Throughout its history, Russia has labored under what the historian David Satter calls “the quasi-deification of the Russian state,” its special mission overawing picayune considerations of individual liberty or dignity.

In its imagination, Russia was the Third Rome. It picked up where Rome and Byzantium left off, and as the vessel of Orthodoxy, took as its mission the defense and the spread of the true faith. The church became an arm of the state, and the state itself became sanctified. Satter quotes a description of how the Czar of Muscovy, circa the 16th century, evoked “resounding incantations, hyperbolic praise, and groveling obeisance.”

Given its geographic vulnerability, with Mongol or Turkish invaders perpetually threatening, the Russian state required a vast military establishment and universal conscription. “Under these conditions,” historian Richard Pipes writes, “there could be no society independent of the state and no corporate spirit uniting its members. The entire Russian nation was enserfed: there was room here neither for a privileged aristocracy, nor for a class of self-governing burghers, nor yet for a rural yeomanry.”

In the West, private property constituted a check on the power of government absolutism. In Russia, the monarch owned the entire realm up until the late 18th century…