The Origins of Autocracy

But let us forget all of this for the moment. Let us agree with Pipes that "during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Moscow mon­archy succeeded in eliminating alodial holdings and making secular land tenure a form of possession conditional on state service."³⁷' We then have before us a Russia which no longer knows an aristocracy, alodial tenure, and private patrimonial property, and is fully trans­formed into a "patrimonial state" in which sovereignty and ownership are indistinguishable. "The system we have described was so immune from pressures from below that, in theory at least, it should have per­petuated itself ad infinitum," Pipes writes. "The great patrimonial states of the Hellenistic world with which the Muscovite state had much in common collapsed not from internal causes but as a result of conquest. The same held true of the related regimes of the 'oriental despotic' type in Asia and Central America."

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With the paterfamilias finally heading his "primitive family," we might expect that "civil tumult" would come to an end forever in Rus­sia, and that an orderly and sedate family life would begin. But after its victory, the "patrimonial state" begins to conduct itself in a highly mysterious manner. "It is only in 1785 under Catherine II when Rus­sian landholders secured clear legal title to their estates that private property in land came once again into being in Russia," Pipes ob­serves.³⁷ Let us make an elementary calculation: if alodial tenure, pri­vate patrimonial property, and aristocracy, which had just ceased to exist in the second half of the seventeenth century, arise again in the second half of the following century, then for how many years—even fully agreeing with Pipes's conception—do we still have the "pat­rimonial state"? It turns out all of a sudden that what is being spoken of is not at all "Russia under the old regime," as the title of Pipes's book suggests, but only one piece of its history.

This is but the beginning of the confusion, however. For the time set aside for Pipes's "old regime" in Russian history will inevitably, like Balzac's peau de chagrin,

get smaller and smaller, until finally it disap­pears altogether. "In the second half of the seventeenth century, of the 888,000 households subject to tiaglo [tax] in Russia, 67 per cent stood on land held by boyars and dvoriane [nobility] . . . and 13.3 per cent on that held by the church," Pipes says.

In other words, 80.3 per cent of the tiaglo households were under pri­vate control. The crown owned outright only 9.3 per cent. . . . For all practical purposes then, by the end of the seventeenth century four out of every five Russians had ceased to be subjects of the state, in the sense that the state had relinquished to their landlords nearly all authority over them/'"

Let us continue with our arithmetic. If by the end of the seven­teenth century, four out of five of the children of the paterfamilias had escaped from his control, how many years of the "patrimonial state" are left? Fifty? Alas, its situation is even worse than this. For, contrary to Pipes's assertions, the Muscovite state never succeeded completely in eliminating alodial property. It is true that the tradi­tional clan patrimony perished under the assault of the Oprichnina revolution and the autocracy established by it, partly being replaced by fiefs (

pomest'ia). But, simultaneously with the abolition of the tradi­tional patrimonial estate and its replacement by pomest'e,

evolution of the pomest'ia into the new patrimonial estates of the service gentry took place. In his last work, the late A. M. Sakharov describes the process as follows: