On the Importance of the State in the Russian Setting

A recurrent theme in the discussion of Russian history, fortunately less frequent in that history itself, is that of “the time of troubles” (smutnoye vremya in Russian). The English translation provides but a pale sense of what Russians understand by the term: an apparently indefinite period of profound economic and social crisis in the body politic, characterized by the collapse of state authority, a crisis magnified by the comparative weakness of Russia's non-state institutions to fill the gap opened by the disintegration of rule from above. Unregulated struggles over political succession, secession of outlying territories, civil strife, foreign intervention, and above all death, on the mass scale, have all been directly associated with Russia's several times of troubles, both in the popular imagination and in actual fact. In practice, the infliction of mass death has also been associated with periods of overweening state authority, as the reigns of Peter I (“the Great,” 1689–1725) and Josif Stalin (ca. 1927–53) demonstrate. Yet arguably it has been the fear of the consequences attending the decomposition of the state rather than its apotheosis as an unresponsive autocratic Leviathan that touches the raw nerve of Russian political culture.