Oleg Kharkhordin's essay can be read as an attempt at deconstructing the (Pan-)Slavic political myth of Moscow as a “Third Rome,” as the authentic inheritor of the legacy of the Roman Empire after Constantinople. This political myth is usually based on an asserted continuity in the so-called Caesaro-Papist form of government, typically said to characterize Byzantium and the tsarist regime. In his The Byzantine Republic Anthony Kaldellis has tried to strike a blow to this historiographical commonplace, by arguing that Byzantium was a “republic” in the recognizable Roman form, and that, if Ceasaro-Papism existed, it did so more as the ideology of the emperor's court than as a characteristic of the Byzantine polity.Footnote ¹ As I understand his essay, Kharkhordin wants to proceed differently: he wants to argue that, if there exists a republican continuity in Russian history, this characterizes more the Novgorod Republic of the late medieval period than its autocratic Muscovite nemesis. In turn, this Russian Republic took less from Constantinople than it did from the Republic of Venice. Venice represents another political myth, this one a republican kind, that identified the Serenissima with the realization of the perfect mixed government first theorized by Plato. Conversely, the ascendancy of Muscovite tsarism, modelled as a “Third Rome,” spells the end of any Russian form of republicanism.

I am not a historian of either Russia or Byzantium, so I shall focus my comments on two problems or questions that are of a politico-theoretical nature. These problems play a crucial role in Kharkhordin's argument and wide-ranging narrative from one Rome to another, and then again to another. The first problem refers to the question of what is an authentic “republic,” and whether its model should be ancient Rome or Renaissance Venice. The second problem refers to the nature of imperial or Caesaro-Papalist government, and what legal, political and theological forms does the unification of political power and legal authority take.

Byzantium is generally absent from consideration in recent, western histories of republicanism precisely because it has long been associated with the transmission of a Roman imperial form of power, and the Roman Empire is understood as having spelled the end of the Roman Republic. Kaldellis's work is an interesting attempt to push back against this tide because he argues that Byzantium was always characterized by a republican organization, and not by a fusion of imperial power with Christian religion, that is, by a politico-theological structure of power.Footnote ² Kaldellis deploys a number of distinct arguments, among them the claim that the people of Byzantium always understood itself as a Roman people, even if they spoke Greek and were Christian. But the central, key argument deployed by Kaldellis is that “Byzantium was a republican monarchy and not primarily a monarchy by divine right” (5) By “republican” monarchy Kaldellis means that the emperor received his power and authority on the basis of popular “consent” (more technically, on the basis of popular acclamations) rather than from divine dispensation. This explains, according to him, why the grip on power of the Byzantine emperors was so brittle, which would not have been the case—supposedly—had a theocracy really existed. (I am not sure on what evidence Kaldellis claims this. Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes already excoriated theocracies for the ease with which they tend to undermine the power of sovereigns.)

The problem is that since at least the Renaissance it has been an assumption of the republican tradition that a “republican monarchy” is a contradiction in terms. This understanding has recently been called into question by James Hankins.Footnote ³ Hankins argues, instead, that the antithesis between republic and monarchy is a much later product of the American and French Revolutions who invent an “exclusionary republicanism,” namely, by defining republic as excluding the monarchic form of government. I have criticized Hankins's thesis elsewhere, so I will not linger on this point, except to mention that Kaldellis's entire book seems to be premised on accepting Hankins's terminological revision.Footnote ⁴ The key argument here, for Hankins and Kaldellis, is that the Roman term res publica translates the Greek politeia, itself defined as the “unity of all citizens in a shared civic community” such that “res publica referred to the public affairs… regardless of the type of political regime” (21). In this way it is possible to have a republic that is also a monarchy, if one takes monarchy to refer simply to one type of government or regime (as opposed to aristocracy or democracy), and “republic” to stand for a polity where state power pursues the “common good” and is based on “popular sovereignty” no matter who exercises government.

If one reads book 3 of Aristotle's Politics, however, one realizes immediately that for Aristotle, at least, a change in the form of regime is a change in the city itself, in the politeia: Athens governed by one man is not the same politeia as Athens governed by the “noble” (aristoi) or Athens governed by the “people” (demos). The Greek term politeia is badly translated by “constitution” precisely because our modern distinction between constitution and government was non-existent for the Greeks. Not that they did not think about it: at least Plato in book 4 of the Laws came up with the idea that the only stable polity would require placing a code of law entirely above the reach of political power, where law would rule “despotically” over the different parts of the city who aspired to gain power. It was the start of constitutional thought in the west, but it did not catch on with the Greeks themselves. Kharkhordin remarks that Vladimir Putin, in promulgating the recent change of the Russian constitution, used a similar sounding phrase, namely, that Russia should be a “dictatorship of laws”—but Putin is no Plato. In reality, his use of the term “dictatorship” was more likely invoking the Schmittian idea of the dictator (or autocrat) as holder of constituent power whereby his will is ipso facto law. Dictatorship is a rule by decrees; constitutionalism is a rule of law. They are mutually exclusive. I shall return later to this distinction in discussing what Kharkhordin has to say about Russian autocracy.

I doubt whether anyone, Greek or Roman, ever believed that “the res publica [or politeia] itself was what underlay regime change” (23). If that was the case, there would have been no need to develop the republican theory of a so-called mixed constitution that included all three forms of government being exercised simultaneously. Although theorized by Plato and Aristotle, a mixed constitution was said by Polybius to have been realized only by the Roman republic once it got rid of its kings. It was this feature that gave Rome the title of being a true republic. It was to this mixed model that Venice appealed when it claimed to be an authentic republic in contradistinction with the myriad of principalities strewn all over Italy, not to speak of the communal governments that were lacerated by constant civil wars between the party of the Emperor and the party of the Pope. In this sense, I think Kharkhordin makes a wise decision to side with the Venice-Novgorod axis as being the effective representative of a republican tradition in Russian history.

However, his discussion of the Venetian model raises an interesting set of issues. According to Kharkhordin, although Venice at the start of its history set out to imitate the (Caesaro-Papist) mode of government of Byzantium by importing the institution of the Doge as a kind of Byzantine emperor, it quickly became disenchanted with the frailty of this arrangement, and therefore set upon to fashion a mixed constitution by giving a fundamental role to the aristocracy and to its particular institution, the senate. At the same time, it excluded from political power the “people” in the Roman sense of the “plebeians.” For Venetians, the “people” referred to all males of the noble families reunited in a Great Council, not a representative body of all Venetians.

I was not sure whether Kharkhordin shares the belief that, by excluding the lower classes, the Venetian Republic displayed its political wisdom and assured its astounding longevity and success in European history. He claims Novgorod never had an actual mixed constitution because it lacked “stable institutes of aristocratic governance” that could put an end to the “popular unrest and factional struggles” caused by the, literally, Byzantine practice of allowing the popular veche (assembly) to elect or eject the prince (5). That's why Kharkhordin, tongue in cheek, even suggests that maybe Novgorod should be considered the true pretender of the Third Rome appellation. In any case, he concludes that “if the Novgorodians had enough time to routinize or solidify stable institutes of aristocratic rule… the system would be more balanced and present-day Russia would look different” (6). He qualifies this as an “insidious” suggestion: does he mean “insidious” to the tsarist legacy? Or does he mean that he does not share the Venetian ideal?

Whatever the case may be, I think Kharkhordin misses here an opportunity to reflect on why the first Rome achieved a real mixed constitution. The reason was precisely because it found a way to institutionalize political conflict through a system of checks and balances, whose fulcrum was the veto power of the Tribunate, the representative of the plebeians. The classical Roman definition of a republic, in fact, entails not only the elimination of the king (to be replaced by an elected consular office, itself divided between two consuls) but also the permanent inclusion of the plebeians in the positive determination of what is to count as law and what is a prevarication of consular power and senatorial authority. The first one to bring out this point in modern times was Niccolò Machiavelli, who remains unmentioned in Kharkhordin's essay. That is a pity, since in the Discourses on Livy Machiavelli contrasts the Venetian republican model to the ancient Roman one to the advantage of the latter. What caused scandal among other Italian humanists was that Machiavelli argued that the Roman republic exemplified the true mixed constitution because it understood that popular “tumults,” and in general social conflict, was the motor of both freedom and power, if only it were constitutionally harnessed.Footnote ⁵ This brings me back to the distinction between the first and the second Rome: if both republican Rome and imperial Byzantium (on Kaldellis's reading) give ample room for its people to run riot, only the Roman model seems to have discovered the secret to make conflict productive of a rule of law that makes for freedom and power. Conversely, the Venetian model of the mixed constitution is the true “exclusionary” form of republicanism: inwardly stable but unfree, and externally weak (so much so that Machiavelli accuses Venice, in collusion with foreign powers, of having rendered Italy disunited and ungovernable for centuries).

This brings me to the second part of Kharkhordin's essay that is focused on Ivan Groznyi and the rise of Muscovite tsarist autocracy over the ashes of the Novgorod failed republican experiment. I take it Kharkhordin's thesis is that Moscow is a Third Rome only in the sense that the tsar took over the imperial principle of uniting power and authority under one crown, passed on from the Roman to the Byzantine Empire. By unifying in his person the potestas of the people and the auctoritas of the senate, the Roman emperor de facto permanently disabled the mixed constitution and denied the Roman republican formula of power to the people and authority to the senate. In addition the Roman emperor unified throne and altar by also taking on the office of the pontifex maximus. Kharkhordin does not discuss whether this left the first and second Romes only with the ineffective dualism of emperor and acclamatory people, or only with the dualism between the emperor and “his” army, the latter being Machiavelli's hypothesis, perhaps an interesting one to consider in the Russian case, as I discuss below.

However, I take it his fundamental point here goes against the Hankins/Kaldellis thesis of a “monarchical republic” in the sense that, as I understand him, Kharkhordin wishes to argue that the Muscovite tsar set up a regime based on the Byzantine idea of an autocracy (autokratia) in which “emperors had to assure in their statements that they ruled for the benefit of the people” (8); “the populace was the main actor in a ritual of laudatory acclamation of the newly proposed, or the newly self-proposed, emperor” (8). For Kharkhordin, unlike for Kaldellis, Ceasarism and popular acclamations are not mutually exclusive but part and parcel of the same form of regime, which is antithetical to republican rule of law because, so the hypothesis, it works in and through the use of the “state of exception” to govern. Here Kharkhordin would have been well-served to adopt Giorgio Agamben's point, that the acclamation is a politico-theological device of imperial sovereignty, and not a republican institution.Footnote ⁶ Instead, Kharkhordin follows Kaldellis in employing Agamben's reconstruction of the genealogy of the state of exception as originally coming from the senatorial authority to declare a standstill of the laws in the so-called iustititium, which was invoked on occasions of “tumults” that imperiled the whole republic, whether through civil war or external invasion. I shall not engage here the question of whether Agamben's attempt to fold together the authority of the law and the exception to the law in one figure (viz. the iustitium) is receivable. For what it's worth, I do not think this is correct. But I think Kharkhordin is justified in claiming that when Augustus takes on the auctoritas of the senate he does so in order to have at his permanent disposal the instrument of the state of exception, and in this sense the emperor becomes “the living embodiment of the right to declare the state of exception in order to save patria from collapse” (14). Here we do have a possible beginning of the fusion of the dictatorship with the idea of a “constituent power” in which Schmitt will eventually see the essence of sovereignty.

Kharkhordin's reconstruction of Ivan Groznyi as a new Augustus, first by exercising the state of exception in the form of the oprichnina and its “satanic regiment” (according to his critics), then by destroying any aristocratic counsel, and lastly by unifying in his person the spiritual authority of the Orthodox Church as a parallel form of pastoral government appears plausible to me. My only remark is that Kharkhordin misses an opportunity, again in contrast to the Hankins/Kaldellis thesis, to show that such a construction of “unbridled autocracy” is through and through politico-theological, not republican. This seems to be confirmed by Kharkhordin's claim that Ivan's extraordinary and infamous cruelty was intended to remind his enemies, and his people, of the coming of the Last Judgment. The autocrat was “helping God prepare the Last Judgment… the key task for a lonely pious ruler on the throne” (22).

But Kharkhordin's decisive blow against the Kaldellis thesis of a “republican” Byzantium (and by extension, of a “republican” tsarism) turns on the claim that the form of government represented by the tsar was decisively influenced by Byzantine thinking. Kharkhordin refers to Ioannes Lydus's writings on the magistracies in Byzantium. Lydus distinguishes three type of rule: ennomos basileia (rule according to laws); tyranny; and autokratia, which conjoins authority with supreme military command (imperium). According to Kharkhordin, the final justification for autokratia is that it is needed to fight “tumults” (that is, fight against what, from a Machiavellian perspective, is constitutive of a mixed constitution). Byzantine emperors were officially titled autokrator kai basileus from the ninth century onward. Ivan modelled himself after this autocratic idea. It is entirely in keeping with the authentic Roman model that critics of Ivan Groznyi like Andrei Kurbskii would find it necessary to appeal to Cicero in order to speak of Ivan's autocracy as an “a-legal” (a-nomia) form of government: a rule based on the state of exception as opposed to a rule of law. Kharkhordin thus concludes that in tsarism there is a permanent condition of anomia. And perhaps this anomia has returned to Russia if, according to the author, the constitutional amendments of 2020 have placed the Constitutional Court under the authority of the President, thus undercutting any real separation of power and checks and balances, the signal characteristic of republicanism.

In the end, if I understand Kharkhordin correctly, he believes that republicanism is characterized by a mixed form of government, and that this is best delivered by a Venetian model, because the Roman one (in the case of all three imperial Romes) ultimately tends to collapse into a Weberian Führer-Prinzip (to employ an anachronistic formula) in which the emperor assumes absolute power and all legal authority on the basis of the acclamation of “his” people (or troops). However, Kharkhordin's dour conclusion may stand in need of being supplemented by a more productive understanding of the role of popular tumults in the tradition of republicanism.