through the rest of the century. These efforts, however, pale in comparison to the
size of the empire. The problem of runaways and these tensions persisted through
the early modern era.
Serfdom could only be enforced by the threat of the landlord’s knout and the
tsar’s posses tracking down runaways. Even so, coercion against serfs was most often
wielded by the peasant commune itself. As Stephen Hoch and Tracy Dennison
have shown, peasant communes preferred to keep landlords’agents at bay by self-
disciplining. The council of elders exerted a tyranny of men over women, old over
young, ordering whippings for petty crime, sending young men off to the army,
disciplining uncooperative members. Village councils also, however, offered sup-
port for the aged, widowed, and anyone devastated by personal misfortune; they
kept villages stable through self-regulation. In this way, the landlord estate and
village commune were perhaps a microcosm of the state itself. Violence was a harsh
reality, its threat was ever-present, but in day-to-day life leaders domesticated it into
institutions such as the village commune, the bureaucracy and the judicial system.
MONOPOLY ON VIOLENCE: THE CRIMINAL LAW
Max Weber famously called monopolization of the means of violence the marker of
sovereignty. In many ways, this is the institutionalization of the sovereign’s right to
wield“sacred violence”for the stability of the state, a theory that post-dated Weber.
Rulers can imbed their monopoly on violence in exclusive control over armed
forces, outlawing private militias; they can imbed it in control over personal
violence through the criminal law, punishing everything from duels tofisticuffs
to murder. In order for sovereign violence to be legitimate, it needs to be perceived
as fair, and the system needs to be perceived as responsive to the people, in terms
appropriate to the setting (constitutional and legal remedies in some states, the
sovereign’s personal mercy and favor in others).
In Muscovy, the criminal law enforced the state’s monopoly on violence. Only
the tsar’s courts had the right to prosecute felony, to torture, and to assign corporal
or capital punishment. Landlords whose peasants committed a felony would be
punished for torturing and punishing on their own; they were required to bring
them to state courts. Similarly, one could kill in self-defense, but if a landowner
caught someone in the act of crime, he was not to torture or punish, but was to turn
the culprit over to the courts. People were forbidden to pursue vendettas over
honor; they had to go to court. Legal scales of compensation for injured honor
offered protection to everyone from slaves to witches to boyars, exempting only
people who had broken their ties with the community, namely“thieves, criminals,
arsonists and known evil men,”according to a Lawcode of 1589.
Boyar clans did not settle their rivalries on the duelingfield (unknown before
European influence in the late seventeenth century, and forbidden for a good
100 years after that), but used an elaborate legal practice of suing for precedence
(mestnichestvo). This occurred when a man felt a military assignment put him
unjustly subordinate to another clan. The court then meticulously established the
168 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801