Russia under the Old regime

186

Some of the very affluent settled permanently abroad where they astonished Europeans with their profligacy. One Russian aristocrat lived for a while in a small German town where he liked to amuse himself by sending his servants early in the morning to the market to buy out all the produce in order then to watch out of his window local housewives frantically run round in circles in search of food. The gambling casinos and spas of western Europe well knew these free-spending Russian potentates. It is said that Monte Carlo never recovered from the Russian Revolution.

People of this kind had very little interest in politics, so absorbed were they in the pursuit of pleasure. In 1813-15 many younger members of these rich families, having spent time in western Europe with the army of occupation, came under the spell of liberalism and nationalism. It is these people who founded the Russian counterparts of the German Tugendbunde and in 1825, inspired by uprisings of liberal officers in Spain, Portugal and Naples, made a move to abolish absolutism in Russia. But the Decembrist revolt had no antecedents and no issue, it was a solitary event, an echo of distant happenings. It shattered the spirit of the great families who had no inkling of its approach and could not understand what madness had seized their youth. In general, the very rich liked to enjoy life, without much thought for their own tomorrow, let alone for the general good.

It is the middle group, the gentry, in possession of 100 to 1,000 'souls' which was potentially the most active political body in the country. In 1858, they owned in the 37 provinces of Russia proper on the average 470 serfs of both sexes-a number sufficient to enable them to live independently and to provide themselves and their children with an up-to-date education. They were likely to know French well, and yet also to be at home in Russian. The richer among them travelled to Europe, sometimes for a year or longer on a 'grand tour' or to attend university. Many joined the military service for a few years not so much to make a career or to gain money, but to see something of their country and make friends. They had libraries and kept up with news from abroad. Although they preferred to live in the city, they spent the summers on their estates, and this custom reinforced their links with the village and the people inhabiting it. This group provided a unique bridge between the culture of rural Russia and that of the modern west, and from its ranks came most of the political and intellectual leaders of imperial Russia. A charming picture of such a provincial gentry family, rather of the less affluent sort, can be found in Serge Aksakov's autobiographic Family Chronicle.

Yet as a whole, this group also was uninterested in political.activity. In addition to all the reasons mentioned above, partly to blame for this apoliticism was the memory of state service. After they had been freed from it, dvoriane remained very suspicious of all civic responsibility. They were inclined to view the crown's attempts to involve them in local government as a device surreptitiously to reharness them in its service. They shied away, therefore, even from the limited opportunities granted them to involve themselves in provincial life, the more so that the bureaucracy always breathed down their necks; it was only too common in Russia for an elected representative of the district dvorianstvo to find himself drawn into the orbit of the civil service and end up being accountable to St Petersburg instead of his constituency. It was a most unfortunate legacy of the Muscovite tradition of life-long state service that even those dvoriane who had the means and the opportunity to participate in public life on the local level preferred to abstain, so deep was their aversion to all work on behalf of the state. Like peasants who could not distinguish between benevolent interference with their lives by well-meaning landlords and thoughtless exploitation, so most dvoriane did not separate compulsory state service from voluntary public service. In both cases, the decisive consideration was an instinctively negative reaction to someone else's will and the wish - without regard to the substance of the issue - to have one's volia or licence.

The other inhibiting factor was that mentioned by Dolgorukov (p. 136), namely the rigidity of the ranking system in the Russian civil service. An educated dvorianin could not enter the civil service at a rank appropriate to his qualifications; he had to start at the bottom and work his way up in competition with professional bureaucrats whose sole concern was with personal advancement. The better educated and more public-minded dvoriane found this intolerable and avoided the civil service. Thus an important opportunity to attract to the government the most enlightened element was lost.

The middle dvoriane tended to be most interested in culture: literature, drama, art, music, history, political and social theory. It is they who created a public for Russian novels and poetry, who subscribed to the periodical press, who filled the theatres, who enrolled at the universities. Russian culture is to a very large extent the product of this class, of some 18,500 families from whose ranks came both the talent and the audience which gave Russia, at long last, something that the rest of the world could recognize and adopt as part of its own heritage. But what culture gained politics lost; the genius which went into literature and art shied away from humdrum affairs of government. Once some members of this group interested themselves in public affairs with any degree of commitment - this occurred in the 1830s - they did so at a visionary level which had little to do with political reality. We shall encounter them later as the founders of the Russian intelligentsia.