9
Co-optation
Creating an Elite
One of the great challenges of empire was to maintain stability in a multi-ethnic,
multi-confessional setting. Russia did this by keeping constituent parts of the
empire separated from each other and dependent on the center. The state sought
only as much cohesion as it needed. The strength of its cohesion was in the constant
renewal and renegotiation of its relationships with elites and commoners, confes-
sional and ethnic groups, and other elements of empire. The state co-opted
important social groups to perform essential service to the tsars; with grants of
status, land, wealth, and privilege, the state forged an elite of military men, who
stood at the center of a society that might be envisioned as an embracing circle.
CIRCLES OF SOCIETY
Muscovites wrote no social-political philosophy, no theory of the state similar to
medieval Europe’s analogy of society as the human body. Muscovy was not a self-
conscious state in that regard; it is even difficult to reconstitute what were the
constituent groups of society. Scattered records—household censuses, lists of
dishonor compensation, military musters, signatories or historical accounts of
political assemblies—give the general outline. Several visual analogies come to
mind. From the perspective of ideology, the ruler would be uniquely on top of, or
at the center of, all the people, who would be in an undifferentiated mass, since,
in theory, they all had equal status before the tsar. They were all his children,
whom he was leading to salvation by moral example. They all possessed honor,
protected by the ruler’s courts (save for criminals who had severed their ties with
community). They all served; no one in Muscovy was a free agent, living off
private income. The privileged served in the army or high merchantry, or prayed
for tsar and realm in the Church. The rest of society paid taxes and more;
packages of service requirements (tax burden, recruitment, labor) varied among
ethnic groups, but all owed something.
But of course Muscovite society had more differentiation than theory would
suggest, even if not rigidly defined. The metaphor of a circle works well to envision
thesefluid relationships. The ruler takes the center, surrounded by permeable
concentric circles of social groups whose greater distance from him indicates less
access, lesser status, and fewer economic privileges. The broken concentric circles