Russia under the Old regime

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inheritance. In the middle of the eighteenth century, dvorianstvo publicists, led by the historian Prince Michael Shcherbatov, sought to dissuade the monarchy from promoting commoners into its ranks, but to no avail. Sympathetic as Catherine was to its interests, she refused to transform the dvorianstvo into a closed estate and the inflow continued. In addition to commoners, an important source of dilution of the ranks of dvorianstvo were foreign nobles. The Russian monarchy generally welcomed foreigners willing to enter its service. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Tartar nobles were converted and inscribed into the ranks of Russian dvorianstvo. In the following century, Ukrainian Cossack 'elders', Baltic barons, Polish szlachta and Caucasian princes were accorded the same privilege. All along, Germans, numerous Scotsmen, Frenchmen and other west Europeans who came to Russia with permission or by invitation of the government were inscribed in dvorianstvo rolls. As a result, the proportion of ethnic Russians in the ranks of dvorianstvo remained relatively small. An historian who has analyzed the background of 915 service clans, largely on the basis of the rolls of the Razriad at the end of the seventeenth century found the following ethnic distribution: 18-3 per cent were descendants of the Riurikides, that is, of Norman blood; 24-3 per cent had Polish or Lithuanian ancestry; 25-0 per cent, other west European; 17-0 per cent, Tatar and other Oriental peoples; 10-5 per cent unknown; and only 4-6 per cent, Great Russian.1* Even if one counts the descendants of the Riurikides and all the 'unknowns' as Great Russian, it would still follow from these computations that in the final decades of the Muscovite period more than two-thirds of all the servitors of the tsars were of foreign extraction. In the eighteenth century, owing to territorial expansion and the introduction of regular procedures for ennoblement, the proportion of foreigners in the service class increased further. While it is true that in imperial Russia fashion dictated that one trace one's ancestry to foreign shores, so that the available figures are undoubtedly inflated in favour of non-Russians, the proportion of non-Russians in the service was high by any reckoning. Modern compilations indicate that of the 2,867 crvu servants holding the top ranks during the imperial period (1700-1917), 1,079 or 37*6 per cent were of foreign nationality, mostly western and pre-eminently German; in the middle of the nineteenth century, Lutherans alone held 15 per cent of the highest posts in the central administration.1' No other nobility was so open to the inflow of aliens or so lacking in deep native roots.

Last but not least among the factors working against the transformation of the dvorianstvo into a corporate body was the insignificance of noble titles. Just as all the sons of a boyar or a dvorianin inherited equal shares of his landed estate, so they inherited, if he was a prince, their father's title. The result was a proliferation of princely families in Russia; and since most of the princes were poor, the title carried little prestige and no power. Englishmen travelling in imperial Russia found among the many oddities of that exotic country not the least surprising that a prince, whom they greeted with due deference, was not automatically a 'noble', and indeed sometimes was a pauper. The only title that mattered was that obtained in the service - that is, rank or chin - and that was dependent not on heredity but on government favour. Thus an important element of patrimonial systems, the ranking of the elite by state function rather than by social origin not only survived Muscovy but was strengthened under the imperial regime.

Under these conditions, well-meaning attempts to transplant into Russia western aristocratic institutions were bound to fail. Catherine 11 made a tentative attempt in this direction. In 1785, in her Dvorianstvo Charter, she provided for Assemblies of Dvoriane, the first corporate organizations (together with the concurrently formed urban corporations) ever granted in Russia to a social group. Her purpose was to give her newly emancipated dvoriane something to keep them busy and incidentally to have them assist the local administration in its duties. But the rules governing the Assemblies were hedged with so many limitations and the members were anyway so strongly disinclined to participate in public responsibilities that they never came to be more than harmless social gatherings. Their administrative functions were fully absorbed by the bureaucracy, whose provincial representatives made sure the Assemblies never overstepped their narrowly prescribed limits. Speranskiy at one time the principal adviser of Alexander 1, who had visions of transforming Russian dvoriane into something resembling the English peerage, was driven to desperation by their complete indifference to the opportunities which the Assemblies provided. 'The nobles run away from elections to the Assemblies,' he complained in 1818, 'and soon it will be necessary to convoke them using gendarmes in order to compel the nobles to take advantage of their rights.'18 The facts adduced help to explain an apparent paradox that a social class which by 1800 had managed to get hold of the bulk of the country's productive wealth (not only land but, as will be pointed out in the following chapter, also much of its industry) and to acquire, in addition, personal rights and estate privileges extended to no other group, nevertheless did not translate its advantages into terms of political power. Wealthy as the dvorianstvo may have been collectively, individually more than nine-tenths of its members were indigent. These people remained economically heavily dependent on the crown. Nor could the affluent minority consolidate its influence because its properties - thinly