AUTOCRACY

AUTOCRACY. Autocracy is perhaps the concept most widely used to describe the political culture of the Russian state before 1917. Indeed, autocracy, understood as the unlimited rule of the monarch over his subjects, is often taken as the signature characteristic of Russian political culture in general. Autocracy is also the term used to describe early modern Russia by many professional historians, especially in the United States, but their understanding is far more nuanced. These historians see the political structure of Russia as essentially oligarchical, with power shared in a mutually beneficial way among various layers of the nobility and the government. This article will present autocracy in the relatively stable political culture from 1450 to 1650 and then will discuss the changes wrought in that culture by massive influences from western Europe under Peter I the Great (ruled 1682–1725) and his immediate predecessors.

Most responsible for the trope of total power of the Russian ruler over his subjects are the accounts of western European visitors to Russia from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. They developed a fairly simple picture of Russian political life, positing a ruler with total power over his subjects, helped in his oppressive rule by his subjects' ignorance, a subservient church, and an ideology that made his orders the equivalent of God's will.

When we turn to evidence that reflects the way Russians themselves thought about politics, however, we find a slightly different picture. Lacking a literary model of abstract political theorizing, Muscovites expressed their political ideas in a wide variety of genres in various media, including saints' lives, chronicles, and other historical texts; icons, mural cycles, and even church building and other types of architecture. This varied body of evidence presents a fairly consistent set of interrelated political ideas. The ruler (grand prince until 1547, tsar thereafter) was understood to derive his political power directly from God. Russians saw their state as a kind of reincarnation of the ancient state of Israel, guided and protected by God so long as the people kept their faith in God. The Russians' picture of the tsar resembled his picture of God himself: a stern but merciful ruler whose relationship to his subjects was essentially personal.

If the ruler was seen as "chosen by God," was he then free to rule utterly as he saw fit, with no restraints to his power? The answer, not surprising within the context of Christian doctrines of rulership, was "no." Texts, court rituals, and images alike agree that rulers had clear obligations: to be personally pious (and thus open to receive God's will), to preserve the institution and doctrines of the Orthodox Church, and to preserve the social hierarchy while protecting the innocent and vulnerable and punishing wrong-doers.

But what of a ruler who willfully disregarded these obligations? Unlike their counterparts in early modern Europe, Russian thinkers had not worked out an answer to this problem. Even advocates of royal power admitted that subjects had not only the right but the obligation to resist an evil ruler, whom they called a "tormentor" (muchitel'), the Slavonic translation of the Greek tyrannos. There is considerable evidence that Ivan IV (the Terrible, ruled 1533–1584) was regarded as a tormentor by the end of his reign. Several rulers during the Time of Troubles (a period of civil wars and foreign intervention, 1598–1613) were regarded in the same way. The problem was that since there was no organized mechanism for replacing a God-defying monarch with another, more godly ruler, the declaration that the current ruler was a tormentor could easily lead to the destruction of legitimate government altogether, and thus to chaos.

The monarch's advisers were the main mechanism for preventing this disastrous situation. Advisers were a standard attribute of good rulers in both literary and visual representations of monarchs. They were there to give godly advice to wise rulers or to correct sinful rulers through their counsel. But this theoretical function of providing wise advice remained a personal matter and was never given a legal or constitutional form. It was not firmly attached to the Boyar Duma, a consultative body of representatives of the most prominent aristocratic families and church hierarchs, which met frequently to advise the ruler throughout the early modern period up until the era of Peter the Great. Although consultative assemblies played a major and necessary role in the seventeenth century, in effect ruling the country on the eve of the election of Michael Romanov as tsar in 1613, the dominance of a personalized, God-dependent theory of governance prevented these assemblies from having a permanent, legitimate role in Muscovite affairs.

Discussion of assemblies brings us into the realm of practical politics. How was real political power distributed in Muscovy? Again, the foreigners' trope of the unlimited power of the monarch has had to be modified. Although there is disagreement among historians, most experts take the view that the successful ruler ruled with and through his boyars and with members of the provincial gentry, and not in opposition to them. Whereas previous historians emphasized the horizontal, corporate divisions in Muscovite society, with power flowing downward from the ruler through a growing bureaucracy, many more recent historians have emphasized a different overlapping structure. Here the great aristocratic families surround the ruler like the protons around the nucleus of an atom, with vertical patronage networks connecting the court with distant corners of the realm. Thus society was bound by the horizontal ties of a hierarchical precedence system (mestnichestvo) and by a growing body of law enforced by a bureaucratic apparatus, as well as by vertical and personal patronage connections across the boundaries of these groupings. Most importantly, the crown and the nobles were more allies than rivals: the crown depended on nobles at all levels to run affairs in the countryside, while the nobles depended on the crown to run national affairs and to protect noble interests in the localities.

Thus, the political culture of Russia on the eve of the eighteenth century had serious vulnerabilities. The legitimacy of any ruler could be challenged (and was challenged, for example, by the Old Believers) on the grounds of failing to carry out God's will, however the latter was interpreted. The ruler was bound by the vaguely defined theoretical obligation to consult with wise advisers and by the very real and growing power of the great aristocratic clans, as well as by a provincial gentry whose power and self-confidence were also growing. Peter tried, with limited success, to resolve these questions.

Borrowing from Western theorists of absolutism and from limited changes in Muscovite political culture at the end of the seventeenth century, Peter and his political assistants substituted reason of state and the common good, as defined by the will of the monarch, for the all-too-vague will of God as the source of legitimate authority in Russia. To be sure, the monarch still claimed to be God's chosen ruler, but to question or even discuss the link between God and the actual ruler became a treasonous act. In spite of the continued use of religious rhetoric, the state changed from an imagined revival of the ancient Israelite theocracy into a self-contained secular system, in which the good order of the state—its military successes and its cultural and social reforms—became the goals of political action.

The relationship of the monarch to the aristocracy was not resolved with similar clarity, perhaps because it did not need resolution. Though he exercised great personal power, used the title "emperor" rather than "tsar" after his victory over the Swedes in 1721, replaced the Boyar Duma with a Senate (1711), and attempted to create an aristocracy of merit through a new Table of Ranks (1722), Peter did not resolve the relationship of the crown to its nobles. Indeed, the power of the aristocracy of birth continued to grow throughout the eighteenth century as it had in the seventeenth. Russian nobles continued to find it advantageous to support the "autocracy" of the ruler at the center, while the ruler gave the nobles ever widening powers in the localities and, in many cases, great informal influence at the center. Thus the contradiction between a rhetoric of "autocratic" rule by one person and an oligarchical political structure, which had misled foreign observers in the pre-Petrine era, continued to characterize the political culture of Russia.

AUTOCRACY

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