"The Duty of Perfect Obedience": The Laws of Subjecthood in Tsarist Russia

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Fall 2023

Identifier/URL

41081991 (Pure)

Abstract

Sometime between 1666 and 1667, Grigorii Kotoshikhin, a former long-serving undersecretary (pod´iachii) in Muscovy's Ambassadorial Chancellery, Swedish spy and defector, composed what the historian Marshall Poe has characterized as "a tell-all description of Russian politics."1 The Swedes, having accepted Kotoshikhin into state service and granted him a salary in 1666, commissioned him to write a book focused on Muscovite statecraft, "to describe," in Kotoshikhin's words, "the whole Muscovite state."2 To explain how the Muscovite state worked, Kotoshikhin organized the book around questions and answers, many of which throw light on a neglected dimension of Russian state formation—namely, the political subjectification of the country's population, or what Russian law beginning in the second half of the 17th century referred to as poddanstvo.

DOI

10.1353/kri.2023.a910978

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