Lest there be any doubt about the government’s willingness to infringe on the nobility’s rights and privileges, Nicholas also enacted a reform of the nobility itself, a remarkable and revealing act in European affairs, demonstrating that the Russian upper class was not a self-governing social estate of the European type that had evolved ahead of or in tandem with the monarchy but rather a creation of the monarchy, its place and privileges subject to definition by the ruler. The reform was occasioned by a growing division in the nobility between those who built their economic livelihood and status on the management of their serf estates and those who did so primarily on positions in the state administration. Many of the second group had acquired patents of nobility by education and advancement through the Table of Ranks, and these new arrivals did not share the values of the established landed nobility. In response to pressure from the hereditary landed nobility to restrict entry to the class, Nicholas’s reform commission proposed to create new status designations to reward persons who advanced through merit to high government office. But Nicholas, no doubt rightly, feared that such a change would impede the government’s efforts to recruit capable men for government service; he did not agree to end ennoblement through the Table of Ranks but only to stiffen requirements for attaining personal nobility and hereditary nobility (qualification for individual nobility for life being raised from the 14th to the 9th rank, that for hereditary from the 8th to the 5th rank). The principal effect of this change was to speed up promotion through the ranks.
At the same time, Nicholas made other changes in the status of the nobles. He raised property qualifications for voting in local assemblies of the nobility, reduced the length of legal foreign residence for nobles from five years to three, pressured nobles to serve in provincial government before applying for posts at the centre, and limited their rights of buying and selling serfs. Given the division within the noble estate, these measures might be opposed or favoured by one or the other constituency. The important point is that they all violated the Charter to the Nobility granted by Catherine II in 1785 and demonstrated the ruler’s determination not to be bound by fundamental rights supposedly adhering to the nobility. The reform of the nobility prefigured the far-reaching assault on noble privilege that occurred in the following reign.
Intellectual and Cultural Life
The intellectual life of Nicholas I’s Russia developed in the shadow of the Decembrist revolt and was therefore constrained in its public expression by tough, if flexible, government censorship. Many accounts of this era, especially those by Western visitors and critics such as the Marquis de Custine, describe Nicholas’s Russia as a night-time of repression. It needs to be kept in mind that most educated Russians, including the brilliant and much-admired Alexander Pushkin, agreed on the necessity of censorship, however much they may have chafed at its limits. It is also important to recall that this was a period of extraordinary cultural creativity, the golden age of Russian letters. Not only was it the era of Pushkin, perhaps the greatest poet in all of Russian history (and whose government censor was, interestingly, Tsar Nicholas himself!), but it was also the time when Russian high culture broke free of its former imitation of Western arts and produced works that themselves reshaped the contours of world culture. In the novels and verse of Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov appeared the ‘superfluous man’, the hero turned antihero. The work of Nikolai Gogol contained at once biting satires on the human failings of his own time and fantastical characters and plot turns that anticipated the post-modernist writings of our own age. These writers and the novelist Ivan Turgenev, whose
