Russian monarchy: the invention of tradition, dynastic succession, the imperial family and fundamental laws. by R. Wortman Реферат

The work was written according to the book "Russian monarchy: representation and rule" by Richard Wortman in memory of Marlene Stein Wortman. 

This article is devoted to studies of the political culture of the Russian monarchy as it influenced aspects of historical development such as law, representations of family and concepts of nation and empire. The articles show how the narratives described in the author's two-volume study, Scenarios of Power, guided monarchical rule, shaped the thought patterns not only of the tsar and the imperial family but also of the political and social elite and set the parameters of compromise that so constrained the policies of imperial Russia.

The author’s work has been devoted to the institutions and culture of the imperial Russian state since 1967. He turned for guidance to works of cultural anthropology and literary criticism. The author began to approach Russian monarchy as an ongoing institution and political culture and as an institution set above the state, dominating and engulfing the organs of the state in the figure of the ruling emperor.  The purpose of the article is to give the reader some information on how Russian monarchy functioned, its visual and literary manifestations and to reveal its presence in Russian life.

The author characterizes the monarchy as an active agent in Russia’s political experience, rather than an institution merely reactive to pressures, economic, political and military, whose dominant role was resisting change until the inevitable collapse facing all absolute monarchies.

The article deals with the aspects of the representation of Russian monarchy that the author has examined at length in the two volumes of “Scenarios of Power” which dealt with the narratives of Russian monarchy as they evolved from Peter the Great to the 1917 revolution. Its organization was chronological and imagery and symbols figured as aspects of the stages of the evolution of tsarist imagery and government. The articles in this volume rather focus on the effects over time of these representations on specific areas of state life, such as law, administrative practice, concepts of national and imperial identities. 

In contrast with the evolution of the absolute monarchies of Europe, the history of Russian monarchy is notable for the weakness of a concept or tradition of legal dynastic succession.

Much attention is given to the connection between traditions of dynastic succession and the evolution of the law has been a theme in the literature of the past few decades on the consolidation of state power in the West. 

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, councils of members of the Prussian ruling house formalized dynastic succession and marriages in agreements.

The princes of Moscow created a unified monarchy in Russia, without the corps of jurists that helped western rulers to consolidate their power over local and feudal privilege or the contractual relations among members of the ruling houses, and with noble estates that characterized European development. Succession was principally by testament, according to primogeniture, though there were no formal rules or laws to that effect.

It is stressed that a Fundamental Law implied permanent inviolable rules, i.e. that the permanent law in Russia was ensuring a condition of impermanence, a lasting uncertainty inviting intervention and glorification of the ascendant monarch.

Montesquieu had introduced the enlightenment conception of “a fundamental law.” He defined monarchy as a government in which “only one person governs according to fixed and established laws,” which he termed “fundamental laws”- laws that would be permanent and would provide guarantees of consistency and continuity in the operation of state. The observance of fundamental laws, he argued, distinguished monarchy from despotism, in which “one person drives everything forward without law or rule by his will and caprices.”

The principles of dynastic succession came to Russian monarchy as another emphatic assertion of change, a heroic and public display of appropriation of a tradition that had gained ascendancy in Europe in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars but was hardly rooted in Russia’s past.

A Statute of the Imperial Family declared the “increase of the Sovereign family” one of the grounds for the “illustrious condition” of the state. The statute specified the estates and revenues to go to members of the family, the titles they held, and the rules of inheritance they would observe. It established an Appanage Department to manage the family’s estates and income.

A dynastic tradition could not be established by an edict; it required the elevation of family values and patterns of public conduct and these took hold in Russia only in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The law could only have the desired effect when it corresponded to the principal symbols that the monarch used to represent his power.

This chapter is aimed to acquaint the reader with the emergence of the imperial family as principal symbol of Russian monarchy as it was presented to the elite in ceremonies, literature, and visual representation. The author calls it a dynastic scenario.

The members of the ruler’s family were included in the realm of monarchical representation during the 18th century. Peter the Great designated the birthdays and name days of members of the imperial family. Family members were kept safely distant from center stage.

Paul I introduced the legal and symbolic basis for the dynastic monarchy. He also fathered the children who represented and established the dynasty in the first half of the 19th century.

The Imperial Family at the close of Alexander’s reign provided no basis for the sure and reliable political continuity that Paul had envisioned in his law of succession.

19th century monarchs began to develop ways to represent themselves as the embodiments of national feeling rather than as distant figures whose title to rule stemmed from otherworldly origins.

The image of the family united the monarchs and subjects who “entered into this beautiful sphere.” The royal family began to put on display the ideal of love in marriage.

The first thing that needs to be said is Russia had no “real political tradition.” The old political traditions had been destroyed by Peter the Great and “could not possibly be renewed”. 

The study of “the invention of tradition” often ignores the symbolic context of the continuities these traditions are supposed to establish. The meaning of invented traditions can be understood only within the context of the mythical narratives that served as their referents. The invention of tradition proceeded in a symbolic context that presumed a separation of the act of ruling from the symbolic preeminence of the monarch.

In Russia, the symbolic preeminence of the emperor had always been closely linked with the extent and efficacy of monarchical power. Russian monarchs themselves had to display the transcendent features of the political order in performances constantly reaffirming the superhuman, heroic attributes attached to the state. Myth and ceremonies elevated the monarch above the population as a distant and legitimate sovereign.

The representation of Russian monarchy appears as a succession of apparent ruptures, producing an illusion of constant renewal, prodigies of transformation effected by the irresistible power of the monarch’s will.

It did not matter whether the changes represented true innovations or not; it was the appearance of change that was important for the signs of renovation revealed the transformative powers of the Russian emperors and empresses.

The authority of the emperor derived from his symbolic preeminence and distance from his subjects and could founder if compromised.

One should note that the invention of tradition took place in Russia under the symbolic imperative that the old appear new. New traditions had to occasion a break with the past in order to create a different conception of the past more suited to the cultural and political needs of the contemporary monarchy. The traditions of Russian monarchy failed to unite government and society, but they did provide rationales for the preservation of absolutism in Russia.

It should be stressed that most accounts of 1905 place Nicholas II at the periphery of the revolution, as a figure buffeted by events, reacting in a defensive, inconsistent manner and exacerbating critical situations by vacillating between indecisiveness and obstinacy. He was a weak authority figure who was nonplussed by the turmoil that confronted him. The characterization of him as a passive defender of the status quo, a ruler reacting unwittingly to social and political developments beyond his control, does not reflect his true role in the unfolding of the revolution and its ultimate defeat. This article aims to clarify this role, to show how Nicholas II understood the future of Russian society within the framework of a myth that both legitimized and exalted his authority, even as it was subject to its greatest challenge. 

Nicholas II viewed the world through the prism of a myth that presented him as a national ruler who would restore a regime of personal patriarchal rule.

He accepted the pre-Petrine imagery of the myth and the belief that the Orthodox religion and the Russian people’s adherence expressed the true national spirit of Russia.

Nicholas felt a powerful emotional bond with the Russian people that he described in his decrees, diary and personal correspondence.

He considered that the new institutions, which would make known the needs of the people, did not conflict with the principle of autocratic power.

Nicholas found additional confirmation for this belief in the ardent entreaties of members of the Union of Russian People, who presented him and the tsarevich with membership badges.

He insisted on the old definition of “unlimited and autocratic” because Nicholas believed that the new representative institutions in no way constrained his right to dispense with them if he wished.

The only person who enjoyed Nicholas’s complete trust was the empress.

Rasputin also impressed Nicholas. His concern for the tsarevich was as great as Alexandra has and grew as he began to present his son as the hope for Russia’s future.

This is a well-written book and its collection of essays on the history of the Russian Monarchy provides a complete picture of the Russian monarchy as an ongoing institution and its political culture, functions, presence in Russian life; and central role of symbolic representation in the Russian political culture. The book would serve as a valuable source for academicians as well as students of Russian history.

The author considers that the Fundamental State Laws elevated the image of the Russian monarch by uniting the rules governing the imperial family with the laws of the Russian state and thus giving the autocracy legal cachet. The fundamental laws left the procedures of legislation and the limits of the emperor’s legislative powers indefinite, permitting him to intervene without regard to law and to issue decrees with the force of law at will.

Nicholas I introduced the concept of dynasty into his scenario. Law and legality were represented as attributes of dynasty and embodied in fundamental laws. The breach between the autocracy and the legal state proved fatal as the tsar explored the byways of his historical imagination for a narrative of transcendence, while leaving the institutions of the Russian state to confront a rising tide of political and social discontent.

R. Wortman draws a conclusion that the family scenario served various functions in the adaptation of the monarchy to the political circumstances of 19th century Europe. The attachment between father and son and between husband and wife elevated the concept of dynastic inheritance to a moral plane and made so elusive a goal appear as part of the national concept of Russian monarchy.

The invention of tradition in Russia sustained a myth requiring dramatic reversals and sharp discontinuities in order to reinforce an image of supreme and irresistible power. In this context, invented traditions hardly contributed to a sense of a unified historical past.