Cities, Republics and Individuals. Reflections on Pavel Lukin’s Book «Novgorod and Venice: Comparative-Historical Sketches of the Formation of the Republican System»

In the monograph by Pavel Lukin, on the one hand, is examined the history of the Novgorod Republic, traditionally considered an almost unique stronghold of «democracy» in medieval Russia, and on the other hand, Venice, the classical republic of the Middle Ages, which has always attracted the attention of historians and not only. This raises the question: how legitimate and productive is the comparison of these two political formations. The difficulty of comparing living organisms, which include cities, is that their fates are individual and irreducible to typological generalizations, in other words, their history is unique. This does not invalidate the value of the comparison, especially if it is based on a critical reading of the sources, which Pavel Lukin resorts to. He sees the similarity of the two medieval republics in the fact that they turned into regional powers and focuses his attention on analyzing their social structure and representative institutions - the veche and the arengo. In this regard, it is essential to bear in mind that the concepts of ‘urban republic’ and ‘city-state’ are not identical. In Italian cities and partly in Novgorod there is a tendency to combine elements of republican and one-man rule, while the people’s assembly in the former case could paradoxically be regarded as a destructive institution. Pavel Lukin sees similarities between Novgorod and Venice also in the struggle for independence from external forces, subordination of colonized territories and in the ideology of heavenly patronage. In general, the study undertaken by Pavel Lukin is useful both from a concrete-historical point of view and in terms of possible generalizations of historical material.