The Russian Moment in World History by Poe Marshall T

Author:Poe, Marshall T. [Poe, Marshall T.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

6

The Progress of the Russian Moment

SOME HAVE ARGUED THAT THE TRUE SUBJECT OF history is change. If one thing happens and another does not follow, then there is no history at all, no story to be told. While intuitive, this view of history is unduly narrow. For sometimes the story is that nothing changed, particularly when all around the stationary point other things were mutating. Russian history in the post-Muscovite period offers an excellent case in point.

The Russian moment in world history began when the Muscovite elite created the first sustainable society capable of resisting the challenge of Europe. Here the Russians succeeded where others had failed (or would fail). We have already laid out in sufficient detail the course of the reforms that molded this society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will now investigate their results.

The most significant consequence of the Muscovite reforms was to make Russia early modern. What is early modernity, and what distinguishes it from premodernity and modernity? The answer is complicated, of course, but we can sensibly limit our definition of early modernity to a combination of four distinctive features: a complex administration, a semipublic sphere, the protoindustrial production of goods, and a gunpowder military. By this definition, almost all the major states of western Europe were early modern by the early sixteenth century. So were the Ottoman, Mogul, and Qing empires, for that matter. As we have indicated, Muscovy in this era was not. In the fifteenth century, Rus’ was administered by a tiny court and its scriptorium; it had no distinct public discourse; its economy was overwhelmingly agrarian; and its army equipped with cold steel.

By the early eighteenth century, however, Russia was definitely early modern in our narrow sense. The country was administered by a semibureaucratic organization under the direct control of the crown. In the prikaz system, officers ran offices with discrete competencies according to acknowledged written rules. True, they were poorly organized, venal, and corrupt. But even the prikazy were a major advance over the casual household administration that had come before, at least in terms of the organization of the court’s affairs. At the same time, something approximating a public sphere was forming at the Russian court and in major urban areas. Salons, assemblies, clubs, and a tiny press all made their first appearance in Peter the Great’s day. Highborn subjects began to read and to discuss what they had read. To be sure, the crown carefully monitored and limited the flow of ideas, but nonetheless the seed of a truly public discourse was present. By late Muscovite times, the production of goods—and particularly arms—was being organized in new, more efficient ways. In the Petrine era, Russians built their first primitive factories to produce basic industrial goods on a large scale—metals, ceramics, explosives, and the like. Finally, the Russian army of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made full use of gunpowder weapons, drill, and unit-based organization. It fought and defeated advanced European forces, such as those fielded by the Swedes in the Great Northern War.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.