Russia. A History полностью

The Great Reforms sought to permit some social change, but it also endeavoured to ensure that it was slow and gradual. Hence many of the reforms were consciously ‘all-estate’ (vsesoslovnyi), not ‘non-estate’ (vnesoslovnyi); that is, they deliberately sought to include all estates, but to include people qua members of the estate, not to disregard estates altogether. Hence the zemstvo included nobles, peasants, and townspeople, but segregated them in separate electoral curiae. And, as a famous contemporary painting by one of the ‘itinerants’ (peredvizhniki) showed, the social distances remained great indeed.

The nobility itself underwent profound change in the wake of emancipation. Juridically, it not only lost the right to own serfs but also surrendered important privileges and perquisites, especially those pertaining to its special access to civil and military service. The new legislation opened schools, including the élite military officer schools, to non-nobles; the inexorable result was a steady influx of non-nobles into institutions of higher learning and, subsequently, into the military and civil service. The change was most dramatic in that old bastion of noble privilege, the officer corps, where the proportion of hereditary nobles shrank from 81 per cent in the 1860s to a mere 12 per cent by the end of the century. The nobles not only forfeited old privileges but also had to bear new responsibilities and burdens. Most notable was the retraction of their right not to serve by the Universal Military Training Act of 1874. Economically, as already pointed out, many nobles fared badly under the conditions of post-emancipation agriculture; especially once the international grain crisis descended on Russia, their debts mounted rapidly, leading to a sharp increase in bankruptcies (from a handful in the 1870s to 2,237 in 1893) and in land sales (by 1905 nobles had sold over 40 per cent of their land held at emancipation). Little wonder that, amidst such distress, the nobility proved such fertile ground for opposition in the zemstvo and, from the 1890s, would spearhead the first phase of the ‘liberation movement’.

A second component of the élite was the ‘nobility of the pen’—the bureaucracy. Although it had early on become differentiated from the landholding nobility (and, especially at the provincial level, had been recruited from non-nobles), this ‘democratization’ accelerated sharply after 1855 and inexorably recast officialdom, even the élite bureaucracy in the two capitals. Although the very top rungs of the civil service remained the purview of blue-blooded nobles, the middling and lower ranks now drew primarily on other groups, especially the offspring of clergy, townsmen, and the educated professions. But even more remarkable than the change in social composition was the enormous growth in aggregate size of the civil service, which swelled from just 112,000 in 1857 to 524,000 in 1900 in the Table of Ranks (plus many others in lower positions). The ‘state’, which in pre-reform Russia had been chiefly myth, was rapidly being reified, even in the countryside, where the bureaucracy was gradually coming face to face with the peasantry.

A third component of élite society consisted of men of means—the old merchants but also the new stratum of rich industrialists and bankers. A relatively thin stratum of society, this ‘bourgeoisie’ actually consisted of several different groups. One important component included Muscovite industrialists and merchants, whose roots went back to the period of Nicholas I and who derived their wealth chiefly from the production and sale of consumer goods (especially textiles) on the domestic market. By all accounts they tended to be more conservative, even in religious matters (with a disproportionate share of Old Believers). Another group was quite different—the St Petersburg industrialists and financiers, who were active in banking and heavy industry. Since much of their activity depended on good relations with the government, they tended to be very conservative politically. The third, highly visible, group consisted of non-Russians, both those from minority groups (especially Jews) and from foreigners (like the Nobel family). In relative terms, this commercial-industrial élite remained very small and, for the most part, remote from politics.