In Peter I's reign the nobility was very largely Russian in ethnic terms, though it included many assimilated (and now Orthodox) nobles of Tatar origin. In the course of the imperial era, however, the nobility became much more diverse. This was partly because both non-Russian subjects of the tsars and foreigners were ennobled in Russian military and civil service, though the families of very many of these servicemen became entirely statist in loyalty and Russian in culture and language. Numerically much more important and politically sometimes less reliable were the nobilities of regions conquered by Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and incorporated into the
10 See I. de Madariaga, 'The Russian Nobility in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries', in H. M. Scott (ed.), The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 2 vols., (London: Longman, 1995), vol. II, p. 249.
11 The fullest discussion of the size of the nobility and of the 1897 census is in A. P. Korelin, Dvorianstvo v poreformennoi Rossii (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), chapter 1.
12 On the Russian officer corpsin 1812, seeD. G. Tselerungo, Ofitseryrusskoiarmii-uchastniki borodinskogo srazheniia (Moscow: Kalita, 2002): on educational levels, see pp. 111-34. On the French army see S. F. Scott, The Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 15-16.
empire. In the 1897 census 53% of hereditary nobles defined their first language as Russian, 28.6% as Polish, 5.9% as Georgian, 5.3% as Turkic/Tatar and 2.04% as German.[9] In the senior ranks of the Russian military and civil service it was Germans, and above all members of the small group of Baltic gentry families, who made by far the biggest impact. Not surprisingly, for most of the imperial period Baltic noblemen in service were much appreciated by the Romanovs and often thoroughly disliked by Russian nobles with whom they were competing for jobs.
Much the most significant privilege possessed by all members of the hereditary nobility before 1861 was their exclusive right to own serfs. However, an ever-growing number of hereditary nobles were not serf owners. Even in 1700 the great majority of noble estates were very small. Subsequently they were partitioned among heirs, with daughters as well as sons increasingly taking a share of lands and serfs. For many men from established noble families, let alone for the growing number of ennobled servicemen, military and civil service became their career, and their source of income and identity. Of the Russian officers who fought at Borodino 77 per cent claimed neither to own estates themselves, nor to be heirs to estates.14 Since this figure includes the Guards regiments, and since army officers were more noble than civil servants, the statistic is all the more striking. After 1861 the landless element within the nobility grew apace, partly because of the problems faced by Russian noble agriculture and partly because the growing size ofthe bureaucracy and armed forces resulted in ever more ennoblements through service. Between 1875 and 1895, for instance, 37,000 individuals acquired hereditary noble status. By 1905 only 30 per cent of the hereditary nobility owned any land.[10]
Given the immense degree of differentiation within the land-owning nobility even common ownership of land (or serfs) did little to create a common sense of interest or identity. In 1797,83.8 per cent of serf owners possessed fewer than 100 serfs, their total ownership amounting to 11.1 per cent of the whole serf population. By contrast the 1.5 per cent of serf owners who possessed over 1,000 serfs owned 35.3 per cent of the serf population.[11] Wealth bought culture: radically differing levels of education, cosmopolitanism and civilisation differentiated the nobility even more than crude statistics of property-owning suggest. Before the nineteenth century, education and culture in general had to be acquired privately, and were therefore largely the monopoly ofthe aristocratic elite. The tiny handful of state educational institutions usually provided only the most rudimentary education to a small minority of the run-of-the-mill provincial nobility. In the nineteenth century the overall cultural level of the nobility rose dramatically but economic differentiation within the land-owning class certainly did not decrease. Everywhere in Europe great aristocratic magnates found it far easier to survive in a capitalist economy than was the case with the land-owning gentry as a whole. Typically, in Russia between 1900 and 1914 the 155 individuals who owned over 50,000 desiatiny sold only 3 per cent of their land, the nobility as a whole over 20 per cent.17 The differing interests of aristocratic magnates and provincial gentry made solidarity difficult, until of course all landowners were threatened by social revolution and expropriation in the twentieth century.
At the core of the hereditary nobility there existed what one can justifiably call an aristocracy. Before 1700 a Russian boyar aristocracy had existed for centuries. The eighteenth century saw it enlarged and enriched. A market for agricultural surpluses emerged, which made commercial agriculture profitable in some regions. Nobles founded a swathe of industrial enterprises on their estates, their monopoly in distilling proving especially valuable, though a small number of magnates also made great fortunes from sugar in the nineteenth century. Most profitable of all was the Urals metallurgical industry, which made Russia the world's leading iron producer by the last quarter of the eighteenth century. By 1800 the whole of this industry was in the hands of a small number of aristocratic families. Meanwhile the massive expansion of Russian territory had brought fertile grain-lands and many other resources into Russian possession. Much of eighteenth-century Russia's new wealth accrued to the crown, which re-distributed a large part ofit to favourites and to leading military and civil officers. Most ofthe richest families ofthe nineteenth-century Russian aristocracy were descended from these individuals either in the direct male line, or through fortunate marriages with heiresses. By 1815 the fruits of the previous century's dramatic economic growth were largely in aristocratic hands and the aristocratic elite, which was to survive down to 1917, was fully formed.
The precise parameters of this group are impossible to draw. Unlike its German or English peers, borders were not defined by titles or by membership of upper houses in the legislature, though even in the British and German cases the boundaries ofthe aristocracy were in reality much more blurred and porous than legal definitions might imply. What united and constituted the Russian aristocracy was membership of a small group of inter-married and usually titled families, all of them very wealthy and with a close historical relationship with the court and the Romanovs. Acceptance into this small circle was defined by marriage and by access to exclusive private salons and clubs (above all, in the nineteenth century the Yacht Club), and to the most aristocratic regiments of the Imperial Guard (Chevaliers Gardes, Horse Guards, Emperor's Life Guard Hussars, Preobrazhensky Guards Infantry Regiment). Since the officers of these regiments in the nineteenth century had the right to accept or reject candidates, this reinforced the principle that membership of the aristocracy was by then above all determined by the aristocrats themselves.[12]
Some families of the aristocracy were branches of the princely dynasties descended from Rurik and Gedymin. The list of Russia's greatest landowners in 1900 includes, for example, Golitsyns, Gagarins, Volkonskiis and Belosel'skii- Belozerskiis, some of whose members were huge Urals landowners. Other aristocratic families were descended from non-titled boyar families ofthe Muscovite court, of whom the Sheremetevs and Naryshkins were most prominent in court, society and government throughout the imperial era. Most of the remaining aristocratic families, such as the Shuvalovs, Vorontsovs and Orlovs, were from the lesser pre-Petrine nobility, whose ancestors had performed military service either in the Moscow or provincial cavalry units. Even in the eighteenth century it was very difficult for any Russian from outside these groups to come within range of imperial notice and largesse. A handful of non-nobles did achieve this, however, of whom the most famous was Prince Menshikov in the reign of Peter I. In addition, two famous Russian merchant families lived at the core of the aristocracy in the imperial era, the Stroganovs from its inception and the Demidovs by the nineteenth century.
10
Korelin,
12
On this, apart from Lieven,
On the very important issue of the integration of Ukrainian elites, see Z. Kohut,