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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
The Russian ruling elite, by the end of the nineteenth century, could be seen as being composed of three loosely defined elements, representing respectively the interests of the hereditary landed gentry, of a bureaucracy that was fast becoming hereditary and of emerging capitalist groups. Each of the three was a significant component of the old regime in Russia in its final decades, each fulfilled important social functions and each was, and was perceived to be, of importance for the Autocracy. It was their balance and interaction which helped to sustain the ancien régime in the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II.
1 An ineradicable confusion surrounds the meaning and use of the term dvorianstvo both in the debates to be described and since. On the one hand, it was used to describe the legal category or estate (soslovie) of nobility, irrespective of the social origin of its members. Used in this sense, it included large numbers of men whose ancestors had been or who themselves had been given hereditary nobility upon reaching the fourth grade in the official table of ranks as well as hereditary landowning gentry. Equally, however, the term was used to refer more specifically to the hereditary landed gentry. The two groups, at one time, had largely coincided but, by the end of the nineteenth century, with the rapid growth of the service nobility, they had become distinct. Often it is only the context of a discussion which reveals in which of its two senses the term dvorianstvo is used.
2 Ju. B. Solov’ev, Samoderzhavie i dvorianstvo v kontse XIX veka (Leningrad, 1973), p. 200. For somewhat different but equally authorative figures on the loss of land by the hereditary landed gentry see below pp. 616–17.
3 There are some echoes of this, among others, already in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina which, in the characters of Count Wronsky, Karenin and Konstantin Levin personalizes the relations of military nobility, bureaucratic nobility and country gentry. For good measure, he divides the bureaucratic nobility into the serious (typified by Karenin) and the irresponsible wastrels (represented by Stiva Oblonsky).
4 Although the debate owed its original intensity to the plight of the landed gentry, it was the future development of the dvorianstvo as a whole which was soon seen to be at stake. In fact, the rapid transformation of its character through the influx of ennobled chinovniks became an issue of almost equal importance.
5 See W. E. Mosse, ‘Imperial favourite, Prince V. P. Meshchersky and the Grazhdanin’, to appear in the Slavonic and East European Review.
6 The state council consisted of four departments which, however, on important matters debated and voted together. For the organization and procedure of the council see Mosse, W. E., ‘Aspects of tsarist bureaucracy. The state council in the late nineteenth century’ in the English Historical Review, xcl (1980), 268ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Solov’ev, Samoderzhavie, p. 175. These figures are among the most interesting relating to the dvorianstvo in the later nineteenth century.
8 ibid.. p. 169.
10 Such as count – graf – the only title conferred with any degree of frequency.
11 State council, united departments of laws, civil and ecclesiastical affairs, state economy, and industry, science and trade (here after quoted as UD), report no. 40, 26 February, 4 and 13 March 1900 (Tsentral’nii Gosudarstvennii Istoricheskii Arkhiv SSSR (hereafter TsGIA) Moscow fi 149 op. 13 d.40 ll. 393–4 ob.
12 It is, perhaps, more than an accident that the six protagonists of the proposal included two Baltic Germans, Pahlen and Mengden, as well as Feodor Gustavovich Terner (Törner) whose name betrays his German affiliations.
13 It is interesting to note that Witte refers to officialdom as an ‘estate’.
14 TsGIA fii49 op. 13 d.40 ll. 395–7 ob.
15 For the following see Solov’ev, Samoderzkavie, pp. 309f.
16 Pobedonostsev, Polovtsov, Chikhachov an ex-minister of marine, Baron Uxküll von Gillenband, Prince Viazemski, Golubiev, Shidlovsky, Verkhovski, Anastasiev and von Kaufman.
17 TaGIA fii49 op.13 d.40 I.397 ob.
18 ibid.. I. 405.
19 The change in fact adopted was that henceforth only the Order of St Vladimir Third Class, not Fourth Class as hitherto, would qualify its wearer for hereditary nobility. The Fourth Class from now on would confer only nobility for life. Solov’ev, Samoderzhavie p. 314. This was likely to reduce the number of new hereditary nobles. Between 1875 and 1884 as has been shown, 12,701 officials had received hereditary nobility through chin and corresponding orders (ibid.. p. 175). On the other hand, between 1875 and 1896 only 10,675 people had received the order of St Vladimir Third Class, whilst another 5,852, between 1882 and 1896 had obtained hereditary nobility in the state service (TsGIA f.ii49 op.13 d.40 l.401 ob).
20 It is interesting to compare this figure with the 12,701 men who had been ennobled more or less automatically for state service between 1875 and 1884.
21 TsGIA d.ii49 op. 13 d.40 ii 405–6 ob. Only an incomplete copy of this document could be obtained.
22 Solov’ev, Samoderzhavie, p. 312.
23 Solov’ev draws attention to the steady decline in support. The Durnovo commission had adopted it by a majority of 15:2. In the united departments it was defeated, relatively narrowly, by 21: 16, in the Plenum by 40;14. ibid.. pp. 310 and 314. Solov’ev, perhaps unjustifiably, considers the opposition to the proposal’ anti-bourgeois’. The Durnovo commission, composed of ministers, high ministerial officials and provincial marshals, which favoured it, could hardly be described as ‘bourgeois’ or as representing bourgeois interests.
24 ibid.. p. 312f.
25 ibid.. pp. 312f.
26 Read gentry.
27 Here, of course, used in the sense of landed gentry.
28 TsGIA f. 1149 op. 13 d.40 ii.444 ob–446 o.
29 It is difficult not to suspect that it was these passages which caused Nicholas II to reject the proposal and also help to explain witte’s opposition.
30 These figures are, of course, at variance with those quoted by Solov’ev (see above p. 605). Perhaps the present ones, in an official document, are the more reliable. However, both sets of figures reveal the steady decline of noble landownership and the prospect of its total extinction within little more than a generation.
31 Here again used in the sense of landed gentry.
32 One is led to ask oneself whether some who subscribed to this passage did not do so ‘ tongue in cheek’. In any case, they were turning against them the arguments used by their opponents about the alleged dvorianstvo traditions of honour and public spirit.
33 It almost sounds like irony but one cannot be sure that it was. Perhaps remarks such as these were designed to appeal to Nicholas II.
34 TsGIA f.ii49 op. 13 d.40 II.446 ob–450.
35 ‘By resolution of the tsar’, he writes, ‘there could be confirmed and were in fact confirmed the views of the minority, however small. All the more so, as the majority itself did not represent a compact grouping but constituted a mechanical combination of different forces which, for one reason or another did not follow to the end the most reactionary section of the dvorianstvo. In the absence not only of parties, but of any organized permanent groupings in the ruling circles, united by a unity of views and political programme, these were replaced at best (v luchshem sluchae) by accidental temporary alliances of some or other dignitaries (sanounikov) who, overall, might hold conflicting views on fundamental issues and supported one another merely for the attainment of some limited objective. Given this amorphousness of political life in the highest spheres and the general insignificance of the leading actors (deyateli) a far greater significance than to the formation of a majority attached to the position of the most prominent and influential members of the ruling circles drawn either from the government or from among the personages close to the tsar.’ (Solov’ev, Samoderzhavie, pp. 27if.) This general thesis is then illustrated - somewhat lamely by a discussion of the views of Witte and some extracts from his polemics with Prince V. P. Meshchersky.
36 ibid.. pp. 272ff. and 391ff.
37 ‘Who had no relations whatever to any liberalism of whatever shade or variety’, ibid.. p. 279.
38 ibid.. p. 295.
39 ibid.. p. 300.
40 ibid.. p. 279.
41 Eduard Vasil’evich Frisch, born in 1829 into a service family, alumnus of the Imperial school of jurisprudence (which he left with a gold medal), spent his service career mainly in the criminal appeals division of the senate. Actively associated with the introduction of the judicial reforms of 1864, he became a senator in 1869, in 1876 assistant minister of justice. On relinquishing the appointment in 1883, he was appointed to the state council and presently became the head of its codification department as well as a member of the department of laws. In 1897, he assumed the presidency of the department of civil and ecclesiastical affairs, three years later that of the department of laws. In 1906 he would be first deputy president, then president of the reformed state council.
42 Dmitri Martynovich Sol’skii, dvoriamn by extraction, was born in 1833. O n completing his studies at the Alexander lycée in St Petersburg, he entered the Second Division of His Majesty’s own chancery. A distinguished bureaucratic career followed, mainly in connexion with matters of public finance. From 1873 until 1884, Sol’skii was state controller. In 1889 he became a member of the state council, in 1893 president of the department of the economy. In 1892 he was made a count. In 1905 Sol’skii succeeded the grand-duke Michael Nicolaevich as the first non-royal president of the council, to be in his turn succeeded by Frisch the following year.
43 It is interesting to examine the votes cast by members of; he departments in the plenum on the ennoblement of new landowners. Eighteen members of the departments (Roop, Markus, Mansurov 2, Semenov, Mengden, Shamshin, Graf Ignatiev, Witte, Shebeko, Ivashchenkov, Lobko, Petrov 2, Murav’ev, Sheremetiev, Sipyagin, Saburov 2, von Kaufman, Zverev) voted against the proposal, 16 (Sol’skii, Vannovskii, Frisch, Polovtsov, Durnovo, Chikhachev, Gerard, Terner, Saburov 1, Uxküll, Viazemskii, Goncharov, Golub’ev, Shidlovskii, Cherevanski and Verkhovskii) for it. The division between’ gentry conservatives’ and ‘ bureaucratic liberals’ is fairly clear, though there is no absolute consistency. Interestingly, in this instance, the general membership of the council, which helped to provide the majority, proved itself more ‘liberal’ than the members of the departments - among whom the proposal would have been narrowly defeated. Ministers (Witte, Khilkov, Murav’ev, Lobko, Sipyagin) opposed the recommendation with only the war minister, Kuropatkin (like his predecessor Vannovskii) casting a vote in its favour.
44 His proposal designed to create – long term – a new ruling class based essentially on capitalist interests might indeed gain a majority in the Durnovo commission, based largely on the support of fellow-ministers dependent on the largesse of the ministry of finance – it had no chance of securing a majority in the council.
45 For personal data of council members see Almanakh sovremennykh russkikh deiatelei, I (St Petersburg, 1897), ed. Levenson, M. L., Gosudarstvennii Soviet (St Petersburg, 1907) and Spisok grazhdanskim chinam pervykh trekh klassov (St Petersburg, 1904).Google Scholar
46 The proportion is almost certainly higher. Two members for whom no information is available were unlikely to have inherited land.
47 This, however, was the special case of the son of a former decembrist.