Russia under the Old regime

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of numerous edicts and customs, and it was maintained by common consent but without explicit official sanction. It was always understood - though again, never spelled out - that the landlords did not actually own their serfs; rather, they were managing them, as it were, on behalf of the crown. The latter assumption acquired particular validity after Peter the Great and his successors had made landlords agents of the state charged with the collection of the soul tax and the gathering of con scripts. For all their reliance on serfs, the landlords' title to them and their labour was vague, and it remained so even after 1785, the year they received title to the land. The favour of the crown, therefore, was essen tial to all those who benefited from serf labour. What the crown had once entrusted, it could at any time revoke. Fear of being deprived of serfs by state decree greatly mitigated the dvorianstvo's interest in poli tics, especially after its liberation from compulsory state service. The status quo assured them of free labour; any change was bound to upset the situation to their detriment. It was a condition understood as part of the dyarchic arrangement under which Russia operated that if they wished to go on exploiting serf labour, the dvoriane had to stay out of politics.

Serf-owners further relied on the crown to keep their serfs under control. The Pugachev uprising of 1773-5 had thoroughly frightened them. Landlords were convinced - rightly, as subsequent events were to show - that at the slightest sign of weakening of state authority the muzhik would take the law in his own hands and once again murder and pilfer as he had done in Pugachev's day. Their most effective weapon to keep serfs obedient was the right to call in troops, and to turn over recalcitrant peasants to the authorities for induction into the army or exile to Siberia. From this point of view, too, the influential serf-owning part of dvorian- stvo had an interest in the maintenance of a strong autocratic regime. Another factor which exerted a strongly negative effect on the political situation of the dvorianstvo was the absence in Russia of corporate institutions and corporate spirit.

Enough had been said of the Muscovite monarchy and its conception of the service class to make it superfluous to have to explain why it never issued collective charters. But in their insistence on the patrimonial power of the monarchy, the tsars went further, using every means at their disposal to humiliate anyone who by virtue of ancestry, office or wealth may have been inclined to become self-important. They habitually referred to their-servitors as slaves (kholopy). Muscovite protocol required every boyar and dvorianin, even the scion of a 'pedigreed* clan, to address his sovereign with the formula: 'I, so-and-so [the diminutive form of the first name, e.g. "Ivashka"], your kholop.' This practice was