For rather obvious reasons, between i860 and 1945 political stability was more tenuous in the poorer 'Second World' periphery of Europe than in its richer First World core. Property was less secure against social revolution and large agrarian property least secure of all. If this was true a fortiori of Russia it was not much less true of Hungary, Italy, Spain or even Ireland. In the Irish case the uniquely wealthy English tax-payer bought out the landlords on generous terms, in the process probably weakening the Anglo-Irish union but killing any chance of social revolution.[21] This option was not available in the rest of peripheral Europe. In Italy in i920-i fascism made great strides by helping the landowners, especially of Tuscany and the Po valley, to crush agrarian radicalism. In Spain and Hungary it took full-scale military counter-revolution backed by formidable foreign intervention to save the land-owning aristocracy from probable destruction. In Russia in 1917 only the victory of military counter-revolution could have saved the big estates, which would have been expropriated as certainly by a democratically elected parliament as they were in fact by peasant mobs and Bolshevik decrees. One could very legitimately see the regimes of General Franco or Admiral Horthy as a high price to pay for the survival of aristocracy. In the specific Russian case, however, the destruction of the traditional rural elite went along with the emergence of a Bolshevik regime whose leaders seldom had much sympathy for, or understanding of, agriculture or peasants. Under Stalin this regime was to mount an assault on the Russian peasantry which went well beyond anything conceivable to Horthy or Franco.31
31 The best comparative work on the politics of aristocratic landownership in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is R. Gibson and M. Blinkhorn (eds.), Landownership and Power in Modern Europe (London: Harper Collins, 1991).
The groups between: raznochintsy, intelligentsia, professionals
ELISE KIMERLING WIRTSCHAFTER
Beginning in the eighteenth century, when regularised bureaucracy struck deep roots in imperial Russia, policy-makers struggled to visualise the middle layers of Russian society. The vast geographical reaches of the empire, the cultural diversity of its population and the absence of constituted political bodies made it difficult to define the social groups situated between the mass of peasant cultivators and the governing classes of noble landowners, civil servants and military officers. As early as the middle of the seventeenth century Muscovite officials codified the assignment of Russian subjects to legally defined ranks (chiny) that carried specific rights, privileges and obligations to the state. This practice continued in the eighteenth century, when agglomerated social categories (sostoianiia or sosloviia) took shape, and remained a key feature of Russian social organisation until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Sometimes called 'estates' by modern-day historians, the Russian sostoianiia consisted of hereditary statuses that functioned both as tools of administration and as social communities.[22] The Russian categories did not play a political role equivalent to that of the French Etats or German Stande, but they did share important features with these groups. Like corporate groups in Western and Central Europe, Russian nobles, clergy and townspeople enjoyed distinctive hereditary privileges; however, in contrast to the European groups, their privileges were not historically constituted in the local law codes, institutions and offices of identifiable territories.2 Indeed, at the Russian monarch's discretion, without the consent of any corporate institution, privileges could be granted or rescinded and obligations redefined.
Alongside the primary categories of Russian society - the nobles, clergy, merchants, townspeople and peasants - the Russian government also erected a range of subgroups characterised by distinctive occupational functions, service obligations and legal privileges. Among the most significant and persistent of these subgroups, the category of the raznochintsy (literally 'people of various ranks' or 'people of diverse origins') appeared early in the eighteenth century and remained an officially recognised social status until the late nineteenth century. In some legal-administrative usages, the designation 'from the raznochintsy' referred to outsiders or non-members of a given social category or community - for example, non-nobles or town residents who were not registered members of the official urban community (the posad). In other applications, the raznochintsy represented an umbrella category encompassing a range of protoprofessionals and lesser servicemen: low-ranking civil servants and unranked administrative employees, retired soldiers, the children of senior military officers born before a father's ennoblement, the children of personal (non-hereditary) nobles, non-noble students in state schools and various specialists, scholars, artists and performers. Careful perusal of the relevant legislation suggests that the malleable contours of the raznochintsy derived from both positive definitions based on function and negative definitions based on exclusion.[23]
The multiplicity of economic, service andprotoprofessional subgroups that made up the raznochintsy highlighted both the complicated structure of Russia's 'groups between' and the desire of the government to impose legal- administrative controls across society Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, resource mobilisation, the regularisation and expansion of state service, and the spread of education gave rise to new social groups that, in accordance with the political thinking ofthe time, needed to be institutionalised as legally defined social categories. Because each category performed specific functions in society and polity, the various subgroups of raznochintsy tended to correspond to recognisable occupations. Yet as the composition of the raznochintsy also showed, the realities of everyday life - the ways in which people struggled to survive and thrive - were far too amorphous and changeable to be contained within prescribed social relationships.
For much of the imperial period, the raznochintsy included entrepreneurial and needy individuals whose economic relationships violated officially recognised social and geographic boundaries. Well into the nineteenth century, for example, debt relations, private employment, and lost social identities allowed non-nobles to exploit serf labour, even though the possession of serfs had become an exclusive noble right in the 1750s.[24] Similarly, in violation of the 1649 Law Code (Ulozhenie) and much subsequent legislation, peasants continued to set up shop in the towns, a privilege theoretically restricted to registered members ofthe official urban community (the townspeople or meshchane). Notwithstanding legal prohibitions and cameralist policing, the Russian government appeared powerless to prevent the illicit pursuit of profit. Nor did it necessarily want to stymie the inventiveness of wayward subjects; when properly regulated through the sale of trading privileges, illicit economic ventures acquired official sanction and served the fiscal interests of the state. Thus, the ascribed (pripisannyi) or trading (torguiushchii) peasant of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could legally reside in a town on condition that he pay taxes as both a peasant and a member of the urban community.[25] With the help of flexible legal definitions, including the various definitions of the raznochintsy, officials tolerated or only half-heartedly prosecuted enterprising subjects who usurped the economic privileges assigned by law to other social groups.
21
W Kissane,
22
The classic analysis remains, Gregory L. Freeze, 'The
23
For full treatment, see E. K. Wirtschafter,
24
E. K. Wirtschafter, 'Legal Identity and the Possession of Serfs in Imperial Russia',
25
R. Hellie, 'The Stratification of Muscovite Society: The Townsmen',