The Origins of Russian Authoritarianism: A Historical Perspective

Nomadic empires, originating from the steppes of Central Asia, have been some of the most fascinating entities in human history. These tribes, living in isolation, honed their skills in nomadic life and warfare, leading to the creation of proficient warrior tribes. Every few centuries, they would venture forth from their steppes to overrun and conquer settled societies that were ill-prepared to face them. However, a curious pattern emerged. Once they settled in the lands they had conquered, the nomads often assimilated into the cultures they had conquered. The Magyar tribes became the Hungarian Kingdom, the Slavic tribes formed Slavic kingdoms, and the Seljuk Turks became the new Iranian Empire. However, there was one significant exception to this pattern: Russia.

Medieval Russia was not much different from many other medieval European states at the time. It was a collection of small duchies, cities, and dukedoms with no centralized overarching authority. The most prominent among these were the Kievan Rus and the Novgorod Republic. The Kievan Rus was a princely state with deep cultural and commercial ties into Europe, mainly through the Byzantines. The Novgorod Republic was a city-state and an important part of the Hanseatic League of cities that stretched across the Baltic and North Sea.

Then came the Mongols. The Mongol Empire, often painted in a positive light as an institution of trade and tolerance, was in reality an extractive institution. The Mongols were tribal people who had no state or legal structures that they transferred over to the people they conquered. Their relation with those they conquered was purely predatory. They wanted to extract wealth and resources from them, and those who resisted paid dearly. The Kievan Rus was one of these places that resisted. Kiev was burnt to the ground, and the surrounding lands pillaged with much of the population slaughtered. Medieval accounts tell us of fields filled with human remains for decades after the siege.

With the burning of Kiev, a substantial political and cultural transformation of what we now know as Russia began. The Kievan Rus, with its deep cultural and economic ties to the Byzantines, had been the cultural motherland and birthplace of Russia. The place where Russia as a European cultural entity had been created was now reduced to ash. The cultural and economic ties with the Byzantines were now broken. This resulted in the geopolitical shift of Russia culturally and politically in power to the northeast.

The Mongols enforced their economic order upon the remaining Russian principality states, and the center of Russian political and economic power consequently shifted to the landlocked plains of Smolensk, Rostov, and Chanikov. These places and the princes who ruled them had been largely ignored backwaters before the Mongols. Now they stood at the center of Russia.

Throughout the rest of Europe, the institution of feudalism had during this time started to be increasingly challenged. New political and commercial institutions evolved in European trade cities from Antwerp to Hamburg to Koenigsberg, Warsaw, Paris, Lisbon, London, and Venice. Merchants, barons, artists, and guilds rewrote the feudal social contract. Additionally, the Black Plague shook up the economic framework of Europe dramatically. With a third of Europe’s population killed, there were no longer enough peasants to work the lands for lords. Landlords consequently started competing for the remaining peasants by offering them payment for work. Previously, peasants had worked in exchange for a promise of protection. That now became increasingly replaced by a wage-based labor system.

But Russia remained untouched by these political and economic developments. It remained under Mongol rule for 250 years and went into an entirely different direction. The princes of central Russia were recruited by the Mongols as tax collectors. The Mongols outsourced the process of extracting the resources they wanted out of the Russian peasantry to the Russian princes. Because that aristocracy had a lot to lose if they failed to appease their Mongol overlords, and because the Mongols had brought no legal code of limited aristocratic power, the Russian princes extracted that wealth with increasing unopposed ruthlessness and brutality.

While in Europe, feudalism increasingly disbanded, an increasingly exploitative economic framework was reinforced in Russia. Urbanization didn’t take place as it did in Europe, with the Russian princes invested in keeping as many peasants working the lands as possible. The Russian princes recruited armies of cavalrymen who were paid not in money but in land and the peasants on it. However, because there was so much land, control of the land was not as important as control of the people. While in Europe, peasants gained access to wages and left for cities to escape feudal lords, in Russia, the peasants became deeper tied into their land through strict rules tying them to it, debt, patronage, and brutal punishments for attempting to flee.

The Black Plague had the opposite socio-economic outcome in Russia compared to Europe. While in Europe, lords started competing for peasants by paying them wages, the Russian princes used the plague to tie lands into enormous estates and fiefdoms under a smaller number of lords, creating an enormous peasantry working the lands of an extremely small aristocracy.

When nomads conquered a settled people, they usually turned into who they conquered. But here, in a weird twist, the conquered Russians almost became Mongols. They were unshackled from any and all political accountability to their peasantry and could rule like the conquerors whom they served. But because the Russian princes merely served the Mongols and were not Mongols themselves, they didn’t adopt the tribal customs and nomadic lifestyle of them. The power structure of the Russian princely states became heavily centralized within the power of a singular ruler figure of a state. The Russian princes even adopted the warfare tactics of their conquerors. Rather than build stone castles as the rest of Europe did, they built wooden fortresses and recruited large cavalry armies. When they were invaded, they burnt the wooden castles down, ransacked and burnt the fields of their own land, and then harassed invaders from horseback while those invaders were forced to march through and suffer the vastness of Russia.

The Russians also missed out on a key development in European political development at the time where a move away from decentralized feudalism into centralized absolutist kingdoms took place, creating the first large and powerful centralized European states. Over the 250 years of Mongol rule, with the shift from Kiev and Novgorod to central Russia, an economic development away from commerce and artisans to a peasant economy, the most powerful Russian princely state to emerge was the Duchy of Moscow, which would eventually be the one to rise up in rebellion and kick the Mongols out to create a new Russian state centered around Moscow.

But with the Mongols gone, the newly independent Russia kept the socio-economic and political structures that had developed under Mongol rule and strengthened them. Absolutism is a system of governments in which all political power lies within one singular ruler. Beginning in the 1500s, many a European monarchy embarked on efforts to construct absolutist states, most famously France. It is during this time that the foundations of the modern nation-state were laid. But the absolutism project in general was rather unsuccessful. The French monarchs drove the state into bankruptcy and ended up selling government offices and thereby state power to the highest bidders. The Stuart dynasty attempts to build absolutism in Britain ended with their expulsion. Throughout Europe, urban populations, lower gentry, and merchants had made the establishment of the all-powerful state difficult. But the conditions found in Russia allowed the Russian Tsars to create a near-perfect absolutism.

There are three main factors that led to this. First, Russian society of the Mongol rule consisted of a monarch, the army the monarch paid with land, an aristocracy of Boyars, and a peasantry. A key difference to other parts of Europe was that the army was not incorporated within the aristocratic class. The army had been directly recruited by the Muscovite state and was dependent upon that state for its status and pay. The state and thereby the monarch could use the army without constraints by any aristocrats, even against those aristocrats.

Second, Russia didn’t experience the regionalized feudal social structures that the rest of Europe did. In fact, there is debate among historians if Russia experienced medieval feudalism at all. Medieval feudalism was a social system in which a peasantry submitted to a military lord and his castle in exchange for protection. In Russia, though, the regionalized structure of aristocracy didn’t exist. There were no castles offering protection in these vast lands, and military power lay with the state. The new Muscovite state also introduced the Mestnichestvo, a system of hierarchies amongst lesser nobles that pitted them up against each other in competition for the favor of the monarch. In Europe, the lower aristocracy had an important role in the creation of parliamentary structures by forming a political bloc competing with the king for concessions, privileges, rights, and powers. In Russia, all power remained with the monarch, and the aristocracy was set up to compete with each other for the favor of the monarch.

Third, law developed differently in Russia to the rest of Europe. One of the key factors in the development of law in Europe had been the Catholic Church. It established almost state-like structures that competed with monarchs for authority, creating standards for accountability that evolved into written codes of law. Kings of Europe could not just do as they pleased to their subjects or their aristocracy. Violating the standards set by the Catholic Church resulted in harsh condemnation and punishment by the Church. Medieval feudalism was not a mere exploitative social framework. It was a religious social order under which systems of accountability were created by religion that limited the power of the state.

The Russian Church was derived from the Byzantines, and the Eastern Orthodox Church was Cesio-Papist, meaning that the head of the church was appointed by the monarch. The Christian Church, as it came to develop in Russia, was an institution subservient to the state and continued to be throughout history, be it to kings, emperors, Communist Party bosses, or today’s oligarchs.

The completion of the Russian absolutist state occurred in the late 1500s under the Tsar Ivan the Fourth. He established a military district with absolute powers to himself called the Oprichnina and inflicted a decade-long reign of terror upon the country. Ivan had asked the aristocracy permission for this undertaking, and they had approved, which goes to show how little the Russian aristocracy could do or even wanted to do to limit the power of the monarch, even though Ivan’s reign of terror would come at an enormous cost to them. Of the many aristocratic families of Russia, only nine survived this reign of terror.

This state structure of absolute, unrestricted power within the monarch continued after Ivan, including with the establishment of the new Romanov dynasty in 1613. And it is not difficult to see it continuing throughout the history of modern Russia. You can see the slavish capitulation of the Russian aristocracy to Ivan’s reign of terror almost reflected in the capitulation of the Soviet Politburo to Stalin’s reign of terror. And you can browse through the list of murdered Russian journalists yourself to see that in many ways, Russia remains a country in which state power puts the ruling man above the law and removes them from any accountability to the law or the wider citizenry.

A mistake often made, though, is to assume that these developments were unavoidable and somehow part of some inner logic of Russian culture itself. The city of Novgorod continued to prosper and was never conquered by the Mongols. Its institutions developed to have more in common with those of European city-states. It was the gateway for European goods into Russia and Russian goods into Europe, which made it incredibly rich. The Prince of Novgorod may have commanded an army, but he was accountable to the Veche, a parliament of the city that all free men of the city voted for and which picked a mayor from the city aristocracy. The Veche and the mayor had control over taxation, laws, and foreign policy. It even had the power to remove the Prince of Novgorod from power to replace him with another. There was a different Russian political development which evolved to have checks and balances as well as state accountability and rule of law. But that development ended when Ivan III conquered Novgorod, had its leaders executed, and its merchants and aristocrats deported to the deep plains of central Russia. One can only imagine what modern Russia would look like if the free city of Novgorod had been its founding structure instead of the Tsardom of Moscow.

The only other Russian representative body was the Zemsky Sobor, a council of aristocrats that gathered to do little more but approve the line of succession to the throne and approve of the Tsar’s wars, until Peter the Great even took those powers away from it. Meanwhile, in the rest of Europe, parliamentary assemblies, which in some cases were as old as the Middle Ages, started gaining more and more power from monarchs, establishing parliamentary political institutions and traditions throughout Europe. In Russia, there was no parliamentary institution until the establishment of the Duma in 1906, which had its powers taken from it by the Tsar again only a few years later.

By the 1700s, the Russian state was far more centralized than any of its European counterparts but far more underdeveloped in economy and bureaucracy. There were no regional political structures tied in accountability to a central state. Instead, rule of local provinces was handed out by the Tsar in so-called “Pomestie,” which means “feedings,” and the name kind of gives away the predatory nature of the political institution itself. Local rulers had no accountability to law either and no restraints on how much they could exploit the office for personal gain as long as they managed to appease the centralized government. When you look closer at the previously mentioned list of murdered Russian journalists, you will notice how most are regional reporters in small towns who were investigating the corruption of a local police department or mayor.

What’s more is that this practice of regional corruption remained in place despite being reformed by Peter the Great, who instituted a standardized system of regionalized government which recruited the aristocracy as local servants to the state. A reason for this may be found in that the new system rewarded successful local governors with tax exemptions, thereby incentivizing the aristocracy to squeeze the peasantry even harder in service of the state and themselves. A legacy of Peter the Great’s reforms was that the tax burden of the state was increasingly placed upon the Russian peasantry, while the aristocracy was increasingly exempt. In modern Russia, you will find an enormous contrast between the wealth of the oligarchs and your average Russian pensioner, whose pension is barely enough to sustain him. In many ways, it has been a common thread throughout Russian history since the 1700s that the burden of securing the state and the ambitions of wealth of its ruler have been dumped upon the Russian peasantry, from the trenches to the gulags to today’s pension and social security cuts.

An additional aspect of Peter the Great’s reforms were the introduction of severe punishments for serfs who left their lands but also for regional rulers and aristocrats who granted more freedoms to some peasants and thereby incited competition with other regional rulers. This bound the rulers of Russia on a regional level even closer together to cooperate in their exploitative economic structure and tied them deeper to the centralized state. Everyone was now tied together in this, and nobody could take the risk of stepping out of line. Centuries later, those Communist Party members who may have disagreed with the Communist Politburo on something found themselves shot, and today those oligarchs who step out of line with the central government find themselves dispossessed, jailed, or murdered.

Russian absolutism was founded on an alliance between the central ruler of the state and the rulers of the various subdivisions of the state to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else. It is why Russia never had a bourgeoisie, a small business “Mittelstand,” commercial trader class, or any resemblance of equality before the law and public accountability. As the historian John Delon described it, “The Russian government, more than any other, was a government of men and not of laws.” And that aspect of Russian absolutism is what makes it so unique.

To show why, we can compare Russia to another absolutist state, China, which also underwent a century-long political development that resulted in a powerful centralized state institution with absolute power and a lack of public accountability. But you will find a very big difference between the two. Chinese absolutism was built on a foundation of meritocracy in competition with patrimonialism. Chinese rulers continuously found themselves in positions of having to abide by some standards of accountability to state bureaucracy. China has, just as Russia, gone through periods of incredible abuse of power, from the Empress Wu to the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution. But all these periods resulted in reshuffling and restructuring of the political leadership to not repeat mistakes. Mao Zedong had to step down from the Politburo after his Great Leap Forward caused the Great Chinese Famine and only regained political power through a populist coup with the Cultural Revolution. And that populism was something the Chinese state consequently cracked down upon after Mao’s death.

Just as in Russia, the state is absolute in China. If you wish to protest against a decision by the state or change the course of the state, you have to go through the institutions of the state. And just as in Russia, you will find corruption and abuse of power in China, such as local governments that cover up the selling of poisonous baby formula. But the difference in the political structure becomes very clear when you compare abuse of power and corruption in China. The further you go up in ranks of government, the less corrupt state officials become as a result of the meritocratic state structures. In Russia, the further you go up in the ranks of government, the more corrupt state officials become as there are no systems of accountability. The only measure in restraint is that you can’t be corrupt enough as a local Russian politician to start bothering and annoying your superior politician, which is why the government becomes more corrupt the higher the office of the state is. The Russian state is a system of progressively corrupting power.

In conclusion, the historical development of Russia has led to a unique form of absolutism that is deeply rooted in its past. The Mongol rule, the geographical vastness, the absence of a strong middle class, and the lack of accountability have all contributed to the creation of a state where power is concentrated at the top, corruption is rampant, and the rule of law is often disregarded. This has had profound implications for the Russian society and its people, and it continues to shape the country’s present and future.