TABLE OF RANKS AND CHIVALRIC ORDERS
In the eighteenth century, Russian noble status depended on the combination of family, noble title, service rank, profession, wealth, and education. The importance of these factors that accorded prestige was for the most part unspoken, yet essential for understanding individuals and their relationships. This brief note explains the nature of noble rank, a phenomenon that is central to the personal and political maneuvering described in Catherine’s memoirs. Although Catherine’s familiar tone gives the impression that she is quite like us, at the same time, the terms in which she thought of herself and others were utterly different.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Russian nobility comprised a mere 1.5 percent of the population, ranging from titled landowners to impoverished, landless civil servants, and distinguished as an estate by legal privileges.1 In 1722, in his drive to modernize Russia, Peter the Great instituted the Table of Ranks to create a sufficient and able bureaucracy and army. He forced the nobility to serve the state in order to acquire service rank (chin), which became the determining factor of social identity. He also allowed non-nobles to attain noble ranks through their service. The importance of service rank is apparent in the fact that a nobleman without it was technically a minor, though still a noble. After 1762, even though nobles no longer had to serve, most did in order to gain rank.
There were fourteen ranks in the military, civil service, and the court, which remained in effect from 1722 until 1917. Fourteen was the lowest rank and one was the highest. Given equal ranks, military rank was superior to court rank, which in turn was superior to the civil service, and the jobs assigned to ranks changed greatly over time. All ranks in the military and classes eight to one in the civil service endowed individuals with either personal or hereditary nobility. With rare exceptions, women did not serve in positions in the military or government that accorded them service rank, and therefore historians of the Russian nobility generally ignore noblewomen. A noblewoman’s rank derived first from her father’s rank and then from her husband’s, and her rank was in relation to her mother and later to other wives. However, in the Russian court that comprises the world of Catherine’s memoirs, noblewomen could acquire their own rank through serving in the personal courts of Empress Elizabeth and Grand Duchess Catherine. 2
Service rank visibly upheld the privileges of the nobility and distinguished nobles from non-nobles, in a period when nobility no longer depended solely on birth. The rules on rank governed all aspects of the appearance of nobles in public, from forms of address, access to events, and precedence, to clothing, carriages, and livery, with fines for acting or dressing above one’s rank. 3 Only certain informal occasions were declared rank-free, and Catherine composed her “Rules” to describe proper conduct at such a gathering. Otherwise, rank shaped all ceremonial activity at the court. In the memoirs, once Catherine becomes Grand Duchess, she supersedes her mother in rank, which creates friction between them. As Catherine explains in the final memoir, “My mother, whom I had always obeyed, did not see without displeasure that I preceded her, which I avoided everywhere that I could, but which was impossible in public.” According to both Catherine’s early and middle memoirs, the day after their arrival in Moscow on February 9, 1744, Empress Elizabeth I presented first Catherine and then her mother, Princess Johanna, with the Order of St. Catherine (41, 449). In contrast, the account that Princess Johanna wrote for her husband stresses that the Empress presented the order “to me first together with the star and afterward to my daughter.” 4 Status was integral to noble identity, especially at court, for women as well as men.
Beginning in 1699, upon his return from the Grand Embassy to Europe (1697–98), Peter the Great instituted chivalric orders, modeled on European orders, as rewards for service to the state. Like rank, orders were meant to connote individual merit through service, and to supplant a system of precedence through noble birth. The symbol of an order was a medal with a motto; the addition of diamonds and a wide, colored ribbon signified the highest degrees of these orders, with the first degree a ribbon worn over the shoulder, and the second degree a ribbon around the neck. Most orders had uniforms, anniversary gatherings, dues, pensions, charters that limited the number of members, and a chief knight. With the exception of the Order of St. Catherine, which was for women only (although Catherine I had awarded it to her favorite, Alexander Menshikov), with rare exceptions, all the orders were for men. Unlike rank, orders did not confer privileges, but orders correlated with ranks and thus might be accompanied by promotions in rank and position. In the memoirs, Catherine hints that her opponents have bought Lev Naryshkin’s loyalty with the inducement of getting the Order of St. Anna.
Details of Catherine’s coup in 1762 reveal the symbolic power of orders. On the eve of Catherine’s coup, the rumor that Peter III had presented his mistress, Elizabeth Vorontsova, with the Order of St. Catherine added urgency to Catherine’s decision to seize power. As Princess Ekaterina Dashkova (née Vorontsova, sister of Elizabeth) writes in her memoirs, the Order of St. Catherine could “be given only to members of the Imperial family and to princesses of foreign ruling houses, unless a woman had saved the ruler’s person or rendered a notable service to the nation.”5 In other words, it signaled that Peter was preparing to depose Catherine and force her into a convent or prison, and make Elizabeth his consort. During the coup, as Catherine dressed to meet the guard regiments, she removed the Order of St. Catherine, which she then presented to Dashkova, who meanwhile procured for Catherine the blue ribbon of the Order of St. Andrei from Count Nikita Panin, which she then wore over her guard’s uniform. Again Dashkova explains that “the blue ribbon was not worn by the Emperor’s wife.” Thus it indicated that Catherine now ruled. Such details in portraits of the Russian nobility and royalty clearly had important state functions. Thus in the final memoir, in a verbal self-portrait, Catherine calls herself “an honest and loyal knight,” for she was a knight of the orders of St. Catherine, St. Andrei, St. George, and St. Vladimir.
Stepping outside this well-developed system of elite status, we find the undistinguished masses in three groups: merchants, clergy, and peasants and serfs. In the opening maxim of the memoir translated here, Catherine refers to the “common herd.” Her term in French, le vulgaire, refers to a traditional notion, the Greek hoi polloi, the Latin profanum or ignobile vulgus and mobile vulgus, or Shakespeare’s “beast with many heads.”6 In this memoir, she illustrates her highly restricted view of society when she writes:
One of the masked balls was for the court alone and those whom the Empress deigned to admit; the other was for all the titled people in the city to the rank of colonel and those who served as officers in the guards. Sometimes the entire nobility and the wealthiest merchants were also permitted to come. The court balls did not exceed 150 to 200 people and those that were called public, 800 maskers.
In contrast to our understanding of the term “public” today, for Catherine it was limited to those who had the right to appear at court. It is worth remembering that when Catherine was writing these memoirs, French citizens had beheaded Louis XVI and American electors had elected their first president with 69 out of 138 votes. Catherine’s memoirs belong to a world of status and rank whose foundations were crumbling elsewhere, but which survived in Russia until 1917, and arguably survives there to the present day. Catherine’s era truly was the golden age of the nobility.
TABLE OF RANKS
The laws governing the Table of Ranks were periodically modified, and the simplified chart below represents the positions by class over the course of the eighteenth century.7 Nineteen additional points to the Table of Ranks detail ranks for women, privileges, responsibilities, and punishments. Military ranks here correspond to those in the army. At the end of the eighteenth century, the complete table breaks down military ranks in the following order: guards (foot soldiers and cavalry), army (foot soldiers and cavalry), dragoons, Cossacks, artillery, and navy.8 Fo
r example, the rank of major in the guards was two classes above that in the army (class 6 and class 8, respectively). Laws limited advancement by the number of places in each class and the minimum number of years someone had to spend in a class. It was possible to occupy a class above or below one’s profession, or service rank, and advance despite restrictions.
CHIVALRIC ORDERS
The orders are listed according to the general hierarchy of their importance; the complete list would include the degrees of each order in relation to each other.11 Russia also added several foreign orders, some of which dated to the Crusades.
NOTES
Privileges included (1) the right to own land occupied by serfs (until their emancipation in 1861), (2) the right not to serve in the government or military (from 1762 to 1874, when universal military conscription became law) and preference in service for those who did serve, (3) freedom from corporal punishment (until 1863), (4) exemption from the poll tax (until 1883), (5) the right to be judged by peers (given to all Russians in judicial reforms of 1864, together with due process for life, status, and property), and (6) the right to travel abroad (restricted under Nicholas I). Paul I suspended the second and third privileges from 1796 to 1801, which led to his murder in 1801.
In 1725, at Peter the Great’s funeral, Catherine I’s ladies-in-waiting preceded the wives of men of the first eight ranks. Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, 194.
Ibid., 180–85. Sumptuary laws regulated, for example, the type of fabric and the width of lace, a luxury item, nobles of each rank were allowed to wear.
Anthony, Memoirs, 81.
Princess Dachkova, Mon histoire: mémoires d’une femme de lettres russe à l’époque des Lumières, ed. Alexander Woronzoff-Dashkoff, Catherine Le Gouis, and Catherine Woronzoff-Dashkoff (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), 44.
Barbara Ann Kipfer, ed., Roget’s International Thesaurus, 6th ed. (New York: Harper-Collins, 2001), 444 (606.2).
“Tabel’ o rangakh,” no. 3890, January 24, 1722, Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, 1649–1913, vol. 6 (St. Petersburg, 1830–1916), 486–93. The most recent full discussion of the Table of Ranks is L. E. Shepelev, Chinovnyi mir Rossii: XVIII-nachalo XIX v. (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 2001). In English, Smith, Love and Conquest, 403–4; Paul Dukes, trans. and ed., Russia Under Catherine the Great, vol. 1 (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1978), 4–14.
Shepelev, Chinovnyi mir, 150.
Ibid., 399–401. There is little information about the actual ranks of men’s and women’s court titles by the end of the eighteenth century, although the Table of Ranks lists positions for all men’s ranks.
Ibid., 410–11. The Table of Ranks initially included additional titles, which were simplified over the course of the century. In the eighteenth century, a total of eighty-two women held these positions. Maids of honor were not married, and had the privilege of being given in marriage with a dowry by the Empress; most came from court families, while a third were from the titled nobility. Once married, they retired from the court, though they retained the right to appear at court. Ladies-in-waiting and above were usually wives of important men in the military or civil service, and were also knights of the Order of St. Catherine. The most extensive information on women at the Russian court is P. F. Karabanov, “Stats-damy i freiliny russkago dvora v XVIII i XIX stoletiiakh,” Russkaia starina 2 (1870): 443–73; 3 (1871): 39–48, 272–82, 457–73; 4 (1871): 59–67, 379–404.
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