The poor can be ignored for this purpose. For although they constituted more than nine-tenths of all the dvoriane, they had no evident political aspirations. Their concerns were of an immediate material nature. Like the peasants, whose way of life many of them shared, they looked to the crown for help and reacted to any effort to liberalize the system of government as a move undertaken in the interest of the magnates. As Stroganov aptly put it, this type, especially when ennobled by way of service, was concerned only to 'see nothing superior to die Emperor's power'. These people, so brilliantly depicted in the novels of Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin, made for a profoundly conservative force.
The very rich - members of some one thousand families with a thousand or more souls each (they owned, on the average, four thousand adult serfs of both sexes) - presented a different picture. They tended to live in oriental splendour, surrounded by hordes of friends, retainers and domestics. Very few of them had any clear idea of their incomes and expenditures. They usually squandered all the rents, and got into debt which their heirs had to sort out the best they could. At a pinch, they
* It is, of course, true that the bulk of the opposition to the imperial regime in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries came from people born dvoriane. But the liberals and radical dissenters were struggling not for the interests of their class, which is what concerns us here. They were struggling for national and social ideals of society as a whole - a struggle which sometimes compelled them to move against the interests of their own class. Surely, Bakunin, Herzen, Kropotkin, Lenin, Struve, Shipov, though of dvoriane background, cannot be said to have been in any sense exponents of dvorianstvo causes. could always sell one of the many scattered properties of which such great fortunes were normally composed, and go on living in their accustomed style. The Rostovs of War and Peace give a faithful portrait of such a family.
It was customary for Russian grandees to keep an open house to which even the slightest acquaintances were freely admitted to share in lavish offerings of food and drink - the surplus from estates for which there was no worth-while market. Much money was spent on foreign luxuries, such as tropical fruits and wines; it was said that imperial Russia consumed each year more champagne than was produced in all the vineyards of France. The hospitality of the great Russian houses could probably not be duplicated anywhere else in Europe. It was possible only where no one kept a close watch on the account books.
An essential feature of life of the very rich were hordes of domestics who catered to their every whim. One general had 800 servants, 12 of whom were assigned exclusively to care for his illegitimate children. A profligate count employed 400 domestics, including 17 lackeys, each of whom had assigned a single duty; one to bring his master water, another to light his pipe, and so on. Another seigneur boasted a special hunting orchestra of serfs, each of whom produced only one sound. Rich households had also their contingents of clowns, 'Arabs' (Negroes), 'Holy People', story-tellers of all sorts, to help while away long winter evenings. Most of the domestics did little work, but prestige required one to have as many of them as possible. Even the poorer dvoriane liked to have a couple of servants in attendance.
A household of this kind, when it ventured on a trip, resembled a tribal migration. In 1830 Pushkin met the son of a grand seigneur who described to him how his father used to travel in the reign of Catherine the Great. This is what Pushkin wrote down:
When my father was about to undertake a journey somewhere, he moved with his entire household. In front, on a tall Spanish horse, rode the Pole Kulikovskii... It was his function in the house to ride out on market days on a camel and show the peasants the lanterne magique. On the road he gave the signal to stop and go. Behind him followed my father's gig, and behind it, a carriage for use in case of rain; under the seat was the place of my father's favourite clown, Ivan Stepanich. These were followed by carriages loaded with us children, our governesses, teachers, nursemaids, and so on. Then came a grated cart with the fools, Negroes, dwarfs - in all, thirteen persons. Then again an identical cart with the sick borzois. Next came a gigantic box with horn instruments, a buffet carried by sixteen horses, and finally wagons with Kalmyk tents, and all sorts of furniture, because my father always stopped overnight under the open sky. You can judge yourself how many people were involved, musicians, cooks, dog-watchers, and other helpers.21
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Some of the very affluent settled permanently abroad where they astonished Europeans with their profligacy. One Russian aristocrat lived for a while in a small German town where he liked to amuse himself by sending his servants early in the morning to the market to buy out all the produce in order then to watch out of his window local housewives frantically run round in circles in search of food. The gambling casinos and spas of western Europe well knew these free-spending Russian potentates. It is said that Monte Carlo never recovered from the Russian Revolution.
People of this kind had very little interest in politics, so absorbed were they in the pursuit of pleasure. In 1813-15 many younger members of these rich families, having spent time in western Europe with the army of occupation, came under the spell of liberalism and nationalism. It is these people who founded the Russian counterparts of the German Tugendbunde and in 1825, inspired by uprisings of liberal officers in Spain, Portugal and Naples, made a move to abolish absolutism in Russia. But the Decembrist revolt had no antecedents and no issue, it was a solitary event, an echo of distant happenings. It shattered the spirit of the great families who had no inkling of its approach and could not understand what madness had seized their youth. In general, the very rich liked to enjoy life, without much thought for their own tomorrow, let alone for the general good.
It is the middle group, the gentry, in possession of 100 to 1,000 'souls' which was potentially the most active political body in the country. In 1858, they owned in the 37 provinces of Russia proper on the average 470 serfs of both sexes-a number sufficient to enable them to live independently and to provide themselves and their children with an up-to-date education. They were likely to know French well, and yet also to be at home in Russian. The richer among them travelled to Europe, sometimes for a year or longer on a 'grand tour' or to attend university. Many joined the military service for a few years not so much to make a career or to gain money, but to see something of their country and make friends. They had libraries and kept up with news from abroad. Although they preferred to live in the city, they spent the summers on their estates, and this custom reinforced their links with the village and the people inhabiting it. This group provided a unique bridge between the culture of rural Russia and that of the modern west, and from its ranks came most of the political and intellectual leaders of imperial Russia. A charming picture of such a provincial gentry family, rather of the less affluent sort, can be found in Serge Aksakov's autobiographic Family Chronicle.
Yet as a whole, this group also was uninterested in political.activity. In addition to all the reasons mentioned above, partly to blame for this apoliticism was the memory of state service. After they had been freed from it, dvoriane remained very suspicious of all civic responsibility. They were inclined to view the crown's attempts to involve them in local government as a device surreptitiously to reharness them in its service. They shied away, therefore, even from the limited opportunities granted them to involve themselves in provincial life, the more so that the bureaucracy always breathed down their necks; it was only too common in Russia for an elected representative of the district dvorianstvo to find himself drawn into the orbit of the civil service and end up being accountable to St Petersburg instead of his constituency. It was a most unfortunate legacy of the Muscovite tradition of life-long state service that even those dvoriane who had the means and the opportunity to participate in public life on the local level preferred to abstain, so deep was their aversion to all work on behalf of the state. Like peasants who could not distinguish between benevolent interference with their lives by well-meaning landlords and thoughtless exploitation, so most dvoriane did not separate compulsory state service from voluntary public service. In both cases, the decisive consideration was an instinctively negative reaction to someone else's will and the wish - without regard to the substance of the issue - to have one's volia or licence.