The Russian Revolution полностью

Like the bureaucracy, the Russian gentry descended from a medieval service class which had performed for the princes a great variety of missions, principally military duty.⁸² Their service was lifelong and compensated mainly by income from fiefs, worked by serfs, who technically remained the Crown’s property. They were not a nobility in the true sense of the word because they had no corporate rights: such benefits as they enjoyed were perquisites of service. The dvoriane rose to a privileged position in the late eighteenth century when the monarchy, eager to divert their attention from politics, admitted them into partnership. In return for the gentry conceding the Tsars complete control over the sphere of high politics, they were given title to their estates as well as de facto ownership of the serfs (then about one-half of the population) and granted a corporate charter of rights, which included release from the obligation of bearing state service. The Golden Age of the dvoriane was between 1730 and 1825. Even then, the vast majority lived in poverty: only one-third had landed estates with serfs and of that number only a minority had enough land and serfs to live in any style.⁸³ Many rural gentry were hard to distinguish from their peasants.

The decline of the Russian gentry began in 1825, as a consequence of the Decembrist Revolt in which young members of the most distinguished noble families took up arms against the monarchy in the name of constitutional and republican ideals. Stung by this “betrayal,” Nicholas I increasingly came to rely on the professional bureaucracy. The economic death knell of the dvorianstvo rang in 1861 when the monarchy, overruling gentry opposition, emancipated the serfs. For although the number of gentry who owned serfs was not very large and most of those who did had too few to live off their labor, the monopoly on serf ownership was the most important advantage which that class had enjoyed. After 1861 the gentry retained certain valuable benefits (e.g., assured admission into the civil and military service), but even so it began to lose status as a privileged social estate.

This was a highly deplorable trend to most Russian conservatives, for whom the survival of Russia depended on a strong monarchy and on the support of privileged and prosperous landed gentry. In the closing three decades of the nineteenth century, much was written on this subject: this literature represented the last gasp of gentry conservatism, a doomed effort to revive the age of Catherine the Great.⁸⁴ The argument held that the landed gentry were the principal bearers of culture in the countryside. They could not be replaced by the bureaucracy because the latter had no roots in the land and merely “bivouacked” there: indeed, the bureaucracy itself was becoming radicalized due to the government’s preference for officials with higher education over those with proper social credentials. The decline of the gentry inevitably paved the way for the triumph of the radical intelligentsia who, working as rural teachers and professional staff of the zemstva, incited the peasantry instead of enlightening it. Such conservatives criticized the Great Reforms of Alexander II for diluting social distinctions. Their plea was for a return to the tradition of partnership between Crown and gentry.

This argumentation had an effect, the more so in that it received political backing from organized landowning groups close to the Court.⁸⁵ The latter managed to fend off social legislation injurious to their interests; but in this case, too, life was running in the opposite direction and it would be wrong to ascribe great influence to the conservative gentry on the regime of Nicholas II. The conservatives fantasized about restoring the partnership between the Crown and the gentry, but Russia was moving, however haltingly, toward social egalitarianism and common citizenship.

For one, an increasing number of gentry turned their back on the conservative ideology, adopting constitutional and even democratic ideals. The zemstvo movement, which gave a major impetus to the 1905 Revolution, had in its ranks a high proportion of dvoriane, scions of Russia’s oldest and most distinguished families. According to Witte, at the turn of the century at least one-half of the provincial zemstva, in which nobles played a leading role, demanded a voice in legislation.⁸⁶ Ignoring these realities, the monarchy continued to treat the gentry as a dependable pillar of absolutism. In 1904–5, when the necessity of granting the country a representative institution of some sort could no longer be ignored, some advisers urged giving the gentry a preponderant number of seats. It took an old grand duke to remind Nicholas that the nobles stood in the forefront of the current disturbances.⁸⁷

No less important was the fact that the gentry were steadily losing ground in the civil service and in land ownership.