The Russian Revolution полностью

The need for technically proficient administrative personnel forced the government, in hiring civil servants, increasingly to favor education over ancestry. As a consequence, the share of dvoriane in the bureaucracy steadily declined.⁸⁸

The gentry were pulling out of the countryside as well: in 1914, only 20 to 40 percent of Russian dvoriane still lived on the land, the rest having moved to the cities.⁸⁹ Under the 1861 Emancipation settlement the gentry had retained about one-half of their land; for the other half, which they were forced to cede to the liberated serfs, they received generous compensation. But the gentry did not know how to manage: some experts thought that in Great Russia it was impossible in any event to make a profit from agriculture using hired (rather than bonded) labor. Whatever the reason, the gentry disposed of their estates to peasants and others at a rate of approximately 1 percent a year. At the beginning of the century, they retained only 60 percent of the properties that had been theirs in 1861. Between 1875 and 1900, the proportion of the country’s privately owned (i.e., non-communal) land held by the gentry declined from 73.6 percent to 53.1 percent.⁹⁰ In January 1915, the gentry (including officers and officials) owned in European Russia 39 million desiatiny* of economically useful land (arable, woodland, and pasture), out of a total of 98 million—only slightly more than the peasants held in private ownership.⁹¹ The landowning gentry were a vanishing breed, squeezed from the countryside by the twin forces of economic pressure and peasant hostility.

Of the several institutions serving the Russian monarchy, the Orthodox Church enjoyed the greatest measure of popular support: it provided the main cultural link with the 80 million Great Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians professing the faith. The monarchy attached great importance to the Church by bestowing on it the status of the Established Church and granting it privileges not enjoyed by official Christian churches elsewhere.

The religiousness of Great Russians is a matter of dispute, some observers arguing that the peasant was deeply Christian, others viewing him as a superstitious agnostic who observed Christian rituals exclusively from concern for life after death. Others yet hold that the Great Russian population was “bi-religious,” with Christian and pre-Christian elements of its faith intermingled. The matter need not detain us. There is no dispute that the masses of the Orthodox population—the great majority of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians—faithfully observed the rituals of their church. Russia before the Revolution was visually and aurally filled with Christian symbols: churches, monasteries, ikons, and religious processions, the sound of liturgical music and the ringing of church bells.

The link between state and religion derived from the belief that Orthodoxy (Pravoslavie) was the national faith of Russia and that only its adherents were true Russians. A Pole or a Jew, no matter how assimilated and patriotic, remained in the eyes of the authorities as well as the Orthodox population an outsider. Membership in the Orthodox Church was a lifelong bond from which there was no escape:

Everybody is free to remain true to the religion of their fathers, but forbidden to make new proselytes. That privilege is reserved for the Orthodox Church alone; it is explicitly so stated in the text of the law. Everybody may enter that church; nobody may leave it. Russian Orthodoxy has doors which open only one way. The confessional laws fill out several chapters of vols, x., xiv., and xv. of the voluminous collection known as “the Code.” Every child born of Orthodox parents is perforce Orthodox; so is every child born of a mixed marriage. Indeed, such a marriage is possible only on this condition.… One article of the Code forbids Orthodox Russians to change their religion; another states the penalties incurred for such offences. The stray sheep is, in the first instance, paternally exhorted by his parish clergy, then made over to the consistory, then to the Synod. A term of penance in a convent can be inflicted. The apostate forfeits all civic rights; he cannot legally own or inherit anything. His kindred may seize on his property or step into his inheritance.… It is a crime to advise anybody to abandon the Orthodox religion; it is a crime to advise anybody against entering it.⁹²

The Imperial Government did not interfere with the religious observances of the other faiths, but as if to underscore the indissoluble link between Orthodoxy and Russianness, it classified all the other religions as “foreign confessions.”