The Charter to Nobility in 1785 defined many of the perquisites of the status for the empire-wide nobility, regardless of ethnicity. The Charter affirmed previous privileges: freedom from service, from corporal punishment, from taxation; inviolability of property, the right of noblemen to serve foreign states who were not hostile to Russia, the right to buy populated land, establish factories, and sell goods wholesale. It also strengthened corporate solidarity by creating a noble assembly in each gubernia and numerous elected offices for local nobles. Nobles were entrusted with tasks such as overseeing recruiting, tax collection, law and order, and public welfare works. New registers of nobles were to be compiled in each gubernia to control admission into the status. It is important to note, however, the limitations of this charter compared to European counterparts: Russia's nobles did not win legislative or fiscal power, representative institutions, a right to resist legally or guarantees against arbitrary search and arrest, all of which the British and Hungarian nobilities won in the thirteenth century and the Polish in the fifteenth. Still, this charter provided affirmation of a cohesive and exclusive social estate, despite its great internal diversity.
Paul I rolled back noble status somewhat in his short reign. He restored mandatory service and amended the 1785 Noble Charter to reduce noble authority in gubernia and district government and to restore corporal punishment; he established a succession law to limit factional influence; he proposed taxation on the nobility. His son and successor Alexander I canceled these moves, but also proceeded on a path of government reorganization and professionalization that shaped the experience of nobility in the nineteenth century.
CULTURE, COHESION, AND STATE POLICY
Jonathan Powis underscores the importance oflifestyle habits in defining a cohesive social group. That could include dress, education, marriage patterns, language, leisure time, and a unifying myth or sense of self. These were particularly important in forging nobility in Russia's situation of economic and ethnic diversity. The problem was not unusuaclass="underline" by the seventeenth century the Polish-Lithuanian nobility (Catholic, Orthodox, Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian) developed a myth of identity, expressed in dress and ideology, to paper over vast economic inequality and regional diversity. Called the "Sarmatian" myth, it attributed to the Polish nobility descent from "Sarmatian" warriors of classical antiquity and promoted an ideology of brotherly equality regardless of wealth. In Parliament magnate and impoverished country gentry who might be patron and client addressed each other as brothers; in dress they affected a Turkish-style kaftan and ornate sash. By the eighteenth century, many Polish noblemen saw the Sarmatian ethic as a conservative obstacle to change and adopted European frock coats, Enlightenment culture, and a rhetoric of national resistance. For Russia's eighteenth-century nobility, their Europeanized culture became their identifying myth.
The nobility's dress, language, and education differentiated it not only from the taxpaying populace but also from clergy and merchant classes. As we have seen, Russia's bishops in the eighteenth century were highly educated, acculturated in Enlightenment thinking, and socially and culturally on a par with the court elites, but the parish clergy constituted a less educated, more insular social group. Similarly, Russia's merchants were Europeanized in dress and culture, and many aspired to become noblemen, but as a rule their educations were more practical, their dress more somber, their lifestyles less lavish, their households (deprived of landed estates and serfs) more self-sufficient. Only the very small educated razno- chinets class—scholars like Lomonosov and Trediakovskii—could keep up with the nobility by virtue of their scholarly talents.
The state engendered the Europeanization of the elite across the century. For Peter I, European education and behavior created a service-oriented elite. As Jan Kusber notes, for Catherine II, imbuing her nobility with Enlightenment ideas and urbanity helped to create an orderly empire-wide nobility analogous to the rationally planned towns and gardens of her empire and the overarching myth of the empire as harmonious garden. Legislation and institutions to inculcate European culture rained from the center. Decrees as early as 1697 and 1700-2 mandated that elite men and women (not peasants) were to wear north European dress. In 1717 a handbook of etiquette derived from contemporary European sources, The Honorable Mirror of Youth, introduced European civility to Russia's young noblemen. They were to become good courtiers, learning how to dance, how to eat properly at table, how to converse in pleasant company, how to speak foreign languages. They were to be respectful to superiors, particularly to their patrons. Unlike its sixteenth- century Muscovite counterpart, the Domostroi, it gave little attention to piety and religion, at least for men. Women, on the other hand, were expected to know European manners, conversational skills, and dancing, but also to adhere to traditional standards. For the Mirror, piety was a woman's primary virtue, followed closely by obedience, chastity, and above all silence.
Nevertheless, the Petrine era opened up a new life for elite women as well as for men. In 1714 Peter I legislated new forms of sociability, called "assemblies," dispensing (not without some opposition) with Muscovy's gender-segregated households and entertainments. A decree defined what guests should expect in the assemblies that noble families would be expected to hold: guests were to arrive at an appointed hour and were expected to mingle, play cards, and dance. Peter I's sister Natalia, wife Catherine, and daughters Anna and Elizabeth set the example for their peers, dressing in European fashions and dancing; at court Natalia founded a theater ensemble. The elite adapted quickly: by the 1720s, Holstein diplomat F. W. Bergholtz remarked on the "subtlety of manners and good breeding" of Russian noblewomen and the familiarity of St. Petersburg's cultural scene.
Muscovy's boyar and gentry elite was transformed into a European nobility not only by wearing different clothes and learning European social dance, but also by living in different kinds of houses. In his design of St. Petersburg, Peter I mandated that servitors should build homes according to three prescribed designs, based on a family's means. Modeled on European manors and townhouses, these homes featured interiors unlike the low ceilings, small rooms, and narrow windows of Muscovite boyar homes. They had large, airy rooms for leisure pastimes in the European style. Studies, libraries, music rooms, and ballrooms, decorated with secular portraits, landscapes, and allegorical ceiling frescos, were prescribed. Over the century noblemen and women did indeed develop personal pastimes ofreading, writing, gardening, dancing, and music; they met and shared ideas, danced, and sang for friends and family.