Russia under the Old regime

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In the eyes of the law, these provisions applied equally to the landowners serving in the military and the salaried personnel holding executive posts in the civil service because all persons holding positions listed on the Table of Ranks were technically dvoriane. In practice, however, in the eighteenth century a sharp distinction came to be drawn between the two categories with their vastly different social backgrounds. It became customary to reserve the term dvorianin for landowners, officers and hereditary dvoriane, and to call career civil servants chinovniki (singular chinovnik), i.e. holders of chin or rank. A well-to-do landowner, especially one of old lineage, appointed to a high administrative post, such as a governor or the head of a ministry in St Petersburg, was never called a chinovnik. On the other hand, an impoverished landlord's son forced to take a clerical job would lose in the eyes of society the status of a dvorianin. The distinction was accentuated by Catherine's creation of corporate organizations called Assemblies of Dvoriane which allowed only land-owners to vote. The growing gulf between the two categories of dvoriane ran contrary to Peter's expectations. Fearing that many dvoriane would seek to escape military service by enrolling in the bureaucracy, he had imposed quotas on the number of persons from each family who could choose such a career. In fact, dvoriane shunned office work, especially after they had been freed from obligatory state service and no longer required a loophole to escape it. Always short of competent bureaucrats, the government was forced to fill the ranks of the civil service with sons of clergymen and burghers, thus further lowering its social prestige. Sometimes, when the shortage of bureaucrats grew acute, as happened during Catherine's provincial administration reforms, the government resorted to forceful drafts of students attending religious seminaries.

Like the landowning dvoriane, mid-eighteenth-century chinovniks began to press the state for concessions. They too wished to be rid of the most disagreeable features of the state service system, especially that provision of the Table of Ranks which had made promotion in rank dependent on the availability of a corresponding post. They much preferred the old Muscovite system - restricted as it had been to the small high echelon of die civil service - whereby possession of a chin entitled the holder to a corresponding post in state service. The force of this Muscovite tradition was so strong that even in Peter's lifetime the basic premises of the Table of Ranks had been grossly violated; this must have savings were effectuated by the wholesale dismissal. Nor is it apparent why bureaucratization required the emancipation of dvoriane, in so far as bureaucrats also belonged to this class. The trouble with this interpretation is that it ignores the entire process of society's 'manumission' of which the emancipation of dvoriane was only one chapter, and which cannot be explained satisfactorily by the desire to save money or by other, narrowly conceived considerations of raison i'itat.