*74
Indeed, a full quarter of the dvoriane in Riazan, a province in the Central Agricultural Region, some 1,700 families, were reported in 1858 to 'constitute a single family with their peasants, partake of food at the same table and live together in one izba'.*
Part of the problem lay in the fact that, as indicated, dvoriane multiplied more rapidly than any other social group in imperial Russia; they were demographically the most dynamic social estate of all. Between 1782 and 1858, the dvorianstvo grew 4-3 times, whereas the country's total population increased only twofold and the peasantry even somewhat less than that.9 This growth put heavy pressures on the land resources and contributed to the over-all impoverishment of the elite.
In the final reckoning, however, the blame for the poverty of dvoriane must be placed on the primitiveness of the Russian economy and the lack of alternative opportunities which compelled the elite to rely much too heavily on income from land and serf labour. The Russian landowning class never developed entail or primogeniture, two institutions essential to the well being of any nobility, because there was hardly anything that young men deprived of their share of the landed estate could draw income from. The son of a dvorianin, stripped of his inheritance, had nowhere to turn; he was worse off than would be a peasant expelled from the commune. Peter the Great, hoping both to strengthen his service class and to induce it to branch out into the many fields of endeavour which his reforms had opened up, issued in 1714 an edict requiring landlords to bequeath their immovable properties to a single heir (not necessarily the eldest). But this law ran so much against traditions and economic realities that it was consistently evaded and in 1730 had to be repealed. Russian landlords always insisted on carving up their estates into more or less equal parcels for distribution among their sons. The constant subdivision contributed as much to the decline of the Russian 61ite as did all the government policies. Veselovskii has shown in the example of five Muscovite boyar families - the kind that elsewhere might have founded influential aristocratic houses - how, owing mainly to the practice of property subdivision by testament, each in its turn fell apart and disappeared. Far from gaining influence, some of their offspring in the third and fourth generation actually sunk to the level of slaves.10
The political consequences of these facts become apparent when one considers the English nobility, a class in every respect the antithesis of the Russian dvorianstvo. In England, the nobility has showed a consistent concern for keeping landed property consolidated in family hands. As a recent study has demonstrated, this concern was in evidence as early as the fourteenth century.11 The introduction in the seventeenth century of'strict settlement' - a legal device by virtue of which the title-holder to a landed estate was treated as only its life tenant - greatly
DVORIANSTVO
solidified the English nobility's hold on the land. Under 'strict settlement' a proprietor could alienate an estate only for as long as he was alive. By the eighteenth century, an estimated half of England was subject to this arrangement, which had the effect both of keeping this much of the country's territory in perpetuity in the hands of the same noble families and out of those of the nouveaux riches. Ample opportunities to earn a living outside agriculture, of course, made such practices feasible. Over the centuries, the richer English nobility steadily expanded its holdings at the expense of the smaller proprietors, causing land ownership to become heavily concentrated. It is estimated that in 1790 between 14,000 and 25,000 families owned 70 to 85 per cent of the cultivated land in England and Wales.12 Even the least affluent in this select group drew from their properties incomes large enough to lead the life of gentlemen.
Elsewhere in western Europe the economic position of the nobility was perhaps less brilliant but still throughout the west the application of entail and primogeniture assured at least the wealthier landed families of a strong economic base. The meshing of this landed wealth with administrative functions enabled the western nobility to resist royal absolutism in its most extreme forms.
As the following statistics will show, in Russia the situation was diametrically the opposite; land was not accumulated but relentlessly cut up into ever smaller lots, with the result that the overwhelming majority of dvoriane lacked economic independence and could not afford to live in the style of landed gentry.
In 1858-9, there were in the Russian empire approximately one million dvoriane of both sexes. Of this number, slightly more than a third belonged to the category of non-hereditary ilichnoe) dvorianstvo legally barred from owning serfs (see above, p. 124). The number of hereditary dvoriane of both sexes is estimated at 610,000.13 More than half of this number - 323,000 - were Polish szlachcice who had come under Russian rule following the Partitions. These can be ignored for our purposes, since they directed their political aspirations towards the restoration of Polish independence rather than reform in the internal government of Russia. There were also Turco-Tatar, Georgian, German and other non-Russian nobles who must be set aside. After these exclusions, there remain approximately 274,000 hereditary dvoriane, male and female, residing in the 37 provinces constituting Russia proper.* The ratio of
* These are the gubernii of Archangel, Astrakhan, Vladimir, Vologda, Voronezh, Viatka, the Region of the Don Cossacks, Ekaterinoslavl, Kazan, Kaluga, Kostroma, Kursk, Moscow, Nizhnii Novgorod, Novgorod, Olonetsk, Orenburg, Orel, Penza, Perm, Poltava, Pskov, Riazan, Samara, St Petersburg, Saratov, Simbirsk, Smolensk, Taurida, Tambov, Tver, Tula, Ufa, Kharkov, Kherson, Chernigov and Iaroslavl.
176
men to women in this group may be set, following data obtained in the 1897 census, at 48 to 52, which yields a figure of 131,000 men.
According to the 1858-9 census, in these 37 provinces lived approximately 90,000 serf-owners of both sexes. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing the ratio of males to females among the serf-owners. But if we assume the ratio to have been two to one in favour of the males, we arrive at the figure of 60,000 hereditary male dvoriane owning estates; if the ratio is assumed to have been 1:1, the number of male serf-owners drops to 45,000. In the former case, one out of two male dvoriane (60,000 out of 131,000) had a landed estate worked with serf labour; in the latter, only one out of three (45,000 out of 131,000).
Setting aside the two-thirds of hereditary dvoriane of both sexes who had no serfs (184,000 out of 274,000) let us inquire into the condition of those who did. In imperial Russia, the possession of 100 'souls' was regarded as the minimum which a dvorianin needed to qualify as a gentleman. This criterion, employed already in the eighteenth century, received official sanction from Nicholas 1 in an edict of 1831 which decreed that only dvoriane with 100 or more 'souls' had the right to a direct vote in the Assemblies of the Dvoriane. Following this standard, landlords with fewer than 100 male serfs can be defined as in varying degrees impoverished. Those with more can be subdivided into the moderately wealthy 'gentry' (100-1,000 'souls') and the grand seigneurs (over 1,000). With these criteria in mind, let us look at the distribution of serf-ownership in Russia proper during the imperial period: TABLE 1 Serf-owning Landlords, Male and Female, in European Russia1* Category in terms of male 1777 1858-9 serfs ('souk') owned Percentage Number Percentage Grand Seigneurs ^