A Social System Oriented Toward the Past, Part I

Abstract

We view the social organization of contemporary Russia as a continuation of the Soviet socioeconomic order, whose roots extend back centuries into the past of a country that has served as the vehicle of Eurasian Orthodox civilization. This article explores the various stages of the country’s development—from the thirteenth century to the present—and argues that the collapse of the communist system in Russia led to a transition from Eurasian civilization to a new stage in Russia’s evolution—a neo-statist socioeconomic order and classical authoritarianism. Part I examines “the influence of the path traveled” on contemporary Russia’s social system and shows that, until the mid-thirteenth century, Rus was an early feudal society with close economic, political, cultural, and dynastic (state) bonds with Europe. The system that existed under the Golden Horde, in addition to Asiatic despotism, introduced an Asiatic (state) means of production and a classless social structure devoid of private property. The state once and for all was elevated above Russian society and was transformed into the primary factor in its development. This was the historical soil out of which grew the system of the social estate (soslovie) that came to be the institutional system stratifying Muscovy Rus, as well as tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia.