With the light hand of the famous sixties poetess in the comprador-pseudo-intellectual circles of Moscow and Leningrad, the aphorism “Russia is a thousand-year-old slave” turned out to be quite popular.
The aforementioned thesis was “deepened” by the “most advanced” of the “superintendents of perestroika” (I don’t remember who was the first) - A. Yakovlev and Yu. Afanasyev: “Russia is a thousand-year paradigm of unfreedom”.
But what about the Pskov Veche Republic? It has existed since mid. 13th and early. 16th century inclusive!
I am not a big fan of parliamentarism. Still, old man Polybius (2nd century BC) is right: "In different historical circumstances, different forms of government can be fair (and optimal, we add)." However, if you take the position of supporters of the selectivity of everything and everyone, then Pskov was the most democratic state of the Middle Ages.
And Mr. Veliky Novgorod (1136 - 1478) was not inferior to the contemporary Western “patrician republics”: Florentine, Genoese and Venetian in terms of “the degree of rule of the people”. At the same time, Grad nad Ilmen (and its "pyatiny", of course) territorially surpassed all 3 listed Italian states (at the time of their heyday) combined!
Or what? Serfdom lasted a thousand years in Great Russia?
Not! The Cathedral Code of 1649 approved this form of feudal dependence, and the government of Alexander II in 1861 abolished it. Total - 212 years. In a consistently rigid form, serfdom functioned even less. Only 83 years old! From the "serfdom" decrees of Peter I (1712 - 1714) and up to 1797 (Paul I restricted corvee work to 3 days, a sharp decline in landlord opportunities to carry out acts of sale and purchase of dependent peasants and some other measures of the "king master ").
In Russia there was never (in contrast to France) "the right of the first wedding night for the feudal lord." There was no in the Moscow Kingdom and in the Russian Empire all forms of landlord's trial (and even more so - the death penalty) over their (as in Poland) slaves. In England, Germany, France, Italy serfdom functioned for many hundreds of years. The German and Czech villages were, moreover, enslaved again and again. In the XVI - XVII centuries.
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