Muscovy as a Hypertrophic State: A Critique

The theory of Muscovy as a "hypertrophic state" — one in which the state dominated society, rather than the reverse — originated in the middle of the 19th century among adherents of the State School of Russian legal historians. It has survived in a variety of incarnations since then, including the "tyranny" or "despotism" of the early modern European ethnographers, ¹ Max Weber's "patrimonial state," Karl Wittfogel's "Oriental Despotism," ² and "totalitarianism," not including Muscovy's own self-definition as an "autocracy." Obviously, the issue remains current, as the thoughtful, informed, and articulate essays by Marshall Poe and Valerie Kivelson attest. ³ It is not my purpose here to reject the theory of Muscovy as a hypertrophic state or to discriminate among its various forms, ⁴ except to note two things. First, these theories are not always mutually compatible ("totalitarianism," which equates communism and Nazism typologically, erases the contrast between "Europe" and "Russia" embedded in the other theories, for example). Second, part of the difficulty in defining any of these theories is that they draw at least as much from a common congeries of images of unjust rulers and oppressed subjects as upon objective criteria. I shall treat them all generically under the rubric I have employed in my title. I am not foolish enough to enter the fray between Poe and Kivelson. Rather, I should like to present a synthesis of some well-known evidence contrary to the theory of Muscovy as a hypertrophic state which I think its advocates have not, or at least not adequately, taken into account, organized in a novel, and hopefully helpful, way. The theory of Muscovy as a hypertrophic state was best defined by Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii: in Russia, unlike in Europe, estates (or classes, or whatever term one applies to segments of society) were defined by their obligations, not their rights. ⁵ This conception can be analyzed under three overlapping pairs of antonyms — it is synchronic, rather than diachronic; based upon theory, not practice; and deals in abstraction, not reality.

First, synchronic vs. diachronic. Of course, all models are synchronic, but applying any model to Muscovy faces the challenge of periodization. In the 14th and the first quarter of the 15th century the obvious modesty of the Muscovite state, and certainly of its governmental apparatus, is obscured by talking about a "nascent" state, "rising" autocracy, or whatever, the evidence for which invariably boils down to a single text in which the grand prince of Moscow is called "tsar,'" the Slovo o zhitii i o prestavlenii velikogo kniazia Dmitriia Ivanovicha, tsaria rus'kago, which by the way most scholars date to the middle of the 15th century, and which also contains counter-evidence of ruler-elite consultation. ⁶ In any event, it is difficult to envisage the Muscovite state of the second quarter of the 15th century as "hypertrophic" or even functional when it was subverted by a protracted and vicious dynastic civil war. The notion of Muscovy as a hypertrophic state really does not attempt to include within its compass the period before the fall of Constantinople in 1453, i.e., it describes "high" Muscovy during the second half of the 15th century until whenever one wishes to end Muscovite history and begin the Petrine, imperial era. ⁷ The problem here is that the 16th and 17th centuries in Muscovy were vastly different. It is valid to argue that the Muscovite political system did not prevent Ivan the Terrible's atrocities, but to make Ivan IV the "poster boy" of the Muscovite hypertrophic state is to overlook the fact that Ivan set a negative example for 17th-century tsars, not one of whom would have dared to try to imitate his arbitrariness. Ivan IV ate more boiare for breakfast on a bad day than most of the Romanov rulers did during decades of the 17th century. ^8...