Russia under the Old regime

188

Whatever hope there might have been that the dvorianstvo would develop into a politically active class vanished in 1861. The emancipation of serfs was a calamity for the landlords. It is not that the provisions of the emancipation settlement were ungenerous: the dvoriane received good money for the land they had to give up to the peasants; indeed, suspicion has been voiced that the assessments for this land had been set artificially high to include at least some compensation for the loss of the serfs. The trouble was that the landlords were now on their own. Under serfdom they did not have to keep accurate account books because, at a pinch, they could always squeeze out a bit more out of the serf. Under the new conditions this was no longer possible. To survive, one had to be able to calculate the costs of rents and services, and exercise some control over expenditures. Nothing in its background had prepared the dvorianstvo for such responsibilities. Most of them did not know how to count roubles and kopeks, and indeed scorned doing so. It is as if, after long tradition of free living, they were suddenly put on a strict allowance. This was the ultimate vengeance of serfdom. Having lived for so long off rents and corvee, whose quantity they were free to set, they were totally unsuited for a self-reliant existence. Despite the fact that after 1861 land values and rents rose sharply, dvoriane got deeper into debt and had to mortgage their land or sell it to peasants and merchants. By 1905, dvoriane had lost a third of the land they had kept as part of the Emancipation settlement; after the agrarian disorders of 1905 they began to dispose 01 it even more rapidly. About half of the land left in private possession at this time was mortgaged. In the northern provinces, by the end of the nineteenth century dvoriane landholding virtually vanished. Unable to manage, dvoriane sold most of the arable land, retaining mainly forests and pastures which they could lease at good prices without much trouble to themselves. In the south, dvoriane landholding did survive but here too it was on the defensive, retreating under the combined pressure of the land-hungry peasantry and capitalist farming working for export. Efforts of the monarchy to shore up the eroding economic position of dvorianstvo by means of easy credit failed to reverse the process. As pointed out above (p. 169), by 1916 self-employed peasants owned two-thirds of all the cultivated land in Russia not in state possession (and the state had little arable land), as well as nine-tenths of the livestock. As a class, the dvorianstvo lost its economic foundation in the final decades of the imperial regime, and politically it no longer represented any force whatever.