Pipes R. Russia Under the Old Regime

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974. - 361 pgs. Pipes purpose in this book is to ask why in Russia, of all the Western states, society failed to place political power under any kind of constraint. His answer is that in Russia, due to exigencies of history and geography (it is both very big and has a very low population density), state power was not imposed upon society from above, nor did it grow from below, but rather entered horizontally. The Russian state spread out from the private holdings of the first tsars, who upon conquering new lands made them part of their domains, making no distinctions between the territory of the state and the personal properties of the tsar. This led over the centuries to a nearly unique form of state organization, the patrimonial (or seigneurial) which was very effective at holding onto its own power and debilitating the other social estates. What makes Pipes so enjoyable to read is not just the quality of his prose and the breadth of his understanding and interest, but his philosophical sophistication. He is very acute in observing the meanings of historical trends, and his facility in areas as diverse as Idealistic philosophy and physical geography mean that he is able to give his history a wider scope and significance than a more blinkered historian, concerned to explain some historical occurrence by one method of analysis alone.