Despite the weakness of the countryside and gains in the factory, the country grew even more dependent upon grain exports. These had already risen from 16 to 31 per cent in the pre-reform period (1801–60); over the next three decades grain rose to represent 47 per cent of all exports, thereby constituting the backbone of foreign trade and the vital linchpin in the balance of payments. Like the rest of Europe, Russia also gravitated from free trade to protectionism, with an inexorable rise from the low tariffs of the 1850s and 1860s—first to a 10 per cent tariff in 1881, then 20 per cent in 1885, and finally to a prohibitive tariff of 33 per cent in 1891.
Society
The Great Reforms sought to permit some social change, but it also endeavoured to ensure that it was slow and gradual. Hence many of the reforms were consciously ‘all-estate’ (vsesoslovnyi), not ‘non-estate’ (vnesoslovnyi); that is, they deliberately sought to include all estates, but to include people qua members of the estate, not to disregard estates altogether. Hence the zemstvo included nobles, peasants, and townspeople, but segregated them in separate electoral curiae. And, as a famous contemporary painting by one of the ‘itinerants’ (peredvizhniki) showed, the social distances remained great indeed.
The nobility itself underwent profound change in the wake of emancipation. Juridically, it not only lost the right to own serfs but also surrendered important privileges and perquisites, especially those pertaining to its special access to civil and military service. The new legislation opened schools, including the élite military officer schools, to non-nobles; the inexorable result was a steady influx of non-nobles into institutions of higher learning and, subsequently, into the military and civil service. The change was most dramatic in that old bastion of noble privilege, the officer corps, where the proportion of hereditary nobles shrank from 81 per cent in the 1860s to a mere 12 per cent by the end of the century. The nobles not only forfeited old privileges but also had to bear new responsibilities and burdens. Most notable was the retraction of their right not to serve by the Universal Military Training Act of 1874. Economically, as already pointed out, many nobles fared badly under the conditions of post-emancipation agriculture; especially once the international grain crisis descended on Russia, their debts mounted rapidly, leading to a sharp increase in bankruptcies (from a handful in the 1870s to 2,237 in 1893) and in land sales (by 1905 nobles had sold over 40 per cent of their land held at emancipation). Little wonder that, amidst such distress, the nobility proved such fertile ground for opposition in the zemstvo and, from the 1890s, would spearhead the first phase of the ‘liberation movement’.
A second component of the élite was the ‘nobility of the pen’—the bureaucracy. Although it had early on become differentiated from the landholding nobility (and, especially at the provincial level, had been recruited from non-nobles), this ‘democratization’ accelerated sharply after 1855 and inexorably recast officialdom, even the élite bureaucracy in the two capitals. Although the very top rungs of the civil service remained the purview of blue-blooded nobles, the middling and lower ranks now drew primarily on other groups, especially the offspring of clergy, townsmen, and the educated professions. But even more remarkable than the change in social composition was the enormous growth in aggregate size of the civil service, which swelled from just 112,000 in 1857 to 524,000 in 1900 in the Table of Ranks (plus many others in lower positions). The ‘state’, which in pre-reform Russia had been chiefly myth, was rapidly being reified, even in the countryside, where the bureaucracy was gradually coming face to face with the peasantry.
A third component of élite society consisted of men of means—the old merchants but also the new stratum of rich industrialists and bankers. A relatively thin stratum of society, this ‘bourgeoisie’ actually consisted of several different groups. One important component included Muscovite industrialists and merchants, whose roots went back to the period of Nicholas I and who derived their wealth chiefly from the production and sale of consumer goods (especially textiles) on the domestic market. By all accounts they tended to be more conservative, even in religious matters (with a disproportionate share of Old Believers). Another group was quite different—the St Petersburg industrialists and financiers, who were active in banking and heavy industry. Since much of their activity depended on good relations with the government, they tended to be very conservative politically. The third, highly visible, group consisted of non-Russians, both those from minority groups (especially Jews) and from foreigners (like the Nobel family). In relative terms, this commercial-industrial élite remained very small and, for the most part, remote from politics.
The ‘semi-privileged’ social orders included the clergy of the Orthodox Church—the parish clergy as well as those serving in monasteries and convents. Although the Great Reforms had endeavoured to improve their status and material condition (indeed, publicists spoke of an ‘emancipation’ of the clergy, not unlike that of the serfs), in fact the reforms had catastrophic consequences. Above all, the reforms failed to improve the material condition of clergy, for neither the state nor the people proved willing to change the form or amount of material support. The parish statute of 1869, which proposed to amalgamate parishes into larger and more viable economic units, likewise proved a dismal failure: while it did reduce the number of clerical positions and hence increase the ratio of parishioners to priests, it failed to generate greater income, as parishioners pronounced traditional sums sacred or even reduced them. The seminary reform of 1867 may have improved the curriculum, but it also shifted much of the financial burden of seminaries to the parish clergy. At the same time, the reform gave the clergy’s sons new opportunities to leave the clerical estate, and they did so in vast numbers (comprising 35 per cent of university students in 1875, for example). As this mass ‘flight of the seminarians’ gained momentum, the Church suddenly encountered an acute shortage of candidates and had to ordain men of inferior education. By the 1880s observers could already discern an absolute decline in the educational level of the clergy, a process that would continue unabated until the end of the ancien régime and indeed beyond.
Another semi-privileged stratum consisted of the new professions, which gained markedly in numbers, status, and self-awareness in the decades after 1855. Previously, most professions had not even enjoyed legal recognition or, at most, simply comprised a subordinate unit of the civil service (for example, doctors and surveyors). After 1855 their number rapidly proliferated, in no small measure because of the rapid expansion of institutions of higher learning and specialized training. As a result, between 1860 and the end of the century, the total number of university and technical-school graduates increased from 20,000 to 85,000; beyond these graduates were many more who failed to graduate or who had an élite secondary-school education. Many of these discovered greatly expanded opportunities for employment not only in state service and the private sector, but also in the new organs of local self-government—the zemstvo and city council, which became a major employer for teachers, doctors, statisticians, agronomists, and the like. By the 1880s, for example, the zemstvo employed some 23,000 white-collar professionals, including 15,000 teachers, 1,300 doctors, and 5,000 registered ill-trained medical practitioners (fel′ dshery). Some, most notably lawyers and doctors, raised their corporate juridical status by establishing a professional organization, with the right not only to regulate but also to represent their profession. Because of their growing size, importance, and organization, the new professional intelligentsia was rapidly becoming a major force in Russian society and politics. It would play a central role in the liberation movement from the 1890s.