Russia under the Old regime

CHAPTER 7 DVORIANSTVO

[In Europe] people believe in the aristocracy, some to scorn it, others to have something to hate, others yet to profit from it or to satisfy their vanity, and so on. In Russia none of this exists. Here one simply does not believe in it. Pushkin1 In the west, society's instrument in restraining the state (where such restraint was, in fact, exercised) was either the nobility or the bourgeoisie, that is groups controlling, respectively, land and money. In some western countries the two acted in concert, in others separately and at cross purposes; sometimes one led and the other followed. The next chapter, devoted to the middle class, will suggest why it had virtually no influence on the course of Russian politics. But even without detailed analysis it should be apparent that in an agrarian country with little money in circulation and no commercial credit such as Russia was until the 1860s, the middle class could not have been very influential by the very nature of things. If the Russian monarchy were to be limited, the job had to be done by the landed estate, the dvoriane, who by the end of the eighteenth century owned outright the bulk of the country's productive wealth, and on whom the crown depended to administer and defend its realm. It was by all odds the strongest and richest social group, best protected by laws, as well as the best educated and politically the most conscious.

And yet, whatever its potential, the dvorianstvo's actual political accomplishments were pitiful indeed. Its occasional acts of defiance were half-hearted, mismanaged, or both. In any event, they never involved more than a thin layer of the very rich, cosmopolitan elite, whom the provincial rank and file mistrusted and refused to follow. Most of the time, the Russian equivalent of the nobility did as it was told. The personal liberties which it won from Peter in and Catherine 11 it used to solidify its economic and social privileges, not to acquire political rights. Instead of accumulating the properties with which it was showered in