The role played by women in property ownership was probably a contributing problem here, but also a form of solution. Women's status in families arose across the century, not only because ofEuropeanized culture and some efforts Peter I had made to undermine elite families' abilities to build factions by marriage (he decreed that affianced couples should have a longer period within which to consider a marriage match arranged by parents, and he made divorce more difficult to obtain). Women's social position rose because of enhanced property rights. As Michele Marrese showed, women's dowries became legally defined as inheritance, not a maintenance allowance, women's rights to control their property and wealth were legally defended, and women became increasingly involved in the purchase and transfer of landed property and serfs in their own names. All this was done in part to keep property within the social class, and clever families used women's ability to own land to shield property from the men's indebtedness and to mitigate the effects of partible inheritance. Widows and married women acted independently in the economy. With their husbands away at war, many noble women, like their seventeenth-century predecessors, became responsible estate managers. One need only read the memoirs of Princess Catherine Dashkova to see a woman skillfully deploying her land and wealth over a lifetime of wealth and deprivation. Marrese concluded that in the eighteenth century women owned about as much land as men, they behaved as men did in disposing of property and taking care of the interests of sons and daughters.
CONSOLIDATING THE NOBILITY
With such diversity of wealth as well as identities, the Russian nobility leaned on time-honored strategies used by aristocracies everywhere to maintain cohesion. Jonathan Powis has argued that to maintain an elite class over time, just as or more important than legal charters (England's Magna Carta 1215, Hungary's similar edict of 1222, Poland's myriad charters to the nobility) were political, social, and cultural strategies. They included winning preferential or exclusive access to political power and economic resources, developing social practices of exclusivity (marriage within the estate, for example) and cultural markers that distinguished them from other social groups (dress, leisure activities). The Muscovite elite deployed many of these strategies, as discussed in Chapter 9, and the newly self-conscious nobility continued to do so in the eighteenth century.
Across the century the state deferred economically to the nobility by not raising the poll tax between 1724 and 1796 (at which point inflation dulled the impact of the raise), despite mounting state financial burdens. As we have seen, landlords steadily raised quitrent and service exactions on serfs, faster than did the state on its peasants. Eighteenth-century rulers further bolstered the nobility between 1740 and 1801 by bestowing more than a million male peasants with their families on nobles. Empresses Anna and Elizabeth assiduously cemented noble exclusivity in ownership of land and serfs in decrees of 1730, 1743, 1746, 1754, 1758, 1760. (There was some slippage here: noblemen stood in as front men for merchants, raznochintsy, and even serfs to purchase land and labor.) Across the century nobles squeezed merchants out of economic opportunity or impinged on merchants' traditional roles in trade and manufacturing. Between 1721 and 1762 merchants could own serfs for manufacturing, for example, but the possession accrued to the factory, not personally to the merchant, and Peter III abrogated that right in 1762 (Paul I restored it in 1797). Nobles won exclusive rights to distill alcohol (1715, 1765); they typically farmed out the distilling and sold the product to state-run taverns. In 1782 the nobility won ownership and unrestricted use of minerals and forests on their lands.
Political privileges came their way as well, most notably a near monopoly over public office in Catherine II's time, inhibiting the development of other professional strata. Laws in the 1760s explicitly prescribed that nobles be given preference in civil and military appointments; one (1765) tried to limit non-noble bureaucrats from rising up into the nobility-bestowing rank 8, setting tougher standards for promotion if the candidate were non-noble. The 1775 administrative reform created hundreds of new jobs for retired military men, regardless of lack of expertise.
Nobles played the Table of Ranks skillfully. Those high families who could afford it enrolled their sons into the Guards Regiments and the Cadet Corps, an elite school founded in St. Petersburg in 1732, graduation from which guaranteed an initial military service appointment already at junior officer rank on the Table. Less wealthy noble families enrolled their sons as children in their fathers' regiments, awarding ample promotions so that when the boy reached maturity, he already held officer rank. Requirements of service lessened over the century: in 1736 Empress Anna reduced the term of service from lifetime to twenty-five years and Peter III abolished it entirely in 1762 (in part as a way to deal with massive demobilizations after the Seven Years War). Emancipation from service provided some nobles the flexibility to pursue life on their estates. Some did so to shore up meager holdings that had fallen into neglect; wealthy nobles focused on exploiting estates and serfs in a booming manufacturing and agricultural economy. Still others turned to the life of country squires inspired by a pastoral ideal inspired by their classical education. Nevertheless, most nobles continued to serve, for the prestige or salary. After Paul I reinstated mandatory service briefly (1796-1801), Alexander I rescinded it and most nobles continued to serve.
Service in turn helped to forge corporate solidarity for men in the nobility. Membership in the Cadet Corps for the highest level of the nobility created tight bonds; others found common bonds in education abroad and engagement with court circles in the capitals. Educational norms for noblemen also created common experiences. When in 1736 lifetime service was reduced to twenty-five years and one son was excused to manage the family property, the state raised the standards of education that all male nobles were required to maintain. Young noblemen had to present themselves for periodic educational reviews (four between the ages of 7 and 20) to show competence in fields including reading, writing, religion, arithmetic, geometry, geography, history, and fortifications. The state continued its functionalist approach to education, as Catherine II's projects for educational reform suggest.
The proper form of education and upbringing was a burning topic for Enlightenment thinkers from John Locke through Rousseau; as Jan Kusber noted, Russians fully engaged in such debates. Some, including V. N. Tatishchev (1733), Andrei
Bolotov, and Catherine II herself, wrote didactic instructions on the upbringing of their children, like counterparts in France, Poland, and elsewhere, but here more focused on duty and service than on individual development. Catherine II pursued at least two projects of educational reform. Early in her reign she entrusted I. I. Betskoi with the design of various schools intended to create a thriving middle class with a curriculum of humanities and Orthodoxy as well as practical skills. Betskoi's overly theoretical approach (children should be totally isolated from parental influence in boarding schools from infancy) and his failure to follow through led Catherine to promote, in the 1775 administrative reforms and the 1780s, a more instrumentalist curricular design (based on a Habsburg reform for their Orthodox minorities). A modern European curriculum that included contemporary sciences and math, history and geography, religious instruction, it favored German over French as more relevant to state service and included a handbook outlining behavioral norms to create "citizens for the fatherland." Here loyalty to the state and to one's social station were paramount. With the goal of inculcating practical skills for state service, these reforms also included the teaching of foreign languages needed around the empire: Greek in Novorossiia and Crimea, Chinese in Irkutsk, Arabic and Tatar in Kazan and Astrakhan. These schools prepared petty noblemen for state service; only the wealthiest nobles could afford the fully classical curriculum enjoyed by those who traveled to Europe for university. Nevertheless, the common thread of education for the nobility and educated elite in this century was European standards mixed with an emphasis on duty, practicality, and religion.