The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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ruler (no assassination attempts in Russian history until Peter I), since the elite
rightly feared competition among themselves, which indeed turned bloody and
destabilizing in the few moments when the stabilizing center was vulnerable (the
minorities of Ivan IV and Ioann and Peter Alekseevichi) or disappeared (1598).
Consensus and cooperation maintained the system that gave them access to
benefits, so boyars strove for a united front. Rulers and elites understood the
mandate to take advice, and the political world provided for it, with an empire-
wide court system ready to accept petitions from even the lowliest subject; rulers,
hierarchs, and boyars participated in personal advice-giving councils in sizes from
the intimate group of the tsar and his boyar in-laws, or all the boyars, or boyars and
hierarchs, or large public assemblies. Boyars and rulers might not have been
personally pious, but they readily participated in religious rituals that demonstrated
legitimacy in this God-appointed ideology. Political life acted out and was struc-
tured by an ideology of the state as“Godly community,”to quote Daniel Rowland.
What resulted was an affinitive, personal political system based on kinship and
connection, very stable and enduring over time.
Finally, a word about“despotism.”Since the sixteenth century when European
travelers applied this Aristotelian category to Russia, it is a cliché that has been
repeated about Russia, gaining renewed currency during the Cold War of the last
century. But the power of the Muscovite tsar was hardly unlimited. Even though
grand princes and tsars claimed to own all land patrimonially, the power of the
state in daily practice was limited by the imperial imaginary. As self-styled
Orthodox rulers, Muscovy’s tsars were required to be pious, to patronize the
faith and defend the realm, to provide justice and perhaps most importantly to
protect their people from evil. It was this expectation, in the absence of consti-
tutional guarantees of the right to resist, that created justifications for the
populace to turn against a ruler until he fulfilled his duty. Rarely did Muscovite
rulers behave unilaterally and despotically; that is why Ivan the Terrible’s excesses
were so shocking. Even as they wielded coercion to mobilize the people and
resources of the empire, and even as they used those resources for the benefitofa
narrow elite, Muscovite rulers fulfilled the expectations of their roles, not only in
symbolically carrying out rituals but pragmatically in providing justice and order.
Such equilibrium between expansive theoretical claims of power and pragmatic
limitations of political practice was the same for Russia’s early modern neighbors
who have also been labeled despotic by European observers. Regarding Ming
China, Timothy Brook noted that a Chinese emperor’s power was limited by
centuries of codified law and bureaucracy, while Camal Kafadar enumerated the
wide array of expectations (that sultans be pious, just, merciful) that limited
Osmanli power in its founding centuries. Theories of legitimacy prescribed roles
that rulers had to act on and limits that bound them in order to create legitimacy.
Legitimacy, however, did not require timidity. Muscovy’s imperial imaginary
by no means prevented Muscovite tsars from using forceful policies to reach
their goals of conquest, control, and mobilization of resources. They conquered,
they bound populations to the land and moved others en masse, they created


Broadcasting Legitimacy 155
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