The other inhibiting factor was that mentioned by Dolgorukov (p. 136), namely the rigidity of the ranking system in the Russian civil service. An educated dvorianin could not enter the civil service at a rank appropriate to his qualifications; he had to start at the bottom and work his way up in competition with professional bureaucrats whose sole concern was with personal advancement. The better educated and more public-minded dvoriane found this intolerable and avoided the civil service. Thus an important opportunity to attract to the government the most enlightened element was lost.
The middle dvoriane tended to be most interested in culture: literature, drama, art, music, history, political and social theory. It is they who created a public for Russian novels and poetry, who subscribed to the periodical press, who filled the theatres, who enrolled at the universities. Russian culture is to a very large extent the product of this class, of some 18,500 families from whose ranks came both the talent and the audience which gave Russia, at long last, something that the rest of the world could recognize and adopt as part of its own heritage. But what culture gained politics lost; the genius which went into literature and art shied away from humdrum affairs of government. Once some members of this group interested themselves in public affairs with any degree of commitment - this occurred in the 1830s - they did so at a visionary level which had little to do with political reality. We shall encounter them later as the founders of the Russian intelligentsia.
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Whatever hope there might have been that the dvorianstvo would develop into a politically active class vanished in 1861. The emancipation of serfs was a calamity for the landlords. It is not that the provisions of the emancipation settlement were ungenerous: the dvoriane received good money for the land they had to give up to the peasants; indeed, suspicion has been voiced that the assessments for this land had been set artificially high to include at least some compensation for the loss of the serfs. The trouble was that the landlords were now on their own. Under serfdom they did not have to keep accurate account books because, at a pinch, they could always squeeze out a bit more out of the serf. Under the new conditions this was no longer possible. To survive, one had to be able to calculate the costs of rents and services, and exercise some control over expenditures. Nothing in its background had prepared the dvorianstvo for such responsibilities. Most of them did not know how to count roubles and kopeks, and indeed scorned doing so. It is as if, after long tradition of free living, they were suddenly put on a strict allowance. This was the ultimate vengeance of serfdom. Having lived for so long off rents and corvee, whose quantity they were free to set, they were totally unsuited for a self-reliant existence. Despite the fact that after 1861 land values and rents rose sharply, dvoriane got deeper into debt and had to mortgage their land or sell it to peasants and merchants. By 1905, dvoriane had lost a third of the land they had kept as part of the Emancipation settlement; after the agrarian disorders of 1905 they began to dispose 01 it even more rapidly. About half of the land left in private possession at this time was mortgaged. In the northern provinces, by the end of the nineteenth century dvoriane landholding virtually vanished. Unable to manage, dvoriane sold most of the arable land, retaining mainly forests and pastures which they could lease at good prices without much trouble to themselves. In the south, dvoriane landholding did survive but here too it was on the defensive, retreating under the combined pressure of the land-hungry peasantry and capitalist farming working for export. Efforts of the monarchy to shore up the eroding economic position of dvorianstvo by means of easy credit failed to reverse the process. As pointed out above (p. 169), by 1916 self-employed peasants owned two-thirds of all the cultivated land in Russia not in state possession (and the state had little arable land), as well as nine-tenths of the livestock. As a class, the dvorianstvo lost its economic foundation in the final decades of the imperial regime, and politically it no longer represented any force whatever.
CHAPTER 8
That the Russian middle class was small and inconsequential is one of the commonplaces of historical literature. Russia's inability to produce a large and vigorous bourgeoisie is usually seen as a major cause of its deviation from the political patterns of western Europe, and of the failure of liberal ideas significantly to influence its political institutions and practices. The stress on this element is understandable if one considers the historic function performed by the western bourgeoisie. In its methods the western bourgeoisie was not always consistent. In France, for example, it initially allied itself with the monarchy to help reduce the power of the landed aristocracy, then reversed itself, and headed the struggle against the monarchy which ended with the latter's destruction. In England, it sided with the aristocracy against the crown and together with it, whittled down its prerogatives. In the Netherlands, having expelled a foreign power ruling the country, it took over. In Spain, Italy and the Holy Roman Empire, where it failed to remake national governments to its liking, at least it managed to extract from the monarchy and the feudal aristocracies corporate rights which it used here and there to establish capitalist enclaves in the form of sovereign city-states. But whatever the strategy employed, the spirit and the aim of the western middle class was everywhere the same. It stood for its business interests, and since these required the rule of law and the safeguarding of personal rights, it fought for a public order consonant with what later came to be articulated as liberal ideals. This being the case, it is reasonable to assume a more than casual connection between the notorious underdevelopment in Russia of legality and personal freedom and the impotence or apathy of its middle class.
What accounts for the insignificance of the Russian middle class? The first answer which suggests itself has to do with the country's economy. The bourgeoisie is by definition the moneyed class, and, as is well known, Russia never had much money in circulation. It was situated too far from the principal routes of international trade to earn bullion from commerce; nor did it have its own precious metals because it began
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