The state has always occupied a special place in the history of Russia. In the search for a national idea that could unite Russian citizens in the context of celebration—in the Year of Russian History—of the 1150th anniversary of the emergence of Russian statehood, we should turn to the very concept of statehood. It can be defined as a historically established system of ideas about the role, functions, and rights and obligations of the state and its institutions and the traditions of state administration.

In society, these ideas exist in various forms:

• in the behavior and historical memory of people;

• in the complex of social and psychological ideas about power;

• in scientific research on the history, law, and economy of the state.

A major factor in the formation of national mentality and self-awareness, which also affects statehood, has always been religious faith: “Every nation has its own religious vocation, and, of course, it is most fully carried out by its religious geniuses…” (G.P. Fedotov).

For centuries Russia has been developing its own compensatory and adaptive mechanisms designed to ensure sustainable development of society. It should be noted right away that the relationship between the authorities and the “people” or society is specific for each historical period. A distinctive feature of Russia is that its statehood has grown on the basis of the expansion and redistribution of land ownership and not commodity‒money relations. The natural and geographical factor largely determined an important feature, “state feudalism” in Russia, where there was only one seigneur—the state—and one vassal—the people [1].

The land is our main wealth, and the expansion of the territory of Russia is primarily the merit and result of the formation and development of statehood. The endless plain and open borders; the danger of invasions from the West and the East; and the need to reclaim access to the seas led to the traditional militarization of society. Only strong centralized power and governance could overcome these difficulties.

Kievan Rus’, feudal fragmentation, and the period of the Horde invasion are independent civilizational strata of the history of our country, from which the statehood of Russia of the 16th‒17th centuries grew and the relationship between power and society was formed. According to the apt definition of B.A. Uspenskii, the grand prince “territorially … turns out to be the successor of the Tatar khan, and semiotically, the Greek emperor” [2, pp. 184, 185]. The struggle for national and religious survival explains the forced centralization of the Russian state, under which there was no room any longer for independence and freedom in society.

In the 13th century, the capital city of Vladimir managed to be under the rule of 1ten princes; in the 14th century, the great reign extended to 11 princes; and the entire 15th century fits into the reign of three grand princes: Vasily I Dmitrievich (1389‒1425), Vasily II Vasilyevich the Blind (1425‒1462), and Ivan III Vasilyevich (1462‒1505). The importance of the grand ducal chancellery also grew: during the feudal war of 1430‒1453, 39 letters missive of Vasily the Blind were preserved in the archives of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, of which only five were signed by boyars. The rest, according to the assumption of Yu.G. Alekseev, were written by the prince’s d’yaks (clerks). When Ivan III began to reign, his lands were almost completely surrounded by independent Russian domains. At the end of the reign, he had only foreign and heterodox neighbors. In the mid-15th century, his policy was appanage, while at the end of the century it became national.

The fundamentally new, centralizing policy of the grand prince power ideologically took the form of a struggle not for the new but for the “well-forgotten old.” The aspiration to emphasize the interconnection and continuity of the power of the Muscovy princes and sovereigns of the pre-Mongol period dictated not only the return of the ancestral lands but also the construction of a new Dormition Cathedral in Moscow in 1472. The Cathedral of the Dormition in Vladimir, erected under Andrei the Pious and Vsevolod the Big Nest, was taken as a model for it [3, p. 155; 4, p. 178]. In 1478, after the incorporation of Novgorod into the state of Muscovy, the entire population of the Novgorod land, “young and old,” was put under oath [4, p. 248] without making a difference between a boyar and a kholop [roughly, slave—Tr.]: from the height of the tsar’s position, all categories of the population were equally his slaves.

In response to the proposal of German Emperor Friedrich III to confer the title of a king on Ivan III, the grand prince answered, “…but we did not want to be anyone’s appointee before and do not want this now’’ [5, p. 214]. The sovereign reasoned about his power similarly in 1502, depriving his grandson Dmitry of the right to the throne and replacing him with his son Vasily: “Am I not free in my grandson and in my children? To whom I want, to that I will give the reign!” The ideal of the supreme power was a ruler who established order in the country, even if by cruel means.

As is known, the development of the state is also manifested in the development of lawmaking. In Muscovy, tsar sudebniks (law codes) and, of course, the Sobornoe Ulozhenie (Council Code) of 1649 can be considered the first examples of the codification of national law. The sources of the First Tsar Sudebnik of 1497 were customary law, statutes, and the practice of state office administration of Moscow prikazy (ministries). The document contained decisions on the central and local courts and articles on civil law and procedure. Importantly, the Sudebnik of 1497 reflected one of the leading processes of state formation, the formalization of serfdom. The document limited the rights of peasants to move from one landowner to another to the week before St. George’s Day in autumn and the week after it.

The reign of Ivan III Vasilyevich became a turning point in Russian history. Under him, a new state order began to take shape, which finally formed under his grandson Ivan IV Vasilyevich (the Terrible). Moreover, Ivan III laid down the main parameters of the imperial statehood that remained until Peter I: estate structures; the structure of the central and local authorities (in particular, that of prikazy [6]); the land system; and the organization of the army, administrative division, and courts [3, p. 166; 4, pp. 55‒57, 202, 203]. Note that it was imperial, since the Russian empire is a large centralized state, characterized by multiethnicity, polyconfessionalism, and an uneven socioeconomic development of individual parts of its territory, which includes previously independent state formations and seeks to pursue an imperial policy.

Note that the idea of centralization, the unification of a country’s territory under the strong rule of one sovereign was not an exclusively Russian problem in the 15th century. Similar processes took place practically throughout Europe (in France, Spain, and England and among the German emperors). For example, in France of the early 15th century, fierce battles took place between two feudal groups—the Burgundians and Armagnacs (against the backdrop of defeats in the war with England). The “Gathering of the Lands” in France roughly ended only under the contemporary of Ivan III, King Louis XI (1461‒1483), as a result of his fierce struggle with the Duke of Burgundy Charles the Bold. England after the defeat in the Hundred Years’ War (1337‒1453) was plunged into the feudal War of the Roses (1455‒1485). The armed struggle of the aristocratic clans of England (the House of Lancaster and the House of York) was on par in intensity with a similar feudal war in the Moscow principality (1430‒1453). Spain was united into a single state (1479) only as a result of the dynastic marriage of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile; the complete liberation of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors followed as late as 1492. The uniting efforts of the German emperors failed at the end of the 14th century. The Horde invasion in no way delayed Russia on this path. One can state that centralizing ideas in Russia developed in the context of European development. Shortly before his death, Ivan III drew up a will, according to which his lands were distributed among his five sons. However, the lion’s share of the inheritance, together with the supreme power, went to the eldest, Vasily Ivanovich, while the territories and rights of appanage princes turned out to be small [3, pp. 161, 163, 164, 168].

The ideas of centralization were reflected in the Russian Orthodox Church as well. In the second half of the 15th century, its unity was violated, and heresies appeared. Within the framework of established Orthodoxy, two trends emerged: the nonpossessors and the Josephites. “Having nothing against the prince’s interference in the affairs of the church, even leaving wide room for this interference, Joseph of Volotsk received the patronage of the authorities in the then most pressing issue for the church: the question of monastic property” [7, p. 37]. The Church Council of 1503 resolved the dispute between the nonpossessors and the Josephites in favor of the latter [8, pp. 452‒454]. This, in fact, predetermined the further fate of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The pope-mediated marriage (1472) of Ivan III and the Byzantine princess Zoe (Sophia) Palaiologina (niece of the last two Byzantine emperors, John and Constantine, and daughter of Despot of the Morea Thomas) helped to increase the authority of the Moscow sovereign. This marriage allowed Ivan Vasilyevich to be perceived as the heir of the Byzantine Empire, which had fallen in 1453; provided additional grounds for adopting the royal title; and contributed to the further development of the “Moscow is the Third Rome” theory, which was destined to become the core of ideological life in the Moscow state until the end of the 17th century. In addition, the marriage helped establish contacts with Europe. Starting from the 1470s‒1480s, the Moscow grand prince, when implementing diplomatic and trade contacts with the Livonian Order and the cities of Narva, Revel, and Lübeck, used to add the word tsar to his title [4, pp. 190, 230; 7, p. 34].

In contrast to the situation in Europe, centralization in Russia was combined with a struggle for national independence, which had to be waged “on three fronts” (the Horde, Germans, and Lithuania). The era of Ivan the Terrible should be recognized the most important stage in the formation of Russian statehood in connection with the coronation of Ivan Vasilyevich himself (the first in the history of Russia) and the annexation of the previously independent Tatar khanates (the khanates of Kazan’, Astrakhan, and Sibir). The forced centralization relied on military force and military methods of government and, naturally, was accompanied by violence. This gave rise to despotic features in the power of the Moscow sovereigns, rigidity, and voluntarism, which became increasingly vivid as Moscow rose. Most of all, the masses suffered from abuses and discontent grew in the country. The departure of peasants and townspeople to the outskirts, to places of greater independence or complete freedom from feudal and state oppression, acquired a mass character; in the forests near cities and highways, gangs of robbers gathered, robbing and killing feudal lords. The highest point in the struggle of that time was the uprising of the Moscow townspeople (1547), the events of which shocked Ivan the Terrible. Later he recalled, “From this, fear entered into my soul and trembling into my bones, and my spirit was humbled” [9, p. 39].

In 1550, the main legislative act of the period of the formation of an estate-representative monarchy in Russia was adopted—the new Sudebnik. Created in an atmosphere of exacerbation of the class struggle and intraclass contradictions, it was designed to strengthen the feudal legal order and help to consolidate the forces of the ruling class. The document strengthened the role of central bodies and the bureaucratic prikazy in the management system and increased their authority among the population. Harsh penalties were imposed for crimes against the feudal state, for the murder of masters, for an attempt on feudal property, etc. Decrees on the organization of local authorities prepared the introduction of zemstvo administration. Taking care of the rights of feudal lords to land, the Sudebnik strengthened their rights to peasants and kholops [10]. It envisaged measures to protect the interests of the nobility, recognized the monopoly of townspeople in trade and crafts, and streamlined taxation.

The issue of possible ways of development of the Russian state was basically resolved by the mid-16th century. The struggle of the Stoglavy Sobor [Hundred Chapter Synod—Tr.] against all manifestations of freethinking, the strengthening of the noble administration during the years of the “Chosen Rada,” etc., showed that the development of Moscow Rus’ had already moved towards the oprichnina dictatorship. It seems that the oprichnina was forced centralization without sufficient economic and social prerequisites, when the authorities were trying to compensate for their weakness with terror and to replace with it long and hard work on creating a state apparatus. Objectively, the oprichnina did contribute to centralization, which was necessary considering the tense relations with some neighbors. It is appropriate to recall that when the army of Peter the Great, after the victory in the Great Northern War, solemnly entered the capital, Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great were depicted on the Triumphal Arch, as well as the symbolic inscription “He started, I finished.”

Let us remember, however, that the turn of the monarchical power to overt belligerence put Russia in an exceptionally difficult position. The statehood was asserted by massive internal terror, aggressive external wars, and the impoverishment of the people, followed by a severe economic crisis and the collapse of power. In 1581, St. George’s Day was canceled and the “Forbidden” and “Fixed” Years were introduced (1581 and 1597, respectively). Indicative in this respect is the conflict between church and state, which found dramatic expression in the confrontation between Tsar Ivan the Terrible and Metropolitan Philip Kolychev. The autocratic ideas of Ivan the Terrible asserted that the power of a tsar was established by God and boundless. By his feat, Philip showed that the state represented by Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible must obey the Divine Principle.

It is noteworthy that Godunov was the first elected tsar in Russia. For Russian society, this was one of the initial experiences of democracy. The question of limiting the tsarist power was considered in the treaty of February 4, 1610, on the election of the Polish prince Władisław to the Russian throne—an agreement that became the first constitutional project in the history of Russia.

The “rebellious” 17th century began with a severe crisis. The Time of Troubles and the events that followed showed that the state could never have survived without the support of the people. On the other hand, the people also constantly sought protection and patronage from the state, personified in the figure of the sovereign. Tsars came and went; different parts of the country and even neighboring cities simultaneously recognized the power of different sovereigns; and peasant revolts and uprisings took place. The most difficult moment of the Time of Troubles, according to contemporaries, was the period of the “interregnum,” when the Moscow throne remained vacant. That period in the documents of the early 17th century was called the “stateless time.” According to V.O. Klyuchevskii, “the people came out of the Time of Troubles much more impressionable and irritable than they had been before. They had lost the political endurance that had surprised foreign observers of the 16th century, and were no longer the same meek and obedient instrument in the hands of the government” [11, p. 204]. Under the influence of the Time of Troubles, questions arose about the legitimacy of the choice of a tsar, about the volume and limits of the royal power, and about the transformation of the state system. It was in the 17th century that a solid opposition to state ideology first appeared—the Old Believers. The prestige of the Church grew particularly during the Time of Troubles. The hard times were inextricably linked with the name of Patriarch Hermogenes (1605‒1612). The hierarch contributed to the preservation of national independence, the Orthodox faith, and communal traditions of the Russian people.

However, False Dmitry I did not fulfill anything that he had promised to the Poles: he did not give them either land or gold. He sought support in Russia: he allowed merchants to go abroad without restraint, declared freedom of confessions, tried to soften the position of serfs and kholops, and intended to summon elected representatives from the nobility. Although he was a creature of the boyar elite, he ridiculed the arrogant Boyar Duma. Moreover, he was preparing the army for a war for Russian territories against Crimea. However, the foreign-policy claims of the Polish‒Lithuanian Commonwealth and Sweden and the interests of boyar, noble, and d’yak circles and the Orthodox clergy surpassed the attempts to democratize power. Importantly, it was civil, prosperous Russia that banked on the patriotic revival of statehood. Not from the rebellious dashing people but from the strong middle, from the craft and trade strata of Nizhny Novgorod, the main forces emerged, who stood up for order and revival. Almost the entire 17th century was spent on eliminating the consequences of the Time of Troubles.

In the 17th century, the Romanovs did not have to resort to such exceptional forms of terror as Ivan IV had practiced, but the memory of the Terrible Tsar was still alive, which made it easier for his successors to strengthen the autocratic power. The authorities understood perfectly well that only autocracy could preserve the territorial unity of Russia. The 17th century was not a lost opportunity; it was a time of a new historical choice of further paths for the development of the state. It was then that the question of what Russia’s future would be like was being decided. The Russian people faced the problem of choosing a sovereign. Such an important issue, according to the ideas of the Russian people, could not be solved otherwise than by the whole land, i.e., by the Zemskii Sobor (Assembly of the Land). For Russian society, this was one of the first experiences of democracy. Another problem was the alternative: autocratic or limited power of the sovereign. In the conditions of the Time of Troubles, two options took shape: the corule of the tsar either with the Boyar Duma (aristocratic version) or with the Zemskii Sobor (democratic version). Currently, the most justified is the opinion of L.V. Cherepnin, who in his work listed 57 sobors in chronological order, of which there were 11 in the 16th century and 46 in the 17th century [12]. However, Cherepnin, as well as M.N. Tikhomirov, N.I. Pavlenko, and S.O. Schmidt believe that there could have been more. Note that the legal status of the Zemskii Sobor was not specified anywhere, and there were no clearly specified norms of representation at the sobor. Zemskii sobors did not limit the monarchical power but, on the contrary, strengthened it, giving the decisions of the tsar and the tsarist government the appearance of nationwide approval. Note also that the Zemskii Sobor expressed not so much the opinion of individual social groups as the opinion of individual territories and regions (zemlyas, meaning lands). This was reflected in its name, Zemskii.

There was another serious problem—the possibility or impossibility of carrying out reforms, modernization, and Europeanization of Russian society. At the same time, the ideological substantiation of the absolutist tendency occupied an increasingly important place in the struggle of the estates. The turning point was the adoption of the Sobornoe Ulozhenie, the first printed code of Russian law. Electors from 116 cities gathered at the Zemskii Sobor in 1648‒1649; about 350 participants represented metropolitan and provincial nobles, clerks, the boyar and clerical establishments, Moscow and city posads [settlements adjoining a town but outside of it—Tr.], and the metropolitan streltsy regiments. The printed 1200 copies were sold quickly, and the need for a reprint arose that same year. Russian society developed steadily, and the demand for legal documents grew.

The code of state laws reflected the increased power of the autocratic monarch: special articles were devoted to protecting the life, honor, and health of the tsar. The code fixed the concept of “state crime,” and no distinction was made between a crime against the state and a crime against the person of the sovereign [13, pp. 304, 305; 14, pp. 331, 332]. The Ulozhenie protected the rights of landowners from the encroachments of vile people (60 options for using the death penalty were thought out). Legislative provisions were introduced to abolish the Fixed Years and to search for escaped peasants indefinitely, about the heredity of serfdom, and on the landowner’s right to the property of the peasant.

The monopoly right to ownership of peasants was assigned to all categories of service class people by birth, i.e., regular officials (the nomenklatura) [13, pp. 304, 305]. The attachment of the posad people to their posads and the sovereign’s tax was legalized; the confiscation of private slobodas [loosely, (tax-)free settlements—Tr.] in posads was authorized. This strengthened the position of tradesmen and craftsmen of cities and deprived feudal lords of the opportunity to exert pressure on them; the predominant position in a posad was secured for the top of the commercial and industrial population [10]. The main point, however, is that the Sobornoe Ulozhenie, in fact, completed the creation of the state system of serfdom.

In 1661, Patriarch Nikon wrote, “There is no one who would be pardoned: the poor, the blind, widows, and monks and nuns—all are taxed heavily…” [11, p. 343]. It is natural that the middle of the century under consideration was marked by a whole series of urban uprisings: the Salt Riot of 1648, which manifested itself in eight cities; the Copper Riot of 1662 in Moscow; the Pskov‒Novgorod uprising of 1650; the uprising of Stepan Razin in 1670‒1671; and, finally, the Streltsy uprising (“Khovanshchina”) in 1682 and the Streltsy riots two years before the new century. To this, add the confusion in the minds caused by the split in the Russian Orthodox Church and numerous wars. Let us emphasize that during all the uprisings of the 17th century, the people never opposed the tsar. The exception was the Time of Troubles, when broad masses used to rise up against the tsar under the banners of the “pretenders.” However, in this case, for the rebels, the pretender was the legitimate tsar, while the Moscow sovereign was a usurper. Characteristically, in crisis situations, the people appealed directly to the  tsar. The practice of receiving petitions personally was established in 1605 by False Dmitry I (1605–1606); in 1648 and 1662, the rebellious Muscovites came with their requests to Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (1645‒1676). During the Copper Riot, they even secured agreements with the tsar with a handshake. True, soon after this, the tsar gave the order for the brutal suppression of the uprising. However, the very fact of “striking a deal” between the tsar and a commoner by shaking hands demonstrates the presence in the popular consciousness of a certain idea of the inextricable connection between the government and the people. The authorities tried to give the most important events in the life of the country the appearance of a common, national cause. For example, the diplomacy of Vasily Shuiskii explained the overthrow and murder of False Dmitry in the following way: having learned about the heresy and imposture of the fugitive novice monk, he, “condemned by a true court, was killed by the nationwide multitude of the Moscow state” [15, fols. 89, 89 verso.]. It is noteworthy that the people began to feel responsibility for the fate of the state. Thus, Avraamy Palitsyn considered the main cause of the tragedy of the beginning of the century to be “many and innumerable sins,” “the reckless silence of the whole world,” which calmly looked at the crimes of the authorities [16, p. 105].

The 17th century was also the time of the last attempt to restore the symphony, the joint making of the state and the Church, which had been violated in the era of Ivan the Terrible. The events of the beginning of the century showed that the only guarantee of the survival of Orthodoxy was protection by the state; in turn, the state could not resist an external onslaught without the support of the Church. The awareness of the indissolubility of the ties between church and state resulted in the formation of the idea of an Orthodox tsardom on the path from Moscow to New Jerusalem. However, the discrepancy in the issue of supremacy between secular and spiritual authorities gave rise to a confrontation between the two tendencies, which led to the triumph of a third direction, absolutism. This trend was fully reflected in the empire of Peter the Great, where the Church and all estates were made completely dependent on the state.

The first succession of the supreme power of Russia in the form of autocracy, absolutism, and empire is the three hypostases of the phenomenon that we designate as the Russian monarchy, which is the essence of our imperial statehood. At the same time, history shows that the relationship between the government and society in the process of evolution must improve from riots to the creation of popular sovereignty bodies and parliamentary forms of government.

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Russia is a country with more than a thousand years of history. This history, just like the history of any great country, contains both times of ups and periods of crises. Wars, foreign invasions, and internal turmoil more than once shook the life of our state. The relations between the authorities and society were not simple. However, loyalty to Russia, its culture, and its spiritual foundations and the ability to unite other peoples without suppressing their dignity made it possible to overcome these crises throughout the centuries. The ideas of statehood lived among the Russian people; they were the compass that showed the way forward. The study of the evolution of the ideas of Russian statehood in the social thought of Russia shows that it is necessary to preserve the connection of times. We must know our true history, learn from it, and remember those who created the Russian state; defended its dignity; and made it great, powerful, and mighty.