The Origins of Autocracy

It was an absolute monarchy, but with an aristocratic administration. There was no political legislation which could have defined the bound­aries of the supreme power, but there was a governmental class with an aristocratic organization, which the regime itself recognized. This re­gime grew together, simultaneously, and even hand in hand, with an­other political force, which limited it. Thus, the character of this regime did not correspond to the nature of the governmental tools through which it had to act. The boyars thought of themselves as powerful ad­visors of the sovereign of all Rus', while the same sovereign, remaining true to the views of an appanage prince, employed them according to ancient Russian law as his household servants, with the title of bonds­men of the sovereign.²"

But here it is, the answer to the riddle which tormented Kliuchev­skii and which he never solved. This answer consists in the fact that the political tradition of medieval Russia was dualistic—that it was a form of coexistence between two types of relationships between the "state" and the "land," which were not only different, but opposite. The first was the ancient relationship of an appanage prince to his household servants, who administered his votchina,

and to the bonds­men who tilled the princely domain. This was a relationship of mas­ter to slave (precisely the relationship which Ivan the Terrible insisted on so fiercely in his letters). But the second relationship was no less ancient. This was the relationship of the prince as war leader and as defender of the land to his free retainers and the boyars of his coun­cil. It was just this relationship—which as a rule was contractual, but in any case was morally obligatory and fixed in the norms of custom­ary law—which Kurbskii was insisting on.

Kurbskii's tradition was rooted in the custom of "free departure" of the boyars from the prince—a custom which gave the boyar a quite definite and strong guarantee against arbitrary behavior on the part of his sovereign, for a prince of a tyrannical turn of mind would soon lose military and thus political power. Therefore he either showed himself willing to make concessions, or he perished. Tyrants simply did not survive in the cruel and permanent war between princes. The competitive standing of the prince was a reliable guarantee of the po­litical independence of his boyar councillors. Such were the historical roots of the absolutist tradition in Russia.

But it was not only that both these tendencies coexisted for many centuries; they also, Kliuchevskii observes, "grew hand in hand." This sharply contradicts the existing stereotype, according to which the ab­solutist tradition gradually but uninterruptedly weakened in Russia as the country was transformed from a conglomerate of princely do­mains into a unified state, and "if one left Muscovy, there was no­where to go, or it was inconvenient." As the unified state was created, the boyars not only were not turned into bondsmen of the tsar, but quite the contrary, became "a governmental class with an aristocratic organization which the regime itself recognized."

The household of an "appanage prince" knew neither a govern­mental class nor an aristocratic organization: it contained either bondsmen or free retainers. Furthermore, the royal votchina

was ad­ministered by bondsmen and not by retainers. Therefore, the aristo- cratization of the elite—that is, the transformation of free retainers into a governmental class—was a comparatively late phenomenon in Russia. The Russian aristocracy was thus formed precisely in connec­tion with, and in the course of, the formation of the unified state. Moreover, it was created by this very process.