In the estate society, inequality was legal. Estates were defined by their rights and duties, which were different for each of them. There was a separate system of law for each estate and only those who belonged to one and the same estate were equal before law. These different systems of law were codified with diligence, much more so than was customary in nations with racial inequality. It was precisely because estates were invisible that their codification needed more effort. The matrix of four estates was simple: gentry, clergy, townspeople, and peasantry. The gentry could own people and land and had to serve the state, usually in the military. The clergy could not own people or land and had to serve God. With the right to marry, Russian priests had many children. Their sons did not serve in the army, but they could receive education and make careers in the ranks of bureaucracy. Neither of these estates paid taxes. The third estate, the townsfolk or merchants, could own property but not people, and had to pay taxes. The peasantry could not own land or property, had to serve their masters, and also paid taxes. Along with their houses, horses, tools, allotments, and families, peasants were owned either by their masters or by the state. But individually or collectively, peasants had some "use rights" with respect to their belongings, rights that before 1861 could exist in practice but not in law. Differing legal codes punished peasants with corporal punishments and the gentry with a penitentiary system. The gentry and townsfolk had some ability to travel, but the peasantry were usually bonded to the land, the master, and the commune. In the army, peasants served as soldiers, gentlemen as officers, and clergymen were exempt from service. Only sons of the gentry and clergy could enter universities. The law and custom conditioned estate differences in food, clothing, healthcare, education, living conditions, marital behavior, and everything else that mattered.
Since many people did not fit into any of the estates, new categories had to be invented, chaotic and porous (Freeze 1986; Wirtschafter 1997; Confino 2008). People of different estates defined themselves by their relations to one another. Like races and castes, estates were produced by merging native traditions and imperial categories. Like races and castes, estates also survived reforms and revolution. In 1917, estate law was abolished, but Soviet practice soon re-established it in the form of "social origin," which reversely discriminated against those who originated from the gentry and clergy (Fitzpatrick 1993). Even in post-Soviet Russia, sociologists suspect there has been a re-emergence of the old system of estates under new names (Kordonsky 2008).
Race and Estate
"Estate" is a poor translation of the Russian word soslovie; a literal translation would be "a coordinate." Indeed, the estates provided the system of coordinates in which the Russian Empire structured Russian society. Dividing society into several layers, the Empire codified divisions and strengthened boundaries between social classes in a way that helped to avoid political conflicts, but that hampered economic and cultural development. The sociologist Michael Mann asserts that organic states, which aimed at national homogeneity, were often more dangerous than stratified states; when organic states colonized distant lands or identified an internal enemy, they were prone to commit genocide (Mann 2005). Large religious, ethnic, and service groups - Cossacks, Jews, Poles, Tartars - received their own lists of rights and duties which worked as if they were estates. Small ethnicities were categorized and treated in a summary way: "mountaineers," "nomads," and "little peoples of the North." From the start, the polity was pluralistic and fragmented, which enabled it to absorb more elements and create new coordinates. In the colonial frontiers, with their cycles of rebellion and oppression, and in the internal provinces, with their routine of corporal punishments, the level of violence was high. But when the revolution abolished the estate system, violence only increased.
Like the system of castes in India, the system of estates was created by the modernizing efforts of the imperial state, which appropriated local traditions and changed them for its own purposes (Dirks 2001). The idea that the condition of the bearded Russian peasants was similar to that of a colonized race was formulated immediately when the critics of the Enlightenment discovered colonialism. Abbe Raynal wrote in the History of Two Indies about Russia:
Civil slavery is the condition of every subject in the empire, who is not noble: they are all at the disposal of their barbarous masters, as cattle are in other countries. Amongst these slaves, none are so ill used as those who till the ground. . . . Political slavery is the lot of the whole nation, since the foreigners have established arbitrary power [there]. (1777: 246)
Modern Russian literature started when Raynal's volume was smuggled into St. Petersburg. The customs officer who did it was Nikolai Radishchev, the author of Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790). When interrogated, Radishchev said that he modeled his Journey after Raynal and Herder. He wrote:
Just imagine, - my friend told me long ago, - that the coffee in your mug and the sugar that you put there, deprived a human being, who is like you, of his peace.. . . My hand started trembling and I spilled my coffee. . . . And how about you, dwellers of St. Petersburg? (Radishchev 1992: 75)
For this and similar passages, Radishchev was exiled to Siberia. In the mid-nineteenth century, the radical-minded Alexander Herzen blamed the world for forgetting about the Russian serfs while banning the slave trade. Writing in English, he explained this discrepancy by unfolding serfdom's "extravagant and unparalleled history, that . . . almost def[ies] belief" (1957: 7, 10). A literary critic, Vissarion Belinsky, wrote about serfs as "white negroes"; Herzen wrote about them as "negres geles" (frozen negroes) (1956: 302). Belinsky described "the horrifying state of the country where people trade people, having no sly justification even of the sort that American slave-owners have when they say that the negro is not a human being" (1954: 10/213). Mocking the idea that American slavery was better than Russian serfdom because it was justified by belief, Belinsky saw their difference. Nobody in Russia, definitely not the state, claimed that serfs were neither human nor Christian. They attended churches and their pastoral care was a recognized duty of the clergy. For the gentry, Christians who owned Christians, this arrangement caused problems. It was also a problem for the clergy, who did not have serfs of their own, but gave Christian sermons to congregations that mixed the masters with their serfs.
The orientalization of serfs was part of the cognitive machinery of serfdom: treating humans like property, one needed to construct a difference between them and oneself. This oceanic gap between gentry and peasantry is well known, but the distance between gentry and clergy is no less illuminating (Manchester 2008). In the 1830s, a highly successful philosophy professor from Moscow Imperial University, Nikolai Nadezhdin, offered his hand in marriage to the daughter of a noble whom he taught privately. The love was mutual and the reason for her family's rejection was his origins in the clergy. The marriage never happened. In the 1880s, the young historian Pavel Miliukov, of impoverished gentry, happily married the daughter of a highly positioned Moscow clergyman. They had to keep their wedding secret; Miliukov's mother rejected her daughter-in-law; Miliukov (1990: 1/152) wrote about their experience of being newly wed as "a social dead-end." For a lady or a gentlemen, it was much easier to marry a foreigner than to marry a person from a lower estate. The introspective, free-minded Miliukov felt the impact of the estate boundary even in his academic affairs. He could not learn from his professor, Vasilii Kliuchevsky, who was from the clergy, because Kliuchevsky "understood the meaning of Russian history from the inside," and he did not. With a bit of irony, Miliukov explained that "the clergy retained a better connection with the old tradition" while the gentry had lost it (Miliukov 1990: 1/115). Indeed, having come from a dominated estate, Kliuchevsky made the development of estates and their struggles against each other a central theme of Russian history. Like Kliuchevsky, many Russian historians were sons of the clergy and owned nothing; the major Russian critics were also from the clergy rather than from the gentry. In contrast, the major nineteenth-century Russian writers and poets were gentlemen and owned estates, often more than one, and serfs. It was as if, in Russia, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction was also based on the estate origin.