Selfgovernment And Freedom In Russia

Sergei Pushkarev

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367287054
• eBook ISBN: 9781000311228
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book reflects the author's abiding scholarly quest to illustrate how elements of freedom and self-government play important roles in the history of nations, even during the darkest periods of their history.

Part One

The widespread belief that the Russian people have always lived in slavery, are used to it and are incapable of ordering their lives on the basis of freedom and independence is contrary to the historical facts. Of course, light and shadows are to be found in the history of every country, but this contrast is particularly sharp in Russia. The burden of the state lay too heavily on the people’s shoulders and delayed the development of social initiative. Periods of reform were followed by periods of reaction. After reforms in local administration during the 1550s came the oprichnina; in the nineteenth century, after Speransky came Arakcheev; after the great reforms of the 1860s came Pobedonostsev.

But many modern authors, in composing their histories of Russia, conceal the brighter side of Russia’s past and emphasize only the darker moments. They come to the conclusion that the totalitarian government established in 1917 was nothing new in history, but simply a continuation of “tsarism.” In reality, several different alternatives for the free development of our country were established. The goal of this survey is to remind the reader of the historical beginnings of political freedom and social initiative in Russia. A knowledge of these beginnings will aid in the search for a way out of the dead end of totalitarianism.

1
Ancient Rus

Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries

The Eastern Slavic tribes of the eighth and ninth centuries lived under a primitive tribal democracy. Varangian princes and their retainers brought the beginnings of state organization to Rus during the ninth and tenth centuries. Moving from Scandinavia to Byzantium along the Volkhov-Dnieper route, the Varangians captured a number of Russian cities and settled in them. In 882 the mighty Varangian hero Oleg captured Kiev and became the founder of the Great Principality of Kiev.

The military might of Oleg, and the russified princes of the dynasty of Rurik who succeeded Oleg, defined the wide area of eastern Slavic lands as subject to the rule of the great prince of Kiev. But in military, financial and administrative terms the prince was powerless to organize a government for his immense empire. The primary expression of the prince’s relationship to his “subjects” was the dispatch of retainers throughout the provinces to collect tribute from the population. The decline of the great power of Kiev commenced when Yaroslav the Wise provided in his will for the division of his domain among his five sons in 1054. This decline continued for three centuries in step with the proliferation of princes of the ruling dynasty of Rurik. Furthermore, provincial centers had their own princes rather than vice regents of the great prince of Kiev.

As a rule, the prince derived his authority by right of succession or by inheritance (except in case of warfare and seizures of power). He was head of the army and supreme judge and ruler, yet his power was by no means absolute.

The political structure of the principalities of ancient Rus was a unique combination of two principles: the monarchical principle, embodied in the prince, and the democratic principle, embodied in the veche, the popular assembly in older provincial centers. According to the Primary Chronicle, “since olden times the people of Novgorod and Kiev, of Smolensk and Polotsk, and all vlasts (that is, volosts or regions) have come together in the veche, and whatever the thought of the elder ones may be, becomes the thought of the outlying ones” (in other words, the small towns of a region accept the decisions of the popular assembly of the main city).

When a new prince took the throne, no formal agreements were concluded (except in “Novgorod the Great”). The prince would promise the people his “favor and good will” and the people would seat him on the prince’s throne in the main church of the city, not interfering in the ongoing business of administration if the prince “favored” the people. But if the prince aroused the people’s ire by abuses or coercion, the veche would go to him with the demand: “Go away from us, prince, we do not want you!” and would then send messengers to a more worthy candidate with the invitation, “Come to us prince, we want you.”

Thus, the grounds for assuming the princely throne in ancient Rus were either legal and dynastic (otchina or dedina [patrimony]) or moral and political - the will of the people. Both these and other grounds were recognized as valid. In 1146 Prince Iziaslav of Kiev answered his rival: “How did I come to be in Kiev? The people of Kiev put me here.”

There was yet another and very important area in which the voice of the veche was critical: deciding the issue of war or peace in defending against external enemies and in case of internecine warfare among the princes. The prince’s personal retinue (his guard) was small in number and insufficient for conducting serious warfare. For this he had to call upon the popular militia, and this was not possible without the veche’s approval. The veche sometimes proved to be more bellicose than the prince, sometimes less.

In 1068 when the Polovtsians crushed the Kievan forces and scattered across the Russian countryside to pillage, the militia, having fled back to Kiev, demanded weapons and horses to continue the fighting. Prince Iziaslav I did not agree to their demands, and the Kievans in anger drove him out of the city. In 1149 Prince Iziaslav II of Kiev wanted to wage war against Prince Iurii of Chernigov, but “the Kievans, not wanting to go, said, ‘make peace, prince, we are not going’,” and the prince had to make peace.

The Tatar conquest of 1237–1240 dealt a mortal blow to the veche system on Russian territory (although the system endured in Novgorod and Pskov). Now princes did not have to seek popular support. They derived their authority, not by the will or the concurrence of the veche, but by means of iarlyki [grants] of principality bestowed on them by the Tatar khan. After this, the veche way of life in the central regions of the Russian plain died out.

However, the people of these regions did not become submissive slaves of the Tatar khans. Uprisings occurred in many cities of the Central Volga region in 1262–1263. The Tatar baskaki [representatives of the khan] who collected tribute from the population and the military detachments that accompanied them were slaughtered. The Great Prince Aleksandr Nevsky “dissuaded” the khan from sending a punitive expedition to crush the rebellious cities, and the Tatar khans wisely decided not to send any more of their officials around to Russian cities to collect tribute from their unwilling subjects and turned that duty over to Russian princes.

The political system of Lord Novgorod the Great, hub of the vast expanses of the north and of the northeastern Russian plain, was unique. At the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth century, Novgorod gained its political independence from the great prince of Kiev, and the veche became its supreme ruling body. At the end of the twelfth century, the Novgorod veche’s right to choose whomever it desired as prince was undisputed and generally recognized. An entry in the Novgorod chronicle made in 1196 states: “And Novgorod reserves the right to its prince: it may choose whatever prince it wishes.” During the Tatar invasion Novgorod was neither sacked nor occupied by Tatar troops. The Tatars exacted a certain amount of tribute from Novgorod, but they did not interfere in its internal affairs at all; until 1471, “Lord Novgorod the Great” was a democratic republic. In Novgorod’s social and economic life there were quarrels and struggles and a marked inequality of classes, but the present study concerns political structure.

The rule of the Novgorod veche was all-encompassing. It decided all questions of internal administration and foreign policy. The veche elected the posadnik [mayor] and the tysiatskii [commander of city militia] who headed Novgorod’s government. It was the veche that elected the prince, who served Novgorod primarily in the role of commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

When it chose a new prince, Lord Novgorod the Great concluded a formal agreement with him according to which the prince promised under oath to carry out the terms of the agreement. The obligation of the prince to cooperate with the posadnik severely limited the prince’s authority. “And without the posadnik thou, prince, shalt not render judgments, nor divide townships, nor issue documents.” Documents granting rights to land and other privileges were issued in the name of “Lord Novgorod the Great” and were drawn up in the veche izba [city hall], which was headed by the veche diak [clerk].

In the area of foreign policy the prince was obliged “not to contemplate war without the word of Novgorod;” that is, without a resolution from the veche he was not to interfere in Novgorod-German trade nor to close down the German court in Novgorod. In short, Novgorod’s prince was only one of three high-ranking officials that were appointed and removed by the all-powerful popular veche.

Another ancient Russian republic was Novgorod’s “little brother,” “Lord Pskov.” In an account of Pskov’s annexation by Moscow in 1510 the chronicler of Pskov writes: “This city of Pskov may not be ruled by any prince save by the will of the people living in it.” The ancient city of Pskov was a powerful military stronghold on the western border of the Russian territory. Over a period of three centuries it successfully defended this border from the almost incessant attacks of the Livonian Order of Knights.

Pskov’s political organization was similar to Novgorod’s. At meetings of the veche the men of Pskov would elect two posadniki, invite a prince, and decide all important questions of domestic and foreign policy, in particular, the ever-recurring issue of summoning the popular militia of the Pskov region for war with the Livonian Germans.

Legislative procedure was formulated by Pskov’s sudnaia gramota [judicial charter]. If it was necessary to add a new “line” (article), then “the posadniki must present it to Lord Pskov in the veche and put the line into writing. And if there is any line in this document of which Lord Pskov disapproves, that line may be stricken from the document.”

The social and economic system in the small, compact Pskov region was much more stable and the domestic conflicts less acute than in Novgorod. The yeomen (izorniki) of Pskov were neither slaves nor serfs of the boiar landowners; and if rights of theirs established by contract were violated, they could seek redress by judicial procedure. In such cases the izomiki as plaintiffs and the landowners as respondents were treated in court as parties with equal rights.

2
The Muscovite State

Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

The “bringing together” of Russian lands by the Muscovite sovereigns that began in the fourteenth century was finished by the middle of the sixteenth century, and in 1547 “the Grand Prince of Vladimir and Muscovy” officially became the “sovereign tsar of Muscovy and all Rus.” In the words of historian Vasilii Kliuchevsky, the distinctive features of the Muscovite state were its “military system” and its “taxation system.” Almost constantly at war on three fronts - south, west and east - it needed substantial armed forces. But with a predominantly natural economy it did not have the money to support a regular army. The only way to do this was to distribute state-owned inhabited lands to a service class with the obligation that, upon the sovereign’s order, they would go on a campaign “with horses, men and arms.” Landowners thus were required to perform military service, and their peasants were obliged to maintain the military service class with their labor. In the sixteenth century, peasants still had the right to transfer from one landowner to another. But the military service class repeatedly and urgently requested the government to ban peasant movement. Otherwise their holdings would become vacant, and it would become impossible for them “to serve their sovereign.” The code of 1649 bound peasants to their masters, but they had not yet become their bonded or other type of slaves; the mingling of these two classes occurred only in the eighteenth century.

The free rural and urban population was burdened with a tiaglo [tax in kind] in addition to various types of monetary payments, furnishing in particular a great number of golovy [local administrators] and tselovalniki [court assistants] to fulfill the state’s many economic and social needs at no cost to the state.

Naturally, given this kind of a system and the huge expanse of state-owned territory, a strong and authoritative power was needed at the center. In historian George Vernadsky’s words, “autocracy and serfdom were the price the Russian people had to pay for their national self-preservation.”

In the absence of any formal or legal limitations on his authority, the autocrat of Muscovy was still (except for the eight years of the oprichnina) not an arbitrary despot. He was morally bound by established customs and traditions. He would listen to, and usually carry out, the verdicts of the boiar duma; in extraordinary cases he would convoke the “council of all the land” (which in historical literature has acquired the name of zemskii sobor).

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the sovereign appointed namestniki in the cities and volosteli in rural areas as local administrators and judges. They were called kormlenshchiki since their compensation was kormy [food], either food itself or money paid by the local population at set rates. Their authority, too, was not without limits or controls. Representatives of the local population known as dobrie liudi [good people] or sudnie muzhi [jurymen] were supposed to sit in these courts and “protect the truth”. The presence of the local starosta [village elder] and court assistants in the courts of namestniki was made universal and obligatory by the 1550 legal code. But the prosecution and punishment of robbers was handled in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the popularly elected gubnoi starosta [district prosecutor] with the assistance of the gubnie tselovalniki [district prosecutor’s assistant].

During the 1550s, a series of charters completely abolished administration by kormlenshchiki in various areas of northern and central Russia and transferred it to the elders and local judges, who were to judge “truly” and “without delay”; and instead of food going to the administrators, quitrent would be paid to the tsar’s treasury.

During the Time of Troubles (1598–1613), local bodies of self-government in the central and northern districts, the posadskii [urban] and volostnyi [peasant] miry, performed a great service for the Russian people and state. Prince Vasilii Shuiskii, who assumed the throne after the murder of the first False Dmitrii (as a contemporary put it, he ”suddenly and spontaneously rose up and made himself tsar,” without being elected by “all the land”), did not enjoy the support of the people. His rival, the second False Dmitrii, set up his own “tsar’s court” in the village of Tushino near Moscow (hence, he was also known as the “Thief of Tushino”). The landless, dissatisfied and anarchy-minded elements who yearned for power and “easy riches” gathered under his banner. Both of the self-proclaimed tsars sent documents around to the towns demanding obedience and the dispatch of soldiers, money and supplies. In the towns, however, there was an outburst of political activity. At meetings called by town authorities, people of all social strata gathered for heated discussions of the political situation. It was as if the ancient Russian veche had been reborn on the town squares of the seventeenth century.

The situation became more complicated in 1610 when Vassilii Shuiskii was deposed. The Moscow boiars, fearing that the “Thief of Tus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• GLOSSARY
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BOOKS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INDEX