How did the serfs respond to all these changes? At one level, it seems unlikely that serfs were well informed about the law and its impact on what they deemed to be tradition. After all, serf communities had few contacts with anyone from the government and conducted their day-to-day relations mostly within their own institutions—the household and commune. Nor did they have much opportunity to become more familiar with the law: they could not legally file petitions and—in contrast to state peasants—did not participate in the Legislative Commission of 1767–8 (an experience that, especially through the preparation of ‘instructions’, raised the legal consciousness of other groups). Nevertheless, as the ethnographer M. M. Gromyko has argued, serfs probably had some familiarity with law and, with time, increasingly invoked decrees (real or bogus) in the defence of their rights and justice. A higher awareness of the outside world was particularly likely given the peasants’ non-agrarian activities (especially for those who travelled regularly to towns to trade or work) and the geographic dispersion and intermixture of social categories, whereby the most diverse status groups—from serf to state peasant—lived in close proximity. It was, in short, no accident that in the 1770s and subsequent decades, serfs became increasingly restive and exhibited their own judgement on this consummately ‘immoral economy’.
Nobility
Although the nobility stood at the apex of the social pyramid, with claims to pedigree and precedence, its status was uncertain and ambiguous. Significantly, the collective term for nobility, dvorianstvo, did not prevail until the mid-century and lacked precise meaning, much less a clear English-language equivalent. The Petrine Table of Ranks of 1722 compounded this confusion by creating a mechanism to elevate the meritorious to personal nobility and, if they rose high enough, to hereditary nobility. Whether of ancient lineage or parvenu, nobles enjoyed important and distinctive privileges, including exclusion from the onerous poll-tax and its attendant disabilities.
Nevertheless, until 1762 the nobility still owed service to the state, ordinarily in the military. As a practical matter, however, many evaded this obligation, a nonfeasance that actually increased—partly because of the quantum increase in service demands under Peter, partly because of the state’s transparent inability to coerce compliance. Moreover, lifetime service took nobles away from their estates, transforming them into absentee landlords who were obliged to depend upon stewards (often peasant-born estate managers) to oversee day-to-day operations and to mediate social and economic relations with the peasants. Such management was not only expensive (diverting scarce labour from the field) but extremely inefficient and unreliable, riddled with graft and deception. Finally service was financially onerous, even for middling and élite strata—especially the requirement that they maintain two or more residences (for which they received no specific compensation), including one in St Petersburg for the most successful.
Still, for the ambitious and well connected, cosmopolitan service was an absolute necessity, bringing not only status and power, but wealth as well. The nominal salaries, though niggardly for the lower and middle range of servitors, were quite substantial for the upper range of the Table of Ranks. And to that must be added the spoils of service, which, in this venality-ridden order, often far exceeded any legal income. Servitors could always dream of special imperial grants, and in fact rulers transferred over 100,000 peasants and millions of acres of arable land to private hands during the last half of the eighteenth century.
Such largesse was not only desirable but essential, for few nobles found their landed estates to be a source of substantial income. Above all, agricultural productivity lagged far behind that in Western Europe and showed little trace of the concurrent ‘agricultural revolution’. Moreover, most nobles belonged to the category of petty landowners, with scanty resources and meagre incomes. The truly rich with more than 1,000 male souls comprised only about 1 per cent of the hereditary nobility; another 17 per cent (the ‘middling nobility’) owned between 100 and 1,000 male souls. Four out of five noble households owned fewer than 100 male souls, most having fewer than twenty, or even none at all.
Even for those with substantial numbers of serfs, the net return on their estates was uncertain and paltry. Above all, Russian agriculture—with its three-field system, primitive technology, and unfavourable climate—produced far less than the modernizing estates in the West. Peasants consumed the bulk of this scant output (with a diet exceeding 3,000 calories per day, including much protein, according to some research); and another 10 per cent of that was lost through spillage and spoilage. The net yield left little for squire and state.
Compounding agricultural inefficiency was the system of partible inheritance that negated ‘economies of size’. Peter had attempted to impose a system of single inheritance in 1714, but the adverse reaction among nobles ultimately impelled Anna to rescind the law in 1731. Restored in full force, partible inheritance guaranteed real estate to all heirs, including widows, but doomed noble estates to endless division to the point where they ceased to be economically viable. Unless new resources could be secured, this system inevitably reduced a noble family to penury and virtual landlessness within a few generations. Moreover, even in the best of circumstances, estates were fragmented, with individual villages, meadows, lakes, and forests parcelled among several owners. This land ‘system’ gave rise to endless disputes and litigation (lasting decades, sometimes more than a century) over boundaries and ownership. Even when service (whether through grants or purchase) brought new property, the new lands were usually remote from the family estate and gave no opportunity to form a single, large estate.
Given this economy, families that had already achieved hereditary nobiliary status recognized the importance of retaining high standing on the Table of Ranks. Historians have demonstrated that, during the first four or five decades of its existence, old aristocratic families dominated the upper levels of the Table of Ranks and collectively prevented large numbers of parvenus from achieving hereditary noble status. A manifesto by Peter III on 18 February 1762, however, freed the nobility from obligatory service and significantly reshaped service patterns for the nobility. This famous decree, interestingly, has confounded historians as much as it did contemporaries: why did Peter III choose to ‘emancipate’ the nobles from service? After all, the fundamental premiss of the imperial system was an implicit social contract based on universal service: serfs toiled for nobles so that the latter could serve the state. Did the manifesto not nullify one of the principal moral foundations of serfdom? Where indeed was the state to recruit for civil servants and military officers if not from the nobility? And how, without service, were noble clans to remain economically viable?
Although historians have not reached a consensus on these questions, most reject the old canard that the nobility collectively demanded its ‘freedom’ and that this ‘concession’ marked the beginning of a noble oligarchy. Nobles needed service, and service needed nobles—a fundamental symbiosis not to be changed by a mere paper manifesto. It is by no means clear that most nobles welcomed the change. Contemporary tales may have portrayed the roads from St Petersburg as clogged with nobles departing for their family estates, but—according to the few scholarly studies on the subject—most nobles still chose to serve, thereby avoiding the inevitable decline in their family fortunes.
Nevertheless, the manifesto did contribute to the formation of a new noble consciousness of its station in Russian society. The fact that the decision to serve now rested with them (‘unto eternity and to all generations to come’), not with the monarch, seemed to reconstitute the hereditary nobility as a corporate body endowed, in the words of the manifesto, with ‘freedom and liberty’.
But why did the state abolish the service requirement? Contemporary gossips speculated that the manifesto was merely concocted to cover a nocturnal dalliance of Peter III and his mistress. More likely, the manifesto came from the emperor’s personal secretary, D. V. Volkov, who wanted the Table of Ranks to serve
state interests, not the nobility. In Volkov’s view, the old élite clans had transformed the service ranks into a facsimile of the medieval system of precedence (mestnichestvo) based on birthright, thereby denying the state an opportunity to recruit, promote, and reward the meritorious with rank, pay, ennoblement, and political influence. Thus the manifesto of 1762 endeavoured to separate service rank from social status, at once enabling the state to replenish its service class with outsiders and to accord a respectable alternative for those who chose not to serve.
State policy for the next two decades, which culminated in the Charter to the Nobility in 1785, sharpened the distinction between service (as a voluntary attribute of nobility) and privilege (as the temporal reward for this historic service). In the event, nobles obtained important and exclusive privileges: to own serfs, to register family patents and heraldry books with local governments, to convene provincial assemblies (which were to provide officials for local government), to appoint local judges, to be exempt from corporal punishment, to travel at home and abroad without special permission, and to ride about in carriages (a symbolic, but important gesture). Most concessions emphasized the provincial locus of noble status; they also provided symbolic and material venues outside the capital and the service system onto which the meaning of nobility could be inscribed.
Nobles also acquired new and weighty economic advantages. Above all, they had a legal monopoly on the ownership of servile labour: they alone could buy and sell serfs, with or without land; they could even break up serf families, send the unruly into hard labour (while deducting the deportees from recruit quotas), and wilfully increase feudal dues (as quitrent, corvée, or both). They could engage in any occupation or trade, and could also open manufactories to exploit the free labour of their serfs. For all these ventures they had exclusive access to cheap credit: they also had special access to the country’s sparse credit reserves through long-term, low-interest (5–6 per cent) loans from the Noble Land Bank established in 1754.
The consequences of the new distinction between service and status were simultaneously momentous and disorienting. From the perspective of the ‘police state’, corporate privilege whetted the aspirations of an élite ‘estate’ now distinguished by its inalienable rights, not its duty to serve. Moreover, with the expansion of state administration, especially at the provincial level, nobles could now retire from the capitals, yet retain the trappings of privilege. Thus many were able to flaunt their status, indulge in conspicuous consumption beyond their means, and open clubs and lodges for their amusement and, on rare occasions, for the discussion of more serious matters.
Some, however, did devote themselves to the development of their estates. At a minimum, they sought to reorganize and manage their estates personally and more effectively—no small task given the diffuse landholding. An audacious few attempted to redesign rural life according to the latest ‘scientific’ methods, even issuing learned ‘instructions’ to their bailiffs on how to run their estates. Some also carried the injunction ‘to administer justice to the peasants without prejudice or oppression’ (in the words of a Soviet historian), but the main impulse was to regulate social and economic life on the estate—not unlike what the enlightened absolutist was attempting to do at a macro level.
Others, however, were only interested in their estate’s output, not its operation, and preferred to give free rein to their poetic imaginations—organizing serf theatres or choruses, constructing English gardens or French waterfalls, and inventing local family festivals to celebrate the virtue and bonhomie of their enlightened paternal vision. Of course, many of these same people remained in service; their periodic visit to the family estate, now inscribed with a poetics of permanence and heritage (which belied the fluid, transitory realities of noble landownership), represented a naïve return to innocence.
Not without cause has Catherine’s era been dubbed the ‘golden age of the Russian nobility’. Never had they been so privileged, so economically advantaged, and so handsomely rewarded for doing so little. In exchange, however, they abdicated nearly all political pretensions. Although they might act on behalf of clan and patronage network, they did not mount a defence of their social estate. In part, that is because they had no need to be institutionally or politically active: they had done quite well vis-à-vis other groups—and without involving themselves collectively in politics or raising an ideological challenge to the autocracy. Hence the vaunted palace coups—which not only installed individual rulers but also resulted in the murder of two sitting monarchs (Peter III in 1762 and Paul I in 1801) and one former monarch (Ivan VI)—did not precipitate a constitutional crisis. At issue was only the person of the nominally all-powerful autocrat, not the system itself. As a result, the aggressive intrigue, the discourse about good rulers and polities, and the ‘legislomania’ of the second half of the eighteenth century rarely proceeded very far towards imposing formal limitations on ruler-ship. Increasingly, the succession crisis of 1730 appeared as an aberration, not to be revisited until the Decembrist revolt of 1825.
All of these material advantages coexisted uneasily with a deepening moral discomfort among the service nobility over the legitimacy of their special privilege. Although most still served, they were no longer bound to do so. Educated and literary nobles freely invoked the language of freedom, rights, and virtue at the very moment when they legally became the sole group in Russian society with the right to hold fellow subjects in virtual slavery. The embryonic provincial assemblies and noble courts were a far cry from French parlements or the manor-based authority of the English peerage. Increasingly, the edifice of hereditary nobility rested upon the precarious claim of historic, ancestral service. This malaise did not, however, precipitate a full-fledged identity crisis during the eighteenth century; most nobles were anything but rootless and alienated. But the discomfort was real and unresolved, evoking a rare but important cri de cœur in the final decades of the century.
A Multinational Empire
From its very outset Russia had included diverse peoples and, as the boundaries of the state expanded, this multi-ethnic character became more pronounced. Coming to terms with these newly acquired ethnicities, cultures, and religions took on both administrative and symbolic importance for Elizabeth, Peter III, and Catherine II. Much of this expansion had been accomplished during the seventeenth century, with the incorporation of the vast Siberian expanses and much of Ukraine, followed by territorial gains in the Baltics and elsewhere during the reign of Peter the Great. But expansion was particularly marked during the reign of Catherine the Great, as the Russian Empire annexed most of Poland (through the three partitions), the Crimea and the northern Caucasus. In the process, the empire came to include large numbers of Poles, Jews, Tatars, and Caucasian peoples.
Recently, the demographic historian V. M. Kabuzan produced estimates of the ethnic distribution of the Russian Empire during the eighteenth century shown in the table.
Although the government was committed to a model (perhaps ‘illusion’ is a more accurate description) of administrative uniformity, relations between St Petersburg and the outlying non-Russian populations varied considerably. In the case where local élites accommodated themselves to Russian rule, willingly swore allegiance to the monarch, and demonstrated their ability to run their territories by keeping order and supplying labour and revenue, these peoples retained considerable autonomy and saw their separate traditions, institutions, and social organizations remain largely intact. Unfortunately, most of the new subjects proved troublesome, either because they believed fiercely in their right to independence (as was true with Poland and the Crimean Tatars) or because they were deemed to be too alien to be trusted (as was the case with Jews in the former Polish territories).
Money, Finances, and Markets
Historians customarily portray the Russian economy as eternally backward, technologically primitive, and fundamentally unproductive. Although these characterizations are not entirely off the mark, they do
not accurately characterize the Russian economy in the second half of the eighteenth century. On the contrary, the growth rates in Russia were then comparable to those in England—a remarkable fact given England’s technical superiority and the onset of its industrial expansion. Russia was a net exporter of numerous raw materials, not only the traditional forest products like timber and furs, but also such agricultural products as hemp, rye, and tallow (and—by some accounts—silver).
Ethnic groupings in the Russian Empire, 1760s-1790s (in millions)
The domestic market also became more active and complex. Apart from the seasonal flow of peasants to towns (bringing wares, trade, and food), some areas of the empire provided a ready market for agricultural goods. That was true of cities in general, but especially the newly built capital, St Petersburg, which expanded from nothing to over a quarter of a million inhabitants by the end of the century. Because the surrounding soil was so marshy and infertile, St Petersburg had to plunge its supply lines deep into the empire, with the requisite network of canals and roads. Similar conditions obtained in the dense forest territories of northern Russia, where poor soil and adverse climate made agriculture marginally productive; as a result, the local population had to import food from the south, providing yet another stimulus to internal trade. The robust trade in agricultural products also fostered a proliferation in rural fairs, which expanded in number (from 383 per year in the 1750s to 3,180 in the 1790s), geographic breadth, and commodities exchanged. Although most fairs were seasonal and lasted only a few days, they had nevertheless become a mainstay of the rural economy.
Russia A History Page 18