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,” Moscow’s annexation of northwest Russia, formerly controlled by Novgorod, and the introduction of a new method for
financing the cavalry—the core of a new service class. The cavalry had to hold off formidable adversaries (first Lithuania, then the Crimean Tatars, then the Livonians, the
Poles, the Swedes, and the Ottomans) for Muscovy to retain its independence. Russia in
1480 was a poor country lacking subsurface mineral resources and with a very poor climate and soil for the support of agriculture. These basic problems inspired autocratic
power and by 1515 an ideology was in place justifying it. Religion, literature, and law
were employed to support the autocracy. A variant of a caste society was created to support the army. This made up the substance of the first service-class revolution in which all
resources (human and intellectual) were mobilized to support a garrison state. After 1667
the external threats to Muscovy diminished, but the service class kept its privileges, especially the land fund and the peasant-serfs.
Russia faced major foreign threats again in 1700 and in the 1920s and 1930s. Those
threats precipitated the second and third service-class revolutions. The second and third
service-class revolutions broadly paralleled the first. Reinvigorated service classes were
created with state institutions to support them. As society became more complex, so did
the service classes and their privileges. Ideologies (Russian Orthodoxy and then MarxismLeninism) were converted into devices to support the infallible autocratic ruler and his
elites. Almost the entire population was bound to state service, either directly, working to
support the service state, or paying taxes. The church and clergy were harnessed first by
Peter’s Holy Synod and then Stalin’s Department 5 of the Secret Police after he revived
the church during World War II. Writers and artists were also put into uniform, until they
finally rebelled—but the arts retained their civic functions, first supporting the regime, and
then criticizing it. Finally, law retained its traditional programmatic functions in regimes
themselves beholden to no law. As the foreign threats diminished, the service classes lost
their function, but the elite servicemen kept their privileges as the service states disintegrated and the service classes lost their collective élan. 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 most
easily as a process of adaptation to perceived threats in Russia’s international
relations, a process marked by three service-class revolutions, each of which was
a response to those perceived threats. Russian elites militarized, mobilized, and

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regulated the state’s resources, starting with their own personnel (the service
class itself) and ending with the peasantry (enserfment). Many other assets were
usurped to serve the state’s perceived needs, ranging from land and other
resources to parts of revenue flows (taxes). Although Russian religious culture
had its origins in borrowings and adaptations from Byzantium and especially
Byzantine Orthodoxy, at the beginning of the sixteenth century it too was put in
state harness—with a distinctive Russian coloration. The Orthodox Church was
nearly always the handmaid of the state, from the time of its installation in 988
by the state down to 1991, when it was run by Department Z of the KGB, but the
subservience of organized religion to the state was enhanced after 1480 by the
willingness of the state to put to death any clergyman who dared express an independent mind. Again, during this period, law was perverted from its ordinary
roles of resolving conflicts and generating revenue for officialdom to a device of
social control and mobilization. Lastly, as is well known, down to 1985–1991,
literature and other aspects of secular intellectual life remained under state sponsorship or censorship or became critical and oppositional. Except for the brief
period 1909–1914, intellectual and artistic neutrality were frowned upon either
by the state or its opposition. However, each service-class revolution lost its
vitality, and degenerated when, in the absence of significant external threats, the
Russian/Soviet state coasted along. In those circumstances the service classes’
privileges were not balanced by their value to the state.
The repetition of service-class revolutions and the channeling of resources into
a garrison state is perhaps the most striking pattern in modern Russia history.
Service-class revolutions occurred three times over roughly 450 years. The causation of this repetition has not been worked out fully, but certainly two factors
were uppermost: first, resources were scarce in a comparatively poor, “backward
country”—those resources that might have been mobilized in a more “normal”
way were simply inadequate to meet the perceived threats; second, once the service-class solution to the issue of inadequacies had been successfully tried, subsequent leaders’ threat perceptions convinced them that initiation of a new service-class revolution was the easiest solution to the problem of saving Russia from
destruction. The fact that the Russians took similar actions to respond to perceived threats three times seems to be a perfect example of path dependency.1
Path dependency can be summarized as having success in solving one problem
and then trying to solve a similar problem in a similar way. The same is true of
the other major elements of the past half-millennium of Russian history: the creation of autocracy and a rigidly, legally stratified society; the harnessing of the
church; the use of law; and the employment and coercion of literature and other
elements of high culture.
A few introductory remarks should be made about the issues of race/nationality/ethnicity and religion. When in the sixth to ninth centuries CE the Eastern
Slavs migrated eastward into Ukraine, the Novgorod region (northwest Russia),
and ultimately in the tenth to eleventh centuries into the Volga-Oka Mesopotamia
1. S. J. Liebowitz, “Path Dependence, Lock-In, and History” Journal of Law, Economics, and
Organization 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 ethnic groups. The indigenous populations were Iranian (in the south) and Baltic
and Finnish (in the north). Vladimir’s “pagan pantheon” of 980 was an attempt
to integrate all those people (plus the Varangian/Viking/Swedish ruling elite after
882) into one state.2 From an early date the Eastern Slavs also had extensive contacts with various Turkic peoples of the steppe; these Turks played an extensive
role in domestic East Slavic/Russian/Rus’ian politics, and added much vocabulary and many family names to the “Russian” language.3 Thus “ethnic” tolerance
has been an issue in Russia from the very beginning, and Russian elites, themselves multiethnic, usually have been noted for toleration of ethnic and language
differences whenever new ethnic groups were added to the “Russian Empire,”
both in the west and the east. Religion, however, has provided a host of major
problems. In many respects, it is unfortunate that the 980 syncretic attempt to
create a pagan pantheon did not work. As is well known, in 988 Christianity was
adopted instead. Articles 17, 33, 49, and 51 of Iaroslav’s Church Statute limited
relations with Muslims, Jews, pagans, and non-Orthodox foreigners, and set up
the enduring standard that Orthodoxy was the sole legitimate religion.4 This, of
course, placed considerable roadblocks in the way of religious minorities and
limits on inclusion in the service classes.
II. THE FIRST SERVICE-CLASS REVOLUTION

The first service-class revolution commenced around 1480, when Moscow
annexed 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 the
land to cavalrymen who rendered lifetime service to the government in exchange
for lifetime receipt of traditional rent flows from a specific plot of land farmed
by peasants. Some of the cavalrymen assigned to the Novgorod lands had been
slaves. This initiated the tradition that membership in the service class depended
only on service, not social origin or ethnicity. The system initiated in Novgorod
was called the pomest’e system, after the name for the type of land granted. The
pomest’e (the term is extant from 1483–1484) bore some resemblance to the
Byzantine pronoia and the Persian ikhta, but was fundamentally a Muscovite
innovation. The cavalrymen-landholders were called pomeshchiki. They became
the core of the service class. The process of converting nearly all of Muscovy’s
populated land fund in the Volga-Oka Mesopotamia and Novgorod regions into
a military funding mechanism was fully completed by legislation of 1556 requiring all possessors of land (but not the peasants, who paid rent and taxes) to render military service from their lands. Moreover, a similar requirement was
extended 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 Rus’—Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries, transl. and ed. Daniel H. Kaiser (Salt Lake
City: Charles Schlacks, Publisher, 1992), 47-49.

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chased, or otherwise acquired property (votchina) that was fully theirs and which
they 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 possessions
were located only a few miles from Moscow. At the beginning of the sixteenth
century the Muscovites delivered a number of severe defeats to the Lithuanians.
The Lithuanian threat was replaced by that of the Crimean Tatars, who burned
Moscow in 1571 and its suburbs in 1591 and carried off tens of thousands of
Russians into slavery, either to be ransomed back by the Muscovites or sold into
the international slave trade. (About ninety percent of the victims of such slave
raids died, either during the initial Crimean attack or while they were being carried to Kefe.) During the Time of Troubles (variously dated 1598–1613 to
1584–1618), Muscovy was nearly dismembered when the Poles seized and
burned Moscow in 1611 and the Swedes grabbed Novgorod and its environs until
the Stolbovo peace treaty of 1618. Throughout the rest of the seventeenth century, Muscovy was at war almost continuously with the Tatars, the Ottomans, the
Poles, and the Swedes. The 800-mile-long Belgorod Fortified Line (constructed
in the years 1636–1654) kept the Tatar predators out of the Muscovite heartland,
and Muscovy’s wars in the rest of the century were fought on its frontiers.
In Muscovite conditions, the pomest’e system made a great deal of sense, for
natural support of the army (direct support of cavalrymen by their peasants)
bypassed the traditional avaricious tax collectors who are typically assumed to
have siphoned off half of what they collected for their own and other bureaucrats’ support. Thus the pomest’e system efficiently maximized the size of the
major segment of the Muscovite military machine, the bow-and-arrow firing cavalry. Elite members of the government were also assigned landholdings for part
of their compensation and thus they were also members of the service class. As
had been the case in Novgorod, membership in the service class was defined by
loyal and efficient service, not social, political, or ethnic origin. As Muscovy
expanded, servitors who had worked for Moscow’s rivals were added to the
Moscow service class and promoted on the basis of meritorious service. The
same was true for non-Slavs, such as various Turkic peoples, who were also welcomed into the Moscow service class.
The fundamental weakness of this system was that it depended crucially on
peasant acquiescence and continuous residence. The cavalryman whose peasant
rent-payers moved somewhere else soon found himself unable to render military
service. 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 of
this is repeated in John L. H. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462–1874
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
6. This might more realistically be expressed in terms of whether the tax collector could find any
member of the peasant community in which the peasant lived, for taxes were assessed collectively
and those present had to pay everyone’s share. Thus if some villagers ran into the woods when the
tax collector came around, those who did not flee were liable for everyone’s obligations. Moreover,
the tax collector felt no compunction against seizing all assets in sight until what was due had been
collected, either in cash or in kind. This system of collective responsibility was a major, almost-continuous 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 nearly
its first century the pomest’e system worked. The peasant population expanded
and with it the three-field system. But the disasters of the most paranoid period
of Ivan the Terrible’s later reign (the Livonian War [1558–1583] with its high
taxes, crop failures, and increased disease, and the catastrophic Oprichnina
[1565–1572]) forced the peasantry to flee the Volga-Oka and Novgorodian
regions for areas north of the Volga, south of the Oka into the steppe, south along
the Volga after the annexation of Kazan’ and Astrakhan’, and eastward across the
Volga in the direction of the Urals and Siberia after the conquest of Kazan’.
Moreover, as population density in the Muscovite homeland itself was relatively
low, free land was still available, and as the peasants began to disperse, other
landlords were always in search of and welcomed other lords’ peasants to farm
their estates. In response to the perceived labor shortage, members of the cavalry asked the government to forbid peasants to move on St. George’s Day in the
autumn (November 26), which it did selectively in the 1580s and then for all
peasants in 1592. These years were known as the Forbidden Years, which were
supposed to have been temporary, but in reality lasted until 1906. The peasants
bound to specific plots of land became serfs.7
The Russian institution of serfdom was possible for many reasons. One was
the 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 the
oppressed could appeal. A third was the age-old indigenous tradition of slavery
in which many of the slaves were East Slavs/Russians who sold themselves into
slavery (contrary to the general rule that a slave is an “outsider” in reality or at
least by legal fiction).8 Thus it became very easy for the Russians to abase their
own peasants, often on the model of Russian slaves. The general absence of
human rights has been a tradition in Russia for half a millennium, and frequently the government took advantage of this for its own purposes. Visiting foreigners were always appalled by the fact that even members of the service class had
no rights, something that was best expressed in the fact that like their serfs they
could be flogged (at least until Article 15 of the Charter of the Nobility forbade
it in 1785).9
The Muscovite government geared up to support the crucial service cavalry by
providing it with cash to buy market commodities, such as horses and sabers, as
well as to support the other parts of the army wholly dependent on the treasury’s
cash flow—the handgun-shooting infantry, the artillery, and foreign mercenaries.
The progress of the gunpowder revolution gradually made the bow-and-arrowshooting middle-service-class provincial cavalry obsolescent as it was replaced
by 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 of
Chicago Syllabus Division, 1967 and 1970). The narrative can be found in Hellie, Enserfment.
8. Richard Hellie, Slavery in Russia, 1450–1725 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
See also Hellie, Kholopstvo v Rossii 1450–1725 (Moscow: Academia, 1998).
9. Catherine II’s Charters of 1785 to the Nobility and the Towns, transl. and ed. David Griffiths
and George E. Munro (Bakersfield, CA: Charles Schlacks, Publisher, 1991), 6.

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Secular “intellectual life” hardly existed during the period of the first serviceclass revolution, but debates within the clergy affected the service class. Around
1500 there were a number of major controversies in the church, including one
over succession to the throne of Grand Prince Ivan III. A major player in these
events, the abbot of the Volokolamsk Monastery, Iosif, essentially formulated the
Russian theory of autocracy. He borrowed a theory of rule enunciated by a sixthcentury Byzantine deacon and adviser to Justinian I, Agapetos (often Agapetus),
the most widely read and published Byzantine author after the church fathers in
western and eastern Europe10: “In his person the ruler is a man, but in his authority he is like God.” This defined the authority of the Russian autocrat from the
beginning of the sixteenth century down to 1917. Readers will recognize this as
a 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 equally mythical Marxist historical dialectic. Throughout Russian history autocratic
authority served as the ideological basis for total control of the state and of everything conceived as being in its jurisdiction.
The Ulozhenie (Law Code) of 1649 codified Muscovite society into castes
from which exit was difficult and often impossible. The peasants were bound to
the land, enserfed, thanks to pressure from the middle-service-class cavalry. The
townsmen were bound to their towns in response to their own petitions: the collective system of taxation (primarily to support the army) meant that when someone departed after a census count had been taken, those remaining had to make
up for the taxes not paid by the departees. Because of this, those remaining petitioned the government for the return of the departed to make the tax burden bearable. The Forbidden Years, designed for peasants, beginning in the 1590s but
especially after the Time of Troubles, were applied to all townsmen.11 Most government military servitors were forbidden to leave their castes, and in 1640 government bureaucrats were turned into a separate caste. In 1654 even foreigners
in Muscovite service were converted into a caste. About the only people not
ascribed to a caste were “wanderers” (guliashchie liudi), people not yet registered in governmental documents that would bind them to a specific place and
status, and freedmen—slaves (perhaps five to fifteen percent of the population,
mostly native “Russians,” some of foreign origin) who had been manumitted for
one reason or another.12
The Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667), 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 of
them, and in prolonged captivity for many others. Although the war virtually
wiped 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: The
Townsmen,” Russian History 6, pt. 2 (1979), 119-175.
12. The Ulozhenie (Law Code) of 1649, transl. and ed. Richard Hellie (Irvine, CA: Charles
Schlacks, Publisher, 1988). See also Hellie, Enserfment and Slavery.

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pomest’e lands and serfs. It was probably about that same time that corruption
began to be a way of life in the government bureaucracy. The early Muscovite
governmental bureaucracy had consisted of slaves or their heirs, and they seem
to 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 other
members of the upper service class nominally taking over the command of the
bureaucracy beginning in the years after 1613. The process of corruption was
slow, and made little headway (as far as I can tell) until the end of the reign of
Peter the Great, who accelerated it when he neglected to pay many government
officials.13
Contact with the West hastened the evolution of the service class. The notion
that individuals existed, that not all people were part of an amorphous mass,
began to appear in the seventeenth century. The Thirteen Years’ War accelerated
Westernization, and with it individualization in literature and art. This undermined the stratified society codified in the Ulozhenie, and signaled the loss of
integrity of the state’s service system.14 Similar social differentiation and individualization appeared when the second and third service-class revolutions were
losing their élan and raison d’être.
In this condition Russia coasted through a number of campaigns at the end of
the seventeenth century against the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Khanate
(although losing those of 1687, 1689, and 1695) until capturing Azov in 1696. In
comparison with the Ottomans, however, the Swedes under Charles XII were an
adversary with a much higher level of military skill. In a battle at Narva in 1700
the young Charles XII decisively defeated the young Peter I (to be “the Great”).
Charles decided to take on Russia seriously, especially after Peter began constructing St. Petersburg in the mouth of the Gulf of Finland in 1703, and arrogantly apportioned the to-be-conquered Russia among his governors-to-be of
Russia.
III. THE SECOND SERVICE-CLASS REVOLUTION

The perception that Sweden genuinely threatened Russia forced the Russians to
launch 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 threat
strengthened the rationale of the old pomest’e system and serfdom as supports of
the revitalizing service class. But Peter went much further. In an attempt to cope
with perceived technological (especially military) backwardness (otstalost’, a
major word in the Russian vocabulary), nearly all Muscovite rulers from Ivan III,
Ivan IV, and Boris Godunov to Tsars Mikhail and Aleksei had recruited foreign
mercenaries, but Peter made a quantum leap in this respect to the point that a
large portion of his officer corps consisted of foreigners. Their task was to trans13. 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: Berkeley
Slavic Specialties, 1995), 116-128.

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form the semi-regular army of Muscovy into a modern standing army equal to
the best on the European continent.15 To the surprise of many, and especially
Charles XII when he was defeated at Poltava in 1709 and also in the naval battle at Hanko in 1714, the second service-class revolution was a success.16
Sweden lost the Northern War (1700–1721), an outcome that was foreseeable at
least as early as 1715, and lost its hegemonic position in much of northern
Europe. To support the new imperial army, Peter reformed the government, conducted new censuses, and changed the tax system. The 1722 Table of Ranks formalized the hierarchy of the new service class and made it clear, as it had been
in Muscovy, that social status depended on meritorious service. As always, promotion in service was open to those willing to put in the effort. That ethnicity
was not an obstacle to promotion in the service class is evident in the fact that
Peter’s foreign minister Shafirov was of Jewish origin.
Under Peter, the system of serfdom began to change. Peasants, once bound to
the land, were now bound to the persons of their masters, so that by the end of
the eighteenth century the serf system differed very little from many systems of
slavery. In this context, one might mention that peasants had been drafted into
the army during the Thirteen Years’ War and that this system was reinvigorated
by Peter, whose new armies needed far more manpower than the landholding
cavalry could provide. Their service was another form of slavery, not unlike the
lifetime service required of the pomeshchiki. The peasant draftees were infantrymen, not members of the service class. The abuse of Soviet and post-Soviet soldiers, the notorious dedovshchina, was foretold by the treatment of draftee
recruits in the eighteenth-century Russian army.
Life in any of the service classes was arduous, typically lifelong, with modest
benefits to its members. But when the military threats and associated expenses
diminished, members of the service classes tried to improve their conditions. In
Muscovy this had involved two major issues: converting the service landholdings into something resembling hereditary estates (in the sense that they could be
passed to heirs, not that they could be sold or otherwise alienated), and converting the free peasantry into serfs. The same pressures persisted in the eighteenth
century, particularly after the death of Peter the Great and the lessening of foreign military threats. On the issue of the land, the pomest’e was officially converted into a votchina in 1714 in the law on primogeniture and it became immovable 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, and
then in 1762 the service requirement for the gentry was abolished completely.
There has been a major historiographical debate over Peter III’s 1762 action: was
it a governmental concession to pressure by a powerful gentry on a weak tsar, or
was it a declaration of independence by a Germanophilic ruler who knew that he
could do without the military services of some of his Russian subjects but that
lack of income would force enough of them to serve so that the army’s strength
15. Richard Hellie, “The Petrine Army: Continuity, Change, and Impact,” Canadian-American
Slavic 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 that
the “gentry ideal” described in Sergei Aksakov’s Family Chronicle persisted
from 1762 to 1874; in brief: begin serving around age fifteen, marry around age
twenty-six, retire from service, and lead a pleasant life.18 Because many members of the gentry lacked the independent means to support the desired, increasingly Westernized, “pleasant life” without a government salary, most were forced
to serve the state (typically in the army, others in the navy or government bureaucracy) for decades.
This “pleasant life,” of course, was dependent upon continued possession by
the gentry of most of Russia’s inhabited land and the serfs working it. Even so,
the condition of the serfs continued to deteriorate throughout the eighteenth century. The list of laws degrading the peasantry is long, but the following give some
flavor 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, factory owners were permitted to enserf a free man by sending a substitute to the
army, without the worker’s consent. In 1760 lords were allowed to exile recalcitrant serfs to Siberia, and then in 1765 they could send them to forced labor projects—and get military recruit credit for their dispatched chattel. In 1767 a serf
who petitioned against his master could be exiled by the lord to the mines in
Nerchinsk, which presumably was a death sentence. By 1796 the condition of
seignorial serfs differed little from that of slaves.19 In 1796, Emperor Paul,
repelled by his mother Catherine’s having given away 800,000 state serfs to private owners, many of whom rendered no service, at least nominally limited serf
corvée labor on their lords’ estates to three days per week and forbade it on
Sunday. (He had much less success in his attempts to restore the Petrine service
state.) From 1797 to 1906, serfdom as an institution suffered one reversal after
another until it was finally abolished—but only until it was again restored by the
Soviets. (Here we should note that although in 1861 Alexander II emancipated
the peasants/serfs from the slave-like control of their owners, he did not restore
their right to move freely wherever they wanted. The “Emancipation” instead
bound the peasants to their commune and thus hardly differed in reality from the
Ulozhenie of 1649, which bound peasants to the land.20)
Reforms from above and Destabilization
The Petrine era was so preoccupied by military events and governmental and
social “reforms” that most “intellectual life” simply died. Under Enlightenment
influence, Peter the Great expanded the pre-1689 practice of explaining edicts,
17. Marc Raeff, “The Domestic Policies of Peter III and His Overthrow,” American Historical
Review 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,” in
European Aristocracies and Colonial Elites: Patrimonial Management Strategies and Economic
Development, 15th–18th 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.

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but aside from that, little evidence of “original thought” survives from the Petrine
era. Prior to 1700 the little that was written existed to advance the didactic mission of the Orthodox Church and to effect government programs via legislation,
with a few other pages penned for the purposes of entertainment and aesthetic
gratification. Peter rather thoroughly secularized Russia, and this trend continues
to the present day. If before 1689 literature had been primarily a vehicle of religious expression, after 1730 it expressed secular trends. Decades after the rest of
Europe, Russia experienced the Baroque, Neoclassicism, Sentimentalism, and
Romanticism. Instead of advancing the interests of the church, literature (especially the Baroque and Neoclassicism, with the latter’s glorification of the state
and rulers) promulgated the interests of the state.21 After the emancipation of the
gentry in 1762, Sentimentalism and Romanticism became vehicles for questioning both the autocracy and the reigning system of serfdom. Alexander
Radishchev, an alienated member of the elite, in his 1790 Journey from St.
Petersburg to Moscow, enraged Empress Catherine the Great with his criticism
of the autocracy and serfdom and thereby initiated the split between the intelligentsia and the regime.22
In the military sphere, Catherine the Great liquidated the age-old scourge of
the Russians, the Crimean Khanate slave raiders, in 1783. This brought Russia
directly into contact with the decaying Ottoman Empire and the Caucasus, which
had been fought over for centuries by the Ottoman Turks, the Persians, and the
Russians. More immediately pressing was the revolutionary France of Napoleon,
who arrogantly believed that Sigismund’s Rzeczpospolita and Charles XII’s
Sweden had been unable to subdue Russia only because they were inadequately
armed. Napoleon’s Grand Army of 600,000 entered Russia in 1812, burned or
provoked the burning of Moscow, and shortly thereafter departed as a rag-tag
band of 50,000. But Russia learned little from the Napoleonic adventure. The
massive destruction was soon repaired and Russian elites affirmed their governmental and social system. Victory in this case was a poorer teacher than defeat
might have been. A second-order consequence of victory, however, was that
Russian soldiers were soon walking the streets of Paris as occupation forces, and
they became infected with “French madness” (Catherine’s term for French
Revolutionary thought), and brought it home with them. When they returned to
Russia these people tried to convince Emperor Alexander I to reform both the
institution of the autocracy and the institution of serfdom and to confer a constitution on Russia.
Alexander had begun his reign in 1801 both as complicit in the murder of his
father Paul and as a reformer, but after 1815 the burden of patricide-regicide
combined with other psychological problems converted him into a reactionary.
The elite officers in the palace guards by 1818 began to realize that they could
not “reach” Alexander with their plans for reform, and so began to conspire
against 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: Harvard
University Press, 1958).

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palace coup in Russia and its first revolution guided by modern ideas, with strong
intellectual roots in both the American and French Revolutions. The uprising was
brutally repressed by Nicholas I, but he kept the summary transcript of the judicial proceedings from the trial of the Decembrists at his bedside throughout his
thirty-year reign and even tried to act on at least some of the Decembrists’
demands. He appointed nine secret commissions to study the issue of serfdom,
and although they did little, their work served as the basis for the “Emancipation”
of 1861.23
The Crimean War (1853–1856) might have been the occasion for another service-class revolution, but it was not—probably because the victors had no territorial designs on Russia and thus were not perceived as a major threat. The defeat
did, however, reveal how backward the Russian system, still based on the twin
pillars of autocracy and serfdom, was relative to industrializing Europe. The
reforms of 1861 through 1874 touched on many serious issues. The “Emancipation” removed the seignorial serfs from the control of their owners and turned
them 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 peasants
bound to their communes had to pay for their freedom over the next forty-nine
years, which had deleterious consequences ranging from making the peasants
hate the regime to seriously retarding the growth of the market by siphoning off
to the state treasury much of what might have been peasant purchasing power.
The redemption payments were cancelled only in 1907.24 Certainly the flawed
“Emancipation” of 1861 did more than anything else to prepare the social cataclysm of 1917.
Other reforms of Alexander II did much to bring Russia into the modern era.25
The local government (zemstvo) reform and the judicial reform of 1864 were
good beginnings. Of the many other reforms, the military reforms of 1874 were
the most central for our story. Among other things, they forced the gentry to render minimal military service for the first time since 1762. The Crimean defeat
had taught the Russians a few lessons, especially in the military sphere. It may
even have been at least partially responsible for the “Emancipation”: the binding
of the serfs to their owners did not permit the creation of a large pool of military
reserves. (Under the old system, discharged soldier draftees were not allowed to
return to their villages for fear that they would foment rebellion against the serf
owners.) But the loss in the Crimean War did not sufficiently teach the rulers
what should have been its major lesson: centralized autocracy and the near total
absence of civil rights were incompatible with modernization.26 Here one should
note that “reforms” initiated by the government “from above” have been another constant for the past half-millennium because very little is allowed to develop
naturally “from below.” The government issued reforms only during perceived
23. W. Bruce Lincoln, “The Genesis of an Enlightened Bureaucracy in Russia, 1825–1856,”
Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 20, no. 3 (1960), 441-458.
24. David Moon, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, 1762–1907 (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.

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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 the
renewal of the revolutionary movement. This led to an expansion and radicalization of the new generation of recruits to the revolutionary movement, most
notably in the revolutionary populist movement of 1874. The evolution of revolutionary populism into terrorism culminated in the assassination of Emperor
Alexander II in 1881. The governmental response during the period of the
reforms, and even more so after 1881, was repression.27 Alexander III successfully suppressed the revolutionary movement, but it revived under Nicholas II
and, in addition to a new generation of revolutionary populists, the regime had to
contend with a Marxist social-democratic party that culminated in Lenin’s
Bolsheviks. Autocratic oppression had prohibited the development of real political parties in Russia, and when World War I led to a collapse of tsarism, the
authoritarian Bolsheviks were best equipped to establish control over the Russian
Empire. A scenario of this sort was sketched before the war in 1914 in a memorandum to Nicholas II by Peter Durnovo, who had learned about Russia’s internal and foreign reality while head of the police. Police prescience is another
recurrent feature of Russian/Soviet history: the chief policeman was often the
most knowledgeable person in the service class.
After 1762 the degenerating heirs of the Petrine service class managed collectively to pass their status and property to their descendants, although by 1861
two-thirds of all they owned was pledged to the government as collateral for
loans. The loans were subtracted from the sums the government paid the gentry
for surrendering ownership of their serfs and some of the land allotted to the
freedmen-serfs. Unable to cope with the post-1861 era, many of the obsolescent
gentry experienced the drama of Chekhov’s great comic play The Cherry
Orchard, in which their assets were sold to outsiders who were not members of
the gentry. The gentry lost control over their serfs in 1861, and the degeneration
of the status of their heirs reached the point by 1914 that they were no longer in
control of the army—indeed, they had fallen from most of their other prior societal commanding social heights as well. This as well opened the road to the
Bolsheviks.
The Evolution of Letters, Religion, and the Law
A few additional words must be said about other subthemes of the
Russian/Soviet service state during the second service-class revolution: literature, the church, and law. The development of Russian literature through
Romanticism has been mentioned. Russian literature tended to have mainly a
civic function. One the one hand, the state tried to control literature to serve its
purposes; on the other, the authors themselves rejected the notion that art should
be created solely for entertainment or aesthetic gratification. The state was conscious of literature’s special role in Russia. Even in the seventeenth century, ped27. Philip Pomper, Peter Lavrov and the Russian Revolutionary Movement (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1972); Venturi Franco, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist
Movements 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 was
able to publish his subversive prose only by ignoring what the censorship had
demanded when he took his (unrevised) manuscript to the printer. After the
Decembrist uprising, Nicholas I imposed a very strict, harsh censorship.28
The response of part of the thinking/writing class was precisely what should
have been expected: rebellion. The leading rebel was the literary critic Vissarion
Belinskii, who at the end of the 1830s laid down the dictum that literature could
only 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 the
task of authors to find ways to criticize the regime, for nothing could be
expressed openly. Literature assumed, among other things, the role of journalism
and opposition politics. This persisted until 1909, when seven authors in the
famous Vekhi (loosely, “Landmarks”) collection insisted that it was possible to
write literature that was both moral and apolitical.29
Law changed little between the 1649 Ulozhenie and the 1830s codification of
the law by Nikolai Speranskii. For that matter, it did not change much until the
1864 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 incompatible 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 evolving popular norms and needs. It thus remained primarily a statement of autocratic 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 1700
than had been the case earlier. Peter helped to assure this by refusing to appoint
another Patriarch after the death of the last one in 1700. He consolidated his control over the church by creating the Holy Synod in 1721 to run the church instead
of the Patriarch. The Holy Synod was just another government bureau, like all
the others, run by a layman.30 This was not as radical as it might appear because
Peter’s father, Tsar Aleksei, had created in the 1649 Ulozhenie (chapter 13) the
Monastery Chancellery, also headed by a layman, who managed all of the
Russian Orthodox Church except for the Patriarchate (which was the subject of
chapter 12 of the Ulozhenie—hardly an expression of church autonomy other
than the obeisance paid in putting the Patriarchate ahead of the Monastery
Chancellery).31 The Petrine clergy were also state servitors who, among other
things, were obliged to report to the state anything that sounded subversive heard
in 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 the
Ulozhenie of 1649,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 25, nos. 1-4 (1991), 179-199.

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the modern period the Imperial Russian Orthodox Church was an object of derision that performed various rituals but otherwise had little in common with what
most thinking contemporaries assumed religion to be about.
In this context it seems almost paradoxical that the Procurator of the Holy
Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev (1880–1905), did more to violate the principles of the service-class state than any other figure in the Imperial Period. A former lawyer, he knew well the low regard in which the Russian Orthodox Church
was held, but most of his measures made the situation even worse. Most importantly, rather than continuing the policies of relative tolerance that had enabled
the Russian service state to function so smoothly for four centuries, he set about
policies of russification (forcing non-Russians to learn Russian and to adopt
Russian culture), conversion (forcing non-Orthodox to adopt Orthodoxy), and
gross discrimination against and persecution of nonconformists. These and other
reactionary 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 are
many issues, such as whether the Alexandrine Reforms of 1861–1874 or 1917
was the greater break in Russian history,33 whether Russian modernization in the
1894–1914 period was artificially curtailed by the outbreak of the war and the
Bolshevik victory,34 whether Russia was socially stabilizing or fracturing prior to
1914, whether revolution was about to break out in 1914 and was postponed by
the outbreak of the war until 1917,35 how much continuity of personnel and practices there was in the period after 1917, and so on. It must be stressed that these
hotly debated issues are secondary in understanding the long-run development of
Russian history because 1917 itself was secondary.
This is not to deny entirely the importance of 1917. Because of it, tsarism and
the contemporary bourgeoisie were driven from the scene. A murderous civil war
reduced the GDP by 1921 to thirteen percent of what it had been in 1914. The
institution of private property, which had been gradually developing since the
Petrine era, was abolished. But in many other spheres the elements of continuity
are evident. Bolshevism itself was cooked in the Orthodox-Hegelian-MarxistRussian-autocratic political and cultural stew. The absence of civil rights was
palpable both before and after 1917, as was oppression, the absence of a
Rechsstaat, and general respect for law. The literary trends present before 1917
32. Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev, Reflections of a Russian Statesman (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1965); Robert Byrnes, Pobedonostsev, His Life and Thought (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1968).
33. That is one of the major issues in The Transformation of Russian Society: An Analysis of Social
Developments 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, 1861–1914,” in his
Continuity 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, 1905–1917,” Slavic
Review 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 real
break occurred in 1927–1928. This has many names in the literature, especially
“the Stalin Revolution.” For reasons that should be apparent already above and
that will be developed below, I propose that this should be called the third service-class revolution. Like the first and second service-class revolutions, the third
was provoked by perceived military threats. England, France, and the United
States had intervened (very minimally and ineffectively, it must be admitted) in
the Russian Civil War, but nevertheless the Bolsheviks were hypersensitized to
the possibility of the capitalist states attacking the young Soviet Union. Thus
when the “war scare of 1927” with Britain and France developed, the threat-perception antennae of the Bolsheviks were primed to receive and process the information in a predetermined fashion.
Lenin had prescribed that the USSR should develop economically through
electrification. After the war scare, however, Stalin changed the priority to the
development of a heavy metallurgical industrial base. Minister of Finance Sergei
Witte (1892–1903) had initiated heavy industrialization in the Russian Empire,
largely at the expense of the peasants. Later, there was a protracted debate in the
1920s between the left Bolshevik-Trotskiite Evgenii Preobrazhenskii and the
right Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin over how to resume industrialization after the
hiatus resulting from World War I, the revolutions of 1917, and the ensuing civil
war. Unexpectedly, Stalin chose the Preobrazhenskii model, once again predicated largely on exploitation of the peasants. Obviously iron and steel were necessary for the construction of tanks and other armaments, whereas electricity was
likely to be consumed by peasants turning on light bulbs in their huts. The war
scare of 1927 led to an intense industrialization drive, which collectivization
would presumably pay for. However, because of peasant destruction of livestock
and other factors, including famine, collectivization failed to yield the expected
benefits for investment in industry. The consequence was that urban workers
paid for industrialization through atrociously low wages, as well as forced/slave
labor. Rational centralized planning (to the extent that the phrase is not an oxymoron—central planners can never anticipate global technological change or
consumer demand) in reality translated into impossible targets. Forced draft
buildup of the military did not yield as much as might have been anticipated after
the war scare of 1927, but seems to have been a factor in the election of Hitler—
to 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 new
service class. Here is where traditional interpretations of Soviet history simply
have it wrong: they assume that Marxism and even Leninism had something to
do with socialism, which in turn had something to do with the proletariat and perhaps even equality. The slogan of socialism in its transition to Communism,
36. Gerald Freund, Unholy Alliance. Russian-German Relations from the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
to the Treaty of Berlin (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957); Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany. A
Century of Conflict (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990), 157-171; Dukh Rapallo:
sovetsko-germanskie otnosheniia, 1925–1933, ed. G. N. Sevostianov (Ekaterinburg: Universitet,
1997).

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“From each according to his ability, to each according to his work,” does not
promise equal compensation, but that somehow is beside the point for those trying to interpret the early Stalin era. It does, however, fit a Russian/Soviet service-class ethos perfectly, for the compensation for its “work” is determined by its
value to the service state. After 1928 the USSR began to reward members of the
new service class according to their value in the new revolutionary response to
the war scare, not according to whether they were urban proletarians and even
much less according to any possible notion of equality or leveling. The definition
of the service class also expanded from elite military and governmental figures
to 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 as
such were in many ways of secondary importance during the third service-class
revolution; what was crucial was access, for often cash would buy almost nothing. All of these forms of compensation were allocated on a service-determined
hierarchical basis, akin to the money and land entitlements in the first serviceclass revolution, or a serviceman’s position in Peter’s Table of Ranks.
Labor was militarized; workers were shot for being late to the job. With collectivization, peasants were again forbidden to move, bound to the land. Not
accidentally, they called it “the second enserfment.”37 This “enserfment” persisted until the peasants were given internal passports in 1957, which allowed them
to migrate to the less desirable towns. (The more desirable cities were closed to
outsiders by the urban registration [propiska] system, so that members of the elite
would not have to contend with the vast shanty-towns that surrounded other
major cities of the developing world.) The changed role of the Communist Party
is 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 revolutionary conspiratorial group, and then a ruling party after Lenin’s death. After
“the Stalin revolution,” its role changed completely from a political body to a
personnel organization, the equivalent in the 1930s and later of the Military
Chancellery (Razriad) in the seventeenth century. It controlled the notorious
nomenklatura, the ranking and assignment of the top 40,000 positions and individuals in the Soviet Union. With the most rare exceptions, one could not get a
very good position in life without being a member of the Communist Party simply because the Party controlled all the good ones.38 A number of times in the
1960s 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, 1980–2004); Andrea
Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917–1933 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1996); Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of
Collectivization (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968); James R. Millar, “Mass
Collectivization and the Contribution of Soviet Agriculture to the First Five-Year Plan: A Review
Article,” Slavic Review 33, no. 4 (December 1974), 750-766; Vladimir Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s
Russia: Industrialization and Social Change in a Planned Economy (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1988); Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928–1932
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
38. Michael Voslensky, Nomenklatura. The Soviet Ruling Class: An Insider’s 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 they
could rise professionally.
I have stressed the importance of ideology in enabling and legitimizing the
first and second service-class revolutions. The Agapetos image of the ruler and
the supporting ideology of Orthodox Christianity played this role until 1917.
Ideology was equally important in the third service-class revolution. The Soviets
built on Russian Orthodox Christianity to make Marxist-Leninist-Stalinism
socialism/communism into a religion whose high priest was the General
Secretary of the CPSU. Alleged historical inevitability and dialectical materialism legitimized the third service-class revolution. Down at the popular level, in
the peasant hut, the Christian icon in the “red corner” was replaced by a picture
of Stalin or some other Soviet dignitary.
The fact that Stalin turned the USSR into a service-class state is evident in the
provision of health care. Five Year Plans “began with the principle of differentiated medical services for individual groups of the population and corresponded
with their role in socialist construction.” There was not even the slightest pretension that health care should be universal or that access to it should be uniform.
Access to health care depended entirely on an individual’s place in the Soviet
service hierarchy. The most important politicians, economic personnel, and
artists had access to the otherwise-closed system of Kremlin hospitals and clinics. Vladimirskii, the Commissar of Health of the RSFSR, explicitly argued that
the role of public health was to raise the productivity of labor. After World War
II, scarce medical personnel were allocated to mills and factories—especially
large, new factories—before anywhere else. This was also regionalized, with
resources directed to the Urals, Kuzbass, Eastern Siberia, the Donbass, and the
industrial districts of Kazakhstan before anywhere else. This became a permanent principle of entitlement. Further down the line in the allocation of medical
resources 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 occupation
of the patient determined the type of care. On the top were mechanics, combine
drivers, agronomists; then workers at livestock farms; then brigade leaders; the
mass of farm laborers were left to last.39 All of this was the Soviet version of the
oft-quoted Biblical injunction that “He who does not work shall not eat” and its
socialist version “From each according to his ability, to each according to his
work.” The same principles applied in the allocation of physicians. The secret
police had first claim on the best doctors (who themselves were mostly rather
low-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, of
course this crude manipulation of the medical system seems an outrageous violation of socialist ideals. If one understands that this was just another manifestation of the third service-class revolution, it is all quite intelligible.
Stalin’s paranoid personality played a major role in the creation of the tenor or
tone of the third service-class revolution, just as Ivan the Terrible had colored the
first and Peter the Great had defined the beginning of the second. This was pos39. Chris Burton, “Medical Welfare during Late Stalinism: A Study of Doctors and the Soviet
Health System, 1945–53” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, December 1999).

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sible for all of them because of the institutionalization of the Agapetos formula
at the beginning of the sixteenth century. God’s vicegerent could not be challenged in the sixteenth century or at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
When God was replaced by Marxist historical inevitability, its spokesman, the
general secretary of the CPSU, could not be challenged either. This absence of
institutional restraints of any kind on the leader was a major feature of all three
service-class revolutions.
The third service-class revolution made the Soviet military into a world-class
power. Between December 1, 1934, and July 1, 1941, Stalin’s paranoia and the
purges of the officer corps, the captains of industry, many leading scientists, and
others who had the misfortune of belonging to the Communist Party or having
ties to purged Communists created a perilous situation, but General Mud and
General Winter helped derail Hitler’s Wehrmacht just as they had raised obstacles to Napoleon’s Grand Army. This gave the Red Army time to regroup, to win
the crucial battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, and the Kursk Bulge, and to drive the
Nazi hordes out of the USSR and back to Berlin.40
The Soviet victory in World War II provided less of a “breathing spell” than it
might have thanks to Stalin’s paranoia and the discovery of all manner of alleged
internal enemies acting on behalf of foreign agents, and then to the Cold War.
The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the Vietnam War unquestionably legitimized domestically Soviet arms expenditures and the existence of the service
class. Even more interesting was the American Sixth Fleet and the launching of
the Polaris submarines in the late 1960s, which allegedly led to the Soviet preoccupation with Egypt and may have had something to do with the 1967 Middle
East War. The distinction between ordinary perception of threat and a paranoid
or paranoiac perception of threat no doubt can be determined clinically, but in
real life it may not matter: Soviet behavior was dictated by culturally cued perceptions, not the “objective reality” of the international arena. This was illustrated most recently with the revelations that many in the Brezhnev entourage were
absolutely, genuinely, honestly convinced that Ronald Reagan was going to
launch a war against the Soviet Union.41 This led to a military buildup and the
attempt during the 1980s to revitalize the third service-class revolution, which
helped to bankrupt the USSR.
It is my impression that the Soviet service class, and especially the nomenklatura, was rather relaxed in the second half of the 1930s, and again especially
after the “successful” conclusion of World War II (which left much of the USSR
destroyed and approximately twenty-six million Soviets dead). Like the service
elite in the two previous service-class revolutions, Stalin’s service class, the
nomenklatura, rapidly degenerated.42 Perpetual diligence and vigilance probably
cannot 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 works
is John Erickson’s two-volume The Road to Stalingrad/The Road to Berlin: Stalin’s War with
Germany (New York: Harper & Row, 1975–1983).
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 Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1990).

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to the next. Moreover, after a while the rhetoric of sacrifice for the future begins
to sound hollow when the promised future never comes and individuals begin to
wonder why the infinitely receding utopia has greater moral claims than does the
present. Signs of degeneration, of an ardor for privilege and luxury, were already
present in the later 1930s, after the rigors and horrors of the First Five Year Plan.
Although traditional Bolshevik ascetics such as the notorious Lazar Kaganovich
died in 1991 with only three suits to his name, on the whole the nomenklatura
evolved into Milovan Djilas’s “New Class.”
I witnessed this degeneration myself, as the following anecdote should illustrate. When I lived in the USSR for fifty-four weeks between September 1963
and October 1964, typically there were queues for certain commodities, especially bread in early 1964 after the magnitude of the crop failure of 1963 became
evident and before the Soviet Union resolved to buy grain from America.
Occasionally someone would try to break into the line, the shout “Observe the
queue, comrade!” would go up, and the violator would immediately go to the end
of the line. When I was in Moscow during the abortive coup attempt in August
1991, the queues were still present as everything was in short supply. Upon one
occasion there was a line of at least twenty-five people waiting to buy newspapers at a kiosk. A man in a suit drove up in front of the kiosk, went to the head
of the line, bought his newspapers, and drove off. No one said a word. Obviously
the Muscovites had become accustomed to those in suits driving automobiles
having privilege, and felt it was useless to say anything.
In my opinion, N. S. Khrushchev, a believer in socialism and impending communism, in certain respects provided a major obstacle to the perpetuation of the
third service-class revolution. In his 1956 “Secret Speech” he spoke out against
some of the grotesque atrocities of the Stalin regime. But he did not criticize
industrialization and collectivization, Stalin’s two major projects.43 He also did
not speak against the privileged service class, but his actions at times spoke louder than words. In a more egalitarian, “socialist” spirit, he ceased construction of
the luxurious Stalinist apartments and replaced them with the notorious
khrushchevki/khrushcheby (Khrushchev apartment buildings/slums), totally
monotonous 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 to
live on rye bread and mannaia kasha (something akin to farina). These elements
illustrate the dilemma of the Khrushchev era: Khrushchev’s belief that in twenty
years the USSR would overtake and surpass the advanced capitalist countries
required military preparedness to assure that the declining capitalist states would
not spoil the socialist/communist future by launching a preventive war, but belief
in socialism required a lessening of the privileges of the service class. The trouble was that Khrushchev could not figure out how to maintain military preparedness without relying on the privileged service class. Brezhnev, on the other
hand, 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).

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moustache), less egalitarian, and breathed new life into the third service-class
revolution.
The reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the third service-class revolution have been commented on endlessly. However one rankorders the reasons for the collapse of the “Communist system” and the demise of
the USSR, the total loss of belief in the system, in the raison d’être of the third
service-class revolution, must be near the top. It was obvious in the later 1980s
that there was no real threat to Russia, that the service class and the entire system were totally anachronistic and corrupt, and that the Soviet system had lost
all semblance of legitimacy—no one believed in it anymore. When the push
came in 1989, the Bloc disintegrated and no one was willing to shed blood to
keep 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 both
to the Soviet people and the rest of mankind.
Certain features of the collapse are worth a few additional words. Tat’iana
Zaslavskaia, the Novosibirsk economist-sociologist, made the most important
observation in her famous “Paper for a Moscow Seminar.” In that 1983 work, for
which she was “disgraced” and temporarily pushed off the public stage,
Zaslavskaia noted that the third service-class revolution (my term, not hers, of
course) with its militarized central planning had made the Soviet population into
a nation of slaves (my term, not hers), with the typical features of slaves as historically known. The Stalinist system deprived the Soviet people of all volition
and turned them into a nation of listless, leisure-seeking alcoholics.44 As the
Soviet interview project directed by James Millar discovered, the incentiveless
Soviet people after about 1969 went to work to associate with their friends, not
to produce anything.45 Thus it was not surprising that the Soviet economy was
stagnating as the annual rate of growth of the economy declined from six percent
in the 1960s to two percent in the 1980s to negative in 1990, that the economy
had lost the dynamism that had legitimized the system even after the foreign
threats had been eliminated.46
Two major intellectual constructs helped to legitimize the early Soviet system.
One was “scientific socialism,” the notion that a nation’s economy could be centrally planned and directed more efficiently than market capitalism could perform the task. The other major “idea” was of the “New Soviet Man,” that the
Soviet socialist system would create a new type of human being superior to anything homo sapiens had heretofore known. The appearance of the “New Soviet
Man” depended on the realization of the centrally planned economy.47 Two international conferences of Soviet-bloc economists held in 1987 and 1989 in Sofia,
44. Tatiana Zaslavskaia, “Paper for a Moscow Seminar, April 1983.” Commentary by Igor
Birman. 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 1917–1991. 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 of
eleven pamphlets under the general title Tvoi moral’nyi kopeks published by Molodaia grvardiia in
1963.

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Bulgaria, concluded that no matter how much tinkering was done, the centrally
planned economy could not be made to work as an efficient system.48 This had a
major impact on Gorbachev’s reforms during his 1985–1991 tenure.
Zaslavskaia’s critique laid to rest the other Soviet article of faith, that Soviet
socialism would produce a “New Soviet Man,” for she showed that socialism
produced not an ideal type of homo sapiens, but a dependent alcoholic completely lacking in initiative and disinclined to work. Gorbachev also knew of
Zaslavskaia’s research, but what impact it had on him is unknown.
Other factors also contributed to the delegitimization of the Soviet system, the
product of the third service-class revolution. The Chernobyl nuclear plant meltdown, which revealed that Soviet science was not as first-rate as people had
believed, also showed that the reformed Soviet government was as willing as its
predecessors to lie to and deceive its own people. Chernobyl revealed once again
that the Soviet service-class state regarded its subjects as fodder for its power and
did not care how many of them were destroyed by the nuclear fallout. The
American 100-hour war against Iraq was another important factor. Soviet generals, at the top of the service class and presumably major supporters and certainly beneficiaries of the Soviet system, realized that the Soviet system was hopelessly backward and could not be redeemed. The exhaustion of the Samotlor oil
field was still another major factor: it revealed the accuracy of the CIA’s predictions about the Soviet oil industry, showed the incompetence of the industry’s
management (which squandered resources, extracting only forty percent of the
recoverable reserves), and deprived the USSR of its sole advantage over capitalism—an “inexhaustible” supply of extraordinarily cheap energy supplied by the
Moscow central planners at two percent of world market price.
The third service-class revolution was officially ended by the abolition of the
CPSU’s monopoly of power in September 1991. The “pain” of the ending of the
third service-class revolution was greatly eased by the notorious nomenklatura
privatization, which led to the ensuing infamous Russian kleptocracy. A somewhat similar phenomenon was observable at the expiration of the first serviceclass revolution: roughly the same people/families were running Russia in 1715
as had been in 1699. There was considerably less continuity with the old tsarist
service class if one takes the dates 1916 and 1930, but that was the result of the
fanatic persecution of “capitalists” and “the bourgeoisie” and their death or flight
in the early years under Lenin. Stalin, on the other hand, despite his notorious
show trials of engineers, typically was willing to put almost any remaining
Russian or imported “bourgeois specialist” to work as long as he was willing to
collaborate in the building of the new Soviet Union, that is, in the third serviceclass revolution.49 Not accidentally, some émigrés, such as the historian R. Iu.
Vipper, returned after Stalin had taken over because they viewed his regime as
continuing that of the tsars. This change of heart was facilitated by the abandon48. O novo teoreticheskom videnii sotsializma: Dlia sluzhebnogo pol’zovaniia, ed. Ognian
Shentov (Sofia: Jusautor, 1987). My copy is numbered “134.” Shentov, Modeli sotsializma: Istoriia
i sovremennost’ (Sofia: Jusautor, 1989).
49. I am aware of the Shakhty Trial of 1929, the phenomenon of “spets-bashing,” and the deportation of the kulaks—all of which ran against the grain of the third service-class revolution.

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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 history
under the direction of B. D. Grekov, M. N. Bakhrushin, and others, who were so
valued 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 state
after the suppression of the Decembrist uprising in 1825 and even to some extent
after 1917. The poets Maiakovskii, Blok, and a handful of other intellectuals supported the Bolshevik revolution, but most of them opposed Leninism and as
many as could emigrated to Paris, Berlin, Prague, Belgrade, Harbin, and other
Eurasian centers, even to America. Those who remained in the USSR found the
1920s to be the freest period in Russian history for most intellectual experimentation, but the third service-class revolution put an end to such freedom. Thanks
to many factors, intellectuals, learning, culture, and the arts were generally
respected even after 1928 and were compensated handsomely, and Stalin
expressed the fact that intellectuals, scientists, and artists were important members of the service class by commenting that they were “in uniform.” In gratitude
for their high compensation, these people were expected not only to “toe the
Party line,” but to advance it with enthusiasm. The result was that the arts nearly died, for “socialist realism” (not the way life is, but should be) proved to be
incompatible both with spontaneous artistic creativity and the creation of anything that would provide genuine aesthetic gratification. Certainly not accidentally, the Stalin era in the high-cultural sphere proved to be much like the eras of
Ivan IV and Peter the Great at the crucial moments in their service-class revolutions—an “ice age.” It is hardly coincidental that all three eras were the three
major low points for written culture since 1500 in Russia, although the specific
reasons were different in each case. Similarly, it is probably not accidental that
interesting and aesthetically pleasing music was composed in all three eras.
Ivan’s reign witnessed creative additions to the traditional znamennyi chant
church music, Peter’s reign saw new Russian additions to the recently borrowed
Baroque style music that replaced the old church music, and Stalin’s era evoked
the creativity of Prokof’ev, Shostakovich, and others. This lends credence to the
generalization that, when expression in words in Russia is too dangerous, a creative outlet may be found in music.
Perhaps the basic principle of the service-class revolutions was that anybody
was welcome to serve who was willing to collaborate. This was particularly
important in the multinational Russian/Soviet empires. Ideally, anybody could
come to Moscow not only from the empire, but from practically anywhere else
on earth, sign up, work to the best of his or her ability in the service class, and
be rewarded accordingly. Thus the first and second service-class revolutions welcomed collaborating Tatars, other national minorities of the Russian Empire, and
mercenaries from all of Europe. This was greatly facilitated in Muscovy by the
“system of places” (mestnichestvo) in which important newcomers were placed
at 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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sovereign’s table, participated in diplomatic receptions, and commanded the cavalry regiments); their offspring started lower in the hierarchy, and were promoted on the basis of service.51 Jews were about the sole exception to the general
welcome accorded meritorious non-Russians, but here one must remember that
Jews who were willing to convert were welcome too, be it Peter the Great’s
Foreign Minister Shafirov or even those who served under Nicholas I. Because
of their general exclusion after the Partitions of Poland and its partial incorporation into the Russian Empire (the other parts went to Austria and Prussia), Jews
had a special hatred for tsarism and many of the Bolsheviks were Jewish. Stalin
employed large numbers of Jews, along with others willing to collaborate in the
third service-class revolution. Those times when “national origin” automatically
excluded people from participation in the service class can only be described as
periods of the most profound degeneration, such as after 1881 and during the
reign 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 important role throughout modern Russian history. As mentioned above, with few
exceptions literature was dead (“frozen”) during the Stalin era. Shortly after
Stalin’s death the role and quality of literature was commented upon extensively
in the period known as “The Thaw.” Most of the Thaw literature was reformist
and only critical of the “excesses” of Stalinism, much in accord with N. S.
Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” to the Central Committee in 1956. The “holies”
of industrialization and collectivization remained unscathed. The real “subversion” was initiated by the group that came to be known as the “village/rural writers” (derevenshchiki), who criticized especially the consequences of collectivization (the peasants had become largely underemployed drunks living in
Khrushchev’s “agro-cities,” which abolished and consolidated the traditional
peasant villages and forced peasants to live in urban-style apartment buildings
miles from their fields—much of which adumbrated Zaslavskaia’s critique of
Soviet socialism), but the patent distortions of Soviet urbanization, electrification, and industrialization did not escape unscathed either.53 Once again the function of literature had flip-flopped, from praising and legitimizing the regime to
criticizing and undermining it. This, along with Khrushchev’s blatant antiSemitism (his purging of Kaganovich—the last Jew in the Soviet ruling circles—
made every Soviet anti-Semite jump for joy), stimulated the dissident and
refusenik 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 Mestnichestvo 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 noteworthy
were Vasilii Belov, Aleksandr Yashin, Vladimir Soloukhin, Valentin Rasputin, Vladimir Tendriakov,
and Vasilii Shukshin. Perhaps the most accessible work is Rasputin’s 1976 novel, Farewell to
Matyora, transl. A. W. Bouis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991). This “village
prose” is usually distinguished from the “kolkhoz/collective farm prose.” The authors of the former
were usually of rural origin, the latter of urban origin.

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forced incarceration in mental institutions (psikhushki—the worst of all the
penalties meted out to dissidents), exile, forced labor, and involuntary/forced and
permitted emigration. Here one might note that involuntary emigration is a constant of Russian history. The abuse of psychiatry also was not invented by the
Soviets. The first notorious case was that of Peter Chaadaev in the reign of
Nicholas 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 the
Soviets to perfect psychiatric abuse. They even had an ideological motivation for
such action: when a dissident was arrested, nearly the first stop was the psychiatrist’s office, for anyone who failed to comprehend that the Soviet Union was
the agent of historical progress was patently insane. The combination of psychiatric abuse and emigration worked, so that literature (as a means of dissent, as
well as dissent itself) was crushed by the end of Brezhnev’s era and essentially
was never revived. The “death of literature” was lamented during Gorbachev’s
tenure and after 1991, but its critical role had been replaced largely by “normal”
journalism. Putin, the heir of the Soviet service state, has repressed critical television journalism and is doing his best to repress “normal” print journalism as
well, but has not totally succeeded by autumn 2005.
The service-class revolution rubric cannot explain everything that happened in
Russia 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 surface endowment (for agriculture) and subsurface endowment (for useful minerals). Materially the state is poor and weak. Over the past half-millennium perceptions of foreign military threat have provoked the comparatively weak state
power to mobilize all of its resources to combat the foreign threat. This led to a
restructuring of governmental personnel, binding the rest of society into castes
useful to the government, and the channeling of whatever resources (natural and
human) that were available into the hands of rulers of the “garrison state.”
Among those resources were the institutions of law, religion, the Russian
Orthodox Church and its dogma, and the Communist Party and its dogma.
Literature, the arts, and even science and sport were perceived as useful to the
service state, and increasingly supported by the state. One might have expected
such 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 legitimize and perpetuate themselves. But one great paradox contributed to the undoing of the service state. The rulers of the state or enlightened members of the
service class itself perceived that the system they had inherited was backward,
that backwardness could only be overcome by education, and that education
should be expanded as much as possible. Depending on the era, however, much
of basic education created problems for the service state. At first it was individualism of the Western Baroque and other ideas that were incompatible with the
caste society of the Ulozhenie of 1649. Then came ideas of the Enlightenment
that were incompatible with the realities of autocracy and serfdom. Finally,
Western ideas of freedom were incompatible with totalitarianism and service-

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state privilege. In a path-dependent fashion, these ideas culminated during the
1980s with the realization that the foreign threat was minimal and that the institutions created to cope with it were harmful because they made the population
dependent on the state, destroyed initiative, and produced backwardness relative
to freer, developed states. Ultimately the no-longer-functional but still privileged
service class degenerated, and took the entire system down with it as the service
state collapsed. One could speculate whether there will be a fourth service-class
revolution. Either Chinese expansion into Siberia or NATO might provide the
perceived threat for mobilization. But before such a course is embarked upon, I
would hope that Russian leaders would heed Zaslavskaia’s warning that an educated populace cannot be coerced into a service-class mold.
University of Chicago