Russians will surely remember 2020 for two reasons. First, because of the amount of effort that went into ensuring that citizens vote during the July 1 plebiscite on amendments to the 1993 Constitution, which was not required by existing legislation. Second, because of a totally novel phenomenon: the issuing of QR-codes, which effectively limited Moscow residents’ constitutional right to free movement, which was justified by the media as a logical response to the COVID pandemic. But what is the rationale for demanding additional political approval in July, when the newly-proposed constitutional amendments had already been adopted through a legally binding procedure in mid-spring? Why allow the mayor of Moscow unprecedented flexibility in limiting basic constitutional rights when, according to President Putin's famous phrase from the early 2000s, Russia should be “a dictatorship of law”?

I will try to show that there is a single logic to both this excessive zeal of the powers that be and their insufficient formalism. This logic is usually explained by many scholars by the simple term, “authoritarianism.” I would like to suggest, however, that the way power and authority are functioning in Russia should perhaps be better analyzed outside of the usual opposition of democracy vs. authoritarianism.

In order to build a genealogy of this relationship between power and authority, I will have to start from a rather specific question about the political structure of classical (non-parliamentary) republics. Next I will consider the concept of auctoritas in ancient Rome, and then I will see what insight that concept offers when used as a vantage point from which to reinterpret some key facts of Russian history. Briefly, philosophers and historians have long been insisting that when power and authority coincide in single hands, this might be a sign of a realistic threat of illegality—or of a swift transition to such.

In his forthcoming book, Novgorod i Venetsiia, Pavel Lukin has compared the role of public assemblies in these two medieval republics.Footnote ¹ Venice had an equivalent of the veche (assembly) called arengo, but its role was progressively reduced until it stopped functioning altogether in the early fifteenth century. During the early period of Venetian history, though, it was a key gathering that was frequently called to elect the Doge—and it did so in a way that was similar to how the veche in Novgorod could grant or deny power to a posadnik, an elected city mayor. This rather unruly order of election was eventually replaced by what we know from the classical rendition of a mature political system in Venice: De magistratibus et republica venetorum by Gasparo Contarini (1543).Footnote ² One could be critical of Contarini, who had provided an idealized image of Venice's institutions as the model of mixed government that one finds in classical works from Aristotle and Polybius to Cicero. Cicero argued that a stable government should unite the three best forms of governing: the rule of the one (monarchy), the rule of the few or the best (aristocracy), and the rule of all (politeia in Aristotle, which we now call democracy). The doge, according to Contarini, was thus an element of wise monarchic rule, limited by the best patricians (who staffed different committees of the Senate), while the democratic element was ensured by the fact that all males from patrician families who had reached an age of maturity joined the Maggior Consiglio that gathered in the halls of the Ducal Palace. From a contemporary perspective, it would be strange to call this gathering an example of the rule of all (democracy), since the majority of Venetians were excluded from it. The usual justification at the time, however, allowed full citizenship rights only to males of patrician origin and a certain age.

Such a mixture of the three regimes created lasting stability in the Venetian political system in comparison, for example, to Florence, which did not retain its republican institutions for long. At least since the time of Polybius, classical political theory has posited that every political regime in its pure form soon degenerated into its opposite: benign monarchy becomes vicious tyranny; noble aristocracy becomes vile oligarchy; and politeia develops in the direction of ochlocracy (mob rule), controlled by fickle popular passions. But as Cicero argued, only a mix of the three pure regimes that limit the excesses of one another could fight against this degeneration.Footnote ³ The outstanding longevity of Venice as a republic testified to the truth of this point.

Before such a system of mixed government solidified, one could hardly have called the Venetian political system stable. Here are some examples from the early Venetian chronicles, for which I am grateful to Lukin's book. In 1026, a great commotion started among the people of Venice under the leadership of Domenico Flabianico against the Doge Otto Orseolo. As a result, “all people of Venice” arrested the Doge and sent him to Byzantium, while Pietro Barbolano was elected to take his place. However, Pietro was not very popular. The Venetian people (Venetorum populus) arrested him in 1032, shaved him and sent him to Constantinople in a monk's garb, while Orseolo was invited back. Otto soon died, however, so the Orseolo family proposed a replacement from its noble ranks: Domenico Orseolo. He usurped the office of the Doge “against the will of the Venetian people,” (absque Veneticorum populi voluntate), remaining Doge for only 24 hours after which he fled to Ravenna. At that point Domenico Flabianico triumphantly returned to Venice and “was appointed Doge with great honor.”

Of course, this description is reminiscent of the lines of the Novgorod chronicles: the veche could take away the office of posadnik from one person and grant it to another when powerful families clashed over these appointments, as happened between the Mikhalkovichi and the Miroshkinichi at the end of the twelfth-early thirteenth centuries. In Venice, nevertheless, we witness a transition from the chaotic struggles for rulership towards a more orderly way of appointing the main executive of this most serene republic. One of the key events that is usually cited happened in 1143, when for the first time a procession of the Great Council was staged, headed by “the most wise men.” The role of popular assembly, notes Lukin, was already becoming auxiliary: key decisions were by then already taken by the city elite, while the people and the clergy solemnly and laudingly accepted such decisions, as the chronicle says (clero et populo Venecie collaudante.) The group of these key “wise men” was later institutionalized as Maggior Consiglio, which enjoyed power since 1172. The development of such bodies of collective decision-making did not go smoothly. For example, in that very year, 1172, Doge Vitale II Michiel was assassinated after the vanquished Venetian army returned from a failed assault on Constantinople. In order to escape such turmoil and to quell fratricidal passions, a new procedure was implemented. First, a body of eleven electors was collected to invite a new Doge, and then, a bit later, this group was extended to include forty-one electors. Thus the function of granting power to the Doge was taken away from the overall public assembly of the citizens.Footnote ⁴

A process known by the name of the Grand Serrata (The Great Closure or the Locking of the Great Council) began in 1297. From 1317 on, only members of patrician families whose names had been included into the select list in 1297 or added by special rules in the next twenty years could claim Venetian citizenship. Thus, only members of such families constituting the Maggior Consiglio could be nominated to take the main magistrates of the republic and be part of its consultative organs, the number of which steadily increased. By the time Contarini wrote his eulogy to a wisely arranged Venetian republic, the equivalent of the veche in Venice had not existed for a hundred years, since at least 1423.

Valentin Ianin uncovered a similar tendency in the progressive oligarchization of the Novgorod power structures between the tenth and fifteenth centuries.Footnote ⁵ First three, and then five districts of the city elected one posadnik, then a group of posadniki, who allegedly represented each district. Not long before the conquest of Novgorod by Muscovy, a collective executive of thirty-six posadniki had been formed that included representatives of the main Novgorod boyar families. However, the system of mixed government had not been established. From the three elements of such a system, Novgorod knew only two. If one can easily point to a veche as a powerful democratic element in such a system of mixed government (public assemblies were held all the way until the fall of Novgorod in 1478), and the monarchical element was represented by invited princes or temporarily elected posadniki (or the archbishop when he took part in international negotiations), then stable institutes of aristocratic governance did not take root or come into stable existence. That is why historical chronicles record frequent incidents of popular unrest and factional struggles. Since we do not have an archive of public records for Novgorod, we cannot fathom whether written decisions of the hypothetical Grand Council of the Novgorod boyars had been kept in the Chamber of Facets of the Novgorod Detinets, and how detailed they might have been. A habitual tendency to think in historical stages would insidiously suggest that if the Novgorodians had enough time to routinize or solidify stable institutes of aristocratic rule (that would eventually lead to stale oligarchy, as in mature Venice of the late seventeenth-eighteenth centuries), the system would be more balanced, and present-day Russia would look different.

But history does not tolerate conjectural thinking, as we know, and the conquest of Novgorod by Muscovy in 1470–78 was partially predetermined by the fact that Russia did not employ knights’ regiments. In order to defend oneself, Novgorod had to rely on the formulas of limited sovereignty or allegiance to the grand princes of Vladimir as their traditional defenders against external attacks. The monarchical element in the system of the Novgorodian rule was not particularly efficient when it came to defending against outside encroachments on Novgorod possessions. Muscovy used this to the best of its ability. Trying to skillfully maneuver one's route amidst the sea of nascent absolutist predators—similar to the way such classical republics as Venice and Ragusa (Dubrovnik) did with success in the fifteenth-eighteenth centuries—did not work out in the case of Novgorod the Great.

Byzantium could serve as a useful vehicle for comparing Venice and Novgorod. The Doge, which was called dux in Latin, was a habitual title of the local representatives of Byzantium who were stationed in Ravenna, Calabria, or Sardinia—in other words, in those remains of the Roman Empire in Italy that did not fall to the Langobards.Footnote ⁶ Initially quite a few Doges wanted to leave those positions to their progeny, but this was against the rules of this magistracy (succession was not hereditary). Since Byzantine emperors could be seen as doing the same, however, some Doges managed to transfer the title to their children, an act that was supported by a frequent practice of sending the Doge's heirs for education at the Roman court in Constantinople, which started to flourish since at least the tenth century. It seemed that high Byzantine culture, as well as everyday mores and useful connections, could be easily appropriated or developed by the visiting Venetians.Footnote ⁷

What Byzantium could not offer to Venice, write historians, was a model of political and social stability. So, Doges in the eighth-tenth centuries were sometimes killed, and attempts to appoint a Doge easily led to factional strife that pitted one part of the populace against another, including fathers against sons. Changes were introduced after the end of the reign of the Orseolo family Doges and the arrival of the Flabianico Doge in 1032. After that, no Doge had successfully managed to install an heir in a Byzantine way, in which an acting Emperor could try simply to point to a desired successor.Footnote ⁸ Venice thus chose to limit the power of the Doges, as well as the frequently unruly public assembly, having increased the power of the aristocratic elements in its more or less stable mix of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. But the most interesting point is a condition from which it departed, because Venice rejected the system that largely resembled what Anthony Kaldellis called “the Byzantine republic” in his eponymous book.

For a present-day reader who is used to thinking that monarchy is a form of political rule that is opposed to republics, Kaldellis's statement that Constantinople was a republic may sound extravagant. But students of the history of political thought of course remember that classical theory since Cicero, at least, defined res publica as a property or concern of the people. Thus, the French language even employs a very felicitous translation of res publica as la chose publique. This “public thing” existed when the Roman people could effectively control it, and ceased to exist when it did not belong to the people.Footnote ⁹ Res publica could therefore exist in three forms: when it could be directed or guided by one ruler (monarchy), by the few (aristocracy), or by all (democracy)—with the principal element being that the common good was pursued by each of these forms. Thus, such historians of the Roman res publica as Appian or Plutarch wrote after the age of Augustus that the latter had saved or vindicated it, having removed the rule of the elected patrician consuls and thus moved it closer to the pure form of res publica in its monarchical guise. But res publica did not disappear as a result of such transformations; the Roman citizens continued to enjoy the benefits of res publica in its monarchical form. Another famous historian, Cassius Dio, thought otherwise: in his opinion, after Augustus, res publica existed as a mixed government of monarchy and democracy.Footnote ¹⁰ Thus, from the perfect three-set piece of the mixed government model, only two remained: monarchy and democracy. The aristocratic element was eliminated from the system for obvious reasons of inconvenience and dysfunction that led to the era of civil wars in Rome.

According to Kaldellis, the political system of the New Rome included elements of popular sovereignty, at least from the fourth century, when the capital moved from Rome to Constantinople, and all the way until the Fourth Crusade in 1204, which is the period under consideration by his book. First of all, emperors had to assure in their statements that they ruled for the benefit of the people. The Byzantine people could reclaim its sovereignty for a moment if a given emperor was losing popularity or in those instances when one emperor was being replaced by another. The populace was the main actor in a ritual of laudatory acclamation of the newly proposed, or newly self-proposed, emperor. One could not become an emperor without the cries Axios!—meaning “Worthy” in Greek—that resounded at the hippodrome in Constantinople where the new emperor offered himself to public attention wearing the solemn wreath. (Alternatively, he could take off the wreath and ask the people to endow him with duties and obligations once again, if before that he had been subject to the cry of infamy, Anaxios! or, “Dig up his bones!”)

Of course, an emperor himself could propose his successor, or this successor could be proposed by the largely powerless Byzantine Senate. The potential pretender to the throne could also emerge in the provinces, usurping power there and recruiting or assembling a provincial army in order to pave his way for the conquest of Constantinople—an act that would be affirmed by the people's laudatory acclamation upon his arrival there. But still, this acclamation of the emperor's or the pretender's actions by the people was central to the maintenance of power in Byzantium. Given that the obverse side of these acclamations was a loss of approval that unleashed people's anger and precipitated the downfall of an unpopular emperor, Kaldellis calls this system “the continual referendum to which emperors were subject.”Footnote ¹¹ This explains to a large extent the common non-dynastic succession of the rulers as well as all the Byzantine horrors of deposing a former emperor that for instance involved blinding him, or the strife, intrigue, and violence that were employed in order to finally elicit acceptable public acclamation on the part of the people in the hippodrome or some other public venue.

Roman emperors after Augustus could, in principle, just not obey the laws—a dictum that had been captured by the famous statement from Roman law, princeps legibus solutus est, or “the first among peers is not tied by laws.” Of course, they could also follow laws, so as not to blatantly undercut them and thus demand their fulfillment from others. However, actual conditions of rule constantly forced them to rely on the practice of what was designated as oikonomia, or house-holding: emperors had to either adopt decisions that violated the laws in order to adequately react to the most pressing concerns of the day, or introduce new regulations where none existed. In both cases, however, it was thought that the emperor had to act in such a way as to reflect the interests of what was designated in Greek as politeia, and in Latin, res publica.

Kaldellis stresses that in response to actions of the emperor that were by definition beyond legal regulation, people had the opportunity to answer with extra-legal measures—that is, to unleash or usher in situations that would remind us of the state of emergency or the state of exception.Footnote ¹² This combination of power (monarchy plus democracy) was rather stable, according to Kaldellis. He notes that we can hardly find another similar political entity in history where the usual mode of antagonism would be a permanent threat of civil war, with civil wars waged not over the structure or the ideology of the regime, but over the personnel.Footnote ¹³ And this system lasted for almost a millennium.

Compared with this political system, Novgorod seems similar on the following grounds. As stated above, Novgorod did not see the establishment of effective institutions of aristocratic rule, as happened in Venice, so it did not create the viable mix of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy necessary for a stable system of mixed government. The autocratic element in the executive and the judiciary constantly clashed with the chaotic elements of popular rule that underpinned Novgorod, and both of these elements—autocratic and democratic—were hardly limited by the consultative, deliberative, and thus potentially more orderly power of the local notables.

Can we not then designate Novgorod the Great rather than Muscovy as the Third Rome? If one follows structural parallels in political institutions, then politics reminiscent of res publica in Cicero's understanding, or that of Cassius Dio, seem to have existed in Novgorod rather than Muscovy. There is a persistent problem, of course, in that we have only small excerpts from the Judicial Charter of Novgorod (in contrast, the city of Pskov retained it in full), and we do not have an archive of public documents as in Venice. And without written law and a list of extant public decisions, one can hardly recognize in a medieval city commune a feature like iuris consensus, which figured famously as the second main criterion in De re publica I: 39 that, according to Cicero, transforms a gathering, crowd, or settlement into a res publica. However, if one treats the term “consensus,” based on its etymology, as a co-sensing or a co-sentiment in matters of law, then one can see that laudatory acclamations during the election of the Novgorod posadniki, or inviting princes to rule and defend Novgorod, could testify to the fact that such common consensual or co-sensing intuitions on how to rule the city together could have developed among the citizens of Novgorod.Footnote ¹⁴

But if Novgorod is a close bet to the Third Rome, if this medieval republic is judged on the basis of Cicero's theory of res publica, then what about the usual claimant of this title, Muscovy? Muscovy seems to be distant from the New Rome model in that it is usually depicted as an unbridled autocracy, and hence it allegedly has nothing to do with the classical republican forms of government. Still, the Muscovite model of monarchic rule that is also sometimes dependent on democratic contributions, coupled frequently with a very slight aristocratic element: could this not remind us of yet another Byzantine republic? In order to consider this model, I will concentrate in the section below on a historical figure who is seemingly most distant from classical republicanism: Ivan Groznyi. Ivan was the first to be crowned tsar, or Caesar, in 1547 (the Russian word itself is a reduced form of this title). What do the excesses of his accepted Caesarship illuminate in terms of the rules of the game of Byzantine republic-type political systems?

Let us first analyze, however, what classical Rome and Byzantium knew about the dangers of Caesarianism or Caesarship. Kaldellis bases his theory of the state of exception that a Byzantine emperor represented by his very existence (and in which the Byzantine people can similarly find itself under certain circumstances) on a book by Giorgio Agamben. Of course, Agamben made a detailed analysis of stato di eccezione not because he was interested in Byzantium, but rather because he was offering a genealogical account of a condition in which modern democracies frequently found themselves lately. Thus, from a strictly defined legal standpoint, Adolf Hitler did not introduce “totalitarianism,” but simply ruled for twelve years according to a state of exception that he announced almost immediately after his accession to power in 1933.Footnote ¹⁵

Agamben wrote his book on the state of exception following a special military decree of President George W. Bush Jr. that, in response to the terrorist attacks of September 2001, allowed the detention of whole categories of combatants captured in Afghanistan and the Middle East. These detainees, held in custody on military bases like Guantanamo, are neither prisoners of war according to the Geneva Convention nor people accused of crimes according to US laws. Rather, they represent “a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being” in that they do not have juridical status; hence they cannot get counsel, right of appeal, or a legal defense.Footnote ¹⁶ Agamben was thus in general concerned with the steady growth of such spaces in modern liberal democracies, not subject to legal regulation.

Looking for the roots of the state of exception, Agamben goes deep into Roman history—all the way to the time when Caesars came to rule res publica. We usually call this period “Rome on the verge of the collapse of the republic,” but in terms of this article—and according to classical political theory—it was res publica that had still functioned like a mixed government of the three regimes. The consuls constituted the monarchical element in this res publica while the Senate constituted its aristocratic part, and the assemblies and tribunes of the people were the democratic element that ensured the participation of the plebs in the system. In this republic of mixed government, however, there was a special condition that was designated under the name of iustitium, under which all laws came to a standstill and courts stopped their normal functioning.Footnote ¹⁷ This stoppage of law was authorized by an injunction from the Senate that stipulated that all previous magistrates—consuls, praetors, dictators—should band together with arms in their hands to eliminate a very serious threat to Rome's existence, while the current powers of the present-day consuls or other magistrates had to be annulled or suspended.Footnote ¹⁸ In other words, the reason for the introduction of iustitium was a condition called tumulti, internal or external disorders that threatened to topple res publica altogether.

Since the time of Octavian Augustus, who concentrated all kinds of power in his hands (he was both a consul and a tribune, for example), the emperor was deemed to have become the savior of Rome from such tumults. As we know, Augustus justified this concentration of power by claiming that he had liberated patria, almost totally ravaged by the disorders resulting from civil wars. In other words, Augustus allegedly rendered res publica tranquil in that he restored order by denying power to the Senate, which had stopped playing its central role. One of the consequences of this transformation was a transfer of auctoritas that the Senate enjoyed as a gathering of the heads of main patrician families of Rome. It was granted to Augustus instead. (The title Augustus, as well as the term auctoritas itself, is linked to the Latin verb augere, “to grow.”)

Agamben reminds us of what Kaldellis does not. The state of exception, or iustitium, was ushered into Rome during the pre-imperial days by authority of the Senate, not by decision of the consuls or the people. Therefore, after a transfer of auctoritas from the Senate to the emperor, he became the living embodiment of the right to declare the state of exception in order to save patria from collapse.Footnote ¹⁹ In imperial Rome, the term iustitium eventually also came to mean the funeral of the emperor. A disappearance of the person who resided outside the law in order to ensure its smooth functioning led to serious danger in that the people could think that during a funeral, sovereignty was reclaimed by the people—at least for a moment, since the people were constantly being persuaded that emperors allegedly ruled for the benefit of politeia, or res publica. People could then also use the condition of anomia, that is, il-legality or a-legality, during the period when one emperor left and another came on. In Byzantium this was expressed by the storming of the prisons, the release of the detained, elimination of court and prison records, and widespread assaults on property.

One should underline that the state of exception in pre-Caesarean Rome was introduced by the authority of the Senate, and during what we usually call the Roman empire this was done by the authority of the emperor, not by the power of consuls or imperial magistrates. In Rome before Caesar, the consuls and tribunes were endowed with power (potestas and imperium, granted to them by the people), but it was the Senate that held auctoritas. Octavian Augustus stressed in his famous statement that in his power (potestas) he was not that much different from other magistrates; however, he had surpassed all others in auctoritas. One should pay specific attention to this distinction between potestas and auctoritas, particularly because in modern English the word “authority” is used to convey the sense of power as well, muddling this basic distinction in the life of the Romans.Footnote ²⁰

The authority of the emperors was soon rekindled, however, because with Christianity becoming the official religion of res publica, emperor Constantine could no longer bear the title divus, or “divine,” for obvious reasons of blasphemy. The auctoritas of the emperor had become tied with Christ, who, as it was eventually interpreted, gave this authority to the emperors even if the divinely determined status of the emperor might have revealed itself through the this-worldly election of the emperor by the army or people's laudatory acclamations. In western Europe, Pope Gelasius is usually credited with the original formulations of the two swords doctrine in his epistle to emperor Anastasius from 494 CE: the Pope maintains spiritual authority, while the emperor ensures and applies secular power. After the coronation of the emperors of the Frankish kingdom, and then of the (western) Holy Roman empire, this doctrine was made more pointed in the epistle of Pope Innocent III: secular princes, of course, have the power (potestas) to even elect an emperor, but authorizing this election (thus granting it auctoritas) can be only done by the Church as represented by its first bishop, a successor of St. Peter.Footnote ²¹

The problem arises, according to Agamben, when auctoritas and potestas do not represent complementing agencies but are concentrated in single hands; this had happened for some time after Octavian Augustus and then again during the state of exception in Germany in 1933–45. When authority and power are not divided between the Senate and the magistrates—as it used to be in what we habitually call republican Rome—or between the spiritual and the secular power, as in the Christian era, then a singular possessor of both auctoritas and potestas can announce or introduce the state of exception on his or her own wish, and “the juridico-political system transforms itself into a killing machine.”Footnote ²²

Historians frequently interpret oprichnina with the help of terms taken from other epochs – for example, saying “the Orthodox Christian dictatorship” (Lur΄e) or “the state of emergency” (Ruslan Skrynnikov) to describe this extraordinary set of policies during the reign of Ivan (IV) Groznyi.Footnote ²³ Given the obvious anachronistic usage of such terms, could one still say that the secret of Ivan's bloody reign was a concentration of an almost limitless secular power and a demanding spiritual authority in the person of one individual?

The very term oprichnina lends itself to such an interpretation. The ancient Russian word oprich΄ means “except,” and thus could designate the space that is exempted or excluded from the rule.Footnote ²⁴ By the same linguistic logic, oprichnina as a policy of Ivan IV presupposed the creation of a special territory in which the habitual laws of Muscovy did not function, and where special or exceptional features of tsar's rule were in effect. These exceptional features could seem hellish to Ivan's contemporaries. Thus, his main epistolary opponent, Prince Andrei Kurbskii, wrote that the tsar had created “a Satanic regiment… for the ruin of the Christians, and it was called kromeshniki or oprishnintsy.”Footnote ²⁵

Let us enumerate the exceptional features of the tsar's rule. First, before he split Muscovy into the normal “land” status and the exceptional terrains, the tsar would have to rely on the boyar's council, or Duma, following the bureaucratic formula that started to gestate during the 1530–40s, as Mikhail Krom has demonstrated: “The Grand prince, having listened to the list, has decided (prigovoril) with all the boyars;” and a no less frequent formulation would hold that “the tsar has indicated/ordered, while the Boyars agreed or added to these words (prigovorili).”Footnote ²⁶ This process of deliberation and counselling still functioned save for the oprich΄ lands, where Ivan Groznyi had established his court at Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda to be run like a monastery. During the night the tsar prayed, during the day he tortured and punished, and during his joint meals with the courtiers of the exceptional realm he read the Holy Writ. However, he did not introduce a practice of deliberating on this monastic lifestyle together with the “bigger brothers,” entrusted with special disciplinarian tasks, as the monastery statute of St. Iosif Volotskii would demand.Footnote ²⁷

The logic was affirmed by Ivan in stark terms: I am free to do with my slaves whatever I want, and thus the slaves next to me had to just listen and obey. It is hard to enumerate all the citations from Groznyi's missive to Kurbskii claiming that he no longer needs counsel or deliberation—and that his former counsellors before 1564 had effectively subjugated his will by their insidious advice such that he had been a tsar in their cunning speeches but not in effect. The tsar also included a lengthy excursus into the history of Byzantium in the first epistle to Kurbskii, striving to prove that the emperors there relied far too much on their counsellors, and their struggles and intrigues had ruined the great Roman empire.Footnote ²⁸

Getting rid of this third form of power, that is, aristocratic counsel that helps and limits the sovereign in the model of triplicate mixed government, the tsar was consistent in allowing only himself and the people a voice in the system. As the official chronicle states about the January 1564 events, unleashing the oprichnina, the tsar sent to the metropolitan of Moscow a charter indicating offenses that the clergy, boyars, secretarial, and service personnel had allegedly committed. There he accused them of not taking care of his state and of Orthodox Christians. Simultaneously, the tsar also sent a second charter that was read in Moscow squares to “all the people” so that they “do not hold any hesitation and he has no anger or grudges against them.” In response, the merchants and simple folk volunteered to settle accounts with the tsar's offenders.Footnote ²⁹

The second exception that separated the oprichnina condition from the past was a policy of denying the church hierarchs the right to intercede in front of the tsar on behalf of sinners. St. Philip (Fedor Kolychev) agreed to move from the far northern Solovki monastery to the office of the Moscow metropolitan, assuming he could still practice the intercession.Footnote ³⁰ The vita of St. Philip, who was canonized by the Russian Church after he died as a martyr in 1569, supplies us with a number of speeches addressed by the metropolitan to the tsar.Footnote ³¹ The logic of Philip's speeches to the tsar is rather direct: “I am a shepherd of the Christian church, and together with you we are to have tutelage for the piety and meekness of all the Orthodox Christianity.” But how can you do such things that were never heard of, he then asked? A pious tsar is plunging his country into tumult and divides it into two parts, the usual land and the land of exception! Groznyi allegedly responded: “Do not contradict our rule, so that my anger does not descend on you, or leave your position!”Footnote ³²

The idea that the tsar might have not only secular but also spiritual functions, and that he as a shepherd can help in the business of salvation of his subjects’ souls, was not novel. In his seminal book on the ancient Russian doctrines on the limits to tsar's power, Vladimir Val΄denberg states that a spiritual mission of a shepherd was recommended to the Russian grand princes by many ancient Russian authors. Even metropolitan Macarius, who held this top church position during the youth of Groznyi, accepted that tsar and metropolitan were together entrusted with the tutelage of human souls.Footnote ³³ St. Philip had just reminded the tsar about this injunction, but for Groznyi it was already unacceptable: the second shepherd was becoming redundant. Ivan Groznyi knew what to do with the sinning souls of his slaves.

The third feature of life in the exceptional, brand new world of Ivan Groznyi was that it was to remind people of the Last Judgment. Descriptions of the bestialities of the tsar and his “exceptional” culprits abound, and it is not my goal to restate them here in vivid detail. But in reconstructing the overall logic of persecution, one could rely on the books of, say, Andrei Iurganov and Andrei Bulychev. The executions of the Novgorodians in the river water in 1570, for example, had a special importance because water had a symbolic significance as something linked to unfaith and hell. Chopping the body in half, quartering, or even slicing it into small pieces and then mixing the remains with the road mud is explained by the wish to so destroy the body that a soul could not find it. The idea was to prevent the soul from going to the afterworld with a body in hand, hoping for salvation. Feeding victims to wild animals fits this pattern also. Ivan Groznyi might have been instrumental in helping to stage the Last Judgment on earth or preparing for such Judgment to eventually take place, the date of which was expected to happen in year 7000, 7070 or 7077 after the creation. Both Kurbskii and Groznyi constantly appeal to the facts pointing to God's Judgment being just around the corner, though some historians do not find enough documentary evidence that the tsar or Prince Andrei would have been waiting for the end of the world exactly then.Footnote ³⁴ Helping God prepare the Last Judgment could seem the key task for a lonely pious ruler on the throne. The German oprich΄ mercenaries, who had vividly described how a tyrant enjoyed the tortures and executions of those detained, could be just unwittingly restating what in other circumstances could seem to be a model for a pious or saintly life.Footnote ³⁵

What were the intellectual sources of the policies of Ivan IV? In the classical study by Val’denberg that has hardly lost its significance since it was published in 1916, we read: it is hard to call Groznyi an original thinker; he was restating existing platitudes. His originality lies in juxtaposing the four main elements of thinking on the mission of the tsar that one can find in other ancient Russian authors.Footnote ³⁶ As for translations from Byzantine political literature most popular in Russia and potentially available to him, one can single out the didactic advice of Deacon Agapetus to emperor Justinian. But if we want to better understand the relationship between different types of power, or between power and authority, then we should perhaps better look at the treatise from the same time by Ioannes Lydus on the magistrates of the New Rome, which largely shares in the discourse of Agapetus but states the political distinctions clearer.Footnote ³⁷

Lydus distinguishes between three types of rule. There is ennomos basileia, or when the basileus rules according to laws; there is tyranny, when he ignores them or rules according to caprice; and then there is autokratia.Footnote ³⁸ If one translates this Greek term into Russian part by part, then we get samo-derzhavie, of course. Under autokratia, Lydus understands autarcheia kai authentia, which is rendered in Latin as imperium auctoritasque—that is, first, supreme military command and, second, authority. Both of these capacities are needed in order to fight turba rem publicam, the turbulences or perturbations of res publica, when one needs to come to the fore of the army and take military command to save the republic. These turba are an analogue of what was called tumulti in the times of Cicero, the disorders and confusions of res publica that threaten to ruin it for good, while auctoritas is a capacity needed to stop it. Once Octavian Augustus acquired this auctoritas, he was in a position to help save res publica. But auctoritas alone is not enough for that; one needs the duties of supreme command (imperium). Since Augustus held them as well, this allowed him to be called imperator, while all Caesars in general—writes Lydus, using the term in 1.4.—were superior to any basileus because they could appoint these Hellenistic kings.Footnote ³⁹

Starting from the ninth century, autokrator kai basileus became the official title of Byzantine emperors.Footnote ⁴⁰ This is how it became known to Russians. A title of autokrator—or in its Russian equivalent, samoderzhets—would, in Russian, literally imply holding (from the verb derzhat΄) the country in one's own hands. Thus, Ivan Groznyi writes to Kurbskii when he describes his own ideal: “to hold one's own tsardom in one's own hand, and not to leave it for one's slaves to possess.” Kurbskii responds to this by saying: you should not hold the law as you see it fit; one should correspond to the laws of one's country. In a startling ending to the third epistle to Ivan IV, Prince Kurbskii translates two sizable fragments from Cicero's Paradoxa stoicorum. Cicero, the main literary defender of the republic of the consuls against the impending tyranny of the Caesars that led, in his opinion, to the collapse of res publica, is used by Kurbskii to tell Ivan: you have immersed the country in the condition of il-legality, hence there is no res publica anymore! Translating the fourth excerpt from the Paradoxes, Kurbskii renders Cicero as follows: “Not there, where one would be, one can hold the laws of a given city, as if it does not befit him to obey the laws.”Footnote ⁴¹ Establishing and holding the laws according to one's wishes, whims, or caprice is il-legality (bezzakonie in Russian), says Kurbskii. And he adds: recently Moscow was burned by the Crimean Tartars, who thus had played the role of divine vengeance for the divine law that you have violated.Footnote ⁴²

It is illuminating to interpret Groznyi's behavior with the help of the Byzantine notion of a Caesar-autokrator who combines power and authority in the same hands. Scholars have long ago noticed that the texts of the speeches of St. Philip (Kolychev) are just lengthy excerpts from the didactic mirror of princes on how one should rule piously and righteously, which had been allegedly offered by Deacon Agapetus to Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. For example, in the most stark episode of the conflict with Tsar Ivan, when he refused to bless the tsar in front of all the oprichniki and boyars in the Uspenskii Cathedral, St. Philip's speech as recorded in the vita just repeated Chapter 2 from Agapetus: “Like the pilot of a ship, the emperor's many-eyed mind keeps a continuous watch, firmly handing the oars of equity and justice (Greek original: eunomias) and strongly repelling the vehement waves of iniquity (Greek: anomias) that the boat of this-worldly commonwealth (Greek: pankosmos politeia) be not crushed by the waves of wickedness (Greek: adikias, or injustice).”Footnote ⁴³ The injunction is clear: o blessed tsar! Please steer the politeia so that it is guided by good laws—eu-nomia, in Greek. Do not succumb to il-legality, a-nomia, and then it will find itself in the realm of justice, dike.

Such an appeal to the tsar could in other contexts be considered peremptory and tedious, a usual didactic narrative for monarchs, habituated to listen to such words. But when St. Philip reveals the sins of the tsar using standard Byzantine discourse, all injustices and iniquities of Ivan IV are effectively linked to the emperor's condition of anomia, an il-legality understood as the time when laws come to a standstill, attention to which has been drawn by Agamben.

But to what extent does this Caesarship or Caesarianism, perhaps best exemplified in Russian history in the figure of Ivan IV, who concentrated potestas and auctoritas in his single hands, always harbor the threat of a terrifying life without any rules, or without any limit to arbitrary rule?

When we consider relations between an emperor and the people in Byzantium, we cannot escape analyzing acclamations. They seem somewhat prehistoric, particularly when one reads about the rites of anagoreusis, as they were called in Greek.Footnote ⁴⁴ This feeling of the antediluvian character of this rite is misplaced, however, because for any person versed in classical Russian literature, Aleksandr Pushkin's ending of Boris Godunov with an emphatic narod bezmolvstvuet (the people is silent) easily points to an understanding that acclamations during an accession of a new tsar to the throne were not things of a distant past. One should of course remember that when Pushkin finished the first version of Boris Godunov in November 1825, it did not end with silence on the part of the people, but rather with an enthusiastic acceptance, or acclamation, of Tsar Dmitrii Ivanovich (aka impostor False Dmitrii I). However, when the play was finally printed six years later in 1831 with all the corrections following censorship advice and thus under the auspices of the granted recognition of His Majesty, this phrase on the silence of the people that refuses to engage in the acclamation was inserted at the end of the play. Such a radical change can be explained by authorial editing for purely aesthetic or for political reasons, with the political context being reconstructed as follows.Footnote ⁴⁵

Pushkin presented the False Dmitrii in his first version of the play as a pretender to the throne who was supported by simple folk because he was against serfdom; attempts to install it were strengthened under Godunov's rule. Thus, Pushkin's initial interpretation went against the grain of the official monarchical rendition of these events that historian Nikolai Karamzin had given before him. Furthermore, False Dmitrii was depicted by Pushkin as either a force of justice waging war against the real usurper on the throne (Godunov was allegedly involved in the killing of the real Prince Dmitrii) or, by analogy, against a regicide. The accession to the Russian throne of Alexander I, who had sent Pushkin into exile in 1820, happened after the death of his father Paul I at the hands of conspirators. Thus, a scene at the end of the play with enthusiastic acclamation was logical, in particular when compared with the play's introductory scenes, which depicted a cynical or forced acclamation of peasants during the accession of Godunov to the throne in a ceremony on the Maiden's field.Footnote ⁴⁶

The text that was corrected for the 1831 publication eliminated some parts of the initial version. For example, after a Polish uprising in 1830, it was impossible to retain large chunks of the text with positive evaluations of the Poles. Overall, the new text largely corresponded to the Karamzin's interpretation of history, though minor details of the initial 1825 interpretation were kept. At the end of the text, however, one could now find a famous ending that showed the people standing silent when asked for an energetic acclamation of the False Dmitrii. This ending asserted that the people could not accept a fugitive monk, an impostor, and thus a real usurper to the throne, who had been brought to the Kremlin by the force of Polish arms. Nicholas I liked this version.

Depictions of acclamations were already widespread in the patriotic dramas that were staged in Russian theaters at that time. For example, the novel Dimitrii the Impostor by Faddei Bulgarin, a chief literary enemy of Pushkin, which was published while Pushkin was engaged in a 5-year long correspondence with the censors, ended with the express silence of the people, from whom acclamation was elicited to greet the crowning of the next tsar, Vasilii Shuiskii.Footnote ⁴⁷ That is, inserting acclamation, or its absence, into a literary narrative reflected its key political significance. The tsar, the censors, and the writers recognized that the rite of acclamation was critically important for the relationship between the tsar and the people.

One of Pushkin's poems that was part of the reason for his exile in 1820–25: “Ode to Liberty,” also mentioned the silence of the people when describing the execution of Louis XVI during the French Revolution:

Val΄denberg thought that Pushkin could not agree with the terrifying excesses of the Revolution and thus wanted to demonstrate that liberty is possible under monarchy. In his interpretation, “a block of perfidy” was chosen as an image that had to convey the thought that “people, who swore their allegiance to a monarch, cannot judge him.” As Val΄denberg added, “during revolution law is silent, as well as the people, that is, one lacks a yardstick to define what is just, and thus all injustice is possible.”Footnote ⁴⁹ He was attracting our attention to the condition of anomia, il-legality, or better yet, the standstill of law, as exemplified by the revolution.Footnote ⁵⁰ But if during the revolution il-legality is introduced for a relatively short period of time (all moments of revolutionary upheavals come to pass eventually), the condition of being an emperor or tsar (Caesar) ushers in a permanent condition of anomia, because princeps legibus solutus est, the emperor or Caesar is not subject to law.

Getting back to the questions with which this essay began, one is now bound to ask: to what extent is relying on the state of exception and acclamations still a key feature of the Russian political system? Eliminating acclamations to laud a ruler, whose authority allows him or her to introduce a state of exception at his or her discretion, would not Russia finally get closer to what Pushkin was dreaming of almost 200 years ago? He finished his “Ode to Liberty” with an appeal to the monarchs to be the first to be bound by law:

Critics observe that the text of the amended Constitution of 2020 moves Russia closer to subjecting, say, its Constitutional Court to the pressures and needs of the executive, notwithstanding all the rhetoric to the contrary by the drafters of the 2020 amendments. Thus, the separation of powers, the critics say, becomes largely a fiction even at the level of interpreting the Constitution. The authoritarianism of such a power arrangement is sometimes harnessed and limited by the personal authority of the current ruler. But what will happen if the intentions of the ruler and the apparatus of rule coincide?