Until the October Manifesto, Russia was an autocracy (samoderzhavie). The old Fundamental Laws defined her sovereign, formally designated Emperor (Gosudar’ Imperator), as “unlimited” (neogranichennyi) and “autocratic” (samoderzhavnyi). The first adjective meant that he was subject to no constitutional restraints; the second, that he was not limited institutionally.2 The Emperor’s authority received its original definition in 1716 in the Military Regulation of Peter the Great (Chapter 3, Article 20), which was still in force in 1900:
His Majesty is an absolute [samovlastnyi] monarch, who is not obliged to answer for his actions to anyone in the world but has the power and the authority to govern his states and lands as a Christian sovereign, in accord with his desire and goodwill [blagomnenie].
The Emperor was the exclusive source of laws and ordinances. According to Article 51 of the old Fundamental Laws, “no post [mesto] or office [pravitel’stvo] of the realm may, on its own initiative, pass a new law, and no law can go into effect without the sanction of the autocratic authority.” In practice it proved impossible to enforce such a rigid absolutism in a country with 125 million inhabitants and the world’s fifth-largest economy, and in time, increasing discretionary authority was vested in the officialdom. Nevertheless, the autocratic principle was strictly insisted upon and any challenge to it, in word or deed, led to savage persecution.
On the face of it, the autocracy did not differ from the monarchies of ancien régime Europe, and it was thus widely regarded, in and out of Russia, as an anachronism. But viewed more closely, in the context of her own past, Russia’s absolutism showed peculiar qualities that distinguished it from that of the Bourbons, Stuarts, or Hohenzollerns. European travelers to Muscovy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when ancien régime absolutism stood at its zenith, were impressed by the differences between what they were accustomed to at home and what they saw in Russia.3 The peculiar features of Russian absolutism in its early form, which lasted from the fourteenth until the late eighteenth century, were marked by the virtual absence of the institution of private property, which in the West confronted royal power with effective limits to its authority. In Russia, the very concept of property (in the Roman sense of absolute dominion over objects) was unknown until introduced in the second half of the eighteenth century by the German-born Catherine II. Muscovite Russia had been run like a private estate, its inhabitants and territories, with everything they contained, being treated as the property of the Crown.
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.
