Russia under the Old regime

THE PARTIAL DISMANTLING OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE

serfs nor bequeath their status.* In this manner provisions were introduced for advancement by merit - an intention that ran contrary to other tendencies intensifying social cleavages, for which reason, as will be shown, it was only partially realized.

Before long the Table of Ranks turned into a veritable charter of the service class. Since at that time power and wealth in Russia were attainable almost exclusively by working for or with the state, acquisition of chin bestowed on the holder uniquely privileged status. He was assured of a government job for himself and, in most cases, for his offspring as well. He also enjoyed the most valuable of all economic privileges, the right to own land worked by serf labour. In the words of the Decembrist Nicholas Turgenev, Russians lacking chin were 'en dehors de la nation qfficielle ou Ugale' - outside the pale of the nation in the official or legal sense of the word.8 Entry into the service and advancement in it became a national obsession for Russians, especially those from the lower middle class; clergymen, shopkeepers and scribes developed a consuming ambition for their sons to acquire the rank of a cornet in the army or commissar or registrar in the civil service, which carried the fourteenth chin, and in this way gain access to the trough. The kind of drive that in commercial countries went into accumulation of capital in imperial Russia tended to concentrate on the acquisition of chin. Chin now joined chai (tea) and shchi (cabbage soup) to form a triad around which revolved a great deal of Russian life.

In retrospect, Peter's attempt to change the character of the eUite by an infusion of new blood seems to have been more successful in the lower echelons of the service class than at the top. Analysis of the composition of the highest four ranks, the so-called generalitet, reveals that in 1730 (five years after Peter's death) 93 per cent of its members were drawn from families which had held high office and often analogous positions in Muscovite Russia.7 It was below these exalted heights, between the fourteenth and tenth chiny that the greatest changes took place. The Table of Ranks accomplished a considerable broadening of the social base of the service class. The class as a whole grew impressively. The increase can be accounted for by the promotion of commoners to officer rank in the greatly expanded military establishment, the granting of chin to holders of lower administrative posts in the provinces, and the enrolment in the ranks of dvorianstvo of landowning groups in such borderlands as the Ukraine, the Tatar regions on the Volga and the newly conquered Baltic provinces.

* In 1845 hereditary dvorianstvo was limited to the topmost five ranks, and in 1856 it was further restricted to the highest four. In the first half of the nineteenth century, personal, non-hereditary dvoriane constituted between a third and a half of all the dvorianstvo.