Tsars and boyars on the Muscovite court

Richard Pipes Photo Levan Ramishvili (CC) www.flickr.com

As Pipes’s work gained huge recognition on both sides of the Atlantic, Keenan remained a much lesser known figure outside of the United States. Nonetheless, Keenan’s theory has profoundly influenced American discourse about Russian history and has been cited in countless books and articles, discussed during numerous conferences and became a must-read for every student trying to get to the heart of the Russian political system. I have commenced a course on “Russian Security Studies” in Washington DC from confronting    the divergent visions of Pipes and Keenan.

Pipes and the tyrants

In a 2017 interview for the Polish edition of Newsweek, Richard Pipes said: “No one imposes a dictatorship on the Russians. Whether we want it or not, they just like it. Because dictatorship frees one from responsibility. It has always been like that.” He described the core of his theory in his most important book, Russia under the Old Regime, first published in 1974. It is worth noting that by this time Pipes was already acknowledged as an expert in Sovietology, holding the post of director of Harvard University’s Russian Research Center and a senior consultant at the Stanford Research Center. In 1981 he became the director of East European and Soviet Affairs at the National Security Council under President Ronald Reagan.

According to Pipes the gist of Russian statecraft lies in the unlimited power of the tsar. His arguments are based on historical accounts of foreign travellers, merchants or diplomats (e.g. Sigmund von Herberstein, Paul of Aleppo and Marquis de Custine) who visited Moscow in the past and unanimously reported that Russia was a tyranny. These accounts illustrated how the Muscovite grand princes exercised absolute authority over each aspect of their domains, including court affairs pertaining to noblemen (called the boyars), the army, local landlords, peasants and the land itself. The structure of power was strictly vertical, with the tsar on top, ruling over his subjects on every level of the social pyramid. The tsar was the sole master, while all others were slaves. However the question remains: how did such an absolute ruling structure emerge?

Beginning with the lowest rank of the social pyramid, Pipes argues that on the eve of the Russian Revolution, due to their former subordinate or even slave-like social standing, the peasants were not directly oppressed but rather totally isolated from public life. They felt neither loyalty towards the state, nor any kind of patriotism towards their homeland. The socio-cultural and political position of the rural inhabitants was even worse than that of the slaves, as they never had any opportunity to develop the sense of freedom necessary to become a citizen. Even though they had finally received land, they remained an unpredictable horde, driven by the forces of anarchy. They remained in the Hobbesian state of nature, and the only force capable of controlling them was a despotic tsar whose legitimacy came from pure strength. When the working class emerged as an independent social force in the 19th century, it turned out that they bore a similar rural legacy. They were mere passive peasants, who moved from the fields and villages to factories and cities. Even more strikingly, the noblemen, despite their position and wealth, were just as dependent on the will of the tsar. The limits of their freedom were meticulously delineated by their subordination to the overlord. The only defiant group was the intelligentsia which, paradoxically, was extremely radical due to the despotic character of tsarist power preventing them from full participation in social life.

Thus, the Russian social structure was internally incoherent and the only unifying element was the god-like will of the tsar. From this perspective, it might be difficult to even talk about a society understood as a community. The complicated mechanism of bureaucracy served as a transmission belt to communicate orders and imbued the system with stability, but only insofar as the persona of the tsar remained a unifying force. This tyrannical system of rule proved to be easily adaptable to communism. In fact, the proletarian ideology provided a perfect legitimisation for the new tsars – now called general secretaries – while exercising the old methods of despotic rule. Over time, the old regime effectively transformed into an even more repressive new one, armoured with modern technologies in a mass society, thus achieving communist totalitarianism. Therefore, George Kennan’s remarks in his Long Telegram were observations of a long-lasting tradition of Russia as the domain of ruthless dictators.

Keenan and actors

Contrary to Richard Pipes’ theory, which was meticulously crafted and well-documented in an academic manuscript comprising over 300 pages, Edward Keenan’s seditious idea was described in just one article entitled “Muscovite Political Folkways”. What is even more striking is that it does not include a single footnote, quote or citation; it was not meant to be an academic paper. It was written as part of a US State Department contract in the mid-1970s and published in limited circulation by the Russian Research Center in July 1976.  Following the path of Pipes, Keenan also served as director of Harvard’s Russian Research Center; however his academic interests focused on the medieval history of Muscovites, and from the beginning he was deemed very controversial.

In his 1971 book, The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha, Kennan questioned the authenticity of the compilation of letters allegedly exchanged between Tsar Ivan the Terrible and the dissident nobleman Andrei Kurbskii, which constitutes the basis of our understanding of that epoch. His arguments provoked fierce debate amongst scholars in the United States, Europe and Russia – a debate that still has yet to be settled. Keenan starts his argument with a simple observation on the accounts of Russia’s alleged innate tyranny. These authors were inexperienced foreigners, according to Keenan, deceived by the great Muscovite “show”. Russian statehood developed out of isolated rural communities, fighting for survival in the extremely harsh natural conditions of great forests and impenetrable marshlands. This hostile environment forged their way of life: a strong devotion to the norms of communal solidarity, an aversion to risk-taking and a suspicion of outsiders. This somewhat paranoid social structure evolved into a statecraft whose overriding aim was to survive at any cost.

The primal threat to such a community was the lack of a single ruler, which inevitably and repeatedly led to civil war and the destruction of the state. While European monarchies experimented with new ideas, the Muscovites, challenged by the surrounding wilderness and the threat of the Mongolian Yoke, could not bear the risk. The presence of a tsar was a sine qua non condition of their existence – although it did not equate his omnipotence. On the contrary, the deeply rooted rural code of conduct relegated him to a subordinate role vis-à-vis the community, on the state level personified by his boyar court. The balance between these two contradictory pulls led to the emergence of a particular power structure. On the one hand, the tsar had to be strong, and on the other, he was expected to obey the rules of an oligarchic community. The merging of these goals resulted in political theatre, in which the tsar was not its director but merely a façade, hiding the real heart of Muscovite politics: a turf war between the boyars. However, his role should not be underestimated. His position safeguarded the core values of the system, which was the guarantee that clan conflicts would never turn into an open war.

The other layers of society were also functioning in the template of this show. Bureaucracy played a vertical role as a strongly hierarchical structure, opposite to the horizontal establishment of the court, yet it was deprived of any real political influence. The countryside comprised of closed villages ruled according to their primordial ways and isolated from the rest of society (at this juncture, both Pipes and Keenan seem to have found a point of convergence). The role of the 19th century dissenters was also an integral part of this interplay, as they served as natural safety valves in case of any disturbance in the balance of power. Finally, the rural prejudices against “the other” resulted in extreme secrecy and an aversion to revealing the true nature of the system. From the political point of view, it was more profitable for the boyars of the system to present the tsar as a sinister despot rather than as a puppet in the machinations of the court.

This concealed, but nevertheless true, face of the Muscovite power structure was quite similar to the European one, making Russian folkways an entity resembling a constitutional monarchy. What is more, this idea was translated into the USSR as a Russian political system. As Marshall Poe points out in his article “The Truth about Muscovy”, “Keenan had done this: the Russian political system was a clan-based oligarchy with a figure-head tsar (party chairman).”

However, what really made his vision popular was the common effort of his disciples – called the “Harvard School” or “Keenan School” – who combined his observation with functionalist views and developed new concepts describing “Muscovite folkways”.  Nancy Kollmann, in her 1987 book Kinship and Politics, reiterated the assumption of elite clans ruling the country from the backseat. Valerie Kivelson, in a 1996 publication Autocracy in Provinces, extended this theory to the relations with peripheries, while Donald Ostrowski, in Muscovy and the Mongols, presented the vision of Muscovy as some sort of constitutional monarchy. Some of these claims went too far and were finally rejected. But the fundamentals of Keennan’s idea survived and, as professor of Russian history at Georgetown University Greg Afinogenov acutely remarked, “few scholars follow Keenan in thinking the tsar was a cipher, but to claim he ruled unchecked over a landscape peopled by human chattel is now distinctly old-fashioned. In some ways, then, ‘Folkways’ has conquered its field.”

Times of war, times of peace

Ultimately, these two competing theories are the offspring of an earlier time. The Pipes perspective stems from the harsh 1960s – marked with the rise of nuclear tension and the war in Vietnam – and became widely accepted a decade later when President Reagan labelled the USSR an “evil empire”. The vision of Russia as the domain of ruthless tyrants perfectly fitted the political agenda of “writing the final pages of the history of the Soviet Union” by competing and exceeding against the Soviet Union’s military and economic capabilities.

Adversely, Keenan’s concept of “Muscovite folkways” was the product of the 1970s era of détente, and the work of his successor matched the post-Soviet age of hope for global peace. It was much easier to build a new world with Russia depicted as an almost democratic state of boyars ruling the tsars rather than a bloodthirsty tyranny mastering the hordes of obedient serfs.

Since Russia has, again, started pursuing the role of a global power and re-entered the old-fashioned path of military aggression, it is tempting to refer to well-known doctrines of the past to describe the reign of Vladimir Putin. The question remains if we need a new Pipes and Keenan to question the phenomenon of the 21st century Muscovite folkways.

Tomasz Grzywaczewski is as journalist, writer and PhD candidate at the University of Łódź. He is the author of the books Borders of Dreamlands. About unrecognized states, Life and Death on the Dead Road and Across the Wild East and the scriptwriter and assistant director of the documentary feature Shadows of the Empire. He is a member of The Explorers Club.

Edward Keenan, Richard Pipes, Russia