Russia under the Old regime

1,032

'Gentry' \

501-1,000 souls 1 '.754

101-500 souls / '5.7'7

21-100 souls

Fewer than 20

These statistical tables indicate that on the eve of Emancipation nearly four-fifths of Russian dvoriane (male and female) fortunate enough to own serfs (68,766 out of 87,269) did not own enough to live off the land in a manner regarded by the authorities as commensurate with their social status. Or, to put it in another way: in 1858-9 only 18,503 Russian dvoriane in the 37 provinces of Great Russia secured enough income from their estates to enjoy financial independence. The number of dvoriane able to rely on corvee and agrarian rents was always exceedingly small. The 1831 decree of Nicholas 1 restricting the right of direct vote in Assemblies of the Dvoriane to owners of 100 or more 'souls' had the effect of reducing the roll of such voters in the empire as a whole to 21,916, a figure close to the 18,503 given in Table 1 for the 37 provinces of Russia proper." What makes these figures even more telling is that the 38,173 dvoriane listed as in possession of fewer than 20 'souls' had on average only 7 male serfs each. The situation in the reign of Catherine 11, the 'Golden Age' of dvorianstvo, was, if anything, more dismal yet, as the figures for 1777 indicate. All of which should serve as a warning not to think of the Russian 'nobility' as a profligate class wallowing in luxury in the midst of poverty and backwardness. The Rostovs, Bezu-khovs and Bolkonskys of War and Peace are in no sense typical: they were members of an exclusive club of some 1,400 grand seigneurs in an Empire in which a million persons claimed 'noble' status of some kind.

Thus, although the dvorianstvo was indeed a landed estate in the sense that prior to Emancipation it owned nearly all of the privately held, cultivated land in the empire and drew much of its income from it, it was not a landowning aristocracy in the western meaning of the word. Ninety-eight per cent of them either had no serfs or not enough of them to be able to rely on their labour and rents for a decent living. These people - unless they had relatives or patrons willing to support them -had to depend on the largesse of the crown. Even after it had gained its liberties in 1762 and 1785, therefore, the dvorianstvo could not dispense with the monarchy's favours; it alone had the jobs, the pomestia and the serfs needed for its survival. The members of this large group were no more a landed aristocracy than a modern salaried employee who invests a part of his savings in some industrial shares is a capitalist entrepreneur. But even that 2 per cent of the dvorianstvo which had enough land to live off its proceeds did not resemble a true landed aristocracy. The scattering and rapid turnover of properties, noted above, precluded the formation of strong local attachments, so essential to die aristocratic spirit. For them, land was a way of making a living, not a way of life. If poor, landless dvoriane depended on the crown for jobs, those affluent enough to own estates were dependent on it for the preservation of serfdom.

It is one of the anomalies of Russian social history that for all its critical importance to the country's evolution, serfdom was always allowed to remain in a kind of legal limbo. No edict enserfing peasants had ever been issued, nor did the crown ever formally certify the landlord's title to their serfs. The institution grew up in practice from an accumulation.