Exactly 100 years ago, on 17 (30) October 1905, the Tsar published a manifesto guaranteeing civil rights in Russia and setting up a parliament, the State Duma, "without whose agreement no law can take effect". The Duma existed for 11 years (1906-17) and busied itself with legislation that laid the basis for a pravovoegosudarstvo, a law-based state, in which officials, before taking arbitrary actions, had to reckon with the possibility of answering for them before the courts. During that time, Russia's newspapers were among the best in the world: diverse, well-informed, and outspoken about the country's problems.

Today Russia again has a Duma and a constitution, but in some respects human rights are less well secured than in the years after 1905. President Vladimir Putin can, for example, issue decrees that do not have to be agreed by the Duma, and officials have to fear prosecution only if they are out of favour with their superiors. Some newspapers still criticize the government over its handling of, for example, the sinking of the submarine Kursk or the Beslan atrocities, but those newspapers do not sell widely outside Moscow and St Petersburg, while all television and nearly all radio is supinely loyalist. The country hovers uneasily between being a democratic, law-based state and an authoritarian one. In matters of civil rights and free speech, Russia has not progressed in the way that might have been anticipated in 1905.

In between, of course, the country went through the searing experience of 74 years of communist rule. When they seized power in 1917, Lenin and his associates dismissed the rule of law as a bourgeois sham, designed to perpetuate the domination of capital over labour. Under the "dictatorship of the proletariat", embryonic civil society was systematically dismantled, to be replaced by the political monopoly of the Communist Party, which was ended only in 1990. What that monopoly generated we all know: the re-enserfment of the peasants in collective farms, the virtual destruction of the Orthodox Church and other religions, the impoverishment of the public media and the nation's cultural life, the "great terror" of 1937-8, and the mass deportation of whole nationalities.

It is easy (and not wholly unfair) to blame this appalling record entirely on the Communist Party. But there are also factors in Russia's social structure that help to explain the degradation of public life between 1917 and 1991. Alongside the strong state, Russia has always had very strong local communities capable of withstanding the rigours of life in a harsh climate as well as providing the taxes, the soldiers, and the dogged patriotism to defend their way of life on vulnerable territories. The problem is that there has been very little between the state and the local community. Local government, law courts, professional associations, a self-regulating media – what one might call "civil society" – have all been weak, liable to pressure from both above and below. Only the magnificent scientific and cultural community, which had begun to develop in the eighteenth century, has been an exception, and as a result has had to bear far more than its fair share of the burdens of civic responsibility.

Otherwise, what has linked central state and local community has usually been personal patron-client relationships. If you read the memoirs of senior officials in Tsarist Russia, you will find that they nearly all have a strong sense of what a "normal" relationship between state and society ought to be, but most of their pages are taken up with descriptions of personal intrigues, which were clearly the main preoccupation of their everyday working lives. Now that we have the recollections of many former Soviet party bosses, we can see that they were obsessed with the same irksome realities: the unceasing conflict of nomenklatura factions, and laws that were not enforced unless they were in the personal interest of some high official.

In the absence of impersonal institutions governed by law, the cohesive mechanism that held local communities together in Russia was krugovaia poruka, usually translated into English as "joint responsibility". It probably began as a social custom, but was adopted by the Tsarist state as an administrative device through which it could ensure that crime was restrained, taxes were collected, and recruits were delivered to the army. The essence of it was that if one household in the community failed to fulfil its obligations, then the other households had to make up the shortfall. If a neighbour fell behind on his tax payments, then you and the other villagers would have to make up the difference. If an army recruit deserted or proved unsuitable for military service, then another household had to send another young man in his place. That was very convenient for tax collectors and recruiting sergeants.

But it was also quite comforting as a principle of social life. It meant that everyone had an interest in everyone else's wellbeing. You would be better off if your neighbour had enough to eat and was able to keep his home in good repair, his animals healthy, and his tools in working order. If you had illness in the family, or not enough working hands to get the harvest in, your fellow villagers would probably rally round and help you. That was not altruism but common sense in the circumstances.

Krugovaia poruka has programmed itself deep inside the personality of most Russians, even today, 100 years after it was officially abolished. Many of the most attractive features of Russian society are generated by it: the warmth and mutual concern, the hospitality and love of conversation. But krugovaia poruka also engendered darker customs: mutual concern could easily become prying into neighbours' affairs and gossiping maliciously about them. In the villages and small towns, people viewed the wealthy and the very poor with suspicion or resentment. The wealthy had probably enriched themselves by dubious means that might threaten the rest of the village, while the poor were a burden everyone else had to bear. As a popular saying had it: "Wealth is a sin before God, and poverty is a sin before one's fellow villagers".

When the communists abolished the (admittedly under-developed) post-1905 Tsarist rule of law and reversed the creation of impersonal legal institutions, society had nothing to fall back on but the partial resurrection of the practice of krugovaia poruka. In the enterprises, after the early storming years of the first two five-year plans, work practices entrenched themselves that ensured that employees had a not too demanding life, yet could enjoy the benefits of housing, recreation, health care, annual holidays, and often food supplies as well – which employers provided through the workplace if they could, because otherwise the constant queuing up for scarce supplies made workers late for work, tired, and irritable. For the ordinary Soviet citizen, employment meant a secure and not too demanding way of life, provided everyone played their part, did their share of work and covered up for each other when things went wrong or a "government inspector" came down.

In the communal apartments in which most town-dwellers lived, tenants had to co-exist somehow, and to devise rules about how this could be done, in ways as far as possible acceptable to everyone. There was a need for mutual consensus and decision-making, which required regular consultation. Some rules, for example about the use of bathroom or telephone, or about paying for gas and electricity, were written and displayed in a prominent position. Most rules, though, were informal, were mediated through kitchen gossip and perhaps tested out through the occasional skandal – a row, scene, or shouting match conducted in public – in which the winner's version would be accepted as more authoritative for the future.

To a far greater extent than the village commune, the communal apartment was linked to an authority system that supervised the behaviour of its members. The close proximity in which people lived ensured that major family events were known by everyone. Even ordinary conversations might well be overheard if they took place in the kitchen – the venue for general sociability – or even in a family room with thin walls. This was one of the factors that made the mutual denunciations of Stalin's terror so ubiquitous and pernicious.

What the Soviet revival of krugovaia poruka meant in practice was the dilution of a sense of personal legal responsibility for one's actions. The group as a whole provided one with cover. This meant that the "rule of law" actually became an instrument of personal domination and/or mutual protection. There was a concept of individual freedom, but no practice of it. Throughout the Soviet period, officials banded together in hierarchical clans to cover up for each other. There was a mass of legislation, of course, but what really mattered to the individual was not observing the written laws, but rather not violating the unwritten practices that held these clans together. Provided someone in public life displayed unwavering loyalty to his (scarcely ever her) superiors, mouthed the required stereotyped group formulae and played by the accepted "rules of the game", then if he got into trouble he could expect to be protected from the consequences.

One could see this system at work in the Union of Writers. Creative artists by nature are not easy to organize or direct. In literature, the Party tackled the problem by establishing a Union of Soviet Writers, membership in which would guarantee writers modest privileges – a pleasant apartment, good medical care, an agreeable holiday home – which shielded them from the grosser forms of the Soviet struggle for a minimal standard of living. The Union was run by officials – often mediocre writers themselves – appointed under the nomenklatura system. What those officials feared above all were talented writers, who might become popular and deprive them of their generous state-supported royalties and mammoth print-runs. Their manipulation of access to goods and services proved to be just as effective a means of administration and control in culture as in factories and collective farms.

Of course the censorship (Glavlit) always existed as a back-stop to prevent flagrant contravention of ideological orthodoxy or the revelation of official secrets. But most of the policing of literature was carried out by writers – editors and secretaries of the Writers' Union – over their colleagues. Now that we have the diaries and memoirs of quite a few Soviet writers, we can see that their main concern was not with Glavlit, but with winning over the editors and secretaries of the Writers' Union.

Understanding krugovaia poruka helps us to understand why terror became so pervasive in the 1930s. When Hitler came to power in Germany with the openly avowed aim of destroying the Soviet Union, the compulsory discourses and practices of the communist leaders became even more rigid. The "general line", as enunciated by the Central Committee, and increasingly by Stalin himself, became compulsory in all its details. Fully elaborated in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, it was disseminated by a huge and penetrative horde of consultants, lecturers, agitators, and propagandists. Anyone who doubted or strayed from its formulaic prescriptions was considered no longer fully trustworthy. As the rhetoric escalated, the doubters became "oppositionists", then "deviationists", then people "with terrorist intentions", and finally "terrorists" or "spies" of capitalist powers, full-scale enemies to be exterminated.

In the end Stalin, fearing that normal Party procedures would not succeed in rooting out "enemies", brought in the NKVD to complete the process. From there on rival patron-client networks fought each other using the weapons of the secret police and deploying the concepts of the unanimous and obligatory rhetoric. At the lowest level, ordinary people denounced each other in their workplaces and homes for the old familiar reasons connected with krugovaia poruka: suspicion and envy of those who were in any way unusual, eccentric, or appeared to challenge group norms. And any denunciation, once received by a Party or police official, had to be acted on, since failure to do so might later be unmasked as "protecting the enemy".

Although after Stalin's death in 1953 some of his crimes were disclosed and denounced, although the criminal law was eased and "socialist legality" was proclaimed, the fundamental structures of state and society remained unchanged. The nomenklatura elite was even more secure without Stalin than under him – since they no longer feared becoming chance victims of indiscriminate terror – and they were determined to enjoy their good fortune. This they could best do not by entrenching legality, but by exploiting their power within personal clientele relationships. When Gorbachev tried in the late 1980s to introduce elements of a genuine market, the rule of law and civil society, he brought about not reform but the collapse of the whole system.

What has been especially discouraging since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has been to see hierarchical patron-client relations once again establishing themselves. President Yeltsin's courage in challenging and eventually overthrowing the communist regime was not matched by skill in creating the institutions of a new society. It is true that under his regime the media enjoyed unprecedented freedom to air political problems and probe the deficiencies of public officials – to the point of frequently lambasting Yeltsin himself, and portraying him in the Puppets television programme as a drunken barin with slurred speech and boorish manners. But his ill-thought-out privatization schemes allowed old nomenklatura bosses to plunder the state and convert their administrative power into private property at almost no cost. His dissolution of the Supreme Soviet in 1993 and subsequent shelling of the White House (symbol of his own triumph two years earlier) tarnished the new democratic institutions with an air of authoritarian violence. And his two invasions of Chechnya (in 1994 and 1999) revived coercive imperial practices that ought to have died with Russia's new status as a nation-state. The mixture of anarchy with state-sponsored violence did not bode well for civil rights or free speech.

President Putin has tried to restore the power of the state. In one sense this was obviously necessary when he came to power in 2000. A state that cannot levy taxes, pay its schoolteachers and pensioners, or restrain tycoons from employing private armies and murdering each other certainly cannot guarantee democracy or civil rights. But unfortunately Putin understands the strong state in the old Russian sense: one that excludes civil society and works through trusted persons and their clients in order to preserve what passes for law and order. Putin betrayed his own ambivalence in the famous phrase in which he defined his political ideal on taking office: "the dictatorship of law". He reminds me of Nicholas I, who came to the throne in 1825 after a period of turbulence: he also tried to strengthen the rule of law, but as an instrument of authoritarian rule, a reinforcement of what Putin now calls the "vertical of power". Alas, his reign ended with defeat in the Crimean War and Nicholas's deathbed recognition that his rule had not brought about stable, effective, or honest government.

Putin's relations with the "oligarchs" serve as an indication of his political practice. At a meeting in 2000, he assured them that they would be left in peace and that their ill-gotten gains of the 1990s would not be questioned, provided they observed a "gentlemen's agreement" about the division of functions: he would manage politics, and they would henceforth obey the law and confine themselves to economics. The only oligarchs he has prosecuted are those who have supported opposition parties or, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, have financed educational and cultural charities that could have political effects.

The Duma has been stacked with members of political parties loyal to Putin and the office he holds. The democratic election of provincial governors has been abolished: now the president appoints them all. The media has been muzzled – though by new methods: newspapers, radio, and television stations that annoy the government are no longer closed down by decree. Instead they receive a visit from the tax inspector (no one has paid taxes punctiliously in the last decade and a half: they would have gone bankrupt had they done so). Or they find their commercial debts being called in, their ownership of their premises contested, or their shares being bought up by a rival concern. A few courageous newspapers survive, but precariously and uncertain of their future.

Today, many Russians identify democracy and the rule of law with an insecure and troubled existence, threatened by poverty, disease, and unemployment. They hanker after the certainties of the past. That is why today on the whole they support Putin and are prepared to settle for the "dictatorship of law" rather than the rule of law. But this is not a stable arrangement, especially in today's global economy, in which Putin wishes Russia to play a full part. To take the most basic concept: secure property rights, without which few investors will place their money, depend not only on a strong state, but also on strong counterweights to the state, like independent courts, a probing media, and concerned, organized citizens. Without them, patron-client networks exploit their influence in high places to hijack the relevant parts of the state machinery and pursue their own interests. The way in which Khodorkovsky's Yukos conglomerate was sold off seems to confirm that that is what is happening right now.

Not everything is gloomy. Putin is serious about law. He has tried to reform the judiciary, with as yet uncertain results. He has simplified the tax system, so that honest businesses can pay tax without committing suicide. He has made the ownership of land more secure. The informed reader can still find plenty of interesting books and journals being published, sometimes dealing with sensitive issues. There is still much to play for. But still the "dictatorship of law" hovers threateningly over the "rule of law".

Published 2006-02-24