The Hungarian scholar Endre Sashalmi has written many articles on Russian history in Hungarian and English. The present book is a significantly expanded and revised version of an earlier book of his published in Hungarian, A hatalom és az állam problematikája Oroszországban 1462–1725 között európai perspektívából (Budapest, 2020). After an Introduction in which he discusses aims, terminology, and genre, Sashalmi divides the book into three main sections: 1) in which he clarifies terms such as “autocracy” and gosudarstvo and discusses the previous approaches to these and other terms; 2) in which he presents a “western perspective” of the notions of power in Russia; and 3) in which he seeks “to pinpoint the shifts in the perception of law and state in Russia introduced by [Feofan] Prokopovich,” Archbishop of Novgorod (374). The book ends with an Epilogue where Sashalmi argues that Vladimir Putin's rhetoric and practice are derivative from the “the Russian state narrative” originated by Prokopovich.
A reader might find the date range of the title—from 1462 (the year Ivan III began his rule) to 1725 (the year Peter I ended his)—to be confusing, because the subtitle indicates an assessment of the “significance of Peter's reign.” One might think that an assessment of a ruler's reign should come after the reign ends in the sense of its impact, not before. Sashalmi justifies the indicated date range in two ways: First, he says: “With the emphasis of the post-1700 years [1700–1725] in the structure of the book, I intend to show the significance of the change that occurred in Russian thought on power both in texts and iconography in a short time, as well as highlight the problem of reception of Western ideas” (24). Secondly, he points out that he attempts to take “a longue durée approach in understanding some aspects of Russian political thought and political vocabulary even as late as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” (48). He sees the reign of Peter I as “not beginning but accelerating” the process of westernization (2).
According to Sashalmi: “Our main purpose of the book . . . is to show in a comparative manner how this distinction was developing, pointing out, at the same time, why this phenomenon could not take firm roots in Russia” (47). By “this distinction” he is referring to “a kind of distinction between” the ruler's two bodies, as Ernst Kantorowicz defined them—the “body natural” and a “body politic.” Citing Michael Cherniavsky and Richard Wortman, Sashalmi asserts that distinction did not emerge in Russia or, then citing Arch Getty, “the identity was so close, as to be imperceptible” (Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars and the Persistence of Tradition, 2013, 48). As well read as Sashalmi obviously is, it would have helped to clarify his argument had he engaged with Edward Keenan's “The Tsar's Two Bodies” article (Canadian-American Slavonic Papers, 51, no. 1 [2017]: 3–28), which includes an application of Kantorowicz's theory to Muscovy.
In discussing the influx of ideas from Ukraine and Belarus starting in the mid-seventeenth century, Sashalmi quotes Daniel Rowland's statement that it did not immediately “result in the creation of a Western-style discourse of political thought—a complex phenomenon that did not emerge until the reign of Catherine the Great, if then” (24). Sashalmi accepts that statement with this caveat: “A limited discourse, however, was clearly under way after 1700 through translations and the emergence of genuine political thought” (24n92). Here he seems to be equating “Western-style discourse of political thought” with “genuine political thought,” which implies that he considers the political thought expressed before 1700 to be “political theology” (202) and not “genuine,” apparently because it was not done in a “western style.” Yet, political theology, as defined by Kantorowicz, was the basis of the two-bodies theory, which he called “a mystical fiction with theological roots.”
Sashalmi accepts Charles Halperin's conclusion that “Calling it [the Muscovy of Ivan IV] a military-fiscal or fiscal-military state contributes nothing to our understanding” (13), yet Sashalmi is of the opinion that calling Russia a fiscal-military state does contribute to our understanding for a later period of state development, from the middle of the seventeenth century to 1725, “mostly due to Peter's reforms after 1700” (81), specifically by his doubling the size of the army to 200,000 and creating a navy of 25,000. Yet later in his reign Peter reduced the size of his army, and the Russian navy virtually ceased to exist in the decade after Peter's death.
Sashalmi makes an incisive critique in the Epilogue in observing that “Putin has Peter the Great as his hero of Russian history” (463). Furthermore, “Beginning from Peter it has become axiomatic: strong, legally unlimited monarchic power and territorial unity of the vast state is the guarantee of the well-being of the Russian people and of Russia's being a great power” (463–64). Although the Peter-as-hero part of the Russian state narrative can be traced back to Prokopovich, it has been historians over the years who have been perpetuating and, whether consciously or subconsciously, turning the writings of Peter's propagandists into a metahistorical romance.
