Paul Goble
Staunton,
November 27 – Since even before the Mongol conquest, the Muscovite state has
stood separate and apart from the population under its control and despotic toward
that population because natural conditions did not allow the people to produce
enough to supply the state’s needs and enrich themselves, according to Vladimir
Yegorov.
And
that pattern has continued both institutionally and at the level of attitudes
with the state viewing its interests as separate from the population and the
population infected by “individual passivity, labor apathy and a lack of
personal initiative,” the Moscow historian argues.
(Yegorov makes his case in an article, “Civilizational
Preconditions of the Political and Socio-Economic Evolution of Russia” (in
Russian), Vestnik Moskovskogo
gosudardstvennogo oblastnogo universiteta, 3 (2018) at cyberleninka.ru/article/v/tsivilizatsionnye-predposylki-politicheskoy-i-sotsialno-ekonomicheskoy-evolyutsii-rossii; excerpted by Pavel Pryanikov at ttolk.ru/articles/chto_sformirovalo_russkuyu_gosudarstvennost_otchuzhdenie_vlasti_ot_naroda_i_prirodnaya_bednost).
“The socio-economic and political
preconditions of the formation of the ancient Russian state were connected,” Yegorov
says, “not with processes taking place within the Slavic community but with external
factors.” Those who emerged as rulers
were outsiders interested in controlling the north-south trade routes and extracting
resources from the population to do so.
As a result, the Norman rulers “could not
bring the Slavs a higher culture or statehood” but instead formed an outsider
state which promoted “the synthesis of the arrivals and the aboriginal
population, the Slavs and the Finno-Ugrics,” the historian suggests, leaving a
situation with two parallel worlds, the increasingly powerful Muscovite state
and an impoverished people.
Princelings outside of Moscow could not extract
sufficient wealth from the population to supply the center with its needs and
build up their own position, he says. As a result, they sank to the level of
agents of the center, further dividing the rulers and the ruled. And that had two fateful and continuing
consequences.
On the one hand, “the state from the moment
of its appearance significantly distanced itself from the interests” of the population.
And on the other, given the absence of social differentiation, reflecting the
poverty of the population, “the single basis of the state could only be military”
in its essential features, gradually suppressing any autonomous democratism.
The Mongol conquest intensified these
processes, further suppressing any social advancement and guaranteeing the
victory of the state over society, Yegorov continues. “The distancing of the princely-druzhiniki
power significantly increased,” and the state became increasingly “despotic”
and committed to extracting resources from the people.
Had the climatic conditions been better in
Russia, the peasantry would have been able to acquire some wealth on its own
and that would have allowed regional powers to develop. But as Helene Carriere
d’Encausse points out, “nowhere in Europe was agriculture over the centuries so
unproductive and insufficient as in Russia, despite the enormous size of the
country.”
As a result, Yegorov says, “the main
consequences of the Tatar-Mongol conquest became the institutionalization of
the centralization of the political system and the formation of the despotic
character of state power, the interests of which extended throughout the course
of all succeeding history.” The state, not society, in short became central.
These patterns continued, the historian
argues, even when the Golden Horde was defeated and the Russian Empire continued.
As before, the population was increasingly poor, and the state organized itself
to extract from the people as much as it possibly could. Thus, there was less
change than many have assumed.
And
those patterns have continued despite all the changes in names of the country
or its institutions since that time.
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