The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I

Patrick O'Meara

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350196568
• eBook ISBN: 9781788315678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The reign of Alexander I was a pivotal moment in the construction of Russia's national mythology. This work examines this crucial period focusing on the place of the Russian nobility in relation to their ruler, and the accompanying debate between reform and the status quo, between a Russia old and new, and between different visions of what Russia could become. Drawing on extensive archival research and placing a long-neglected emphasis on this aspect of Alexander I's reign, this book is an important work for students and scholars of imperial Russia, as well as the wider Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic period in Europe.

Part I

RUSSIA’S NOBLE ESTATE (SOSLOVIE)

Chapter 1

RUSSIAN SOCIETY AND NOBILITY FROM 1801

This opening section, Part I, sets the historical context of the Russian nobility in the age of Alexander I and identifies a number of key themes and problems which will be explored in subsequent chapters. Specifically, it seeks to gauge the nobility’s own sense of place within the framework of Russia’s social and political life and to suggest some of the principal sources of the estate’s social prestige, with particular focus on the extent to which this depended on proximity to Alexander I’s court and the institutions of his government.

The nobility’s privileges and legal status

Developments in the eighteenth century

Definitions of the Russian nobility and nobleman (dvorianstvo/dvorianin) have tended to be elusive and ambiguous. A late-nineteenth-century attempt suggested the terms represented concepts ‘felt rather than recognised’, implying something select, privileged and different from the rest of the population. Etymologically the terms suggest proximity to the court (dvor) either by descent or through service to it.¹ One of Peter the Great’s reforms (1722) established the Senate Office of Chief Herald (gerol’d-meister) to supervise the nobility’s education and keep its registers, to scrutinize applicants’ credentials and to recruit them to state service. Despite the efforts of the Chief Herald, however, his office was still complaining about the lack of a complete register of nobles five years into the reign of Catherine the Great (1767). It requested a precise ruling on whether the qualifications for noble status should consist of service rank, possession of an estate, or both. Even so, a century after the office’s establishment, a survey revealed that in some provinces many were accepted to the noble estate (dvorianskoe soslovie) without the slightest right to belong to it.²

Noblemen, ideally owners of both land and serfs, were accorded their legal status as the main buttress of the tsarist system by two key eighteenth-century legislative acts: Peter the Great’s 1722 Table of Ranks (Tabel’ o rangakh) and Catherine the Great’s 1785 Charter to the Nobility. The former regulated fourteen ranks in the military and civil services, and at court, up until 1917. All fourteen military and naval ranks and the first eight civil and court ranks brought exemption from the poll tax and the right to own serfs. Ranks in the Guards were two higher than those in the army generally; thus a Guards captain was seventh rank (chin).³ The Petrine original (and subsequent legislation under his successors) continued to recognize certain forms of precedence, such as military ranks over their civilian equivalents and for those from princely bloodlines over other nobles of equivalent rank.

The impact of Peter’s groundbreaking initiative, introduced three years before his death in 1725, was to prove much greater on the lower echelons of the service class than at its apex. As Richard Pipes has shown, analysis of the composition of the top four ranks, the so-called generalitet, reveals that five years after Peter’s death, 93 per cent of its 179 members still derived from 13 of the 22 families, the Dolgorukiis, the Sheremet’evs and the Golitsyns among them, which had held similarly high office in Muscovite Russia. Otherwise, particularly between the fourteenth and tenth grades, great changes ensued. It was here that the Table of Ranks achieved a significant broadening of the social base of the service class, as well as its impressive numerical increase. This was due to the promotion of commoners to officer rank in the expanding military establishment, the conferment of rank on holders of lower administrative posts in the sixty provinces of the Russian Empire and the ennoblement of landowners in the empire’s borderlands in Ukraine, the Tatar regions on the Volga and the newly acquired Baltic provinces.⁴

Catherine’s 1785 Charter identified six categories of nobility which were subsequently enshrined in Nicholas I’s 1832 Consolidated Statutes. These were (1) nobility granted by the sovereign, or ‘real nobility’, (2) nobility achieved by reaching commissioned officer rank (rank fourteen) in military service, (3) nobility achieved by promotion to rank eight in civil service, (4) nobility derived from membership in foreign noble families, (5) titled (Russian) noble families and (6) ancient well-born (untitled Russian) noble families.⁵

Catherine’s 1785 Charter and Peter III’s 1762 manifesto, which effectively freed the nobility from the obligation of serving the state, together represent the legislative acts on which the eighteenth-century Russian nobility’s ‘Golden Age’ was founded. However, despite the 1762 act, paid state service would remain for many noblemen the main source, in some cases, the sole source of income and security. But, as Isabel de Madariaga points out, there is no obvious way of measuring precisely the psychological impact on the nobility of their new freedom:

Historians have not tired of pointing out that in spite of the manifesto, the nobility continued to serve. But there is a great difference between being compelled to serve and choosing to serve. In this respect the Russian noble was at last on a par with the gentry and nobility of other countries. If his social status in Russia still depended on his chin [rank], his social status abroad depended more on title, wealth and even personality. The Russian noble was no longer ‘enserfed’ to the state.⁶

Catherine’s 1785 act had also created the provincial and district assemblies of the nobility as corporate estate organizations, while the 1775 provincial government reform act had given the nobility the right to elect from among their peers provincial police and court officials. It meant that potentially the nobleman-landowner’s authority now extended from his estate to the province beyond its boundaries, though his typical reluctance to exercise it would become problematic for Catherine and her successors well into the nineteenth century.⁷ Nevertheless, it was the 1785 Charter which would effectively underpin the legal position of the nobility during Alexander I’s reign. It was to be modified by only four ukazy which related mostly to the status of the marshal (predvoditel’) of the nobility.⁸

An important aspect of this era was the increasing Westernization (Europeanization) of Russia’s social and political structure, whereby the impact of political power on Russian life began to be played out to a significant extent under the influence of Western European patterns. The Russian historian Boris Mironov argues that this tendency, accelerated further by the increasing number of Western Europeans entering Russian service, was reflected in the transformation of the nobility into a legal estate, largely as a result of the 1785 Charter:

1) it gave legal underpinning to the nobility’s rights; 2) these rights were hereditary and unconditional; 3) the nobility enjoyed class (soslovnyi) organisation in the form of district and provincial noble assemblies; 4) it acquired class consciousness and mentality; 5) the nobility had the right to self-regulation and participation in local government; 6) it had the external signs of noble membership⁹

There is no question that Western influences were reflected also in the continued development of the noble estate, which was turning from a service class to a noble and privileged estate, just as the feudal estate in the West had been from the outset.¹⁰ Indeed, from the outset, in the persuasive view of Michael Confino, the emergence of noble estates in the West as in Russia can be attributed to a type of reward from the ruler for service rendered to him or her. The Russian nobility was pre-eminently a service nobility (sluzhiloe dvorianstvo), with a corresponding service mentality but, as in the West, an overarching ethos of honour combined with a highly developed sense of lineage and inheritance as the typically salient features of the social elite.¹¹

Even so, while the Petrine reforms, specifically the 1722 Table of Ranks, had vested increasing social power in the nobility, which provided the officer corps for the army, and enjoyed outright ownership of enserfed peasants, it did so at the expense of any meaningful political power. This continued to reside exclusively in the autocracy and its growing bureaucracy. Consequently, as Martin Malia has rightly noted, well into the nineteenth century, Russia ‘was almost without a developed civil society and “intermediate” public bodies between the state and service gentry, on the one hand, and the sullen peasant mass, on the other’.¹² The 1722 reform also enshrined an important stratification of the nobility into ‘personal’ (lichnoe), for those who achieved only the ninth of the fourteen ranks, and ‘hereditary’ (potomstvennoe) for those who achieved the fourteenth rank and above in military service, and the eighth in civilian service. Effectively, therefore, the Table of Ranks can be said to have failed to eliminate the pre-eminence of the principle of birth-right and, to cite Confino,

institutionalized a distinction of honor and prestige in favour of the hereditary nobility and, paradoxically, acknowledged the privileges stemming from birth and lineage that this same Table of Ranks was supposed to abolish and replace with the ‘service, fountain of all distinction’.¹³

The collective deference of the Russian nobility to authority was a product both of its passivity and obduracy. It was a combination which meant that, historically, deference was not always unalloyed or guaranteed, as the involvement of highly placed noblemen in the assassinations of both Peter III (1762) and Paul I (1801) so clearly demonstrated.

The Table of Ranks was a generally successful attempt to create an entirely new service nobility, with the possibility open to the wider community – but excluding serfs – of qualifying for automatic ennoblement and membership of the estate (soslovie). Crucially, it created a social hierarchy to which individual noblemen attached considerable importance since their personal status was now defined preeminently by rank (chin). In the following decades, the nobility sought to consolidate its privileged position, especially in relation to the throne and its rights of ownership of both land and peasants. It thereby achieved its ‘Golden Age’ with emancipation from obligatory service in 1762, followed by confirmation of all its rights and privileges in 1785.

After 1762, however, and despite the freedom granted then from obligatory service, noblemen continued by and large to commit to careers in state service. This was no doubt partly for financial reasons, but the tendency may also be explained by the fact that by the second half of the eighteenth century the nobility had come to identify itself increasingly with the state and its needs. On the other hand, when under Catherine II the office of marshal of the nobility was established and noble assemblies set up on an electoral basis, the requirement to participate in them was seen by the nobility as yet another form of state service which many sought to avoid, despite the prestige and financial security such participation might bring.

Matters did not improve in Alexander I’s reign, when the nobility had to be compelled to stand for election to their corporate organizations which were, given their collective neglect of them, increasingly staffed by professional bureaucrats. Paradoxically, however, without any official sanction from the government, noble culture was developing in a variety of new ways on country estates, city salons, in friendship circles, Masonic lodges and unofficial publications. The nobility’s own view of what form allegiance to authority might take was clearly evolving.¹⁴

The impact of Alexander I’s accession

From the moment of Emperor Alexander I’s eagerly awaited and widely welcomed accession in 1801, political and social stability in Russia would depend crucially, as it had also throughout the eighteenth century, on the maintenance of a dependable working relationship between the ruler and the nobility. The empire’s most privileged estate had become accustomed to its guaranteed status and prerogatives vis-à-vis the throne. However, while these had been in jeopardy during the brief reign of Alexander’s father, the unpredictable Emperor Paul I, the nobility now confidently expected the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• A Note on the Text
• Plates
• Map: The provinces of European Russia
• Part I Russia’s Noble Estate (Soslovie)
• Part II Educating the Russian nobility
• Part III The nobility in local government and administration
• Part IV The tsar, the nobility and reforming Russia
• Part V Government, nobility and the ‘peasant question’
• Part VI The radical nobility challenges autocracy
• Afterword
• A Note on Sources
• Notes
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates Section
• Copyright Page