Systema Toronto Seminar: Relaxing through Pain

 

While all martial arts are physical encapsulations of survival strategy, there is considerable variation in both the depth of the strategy and the time required to teach it to a useful level.  Systema, a martial art of the Russian Special Forces, is remarkable both for the depth of its teachings and the effectiveness and rapidity of its teaching method.  While many systems of martial arts promote physical, energetic and psychological wellbeing as well as teaching self-defence, this usually requires lengthy training cycles. 

 

Systema tends to teach much more quickly, and the recent seminar in Toronto given by visiting masters Valantin Talanov and Major Konstantin Komarov was no exception. 

 

Systema has no forms, no stances and few techniques. Its approach to life and to combat rests on two main teachings: natural movement and proper breathing, taught through a repertoire of exercises and drills. 

 

How it Works

 

Well, it turns out that most people don’t know how to do either of these things properly, and Systema addresses that directly and immediately.  Students are taught methodically how to avoid and move around incoming force, how to absorb it and cushion even the most powerful punches, and how to move naturally even in the most unpleasant situations, such as while on the ground being kicked. Through natural movement and breath work, the practitioner maintains physical and psychological relaxation throughout the encounter, which, paradoxically, makes him or her a very difficult target. 

 

Of course, cultivating natural movement requires deep relaxation and relaxation in turn requires that you be free from fears, doubts and anxieties.  Never fear, though – Systema has this covered too.  Since the two primary physical fears are falling and getting hit, Systema takes you through a series of exercises that let you experience these in a controlled way.  And it works – you really do lose any fear of falling or getting hit.

 

Furthering these principles, a great deal of Talanov’s morning session was spent on giving and absorbing energy from punches, as well as on detecting points of tension within your attacker and pushing or striking them.  This serves two purposes.  First, in striking a point of tension, the tension, along with the emotional energy behind it, dissipates, thus reducing the opponent’s will to attack.  Given this approach, it isn’t surprising that another of the exercises focused on the difference between defending yourself in a way that calms the aggressor down rather than further infuriating him. Second, the point of tension is the point at which you can cause your opponent to collapse with a shocking degree of ease, as you’ll see in the video below.

 

All of this, of course, helps you in several ways, by dispersing your own tensions and allowing you to learn to deal with a wide variety of different energies from different people.  They learn to take punches while relaxing through the pain enough to be sensitive to a partner’s points of tension.  One of the more interesting iterations of these exercises involved punching inside an incoming punch and then immediately punching to the torso; in other words, hitting two points of tension in rapid succession.  With the punches coming at you, there’s no time to think.  You just have to relax and be sensitive to your partner.

 

In combat, this gets really interesting: your opponent is on the offensive, tense and primed for combat, and convinced until the very last second that he’s going to win.  Then suddenly he’s in a heap on the floor, bewildered and wondering what happened.  Because Systema exercises train natural body movement, all movements in combat are ideally made without any thought and using very little energy - they happen naturally, and are thus very difficult to see or anticipate.  Humans are set up to react against hostile energy, which Systema movements exclude.  Systema’s punches and strikes rely on only momentary muscular tension- yet tend to feel like being hit with bricks when done right. 

 

The amazing thing from our point of view was that so many of Systema’s basic principles resemble those of the “soft” or “internal” martial arts of China, despite external disparity in teaching styles.  The emphasis on relaxation during combat, the central use of breathing to remove tensions from the body, the use of posture and the role of attention all seemed familiar from Tai Chi. 

 

The latter was particularly interesting.  A number of students asked Major Komarov about dealing with fear and accumulated stress, and his advice was to make a practice of regularly scanning your body from top to bottom for areas of tension caused by stress or fear.  Then you focus on and physically press on each tense area in turn while breathing into it to release the tension.  This develops your internal attention so that you’re always subconsciously correcting fear and stress through their physiological manifestations.  In other words, you train yourself to defuse fear and anxiety, tension and stress at their early stages, rather than letting them build up and run your life.

 

Systema is a tremendous tool for psychological and energetic healing, a means of dealing with incoming stress from any source, and a deadly martial art that can become combat-effective very quickly.  Above all, it is a tremendous tool of personal development.  The principles you learn will help your relationships with everyone, even (especially) people attempting to do you harm. 

 

See the repost on my dad's blog here

 

 

 

Harmonisation in China: A Window into the Party's biggest problems

Harmonisation joined the pantheon of CCP buzzwords partly as a way to make the pill of the end of class struggle and the cradle-to-grave economic support of state industrial workers go down more easily; yet the idea behind this and similar concepts has turned into a challenge in itself to the Party's ability to bring meaningful change to the ordinary worker.

One thing that the study of China has brought home to me is just how Herculean the problems of governing so populous a country really are.  Where I live, healthcare and education are regulated at the provincial level.  In China, they are regulated at the township and village level, because that is the difference in the scale of the population.  Harmonisation provides a window into the nature of these problems.

Harmonisation itself is a disputed concept.  As with a great deal of Party rhetoric since 1978, it advances an inclusive agenda, wherein the Party represents everyone, not merely the working class.  This, however, is where consensus ends.  Many authors note that the concept of harmonious society references Confucius, and claim that the Party is hearkening to the values of the past in order to compensate for the ideological void left by the demise of Marxism.  Holbig and Gilley disagree, noting that the CCP has faced a series of ideological challenges to Marxism through Confucian revivals over the past two decades.  In this context, they interpret harmonisation as a ‘sterilisation’ of Confucianism as a potential rival to Party doctrine.  

Some authors go so far as to argue that harmonious society rhetoric is the logical link between current phase of China’s development and still-desired yet distant communism, taking Deng Xiaoping’s line, reiterated by Hu Jintao, that China is in the primary stages of socialism, and that realising the goal of the Party will take generations.   One need not take this argument at face value to appreciate the value of harmonisation as a means of seamlessly weaving together the traditional ideological demands of the Party and the politics of the present.  Harmonious society can be all things to everyone, precisely because it is not much of anything by itself.  Harmonisation nicely accommodates every viewpoint without saying much about any of them, while simultaneously introducing an unhealthy atmosphere of conformism.

We will see that the same indeterminacy applies to the programs subsumed under the umbrella of harmonisation; while these are promising in many respects, it is difficult to make the case that they would not have occurred without harmonisation.  Neither do they have any observable coherence among themselves which would suggest a planned, unified reform program that could be called “harmonisation.” 

While programs designed to alleviate rural and regional inequality were not new to the party, it has been argued that harmonisation coincided with a new willingness to deal with labour rights issues, as part of a shift away from low-end manufacturing.  The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) functioned up to this point mainly to prevent the rise of an independent labour movement, thus depressing labour costs,  a stance that appears to have moderated to some degree.  This is probably one of the best-documented original reforms claimed for harmonisation, and so deserves some attention.

At the level of labour relations, there has been a rise in rhetoric surrounding the role of the ACFTU, with Chairman Wang Zhaoguo calling for the unions to “organise the unorganised and fight for worker rights.”   What effect this may have is unclear.  Such symbolic victories as the Wal-Mart unionisation have so far been just that; the Wal-Mart union essentially pledged never to strike at its inception, and the avoidance of economic disruption is seen by the ACFTU as essential.  


The 2007/8 Labour Contract Law made some advances in employment security, and the consultation process for that law included an unprecedented cross-section of civil society, including NGOs, workers and entrepreneurs.   The Labour Contract Law drew over 200 000 online comments from the public following the release of the initial draft, and was extended as a result to cover part-time, contract and farm labour.  The law shifted the basis of contract law in favour of employees by encouraging collective bargaining and indefinite-term written contracts.   Despite employer resistance to the law, it has had the definite effect of sharply raising the number of employee litigations throughout China,  thus providing a new pressure valve for labour discontent. 

Part social policy, part macroeconomic tool, the Party’s new labour advocacy seeks to regularise the extremely tenuous position of the workers under market transition.  There are many possible contributing factors to this policy, such as a desire to shift to higher-end skilled industries, the need to develop the internal market through a decently-paid workforce, and even latent guilt over the role of the Party of the working class in suppressing the interests of the working class.  Yet there is one key factor, namely the increasing awareness and ability of the working class to organise and protest.  The Party would have had no choice but to deal with labour irrespective of harmonisation for this reason alone.  Further, despite the significant and disruptive effect of the Labour Contract Law, there is no evidence of a coordinated harmonisation plan, either between labour and other areas or within labour policy itself, and the Party organ involved, the ACFTU, remains the least effective aspect of labour policy.

Harmonisation is commonly understood as implying a renewed focus on problems arising as byproducts of economic growth, particularly “rural poverty, income inequality and environmental degradation.”  The Sixth Plenum resolution “Major Issues Concerning the Building of a Socialist Harmonious Society” specifies that the Party’s major focus until 2020 will be redressing inequalities, rebuilding medical care and improving access to education, while attempting to balance economic growth with environmental concerns.   Other programs nominally associated with harmonisation include rural education and healthcare schemes and a rural minimum living stipend.

The idea that the Party can redress economic inequalities is predicated on the increase in central government revenue and a desire to redistribute some of that wealth.  The central obstacles remain the lack of accountability mechanisms at lower levels of government, which are responsible for administering social programs, and a broken fiscal system.   What seems to be lacking at the moment is a comprehensive plan to improve control over local administration, or conversely, to centralise these services.  Rather, a series of initiatives that would have been necessary in any case have been brought under the umbrella of the harmonious society, without significant evidence of coordination or an overall plan.

It is most likely that the program of harmonisation is foremost a matter of internal CCP housekeeping.  Despite decades of anticorruption work and the removal of high-ranking cadres, corruption remains endemic at every level of administration.   Various methods of holding cadres accountable to the people, including local elections,  failed.  During the past two decades of reform, performance evaluations have had a primarily economic basis, thus encouraging cadres to involve themselves heavily in local business enterprises.  The harmonisation paradigm offers the potential to reorient toward good governance, rule of law and responsiveness to public needs, all of which CCP leadership sees as crucial to the Party’s continued ascendancy.

In short, harmonious society is less of a policy and more a state of mind, a marker for what was certainly an inevitable shift in the Party’s legitimation strategy in a more advanced stage of economic development.  At best, it is a direction that may lead the CCP to fulfill the promises harmonisation has made; at worst, it is a placebo designed to inspire unity while distracting the public from the truth that the Party still has no comprehensive program to deal with the rising tide of inequality, and the people’s rising demand for better services.  In either case, harmonisation has certainly set high expectations, if not scientifically testable ones.  The Party’s future may depend on its ability to follow through.


Richard McGregor, The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers  (New York: HarperCollins, 2010)

Baogang Guo and Sujian Guo, “China in Search of a Harmonious Society” in Baogang Guo and Sujian Guo, eds. China in Search of a Harmonious Society, (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008)

Haiyan Wang,  Richard Appelbaum, Francesca Degiuli and Nelson Lichtenstein, “China’s New Labour Contract Law: Is China moving toward increased power for workers?” Third World Quarterly 30 No. 3 (2009)

Alice Miller, “Hu Jintao and the Sixth Plenum,” China Leadership Monitor 20 (Winter 2007)

Joseph Mahoney, “On the Way to Harmony: Marxism, Confucianism and Hu Jintao’s Hexie Concept,” in Baogang Guo and Sujian Guo, eds. China in Search of a Harmonious Society, (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008)

Heike Holbig and Bruce Gilley “Reclaiming Legitimacy in China,” Politics and Policy 38 no. 3 (2010)

Malcolm Warner and Ying Zhu, “Labour and Management in the People’s Republic of China: Seeking the ‘harmonious society’” Asia Pacific Business Review 16 no. 3 (2010)

Christine Wong, “Rebuilding Government for the 21st Century: Can China incrementally reform the public sector?”  The China Quarterly 200 (2009)

Burke and Smith on the Morality of Revolution and Social Change: How Societies Evolve

One of the primary distinctions Edmund Burke’s Reflection on the Revolution in France draws is between the purely theoretical speculations of thinkers and the practical problems of government.  Adam Smith provides in his Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments an excellent counterpoint to Burke’s arguments, since Smith, though an superb thinker, could hardly be accused of being either impractical or a radical reformer.  Since Burke mobilises Enlightenment thought to serve a political end, it is legitimate to ask whether and to what extent Burke’s claims about the fundamental and inalienable place of property the role of the elite are supportable in the thought of someone like Smith.  It is not to be expected that even Smith would have thought to the final conclusions his approach suggests.  Smith does not so much demand action as report his findings, but his findings have practical bearing on the issues raised by the French Revolution to which Burke is responding. 


Though Burke’s impassioned defence of property and the entailment of rights would not stand comparison with Smith’s more realistic and humane analysis of power dynamics, Smith’s approval of natural mechanisms of social change would not extend to revolution.  What Smith can provide are the tools to effectively critique the civic morality of protecting inherited right regardless of circumstance.


"It has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity- as an estate especially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right." - Edmund Burke.  Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. J. Pocock. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 29.


Edmund Burke uses this notion of entailment to underpin his discussion of the place of landed aristocracy in the framework of inherited rights.  What Burke does not investigate, as Adam Smith does, are the origins and development of this system in which great proprietors are the anchor of the ship of state.  Perpetuation of property, Burke asserts, not only tends to family virtue, but “tends most to the perpetuation of society itself.”   Statements like this are difficult to reconcile with Adam Smith’s constructions, which suggest the very nature of this system is to inhibit the growth of society.
Burke, lamenting the destructive influence of reason, says “All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal... are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason... On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order.”  


The “mixed system of opinion and sentiment”  which Burke claims arose from “chivalry,” is in Smith’s conception the operation of the natural tendency of the people to follow the great, and of the training an aristocrat receives from birth to play up to it.  Since Burke is in effect mobilising something like Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments to argue that the natural operation of the passions creates a system superior to that which reason tries to artificially construct, Smith’s thoughts on the operation of these natural tendencies are important. 


“Upon this disposition of mankind, to go along with all the passions of the rich and powerful,” says Smith, “is founded the distinction of ranks, and the order of society.”  (Adam Smith.  Theory of Moral Sentiments.  Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie.  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976))   This natural inclination is all that Smith can find to distinguish the nobility from ordinary persons.  “By what other great accomplishments is the young nobleman instructed to support the dignity of his rank, and to render himself worthy of that superiority over his fellow-citizens, to which virtue his ancestors had raised them?  Is it by knowledge, by industry, by patience, by self-denial, or by virtue of any kind?”  The only attainment of a nobleman, on the contrary, is the “graceful sense of his own superiority... These arts, supported by rank and preheminence, are, upon ordinary occasions, sufficient to govern the world.”   In other words, Smith does not see that noble birth confers nobility of character, or any other useful thing except this one illusion that allows a set of otherwise useless men to lead humanity by the nose. 


This strange natural inclination of human passions arises from the perception of the ideal life of the powerful.  “We are eager to assist them in completing a system of happiness that approaches so near to perfection.”   The skills to run the state, however, do not come packaged with the aristocratic aura.  Burke, on the one hand, asserts that “The state suffers oppression” if “servile” tradesmen “are permitted to rule.  In this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature.”   Smith does not precisely contradict him, and certainly would concede that nature favours the station of the powerful.  However, Smith does not, unlike Burke, infer that governance by propertied interest is therefore desirable or even fully possible.  “These virtues are hardly ever to be met with in men who are born to those highest stations.  In all governments accordingly, even in monarchies, the highest offices are generally possessed, and the whole detail of the administration conducted, by men who were educated in the middle and inferior ranks of life, who have been carried forward by their own industry and abilities.”   The nobleman tends to form a character, Smith argues, that is better suited to the social scene than the crises of state.  Although Burke appears to take a great deal of his construction from Smith, the superficial similarity of their ideas conceals a fundamental difference of inclination as far as the aristocracy are concerned. 


Both Smith and Burke make significant arguments for the power of gradual and unplanned social change.  Smith points out, for instance that the division of labour did not arise from “any human wisdom,” but was “the gradual consequence of... the human propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another.”   (Adam Smith. An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations. Vol. 1 ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner.  (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1976)) 


The same principle applied to the process whereby the wealth of the land holders was communicated to the mercantile classes.  Of the aristocrats and artificers, Smith says, “Neither of them had either knowledge or foresight of that great revolution which the folly of the one, and the industry of the other, was gradually bringing about.”   Burke uses the metaphors of familial real estate security to describe the entailment of rights; they are a “family settlement, grasped as in a kind of mortmain,”  “adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections.”   England has “chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges.”   These liberties are the result of “wisdom without reflection, and above it.”   Both Smith and Burke, therefore, would far more readily support a measured and natural course of change than the wholesale demolition French society faced during the Revolution.  Yet Smith also wrote that “Laws frequently continue in force long after the circumstances, which first gave occasion to them, and which could alone render them reasonable, are no more.”  


“I cannot stand forward,” Burke argues, “and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.”   This opposition between stratospheric reason as practiced by enlightenment thinkers and the practical reality of running a society is another reason why the inherited structure must, in Burke’s view, remain intact.  This is the difference, he says, between an “geometrical and arithmetical constitution,”  the one being a compound of all the inherited wisdom of historical statecraft and the other absolutist declarations of right which unbalance the basis of many, limited freedoms in favour of a few absolute ones.  “What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or medicine?  The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them.”   The question of what happens when neither is being attended to does not arise, but one is tempted in this age of stratospheric ideology to sympathise with Burke's relativism.


On an amusing note, Burke asserts that the English “have never dreamt that parliaments had any right whatever to violate property, to overrule prescription.”   For what else were the first parliaments constituted than to legislate taxes?  The Glorious Revolution, for that matter, for all its comely trappings of succession, did overrule prescription, even if the extent of the deviation was self-limited.  Burke made many of his points concerning the actual procedure of land confiscation and the mismanagement thereof, and these points must be conceded by history.  The more interesting question is the moral basis for such an action.  Did Burke, in light of Smith’s philosophy, proceed to these well-founded practical insights from a defensible civic morality?


Burke’s argument was against not only the specific reordering of the French Revolution, but any radical reordering of society, while Smith may or may not have entirely agreed.  Yet the moral basis for this formative appeal to tradition rests on shaky ground.  Burke’s famous rhapsody on the fate of Marie Antoinette laments the demise of “that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exulted freedom...The unbought grace of life... under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.”   The obvious question arising from any comparison with the works of Smith is whether the social cohesion wrought by this illusory yet natural good was enough to counterbalance the real faults of the system.  Burke appeals throughout the Reflections to the example of English liberties as the solution to the French situation.  Yet it is from analysis of this ameliorated nation that Smith draws his best criticisms of the landed aristocracy.


Burke raises the issue of the body involved in carrying out the confiscation of property, criticising its lack of propertied representation.  The British House of Commons Burke extols for being “by the sure operation of adequate causes, filled with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary and acquired opulence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval, and politic distinction.”   By contrast, the Revolutionary Assembly had little regard “to the general security of property” because its deputies were “immersed in hopeless poverty” and thus “could regard all property, whether secular or ecclesiastical, with no other eye than that of envy.”  “For the smallest hope of the meanest dividend in plunder,” they “would readily join in any attempts upon a body of wealth in which they could hardly look to have any share except in a general scramble.”   While Burke could write this with a straight face, thinking that the graceless greed of the poor ought not to overcome the gracious wealth of their betters, a modern reader must have rather a different approach, even if the philosophy of Adam Smith were the only reference point. 


Burke holds it to be a “profaneness, to talk of the use, as affecting the title to the property.”   This is the main difference between Burke’s regard for property and Smith’s.  Smith’s view is pragmatic and pays more attention to history.   “This original engrossing of uncultivated lands, though a great, might have been but a transitory evil.  They might soon have been divided again, and broke into small parcels either by succession or alienation.”  The primacy of property as a source of power resulted in the exclusion of small proprietors, as the aristocracy introduced measures to prevent the alienation of land.  “The law of primogeniture hindered [the estates] from being divided by succession; the introduction of entails prevented their being broke into small parcels by alienation.”   This situation only changed with the arrival of a luxury market, operated by the emerging middle class and perfectly arranged to part the aristocrats from at least their money and retainers, and sometimes their land.  “As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons.”


The continuity of entails in Eighteenth century Europe comes, in the opinion of Smith, from “the supposition that every successive generation of men have not an equal right to the earth, and to all it possesses; but that the property of the present generation should be restrained and regulated according to the fancy of those who died perhaps five hundred years ago.”   The improvement of agriculture depends on long-term land security to induce small holders to improve their lots.  “A small proprietor, however, who knows every part of his little territory, who views it with all the affection which... small property, naturally inspires... is generally of all improvers...the most successful.”   The inherited veneer of grace and aura of chivalric power that surrounded the aristocracy and to which Burke appeals can be seen in this light as injustice and illusion, an accident which history was in the process of revisiting.


This subtle, unplanned revolution had Smith’s total approval.  But what are the implications of forcing the pace of change, for the good of the people?  Smith sits, at best, on a fence.  As an empiricist observing the evidence, he sees both the flaws of the current order, and the moral and practical problems of changing it.  “That kings are the servants of the people, to be obeyed, resisted, deposed or punished, as the public conveniency may require, is the doctrine of reason and philosophy; but it is not the doctrine of Nature.”   This personified Nature to whom Burke and Smith both appeal is not, in this case, the fundamental nature of the savage or “the state of nature,” nor is it precisely equivalent to Providence.  Deference to the powerful is not, Smith observes, “founded chiefly, or altogether, upon a regard for the utility of such submission, and to the order of society, which is best supported by it.  Even when the order of society seems to require that we should oppose them, we can hardly bring ourselves to it.”   With the ambivalence of someone assimilating a cognitive dissonance he sees but cannot resolve, Smith reports his empirical finding that Nature is against reason:


 "A stranger to human nature, who saw the indifference of men about the misery of their inferiors, and the regret and indignation they feel for the misfortunes and suffering of those above them, would be apt to imagine, that pain must be more agonising, and the convulsions of death more terrible to persons of higher rank, than to those of meaner stations."


Smith as an observer reports the “natural” order of government, but sees the propertied aristocracy as an immoral, inert mass suffocating better men beneath the weight of their privilege.


Edmund Burke’s political project in the Reflections employed the idea, found in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, that a natural ordering of human passions had resulted over time in a system best fitted for the ordering of society, beyond the capacity of narrow human reason to address.   Although Edmund Burke’s practical criticisms of the program of the French Revolution are effectively conceded by Smith’s gradualist approach to social change, neither the moral authority of entailed right within society nor the indiscriminate conservation of property above and against the needs of the people are ultimately supportable given Smith’s specific criticisms of the origin, nature and effects of landed aristocracy.

Cossack: Democratic Bandit to Tsarist Reactionary

The Cossack subculture represents one of the most interesting studies in the history of liberty as a social ideal.  To the early Muscovite State, the Cossack hosts represented a volatile natural force.  Cossacks were both useful and dangerous, a disruptive element in commerce and diplomacy and a wild card in war.  While some authors maintain that the Cossacks have always functioned as the vanguard of Slavic control of Steppe, whether Polish or Russian,  they were never truly invested in either of these societies.  The word “Cossack” itself is Turkik, meaning “free warrior and vagrant”  without a place in society and living on the periphery.    How then did the word Cossack by the nineteenth century come to mean a reactionary conservative who suppresses change by force? 


The efforts of Ivan IV of Moscow and his successors to expand southward, together with the beginnings of peasant flight from the land, brought the ordered Muscovite world into conflict with the Cossack hosts.   Theirs was both a military organization and an oddly democratic one, with officers being selected by the fighting men.  Yet these officers lived in the knowledge that they could be violently deposed at any moment.   If this seems odd, parallel instances of internal democracy among outlaws exist, most notably in some of the pirate laws of the Caribbean.  Even when they deigned to fight for a state, the Cossack hosts understood that this was a purely voluntary association. 


In 1665, a contingent of the Don host was fighting with Prince Yuri Dolgoruky against the Poles.  Disgusted with their indecisive Russian leaders, the Cossack commander informed Dolgoruky that his men were not being properly used and that they intended to return home.   Upon the Prince’s indignant refusal, this Cossack, the brother of future rebel Stepan (Stenka) Razin, called a mass meeting and told his Cossacks that they were free men and not soldiers and had the right to go home.   A well-disposed Polish chronicler called the Cossacks “those who since ancient times considered themselves warriors, who learned to carry a sword and did not recognize the yoke of slavery.”   Fighting for Orthodoxy and the Tsar was one thing- being in bondage was another. 


With the so-called "Time of Troubles," the Cossacks reached the zenith of their political influence and military strength.  The Don host in particular enjoyed the benefits of large numbers of peasants fleeing famine and disorder.  They became a politically potent force, putting several pretenders on the throne.  These were only the first steps in awakening the state to the dangers the Cossacks could pose. 


In September of 1670, Stenka Razin, successful leader of a band of rogue Cossacks (rogue in relation to the power structures of the Cossack hosts, that is), sailed with his following up the Volga, capturing Tsaritsin.  There, emissaries came to him from Astrakhan, asking him to come and liberate their city from the rule of the aristocrats.   With a little incitement from advance agents, most of the population rose against the aristocracy as soon as the Cossacks appeared, as did the elite Streltsi.   In Astrakhan he did the unprecedented, instituting the organization of a Cossack host.  This action proved to be so inspirational that from there, Razin stampeded through Russia, cities falling to him or freeing themselves before his arrival.  His proclaimed goals and those of his followers were often disparate.  Razin proclaimed to the Streltsi who joined him that they were “fighting for the Tsar against the boyars who have betrayed his trust.”   Bulgars, pagan remnants, raskolniki, serfs, merchants and many other parts of society flocked to Razin, each with their own goals, a process that would repeat itself in other Cossack uprisings in the time of Catherine II.  


Over the course of three centuries, the Cossacks demonstrated that they could mount the military force and popular support for expeditions ranging from isolated raids to territorial occupations to regime changes to full-scale rebellion.  Thus, the foremost question of internal security for the Russian Empire was how to remove the Cossacks not only as a military threat, but as the focal point of social unrest.


The first part of the solution to the Cossack problem came ironically from a Cossack.  Yermak, a Cossack expeditionary who later conquered parts of Siberia, was originally hired by the wealthy Stroganov family to protect their trade from Tatar raiders.  The Cossacks drove off the Tatars, and then, for lack of activity, began plundering Stroganov possessions.  To the Stroganovs’ complaints, Yermak pointed out that as long as the Cossacks had no war to fight, they could not be stopped.  He proposed that the Stroganovs provide them with military employment.  It was from this proposal that the Siberian venture originated.   After Yermak had occupied several towns, he sent a mission to the Tsar bearing gifts.  It was then that Ivan IV set a new precedent by detaching some of his own troops to the ataman’s command, under the appellation of Cossacks.   Thus, the first formal Cossack military unit was formed, though of course the Cossacks did not yet see it in that light.  So long as Moscow could provide manly work for the Cossacks, they were willing.  This was the first and most obvious of the Cossack weaknesses.


Second and ultimately more important were the Cossack tendencies to identify with the Tsar and the Russian cause on the grounds of their Orthodox faith,  but not to identify with anything else about Russian society.  The hierarchy they detested, and detested equally the serfs at the bottom of it, save those who showed the courage to run away.  The Cossack mind reviled servility.  This sense of Cossack exceptionalism made it possible to alienate the Cossack from the commoner by appealing to the Cossack’s ego. 


In each town he took, Stenka Razin instituted Cossack principles of equality, and most of all in those towns which overthrew their nobles before his arrival.  The streltsi who came over to him he made Cossacks.   This course of action allowed Razin to make these new allies acceptable to his fellow Cossacks.  A free Cossack respects a free Cossack, but does not respect those still enslaved.  Thus, it was only a matter of time and patience for Moscow to completely alienate the affections of the Cossacks from the rest of their subjects, making the Cossacks a useful tool for suppressing popular unrest.  


A third Cossack weakness was the pronounced lack of political agenda.  With the exception of Stenka Razin, Cossacks were usually content to stand apart from the social order of the Russian Empire without attempting to institute or popularize Cossackdom throughout it.  Thus, they became a sort of pressure valve for social unrest among the serfs and other lower classes, who could choose to flee to the Cossacks if their conditions became unbearable, without expressing to the latter any of the values that could make these classes able to stand up for themselves.  Stenka Razin’s exceptionality to this rule may stem from the murder of his brother by Yuri Dolgoruky,  or from his identification with the many poorer peasants who had fled to the Don.  


It was Stenka who expressed for the first time the kernel of a democratic idea of universal Cossackdom: “There shall be no serfs anymore, but all shall be free and equal…I do not wish to be as a Tsar, but to live amongst you as a brother.”   However, with the defeat and execution of Razin, this idea died quickly, for the hunger and oppression of the Russian people on the one hand and the Cossack love of any subversion and battle had alone caused the acceptance of such a notion, which was still foreign to the official Cossack hetmanates.  As long as the rights of Cossacks were maintained sufficiently, or at least worn away very slowly, the Cossacks would not stand on principle.


Peter the Great turned his formidable attentions to the issue of Cossack independence when his trusted, aristocratic Cossack minister Mazeppa betrayed him and joined the Swedes in exchange for the promise of Cossack independence.   Fortunately for Peter, only a handful of Cossacks joined Mazeppa, but the Emperor was not one to sweep a problem under the carpet.  To him, unity meant uniformity, and so he dissolved Cossack privileges, put Cossacks under oath of loyalty, imposed military service, and officially dissolved independent Cossack law.   In 1721, he placed all Cossacks under the authority of a military Collegium, affirming their status as a military adjunct of the Russian Empire, while simultaneously exulting certain Cossack leaders to the level of military dukes, thus alienating the traditional councils of elders from authority.   This typically Petrine measure was not, however, the cleverest way of managing the Cossacks.  Future rulers would adopt other techniques.

 
The Empress Elizabeth, for example, introduced privileges for the Cossack elite, thus alienating them from their subordinates at a time of spreading serfdom in the Ukraine.    It was during this period that the Cossack democratic assemblies came to exclude the lower ranks, and the hetmanate attained a truly ducal character, with appointments and hereditary titles backed by the crown.  


However, it was ultimately Catherine II who was put in the position of trying to disarm the “tradition of revolt”  which the Cossacks had been building since the Time of Troubles.  Her initial policies followed those of Peter, regularizing Cossack forces, removing their right to elect their own officers, and appointing foreign officers to oversee Cossack affairs.   Short of pay and frustrated by Catherine’s deafness to their appeals, the Terek Cossacks welcomed an articulate and energetic deserter from the Russian army named Pugachev, who swiftly rose to become ataman.   Appealing to Old Believers and peasants and impersonating the deceased Tsar Peter, Pugachev launched a rebellion paralleling those of both Stenka Razin and the False Dmitris.  It was after Pugachev’s execution that an appalled Catherine began to rethink her approach.   She offered both the carrot and the stick, lowering taxes and salt prices and offering a blanket amnesty, while simultaneously displacing Cossack populations, in effect creating reserves for them.  At the same time, Catherine substituted a mixture of imperial and Cossack law and created an administration based on the emerging Cossack noble class.


The result of these policies was to create a number of buffer communes along sensitive frontiers, giving both the Cossacks and external enemies something to keep them busy.   It was in these units that the weaknesses of Cossack society outlined above were fully exploited.  Because Cossack land was permenantly restricted for the first time, land came to be owned by a number of important Cossack families, leading to considerable stratification of Cossack society.   In the 18th Century, the Society of Notable Military Fellows was formed in the Ukraine, recognizing Cossacks whose ancestors had held starshina or hetman rank.  It was to this exclusive group of office holders that the tsars granted land and privilege.  For peasants and lower-ranking Cossacks, this meant increasing subjugation.  The government could play the “rabble” against the starshina, making the latter dependent on the government for support.  Later, the hetmanate officially divided Ukrainian Cossacks into two classes.   Needless to say, if even lower-class Cossacks had little access to the traditional privileges of their nation, escaped serfs could no longer count on the Cossack settlements as a refuge. 


Secondly, the male Cossack population was almost entirely occupied with military service, in recognition of which Cossacks were exempt from many taxes.  Cossacks also owned a great deal more land per capita than any other section of society.  Thus, the government formed twin buffers of alienation: one within the Cossack community between the privileged and the poor, and another between the Cossacks and their neighbours.   Catherine and her successors achieved a system that not only catered to the Cossack love of adventure and warfare, but to Cossack vanity as well.  Special career paths and privileges, ranging from elite field units to the personal guards of Tsars and magnates were open to the Cossack.   The system exulted Cossacks to a special caste, and, while this is no more than the Cossacks had always thought of themselves, it meant that they no longer felt threatened by the state order.  With the state as a patron, Cossacks seldom obected to being used in the suppression of rebellions.


From the end of Catherine’s reign until the later nineteenth century, the imperial government managed to effectively direct Cossack energies to the maintenance of the established order.  It should be noted, however, that the Cossacks began to realize and resent their own servitude toward the end of the monarchy.  With the establishment of state Dumas (Assemblies), Cossack deputies immediately began not only to raise the question of self-government,  but to support the liberal opposition.  Nor was this feeling unique to the delegates; several military units began to refuse orders to attack civilians, culminating in the refusal of Cossack units in 1917 to protect the government, walking their horses over to join the demonstrators rather than charging them down.   Perhaps the conditions on the eastern front of World War I had brought home to the Cossacks the misery of the entire empire, or perhaps they were beginning to transcend the selfish, introverted nature of their own lust for freedom and project it to others, as Razin had tried to teach them.


To the Russian state, the Cossacks represented a threat greater than any other enemy; to the Russian peasant, both fear and aspiration.  To the Cossacks themselves, nothing mattered so much as the freedom to fight.  In attempting to control the Cossacks by conventional means, the Russian government succeeded only in provoking rebellion.  But by employing Cossack soldiers in a way that catered to their sense of adventure and special destiny, by exulting them above the peasants and leaving them with a semblance of their own traditions, the state succeeded in taming their anarchic impulse and annulling their alliance with the peasant class- an alliance of convenience rather than sentiment.





Peter Julicher Renegades, Rebels and Rogues under the Tsars.  (London: McFarland & Co., 2003)

Maurice Hindus The Cossacks: The Story of a Warrior People. (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1945.)

Cecil Field, The Great Cossack: The Rebellion of Sten’ka Razin against Alexis  Michaelovitch, Tsar of All the Russias.  (London: Herbert Jenkins Ltd, 1947.)

Orest Subtelny Ukraine: A History.  (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994)

Linda Gordon Cossack Rebellions:Social Turmoil in the Sixteenth Century Ukraine. (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983.) 

Law as Collective Agreement: A Civilizational Strategy

Studying the systems of law originating in the British Isles in their ancient, medieval, pre-modern and modern forms, an odd consistency of approach seems to emerge, in contrast with most other European systems.  That approach is the compact, the collective agreement of one part of society with another.  It reappears with strange consistency from the earliest recorded laws to the present day.

The Brehon laws of ancient Ireland, which were remarkable in many ways for their humanity and moderation in an era characterised elsewhere in Europe by capital punishment for the most trivial of crimes and judicial procedure based upon the ordeal, operated entirely on this principle.  When Ireland had High Kings, they would call a feis or gathering of all the educated people and leaders of the country every three years to discuss matters of law.  The promulgation of laws was not a monopoly of kings; in order to pass a law, the king had to call together a council of at least nine people of particular stations, including a teacher of law, a teacher of history, a bard, clergymen and so on.  The king himself was bound by certain specific laws.  The laws themselves were essentially the product of and guide to the negotiations of the different parts of society with each other, each part having certain rights. 

That this process of negotiation was ongoing can be seen in the advancement of women’s rights in recorded laws.  Despite a low status in the earlier law tracts, by the late "Dark Ages," Irish women were the freest in Europe, able to divorce as well as to own, accumulate and transmit property.  The very legal process itself took on the aspect of a negotiation mediated by the jurist, and the consequences for even serious crimes were often shockingly lenient in modern eyes.  The process of negotiation within the society over time leant the Irish laws a remarkable humanity, mirrored in the other Celtic law systems for which we have evidence, and arguably in the Anglo-Saxon laws of Alfred the Great, who, likely due to centuries of Irish missionising, seems to have adopted many similar legal concepts. 

The laws of Norman England were by far the darkest in British history, reverting to trial by ordeal, not to mention hanging for offenses ranging from adultery to petty theft to killing the King’s game.  The nobility and the Church had their own courts, and the power of life and death over their serfs.  Of the legal systems in play, the king’s law was, for the average person, perhaps the least significant.

Rivalry between kings and nobles led to the collective agreement (soon broken) known as Magna Carta, and later to a particularly interesting rebellion led Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester.  Simon, whose anniversary of death was this past week, was responsible the first directly-elected Parliament, also the first which had substantial rights of government and in which commoners had a substantial role, and was one of the first pioneers of democracy in England.  Simon was one of the first to see beyond the rights of his own class and to try for a constitution beneficial to the nation writ large.

It was around this time (the 13th Century) that the English monarchy smartened up.  Royal law had enjoyed minimal presence in the Shires, and to lend it credibility, the idea of indictment, and later trial, by a jury of freemen was introduced.  The former kind of jury seems to have been a significant influence on the abandonment of the ordeal system, and there are records of accused persons throwing themselves "on the verdict of the country" before the trial jury was introduced.  The free farmers and the burgers of the growing charter boroughs, the minority of the non-noble population directly affected by the King’s law, would henceforth be judged firstly by the fair mind of the community (your mileage may vary) and secondly by the distillation of the fair mind of the law (ditto), embodied in the precedents of the Common Law.  The power of the jury was of great help to the non-noble classes in resisting the nobility on certain points, such as the noble monopoly on game.  A jury composed of poachers and those sympathetic to poachers was unlikely to uphold an unfair noble privilege when one of their peers was caught.

The negotiations and arguments around the role of the jury have a fascinating history, (almost every argument made against juries today is at least four hundred years old), with many vicissitudes, but it was in the early modern period, with the disappearance of serfdom, an educated middle class and juries willing and able to defy the letter of the law to preserve the spirit of justice that the jury came into its own.  Notably in the trials of Quakers, juries refused to convict and withstood judicial sanctions including fines and imprisonment for it.  It was this issue which ultimately forced the law to fully recognise the right of jury nullification, which had in practice been occurring since the dawn of the jury trial.  The fair mind of the (property-owning male) community could overturn unjust laws, such as those restricting the freedom of worship.

English history is often read as a process of negotiation between the classes: the king and the nobility, the lower nobility and the higher, the nobility and the middle class, and so on.  The markers of these negotiations- Magna Carta, the English Revolution, the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution, th 19th Century reforms, the extensions of the franchise, each represent a renegotiation of the rights and privileges of particular classes and of the monarchy.  The negotiated nature of law is inherent in the Westminster system, as every written law is a signed agreement between the monarch and the representatives of the people.  In that way, the monarch gradually became the embodiment and guarantor of the constitution, rather than a lawgiver, in a way that gives the whole system an incredible resilience. 

The intervals between the Saxon and Danish invasions, the Norman Conquest in 1066 and the reforms of the 19^th Century in Britain can be read as a gradual amelioration of the legal concepts brought by the invaders, through the extension of the right of collective bargaining to ever-wider portions of society.  It is from this process that our most treasured legal principles, from Habeas Corpus to the presumption of innocence to the right to legal council, gradually emerged. 

Even so, it is striking that until the parliamentary and legal reforms of the 19^th Century and the extensions of the franchise to most of the population, the system seems scarcely recognisable.  Until that time, we see mainly a sort of theatre of justice, quick trials conducted with private prosecution and easily decided by the prejudices of judge and jury, and culminating too often in the spectacle of a public hanging for offenses ranging from the trivial to the unrecognisable.  Only when women and the lower classes were included in the conversation did the law start to become more human and less a system for the defence of the upper-class male and his property, social and sexual rights.

Despite all its disadvantages- a slow learning curve and tendency to periodically forget the lessons of the past- the principle of collective agreement as the basis for law is the irreplaceable foundation of modern democracy.  In place of a lawgiver and a rigid code of penalties policed by force, this ideal places the monarch and the people, the rich and the poor, the state and the citizen, and each section of society with every other, in negotiation and seeks a credible collective arrangement.  The system is admittedly imperfect.  But it does not stand for perfection.  It stands for humanity and legitimacy, and imposes a series of time-tested speed bumps on any one force of state or society running roughshod over any other.  That is why, whenever I read a comment by police or crown lawyers decrying the fact that juries, unlike judges, are not inclined to take police testimony uncritically and are likely to demand a high standard of proof (I can produce studies on both points), I think, “Great!  An example of the system working!”

None of this is to say that the law in the UK, here in Canada or down south in the US is anywhere close to working right.  Trivial offenses fill dockets and prisons while violent criminals are paroled early to make room.  Political priorities and not the safety of the people apportion the resources of the law and the police.  The right to speedy trial is a sick joke, as is the right to effective representation.  Laws are tangled, criminally lengthy and totally inaccessible to the citizen.  The bar and the judiciary are self-selecting interest groups with no interest in cleaning up the situation.  The police in many places are disturbingly occupied with questions of public order and paramilitary training and disturbingly unoccupied with community relations and catching serious criminals, not to mention the training and behaviours of their own officers which too often bring the administration of justice into disrepute.  Corporate and white-collar crime is remarkably unchecked, while small-time street crooks are the focus of every political campaign. 

As we ponder these and other problems, the subjects for the next great renegotiation of the law and the social compact, we the people could do worse than remember this heritage of collective negotiation, its lessons, and the ways in which it empowers us.  The law and the legal system stands or falls on the legitimacy we give it.  If we refuse to put up with the status quo- well, that is what workers and women did in the 19^th Century, the slave-trade abolitionists before that and the jury and its supporters before that.  That is how the social compact and the laws which embody it get renegotiated in a democratic society.