Doomed to despotism: the legacy of the Byzantine Empire and the Horde lives on in the 21st century

Sabirjan Badretdinov, journalist (USA)

It is generally accepted that Putin is the main reason why today's Russia is a dictatorship. They say, if someone else came to power in 2000, the country could follow the path of democracy. I strongly disagree with this view for the reason that Russian authoritarianism has much deeper and more fundamental reasons than the desires of one person, no matter how powerful that person is. These reasons, it seems to me, are three:

1. The Horde heritage, which introduced the principle of rigid centralism into Russian society
2. Byzantine heritage, which transmitted to Russian society the tradition of the complete fusion of spiritual and secular power
3. The imperial factor, which made the hypertrophied development of the repressive apparatus of the state necessary to the detriment of its administrative and economic functions.

These three reasons over many centuries have led to the fact that despotism in Russia has become an integral part of the foundation of statehood.

Let's consider them separately.

1. With the first reason, everything is simple: the scattered Russian principalities, constantly at war with each other, were annexed to a single state, as a result of which the backbone of the future "vertical of power" emerged. The Moscow sovereigns inherited the administrative methods of the khans of the Golden Horde, actually borrowing from them the technology of power. If before the Mongol invasion, veche meetings and elective offices existed in some large Russian cities, then under the Horde domination the Russian elites integrated into the nomenclature of the Mongol Empire, penetrated from top to bottom with “tagged” investiture. Thus, the fundamental component of authoritarianism arose - strict centralism.
2. The Byzantine factor was no less important. Before the establishment of the Moscow Patriarchate in the middle of the 15th century, all metropolitans (Kiev, Vladimir, Moscow) were Greek in origin and considered Constantinople the center of the Orthodox world. That is, there was an interesting phenomenon when the principle of Caesaropapism concerned only Constantinople, but not Moscow. The Moscow Greek metropolitans considered themselves vassals of the Byzantine emperors, and not the Moscow tsar. Muscovy for them was only one of several dioceses subordinate to Constantinople. This changed dramatically after the Union of Florence (1439) and especially after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. The center of the Orthodox world moved to Moscow and the Moscow patriarchs, with a few exceptions, began to be elected from among the Muscovites. And quite naturally, they adopted from the Greeks the principle of the subordination of the church to the state. This became an important point of bifurcation, after which the Moscow state and then Russia could hardly evolve smoothly towards democracy, as was the case in European countries. In Europe, one of the preconditions for the emergence of democracy was the Reformation and the resulting religious pluralism. Religious pluralism gradually led European countries to political and ideological pluralism, which served as an essential prerequisite for democracy. This did not happen in Russia, mostly due to the merger of church and state, or rather, the transformation of the church into a servant of the state.
3. For a couple of centuries after the capture of the Kazan Khanate in 1552, the Russian state expanded to the Pacific Ocean, annexing more and more peoples and territories. The aliens, naturally, had to be suppressed and kept at bay. For this, an apparatus of violence and an ever more complicated mechanism of oppression and repression were needed. If in the overseas colonies of European countries it was possible to impose despotism while maintaining democracy and freedom in the metropolises, then Russia did not have such a choice. In the absence of overseas colonies, when Russians and foreigners lived interspersed, Moscow, willy-nilly, had to impose despotism throughout the country, including purely Russian provinces. Thus, the difference between the colonies and the metropolis disappeared, and the whole country for the ruling elite became, in fact, a colony. Therefore, the ruling elite began to treat the Russians themselves as a conquered people, as a conquered enemy.

All these factors are firmly rooted in the Russian state tradition and in the mentality of the people. No king, secretary general or president can single-handedly change these realities. Conclusion: democratization in Russia is possible only if all these three factors disappear simultaneously. And this is possible only in the event of a huge cataclysm.

Original is here.