Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Non-Russian nationalities

in 1911, the movement Alash Orda (Loyalty) among the Kazakhs in the Steppe

governor-generalship in 1912, and Melli Firqa (National Party) in Crimea. In the

Central Asian khanates under the Russian protectorate political movements

of the Young Bukharans and the Young Khivans appeared already in 1909

under the impact of jadid associations in Tashkent. None of these parties was

‘nationalist’ in the strict sense (exceptperhaps Alash Orda).Most of them sought

emancipation for all Muslims within the imperial framework and under shari‘a

law. Even the Tatars did not claim territorial separation from Russia. Azeris,

Kazakhs and Central Asians preferred a federal organisation of future Russia.

Most of the Muslim political groups in late tsarist Russia were created

secretly. Some were closed by the authorities later. Much more inﬂuential

appeared to be the Muslim press, which emerged in the post-1905 period

especially in Kazan and Baku. As Dilara Usmanova has shown, it played a

crucial role in politicising Muslims in the last decade of the tsarist regime.

Making their ﬁrst appearance in 1904–5, Muslim journals and newspapers

much contributed to the spread of secular and even anticlerical ideas among the

Muslim intelligentsia. The majority of newspapers and journals such as Azat,

Dinwe-Magyshat,Din we-l-Edeb in Kazan, and Hayat, Irshad, Taraqqi,Fuyuzat and

Molla Nasreddin in Baku were published in Turkic and used the Arab alphabet.

Therewasalso an Arabic press such as the well-known JaridatDaghestan printed

in the town of Temir-Khan-Shura in 1913–19.

It is noteworthy that most of

these periodicals abandoned the traditional Islamic discourse, while sharing

modernist visions of tsarist Russia and Islam in it.

Meanwhile, the old regime was losing political control in certain regions.

Serious disturbances occurred in the North Caucasus, Central Asia and the

Steppe region. When in 1913 rumours spread that Russian notaries (pisari)

would be introduced in Muslim oral courts in the North Caucasus, trou-

bles known as the Anti-notary uprising spread all over Dagestan province.

Another insurrection engulfed the Steppe and parts of Turkestan in 1916.The

primary cause was the hardships imposed on the local populations (exempt

from conscription during the First World War), especially the mobilisation of

men between eighteen and forty-three years old for home-front work in other

30 D. M. Usmanova, ‘Die tatarische Presse 1905–1918: Quellen, Entwicklungsetappen und

quantitative Analyse’, in A. von Kuegelgen, M. Kemper and A. J. Frank (eds), Muslim

Culture in Russia and Central Asia, vol. I (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag), S 239–78;D.M.

Usmanova, Musul’manskaia fraktsiia i problemy ‘svobody sovesti’ v Gosudarstvennoi Dume

Rossii (1906–1917) (Kazan: Master Line 1999), especially pp. 48–64.

31 Some of these periodicals even survived the old regime. E.g. the just-mentioned Arabic

newspaper Jaridat Daghestan was issued under the title of Daghestan in 1918–19 until the

outbreak of the civil war in the Caucasus.

222

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Islam in the Russian Empire

parts of the empire. Both revolts were severely suppressed, but stability was

not completely re-established. In the Kazakh steppe troubles continued until

the spring of 1917, when the whole imperial building disintegrated. Its collapse

in 1917 caused the subsequent destruction of some basic Islamic institutions

and practices like the ofﬁcial hierarchies of the Muslim clergy and Islamic

discourse that had emerged in the imperial context and were unable to exist

without the imperial framework.

In conclusion, the relationship between the tsarist state and Islam should be

understood as involving interaction sooner than confrontation. Having recog-

nised Islam at the end of the eighteenth century, the authorities constructed a

complicated imperial network of Islamic institutions including Muslim clergy,

parishes and four regional muftiates. The administration of Muslims differed

in central Russia and the borderlands. In a number of frontier regions such

as the North Caucasus and Central Asia, Islam had not been institutionalised

even at the end of the old regime. New Muslim elites emerged in response to

these new Islamic institutions, which were accepted by most Russian Muslims.

Despite this long history of interaction, however, the crisis of the tsarist regime

beginning in the last third of the nineteenth century generated new fears

and trepidations concerning Islam among tsarist functionaries. And indeed

Muslims were involved in the political opposition that ﬁnally crushed the

imperial regime in 1917.

223

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

part iv

RUSSIAN SOCIETY, LAW

AND ECONOMY

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

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).

Even

in 1914 the core of the social elite were members of great aristocratic land-

owning families.

Thisgroup overlapped to a still considerablebutever decreas-

ing 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 fami-

lies of the provincial gentry, or sometimes from well-entrenched service noble

‘dynasties’. The still relatively small minority of senior generals and bureau-

crats who were not noble by birth had acquired this status automatically by

reaching senior ranks in the civil and military service.

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.

Since the Church was ﬁrmly subordinated to the secular ruling elite

and enjoyed limited status in aristocratic society, perhaps the senior clergy is

1 On the soslovie/estate system: G. L. Freeze, ‘The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm in Russian

Social History’, AHR 91,(1986): 11–36.

2 In D. Lieven, The Aristocracy in Europe 1815–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 49–

50, I have tables listing the names of owners of over 50,000 desiatiny: these are derived

from L. P. Minarik, Ekonomicheskaia kharakteristika krupneishikh sobstvennikov Rossii kontsa

XIX–nachala XX vek (Moscow: Nauka, 1971).

3 On the ofﬁcial and military top elite, see D. Lieven, Russia’s Rulers under the Old Regime

(London: Yale University Press, 1989). On the senior bureaucracy as a whole, see

D. Lieven, ‘The Russian Civil Service under Nicholas II: Some Variations on the Bureau-

cratic Theme’, JfGO 29, 3 (1981): 366–403. Much of this chapter is derived from my three

publications cited in notes 2 and 3.

4 Between 1701 and 1763 most bishops were Ukrainian, many of whom claimed to be Polish

nobles: I am grateful to Paul Bushkovitch for this information.

227

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Russian society, law and economy

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,

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 Mus-

covite 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 enor-

mous 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.

One way to illustrate these

points is by reference to England, whose aristocracy and gentry in the eigh-

teenth 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.

5 E. P. Karnovich, Zamechatel’nye bogatstva chastnikh lits v Rossii (St Petersburg: Izd. A. S.

Suvorov, 1885): e.g. p. 18: ‘almost all the wealth, originally created in our country in the

sphere of commercial and industrial activity, became noble wealth’.

6 For a useful recent discussion of precisely these points in the context of the emancipa-

tion era, see I. A. Khristoforov, ‘Aristokraticheskaia’ oppozitsiia velikim reformam (Moscow:

Russkoe slovo, 2002).

7 My comparisons with English (and German) aristocracy are drawn from Lieven, Aristoc-

racy.

228

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

The elites

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.

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 sub-

soil, and exclusive rights to ownership of serfs. Catherine II’s son, Paul I (1796–

1801), 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 punish-

ment. 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.

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

8 On Peter and Catherine’s legislation, see respectively: S. M. Troitskii, Russkii absoliutizm

i dvorianstvo (Moscow: Nauka, 1974) and I. de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the

Great (London: Weidenfeld; 1981).

9 On the conspiracy which overthrew Paul I, see H. Ragsdale (ed.), Paul I: A Reassessment

of his Life and Reign (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979).

229

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Russian society, law and economy

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’.

Over the next two centuries the hereditary nobility grew enor-

mously in size, by 1897 numbering 1.2 million people, or roughly 1 per cent

of the total population.

Though this sounds formidable, one has to remem-

ber 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 popula-

tion 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.

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 Russianofﬁcer corps in 1812, see D. G.Tselerungo,Oﬁtsery russkoi armii – 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.

230

The elites

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.

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 hered-

itary 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.

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 of the 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.

Given the immense degree of differentiation within the land-owning nobil-

ity 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.

Wealth bought culture:

radically differing levels of education, cosmopolitanism and civilisation dif-

ferentiated the nobility even more than crude statistics of property-owning

13 Korelin, Dvorianstvo,pp.48–9.

14 Tselerungo, Oﬁtsery,p.102.

15 Korelin, Dvorianstvo,p.67. But see SeymourBecker’s discussion and statistics in Appendix

C of S. Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois

University Press, 1985), p. 188, where he states that 38–9 per cent of nobles belonged to

land-owning families in 1905.

16 Madariaga, ‘Russian Nobility’, pp. 254–5.

231