SUMMARY:

Jörg Baberovsky’s article opposes two types of state-society communication: one is based on a broadly defined trust in popular conventions, law (which is guaranteed by the state), and state institutions and is characteristic of modern states with professional bureaucracies and responsible institutions. This is a depersonified model of state-society relations where trust is granted to institutions and procedures but not to concrete persons in power. The other type is a premodern form based on personified and delegated trust that requires personal loyalty and depends on control and violence. The latter type is called Anwesenheitsgesellschaft – a presentist society. Baberovsky shows that beginning from the time of Peter the Great, the governing discourse and laws were in open conflict with actual governing practices and the system of personal loyalties and bureaucratic patronage. However, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a central bureaucracy staffed by people with new education and new etatist consciousness, started to operate within the modern paradigm of institutional trust, thus broadening the split between the central government level and the provincial bureaucracy, not to mention the traditional layers of Russian corporate society. To make this system effective and to fill in the lacunae of trust, the state resolved to direct violence – while at the same time the local and unsanctioned usage of violence as the means of social communication was viewed by the state as being illegitimate. This structural need of the Russian imperial state for direct violence is illustrated in the article by a number of examples pertaining mostly to the times of the first Russian revolution and the changes in the status of the Gubernatory. Baberovsky concludes that in the early twentieth century the centralized bureaucracy forced upon the Russian autocracy a style of governing that was not suitable for social practices of a presentist society. The state was delegitimizing itself in the eyes of the society thus making inevitable the Revolution of 1917 and the violence that followed.