Russia under the Old regime

*74

Indeed, a full quarter of the dvoriane in Riazan, a province in the Central Agricultural Region, some 1,700 families, were reported in 1858 to 'constitute a single family with their peasants, partake of food at the same table and live together in one izba'.*

Part of the problem lay in the fact that, as indicated, dvoriane multiplied more rapidly than any other social group in imperial Russia; they were demographically the most dynamic social estate of all. Between 1782 and 1858, the dvorianstvo grew 4-3 times, whereas the country's total population increased only twofold and the peasantry even somewhat less than that.9 This growth put heavy pressures on the land resources and contributed to the over-all impoverishment of the elite.

In the final reckoning, however, the blame for the poverty of dvoriane must be placed on the primitiveness of the Russian economy and the lack of alternative opportunities which compelled the elite to rely much too heavily on income from land and serf labour. The Russian landowning class never developed entail or primogeniture, two institutions essential to the well being of any nobility, because there was hardly anything that young men deprived of their share of the landed estate could draw income from. The son of a dvorianin, stripped of his inheritance, had nowhere to turn; he was worse off than would be a peasant expelled from the commune. Peter the Great, hoping both to strengthen his service class and to induce it to branch out into the many fields of endeavour which his reforms had opened up, issued in 1714 an edict requiring landlords to bequeath their immovable properties to a single heir (not necessarily the eldest). But this law ran so much against traditions and economic realities that it was consistently evaded and in 1730 had to be repealed. Russian landlords always insisted on carving up their estates into more or less equal parcels for distribution among their sons. The constant subdivision contributed as much to the decline of the Russian 61ite as did all the government policies. Veselovskii has shown in the example of five Muscovite boyar families - the kind that elsewhere might have founded influential aristocratic houses - how, owing mainly to the practice of property subdivision by testament, each in its turn fell apart and disappeared. Far from gaining influence, some of their offspring in the third and fourth generation actually sunk to the level of slaves.10

The political consequences of these facts become apparent when one considers the English nobility, a class in every respect the antithesis of the Russian dvorianstvo. In England, the nobility has showed a consistent concern for keeping landed property consolidated in family hands. As a recent study has demonstrated, this concern was in evidence as early as the fourteenth century.11 The introduction in the seventeenth century of'strict settlement' - a legal device by virtue of which the title-holder to a landed estate was treated as only its life tenant - greatly