The reign of Alexander I witnesses to some of the realities of this mutual dependence of crown and nobility. By 1801 a significant section of the Petersburg aristocratic elite was already beginning to hanker after English-style civil and political rights. Alexander's rejection of the claims of the so-called 'Senatorial Party' frustrated them. His failure after 1815 to deliver either on the abolition of serfdom or on constitutional reform infuriated the future Decembrists and led to plans for revolution and regicide. But Alexander too faced frustration. The evidence strongly suggests that his desire to end serfdom and introduce some sort of constitution was sincere. In the absence of support from at least a sizeable minority of the nobility, however, emancipation might easily lead both to his own assassination and to chaos in the state administration. The fiasco which resulted from his efforts to create military colonies does not suggest optimism about any attempt to rule the countryside directly through officialdom. Moreover, given both the political views and the low cultural level ofthe provincial landowners, one can at least understand why Alexander might believe that the cause of progress was best entrusted to unlimited autocratic power.26
The emergence of an effective bureaucracy during the nineteenth century changed the balance of power between crown and aristocracy. Tension between aristocracy and the growing bureaucratic state was common in Europe but in Russia took extreme forms. This was in part because the Russian bureaucracy was often peculiarly incompetent and intrusive. Relatively unconstrained by law, it was quite capable oftrampling on the civil rights and dignity of noblemen. In addition, almost uniquely by 1900, Russia's social elites had no representative institutions through which they could exercise some degree of supervision over the bureaucratic state. It is not a complete coincidence that two of Europe's most famous anarchists were members of prominent Russian aristocratic (Petr Kropotkin) and gentry (Mikhail Bakunin) families. When the bureaucratic state imposed policies very unfavourable to noble interests hostility threatened to turn into revolt. There were signs of this in the wake of the 1861 emancipation settlement. In 1900-5 the anger of noble landowners at Witte's policy of industrialisation was an important factor in the growing revolt of the elected local assemblies (zemstva) amidst a surge of gentry liberalism.
The landowners' anger has also, however, to be seen within the context of the economic difficulties faced by Russian nobles after 1861. Most noble- owned industrial enterprises collapsed since they could not operate profitably without serf labour and could not compete with modern, capitalist factories. Noble agriculture also faced huge difficulties, one result of which was that 43 per cent of all noble land was sold between 1862 and 1905. Traditionally the post-emancipation era has been seen as one of noble decline, a decline for which the nobles' own fecklessness was partly responsible.
Without in any way denying that fecklessness existed, the nobility's economic performance needs to be put in context. Everywhere in Europe, with the partial exception of Silesia, the aristocracy was pulling out of industrial leadership. In much of Russia it was virtually impossible to run big agricultural estates profitably, particularly after the influx of New World grain and meat into global markets which began in the 1870s. Everywhere in Europe noble agriculture faced varying shades of crisis. If the big East Anglian landowners, traditional paragons of agricultural enterprise and advanced technology, could not survive the Great Depression, it is not at all surprising that the same was true of many Russian landlords.[18]
In any case the picture of decline is only partly correct. Like their European peers, and very sensibly, many Russian nobles were withdrawing from direct industrial enterprise and moving into stocks and bonds. By 1910 some aristocrats had huge portfolios and 49 per cent of the 137,825 nobles residing in St Petersburg lived on income from securities. Between 1862 and 1912 noble land had increased in value by 443 per cent while diminishing in extent by more than half. No doubt many Russian nobles had made the sensible decision to cash in their land for a much more reliable source of income which enabled them to live snugly as urban rentiers. Of course by pursuing this strategy, the Russian nobility began to undermine their position as the dominant group in rural society and in rural government at district (uezd) and local levels. This is, however, an inevitable part of modernity, and one might argue that the Russians' strategy was healthier than the determination of the Prussian junkers to preserve their increasingly anachronistic position as a rural ruling class through ruthless agrarian interest-group politics.[19]
The Russian situation in which the land-owning gentry suffered but aristocratic families became the core of a new industrial-era plutocracy was very common to Europe as a whole. On the eve of the First World War the ratio of debt to income among the Russian aristocracy was usually a good deal healthier than it had been a century before. Russia's richest aristocrats had incomes of between £100,000 and £200,000 per annum. Given their sometimes immense holdings of shares and urban land, there was every reason to expect these incomes to soar as the industrial economy took off, as had happened to some aristocratic incomes in England and Germany. Even the Urals aristocratic magnates, though temporarily falling on bad times, had much room for optimism in 1914. With bank capital and new railways on the point of linking the region's vast iron ore deposits to the coal of western Siberia, there was good reason to expect huge future profits from their still immense landholdings.
In the early twentieth century the biggest threat to the land-owning class was political rather than economic. In 1905 peasant looters tried to destroy many noble estates. In 1906-7 peasant deputies, who made up a majority in the first two Dumas, demanded the expropriation of all private large-scale land-owning in Russia. The revolution of 1905-6 in fact drove the regime and the nobility back into close alliance. The landowners understood that without the support of the tsarist police and army their estates would be forfeit. Meanwhile the government learned the dangers of isolation even from its natural supporters among Russia's elites. Relations between crown and landed nobility were much better after 1906 than they had been in the decade before 1905. Nevertheless tensions remained, often for reasons which were already familiar from Prussian developments. In Russia, as earlier in Prussia, the regime's response to near revolution had been to set up a parliament dominated by representatives of the land-owning elite, who for the first time were able to articulate programmes, unite to defend their group interests, and choose their own leaders. In time the Prussian agrarians became a formidable conservative lobby and a thorn in the side of the Berlin government. Their Russian equivalents strongly circumscribed Stolypin's reformist strategy because of their great influence in both the lower (Duma) and upper (State Council) houses of the newly established parliament.
European comparisons suggest that in 1914 the Russian land-owning nobility was both not powerful enough and too powerful for its own good. In nineteenth-century England 7,000 individuals, mostly members of the aristocracy and gentry, owned over 80 per cent of the land. Prussian land-owning was never this aristocratic, but in some provinces the big estates covered more than half the land. Both upper classes controlled rural society with little difficulty. In the English tenant farmer and the Prussian 'big' peasant the nobles also had powerful allies in the defence of property and order. In 1848-9 the Prussian nobles could play off peasant and landless labourer in a way that was far harder in most of Russia, given the relative solidarity of the much more homogeneous communal peasantry. On the other hand, however, the Russian nobles had not yet succeeded in marginalising themselves in the manner of the west and south German nobilities. By 1914 the latter very seldom owned more than 5 per cent of the land in any province and were barely a worthwhile target for expropriation. By contrast, even in the Central Industrial region (admittedly in 1905) the Russian nobles still owned 13.7 per cent of the land. In the south and west German case, many generations had passed since the end of serfdom and the tensions it had caused. In addition, the growing power of urban and industrial lobbies was tending to create a common agrarian front, which in Catholic areas enjoyed the powerful support of the Church. None of this applied in Russia.[20]
18
I compare British, Russian and German responses to agricultural crisis in Lieven,