Russian Autocracy

11 Key excerpts on "Russian Autocracy"

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  The Rule Of Law And Economic Reform In Russia

  • Jeffery Sachs, Katharina Pistor(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This chapter is organized as follows. First, it offers brief definitions of autocracy and the rule of law in their historical contexts. This discussion analyzes the persistence of the Russian autocratic tradition over the past several centuries, during which occasional episodes of reform from above alternated with long periods of bureaucratic resistance to reform. Next, it examines two crucial episodes in the late nineteenth century, when major economic reforms based on the rule of law seemed possible: the era of the Great Reforms (1861–1874) and the period of rapid industrial development under Minister of Finance Sergei Iu. Witte (1892–1903). After consideration of why these reforms failed, the discussion concludes with some thoughts on the prospects for the rule of law in the post-Soviet economy.

  The Concepts of Autocracy and the Rule of Law

  The standard definition of Russian Autocracy (samoderzhavie) has two components. The primary meaning relates to foreign affairs as a ruler who has no foreign overlord enjoys autocratic power, literally “ruling by oneself.” In the absence of internal checks and balances, the term connotes absolute power as well. By the end of Tatar rule, conventionally dated in 1480, the grand principality of Muscovy had made the transition to this system. Over the centuries, in medieval Muscovy, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union, the autocratic government required personal service from most if not all of its subjects, issued a host of arbitrary laws, and remained immune from constitutional restraints on its executive power.4

  A distinction must be drawn between the rule of law and rule through law. The vast number and complexity of the laws promulgated by Russian autocrats had nothing to do with the defense of human rights or limits on the power of the tsar. The enormous Polnoe sobranie zakonov (Complete Collection of Laws, 1649–1913, hereinafter PSZ) and its supplement, the Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii pravitel’stva (Collection of Governmental Statutes and Decrees, 1863–1917, hereinafter SURP), together with the various codes of laws issued from 1497 onward, indicated the vigor with which tsarist bureaucrats sought to regiment society by means of statutory compulsion and restriction. The law functioned as an administrative device, not as a set of rules to be obeyed by state officials. For example, profiles of all corporations founded in the Russian Empire are contained in the PSZ and the SURP because every new corporate charter took the form of a law.5

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  Economic Policy Making And Business Culture: Why Is Russia So Different?

  Why is Russia so Different?

  • David A Dyker(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • ICP

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1 THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The Autocratic Tradition of Governance The supreme Autocratic power belongs to the All-Russian Emperor. Obedience to his authority, not only for wrath but also for conscience sake, is ordained by God Himself. 1 The first Tsars of Muscovy were the political descendants, not of the old independent Princes, but of the Mongol Khans. It may be said, there-fore, that the autocratic power, which has been during the last four centuries out of all comparison the most important factor in Russian history, was in a certain sense created by the Mongol domination. (Mackenzie Wallace, 1905, vol. I, p. 287) The icon of the [Mother of God] does not make room for ordinary folks, because her majestic authority does not derive its legitimacy from the presence of the faithful. This kind of authority is immutable, precisely because ordinary people did not author it, did not will it, and were not consulted in forging her jurisdiction, nor will they be tolerated to sug-gest modifications. Authority is uncreated matter; it predates all creations and will survive their eventual demise. 2 1 1 Fundamental Law, 1906, as quoted in Sumner, 1961, p. 57. Translation by Sumner. 2 Procaccia, 2007, p. 106. The icon in question is In Thee Rejoices All Creation , Dionysius School, sixteenth century. 2 Economic Policy-Making and Business Culture From St. Petersburg to Moscow the locomotive runs for a distance of 400 miles, almost ‘as the crow’ is supposed to fly, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left. For twelve weary hours the passenger in the express train looks out on forest and morass, and rarely catches sight of human habitation…. And why was the railway constructed in this extraordi-nary fashion? For the best of all reasons — because the Tsar so ordered it. When the preliminary survey was being made, Nicholas I.

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  Political Culture and Post-Communism

  • S. Whitefield(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  2 Myths about Russian Political Culture and the Study of Russian History Alexander Lukin and Pavel Lukin A belief in the dominance of authoritarianism in Russian history is widely held by political scientists. Scholarly proponents of this view – Zbigniew Brzezinski, Thomas Remington, Stephen White, Archie Brown and others – share the opinion that ‘there is no getting away from the predominantly authoritarian nature of Soviet and Russian political experience’ (Brown, 1989, p. 18; see also White, 1979, p. 22; Barghoorn and Remington, 1986, p. 5; Brzezinski, 1976, pp. 69–70) which, in their view, to a great extent determined or at least significantly influenced the country’s development in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, impeding the emergence of the Western-style institutions. Brzezinski formulated this proposition in a concentrated form: The central and significant reality of Russian politics has been its predominantly autocratic character. Unlike its western European neighbours, Russia had not experienced a prolonged feudal phase. The overthrow of the Tartar yoke gave rise to an increasingly assertive and dominant autocracy. Property and people were the possessions of the state, personalised by the Autocrat (designed as such explicitly and proudly). The obligation of well-nigh complete subordination of any individual to the personalised symbol of the state was expressly asserted. Control over society – including the church by the state – among other means, through a census mechanism adopted centuries ahead of any corresponding European device, was reminiscent of Oriental despotisms and, in fact, was derived directly from that his- torical experience. The result has been to establish a relationship of state supremacy over society, of politics over social affairs, of the 15 functionary over the citizen (or subject), to a degree not matched in Europe; and differences of degree do become differences of kind.

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  Moscow Rules

  What Drives Russia to Confront the West

  • Keir Giles(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Brookings Institution Press

    (Publisher)

  Part II Russia’s Internal System 71 Five Ruling Russia The Firm Hand The miracle is that Russia has a government at all. The country is both too big and too Russian for it to have been governable by Western methods. —sasha kennaway , December 1999 1 Russia’s traditional form of governance has been consistent through almost the entirety of its history. It is only since the end of the Soviet Union that modifications have begun to the pattern of autocratic rule with a small and restricted upper class and a negligible middle class, shored up by an anony-mous oppressed and exploited mass. 2 From the earliest stages of its existence, Russia was faced with the ne-cessity of harnessing all its meager resources for defense, war, and colo-nization, on a geographic scale beyond what was conceivable in Europe. Despotic government, building on the Mongol legacy of absolutism, pre-sented a means of coping with a more or less perpetual state of emergency and external conflict. In addition, the basic Mongol principles of unquali-fied submission to the state and the compulsory and permanent state service of all individuals and classes of society had permeated the Muscovite social structure and were subsequently preserved by centuries of Russian rulers unwilling, or in some cases unable, to implement change. 3 Together, these related influences contributed to a presumption that the country was in moscow rules 72 effect owned by its rulers, who could do as they pleased with it: the grand princes inherited from the Khans a perverse form of legitimacy, supplant-ing them as conquerors of their own subjects. 4 The inclination to run the country for personal profit persists today, since the social development of Russia has never quite overcome the understanding that those in power— from the most junior traffic policeman to the ruler of the country—have an automatic right to self-enrichment.

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  Writing Russia

  The Discursive Construction of AnOther Nation

  • Melissa-Ellen Dowling(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This demonstrative history gives context to the conceptual insights furnished by discordus and emplotment while also providing a clearer and substantive link between theory and practice in historiography. This short history of Russian authoritarianism is written in a way which emphasises the tragic emplotment which is characteristic of Anglophone histories of Russia. Like the idea of Russia which emerges from the history texts analysed throughout this book, the Russia of my text is also a nation which will always be Other. Despite its struggle to liberalise and democratise, Russia (according to the story) will never be Western. Authoritarianism is not only an affliction for Russia but also its defining trait.

  Notes

  1 Nicolai Petro, The Rebirth of Russian Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 31; see also Geoffrey Hosking, Russian History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 49.

  2 Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime (New York: Scribner, 1974), 31–56.

  3 Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, 56.

  4 Roger Bartlett, A History of Russia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

  5 Marie Mendras, Russian Politics: The Paradox of a Weak State (London: Hurst, 2012), 31; Hosking, Russian History, 84–85.

  6 Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime.

  7 Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, 41.

  8 Glenn Curtis, Russia: A Country Study (Washington: Library of Congress, 1998), 12.

  9 Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, 21.

  10 Quoted in Alexander Polunov, Russia in the Nineteenth Century: Autocracy, Reform, and Social Change, 1814–1914

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  Political Ideas And Institutions In Imperial Russia

  • Marc Raeff(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Six The Russian Autocracy and Its Officials 1 1 THE UNDERGRADUATE STUDYING for his final examination in Russian domestic history no doubt often feels that it consisted merely of a series of futile attempts at reforming the political and social structure of the Empire. 2 Successive rulers and their ministers appear to have devoted the best of their time and energies to devising measures which, they fondly hoped, would bring some order to the "chaotic structure of the Empire" (in the words of Alexander I). So much effort was spent on drafting and implementing various reforms that no time seems to have been left: for a systematic study of the country's condition and for the working out of long-range policies. And how often does the historian put down the records of the deliberations of administrative bodies or the memoirs and letters of officials with a feeling of the complete absence of any purposefulness or continuity in the actions of the Imperial government? And while this original feeling may be qualified somewhat by subsequent analysis and research, the basic impression of the lack of direction in the tsar's administration will not be eradicated. The origin of this state of affairs is not hard to see. By saddling the government with new tasks and problems, Peter the Great radically changed the traditional foundation of the Russian state. The Muscovite concept that Russia was a patrimony (votčina) of the tsar, to be administered and exploited like a private domain, made way for the notion of the state as a political and social institution, separate from the person of the ruler, with tasks and problems of its own. But in effecting this change, Peter the Great failed to provide the "new" state with an administration capable of insuring its smooth operation. To use a modern industrial simile, Peter I set up a new type of production, while neglecting to hire the technical personnel capable of running and adjusting the new machinery

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  The Putin System

  An Opposing View

  • Grigory Yavlinsky(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  6 In this new framework, the state is not just equal to the powers that be; it is a function of their activities. So an assault upon the ruling circle is viewed as an attempt to destroy the state itself. Essentially, the Kremlin has taken up the idea of autocracy—not as it was known in the Romanovs’ imperial Russia but in the meaning that it takes in political Eurasianism. This involves a deification of power as sacred in itself and not accountable to any institutions. It is presented as allegedly the natural and sole form of existence of Russia’s statehood and the only one that safeguards Russia against extreme polarization and the fragmentation of society.

  Officially, the system holds on to elections as a form of legitimation of the country’s supreme authorities. Yet, ideologically, elections are presented not as an opportunity to select one of several candidates competing with one another on an equal basis but as a selfless, heroic struggle of Vladimir Putin, the sole and unrivalled tsar and leader of the nation, against presumptuous attempts by outsiders, impostors, to take the throne away from its legitimate holder. Hence the conspicuous absence of the “Chief Candidate” from presidential debates (since the autocrat cannot bring himself down to the level of personal debate with impostors); hence the aura of majestic grandeur in government media’s presentation of this candidate; hence the emphatic support from senior clergy of Russia’s top religion, the Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. In this framework, elections of the chief of state turn into an expression of the people’s support for the authorities—which meets everyone’s expectations and is encouraged through a variety of means. This demonstration of support is based not on a hardheaded assessment of the quality of governance and the resulting quality of life but rather on the notion of defending the powers that be, as the personification of the state, against their weakening, whether willful or accidental, by various “schismatics.”

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  Old World Empires

  Cultures of Power and Governance in Eurasia

  • Ilhan Niaz(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Alexander I came to the throne by consenting to a conspiracy against his father that resulted in the latter’s death. This is hardly remarkable for in an arbitrary and autocratic culture of power moral relationships are almost impossible to forge and maintain. Alexander I had a mania for secrecy and a tendency to be obstinate somewhat mitigated by a mercurial temperament. Like Catherine II, Alexander I projected himself as a reform-minded and benevolent sovereign who wanted to wield arbitrary power in a manner that would do justice to his subjects. Unlike Catherine II, the Napoleonic domination of Europe that culminated in the disastrous French invasion of Russia (1812), meant that Alexander I had to confront a very real menace to his empire’s continued existence. The way to deal with the challenge posed by the French Revolution and its Napoleonic incarnation was to strengthen autocracy. Russia’s diversity and size meant that only an autocratic ruler with arbitrary power could maintain order and introduce reforms. However, due to the absence of autonomous institutions such reforms needed autocracy to succeed. Any reform that weakened autocracy was a danger to the state.

  Alexander I thus set about modernizing Russia by transforming its government “more than ever” into “a bureaucratic apparatus, headed by ministers, directly responsible to the emperor.”49 These ministers formed a committee, somewhat like a cabinet, but were burdened by petty details involving doing favors for powerful people while awaiting the czar’s directives on matters of policy. In August 1809, the czar’s most brilliant adviser, Count Speransky, persuaded him to make university education and qualification via tests mandatory for recruitment to senior grades.50 The Council of State was formed on January 1, 1810, comprising “a number of appointed elder statesmen” who represented the “accumulated wisdom of the most experienced bureaucrats.”51 The ministerial-bureaucratic system steadily gained ascendancy over the provincial governors while the Ministry of Police and Special Chancery collected intelligence and rooted out disloyalty to the czar, with the former also dealing with public health issues such as inoculating 2 million people against small pox between 1806 and 1815.52

  While Speransky retained the czar’s confidence on administrative reform, General Aracheyev, war minister and, for the last years of his reign, practically Grand Vizier, dominated the military sphere. The czar was inspired by the discipline and efficiency that prevailed on Aracheyev’s estates and wanted the model replicated throughout the empire. Aracheyev was always willing to implement the czar’s wishes without a second thought and embarked upon building a network of military-farming settlements that, by 1825, were populated by 750,000 men and their families accounting for perhaps one-third of the peacetime strength of the Russian army.53 The idea was that soldiers, nearly all of them conscripted serfs, would make better farmers on account of their military discipline and devotion to the czar, which had, only recently, crushed the Napoleonic hordes, catapulted Russia to the status of the most powerful country in Europe and the only global empire other than that of the British. Landowners in areas marked for military-agricultural settlements were compensated with lands elsewhere in the empire or through “monetary compensation, usually below the value of the property they were obliged to leave.”54 The military farms became “a state within the state” that reported to Aracheyev and through him to the czar who was, at any rate, losing the inclination to engage with domestic issues.55

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  Invisible Hands, Russian Experience, and Social Science

  Approaches to Understanding Systemic Failure

  • Stefan Hedlund(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  28 From his perspective, the imposition of Bolshevik rule was a watershed event that served to derail Russia from her path toward Europe: “Soviet Russia … 26 This understanding of repeated “times of trouble” as interludes, or as punctuations, between cycles of repression and liberalization, is central also to Alexander Yanov’s theory on the origin and evolution of Russian Autocracy (Yanov, Alexander (1981), The Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press). See especially his presentation of the “Political Spiral” (on pp. 59–65). 27 Pipes, Richard (1974), Russia under the Old Regime, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, p. 23. Writing in 1996, he said: “The sense of isolation and uniqueness bequeathed by Orthodox Christianity unfortunately survives. Present-day Russians feel themselves to be outsiders, a nation sui generis, belonging neither to Europe nor Asia” (Pipes, Richard (1996), “Russia’s Past, Russia’s Future,” Commentary, June, p. 35). 28 Malia, Martin (1999), Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 418–19. Russia’s Historical Legacy 123 represents both maximal divergence from European norms and the great aberration in Russia’s own development.” 29 The problem in assessing which of these views may offer the better inter- pretation of essentially the same set of events is that while the former is mainly concerned with measures taken to surmount obstacles, the lat- ter focuses on perceptions, mainly by outsiders, of those same measures.

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  Russia's New Authoritarianism : Putin and the Politics of Order

  • David G. Lewis(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  Yet hybridity was an unsatisfactory description of a political system that also corresponded clearly to traditional defnitions of an authoritar-ian regime in terms of the classic question of political science: ‘who rules?’ Guillermo O’Donnell wrote that ‘all forms of authoritarian rule . . . have 2 / Russia’s New Authoritarianism somebody (a king, a junta, a party committee, a theocracy, or what not) that is sovereign in the classic sense: if and when they deem it necessary, they can decide without legal constraint’ (O’Donnell 1998: 21, n 56). Russia under Putin corresponded to just such an understanding of authoritarianism, as a political regime above the law, a political system in which a single centre of power was able to make sovereign decisions without legal limitations. However, simply identifying Russia’s political regime as ‘authoritarian’ told us little about how the system worked, and even less about why its leaders had built such a regime after a decade of free-wheeling semi-pluralist poli-tics in the 1990s. Attempts to answer these questions were often constrained by the differ-ent theoretical frames through which analysts view Russia. Democratisation theory interpreted Russia solely in terms of regime type, measuring Russia on a binary scale between democracy and dictatorship. It told a simple story of democratic backsliding, in which a fawed – but real – democracy under Boris Yeltsin was subverted by the rise to power of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB of fcer, who ended Russia’s democratic experiment and introduced an authoritarian regime (Fish 2005; McFaul and Stoner-Weiss 2008). Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 only intensifed the shift to a fully authori-tarian state, which was now also accompanied by an increasingly assertive foreign policy, including military interventions in Ukraine (2014) and Syria (2015).

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  Law, Rights and Ideology in Russia

  Landmarks in the Destiny of a Great Power

  • Bill Bowring(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  11

  I start with autonomy in the Russian Empire. This took a wide variety of forms and I give an overview of a number of cases: Ukraine, Georgia, Poland, Khiva and Bukhara, Finland, the Baltics, Russian Germans, Tatars and Inorodtsy. Second, I turn to religious diversity in Russia, after Catherine II’s reforms. Third, I look at the extensive scholarly literature on the constitutional role of autonomy in the later years of the Russian Empire. Fourth, I examine Bolshevik nationalities policy before and after the 1917 Revolution and the creation of the territorial autonomies in 1920–1922. Fifth, I have a number of criticisms of Terry Martin’s The affirmative action empire and turn to a Tatar case study. My conclusion emphasises the deep roots of autonomy in Russia.

  Autonomy in Tsarist Russia

  Robert Suny points out that: ‘With Ivan IV’s conquests of Kazan and Astrakhan in the mid-sixteenth century, the Muscovite state incorporated ethnically compact non-Russian territories, indeed and alien polity, and transformed a relatively homogenized Russia into a multinational empire … when the problem of security was settled, Moscow allowed local elites, though no longer sovereign, to rule and atraditional customs and laws to continue in force.’12 Kutafin makes the point that, as it expanded, the Russian Empire often preserved in the territories it incorporated their local laws and institutions, and accorded them more or less broad autonomy.13 He reminds his readers that the legal status of Russian regions changed continually over time.14

  Finland

  The most famous example of autonomy in the Russian Empire was Finland, about which Russian scholars have conflicting views. Some consider Finland to have been an independent state in de facto union with Russia. Others see it as a province with a high degree of autonomy. A third camp see Finland as a non-sovereign state united with Russia on the basis of subordination. The late nineteenth-century scholar N.M. Korkunov15 considered these distinctions to have enormous practical significance.16

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