The Origins of Political Order

As in the case of almost all of the other polities we have looked at, Russian state building was driven by the need to wage war. (Location 7191)

Since land was so abundant, control over people was more important than control over land. (Location 7202)

The fact that the middle service class was directly subordinated to the state rather than subenfeudated to the territorial nobles is one important reason why Russian society threw up far fewer obstacles to the Muscovite state-building project than did the societies of Western Europe. (Location 7215)

Another reason for the failure of the Russian nobility to limit the power of the central state had to do with the fact that the Russian version of feudalism simply did not exist long enough to entrench itself. There has been a long-standing debate in Russian historiography as to whether the country experienced feudalism at all, since Russian feudal domains did not have the same self-governing authority that their Western European counterparts did.9 Russian princes and lesser nobles did not have the time to build castles; the flat Russian plains and steppe gave an advantage to highly mobile offensive forces over defensive ones. (Location 7217)

The result was that Russian nobles were far less cohesive as a class and developed few institutions that permitted them to collectively resist the centralized state. They were famous for the petty internal squabbles that constantly consumed them. (Location 7225)

In Russia, the rule of law was from the start weaker than in Western Europe. The Russian Orthodox church never played the same role that the Catholic church did in establishing a canon law outside the purview of territorial sovereigns. The Byzantine Empire from which Russia drew its model of church-state relations was caesaropapist; (Location 7227)

oprichnina, a dark period in Russian history that unfolded in the second half of the reign of Ivan IV (1530–1584), which had no real counterpart in Western European history. (He was subsequently known as Ivan Grozny, which can be translated either as Ivan the Terrible or Ivan the Great.) (Location 7237)

creation of a special administrative district known as the oprichnina in which the prince would have sole authority to deal with evildoers and traitors. They granted him this power only to see the prince turn on them in a reign of terror in which larger and larger numbers of boyars were arrested, tortured, and executed, along with their entire families. Ivan created a special police corps known as the oprichniki, who dressed in black and rode black horses, that became the instrument of his special, extralegal rule. Private property within the oprichnina was confiscated by the state and more land added to it subsequently until this domain came to constitute half the territory of the state. (Location 7241)

It is hard not to see in the oprichnina a precedent for Joseph Stalin’s purges of the Soviet Communist Party in the mid- to late 1930s, (Location 7249)

final potential source of resistance to authority was the Russian church. For reasons noted above, the Russian church has often been denounced by critics as a pliant tool of the ruler in Moscow from tsarist times to the present. But during the period prior to the deposing of the Patriarch Nikon, there was potentially a different path. (Location 7278)

The Russian state at the end of the seventeenth century was centralized, but far less developed than its European counterparts. There was no coherent centralized bureaucracy, only a series of so-called prikazy, departments with overlapping and inconsistent mandates created out of a welter of individual orders (Location 7289)