What Was the Russian Nobility?
The Russian nobility, the dvoryanstvo, was the privileged class that ran the army, the civil service, the courts, and the great estates of the Russian Empire. Its members made up something between 1 and 2 per cent of the population: by the late nineteenth century, when the first modern census was taken in 1897, the dvoryanstvo numbered about 1.9 million people (the rest of the empire was overwhelmingly peasant). The dvoryanstvo possessed roughly a quarter of all the land in the European Russian provinces; the great Sheremetev, Stroganov, and Orlov families held more land individually than some European principalities (see Ragsdale, “Aleksei Petrov and the Origin of the Russian Nobility,” Cahiers du Monde russe, 1968).
Origins
The Russian nobility grew out of the service gentry of the Muscovite state. The pomestnaya konnitsa of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a body of cavalry servicemen who held land grants (pomestia) in return for military service. The grants were not inheritable in the strict sense: the tsar could recall the land at any time, and the family was required to continue providing men for the cavalry. By the seventeenth century the pomestie had become largely de facto hereditary, and the Tsar’s service gentry had become a recognisable noble class with a sense of corporate identity (Ragsdale, 1968).
Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks of 24 January 1722 (4 February new style) confirmed the merger of the old service gentry and the new imperial nobility. The Table opened the nobility to anyone who reached the eighth civil or fourteenth military rank, and it obliged the existing nobility to serve the state in order to maintain its status. The 1785 Charter to the Nobility of Catherine the Great, which was modelled on the Charter of the Towns of the same year, gave the nobility the corporate status it had been seeking: the right to meet in provincial assemblies, the right to elect marshals of the nobility, the right to address the throne through elected spokesmen, and the right to a tax-exempt status. The 1785 Charter was the constitutional foundation of the Russian nobility, and it remained in force until 1917 (Raeff, The Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia, 1966).
Structure
The Russian nobility was not a single class. At the top stood the great magnates — the Sheremetevs, the Stroganovs, the Orlovs, the Dolgorukovs, the Vorontsovs, the Gagarins, the Golitsyns — with estates of 100,000 to 500,000 acres and serfs numbering in the tens of thousands. Count Nikolai Sheremetev, who died in 1809, had some 300,000 serfs. Below the magnates stood the middle gentry, typically owning 2,000 to 10,000 acres; below that stood the small gentry, often with a few hundred acres and a few dozen serfs. The Russian novelist Turgenev made the social map of the small gentry famous in A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852), where the declining country squire is a recurring type.
The gap between the magnates and the small gentry was one of the most durable features of the class. The middle and small nobility, who had been the political backbone of the Romanov state in the seventeenth century, found themselves increasingly outclassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many of them married into the merchant class, sold their estates, or joined the provincial bureaucracy. The Russian literary canon — Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bunin — is the literature of the small and middle nobility (Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 1995).
Role in the state and culture
The dvoryanstvo was the officer class of the imperial army. Generals, regimental commanders, and the regimental officers were almost without exception noble. The Russian state relied on the nobility to staff the ministries, the senate, the synod, the provincial boards, and the courts. The dvoryanstvo also dominated the universities: of the 19,000 students in the empire in 1894, 56% were nobles; of the small number who graduated, 80% were noble (Raeff, 1966).
The dvoryanstvo was, in turn, the principal patron of Russian culture. The Sheremetev family, with the Kuskovo and Ostankino estates outside Moscow, maintained a private opera company of 70 singers and 100 musicians; the Yusupov family, with the Arkhangelskoye estate near Moscow, was a major patron of the arts. The literary salon, the country estate, and the metropolitan house in St Petersburg or Moscow were the principal settings of Russian social life from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The Russian noble culture produced a body of painting, music, and literature that is, with the partial exception of the Italian Renaissance, the most concentrated such achievement in European history (Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 2002).
Decline
The nobility’s economic position declined through the nineteenth century. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 cut the dvoryanstvo’s main source of labour; the redemption payments that the peasants were obliged to make did not compensate for the loss. The state had to step in to assist the small nobility: the Peasant Land Bank of 1882, which lent money to the peasants to buy out noble estates, became a means of liquidating the small gentry’s holdings. The Stolypin reforms of 1906-1911, which encouraged the peasantry to consolidate their holdings outside the commune, accelerated the transfer of land.
The political decline of the dvoryanstvo was equally striking. The 1905 Manifesto deprived the noble marshals of their ex officio seats on the provincial zemstvo boards; the 1906 Fundamental Laws abolished the civil privileges of the nobility; the 1907 coup d’état abolished the consultative role of the Council of the State. The dvoryanstvo entered 1917 as a class that was still legally privileged but no longer politically central, and the Provisional Government abolished the corporate nobility in June 1917. The October Revolution dispossessed the dvoryanstvo altogether; the class that had been the backbone of the Romanov state was, in less than a year, dispersed into exile, imprisonment, or the Soviet bureaucracy (Lynch, The Soviet Regime and the Nobility, 1986).