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the eighteenth century, it tended to carve up and dissipate them. In the end, whatever contribution the dvoriane made to political life they made not as a social and economic group standing up for its particular interests, but as a supra-class body fighting for what it conceived to be the general good: that is, not as a dvorianstvo but as an intelligentsia.

The historian N. Khlebnikov, writing a century ago, was among the first to inquire into the reasons for the political impotence of the Russian upper class as compared with the western. In his analysis he proceeded on the premiss that the latter's power rested on two foundations: control of local government and great landed wealth. Where it proved especially effective, for instance in England, the nobility combined the two powers, aristocrats dominating the countryside in the double capacity of administrators and proprietors. Khlebnikov noted that the dvorianstvo in Russia enjoyed too little of either power to be able to stand up to the monarchy.2 This scheme provides a convenient starting point for an investigation of the dvorianstvo's politics. The basic fact which one must take into account in dealing with the historical evolution of the dvorianstvo is the absence in Russia of a tradition of land ownership. As has been noted earlier, the relationship of property in land to the growth of statehood had been in Russia the reverse of that encountered in the history of western Europe. In the west, conditional land tenure preceded the emergence of royal absolutism; with the growth of the national monarchy and centralized statehood conditional possession in land was transformed into outright property. In Russia, alodial property existed only as long as there was no monarchy. As soon as it came into being, the monarchy proceeded to eliminate alodial property, replacing it with tenure conditional on service. During the three centuries separating the reign of Ivan in from that of Catherine II the Russian equivalent of the nobility held its land on royal sufferance. The Russian state grew and took shape without having to contend with entrenched landed interests - an absolutely fundamental factor in its historic evolution.

But even without clear title to its landed estates and serfs the dvorianstvo might have been able to secure a solid economic base; after all, the line separating possession from ownership is never as sharp in reality as it appears in legal manuals. To have done so, however, called for certain conditions which were missing. Everything conspired to make the dvorianstvo dependent on the monarchy, and to divert its attention from the struggle for its long-term interests to the satisfaction of its immediate needs.

From what has been said of the early Russian state it should be clear why the monarchy never allowed its service class to sink roots in the countryside. It desired its dvoriane to be mobile, ever ready to change jobs and residences. Sovereignty in Russia had been built on the ruins of private property, by a ruthless destruction of appanages and other votchiny. Once the rulers of Moscow had subjugated rival princes, they made certain that neither they nor their descendants, nor the boyars and the newly created dvorianstvo obtained a grip on regions such as had existed during appanage system. We have noted to what trouble Moscow went to prevent its provincial administrators from ensconcing themselves in their localities by prohibiting servitors from holding office in any area where they had estates and by rotating them at annual or biannual intervals. The Prussian Indigenatsrecht, which required administrators to reside and therefore, in effect, to own landed property in the province where they officiated would have been unthinkable in Russia. Hereditary office-holding was unknown as well. Western royalty, too, would have preferred its nobility not to become entrenched in the provinces, but in most countries it was unable to prevent this from happening and so it concentrated on weakening the nobility's political influence at the centre and replacing it gradually with a bureaucracy. In Russia, the issue was viewed with much greater gravity. A dvorianstvo enjoying local roots would have challenged die very principle of monocracy, a basic ingredient of tsarist authority as historically evolved, and as such could never have been tolerated. The mass deportations carried out by Ivan in, Basil in and Ivan iv did the job so thoroughly that afterwards even the mightiest of Russian grandees, possessors of millions of acres and hundreds of thousands of serfs, could not lay proprietary claim to any one part of Russia.

The Muscovite government made sure that the landholdings of its servitors were well dispersed. The Razriad and the Prikaz of Pomestia, which controlled the land reserve, issued estates to servitors without regard to their place of birth or the location of their other holdings. A petitioner, requesting additional land for himself or his son, had to take it wherever it was assigned, sometimes hundreds or more miles away from the family estate. As new frontier areas were opened to Russian colonization, dvoriane were encouraged and occasionally ordered to pick up their household and move with their serfs to new locations. The turnover of properties in Muscovite Russia was remarkably high. In the Moscow region during the sixteenth century, over three-quarters of all the pomestia are known to have changed hands in one twenty-five year period; in Kolomna during that same century, half the estates acquired new landlords in the course of sixteen years. In the seventeenth century, after a lapse of some fifty to sixty years, only a third of all die pomestia in the central regions of Muscovy still remained in die possession of the same owners.3