hellie russian imperial history

History and Theory, Theme Issue 44 (December 2005), 88-112 Wesleyan University 2005 ISSN: 0018-2656

THE STRUCTURE OF RUSSIAN IMPERIAL HISTORY

RICHARD HELLIE

ABSTRACT

Path dependency is a most valuable tool for understanding Russian history since 1480,which coincides with the ending of the Mongol yoke, Moscows annexation of north-west Russia, formerly controlled by Novgorod, and the introduction of a new method forfinancing the cavalrythe core of a new service class. The cavalry had to hold off for-midable adversaries (first Lithuania, then the Crimean Tatars, then the Livonians, thePoles, the Swedes, and the Ottomans) for Muscovy to retain its independence. Russia in1480 was a poor country lacking subsurface mineral resources and with a very poor cli-mate and soil for the support of agriculture. These basic problems inspired autocraticpower and by 1515 an ideology was in place justifying it. Religion, literature, and lawwere employed to support the autocracy. A variant of a caste society was created to sup-port the army. This made up the substance of the first service-class revolution in which allresources (human and intellectual) were mobilized to support a garrison state. After 1667the external threats to Muscovy diminished, but the service class kept its privileges, espe-cially the land fund and the peasant-serfs.

Russia faced major foreign threats again in 1700 and in the 1920s and 1930s. Thosethreats precipitated the second and third service-class revolutions. The second and thirdservice-class revolutions broadly paralleled the first. Reinvigorated service classes werecreated with state institutions to support them. As society became more complex, so didthe service classes and their privileges. Ideologies (Russian Orthodoxy and then Marxism-Leninism) were converted into devices to support the infallible autocratic ruler and hiselites. Almost the entire population was bound to state service, either directly, working tosupport the service state, or paying taxes. The church and clergy were harnessed first byPeters Holy Synod and then Stalins Department 5 of the Secret Police after he revivedthe church during World War II. Writers and artists were also put into uniform, until theyfinally rebelledbut the arts retained their civic functions, first supporting the regime, andthen criticizing it. Finally, law retained its traditional programmatic functions in regimesthemselves beholden to no law. As the foreign threats diminished, the service classes losttheir function, but the elite servicemen kept their privileges as the service states disinte-grated and the service classes lost their collective lan. Both the Russian Empire (in 1917)and then the Soviet Empire (in 1991) collapsed almost without a whimper.

I. INTRODUCTION

Russian imperial history for the past half-millennium can be understood mosteasily as a process of adaptation to perceived threats in Russias internationalrelations, a process marked by three service-class revolutions, each of which wasa response to those perceived threats. Russian elites militarized, mobilized, and

regulated the states resources, starting with their own personnel (the serviceclass itself) and ending with the peasantry (enserfment). Many other assets wereusurped to serve the states perceived needs, ranging from land and otherresources to parts of revenue flows (taxes). Although Russian religious culturehad its origins in borrowings and adaptations from Byzantium and especiallyByzantine Orthodoxy, at the beginning of the sixteenth century it too was put instate harnesswith a distinctive Russian coloration. The Orthodox Church wasnearly always the handmaid of the state, from the time of its installation in 988by the state down to 1991, when it was run by Department Z of the KGB, but thesubservience of organized religion to the state was enhanced after 1480 by thewillingness of the state to put to death any clergyman who dared express an inde-pendent mind. Again, during this period, law was perverted from its ordinaryroles of resolving conflicts and generating revenue for officialdom to a device ofsocial control and mobilization. Lastly, as is well known, down to 19851991,literature and other aspects of secular intellectual life remained under state spon-sorship or censorship or became critical and oppositional. Except for the briefperiod 19091914, intellectual and artistic neutrality were frowned upon eitherby the state or its opposition. However, each service-class revolution lost itsvitality, and degenerated when, in the absence of significant external threats, theRussian/Soviet state coasted along. In those circumstances the service classesprivileges were not balanced by their value to the state.

The repetition of service-class revolutions and the channeling of resources intoa garrison state is perhaps the most striking pattern in modern Russia history.Service-class revolutions occurred three times over roughly 450 years. The cau-sation of this repetition has not been worked out fully, but certainly two factorswere uppermost: first, resources were scarce in a comparatively poor, backwardcountrythose resources that might have been mobilized in a more normalway were simply inadequate to meet the perceived threats; second, once the serv-ice-class solution to the issue of inadequacies had been successfully tried, sub-sequent leaders threat perceptions convinced them that initiation of a new serv-ice-class revolution was the easiest solution to the problem of saving Russia fromdestruction. The fact that the Russians took similar actions to respond to per-ceived threats three times seems to be a perfect example of path dependency.1Path dependency can be summarized as having success in solving one problemand then trying to solve a similar problem in a similar way. The same is true ofthe other major elements of the past half-millennium of Russian history: the cre-ation of autocracy and a rigidly, legally stratified society; the harnessing of thechurch; the use of law; and the employment and coercion of literature and otherelements of high culture.

A few introductory remarks should be made about the issues of race/national-ity/ethnicity and religion. When in the sixth to ninth centuries CE the EasternSlavs migrated eastward into Ukraine, the Novgorod region (northwest Russia),and ultimately in the tenth to eleventh centuries into the Volga-Oka Mesopotamia

THE STRUCTURE OF RUSSIAN IMPERIAL HISTORY 89

1. S. J. Liebowitz, Path Dependence, Lock-In, and History Journal of Law, Economics, andOrganization 11, no. 1 (April 1995), 205-226; Stefan Hedlund, Russian Path Dependence (London:Routledge, 2005).

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region, the cradle of the modern Russian state, they encountered numerous eth-nic groups. The indigenous populations were Iranian (in the south) and Balticand Finnish (in the north). Vladimirs pagan pantheon of 980 was an attemptto integrate all those people (plus the Varangian/Viking/Swedish ruling elite after882) into one state.2 From an early date the Eastern Slavs also had extensive con-tacts with various Turkic peoples of the steppe; these Turks played an extensiverole in domestic East Slavic/Russian/Rusian politics, and added much vocabu-lary and many family names to the Russian language.3 Thus ethnic tolerancehas been an issue in Russia from the very beginning, and Russian elites, them-selves multiethnic, usually have been noted for toleration of ethnic and languagedifferences whenever new ethnic groups were added to the Russian Empire,both in the west and the east. Religion, however, has provided a host of majorproblems. In many respects, it is unfortunate that the 980 syncretic attempt tocreate a pagan pantheon did not work. As is well known, in 988 Christianity wasadopted instead. Articles 17, 33, 49, and 51 of Iaroslavs Church Statute limitedrelations with Muslims, Jews, pagans, and non-Orthodox foreigners, and set upthe enduring standard that Orthodoxy was the sole legitimate religion.4 This, ofcourse, placed considerable roadblocks in the way of religious minorities andlimits on inclusion in the service classes.

II. THE FIRST SERVICE-CLASS REVOLUTION

The first service-class revolution commenced around 1480, when Moscowannexed Novgorod and deported the former owners of millions of acres of land,thereby creating a problem. The solution to this problem was to parcel out theland to cavalrymen who rendered lifetime service to the government in exchangefor lifetime receipt of traditional rent flows from a specific plot of land farmedby peasants. Some of the cavalrymen assigned to the Novgorod lands had beenslaves. This initiated the tradition that membership in the service class dependedonly on service, not social origin or ethnicity. The system initiated in Novgorodwas called the pomeste system, after the name for the type of land granted. Thepomeste (the term is extant from 14831484) bore some resemblance to theByzantine pronoia and the Persian ikhta, but was fundamentally a Muscoviteinnovation. The cavalrymen-landholders were called pomeshchiki. They becamethe core of the service class. The process of converting nearly all of Muscovyspopulated land fund in the Volga-Oka Mesopotamia and Novgorod regions intoa military funding mechanism was fully completed by legislation of 1556 requir-ing all possessors of land (but not the peasants, who paid rent and taxes) to ren-der military service from their lands. Moreover, a similar requirement wasextended to and imposed on owners of land, all those who had inherited, pur-

2. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text, transl. and ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross(Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953), 93-94.

3. N. A. Baskakov, Russkie familia tiurkskogo proiskhozhdeniia (Moscow: Nauka, 1979). 4. The Laws of RusTenth to Fifteenth Centuries, transl. and ed. Daniel H. Kaiser (Salt Lake

City: Charles Schlacks, Publisher, 1992), 47-49.


chased, or otherwise acquired property (votchina) that was fully theirs and whichthey had legal right to dispose of in nearly any way they chose.5

The Muscovites faced a variety of real rather than perceived threats after 1480.At the time Lithuania was the largest state in Europe and some of its possessionswere located only a few miles from Moscow. At the beginning of the sixteenthcentury the Muscovites delivered a number of severe defeats to the Lithuanians.The Lithuanian threat was replaced by that of the Crimean Tatars, who burnedMoscow in 1571 and its suburbs in 1591 and carried off tens of thousands ofRussians into slavery, either to be ransomed back by the Muscovites or sold intothe international slave trade. (About ninety percent of the victims of such slaveraids died, either during the initial Crimean attack or while they were being car-ried to Kefe.) During the Time of Troubles (variously dated 15981613 to15841618), Muscovy was nearly dismembered when the Poles seized andburned Moscow in 1611 and the Swedes grabbed Novgorod and its environs untilthe Stolbovo peace treaty of 1618. Throughout the rest of the seventeenth centu-ry, Muscovy was at war almost continuously with the Tatars, the Ottomans, thePoles, and the Swedes. The 800-mile-long Belgorod Fortified Line (constructedin the years 16361654) kept the Tatar predators out of the Muscovite heartland,and Muscovys wars in the rest of the century were fought on its frontiers.

In Muscovite conditions, the pomeste system made a great deal of sense, fornatural support of the army (direct support of cavalrymen by their peasants)bypassed the traditional avaricious tax collectors who are typically assumed tohave siphoned off half of what they collected for their own and other bureau-crats support. Thus the pomeste system efficiently maximized the size of themajor segment of the Muscovite military machine, the bow-and-arrow firing cav-alry. Elite members of the government were also assigned landholdings for partof their compensation and thus they were also members of the service class. Ashad been the case in Novgorod, membership in the service class was defined byloyal and efficient service, not social, political, or ethnic origin. As Muscovyexpanded, servitors who had worked for Moscows rivals were added to theMoscow service class and promoted on the basis of meritorious service. Thesame was true for non-Slavs, such as various Turkic peoples, who were also wel-comed into the Moscow service class.

The fundamental weakness of this system was that it depended crucially onpeasant acquiescence and continuous residence. The cavalryman whose peasantrent-payers moved somewhere else soon found himself unable to render militaryservice. A tax collector could collect his due regardless of where a peasant lived(provided he could find him, of course6), but that was not true for a cavalryman

5. All the information on the Russian military before 1700 is taken from Richard Hellie,Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). Much ofthis is repeated in John L. H. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 14621874(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

6. This might more realistically be expressed in terms of whether the tax collector could find anymember of the peasant community in which the peasant lived, for taxes were assessed collectivelyand those present had to pay everyones share. Thus if some villagers ran into the woods when thetax collector came around, those who did not flee were liable for everyones obligations. Moreover,the tax collector felt no compunction against seizing all assets in sight until what was due had beencollected, either in cash or in kind. This system of collective responsibility was a major, almost-con-tinuous control device from the mid-sixteenth century until the end of the Soviet gulag.

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in military service half the year and assigned a specific plot of land. For nearlyits first century the pomeste system worked. The peasant population expandedand with it the three-field system. But the disasters of the most paranoid periodof Ivan the Terribles later reign (the Livonian War [15581583] with its hightaxes, crop failures, and increased disease, and the catastrophic Oprichnina[15651572]) forced the peasantry to flee the Volga-Oka and Novgorodianregions for areas north of the Volga, south of the Oka into the steppe, south alongthe Volga after the annexation of Kazan and Astrakhan, and eastward across theVolga in the direction of the Urals and Siberia after the conquest of Kazan.Moreover, as population density in the Muscovite homeland itself was relativelylow, free land was still available, and as the peasants began to disperse, otherlandlords were always in search of and welcomed other lords peasants to farmtheir estates. In response to the perceived labor shortage, members of the caval-ry asked the government to forbid peasants to move on St. Georges Day in theautumn (November 26), which it did selectively in the 1580s and then for allpeasants in 1592. These years were known as the Forbidden Years, which weresupposed to have been temporary, but in reality lasted until 1906. The peasantsbound to specific plots of land became serfs.7

The Russian institution of serfdom was possible for many reasons. One wasthe nature of political authority, which will be discussed further in a moment.Another was the fact that Russia had no tradition of human rights to which theoppressed could appeal. A third was the age-old indigenous tradition of slaveryin which many of the slaves were East Slavs/Russians who sold themselves intoslavery (contrary to the general rule that a slave is an outsider in reality or atleast by legal fiction).8 Thus it became very easy for the Russians to abase theirown peasants, often on the model of Russian slaves. The general absence ofhuman rights has been a tradition in Russia for half a millennium, and frequent-ly the government took advantage of this for its own purposes. Visiting foreign-ers were always appalled by the fact that even members of the service class hadno rights, something that was best expressed in the fact that like their serfs theycould be flogged (at least until Article 15 of the Charter of the Nobility forbadeit in 1785).9

The Muscovite government geared up to support the crucial service cavalry byproviding it with cash to buy market commodities, such as horses and sabers, aswell as to support the other parts of the army wholly dependent on the treasuryscash flowthe handgun-shooting infantry, the artillery, and foreign mercenaries.The progress of the gunpowder revolution gradually made the bow-and-arrow-shooting middle-service-class provincial cavalry obsolescent as it was replacedby more effective branches of military service. Thanks to their political power,however, the pomeshchiki managed to retain control over their serfs.

7. Translations of the documents of the enserfment process can be found in Richard Hellie,Muscovite Society. (Readings for Introduction to Russian Civilization.) (Chicago: University ofChicago Syllabus Division, 1967 and 1970). The narrative can be found in Hellie, Enserfment.

8. Richard Hellie, Slavery in Russia, 14501725 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).See also Hellie, Kholopstvo v Rossii 14501725 (Moscow: Academia, 1998).

9. Catherine IIs Charters of 1785 to the Nobility and the Towns, transl. and ed. David Griffithsand George E. Munro (Bakersfield, CA: Charles Schlacks, Publisher, 1991), 6.


Secular intellectual life hardly existed during the period of the first service-class revolution, but debates within the clergy affected the service class. Around1500 there were a number of major controversies in the church, including oneover succession to the throne of Grand Prince Ivan III. A major player in theseevents, the abbot of the Volokolamsk Monastery, Iosif, essentially formulated theRussian theory of autocracy. He borrowed a theory of rule enunciated by a sixth-century Byzantine deacon and adviser to Justinian I, Agapetos (often Agapetus),the most widely read and published Byzantine author after the church fathers inwestern and eastern Europe10: In his person the ruler is a man, but in his author-ity he is like God. This defined the authority of the Russian autocrat from thebeginning of the sixteenth century down to 1917. Readers will recognize this asa Russian variation on the western European divine right of kings. After 1917,the CPSU General Secretary-autocrat was not the agent of God but of the equal-ly mythical Marxist historical dialectic. Throughout Russian history autocraticauthority served as the ideological basis for total control of the state and of every-thing conceived as being in its jurisdiction.

The Ulozhenie (Law Code) of 1649 codified Muscovite society into castesfrom which exit was difficult and often impossible. The peasants were bound tothe land, enserfed, thanks to pressure from the middle-service-class cavalry. Thetownsmen were bound to their towns in response to their own petitions: the col-lective system of taxation (primarily to support the army) meant that when some-one departed after a census count had been taken, those remaining had to makeup for the taxes not paid by the departees. Because of this, those remaining peti-tioned the government for the return of the departed to make the tax burden bear-able. The Forbidden Years, designed for peasants, beginning in the 1590s butespecially after the Time of Troubles, were applied to all townsmen.11 Most gov-ernment military servitors were forbidden to leave their castes, and in 1640 gov-ernment bureaucrats were turned into a separate caste. In 1654 even foreignersin Muscovite service were converted into a caste. About the only people notascribed to a caste were wanderers (guliashchie liudi), people not yet regis-tered in governmental documents that would bind them to a specific place andstatus, and freedmenslaves (perhaps five to fifteen percent of the population,mostly native Russians, some of foreign origin) who had been manumitted forone reason or another.12

The Thirteen Years War (16541667), a major event in early modern Russia,demonstrated the technological obsolescence of the bow-and-arrow-firing,provincial middle-service-class cavalry. It also resulted in the death of many ofthem, and in prolonged captivity for many others. Although the war virtuallywiped out this segment of the service class, the surviving servitors kept their

10. Agapetos, The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991),1: 34. On the Russian situation, see I. U. Budovnits, Russkaia publitsistika XVI veka (Moscow:Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1947).

11. Hellie, Muscovite Society, 33-62; Hellie, The Stratification of Muscovite Society: TheTownsmen, Russian History 6, pt. 2 (1979), 119-175.

12. The Ulozhenie (Law Code) of 1649, transl. and ed. Richard Hellie (Irvine, CA: CharlesSchlacks, Publisher, 1988). See also Hellie, Enserfment and Slavery.

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pomeste lands and serfs. It was probably about that same time that corruptionbegan to be a way of life in the government bureaucracy. The early Muscovitegovernmental bureaucracy had consisted of slaves or their heirs, and they seemto have imparted an efficiency and honesty to that branch of the service class.The turn to corruption probably had something to do with the boyars and othermembers of the upper service class nominally taking over the command of thebureaucracy beginning in the years after 1613. The process of corruption wasslow, and made little headway (as far as I can tell) until the end of the reign ofPeter the Great, who accelerated it when he neglected to pay many governmentofficials.13

Contact with the West hastened the evolution of the service class. The notionthat individuals existed, that not all people were part of an amorphous mass,began to appear in the seventeenth century. The Thirteen Years War acceleratedWesternization, and with it individualization in literature and art. This under-mined the stratified society codified in the Ulozhenie, and signaled the loss ofintegrity of the states service system.14 Similar social differentiation and indi-vidualization appeared when the second and third service-class revolutions werelosing their lan and raison dtre.

In this condition Russia coasted through a number of campaigns at the end ofthe seventeenth century against the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Khanate(although losing those of 1687, 1689, and 1695) until capturing Azov in 1696. Incomparison with the Ottomans, however, the Swedes under Charles XII were anadversary with a much higher level of military skill. In a battle at Narva in 1700the young Charles XII decisively defeated the young Peter I (to be the Great).Charles decided to take on Russia seriously, especially after Peter began con-structing St. Petersburg in the mouth of the Gulf of Finland in 1703, and arro-gantly apportioned the to-be-conquered Russia among his governors-to-be ofRussia.

III. THE SECOND SERVICE-CLASS REVOLUTION

The perception that Sweden genuinely threatened Russia forced the Russians tolaunch the second service-class revolution. In view of the extremity of the threat,the remnants of the old army were put back in harness. The Swedish threatstrengthened the rationale of the old pomeste system and serfdom as supports ofthe revitalizing service class. But Peter went much further. In an attempt to copewith perceived technological (especially military) backwardness (otstalost, amajor word in the Russian vocabulary), nearly all Muscovite rulers from Ivan III,Ivan IV, and Boris Godunov to Tsars Mikhail and Aleksei had recruited foreignmercenaries, but Peter made a quantum leap in this respect to the point that alarge portion of his officer corps consisted of foreigners. Their task was to trans-

13. This dreadful story has yet to be solidly researched.14. Richard Hellie, The Great Paradox of the Seventeenth Century: The Stratification of

Muscovite Society and the Individualization of Its High Culture, Especially Literature, in O Rus!Studia Literaria Slavica in Honorem Hugh McLean, ed. Simon Karlinsky et al. (Berkeley: BerkeleySlavic Specialties, 1995), 116-128.


form the semi-regular army of Muscovy into a modern standing army equal tothe best on the European continent.15 To the surprise of many, and especiallyCharles XII when he was defeated at Poltava in 1709 and also in the naval bat-tle at Hanko in 1714, the second service-class revolution was a success.16Sweden lost the Northern War (17001721), an outcome that was foreseeable atleast as early as 1715, and lost its hegemonic position in much of northernEurope. To support the new imperial army, Peter reformed the government, con-ducted new censuses, and changed the tax system. The 1722 Table of Ranks for-malized the hierarchy of the new service class and made it clear, as it had beenin Muscovy, that social status depended on meritorious service. As always, pro-motion in service was open to those willing to put in the effort. That ethnicitywas not an obstacle to promotion in the service class is evident in the fact thatPeters foreign minister Shafirov was of Jewish origin.

Under Peter, the system of serfdom began to change. Peasants, once bound tothe land, were now bound to the persons of their masters, so that by the end ofthe eighteenth century the serf system differed very little from many systems ofslavery. In this context, one might mention that peasants had been drafted intothe army during the Thirteen Years War and that this system was reinvigoratedby Peter, whose new armies needed far more manpower than the landholdingcavalry could provide. Their service was another form of slavery, not unlike thelifetime service required of the pomeshchiki. The peasant draftees were infantry-men, not members of the service class. The abuse of Soviet and post-Soviet sol-diers, the notorious dedovshchina, was foretold by the treatment of drafteerecruits in the eighteenth-century Russian army.

Life in any of the service classes was arduous, typically lifelong, with modestbenefits to its members. But when the military threats and associated expensesdiminished, members of the service classes tried to improve their conditions. InMuscovy this had involved two major issues: converting the service landhold-ings into something resembling hereditary estates (in the sense that they could bepassed to heirs, not that they could be sold or otherwise alienated), and convert-ing the free peasantry into serfs. The same pressures persisted in the eighteenthcentury, particularly after the death of Peter the Great and the lessening of for-eign military threats. On the issue of the land, the pomeste was officially con-verted into a votchina in 1714 in the law on primogeniture and it became immov-able gentry property. The next issue after 1725 became that of service itself,which was reduced from lifetime to twenty-five years, then to twenty years, andthen in 1762 the service requirement for the gentry was abolished completely.There has been a major historiographical debate over Peter IIIs 1762 action: wasit a governmental concession to pressure by a powerful gentry on a weak tsar, orwas it a declaration of independence by a Germanophilic ruler who knew that hecould do without the military services of some of his Russian subjects but thatlack of income would force enough of them to serve so that the armys strength

15. Richard Hellie, The Petrine Army: Continuity, Change, and Impact, Canadian-AmericanSlavic Studies (Summer, 1974), 237-253.

16. Peter Englund, The Battle that Shook Europe: Poltava and the Birth of the Russian Empire(London: I. B. Tauris, 2003).

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would not be threatened?17 This issue has not been resolved, but it is clear thatthe gentry ideal described in Sergei Aksakovs Family Chronicle persistedfrom 1762 to 1874; in brief: begin serving around age fifteen, marry around agetwenty-six, retire from service, and lead a pleasant life.18 Because many mem-bers of the gentry lacked the independent means to support the desired, increas-ingly Westernized, pleasant life without a government salary, most were forcedto serve the state (typically in the army, others in the navy or government bureau-cracy) for decades.

This pleasant life, of course, was dependent upon continued possession bythe gentry of most of Russias inhabited land and the serfs working it. Even so,the condition of the serfs continued to deteriorate throughout the eighteenth cen-tury. The list of laws degrading the peasantry is long, but the following give someflavor of the era. Peasants were forbidden to file petitions against their masters.In 1747 a lord could enserf a free man by entering him in a census. In 1759, fac-tory owners were permitted to enserf a free man by sending a substitute to thearmy, without the workers consent. In 1760 lords were allowed to exile recalci-trant serfs to Siberia, and then in 1765 they could send them to forced labor proj-ectsand get military recruit credit for their dispatched chattel. In 1767 a serfwho petitioned against his master could be exiled by the lord to the mines inNerchinsk, which presumably was a death sentence. By 1796 the condition ofseignorial serfs differed little from that of slaves.19 In 1796, Emperor Paul,repelled by his mother Catherines having given away 800,000 state serfs to pri-vate owners, many of whom rendered no service, at least nominally limited serfcorve labor on their lords estates to three days per week and forbade it onSunday. (He had much less success in his attempts to restore the Petrine servicestate.) From 1797 to 1906, serfdom as an institution suffered one reversal afteranother until it was finally abolishedbut only until it was again restored by theSoviets. (Here we should note that although in 1861 Alexander II emancipatedthe peasants/serfs from the slave-like control of their owners, he did not restoretheir right to move freely wherever they wanted. The Emancipation insteadbound the peasants to their commune and thus hardly differed in reality from theUlozhenie of 1649, which bound peasants to the land.20)Reforms from above and DestabilizationThe Petrine era was so preoccupied by military events and governmental andsocial reforms that most intellectual life simply died. Under Enlightenmentinfluence, Peter the Great expanded the pre-1689 practice of explaining edicts,

17. Marc Raeff, The Domestic Policies of Peter III and His Overthrow, American HistoricalReview 75 (June 1970), 1289-1310.

18. S. T. Aksakov, The Family Chronicle (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1961). Also, Sergei Aksakov,A Russian Gentleman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

19. Richard Hellie, Early Modern Russian Estate Management and Economic Development, inEuropean Aristocracies and Colonial Elites: Patrimonial Management Strategies and EconomicDevelopment, 15th18th Centuries, ed. Paul Janssens and Bartolome Yun-Casalilla (Aldershot, Eng.:Ashgate, 2005), 188-189.

20. Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 575-600.


but aside from that, little evidence of original thought survives from the Petrineera. Prior to 1700 the little that was written existed to advance the didactic mis-sion of the Orthodox Church and to effect government programs via legislation,with a few other pages penned for the purposes of entertainment and aestheticgratification. Peter rather thoroughly secularized Russia, and this trend continuesto the present day. If before 1689 literature had been primarily a vehicle of reli-gious expression, after 1730 it expressed secular trends. Decades after the rest ofEurope, Russia experienced the Baroque, Neoclassicism, Sentimentalism, andRomanticism. Instead of advancing the interests of the church, literature (espe-cially the Baroque and Neoclassicism, with the latters glorification of the stateand rulers) promulgated the interests of the state.21 After the emancipation of thegentry in 1762, Sentimentalism and Romanticism became vehicles for question-ing both the autocracy and the reigning system of serfdom. AlexanderRadishchev, an alienated member of the elite, in his 1790 Journey from St.Petersburg to Moscow, enraged Empress Catherine the Great with his criticismof the autocracy and serfdom and thereby initiated the split between the intelli-gentsia and the regime.22

In the military sphere, Catherine the Great liquidated the age-old scourge ofthe Russians, the Crimean Khanate slave raiders, in 1783. This brought Russiadirectly into contact with the decaying Ottoman Empire and the Caucasus, whichhad been fought over for centuries by the Ottoman Turks, the Persians, and theRussians. More immediately pressing was the revolutionary France of Napoleon,who arrogantly believed that Sigismunds Rzeczpospolita and Charles XIIsSweden had been unable to subdue Russia only because they were inadequatelyarmed. Napoleons Grand Army of 600,000 entered Russia in 1812, burned orprovoked the burning of Moscow, and shortly thereafter departed as a rag-tagband of 50,000. But Russia learned little from the Napoleonic adventure. Themassive destruction was soon repaired and Russian elites affirmed their govern-mental and social system. Victory in this case was a poorer teacher than defeatmight have been. A second-order consequence of victory, however, was thatRussian soldiers were soon walking the streets of Paris as occupation forces, andthey became infected with French madness (Catherines term for FrenchRevolutionary thought), and brought it home with them. When they returned toRussia these people tried to convince Emperor Alexander I to reform both theinstitution of the autocracy and the institution of serfdom and to confer a consti-tution on Russia.

Alexander had begun his reign in 1801 both as complicit in the murder of hisfather Paul and as a reformer, but after 1815 the burden of patricide-regicidecombined with other psychological problems converted him into a reactionary.The elite officers in the palace guards by 1818 began to realize that they couldnot reach Alexander with their plans for reform, and so began to conspireagainst him. This resulted in the Decembrist uprising of 1825, the last attempted

21. The Literature of Eighteenth-Century Russia: A History and Anthology, ed. Harold B. Segal,2 vols. (New York: Dutton, 1967).

22. A. N. Radishchev, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1958).

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palace coup in Russia and its first revolution guided by modern ideas, with strongintellectual roots in both the American and French Revolutions. The uprising wasbrutally repressed by Nicholas I, but he kept the summary transcript of the judi-cial proceedings from the trial of the Decembrists at his bedside throughout histhirty-year reign and even tried to act on at least some of the Decembristsdemands. He appointed nine secret commissions to study the issue of serfdom,and although they did little, their work served as the basis for the Emancipationof 1861.23

The Crimean War (18531856) might have been the occasion for another serv-ice-class revolution, but it was notprobably because the victors had no territo-rial designs on Russia and thus were not perceived as a major threat. The defeatdid, however, reveal how backward the Russian system, still based on the twinpillars of autocracy and serfdom, was relative to industrializing Europe. Thereforms of 1861 through 1874 touched on many serious issues. The Emanci-pation removed the seignorial serfs from the control of their owners and turnedthem over to the control of their communes. They still were not free to move,however, and such freedom was not restored until 1906. Worse yet, the peasantsbound to their communes had to pay for their freedom over the next forty-nineyears, which had deleterious consequences ranging from making the peasantshate the regime to seriously retarding the growth of the market by siphoning offto the state treasury much of what might have been peasant purchasing power.The redemption payments were cancelled only in 1907.24 Certainly the flawedEmancipation of 1861 did more than anything else to prepare the social cata-clysm of 1917.

Other reforms of Alexander II did much to bring Russia into the modern era.25The local government (zemstvo) reform and the judicial reform of 1864 weregood beginnings. Of the many other reforms, the military reforms of 1874 werethe most central for our story. Among other things, they forced the gentry to ren-der minimal military service for the first time since 1762. The Crimean defeathad taught the Russians a few lessons, especially in the military sphere. It mayeven have been at least partially responsible for the Emancipation: the bindingof the serfs to their owners did not permit the creation of a large pool of militaryreserves. (Under the old system, discharged soldier draftees were not allowed toreturn to their villages for fear that they would foment rebellion against the serfowners.) But the loss in the Crimean War did not sufficiently teach the rulerswhat should have been its major lesson: centralized autocracy and the near totalabsence of civil rights were incompatible with modernization.26 Here one shouldnote that reforms initiated by the government from above have been anoth-er constant for the past half-millennium because very little is allowed to developnaturally from below. The government issued reforms only during perceived

23. W. Bruce Lincoln, The Genesis of an Enlightened Bureaucracy in Russia, 18251856,Jahrbcher fr Geschichte Osteuropas 20, no. 3 (1960), 441-458.

24. David Moon, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, 17621907 (New York: Longman, 2001). 25. W. Bruce Lincoln, The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in

Imperial Russia (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990). 26. Albert J. Rieber, Alexander II: A Revisionist View, Journal of Modern History 43, no. 1

(March 1971), 42-58.


crises, typically at the beginning of a new reign, whether that of Ivan IV,Alexander II, or Khrushchev.

The failure of the Alexandrine reforms provoked almost immediately therenewal of the revolutionary movement. This led to an expansion and radicaliza-tion of the new generation of recruits to the revolutionary movement, mostnotably in the revolutionary populist movement of 1874. The evolution of revo-lutionary populism into terrorism culminated in the assassination of EmperorAlexander II in 1881. The governmental response during the period of thereforms, and even more so after 1881, was repression.27 Alexander III success-fully suppressed the revolutionary movement, but it revived under Nicholas IIand, in addition to a new generation of revolutionary populists, the regime had tocontend with a Marxist social-democratic party that culminated in LeninsBolsheviks. Autocratic oppression had prohibited the development of real polit-ical parties in Russia, and when World War I led to a collapse of tsarism, theauthoritarian Bolsheviks were best equipped to establish control over the RussianEmpire. A scenario of this sort was sketched before the war in 1914 in a memo-randum to Nicholas II by Peter Durnovo, who had learned about Russias inter-nal and foreign reality while head of the police. Police prescience is anotherrecurrent feature of Russian/Soviet history: the chief policeman was often themost knowledgeable person in the service class.

After 1762 the degenerating heirs of the Petrine service class managed collec-tively to pass their status and property to their descendants, although by 1861two-thirds of all they owned was pledged to the government as collateral forloans. The loans were subtracted from the sums the government paid the gentryfor surrendering ownership of their serfs and some of the land allotted to thefreedmen-serfs. Unable to cope with the post-1861 era, many of the obsolescentgentry experienced the drama of Chekhovs great comic play The CherryOrchard, in which their assets were sold to outsiders who were not members ofthe gentry. The gentry lost control over their serfs in 1861, and the degenerationof the status of their heirs reached the point by 1914 that they were no longer incontrol of the armyindeed, they had fallen from most of their other prior soci-etal commanding social heights as well. This as well opened the road to theBolsheviks.

The Evolution of Letters, Religion, and the LawA few additional words must be said about other subthemes of theRussian/Soviet service state during the second service-class revolution: litera-ture, the church, and law. The development of Russian literature throughRomanticism has been mentioned. Russian literature tended to have mainly acivic function. One the one hand, the state tried to control literature to serve itspurposes; on the other, the authors themselves rejected the notion that art shouldbe created solely for entertainment or aesthetic gratification. The state was con-scious of literatures special role in Russia. Even in the seventeenth century, ped-

27. Philip Pomper, Peter Lavrov and the Russian Revolutionary Movement (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1972); Venturi Franco, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and SocialistMovements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960).

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dlers could not sell imported chapbooks without governmental surveillance.Censorship developed rigorously in the eighteenth century, and Radishchev wasable to publish his subversive prose only by ignoring what the censorship haddemanded when he took his (unrevised) manuscript to the printer. After theDecembrist uprising, Nicholas I imposed a very strict, harsh censorship.28

The response of part of the thinking/writing class was precisely what shouldhave been expected: rebellion. The leading rebel was the literary critic VissarionBelinskii, who at the end of the 1830s laid down the dictum that literature couldonly be moral when it was political, that is, critical of the state and social order.This perpetuated the age-old tradition of civic literature, but turned it on its head:instead of supporting the state, literature now had to criticize it. It became thetask of authors to find ways to criticize the regime, for nothing could beexpressed openly. Literature assumed, among other things, the role of journalismand opposition politics. This persisted until 1909, when seven authors in thefamous Vekhi (loosely, Landmarks) collection insisted that it was possible towrite literature that was both moral and apolitical.29

Law changed little between the 1649 Ulozhenie and the 1830s codification ofthe law by Nikolai Speranskii. For that matter, it did not change much until the1864 reforms of Alexander II, which prompted the creation of a legal profession(a bar) and discussion of the need for a Rechtsstaat. A Rechtsstaat was incom-patible with the Russian autocracy, which both made the law and was above it.Law remained a statement of social programs rather than a codification of evolv-ing popular norms and needs. It thus remained primarily a statement of autocrat-ic governmental programs until 1917, in spite of the existence of the four Dumas(parliaments) between 1906 and 1917.

The church and religion were even more subservient to the state after 1700than had been the case earlier. Peter helped to assure this by refusing to appointanother Patriarch after the death of the last one in 1700. He consolidated his con-trol over the church by creating the Holy Synod in 1721 to run the church insteadof the Patriarch. The Holy Synod was just another government bureau, like allthe others, run by a layman.30 This was not as radical as it might appear becausePeters father, Tsar Aleksei, had created in the 1649 Ulozhenie (chapter 13) theMonastery Chancellery, also headed by a layman, who managed all of theRussian Orthodox Church except for the Patriarchate (which was the subject ofchapter 12 of the Ulozheniehardly an expression of church autonomy otherthan the obeisance paid in putting the Patriarchate ahead of the MonasteryChancellery).31 The Petrine clergy were also state servitors who, among otherthings, were obliged to report to the state anything that sounded subversive heardin a confession or elsewhere. In almost every respect, to the educated public in

28. Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia under Nicholas I (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1961).

29. Vekhi (Landmarks): A Collection of Articles about the Russian Intelligentsia, transl. and ed.Marshall Shatz and Judith B. Zimmerman (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).

30. James Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1971).

31. Richard Hellie, The Church and the Law in Late Muscovy: Chapters 12 and 13 of theUlozhenie of 1649, Canadian-American Slavic Studies 25, nos. 1-4 (1991), 179-199.


the modern period the Imperial Russian Orthodox Church was an object of deri-sion that performed various rituals but otherwise had little in common with whatmost thinking contemporaries assumed religion to be about.

In this context it seems almost paradoxical that the Procurator of the HolySynod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev (18801905), did more to violate the princi-ples of the service-class state than any other figure in the Imperial Period. A for-mer lawyer, he knew well the low regard in which the Russian Orthodox Churchwas held, but most of his measures made the situation even worse. Most impor-tantly, rather than continuing the policies of relative tolerance that had enabledthe Russian service state to function so smoothly for four centuries, he set aboutpolicies of russification (forcing non-Russians to learn Russian and to adoptRussian culture), conversion (forcing non-Orthodox to adopt Orthodoxy), andgross discrimination against and persecution of nonconformists. These and otherreactionary policies radically alienated Jews, Caucasians, Poles, Finns, Tatars,and others and accelerated the downfall of the Russian Empire.32

IV. THE THIRD SERVICE-CLASS REVOLUTION

Scholars have been arguing over the importance of 1917 for decades. There aremany issues, such as whether the Alexandrine Reforms of 18611874 or 1917was the greater break in Russian history,33 whether Russian modernization in the18941914 period was artificially curtailed by the outbreak of the war and theBolshevik victory,34 whether Russia was socially stabilizing or fracturing prior to1914, whether revolution was about to break out in 1914 and was postponed bythe outbreak of the war until 1917,35 how much continuity of personnel and prac-tices there was in the period after 1917, and so on. It must be stressed that thesehotly debated issues are secondary in understanding the long-run development ofRussian history because 1917 itself was secondary.

This is not to deny entirely the importance of 1917. Because of it, tsarism andthe contemporary bourgeoisie were driven from the scene. A murderous civil warreduced the GDP by 1921 to thirteen percent of what it had been in 1914. Theinstitution of private property, which had been gradually developing since thePetrine era, was abolished. But in many other spheres the elements of continuityare evident. Bolshevism itself was cooked in the Orthodox-Hegelian-Marxist-Russian-autocratic political and cultural stew. The absence of civil rights waspalpable both before and after 1917, as was oppression, the absence of aRechsstaat, and general respect for law. The literary trends present before 1917

32. Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev, Reflections of a Russian Statesman (Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 1965); Robert Byrnes, Pobedonostsev, His Life and Thought (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1968).

33. That is one of the major issues in The Transformation of Russian Society: An Analysis of SocialDevelopments since 1861 by Authorities in Fields from Economics to Philosophy, ed. Cyril E. Black(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).

34. Alexander Gerschenkron, Russia: Agrarian Policies and Industrialization, 18611914, in hisContinuity in History and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 140-248.

35. Leopold H. Haimson, The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 19051917, SlavicReview 23, no. 4 (December 1964), 619-642, and 24, no. 1 (March 1965), 1-22.

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continued well into the 1920s. The list could go on, but the point is that by 1927,when the economy had nearly recovered to the point it had reached in 1913,many other features of life did not differ radically from those in 1913. The realbreak occurred in 19271928. This has many names in the literature, especiallythe Stalin Revolution. For reasons that should be apparent already above andthat will be developed below, I propose that this should be called the third serv-ice-class revolution. Like the first and second service-class revolutions, the thirdwas provoked by perceived military threats. England, France, and the UnitedStates had intervened (very minimally and ineffectively, it must be admitted) inthe Russian Civil War, but nevertheless the Bolsheviks were hypersensitized tothe possibility of the capitalist states attacking the young Soviet Union. Thuswhen the war scare of 1927 with Britain and France developed, the threat-per-ception antennae of the Bolsheviks were primed to receive and process the infor-mation in a predetermined fashion.

Lenin had prescribed that the USSR should develop economically throughelectrification. After the war scare, however, Stalin changed the priority to thedevelopment of a heavy metallurgical industrial base. Minister of Finance SergeiWitte (18921903) had initiated heavy industrialization in the Russian Empire,largely at the expense of the peasants. Later, there was a protracted debate in the1920s between the left Bolshevik-Trotskiite Evgenii Preobrazhenskii and theright Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin over how to resume industrialization after thehiatus resulting from World War I, the revolutions of 1917, and the ensuing civilwar. Unexpectedly, Stalin chose the Preobrazhenskii model, once again predi-cated largely on exploitation of the peasants. Obviously iron and steel were nec-essary for the construction of tanks and other armaments, whereas electricity waslikely to be consumed by peasants turning on light bulbs in their huts. The warscare of 1927 led to an intense industrialization drive, which collectivizationwould presumably pay for. However, because of peasant destruction of livestockand other factors, including famine, collectivization failed to yield the expectedbenefits for investment in industry. The consequence was that urban workerspaid for industrialization through atrociously low wages, as well as forced/slavelabor. Rational centralized planning (to the extent that the phrase is not an oxy-moroncentral planners can never anticipate global technological change orconsumer demand) in reality translated into impossible targets. Forced draftbuildup of the military did not yield as much as might have been anticipated afterthe war scare of 1927, but seems to have been a factor in the election of Hitlerto which the Soviets themselves contributed significantly in other ways as well.36

All of this could not have been accomplished without the creation of a newservice class. Here is where traditional interpretations of Soviet history simplyhave it wrong: they assume that Marxism and even Leninism had something todo with socialism, which in turn had something to do with the proletariat and per-haps even equality. The slogan of socialism in its transition to Communism,

36. Gerald Freund, Unholy Alliance. Russian-German Relations from the Treaty of Brest-Litovskto the Treaty of Berlin (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957); Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany. ACentury of Conflict (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990), 157-171; Dukh Rapallo:sovetsko-germanskie otnosheniia, 19251933, ed. G. N. Sevostianov (Ekaterinburg: Universitet,1997).


From each according to his ability, to each according to his work, does notpromise equal compensation, but that somehow is beside the point for those try-ing to interpret the early Stalin era. It does, however, fit a Russian/Soviet serv-ice-class ethos perfectly, for the compensation for its work is determined by itsvalue to the service state. After 1928 the USSR began to reward members of thenew service class according to their value in the new revolutionary response tothe war scare, not according to whether they were urban proletarians and evenmuch less according to any possible notion of equality or leveling. The definitionof the service class also expanded from elite military and governmental figuresto factory directors, important scientists, and even leading writers, musicians,and artists. This affected every aspect of social rewards: food rations, wages,housing, clothing, priority for and access to all other scarce resources. Salaries assuch were in many ways of secondary importance during the third service-classrevolution; what was crucial was access, for often cash would buy almost noth-ing. All of these forms of compensation were allocated on a service-determinedhierarchical basis, akin to the money and land entitlements in the first service-class revolution, or a servicemans position in Peters Table of Ranks.

Labor was militarized; workers were shot for being late to the job. With col-lectivization, peasants were again forbidden to move, bound to the land. Notaccidentally, they called it the second enserfment.37 This enserfment persist-ed until the peasants were given internal passports in 1957, which allowed themto migrate to the less desirable towns. (The more desirable cities were closed tooutsiders by the urban registration [propiska] system, so that members of the elitewould not have to contend with the vast shanty-towns that surrounded othermajor cities of the developing world.) The changed role of the Communist Partyis the strongest evidence that the new order was a third service-class revolution.The CP in its early existence had been an underground political party, a revolu-tionary conspiratorial group, and then a ruling party after Lenins death. Afterthe Stalin revolution, its role changed completely from a political body to apersonnel organization, the equivalent in the 1930s and later of the MilitaryChancellery (Razriad) in the seventeenth century. It controlled the notoriousnomenklatura, the ranking and assignment of the top 40,000 positions and indi-viduals in the Soviet Union. With the most rare exceptions, one could not get avery good position in life without being a member of the Communist Party sim-ply because the Party controlled all the good ones.38 A number of times in the1960s and later people told me that they joined the Communist Party not because

37. Books on these topics are legion. For example: R. W. Davies, The Industrialization of Russia,5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; New York: Palgrave, 19802004); AndreaGraziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 19171933 (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1996); Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study ofCollectivization (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968); James R. Millar, MassCollectivization and the Contribution of Soviet Agriculture to the First Five-Year Plan: A ReviewArticle, Slavic Review 33, no. 4 (December 1974), 750-766; Vladimir Andrle, Workers in StalinsRussia: Industrialization and Social Change in a Planned Economy (New York: St. Martins Press,1988); Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalins Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 19281932(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

38. Michael Voslensky, Nomenklatura. The Soviet Ruling Class: An Insiders Report (Garden City,NY: Doubleday, 1984).

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they believed in it or anything it stood for, but because it was the only way theycould rise professionally.

I have stressed the importance of ideology in enabling and legitimizing thefirst and second service-class revolutions. The Agapetos image of the ruler andthe supporting ideology of Orthodox Christianity played this role until 1917.Ideology was equally important in the third service-class revolution. The Sovietsbuilt on Russian Orthodox Christianity to make Marxist-Leninist-Stalinismsocialism/communism into a religion whose high priest was the GeneralSecretary of the CPSU. Alleged historical inevitability and dialectical material-ism legitimized the third service-class revolution. Down at the popular level, inthe peasant hut, the Christian icon in the red corner was replaced by a pictureof Stalin or some other Soviet dignitary.

The fact that Stalin turned the USSR into a service-class state is evident in theprovision of health care. Five Year Plans began with the principle of differenti-ated medical services for individual groups of the population and correspondedwith their role in socialist construction. There was not even the slightest pre-tension that health care should be universal or that access to it should be uniform.Access to health care depended entirely on an individuals place in the Sovietservice hierarchy. The most important politicians, economic personnel, andartists had access to the otherwise-closed system of Kremlin hospitals and clin-ics. Vladimirskii, the Commissar of Health of the RSFSR, explicitly argued thatthe role of public health was to raise the productivity of labor. After World WarII, scarce medical personnel were allocated to mills and factoriesespeciallylarge, new factoriesbefore anywhere else. This was also regionalized, withresources directed to the Urals, Kuzbass, Eastern Siberia, the Donbass, and theindustrial districts of Kazakhstan before anywhere else. This became a perma-nent principle of entitlement. Further down the line in the allocation of medicalresources were the state farms, and at the very bottom were the collective farms.In the farm system of health care, such as was actually provided, the occupationof the patient determined the type of care. On the top were mechanics, combinedrivers, agronomists; then workers at livestock farms; then brigade leaders; themass of farm laborers were left to last.39 All of this was the Soviet version of theoft-quoted Biblical injunction that He who does not work shall not eat and itssocialist version From each according to his ability, to each according to hiswork. The same principles applied in the allocation of physicians. The secretpolice had first claim on the best doctors (who themselves were mostly ratherlow-ranking members of the service class), followed by the Kremlin hospitals,and so on. If one believes that the USSR was practicing socialism after 1928, ofcourse this crude manipulation of the medical system seems an outrageous vio-lation of socialist ideals. If one understands that this was just another manifesta-tion of the third service-class revolution, it is all quite intelligible.

Stalins paranoid personality played a major role in the creation of the tenor ortone of the third service-class revolution, just as Ivan the Terrible had colored thefirst and Peter the Great had defined the beginning of the second. This was pos-

39. Chris Burton, Medical Welfare during Late Stalinism: A Study of Doctors and the SovietHealth System, 194553 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, December 1999).


sible for all of them because of the institutionalization of the Agapetos formulaat the beginning of the sixteenth century. Gods vicegerent could not be chal-lenged in the sixteenth century or at the beginning of the eighteenth century.When God was replaced by Marxist historical inevitability, its spokesman, thegeneral secretary of the CPSU, could not be challenged either. This absence ofinstitutional restraints of any kind on the leader was a major feature of all threeservice-class revolutions.

The third service-class revolution made the Soviet military into a world-classpower. Between December 1, 1934, and July 1, 1941, Stalins paranoia and thepurges of the officer corps, the captains of industry, many leading scientists, andothers who had the misfortune of belonging to the Communist Party or havingties to purged Communists created a perilous situation, but General Mud andGeneral Winter helped derail Hitlers Wehrmacht just as they had raised obsta-cles to Napoleons Grand Army. This gave the Red Army time to regroup, to winthe crucial battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, and the Kursk Bulge, and to drive theNazi hordes out of the USSR and back to Berlin.40

The Soviet victory in World War II provided less of a breathing spell than itmight have thanks to Stalins paranoia and the discovery of all manner of allegedinternal enemies acting on behalf of foreign agents, and then to the Cold War.The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the Vietnam War unquestionably legit-imized domestically Soviet arms expenditures and the existence of the serviceclass. Even more interesting was the American Sixth Fleet and the launching ofthe Polaris submarines in the late 1960s, which allegedly led to the Soviet pre-occupation with Egypt and may have had something to do with the 1967 MiddleEast War. The distinction between ordinary perception of threat and a paranoidor paranoiac perception of threat no doubt can be determined clinically, but inreal life it may not matter: Soviet behavior was dictated by culturally cued per-ceptions, not the objective reality of the international arena. This was illustrat-ed most recently with the revelations that many in the Brezhnev entourage wereabsolutely, genuinely, honestly convinced that Ronald Reagan was going tolaunch a war against the Soviet Union.41 This led to a military buildup and theattempt during the 1980s to revitalize the third service-class revolution, whichhelped to bankrupt the USSR.

It is my impression that the Soviet service class, and especially the nomen-klatura, was rather relaxed in the second half of the 1930s, and again especiallyafter the successful conclusion of World War II (which left much of the USSRdestroyed and approximately twenty-six million Soviets dead). Like the serviceelite in the two previous service-class revolutions, Stalins service class, thenomenklatura, rapidly degenerated.42 Perpetual diligence and vigilance probablycannot be demanded from anyone for very long, much less from one generation

40. The literature on the role of the USSR in World War II is enormous. One of the classic worksis John Ericksons two-volume The Road to Stalingrad/The Road to Berlin: Stalins War withGermany (New York: Harper & Row, 19751983).

41. Bruce Kennedy, War games. Soviets, fearing Western attack, prepared for worst in '83(http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/22/, accessed 10/28/2005)

42. Vera S. Dunham, In Stalins Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 1990).

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to the next. Moreover, after a while the rhetoric of sacrifice for the future beginsto sound hollow when the promised future never comes and individuals begin towonder why the infinitely receding utopia has greater moral claims than does thepresent. Signs of degeneration, of an ardor for privilege and luxury, were alreadypresent in the later 1930s, after the rigors and horrors of the First Five Year Plan.Although traditional Bolshevik ascetics such as the notorious Lazar Kaganovichdied in 1991 with only three suits to his name, on the whole the nomenklaturaevolved into Milovan Djilass New Class.

I witnessed this degeneration myself, as the following anecdote should illus-trate. When I lived in the USSR for fifty-four weeks between September 1963and October 1964, typically there were queues for certain commodities, espe-cially bread in early 1964 after the magnitude of the crop failure of 1963 becameevident and before the Soviet Union resolved to buy grain from America.Occasionally someone would try to break into the line, the shout Observe thequeue, comrade! would go up, and the violator would immediately go to the endof the line. When I was in Moscow during the abortive coup attempt in August1991, the queues were still present as everything was in short supply. Upon oneoccasion there was a line of at least twenty-five people waiting to buy newspa-pers at a kiosk. A man in a suit drove up in front of the kiosk, went to the headof the line, bought his newspapers, and drove off. No one said a word. Obviouslythe Muscovites had become accustomed to those in suits driving automobileshaving privilege, and felt it was useless to say anything.

In my opinion, N. S. Khrushchev, a believer in socialism and impending com-munism, in certain respects provided a major obstacle to the perpetuation of thethird service-class revolution. In his 1956 Secret Speech he spoke out againstsome of the grotesque atrocities of the Stalin regime. But he did not criticizeindustrialization and collectivization, Stalins two major projects.43 He also didnot speak against the privileged service class, but his actions at times spoke loud-er than words. In a more egalitarian, socialist spirit, he ceased construction ofthe luxurious Stalinist apartments and replaced them with the notoriouskhrushchevki/khrushcheby (Khrushchev apartment buildings/slums), totallymonotonous five-story box-buildings put up to ease the acute housing shortage.On the other hand, he did not put an end to the non-egalitarian Kremlin stores,where the elite could buy imported turkeys and prunes while the masses had tolive on rye bread and mannaia kasha (something akin to farina). These elementsillustrate the dilemma of the Khrushchev era: Khrushchevs belief that in twentyyears the USSR would overtake and surpass the advanced capitalist countriesrequired military preparedness to assure that the declining capitalist states wouldnot spoil the socialist/communist future by launching a preventive war, but beliefin socialism required a lessening of the privileges of the service class. The trou-ble was that Khrushchev could not figure out how to maintain military pre-paredness without relying on the privileged service class. Brezhnev, on the otherhand, was more Stalinist (foreign caricatures had him sporting a Stalin-type

43. Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, The Crimes of the Stalin Era (New York: The New Leader,1962).


moustache), less egalitarian, and breathed new life into the third service-classrevolution.

The reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the third serv-ice-class revolution have been commented on endlessly. However one rank-orders the reasons for the collapse of the Communist system and the demise ofthe USSR, the total loss of belief in the system, in the raison dtre of the thirdservice-class revolution, must be near the top. It was obvious in the later 1980sthat there was no real threat to Russia, that the service class and the entire sys-tem were totally anachronistic and corrupt, and that the Soviet system had lostall semblance of legitimacyno one believed in it anymore. When the pushcame in 1989, the Bloc disintegrated and no one was willing to shed blood tokeep it. By 1991 not only was the monopoly of the Communist Party abolished,but the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist on Christmas Day, 1991, a present bothto the Soviet people and the rest of mankind.

Certain features of the collapse are worth a few additional words. TatianaZaslavskaia, the Novosibirsk economist-sociologist, made the most importantobservation in her famous Paper for a Moscow Seminar. In that 1983 work, forwhich she was disgraced and temporarily pushed off the public stage,Zaslavskaia noted that the third service-class revolution (my term, not hers, ofcourse) with its militarized central planning had made the Soviet population intoa nation of slaves (my term, not hers), with the typical features of slaves as his-torically known. The Stalinist system deprived the Soviet people of all volitionand turned them into a nation of listless, leisure-seeking alcoholics.44 As theSoviet interview project directed by James Millar discovered, the incentivelessSoviet people after about 1969 went to work to associate with their friends, notto produce anything.45 Thus it was not surprising that the Soviet economy wasstagnating as the annual rate of growth of the economy declined from six percentin the 1960s to two percent in the 1980s to negative in 1990, that the economyhad lost the dynamism that had legitimized the system even after the foreignthreats had been eliminated.46

Two major intellectual constructs helped to legitimize the early Soviet system.One was scientific socialism, the notion that a nations economy could be cen-trally planned and directed more efficiently than market capitalism could per-form the task. The other major idea was of the New Soviet Man, that theSoviet socialist system would create a new type of human being superior to any-thing homo sapiens had heretofore known. The appearance of the New SovietMan depended on the realization of the centrally planned economy.47 Two inter-national conferences of Soviet-bloc economists held in 1987 and 1989 in Sofia,

44. Tatiana Zaslavskaia, Paper for a Moscow Seminar, April 1983. Commentary by IgorBirman. N.P.

45. Politics, Work, and Daily Life in the USSR: A Survey of Former Soviet Citizens, ed. James R.Millar (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

46. Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR 19171991. New and Final Edition (New York:Penguin Books, 1992), 371, 399.

47. The early Stalinist dogma about the New Soviet Man is perhaps best spelled out in a set ofeleven pamphlets under the general title Tvoi moralnyi kopeks published by Molodaia grvardiia in1963.

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Bulgaria, concluded that no matter how much tinkering was done, the centrallyplanned economy could not be made to work as an efficient system.48 This had amajor impact on Gorbachevs reforms during his 19851991 tenure.Zaslavskaias critique laid to rest the other Soviet article of faith, that Sovietsocialism would produce a New Soviet Man, for she showed that socialismproduced not an ideal type of homo sapiens, but a dependent alcoholic com-pletely lacking in initiative and disinclined to work. Gorbachev also knew ofZaslavskaias research, but what impact it had on him is unknown.

Other factors also contributed to the delegitimization of the Soviet system, theproduct of the third service-class revolution. The Chernobyl nuclear plant melt-down, which revealed that Soviet science was not as first-rate as people hadbelieved, also showed that the reformed Soviet government was as willing as itspredecessors to lie to and deceive its own people. Chernobyl revealed once againthat the Soviet service-class state regarded its subjects as fodder for its power anddid not care how many of them were destroyed by the nuclear fallout. TheAmerican 100-hour war against Iraq was another important factor. Soviet gener-als, at the top of the service class and presumably major supporters and certain-ly beneficiaries of the Soviet system, realized that the Soviet system was hope-lessly backward and could not be redeemed. The exhaustion of the Samotlor oilfield was still another major factor: it revealed the accuracy of the CIAs predic-tions about the Soviet oil industry, showed the incompetence of the industrysmanagement (which squandered resources, extracting only forty percent of therecoverable reserves), and deprived the USSR of its sole advantage over capital-isman inexhaustible supply of extraordinarily cheap energy supplied by theMoscow central planners at two percent of world market price.

The third service-class revolution was officially ended by the abolition of theCPSUs monopoly of power in September 1991. The pain of the ending of thethird service-class revolution was greatly eased by the notorious nomenklaturaprivatization, which led to the ensuing infamous Russian kleptocracy. A some-what similar phenomenon was observable at the expiration of the first service-class revolution: roughly the same people/families were running Russia in 1715as had been in 1699. There was considerably less continuity with the old tsaristservice class if one takes the dates 1916 and 1930, but that was the result of thefanatic persecution of capitalists and the bourgeoisie and their death or flightin the early years under Lenin. Stalin, on the other hand, despite his notoriousshow trials of engineers, typically was willing to put almost any remainingRussian or imported bourgeois specialist to work as long as he was willing tocollaborate in the building of the new Soviet Union, that is, in the third service-class revolution.49 Not accidentally, some migrs, such as the historian R. Iu.Vipper, returned after Stalin had taken over because they viewed his regime ascontinuing that of the tsars. This change of heart was facilitated by the abandon-

48. O novo teoreticheskom videnii sotsializma: Dlia sluzhebnogo polzovaniia, ed. OgnianShentov (Sofia: Jusautor, 1987). My copy is numbered 134. Shentov, Modeli sotsializma: Istoriiai sovremennost (Sofia: Jusautor, 1989).

49. I am aware of the Shakhty Trial of 1929, the phenomenon of spets-bashing, and the depor-tation of the kulaksall of which ran against the grain of the third service-class revolution.


ment of the internationalism of the dean of Soviet historians, M. N. Pokrovskii,the purge of his followers, and the restoration of the study of Russian historyunder the direction of B. D. Grekov, M. N. Bakhrushin, and others, who were sovalued for their work that they were never required to join the Communist Party(and, incidentally, escaped the Great Purge).50

As already mentioned, intellectual life was frequently directed against the stateafter the suppression of the Decembrist uprising in 1825 and even to some extentafter 1917. The poets Maiakovskii, Blok, and a handful of other intellectuals sup-ported the Bolshevik revolution, but most of them opposed Leninism and asmany as could emigrated to Paris, Berlin, Prague, Belgrade, Harbin, and otherEurasian centers, even to America. Those who remained in the USSR found the1920s to be the freest period in Russian history for most intellectual experimen-tation, but the third service-class revolution put an end to such freedom. Thanksto many factors, intellectuals, learning, culture, and the arts were generallyrespected even after 1928 and were compensated handsomely, and Stalinexpressed the fact that intellectuals, scientists, and artists were important mem-bers of the service class by commenting that they were in uniform. In gratitudefor their high compensation, these people were expected not only to toe theParty line, but to advance it with enthusiasm. The result was that the arts near-ly died, for socialist realism (not the way life is, but should be) proved to beincompatible both with spontaneous artistic creativity and the creation of any-thing that would provide genuine aesthetic gratification. Certainly not acciden-tally, the Stalin era in the high-cultural sphere proved to be much like the eras ofIvan IV and Peter the Great at the crucial moments in their service-class revolu-tionsan ice age. It is hardly coincidental that all three eras were the threemajor low points for written culture since 1500 in Russia, although the specificreasons were different in each case. Similarly, it is probably not accidental thatinteresting and aesthetically pleasing music was composed in all three eras.Ivans reign witnessed creative additions to the traditional znamennyi chantchurch music, Peters reign saw new Russian additions to the recently borrowedBaroque style music that replaced the old church music, and Stalins era evokedthe creativity of Prokofev, Shostakovich, and others. This lends credence to thegeneralization that, when expression in words in Russia is too dangerous, a cre-ative outlet may be found in music.

Perhaps the basic principle of the service-class revolutions was that anybodywas welcome to serve who was willing to collaborate. This was particularlyimportant in the multinational Russian/Soviet empires. Ideally, anybody couldcome to Moscow not only from the empire, but from practically anywhere elseon earth, sign up, work to the best of his or her ability in the service class, andbe rewarded accordingly. Thus the first and second service-class revolutions wel-comed collaborating Tatars, other national minorities of the Russian Empire, andmercenaries from all of Europe. This was greatly facilitated in Muscovy by thesystem of places (mestnichestvo) in which important newcomers were placedat the top of the precedence system (according to which men were seated at the

50. A. A. Chernobaev, Istoriki Rossii dvadtsatogo veka: Biobibliograficheskii slovar (Saratov:Saratovskii universitet, 2005).

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sovereigns table, participated in diplomatic receptions, and commanded the cav-alry regiments); their offspring started lower in the hierarchy, and were promot-ed on the basis of service.51 Jews were about the sole exception to the generalwelcome accorded meritorious non-Russians, but here one must remember thatJews who were willing to convert were welcome too, be it Peter the GreatsForeign Minister Shafirov or even those who served under Nicholas I. Becauseof their general exclusion after the Partitions of Poland and its partial incorpora-tion into the Russian Empire (the other parts went to Austria and Prussia), Jewshad a special hatred for tsarism and many of the Bolsheviks were Jewish. Stalinemployed large numbers of Jews, along with others willing to collaborate in thethird service-class revolution. Those times when national origin automaticallyexcluded people from participation in the service class can only be described asperiods of the most profound degeneration, such as after 1881 and during thereign of N. S. Khrushchev. There were periods when Stalin seemed anti-Semitic,but they were connected with paranoid episodes.52

A last word must be said about the writers, who have played such an impor-tant role throughout modern Russian history. As mentioned above, with fewexceptions literature was dead (frozen) during the Stalin era. Shortly afterStalins death the role and quality of literature was commented upon extensivelyin the period known as The Thaw. Most of the Thaw literature was reformistand only critical of the excesses of Stalinism, much in accord with N. S.Khrushchevs Secret Speech to the Central Committee in 1956. The holiesof industrialization and collectivization remained unscathed. The real subver-sion was initiated by the group that came to be known as the village/rural writ-ers (derevenshchiki), who criticized especially the consequences of collec-tivization (the peasants had become largely underemployed drunks living inKhrushchevs agro-cities, which abolished and consolidated the traditionalpeasant villages and forced peasants to live in urban-style apartment buildingsmiles from their fieldsmuch of which adumbrated Zaslavskaias critique ofSoviet socialism), but the patent distortions of Soviet urbanization, electrifica-tion, and industrialization did not escape unscathed either.53 Once again the func-tion of literature had flip-flopped, from praising and legitimizing the regime tocriticizing and undermining it. This, along with Khrushchevs blatant anti-Semitism (his purging of Kaganovichthe last Jew in the Soviet ruling circlesmade every Soviet anti-Semite jump for joy), stimulated the dissident andrefusenik movements, which were suppressed by a combination of jailings,

51. Iu. M. Eskin, Mestnichestvo v Rossii XVI-XVII vv.: Khronologicheskii reestr (Moscow:Arkheograficheskii tsentr, 1994); Ann M. Kleimola, Status, Place, and Politics: The Rise of Mestni-

chestvo during the Boiarskoe Pravlenie, Forschungen zur Osteuropaischen Geschichte 27(1980), 195-214.

52. Zhores Medvedev, Stalin i evreiskaia problema. Novyi analiz (Moscow: Prava Cheloveka,2003), 92. Medvedev says that Stalin was guilty of anti-Zionism, not Judo-phobia.

53. The village/rural writers encompassed at least a dozen authors, of whom the most noteworthywere Vasilii Belov, Aleksandr Yashin, Vladimir Soloukhin, Valentin Rasputin, Vladimir Tendriakov,and Vasilii Shukshin. Perhaps the most accessible work is Rasputins 1976 novel, Farewell toMatyora, transl. A. W. Bouis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991). This villageprose is usually distinguished from the kolkhoz/collective farm prose. The authors of the formerwere usually of rural origin, the latter of urban origin.

forced incarceration in mental institutions (psikhushkithe worst of all thepenalties meted out to dissidents), exile, forced labor, and involuntary/forced andpermitted emigration. Here one might note that involuntary emigration is a con-stant of Russian history. The abuse of psychiatry also was not invented by theSoviets. The first notorious case was that of Peter Chaadaev in the reign ofNicholas I. Chekhov wrote a short story about psychiatric abuse, Ward No. 6.But as with many other features of the Russian service-class state, it took theSoviets to perfect psychiatric abuse. They even had an ideological motivation forsuch action: when a dissident was arrested, nearly the first stop was the psychi-atrists office, for anyone who failed to comprehend that the Soviet Union wasthe agent of historical progress was patently insane. The combination of psychi-atric abuse and emigration worked, so that literature (as a means of dissent, aswell as dissent itself) was crushed by the end of Brezhnevs era and essentiallywas never revived. The death of literature was lamented during Gorbachevstenure and after 1991, but its critical role had been replaced largely by normaljournalism. Putin, the heir of the Soviet service state, has repressed critical tele-vision journalism and is doing his best to repress normal print journalism aswell, but has not totally succeeded by autumn 2005.

The service-class revolution rubric cannot explain everything that happened inRussia in the past 500 years, but it certainly explains more than anything else.The cradle of the first Russian imperial state is located in a place with a poor sur-face endowment (for agriculture) and subsurface endowment (for useful miner-als). Materially the state is poor and weak. Over the past half-millennium per-ceptions of foreign military threat have provoked the comparatively weak statepower to mobilize all of its resources to combat the foreign threat. This led to arestructuring of governmental personnel, binding the rest of society into castesuseful to the government, and the channeling of whatever resources (natural andhuman) that were available into the hands of rulers of the garrison state.Among those resources were the institutions of law, religion, the RussianOrthodox Church and its dogma, and the Communist Party and its dogma.Literature, the arts, and even science and sport were perceived as useful to theservice state, and increasingly supported by the state. One might have expectedsuch structures to disappear once the emergencies had passed, but they persisted.The privileges of the service class were the fuel that motivated the elite to legit-imize and perpetuate themselves. But one great paradox contributed to the undo-ing of the service state. The rulers of the state or enlightened members of theservice class itself perceived that the system they had inherited was backward,that backwardness could only be overcome by education, and that educationshould be expanded as much as possible. Depending on the era, however, muchof basic education created problems for the service state. At first it was individ-ualism of the Western Baroque and other ideas that were incompatible with thecaste society of the Ulozhenie of 1649. Then came ideas of the Enlightenmentthat were incompatible with the realities of autocracy and serfdom. Finally,Western ideas of freedom were incompatible with totalitarianism and service-


state privilege. In a path-dependent fashion, these ideas culminated during the1980s with the realization that the foreign threat was minimal and that the insti-tutions created to cope with it were harmful because they made the populationdependent on the state, destroyed initiative, and produced backwardness relativeto freer, developed states. Ultimately the no-longer-functional but still privilegedservice class degenerated, and took the entire system down with it as the servicestate collapsed. One could speculate whether there will be a fourth service-classrevolution. Either Chinese expansion into Siberia or NATO might provide theperceived threat for mobilization. But before such a course is embarked upon, Iwould hope that Russian leaders would heed Zaslavskaias warning that an edu-cated populace cannot be coerced into a service-class mold.

University of Chicago

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