Russia under the Old regime

172

'73

The wide scattering of properties and their rapid turnover continued throughout the imperial period. The recipients of the munificent gifts bestowed by Catherine n and Paul i did not obtain their holdings concentrated in one place: what they got were bits of property here and there, exactly as had been the case in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As a result, even the largest fortunes in Russia consisted not of latifundia but of numerous scattered holdings. The Morozovs who thanks to their family links with the royal house became the richest landlords of mid-seventeenth-century Russia had their 9,000 peasant households dispersed in 19 different provinces. The extensive properties which the Vorontsovs managed to accumulate in the course of the eighteenth century from imperial grants - 5,711 peasant households with 27,000 male serfs living on 700,000 acres - were located in 16 provinces. The same held true of P.Sheremetev's fortune, the largest in the reign of Catherine 11: his 186,000 serfs and 2.7 million acres lay scattered in 17 provinces.4 In other words, imperial, like Muscovite, Russia had nothing resembling ducal properties - properties sufficiently large and concentrated to give their owners, as a by-product of ownership, a decisive voice in local politics. A Russian magnate resembled a modern 'diversified' investor who owns stock in many companies but not enough in any one of them to have a controlling voice. This was even truer of owners of medium and small estates. The poorest landlords had strips of arable in one or more villages which they shared with several proprietors. It is difficult for a person educated on western history to realize how extreme was the morcellement of estates in Russia. It was not uncommon for a complex of villages (selo), inhabited by 400 or 500 peasants, to be co-owned by 30 or 40 landlords. In the late eighteenth century the majority of Russian villages are said to have belonged to two or more landlords; single ownership was rather the exception.6 Haxthausen was shown a village of 260 peasants belonging to 83 proprietors. Such a situation, incidentally, precluded enclosures or other measures designed to rationalize the rural economy.

Dvoriane continued to turn over land at a rapid rate throughout the imperial age, even after it had been declared their property and they no longer depended on the whimsy of government agencies. The practice of centuries had become habit. Romanovich-Slavatinskii, the leading historian of the dvorianstvo, estimates that in imperial Russia estates rarely remained in the same family longer than three or four generations. Foreigners were for ever astonished at the casual manner in which Russians disposed of their landed inheritance, and Haxthausen states flatly that nowhere in Europe did landed properties change hands as frequently as in Russia. One needs only to compare this situation with that prevailing in England, Spain, Austria or Prussia to understand the implications. The extreme dispersal and constant turnover of holdings deprived the dvorianstvo of a solid territorial base, and greatly reduced the political power latent in its vast collective resources. Nor did the situation look much better in terms of absolute wealth. The Morozovs, Vorontsovs and Sheremetevs were rare exceptions. In Russia, there was always a very wide gap between the few rich families and the rest. Suffice it to say that in 1858-9, 1,400 of the wealthiest landowners in the empire, constituting 1 -4 per cent of all the serf-owners, held 3 million serfs, whereas 79,000 of the poorer ones, or 78 per cent of the serf-owners, held only 2 million. The vast majority of Russian dvoriane at any time in history lived at the bare subsistence level or on a standard that made them indistinguishable from peasants.

There are no precise figures on medieval incomes from land in Russia, but enough is known to suggest how meagre they were. It has been previously noted (p. 80) that over three-quarters of the landlords in fifteenth-century Novgorod could not afford to equip themselves for war. Alexander Eck estimates that in the second half of the sixteenth century, a horse in Russia cost one to three rubles, a cavalryman's weapons one ruble, and his clothing two; this at a time when an average landed estate yielded a cash income of from five to eight rubles.8 In other words, the outlay for military equipment which a servitor was required to make could absorb more or less his entire income. There was no surplus. Little wonder that Herberstein observed Muscovite 'nobles' pick up the lemon peelings and melon rinds which he and his colleagues in the embassy had cast aside. Many Muscovite dvoriane either had no serfs or not enough to turn over to them the cultivation of their pomestia. Such men had to till the land themselves. They formed a class of odnodvortsy ('single-householders") whom Peter later subjected to the soul tax and merged with state peasants.

The situation did not improve in the imperial period, despite the country's expansion into fertile areas. The great majority of imperial dvoriane remained destitute. Their incomes were so small they could not educate their children or afford any of the amenities associated with aristocratic life to which they now began to aspire. An Englishman who visited Russia around 1799, describes the typical provincial pomeshchik with evident revulsion:

You will then find him throughout the day, with his neck bare, his beard lengthened, his body wrapped in sheep's hide, eating raw turnips, and drinking kvass, sleeping one half of the day, and growling at his wife and family the other. The same feelings, the same wants, wishes, and gratifications... characterize the nobleman and the peasant...'