ABSOLUTISM IN THE EAST
When one turns to the eastern half of Europe, it is seen that the great crisis which struck the European economies in the 14th and 15th centuries produced a violent manorial reaction in this half of the continent. The seigneurial repression unleashed against the peasants increased in intensity throughout the 16th century. The political result in Prussia and Russia was an Absolutism of the East that was different from the west. The Absolutist State in the West was, according to Perry Anderson, the redeployed political class of a feudal class which had accepted the commutation of dues. It was a compensation for the disappearance of serfdom, in the context of an increasingly urban economy which it did not completely control and to which it had to adapt. The Absolutist State of the East, by contrast, was the repressive machine of a feudal class that had just erased the traditional communal freedoms of the poor. It was a device for the consolidation of serfdom. The manorial reaction in the East meant that a new world had to be implanted from above, by main force.
Yet at the same time, the internal class struggle within the Eastern social formations and its outcome, the enserfment of the peasantry, do not in themselves provide an exhaustive explanation for the emergence of the distinctive type of Absolutism of the region. The distance between the two can be measured chronologically in Prussia, where the manorial reaction of the nobility had already rolled over much of the peasantry with the spread of the Gutsherrschaft in the 16th century, a hundred years before the establishment of an Absolutist State in the 17th century. In Poland, classical land of the ‘second serfdom’, no Absolutist State ever emerged. In Russia, the installation of serfdom and the erection of Absolutism were more closely coordinated. To explain the subsequent ascent of Absolutism it is necessary first of all to reinsert the whole process of the second serfdom into the international system of the late feudal Europe.
It has been seen that the pull of the more advanced Western economy on the East has often been exaggerated as the sole main force responsible for the manorial reaction there, primarily because the feudal mode of production could not create a unified international economic system; it was only the world market of industrial capitalism that accomplished this, radiating out from the advanced countries to mould and dominate the development of backward ones. Foreign trade still represented a small percentage of the national product of all countries except Holland or Venice. Any wholesale integration of Eastern Europe into a Western European economic circuit is thus inherently implausible.
This is not to say, however, that the impact of Western on Eastern Europe was not determination for the state structures which emerged there. For transnational interaction within feudalism was typically first always first at the political, not the economic level, precisely because it was a mode of production founded on extra-economic coercion. The main mediation between East and West in these centuries was military. It was the international pressure of Western Absolutism, the political apparatus of a more powerful feudal aristocracy, ruling more advanced societies, which obliged the Eastern nobility to adopt an equivalently centralized state machine, to survive. For otherwise the superior military force of the reorganized and magnified Absolutist armies would inevitably take its toll in the normal medium of inter-feudal competition: war. The very modernization of troops and tactics brought about by the ‘military revolution’ in the West after 1560 rendered aggression into the vast spaces of the East more feasible than ever before, and the dangers of invasion correspondingly greater for the local aristocracies there.
The impact and immediate effects of the military threat of Western Absolutism in the political pattern in the East were striking. Sweden proved to be the Hammer of the East. Its impact on Prussia, Poland and Russia in the ninety years from 1630 to 1720 bears comparison with that of Spain in an earlier age in Western Europe. It was one of the greatest cycles of military expansion in the history of European Absolutism. It was the Thirty Years’ War which produced the first fully formalized international state system in Europe that appropriately marked the decisive onset of the Swedish irruption into the East. The intervention of Sweden had definitely broken the prospect of a Habsburg imperial state in Germany: the whole course and character of Austrian Absolutism were henceforward to be determined by this defeat, which deprived it of any chance of a consolidated territorial centre in the traditional lands of the Reich. At the same time, the impact of Swedish power on the evolution of Prussia, less visible internationally, was domestically even deeper.
The construction of Prussian Absolutism by the Great Elector from the 1650’s onwards was in large measure a direct response to the impending Swedish menace. Prussian Absolutism, and its ultimate shape, came into being during the epoch and under the pressure of Swedish expansionism.
The Swedish invasion of Poland in 1655 quickly shattered the loose aristocratic confederation of the szlachta. The social results of the devastating Swedish attack were far more serious: Polish economic and demographic patterns were so badly damaged that the Swedish invasion came to be known as the ‘Deluge’. The Polish nobility did not succeed in generating an Absolutism during these ordeals. Unable to recover from the lethal blows delivered by Sweden, Poland ultimately ceased to exist as an independent state.
Russia presents a different case. There, the impulse within the aristocracy towards a military monarchy was evident much earlier than anywhere else in Eastern Europe. Russia had to bear the brunt of the Crimean Tartars’ attacks for a hundred years, and the result was an earlier and greater impetus towards a centralized State in the Duchy of Muscovy than in the more sheltered Electorate of Brandenburg or the Polish Commonwealth. In Russia also, the decisive phases of the transition towards Absolutism occurred during successive phases of Swedish expansion. Swedish influence was also extensive within the Russian political system itself, in the early years of Romanov rule. Tsarist power was thus tested and forged in the international struggle for ascendancy with the Swedish Empire in the Baltic. The Austrian State had been turned back from Germany by Swedish expansion; the Prussian and Russian states, but contrast, withstood ad repelled it, acquiring their developed form in the course of the contest. Eastern Absolutism was thus centrally determined by the constraints of the international political system into which the nobilities of the whole region were objectively integrated.
Absolutism was also inevitably determined by the course of class struggle within the Eastern social formations. The decisive juridical and economic consolidation of serfdom in Prussia, Russia and Bohemia occurred during precisely the same decades in which the political foundations of the Absolutist State were firmly laid. This double development—institutionalization of serfdom and inauguration of Absolutism—was in all three cases clearly linked. In all three regions, the consolidation of landlord control over the peasantry, and discrimination against the towns, was tired to a sharp increase in the prerogatives of the monarchy and was succeeded by a disappearance of the estates system.
The cities of Eastern Europe had been generally curtailed and repressed in late medieval times. The economic upswing throughout the 16th century, however, fostered a new if uneven urban growth in certain zones of the East. The maturation of the Absolutist States in the 17th century now effectively dealt a death-blow to the possibility of a revival of urban independence in the East. The new monarchies—Hohenzollern, Habsburg, and Romanov—unshakeably assured the political supremacy of the nobility over the towns.
The most fundamental domestic rationale of Eastern Absolutism, however, lay in the countryside. Its complex machinery of repression was essentially and primarily directed against the peasantry. In the east, wars and civil disasters had created particularly acute labour crises. The demographic downturn of this epoch created, or aggravated, a constant shortage of rural labour for demesne cultivation. There e was also the endemic problem for Eastern feudalism of the land/labour ratio—the existence of too few peasants scattered over too vast spaces. The first objective of the landlord class was thus everywhere to arrest the mobility of the villager and bind him to the estates. Conversely, over huge areas of Eastern Europe, the most typical and effective form of class struggle waged by the peasantry was simply flight—collective desertion of the land for uninhabited and uncharted spaces beyond.
The measures taken by the Prussian, Austrian and Czech nobility to prevent this traditional mobility were intensified in the inaugural era of Absolutism. Farther east, in Russia and Poland, the problem was even more serious. No stable frontiers or boundaries of settlement existed in the wide Pontic hinterlands lying between the two countries. It was this absence of normal territorial fixitude in Russia that accounts for the striking survival of slavery on a very considerable scale. It was not until a stable and powerful central autocracy was established, with a coercive state apparatus capable of enforcing adscription throughout Russian territory, that conflicts were suspended. It was the constant seigneurial preoccupation with the problem of labour mobility in the East which undoubtedly lay behind much of the internal drift towards Absolutism.
A ruthlessly centralized and unitary oppressive apparatus was an objective necessity for the surveillance and suppression of widespread rural mobility in times of economic depression. The domestic policing functions necessary for the second serfdom in the East were in this respect more exigent than those needed for the first serfdom in the West: the result was to render possible an Absolutist State in advance of the relations of production on which it was founded, contemporary with that of the West in the transition beyond serfdom.
Throughout eastern Europe, the intensity of class struggle in the countryside—always latent in the form of rural flights—also detonated peasant explosions against serfdom in which the collective power and property of the nobility was frontally threatened. The widespread danger from their own serfs consequently acted as a general centripetal force on the Eastern aristocracies. The ascent of the Absolutist state in the 17thccentury ultimately answered to social fear: its politico-military apparatus of coercion was the guarantee of the stability of serfdom. The function of the centralized State was to defend the class position of the feudal nobility against both its rivals abroad and its peasants at home.
The specific traits of the Eastern variant of absolutism were two basic and inter-related peculiarities. First, the influence of war in its structure was even more preponderant than in the West and took unprecedented forms. Prussia represents perhaps the extreme limit reached by the militarization of the State; the entire tax-structure, civil service and local administration of the Great Elected came into being as sub-departments of the military overhead. The Prussian bureaucracy, in other words, was born as an offshoot of the Army. The whole organization of officialdom was interlocked with military objectives and designed to serve them.
Austrian Absolutism exhibited an imperfect compound of Western and Eastern traits, befitting its mixed territorial basis. The machinery of war was always the most constant escort of the development of Austrian Absolutism. But the Austrian armies nonetheless never achieved the position of their Prussian counterparts: the militarization of the State was checked by the limits to its centralization.
The military apparatus in Russia was as great as Prussia’s. The most celebrated rulers, Ivan IV and Peter I, both designed their basic administrative system to augment Russian war capacity. All land became liable for military duty and all nobles had to start indefinite State service at the age of 15. The overwhelming focus of the Absolutist state on war was not supererogatory. It corresponded to much greater upheavals of conquest and expansion than occurred in the West.
The second major peculiarity of Absolutism n both Prussia and Russia lay in the nature of the functional relationship between the feudal landowners and the Absolutist monarchies. The critical difference between the Eastern and Western variants can be seen in the respective modes of integration of the nobility into the new bureaucracy created by them. In neither Prussia nor Russia did sale of offices exist on any considerable scale.
The new Prussian state henceforward enforced an increasing financial probity in its administration. Purchase of profitable positions in the bureaucracy by nobles was not permitted. In Prussia itself, the civil service was on the whole remarkable for its conscientious professionalism. In Russia, on the other hand, frauds and embezzlement were endemic in the Muscovite and Romanov State machines. But this phenomenon was merely a straightforward and primitive variety of peculation and theft, if on a huge and chaotic scale. Sale of officers proper—as a regular and legal system of recruitment to the bureaucracy—never became seriously established in Russia.
In the West, sale of offices corresponded to the over-determination of the late feudal state by the swift growth of mercantile and manufacturing capital. Merchants, lawyers and bankers had access to the State machine if they could unbelt the sums necessary to buy positions in it.
In the East, on the other hand, there was no urban bourgeoisie to inflect the character of the Absolute State; it was not tempered by a mercantile sector. In Russia, the Tsars controlled trade—frequently through their own monopoly enterprises—and administered the towns. Uniquely, urban residents were often serfs. The device of a service nobility was in many respects the Eastern correlate of sale of offices in the West. The Prussian junker class was incorporated directly into the War Commissariat and its financial and tax services, by recruitment to the State.
In Austria there was no such compact fit between the Absolutist state apparatus and the aristocracy; the insurmountable heterogeneity of the landed classes of the Habsburg realms effectively precluded it. Yet a drastic if incomplete sketch for a service nobility occurred there too. But no general or institutionalized linkage between State service and the aristocratic order emerged, to the ultimate detriment of the international strength of Austrian Absolutism.
In the more primitive environment of Russia, military service was obligatory for every lord and precise allocations of warriors to be supplied were laid down, thereby consolidating to pomeshchik class of gentry which has started to emerge under his predecessor. Conversely, only persons performing State services could henceforward technically own land in Russia, apart from religious institutions. Every subject was bound to certain specific functions that were designed to preserve and aggrandize the power and authority of the State.
In the 17th and early 18th centuries, Peter I merged conditional and hereditary estates and henceforward every noble had to become a permanent servitor of the Tsar. In this way, feudal rank and bureaucratic hierarchy were organically fused: the device of the service nobility in principle made the State a virtual simulacrum of the structure of the landowning class, under the centralized power of its ‘absolute’ delegate.