This type of regime has been known since the time of Hobbes as “patriarchal” or “patrimonial.”* Its distinguishing feature is the fusion of sovereignty and ownership, the monarch viewing himself and being viewed by his subjects as both ruler of the realm and its proprietor. At its height patrimonial rule in Russia rested on four pillars:
1. Monopoly on political authority
2. Monopoly on economic resources and wholesale trade
3. The ruler’s claims to unlimited services from his subjects; absence of individual as well as group (estate) rights
4. Monopoly on public information
Having in the early 1700s laid claim to the status of a European power, Russia had to be able to match her Western rivals in military might, economic productivity, and culture. This requirement forced the monarchy partially to dismantle the patrimonial institutions which had served it well as long as Russia had been essentially an Oriental power competing with other Oriental powers. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the monarchy recognized the right to property in land and in its other forms: the word “property” (sobstvennost’, from the German Eigentum) entered the Russian vocabulary at this time. Concurrently, the Crown began to withdraw from manufacture and trade. Although by Western standards the Russian state of 1900 still loomed large in the national economy, the country by then had a flourishing free market and corresponding capitalist institutions. Even while violating human rights, tsarism respected private property. The government also gradually gave up the claim to unlimited services from its subjects, freeing from compulsory state service first the gentry (dvorianstvo) (1762) and a century later (1861) the serfs. It continued to insist on the right to censor publications, but since it did not exercise this right either strictly or consistently, the flow of ideas was not seriously affected, the more so that there were few restrictions on foreign travel.
Thus, by 1900, with one exception, the patrimonial regime was a thing of the past: the exception was the country’s political system. While “manumitting” society economically, socially, and culturally, the Crown persisted in refusing to give it a voice in legislation and administration.* It continued to insist that it had the sole right to legislative and executive power, that the Tsar was “unlimited” as well as “autocratic,” and that all laws had to emanate from him. The incompatibility of Russia’s political constitution with her economic, social, cultural, and even administrative realities was widely recognized at the time as an anomaly by most educated Russians. For, indeed, how could one reconcile the advanced state of Russia’s industrial economy and culture with a political system that treated her inhabitants as incapable of governing themselves? Why did a people that had produced a Tolstoy and a Chekhov, a Tchaikovsky and a Mendeleev, need to be ruled by a caste of professional bureaucrats, most of whom had no higher education and many of whom were notoriously corrupt? Why could the Serbians, Finns, and Turks have a constitution and parliament but not the Russians?
On the face of it, these questions seem unanswerable, and yet they did have answers which, in view of what happened after 1917, deserve a hearing.
The educated and economically advanced elements of Russia’s population which clamored for political rights were a visible but small minority. The main concern of the Imperial administration was the fifty million Great Russian peasants concentrated in the central provinces, for it was on their tranquillity and loyalty that the internal security of the Empire ultimately depended.† The peasant had his grievances but they were not politicaclass="underline" he could no more imagine a different system of government than a different climate. The existing regime suited him well because he could understand it from his personal experience in the peasant household, which was organized on the same modeclass="underline"
The sovereign’s authority is unlimited—like the father’s. This autocracy is only a prolongation of paternal authority.… From base to summit, the immense Empire of the North appears, in all its parts, and on all its tiers, constructed on one plan and in one style; all the stones seem to have come out of the same quarry, and the entire building rests on one foundation: patriarchal authority. With this side of her Russia leans toward the old monarchies of the East and decidedly turns away from the modern states of the West, which are all based on feudalism and individualism.4
The Great Russian peasant, with centuries of serfdom in his bones, not only did not crave for civil and political rights, but, as will be indicated later on, held such notions in contempt. Government had to be willful and strong—that is, able to exact unquestioned obedience. A limited government, subject to external restraints and tolerant of criticism, seemed to him a contradiction in terms. To the officials charged with administering the country and familiar with these peasant attitudes, a Western-type constitutional order spelled one thing only: anarchy. The peasants would interpret it to mean the release from all obligations to the state which they fulfilled only because they had no choice: no more taxes, no more recruits, and, above all, no more tolerance of private property in land. Even relatively liberal officials regarded the Russian peasants as savages who could be kept in check only as long as they believed that their rulers were made of different “clay.”5 In many respects, the bureaucracy treated its population as the European powers treated their colonials: some observers actually drew parallels between the Russian administration and the British civil service in India.6 Even the most conservative bureaucrats realized that one could not forever base internal security on coercion and that sooner or later a constitutional regime was bound to come: but they were content to leave this matter to future generations.
The other obstacle to liberalization was the intelligentsia, broadly defined as a category of citizens, mostly upper- and middle-class and educated, in permanent opposition to tsarism, who demanded, in the name of the nation, that the Crown and bureaucracy turn over to them the reins of power. The monarchy and its officialdom regarded this intelligentsia as unfit to govern. Indeed, as events would demonstrate, the intelligentsia vastly underestimated the difficulties of administering Russia: it regarded democracy, not as the product of a slow evolution of institutions and habits, but as man’s natural condition, which only the existing despotism prevented from exerting its beneficial influence. Since they had no administrative experience, they tended to confuse governing with legislating. In the eyes of bureaucrats, these professors, lawyers, and publicists, if given access to the levers of power, would promptly let it slip from their hands and unleash anarchy, the only beneficiaries of which would be the radical extremists. Such was the conviction of the Court and its officials. There existed among the intelligentsia sensible, pragmatic individuals, aware of the difficulties of democratizing Russia and willing to cooperate with the establishment, but they were few and under constant assault from the liberals and socialists who dominated public opinion.
The Russian establishment of 1900 believed that the country simply could not afford “politics”: it was too vast, ethnically too heterogeneous, and culturally too primitive to allow for the free play of interests and opinions. Politics had to be reduced to administration carried out under the aegis of an impartial arbiter personified in the absolute ruler.