False Economy - Alan Beattie [136]
While Europe was growing out of the feudal system in which lands were granted in return for services rendered to the monarch, and was establishing the idea that individuals could own property outright, Russia was going in the other direction. Ivan the Terrible claimed ultimate property rights over all land for himself. In 1550, a new law code required landholders to provide military and administrative service to the tsar. Hereditary rights were not respected: unhelpful boyars had their land confiscated and found themselves deported. The tsar also seized and redistributed the property of any landowner who left for the less authoritarian Poland-Lithuania federation to the west.
The system was refined by successive tsars, perhaps reaching its zenith under Peter I (the Great) in the eighteenth century. Peter divided the military and civil services into a total of fourteen separate ranks, with promotion linked to service to the state, and created the splendidly named Chancery of Confiscations to seize and redistribute land as necessary. According to contemporary accounts, he made a point of underlining the reach of his personal authority by physically beating—personally—even senior members of his entourage who disappointed him. (Peter's constitutional strength was matched by his bearlike personal physique, and these assaults could do serious damage.) While European contemporaries would describe themselves to their superiors as "your obedient servant"—a habit that persisted for centuries in British letter-writing etiquette—Russian nobles would sign off addresses to the tsar with "your slave" Prince Vasili III, who succeeded Ivan the Great, said of Russian society that "all are slaves."
Peter was keen to import technology from the West, such as modern shipbuilding techniques, to try to catch up with European progress. He was also keen on European art and dress, personally shaving the beards of some nobles and imposing heavy taxes on facial hair for the rest. But any concessions to Western-style political reform were slow, grudging, and prone to reversal. He set up what was in effect a secret police to spy on and control his own people, a function in which the Russian state established lasting expertise. Envying the advanced economies and technologies of the West while rejecting the political structures that went along with them was a painful ambiguity to which Russia would return.
Catherine II (another "the Great"), who ruled at the end of the eighteenth century, was interested in modern political ideas. She corresponded with Western European philosophers of the Enlightenment who were developing concepts of individual rights and limited states whose political powers were balanced between an executive, a legislature, and a judiciary. But apart from a limited Charter of the Nobility, she and subsequent tsars did little to bring these Western concepts into practice. Judicial decisions, rather than being the province of a separate legal function, were largely made by tsarist state bureaucrats in the course of their work. Serfdom, in which peasants owed direct allegiance to their master, was not abolished in Russia until 1861, centuries after it had died out in most of Western Europe. The only real recourse that people had against tsarist rule was violence and rebellion. It was once remarked that Russia's constitution was "absolutism moderated by assassination."
The only substantive political unit of Russian society below the tsar was at a very low level—the mir, or village commune, which existed essentially to enable its members to survive by collectively banding together. Russia never developed a landowning or merchant class that was capable of organizing itself sufficiently to restrain the tsar.