Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917
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Russian society, law and economy
suggest. Before the nineteenth century, education and culture in general had
to be acquired privately, and were therefore largely the monopoly of the aristo-
cratic 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 dramaticallybut economic differentiationwithin the land-owning
class certainly did not decrease. Everywhere in Europe great aristocratic mag-
nates 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 justifi-
ably 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 prof-
itable 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 indus-
try, 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
Russianterritory 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 of it to favourites and to leading
military and civil officers. Most of the richest families of the 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
17 Minarik, Ekonomicheskaia,p.37.
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the boundaries of the aristocracy werein realitymuchmore 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.
18
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 of the Mus-
covite 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 mil-
itary 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, allthese families were ethnicRussians
by the eighteenth century though the cosmopolitan and frequently French-
speaking world of Petersburg high society was often seen as alien, even dis-
loyal, by nineteenth-century Russian nationalists. Nevertheless it was one of
the strengths of the tsarist regime that it was able to incorporate the aristocra-
cies 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
18 On this, apart from Lieven, Russia’s Rulers, see G. S. Chubardin, Staraia gvardiia (Orel:
Izd. Veshnie vody, 2002).
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some of the freedoms it lost upon assimilation into the empire, but the sta-
tus, 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.
20
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 moderni-
sation of state and society, and had its parallels throughout nineteenth-century
19 On the very important issue of the integration of Ukrainian elites, see Z. Kohut, Russian
Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988)
and D. Saunders, The Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture 1750–1850 (Edmonton: CIUS,
1988).
20 For example, ‘scarcely any (Balts i.e. my addition) have acquired their fortunes in Russia.
It would be easy to enumerate those who, like the Lievens and Pahlens, owe a part of
them to the munificence of the tsars’: A. von Haxthausen, The Russian Empire: Its People,
Institutions and Resources,trans.R.Faire,2 vols. (London: Frank Cass, 1968): here vol. II,
p. 199. One branch of the Lievens, for example, held its main estates in Courland and
Livonia but also owned land in Russia and possessed Yuzovka, the core of the Ukrainian
mining industry.
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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 expanding bureaucracy 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 fewother 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 profession-
als, often of humble origin, who were usually graduates of the General Staff
Academy. Senior officers serving in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in the Min-
istry 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. Gov-
ernors by definition were ‘generalists’ and in addition even in the twentieth
century benefited from an ability to move comfortably in provincial land-
owning 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 of the
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 domina-
tion of the Foreign Ministry by scions of the aristocracy and prominent gentry
families.
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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 ser-
vants 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 aris-
tocratic 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 Lyc
´
ee 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 Lyc
´
ee, 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 co-
ordinating 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.
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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.
21
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.
22
In the nine-
teenth 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 lan-
guages. In certain respects educated Russian elites in the nineteenth century
were indeed more ‘European’ than many of their peers in western and central
21 The whole discussion of the bureaucratic elite is derived from Lieven, Russia’s Rulers.
22 The classic work on the noble origins of the Russian intelligentsia remains M. Raeff,
Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1966). See also chapter 1 of
N. Marasinova, Psikhologiia elity rossiiskogo dvorianstva poslednei tret’i XVIII veka (Moscow:
Rosspen, 1999).
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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 of inheritance and power
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 Rus-
sia. 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 espe-
cially 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
23 As regardsRussian and Ottoman elites and the contexts in whichthey operated, for exam-
ple, compare Potemkin (see S. Sebag Montefiore, Prince of Princes. The Life of Potemkin
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000)) and Ali Pasha of Ioannina (see K. E. Flem-
ing, The Muslim Bonaparte. Diplomacy and Orientalism in Ali Pasha’s Greece (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999)). On the politics of dynasty and court, L. P. Pierce, The
Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993). For general background see R. Mantran (ed.), Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman
(Paris: Fayard, 1989).
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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.
24
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 con-
tract mutually binding on monarch and aristocracy. In more concrete form
feudalism bequeathed estate institutions which were the forebears of repre-
sentative 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.
25
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.Evenin1800 the number
of state high schools (gymnazii) was pitiful. Inevitably therefore the crown
24 In general on the early Ching, see W. J. Peterson (ed.), The Cambridge History of China,
Vol. IX, Part I: The Ching Dynasty to 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Specifically on court and ruling elite, see: E. S. Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social
History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)and
B. Bartlett, Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council in mid Ch’ing China 1723–1820
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). I made an amateur effort to compare the
three imperial regimes in D. Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals (London:
John Murray, 2000).
25 R. E. Jones, The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility 1762–1785 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1973) is the best introduction to this.
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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 Peters-
burg aristocratic elite was already beginning to hanker after English-style civil
and political rights. Alexander’s rejection of the claims of the so-called ‘Sen-
atorial Party’ frustrated them. His failure after 1815 to deliver either on the
abolition of serfdom or on constitutional reform infuriated the future Decem-
brists 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
of the 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 cen-
tury changed the balance of power between crown and aristocracy. Ten-
sion 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 uncon-
strained by law, it was quite capable of trampling 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
26 S. V. Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy. Politicheskaia bor’ba v Rossii v nachale XIXv.
(Moscow: Nauka, 1989) is realistic on Alexander’s aspirations and some of the constraints
under which he operated. So is Alexander Martin: see his ‘The Russian Empire and the
Napoleonic Wars’, in P. G. Dwyer (ed.), Napoleon and Europe (London: Longman, 2001),
pp. 243–63.
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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 eco-
nomic 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.
27
In any case the picture of decline is only partly correct. Like their Euro-
pean 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
27 I compare British, Russian and German responses to agricultural crisis in Lieven, Aris-
tocracy, chapter 3.
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