* This system of automatic promotion through seniority later penetrated the armed forces, and contributed to the lowering of the quality of the officer staff. Solzhenitsyn blames on it the Russian disasters in the First World War: 'The Russian army perished because of seniority - the supreme indisputable reckoning and the order of promoting by seniority. As long as you did not make a slip, as long as you did not offend your superiors, the very march of time would bring you at the appropriate time the desired next chin, and with the chin, the assignment. And everybody so accepted this wisdom... that colonel hurried to learn of another colonel and general of another general not where he had fought but from what year, month, and day dated his seniority, i.e. at what stage of promotion he was towards his next appointment': August 1914, Chapter 12.
THE PARTIAL DISMANTLING OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE
its essential charge. It suggests, incidentally, an important cause for the estrangement of Russia's educated classes from the state. Attempts to correct the situation, were, of course, made because every monarch in the nineteenth century wished to regain control over his civil service, so lightheartedly forfeited by Catherine. The most celebrated of these was an order issued by Alexander 1 in 1809 on the advice of M. M. Speranskii, requiring officials to pass examinations before qualifying for promotion to Rank 8, as well as permitting, also by means of examinations, direct advancement from Rank 8 to Rank 5. But this and similar attempts always broke against the solid resistance of the bureaucratic establishment.
From the 1760s onwards a kind of dyarchy was introduced into Russia which until then had been governed in a strictly hierarchical fashion from a single centre. The monarch continued to enjoy unlimited authority in the sphere of foreign policy and the right to dispose of at his pleasure that part of the revenues which actually reached the Treasury. In governing the country, however, he was severely constrained by the power of his one-time servitors - dvoriane and chinovniki. In effect, the population of Russia was turned over to these two groups for exploitation. Their respective areas of competence were fairly well delineated. One historian divides post-Catherinian Russia in two parts, one of which he calls dvoriane-run (dvorianskie), the other bureaucratic (chinovnye), depending on the proportion of each group in the region's population. In the former category he includes twenty-eight provinces concentrated in the geographic centre of the country, the heartland of serfdom. As one moved outward from the centre, towards the borderlands, the bureaucrats took over.14 Herzen who had been twice in provincial exile noted a similar phenomenon: 'The power of the governor', he observes in his Memoirs, 'generally grows in direct proportion to the distance from St Petersburg, but it grows at a geometric rate in the provinces where there is no dvorianstvo, such as Perm, Viatka, and Siberia.'16
Having conceded the direct exploitation of the country to some 100,000 landlords and 50,000 bureaucrats with their respective families, staffs, and hangers-on, the monarchy assumed towards the country at large an attitude more like that of an occupying power than of an absolute monarchy in the western sense. It no longer interceded on behalf of the population of commoners against the elite's abuses even in that limited sense in which it had done so in Muscovy. Indeed, in his legislation Peter referred to the landlords' serfs as their 'subjects' (poddanye), employing a term from the vocabulary of public law to describe what seemingly was a purely private relationship. At the same time, as will be noted (p. 181) dvoriane in dealing with the crown were in the habit of calling themselves 'slaves' (raby). 'If slaves were called subjects, then
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subjects, too, were called slaves', remarks a Russian historian, thus calling attention to the survival of strictly patrimonial relations in an age of seeming westernization.18 The money which the crown extracted from the country through the intermediacy of its agents it spent not on the inhabitants but on the court and armed forces. 'It spent no more on the provinces than it had to spend in order to exploit them.'1'
After 1762, the Russian monarchy became in large measure the captive of groups which it had originally brought into existence. The trappings of imperial omnipotence served merely to conceal its desperate weakness - as well as to camouflage the actual power wielded by dvoriane and chinovniki.
Under these circumstances, the situation seemed ripe for the elite to move in and seize the political prerogatives claimed by the crown. To understand why this did not happen we must investigate the condition and political attitudes of the principal social groupings.
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CHAPTER 6
The reason for beginning a survey of the social classes in old regime Russia with the peasantry does not call for elaborate explanation. As late as 1928, four-fifths of the country's population consisted of people, who although not necessarily engaged in farming, were officially classified as peasants. Even today, when the census shows the majority of Russia's inhabitants to be urban, the country retains unmistakable traces of its peasant past: a consequence of the fact that most of the inhabitants of Soviet cities are one-time peasants or their immediate descendants. As will be shown later, throughout its history the urban population of Russia has preserved strong links with the countryside and carried with it rural habits into the city. The Revolution revealed how tenuous the urbanization of the country had been. Almost immediately after its outbreak, the urban population began to flee to the countryside; between 1917 and 1920, Moscow lost one half of its population and Petrograd two-thirds. Paradoxically, although it had been carried out in the name of urban civilization and against the 'idiocy of rural life', the 1917 Revolution actually increased the influence of the village on Russian life. After the old, westernized elite had been overthrown and dispersed, the ruling class which had replaced it consisted largely of peasants in their various guises: farmers, shopkeepers and industrial workers. Lacking a genuine bourgeoisie to emulate, this new elite instinctively modelled itself on the village strong man, the kulak. To this day it has not been able to shake off its rural past. In the middle of the sixteenth century, when they were being fixed to the soil, the peasants began to abandon the slash-burn method of cultivation in favour of the three-field system (trekhpoVe). Under this farming pattern the arable was divided into three parts, one of which was sown in the spring with summer crops, another in August with winter crops, and the last left fallow. The following year, the field which had been under winter crops was sown with spring crops, the fallow with winter crops, and the spring-crop field was set aside for fallow. The cycle was
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completed every three years. It was not a very efficient method of utilizing land, if only because it placed a third of the arable permanently out of commission. Already in the eighteenth century agrarian specialists criticized it and much pressure was exerted on the peasant to abandon it. But as Marc Bloch has shown in the instance of France and Michael Gonfino has confirmed in that of Russia, agricultural techniques cannot be isolated from the entire complex of peasant institutions. The muzhik fiercely resisted pressures to abandon the three-field routine and it remained the prevalent pattern of cultivation in Russia well into the twentieth century.1