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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 December 2021
Can classical political theories of mixed constitution from Polybius to Cicero help us shed new light on Russian politics? In order to so, this article first considers political structures of such non-parliamentary republics as medieval Novgorod and Venice, while choosing Constantinople as a basis for their comparison. Second, using Anthony Kaldellis's recent book that has reinterpreted Byzantium in terms of the classical theory of res publica, it analyzes the question of auctoritas in ancient republican Rome and then imperial Constantinople. Third, the author employs Giorgio Agamben's book on the state of exception, in order to see how mechanisms of power and authority that the Roman emperors had employed might help us interpret anew the phenomenon of tsardom, given that Ivan the Terrible was the first in Russia to be crowned as tsar, that is, Ceasar. This might have a lasting significance even for present day politics.
1. Lukin, Pavel, Novgorod i Venetsiia: Sravnitel΄no-istoricheskie ocherki stanovleniia respublikanskogo stroia (St. Petersburg, forthcoming, 2021)Google Scholar.
2. Translated by Lewkenor, Lewes as The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (London, 1599)Google Scholar.
3. See Cicero, De re publica I: 44–45, in Cicero, On the Republic. On the Laws, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes, Loeb Classical Library vol. 213, Cambridge, Mass., 1928, 68-71; and Oleg Kharkhordin, Respublika, ili delo publiki (St. Petersburg, 2020), 17–18, 30–32.
4. Lukin, Novgorod i Venetsiia.
5. Valentin Ianin, Novgorodskie posadniki, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 2003).
6. In Greek, such magistrates were called protospatharios or hypathos. A derivative Russian word ipaty that Ivan Groznyi used while describing the history of Byzantine turmoils, meant “consuls.” See Iakov Lur΄e and Iurii Rykov, eds., Perepiska Ivana Groznogo s Andreem Kurbskim (Leningrad, 1979; hereafter PIGAK), 22.
7. Donald M. Nicol, Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and Cultural Relations (Cambridge, Eng., 1988), 10, 22, 33, 47.
8. Ibid., 33–34, 51.
9. Cicero, De re publica I:39.
10. Anthony Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in the New Rome (Cambridge, Mass., 2015), 28–29.
11. Kaldellis, Byzantine Republic, 200.
12. This did not entail a right to rebellion. Rather, an extra-legal action of one (monarchical) part of the system of power could in principle be counterbalanced by the equally extra-legal, or il-legal, actions of another (popular) part. Such a condition of il-legality could rapidly arise during the emperor’s succession, because if the former emperor, who was frequently characterized as nomos empsykhos—“law enpsyched (or ensouled)”—disappeared, then it turned out that the law dissipated with him. As a consequence, the Byzantine people held special powers at that very moment.
13. Kaldellis, Byzantine Republic, 138.
14. On Cicero, see Kharkhordin, Republicanism in Russia: Community Before and After Communism (Cambridge, Mass., 2018), 52–54, 263.
15. Before Hitler the German state, formally democratic and existing according to the Weimar Constitution, had itself more than 250 times proclaimed a state of exception in Germany during the 1920s and 30s. This allowed the German government of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning to fight the threat of a communist uprising, while the French government of Édouard Daladier during the same epoch adopted similar state-of-exception policies to solve other mobilization goals. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago, 2005), 2, 13–15.
16. Agamben, State of Exception, 3.
17. The term ius-titium was linguistically created on the model of the term sol-stitium, “a standstill of the sun,” so iustititum meant the stoppage or break in the functioning of the law. It could be introduced in Rome, when, for example, an external army (Hannibal) or a civil war (initiated by the supporters of the Gracchi) threatened to destroy the very foundations of Rome. See Agamben, State of Exception, 41.
18. If the previous magistrates could not resolve the issue together, then even a simple citizen of Rome could take the fate of Rome into his own hands. This is what happened in the case of Scipio Nasica, who had killed Tiberius Gracchus. See Agamben, State of Exception, 41–44.
19. These were the origins of the right of the Byzantine emperors, when important needs pressed them to do so, to apply oikonomia—that is, an extra-legal policy decision—that would establish a ruling on a very important issue of the day needed to maintain peace and prosperity of New Rome. Of course, when an emperor in Constantinople applied oikonomia to make a new policy decision or solve a difficult pragmatic issue, he himself was in a condition that could be designated in Greek as anomia, an il-legality or a-legality. As emperor, he was nomos empsykhos, or an ensouled law, but giving rise to these legally binding decisions, he himself resided outside the law.
20. Agamben reveals to us the structure of how auctoritas acts. The term itself was purely Roman, and Cassius Dio, who wrote his Roman history in Greek, had to stress that the Latin term had to be translated each time by a different word, depending on context. In the Roman law, this term was part of both private and public law. In civil code transactions, this term designated the part of a property transaction when it becomes exhaustively complete, that is, acquires a foundation and guarantees. In other words, this very property transaction had to be “augmented” by a third party that would testify to its efficient execution. In a similar way, the Senate could supply the foundation and guarantees to the decisions of the consuls and other magistrates. The Senate did not have potestas (magistrates were endowed with it, according to the specified duties of their offices), and it did not have imperium, which belonged to the people. Thus, during the Rome of Scipio and Cicero, the Senate did not have the right to act independently; its role was to “authorize,” that is, to confirm and grant the full force of the decisions of the magistrates and public assemblies. The Senate could not initiate actions but instead reacted to the requests by the magistrates, but it could file a demand or request for action and publish the senatum consultum, which carried the power of less than an order but more than just advice. See Agamben, State of Exception, 75–78, 82–83.
21. Aleksandr Marei, Avtoritet, ili podchinenie bez nasiliia (St. Petersburg, 2017), 49–59. In the New Rome of Justinian, we find a decree from 530 AD proclaiming that the potestas of the Roman people had now been transferred to the emperor, while imperium (military command) had been offered to him by “celestial majesty” because the emperor had been elected deo auctore, following divine authorization. The people, having transferred to the emperor both potestas and imperium, “have put him above law, and by this a strictly juridical justification is provided for the limitless power of the emperor; however, the imperial power, following the interests of law and order and respect for law, submits itself voluntarily to law and proclaims it obligatory for itself.” See Vladimir Val΄denberg, “Gosudarstvennoe ustroistvo Vizantii do kontsa VII veka” [1932], in Entoni Kaldellis, Vizantiiskaia Respublika: Narod i vlast΄ v Novom Rime (St. Petersburg, 2016), 355, 357, 401). From Kaldellis’s exposition we know that the divine authorization of the emperor’s actions allows him to break those laws in times of dire necessity.
22. Agamben, State of Exception, 86
23. PIGAK, 245, and Ruslan Skrynnikov, Tsarstvo terrora (St. Petersburg, 1992), 204, 207.
24. Initially in the realm of landholding, for example, this term meant, as the dictionary of the medieval Russian holds, “a separate appanage holding for the women in the family of the grand prince” in order for them to procure for their needs, with this example: “and in addition to that I give her two villages in Iuriev as oprichinina, exemption.” Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XI-XVII vv., 30 vols., (Moscow, 1975–2015), 13:45.
25. Slovar΄ russkogo iazyka, 13:45. The adverb krome, of course, means “except,” and Kurbskii was not to miss offering allusions to such expressions as kromeshnaia t΄ma, “exceptional, total darkness,” or kromeshnyi ad, “total hell.”
26. Mikhail Krom, “Vdovstvuiushchee tsarstvo”: Politicheskii krizis v Rossii 30-40-kh godov XVI veka (Moscow, 2010), 438–39.
27. Charles J. Halperin, Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish (Pittsburgh, 2019), 186 and Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley, 1999), 119–21. One would expect that certain commands were given by Groznyi in the presence of the top layer of his oprichniki, and perhaps even details of commands were discussed. But an establishment of the whole realm of life exempt from the usual rules and laws entailed that the tsar had no need from now on to confer with the boyar counsellors or lesser executives.
28. According to Groznyi, while the ipaty (consuls), the sinklity (senators), and the eparkhi (local dignitaries) were engaged in warfare for power and privilege, the territory of the Byzantine empire was shrinking, and Greek tsardom, as Ivan calls it, was crumbling (PIGAK, 22). On the contrary, Andrei Kurbskii adamantly defended the need to limit the tsar’s powers by advice from or deliberation with the aristocratic councils that would consist of the “best sinklit,” as he wrote to Ivan IV about the qualities of Cicero (PIGAK, 110).
29. After the 1564 charter of the tsar addressed to the merchants and “all tenants” (grazhane) of Moscow—the same page of the chronicle a little later also mentions “the black people”—these people petitioned the Moscow metropolitan that when the clergy, together with the boyars and the service personnel, would come to ask for forgiveness from the tsar so that he would return to head the abandoned tsardom, he should know that simple folk was waiting for him as the meek sheep awaiting the shepherd, so that he could defend them from the wolves and the injustices inflicted by the powerful, and “as for the tsar’s traitors and rascals, they do not support those and may exterminate them themselves.” See Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei, 43 vols., vol. 13; Letopisnyi sbornik, imenuemyi Patriarsheiu ili Nikonovskoiu letopis'iu (1506–1558 gg.), pt. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1906), 392–93.
30. This meant that he would have the power to admonish and remonstrate the tsar in cases of most blatant violations of traditional mores or unjust punishments of the boyars, who had fallen out with the powers that be. This intercession was well established in canon law and had its source in the New Testament to reveal the sins of the powerful if they assault an innocent victim; admonish them into righteous behavior if they do not listen; and prohibit communion with the holy during the sacrament of the Eucharist if they still insist on continuing persecution. See Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual, 53–54.
31. There was one speech during a council that introduced the state of exception, and two more: one during the liturgy at the Uspenskii Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin in 1568 (which entailed a direct refusal to bless the tsar’s actions) and another after a specially arranged unjust trial by top clergy that denied St. Philip his position as a metropolitan and deposed him.
32. After that, the vita says, “bitter was the fate for the Christian faith from the oprichnina: a great commotion in all of the world, and the shedding of blood and court proceedings not according to justice.” Irina Lobakova, Zhitie mitropolita Filippa: Issledovanie i teksty (St. Petersburg, 2006), 187–88.
33. Vladimir Val΄denberg, Drevnerusskie ucheniia o predelakh tsarskoi vlasti (Moscow, 2006 [1916]), 108–9, 165, 236, 277–78.
34. See Andrei Iurganov, Kategorii russkoi srednevekovoi kul’tury (Moscow, 1998); and Andrei Bulychev, Mezhdu sviatymi i demonami. Zametki o posmertnoi sud’be opal’nykh Ivana Groznogo (Moscow, 2005). The timing for the start of the executions of the oprichnina is easier explained by Muscovite misfortunes in the Livonian war, an unwillingness of some groups of boyars to fight Poland-Lithuania, and the number of defections to the enemy ranks during this war. Please see Konstantin Erusalimskii, “Moskovsko-litovskaia voina 1562–1566 gg. i vvedenie oprichniny: Problemy demografii i zemel'noi politiki,” Rossiiskaia istoriia 2017, no. 1: 3–31.
35. “. . .men of unquestionable stature—among them Tertullian and even Thomas Aquinas—could be convinced that one of the joys in heaven would be the privilege of watching the spectacle of unspeakable sufferings in hell.” Hannah Arendt, “What is Authority?” in her Between Past and Future (New York, 1961), 133.
36. First, it is the idea that the tsar’s power is God-given. Second, there is an idea that submission or obedience to the tsar has a religious sanction because this is how the world has been created by God; disobedience hence is an instance of sin or blasphemy. Third, even though the tsars are free to do with their slaves what they wish, they are themselves subject to God’s will when they appear in front of Him during the Last Judgment. Fourth, the tsar must guard Orthodox Christianity, and be a shepherd to his sheep (Val΄denberg, Drevnerusskie ucheniia, 273–86).
37. Kaldellis takes this treatise to be a masked critique of the usurpation of power that had revealed itself most fully under Justinian. See Kaldellis, “Republican Theory and Political Dissidence in Ioannes Lydos,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 29, no.1 (2005): 1–16.
38. One should note that the basileus at that time was not yet an official title of the Byzantine emperors; rather, it designated any monarchical ruler, according to word usage characteristic of the Greeks since the Hellenistic era. Basileus became part of the title of the Byzantine emperor only after 629 CE, when Emperor Heraclius ordered that official documents of the empire be recorded and kept in Greek, not in Latin. So, basileus is a monarch who rules in such a way that he does not change any of the existing laws following his whim (Lydus 1.3). Such a ruler does not engage in self-willfulness (kath΄ authentian in Greek) but rather applies the stamp to the decisions already discussed and proposed by the wise and dignified notables. The tyrant, on the contrary, does not make the law the guide for his will, but establishes his will as law. (Ioannes Lydus, On powers, or the Magistracies of the Roman State, ed. Anastasius C. Bandy (Philadelphia, 1983), 58, 63, 65.
39. Lydus, On Powers, 61–66; Latin text—Ioannes Lydus, De magistratibus romanis (Bonn, 1837), 124.
40. In situations of co-rule this title was given to the elder or superior among the two co-rulers, and under the rule of the Paleologue dynasty in the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries, this title started to belong to the designated successor to the throne.
41. Kurbskii wanted to stress this thought (that the tsar cannot hold the laws in his hands the way he sees it fit) so much that he had distorted the translation from Latin. Non igitur, ubi quisque erit, eius loci ius tenebit, si ibi eum legibus esse non opportebit (Paradoxa Stoicorum IV) is standardly rendered into English as “Therefore a man will not have the rights of the particular place where he happens to be if by law he ought not to be there.” (Cicero, On the Orator: Book 3. On Fate. Stoic Paradoxes. Divisions of Oratory, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library 349 [Cambridge, Mass., 1942], 282–83.) So, Cicero was saying in the original: the laws prohibit you to be in Rome! Kurbskii rendered this sentence as “you are trying to hold the laws of Rome in your own hands and do whatever you want” (PIGAK, 113, 175.)
42. PIGAK, 108.
43. Lobakova, Zhitie mitropolita Filippa, 51, 189; English and Greek—Ihor Shevchenko, “A Neglected Byzantine Source of Muscovite Political Ideology,” Harvard Slavic Studies, no. 2 (1954): 161.
44. See Val΄denberg, “Gosudarstvennoe ustroistvo,” 359, 377. Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus gives some details of the variations of this rite in his treatise De ceremoniis. For example, not during a regular election of a new emperor but rather during the orderly announcement of the second basileus by the emperor who would co-rule with this existing emperor “the Senate, the demoi and the army express their participation in the ceremony not only by their presence but by their active performance of exclamations, demands, signs of approval, etc.” (Val΄denberg, “Gosudarstvennoe ustroistvo,” 371).
45. For an aesthetic explanation see Pushkin, Alexander, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 20 vols. (St. Petersburg, 2009), 7:704Google Scholar.
46. Chester Dunning, Caryl Emerson, Sergei Fomichev, Lidiia Lotman, and Antony Wood, The Uncensored Boris Godunov: The Case for Pushkin’s Original Comedy with Annotated Text and Translation (Madison, Wisc., 2006), chs. 2–3. The rule of Godunov, who de facto became a supreme ruler under the short-witted Tsar Feodor Ivanovich, son of Ivan Groznyi, is painted by Pushkin as disguised tyranny, which is marked by more than just open bloody executions like those that had happened under Ivan IV. Pushkin puts this criticism into the mouth of a character called Afanasii Pushkin, his historical ancestor;. . . He rules us like Tsar Ivan(Whose name should never be pronounced at night).What if we have no public executions?What if, before the people’s eyes, we singNo hymns to Jesus on the bloodied stake?What if we’re not being burned on the public square,On coals the Tsar himself stokes with his rod?Can we be certain of our wretched lives?Disgrace awaits us where we least expect it,Prison, Siberia, fetters or the cowl,A lonely death by hanging or starvation (Dunning et al., Uncensored Boris Godunov, 325).
47. Dunning et al., Uncensored Boris Godunov, 121.
48. Alexander Pushkin, “Ode to Liberty,” trans. A.Z. Foreman, RuVerses, at https://ruverses.com/alexander-pushkin/ode-to-liberty/ (accessed July 29, 2021).
49. Val’denberg, Vladimir, Sen’ nadezhnaia zakona: Politicheskoe mirovozzrenie Pushkina (St. Petersburg, 2017), 70–71Google Scholar, 75.
50. Nevertheless, the next lines of Pushkin’s ode that resolutely condemned Napoleon as a ruler who usurped power in the end of the revolution, tell us: the people can be silent also because it cannot engage in an acclamation of Napoleon. The people is silent therefore in two situations – when revolution happens, and when a new emperor or tsar could be refused acclamation. In the first case, though, the people is silent at the sight of an execution of their sovereign. Here one encounters not a refusal to provide acclamation but rather a terrifying silence in sight of the execution of the king with whom the people had entered into a compact before. In the second case, it is an intentional non-acceptance of a new emperor. Thus, in the two cases when the people is silent, the first one involves the condition of revolutionary anomia—and the second one, a refusal of the emperor’s anomia.
51. Alexander Pushkin, “Ode to Liberty.”