What Was the Table of Ranks in Russia?
The Table of Ranks (Tablеl’ o rangakh) was promulgated on 24 January 1722 (4 February new style) by Peter the Great in the form of a single law listing fourteen ranks in three parallel hierarchies — civil, military, and court. The Table replaced the Muscovite system of chin (rank) that had been the basis of the service state under the previous century’s tsars, and it gave the new imperial service a single, graduated system of ranks that would last, with relatively minor modifications, for the next 195 years. The Table was modelled on the Danish, Prussian, and Swedish rank systems Peter had studied during the Grand Embassy of 1697-1698 (see Ransel, The Politics of Catherinian Russia, 1975).
The structure
The Table had fourteen classes. Class 1, the highest, was the rank of Field Marshal in the army, Admiral of the Fleet in the navy, and Chancellor in the civil service; Class 14, the lowest, was the rank of Ensign in the army, Midshipman in the navy, and Collegiate Registrar in the civil service. The Court hierarchy had its own ranks, from the Ober-Hofmeister (Class 1) to the lowest court chamberlain ranks (Class 9 and below). Each rank was paired with a corresponding one in the other hierarchies, and the two were treated as equivalent for purposes of precedence and salary.
The Table also set out the rights and privileges attached to each class. The most consequential was the grant of personal and hereditary nobility. Personal nobility (i.e., nobility for the lifetime of the holder) was granted at Class 14 of the military service and Class 8 of the civil service; hereditary nobility (i.e., nobility transmissible to the holder’s descendants) was granted at Class 8 of the military service and Class 4 of the civil service. The asymmetry was deliberate: a soldier had to reach a higher rank than a civil servant to be ennobled, on the principle that a military commission was a lower threshold of entry. The Table also required every Russian noble to begin service at Class 14 and to work his way up; nobility alone, without service, was no longer sufficient (Ransel, 1975).
The service state
The Table was the centre of the new Russian service state. It required every Russian male of noble birth to serve the state, in the army, in the navy, in the civil administration, or at court. The system had its origins in the Muscovite mestnichestvo and the system of pomestia (service land grants), but it was more rigorous than either. The nobleman could not retire from service (until the reforms of 1762, when Peter III freed the nobles from compulsory service); the nobleman’s promotion depended on his actual rank, not on his family connections. The Table, accordingly, opened the imperial service to the talented commoner and the foreigner, who could enter the nobility through service (Raeff, The Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia, 1966).
The system was also a way of centralising the imperial bureaucracy. The Table listed the ranks, the salaries, the uniforms, the precedence at court, and the privileges of each class. The uniformity of the system — the same ranks, the same titles, the same chain of command — was the basis of the new Russian imperial service. By the late eighteenth century, the Table had become the single most important institution of the Russian state, and the Russian nobility was, in practice, a service class (Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 1995).
The 18th- and 19th-century modifications
The Table was modified several times in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The 1730 and 1731 decrees of Empress Anna and the 1755 decree of Empress Elizabeth refined the salary system; the 1762 decree of Peter III freed the nobles from compulsory service; the 1796 decree of Paul I reorganised the court ranks; the 1845 decree of Nicholas I introduced the “Service Class” for civil servants, parallel to the Table ranks; the 1856 decree of Alexander II created the “Lower Military Ranks” of the Table. The Table was also affected by the 1801 decree of Alexander I, which ended the 1798 rule that only the senior sons of noble families were obliged to serve (Ransel, 1975).
The Table was the longest-lived of Peter’s institutions. It survived the abolition of the pomestia system, the emancipation of the nobles from compulsory service, the abolition of serfdom, the Great Reforms, and the 1905 Revolution. It was not, however, the basis of the post-revolutionary Soviet bureaucracy, and the 1917 Russian Revolution put an end to the system of Table ranks. The last Russian noble was officially a member of the Table system in 1917, and the last holder of a Class 1 rank — General Alexei Brusilov, the commander of the South-Western Front in 1916 — was a Field Marshal under the old system.
The historical assessment
The Table was the principal mechanism by which the Russian state created its service class. The class was, in turn, the social basis of the imperial state. The Table’s innovation — that nobility was a reward of service, not a hereditary right — was the foundation of the Russian merit-based service; the consequent openness of the system to foreigners, commoners, and talented sons of the lower classes produced the extraordinary Russian social mobility of the eighteenth century. The 18th-century Russian administration was the most merit-based in Europe, and the new service class produced the major generals, the major administrators, and the major cultural figures of the period. The Table was, accordingly, the institutional framework within which the Russian Empire was built (Raeff, 1966).