represent some form of natural state, a societal default position of sorts to which all societies will automatically revert – if they can only be sufficiently liberalized. One of the main ambitions of our account in this book has been to argue that the real world does not agree with such assumptions. Real people will in the general case tend to be driven by a mixture of motivations, ranging from pure rationality to social and other norms. In the Russian case, we have argued that the role of norm-driven behaviour is quite substantial, and that this has a set of major implications for potential reformers. The time has now come to look at those implications in somewhat greater detail.

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In the preceding chapter, we listed a number of causes for concern about Russia’s future, should it turn out that the recovery in Putin’s first term was no more than a brief rebound. Those causes may be roughly divided into factors linked to insufficient investment and to potential threats against global security. When Putin set about creating his strong state, to be based on the much-vaunted power vertical, there were two questions that loomed larger than all others. Would this be a strong state in the sense of being able to uphold the law whilst accepting that the law also was a set of binding constraints on its own behaviour? Assuming that his administration was indeed ready to make such a commitment, would it then also be able to make that commitment credible, in a situation where most of its subjects were strongly driven by norms, norms, moreover, that embodied very little in the sense of trust in government agencies? Before we turn to look at these matters in more detail, we shall note that there was before Vladimir Putin an obvious alternative to that of aiming for liberal democracy and market economy. A recreated stationary bandit would not have to take the form of a market-friendly government that is bent on providing public goods such as the rule of law. It could equally well be geared into re-empowering the old VPK, which has now been renamed OPK (‘defence-industrial’ rather than ‘military-industrial’). It is in this context that the spectre of remilitarization and of threats to global security looms so large. There is also a somewhat paradoxical dimension to this alternative, in the sense that it would pose far less demanding conditions for success. If a Russian government were indeed to opt for ‘structural remilitarization’, it first of all would find that much of the needed capital stock and infrastructure is already on hand. Given the low levels of capacity utilization, it is hard to know the exact status of these old plants, and in some cases actual physical collapse certainly cannot be excluded. The main point, however, is that obsolescence may be defined only in relation to effective demand. What must be seen as a truly monumental problem for civilian industries aiming to compete in world markets is much less so for military-industrial plants that cater to the Russian government, or indeed to foreign governments that are shopping for Russian military technology. The development of Sino-Russian cooperation in this field certainly provides powerful support on the latter count.54 In further support of this scenario, we may note that military-industrial output surely did not feature on the ‘sloppy’ end of Soviet economic activities. The authoritarian command and control that would be needed for a return to this past also is well in tune with previously described path dependencies. Insufficient monetization and property rights protection no longer would present much of a problem, and, perhaps most importantly, the nation would be filled with a new sense of purpose, far more virulent

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than Putin’s cautious rehabilitation of the KGB and of the Soviet national anthem (without the lyrics). One may certainly question the extent of remaining surge capabilities, but as Rosefielde explains at length, there are few if any valid technical arguments to say that an extensive remilitarization of the Russian economy is outside the bounds of possibility.55 The arguments in favour, on the contrary, are fairly strong. A decision to kick-start the OPK would likely meet with a rapid supply response, breathing new life into Siberian company towns and generating economic activity on a broad front stretching well outside of the OPK itself. Russian manufacturing industries no longer would be associated with the same sense of decay, and the centuries-old urge to mobilize and catch up no longer would be limited to matching Portuguese GDP per capita. The shift in political power that would be associated with such a policy also would solve the problem of restoring the state monopoly on the use of force. This scenario becomes particularly threatening if we assume a leadership in the Kremlin that is bent on restoring Soviet-era power also in the sense of re-extending Moscow’s control not only to Ukraine and Belarus but also to the Caucasus and Central Asia. One is tempted here to recall Dostoevsky’s previously cited call for the Russians to give up their ambitions of competing with the West and to proceed instead to lord it over the East. What would be needed, in order to complete the parallel with past drives for mobilization of military capabilities, is a threat from outside, but a new leadership in the Kremlin surely would not find that too hard to conjure up. A growing frequency of hate crimes and a general rise in xenophobia indicate that Putin’s Russia is steering a dangerous course. The implications for the future of US–Russian relations are not comforting. To what extent a return to structural militarization really may be seen as a likely scenario is impossible to tell. As we may recall from above, Putin’s punitive agenda was marked by strong ambitions of re-empowering the FSB, and his appointment policy brought plenty of generals from the power structures to positions of great influence. Russia’s stance during the crisis in the UN Security Council that preceded the war against Iraq also left a taste of more trouble to come.56 Still, if there is to be a decisive shift in the direction of remilitarization that will not be possible until the Kremlin has conclusively settled the score with the oligarchs. We shall thus leave it aside here. Returning to our main track of looking at the preconditions for undertaking a decisive longer-term move towards liberal democracy and market economy, we may recall some of our key criteria from above. We will be looking for ‘market-augmenting government’, and we will want to see ‘property-rights intensive’ production that may serve to generate the necessary institutions of democracy and rules-based economic activity. In both cases we are back to what was just said about commitment and credibility.

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Given that market economy will not be possible without functioning money and money markets, it also follows that a decisive break must be achieved with the patterns of personalization that are ingrained in the path dependent practices of kormlenie and krugovaya poruka. Since the use of money and of all the instruments that are associated with money markets in turn may be seen as manifestations of the ultimate form of trust to be exhibited by economic actors, it again should be made quite clear that the key to devising an ‘adaptively efficient path’ lies not in liberalization per se but in broad-based confidence building, in the formation of expectations that monetary institutions are indeed to be trusted. Placing these various tests into a wider context, we may introduce Christopher Clague’s distinction between individual culture and community culture. The former represents what the individual carries with him, as a result of having been brought up in a certain culture. It is, for example, what sets an immigrant aside from the natives of the new country, and it is not a major problem: ‘There is abundant evidence that migrants tend to adopt the behaviour patterns of their new homes, at least in their economic decisions, and in this sense individual culture is usually not a serious obstacle to economic progress.’ The real problems are to be found in the other dimension: Community culture, on the other hand, is the set of norms, attitudes, and values of an entire community, and it of course affects the incentives of individuals to behave in particular ways. Community culture tends to reinforce and be reinforced by the patterns of behavior in the community, and it is obvious that the behavior patterns (institutions) and the associated cultural norms can be a serious obstacle to economic progress in the community (for example, corruption in government and popular disdain for politicians and bureaucrats).57 Assuming that any ambition of transforming community culture may be seen as a problem of strategic interaction, where the behaviour of individuals will be contingent on how they expect ‘everyone else’ to behave, we may return to Inglehart’s definition of the core matter: ‘Interpersonal trust is a relatively enduring characteristic of given societies: it reflects the entire historical heritage of a given people, including economic, political, religious, and other factors.’ 58 As Claus Offe points out, the solution to the problem of how to augment social capital in general, or to generate interpersonal trust more specifically, may be sought in two different ways. The ‘top-down’ version holds that trust ‘can be increased if institutions and procedures generate an impeccable record in terms of truth-telling, promise-keeping, fairness and solidarity – and thus reasons for suspicion and cynicism are virtually nullified’.59 Looking back at what went on in the Yeltsin era, ‘truth-telling, promisekeeping, fairness and solidarity’ are not amongst the most immediate

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labels that come to mind. On the contrary, we may assume that the impact on norms and mental models was to further entrench old patterns of distrust. Proceeding to Putin’s first term, moreover, his punitive agenda and his repressive media policy may also be taken as steps in the wrong direction. The latter concern constitutes by far the most important precondition for any constructive further developments to be at all realistic. Without a seriously intended dialogue with society, no Russian reformer can expect that mental models will be transformed in such a way that the rule of law can finally triumph over the rule of men. At the same time, however, no dimension of the previously presented path dependencies has been as deeply entrenched as the refusal by those in power to invite their subjects into dialogue and genuine participation. Offe’s other way of enhancing social capital and of building interpersonal trust is that of ‘bottom-up’. Operating on the supply side of trust, it aims at making individuals less reluctant to show trust in anonymous others. The problem here is that no one really seems to know just how such a ‘friendly attitude towards fellow citizens’ may come about: ‘All we know from recent debates on social capital is that it thrives where it is favored by supportive local traditions – and doesn’t where it isn’t.’ The implication comes close to our previous argument about ‘pathological path dependence’ and it leaves one really major question hanging: ‘Is it conceivable that the ‘‘social capital’’ of trusting and cooperative civic relations can be encouraged, acquired, and generated – and not just inherited?’ 60 The implications are that the only solution that is within grasp of deliberate policy is that of promoting good government, in the ‘market-augmenting’ sense. If that government is to be successful in achieving a transformation of underlying norms, it will have to be persistent in its good performance, and such persistence will be constantly threatened by problems of timeinconsistency, i.e. of temptations to renege on the commitment. The ideal outcome would be one of credible ‘shackling’, but as our account of the Glorious Revolution showed, that is contingent on the presence of supporting norms, on what Weingast referred to as ‘shared mental models’ that make the citizens react when the government goes back on its obligations. What it all comes down to, then, is that the main challenge to Russian reformers really does not lie in the realm of economic policy at all, but rather in democratic institution-building. It is only by moving in the direction of accountability in government that true progress may be envisioned, and for that to happen we must see not only firm guarantees for the freedom of speech but also a true movement in the direction of enforceable rights for the population. Viewed from this perspective, the future for Russia does look rather bleak. In the presentation of various path dependencies that has made up the Leitmotif of the foregoing chapters, no two individual features have been as powerfully present as those of an absence of individual rights and a preference for the rule of men over the rule of law; their combined effect

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has made for a powerful personalization of both economic and political relations. Some day Russia surely will be blessed with a ruler who exercises sufficient ‘forbearance and restraint’ for true movement in the good direction to be initiated. As Putin’s second term in office was beginning to unfold, it was, however, becoming increasingly obvious that he did not fit that ticket. It thus remains to wait for the next ‘window of opportunity’, and to hope that the intervening backlash will not be too powerful.

Notes

1 History matters 1 Harrison, Lawrence E. and Samuel P. Huntington (eds) (2000) Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, New York: Basic Books. 2 Ibid., pp. xxxi–xxxii. See also Samuel Huntington’s foreword to the same volume, which elaborates on some of the themes that are mentioned here. 3 Words cited by Charles Cadwell, in his foreword to Olson, Mancur (2000) Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships, New York: Basic Books, p. xv. 4 Olson, Mancur (1996) ‘Big Bills Left on the Sidewalk: Why Some Nations are Rich and Others Poor’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 10, no. 2, p. 22. 5 Quoted by Goldman, Marshall (1996) Lost Opportunity: What Has Made Economic Reform in Russia so Difficult?, New York: Norton, p. 106. 6 Quoted by Keegan, William (1993) The Spectre of Capitalism: The Future of the World Economy after the Fall of Communism, London: Vintage, p. 109. Summers would subsequently move on to the US Treasury, where he would be a powerful supporter of such economic reform policies that were derived from the Washington Consensus. 7 Brabant, Jozef M. van (1998) The Political Economy of Transition: Coming to Grips with History and Methodology, London: Routledge, p. 27. 8 See in particular Stiglitz’s oft-cited keynote address to the 1999 World Bank conference on development economics. The article is available on the World Bank web site: Stiglitz, Joseph E. (1999) ‘Whither Reform? Ten Years of the Transition’ (http://www.worldbank.org/research/abcde/washington_11/pdfs/ stiglitz.pdf ). It has also been reprinted in Chang, Ha-Joon (ed.) (2001) Joseph Stiglitz and the World Bank: The Rebel Within, London: Anthem Press, ch. 4. For a brief but harsh critique of the Washington Consensus, see Sapir, Jacques (2000) ‘The Washington Consensus and Transition in Russia: History of a Failure’, International Social Science Journal, vol. 52, no. 166. The host of theoretical problems that marked the design of economic transition in general, and the lessons that may be drawn after the fact, are discussed in Roland, Ge´rard (2000) Transition and Economics: Politics, Markets, and Firms, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. For a broader perspective on the role of economics and economists in Russia’s transition, see a collection of papers in Klein, Lawrence and Marshall Pomer (eds) (2001) The New Russia: Transition Gone Awry, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 9 The clarion call for the Westernizing challenge was sounded by the retired Guards officer Pyotr Chaadaev, in an 1836 ‘Philosophical letter’ that was published (in French!) in the Moscow journal Teleskop. His verdict over the

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19

20

contributions of Russian culture was hard hitting: ‘Alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, taken nothing from the world, bestowed not even a single idea upon the fund of human ideas, contributed nothing to the progress of the human spirit, and we have distorted all progressivity which has come to us.We are one of those nations which does not seem to form an integral part of humanity, but which exists only to provide some great lesson for the world.’ (Cited from Duncan, Peter J. S. (2000) Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After, London and New York: Routledge, p. 20.) The only possible remedy, according to Chaadaev, would be an instant embrace of the West, including Catholicism. Although he was immediately declared insane and placed under house arrest, his challenge would live on. Cited by Billington, James H. (1970) The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture, New York: Vintage, p. 320. McNeill, William H. (1963) The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Pipes, Richard (1996) ‘Russia’s Past, Russia’s Future’, Commentary, June, p. 35. For an excellent popularization of the undoubtedly complex matters that are associated with nihonjinron, see Smith, Patrick (1997) Japan: A Reinterpretation, New York: Vintage, ch. 7. In order to get this controversial law passed at all, it was necessary to defer matters regarding the circulation of agricultural land to special federal legislation. It was, moreover, explicitly stated that state and municipal agricultural land may not be privatized, and that foreign entities and individuals may hold leases only and may not acquire property rights to such land. For some insights into the reactions that were provoked, and the shortcomings that were revealed by and in this law, see articles in Moscow Times on 28 and 29 January 2002. Pipes, Richard (1999) Property and Freedom, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 162. See further Hedlund, Stefan (2001a) ‘Property without Rights: Dimensions of Russian Privatization’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 53, no. 2. Rose, Richard (1999) ‘Living in an Anti-Modern Society’, East European Constitutional Review, vol. 8, nos 1–2. See also Rose, Richard and Ian McAllister (1996) ‘Is Money the Measure of Welfare in Russia?’, Review of Income and Wealth, vol. 42, no. 1. On the more specific issue of blat and favours, see Ledeneva, Alena V. (1998) Russia’s Economy of Favors: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olson, Mancur (1997) ‘The New Institutional Economics: The Collective Choice Approach to Economic Development’, in Christopher Clague (ed.) Institutions and Economic Development: Growth and Governance in Less-Developed and Post-Socialist Countries, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 50–51. Two of the pioneering contributions to this field are David, Paul (1985) ‘Clio and the Economics of QWERTY’, The American Economic Review, vol. 75, no. 2, and Arthur, W. Brian (1988) ‘Self-Reinforcing Mechanisms in Economics’, in Philip W. Anderson, Kenneth J. Arrow and David Pines (eds) The Economy as an Evolving Complex System, Redwood City, Calif.: Addison-Wesley. See also Hedlund, Stefan (1999) Russia’s ‘Market’ Economy: A Bad Case of Predatory Capitalism, London: UCL Press, ch. 8, and further sources cited therein. In a foreword to a book by Brian Arthur, Kenneth Arrow, the dean of economists, notes the importance of these contributions: ‘It is in this context that Brian Arthur’s precise and fully modeled papers caused us all to understand clearly and specifically what kinds of models have what implications.’ (Arthur, W. Brian (1994) Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, pp. ix–x.)

334

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21 North, Douglass C. (1990) Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 6–7. 22 Ibid., p. 11. 23 Putnam, Robert (1993) Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, p. 167. See also Putnam, Robert (1996) ‘Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital’, in Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner (eds) The Global Resurgence of Democracy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; and Putnam, Robert (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon & Schuster. 24 Coleman, James S. (1990) Foundations of Social Theory, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p. 304. 25 Killick, Tony (1995) The Flexible Economy, London: Routledge. 26 Abramowitz, Moses (1986) ‘Catching Up, Forging Ahead and Falling Behind’, Journal of Economic History, vol. 46, no. 2, p. 387. 27 It might be argued here that measurement problems preclude us from ever proving that Russia, for example, has been persistently underperforming. While there is plenty of superficial evidence to indicate gross resource mismanagement, the presumption here is more of the deductive kind. If at any chosen point in time we may identify serious impediments to efficient resource allocation, then the outcome must be an inward shift of the production possibility frontier. Outlining which these impediments have been will be an important task to be addressed in the following. For a detailed argument and explanation of how and why a technically inferior economic system may still temporarily outperform a superior rival, see Rosefielde, Steven (2002b) Comparative Economic Systems: Culture, Wealth and Power in the 21st Century, Oxford: Blackwell. 28 For some tentative explorations of the implications of Russian path dependence for current-day policy-making, see Hedlund, Stefan (2000) ‘Path Dependence in Russian Policy Making: Constraints on Putin’s Economic Choice’, PostCommunist Economies, vol. 12, no. 4. 29 Landes, David (2000) ‘Culture Makes Almost all the Difference’, in Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (eds) Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, New York: Basic Books. See also Landes, David (1998) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are so Rich and Some so Poor, New York: Norton. 30 David, Paul (1993) ‘Historical Economics in the Long Run: Some Implications of Path Dependence’, in G. D. Snooks (ed.) Historical Analysis in Economics, London: Routledge, p. 29. 31 Ibid., p. 39. 32 In a comment on Russian economic growth performance under Putin, Steven Rosefielde contrasts the short-term macro numbers against underlying systemic deficiencies: ‘A system of this sort may give an illusion of growth by reactivating idle capacity, but cannot outperform more Paretian efficient rivals in the long run, qualitatively or quantitatively, even if its vast mineral wealth from time to time generates transient bonanzas. Accordingly, Russia must underperform the West, despite prattle about catching up with Portugal, and is likely to be outdistanced by China, undermining its national security.’ (Rosefielde, Steven (2004) Prodigal Superpower: Russia’s Re-Emerging Future, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 102.) 33 At the very least, this exercise in counter-factual speculation will serve to remove the danger of falling into the trap of historical determinism. It is important always to bear in mind that Russian history, from the time of Rus onwards, has been marked by numerous crossroads where different paths could have

Notes 335 been chosen. It is important to note that both Lithuania and Novgorod evolved very differently from Muscovy, and it is equally important to bear in mind that in the imperial age there were many attempts made to break out of the Muscovite mould.

2 Stationary bandits 1 David, Paul (1993) ‘Historical Economics in the Long Run: Some Implications of Path Dependence’, in G. D. Snooks (ed.) Historical Analysis in Economics, London: Routledge, p. 40. 2 See, e.g., Olson, Mancur (2000) Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships, New York: Basic Books, pp. 3–6. 3 The contrast between ‘narrow’ and ‘encompassing’ interests was originally formulated in Olson, Mancur (1982) The Rise and Decline of Nations, New Haven: Yale University Press. 4 This is the conventional wisdom. For an argument holding that there actually was a predecessor, see Christian, David (2002) ‘The Kaghanate of the Rus: Non-Slavic Sources of Russian Statehood’, in Stephen G. Wheatcroft (ed.) Challenging Traditional Views of Russian History, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 5 Olson, Mancur (1995) ‘Why the Transition from Communism is so Difficult’, Eastern Economic Journal, vol. 21, no. 4, p. 440. 6 On these notions, see also Leonardi, Robert (1995) ‘Regional Development in Italy: Social Capital and the Mezzogiorno’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, vol. II, no. 2. 7 Putnam, Robert (1993) Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, p. 180. 8 For a brief account of the peoples inhabiting the Pontic Steppe, see Christian, David (1998) A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, vol. 1, Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 357–61. 9 Billington, James H. (1970) The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture, New York: Vintage, p. 3. 10 Poe, Marshall T. (2003) The Russian Moment in World History, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, p. 30. 11 Olson, 2000, op. cit., p. x. 12 Cross, Samuel H. (ed. and transl.) (1953) The Russian Primary Chronicle, Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America. Even the authorship of this document has been hotly debated. At first it was ascribed to a monk by the name of Nestor, but in later scholarship it has been presented as a compilation of several documents. The presumed compiler was a certain Silvester, Abbot of the Viebuditsky Monastery in Kiev at the beginning of the twelfth century. See further, e.g., Kluchevsky, V. O. (1911) A History of Russia, vol. 1, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, ch. 1. 13 Cross, op. cit., p. 145. 14 Exactly how, when and why the Vikings began penetrating deep into the Russian lands has been hotly debated. Thomas Noonan suggests an explanation in two steps. First, there had been Viking settlements in the Staraya Ladoga area long before the alleged arrival of Rurik. Then, as these settlers got wind of the increasing prevalence of Islamic silver coins, dirhams, to the south, they began their push in that direction, a push that in the end would take them to Kiev and to Constantinople (Noonan, Thomas S. (1986) ‘Why the Vikings first Came to Russia’, Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 34, no. 3). For a broader account, see Franklin, Simon and Jonathan Shepard (1996) The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200, London and New York: Longman, ch. 1.

336

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15 Such evidence mainly concerns the Norse roots of subsequently Slavicized names. Grand Prince Oleg would, for example, originally have been called Helge. Similarly, Olga would have been Helga, and there are numerous other cases of the same kind. It is also the case that the very notion of ‘Rus’, which would eventually become ‘Russia’, has roots that may be credibly shown to have originated in Old Norse. Other aspects of Varangian influence on the formation of Rus are more contentious, and will not be touched upon here. 16 See further Christian, 1998, op. cit., pp. 334–41; and Poe, 2003, op. cit., pp. 17–18. 17 The Primary Chronicle suggests that there may have been some initial resistance. In 859 another band of Varangians ‘from beyond the sea’ are said to have infiltrated the region and attempted to impose tribute on its population. The locals, however, ‘drove them back beyond the sea and, refusing them further tribute, set out to govern themselves’ (Cross, op. cit., pp. 144–45). It was this incident that provided the rationale for the appeal to Rurik to come and rule. Perhaps it was a rational case of appealing for protection from the most ferocious of a host of different roving bandits. Perhaps it is all an ex post construction. In any case, it will remain a good story. 18 See further Noonan, Thomas S. (1965) The Dnieper Trade Route in Kievan Russia (900–1240 AD), Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1979. 19 Blum, Jerome (1964) Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century, New York: Atheneum, p. 15, quotes several contemporary sources to this effect, notably so Adam of Bremen (d. 1076) who wrote that it rivalled Constantinople. See also Noonan, 1965, op. cit., pp. 15–16. 20 Filled with the ambition of turning Kiev into a rival of Constantinople, Yaroslav began importing Byzantine building masters. He had the city surrounded by a great wall, which included the famous Golden Gate. He ordered the building of the St Sophia cathedral, patterned after the Hagia Sofia. He founded the Monastery of the Caves and the Monastery of St Michael, as well as numerous secular buildings inside the city, and it was he who had the first native cleric appointed Metropolitan of Kiev (Ilarion, in 1051). It is small wonder that he would be subsequently known as Yaroslav the Wise. 21 North, Douglass C. and Robert Paul Thomas (1973) The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 22 It might be argued that Max Weber’s classic model of the development of capitalism would serve as a better frame of reference. The broad scope of that undertaking surely would support such an argument. Given our strong focus on institutional development, however, we shall remain with the story that is laid out by North and Thomas. 23 For a map of the settlement areas of the most important tribes, see Dmytryshyn, Basil (1977) A History of Russia, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, p. 35. 24 Pipes, Richard (1999) Property and Freedom, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 162. 25 Kluchevsky, 1911, op. cit., pp. 78–79. 26 See Noonan, 1965, op. cit., pp. 14–16. 27 The dangers that lurked along the route south from Kiev are described by Noonan, 1965, op. cit., pp. 24–26, citing from Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus’ book De Administrando Imperio. For a translation of the relevant passage from the latter, see also Dmytryshyn, 1977, op. cit., ch. 5. 28 Kluchevsky, 1911, op. cit., p. 82. 29 According to the Primary Chronicle it happened in 866, but Byzantine sources say 860, and are held to be more reliable on this count. 30 Cross, op. cit., p. 149.

Notes 337 31 On the attack as such, see ibid., pp. 149–51, and Vernadsky, George (1948) A History of Russia, vol. 2, Kievan Russia, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 26–27. 32 Kluchevsky, 1911, op. cit., pp. 70–71, 81. 33 Vernadsky, 1948, op. cit., pp. 20–21. 34 Ibid., p. 27. 35 See further McNeill, William H. (1964) Europe’s Steppe Frontier, 1500–1800, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, ch. 1. 36 Hosking, Geoffrey (2001) Russia and the Russians: A History from Rus to the Russian Federation, Harmondsworth: The Penguin Press, p. 2. 37 Halperin, Charles J. (1985a) Russia and the Golden Horde, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 16. 38 Ibid., p. 19. 39 Kluchevsky, V. O. (1912) A History of Russia, vol. 2, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, p. 118. 40 Hosking, op. cit., p. 3 41 Halperin, 1985a, op. cit., p. 20. 42 As comparison, he notes that the total volume of goods transported annually from Germany to Italy over the St Gotthard Pass in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries averaged 1,250 tons (Vernadsky, 1948, op. cit., p. 30). 43 Pipes, Richard (1974) Russia under the Old Regime, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, p. 31. 44 Ostrowski, Donald (1998) Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 47–48. 45 Cross, op. cit., pp. 231–32. 46 Kluchevsky, 1911, op. cit., ch. 7. 47 Halperin, 1985a, op. cit., p. 18. 48 Kollmann, Nancy S. (1987) Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345–1547, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, p. 60. 49 Hosking, op. cit., p. 45. 50 Kollmann, op. cit., p. 60, also emphasizes the importance of this system in keeping the many members ‘committed to the dynasty’s unity’. 51 Kaiser, Daniel H. (ed. and transl.) (1992) The Laws of Rus – Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries, Salt Lake City, Utah: Charles Schlacks Jr. For a broader selection of – translated – source materials, see also Vernadsky, George (ed.) (1972) A Source Book for Russian History from Early Times to 1917, vol. 1, Early Times to the Late Seventeenth Century, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 52 Kaiser, 1992, op. cit., p. xli. Matters are further complicated by the fact that the Pravda comprises not one but three partly separate documents. The first, known as the ‘Short Pravda’, probably was compiled in 1015/16 and consists of 18 articles (of which three are believed to have been interpolated later). The second, known as the ‘Sons’ Pravda’, was compiled in 1072 and consists of 43 articles, including the above 18. The third version, the ‘Expanded Pravda’, evolved over the course of the twelfth century, with the final compilation probably taking place in the 1160s. It includes all but two of the 43 articles in the ‘Sons’ Pravda’ plus another 80. The ‘expanded’ version constitutes a considerably more elaborate piece of legislation, and it is clear from its formulations that its compilers were well versed in Byzantine law. 53 Hellie, Richard (1992) ‘Foreword’, in Daniel H. Kaiser (ed. and transl.) The Laws of Rus – Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries, Salt Lake City, Utah: Charles Schlacks Jr, pp. xiii, xviii–xix.

338 54 55 56 57 58

59

60

61 62 63 64 65

Notes

Pipes, 1999, op. cit., p. 163. Kluchevsky, 1911, op. cit., pp. 185–86. Hellie, op. cit., p. xii. In Muscovy it formed an important inspiration for the Sudebnik of 1497, and was not really replaced until the Sudebnik of 1550. In Lithuania it remained in force until replaced by the Code of 1588. See further Dewey, Horace W. and Ann M. Kleimola (1970) ‘Suretyship and Collective Responsibility in Pre-Petrine Russia’, Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 337–43; Dewey, Horace W. and Ann M. Kleimola (1984) ‘Russian Collective Consciousness: The Kievan Roots’, Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 62, no. 2; and Szeftel, Marc (1975) Russian Institutions and Culture up to Peter the Great, London: Variorum Reprints, ch. X. The initial contact between the Mongols and the Rus was made already in 1223, when a Mongol scouting expedition, presented by Halperin as a ‘reconnaissance in force’, broke through an alliance of Polovtsians and Alans, and entered into the Pontic steppe. Having subsequently been ‘disastrously defeated’ by a combined army of Russians and Polovtsians, the Mongols withdrew and would stay away for nearly 15 years (Halperin, 1985a, op. cit., pp. 45–46). Perhaps the Russians thought that they had seen both the first and the last of these newcomers. If so, they would be proven disastrously wrong. When the Italian monk John of Piano Carpini passed Kiev in 1246, on his way to Mongolia, he reported that ‘we came across countless skulls and bones of dead men lying about on the ground. Kiev had been a very large and thickly populated town, but now it has been reduced almost to nothing, for there are at the present time scarce two hundred houses there and the inhabitants are kept in complete slavery’ (Christian, 1998, op. cit., p. 410). For a full translation of his letter, see Dmytryshyn, Basil (ed. and transl.) (1973) Medieval Russia: A Source Book, 900–1700, Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden Press, ch. 18, esp. p. 116. Blum, op. cit., pp. 41–42. Hosking, op. cit., p. 47. Kluchevsky, 1911, op. cit., p. 125. As an important illustration we may note a meeting at Lyubech in 1097, when the surviving descendants of Yaroslav the Wise came to a very temporary agreement on respecting each other’s claims to heritage (Cross, op. cit., p. 279). Kluchevsky, 1911, op. cit., p. 125.

3 Successor states 1 Keenan, Edward (1986) ‘Muscovite Political Folkways’, Russian Review, vol. 45, no. 2, p. 119. 2 Ibid., p. 122. 3 Poe, Marshall T. (2000) ‘A People Born to Slavery’, Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, pp. 219–20. 4 Ibid., p. 226. 5 Pipes, Richard (1974) Russia under the Old Regime, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, p. 19. 6 Dmytryshyn, Basil (1977) A History of Russia, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, p. 125. 7 Birnbaum, Henrik (1981) Lord Novgorod the Great: Essays in the History and Culture of a Medieval City-State, Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, p. 45, citing the Soviet scholar V. L. Yanin.

Notes 339 8 See further Martin, Janet (1986) Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and its Significance for Medieval Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch. 3. 9 Hosking, Geoffrey (2001) Russia and the Russians: A History from Rus to the Russian Federation, Harmondsworth: The Penguin Press, p. 66. 10 On the role of the Hansa in Novgorod, see Martin, op. cit., pp. 61–68, and Birnbaum, Henrik (1996) Novgorod in Focus: Selected Essays by Henrik Birnbaum, Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, ch. 5. 11 For a translation, see Michel, Robert and Neville Forbes (transl.) (1970) The Chronicle of Novgorod, 1016–1471, Hattiesburg, Miss.: Academic International. 12 Kluchevsky, V. O. (1911) A History of Russia, vol. 1, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, p. 137. 13 Vernadsky, George (1947) Medieval Russian Laws, New York: Norton, p. 14. 14 Kluchevsky, 1911, op. cit., p. 137. 15 Birnbaum, 1981, op. cit., p. 85. 16 Ibid., pp. 85–86. 17 Birnbaum, 1996, op. cit., p. 89. 18 Pipes, Richard (1999) Property and Freedom, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 170. 19 Kluchevsky, 1911, op. cit., p. 325. 20 Ibid., p. 327. The texts of four such documents may be found in Kaiser, Daniel H. (ed. and transl.) (1992) The Laws of Rus – Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries, Salt Lake City, Utah: Charles Schlacks Jr, pp. 66–78. 21 See further Vernadsky, George (1959) A History of Russia, vol. 4, Russia at the Dawn of the Modern Age, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 34–37. 22 Kluchevsky, 1911, op. cit., p. 326. It was obviously understood that the choice would have to be made from amongst the princely families, but given their growing numbers and the constant feuding between them, there would be ample latitude for choice. 23 Birnbaum, 1981, op. cit., p. 46. 24 The text may be found in Kaiser, 1992, op. cit., pp. 87–105. 25 Hellie, Richard (1992) ‘Foreword’, in Daniel H. Kaiser (ed. and transl.) The Laws of Rus – Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries, Salt Lake City, Utah: Charles Schlacks Jr, p. xxiii. 26 Kaiser, op. cit., p. xlviii. 27 See ibid., pp. 79–86. 28 Hellie, op. cit., pp. xxiii–xxiv. 29 Against this conventional view, Charles Halperin argues that the Mongols approaching Novgorod may simply have been in pursuit of refugees. To him, their weak concentration of forces does not agree with any plans to storm or take the city. (Halperin, Charles (1985b) The Tatar Yoke, Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, p. 65.) 30 Birnbaum, 1996, op. cit., p. 126. 31 Pipes, 1999, op. cit., p. 171. 32 Birnbaum, 1996, op. cit., p. 91. 33 Ibid., pp. 175–76. 34 Ibid., p. 73. 35 Vernadsky, 1959, op. cit., p. 53, and ch. II passim. 36 As it really should have been in Casimir’s best interest to counter the expansion of Muscovy, the reasons why he failed to show up present something of an enigma: ‘To the best of my knowledge, Polish scholarship has yet to provide a satisfactory answer to this question.’ (Birnbaum, 1996, op. cit., p. 177.) 37 Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 83. 38 Poe, 2000, op. cit., pp. 43, 46, 48, 50.

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39 Noonan, Thomas S. (1975) ‘Medieval Russia, the Mongols, and the West: Novgorod’s Relations with the Baltic, 1100–1350’, Medieval Studies, vol. 37, pp. 328, 330, 338. 40 Rosenberg, Nathan and L. E. Birdzell, Jr (1986) How the West Grew Rich, New York: Basic Books, p. 35. 41 What had originally destroyed the ‘ancient unity of the Mediterranean’ was not so much the ‘Arab assault’ as the subsequent Byzantine domination. The gradual weakening of the Byzantines thus was an important factor in allowing the Western powers, notably so the Venetians, to return to the eastern Mediterranean. See further Lewis, Archibald R. (1951) Naval Power and Trade in the Mediterranean, AD 500–1100, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, p. 97 and passim. 42 For a more detailed study of the Maghribi, see also Greif, Avner (1993) ‘Contract Enforceability and Economic Institutions in Early Trade: The Maghribi Traders’ Coalition’, American Economic Review, vol. 83, no. 3. 43 Greif, Avner (1994a) ‘Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: A Historical and Theoretical Reflection on Collectivist and Individualist Societies’, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 102, no. 5, p. 937. 44 Ibid., p. 938. For a more detailed discussion of the case of Genoa, see also Greif, Avner (1994b) ‘On the Political Foundations of the Late Medieval Commercial Revolution: Genoa During the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, The Journal of Economic History, vol. 54, no. 4. 45 Greif, 1994a, op. cit., p. 943. 46 Greif, Avner (1995) ‘Political Organizations, Social Structure, and Institutional Success: Reflections from Genoa and Venice During the Commercial Revolution’, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, vol. 151, no. 4, p. 734. 47 Olson, Mancur (1997) ‘The New Institutional Economics: The Collective Choice Approach to Economic Development’, in Christopher Clague (ed.) Institutions and Economic Development: Growth and Governance in Less-Developed and PostSocialist Countries, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 39. 48 Greif, 1995, op. cit., p. 734. 49 Ibid., p. 737. 50 Ibid., p. 738. 51 De Long, J. Bradford and Andrei Shleifer (1993) ‘Princes and Merchants: European City Growth Before the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 36, October, p. 674. 52 Pipes, 1999, op. cit., p. 172. 53 De Long and Shleifer, op. cit., p. 671. 54 Pipes, 1999, op. cit., p. 160. 55 More than three centuries later, the Marquis de Custine would report from his travels in the Russian Empire of Nicholas I that ‘The more I see of Russia, the more I approve the conduct of the Emperor in forbidding his subjects to travel, and in rendering access to his own country difficult to foreigners. The political system of Russia could not survive twenty years’ free communication with the rest of Europe’ (Custine, Astolphe, Marquis de (1989) Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia, New York: Doubleday, p. 139). 56 Martin, op. cit., pp. 68–81, places much emphasis on the creation of an elaborate supply system to support the trade in squirrel pelts, which were in high demand on foreign markets. 57 Pipes, 1999, op. cit., p. 171. 58 Halperin, Charles J. (1985a) Russia and the Golden Horde, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 50. 59 Ibid. 60 Birnbaum, 1996, op. cit., p. 92.

Notes 341 61 62 63 64 65

Halperin, 1985a, op. cit., p. 50. Dmytryshyn, op. cit., pp. 93–94. Birnbaum, 1996, op. cit., p. 180. De Long and Shleifer, op. cit., pp. 673, 675, 679. Ibid., p. 700.

4 Lords of all Rus 1 Billington, James H. (1970) The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture, New York: Vintage. 2 Pipes, Richard (1974) Russia under the Old Regime, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 3 Ostrowski, Donald (1998) Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 246. 4 Billington, op. cit., ch. II:1. See also Halperin, Charles J. (1973) The Russian State and the Russian Tsar: The Emergence of Muscovite Ideology, 1380–1408, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1979. 5 Kluchevsky, V. O. (1911) A History of Russia, vol. 1, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, p. 201. 6 Vernadsky, George (1948) A History of Russia, vol. 2, Kievan Russia, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 100. 7 Blum, Jerome (1964) Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century, New York: Atheneum, p. 17, note 5. 8 Noting that Kluchevsky’s position ‘definitely needs revision’, Thomas Noonan still holds that ‘the degree of the modification remains a moot question’ (Noonan, Thomas S. (1965) The Dnieper Trade Route in Kievan Russia (900– 1240 AD), Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1979, p. 6). 9 Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 5. 10 Billington, op. cit., p. 48. 11 The question of princely prowess is yet another of so many contentious issues in Russian historiography. While some present them as great personalities, others argue that they were plain and rather lacking in distinction. See further Vernadsky, George (1953) A History of Russia, vol. 3, The Mongols and Russia, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 243–44. 12 Kluchevsky, 1911, op. cit., pp. 276–81. 13 Kluchevsky, V. O. (1912) A History of Russia, vol. 2, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, p. 118. 14 Ibid., p. 119. 15 Hosking, Geoffrey (2001) Russia and the Russians: A History from Rus to the Russian Federation, Harmondsworth: The Penguin Press, p. 4. 16 It is true that there was a substantial inflow of silver from Novgorod already by the early fourteenth century (Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., p. 123) but it is also clear that Muscovy would become a great commercial power only in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Most importantly, it would be a full century after the attack before Muscovy could resume the minting of coins (Halperin, Charles J. (1985a) Russia and the Golden Horde, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 76). On the role of silver in Novgorod’s trade, see also Martin, Janet (1986) Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and its Significance for Medieval Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 67–68. 17 According to a Mongol tax assessment in 1446, Moscow had about 100,000 inhabitants. Few urban centres anywhere at the time had more than 20,000. At the mid-fourteenth century, only Milan and Venice are estimated to have had more than 100,000. (See further Blum, op. cit., pp. 62–63.)

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18 Halperin, 1973, op. cit., p. 176, citing the Troitskaya Chronicle. 19 Kluchevsky notes that common townspeople, many of whom were former peasants from the south, soon began to form a separate force. Having little patience with the boyar elites of the large cities, they chose to side with Vladimir and some of the other minor towns. This arousal of the lower orders, which he sees as ‘class struggle’, may have further contributed to the ‘revolution’ that began with Bogolyubskii (Kluchevsky, 1911, op. cit., pp. 229–34). 20 Kluchevsky, 1911, op. cit., p. 235. 21 Ibid., pp. 250–51. 22 Ibid., p. 253. 23 Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 40. 24 For a brief account of the formation and structure of the Mongol Empire, see Christian, David (1998) A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia, vol. 1, Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire, Oxford: Blackwell, chs 15–16. 25 One important reason is that the Mongols’ own archives were destroyed in 1395, when Tamerlane sacked and destroyed Sarai, the capital of the Golden Horde. 26 For a succinct overview of some of the more general scholarly problems that are involved in studying the political culture of Muscovy, where possible forms of influence by the Mongols constituted such an important part, see Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., pp. 1–27. 27 For more examples, see Pipes, 1974, op. cit., pp. 203–04. 28 As pointed out by ibid., p. 205, ‘The dishonesty of the Russian merchant was notorious. It is repeatedly stressed not only by foreign travelers, whom one might suspect of prejudice, but also by native writers.’ 29 Halperin, Charles J. (1985b) The Tatar Yoke, Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, p. 15. 30 Quoted by Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., p. 2. Kluchevsky similarly maintains that Mongol rule was beneficial, in the sense of curbing some of the worst aspects of Russian destructiveness: ‘Social consciousness of so atrophied a kind was incapable of rising beyond the mere instincts of self-preservation and plunder’ (Kluchevsky, 1911, op. cit., pp. 308–09). 31 Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., p. 7. For a more detailed argument, see Ostrowski, Donald (1990) ‘The Mongol Origins of Muscovite Political Institutions’, Slavic Review, vol. 49, no. 4. 32 Pipes, Richard (1999) Property and Freedom, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 167. 33 Halperin, Charles J. (1985a) Russia and the Golden Horde, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 26. 34 As pointed out by Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., p. xiii, ‘Golden Horde’ is a term that appears only in the seventeenth century, when the Mongols had long since been defeated. A more adequate usage would be ‘Qipchaq Khanate’ or ‘Ulus of Jochi’, which were names used by the Mongols themselves. (Contemporary Muscovite sources simply speak of the Orda, which meant ‘the court’.) In the following, however, although technically incorrect we shall abide by ‘Golden Horde’ as the common usage. 35 Halperin, 1985a, op. cit., p. 26. 36 Ibid., p. 30. 37 Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., p. 44. See also Christian, op. cit, p. 417. 38 As a general rule, the khans demanded that princes offer their sons as hostages (Ostrowski, 1990, op. cit., p. 525). This meant that after a couple of generations all of the leading princes of Rus would have spent a great many of their formative years observing the court of the khan from within.

Notes 343 39 Halperin, 1985a, op. cit., p. 35. 40 Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., pp. 36–45. In the sixteenth century, these would in turn be replaced by pomeshchiki and voevoda. 41 For an overview of the system of Mongol administration in Rus, see Vernadsky, 1953, op. cit., pp. 214–32. 42 Halperin, 1985a, op. cit., p. 60. 43 Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., p. 44. 44 Kluchevsky, 1911, op. cit., p. 286. 45 Vernadsky, 1953, op. cit., pp. 88, 201. 46 See further ibid., pp. 200–02. 47 Halperin, 1985a, op. cit., p. 78. 48 Pipes, 1999, op. cit., p. 166. 49 Kluchevsky, 1911, op. cit., p. 305. 50 Ibid., p. 311. 51 The real cause of this struggle may be found in the will of Dmitrii Donskoi. Seeing that his son, Vasilii I, had no heir, he stipulated that the throne instead should go to his brother. When he subsequently did get an heir, the future Vasilii II, the stage was thus set for confrontation. 52 Dmytryshyn, Basil (1977) A History of Russia, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, p. 143. 53 Vernadsky, 1953, op. cit., p. 325. 54 The first prince of Moscow was Daniel, the youngest son of Alexander Nevskii. Appointed at the death of his father, in 1263, he is normally considered as the founder of the line of Moscow princes. 55 Vernadsky, 1953, op. cit., pp. 312–13. 56 See further Kluchevsky, V. O. (1912) A History of Russia, vol. 2, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, pp. 13–15. 57 Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., p. 47. 58 Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 47. 59 Kluchevsky, 1911, op. cit., p. 263. 60 Pipes, Richard (1994b) ‘Was there Private Property in Muscovite Russia?’, Slavic Review, vol. 53, no. 2, p. 525. 61 Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., p. 47. 62 Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 88. See also Szeftel, Marc (1975) Russian Institutions and Culture up to Peter the Great, London: Variorum Reprints, p. 857. 63 Kluchevsky, 1912, op. cit., p. 119. 64 According to Pipes, the earliest case of land being granted as pomestie, rather than as votchina, has been traced to the fourteenth century, when an appanage prince made such an award to the keeper of his kennel (Pipes, 1999, op. cit., p. 175). 65 Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., pp. 48–49. 66 Ibid., p. 62. 67 Dewey, Horace W. (1987) ‘Political Poruka in Muscovite Rus’, The Russian Review, vol. 46, no. 2, p. 131. 68 Kluchevsky, 1912, op. cit., p. 123. 69 Ibid., p. 123, dates the final merger between household and military service to the time when the previous practice of mutual agreements not to press the household servitors into military service was abandoned. 70 The Sudebnik of 1497 mentions these lands (in article 63) as state rather than as private lands (Vernadsky, George (1959) A History of Russia, vol. 4, Russia at the Dawn of the Modern Age, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 116). 71 Pipes, 1994b, op. cit., p. 527. 72 Kluchevsky, 1912, op. cit., p. 135.

344 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86

Notes

Pipes, 1994b, op. cit., p. 526. See further Vernadsky, 1959, op. cit., pp. 108–11. Blum, op. cit., p. 93. Ibid., pp. 96–97. Ibid., p. 85. Vernadsky, 1959, op. cit., p. 110. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 48. Blum, op. cit., p. 90. The only article in that code with any relevance to this matter was one granting a peasant the right to report treason by his landlord. Should the report be false, he would be beaten with the knout and sent back to his master. Ibid., p. 107. Ibid., p. 249. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 101. Blum, op. cit., pp. 254–55. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 103. Ibid., pp. 104–05.

5 The only true Christians 1 In the ‘Brezhnev’ Constitution of 1977, they were to be found, respectively, in Articles 1 and 6. 2 Laqueur, Walter (1997) Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia, New York: HarperCollins, p. 66. 3 For a classic treatment, see Billington, James H. (1970) The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture, New York: Vintage Books. On the specific dimension of Russian messianism, see also Duncan, Peter J. S. (2000) Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After, London and New York: Routledge. Ibid., pp. 34–41, also deals specifically with the role of Dostoevsky. 4 According to the Primary Chronicle the event took place in 988, but some later scholars have placed it in 989. The reason has to do with the order of events, and need not occupy us here. 5 Still today, we may observe serious friction between Russian Orthodoxy and Catholicism in particular. The question of foreign mission in Russia is still contentious, and despite a strong desire to do so Pope John Paul, perhaps the most well-travelled Pope ever, would never be granted permission to make an official visit to Moscow. The closest he got was an offer from Putin to issue an invitation to him as head of state of the Vatican. 6 The crisis was largely provoked by Patriarch Cerularius, who was a man of great personal ambition. We may also note that the Papal bull was issued shortly after the death of Pope Leo IX. Faced with a refusal by the Patriarch to recognize their legitimacy, Papal legates negotiating in Constantinople departed in great fury, leaving behind on the altar of the St Sophia a bull that excommunicated the Patriarch and his advisers. See further Runciman, Steven (1953) A History of the Crusades, vol. I, The First Crusade, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 96–97, and ch. II:II passim. 7 Billington, op. cit., p. 57. 8 Poe, Marshall T. (2000) ‘A People Born to Slavery’, Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ch. 3. 9 Kochan, Lionel and Richard Abraham (1990) The Making of Modern Russia, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 94.

Notes 345 10 Pipes, Richard (1974) Russia under the Old Regime, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, p. 227. 11 Billington, op. cit., pp. 61–64. 12 Cross, Samuel H. (ed. and transl.) (1953) The Russian Primary Chronicle, Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, pp. 183–207. 13 The text of Vladimir’s Statute may be found in Kaiser, Daniel H. (ed. and transl.) (1992) The Laws of Rus – Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries, Salt Lake City, Utah: Charles Schlacks Jr, pp. 41–44. 14 Ibid., p. 44. 15 Kluchevsky, V. O. (1911) A History of Russia, vol. 1, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, p. 166. 16 Ibid. 17 Hellie, Richard (1992) ‘Introduction’, in Daniel H. Kaiser (ed. and transl.) The Laws of Rus – Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries, Salt Lake City, Utah: Charles Schlacks Jr, p. xxi. 18 See further Kaiser, Daniel H. (1980) The Growth of the Law in Medieval Russia, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 165–69. 19 Ibid., p. 16. 20 Hellie, op. cit., p. xxii. 21 See further Kaiser, 1980, op. cit., p. 170. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 171. 24 Ibid. 25 Hellie, op. cit., p. xxi. 26 The diatribes would be similar in form to those issued against previous barbarian intruders such as the Pechenegs. For some colourful examples, see Ostrowski, Donald (1998) Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 144–45. 27 Ibid., pp. 138, 145. 28 Halperin, Charles J. (1984) ‘The Ideology of Silence: Prejudice and Pragmatism on the Medieval Religious Frontier’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 26, no. 3. 29 Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., p. 144. 30 The primary source of this information is Clement Adams, who visited the country in 1553 and went on to present his impressions in a study that was titled The Newe Navigation and Discoverie of Muscovia, by the Northeast, in the Yeere 1553. See further Blum, Jerome (1964) Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century, New York: Atheneum, p. 188. 31 Ibid., pp. 188–89. 32 See further ibid., pp. 189–90. 33 Ibid., pp. 190–91. 34 Ibid., pp. 191–92. 35 Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 227. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., p. 245. 38 Ibid., p. 226. 39 See further Kluchevsky, 1911, op. cit, p. 166. 40 Kaiser, 1980, op. cit., p. 171. 41 Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 228. 42 See further Billington, op. cit., pp. 60–61. 43 Blum, op. cit., p. 136. 44 Ibid., p. 197. 45 Billington, op. cit., p. 64.

346 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63

64

65 66 67 68

69 70

Notes

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 56. Duncan, op. cit, p. 1, uses the expression of ‘crucified Serbia’, as a national myth that ‘both justified the ill-treatment of minorities and sustained the nation at times when it seemed that the whole world was against it’. Rather unsurprisingly, Kosovo Pole also would figure prominently in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. Billington, op. cit., p. 56. Ibid., p. 57. Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., p. 141. Poe, 2000, op. cit., p. 149. Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., pp. 142–43. Billington, op. cit., p. 58. Following the capture of Jerusalem in 638, the true cross and other sacred relics had been taken to Constantinople. Based on this transfer, there arose a belief ‘that Constantinople might in some sense be the New Jerusalem as well as the New Rome’ (ibid., p. 55). Duncan, op. cit., pp. 11–12. Billington, op. cit., p. 57. Kluchevsky, V. O. (1912) A History of Russia, vol. 2, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, p. 21. Kluchevsky, 1912, op. cit., p. 22. See further Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., pp. 173–75. As a small aside, we may note that when President Vladimir Putin celebrated his 50th birthday, in 2002, amongst the gifts he received was a replica of that very cap. There was some dark irony indeed in the fact that an Orthodox president who was engaged in something that might well be compared to a crusade against the Moslem Chechens would be clad in a crown once fabricated by the Moslem Mongols. Duncan, op. cit., p. 14, argues that ‘the masses of the population sometimes behaved as if they took aspects of the doctrine very seriously’. Since the peasantry of the time was largely illiterate, it is clearly impossible to say anything conclusive about their beliefs. Nevertheless, based on such demands that were expressed in the frequently occurring peasant rebellions, it is possible to ‘fit together a plausible peasant ideology, based on the myths of ‘‘Holy Russia’’ and the ‘‘saintly ruler’’ ’. For a discussion of the correct dating and possible intentions of this and other similar sources, see Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., ch. 10. Poe, Marshall T. (2001) ‘Moscow the Third Rome: The Origins and Transformation of a ‘‘Pivotal Moment’’ ’, Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 49, no. 3. Kluchevsky, 1912, op. cit., p. 19. Ibid., pp. 20–21. For a detailed discussion of the changing titles of the Muscovite monarchs, see Szeftel, Marc (1979) ‘The Title of the Muscovite Monarch Up to the End of the Seventeenth Century’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, vol. 13, nos 1–2. Poe, Marshall T. (1998) ‘What did the Russians Mean When They Called Themselves ‘‘Slaves of the Tsar’’?’, Slavic Review, vol. 57, no. 3, p. 587. As an interesting aside, we may note that while gospodin was associated with free servants, gosudar was used with regard to those without freedom. The increasingly complicated relation between Novgorod and Ivan III would have much to do with how the Novgorodians should address the Muscovite grand prince. (Szeftel, op. cit., p. 63.)

Notes 347 71 See further Vernadsky, George (1959) A History of Russia, vol. 4, Russia at the Dawn of the Modern Age, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, pp. 24–25. 72 Kluchevsky, 1912, op. cit., p. 17. 73 Ibid., p. 20. 74 Ibid., p. 21. 75 Vernadsky, 1959, op. cit., p. 83. 76 Kluchevsky, 1912, op. cit., p. 24. 77 In the end, there actually was a treaty signed (in 1491) but soon thereafter Maximilian (the son of Frederick) made peace with King Wladyslaw of Bohemia and Hungary. Thus the treaty with Moscow was no longer of use, and it would not be put into effect (Vernadsky, 1959, op. cit., p. 83). 78 Billington, op. cit., p. 67. 79 Kluchevsky, 1912, op. cit., pp. 22–23. 80 Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 73. 81 Kluchevsky, 1912, op. cit., p. 22. 82 Billington, op. cit., p. 68. 83 Ibid., p. 67.

6 The patrimonial state 1 Cited from Pipes, Richard (1974) Russia under the Old Regime, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, p. 22. See further Weber, Max (1972) Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, vol. II, Tu¨bingen: Mohr, p. 585, and ch. 9 passim. 2 Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 23. 3 Mises, Ludwig von (1922) ‘Die Wirtschaftsrechnung in sozialistischen Gemeinwesen’, Archiv fu¨r Sozialwissenschaften, vol. 47. Reprinted as ‘Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth’, in Friedrich von Hayek (ed.) (1935) Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibilities of Socialism, London: George Routledge & Sons, p. 110. 4 Pipes, Richard (1999) Property and Freedom, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, pp. 12–13, 28. 5 Kornai, Ja´nos (1992) The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, esp. ch. 15. 6 Ibid., p. 361. 7 For a comprehensive presentation of this theory, see North, Douglass C. (1990) Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 8 He specifically cautioned that ‘transferring the political and economic rules of successful market economies to Third World and Eastern European economies is not a sufficient condition for good economic performance’ (North, Douglass C. (1995) ‘Economic Performance Through Time’, American Economic Review, vol. 84, no. 3, p. 366). 9 Dewey, Horace (1956) ‘The 1497 Sudebnik – Muscovite Russia’s First National Law Code’, American Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 15, no. 3, p. 325. 10 Kaiser, Daniel H. (1980) The Growth of Law in Medieval Russia, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, p. 3. 11 Dewey, 1956, op. cit., p. 326. 12 Kaiser, Daniel H. (ed. and transl.) (1992) The Laws of Rus – Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries, Salt Lake City, Utah: Charles Schlacks Jr, pp. xlviii–lii. 13 Kaiser, 1980, op. cit., pp. 3–4. 14 Kaiser, 1992, op. cit., p. xlviii. 15 Dewey, 1956, op. cit., pp. 326, 336.

348

Notes

16 Kaiser, 1980, op. cit., p. 119. 17 Dewey, 1956, op. cit., p. 338. 18 Vernadsky, George (1953) A History of Russia, vol. 3, The Mongols and Russia, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 151. 19 Halperin, Charles J. (1985a) Russia and the Golden Horde, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 81–82. 20 On the broader aspects of the Mongol impact on Russia, see further Vernadsky, 1953, op. cit., ch. 5. 21 Halperin, 1985a, op. cit., p. 80. 22 Ibid., pp. 75–76. See also Ostrowski, Donald (1998) Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 113–15; and Vernadsky, 1953, op. cit., pp. 213, 338–39. 23 See further Martin, Janet (1986) Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and its Significance for Medieval Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch. 4. 24 Halperin, 1985a, op. cit., p. 83. 25 E.g. Vernadsky, 1953, op. cit., pp. 341–44. 26 Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., pp. 125–26. 27 For an overview, see ibid., pp. 121–31. 28 Keenan, Edward (1986) ‘Muscovite Political Folkways’, Russian Review, vol. 45, no. 2, p. 137. 29 Vernadsky, 1953, op. cit., p. 345, for example, argues that the Mongols ‘were determined to crush the opposition of the cities and to eliminate the veche as a political institution’. Later scholarship has disputed this interpretation, placing emphasis instead on purely internal factors (e.g. Halperin, 1985a, op. cit., pp. 95–96). 30 Pipes, 1999, op. cit., pp. 173–74. 31 Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 282. 32 Keenan, op. cit., p. 130. 33 Poe, Marshall T. (2000) ‘A People Born to Slavery’, Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, p. 220. 34 Ibid., p. 221. 35 Keenan, op. cit., pp. 129, 135, 141. 36 Poe, 2000, op. cit., p. 222. 37 North, 1990, op. cit., p. 46. 38 For a detailed discussion of the difference between these two concepts, see a collection of articles in Maravall, Jose´ Maria and Adam Przeworski (2003) Democracy and the Rule of Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. According to these authors, the dividing line is determined by the distribution of power, an argument that is well in line with our path dependence approach. 39 Elster, Jon (1989) The Cement of Society: A Study of Social Order, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 40 North, Douglass C. and Arthur T. Denzau (1994) ‘Shared Mental Models: Ideologies and Institutions’, Kyklos, vol. 47, no. 3, p. 3. 41 Ibid., p. 4. 42 See further Elster, Jon (1985) Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, section II. 43 Ibid., p. 43, notes two importants fallacies that may arise in this context. Since many of the states that fall into the category of by-products are useful and desirable, it may be tempting to try to bring them about, even though that undertaking is doomed to fail. This is a moral fallacy. Similarly, if such useful and desirable states are observed to be present, it may be tempting to explain

Notes 349

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

their presence as the result of actions designed to bring them about, even though there can be no such connection. This is an intellectual fallacy. The combination provides a rather sobering background to the field of policy analysis. Billington, op. cit., pp. 54, 63. As cases in point, he refers to the ‘life’, or vita, of Alexander Nevskii and to the ‘Kulikovo cycle’, the set of tales that were written to celebrate the victory of Dmitrii Donskoi over the Mongols in 1380. Ibid., p. 55. Keenan, op. cit., pp. 145, 148. Ibid., p. 147. Halperin, Charles J. (1973) The Russian State and the Russian Tsar: The Emergence of Muscovite Ideology, 1380–1408, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1979, p. 35. Ibid., pp. 42–46. Ibid., p. 150. Vernadsky, 1953, op. cit., p. 352. Taking the parallel one step further, it may also be noted that while the khan of Chingizid blood was always referred to as tsar, his heir apparent would be called tsesar, reflecting the Byzantine distinction between Augustus and Caesar, as senior and junior emperors (Cherniavsky, Michael (1970) ‘Khan or Basileus: An Aspect of Russian Medieval Political Theory’, in idem (ed.) The Structure of Russian History: Interpretive Essays, New York: Random House, p. 67). Ibid., p. 72. Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., pp. 180–81, points out that in documents from 1474 until 1505, tsar is used only in contexts where the grand prince guarantees safe passage across his territory. The logic is that under such special circumstances it may have been seen as useful to rely on the authority of the Mongol title. For further discussion on these matters, see Croskey, Robert M. (1987) Muscovite Diplomatic Practice in the Reign of Ivan III, New York: Garland. Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., p. 181. Ibid., p. 176. Ibid., pp. 90–92. Ibid., pp. 177–78. For a more detailed presentation, see Szeftel, op. cit., pp. 65–69. See further Dewey, Horace W. (1962) ‘The 1550 Sudebnik as an Instrument of Reform’, Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r Geschichte Osteuropas, n.s. 10, no. 2. Dmytryshyn, Basil (1977) A History of Russia, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, p. 159. Billington, op. cit., p. 99, argues that the ‘mounting fury’ of Ivan IV’s last years was ‘less a product of his paranoia than of a kind of schizophrenia’. His two allegedly conflicting sides were ‘exclusivist, traditional ideology’ and ‘experimental modern statecraft’. Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., p. 189. This view is also supported by Pelenski, Jaroslaw (1967) ‘Muscovite Imperial Claims to the Kazan Khanate’, Slavic Review, vol. 26, no. 4. Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., p.192. Cherniavsky, op. cit., p.74. Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., p. 188. Ibid., p. 198. Ibid., p. 88. Kollmann, Nancy S. (1987) Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345–1547, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, pp. 26, 29. Ibid., p. 27.

350 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88 89

90 91 92

93 94

95

Notes Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid., p. 76. Vernadsky, 1953, op. cit., pp. 371–72. Blum, Jerome (1964) Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century, New York: Atheneum, p. 144. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., pp. 94–95. Poe, 2000, op. cit., 69. This immortal phrase was originally formulated by Richard Chancellor, whose Muscovy company did good trade with Ivan the Terrible. See also Berry, Lloyd E. and Robert O. Crummey (eds) (1968) Rude and Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-Century English Voyagers, Madison, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press. Poe, 2000, op. cit., pp. 68–73. Cherniavsky, op. cit., p. 73. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. xxi. Owen, Thomas C. (1998) ‘Autocracy and the Rule of Law’, in Jeffrey Sachs and Katarina Pistor (eds) The Rule of Law and Economic Reform in Russia, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, pp. 24–25. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 288. Billington, op. cit., p. 119. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 21. The Marquis de Custine came away with the following impression: ‘All men are equal before God, and the Russians’ God is the emperor. This supreme governor is so raised above earth, that he sees no difference between the serf and the lord.’ (Custine, Astolphe, Marquis de (1989) Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia, New York: Doubleday, p. 227.) Poe, 2000, op. cit., p. 224. This notion was pioneered by Karl Wittfogel, claiming that it had come to Muscovy from China via the Mongols (Wittfogel, Karl (1981) Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, New York: Vintage, pp. 190–91). There were a whole range of good rational reasons for them to do so, most of which were related to security and welfare. See further Hosking, Geoffrey (2001) Russia and the Russians: A History from Rus to the Russian Federation, Harmondsworth: The Penguin Press, p. 151. Rancour-Laferriere, Daniel (1995) The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering, New York: New York University Press. Poe, Marshall T. (1998) ‘What did the Russians Mean When They Called Themselves ‘‘Slaves of the Tsar’’?’, Slavic Review, vol. 57, no. 3, p. 586–608. We may note here the great importance that has been assigned by economists to institutions like merchant guilds in the emergence of the ‘Western’ system. See, e.g., Greif, Avner, Paul Milgrom and Barry R. Weingast (1994) ‘Coordination, Commitment, and Enforcement: The Case of the Merchant Guild’, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 102, no. 4. Billington, op. cit., p. 64, maintains that this ‘probably represents an extension to the public at large of the rigid obligations to report fully any wavering of loyalties inside Josephite monasteries’. Dewey, Horace W. and Ann M. Kleimola (1970) ‘Suretyship and Collective Responsibility in Pre-Petrine Russia’, Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 18. no. 3, p. 343. The possibly borrowed methods of coercion would include shin beating, so called pravezh. Dewey, Horace W. (1987) ‘Political Poruka in Muscovite Rus’, The Russian Review, vol. 46, no. 2, p. 117. On the early roots, see also Dewey, Horace W.

Notes 351

96 97 98 99

100 101 102 103 104 105 106

107 108 109 110 111 112

113 114 115 116 117 118

119

and Ann M. Kleimola (1984) ‘Russian Collective Consciousness: The Kievan Roots’, Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 62, no. 2. Dewey, 1987, op. cit., p. 128. Kleimola, Ann M. (1972) ‘The Duty to Denounce in Muscovite Russia’, Slavic Review, vol. 31, no. 4, p. 765. Poe, 1998, op. cit., p. 602. His comment concerns political behaviour in a current Western context, but it seems eminently applicable to the case at hand as well: ‘One cannot indefinitely praise the common good ‘‘du bout des le`vres’’, for one will end up having the preferences which initially one was faking’. (Elster, Jon (1985) Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 36.) Poe, 2000, op. cit., p. 223. Ibid., pp. 223–24. Poe, 1998, op. cit., p. 607. The system in a sense resembles what anthropologists refer to as ‘generalized exchange’, i.e. a personalized relationship of making gifts and creating networks of mutual obligations. See further Hosking, op. cit., p. 69. Vernadsky, 1953, op. cit., pp. 359–60. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 282. The Marquis de Custine captures the essence of this problem: ‘The governor of a province knows that he is constantly in danger of something occurring that may send him to finish his days in Siberia. If, during the time that he continues in office, he has the cleverness to steal enough to defend himself in the legal process which would precede his exile, he may get out of the difficulty; but if he continue poor and honest he must be ruined.’ (Custine, op. cit., p. 466.) Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 282. Poe, 1998, op. cit., pp. 606–07. Keenan, op. cit., pp. 115–25. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 155. Keenan, op. cit., pp. 125–26. Mironov, Boris N. (1994) ‘Peasant Popular Culture and the Origins of Soviet Authoritarianism’, in Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg (eds) Cultures in Flux: Lower Class Values, Practices and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, p. 63. Ibid., p. 62. Dewey and Kleimola, 1970, op. cit., pp. 344, 348. Importantly, the only clause in the 1649 ulozhenie that gives the peasant a right to appeal to the tsar is that which mandates denunciation of landlords. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 161. See further Blum, op. cit., pp. 152–54. Dewey, 1987, op. cit., p. 128. There are strong suspicions that Ivan IV had actually ordered the murder of his elder son, who died from a knife wound to the chest. The official version at the time was that he had fallen on the knife during an epileptic fit. What may have been the truth will probably never be fully established. Ostrowski, 1998, op. cit., p. 246.

7 The apogee of patrimonialism 1 McDaniel, Tim (1996) The Agony of the Russian Idea, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, p. 174. 2 While the moral leadership of the Church was of crucial importance, it was the resources of the newly acquired areas in the east and the north that made the

352

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Notes

real difference: ‘Without its newly acquired territories it is clear that Russia could not have survived the time of troubles’. (Hosking, Geoffrey (2001) Russia and the Russians: A History from Rus to the Russian Federation, Harmondsworth: The Penguin Press, p. 142.) Billington, James H. (1970) The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture, New York: Vintage, pp. 109–10. Ibid., pp. 138–39. Pipes, Richard (1999) Property and Freedom, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 187. Hedlund, Stefan (1999) Russia’s ‘Market’ Economy: A Bad Case of Predatory Capitalism, London: UCL Press, p. 270. North, Douglass C. (1990) Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 99. North, Douglass C. (1993b) ‘Toward a Theory of Institutional Change’, in W. A. Barnett, M. J. Hinich and N. J. Scofield (eds) Political Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 62. Crummey, Robert O. (1983) Aristocrats and Servitors: The Boyar Elite in Russia, 1613–1689, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, p. 35. While there has been some debate over the issue of social mobility, two things seem to be fairly clear. Up until the mid-seventeenth century it was virtually unheard of for people to move up in the ranks, and even more so for provincial elites arriving in Moscow to make it to the top. Elite positions were an effective monopoly of the elite Moscow families. See further Kollmann, Nancy S. (1987) Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345–1547, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ch. 4. Ostrowski, Donald (1998) Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 64–84. Keenan, Edward (1986) ‘Muscovite Political Folkways’, Russian Review, vol. 45, no. 2, p. 144. Kollmann, op. cit., p. 184. Ibid., p. 107. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 8. Crummey, op. cit., p. 34. North, 1990, op. cit., p. 99. Greif, Avner (1994a) ‘Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: A Historical and Theoretical Reflection on Collectivist and Individualist Societies’, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 102, no. 5, p. 913. Ibid., p. 915. Ibid., p. 917. Elster, Jon (1989) The Cement of Society: A Study of Social Order, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 15. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., pp. 99, 100, 195. Hirschman, Albert O. (1970) Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. A modern literary parallel may be found in Richard Adams’ beautiful novel Watership Down. A group of rabbits living in a warren experience that food is being mysteriously provided, but also that their fellows tend to disappear equally mysteriously. They adjust by rationalizing the latter as unavoidable, as a part of a natural order that must not be questioned. Adams allows one of the rabbits to be imbued with a sense of evil being afoot. By making an Exit from the warren, his

Notes 353

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

group manages to avoid being trapped and killed. The boyars of Muscovy were less fortunate. Greif, 1994a, op. cit., p. 917. Crummey, op. cit., p. 35. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 9. Kollmann, op. cit., p. 119. Crummey, op. cit., pp. 83–85. Hosking, op. cit., p. 157. Ibid., pp. 158–59. See further Crummey, op. cit., pp. 22–23, and Appendix A. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., pp. 61–62. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 43. Hosking, op. cit., p. 153. Ibid., p. 165. Billington, op. cit., pp. 79, 114. Ibid., p. 130. The influence of Filaret on the upbringing of Aleksei takes on great importance here. Having spent much of the time of troubles in Polish captivity, the future Patriarch had developed strongly anti-Polish sentiments that he surely must have communicated to the future Tsar Aleksei. Ibid., p. 131. Ibid. Hosking, op. cit., p. 170. Billington, op. cit., p. 121. Raeff, Marc (1984) Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 2–3. Billington, op. cit., p. 61. Raeff, Marc (1976) ‘Imperial Russia: Peter I to Nicholas I’, in Robert Auty and Dimitri Obolensky (eds) An Introduction to Russian History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 126. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 124. Raeff, 1984, op. cit., p. 43. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., pp. 209–10. Hosking, op. cit., p. 152. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., pp. 126–27. Raeff, 1976, op. cit., p. 121. Ibid., p. 123. Raeff, 1984, op. cit., pp. 67–68. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 129. Kollmann, op. cit., p. 128. Raeff, 1984, op. cit., pp. 43–44. Hosking, op. cit., p. 196. Raeff, 1976, op. cit., p. 142. Ibid., p. 141. Ibid., p. 142. Hosking, op. cit., p. 203. Raeff, 1976, pp. 142–43. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 130. Ibid., pp. 180–81.

354

Notes

73 Custine, Astolphe, Marquis de (1989) Empire of the Czar: A Journey through Eternal Russia, New York: Doubleday, p. 440. 74 Hosking, op. cit., p. 176. 75 Peterson, Claes (1979) Peter the Great’s Administrative and Judicial Reforms: Swedish Antecedents and the Process of Reception, Lund: Blom’s boktryckeri, p. 415. 76 Raeff, 1976, op. cit., pp. 129–30. 77 Pipes, 1974, op. cit., pp. 240–41. 78 Raeff, 1976, op. cit., p. 147. 79 Ibid., p. 148. 80 Ibid. 81 Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 240.

8 Failures to break out 1 Keenan, Edward (1986) ‘Muscovite Political Folkways’, Russian Review, vol. 45, no. 2, p. 158. 2 Ibid., p. 159. 3 A striking Soviet parallel lies in the fact that the end of the Second World War failed to bring about any relaxation of the wartime systems of internal command and control. In some aspects the reverse actually would be true. 4 Kochan, Lionel and Richard Abraham (1990) The Making of Modern Russia, Harmondsworth: Penguin, ch. 8. 5 Ibid., p. 126. 6 This core distinction was clearly recognized already at the time. In the reign of Catherine, for example, Count Nikita Panin, one of her most influential advisors, would say that Russia was governed not by ‘the authority of state institutions’ but by ‘the power of persons’ (Dukes, Paul (1967) Catherine the Great and the Russian Nobility: A Study Based on the Legislative Commission of 1767, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 20). 7 Kochan and Abraham, op. cit., p. 126. 8 Pipes, Richard (1974) Russia under the Old Regime, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, pp. 208–09. 9 Kochan and Abraham, op. cit., p. 116. 10 Hosking, Geoffrey (2001) Russia and the Russians: A History from Rus to the Russian Federation, Harmondsworth: The Penguin Press, p. 204. 11 Pipes, Richard (1994b) ‘Was there Private Property in Muscovite Russia?’, Slavic Review, vol. 53, no. 2, p. 529. 12 Raeff, Marc (1984) Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 51. 13 Kochan and Abraham, op. cit., pp. 128–29. 14 Ibid., p. 142. 15 Raeff, 1984, op. cit., p. 35. 16 Ibid., p. 80. 17 Kochan and Abraham, op. cit., p. 128. 18 Raeff, 1984, op. cit., p. 84. 19 Ibid., p. 65. 20 Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 184. 21 Ibid., p 185. 22 See, in particular, Fukuyama, Francis (1995) Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, New York: The Free Press. 23 Kochan and Abraham, op. cit., pp. 129–30.

Notes 355 24 For further reference to the controversy on this point, see Jones, Robert E. (1973) The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility 1762–1785, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, pp. 44–46. 25 Raeff, 1984, op. cit., p. 107. 26 Jones, op. cit., pp. 24–25. 27 Ibid., p. 29. 28 Ibid., p. 7. 29 Ibid., p. 8. 30 Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 175. 31 Kahan, Arcadius (1966) ‘The Costs of ‘‘Westernization’’ in Russia: The Gentry and the Economy in the Eighteenth Century’, Slavic Review, vol. 25, no. 1, p. 47. 32 Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 175. 33 Kahan, op. cit., p. 61. 34 Ibid., p. 45. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 188, also notes that it was the middle group of ‘gentry’, owning between 100 and 500 serfs, that would prove to be the most politically active. 35 Jones, op. cit., p. 3. 36 Kahan, op. cit., p. 45. These numbers again refer to males only, and exclude those in military service. All in all, the nobles ‘controlled the destiny’ of about 40 per cent of the empire’s total population (Jones, op. cit., p. 4). 37 As an illustration, we may note that a 1737 inventory of the estate of Prince D. M. Golitsyn found his manor house consisting of no more than two rooms (Dukes, op. cit., p. 18). 38 Kochan and Abraham, op. cit., p. 129. 39 Pipes, Richard (1959) Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p. 15. The notion of a ‘leisure class’ was originally introduced by Veblen, Thorstein (1899) The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions, New York: Macmillan. We may also note that our understanding of the emancipation decree of 1762 as a step in a gradual process, rather than a sudden break, is supported by Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 254, who notes that beginning already in the 1730s ‘it became progressively easier for the dvoryanie to pursue their private interests while nominally on active service.Thus, without any formal legislation, a leisure class began to form.’ 40 Raeff, 1984, op. cit., p. 61. 41 Jones, op. cit., pp. 191–92. 42 Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 189. 43 Ibid., pp. 213–14. 44 Ibid., p. 190. 45 Raeff, 1984, op. cit., p. 84. 46 On the background and participants of the conspiracy, see further Jones, op. cit., pp. 97–101. 47 Raeff, 1984, op. cit., p. 84. 48 Kochan and Abraham, op. cit., p. 143. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 For a discussion on the process surrounding Catherine’s commission, and on the contents of the petitions that were submitted to it for discussion, see Jones, op. cit., ch. 4. 52 Raeff, 1984, op. cit., p. 90, citing as ‘an invaluable monograph’ on the matter Coquin, Franc¸ois-Xavier (1972) La grande commission le´gislative (1767–1768). Les cahiers de dole´ances urbains, Paris-Louvain: Nauwelaerts. 53 Raeff, 1984, op. cit., p. 92.

356 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

88 89 90

Notes Jones, op. cit., p. 30. Hosking, op. cit., p. 215. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 255. Kochan and Abraham, op. cit., p. 131. Jones, op. cit., p. 201. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 180. Jones, op. cit., p. 197. Pipes, 1994b, op. cit., p. 530. On the broader aspects of Catherine’s provincial reform, see Jones, op. cit., ch. 6. For more insights into Speranskii’s programme and ambitions towards a rulesbased administration, see Raeff, Marc (1957) Michael Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772–1839, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Raeff, 1984, op. cit., p. 123. Ibid. Owen, Thomas C. (1998) ‘Autocracy and the Rule of Law’, in Jeffrey Sachs and Katarina Pistor (eds) The Rule of Law and Economic Reform in Russia, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, p. 26. Jones, op. cit., p. 154. Raeff, 1984, op. cit., p. 100. Ibid., pp. 101–02. Jones, op. cit., p. 90. Ibid., pp. 162–63. The Marquis de Custine offers one explanation for this: ‘The tradespeople who ought to form a middle class are too few in number to possess any influence in the state; besides they are almost all foreigners’ (Custine, Astolphe, Marquis de (1989) Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia, New York: Doubleday, p. 236). For some illustrations of her early, liberal attitudes to the problem, see Jones, op. cit., pp. 136–37. Kochan and Abraham, op. cit., pp. 130–31. The right for serf owners, ‘at their own discretion, to turn troublesome peasants over to the state for transportation to Siberia’, was explicitly granted by Catherine in 1765 (Jones, op. cit., p. 135). Raeff, 1984, op. cit., p. 104. Kochan and Abraham, op. cit., p. 132. Jones, op. cit., p. 134. Hosking, op. cit., p. 227. Ibid. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 199. Jones, op. cit., p. 21. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 195. Ibid., p. 202. Ibid., p. 215. Kochan and Abraham, op. cit., p. 155. Ibid. The topic as such is so huge that it seems futile to offer even cursory reference. Suffice it to note that the debate revolved around the eternal Russian question – brooding over the nature and mission of Russia – that had been made even more acute by close contacts with Europe during the Napoleonic war. Kochan and Abraham, op. cit., pp. 165–66. Raeff, Marc (1976) ‘Imperial Russia: Peter I to Nicholas I’, in Robert Auty and Dimitri Obolensky (eds) An Introduction to Russian History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 129. Ibid., p. 130.

Notes 357 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

99 100 101 102 103 104

See further Hosking, op. cit., pp. 259–64. Kochan and Abraham, op. cit., p. 160. Ibid., p. 161. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 291. Ibid., p. 292. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 290. Hosking, op. cit., p. 267. We might note that there is a problem of translation here. The Russian word narodnost, which is normally translated as ‘nationality’, representing the third part of Uvarov’s classic triad, really means something like a spirit of fusion or of closeness with the narod, the ‘ordinary people’, rather than a sense of belonging to a particular natsiya, or ‘nation’. (See further Duncan, Peter J. S. (2000) Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 18–29.) While the increasingly multinational character of the population of the empire did cause problems from below, it may thus not have contradicted the autocracy’s subjective feelings of narodnost. (I am grateful to La´szlo´ Szamuely for drawing my attention to these distinctions.) Kochan and Abraham, op. cit., p. 161. Ibid., p. 166. Hosking, op. cit., p. 267. Kochan and Abraham, op. cit., p. 162. Pipes, 1974, op. cit., 293. Ibid., p. 295.

9 Back to Muscovy 1 Robinson, Geroid T. (1932) Rural Russia under the Old Regime: A History of the Landlord–Peasant World and a Prologue to the Peasant Revolution of 1917, New York: Longmans, Green and Company, p. 194. 2 On Stolypin’s programme, see further ibid., ch. 11, and Volin, Lazar (1970) A Century of Russian Agriculture: From Alexander II to Khrushchev, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ch. 5. 3 Nove, Alec (1982) An Economic History of the USSR, Harmondsworth: Pelican, pp. 43–44. 4 Gerschenkron, Alexander (1962) Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p. 130. 5 Mosse, W. E. (1992) Perestroika under the Tsars, London: I. B. Tauris & Co., ch. 6. 6 Ibid., p. 44. 7 See further ibid., pp. 63–65. 8 Ibid., pp. 71–76. 9 Ibid., p. 77. 10 Ibid., p. 81. 11 Pipes, Richard (1974) Russia under the Old Regime, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, p. 297. 12 Kochan, Lionel and Richard Abraham (1990) The Making of Modern Russia, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 195. 13 Mosse, op. cit., p. 59. 14 Ibid., pp. 88–89. 15 Ibid., p. 90. 16 Ibid. 17 Volin, op. cit., p. 63.

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18 Mosse, op. cit., p. 91. 19 Kochan and Abraham, op. cit., p. 227. 20 It may be noted that the imposition of redemption payments on the newly emancipated peasantry was of perhaps even greater importance in this respect. 21 Nove, 1982, op. cit., pp. 12–13. 22 Ibid., p. 14. 23 Ibid., p. 15, citing calculations by P. Bairoch. 24 Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 113. 25 Mosse, op. cit., pp. 12–13. 26 Gerschenkron, 1962, op. cit., p. 7. 27 Ibid., p. 17. 28 See further Mosse, op. cit., p. 256. 29 Owen, Thomas C. (1991) The Corporation under Russian Law, 1800–1917: A Study in Tsarist Economic Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 1. 30 Mosse, op. cit., p. 98. 31 On the background of land hunger and agrarian crisis, see further Volin, op. cit., ch. 3. 32 Hosking, Geoffrey (2001) Russia and the Russians: A History from Rus to the Russian Federation, Harmondsworth: The Penguin Press, p. 292. 33 Mosse, op. cit., p. 128. 34 See further Pipes, Richard (1990) The Russian Revolution, New York: Vintage Books, ch. 1 passim, and pp. 21–27 on ‘Bloody Sunday’. 35 The Manifesto was issued on 17 October, granting inviolability of person and liberty of conscience, speech, assembly, and association, together with a declaration that no further laws would be issued without consent by the elected Duma (ibid., pp. 42–44). 36 Ibid., pp. 157–60. 37 As Marc Szeftel underscores, in his grand study of this body of law, it was different from previous ‘Fundamental Laws’, and did merit being labelled a constitution: ‘The Fundamental laws of 23 April 1906, were substantially different. They differed from all other laws because of the difficulty of their revision: they could be modified by the chambers only pursuant to the Emperor’s initiative; on the other hand, they could not be modified provisionally by the Emperor’s interim legislation’ (Szeftel, Marc (1976) The Russian Constitution of April 23, 1906: Political Institutions of the Duma Monarchy, Brussels: Editions de la Librairie Encyclope´dique, pp. 25–26). 38 Owen, 1991, op. cit., p. xiii. 39 Wortman, Richard S. (1976) The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p. 285. 40 The more specific problems that were encountered in seeking to reform corporate law have been amply documented and analysed by Owen, 1991, op. cit., passim. 41 Mosse, op. cit., p. 128. 42 Pipes, 1974, op. cit., p. 218. 43 Ibid., p. 219. 44 Owen, 1991, op. cit., p. xi. 45 Ibid., pp. 1–2. On the broader aspects of merchants and the growth of capitalism in Russia, see also Owen, Thomas C. (1981) Capitalism and Politics in Russia: A Social History of the Moscow Merchants, 1855–1905, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 46 Pipes, Richard (1994a) Communism: The Vanished Specter, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, p. 15. 47 Gerschenkron refers to the ensuing change in heart as the ‘great volte-face’ (Gerschenkron, Alexander (1968) ‘Russia: Agrarian Policies and Industrialization,

Notes 359

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

1861–1914’, in idem, Continuity in History and Other Essays, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p. 229 and passim). Robinson, op. cit., pp. 146, 150, 168. Gerschenkron, 1968, op. cit., p. 209. See, e.g., Robinson, op. cit., ch. 11. Mosse, op. cit., p. 254. For some differing views on its prospects, see ibid., pp. 258–62. Volin, op. cit., p. 105. Ibid. Pipes, 1990, op. cit., p. 176. Ibid., p. 720. Ibid., p. 721. Kornai, Ja´nos (1992) The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 361 and passim. Pipes, 1990, op. cit., p. 525, and ch. 12 passim. Ibid., p. 565. We may note here that duvan is an archaic expression, being referred to already in Ushakov’s 1935 dictionary as a regional and out-of-use term. It also has a broader meaning than the narrow one of ‘plunder’ that will be used here. According, for example, to Dahl’s nineteenth-century dictionary it refers not only to plunder but also to collective earnings, and the verb duvanit means not only pillage but mostly distribution/sharing of common earnings or spoils. (I owe this clarification to La´szlo´ Szamuely.) In the following we shall nevertheless retain the notion as suggested by Pipes, this mainly because it facilitates comparison between the respective times of trouble that marked the beginning and the end of Soviet power. Pipes, 1990, op. cit., pp. 512–13. Ibid., p. 514. While the formation of the Communist youth organization, the komsomol, did show that age would remain an acceptable criterion, the suppression of the women’s organization, the zhenotdel, showed that gender would not. Yakovlev, Alexander M. (1995) ‘The Rule-of-Law Ideal and Russian Reality’, in Stanislaw Frankowski and Paul B. Stephan III (eds) Legal Reform in PostCommunist Europe: The View from Within, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, p. 10. Rosenfeldt, Niels-Erik (1978) Knowledge and Power: The Role of Stalin’s Secret Chancellery in the Soviet System of Government, Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger. See further Tumarkin, Nina (1983) Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Reflecting the absence of complete openness even in the best years of the nineteenth century, we may note that a celebrity like Pushkin would be what the Soviets would later refer to as nevyezdnoi, i.e. not allowed to travel abroad. For more on Russian messianism under Stalin, see Duncan, Peter J. S. (2000) Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After, London and New York: Routledge, ch. 4. Cited by Poe, Marshall T. (2001) ‘Moscow the Third Rome: The Origins and Transformation of a ‘‘Pivotal Moment’’ ’, Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 49, no. 3, p. 428. Nove, Alec (1983) The Economics of Feasible Socialism, London: Allen & Unwin, p. 10. See further Pipes, 1990, op. cit., pp. 800–05. E.g. Elster, Jon (1985) Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, passim.

360

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74 Orwell, George (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four, London: Martin Secker & Warburg. 75 Elster, 1985, op. cit., section II. 76 Hirschman, Albert O. (1970) Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 77 For further discussion along these lines, see Hedlund, Stefan (1989b) ‘Exit, Voice and Loyalty – Soviet Style’, Coexistence, vol. 26, no. 2. 78 In order to explain the pervasive role that was played by the military in the Soviet economy, Steven Rosefielde uses the notion of ‘structural militarization’. See further Rosefielde, Steven (2002a) ‘Back to the Future? Prospects for Russia’s Military-Industrial Revival’, Orbis, vol. 46, no. 3; and Rosefielde, Steven (2004) Prodigal Superpower: Russia’s Re-Emerging Future, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch. 3. 79 Pravda, 5 February 1931. Cited by Smolinsky, Leon (1966) ‘The Soviet Economy’, Survey, no. 59, April, p. 88. 80 Poe, Marshall T. (2003) The Russian Moment in World History, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, pp. 60–61. 81 Rosefielde, 2002a, op. cit, p. 505. 82 For an incisive argument along these lines, see Szamuely, La´szlo´ (1974) First Models of the Socialist Economic System, Budapest: Akademiai Kiado. 83 Katsenellenboigen, Aron (1977) ‘Coloured Markets in the Soviet Union’, Soviet Studies, vol. 29, no. 1. 84 Olson, Mancur (1995) ‘Why the Transition from Communism is so Difficult’, Eastern Economic Journal, vol. 21, no. 4, p. 446. 85 Shlykov, Vitalii (2001) ‘Chto Pogubilo Sovetskii Soyuz? Amerikanskaya Razvedka o Sovetskikh Voennykh Raskhodakh’, Voennyi Vestnik, no. 8, p. 38. Cited and elaborated upon by Rosefielde, 2002a, op. cit., p. 499 and passim. 86 Deutscher, Isaac (1954) The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879–1921, New York and London: Oxford University Press, p. 495. 87 Nove, Alec (1972) ‘Economic Reforms in the USSR and Hungary: A Study in Contrasts’, in Alec Nove and Mario Nuti (eds) Socialist Economics, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 354. 88 It should be noted here, that this is not the same as saying that there were no positive changes at all. It was surely of great importance that mass terror was ended, that the GULAG was closed, that the plight of the collectivized peasantry was eased, and that living standards in general were improved. None of this, however, was of any major relevance to the core features of the institutional matrix. 89 Grossman, Gregory (1977) ‘ ‘‘The Second Economy’’ of the USSR’, Problems of Communism, vol. 26, no. 5. 90 Schroeder, Gertrude (1979) ‘The Soviet Economy on a Treadmill of ‘‘Reforms’’ ’, in US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Soviet Economy in a Time of Change, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. 91 This expression allegedly was coined by the German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, during a visit to the USSR in the late 1970s. Over time, it became something of a household phrase, to be used even by Mikhail Gorbachev. It also would come in many imaginative variations, such as a ‘banana republic without bananas’. 92 Symptomatically cited by Mosse, op. cit., p. 55, with respect to the Great Reforms of Alexander II.

10 Another time of troubles 1 Cited by McDaniel, Tim (1996) The Agony of the Russian Idea, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, p. 17.

Notes 361 2 North, Douglass, C. (1995) ‘Economic Performance Through Time’, American Economic Review, vol. 84, no. 3, p. 366. 3 Szamuely, La´szlo´ (1993) ‘Transition from State Socialism: Whereto and How?’, Acta Oeconomica, vol. 45, nos 1–2, p. 8. 4 Johnson, Juliet E. (1994) ‘The Russian Banking System: Institutional Responses to the Market Transition’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 46, no. 6, p. 973, fn. 11. 5 Reddaway, Peter and Dmitry Glinski (2001) The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy, Washington, D.C.: The United States Institute of Peace Press. 6 Stiglitz, Joseph E. (1999) ‘Whither Reform? Ten Years of the Transition’, available on http://www.worldbank.org/research/abcde/washington_11/pdfs/stiglitz. pdf, p. 22. 7 McDaniel, op. cit., p. 147. 8 Szamuely, Tibor (1974) The Russian Tradition, London: Secker & Warburg, p. 9. 9 EBRD (2002) Transition Report 2002: Agriculture and Rural Transition, London: EBRD, p. 22. 10 Shleifer, Andrei and Robert Vishny (1998) The Grabbing Hand: Government Pathologies and Their Cures, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 11 Sachs, Jeffrey D. (1995) ‘Russia’s Struggle with Stabilization: Conceptual Issues and Evidence’, Proceedings of the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics 1994, Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, p. 59. 12 Sterling Claire (1994) Thieves’ World: The Threat of the New Global Network of Organized Crime, New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 14. 13 Ibid., p. 33. 14 For a more detailed account of the vorovskoi mir, and of the vory v zakone, the ‘thieves-in-law’, see Handelman, Stephen (1994) Comrade Criminal: The Theft of the Second Russian Revolution, London: Michael Joseph, ch. 1–2. 15 CSIS (1997) Russian Organized Crime, Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, p. 17 and passim on other official portrayals of what some held to be a ‘clear and present danger’. All of this took place in times still marked by blissful ignorance of the threats that were to emerge from international terrorism. 16 Friedman, Robert I. (2000) Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob has Invaded America, Boston: Little, Brown. 17 Sterling, op. cit., p. 15. 18 ‘Russia 2000’, Stratfor.com, 2nd November 1999. Cited from www.cdi.org ‘Johnson’s Russia List’, 3 November 1999, p. 13. 19 Layard, Richard and John Parker (1996) The Coming Russian Boom: A Guide to New Markets and Politics, New York: The Free Press, p. 84. 20 ‘Russia 2000’, op. cit., p. 13. 21 Sterling, op. cit., p. 94. 22 Pomer, Marshall (2001) ‘Demise of the Command Economy’, in Lawrence R. Klein and Marshall Pomer (eds) The New Russia: Transition Gone Awry, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, p. 153. 23 For further details on the role of the ‘criminal state’ around the time of the Soviet collapse, see Handelman, op. cit., ch. 6. 24 Graham, Thomas E. Jr (2002) Russia’s Decline and Uncertain Recovery, Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, p. 15. 25 Lipton, David and Jeffrey Sachs (1992) ‘Prospects for Russia’s Economic Reforms’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, no. 2, p. 255. 26 There has certainly been no shortage of conspiracy theories concerning what actually went on behind the scenes. For a succinct and largely credible version, see Clark, Bruce (1995) An Empire’s New Clothes: The End of Russia’s Liberal

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29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

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Dream, London: Vintage, chs 11–12. When the tenth anniversary of the October events was observed, in 2003, numerous opinion polls showed that Russians at large were very critical of Yeltsin’s actions during that crisis. In key policy-making circles it was simply taken for granted that any attempt at engaging the Russian parliament in a constructive dialogue would have been doomed to failure. Reddaway and Glinski, op. cit., present a detailed and convincing argument that this was a false image. More specifically, they argue that in the early stages of reform the ‘Democratic Russia’ movement presented a credible and highly preferable alternative to the ‘shock’ policies of the Gaidar government. In reflection of this leadership style, it soon became common amongst Moscow insiders to refer to the president simply as ‘the tsar’. For amusement’s sake, it may also be noted that when Yeltsin – jestingly – took to referring to himself as Boris I, he implicitly did not recognize as legitimate his predecessor Boris Godunov, who had been elected tsar during the first time of troubles. Mosse, W. E. (1992) Perestroika under the Tsars, London: I. B. Tauris & Co., p. 270. Wedel, Janine R. (1997) ‘Cliques and Clans and Aid to Russia’, Transitions, vol. 4, no. 2, p. 68. Financial Times, 6 October 1993. For an early discussion on the need to make a serious distinction between ‘feasibility constraints’ that apply ex ante and ‘backlash constraints’ that apply ex post, see Roland, Ge´rard (1994) ‘On the Speed and Sequencing of Privatization and Restructuring’, Economic Journal, vol. 104. Titled ‘Novyi rossiiskii rezhim’, or ‘The New Russian Regime’, his article was published in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 23 November 1995. See also Graham, op. cit., pp. 32–34. See further Hedlund, Stefan (1999) Russia’s ‘Market’ Economy: A Bad Case of Predatory Capitalism, London: UCL Press, pp. 257–59. See further Goldman, Marshall (2003) Piratizing Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry, London: Routledge. Financial Times, 1 November 1996. Jones, Robert E. (1973) The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility 1762–1785, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, p. 30. Wedel, Janine R. (1998) Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe 1989–98, New York: St Martin’s Press, pp. 51–52. Graham, op. cit., p. 31. ‘Russia 2000’, op. cit., p. 14. See further Hedlund, 1999, op. cit., ch. 6. It is interesting that the latter phrase was used by a former IMF official, writing about the first years of complicated Russian relations to the Fund. (Herna´ndezCata´, Ernesto (1995) ‘Russia and the IMF: The Political Economy of Macrostabilization’, Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 42, no. 3, p. 24.) Ickes, Barry W., Peter Murrell and Randi Ryterman (1997) ‘End of the Tunnel? The Effects of Financial Stabilization in Russia’, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 13, no. 2, p. 126. See further Rose, Richard and Ian McAllister (1996) ‘Is Money the Measure of Welfare in Russia?’, Review of Income and Wealth, vol. 42, no. 1. Johnson, Juliet (2000) A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 121–23 and passim. In one illuminating case, the Oneksimbank first accepted from the budget a 100billion ruble payment that was destined for Tyumen region. It then passed on a veksel for the amount, which it offered to cash at a 25 per cent discount rate

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49 50 51

52 53 54 55

(Reddaway, Peter (1997) ‘Possible Scenarios for Russia’s Future’, Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 44, no. 5, p. 43). See further Hedlund, Stefan (2001b) ‘Russia and the IMF: A Sordid Tale of Moral Hazard’, Demokratizatsiya, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 128–29, and passim on the broader problems of moral hazard that came to mark relations between Russia and the IMF. Faced with a barrage of critique, the Central Bank of Russia finally did commission PricewaterhouseCoopers to undertake an audit, the results of which would be used by the IMF as evidence that there had been no misuse of IMF funds. What was conveniently forgotten here was the fact that the auditors were careful in covering their own backs. When their report was placed on the IMF website (dated 10 August 1999) it began with a big disclaimer, informing the reader that no proper audit had been possible to undertake, for the simple reason that the disclosure of facts had been highly selective: ‘PricewaterhouseCoopers have not carried out any verification work which may be construed to represent audit procedures. Accordingly, they do not express an opinion on the financial data included in or referred to in the reports.’ It is also interesting to note that the report would be available for a limited time only, after which it was simply removed. A particularly important step was taken in February 1988, when the KGB was deprived of its rights to consider anonymous accusations, known pejoratively as anonimiki. Rose and McAllister, op. cit., p. 88. There have been a number of various estimates presented over the years. This one is the latest, derived from prominent Russian insiders in positions to know. (Cited by Rosefielde, Steven (2002a) ‘Back to the Future? Prospects for Russia’s Military-Industrial Revival’, Orbis, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 505–06.) Cooper, Julian (2001) ‘The Russian Military-Industrial Complex: Current Problems and Future Prospects’, in Pentti Forsstro¨m (ed.) Russia’s Potential in the 21st Century, Helsinki: National Defence College, Series 2, no. 14, p. 43. The numbers are readily available, e.g. in the EBRD’s annual Transition Report, in the Goskomstat’s monthly publication Sotsialno-ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii, or on the Central Bank of Russia web page: www.cbr.ru. Graham, op. cit., p. 67. North, Douglass C. (1981) Structure and Change in Economic History, New York: Norton, p. 11.

11 Muscovy reconstituted 1 Layard, Richard and John Parker (1996) The Coming Russian Boom: A Guide to New Markets and Politics, New York: The Free Press. Other titles in the same category include Aslund, Anders (1995) How Russia Became a Market Economy, Washington, D.C.: Brookings; Granville, Brigitte (1995) The Success of Russian Economic Reforms, Washington, D.C.: Brookings; and Poe, Richard (1993) How to Profit from the Coming Russian Boom: The Insider’s Guide to Business Opportunities and Survival on the Frontiers of Capitalism, New York: McGraw-Hill. 2 Graham, Thomas E. Jr (2002) Russia’s Decline and Uncertain Recovery, Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, p. 4. 3 The original statement was made in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, by Adam Elstein of Bankers Trust in Moscow. It soon would become immortal. 4 The Economist, 6 February 1999, p. 21. 5 Ermarth, Fritz W. (1999) ‘Seeing Russia Plain: The Russian Crisis and American Intelligence’, The National Interest, no. 55, Spring, pp. 5–6.

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6 Graham, op. cit., p. 65. 7 On this count, foreign service officer Wayne Merry even had gone public, in an article in The Wall Street Journal (8 September 1999) detailing personal recollections from his own years at the Moscow embassy. 8 A leak to the New York Times (23 November 1998) had recounted how a CIA report accusing Chernomyrdin of being seriously corrupt had been returned to the Agency by Vice-president Gore, ‘with a barnyard epithet’ scribbled across the front. 9 US Congress (2000) ‘Russia’s Road to Corruption: How the Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise and Failed the Russian People’, available on http://policy.house.gov/Russia/. 10 For a widely acclaimed account, see Wedel, Janine R. (1998) Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe 1989–98, New York: St. Martin’s Press, esp. ch. IV. For an update, see also Wedel, Janine R. (2000) ‘Tainted Transactions: Harvard, the Chubais Clan and Russia’s Ruin’, The National Interest, no. 59, Spring, and the hard-hitting exchange that followed in two subsequent issues of that journal. 11 See further Hedlund, Stefan (1999) Russia’s ‘Market’ Economy: A Bad Case of Predatory Capitalism, London: UCL Press, part III. 12 Gavrilenkov, Evgeny (2000) ‘Savings, Capital Flight, and Economic Growth in Russia’, paper presented to the Annual Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), Denver, Colo., 9–10 November 2000, p. 12, Table 3. 13 Graham, op. cit., p. 64, citing Ericson, Richard (2000) ‘The Russian Economy: A Turning Point?’, in U.S.–Russian Relations: Twenty-fifth Conference, 21– 25 August 2000, Washington, D.C.: Aspen Institute. 14 Investment intensity in the Russian economy declined from just over 30 per cent in 1991 to below 14 per cent in 1996–2000. Although it has since risen considerably, it still remains far too low. As Sapir notes, historical experience from the post-war reconstruction in Japan and Western Europe shows that successful rebuilding requires an investment intensity that is ‘greater than 20 percent and probably closer to 25 percent’ (Sapir, Jacques (2002) ‘Russia’s Economic Rebound: Lessons and Future Directions’, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 18, no. 1, p. 19). 15 Although reliable numbers are hard to come by, it is common to encounter statements saying that the pipeline grid is ‘on its last legs’ and that more than half of the national power transmission capacity is beyond repair. 16 Cited by Graham, op. cit., p. 64. 17 The effects have been nothing short of catastrophic. According to Stephen Blank, in February 2001 a total of some 4,000 scientific research organizations were able to receive funding that was merely one-sixth of what had been available a decade earlier. With low pay and poor prospects serving to discourage new entrants, the average age of researchers was approaching 60, above male life expectancy. The total number of researchers had fallen by two-thirds, to 910,000, of whom a mere 11 per cent were young scientists. Three-quarters of Russia’s world-class mathematicians and half of all physicists had emigrated, and 85 per cent of all Russian science PhDs were working abroad. It was hardly surprising to find that Russia’s share of the global high-tech market was a puny 0.3 per cent (Blank, Stephen (2003) ‘The Material-Technical Foundations of Russian Military Power’, Ankara Paper 7, London: Frank Cass, pp. 25–26). 18 See, e.g., Persson, Torsten and Guido Tabellini (1994) ‘Is Inequality Harmful for Growth?’, American Economic Review, vol. 84, no. 3.

Notes 365 19 For a more detailed argument in the specifically Russian case, see Ellman, Michael (2000) ‘The Russian Economy under El’tsin’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 52, no. 8, pp. 1424–29. 20 Sapir, Jacques (2001) ‘The Russian Economy: From Rebound to Rebuilding’, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 17, no. 1, p. 9. (Italics in the original.) 21 The turbulence of economic policy and performance added strong fluctuations. Thus, for example, the number went from 64 million in the first quarter of 1999 to 35 million in the fourth quarter of 2001 (Goldman, Marshall (2002) ‘Putin and the Russian Economy: Did He make a Difference?’, Russia and Eurasia Review, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 2). Towards the end of 2002, it was 44 million (Pravda, 25 November 2002). Current numbers on matters like poverty and income distribution are presented by the Goskomstat in its monthly publication Sotsialnoekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii. For a broader view and a historical perspective, see also Klugman, Jeni (1997) Poverty in Russia: Public Policy and Private Responses, Washington, D.C.: The World Bank. 22 Sapir, 2001, op. cit., pp. 9–10. 23 Moscow Tribune, 11 December 2002. 24 The natural rate of population growth is defined as the excess of births over deaths, not taking into account cross-border movements. The magnitude of the Russian deficit is determined by high mortality as well as by low fertility. The rise in mortality during the Yeltsin years was so dramatic that it sparked a lively debate concerning its causes. The drop in fertility has been similarly worrisome, in particular so since many experts fear that venereal disease and multiple abortions have rendered many young Russian women clinically infertile. Simple population replacement requires a fertility rate of 2.14. The current Russian number is 1.17. From the point of view of future labour supply, population growth also must include net migration. In the Russian case, severe conditions in the ‘near abroad’ have resulted in a substantial net immigration of ethnic Russians, which partly compensates for the negative trend in the natural growth rate. Taking such movements into account, the drop in population for 2002 was reduced from 856,700 to 760,000, which obviously still represented a major decline. 25 Those who argue that demographic constraints will not be binding on future economic growth prospects, since immigration and productivity growth will compensate for the natural population decline, probably fail to take into full account the gravity of the rise in epidemic disease, most notably so the looming HIV/ AIDS disaster. For further insights and discussion on these sordid matters, see Eberstadt, Nicholas (1999) ‘Russia: Too Sick to Matter?’, Policy Review, no. 95, June and July; Ellman, Michael (1994) ‘The Increase in Death and Disease under ‘‘Katastroika’’ ’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol. 18, no. 4; Feshbach, Murray (2001) ‘Russia’s Population Meltdown’, Wilson Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 1; Feshbach, Murray (2003) Russia’s Health and Demographic Crises: Policy Implications and Consequences, Washington, D.C.: The Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute; and Rosefielde, Steven (2001) ‘Premature Deaths: Russia’s Radical Transition’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 53, no. 8. The 2002 census came up with a number for the total population of 145 million, which was higher than the expected 143 million. The reason is presumed to be due to larger than expected immigration from Ukraine and Belarus. 26 Feshbach, 2003, op. cit., p. 5. 27 Cited by Graham, op. cit., p. 63. The original text is available on www.kremlin.ru/ events/42.html. 28 For a broad assessment, see a collection of papers by a group of prominent experts in a variety of fields, contained in NIC (2000) Russia’s Physical and Social

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32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

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Infrastructure: Implications for Future Development, Washington, D.C.: National Intelligence Council (available on www.cia.gov/nic/pubs). A couple of randomly chosen media reports from the winter of 2001 may serve to illustrate. On 16 February, a writer in the Guardian chose to welcome her readers to Vladivostok in the following cheerful way: ‘It’s minus 60, there’s no heating and no electricity.’ On 26 February, a colleague writing for The Christian Science Monitor found that ‘Russia’s Arctic is now an Economic Gulag’. The situation has become so dire that the World Bank has actually begun granting loans for major resettlement schemes. Perhaps in the end the cold and remote areas of Siberia will revert to the indigenous populations who once were the sole masters of those areas. Noting that the reforms ‘were a failure’, and that ‘Russia ended up with a mutant system’, Michael Ellman outlines eight different aspects that serve to define the mutation (Ellman, 2000, op. cit., pp. 1417–20). There is some debate about the credibility of these growth numbers. In the Russian case, ambitions to evaluate the post-crash recovery are marred by Goskomstat’s habit of continually revising data from several years back. Thus, the GDP growth figure for 2000 was upped from 7.4 to 8.3 and 9.0 and finally to an even 10.0 per cent. One is inclined here to agree with one exasperated Moscow-based analyst who commented that ‘It appears that there are only five levels of growth one can talk about in Russia – very bad, bad, zero, good and very good. Everything else is meaningless’ (Moscow Times, 6 May 2003). In the Chinese case, the reasons to be sceptical are of a more fundamental and technical nature. See further Maddison, Angus (1998) Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run, Paris: OECD; Rawski, T. (2001) ‘What’s Happening to Chinese Statistics?’, China Economic Review, December; and Wu, Friedrich (2003) ‘Chinese Economic Statistics – Caveat Emptor!’, Post-Communist Economies, vol. 15, no. 1. For further discussion and factual documentation of this argument, see Rosefielde, Steven (2002b) Comparative Economic Systems: Culture, Wealth and Power in the 21st Century, Oxford: Blackwell, chs 15–18. Rosefielde, Steven (2004) Prodigal Superpower: Russia’s Re-Emerging Future, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 109. Rosefielde, Steven (2002c) ‘Culture versus Competition: Economic Liberalization in Russia, China and Japan’, Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 49, no. 5, p. 51. Graham, op. cit., p. 66. Merry, Wayne E. (2003) ‘Moscow’s Retreat and Beijing’s Rise as Regional Great Power’, Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 50, no. 3, p. 17. Graham, op. cit., p. 70. Rosefielde, 2004, op. cit., p. 110. In an interview shortly after Putin’s appointment to acting president, Bonner warned that ‘There is no doubt for me that Russia will be guided towards a military-police state with Putin’ (AFP (Agence France Presse), 27 January 2000). Her misgivings were spelled out in greater detail later in the Spring, in a speech accepting the Hannah Arendt award (reprinted in Bonner, Elena (2001) ‘The Remains of Totalitarianism’, The New York Review of Books, 8 March). A perhaps even more alarmist stance was taken by Sergei Kovalev, e.g. at a press conference in late November. (See further Johnson’s Russia List, no. 4656, 25 November 2000.) His memorable quip, in a speech on 20 December (the Cheka day!) that a ‘group of FSB colleagues dispatched to work undercover in the government has successfully completed its first mission’, was seen by some as funny and by others as rather ominous. For a brief summary of Putin’s KGB background, and of his early symbolic gestures and statements as acting president, see Los Angeles

Notes 367

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43 44

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Times, 12 January 2000 (reprinted in Johnson’s Russia List, no. 4031, 13 January 2000). The notion of an ‘FSB Party’ was introduced by Andrei Serenko, an investigative journalist at Nezavisimaya Gazeta who had specialized in documenting the growing influence of the FSB. In a comment, Mikhail Kochkin claimed that if it were indeed to form a party, the FSB would win a majority in the next Duma elections. While the high level of confidence that this clandestine organization enjoys is reflective of the population’s sense of exasperation over years of increasing criminalization, according to Kochkin it also indicates that a showdown might be in the offing between what he refers to as ‘the criminal party and the special services party’ (Kochkin, Mikhail (2002) ‘The Lubyanka Strikes Back: Apostles of Controlled Democracy’, Russia and Eurasia Review, vol. 1, no. 8, pp. 1–2). According to another source, of all appointments made at the deputy-minister level in 2000– 02, almost 35 per cent were former military or intelligence officials. The main outcome has been that Putin ‘has managed not only to strengthen the center, but also to create a group of bureaucrats committed to him personally’ (RFE/RL Newsline, 19 September 2002). For a thorough account of the anatomy of this new form of security-based autocracy, see Kryshtanovskaya, Olga and Stephen White (2003) ‘Putin’s Militocracy’, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 19, no. 4. While Gorbachev’s decision was announced in a formal decree from the Supreme Soviet on 2 February 1988, Putin was satisfied with allowing the FSB to make a minor formal announcement in the government’s daily paper Rossiiskaya Gazeta, in early February 2001. Although some Duma members did protest that ‘this is serious evidence of the fact that the power structures of the state are stubbornly pushing their country into the path of creating a police state’, there was no significant mobilization to criticize and defeat the decision (The New York Times, 14 February 2001). The rights thus granted to the FSB were to be officially confirmed by the Supreme Court towards the end of April 2001. For a balanced and disturbing account of the first war in Chechnya, see Lieven, Anatole (1998) Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power, New Haven: Yale University Press. Human Rights Watch has compiled a long series of reports on this matter that are available on http://www.hrw.org/europe/russia.php. Towards the end of 2002, Amnesty International found reason to launch a special campaign, called ‘Justice for Everybody’, to highlight human rights abuses in the Russian Federation (www.amnesty.org/russia). In April 2002, presenting testimony to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, a representative for Doctors without Borders ended with the following appeal: ‘Will you choose to close your eyes to this policy which aims to exterminate a whole people?’ Kovalev, Sergei (2000) ‘Putin’s War’, The New York Review of Books, 10 February. Popular support for the war peaked in March 2000, with 73 per cent of survey respondents being in favour. By June 2002, that figure had dropped to 33 per cent, with 59 per cent instead being in favour of peace negotiations. (Treisman, Daniel (2002) ‘Russia Renewed?’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 81, no. 6, p. 68.) It may be noted here that in his time as prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin had tried a similar ploy, seeking to promote a party of power that was called ‘Our Home is Russia’ (Nash dom Rossiya). At that time, however, the Kremlin was too ineffectual to make the ploy work. Rutland, Peter (2003) ‘Russia in 2002: Waiting, and Wondering’, Transitions Online (www.tol.cz). The ‘coalition’ consisted of Unity (82) Fatherland-All Russia (52) Russia’s Regions (47) and People’s Deputy (54). The splintered opposition was made up of Communists (82) Agrarians (43) Liberal Democrats (13) SPS (32) and Yabloko (17).

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49 Rutland, Peter (2004) ‘Russia in 2003: The Power of One’, Transitions Online (www.tol.cz). 50 Ibid. 51 Rutland, Peter (1997) ‘Yeltsin the Problem, not the Solution’, The National Interest, no. 49, Autumn, p. 34. 52 Treisman, op. cit., p. 62. 53 Ibid., p. 63. 54 Perhaps the best image of the first term of the Putin presidency is one of a halfway house of sorts, that is neither fully authoritarian nor fully democratic, but rather a continuation of the eternal manoeuvring of the Yeltsin years. For an in-depth analysis of this balancing act, see Reddaway, Peter (2001) ‘Will Putin Be Able to Consolidate Power?’, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 17, no. 1; and Reddaway, Peter (2002) ‘Is Putin’s Power More Formal Than Real?’, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 18, no. 1. From an economic perspective, we may also note Ellman’s observation, that although ‘the Russian economy may be a mutant one, it is nevertheless a mutant market economy’ (Ellman, 2000, op. cit., p. 1419). 55 Graham, op. cit., p. 49. 56 See Politkovskaya, Anna (2001) A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya, London: The Harvill Press. We may also note that in February 2003 Politkovskaya was awarded the OSCE annual Prize for Journalism and Democracy. 57 Treisman, op. cit., p. 66. 58 Ibid., p. 69. 59 Reddaway, 2002, op. cit., pp. 32–33, presents a whole list of reasons why Putin’s assault remained inconclusive. 60 As a sobering illustration, we may draw a parallel between the respective enforcement roles of Russia’s ‘Comrade Kalashnikov’ and the Sicilian ‘Lupara Bianca’. The standard response from Italian prosecutors when it comes to intensifying the struggle against the Mafia has a great deal of ominous relevance to the present predicament of Russian law enforcement. As was well proven by Mussolini, in an all-out battle the state will always win over organized crime, simply because its potential to unleash lethal force is much superior. The price for such success, however, will be measured in a serious degradation of the rule of law, thus largely defeating the purpose of rooting out crime. The Italian dilemma has been that of accepting either to live with a Mafia that is kept under some control, or to see the Mafia being defeated by a fascist state. The Russian dilemma surely must be of the same nature, reflecting that some form of unpleasant outcome is most likely to be expected. 61 Reddaway, 2002, op. cit., p. 34. The cited analyst was Aleksandr Budberg. 62 The deal was for an investment of $6.75 billion, to purchase one half of Russia’s fourth largest oil company, the Tyumen Oil Company, TNK. The technical design was for BP and TNK to become equal partners in a new oil giant, which will consist of BP’s existing Russian assets together with half of TNK. While some say that the demonstration effect of BP’s return will pave the way for others to follow, it may well turn out differently. In 1997, BP paid $471 million for a 10 per cent stake in Sidanco, which at the time was controlled by Vladimir Potanin’s Interros. In 1999, that deal turned sour via a bankruptcy deal that BP claimed had been rigged – by the very same TNK. BP apparently believed that matters had changed sufficiently for the better. Whether that judgement was correct or not, only time can show.

12 Achieving credible commitment 1 Treisman, Daniel (2002) ‘Russia Renewed?’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 81, no. 6, p. 11.

Notes 369 2 Over the period August to December 1998, the nominal rate of the ruble fell from 6.5 to 20.6 to the dollar, and over 1999 it slid further, to 27.0 to the dollar. The price per barrel of Urals blend rose from around $10 at the beginning of 1999 to around $25 at year’s end. It peaked in the third quarter of 2000, at around $30. 3 Olson, Mancur (2000) Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships, New York: Basic Books, p. x. 4 Sapir, Jacques (2002) ‘Russia’s Economic Rebound: Lessons and Future Directions’, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 18, no. 1, p. 25. In a similar vein, Stephen Holmes notes that ‘Today’s Russia makes it excruciatingly plain that liberal values are threatened just as thoroughly by state incapacity as by despotic power. ‘‘Destatization’’ is not the solution: it is the problem’ (Holmes, Stephen (1997) ‘When Less State Means Less Freedom’, Transitions, vol. 4, no. 4, p. 67). 5 There are numerous observers both inside and outside Russia who still claim that it would be wrong to seek to emulate the West, and that Russia must seek to find its own way. There may well be merit in such arguments, but the risk is that any ambition by Russian leaders to find a Russian Sonderweg would risk leading to no more than a reversal to the path dependence. If there is to be true change, there seems to be no other role model than that of liberal democracy and market economy built on the rule of law. 6 North, Douglass C. (1990) Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 6. 7 Rosefielde, Steven (2002c) ‘Culture versus Competition: Economic Liberalization in Russia, China and Japan’, Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 49, no. 5, p. 48. 8 Olson, Mancur (1996) ‘Big Bills Left on the Sidewalk: Why Some Nations are Rich and Others Poor’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 10, no. 2. 9 North, 1990, op. cit., p. 7. 10 Greif, Avner (1994a) ‘Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: A Historical and Theoretical Reflection on Collectivist and Individualist Societies’, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 102, no. 5, p. 912. 11 North, 1990, op. cit., pp. 98–99. 12 Ibid., p. 99. 13 Cited by Eggertsson, Thra´inn (1996a) ‘No Experiments, Monumental Disasters: Why it Took a Thousand Years to Develop a Specialized Fishing Industry in Iceland’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, vol. 30, no. 1, p. 2. 14 Ibid., p. 2. 15 Eggertsson, Thra´inn (1996b) ‘Rethinking the Theory of Economic Policy: Some Implications of the New Institutionalism’, paper prepared for a workshop on ‘Economic Transformation, Institutional Change, Property Rights, and Corruption’, arranged by the NAS/NRC ‘Task Force on Economies in Transition’, Washington, D.C., 7–8 March 1996, pp. 22–23. 16 North, 1990, op. cit., p. 59. 17 Elster, Jon (1989) The Cement of Society: A Study of Social Order, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 97. 18 Greif, 1994a, op. cit., pp. 942–43 and passim. 19 Olson, Mancur (1991) ‘Autocracy, Democracy and Prosperity’, in R. J. Zeckhauser (ed.) Strategy and Choice, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, p. 135. 20 Olson, Mancur (1995) ‘Why the Transition from Communism is so Difficult’, Eastern Economic Journal, vol. 21, no. 4, p. 458. 21 Pipes, Richard (1974) Russia under the Old Regime, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, p. xxi. 22 Olson, Mancur (1982) The Rise and Decline of Nations, New Haven: Yale University Press.

370

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23 Shepsle, Kenneth A. (1991) ‘Discretion, Institutions and the Problem of Government Commitment’, in Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman (eds) Social Theory for a Changing Society, Boulder, Colo.: Western Press, pp. 246–47. 24 Cited by Eggertsson, Thra´inn (1993) ‘Mental Models and Social Values: North’s Institutions and Credible Commitment’, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, vol. 149, no. 1, p. 25. 25 North, Douglass C. (1993a) ‘Institutions and Credible Commitment’, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, vol. 149, no. 1, p. 14. 26 Ibid., p. 17. 27 Yakovlev, Alexander M. (1995) ‘The Rule-of-Law Ideal and Russian Reality’, in Stanislaw Frankowski and Paul B. Stephan III (eds) Legal Reform in PostCommunist Europe: The View from Within, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, p. 19. 28 It may be argued that the revolution really was begun in the Netherlands and then exported to England. While there is much factual truth in this version, it also comes up a bit short in the sense that while the Dutch revolted against foreign rulers, the English succeeded in writing a contract with their own. 29 Without venturing into that debate, we may note that the understanding of institutional change in England in the seventeenth century as the basis of and indeed explanation for the subsequent industrial revolution has been somewhat controversial. Olson, for one, is quite specific in stating that the case of British development after 1688–89 is ‘relatively clear-cut’, and that ‘as almost everyone knows, the consolidation of individual and more or less democratic rights provided during the Glorious Revolution was followed by the Industrial Revolution’. (Olson, Mancur (1997) ‘The New Institutional Economics: The Collective Choice Approach to Economic Development’, in Christopher Clague (ed.) Institutions and Economic Development: Growth and Governance in Less-Developed and Post-Socialist Countries, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 52.) For an alternative view of the roots and explanations of Western success, see Frank, A. G. (1998) ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, ch. 6. 30 Fukuyama, Francis (1989) ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest, Summer; and Fukuyama, Francis (1992) The End of History and the Last Man, New York: The Free Press. 31 North, 1993a, op. cit, p. 19. 32 There is, obviously, the special case where incentives are structured in such a way that narrowly defined short-term self-interested behaviour by all actors will indeed produce a collectively optimal outcome, needing no reference to underlying systems of norms. Elevated to the national level it is, however, difficult to see the relevance of such highly restricted ‘motivational’ forms of commitment. 33 North, 1993a, op. cit., p. 21. 34 Ibid., p. 12. 35 Pipes, Richard (1996) ‘Russia’s Past, Russia’s Future’, Commentary, June, p. 37. 36 Pipes, Richard (1999) Property and Freedom, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, pp. 11–13, 28. 37 Quoted by ibid., pp. 43–44. 38 North, Douglass C. (1991) ‘Institutions’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 5, no. 1, p. 101. 39 Weingast, Barry R. (1993) ‘Constitutions as Governance Structures: The Political Foundations of Secure Markets’, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, vol. 149, no. 1, p. 305. 40 Elster, Jon (1985) Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 93–97 and passim.

Notes 371 41 Although he stopped short of inserting his own name as president, Yeltsin did make sure that the Russian constitution explicitly identified the president as its guarantor. More precisely, Article 80, paragraph 2, reads as follows: ‘The President of the Russian Federation shall be a guarantor of the Constitution of the Russian Federation and the rights and freedoms of the individual and the citizen.’ Yeltsin also would make it quite clear that he regarded this document as very much his own personal achievement. Others would be able to criticize it only at their own peril. 42 There have been allegations of substantial fraud both in the referendum and in the simultaneous Duma election. In the former case, the problem was an insufficient voter turnout. Unless at least 50 per cent of eligible voters showed up at the polling stations, the referendum would not be valid and the constitution not accepted. In order to deal with this problem, a few million votes allegedly were added during the following night, when votes were aggregated. Although the allegations have not been conclusively proven, they have generally been seen as rather credible, indicating that Russia in effect does not have a valid constitution. (See further Clark, Bruce (1995) An Empire’s New Clothes: The End of Russia’s Liberal Dream, London: Vintage, pp. 277–78.) 43 Although it was certainly not alone, Gazprom would come to serve as the most important target for such ad hoc sequestration. The outcome logically would have to be a situation of highly opaque relations between the Kremlin and its cash-rich supporters. Amongst the more anecdotal evidence, we may recall how Moscow mayor Yurii Luzhkov gave one of the Moscow bankers an offer the latter simply could not refuse, namely to graciously donate 40 kg of pure gold for the cupolas of the Cathedral of the Saviour that Luzhkov was having rebuilt. 44 Cited by Yavlinsky, Grigory (1998) ‘Russia’s Phony Capitalism’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 77, no. 3, p. 69. 45 Hellman, Joel S., Geraint Jones and Daniel Kaufman (2000) ‘Seize the State, Seize the Day: State Capture, Corruption, and Influence in Transition’, Policy Research Working Paper, no. 2444, September: The World Bank. 46 One example is the Berlin-based non-profit organization Transparency International, which puts out an annual ranking of countries according to perceived degrees of corruption amongst public officials and politicians. In its 2002 ‘Corruption Perception Index’, Russia was ranked in place 71 out of a total of 102 surveyed countries. Also to be found in that same lacklustre place were Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Both current and previous CPI rankings (beginning in 1995) are available on www.transparency.org. 47 According to Freedom House, which ranks countries according to ‘political rights, civil liberties and freedom status’, Russia remained throughout the 1990s in the category of ‘partly free’ countries, but the trend was slipping. In the 2001–02 ranking, Russia’s score had dropped from 3.3 to 5.5, which is on the very borderline of being ‘not free’ (http://www.freedomhouse.org/ratings/ index.htm). Another example is the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, which puts out an annual ‘Index of Economic Freedom’. In its ranking for 2002, Russia ends up as number 135 out of 156, ranked only slightly above countries like Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (www.heritage.org/index/indexoffreedom.cfm). 48 Reddaway, 2002, op. cit., p. 34. 49 Industrial production as a whole declined over 1991–98 by about 50 per cent. Gas was down by only 15 per cent, and electricity and oil extraction by about 25 per cent. In contrast, food industry dropped 55 per cent, and light industry by 86 per cent. The output of metals (ferrous and non-ferrous) meanwhile fell

372

50 51 52 53 54

55 56

57

58 59 60

Notes

by 40 per cent and machine building by almost 60 per cent. (Goskomstat, official statistics.) Williamson, Oliver E. (1995) ‘The Institutions and Governance of Economic Development’, in Proceedings of the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics 1994, Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, p. 181. Ibid., pp. 181–82. Olson, 2000, op. cit., p. 186, and ch. 10 passim on ‘markets needed for prosperity’. Inglehart, Ronald (1999) ‘Trust, Well-being and Democracy’, in Mark E. Warren (ed.) Democracy and Trust, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 88–120. Driven by its strong economic growth, China has become Moscow’s biggest client, buying an estimated $15 billion of weapons through 2004–05. Compared to 1996–99, the rate of bilateral military exchange has already doubled, or even tripled, and the present 15-year agreement contemplates ultimate joint production of both conventional and strategic systems (Blank, Stephen (2003) ‘The Material-Technical Foundations of Russian Military Power’, Ankara Paper 7, London: Frank Cass, p. 16). Rosefielde, Steven (2004) Prodigal Superpower: Russia’s Re-Emerging Future, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 87–90. His decision, in the midst of that crisis, to reshuffle the government in favour of the FSB was seen by many as a rather ominous sign. In a comment, Russian defence analyst Pavel Felgenhauer noted that ‘It is typical that while announcing the recreation of a KGB-style super secret police, Putin did not propose the creation of any, even superficial, public system for controlling its activities. Of course, an authoritarian state does not envisage any such controls.’ (Felgenhauer, Pavel (2003) ‘KGB: Big, Bad, and Back?’, Moscow Times, 13 March p. 9.) Clague, Christopher (1997) ‘The New Institutional Economics and Economic Development’, in idem. (ed.) Institutions and Economic Development: Growth and Governance in Less-Developed and Post-Socialist Countries, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 17. Inglehart, op. cit., p. 88. Offe, Claus (1999) ‘How Can We Trust Our Fellow Citizens?’, in Mark E. Warren (ed.) Democracy and Trust, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 85. Ibid., p. 85. (Italics in the original.)

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Index

Abalkin, L. 259 Abraham, R. 193, 199, 218 accountability 321, 330 agriculture 67, 76, 201; in Kievan Rus 32–3; reform of 222–3, 236–9 Alexander I 210, 218 Alexander II 211, 224–5, 226; assassination 227 Alexander III 159, 224, 227 Alexei, Tsar 50, 171, 172, 178; and boyar Duma 173; and the Church 174, 175, 176 Anna, Empress 195, 197, 200 appanage system 78–81, 88 arbiter, autocrat as 134, 213, 278, 304, 322 army 6; of Peter the Great 184–5 Arrow, K. 7 Arthur, B. 24 Asia, Russia belonging to 12 Astrakhan 124, 139 autocracy 25–6, 81, 130, 134, 180, 182, 183, 297, 306; above law 320, 321, 322; Bolshevism and 240–4; and clergy 140–1; erosion of 194–8; and nobility 87–90; and peasantry 160; and reform 210–12, 213, 233–4; Soviet 257, 275; of tsars 275 Aven, P. 11 Balkans, Turks in 114–15 Baltic trade 51–2, 63 bandits: roving 25–6, 314, 325–6; stationary 25–6, 28–9, 64, 255, 314–15 banking 228, 280–1 bankruptcy 260, 271 Bashkortostan 301 baskaki 84, 85

Bekbulatovich, Simeon 143 Benckendorff, General 220 Berezovsky, Boris 278, 302, 303 Billington, J. 28, 73, 74, 114, 115, 124, 137, 140, 147, 177 Birnbaum, H. 53, 68, 69 bishops 54, 107 Black Death 59 Blank, S. 363n Bloody Sunday (1905) 232 Blum, J. 145 body and soul 127, 181–6, 239, 244–51 Bogolyubskii, Prince Andreii 42, 78, 87 Bolsheviks: and body and soul 239, 244–51; economic policy 253–6; land reform 238–9; reconstituting autocracy 240–4; and service nobility 265 Boris Godunov 113, 155 bourgeoisie 216, 235 boyar Duma 143–6, 163–4, 165, 183–4; demise of 172–4; membership 144, 173; Peter the Great and 179, 180–1; reconstitution of 169, 170–1 boyars 144, 146, 148; bonds against disloyalty 150; collective responsibility 92, 150; compulsory service 93; gifts of land to Church 110; and kormenie 34–5; land ownership 91–2, 93, 94; in Novgorod 53, 54, 55, 58, 61, 67; powers of 53, 54, 55, 58, 59; purges of 61, 142, 145; relationship with grand prince 53, 58, 144, 149, 150; right to free departure 92–3; as service nobility 91–5; as ‘slaves’ 149, 150 brain drain 292 Brezhnev, Leonid 258

386

Index

Bulgars, influence on Muscovite ideology 115 Bunge, N.K. 228–9 bureaucracy 19, 132, 133, 171, 188, 210, 225, 234; college organization 182, 210; in Novgorod 59; venality of 254 business elite 303–5, 324 Byzantine heritage 121–2, 123–4, 139, 140 Byzantine-Rus relations 32 Byzantium see Constantinople Caesaropapism 113, 123, 124 capital 290, 291; investment 290–1; movement overseas 271 Casimir IV, of Poland 60, 61 ‘catch-up’ 230, 252, 258, 287 Catherine II (the Great) 198, 205–6; and nobility 213–14, 215 central planning 253 centralization of control 129, 164, 180 Cerularius, Patriarch 343n Chaadaev, Pyotr 331–2n Chancellor, Richard 141 Chancery of Confiscation 195 Charter of the Nobility 209, 213 Chechnya, war in 6, 273, 298 Cheka 247–8 chelobitnyi prikaz 171 Chernomyrdin, Viktor 287 Chicherin, B. 88 China 239, 283; military–industrial advances 294–5 Chingizids 139, 143 Christianity (see also Orthodox Church) 13, 27, 41, 63, 73–4, 102–5, 118; Mongols and 108–9; Peter the Great and 212 Church Council, Florence 1437–39 116 Cicero 126, 318 cities 216, 217, 226, 232; destruction 131; elites 42; urban growth 65, 73 City Charter 217 classical antiquity, lock-out from 104 Clague, C. 329 clergy 142, 156; authority of 143; landowners 109–10, 111, 117; literary work 104; and Muscovite ideology 116–17; relations with autocracy 112–14, 117–19, 139, 140–1, 188 Coleman, J. 17 COMECON 6 command economy 126, 133, 178, 180–1, 184–6, 216–17; Bolshevism and 253–4

commerce (see also trade) 144, 178, 218; Mongols and 130–1 commitment, imperative/motivational 315–16, 317 committees of the poor 253 Commonwealth of Independent States 269 communes 153, 236–8 Communist Party 101, 243, 245, 250–1, 300; agitprop 246, 248; creed of socialism 245, 246; and kormlenie 255; power of 246; Putin and 299 comparative statics 23, 24 compulsory service 93 conditional land tenure 92, 93–4 Constantinople 27, 30, 42, 51; Christianity in 104; fall of 117; influence of 74, 105, 106, 115–17; trade with 29, 32, 34 Constituent Assembly 233, 240, 242 constitution 321, 322 constitutional reform 210–12, 222, 226, 242 constitutionalism 234, 274 consumer sovereignty 252, 326 corporal punishment 186 Corps of Cadets 195 corruption 6, 171, 279, 323, 324 Council of Lords (Novgorod) 55 Council of People’s Commissars 240 Cox Report 287 Criminal Code 1845 221 Crummey, R. 164, 165, 170, 173 Crusades 41, 42, 63 cult of the land 138 cultural beliefs 166–7, 168 cultural borrowing 45, 83–4 cultural values 24 culture 9–12, 16–17; individual/community 329 currency 228–9 Cyprian, Metropolitan of Moscow 115 Daniel Kholmskii, Prince 92 Danilovichi 89, 139 David, P. 18, 23–4 De Long, J.B. 65, 66, 67, 69 Debreu, G. 7 Decembrist revolt 198, 219 decentralization 42, 48 Decree on Land 238 democracy 260, 274, 322–3, 326; suppression of 132; transitions to 5–6 Denmark 160

Index 387 denunciations 150, 153–4, 155, 185–6, 199, 220, 221; reintroduction 298; Soviet 248 deportations 94 deprivation hypothesis 46 deregulation 8–9, 196, 267, 314 determinism 17, 310 Deutscher, I. 256 Dewey, H. 128–9, 130 dictatorships 66, 240–1 Dmitrii, Grand Prince 59, 60 Dolgorukaya, Catherine 225, 226 Duma, State (see also boyar Duma) 233; elections to 299–300, 323; end of 242; Putin and 299–300 Dushan, Tsar 115 duvan 241; post-Soviet 269 dynastic rights 36, 62 dynastic rule (see also succession) 43, 133–4; Viking 28, 35–7 economic backwardness 230–1 economic growth 63, 223, 230–1; cyclical pattern 161–2, 231; political systems and 64–5 economic recovery 288, 289, 290–1, 307 economic reform 11–12; Soviet Union 259–60; Witte 229–32 education 104, 184, 195, 203–4, 218; lack of in business 235 Eggertsson, T. 311 elections 299–300, 322–3 Elizabeth, Empress 195–6 Elster, J. 136, 151, 167, 248, 249, 312, 319 energy industry 304–5, 324 enforcement mechanisms 19, 127, 146–54, 199, 215, 313; and judiciary 129, 152; and legitimacy 152, 184–6; moral 169; third party 312, 316 England: Glorious Revolution 316; rule of law 317 Enlightenment 206–7, 218, 264, 265 Entail Law 194–5 entrepreneurs 203, 216–17; nobility and 218–19; Peter the Great and 180–1 equilibrium 167, 168; multiple 16, 17 Ermarth, Fritz 286 ethnic separatism 272, 273 Europe, Russia belonging to 12 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development 267 expectations 167, 265

exportation 99 exports 229 fear of invasion 252 federal districts 300–1 Federal Security Service 297–8 Federation Council 301 Filaret 155–6, 174 fiscals 185 five-year planing 251–2 foreign debt 228, 271, 286 foreign policy 228, 229, 231, 295–6 foreign travellers 46, 61–2, 145–6; accounts of 146, 154, 339n foreigners, suspicion of (see also xenophobia) 103–4, 175, 245, 328 France, property law 318 Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor 122–3 freedom of information 182 freedom of speech 302, 303, 330 Freeh, L. 270 Friedman, R. 270 Fundamental Laws 233 Fyodor II 113, 155, 173, 178 Gaidar, Yegor 282 Galicia–Volhynia 42 GDP 282–3 Gediminas 49, 87 general equilibrium theory 7 Genoa, traders from 63–4, 65, 313 Germogen, Patriarch 160 Gerschenkron, Alexander 223, 230 glasnost 260, 268, 281 Glinski, D. 266 global security 286–7, 294–6 Glorious Revolution 1688–89 (England) 316 Golden Horde 59, 83–4 Gorbachev, Mikhail 5, 259–60, 268; and collapse of Soviet Union 271, 272–3, 274; and perestroika 259 gosudar 120–1, 152 Gotland Yard 51–2 government 308, 309–11; market–augmenting 308, 327, 328, 330; and property rights 319 Graham, Thomas 272, 277, 286, 294–5 grand princes 46, 86, 90, 134; boyars and 53, 58, 144, 149, 150; Church and 113–14, 117, 124, 139, 140; and judiciary 129–30; as landowners 90–1; role of 143–4; as tsar 122

388

Index

Great Socialist October Revolution 238, 264–5 Great Terror 243 Greif, A. 63–4, 166 Gusinsky, Vladimir 302, 303 Halperin, C. 33, 36, 68, 82, 85, 138 Hanseatic League 51–2, 61, 130 Harrison, L. 9, 10 Harvard University, Symposium 1999, ‘Cultural Values and Human Progress’ 9–10 Hellie, R. 38, 39, 57, 106, 107, 108, 129 Herberstein, Sigismund von 121 Hirschman, A. 168, 250 historical economics 18, 23–4, 36 history 8–9, 16, 313 Hosking, G. 33, 36 hyperdepression 324 ideology 154, 224; Muscovite 74, 124, 136, 137–8; religion and 249; Soviet 245–6; and totalitarianism 127 Illarionov, A. 324 illiteracy 104, 130 immunity charters 97 income differentials 292; Third World 309 increasing returns 163–6 industrialization 223, 230, 232, 234, 254; mis- 8, 290 industries 254, 324; Peter the Great and 180 inferior equilibria 17, 162, 163, 167 infrastructure, degradation of 291 Inglehart, R. 326 institutional change (see also reform) 30, 128, 191, 227, 311; in Italy 63; in Muscovy 223; in Novgorod 53–5, 67 institutional continuity 263 institutional lock-in 27, 46, 74, 223, 312 institutional preference 162 institutional theory 16, 127–8, 225 institutions: Communist Party and 250; pathological 311, 312; self-enforcing 146–54, 169, 212, 243 intelligentsia 195, 203–4, 217–19 International Monetary Fund 281, 287 Iona, Metropolitan of Moscow 116, 117 Isidore, Metropolitan of Moscow 116 Islam 29, 114–15 Italy 26; rise of city–states 63–5 Ivan I (Kalita) 85–6, 87

Ivan II 87 Ivan III (the Great) 61, 67, 89, 90, 112, 113; and boyars’ rights 92; ‘Lord of all Rus’ 120, 121, 122–3 Ivan IV (the Terrible) 49, 139–40, 141; and the Church 111, 113; coronation of 123–4; marriage 165; mock abdication 143; reforms 141; wave of terror 141–3 Japan 13–14 John III, Byzantine Emperor 108 John Paul II, Pope 343n Johnson, J. 266 Jones, R. 200, 212 Joseph of Volokolamsk 113, 123 Judicial Charters: Novgorod 57, 66; Pskov 56 judiciary 152, 154, 325; autocracy and 234; development of in Muscovy 129–30; Soviet 257 junta 1991 5 jurisprudence 129, 133 Kahan, A. 201 Kaiser, D. 38, 56, 107, 129 Karamzin, N.M. 82 Keenan, E. 132, 133, 137, 138, 146, 153, 165, 190 Kerenskii, Alexander 233 KGB 249–50, 271, 297 Khanate: Ivan IV and 143; Muscovy seen as successor to 139, 142 Khodorkovsky, Mikhail 304, 305 Khrushchev, Nikita 230, 256 Kiev 28, 30, 51, 75, 175; captured by Lithuania 49; cathedral 105; decline and fall of 40–4; princes of 42; sack of 78; as stationary bandit 31–7 Kievan Rus 26, 27–44, 80, 90 kleptocracy 25, 315 Kluchevsky, V. 32, 33, 36, 39, 43, 44, 53, 76, 86, 120, 121, 122 Kochan, L. 193, 199, 218 kolkhoz system 254 Kollmann, N. 36, 144, 165 kormlenie 34–5, 77, 151–2; Communist Party and 255; in Soviet Union 258; Yeltsin and 273, 279, 280–1 Kornai, J. 127, 239, 244, 251 Korzhakov, A. 5 Kovalev, S. 298 Kremlin 3, 4, 5

Index 389 krugovaya poruka 40, 150, 152–3, 185, 217, 258; post-Soviet 281; removal of 236–7 Kulikovo, battle of 59, 117 land 14, 39; confiscations 67, 195; cult of 138; exploitation 39; privatization of 96–7; and service 95, 97–8; subdivision of 79–80, 88, 164, 194, 201 land ownership 42, 93; absentee landlords 202–3; Church and 109–11, 113; serfs and 214–16 Landes, D. 17 landholding 202; appanage system 79–81; categories of 96; conditional tenure 92, 93–4 lateral succession 35–7, 79 law 56–7; absence of 213, 221; punitive 149; rule by 147–9; on ‘word and deed’ 149–50, 185 law codes: 1497 128–30; 1649 97, 147, 203; russkaya pravda 38–40, 53, 56, 91, 128, 129 law commission 207, 208 Layard, R. 277 Lebedev, Platon 305 legal reform 211, 234 legitimacy 152, 184–6, 199 leisure class 198–205 Lenin, V.I. 244, 263, 266; and autocracy 264; cult of 245, 246–7; and NEP 253–4 liberalization 198–9, 208, 211, 225, 252, 257, 279–81 Liberman, Y. 257 Lithuania (see also Poland–Lithuania) 45, 48–50, 90, 92, 94; Mongols and 87 Livonian War 154–5 local administration 210, 211 Loris–Melikov, Count 226–7 Lotman, Y. 265 loyalty 168, 169, 173, 250; oaths of 92, 93–4, 150 Luzhkov, Yurii 275, 299 MABETEX 287 McAllister, I. 281 McDaniel, T. 159 McNeill, W. 13 Maghribi 63–4, 313 market-friendly economic policy 26, 47, 128, 147, 182, 194, 216, 252, 315

markets 11, 67, 314; absence of 196 marriage: customs 106–7; politics of 164–5, 169, 178–9, 183, 225 Marxism–Leninism 246, 251 media, Putin and 302–3 Menshikov, S. 292 mental models 24, 36, 81, 135–7, 166–70, 192, 312, 313; different 187, 213, 215; path dependent 235, 258, 259, 260; shared 166, 187, 316; transformation of 135–41, 225, 260, 264, 330 mentalité 18, 37; boyar elite 169; peasantry 162, 215 merchants 216–17, 235 Merry, W. 295 mestnichestvo 164, 169, 179, 183 Mikhail, Tsar 104, 113, 155, 177, 178; and boyar elite 170–1 military 47, 133; expenditure on 77, 228, 256 Military–Industrial Complex 252, 282, 327 military servitors 92–4 mir 40, 237 Mironov, B. 153 Mises, L. von 126 mobilization of resources 47, 180, 181, 184–5, 252, 253, 256 modelling 24 modernity/modernization 181–6, 187, 188–9 monasteries 97, 107, 110, 112; land ownership 109–10, 111, 113 monetary exchange 14, 133 monetization 194, 229 money 34, 216, 280, 329; absence of 194, 258 Mongol Yoke 57, 62–3, 81, 82–4, 130–1 Mongols 37, 41, 52, 59, 139; administration 84, 85; and Church 108–9, 117–18; influence of 74, 82–3, 130–1, 132–3; and Lithuania 48, 49; and Novgorod 57, 62, 68, 130; puppet Khans 143; and taxation 84–7, 130, 131; working with 81, 82, 83, 84–7 Monomakh, Vladimir 118–19, 123, 124 monopolies 194, 216–17 Montesquieu, C.S. de 207, 208 Moscow 5, 28, 43, 45, 78, 90; attack on 1571 142; economic growth 131; Kremlin 3, 4, 5; leader of Rus 87; Red Square 3–4; rise of 76; strategic position 76–7

390

Index

Mosse, W.E. 225, 230, 275 Muscovy (see also Moscow) 28, 29, 43, 57, 66, 69, 73; collapse of 154–5; expansion of 33, 49, 50, 59, 77, 93, 123; institutional stability 47; judicial process 129–30; lack of merchant class 216–17; land policy 91–5; Novgorod annexed to 60, 61, 69; political culture 45–6; princes 69, 85–6, 87; relocation to 75–8; restoration of 155–6; as ‘Third Rome’ 117–19, 123, 245; trade with Constantinople 76, 77; xenophobia of 61–2 Muscovy Company 141 Napoleon, war with 218 nationality 101–2; religion and 177 nationalization of private industries 254 natural environment 48, 67, 73, 76, 77, 80, 201 Nevskii, Alexander 57–8, 68 New Economic Policy 253–4 Nicholas I 219–21 Nicholas II 222, 232–3 Nikon 175–6 Nil Sorski 112 1984 (Orwell) 248–9 nobility (see also boyars; princes) 204–5; Catherine and 209; cultural Westernization 196, 204; divisions within 200–1; emancipation of 198, 199–205, 214; entrepreneurship 218–19; estates of 231; humiliation by tsar 146; post-Peter 193–4; poverty of 201–2, 203; relationship with tsars 194–6, 197–8, 206, 208, 213; selfimage of 207; uncertainty of 196 nomenklatura 179, 243 Noonan, T. 62 norms 236, 312, 317, 326; cultural 166; individualist/collectivist 64, 313; informal 127–8, 166, 265; internalization of 136, 316, 320; new 142; patrimonial 151; social 167–8, 212, 312–14, 319; transformation of 83, 133, 135–7 North, D. 16, 30, 39, 47, 127, 128, 136, 166, 186, 265–6, 309, 310, 311, 312, 315, 316, 318, 319 Nove, A. 223, 247 Novgorod 28–9, 30, 45, 50–2, 90, 175; City Charter 130; end of 60–3, 66, 142; independence of 51; population

154; posadnik 53, 54, 58; princes of 53–5, 68; republican institutions 52–6, 66, 67; rise of oligarchy 57–60, 67; St Sophia Cathedral 52–3; suspicion of foreigners 103; veche 54, 55–6, 59, 68–9, 132 obligations (see also service obligations) 14, 40, 150–1 October Manifesto 232–3, 264, 320 Offe, C. 329, 330 oil 279, 304–5 okolnichii 144–5 Oleg, Grand Prince 30, 32 Olgert 49 oligarchy 65, 323, 324, 325–6; Putin and 302, 303–5; rise of in Novgorod 57–60, 67; Yeltsin and 277–9 Olson, M. 10, 11, 15, 25, 26, 29, 255, 308, 313–14, 325, 326 ‘One Russia’ 300 OPK (defence–industrial complex) 327, 328 opportunity costs 15, 47 oprichnina 142, 143, 145 organized crime 269–70, 271–2; metaphor of 25 Orthodox Church (see also clergy) 244, 249; autocracy and 90–1, 154, 156, 246; break with Constantinople 116, 117; Church Council 1551 141; decline of 170; Great Schism 176–7; influence of 160, 174; land ownership 109–11, 113; Most Holy Synod 188; Old Believers 176, 187, 188; Peter the Great and 187–8, 244; relationship with state 160, 187–8; rights of 107; in Rus 105–8; see moved to Moscow 87; synods 112–13, 176, 177 Ostrom, V. 311 Ostrowski, D. 74, 84, 85, 91, 93–4, 108, 117, 140, 142, 143, 164 Owen, T. 147, 211, 231, 235 path dependence 161–2, 183, 265, 310, 311; theory of 16–18, 24, 26–7 Patriarchate of all Rus 155, 156 patrimonialism 125–6, 254, 257, 306; Bolshevik return to 242, 251; cracks in 212, 218 Paul 210 peasant economy 131 peasant institutions 39–40

Index 391 peasants 41, 95–6, 152–4, 172, 181, 209; Bolshevism and 246–7, 254; enserfment of 97–100; fiscal burden on 184, 229, 230, 231, 236–7; joint responsibility 40; rebellions of 148, 155; rejection of reform 238; rights of departure 98–9; runaways 99–100, 203; view of tsar 148, 154, 160 perestroika 259, 268 Pereyaslavl, Treaty of 50, 175 personal enrichment 151–2, 257–8 personalization 151, 197, 198, 235, 243, 257–8 Peter I (the Great) 3, 178, 179, 218, 230; and the Church 187–8, 212, 244; commercial policy 194; and corporal punishment 186; and industry 254; land policy 194–5; and modernization 181–8; and service order 179–81, 186; succession to 193, 197 Peter III 198, 199, 200, 205, 208 Peterson, C. 186 Philoteus 118, 120 Pipes, R. 13, 14, 31, 35, 54, 58, 61, 66, 73, 74, 75, 81, 83, 88, 97, 104, 111, 125–6, 132, 145, 147, 148, 153, 179, 180, 183, 185, 197–8, 201, 204, 205, 216, 221, 227, 238, 240, 241, 314, 318 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin 227 Poe, M. 28, 46, 61, 103, 119, 133, 145–6, 148, 150, 151 pogosti 31 Poland 160; army of in Moscow 155; war with 171, 175 Poland–Lithuania 49–50, 59, 60, 120, 122; Novgorod treaty with 60–1 police see secret police Politburo 4, 243, 245 political culture 82, 128, 138, 235–6; at Muscovite court 149 political poruka 221, 248, 258, 281 Polotsk 49 Polovtsians 75 pomestie 92, 93, 94–5, 194 Poppel, Nicholas 122 population growth 230, 292–3 posadnik 53, 54, 58, 217 poverty 292; of nobility 201–2, 203 power struggles 37 power vertical 6, 298–300 Preobrazhenskii prikaz 185, 247 Primakov, Yevgenii 299 princes: appanage system 79–81; and Christianity 107–18; and Church

lands 107–8, 110, 113; cooperation with Mongols 81, 82, 83, 84–7; contracts with 54–5, 66; division of property 88–9; in Kiev 42; loyalty to grand prince 93–4; in Novgorod 53–4, 58, 66, 68, 69; and peasants 95–100; power of 53–4, 55, 58, 81; reduced status 80; treaties with 91–2 private property 14, 38–9, 68, 209, 314, 318 privatization 276–9, 306; household 281 production: military at expense of civilian 290, 310; property–rights intensive 325, 328 professional elite 195 property: plunder of 241, 242, 269; sovereignty and 125–6, 128, 318 property rights 66, 79, 91, 237, 257, 315, 318–19, 323; suppression of 254 provincial charter 1775 210 Prus 118–19 Pskov 56–7, 61; City Charter 98, 130 public goods 28, 182, 212 Pugachev rebellion 208–9 Putin, Vladimir 6, 20, 293, 306, 331; control over media 302–3, 330; and Duma 298–300; and oligarchy 303–5; punitive agenda 297–8, 330; recovery under 288, 289, 307; and regions 300–1 Putnam, R. 17, 26 Raeff, M. 177, 178, 183, 185, 187, 197, 199, 204, 207, 212 railway construction 229 rational action 80, 132, 133, 154, 167–8, 319 Razin, S. 176 rebellions 171–2, 176–7 Reddaway, P. 266 reform 159, 162, 191–2, 213; Alexander I and 210–11; Alexander II and 211, 226; Catherine and 205–6, 207, 209–10; obstacles to 192; Peter the Great and 178, 181–6; resistance to 162–3 regional governors 301 religion (see also Christianity; Orthodox Church) 62–3, 107; nationality and 177; norms 244 remilitarization 295–6, 327–8 repression 192, 198–9, 215, 220, 221, 226, 233

392

Index

resource extraction 47, 66, 79, 132, 133, 134, 252, 255; to meet external threats 171–2, 177, 185 resource mismanagement 47, 66, 180 Reutern, Count 228 revolutions: Bolshevik 265; 1905 232 Riga 49 rights 66, 182–3, 207, 296; refusal to grant 199; suppression of 132, 133, 298 Roman Catholicism 49, 61, 103, 116 Roman law 318 Rose, R. 14–15, 281 Rosefielde, S. 294, 295, 328, 333n Rostov 51, 76, 78 rule of law 296, 317, 326, 327; absence of 19, 26; in Kievan Rus 38–40 rules 19, 128–35; formal 19, 163, 207–8, 233, 236, 265; and norms 127, 128, 181, 183 Rurik 29, 32 Rus 33–4, 104; early Church in 105–8; in Lithuania 49; Mongols and 81, 83–4; relocation to Muscovy 75–8 Russia: difference of 12–16; economic reforms 11–12; economy 6–9; international position 196; mafia 270 Russian Federation 273, 321 Russian Land Code 14 Russkaya Pravda 38–9, 40, 53, 56, 91, 128, 129 russkaya zemlya 43, 62, 63, 78, 138 Russo–Byzantine relations 27, 32 Russo–Japanese war 232 Rutland, P. 299, 300 Sachs, J. 268 St Petersburg 3, 4; building of 181 Sapir, J. 292, 308 Sarai 83, 84, 85 Schroeder, G. 258 secret police 185, 220–1, 247–8; abolished by Peter III 198, 210 Secret Privy Council 197 security 27–8, 32, 32, 77, 310; and fear of invasion 252; global 286–7, 294–6; of property 66 Seneca 126 Senate, Petrine 179, 197 Serbia 114–15 serfdom (see also peasants) 172, 181, 201, 202, 214–16, 220–1; possessional 180; reintroduction of 254 service culture 203, 208

service nobility 91–5, 149, 165, 183, 278; Bolsheviks and 265; Communist Party and 250–1 service obligations 134, 179, 193, 195, 203; Bolsheviks and 243; ending of 199–200; nobility attack on 195–6; Peter the Great and 184 servitors 92–4, 171, 180; household 94, 145; military 92–4 Shaimiev, M. 301 Shepsle, K. 315 Shleifer, A. 65, 66, 67, 69 Shlykov, V. 255 shock therapy 7–8, 15, 20, 234–5, 266, 282, 283, 286 Sievers, Jacob 204 slavery 39, 75, 181, 217; ceremonial 148, 149, 152 Slavs 26, 29, 32–3, 46; and Christianity 106–7; relocation of 75–6 Smolensk 50, 75, 171 Sobornoe ulozhenie 97, 147, 156, 172, 175 social capital 17, 329, 330 social flexibility 311 socialism 127, 259 Socialist Revolutionaries 240 society 212, 221; state and 46–54, 126, 133, 148, 307–8, 317–18 Solovetsk monastery 176–7 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 257 Sophia (regent) 121, 173, 179, 183 Soros, G. 324 sovereign’s paradox 315–16, 320 ‘Soviet Men’ 245, 246, 247, 248 Soviet Union 101; collapse of 267–9; fragmentation of 6, 272–4 Speranskii, Mikhail 210–11, 221 spiritual regulation 187–8 spot-market trading 324, 325 Stalin, Joseph 15, 245, 249, 255; secret chancellery 243–4; and serfdom 254; xenophobia of 252 state (see also society) 39, 283, 314; as enforcer of contracts 65; Muscovite 161, 182 state assets, looting of 269–72 state building 26, 28, 35–7 state collapse 47, 268 steppe 27–8, 32, 33–4 Sterling, C. 269 Stiglitz, Joseph 8, 12, 266 Stolypin, Pyotr 222–3, 237–9, 321

Index 393 strikes 232 succession: rota system 35–7, 41–2, 78–80, 88–9; in Soviet Union 256, 288–9; of tsars 193, 197 Sudebnik 1497 128–30 Summers, Larry 11 superpowers 253, 255, 294–6 Supreme Soviet 5 Suzdal 76, 78, 86 Sweden 160, 171; army of in Moscow 155; war with 178 Szamuely, L. 266 Szamuely, T. 267 Table of Ranks 179–80, 195 Tatarstan 273, 301 taxation 31, 35, 96, 171, 255; collection 84–7; reform 236–7 television, Putin and 302 terrorism 226, 227, 232 Third Section of Chancellery 219–20 Thomas, R. 30, 39, 47, 311 time inconsistency 315 time of troubles 154–5 tithes 107 Tocqueville, A. de 319 trade 29, 30, 31, 32, 51–2; Baltic 51–2, 63; fur 131; legal regulation of 64, 65; protection of 30, 34; theory of 11 Trans-Siberian Railway 229 transactions: bimodal distribution 325; hierarchical 325 transition economies 11 Treisman, D. 301, 303, 307 trial by jury 211 Trotsky, Leon 256 trust 199; interpersonal 326, 329, 330 tsardom 138–41; ideology of 137–8; succession to 193, 197 tsars (see also under individual tsars) 3, 148, 154; autocracy of 275; and doctrine of ‘Third Rome’ 119–24; forms of address to 149; peasants’ view of 148, 154; petitions to 171–2; relationship with monks 112–14; self-image of 120, 122, 124 Tsarskii Sudebnik 141 Turkey, war with 226 Tver 86 Tyutchev, Fyodor 13 Ukraine 50, 175, 269 uncertainty 196 underperformance 18

Union of Lublin 49 Union of Salvation 219 Unity (Party of Power) 299 USA 294; relations with Russia 287, 288 Uvarov, Count 220 Varangians 29–30, 35 Vasili I 89 Vasili II 89, 116 Vasili III 118, 119, 123, 146 veche 39–40, 42; in Novgorod 54, 55–6, 59, 68–9, 132 vedomosti 182 venality 114, 152, 171, 254, 279, 323 Venice 65 Vernadsky, G. 32, 34, 53, 60, 86, 89 Vikings 26, 28, 29–31 Vladimir, Grand Prince 87, 102, 105–6, 107 Vladimir 42, 51, 76, 78; see of Orthodox Church moved from 87 Volin, L. 238 volosti 79, 96–7 Volynia 49 votchina 78, 79, 87, 91, 94–5, 120, 194; confiscation of 145 Vsevolod I 53, 55 Vsevolod III 78–9 Vyshnegradskii, A.A. 228–9 War Communism 240, 253 warfare 154–5, 171, 177–8, 218 Weber, M. 125 Weingast, B. 319 West 230; attitudes to Russia 284, 286, 295 Westernization 12–13, 14, 196, 204, 221 Williamson, O. 325 wills 88 Witte, Sergei 222, 228, 229–32, 233, 234–5 Wladyslaw II Jagiello 49, 59 women, emancipation from seclusion 183 workers, Communist Party and 247 World Bank 11, 268 Wortman, R. 234 xenophobia 103–4, 175, 328; Communist Party and 245; in Muscovy 61–2; Putin and 306; Stalin and 252 Yakovlev, Aleksandr 243, 317 Yanin, V.L. 59

394

Index

Yaroslav 30, 35–6 Yasin, Y. 291 Yeltsin, Boris 5, 7, 260, 263, 266, 274; as autocrat 274, 275; and collapse of Soviet Union 268–9, 273; and

constitution 321, 322; and the Family 277 Yukos 304–5 Zinoviev, Alexander 248