(over 1,000 souls) 1
1,032
'Gentry' \
501-1,000 souls 1 '.754
101-500 souls / '5.7'7
21-100 souls
Fewer than 20
These statistical tables indicate that on the eve of Emancipation nearly four-fifths of Russian dvoriane (male and female) fortunate enough to own serfs (68,766 out of 87,269) did not own enough to live off the land in a manner regarded by the authorities as commensurate with their social status. Or, to put it in another way: in 1858-9 only 18,503 Russian dvoriane in the 37 provinces of Great Russia secured enough income from their estates to enjoy financial independence. The number of dvoriane able to rely on corvee and agrarian rents was always exceedingly small. The 1831 decree of Nicholas 1 restricting the right of direct vote in Assemblies of the Dvoriane to owners of 100 or more 'souls' had the effect of reducing the roll of such voters in the empire as a whole to 21,916, a figure close to the 18,503 given in Table 1 for the 37 provinces of Russia proper." What makes these figures even more telling is that the 38,173 dvoriane listed as in possession of fewer than 20 'souls' had on average only 7 male serfs each. The situation in the reign of Catherine 11, the 'Golden Age' of dvorianstvo, was, if anything, more dismal yet, as the figures for 1777 indicate. All of which should serve as a warning not to think of the Russian 'nobility' as a profligate class wallowing in luxury in the midst of poverty and backwardness. The Rostovs, Bezu-khovs and Bolkonskys of War and Peace are in no sense typicaclass="underline" they were members of an exclusive club of some 1,400 grand seigneurs in an Empire in which a million persons claimed 'noble' status of some kind.
Thus, although the dvorianstvo was indeed a landed estate in the sense that prior to Emancipation it owned nearly all of the privately held, cultivated land in the empire and drew much of its income from it, it was not a landowning aristocracy in the western meaning of the word. Ninety-eight per cent of them either had no serfs or not enough of them to be able to rely on their labour and rents for a decent living. These people - unless they had relatives or patrons willing to support them -had to depend on the largesse of the crown. Even after it had gained its liberties in 1762 and 1785, therefore, the dvorianstvo could not dispense with the monarchy's favours; it alone had the jobs, the pomestia and the serfs needed for its survival. The members of this large group were no more a landed aristocracy than a modern salaried employee who invests a part of his savings in some industrial shares is a capitalist entrepreneur. But even that 2 per cent of the dvorianstvo which had enough land to live off its proceeds did not resemble a true landed aristocracy. The scattering and rapid turnover of properties, noted above, precluded the formation of strong local attachments, so essential to die aristocratic spirit. For them, land was a way of making a living, not a way of life. If poor, landless dvoriane depended on the crown for jobs, those affluent enough to own estates were dependent on it for the preservation of serfdom.
It is one of the anomalies of Russian social history that for all its critical importance to the country's evolution, serfdom was always allowed to remain in a kind of legal limbo. No edict enserfing peasants had ever been issued, nor did the crown ever formally certify the landlord's title to their serfs. The institution grew up in practice from an accumulation.
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of numerous edicts and customs, and it was maintained by common consent but without explicit official sanction. It was always understood - though again, never spelled out - that the landlords did not actually own their serfs; rather, they were managing them, as it were, on behalf of the crown. The latter assumption acquired particular validity after Peter the Great and his successors had made landlords agents of the state charged with the collection of the soul tax and the gathering of con scripts. For all their reliance on serfs, the landlords' title to them and their labour was vague, and it remained so even after 1785, the year they received title to the land. The favour of the crown, therefore, was essen tial to all those who benefited from serf labour. What the crown had once entrusted, it could at any time revoke. Fear of being deprived of serfs by state decree greatly mitigated the dvorianstvo's interest in poli tics, especially after its liberation from compulsory state service. The status quo assured them of free labour; any change was bound to upset the situation to their detriment. It was a condition understood as part of the dyarchic arrangement under which Russia operated that if they wished to go on exploiting serf labour, the dvoriane had to stay out of politics.
Serf-owners further relied on the crown to keep their serfs under control. The Pugachev uprising of 1773-5 had thoroughly frightened them. Landlords were convinced - rightly, as subsequent events were to show - that at the slightest sign of weakening of state authority the muzhik would take the law in his own hands and once again murder and pilfer as he had done in Pugachev's day. Their most effective weapon to keep serfs obedient was the right to call in troops, and to turn over recalcitrant peasants to the authorities for induction into the army or exile to Siberia. From this point of view, too, the influential serf-owning part of dvorian- stvo had an interest in the maintenance of a strong autocratic regime. Another factor which exerted a strongly negative effect on the political situation of the dvorianstvo was the absence in Russia of corporate institutions and corporate spirit.
Enough had been said of the Muscovite monarchy and its conception of the service class to make it superfluous to have to explain why it never issued collective charters. But in their insistence on the patrimonial power of the monarchy, the tsars went further, using every means at their disposal to humiliate anyone who by virtue of ancestry, office or wealth may have been inclined to become self-important. They habitually referred to their-servitors as slaves (kholopy). Muscovite protocol required every boyar and dvorianin, even the scion of a 'pedigreed* clan, to address his sovereign with the formula: 'I, so-and-so [the diminutive form of the first name, e.g. "Ivashka"], your kholop.' This practice was
DVORIANSTVO
stopped only by Peter; but even after him and throughout the eighteenth century, it was quite customary for great and small lords in addressing the crown to continue referring to themselves as slaves by another name, raby.
Corporal punishment was applied indiscriminately to dvoriane and commoners: a boyar or a general was lashed with the knout exactly as the meanest serf. Peter in particular liked to show his displeasure by beating his associates. The upper class was exempt from corporal punishment only in 1785 by terms of the Dvorianstvo Charter.