BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
There are books that inform, books that provoke, and books that fundamentally rearrange the furniture of one’s mind. Ian Mitchell’s Russia and the Rule of Law, Volume I: Status Unbound (862–1856) belongs emphatically to the third category. It is a monumental, eccentric, often maddening, and utterly indispensable work of historical synthesis that dares to ask the largest possible question, how does law deal with violence, and pursues it across a thousand years of Russian and Anglosphere history with the tenacity of a dog worrying a bone, as Lord Hope of Craighead memorably puts it in his foreword.
Let me be clear from the outset. This is not a conventional academic history. Mitchell is not an academic, and he wears his learning lightly, perhaps too lightly for some tastes. There are no footnotes, no bibliography, and the author cheerfully admits to an impressionistic approach. He quotes David Morgan, the great Mongol historian, on the impossibility of mastering all the relevant languages, and defends himself by analogy. This is a cross-cultural essay, he tells us, in which I am suggesting a new way of looking at the fundamental question of all civilisation. The result is a book that reads less like a monograph and more like a sustained conversation with a brilliant, irascible, widely travelled companion who has read everything, been everywhere, and formed very definite opinions about it all.
The organising principle of Mitchell’s narrative is the dichotomy between status and contract. He borrows the terms from Sir Henry Maine’s Ancient Law (1861), the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract, and applies them with a rigour and imaginative sweep that Maine himself might have found startling.
Status, in Mitchell’s formulation, is government by command. It is the rule of the paterfamilias, the khan, the tsar, the autocrat. It acknowledges no law above the will of the status holder, no reciprocity between ruler and ruled, no limits derived from consent. Its logic is expansionist and insecure, expand or die, as Mitchell puts it. The borders of Russia, Putin has said, do not end anywhere.
Contract, by contrast, is government by consent. It depends on trust, on pacta sunt servanda, on clear and well policed boundaries, on the idea that the law binds the ruler as much as the ruled. Its logic is adaptive, adapt or die. It is the tradition of Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, the Bill of Rights, the American Constitution, and the common law.
This dichotomy, Mitchell argues, is not merely a useful analytical tool but the fundamental fault line in human political development, visible from the dawn of history to the present day. Each of us, he suggests, is partly both. The question is one of proportion and balance.
The great achievement of this first volume is to trace the divergence of the Slavosphere and the Anglosphere through a thousand years of history, from Rurik’s invitation to rule at Novgorod in 862 to the death of Tsar Nicholas I in 1855 and the end of the Crimean War. The story is told with an eye for the telling detail, the revealing anecdote, and the illuminating comparison.
Mitchell’s narrative is capacious, and it would be impossible to summarise it fully here. But certain themes and episodes stand out. One of the most powerful threads in the book is the story of Novgorod the Great, the merchant republic that developed a form of semi democratic governance centuries before England’s parliament. Novgorod had a veche, a public assembly, elected officials, a commercial legal code, the skra, and even, astonishingly for the time, forbade its princes from owning property in the city to prevent conflicts of interest. It was, Mitchell argues, far ahead of England in the evolution from status to contract.
And then it was destroyed. Ivan III’s conquest of Novgorod in 1478 was, in Mitchell’s telling, one of the great catastrophes of Russian history. The veche bell was taken down, the city’s commercial elite was deported, the Hanseatic kontor was closed, and the window on the West was shut. Russia was condemned to two centuries of commercial isolation and political autocracy. Mitchell returns to this theme repeatedly, and with good reason. It is the central what if of Russian history. What if Novgorod had survived? What if Russia had developed along the lines of the Italian city states or the Hanseatic League?
Mitchell is particularly good on the Mongols, drawing on recent scholarship to challenge the traditional picture of wholesale destruction. The Mongols were, he argues, responsible for the division of Europe into two parts, but they were also tolerant of religion, respectful of trade, and crucially, willing to leave conquered peoples largely alone so long as tribute was paid. The Russian princes, beginning with Alexander Nevsky, collaborated with the Mongols for their own advantage, and it was they, not the Mongols, who entrenched the extractive, autocratic system that would characterise Russian governance for centuries. Russia owes its greatness to the Khans, Karamzin wrote, and Mitchell agrees.
The story of Moscow’s rise is told with a clear eye for the moral ambiguities involved. The Moscow princes were not heroes of national liberation. They were tax farmers for the Mongols who used their position to enrich themselves and suppress their Russian rivals. Ivan Kalita, Moneybag, was a predatory banker who lent money to lesser princes and then claimed their properties when they defaulted. The gathering of the lands was not a patriotic project but a gigantic exercise in tax base expansion.
The portrait of Ivan IV is one of the most vivid in the book. Mitchell is not squeamish about the horrors of Ivan’s reign, the Oprichnina, the destruction of Novgorod, the murder of his own son, but he also gives Ivan credit as an intelligent, reforming tsar whose correspondence with Queen Elizabeth I reveals the yawning gulf between status and contract in the sixteenth century. Ivan wanted an unconditional alliance. Elizabeth offered only a conditional one. He was puzzled, then annoyed, then contemptuous. We had thought that you were sovereign over your domain, he wrote, and rule it yourself. But now we see that you have other people who rule beside you, and you carry on in your maidenly rank as though you were more than a real maid.
The seventeenth century is, in Mitchell’s telling, the period when the two vectors crossed. In England, the Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the Glorious Revolution, and the Bill of Rights established contract as the primary driver of constitutional relations. In Russia, the Ulozhenie of 1649 cemented serfdom as the status of the overwhelming mass of the people. The two societies were on opposite trajectories.
Peter the Great is a fascinating figure in Mitchell’s account, a ruler who wanted to Europeanise Russia but did so by Eastern methods. He shaved the boyars’ beards, founded the Table of Ranks, established a police state, and intensified serfdom. He wanted Russia to be a civilised member of the Concert of Europe abroad while ruling as an autocrat at home. The contradiction would bedevil Russia for centuries.
Catherine’s Legislative Commission of 1767 is one of the most instructive episodes in the book. The Empress, influenced by Montesquieu and Beccaria, hoped to reform Russian law along enlightened lines. But the delegates, nobles, merchants, state peasants, Cossacks, were interested only in clarifying and expanding their rights over their own serfs. When someone is under the law, one delegate objected, that one cannot be called free. Catherine wanted reciprocity, but on her terms only. The Commission achieved nothing.
The final chapters on the Crimean War are among the best in the book. Mitchell shows how the war exposed the technological, logistical, and institutional backwardness of Nicholas I’s Russia. The allies had Minié rifles, railways, the electric telegraph, and a free press that exposed incompetence and demanded reform. Russia had serf soldiers, corruption, micromanagement from St Petersburg, and a censored press that concealed the scale of the disaster. The fall of Sevastopol in September 1855 was not just a military defeat. It was a verdict on the entire status system.
Mitchell’s method is comparative and anecdotal. He constantly juxtaposes events in Russian and Anglosphere history, drawing out parallels and contrasts that illuminate both. The Battle on the Ice in 1242 and the sealing of Magna Carta in 1215. The Oprichnina and the Gordon Riots. The Pugachev Rebellion and the American Revolution. The Cherokee cases and the Polish revolt. The Roebuck Committee and the Zatler affair.
This method has its dangers. The comparisons can sometimes feel forced, and Mitchell is not above the occasional rhetorical flourish that oversimplifies complex situations. But at its best, the comparative approach yields genuine insight. The contrast between the American treatment of the Cherokees, flawed, often brutal, but grounded in law and treaty, and the Russian treatment of the Siberians, wholly extractive and without legal restraint, is particularly illuminating. The contrast between the Roebuck Committee’s public inquiry into the Crimean disaster and the secret, scapegoating trial of General Zatler is devastating.
Mitchell is also a master of the revealing anecdote. The story of Catherine’s snowdrop, the sentry who stood guard for a century over a flower that had long since died, is a perfect parable of status’s tendency to perpetuate itself mindlessly. The story of the Oblomov estate, where the family kept its money in a chest and hesitated for four days before opening a letter, captures the economic mentality of a status society. The story of Nicholas I’s visit to England in 1844, his assumption that a casual conversation with a Tory Prime Minister constituted a binding alliance, illustrates the ego chamber in which autocrats live.
The book is also, it must be said, full of moral judgement. Mitchell does not pretend to be neutral. He is on the side of contract, of the rule of law, of reciprocity, of individual rights. He is contemptuous of status, of autocracy, of the internal empire. This partisanship is part of the book’s power. Mitchell is not just describing the past. He is arguing about the present and the future.
The book is framed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Mitchell quotes Putin’s essay of July 2021, On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, and then contrasts its words with the actions that followed just eight months later. The invasion, he argues, is a manifestation of status unbound, the refusal of status to be shackled by rules it has not made itself. Putin’s old rule, where the foot of a Russian soldier steps, that is ours, is a direct echo of the Mongol formulation, Whatever the hooves of the khan’s horse steps on, this belongs to the khan.
This contemporary framing gives the book its urgency. Mitchell is not writing about a remote past. He is writing about the roots of a conflict that is happening now, and about the deeper civilisational struggle between status and contract that will shape the twenty first century.
The book ends with a warning. Contract has been making ground for centuries, but it is not inevitable. The gains of contract since the seventeenth century are coming under threat, Mitchell writes. Autocracy hasn’t won either. The story of the conflict between authoritarian status and the countries which aspire to the rule of law continues, an important aspect of which is the war in Ukraine.
One of the most attractive features of the book is its binocular quality. Mitchell writes from both a British and a Russian perspective, informed by twelve years of living in Russia, by thousands of miles cycled across its roads, by conversations in kitchens and dachas, by a friendship with a Russian historian whose family suffered under Stalin. He is alive to the nuances and contradictions of Russian life in a way that few Western commentators are.
He quotes a Swedish lawyer who ran IKEA’s legal department in Russia. You should all understand that, though Russians are nice and interesting people, there is one major problem with them. They look like us. This can give the illusion that they are like us, when in fact they think completely differently. Really, they should be painted blue and have sticks attached to their foreheads to remind us how different they are.
But he also quotes a bilingual Russian publisher who dismissed the idea of the mysterious Russian soul. There is no such thing as the mysterious Russian soul, only bad translation.
Mitchell’s achievement is to hold both perspectives in tension. He is neither a Russophobe nor a Russophile. He is, to his great credit, a relentless truth seeker, and he follows the evidence where it leads.
Mitchell writes with clarity, wit, and an eye for the telling phrase. His prose is a pleasure to read. Consider this description of the Mongol army. The whole of the army whose conquests built the largest empire in world history could be seated in a single American football stadium. Or this on the Russian aristocracy. The aristocracy in St Petersburg was incorrigibly self-centred, actually it was not so much an aristocracy as a titled oligarchy. It had little esprit de corps and therefore no collective morality. Or this on the melancholy of Alexander I. Pure status can have no equals, by definition, and therefore it cannot interact. It is, in a general sense, sterile.
The structure of the book is chronological but not rigidly so. Mitchell weaves back and forth between Russia and the West, between public events and private lives, between high politics and the details of daily existence. The result is a narrative that feels organic rather than imposed.
The illustrations, photographs taken by the author on his travels, add a valuable dimension. Mitchell has a good eye, and the images of monasteries, fortresses, steppes, and cityscapes give a visceral sense of the places he describes.
No book of this ambition is without its flaws. Mitchell’s impressionistic approach means that some episodes are given short shrift while others are explored in loving detail. The absence of footnotes will frustrate scholars who want to follow up on specific claims. The comparative method occasionally leads to oversimplification. And Mitchell’s partisanship, while understandable, sometimes leads him to caricature the other side.
But these are minor quibbles in the face of such a monumental achievement. This is a book that will change the way you think about Russia, about the West, and about the fundamental question of how human beings should govern themselves.
Ian Mitchell has written a book of extraordinary range, depth, and moral seriousness. It is the product of a lifetime of reading, travel, observation, and reflection. It is a work of synthesis rather than original research, but the synthesis is so bold, so illuminating, and so timely that it constitutes an original contribution in its own right.
This is not a book for the faint hearted. It is long, demanding, and often uncomfortable. But it is also exhilarating, enlightening, and in the best sense, provocative. It will make you think differently about the past, the present, and the future.
I cannot recommend it too highly.
Buy it.
Read it.
Argue with it.
But most of all, allow it to challenge your assumptions about the world and about the eternal struggle between status and contract.
Russia and the Rule of Law, Volume I: Status Unbound (862–1856) by Ian Mitchell is available now. Volume II, Status Challenged, is forthcoming.