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CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA PRESENTS A PECULIAR SOCIETY (in a political sense) for which the best parallel (albeit limited, as is the case with any historical comparison) is early West European feudalism as it existed between the ninth and twelfth centuries. The Holy Roman Empire, which encompassed most of Germany and Northern Italy as well as England and France, was a peculiar political formation which emerged in the aftermath of the disintegration of the great Carolingian empire. Its former glory and might influenced these new states in a manner similar to that in which the memory of the Soviet Union as a superpower is influencing the political processes in the Russian Federation.

Feudal Europe prompts numerous parallels with political life in modern Russia, even if the economic environments of the two societies seem incomparable—the one a mediaeval economy with absolute predominance of …