11
The elites
DOMINIC LIEVEN
Throughout the imperial period Russia's political and social elites were drawn overwhelmingly from members of the hereditary noble estate (soslovie).[1] Even in 1914 the core of the social elite were members of great aristocratic landowning families.[2] This group overlappedto a still considerable but ever decreasing degree with the political elite, whose core were senior civilian and military officials. The aristocrats were all from hereditary noble families, these families usually being both old and titled, as well as rich. Most of the military and bureaucratic elite were also by birth from the hereditary nobility, the majority still coming from well-established though not usually rich land-owning families of the provincial gentry, or sometimes from well-entrenched service noble 'dynasties'. The still relatively small minority of senior generals and bureaucrats who were not noble by birth had acquired this status automatically by reaching senior ranks in the civil and military service.[3]
There were really only two relatively minor exceptions to the rule that the imperial elite was made up of hereditary noblemen. During the whole period senior clerics of the Orthodox Church, all of them drawn from the celibate monastic clergy, played a significant role in tsarist government and society.[4] Since the Church was firmly subordinated to the secular ruling elite and enjoyed limited status in aristocratic society, perhaps the senior clergy is best defined as a sub-elite. The other non-noble sub-elite worth mentioning is the new Russian business class which had emerged since the middle of the nineteenth century and whose national centre was Moscow. Whereas before the 1850s most great business fortunes either were founded by the nobility or were absorbed into it by marriage or ennoblement,[5] this became much less true in the last three generations of Imperial Russia, when a distinctive Moscow business elite and subculture emerged and came to dominate Muscovite society. In 1914 this group was still of distinctly second-class status within the tsarist political and social world, and this was a source of weakness for the tsarist regime. By contrast, the Petersburg business and financial elite was less Russian than its Muscovite peers and its financial barons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were closely linked to the Ministry of Finance.
Although members of the imperial social and political elite were almost all hereditary nobles, the hereditary nobility as a group was not a class, let alone a ruling class. It was not a class above all because of its enormous heterogeneity in terms of wealth, culture, lifestyles, economic interests, ethno-national allegiances and careers. Even its aristocratic core was not a true ruling elite because it lacked the political institutions which would have allowed it to define and defend coherent policies and interests, choose its own leaders and control the government machine.6 One way to illustrate these points is by reference to England, whose aristocracy and gentry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a ruling class in the full sense of the word. Through Parliament in the centre and the justices of the peace in the counties the English aristocracy and gentry itself governed the country and developed the skills and mentalities of a political ruling class. Though, except for the tiny group of peers, the English elites had no legally defined status or privileges, the English 'gentlemen' were far more coherent in values, culture, lifestyles and loyalties than the Russian hereditary nobility. This was because to acquire the values and live in the style of an English gentleman required a substantial income. By the nineteenth century almost all gentlemen shared a common experience of socialisation through the expensive Public School system.[6]
The hereditary nobility was not a class nor a political elite but rather a group (estate/soslovie) defined by law whose members shared certain privileges and institutions. These were largely set out in legislation enacted under Peter I and Catherine II.[7] This legislation established who was or was not a noble, how one acquired nobility, what rights and obligations noble status entailed, and what common institutions united the nobility. The most famous piece of Petrine legislation was the 1722 Table of Ranks which stressed the link between service to the crown and noble privilege, and created the rule that officers and civil servants acquired noble status automatically upon reaching defined ranks. Peter's imposition of lifelong state service on male nobles was unique in European (and Russian) history and did not long survive his death. Nevertheless the service ethic remained very important. Until the middle of the nineteenth century even wealthy young nobles usually served some years in the army (or more rarely the bureaucracy) before retiring into a private life of marriage and estate-management.
The eighteenth-century legislation also confirmed the nobility as a property-owning class, with absolute possession of their estates and the subsoil, and exclusive rights to ownership of serfs. Catherine Il's son, Paul I (17961801), attempted to infringe her Noble Charter of 1785 which had confirmed that noble property could under no circumstances be confiscated by the crown and that noble honour entailed an absolute exemption from corporal punishment. Paul's (actually rather limited) assault on the nobility's sense of its rights and dignity was a key factor in his overthrow and assassination by members of the Petersburg aristocracy.[8] Catherine II also established noble corporate institutions in each province (guberniia) and district (uezd). These gave shape and identity to the local nobility, and the elected provincial and district noble marshals became key figures in local government and society. Nevertheless these noble corporate bodies never enjoyed anything approaching the power of provincial estate institutions in Central and Western Europe and it was only after 1905 that the nobility was allowed to create a central overarching body (the Union of the United Nobility) through which it could unite and lobby the government in defence of its interests.
One fundamental point about the hereditary nobility was that it was a relatively small group when one considers the governing, modernising and civilising role which the state expected it to play in Russian government and society. According to Isabel de Madariaga in 1700 the (still not fully defined) nobility entitled to own estates and serfs came to little more than 15,000 men, 'who had to carry the whole military and administrative burden of the new empire'.10 Over the next two centuries the hereditary nobility grew enormously in size, by 1897 numbering 1.2 million people, or roughly 1 per cent of the total population.11 Though this sounds formidable, one has to remember that until well into the second half of the nineteenth century most of the professional class was in state service and thereby ennobled, as were almost all the leading businessmen. Even in 1897 there were two-thirds as many hereditary nobles as there were members of the non-noble professional, clerical and merchant estates combined. European comparisons underline the point that Russia's educated and ruling cadres remained small. In pre- partition Poland 8 per cent of the population was noble, in Hungary in 1820 the figure was 4 per cent. In pre-revolutionary France 1.5 per cent of the population was noble but in addition a large and relatively well-educated middle class also existed. When Russia confronted revolutionary and Napoleonic France its lack of educated cadres put it at a serious disadvantage. Even most officers in Russian infantry regiments of the line in 1812 were not much more than literate, whereas even the French royal army of the 1770s already required literacy of senior non-commissioned officers.12 This helps to explain the warm welcome that the tsarist regime gave to foreigners willing to enter Russian service.
In Peter I's reign the nobility was very largely Russian in ethnic terms, though it included many assimilated (and now Orthodox) nobles of Tatar origin. In the course of the imperial era, however, the nobility became much more diverse. This was partly because both non-Russian subjects of the tsars and foreigners were ennobled in Russian military and civil service, though the families of very many of these servicemen became entirely statist in loyalty and Russian in culture and language. Numerically much more important and politically sometimes less reliable were the nobilities of regions conquered by Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and incorporated into the
10 See I. de Madariaga, 'The Russian Nobility in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries', in H. M. Scott (ed.), The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 2 vols., (London: Longman, 1995), vol. II, p. 249.
11 The fullest discussion of the size of the nobility and of the 1897 census is in A. P. Korelin, Dvorianstvo v poreformennoi Rossii (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), chapter 1.
12 On the Russian officer corpsin 1812, seeD. G. Tselerungo, Ofitseryrusskoiarmii-uchastniki borodinskogo srazheniia (Moscow: Kalita, 2002): on educational levels, see pp. 111-34. On the French army see S. F. Scott, The Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 15-16.
empire. In the 1897 census 53% of hereditary nobles defined their first language as Russian, 28.6% as Polish, 5.9% as Georgian, 5.3% as Turkic/Tatar and 2.04% as German.[9] In the senior ranks of the Russian military and civil service it was Germans, and above all members of the small group of Baltic gentry families, who made by far the biggest impact. Not surprisingly, for most of the imperial period Baltic noblemen in service were much appreciated by the Romanovs and often thoroughly disliked by Russian nobles with whom they were competing for jobs.
Much the most significant privilege possessed by all members of the hereditary nobility before 1861 was their exclusive right to own serfs. However, an ever-growing number of hereditary nobles were not serf owners. Even in 1700 the great majority of noble estates were very small. Subsequently they were partitioned among heirs, with daughters as well as sons increasingly taking a share of lands and serfs. For many men from established noble families, let alone for the growing number of ennobled servicemen, military and civil service became their career, and their source of income and identity. Of the Russian officers who fought at Borodino 77 per cent claimed neither to own estates themselves, nor to be heirs to estates.14 Since this figure includes the Guards regiments, and since army officers were more noble than civil servants, the statistic is all the more striking. After 1861 the landless element within the nobility grew apace, partly because of the problems faced by Russian noble agriculture and partly because the growing size ofthe bureaucracy and armed forces resulted in ever more ennoblements through service. Between 1875 and 1895, for instance, 37,000 individuals acquired hereditary noble status. By 1905 only 30 per cent of the hereditary nobility owned any land.[10]
Given the immense degree of differentiation within the land-owning nobility even common ownership of land (or serfs) did little to create a common sense of interest or identity. In 1797,83.8 per cent of serf owners possessed fewer than 100 serfs, their total ownership amounting to 11.1 per cent of the whole serf population. By contrast the 1.5 per cent of serf owners who possessed over 1,000 serfs owned 35.3 per cent of the serf population.[11] Wealth bought culture: radically differing levels of education, cosmopolitanism and civilisation differentiated the nobility even more than crude statistics of property-owning suggest. Before the nineteenth century, education and culture in general had to be acquired privately, and were therefore largely the monopoly ofthe aristocratic elite. The tiny handful of state educational institutions usually provided only the most rudimentary education to a small minority of the run-of-the-mill provincial nobility. In the nineteenth century the overall cultural level of the nobility rose dramatically but economic differentiation within the land-owning class certainly did not decrease. Everywhere in Europe great aristocratic magnates found it far easier to survive in a capitalist economy than was the case with the land-owning gentry as a whole. Typically, in Russia between 1900 and 1914 the 155 individuals who owned over 50,000 desiatiny sold only 3 per cent of their land, the nobility as a whole over 20 per cent.17 The differing interests of aristocratic magnates and provincial gentry made solidarity difficult, until of course all landowners were threatened by social revolution and expropriation in the twentieth century.
At the core of the hereditary nobility there existed what one can justifiably call an aristocracy. Before 1700 a Russian boyar aristocracy had existed for centuries. The eighteenth century saw it enlarged and enriched. A market for agricultural surpluses emerged, which made commercial agriculture profitable in some regions. Nobles founded a swathe of industrial enterprises on their estates, their monopoly in distilling proving especially valuable, though a small number of magnates also made great fortunes from sugar in the nineteenth century. Most profitable of all was the Urals metallurgical industry, which made Russia the world's leading iron producer by the last quarter of the eighteenth century. By 1800 the whole of this industry was in the hands of a small number of aristocratic families. Meanwhile the massive expansion of Russian territory had brought fertile grain-lands and many other resources into Russian possession. Much of eighteenth-century Russia's new wealth accrued to the crown, which re-distributed a large part ofit to favourites and to leading military and civil officers. Most ofthe richest families ofthe nineteenth-century Russian aristocracy were descended from these individuals either in the direct male line, or through fortunate marriages with heiresses. By 1815 the fruits of the previous century's dramatic economic growth were largely in aristocratic hands and the aristocratic elite, which was to survive down to 1917, was fully formed.
The precise parameters of this group are impossible to draw. Unlike its German or English peers, borders were not defined by titles or by membership of upper houses in the legislature, though even in the British and German cases the boundaries ofthe aristocracy were in reality much more blurred and porous than legal definitions might imply. What united and constituted the Russian aristocracy was membership of a small group of inter-married and usually titled families, all of them very wealthy and with a close historical relationship with the court and the Romanovs. Acceptance into this small circle was defined by marriage and by access to exclusive private salons and clubs (above all, in the nineteenth century the Yacht Club), and to the most aristocratic regiments of the Imperial Guard (Chevaliers Gardes, Horse Guards, Emperor's Life Guard Hussars, Preobrazhensky Guards Infantry Regiment). Since the officers of these regiments in the nineteenth century had the right to accept or reject candidates, this reinforced the principle that membership of the aristocracy was by then above all determined by the aristocrats themselves.[12]
Some families of the aristocracy were branches of the princely dynasties descended from Rurik and Gedymin. The list of Russia's greatest landowners in 1900 includes, for example, Golitsyns, Gagarins, Volkonskiis and Belosel'skii- Belozerskiis, some of whose members were huge Urals landowners. Other aristocratic families were descended from non-titled boyar families ofthe Muscovite court, of whom the Sheremetevs and Naryshkins were most prominent in court, society and government throughout the imperial era. Most of the remaining aristocratic families, such as the Shuvalovs, Vorontsovs and Orlovs, were from the lesser pre-Petrine nobility, whose ancestors had performed military service either in the Moscow or provincial cavalry units. Even in the eighteenth century it was very difficult for any Russian from outside these groups to come within range of imperial notice and largesse. A handful of non-nobles did achieve this, however, of whom the most famous was Prince Menshikov in the reign of Peter I. In addition, two famous Russian merchant families lived at the core of the aristocracy in the imperial era, the Stroganovs from its inception and the Demidovs by the nineteenth century.
Whatevertheir ultimate ethnic origin, all these families were ethnic Russians by the eighteenth century though the cosmopolitan and frequently French- speaking world of Petersburg high society was often seen as alien, even disloyal, by nineteenth-century Russian nationalists. Nevertheless it was one of the strengths of the tsarist regime that it was able to incorporate the aristocracies of most of its non-Russian peripheral regions into the imperial nobility and even into the Petersburg aristocracy. This was particularly crucial as regards the Ukraine. The raw Cossack elite of the Hetmanate may have regretted some of the freedoms it lost upon assimilation into the empire, but the status, careers and privileges it acquired through membership of the Russian nobility made it easier to bow to the inevitable.19 Some of the most famous names of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian political history (Razumovskii, Potemkin, Bezborodko, Kochubei) were minor nobles of the Western Borderlands transformed by imperial favour and their own ability into core members of the Petersburg elite.
The same process occurred with a few families of ultimately Tatar or non- Christian origin, for example the Yusupovs, but in these cases entry into the Russian aristocracy meant complete sundering of ancestral roots. This was true to a much lesser degree of the leading Georgian families, the Bagrations, Immeritinskiis, Orbelianis and Dadianis. The regime's relationship with the Polish aristocracy was more troubled, though for obvious reasons the great magnates were much less inclined to radical nationalism than was the case with the Polish gentry as a whole. The Baltic German gentry on the contrary was very loyal, at least until the 1880s when tsarist administrative centralisation and support for Russian nationalism began to alienate many of its members. Although Baltic noble agriculture flourished throughout the imperial era and countless Balts made outstanding careers in the Russian service, very few big Baltic landowners also acquired great estates in Russia or joined the Petersburg aristocracy. As Haxthausen noted, the list barely extended beyond the Lievens and Pahlens, though in the nineteenth century the Benckendorffs were also fully-fledged members of Petersburg aristocratic society.[13]
By the end of the first half of the imperial era (i.e. roughly 1815) these families and their peers had been consolidated into a relatively homogeneous aristocratic elite. Though this aristocratic core of the Russian nobility to a very great extent survived down to 1917, in the interim it had been forced to concede much of its political power and role in government to the rapidly expanding bureaucracy. This was an inevitable concomitant of the modernisation of state and society, and had its parallels throughout nineteenth-century
Europe. Bureaucracies grew in scale and professionalism in order to regulate and modernise increasingly complex societies. No aristocracy could provide recruits for all the new posts and skills that an expandingbureaucracy required. Even had it done so, these recruits' professional skills and career experience would still have differentiated them from each other and from the bulk of the land-owning elite.
The Russian bureaucratic elite which developed in the nineteenth century drew some of its recruits from the aristocracy and many more from the sons of the provincial land-owning gentry. In its initial period of growth, and especially under Nicholas I (r. 1825-55), its senior ranks were often dominated by generals, very many of whom were also aristocrats. By the second half of the nineteenth century most ministers were former civil servants, though right down to 1917 almost all governors-general, many provincial governors and a few other senior officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs were military officers. All officers of the Gendarmerie (i.e. the political police) had previously served in the army and still to some extent came under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of War.
By the reign of Nicholas II the army was dominated by military professionals, often of humble origin, who were usually graduates of the General Staff Academy. Senior officers serving in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in the Ministry of the Imperial Court or as regional governors and governors-general on the contrary were usually former Guards officers from well-connected families who had often abandoned professional military careers at a relatively early age for more rapid and sometimes easier careers in the civil administration. Governors by definition were 'generalists' and in addition even in the twentieth century benefited from an ability to move comfortably in provincial landowning society. Not at all surprisingly, and in a way that had many Prussian and English parallels, governorships were very frequently held by aristocrats and members of prominent gentry families. Some of these men were former Guards officers but even more had previously served as district and provincial marshals of the nobility.
If the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and in particular its top provincial official, remained gentry nests in the bureaucracy, the same was even more true ofthe Foreign Ministry and diplomatic service, which were packed with aristocrats. Once again, in this Russia followed the usual European pattern of the era. Indeed in a monarchical Europe where the political world and high society were still intertwined, it was relatively easy to justify the continuing domination of the Foreign Ministry by scions of the aristocracy and prominent gentry families.
The most spectacular examples of aristocratic military and naval officers who held key positions in government were some of the Romanov grand dukes, all of whom served in the armed forces but some of whom played important roles in domestic politics and administration even in the reign of the last emperor. The values, lifestyles and social circle of these men linked them much more closely to the aristocracy than to the professional civil servants who increasingly dominated the government, and for whom in general the Romanovs had little sympathy. On the other hand, most of the Romanov family, and above all the last two monarchs, also had no sympathy for aristocratic political pretensions. Nicholas II in particular was a populist who far preferred the peasants (or at least his own conception of the peasantry) to Petersburg high society, in which he (not to mention his wife) felt increasingly ill at ease. By January 1917 Nicholas II had succeeded in alienating himself from almost the entire Russian elite, whether aristocratic, bureaucratic or military.
The civil bureaucratic elite of the nineteenth century was mostly educated in one of four higher educational institutions: the Alexander Lycee and the School of Law, both exclusively noble boarding schools, and the universities of St Petersburg and Moscow. These institutions were on a par with the best schools and universities in Europe. As its name implies, the School of Law existed to train judicial officials, and most graduates of the two universities had also studied in their law faculties. The Alexander Lycee, on the other hand, offered a broader humanitarian curriculum. Its graduates packed the top ranks of Nicholas II's Foreign Ministry, just as graduates of the School of Law dominated the Ministry of Justice and the Senate. On the whole by the last quarter of the nineteenth century senior and middle-ranking officials in Petersburg were intelligent, incorruptible and professionally competent bureaucrats with a strong commitment to the state and to Russia. As in many bureaucracies, the ablest officials were often those serving in the key coordinating central institutions: in Russia's case that meant above all the State Chancellery and the Chancellery of the Committee of Ministers. Also very able were most officials of the Finance Ministry. Some top Finance Ministry officials by the twentieth century had considerable experience in running private investment banks. Although most senior officials saw themselves (by no means necessarily wrongly) as more competent than any other group to govern Russia, their authoritarian and paternalistic proclivities were often tempered by acute awareness of the state's need to hold the allegiance of key social elites, who in many cases remained their own friends and close relations.
Inevitably senior officials sometimes lacked political skills and were at sea after 1905 when forced to speak and propagandise for government policy in the Duma (parliament). In other respects they were sometimes all too political: since ministers were senior officials and no real barrier divided politics and administration, officials had to be sensitive to policy, and to ideological and factional conflict at court and among the ministers simply in order to survive. Making a successful career in some parts of the civil service required not just hard work and professional competence but also caution, and the ability to acquire powerful patrons and to keep one's nose to the current political wind. When they actually reached top ministerial positions, the free-wheeling political skills they had honed during bureaucratic careers could, however, often serve senior officials well. Traditionally tsarist bureaucracy has had a very bad press from Russian aristocratic, liberal and radical critics, not to mention from Anglo-American historians. But from the origins of the modern Russian civil bureaucracy in the 1800s under the wing of Mikhail Speranskii down to 1917, the civil service produced many outstanding statesmen. A bureaucratic elite whose last generation produced men as diverse, imaginative and effective as Serge Witte, Petr Stolypin, Petr Durnovo and Alexander Krivoshein was something more than a Gogolean farce.[14]
In the imperial era the Russian elites, both aristocratic and bureaucratic, were part of a broader European elite culture and society. This was more true in the nineteenth century than in the eighteenth, and it always tended to be most true the higher up the social ladder one travelled. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century the Petersburg and Moscow intellectual elite, inevitably drawn overwhelmingly from the wealthier nobility, was developing its own variation on the theme of modern European literary culture.[15] In the nineteenth century it was to produce some of Europe's greatest musicians, poets and novelists. In general, education had high prestige among the nineteenth- century Russian elites, including among their wives and daughters. Given the extent to which the Russian elites drew on European models for everything from literary culture to fashionable dress and administrative modernisation, it was inevitable that they would attach a very high value to European languages. In certain respects educated Russian elites in the nineteenth century were indeed more 'European' than many of their peers in western and central
Europe in that they were better equipped to look at European culture in total and without some of the national blinkers of the French, English or Germans.
In cultural terms the nineteenth-century Russian elites were obviously far closer to Europe than to Asia. In fact, even if one goes back to 1700 and compares socioeconomic and political structures rather than cultures, one comes to the same conclusion. One good way to situate Russia on the global map is to make brief comparisons with the two other great empires in Asia at that time, namely the Ottoman Empire and China's Ching dynasty. In very many ways, comparing these three land empires provides rewarding insights for a Russianist, but it also underlines how much closer to Europe than to Asia the Russian elites were even in the Petrine era.
If, for instance, one looks at the Ottoman ruling group, the slave elite which governed the Ottoman Empire at its apogee had much in common with other ruling systems in the Middle East and very little in common with Russia. Even after the abolition of the devsirme the Ottoman elite was far from being an hereditary, military, property-owning nobility on the European (or Russian) model. The absence of monogamy and the existence of the imperial harem strongly differentiated Russian and Ottoman patterns ofinheritance andpower relations. So too did the absence in the Ottoman Empire of secure property rights to land. Already in the seventeenth century Russia was borrowing ideas and techniques from Europe. Quite apart from anything else, overt borrowing from an Islamic state would have been very difficult.23
In the case of the Chinese imperial tradition, one might argue that Chinese elites' strong identification with state service had some similarities with Russia. But the highly refined and self-confident secular high culture of Chinese elites had no equivalent in Petrine Russia. Nor did the cultural and ideological hegemony of the civil bureaucracy, and the latter's contempt for the brutal craft of war. In imperial Russian elite culture and society, officers, and especially Guards officers, always enjoyed far higher respect than the despised bureaucracy. One can indeed make some interesting comparisons between Russian elites and the Manchu military aristocracy which shared the rule of Ching China, so long as one remembers that in terms of mutual cultural awareness the two elites might as well have lived on separate planets. But even in structural-political terms, the position of an initially semi-nomadic conquest elite ruling over a culturally somewhat alien sedentary society has far more in common with the Mughal or Ottoman Empire than it does with tsarist
Russia.[16]
If Russian elites belonged unequivocally to Europe rather than Asia, they were nevertheless a very specific variation on the European theme. In certain respects their position vis-a-vis the crown was much weaker than in most of the rest of Europe. One illustration of the Russian monarchy's power concerns the lands of the Church. In Catholic Europe the Church usually held on to its lands into the nineteenth century. In Protestant countries ecclesiastical land was usually acquired by the landed elites as a result of the Reformation. In the Russian case, however, the state took over the Church's lands and held on to them. That was one reason why on the eve of emancipation more Russian peasants 'belonged' to the state than to private landlords.
The absence of feudal traditions, or at least of traditions which survived into the eighteenth century, is often and correctly cited as one of the key weaknesses of the Russian aristocracy. At the core of feudalism was the contract mutually binding on monarch and aristocracy. In more concrete form feudalism bequeathed estate institutions which were the forebears of representative government and which operated on the principle that the king was subject to law and could not tax his subjects without their consent. Though the lack of such institutions and concepts did indeed make the Russian elites very vulnerable to an autocrat's whims, one should not, however, forget the other side of the picture. In 1763 the Russian bureaucracy was barely larger than the Prussian and far worse educated.[17] Most German princes governed states which were tiny by Russian standards and could employ a swathe of university-educated officials, many of whom studied courses in cameralism in educational institutions which had existed since medieval times. Russia's first university was founded in 1755. Even in 1800 the number of state high schools (gymnazii) was pitiful. Inevitably therefore the crown was very dependent on the provincial landowner, whom Paul I called the state's involuntary police chief and tax collector in the village. Moreover, as many eighteenth-century monarchs discovered, emperors who annoyed the Petersburg aristocracy were liable to be overthrown and murdered in palace coups.
The reign of Alexander I witnesses to some of the realities of this mutual dependence of crown and nobility. By 1801 a significant section of the Petersburg aristocratic elite was already beginning to hanker after English-style civil and political rights. Alexander's rejection of the claims of the so-called 'Senatorial Party' frustrated them. His failure after 1815 to deliver either on the abolition of serfdom or on constitutional reform infuriated the future Decembrists and led to plans for revolution and regicide. But Alexander too faced frustration. The evidence strongly suggests that his desire to end serfdom and introduce some sort of constitution was sincere. In the absence of support from at least a sizeable minority of the nobility, however, emancipation might easily lead both to his own assassination and to chaos in the state administration. The fiasco which resulted from his efforts to create military colonies does not suggest optimism about any attempt to rule the countryside directly through officialdom. Moreover, given both the political views and the low cultural level ofthe provincial landowners, one can at least understand why Alexander might believe that the cause of progress was best entrusted to unlimited autocratic power.26
The emergence of an effective bureaucracy during the nineteenth century changed the balance of power between crown and aristocracy. Tension between aristocracy and the growing bureaucratic state was common in Europe but in Russia took extreme forms. This was in part because the Russian bureaucracy was often peculiarly incompetent and intrusive. Relatively unconstrained by law, it was quite capable oftrampling on the civil rights and dignity of noblemen. In addition, almost uniquely by 1900, Russia's social elites had no representative institutions through which they could exercise some degree of supervision over the bureaucratic state. It is not a complete coincidence that two of Europe's most famous anarchists were members of prominent Russian aristocratic (Petr Kropotkin) and gentry (Mikhail Bakunin) families. When the bureaucratic state imposed policies very unfavourable to noble interests hostility threatened to turn into revolt. There were signs of this in the wake of the 1861 emancipation settlement. In 1900-5 the anger of noble landowners at Witte's policy of industrialisation was an important factor in the growing revolt of the elected local assemblies (zemstva) amidst a surge of gentry liberalism.
The landowners' anger has also, however, to be seen within the context of the economic difficulties faced by Russian nobles after 1861. Most noble- owned industrial enterprises collapsed since they could not operate profitably without serf labour and could not compete with modern, capitalist factories. Noble agriculture also faced huge difficulties, one result of which was that 43 per cent of all noble land was sold between 1862 and 1905. Traditionally the post-emancipation era has been seen as one of noble decline, a decline for which the nobles' own fecklessness was partly responsible.
Without in any way denying that fecklessness existed, the nobility's economic performance needs to be put in context. Everywhere in Europe, with the partial exception of Silesia, the aristocracy was pulling out of industrial leadership. In much of Russia it was virtually impossible to run big agricultural estates profitably, particularly after the influx of New World grain and meat into global markets which began in the 1870s. Everywhere in Europe noble agriculture faced varying shades of crisis. If the big East Anglian landowners, traditional paragons of agricultural enterprise and advanced technology, could not survive the Great Depression, it is not at all surprising that the same was true of many Russian landlords.[18]
In any case the picture of decline is only partly correct. Like their European peers, and very sensibly, many Russian nobles were withdrawing from direct industrial enterprise and moving into stocks and bonds. By 1910 some aristocrats had huge portfolios and 49 per cent of the 137,825 nobles residing in St Petersburg lived on income from securities. Between 1862 and 1912 noble land had increased in value by 443 per cent while diminishing in extent by more than half. No doubt many Russian nobles had made the sensible decision to cash in their land for a much more reliable source of income which enabled them to live snugly as urban rentiers. Of course by pursuing this strategy, the Russian nobility began to undermine their position as the dominant group in rural society and in rural government at district (uezd) and local levels. This is, however, an inevitable part of modernity, and one might argue that the Russians' strategy was healthier than the determination of the Prussian junkers to preserve their increasingly anachronistic position as a rural ruling class through ruthless agrarian interest-group politics.[19]
The Russian situation in which the land-owning gentry suffered but aristocratic families became the core of a new industrial-era plutocracy was very common to Europe as a whole. On the eve of the First World War the ratio of debt to income among the Russian aristocracy was usually a good deal healthier than it had been a century before. Russia's richest aristocrats had incomes of between £100,000 and £200,000 per annum. Given their sometimes immense holdings of shares and urban land, there was every reason to expect these incomes to soar as the industrial economy took off, as had happened to some aristocratic incomes in England and Germany. Even the Urals aristocratic magnates, though temporarily falling on bad times, had much room for optimism in 1914. With bank capital and new railways on the point of linking the region's vast iron ore deposits to the coal of western Siberia, there was good reason to expect huge future profits from their still immense landholdings.
In the early twentieth century the biggest threat to the land-owning class was political rather than economic. In 1905 peasant looters tried to destroy many noble estates. In 1906-7 peasant deputies, who made up a majority in the first two Dumas, demanded the expropriation of all private large-scale land-owning in Russia. The revolution of 1905-6 in fact drove the regime and the nobility back into close alliance. The landowners understood that without the support of the tsarist police and army their estates would be forfeit. Meanwhile the government learned the dangers of isolation even from its natural supporters among Russia's elites. Relations between crown and landed nobility were much better after 1906 than they had been in the decade before 1905. Nevertheless tensions remained, often for reasons which were already familiar from Prussian developments. In Russia, as earlier in Prussia, the regime's response to near revolution had been to set up a parliament dominated by representatives of the land-owning elite, who for the first time were able to articulate programmes, unite to defend their group interests, and choose their own leaders. In time the Prussian agrarians became a formidable conservative lobby and a thorn in the side of the Berlin government. Their Russian equivalents strongly circumscribed Stolypin's reformist strategy because of their great influence in both the lower (Duma) and upper (State Council) houses of the newly established parliament.
European comparisons suggest that in 1914 the Russian land-owning nobility was both not powerful enough and too powerful for its own good. In nineteenth-century England 7,000 individuals, mostly members of the aristocracy and gentry, owned over 80 per cent of the land. Prussian land-owning was never this aristocratic, but in some provinces the big estates covered more than half the land. Both upper classes controlled rural society with little difficulty. In the English tenant farmer and the Prussian 'big' peasant the nobles also had powerful allies in the defence of property and order. In 1848-9 the Prussian nobles could play off peasant and landless labourer in a way that was far harder in most of Russia, given the relative solidarity of the much more homogeneous communal peasantry. On the other hand, however, the Russian nobles had not yet succeeded in marginalising themselves in the manner of the west and south German nobilities. By 1914 the latter very seldom owned more than 5 per cent of the land in any province and were barely a worthwhile target for expropriation. By contrast, even in the Central Industrial region (admittedly in 1905) the Russian nobles still owned 13.7 per cent of the land. In the south and west German case, many generations had passed since the end of serfdom and the tensions it had caused. In addition, the growing power of urban and industrial lobbies was tending to create a common agrarian front, which in Catholic areas enjoyed the powerful support of the Church. None of this applied in Russia.[20]
For rather obvious reasons, between i860 and 1945 political stability was more tenuous in the poorer 'Second World' periphery of Europe than in its richer First World core. Property was less secure against social revolution and large agrarian property least secure of all. If this was true a fortiori of Russia it was not much less true of Hungary, Italy, Spain or even Ireland. In the Irish case the uniquely wealthy English tax-payer bought out the landlords on generous terms, in the process probably weakening the Anglo-Irish union but killing any chance of social revolution.[21] This option was not available in the rest of peripheral Europe. In Italy in i920-i fascism made great strides by helping the landowners, especially of Tuscany and the Po valley, to crush agrarian radicalism. In Spain and Hungary it took full-scale military counter-revolution backed by formidable foreign intervention to save the land-owning aristocracy from probable destruction. In Russia in 1917 only the victory of military counter-revolution could have saved the big estates, which would have been expropriated as certainly by a democratically elected parliament as they were in fact by peasant mobs and Bolshevik decrees. One could very legitimately see the regimes of General Franco or Admiral Horthy as a high price to pay for the survival of aristocracy. In the specific Russian case, however, the destruction of the traditional rural elite went along with the emergence of a Bolshevik regime whose leaders seldom had much sympathy for, or understanding of, agriculture or peasants. Under Stalin this regime was to mount an assault on the Russian peasantry which went well beyond anything conceivable to Horthy or Franco.31
31 The best comparative work on the politics of aristocratic landownership in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is R. Gibson and M. Blinkhorn (eds.), Landownership and Power in Modern Europe (London: Harper Collins, 1991).
The groups between: raznochintsy, intelligentsia, professionals
ELISE KIMERLING WIRTSCHAFTER
Beginning in the eighteenth century, when regularised bureaucracy struck deep roots in imperial Russia, policy-makers struggled to visualise the middle layers of Russian society. The vast geographical reaches of the empire, the cultural diversity of its population and the absence of constituted political bodies made it difficult to define the social groups situated between the mass of peasant cultivators and the governing classes of noble landowners, civil servants and military officers. As early as the middle of the seventeenth century Muscovite officials codified the assignment of Russian subjects to legally defined ranks (chiny) that carried specific rights, privileges and obligations to the state. This practice continued in the eighteenth century, when agglomerated social categories (sostoianiia or sosloviia) took shape, and remained a key feature of Russian social organisation until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Sometimes called 'estates' by modern-day historians, the Russian sostoianiia consisted of hereditary statuses that functioned both as tools of administration and as social communities.[22] The Russian categories did not play a political role equivalent to that of the French Etats or German Stande, but they did share important features with these groups. Like corporate groups in Western and Central Europe, Russian nobles, clergy and townspeople enjoyed distinctive hereditary privileges; however, in contrast to the European groups, their privileges were not historically constituted in the local law codes, institutions and offices of identifiable territories.2 Indeed, at the Russian monarch's discretion, without the consent of any corporate institution, privileges could be granted or rescinded and obligations redefined.
Alongside the primary categories of Russian society - the nobles, clergy, merchants, townspeople and peasants - the Russian government also erected a range of subgroups characterised by distinctive occupational functions, service obligations and legal privileges. Among the most significant and persistent of these subgroups, the category of the raznochintsy (literally 'people of various ranks' or 'people of diverse origins') appeared early in the eighteenth century and remained an officially recognised social status until the late nineteenth century. In some legal-administrative usages, the designation 'from the raznochintsy' referred to outsiders or non-members of a given social category or community - for example, non-nobles or town residents who were not registered members of the official urban community (the posad). In other applications, the raznochintsy represented an umbrella category encompassing a range of protoprofessionals and lesser servicemen: low-ranking civil servants and unranked administrative employees, retired soldiers, the children of senior military officers born before a father's ennoblement, the children of personal (non-hereditary) nobles, non-noble students in state schools and various specialists, scholars, artists and performers. Careful perusal of the relevant legislation suggests that the malleable contours of the raznochintsy derived from both positive definitions based on function and negative definitions based on exclusion.[23]
The multiplicity of economic, service andprotoprofessional subgroups that made up the raznochintsy highlighted both the complicated structure of Russia's 'groups between' and the desire of the government to impose legal- administrative controls across society Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, resource mobilisation, the regularisation and expansion of state service, and the spread of education gave rise to new social groups that, in accordance with the political thinking ofthe time, needed to be institutionalised as legally defined social categories. Because each category performed specific functions in society and polity, the various subgroups of raznochintsy tended to correspond to recognisable occupations. Yet as the composition of the raznochintsy also showed, the realities of everyday life - the ways in which people struggled to survive and thrive - were far too amorphous and changeable to be contained within prescribed social relationships.
For much of the imperial period, the raznochintsy included entrepreneurial and needy individuals whose economic relationships violated officially recognised social and geographic boundaries. Well into the nineteenth century, for example, debt relations, private employment, and lost social identities allowed non-nobles to exploit serf labour, even though the possession of serfs had become an exclusive noble right in the 1750s.[24] Similarly, in violation of the 1649 Law Code (Ulozhenie) and much subsequent legislation, peasants continued to set up shop in the towns, a privilege theoretically restricted to registered members ofthe official urban community (the townspeople or meshchane). Notwithstanding legal prohibitions and cameralist policing, the Russian government appeared powerless to prevent the illicit pursuit of profit. Nor did it necessarily want to stymie the inventiveness of wayward subjects; when properly regulated through the sale of trading privileges, illicit economic ventures acquired official sanction and served the fiscal interests of the state. Thus, the ascribed (pripisannyi) or trading (torguiushchii) peasant of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could legally reside in a town on condition that he pay taxes as both a peasant and a member of the urban community.[25] With the help of flexible legal definitions, including the various definitions of the raznochintsy, officials tolerated or only half-heartedly prosecuted enterprising subjects who usurped the economic privileges assigned by law to other social groups.
The category of the raznochintsy, by incorporating social and economic relationships that lay outside the framework of official 'society', at once facilitated and undermined governmental control. Prior to the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the pursuit of profit, the satisfaction of greed and the struggle to subsist frequently took the form of forbidden economic activity that the government sought to eradicate or co-opt. Moreover, because some productive, potentially beneficial economic ventures (subsequently regarded as legitimate entrepreneurship) remained illicit and informally organised, business fortunes also could be highly unstable. Thus, for over three decades, from 1813 until 1844, the serf entrepreneur Nikolai Shipov roamed the Russian Empire geographically and occupationally, by legal and illegal means, until finally he achieved emancipation and became a sutler in the Caucasus and Bessarabia.[26]As Shipov's experience illustrates, the Russian government's insistence that economic functions be based on social origin inevitably led ambitious and talented individuals to violate the law The presence of successful entrepreneurs among the raznochintsy revealed the skill with which ordinary Russians not only evaded state authority but also manipulated official social definitions in the interest of personal security and profit.
Try as it might to contain society's development within hereditary social categories, the imperial government's need to mobilise human and material resources also created legal opportunities for the crossing of social boundaries. The imposition of service obligations opened avenues of social mobility and spawned new subgroups of raznochintsy. When serfs, state peasants and registered townspeople were conscripted into the army, they became legally free from the authority of the landlord or local community; consequently, soldiers' wives and any children born to soldiers or their wives after the former entered service also attained legal freedom. Legal emancipation surely represented upward mobility, yet its realisation and consequences remained problematic. For while soldiers and their families enjoyed special economic and educational privileges, their actual lives did not always conform to official prescriptions. Soldiers' wives (soldatki) could obtain passports allowing them to engage in urban trades, and soldiers' sons (soldatskie deti) were required to enter military schools and eventually active service; however, local communities did not necessarily tolerate the presence of soldiers' wives, and soldiers' children, including female and illegitimate children, did not necessarily end up in the appropriate schools, institutions or occupational groups. By freeing lower-class people from local seignorial and community controls, the demands of military service produced a floating population, eligible for registration in a variety of service and economic groups, but not always living within the confines of their legal status.[27]
Whether historians focus attention on economic activities or state service, a dynamic relationship between governmental policy and spontaneous societal development underlies the phenomenon of the raznochintsy. Effective government required both trained personnel and a prosperous populace. But whereas the extraction of resources from society encouraged the imposition of ever-tighter social controls, the demand for educated servicemen loosened social restrictions and encouraged social mobility. Throughout the imperial period, commoners acquired education, benefited from the rewards of state service and rose into the hereditary nobility precisely because the state needed technically competent administrative and military personnel. At the higher levels of Russian society, the Table of Ranks institutionalised this process, which included the creation of service-related raznochintsy. Established in 1722 by Peter the Great, the Table ofRanks regulated promotion and ennoblement in military, state and court service.[28] In state service, promotion to rank eight conferred hereditary nobility, whereas ranks nine to fourteen granted personal nobility. Personal nobles enjoyed all the rights and privileges of hereditary nobles, including the right to possess populated estates, but their non-noble children did not inherit these rights.[29] Thus children born to civil servants or military officers priorto hereditary ennoblement belongedto the raznochintsy, as did individual servicemen whose positions fell below the Table of Ranks and those whose ranks did not confer nobility (hereditary or personal). Adding to the complexity of these arrangements, a law of 1832 established the title 'honoured citizen', which granted noble-like privileges - exemption from conscription, the capitation and corporal punishment - in recognition of economic and cultural achievements.[30]
As the number of servicemen and educated non-nobles grew and as ennoblement occurred at ever-higher ranks, the significance of the raznochintsy moved beyond the realm of legal-administrative order into the realm of social consciousness. With the founding of Moscow University in 1755, the official boundaries of the raznochintsy had expanded to include all non-noble students at the university and preparatory gymnasia, many of whom would go on to serve in the army and bureaucracy.[31] Born of the government's need for scholars, artists, technical specialists and trained servicemen, the educated commoners became the most widely recognised subgroup of raznochintsy. In nineteenth-century literature, memoirs and journalism, and in much subsequent commentary and scholarship, the category of the raznochintsy referred to upwardly mobile educated commoners who belonged to a 'society' (obshch- estvo) or 'public' (publika) of diverse social origins. This notion of 'society' as an abstract entity arose in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to indicate fashionable or polite society (le grand monde), 'the civil society of the educated', or educated Russians who were 'neither agents of the government (pravitel'stvo) nor in the traditional sense its subjects (narod)'.12 Organised around print culture and sites of polite sociability, 'society' originated in the educated service classes of the eighteenth century, which while overwhelmingly noble, also encompassed a sizeable contingent of non-noble raznochintsy.13
Almost from the outset, however, noble members of 'society' questioned the moral worthiness of the educated raznochintsy. Noble instructions to the Legislative Commission of 1767-8 defined the raznochintsy not simply as non-nobles, an established legal-administrative usage, but also as new service nobles in the derogatory sense of social upstarts. This derogatory usage acquired broad resonance in the nineteenth century, when major literary figures such as Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Turgenev depicted the raznochintsy as social and cultural inferiors. For P. D. Boborykin, a noble journalist prominent in the 1860s, the raznochintsy likewise represented social and cultural inferiors who nonetheless participated in the literary, theatrical and musical life of St Petersburg.14 Whatever their contributions to the empire's military might and cultural glory, and these received recognition already in the eighteenth century, the raznochintsy in no way represented the best 'society'.
But the noble Boborykin also used the category raznochintsy in a more neutral sense to describe participants in a socially diverse urban cultural milieu. Out of this milieu there emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century an identifiable group of non-noble radical intellectuals enshrined in Russian cultural memory as 'the raznochintsy'. Associated with the likes ofV G. Belinsky, N. G. Chernyshevsky and N. A. Dobroliubov, the educated raznochintsy of the i840s-70s combined literary careers with social radicalism and political opposition. As in the past, some members of Russian 'society' disdained the raznochintsy, seeing in their radical ideas and alternative lifestyle, a threat to morality and civilisation. To others, the raznochintsy represented a generation of 'new people' who would lead the country through a revolutionary transformation to a bright and joyous future. Regardless of how the raznochintsy were judged, their presence in the consciousness of Russia's educated
12 M. Raeff, 'Transfiguration and Modernization: The Paradoxes of Social Disciplining, Paedagogical Leadership, and the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Russia', in H. Bodeker and E. Hinrichs (eds.), Alteuropa - Ancien Regime - Friihe Neuzeit: Prohleme und Methoden der Forschung (Stuttgart, Bad Cannstatt: Fromann-Holzboog, 1991), p. 109. See also A. Netting, 'Russian Liberalism: The Years of Promise', unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia University (1967), p. 20.
13 M. M. Shtrange, Demokraticheskaia intelligentsiia Rossii v XVIII veke (Moscow: Nauka,
i965).
14 Wirtschafter, Structures of Society, pp. 98-101.
classes contributed to the formation of another sociocultural identity, the intelligentsia, which has remained an 'institution' of Russian society to the present day.15
On-going scholarly research shows that the conceptual and historical reality of the intelligentsia, no less than that of the raznochintsy, cannot be subordinated to any single collective meaning.16 Historians situate 'the origins of the Russian intelligentsia' in a variety of social milieus: the educated and increasingly disaffected service nobility of the eighteenth century; the idealist philosophical circles that formed around the universities, salons and 'thick' journals of the i83os-4os; and finally, the radical raznochintsy and nihilist movement of the 1860s.17 One historian counts over sixty definitions of the 'intelligentsia' in the scholarship of the former Soviet Union, the most common being a social group composed of individuals 'professionally employed in mental labour'. Echoing the official classifications of Soviet society, this definition equates the intelligentsia with the technically specialised professions of modern times.18 Clearly, the possibilities for definition and redefinition are numerous. Suffice it to say that any effort to summarise or critically evaluate the massive historiography on the intelligentsia can hardly do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon or the diligence of its scholars.
15 On the continuity of the intelligentsia 'counterculture', seeJ. Burbank, 'Were the Russian Intelligenty Organic Intellectuals?' in L. Fink, S. T. Leonard and D. M. Reid (eds.), Intellectuals and Public Life: Between Radicalism and Reform (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 97-120.
16 As a collective term, intelligentsia appeared in Russia from the i83os to the i86os. Wirtschafter, Structures ofSociety,pp. 101-2,125-33; O. Muller, Intelligencija. Untersuchungen zurGeschichteeinespolitischenSchlagwortes (Frankfurt: Athenaum, 1971); andmost recently S. O. Shmidt, 'K istorii slova "intelligentsiia"', reprinted in Obshchestvennoe samosoznanie rossiiskogo blagorodnogo sosloviia, XVII-pervaia tret' XIX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 2002), pp. 300-9.
17 I provide here only a handful of references. M. Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966); M. Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961); D. Brower, 'The Problem of the Russian Intelligentsia', SR 26 (1967): 638-47; D. Brower, TrainingtheNihilists:EducationandRadicalisminTsaristRussia(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975); A. Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979); V Nahirny, 'The Russian Intelligentsia: From Men of Ideas to Men of Convictions', Comparative Studies in Society and History 4 (1962): 403-35; V Nahirny The Russian Intelligentsia: From Torment to Silence (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1983). For fuller historio- graphic treatment, see Wirtschafter, Structures of Society, pp. 93-150; Wirtschafter, Social Identity, pp. 86-99.
18 S. I. Khasanova, 'K voprosu ob izuchenii intelligentsii dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii', in G. N. Vul'fson (ed.), Revoliutsionno-osvoboditel'noe dvizhenie v XIX-XX vv. v Povolzh'e i Pri- ural'e (Kazan: Izd. Kazanskogo universiteta, 1974), pp. 37-54; V R. Leikina-Svirskaia, 'Formirovanie raznochinskoi intelligentsii v Rossii v 40-kh godakh XIX v.', Istoriia SSSR (1958) no. 1: 83-104; V R. Leikina-Svirskaia, Intelligentsiia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow: Mysl', 1971).
In current popular and scholarly usage, it often seems as if almost any educated or self-educated individual in Russia in the nineteenth or early twentieth century can be identified as an intelligent (pl. intelligenty), a member of the intelligentsia. But to warrant inclusion in the intelligentsia, a person also needed to possess a critical mind, a secular code of ethics, a commitment to social justice, a strong sense of individual dignity and cultural refinement or, as in the case of the nihilists of the 1860s, a distinctive lifestyle. An educated person who did not become a social radical or political oppositionist still could take an active interest in the reform of government and the welfare of the empire's population. Possessed of social conscience and political awareness, such a person might be called an intelligent and placed in the ranks of the intelligentsia. Membership in the intelligentsia is perhaps best represented as a sociocultural ideal or identity that encouraged the individual to define personal morality and personal interests in social terms. The intelligent worked for the betterment of society, whether or not this effort served the needs of his or her family and immediate community. To be an intelligent did not require adherence to any particular political movement, but it did imply a critical attitude toward conditions in society and government. Equally crucial, it implied a desire to change those conditions.19
Such an amorphous, value-laden definition of the intelligentsia can make concrete historical analysis difficult. A member of the intelligentsia could belong to or originate from a broad range of social, occupational and professional groups, including nobles and factory workers, officials and revolutionaries. He or she could embrace almost any political ideology or party, from monarchist to liberal to anarchist, and be a religious believer or an atheist, a nationalist or an internationalist. The intelligent also could represent almost any artistic movement or school of scholarly inquiry. Historians struggle valiantly to understand the intelligentsia in sociological, ideological and cultural terms. Not only do they seek to connect specific ideas to identifiable subcultures or social environments; their definitions also move back and forth between the intelligentsia as a 'subjective' state of mind and the intelligentsia as an 'objective' social stratum. Precisely because no single social circle, political movement or cultural current can contain the concept or reality of the intelligentsia, scholars end up distinguishing multiple intelligentsias: the noble intelligentsia, the 'democratic' (non-noble) intelligentsia, the liberal intelligentsia, the radical intelligentsia, the revolutionary intelligentsia, the worker intelligentsia, the peasant intelligentsia and so on. True to the very traditions of the Russian intelligentsia, historians are unable to avoid subjective judgements when trying to determine membership in the 'real' intelligentsia.[32]
Given the social and political diversity ofthe intelligentsia, even those historians who rely on subjective factors to define the group are reluctant to equate membership with a specific set of principles, beliefs or attitudes. Instead of compiling a laundry list ofsocial, political and moral traits, they represent the intelligentsia as a form of individual or collective self-definition. Self-declared members ofthe intelligentsia assumed a declasse position in Russian society by claiming to be above the interests and concerns of any particular social group or territorial community. Ironically, intelligenty propagated a myth of the intelligentsia that echoed the myth of the monarchy so many of them sought to oppose. Like the monarchy, members of the intelligentsia presented themselves as transcendent in the sense of being 'above class interests', though in contrast to the monarchy, they lacked concrete powers of intervention. Nor could the intelligentsia claim God-given or sacred authority; their moral authority remained strictly secular, sometimes even atheistic. Through education and personal behaviour, not election by God, individuals achieved social recognition as members of the intelligentsia.21
Whether one chooses to define the intelligentsia as myth, sociocultural self-image, political concept or sociological subculture, it remains necessary to explain how such a group arose in Russia and how it relates to the 'groups between'. Despite years of debate, argument and counter-argument, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the Russian intelligentsia had its origins in the Enlightenment culture of the educated nobility or educated service classes of the late eighteenth century. By that time, elite Russia possessed all the trappings of European fashionable society, including a small commercialised print culture organised around private publishing, journalism, the book trade and public theatre (with permanent buildings and paid entry). The producers and promoters of this culture included eminent personages with close ties to the court and highest social circles, in addition to individuals from the foreign community and lesser service classes.[33] Among consumers - for example, public theatre audiences and purchasers of popular prints and chapbooks - a humbler clientele also could be seen.23 Consumers from the labouring, commercial and lesser service classes did not necessarily identify with Enlightenment ideas or become self-conscious creators of a literary product, but clearly they participated in a public culture where high and low forms of art, literature and sociability inevitably overlapped. Nobles purchased chapbooks, and Enlightenment themes entered 'popular' culture. Lower-class people (chern') and petty bureaucrats attended the theatre, and among the authors of literary plays, one finds the serf M. A. Matinskii (17591829) alongside Empress Catherine the Great (r. 1762-96). In principle at least, to be a participant in the cosmopolitan, pan-European Enlightenment required not noble status, but noble behaviour.24
Ironically, however, the social diversity of Russia's lived Enlightenment did not produce a corresponding cultural or ideological pluralism. When compared with the educated classes of the nineteenth century, those of the eighteenth articulated a uniform brand of Enlightenment thought barely distinguishable from that of the court. Prior to i800, Russia's governing classes, cultural luminaries and everyday consumers of print culture and the arts belonged overwhelmingly to the urban service milieu. In the nineteenth century, numerical growth and further social diversification produced educated classes of more varied ideological hues, yet the elite Enlightenment culture of the preceding century remained integral to the intelligentsia's understanding of justice, equality and progress. Despite the emergence of new cultural credos and organised political opposition, the government and educated classes continued to employ common categories of thought. Irrespective of political ideology, educated Russians defined themselves in relation to a contemporary European culture which they chose either to reject or to emulate. Perhaps more important, officials and self-proclaimed members of the intelligentsia, following the lead of the eighteenth-century educated service classes, also posed as carriers of civilisation and enlightenment to a presumably backward
LiteraryJournals in ImperialRussia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 1133; E. K. Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas inRussianEnlightenmentTheater (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), chapters 1-2. On the greater degree of commercialisation further west, see J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997); James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
23 On theatre audiences, see the brief treatment in Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas, chapter 1. On the consumers of popular prints and chapbooks, see D. E. Farrell, 'Popular Prints in the Cultural History of Eighteenth-Century Russia', unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison (1980), pp. 34-41.
24 In practice, most participants in the Russian Enlightenment originated from the nobility, but the principle of social pluralism remained.
and benighted Russian people.[34] In so far as nineteenth-century educated Russians identified with a broader 'society', they claimed to embody its essential aspirations and beliefs. Social progress corresponded to their understanding of social progress, and Russia's future became theirs to imagine.
That the eighteenth-century educated nobility or educated service classes represented the cultural origins ofthe Russian intelligentsia may help to explain why the intelligentsia so often can be seen as a creation or creature of the state. But clearly the concept of the intelligentsia, with its suggestion of morally autonomous political opposition and social criticism, did not simply represent an extension of enlightened bureaucracy or the societal obverse of the government.26 The intelligentsia may have lacked strong ties to a broad audience or public, yet in social reach and influence it moved beyond the eighteenth- century educated classes. Indeed, early in the nineteenth century, a 'parting of ways' between the government and educated classes started to change the social and political landscape of Imperial Russia.27 The self-conscious arrival of the intelligentsia in the 1860s showed that the 'parting of ways' had developed into ideological and social identity. In the concept of the intelligentsia, the educated classes resolutely declared their independence from the educated service classes at a time when social, professional and cultural elites in Russia still lacked the autonomous institutions of a politically organised civil society.
Across Europe, the modern concept of civil society has its origins in G. W F. Hegel's definition of civil society as the realm of free market relations beyond the family and distinct from government. But prior to Hegel, theorists such as John Locke, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and various French Enlightenment figures concerned with the problem of making society civil used 'civil society' as a synonym for the political state.[35] Echoing this definition, historians of eighteenth-century Western and Central Europe see in the activities of constituted bodies - diets, provincial estates, parlements, Estates General and the English Parliament - the appearance of a 'new politics' of open contestation in which the corporate institutions of'absolute monarchy' became absorbed into an emergent 'public sphere' situated between the private sphere ofthe household and the sphere of public/political authority represented by the state.[36] In the public sphere, sometimes termed 'bourgeois' because of its roots in the capitalist market economy, the freedom and openness of relationships within the private household expanded into the arena of public/political authority. Through the development of autonomous civic organisations, the commercialisation of print culture, and the formation of communities structured around sites of sociability, the public sphere effectively limited the 'absolute' power of the state to the point where public/political authority became the common domain of society and government. The public sphere thus provided the setting for the emergence of a new kind of civil society organisationally independent of and more readily opposed to the political state.[37]
Inbroad outline, the development of Russian civil society followed the familiar Europeanpattern. But in Russia, priorto the mid- or even the late nineteenth century, it would be misleading to speak of a politically organised civil society independent of the state. A realm of free market relations (Hegel's civil society) did exist, though often illicitly and without legal protections (remember the life of serf entrepreneur Nikolai Shipov), as did a pre-political literary public sphere grounded in print culture, learned and philanthropic societies, social clubs, commercial associations and masonic lodges. At the same time, however, the Russian reading public remained minuscule, and throughout the eighteenth century, Russian elites understood civic engagement as service in military and administrative bodies, including elective bodies and offices, which nevertheless were created, defined and regulated by state prescription. Nor did the ownership of serfs and landed property carry legal-administrative authority beyond the family estate. When enlightened officials and educated Russians of the late eighteenth century called for civic engagement and worked to build civic institutions, they continued to equate social progress with personal moral reformation. Their calls for justice implied not open-ended social and political transformation but the restoration of God-given natural order. Only in the nineteenth century would their moral consciousness become a form of social identity to be affirmed by political means.
In Russia, the evolution from late-eighteenth-century 'civic society' to late- nineteenth-century 'civil society' can be traced through the provincial noble assemblies established in the reign of Catherine the Great. Although historians have devoted scant attention to these assemblies, there is no evidence to suggest that they played, or even aspired to play, a significant political role before the 1850s. On the contrary, the noble assemblies extended state administration into rural localities and provided a channel of communication between local nobles and the monarch in St Petersburg.31 Governors appointed by the sovereign supervised the assemblies, and the cultural, educational and philanthropic activities they sponsored tended to result from official mandates. In general, judging from fragmentary and passing references, the assemblies served the social needs of local nobles by addressing genealogical, inheritance and welfare claims. Such a narrow particularistic orientation can hardly be equated with contested politics within an institutionalised public sphere.
But conditions changed in the era of the Great Reforms. Local nobles organised in provincial assemblies began to play a translocal political role not, as in the past, by serving in the army and bureaucracy, but by representing the interests of noble society in relation to the state and other social groups.32 The turning point came in 1858, when at the behest of the central government, provincial committees met to draw up projects for the impending emancipation of the serfs.[38] The projects were locally conceived and generally non- political; however, the landed nobility appeared almost universally united in refusing to endorse the government's vision of the emancipation settlement. Not surprisingly, officials in St Petersburg roundly rejected the noble projects, a move that led some provincial assemblies to call for open debate and societal representation in an on-going process of reform. The government had consulted with noble representatives on a matter of national importance but then completely ignored their views and silenced their voices, opting instead for emancipation by bureaucratic fiat.[39] Relations between the landed nobility and the monarchy would be changed forever. From this point onward, noble landowners would comprise a distinct social and political interest. Russia's pre-political literary public sphere, grounded in print culture and sociability, had evolved into a politically organised public sphere, grounded in legally and historically constituted institutions. The articulation of noble interests in opposition to official policy heralded the birth of Russian civil society independent of the state.
Of course, most Russian nobles remained loyal subjects of the monarchy. Still, the political and social agitation surrounding the peasant emancipation represented an early, if narrow, assertion of politically organised civil society. A more permanent locus of political action, one rooted in an institution of self-government rather than a particular policy decision, arose with the establishment of zemstvo (local elected council) assemblies in 1864.[40] Following the peasant emancipation, locally elected, multiclass zemstvos helped to fill the vacuum created by the removal of seignorial authority. The zemstvos enjoyed limited powers of taxation, which they used to finance meaningful social services, though always with the permission of the provincial governor or officials in St Petersburg. Local nobles dominated the ranks of private landowners and thus controlled the zemstvos; however, representatives of the peasant and urban classes also sat in the assemblies. Equally important for the development of a broad-based political society in Russia, zemstvo responsibility for infrastructure, education, public health and social welfare increasingly tied local self-government to the national political arena. Although Russia had no elected legislative body before 1906, zemstvo functions drew significant numbers of Russians into direct involvement with issues of empire-wide importance. This political experience, framed by an institution designed to meet the needs of diverse localities and social groups, provided a solid foundation for the emergence of modern civil society.
In functional and organisational terms, the zemstvo assemblies can be called institutions of the state and society. To a significant degree, the zemstvos, like the noble assemblies, represented an arm of government. They delivered public health services and elementary education, built roads and bridges and even provided famine relief. The zemstvos also remained subject to bureaucratic oversight, and they possessed no independent legislative authority. At the same time, however, the state-society relationship that the zemstvos made possible clearly contributed to the emergence of Russian civil society. If a politically organised civil society were to flourish in late Imperial Russia, the people of the empire needed to be incorporated into the everyday operations of government. They needed to be linked in a positive relationship to political authority. In contrast to what the intelligentsia ethos might suggest, effective civil societies limit the power of government not by disengaging from or opposing constituted authority but by sharing in its exercise, and if need be challenging specific policies, from a position of institutional autonomy. The zemstvos surely represented this potential, embodying both society's struggle for independent authority within the Russian polity and the integration of politically organised society into institutions of government.
If the raznochintsy revealed the capacity of ordinary Russians to fashion economic and social relationships outside official controls, and if identification with the intelligentsia effectively distinguished the educated classes from the educated service classes, the professions created a social environment in which the educated classes became connected to the needs of everyday life and ordinary people. Given the absence of autonomous guild structures in Russia, the professions originated in government-directed occupational training and specialisation.[41] Traditionally, teachers, physicians, midwives, medical orderlies, statisticians, agronomists, veterinarians, architects and engineers worked as state servicemen under military or civil administration. Yet as in so many areas of Russian life, conditions changed following the peasant emancipation. The establishment of the zemstvos allowed a significant number of professionals to find employment outside state institutions. This relative autonomy encouraged them to see in professional work a form of service to the nation rather than the government. Armed with scientific knowledge and technical expertise, professionals began to claim authority over the organisation of training and services. A small group of activists - a group that straddled the intelligentsia - joined professional organisations and became socially delineated from their rank-and-file colleagues. When the government disappointed the expectations of these activists, denying them a role as expert consultants to policy-makers, they joined zemstvo and business leaders in open political opposition.37
The experience of public sector physicians (in the late nineteenth century about three-quarters of all physicians) illustrates the pattern.[42] Prior to the Great Reforms, physicians belonged to an official medical soslovie educated and employed by the state; however, beginning in the 1860s, the establishment of medical organisations and the articulation of a service ethic heralded the emergence of a distinct professional identity. Increasingly, physicians claimed authority over public health, and increasingly they felt frustrated by bureaucratic interference and popular indifference. By 1902, physicians and other medical professionals entered the political opposition with demands for social reform and broad civil rights. But like other professionals and paraprofessionals in the revolutionary era, physicians proved unable to sustain a unified political challenge or achieve control over licensing, medical ethics, education, employment and association. Lacking significant social recognition, the politicised among them joined the liberal or radical intelligentsia, while the majority lapsed into political apathy or avoided politics altogether.
When a national political movement appeared among professionals in August 1903, leading to the formation of a Union of Unions in early 1905, an activist minority became involved in the organisation of local unions and all- Russian congresses that demanded social andpolitical change. Still, throughout the revolutionary crisis of 1905-7, political oppositionists never predominated in any of the professions. At the height of its influence in 1905-6, the All- Russian Teachers Union had no more than 14,000 members, and many of these neglected to pay their dues. Membership in the Union of All-Russian Medical Personnel peaked in August 1905 with a total of no more than 25,000 members out of close to 79,000 certified medical practitioners.[43] Geographic distance, inadequate communications and outright poverty made it difficult for rural schoolteachers and medical practitioners - groups that directly served the Russian people - to maintain translocal organisational ties or provide basic professional services. The lack of professional unity, at the very moment when concessions from the monarchy allowed activists to organise in an unprecedented manner, provided telling evidence of the social and political fragmentation in Russian educated society.
Political repression surely played a role in weakening organisational ties, even after 1905; however, the fragility of professional bonds also resulted from the gap between highly educated, socially elite professionals on the one hand and uncertified protoprofessionals or less educated paraprofessionals on the other. In the most visible professions ofthe late nineteenth century - medicine, teaching and law - non-politicised and less educated specialists, working in local communities, could be difficult to distinguish from the populations they served. Over the objections of activist elites, these rank-and-file professionals were also more likely to co-operate with uncertified practitioners, a relationship that blurred the boundary between professional and non-professional services. Such practices generated conflict among professionals and between the professions and the government; however, they are most noteworthy for exposingpopular disregard for the enlightened guardianship and expert knowledge that professionals (and officials) sought to deliver to ordinary people. Indeed, the widely recognised achievements of late imperial public health, education and justice would have been far less effective without the mediation of protoprofessional and paraprofessional groups.
Following the judicial reforms of 1864, the most autonomous and institutionally secure Russian professionals were the university-educated sworn attorneys organised in formal bar associations. In 1874, when the government suspended the establishment of new bar councils for thirty years, only three had come into existence - in Moscow, St Petersburg and Kharkov. Russia's modern legal profession, the pride and joy of Westernised liberal reformers, occupied a narrow field of action. But the limited social reach of the sworn attorneys is deceiving. Russians from all walks of life had participated in formal judicial proceedings since Muscovite times, and after 1861 the impact of official courts, including peasant courts, became massive.[44] How did a broad-based legal culture encompassing nearly the whole of Russian society flourish when the legal profession remained so small and the liberal judicial reforms only partially implemented?
An answer can be found in traditional forms of advocacy which effectively absorbed Russia's new legal profession. Prior to the Great Reforms, any subject of the empire, not expressly forbidden to do so by law, had the right to represent clients in court. The unofficial 'street advocates' who operated in the post-reform period thus belonged to a tradition of legal practitioners dating backto the reign of Peter the Great. Generally of low birth, the street advocates nevertheless included in their ranks nobles with higher education and, after 1864, qualified attorneys who chose not to join the bar.[45] In 1874 the government adopted measures that should have eliminated the illicit practitioners. 'Private attorneys', regardless of education, became eligible to practise law by purchasing licenses and registering with local courts; however, lax enforcement meant that registered attorneys continued to work with unregistered street advocates. Private and sworn attorneys pleaded cases in court for the street advocates and relied on them in return to refer clients. Although accused of corruption and incompetence, the street advocates not only survived but also provided a crucial link between formal judicial institutions and ordinary people.
In the fields of education and medicine, uncertified specialists performed a similar social function. The central government and local elites did not commit significant resources to universal primary education before the mid- 1890s, yet already in the seventeenth century and continuing throughout the imperial period, unofficial schools taught basic literacy to ordinary people. In 1882, limited funding, a shortage of teachers and the tendency of peasants to leave school after acquiring minimal literacy and numeracy led to the legalisation of village schools where uncertified teachers taught reading, writing and counting.[46] By adapting education to the needs and expectations of peasant parents, less-educated rural schoolteachers, many of whom came from the peasantry, provided a meaningful link between the countryside and translocal civil society. Medical orderlies (fel'dshery) did likewise by working with traditional village healers to deliver methods of treatment acceptable to peasants. In the process, they also carried scientific knowledge to the countryside. Although formally trained physicians denounced the orderlies and other practitioners for performing illegal operations and prescribing inappropriate treatments - services for which they were not properly trained - they nonetheless relied on their less-educated associates to offset shortages of funding and certified personnel.[47] Once again, the much-maligned protoprofessionals and paraprofessionals connected the general population to the elite world of Russia's modern professions.
Of course, qualified professionals became dismayed when labouring people failed to distinguish street advocates from registered attorneys or physicians from witches, sorcerers and faith healers. They were likewise angered by the lack of political and organisational freedom before 1905 and by continuing governmental hostility and bureaucratic interference after the introduction of constitutional monarchy in 1906. Their frustrations, their dual alienation from the people and the government, pushed an activist minority into political opposition and identification with the intelligentsia. It was not, however, the ideologically articulate professional elites who represented the development of a politically effective Russian civil society. In contrast to the intelligentsia, whose condescension toward 'the people' and identification with the methods, if not the policies, of the state continues to this day, rank-and-file professionals together with their paraprofessional and uncertified associates served the everyday needs of real Russians.[48] Aside from the obvious practical benefits that accrued, their relationships with ordinary people linked local communities to translocal society without the mediation of government. In these independent relationships and in the independent relationships of the capitalist market economy, not in the identities and ideological movements of the intelligentsia, a Russian civil society distinct from official society came to life.
Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century: portrait of a city
CATHERINE EVTUHOV
To the present-day observer, standing on the mansion-lined embankment overlooking the confluence of the Volga and Oka rivers, or wandering through the restored and freshly painted central streets of the city, Nizhnii Novgorod does not look so different from the provincial town it was a century ago. The massive automobile factory, the military installations and large-scale industry of the Soviet city of Gorky - all of which closed the area to foreigners until 1991 - sprouted around the edges while leaving the city centre intact. Only the cupolas which once studded the streets like points of gold have vanished, victims of the 1929 eradication of churches. Nizhnii Novgorod boasts all the features of the most lovely of Russian provincial towns: perched picturesquely atop a network of ravines, it nevertheless follows a strictly Petersburgian layout with the three straight avenues radiating from the central kremlin. The above- mentioned observer can walk to the edge of the promenade to look out over the Oka at the old fairgrounds and the massive nineteenth-century Alexander Nevsky cathedral on the promontory. Across the Volga, in the meantime, forests still stretch north as far as one can see, past the pilgrimage site of Lake Svetloiar, whose depths conceal the lost city of Kitezh, and the historical refuge of the Old Belief.
Topography
The comfortable provincial ease with which Nizhnii Novgorod straddles bluffs and ravines was in fact the product of a concerted effort involving the central government, local authorities and the town population itself. The history of urban planning for Nizhnii Novgorod as for many Russian cities begins with Catherine the Great's 1785 Charter to the Towns, which not only bestowed certain privileges upon town dwellers, but converted frontier outposts and administrative centres into 'proper' imperial cities with regular street plans and municipal institutions.1 Yet Catherine's quest for the well-ordered city had achieved only partial realisation at the time of Nicholas I's visit to Nizhnii Novgorod in 1834 - an event that immediately entered local lore and whose story continues to be told to this day. Stopping in Nizhnii on his tour of the realm, the tsar expressed horror and dismay at how little it resembled a real city. In defiance of the regularised city plan on paper, the buildings along even the main streets jutted out unevenly and at irregular intervals, resembling an assemblage of manors (usad'by) merely more tightly spaced than they would have been in the countryside. Not only had residents obliviously built their houses along the lovely Volga embankment with their backs to the river, but they used the gentle slope of the bluff itself as a garbage dump. Nicholas's solution both typified his mania for discipline (one of his passions was the planning of prison buildings) and his desire to bring the vast imperial reaches under central control.2 An 1836 decree gave property owners three years to erect a wooden house on any vacant lots in the city centre, or five for a stone one, under the supervision of an architectural commission that was in turn subject to the Department of Military Colonies in St Petersburg. Noncompliance meant simply that the empty lot would be auctioned off.3 The riverbank houses were turned around. In this fashion the central government enlisted the co-operation of the town residents, twisting their arms into conforming to its vision.4 At the end of the nineteenth century, though, a glance at detailed street plans reveals that Nizhnii's streets remained lined not with single buildings as in a European or American city, but with whole manors: a main house and several outbuildings grouped around a courtyard - much as Belinsky had described Moscow at mid-century.5
The regular city plan required a victory not only over the undisciplined residents, but over nature itself. The meandering, slow-flowing Russian rivers
1 See Albert J. Schmidt, 'A New Face for Provincial Russia: Classical Planning and Building under Catherine II and Alexander I', forthcoming.
2 V Kostkin, 'PoseshchenieNizhnego NovgorodaImperatoromNikolaemIiegozabotypo blagoustroistvu goroda', in Deistviianizhegorodskoi gubernskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi kommissii (NGUAK) (Nizhnii Novgorod (henceforth NN): Tip. gubernskogo pravleniia, 1994), vol. XVII:i, pp. 1-14.
3 'Polozhenie ob ustroistve gubernskogo goroda', PSZ, 2nd series, 55 vols. (St Petersburg: 1830-84), 1836 no. 9149. Parallel decrees were issued, in this period, for many other cities, including Elizavetgrad, Kaluga, Yaroslavl, Saratov Kharkov, Vladimir, Archangel, Tver, Kazan, Orel, Tiflis, Uman.
4 For particular cases, see RGVIA, Fond 405, op. 4 (1826-59): Departamentvoennykhposelenii: khoziaistvennoe otdelenie (1835-1843);otdelenie voennykh poselenii (1843-1857).
5 B. Belinsky, 'Peterburgi Moskva', repr. in D. K. Burlak(ed.), Moskva-Peterburg:pro etcontra (St Petersburg: Izd. Russkogo Khristianskogo gumanitarnogo instituta, 2000), pp. 185-214, p. i90.
almost inevitably have one high bank (the right) and one low one; the nineteenth-century naturalist Karl Baehr explained this phenomenon by relating the current of longitudinal rivers to the earth's rotation. The central part of Nizhnii Novgorod was located on the quite substantial hill that was created by the intersecting currents of the Oka and the Volga. Yet another feature of central Eurasian ecology, however, was the fragility and volatility of the topsoils - once upon a time ground down and eroded by the great Scandinavian-Russian glacier. Provincial residents were tormented by ravines, which a single rainfall could initiate, and which had been known to traverse paved roads, or agricultural plots, entirely within the space of a year. The construction of Nizhnii Novgorod involved a combination of careful coexistence with, and struggle against, the ravines: some were preserved and lined with houses, while others, including in the very centre of the city, had to be filled in or bridged with dams.
In about i860, Nizhnii Novgorod was divided into four sections, each with a distinctive flavour and way of life. Atop the bluff lay the two Kremlin Sections, radiating out from the fifteenth-century kremlin situated exactly at the intersection of the two rivers. The formidable fortress, constructed as Muscovy's defence against the Tatars, eventually served as the jumping-off point for the conquest of Kazan in 1551. Nizhnii Novgorod witnessed military action only once, when a stray Tatar murza's bullet aimed at the walls landed along the Oka embankment and was commemorated by the construction of a small church which, curiously, the Soviet era merely concealed behind a prestigious apartment building bearing the slogan, 'Peace to the World!' (Miru-mir!). The expansive square around the kremlin accommodated the city's most majestic institutions: the Church of the Annunciation (currently a park), the Theological Seminary, the city duma (representative assembly, council) and, just behind, the Alexander Boys' High School.
Pokrovskaia street, universally known as Pokrovka, was Nizhnii's answer to Petersburg's Nevsky Prospect. Walking up the busy shop-lined thoroughfare from the kremlin, one would pass the houses of the most distinguished citizens, soon reaching the city theatre - for many years the sole focus of local cultural life, the governor's residence, and the National Bank. Perhaps more intriguing was the quieter Pecherskaia street, or Pechorka, just behind the Volga embankment. In the 1840s, the ethnographer and lexicographer Vladimir Dal' and Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov, who immortalised the Nizhnii Novgorod region in his magisterial diptych, In the Forests and On the Hills, lived next door to each other. Dal' drew heavily on local materials for the Dictionary, while Melnikov's pseudonym Andrei Pecherskii was taken from the street name. The pedantic record-keeping of the nineteenth century makes it possible to trace owners of every house until 1917. The documents show that, on the one hand, the social status of residents declined with distance from the centre; on the other, the social composition ofthe street gradually shifted from primarily gentry inhabitants in 1850 to a greater mix, including merchants and meshchane (urban lower-middle class), by 1900.[49] The richest merchants built their elaborate stucco-embellished mansions just in front of Pechorka, overlooking the Volga. Athird, radial, street, Il'inka, attracted well-to-do merchants and housed the stock exchange. The city's limits were symbolically marked by the whitewashed building, rather charming to the contemporary eye, of the municipal prison.
Yet, while the typical provincial town would stop there, multifaceted Nizh- nii Novgorod boasted two more neighbourhoods. The Makariev Section was perhaps the most dynamic part of the city. Nestled under the Oka bluff, it was Nizhnii's true commercial heart: here was the wharf, where goods from ships and barges coming from as far as Astrakhan or as close as Rybinsk or Kostroma were unloaded; here was a second 'main street' with its wholesale warehouses and commercial enterprises; here was the fantastically ornate eighteenth-century Rozhdestvenskaia church, a remarkable example of Naryshkin baroque. Finally, the Fair Section across the river - there was no permanent bridge until the 1890s - displayed the immense permanent Fair House, constructed in the 1820s, the temporary 'rows' (riady) of retail outlets and the exquisite Alexandrine Fair Cathedral (now serving as Nizhnii's primary house of worship), which, replete with Grail motifs, pyramids with all- seeing eyes, and a Pantheon-like vault, resembles a Masonic temple as much as a church. The Kunavino suburb outside the fairgrounds completed the ensemble.
Rhythms
Nizhnii Novgorod was the capital of a province quite diverse in its ecology and economy. In the northern districts beyond the Volga, agriculture was virtually non-existent; the sparse population farmed the rivers and the abundant forests instead of the sandy, rocky soil, exporting fish, timber and the famed Semenov wooden spoons. The black soil of the south-east corner provided the rest of the province with the grain it could not produce itself. The districts around the city itself - Nizhnii Novgorod, Gorbatov, Balakhna, Arzamas, Ardatov - had a mixed economy, combining agriculture with industrial production. Boris
Mironov has recently suggested that the separation between city and countryside in Russia remained partial even up to the early nineteenth century.[50] Life in Nizhnii Novgorod pulsed to the rhythms of the surrounding countryside, as well as the rhythms of commercial enterprise and those created by the religious calendar. In a climate that school geography textbooks described as 'sharply continental', trade, transport, agriculture and industrial production were all subject to dramatic seasonal variations. The last days of winter witnessed an influx of migrants in search of work on the steamships and barges that plied the Volga. Carpenters and masons followed in springtime, hiring themselves out as collectives to do the building that could only be accomplished in the summer months. Stevedores and porters were in high demand throughout the ice-free season. The onset of winter in October, and the first sleigh-roads in the snow, brought droves of izvozchiki (cobmen); as many as 800 operated out of the city.[51] Nizhnii Novgorod functioned as a magnet for the thousands of artisans, most of them doubling as farmers, working throughout the province: the leather manufacturers of Bol'shoe Murashkino came here to buy their sheepskins; farmers from the distant district of Sergach came to market their grain and tobacco; and the city provided the first major market for such locally renowned goods as Kniaginin caps and Vorsma locks. Still, it is interesting to note that much local or internal trade bypassed the city itself: the major river ports for grain exchange, for example, were located downriver at Lyskovo, upriver at Gorodets, and at Vorotyn. Nor did the city have a monopoly on factory production. Its two shipbuilding factories (one owned by a merchant, the other by a British citizen), salt-processing plant, sawmill and tobacco factory did well but ceded first place to establishments such as the renowned steel and iron manufacturers at Pavlovo (nicknamed the 'Russian Sheffield'), the enormous Sormovo ship-building plant, or the venerable leather producers in Arzamas.[52]
For two months every summer, Nizhnii Novgorod metamorphosed from a relatively quiet provincial town into a major international centre - the largest trade fair in Europe (bigger than Leipzig), and a unique meeting place of East and West, where traders from China, Persia, Bukhara and Armenia rubbed shoulders with Astrakhan fishmongers, Moscow entrepreneurs, Baltic merchants and itinerant Old Believer icon peddlers. The fair had a yearly turnover of 200 million roubles, and an attendance of 1.5 million;[53] the greatest volume of trade was in tea, cotton, fish and metal.[54] But aggregate trade statistics capture only a fraction of the life of the Nizhnii Novgorod Fair, which had moved upriver from its old site at Makariev following a fire there in 1817.[55]No stock exchange existed until late in the century, so that - in stark contrast to the commodities market in Chicago, for example (in some ways Nizhnii Novgorod's American equivalent) - goods had to be physically transported in order to be saleable.[56] Transactions took place, again until a new generation took over, through an elaborate informal network of friendships, marriages and deals sealed in smoky riverfront taverns. In his history of the daily life of the Fair, A. P. Melnikov describes the Madeira-lubricated rituals by which a debtor, unable to meet his obligations, appeases his creditor.[57] An 1877 guidebook directs the visitor towards the Siberian wharf, where he can sample teas for hours; the multi million rouble Iron Line; the odorous Greben' wharf, piled high with dried fish; and the Grain wharf. Paperweights made from Urals minerals, silver pistols from the Caucasus, exquisite Ferghana and Khorasan rugs, Tula samovars, books typeset in Old Russian, icons, crosses, gingerbread, sheepskin coats, felt boots, lace and Tatar soap vied for the visitor's attention. Equally usefully, the guidebook counsels him to avoid the pseudo- Asian ornamentation of the Chinese Row, where no one from China had ever traded; the Fashion Lane housing a number of brand-name establishments including the 'inevitable' Salzfisch; and the variety of theatres, circuses, zoos and freak shows that held no surprises for the sophisticated Western
traveller. [58]
The Nizhnii Novgorod Fair functioned as an irreplaceable stimulus to the local economy as well. Where else could local sheepskin processors have bought Persian merlushka (lambskin) and Riga ovchina (sheepskin) - the top of the line for sheepskin manufacture[59]; local spoon-makers have bought palm and maple to make the most exquisite spoons17; or Kniaginin hat-makers have bought Popov, Singer or Blok sewing machines?18 Conversely, Pavlovo locks, knives, razors and surgical instruments, fine 'Russia-leather' gloves from Krasnaia Ramen' and even local jams (known inexplicably as 'Kievan') and pickles found their way to Moscow, Petersburg and European consumers via the fair.19 Residents of Kunavino by the fairgrounds made good money by renting out their property for use as hotels, restaurants and taverns.20
Economic and religious rhythms overlapped to a large extent, as must be the case where the church calendar is the most reliable tool for calculating the passage of time. The two major trade congresses in Nizhnii Novgorod - one for the wood products which were one of the province's staples, and the other a big horse fair - were timed to coincide with Epiphany (6-7 January) and St John's (24 June), respectively. Artisans' work seasons often began and ended on religious holidays; wheel-makers, for example, ended their labours on the Feast of the Protection, when they returned to the land. The seven-week Lenten season regularly wreaked disaster in the lives of small-scale producers and factory workers, leaving them without employ and thus severing the fine thread that linked them to solvency.21 No major event, from the yearly opening of the Fair to visits of royalty, was conceivable without the presence of the local hierarchy, with the bishop at its head. The actual moment of peasant emancipation, as everywhere throughout the empire, was as much a religious as a social phenomenon. The townspeople experienced Emancipation day, for Nizhnii Novgorod 12 March 1861, as one big religious procession: respondingto pealing church-bells at ten o'clock in the morning, the gentry, merchantry and honorary citizenry gathered in the diocesan cathedral to hear, together with the crowd packing the kremlin grounds, the first words of the manifesto as read by the proto-deacon in full ceremonial dress. A liturgy of thanksgiving, led by Bishop Nektarii, was followed by the reading of the manifesto itself outside, on the central square, by Chief of Police Khval'kovskii, accompanied by Governor Muravev and Prince Shakhovskoi who had brought the manifesto from St Petersburg, as well as by the vice-governor, marshal of the nobility and others.22
17 L. Borisovskii, 'Lozhkarstvo v Semenovskom uezde', Trudy kommissii po issledovaniiu kustarnoi promyshlennosti v Rossii, issue 2 (St Petersburg: Tip. V Kirshbauma, 1897), p. 14.
18 'Shapochnyi i kuznechnyi promysly v g. Kniaginine i okruzhaiushchikh ego slobodakh,' in 'Kustarnye promysly nizhegorodskoi gubernii: Kniagininskii uezd', p. 185.
19 Pamiatnaiaknizhka 1865, pp. 63, 52, 49.
20 Pamiatnaiaknizhka 1865,p. 48.
21 'Promysly sela Bol'shogo Murashkina', p. 234.
22 A. I. Zvezdin, 'K 50-letiiu ob'iavleniia manifesta 19 fevralia 1861 goda v Nizhegorodskoi gubernii', in Deistviia NGUAK, vol. X, p. 66.
Not all religious celebrations, of course, were linked to economic or social events. Nizhnii Novgorod counted fifteen major processions every year, on holidays. Religious feasts and even the Sunday liturgy had an unusual intensity in Nizhnii Novgorod: the bishop's reports, submitted annually to the Holy Synod, complained if anything of the excessive piety of local parishioners, who celebrated fervently and constantly (church attendance records were very high), while at the same time refusing to take communion even the obligatory one time a year, at Easter.[60] The bishops attributed this reluctance to make a definitive commitment to the Orthodox Church to 'infection' with the Old Belief.
People
At mid-century, Nizhnii Novgorodboasted a population of 41,543. The number included 5,085 gentry (1,838 of them hereditary), 1,627 clergy, 16,014 townspeople (merchants, honorary citizens, meshchane), 7,431 peasants, 10,397 military, 207 foreigners and 782 others.[61] The ethnic composition of the province as a whole was, characteristically for the Middle Volga region, quite diverse, and included Tatars, Mordvinians and Cheremis. However, it was mostly the Old Believers who gave the region its distinctive character. In the 1840s P. I. Melnikov counted 170,506 (as opposed to the mere 20,000 in the official governor's report) Old Believers in the province.[62] A breakdown of the town's residents by religion yields the following picture: 39,784 Orthodox, 136 edinovertsy (members of Edinoverie, a group which combined aspects of Orthodoxy and Old Belief), 260 Old Believers, 1 Armenian-Gregorian, 471 Catholic, 364 Protestant, 354 Jewish, i73 Muslim. They worshiped at forty-seven Orthodox churches and chapels; two major monasteries, Pecherskii and Blagoveshchenskii, both dating back to the thirteenth century, provided an important focal point for local religious life. Two edinovercheskie churches and one each Armenian-Gregorian, Catholic and Protestant, and one mosque, brought the total number of houses ofwor- ship to fifty-five.[63] At fairtime, the population swelled to at least double its normal size, placing Nizhnii Novgorod temporarily in the ranks of the most populous of Russian cities. By the time of the 1897 census, the town's year- round population had risen to 95,000, and proportions had shifted: the petty bourgeoisie (33 per cent) and peasants (48 per cent) together constituted the bulk of urban residents.[64] In comparison with other cities, there may have been more merchants in Nizhnii Novgorod, or perhaps they merely wielded more power and influence.
Both the fair and the annual influx of impoverished labourers in search of employment created an underclass of beggars, wanderers, the homeless and the diseased, whose numbers evaded the soslovie (estate)-based categories of nineteenth-century statisticians. The dormitories and homeless shelters erected, in the Makariev Section in particular, bear ample witness to their presence. Cholera epidemics regularly spread up the Volga from Astrakhan, most devastatingly in 1892 and 1893 when the disease ravaged the working population of the fair.[65]
Aggregate statistics leave much to be desired if one is trying to capture the atmosphere of provincial society, for two reasons. First, one or two outstanding individuals could have an enormous influence on local development. Two such individuals in Nizhnii Novgorod were Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov (1819-83) and Aleksandr Serafimovich Gatsiskii (1838-93). Melnikov, the son of a minor landowner in the remote and densely forested Semenov district, made his mark as editor of the recently established Provincial Messenger (Gubern- skie vedomosti), which he transformed from a terse purveyor of governmental directives into a vibrant annal of local life and history; and as an ethnographer who, while occupying a series of positions in the state bureaucracy, compiled an abundance of materials on the region's inhabitants and particularly the Old Believers. Eventually, these researches bore fruit in the extraordinarily rich and basically sympathetic fictional account of Old Believer life, In the Forests and On the Hills, composed under the pseudonym Andrei Pecherskii. Apparently, Melnikov's saga originated in the tales he recounted to the subsequently deceased heir to the throne, Nicholas, in the course of a voyage down the Volga in 1861.[66]
Gatsiskii, who came to Nizhnii from Riazan at the age of nine, dedicated his life to things local - as he jokingly put it, to nizhegorodovedenie and nizhe- gorododelanie from the moment of his return from a brief stint at St Petersburg University in the crucial year, 1861. Gatsiskii's curriculum vitae is a whirlwind of local activity: founder of the local statistical committee and editor of its papers, president of the local provincial archival commission, member of the zemstvo (elective district council)(at moments when he was able to meet the property qualification) and at one time its president, author of some 400 articles on local history, popular religion, archeology, ethnography and statistics. Gatsiskii never became a nationally known figure on the same scale as Melnikov; but he did enter the national limelight in the 1870s as the defender of the 'provincial idea' - the notion, in part inspired by Shchapov's regionalism (oblastnichestvo), that Russia's provinces had a crucial role to play in national development.[67]
Besides these two, a number of other key figures appear inevitably on the pages of any historical account of the city of Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century. The extremely active marshal ofthe nobility Prince Gruzinskii dispensed justice and charity in the first quarter of the century.[68] Merchants and Maecenases Nikolai Bugrov and Fedor Blinov (both millers) were famous for their municipal involvement and charitable deeds as well as their wealth.[69]The priest Ioann Vinogradov, from whose illustrious family the radical and poet Nikolai Dobroliubov came, managed a prestigious apartment house in the centre of town.[70] Ivan Kulibin gained national fame as the inventor of the steam engine; while the renown of the merchant of Greek origin and owner of the Sormovo shipyards D. E. Benardaki rested on his commercial
achievements.[71]
Aggregate statistics prove inadequate for a second reason: they also fail to capture the dramatic changes in social composition experienced by many Russian cities, Nizhnii Novgorod among them, in the last third of the nineteenth century. In adhering to the traditional soslovie categories, information- gatherers ignored the emergence of significant new social groups, most notably middle classes and workers. To give the statisticians some credit, the perpetual flux of post-emancipation society, in which, for example, the same person could be the employee of a sheepskin manufacturer, an independent entrepreneur in that same line of business and an agricultural labourer in the course of a single year, made it virtually impossible to measure status, occupation and class; the geographical location and employ of many provincial inhabitants was subject to change. The Sormovo shipbuilding plant, dating back to the 1840s and one of the earliest working-class communities in Russia, alone employed 10,748 workers in 1899 (up from 2,000 only five years earlier).[72]
Even more elusive are the middle classes. Fortunately, we can turn to the eye of contemporaries who, if they did not count, caught members of Nizhnii Novgorod society on paper or on film: Aleksandr Gatsiskii's fondest project, in fulfilment of his belief that 'history should take as its task the detailed biography of each and every person on the earth without exception',[73] was the compilation of quantities of biographies of local citizens; in combination with the exquisitely posed portraits by the local photographer A. O. Karelin, we can get a satisfying impression, if not quantification, of Nizhnii's middle class.[74] Through Gatsiskii's materials, we learn of Anna Nikolaevna Shmidt, the eccentric journalist of petty gentry background who created a theology which she called the Third Testament, and was 'adopted' by various Silver Age cultural figures, Zinaida Gippius in particular; of Petr Bankal'skii, the meshchanin and small businessman who eventually opened a bar, then a hotel near the fairgrounds, in the meantime writing treatises that sought to reconcile science and religion;[75] of the much-admired local historian Stepan Eshevskii (1829-65);[76] of A. V Stupin (1776-1861), founder of a well-known icon-painting school in the wilds of Nizhnii Novgorod province; of Liubov' Kositskaia (182968), beloved local actress.[77] Karelin, in the meantime, went inside the bourgeois household with his camera (i870s-90s) to portray families, loving couples, girls in exotic dress - in short, the whole panoply of Victorian photographic repertoire. Whether verbal or visual, the portraits are unmistakably middle- class. The middle class might perfectly well contain people officially classified as gentry, merchants, clergy (namely in the Dobroliubov family's apartment building), meshchane, and even peasants (who continued to be counted as such even if - as happened in Old Believer circles - they happened to be millionaires). Donald Raleigh estimated for another provincial town, Saratov, that the professional and commercial middle classes made up 25 per cent of the urban population.[78]
Administration and institutions
Since at least the local government reform of Catherine II, the provincial capital (gubernskii gorod) signified the extension, down to the provincial level, of the state administrative apparatus.[79] By definition, the provincial and district capitals were distinguished from other types of settlements by the presence of governmental offices - even though the non-administrative (zashtatnyi) town, the Cossack village (stanitsa), or the industrial village might have a larger population and every appearance of a city. The administration and institutions of every provincial capital were thus very nearly identical. Before the 1860s, these were limited to the governor and his staff, the Gentry Assembly, and the Merchant Guilds; the post office, the local Statistical Committee (1840s) and tax and customs officials completed the picture. The Great Reforms wrought deep and immediate changes in provincial administration, creating a new institution, the zemstvo, conceived by the monarchy (it was originally Nicholas I's idea) essentially as an organ for the more efficient collection and disbursement of taxes;[80] setting up a court system; and granting the provincial capitals a city council (1870). In the last third of the century, Nizhnii Novgorod housed the provincial zemstvo, the district zemstvo, the city duma and various offices of the government bureaucracy. Overlapping jurisdictions provoked frequent complaints.
Yet the importance of these institutions lies above all in the uses to which they were put, locally. Nizhnii Novgorod had a tradition of liberal governors that included Mikhail Urusov (1843-55), the ex-Decembrist Alexander Muravev (1856-61) and the beloved Aleksei Odintsov, whose illustrious governorship (1861-73) set the tone for the reform era in Nizhnii Novgorod. Odintsov, who, in a humorous farewell speech in 1873, characterised his tenure as 'proof- and this is my main achievement - that the province could do perfectly well without a governor for ten years',[81] in fact presided over the elections of the first zemstvo and the municipal duma, and managed the peaceful transition to new landlord-peasant relations. The conservative politics of his successor, Count Pavel Kutaisov (great-grandson of one of Paul I's henchmen) sat so ill with local society that they managed to squeeze him out of power and replace him briefly with the local marshal of the nobility, S. S. Zybin, until the appointment of a new and once again liberal governor, Nikolai Baranov, in 1882. One of the most potentially influential posts one could have on the governor's staff was that of'official for special assignments' (chinovnik osohykhporuchenii): both P. I. Melnikov and A. S. Gatsiskii held this position, compiling some of their most important statistical and ethnographic studies under its auspices.
The Nizhnii Novgorod provincial zemstvo was one of the most dynamic among the thirty-four such institutions. In the first elections to the district zemstvos, the delegates numbered 402: 189 representing the landlords, 38 city-dwellers and 175 from the peasant communes. The zemstvos had a dual mandate: the 'obligatory' functions included oversight of peasant affairs, land redistribution, local administration (police, courts, statistics), transportation, and property taxes; and 'non-obligatory' responsibility for medicine, veterinary medicine, education, pensions, railways, commerce, welfare, agricultural credit and insurance. The 1864 law gave the zemstvos the right to collect and spend their own taxes; a good deal of decision-making power thus devolved on to this local institution. The Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo built schools, hospitals, roads, sanitation, lighting, and provided fire insurance. Some of its most significant initiatives included an ultimately unsuccessful bid for the Trans- Siberian railroad, 'restoring the old natural route through Nizhnii Novgorod province to Siberia and Central Asia';[82] a constant struggle against the epidemics that periodically wound their way up the Volga; and an extremely sophisticated local cadaster (i880s-90s), funded by the zemstvo and executed by scientists from St Petersburg, intended to create an absolutely equitable system of land taxation and distribution.[83]
The city duma was dominated by local merchants.[84] The influential mayor's post attracted some of the most visible municipal figures. Fedor Blinov, in the 1860s, became a sort of shadow mayor: elected by an overwhelming majority, he nevertheless, as an Old Believer, could not officially occupy the position.[85]If, prior to 1870, participation in municipal government was considered an onerous duty to be avoided by all available means - medical excuses, declaration of capital in other cities, or, in one case, serving a twenty-day prison term, the council, whose mandate was basically to ensure the absence of basic disorder, managed to achieve some limited goals. It was their decision that resulted in the construction of a water-supply system in 1847.[86] The reformed duma of 1870, headed by Mayor A. M. Gubin, included members of all estates but still a preponderance of merchants. Apart from routine management, they continued to make improvements in the water supply and initiated measures to institute gas lighting.
Secular regional administration functioned alongside a parallel ecclesiastical administration. Nizhnii Novgorod diocesan history was linked from the beginning (1672) with the struggle against Old Belief. Peter I's appointee Pitirim (1719-38) became renowned for his merciless campaigns against the regime's opponents.[87] In Catherine II's reign, Ioann Damaskin (1783-94) made his reputation in a different fashion, making converts among the Finnic and Turkic peoples of the region and compiling grammars of Mordvinian and other local languages. Catherine's secularisation of church lands had a profound effect on landholding patterns: the two major monasteries on the outskirts of the city, as well as Makariev monastery downriver, monasteries and a convent in Arzamas, all lost substantial holdings in the region. The ecclesiastical hierarchy extended down to the parish level, where local initiative had, until the 1880s, a means for expression through the elected blagochinnye. The Nizh- nii Novgorod Seminary was one of the most visible and active institutions in the city landscape, situated just across the square from the kremlin and the Alma Mater of Nikolai Dobroliubov and other less iconoclastic priests' sons. The effort to increase 'bottom-up' participation emblematised by the Gubernskie vedomosti found an echo in the Eparkhial'nye vedomosti, established throughout the empire in the 1860s and in 1864 in Nizhnii Novgorod. In general, the i860s witnessed remarkable social activism in clerical circles - the founding of rural schools, sometimes with just a few students; clerical participation in various scientific observations and educational experiments; and the centrally engineered effort, in the wake of the Emancipation which after all was to a large degree implemented by the Church, to add inspirational sermons to the highly ritualised liturgy. Ironically, this last effort backfired significantly in Nizhnii Novgorod, where parishioners complained that they came to church to hear the eternal wisdom of the Fathers of the Church, not some kind of off-the-cuff musings by their local priest.[88] In the 1880s, as Kon- stantin Pobedonostsev increasingly took the parish-school movement under his wing, the activities of the Nizhnii Novgorod Brotherhood of Saint Gurii (modelled after the seventeenth-century Ukrainian religious brotherhoods) intensified in the promotion of ecclesiastically sponsored education.
This 'official' religious life found a constant shadow and counterpoint across the river, in the sketes and communities ofthe Old Belief. This universe, where priests were a rarity and needed, if at all, to be imported from Old Believer communities at Belaia Krinitsa in Austria, was run by powerful female religious figures and funded by wealthy male merchants. Hundreds of thousands of faithful, from merchants' daughters sent to the sketes for a convent education to peddlers of icons and 'old-print' (i.e. Slavonic) books, found a home or a touchstone in the powerful communities, even after Nicholas I's (with Melnikov's critical help) massive campaign shut many of them down in the 1850s. Melnikov's unforgettable portrayal of this universe inspired a whole movement in art, music and literature, including Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Invisible City ofKitezh, Modest Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina, Mikhail Nesterov's Taking the Veil, and Andrei Bely's Silver Dove.
Civic and cultural life
As in many provincial towns, cultural life in the first half of the nineteenth century revolved around a very small number of institutions: apart from the domestic living room and an occasional ball or concert, the Gentry Assembly and above all the town theatre provided a venue for social gatherings and entertainment. For a few days in 1847, the local Guhernskie vedomosti engaged in a debate over whether there was, in fact, anything to do in Nizhnii, or not. The newspaper's contributor A. P. Avdeevtooka Gogoliantone, lamenting the boredom and limitations of provincial life ('You cannot imagine how difficult is the situation of a person taking up his pen to write the chronicle of a city, when there are decidedly no events in this city that could possibly deserve attention').[89] Finally, mimicking Gogol directly, he decided to describe theatre-goers as they left a performance. The editor, P. I. Melnikov, responding with local patriotism, insisted that Nizhnii Novgorod with its gentry elections, balls, masquerades, plays and religious processions, was better than most other places,[90]and exalted the physical beauty and architecture of the city. The Nizhnii Novgorod theatre provided the focal point of cultural life. It originated in the immensely successful serf troupe of the landowner Prince Shakhovskoi which, transported to an ugly and unwieldy but permanent building on the Pecher- skaia Street in 1811, metamorphosed into a public institution.[91] Performances took place thrice weekly, and daily in holiday season; a second theatre on the fairgrounds played daily in the summer months.[92] A Russian and European repertoire - Griboedov, Ostrovsky, Tolstoy, alongside Shakespeare, Calderon and Kotzebue - attracted local audiences and foreign visitors, among them Baron Haxthausen who in 1843 pronounced the performance of the opera, 'Askold's Grave', not bad ('passablement bon').[93]
One of the key moments in Nizhnii's cultural and intellectual life tookplace outside the city and even the province: the founding of Kazan University in 1804 provided a regional centripetal focus and helped to create a local intelligentsia that was able to complete its education without travelling to the capitals, or abroad. Such figures as Stepan Eshevskii, Konstantin Bestuzhev-Riumin, and Melnikov wended their way downriver to study at Kazan, attending lectures by Shchapov, Lobachevskii and other more or less illustrious professors, subsequently returning to teach history, ethnography, mathematics and other subjects to students at the Nizhnii Novgorod gymnasium. When Eshevskii finally removed to Moscow in 1862, his first course of lectures there surveyed the provinces of the Roman Empire, proposing as its central thesis the retention of local culture - in the form of language, custom, religion and even social organisation - in the face of the centralising aims of the Roman state. An interesting early product of the Nizhnii Novgorod gymnasium is the Statistical Description of Nizhnii Novgorod Province written by the senior instructor, Mikhail Dukhovskii, and published under the auspices ofthe Kazan
University Press in 1827. Although the pamphlet bears little resemblance to our notion of statistics, it comprises a sober breakdown of types of industry and agriculture, population, architecture, ethnicity (which noted, among other things, the virtually complete assimilation of indigenous populations), religion, a detailed district-by-district survey, and a good deal of data and also colour on the Nizhnii Novgorod Fair.[94] An added, if serendipitous, impetus, to local cultural activity resulted from the temporary exile of Moscow literary circles specifically to the city in the wake of Napoleon's invasion in 1812. Nikolai Karamzin, S. N. Glinka and Konstantin Batiushkov found temporary refuge in Nizhnii's wilds, where their salons and gatherings doubtless fuelled the proverbial 'mixture of French with Nizhegorodian'.[95] Finally, the above- mentioned Gubernskie vedomosti - established by decree throughout European Russia beginning in i838 - became itself a crucial agent in stimulating local historical, scientific and aesthetic interests. Particularly under Melnikov's editorship in 1845-50, the Vedomosti became an organ for the construction of a local, non-state-centred, narrative of Russian history, as well as for conveying useful local meteorological, statistical and ethnographic material.[96]
Still, the blossoming of provincial culture and civic life unquestionably belongs to the post-reform period. The new institutions - the zemstvo, the courts, the municipal duma - as well as some old ones - merchant guilds, corporations, the gentry assembly - were invested with real power to make decisions on a local level. Elections to the zemstvos, controversial court cases and important decisions on urban infrastructure - electric lighting, sanitation, transportation - became the stuff of animated public discussion. Nine full-fledged lawyers resided in town in 1877, as well as twenty-five persons authorised to intervene for other parties in the circuit or communal courts. Private societies and brotherhoods operating in the city in the 1870s included: a commercial club, a military club, a hunting society, societies for co-operation with industry and trade, a mutual insurance fund in case of shipwreck, a mutual aid society for the private service sector, a literacy society, a local physicians' society, a branch of the Russian Musical Society, the brotherhood of Cyril and Methodius, and the ubiquitous all-estate club; there were twenty in all. As the century drew to an end, the old soslovie organisations - merchant guilds and the meshchanstvo society in particular - began to function as corporations, providing social standing to small-scale entrepreneurs and creating a forum for commercial transactions. Some of the most prosperous merchants became known for their service to charity, among them Nikolai Bugrov (1837-1911), major industrialist and banker who became famous for his aid to Old Believer communities and for founding a homeless shelter (i880) that made it onto the pages of Maxim Gorky's novels.[97]
If, until the 1870s, the Guhernskie vedomosti had been the sole legal periodical publication in the Russian provinces, lifting the ban resulted in an explosion of provincial publishing. The questions of the potential civic role of the provincial press triggered a nationwide debate in the mid-i870s, that raised much deeper issues of the relation of the centre and the provinces. In response to the claim of the Petersburg publicist, D. L. Mordovtsev, that the capitals necessarily exercised a gravitational pull, extracting all true talent from the provinces, Aleksandr Gatsiskii argued that the centre could only be as strong as its constituent parts. The same year, a Kazan-based publication, Pervyi shag, brought together provincial authors to demonstrate the provinces' literary power. (One of the stories later provided material for one of the first Russian feature movies, Merchant Bashkirov's Daughter, 1913.) Already in 1880, Nizhnii Novgorod had two major daily newspapers (Volgar' and the Vedomosti), as well as the Iarmorochnyi Listok which came out in fairtime. Other publications came and went. Six private printing presses, three photographic studios, two bookstores and a public library provided the literary infrastructure.
Provincial residents read a good deal. An 1894 survey found that residents subscribed to 110 Russian journals and newspapers, or 4,198 copies. Adolf Marx's illustrated weekly, Niva, accounted for more than a quarter of all publications purchased. Judging by Niva's popularity, as well as by the illustrated journals that followed it on the list (Rodina, Zhivopisnoe ohozrenie, Sever, Nov', VokrugSveta, Sem'ia, VsemirnaiaIlliustratsiia, Lug, PrirodaiLiudi), people wanted to read about, and see images of, exotic travels, family life, art and nature. Russkaia mysl' was by far the most widely read of the national thick journals, followed by Russkoe hogatstvo and Vestnik Evropy. Residents subscribed to national daily newspapers as well: Svet, Novoe vremia and Russkie vedomosti by the 1890s displaced the once-dominant Syn Otechestva.
Nizhegorodians had a particular penchant for music and science. In the 1840s the violinist and musicologist (and member ofthe local nobility) Aleksandr Uly- byshev - author of a two-volume biography of Mozart published in Leipzig - founded a musical circle at his house at the intersection of Bol'shaia and Malaia Pokrovka, playing chamber music, and importing musicians for a symphony orchestra from Moscow. The musical environment proved sufficiently rich to nurture Milii Balakirev (1837-1910) up to the age of sixteen, when, Ulybyshev's recommendation in hand, he travelled to Moscow to study with Glinka, and eventually to become a founder of the 'Mighty Five'. In the second half of the century, the musical tradition continued with the founding of a branch of Anton Rubinstein's Russian Musical Society through the efforts ofV I. Villuan, who came to the town in 1873. Concerts and charitable recitals formed an integral part of cultural life, and musical instruction was available to students at the local schools and institutes. The region also nourished a strong tradition of choral singing, most notably in the knife- and lock-producing area around Pavlovo.
Observation of the heavens was another local passion. If, in the 1840s, the pages of the Gubernskie vedomosti were already filled with the meteorological notes of local priests and teachers, by 1893 a province-wide network of meteorological stations was established (there were forty-seven by 1912); they drew on the efforts of the rural intelligentsia to chart average temperatures, precipitation rates, cloud movements, the behaviour of snow masses on the ground and so on. The Circle of Amateurs of Physics and Astronomy was founded in 1888 and flourished up to the First World War. They proudly proclaimed Camille Flammarion as one of their honorary members (he actually condescended to send them a letter acknowledging this honour), and counted some 150 real members, including Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, then a resident of Kaluga, by the turn of the century. The circle conducted meteorological observations of their own (here, peasants and clergy were their most dedicated contributors), as well as holding lectures and readings, conducting an active correspondence with learned societies in the capitals and abroad, and collecting a very respectable library of scientific works in French and German as well as Russian.
If one were to speak of a 'provincial culture' distinct from that of the capitals, one of the key loci for its emergence was the museum. For residents of provincial Russia, the notion of a museum evoked not so much an art collection, as an assemblage of historical, ethnographic, or natural-scientific artefacts. One of the first natural-historical museums was founded in Nizhnii Novgorod in 1888 by the soil scientist Vasilii Dokuchaev; its aim was not only the display of soil types, meteorological tables, examples of handicrafts, but also the education of visitors. Eventually, a network of such museums became a means for the dissemination of information and creation of a local consciousness throughout Russia. The major instrument for fostering historical consciousness became the Provincial Archival Commissions, established (like the Gubernskie vedomosti fifty years earlier) by decree from the central government in 1883.[98] Not only did the Archival Commissions (NGUAK) undertake the daunting task of sifting through mountains of ancient documents accumulated in one of the kremlin towers (in the process, incidentally, destroying a significant amount of materials that did not interest them), but they also launched a plethora of research expeditions, festivals and historical preservation efforts. Thus a tiny house where Peter the Great had stayed a few days became a museum; Nizhegorodi- ans gathered in 1889 to celebrate the birthday of the city's legendary founder, Prince Georgii Vsevolodovich (1189-1238); and preparations were already well under way in the 1890s for the eventual jubilee of the rescue of Moscow from the Poles, projected to be celebrated in 1912. The Archival Commissions had published eighteen volumes (46 issues) of historical materials by 1914, including contributions by Sergei Platonov who kept up an active correspondence
with commission members as part of his research on the Time of Troubles.
***
Two themes emerge from the above discussion. First, it is clear that there was nothing 'typical' or 'representative' about Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century. Like every other provincial town, it pulsated to its own rhythms, drawing on a richness of local environmental and social circumstances to create an individual personality. A thriving commercial life, the civic prominence of the merchant estate, the distinct cultural flavour of the Old Belief were but some of the particular characteristics of 'Russia's pocket' - as popular wisdom dubbed Nizhnii. A second theme is the importance of the Great Reforms for provincial Russia. A demographic upsurge, the creation of entirely new institutions like the zemstvo and the infusion of new energy into old ones, and a burgeoning press and musical, scientific, and historical societies marked the last third of the nineteenth century. The All-Russian Fair, held in Nizhnii Novgorod in 1896, presented to the public not only the products of Russian industry, commerce and agriculture, but a bustling and growing city poised to enter the twentieth century with considerable pride, optimism, and energy.
Russian Orthodoxy: Church, people and politics in Imperial Russia
GREGORY L. FREEZE
The Orthodox Church, which had possessed enormous property and power in medieval Russia, underwent profound change in Imperial Russia. It was not, as traditional historiography would have it, merely a matter of the Petrine reforms which purportedly turned the Church into a state agency and subservient 'handmaiden'. The Church's history did not end in 1721; it did, however, inaugurate a new age - one that brought fundamental changes in its status, clergy, resources, relationship to laity, and role in social and political questions. All this reflected the impact of new forces (and the Church's response): state-building, territorial expansion, growth and transformation of society, and the challenges posed by secularisation and religious pluralism.[99]Like the ancien regime itself, Russian Orthodoxy faced an acute crisis by the early twentieth century, affecting both its capacity to conduct internal reforms and its relationship to the regime and society. The Church thus faced revolution not only in state and society, but within its own walls - profoundly affecting its capacity (and desire) to defend the ancien regime.
Institutionalising Orthodoxy
Although the medieval Russian Church had constructed an administration to exercise its broad spiritual and temporal authority, it exhibited the same organisational backwardness as did the secular regime. The patriarchate, established in 1589, presided over a vast realm called the 'patriarchal region' (patriarshaia oblast') and nominally supervised a handful of surrounding dioceses. Despite the resolutions of church councils and the patriarch, the Church had no centralised administration to formulate and implement a standardised policy. Attempts to do so, like the liturgical reforms of the 1650s, provoked resistance and precipitated schism and the Old Belief. At the diocesan level, ecclesiastical governance was nominal; Russian bishops simply could not exercise the kind of control found in Reformation and post-Reformation Europe.
These shortcomings in ecclesiastical administration, compounded by the sharp conflict between the tsar and patriarch, provided the primary impetus for the church reforms of Peter the Great.[100] When the conservative patriarch, Ioakim, died in 1700, Peter left the position vacant and appointed a locum tenens as acting head of the Church. Faced with the fierce exigencies of the Northern War, Peter was more interested in the Church's material resources and promptly re-established, in 1701, the 'Monastery Office' (monastyrskii prikaz) to siphon off income from monastic estates. That order was followed by others imposing new levies and restrictions on the Church and clergy. Only when the Northern War abated did Peter turn his attention to ecclesiastical administration and, in 1718, included the Church in his design for a new system of administrative colleges (kollegii), then deemed the model of efficient administration. For the Church, that meant replacing the patriarchate with a 'spiritual college' of bishops (later renamed the 'Holy Synod'). In 1721 Peter issued the 'Spiritual Regulation' (with a supplement in 1722) to serve as its governing charter and to set the agenda for ecclesiastical and religious reform. In 1722 he also established the office of chief procurator to serve as his 'eyes and ears' in ecclesiastical affairs. Peter also issued a plethora of other decrees, such as those restricting the construction of churches and limiting the number of monastic and secular clergy. But his death in 1725 came during the initial stages of implementation; his immediate successors either deferred or dismantled further reform.
From the 1740s, however, the project of 'church-building' (the ecclesiastical counterpart to state-building) and religious reform was once again underway. To improve diocesan administration, the Synod tightened its oversight and reorganised the mammoth Patriarchal (now 'Synodal') Region into several smaller, more manageable dioceses.[101] This process gained new impetus under Catherine the Great (r. 1762-96), who first vented ecclesiastical questions in the Legislative Question of 1767-8[102] and made a systematic reorganisation of dioceses in the 1780s (an ecclesiastical counterpoint to her provincial reform of 1775).5 The new dioceses, operating under strict oversight of the Synod,6 not only administered smaller territories and populations but also acquired new administrative organs - above all, the dean (blagochinnyi) as overseer for ten to fifteen parish churches. As a result, the bishop could now collect systematic information and tighten control over the clergy and, increasingly, the believers themselves.7 At the same time, the Church expanded its network of seminaries to train clergy. Although mandated by Peter the Great, these existed only on paper until the Catherinean era and now steadily increased their enrolments and developed a full curriculum based on Latin.8
Reforms in the first half of the nineteenth century brought further institution-building. This included the formation of a 'system' of ecclesiastical schools in 1808-14, publication of the Charter of Ecclesiastical Consistories in 1841 (to direct diocesan administration)9 and the introduction of annual diocesan reports in 1847.10 All this brought tangible results - for example, in the Church's growing capacity to regulate marriage and divorce (which, in contrast to most of Western Europe, remained entirely in its hands). The Church used its new power to prevent and detect illegal marriages (those which violated canon or state law) and to thwart divorce. As a result, by the middle of the nineteenth century, marital dissolution - which had once been easy and informal - had become virtually impossible.11
The pre-reform era also marked an unprecedented expansion in the role of the chiefprocurator, above all, duringthe tenure of Count N. A. Protasov (183655). Protasov established his own chancellery (parallel to that of the Synod12) and used the diocesan secretary (the main lay official assisting the bishop) as his own agent in diocesan administration. Protasov even assumed a decisive role
Muller (ed.), '. . . aus der anmuthigen Gelehrsamkeit'. Tiibinger Studien zum 18. Jahrhundert (Tubingen: Attempto Verlag, 1988), pp. 155-68.
5 I. M. Pokrovskii, Russkie eparkhii v XVI-XIX vv., 2 vols. (Kazan, 1913), vol. II, appendix, pp. 55-8.
6 By the 1760s and 1770s, the Synod demanded - and received - systematic data on a wide variety of matters; see RGIA, Fond 796, op. 48, g. 1767, d. 301; op. 55, g. 1774, d. 534, ll. 9-10 ob. Previously as the chief procurator (I. Melissino) complained to the Synod on 31 October 1764, such reporting was sporadic or non-existent (op. 45, g. 1764, d. 335, l. 1-1 ob.)
7 See G. L. Freeze, The Russian Levites (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977),
pp. 46-77.
8 Ibid., pp. 78-106.
9 Ustav dukhovnykh konsistorii (St Petersburg: Sinodal'naia tip., 1841).
10 On the standardised annual reports (otchety), essential for the chief procurator's own annual reports, see: RGIA, Fond 797, op. 14, g. 1844, d. 33752, ll. 1-54.
11 G. L. Freeze, 'Bringing Order to the Russian Family: Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia, 1760-1860', JMH 62 (1990): 709-48.
12 For the establishment of the chancellery see RGIA, Fond 797, op. 2, d. 6122, ll. 1-18.
in setting the Synod's agenda, framing its resolutions, and controlling their implementation. Nevertheless the bishops deeply resented the intrusion, the spirit of ill-will steadily mounting during his decades as chief procurator.[103]
The 'Great Reforms' under Alexander II (r. 1855-81) also included the Church and sought to transform the basic institutions of the Church - its administration, education, judiciary, censorship and parish. The reforms, largely undertaken at state initiative, applied the general principles and policies ofthe secular reforms to the Church. Above all, that meant measures to encourage society to help plan, finance and implement reform. In the case of the Church, this entailed a limited 'democratisation' (for example, by allowing priests to elect deans and hold diocesan assemblies) and even 'laicisation' (by allowing the laity to assume a greater role in parish affairs). The hope was to revitalise the Church and to bring it into greater accord with society and state.
These hopes were soon dashed. The 'democratisation' elicited strong criticism, chiefly on the grounds that the dean was now the agent of the clergy, not the bishop, and therefore lax and lenient in the face of grievous misdeeds and malfeasance. Nor did the diocesan assemblies perform as hoped, partly because of the bishops' hostility, partly because of the clergy's own shortcomings. In any case these changes failed to solve the needs of the clergy and seminary and to provide a forum for pastoral interaction and co-operation. The parish reforms were no less disappointing. The 1864 statute (establishing parish councils to raise funds for charity, schools, clergy and the parish church) ran into a wall of popular indifference: few parishes availed themselves of the opportunity to establish a council and, of those that did, they raised scant funds (which, for the most part, went mainly to renovate and beautify their church). By 1869 the reform resorted to an older strategy of'reorganising parishes', i.e. merging them into larger units and reducing resident clerical staffs, with the expectation that a higher parishioner:priest ratio would enable more ample material support. That too failed: parishioners resisted and withheld support (by cutting the voluntary gratuities), while the clergy found that they had to serve many more parishioners for the same income.
Reform in ecclesiastical administration and judiciary failed even to pass from draft to law. Already the butt of lay criticism for red tape and corruption, ecclesiastical administration suffered from hyper-centralisation at the top and under-institutionalisation at the base. And time did not stand still: the workload rose sharply in the post-reform period, making the deficiencies of diocesan rule increasingly evident. The critical dynamic was the deluge of marital and divorce cases, which increased exponentially in sheer numbers and became ever more complex - so that, by century's end, they were completely overwhelming diocesan and Synodal administration.[104] Indeed, it is not wholly unfair to describe the final decades, marked by a gradual breakdown of ecclesiastical administration, as an incremental de-institutionalisation - a reversal of the process launched by the Petrine reforms in the early eighteenth century.
That was compounded by a sharp deterioration in Church-State relations in the years before the 1905 Revolution. One impetus was K. P. Pobedonos- tsev, the chief procurator (1880-1905) who engineered 'counter-reforms' (to dismantle the reforms of the 1860s) in an abrasive, imperious way that put a severe strain on Church-State relations.[105] Matters deteriorated further with the accession of Nicholas II to the throne in 1894: to an unprecedented degree, he personally intervened in strictly spiritual matters. Partly out of conviction, partly out of his own (and others') desire to 'resacralise' autocracy, Nicholas launched an inquiry into the moral and religious condition of monasteries, sought to shield 'popular' icon-painting from commercialisation and mass production, and personally sponsored the canonisation of a popular religious figure, Serafim Sarovskii, in 1903.[106] This unprecedented intrusion offended hierarchs and did little to resacralise autocracy. Particularly ominous was the February Manifesto of 1903 ('Plans for the Improvement of the State Order') with hints of further concessions to religious minorities that posed a direct challenge to the Church's privileged position. By 1905 clergy, lay activists and conservative prelates had come to demand an end to state tutelage, realisation of'conciliarism' (sobornost'), even re-establishment of the patriarchate.
The clergy
The 'clerical estate' (dukhovnoe soslovie) that served the Church consisted of three categories: the ruling episcopate, celibate monastic clergy and married secular clergy. All underwent profound changes, some positive and some negative, that significantly recast their profile and mentalite.
Episcopate
The hierarchy (comprised of three descending ranks - metropolitan, archbishop and bishop) still came exclusively from the ranks of monks but exhibited substantial change in the imperial era. The total size increased steadily, rising from 26 prelates under Peter the Great to 147 by 1917, partly through the establishment ofadditional dioceses but mainly through the appointment of suffragan bishops to assist in larger, less manageable dioceses. There were equally striking changes in their social and education profile.[107] To overcome opposition from tradition-bound Russian prelates, Peter chose prelates from Ukraine, not because of their ethnicity, but because of their superior education (often in Catholic institutions in the West), which, he presumed, would incline them to support his reforms. From the middle of the eighteenth century, however, prelates came primarily from central Russia, partly because of suspicion of Ukrainian prelates, but chiefly because of the growing network of seminaries in central dioceses (which could now supply qualified Russian candidates). The social origin of bishops also changed: whereas only half of the Petrine prelates came from the clerical estate, by the nineteenth century this quotient had climbed to more than 90 per cent. Bishops from other groups, notably the nobility, virtually disappeared. The critical factor here was education: elevation to the episcopate required a higher ecclesiastical education which was only accessible to members of the clerical estate. Indeed, most bishops held advanced degrees, published extensively and earned the sobriquet of 'learned monks'. Education also shaped their careers prior to consecration: many served as rectors in seminaries and academies, earning their spurs as scholars and administrators, and then rising quickly - at an early age - to choice episcopal appointments. Only in the late imperial era did this career-line change, chiefly because fewer students in the elite ecclesiastical academies were willing to take monastic vows. As a result, by the early twentieth century over half of the new prelates had come from non-academic careers in the secular clergy (widowed priests who had taken monastic vows) and in missions. They too, however, were of clerical origin and held a higher academic degree.[108]
After consecration, an episcopal career proved highly volatile, with bishops moving rapidly up (or down) the diocesan hierarchy, as their merits and luck would have it. The rate of transfers steadily accelerated; under Alexander III the average tenure in a given diocese shrank to a mere 2.4 years. In theory, mobility gave prelates a broader, national perspective and a strong incentive for zealous performance. But rapid turnover also denied them a chance to develop spiritual bonds with local clergy and laity; it also generated accusations that prelates were careerists with no real interest in the spiritual needs of their flock. Tensions between prelates and priests, while hardly new or unique to Russia, increased markedly in post-reform Russia as priests and parishioners became ever more aggressive in asserting their rights and prerogatives. This challenge from below, compounded by the pressure from the secular state, made prelates increasingly protective of canons (and their prerogatives), deepening the divide within the clergy itself.
Monastic ('black') clergy The monastic clergy became the object of a full-scale onslaught in the eighteenth century.[109] In medieval Russia they had been the backbone of Orthodoxy, monopolising high religious culture, attracting large numbers to take vows and acquiring vast tracts of populated land. Those material assets, long a temptation for the resource-starved state, became an irresistible target for Peter the Great as he desperately searched for the wherewithal to wage the Northern War. In 1701 he therefore re-established the 'Monastery Office' (monastyrskii prikaz), so unpopular with churchmen in the seventeenth century, to administer monasteries and divert their revenues to the state. After Peter, policy fluctuated between retreat and renewed attack, yet always short of fateful secularisation until an abortive attempt by Peter III in 1762. Catherine at first retreated, but in 1764 carried through the long-sought secularisation. Seeking primarily to pad state coffers (but also to end the mounting unrest among the Church's peasants), Catherine justified sequestration for liberating the Church from worldly cares so that it could focus upon its spiritual mission.[110]The state not only confiscated lands and peasants: it also closed two-thirds of the monasteries and forbade the tonsure of new males and females until the existing surfeit disappeared.[111] Once the surplus monks and nuns were eliminated, the Church found it difficult to attract new recruits; by the 1780s the surfeit had turned into a general shortage of monks and nuns.[112] As a result, by 1825 the number of monks, nuns, and novices (11,080) was less than half its size a century earlier (25,207).
By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, that crisis gave way to a renaissance of monasticism.[113] Most obvious was the sheer increase in the number of monasteries, as the state approved their establishment if they had sufficient financing and, especially, if they could bolster Orthodoxy in minority areas. Hence the number of monasteries, which had fallen to 476 by 1825, climbed to nearly 1,000 by 1914; resident monks, nuns and novices rose about 8.5 times (from 11,080 to 94,629).[114] New recruits came from increasingly diverse social backgrounds, especially in the case of women. No less important was the spiritual renaissance in the monastery, above all, the emergence of elderhood (starchestvo) as the quintessence of Orthodox religiosity.[115]
But the most remarkable feature of the monastic renaissance was the growing predominance of women. Once a minority, by the early twentieth century nuns and female novices had come to constitute a majority of the monastic clergy (77.5 per cent). This process was hardly unique to Russia, occurring as well in the contemporary West. The key factors in the Russian case included a heightened (and ascribed) sense of religiosity among women, breakdown of the patriarchal family (giving women greater autonomy and freedom of choice), the positive role of female cloisters (as hospitals, schools and homes for the elderly) and the Church's growing recognition of women's potential role in combatting dissent and de-christianisation.
Although monasticism was regaining its erstwhile status (and much property as well), it also elicited growing criticism. It was a favourite target of anticlericals, who accused it of harbouring indolence and gluttony, failing to perform useful worldly service, and associating with right-wing forces. Such criticism was also to be heard within the Church, especially among parish clergy, who resented the monastic monopoly of power in the episcopate and ecclesiastical schools. Even among the laity, despite the popular veneration of the monastery's religious significance, there was mounting resentment over monastic landholding amidst the 'land hunger' of late Imperial Russia.
Secular ('white') clergy The secular clergy served primarily in parish churches, but they also staffed cathedrals, institutional churches, cemetery chapels and the like. The secular clergy consisted of two distinct groups: ordained clergy (sviashchennosluzhiteli) and sacristans (tserkovnosluzhiteli). The former included mainly priests (a small number of whom held the honorific title of archpriest) and deacons (d'iakony); only the priest could conduct the liturgy and dispense sacraments. If funding permitted, a parish preferred as well to have the optional deacon, prized for his voice and role in enriching the aesthetics of the liturgy. More numerous were the unordained sacristans (earlier diachok and ponomar', retitled psalomshchik in 1869), who assisted the priest in performing rites and rituals, read the divine liturgy, and helped maintain the church and keep order during services.
The secular clergy increased in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but at a far slower pace than the population. Thus, although the number ofclergy more than doubled between 1722 and 1914 (from 61,111 in 1722 to 117,915), the population of Orthodox believers grew nearly tenfold (from 10 to 98 million). That meant, of course, a substantial rise in the ratio of parishioners to secular clergy, from 1,008 in 1824 to 1,925 in 1914. In many cases, the situation was actually worse: rural parishes often embraced numerous hamlets scattered over a broad, untraversable area, while some urban parishes swelled to gargantuan size (with tens of thousands of 'parishioners'). While this process also affected Western churches, especially Protestants, it had particularly negative consequences for Russian Orthodoxy: because the priest had to perform myriad daily rites, he found it exceedingly difficult to perform the new duties of pastor and preacher, not merely dispense various rituals and sacraments.
Yet those newer duties gained steadily in importance and underlay the Church's drive to educate and 'professionalise' the clergy. Whereas earlier priests had lacked formal education, the new educational network - which took root and expanded steadily after the middle of the eighteenth century - soon made formal seminary study and, later, a full seminary degree a sine qua non for the priesthood. Thus, 15 per cent of the priests had a seminary degree in 1805, but that quotient had jumped to 83 per cent in i860 and reached 97 per cent by 1880. That superior education also generated growing emphasis on a pastoral, not just liturgical, role.[116] But this 'educational revolution' applied only to priests, not deacons and especially sacristans, who had scant formal schooling. As the bishop of Saratov observed in 1850, the priests are well educated, but 'the deacons and sacristans, almost without exception, do not know the catechism'.[117] That educational gap, compounded by disputes over the sharing of parish revenues, was a ubiquitous bane of parish life.[118]
Education also played a role in transforming the secular clergy into a hereditary social estate (dukhovnoe soslovie). Whereas the Church in Muscovy had no educational barriers to the appointment of clergy (who were chosen by parishioners and merely confirmed and ordained by the bishops), educational requirements became a major obstacle to choosing clergy from other social groups: first, because the seminary was open only to the sons of clergy (to avoid wasting the Church's scarce resources on those who would not serve); and, second, because the bishop insisted that the best students (regardless of parish wish) receive appointments. A further obstacle to outsiders was the new poll tax: since the clergy had a privileged exemption, the state was loath to release poll-tax registrants (peasants and townspeople) to the clergy and thus diminish its revenues. While exceptions were possible (if the registrant's community agreed to pay the poll tax), that became increasingly rare after the middle of the eighteenth century.[119] A final factor was the vested interest of the clergy, who preferred to have kinsmen in the same parish. That was partly to avoid the presence of outsiders (deemed more likely to report misconduct or malfeasance), partly to ensure positions for relatives, and partly to provide dowries for daughters and support for elderly clergy (the new cleric agreeing to support his retiring predecessor). Although the Church tenaciously resisted kinship ties within the same parish, these nevertheless persisted and appear frequently in the clerical service registers (klirovye vedomosti).[120]
The formation of a closed estate was fraught with significant consequences. First, it had a negative impact on the quality of pastors and their ties to the laity. On the one hand, the hereditary order ensured a sufficient number (indeed surfeit) of candidates, but not necessarily zealous, committed servitors.
Critics argued that ordinands simply followed in their father's footsteps and lacked real commitment or vocation. On the other hand, the hereditary estate weakened the ties between priest and parishioner. That meant, in the first instance, few kinship ties: given that marriage into the disprivileged poll-tax population was undesirable, the clergy predictably showed a strong propensity for endogamous marriages. That endogamy was compounded by a growing cultural rift between the seminary-educated priest and the mass of illiterate parishioners. Not only did the priest find it difficult to communicate with his flock, but parishioners resented the diversion of scarce parish revenues to finance seminaries serving only the clergy's offspring.
The second problem was demographic imbalance. Given the slow rate of expansion in parishes and their personnel, the clerical estate simply produced far more progeny than the ecclesiastical domain could absorb. While the regime did 'harvest' the clerical estate periodically (through conscript of 'idle' sons into the army and enticement of seminarians into the civil service), these outlets proved insufficient. The result was a surfeit of unplaced clerical sons, including large numbers of seminary graduates, who became the focus of growing concern by the middle of the nineteenth century. This backlog of 'idle' seminary graduates steadily increased, rising from 430 in 1830 to 2,178 in 1850. Thus by mid-century - within the span of two or three generations - the Church had gone from a chronic shortage of educated candidates to a chronic
surplus. [121]
In one important respect, however, the secular clergy experienced little change: in the form and amount of their material support. Financially, the parish was an autonomous unit: it provided land (for the clergy to cultivate themselves) and voluntary gratuities from various rites (such as baptism, weddings and burials) and holiday processions.[122] With the exception of a few prosperous parishes, support was marginal and left the clergy poor if not destitute; predictably, it was difficult to find candidates willing to come - and especially stay - in the poorer parishes. Even worse than the penury was the pernicious form of the support. Cultivating the parish plot, complained the priests, inevitably distracted them from spiritual duties, rendered the advanced education irrelevant, and diminished their status in the eyes of the privileged (and perhaps even the disprivileged). The 'voluntary' gratuities were even more problematic: they left the clergy feeling like beggars and triggered constant disputes, as the two sides haggled over the fee - with such disputes often ending in charges of'extortion'.
Although the Petrine reform raised the question of clerical support, it had other priorities and left the problem unresolved. About all that the eighteenth- century state could do was to ensure that the parish staff had a full allotment (33 desiatiny) and to set guidelines for gratuities in 1765. The first to take concrete measures was Nicholas I, first by providing a small budget to subsidise clergy in the 'poorest' parishes (1829) and then by attempting to prescribe parish obligations (land and labour dues) and provide small subsidies in the politically sensitive western provinces (1842). But these measures did not apply to the mass of parish clergy, their economy remaining unchanged from pre-Petrine times - even as their expenses, above all, for educating sons, rose dramatically.
The ecclesiastical 'Great Reforms' sought to address the issues of the hereditary order and material support, but without success. As noted above, the parish reforms of the 1860s aimed at improving the clergy's material support - first by establishing parish councils, then by the reorganisation of parishes and reduction of parish staffs, but neither measure proved effective in alleviating the clergy's financial needs. Dismantling the hereditary estate also proved difficult. The reforms did abolish hereditary claims to positions (1867), assigned clerical offspring a secular legal status (1871) and opened ecclesiastical schools to outsiders, but the results proved very disappointing. By 1914 only 3 per cent of the secular clergy came from other social estates. And that 3 per cent came at a high cost. Abolition of family claims to positions simply eliminated the traditional form of social security; alternative schemes for pensions proved ineffective, forcing elderly clergy to remain in service and doomed retirees to destitution. Opening diocesan schools proved counterproductive: not only did few outsiders choose to matriculate (hardly surprising, given the failure to improve clerical income), but many of the clergy's sons used their right of exit to flee to secular careers. Hence the Church - after decades of a surfeit of candidates - suddenly faced a dearth of qualified candidates. To fill vacancies, bishops had to ordain inferior candidates and, increasingly, even those without a seminary degree. The result was a decline in the clergy's educational standards, with the proportion of priests with a seminary degree plummeting from 97 per cent in 1880 to 64 per cent in 1904.
Disenchantment with the reforms was intense and universal. The ostensible beneficiaries, the parish clergy, came to loathe the very word 'reform' - which promised so much and gave so little. Little wonder that some proved increasingly receptive to 'clerical liberalism' and even revolutionary causes.33 Conservatives were no less disenchanted. That dim view of the reforms propelled Pobedonostsev's 'counter-reforms', including a reversal of parish reorganisation as well as measures to limit the matriculation of outsiders and to impede the 'flight' of seminarians from church service.34 By the 1890s the failure to improve the clergy's material and legal status, compounded by the attempt to imprison sons in church service, only fuelled growing discontent within the secular clergy.
Believers
'Christianisation' was not an event in 988, but a complex, incremental process that slowly worked its way across the great Eurasian plain. Given the dispersion of population, the heterogeneity of local cultures, and the institutional backwardness of the medieval Church, Russian Orthodoxy was actually Russian Heterodoxy, with kaleidoscopic variations in local customs, superstitions and religious practice. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Church undertook to standardise and purify popular religious practice, but as yet lacked the instrumentalities to make a fundamental 'reformation' in popular religious practice.35
It was only in the eighteenth century that the Church launched a full-scale campaign to reshape popular Orthodoxy. The Petrine reform fired the initial salvo, but a sustained effort began only in the middle of the eighteenth century.36 The issue was not disbelief, but deviant belief- the welter of unauthorised, sometimes heretical customs and practices that pervaded local religious life, such as sorcery and black magic, unofficial saints and relics, and 'miracle- working icons'. A further concern was the Old Belief, especially from the early nineteenth century, as the number of registered 'schismatics' - and, reports of 'semi-schismatics' (poluraskol'niki) - steadily increased.37
33 Freeze, Parish Clergy, pp. 389-97.
34 By i900 the Synod limited outsiders (youths from non-clerical estates) to i0 per cent (RGIA, Fond 179, g. 1898, d. 415).
35 See, for example, '1651 g. oktiabria 20. Ustavnaia gramota temnikovskogo sobora pro- topopu o proizvodstve suda i tserkovnoi rasprave', Izvestiia Tambovskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi komissii 8 (1886): 71-6.
36 A. S. Lavrov Koldovstvo i religiia v Rossii (Moscow: Drevlekharnilishche, 2000); G. L. Freeze, 'Policing Piety: The Church and Popular Religion in Russia, 1750-1850', in David L. Ransel and Jane Burbank (eds.), Rethinking Imperial Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 210-49.
37 Official data, notorious for understating the number of Old Believers, none the less showed a steady increase - from 84,150 (1800) to 273,289 (1825) to 648,359 (1850). RGIA,
This 'reformation from above' had a twofold thrust. One was traditional: repression. Peter's Spiritual Regulation specified the superstitious and deviant behaviour that the clergy were to combat, and subsequent decrees continued the attack. In the 1740s the campaign was broadened to include behaviour in the Church and the performance of religious rites; the Church also took the first steps toward creating a new official to ensure this 'good order'. The second thrust was 'enlightenment' - the attempt to inculcate a basic understanding of Orthodoxy by requiring priests to catechise and preach, not merely perform rites. This broader pastoral vision, to be sure, was slow to take effect. Despite the dissemination of printed sermons,38 parish priests found it difficult to comply, with most offering a sermon three or four times per year (if at all).39 They proved more energetic about catechisation;40 by the middle of the nineteenth century, a small but growing number of priests - especially in urban parishes - offered some form of catechism instruction.41 With the initial campaign to open village schools (first by the Ministry of State Domains in 183842 and later by the Church itself), the clergy had yet another venue to teach religious fundamentals. The Church also expanded its publication of religious literature for the laity, which was initially aimed at the educated but later targeted at a less privileged readership. The result was a gradual confessionalisation that sought to make the folk more cognitively Orthodox, to be not only 'right-praising' but also 'right-believing'.
Church policy toward popular Orthodoxy underwent a significant shift in the middle of the nineteenth century. Although the Church continued to
Fond 138, g. 1857, d. 549, ll. 4-5; Fond 797, op. 25, otd. 2, st. 1, d. 105, ll. 16 ob., 23 ob. By mid- century prelates warned increasingly of the 'semi-schismatics', who, while nominally Orthodox, in fact simultaneously observed the Old Belief.
38 To encourage and facilitate such preaching, the Church published and distributed model sermons that parish priests (few ofwhom, until the early nineteenth century, had formal schooling) could simply read aloud to parishioners. For the fundamental three-volume collection, compiled by Platon (Levshin) and Gavriil (Petrov), Sobranie raznykhpouchenii na vse voskresnye i prazdnichnye dni, 3 vols. (Moscow: Sinodal'naia tip., 1776). The publication came at the direct initiative of Catherine II; see the memorandum from the chief procurator, 15 March 1772, in RGIA, Fond 796, op. 53, g. 1772, d. 19, l. 1-1 ob.
39 The rarity of sermons is evident from the service records; see, for example, the Kursk files in Gos. arkhiv Kurskoi oblasti, Fond 20, op. 2, d. 10, ll. 2-2 ob., 10 ob.-ii, 18 ob-19.
40 For the development of catechism texts, see Peter Hauptmann, Die Katechismen der Russisch-Orthodoxen Kirche. Entstehungsgeschichte und Lehrgehalt (Gottingen, 1971).
41 Stung by reports that few parishes offered catechism instruction, in the mid-i840s the Synod collected systematic data that showed a modest, but rising, percentage of churches giving catechism instruction: 7.8 per cent in 1847, 8.7 per cent in 1850 and 11.6 per cent in 1855 (G. L. Freeze, 'The Rechristianization of Russia: The Church and Popular Religion, 1750-1850', StudiaSlavicaFinlandensia 7 (1990): 109-10). Compliance varied considerably - from 12 parishes in Vladimir to 504 in Podolia (RGIA, Fond 797, op. 14, d. 33764, ll. 94-6).
42 For the ministry's appeal for clerical participation, see the 1838 memorandum in RGIA, Fond 796, op. 119, g. 1838, d. 1178.
intensify the clergy's didactic role (uchitel'stvo), it began to revise its view of popular Orthodoxy and now endeavoured to incorporate, not repress, lay religious practice. Thatmeant, forexample, anew view oficon processions; earlier derogated as useless and even harmful, the Church now tended to encourage such public displays of piety - both to satisfy the demands of believers and to demonstrate the power of Orthodoxy.[123] As one dean in Volhynia diocese explained: 'Such icon processions develop in the people a feeling of religious sensibility, arouse a profound reverence toward things sacred, instil piety in the souls, and protect them from superstition.'[124] The Church also sought to involve the laity directly in religious life, not only through the parish councils described above, but also through the development of choirs[125] and religious associations, such as societies of believers who bore religious banners during processions.[126]
To be sure, the Church had to fight an uphill battle against forces inimical to traditional religious life, not so much the intellectual challenges of disbelief and science, as the urbanisation and industrialisation that uprooted people from their community and its embedded traditions and beliefs. But it was not only 'sociological de-christianisation' that threatened Orthodoxy; the Church also faced serious challenges from religious pluralism - from the Old Believers, sectarians and other confessions seeking to convert the Orthodox. In the face of all this, did the Russian Church, like its peers in the West, experience a decline in religious observance?
That is a complex issue, but one conventional measure of religious practice is the data on confession and communion.[127] Significantly, especially when compared with Western Europe, observance among the Russian Orthodox remained extraordinarily high, with relatively modest fluctuations over the course of the entire nineteenth century (see Table 14.1). In 1900, on the eve of the revolutionary upsurge, Church data show that 87 per cent of the male and 91 per cent of the female believers performed their 'spiritual duty' of confession
Russian Orthodoxy: Church, people and politics Table 14.1. Confession and communion observance: Russian Empire (in per cent)
Neither confession nor communion
| Confession and | ||||||||
| communion Confession only Excused Indifference | ||||||||
| Year | Male | Female | Male | Female | Male | Female | Male | Female |
| 1797 | 85.25 | 86.31 | 9.03 | 8.22 | 1.33 | 1.24 | 1.43 | 1.37 |
| 1818 | 85.07 | 86.76 | 8.09 | 8.13 | 0.47 | 0.12 | 5.38 | 4.72 |
| 1835 | 83.70 | 86.17 | 6.78 | 6.23 | 0.53 | 0.10 | 8.99 | 7.50 |
| 1850 | 84.18 | 85.84 | 5.98 | 6.06 | 2.33 | 1.09 | 7.51 | 7.01 |
| 1900 | 87.03 | 91.03 | 0.52 | 0.45 | 5.76 | 2.58 | 6.69 | 5.94 |
and communion.[128] Little wonder that, before the 1905 Revolution, the bishops' annual reports to the Holy Synod routinely exuded such complacency and confidence about popular piety. The data do, however, also reveal a darker side. Whereas the non-compliants had consisted primarily of semi-confessors in 1797 (i.e. people who made confession, but not received communion), that category all but disappeared in the nineteenth century. As local archival materials show, they did so for various reasons: some because they fell ill or encountered other impediments, others because they simply lacked the zeal to return for communion, and still others because of 'the counsel of their spiritual father' (for failing to observe the Lenten requirements of abstinence, especially from sexual intercourse). In lieu ofthe semi-observants, there emerged a larger pool of non-compliants who were either 'excused' (mainly because of absenteeism associated with trade or migrant labour) or 'unexcused' (for 'indifference'). In short, Russia showed signs of religious differentiation: an overwhelming mass of the population remained observant, while a tiny but distinct minority neglected or outright rejected their 'spiritual duty'.
Significantly, in the late nineteenth century church authorities were more inclined to complain about the parishioners' assertiveness, not their indifference. Ever since the Petrine reform, ecclesiastical authorities had increasingly violated traditional parish prerogatives, above all, in the appointment of clergy and expenditure of parish funds. The latter was particularly sensitive: the earnings from the sale of votive candles, a prime source of parish revenues, were diverted to finance the ecclesiastical schools open only to the clergy's offspring. In the post-emancipation era, parishioners increasingly sought to assert their rights over both the local clergy and the local revenues, an aspiration that erupted into full view as revolution shattered authority and emboldened parishioners to reclaim their rights.[129]
Worldly teachings: from 'reciprocity' to social Orthodoxy
Parallel with the 're-christianisation' of the folk, the Church began to develop and articulate its social and political teachings. To be sure, it reaffirmed the traditional teaching that the existing order was divinely ordained (applying that principle even to the Mongol suzerainty in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) and that 'subordinates' should obey their superiors - a paradigm that applied to ruler and ruled, masters and serfs, husbands and wives. But, under the influence of Western thought, the 'enlightened prelates' of Catherinean Russia added an important theme of'reciprocity': duties and responsibilities were bilateral, not reducible to a mere commandment to 'obey and submit'. Power and wealth conveyed responsibilities, not merely the right to demand obedience; the superior had a moral obligation to care for those in his charge. In turn, subordinates were not only to obey, but to perform their duties faithfully and energetically. Hence the existing order was a kind of divinely ordained social contract, entailing hierarchy but also reciprocity in social relationships.[130]
The Church also applied that precept to serfdom.[131] Although formally excluded from 'meddling' in matters of the secular domain, prelates and priests none the less sought to apply the reciprocity principle, both to protect sacraments like marriage from violation and to uphold the Ten Commandments (broadly construed). Such injunctions were explicit in sermons and other writings that admonished squires to fulfil their responsibilities and, specifically, to attend to the spiritual needs of their serfs.[132] Some turned to deeds, not words, and became embroiled in social unrest - most dramatically in the Pugachev rebellion of 1773-5,[133] but on a regular basis in villages in the first half of the nineteenth century.[134]
Significantly, by the 1840s and 1850s even some prelates, more accountable and conservative, came to disparage serfdom not only for its abuses, but for the harm it dealt to the serfs' spiritual needs. Whereas bishops had earlier counted on nobles to provide parish churches and ensure peasant religious observance, some prelates began to send reports chastising the squires for neglecting this duty. Indeed, in the Western Provinces, where the squire was non-Orthodox, bishops suspected the non-Orthodox squires of deliberately subverting religious practice: 'The chief cause [of the serfs' unsatisfactory religious condition] is the indifference of the Roman Catholic squires, who, because of their hostility toward Orthodoxy, are unconcerned about the spiritual benefit of the peasants and even try to disseminate religious indifference among them.'[135] That accusation gained momentum and even began to penetrate the reports from central dioceses. The bishop of Penza, for example, attributed the serfs' religious ignorance to the 'excessive use of serf labour during fasts and sometimes holidays'.[136]
By the 1850s, the clergy openly came to espouse the need to engage temporal questions. In part, that derived from the impending emancipation of serfs - who would need the active assistance and guidance of their parish priest in navigating the rights and perils of citizenship. Theology helped legitimise the engagement, as new currents in Christology counselled the Church to 'enter into the world', just as Christ had done, and underlined the connection between Orthodoxy and contemporaneity.[137] The profusion of new clerical periodicals, with their close attention to secular issues, reinforced the new engagement. Drawing on earlier practices (which encouraged priests to disseminate 'useful' knowledge about agriculture and medicine),[138] liberal clergy now redoubled and diversified such efforts. The seminary also played an important role; it not only produced a disproportionate number of radicals[139] but also had a significant impact on younger clergy.
The result was a 'social Orthodoxy' which emphasised the Church's responsibility to address key social ills. Sermons not only became a regular feature of parish services, but came to address a broad range of worldly problems, from spouse abuse to alcoholism. The religious press, similarly, gave growing attention to temporal issues. In practical terms too, post-reform clergy sought to tackle social problems like poverty and prostitution, encouraged parishes and monasteries to open almshouses and medical clinics, and generally endeavoured to bring the Church into the world.
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