The category of the raznochintsy, by incorporating social and economic relationships that lay outside the framework of official 'society', at once facilitated and undermined governmental control. Prior to the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the pursuit of profit, the satisfaction of greed and the struggle to subsist frequently took the form of forbidden economic activity that the government sought to eradicate or co-opt. Moreover, because some productive, potentially beneficial economic ventures (subsequently regarded as legitimate entrepreneurship) remained illicit and informally organised, business fortunes also could be highly unstable. Thus, for over three decades, from 1813 until 1844, the serf entrepreneur Nikolai Shipov roamed the Russian Empire geographically and occupationally, by legal and illegal means, until finally he achieved emancipation and became a sutler in the Caucasus and Bessarabia.[26]As Shipov's experience illustrates, the Russian government's insistence that economic functions be based on social origin inevitably led ambitious and talented individuals to violate the law The presence of successful entrepreneurs among the raznochintsy revealed the skill with which ordinary Russians not only evaded state authority but also manipulated official social definitions in the interest of personal security and profit.
Try as it might to contain society's development within hereditary social categories, the imperial government's need to mobilise human and material resources also created legal opportunities for the crossing of social boundaries. The imposition of service obligations opened avenues of social mobility and spawned new subgroups of raznochintsy. When serfs, state peasants and registered townspeople were conscripted into the army, they became legally free from the authority of the landlord or local community; consequently, soldiers' wives and any children born to soldiers or their wives after the former entered service also attained legal freedom. Legal emancipation surely represented upward mobility, yet its realisation and consequences remained problematic. For while soldiers and their families enjoyed special economic and educational privileges, their actual lives did not always conform to official prescriptions. Soldiers' wives (soldatki) could obtain passports allowing them to engage in urban trades, and soldiers' sons (soldatskie deti) were required to enter military schools and eventually active service; however, local communities did not necessarily tolerate the presence of soldiers' wives, and soldiers' children, including female and illegitimate children, did not necessarily end up in the appropriate schools, institutions or occupational groups. By freeing lower-class people from local seignorial and community controls, the demands of military service produced a floating population, eligible for registration in a variety of service and economic groups, but not always living within the confines of their legal status.[27]
Whether historians focus attention on economic activities or state service, a dynamic relationship between governmental policy and spontaneous societal development underlies the phenomenon of the raznochintsy. Effective government required both trained personnel and a prosperous populace. But whereas the extraction of resources from society encouraged the imposition of ever-tighter social controls, the demand for educated servicemen loosened social restrictions and encouraged social mobility. Throughout the imperial period, commoners acquired education, benefited from the rewards of state service and rose into the hereditary nobility precisely because the state needed technically competent administrative and military personnel. At the higher levels of Russian society, the Table of Ranks institutionalised this process, which included the creation of service-related raznochintsy. Established in 1722 by Peter the Great, the Table ofRanks regulated promotion and ennoblement in military, state and court service.[28] In state service, promotion to rank eight conferred hereditary nobility, whereas ranks nine to fourteen granted personal nobility. Personal nobles enjoyed all the rights and privileges of hereditary nobles, including the right to possess populated estates, but their non-noble children did not inherit these rights.[29] Thus children born to civil servants or military officers priorto hereditary ennoblement belongedto the raznochintsy, as did individual servicemen whose positions fell below the Table of Ranks and those whose ranks did not confer nobility (hereditary or personal). Adding to the complexity of these arrangements, a law of 1832 established the title 'honoured citizen', which granted noble-like privileges - exemption from conscription, the capitation and corporal punishment - in recognition of economic and cultural achievements.[30]
As the number of servicemen and educated non-nobles grew and as ennoblement occurred at ever-higher ranks, the significance of the raznochintsy moved beyond the realm of legal-administrative order into the realm of social consciousness. With the founding of Moscow University in 1755, the official boundaries of the raznochintsy had expanded to include all non-noble students at the university and preparatory gymnasia, many of whom would go on to serve in the army and bureaucracy.[31] Born of the government's need for scholars, artists, technical specialists and trained servicemen, the educated commoners became the most widely recognised subgroup of raznochintsy. In nineteenth-century literature, memoirs and journalism, and in much subsequent commentary and scholarship, the category of the raznochintsy referred to upwardly mobile educated commoners who belonged to a 'society' (obshch- estvo) or 'public' (publika) of diverse social origins. This notion of 'society' as an abstract entity arose in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to indicate fashionable or polite society (le grand monde), 'the civil society of the educated', or educated Russians who were 'neither agents of the government (pravitel'stvo) nor in the traditional sense its subjects (narod)'.12 Organised around print culture and sites of polite sociability, 'society' originated in the educated service classes of the eighteenth century, which while overwhelmingly noble, also encompassed a sizeable contingent of non-noble raznochintsy.13
26
Shipov's son graduated from the Kherson Gymnasium and became a teacher in Odessa.
27
E. K. Wirtschafter, 'Social Misfits: Veterans and Soldiers' Families in Servile Russia',
28
For recent treatment, see L. E. Shepelev
29
Beginningin 1845 rankfive conferredhereditary nobility; ranks nine through six, personal nobility; and ranks fourteen through ten, personal honoured citizenship. A decree of 1856 then raised the attainment of hereditary nobility to rank four. L. E. Shepelev,
31
Of the two preparatory gymnasia attached to Moscow University one was 'for nobles, and the other for
M. Confino, 'On Intellectuals and Intellectual Traditions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- Century Russia',