Zakonodatel′stvo i pravo Rossii vtoroi poloviny XVII v (review)

This must be one of those late Soviet monographs trapped in the collapse of the Soviet system that could not be published at the time for lack of funds. The most recent work cited in Arkadii Georgievich Man'kov's volume is a decade old, and the author himself, who published before World War II, is now 88 years old and reportedly not very active. This may help to explain the "classical Soviet" character of the work: the now-obsolete, obligatory citations of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, the base/superstructure and class struggle rhetoric, the endless use of the adjective "feudal" and the characterization of upper members of society as "feudals." The appearance of this "Stalinist" work in 1998 is especially surprising in light of the publication of Man'kov's memoirs in the mid-1990s, which, as noted in the editor's introduction, would have proved fatal for both the author and his entire family had they fallen into unfriendly hands.¹ The volume under review vividly demonstrates the contagiously poisonous and pervasive nature of Stalinist patterns of historical thought. A professed doubter in the 1930s and in the early 1990s, Man'kov wrote at the end of the 1980s (and published at the end of the 1990s) as though he were still living half a century earlier. Soviet ways of thinking were so strong that apparently Man'kov simply could write no other way.

After the introduction, most of the rest of the Man'kov monograph is more straightforward and less controversial, an intelligent and useful compendium of the legislation found in the first three volumes of the magnificent 1830 Speranskii legal codification, Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, affectionately known as the "PSZ." In addition to the PSZ, Man'kov also used some other legal materials and monographic literature as well. From time to time, however, it is necessary to take exception with some of his statements and generalizations. Chapter 1 is on the statistics and dynamics of legislative documents in the second half of the 17th century. His chief point is that the general tendency was for legislative activity to increase with the passage of time. The Ulozhenie finally created the "Boyar Council" that Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii invented for earlier periods in his doctoral dissertation and monograph of that name (1880–81), but which M. F. Vladimirskii-Budanov and other fact-oriented scholars immediately observed did not exist until after 1649.² Man'kov makes much of the fact that some legislation was promulgated by the tsar alone, some by the Boyar Council alone, and most of it by both of them jointly, but I must confess that this seems to me to be a distinction without difference in meaning. There was no formal "division" of powers in Muscovite legislative practice.

Chapter 2, by far the longest, is on land legislation. As is well known, Muscovy knew many types of tenures, ranging from the ancient hereditary estate (votchina) to the service landholding (pomest'e) created in the 1480s to support the provincial cavalry. The 1556 law on service removed much of the distinction between the two types of land by requiring military service from each, but Muscovite servitors preferred votchina to pomest'e. The fortunes of these two types of land varied enormously throughout Muscovy, with pomest'e nearly overwhelming votchina in Ivan IV's later years. In the first half of the 17th century the ratio of pomest'e to votchina was 60: 40, but in the second half of the century the ratios were reversed, 40: 60. There were various types of votchina (clan, purchased, granted for meritorious service), each with differing rights and rules of alienation, inheritance, and redemption. The government was insistent that there could only be one kind of pomest'e, but its fate was by no means uniform between the 1480s and its abolition in 1714. Man'kov is correctly adamant that the pomest'e was never legally inheritable or inherited...