Emancipation of Russian Nobility, 1762-1785 9781400872145

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The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

1762-1785

The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility 1762-1785

By Robert E. Jones

Princeton University Press Princeton, JVew Jersey

Copyright © 1973 by Princeton University Press ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including in­ formation storage and retrieval systems with­ out permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

L. C. Card: 72-4045 ISBN: 0-691-05208-5 Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Whitney Darrow Publication Reserve Fund of Princeton University Press and from the Research Council of the University of Massachusetts This book has been composed in Linotype Monticello Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey

Preface

HE SUBJECT of this book is the redefinition and reorganization of the Russian nobility carried out between 1762 and 1785 by the government of Catherine the Great. At the beginning of the eighteenth century Peter the Great had defined and organized the modern Russian nobility according to the principle of obligatory state service. In 1762, however, Catherine's husband and predecessor had "emancipated" the nobility from compulsory service, thereby raising a host of ques­ tions about the future relationship of the nobility to the state. Those questions were finally answered in 1785, when Catherine promulgated her Charter to the Nobil­ ity, which revised and renewed the close alliance be­ tween the nobility and the state and conferred upon the nobility the legal status that it was to retain until 1861 and in some respects even until 1917. This subject is of great importance to the history of Russia, for it ties together most of the major trends and issues of the second half of the eighteenth century and explains the underlying strength of the social, eco­ nomic, and political status quo that persisted through­ out the first half of the nineteenth century. Within that status quo no element with the exception of the au­ tocracy itself was so crucial as the role of the land­ owning nobility. Supported by the laws and policies of the government, the privileged position of the nobil­ ity served as the keystone of the ancien regime. Its most important and obvious effect was to hold half of the total population in bondage, but there was no domestic issue, be it social, political, economic, ad-

Preface

ministrative, or military, that was not seriously af­ fected by the alliance between the government and the nobility. What Catherine II did with regard to the Russian nobility has been spelled out in the legalistic studies of Romanovich-Slavatinsky, Iablochkov, Porai-Koshits, Ditiatin, Korf, and others although some disagreement about the effects and implications of her acts remains, but the question of why Catherine treated the nobility as she did remains open. Behind Catherine's words and deeds, Kizevetter, Miliukov, Gukovsky, Sacke, Beliavsky, Dukes, and others have discerned a wide variety of policies and motives. There is something of a con­ sensus, however, that the fate of the nobility was ulti­ mately decided as part of a political accommodation or compromise between a usurping empress and the dominant social and economic class. This book will not contribute to that consensus. Instead it will argue that Catherine's control over the government was well es­ tablished and relatively secure by the time she began to resolve the question of the nobility's status under law and that considerations of political support for her re­ tention of the throne did not play an important part in her resolution of that question. For reasons that will be explained, the nobility was not an organized political force capable of imposing a political program on the monarch. So, instead of concentrating on the political relationship between Catherine and the nobility, as Dukes, for example, has done, I shall attempt to ex­ plain Catherine's treatment of the nobility in terms of the problems that she encountered in trying to provide Russia, especially the vast and underdeveloped prov­ inces, with a government capable of defending and promoting the national interest.

Preface

Its focus on administrative problems connects this book with many of the most recent writings on the government of Russia in the second half of the eight­ eenth century. The works of RaefF on the domestic policies of Peter III, of Alexander on the government's response to the Pugachev Revolt, of Troitsky and Duran on financial reform, of Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia and Zheludkov on the reform of provincial administration, and of Demidov and Torke on the growth of bureauc­ racy have greatly expanded our knowledge of the reali­ ties of government in late eighteenth century Russia. In the light of their findings it is no longer possible to treat Catherine's domestic policies simply as measures calculated to secure political support or, alternatively, as attempts to implement theories borrowed from the philosophes. While intellectual and political influences should not be ignored, historians who try to explain Catherine's policies should concentrate on the concerns that most often absorbed the attention of the Empress and her statesmen, the problems of promoting the wel­ fare and power of the state, of raising and supporting an army and a navy, of increasing the wealth of the na­ tion and the revenues of the state, and of insuring the preservation of a domestic order in which those other activities were possible. Catherine stated on more than one occasion that the laws governing the nobility should be designed to serve the interests of the state, and there is no reason to doubt that she believed her Charter satisfied that requirement. The aim of this book, accordingly, is to relate Cath­ erine's treatment of the nobility to the goals of her domestic policy and to her perception of the state's interests.

Acknowledgments

AM INDEBTED to many people and institutions for

I

the aid they have given me in the writing of this book. A travel grant from the Inter-University Com­ mittee on Travel Grants enabled me to carry out essen­ tial research in the national archives of the Soviet Union; a grant from the Research Council of the University of Massachusetts enabled me to collect and copy important research materials; and a grant from the American Philosophical Society enabled me to finish my research and begin the writing of this book. My research was greatly facilitated by the coop­ eration and assistance of the librarians and archi­ vists at the Central State Archives of Ancient Acts (TsGADA) in Moscow, the Central State Historical Archive (TsGIAL) in Leningrad, the Leningrad Sec­ tion of the Institute of History (LOII), the Leningrad Public Library, the Library of the University of Lenin­ grad, the Academy of Sciences Library (BAN) in Leningrad, the Library of Congress, the Olin Library at Cornell University, the Yale University Library, and the Library of the University of Massachusetts. I am deeply grateful to Professor Walter M. Pintner of Cornell University for helping me to begin this work, for directing the doctoral dissertation from which this book has evolved, and for many kindnesses and favors. I also wish to thank Professor V. V. Mavrodin for the personal kindness and professional assistance that he extended to me during my stay in Leningrad. Robert E. Jones

Contents

I

Preface

ν

Acknowledgments

ix

Abbreviations

2

The Russian Nobility from Peter the Great to Peter III The Petrine Nobility Service, the State, and the Nobility from 1700 to 1762

II

91 97 108 118

The Legislative Commission "Come, Let Us Reason Together" The Clash of Opposing Views Catherine and the Nobility: The Problem

V

39 46 56 67

The Politics of Usurpation A Politic Evasion The Imperial Council The Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility The Consolidation of Power

IV

18

The "Emancipated" Nobility The Manifesto and the Nobles The Nakazy of 1767 The Provincial Nobles The Would-Be Gentry

III

3

123 133 154

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774 The Threat to the Nobility Administrative Reform 1762-1768

164 172

Contents The Limitations of Bureaucratic Absolutism An Alternative to Bureaucratic Absolutism The Failure of Bureaucratic Absolutism VI

188 196

The Provincial Reform of 1775 The Composition of the Law The Substance of Reform The Reform and the Nobility

VII

180

210 220 235

The State and the Nobility 1775-1785 The First Elections The State's Satisfaction with the Reform The Development of the Provincial Assemblies

VIII The Resolution of the Problem The Charter to the Nobility The Significance of the Charter

244 253 260 273 287

Bibliography

300

Index

313

The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

1762-1785

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations appear in the notes and bib­ liography: AHR CSS IZ

American Historical Review Canadian Slavic Studies Istoricheskie Zapiski

L. LOII

Leningrad Leningradskoe Otdelenie Instituta Istorii Akademii Nauk SSSR Moscow

M. PSZ RA RBS RS RV

Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossiskoi Imperii s 1649 goda Russkii Arkhiv Russkii Biograficheskii Slorvar1 Russkaia Starina Russkii Vestnik

SPB.

St. Petersburg

SIRIO

Sbornik Imperatorskago skago Obshchestva Slavic Review

SR

TsGADA TsGIAL ZMNP

Russkago

Istoriche-

Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Drevnikh Aktov Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Leningrad Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnago Prosveshcheniia

The Russian Nobility from Peter the Great to Peter III

THE PETRINE NOBILITY

I

N 1762 the Russian government began a general re­

organization of the state aimed at reducing the in­ efficiency and disorder that had frustrated its efforts in the Seven Years' War and driven it to the verge of bankruptcy. An integral part of that reorganization was the revision and updating of the laws governing the nobility. Although Russia's 50,000 noblemen repre­ sented only .6 percent of the empire's male population,1 they accounted for 100 percent of its military officers and its middle- and upper-level civil servants.2 Their educational advantages assured the nobles of a predomi­ nant role in intellectual and cultural affairs.3 As the pos1 V. M. Kabuzan, Narodonaselenie Rossii ν XVIII—pervoi polovine XIX v. (M., 1963), p. 154. 2 The 100 percent is explained by the fact that any com­ moner who attained the rank of officer or middle-level civil servant automatically became a nobleman under the laws of Peter the Great. Although commoners usually found it difficult to obtain such ranks, it was never expressly forbidden by law. 3 M. M. Shtrange, Oemokraticheskaia intelligentsiia Rossii ν XVIII veke (M., 1965) presents an extensive study of eight­ eenth century Russian intellectuals who were of non-noble ori­ gin. Although Shtrange set out to show that the intelligentsia of eighteenth century Russia was not composed exclusively of noblemen, his rather meager findings serve principally to demonstrate the predominance of the nobility.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

sessors of landed estates worked by enserfed peasants, the nobles dominated Russia's agricultural economy and controlled the destiny of some 8,000,000 men, women, and children or approximately 40 percent of the empire's total population.4 In Russia the regulations of the state were more im­ portant in determining the character, status, and activi­ ties of the nobility than in any other European state with the possible exception of Prussia. By the eight­ eenth century the Russian state had acquired the power to control the membership of the nobility and to define its relationship to the state and to the rest of the popu­ lation. In the first quarter of that century Peter the Great had reorganized the nobility so completely that he may be said to have created a new nobility, subsequently known as the dvorianstvo, that was as different from the old, pre-Petrine nobility as the Petrine state itself was different from the tsardom of Moscovy. By 1762, how­ ever, it had become increasingly apparent that many of Peter's laws affecting the nobility were outmoded and that a new "constitution" for the nobility was in order.5 Thus, when Catherine II suggested the creation of one comprehensive statute that would define nobility, regu­ late its membership, and specify its privileges and obli4 Kabuzan,

p. 154. After its resurrection by Peter Shuvalov in 1758-59, the Legislative Commission of Elizabeth Petrovna had begun the work of compiling and revising the laws pertaining to the nobility (Kerry Morrison, "Catherine II's Legislative Com­ mission: an Administrative Interpretation," CSS, iv, no. 3 [Fall 1970], 468-69). For a rather tendentious appraisal of the results of that commission's efforts, see N. L. Rubinshtein, "Ulozhenaia komissiia 1754-1766 gg. i ee proekt novogo ulozheniia Ό sostoianii poddannykh voobshche,'" IZ, xxxvm (1951). 5

The Nobility from 1700-1762

gations her advisers agreed that such a law was urgently needed to end the confusion that then existed about the status of the nobility and about the meaning of the term dvorianstvo.6 Like the nobilities of other European lands, the dvor­ ianstvo of eighteenth century Russia was composed of a variety of groups and subgroups that otherwise had little in common. Historically speaking, the Russian no­ bility was an agglomeration of families that had been ennobled at different times for different reasons over the course of several centuries. The oldest and proudest no­ ble families were those that claimed descent from Rurik, the legendary Varangian chieftain who was supposed to have founded the Russian state in the ninth century. Nobles who could claim genealogical equality with the "children of Rurik" included the descendants of Prince Gedemin of Lithuania, the descendants of a Tatar khan, and, in a very few instances, the descendants of the royal house of Georgia or some other land. Those families had in common the fact that their ancestors had at one time ruled their own lands as independent princes. After their absorption by Moscow, the once independent princes and their retainers had been integrated into the old Mus­ covite nobility, the boiarstvo, through a complicated system of precedence known as mestnichestvo that com­ bined the length of a family's genealogy with the length and importance of its service to Moscow. Until the seventeenth century the boiarstvo supplied the state with almost all of its important servitors, both civilian and military, and remained apart from the lower service classes, the deti boiarskie, sluzhilye liudy, or dvor6

LOII, f. 36, d. 398, pp. 245-48. The three men con­ sulted were R. L. Vorontsov, D. I. Chicherin, and Ν. I. Panin.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility ianstvo. By the eighteenth century, however, the distinc­ tion between boiars, who were required to serve the state because they owned land, and dvoriane, who re­

ceived land as a reward for service, had lost its func­ tional significance and was finally obliterated by the laws of Peter the Great. With respect to law and serv­ ice, Peter placed all of the members of the nobility on an equal footing, giving them preference and assigning them ranks and offices according to their talent and ability irrespective of their ancestry. In 1721 he ruled that all commissioned officers were to be given patents of nobility and were to be regarded in the future as the equals of the older nobility, and in 1722 Peter intro­ duced the Table of Ranks, a new system of precedence based solely upon the rank that the individual had at­ tained in the state service.7 As a result of Peter's legis­ lation, descendants of the old nobility were merged with the service gentry in much the same way as the former appanage princes had previously been merged with the boiarstvo. Unlike those of western Europe, the Petrine nobility was not truly a landed nobility so much as it was a hereditary class of state servitors sup­ ported in part through the possession of landed estates. Included in its ranks were the descendants of princes, boiars, and the old gentry together with the offspring of commoners, foreigners, soldiers, and civil servants ennobled through the Table of Ranks. Although it had no force in law after 1722, the dis­ tinction between nobles who were descended from the old nobility and those whose families had been ennobled since the introduction of the Table of Ranks retained its importance in the minds and hearts of the nobles 7 PSZ nos. 3705 (16 January 1721) and 3890 (24 Janu­ ary 1722).

The Nobility from 1700-1762

themselves. It continued to serve as a basis for pride, pretension, snobbery, and social discrimination. Thus we read that Sergei Aksakov's grandfather refused to marry the girl he loved because her great-grandfather had been a commoner whereas he was a descendant of Rurik.8 Some nobles wanted nothing less than the re­ peal of Peter's reforms. At the Legislative Commission convened in 1767, some noblemen were to argue for a closed nobility in which ancestry would be the only criterion for membership. Others tried to influence the policy of the autocracy through direct appeal. As late as the 1790s, S. R. Vorontsov urged Catherine to correct what he termed "an extreme abuse introduced by Pe­ ter I. .. : that which allows every officer and every civil servant of equivalent rank, together with their de­ scendants, to pass themselves off as gentlemen."9 Al­ though taken quite seriously by some people, distinc­ tions of pedigree were in reality much less important than some of the other cleavages that divided the eight­ eenth century Russian nobility. More important than ancestry in setting one noble­ man apart from another was the criterion that Peter himself had substituted for it: importance to the state expressed in terms of service rank or chin. Established by the state to serve its own purposes, service rank was also esteemed by the overwhelming majority of noble­ men, whose veneration of chin became a subject of satire and notoriety. Obscure noblemen hoped to im­ prove their position in the world by moving up through the Table of Ranks, and those who were born to emi­ nence sought a rank commensurate with their opinion 8

S. T. Aksakov, Chronicle of a Russian Family (London and N.Y., 1924), pp. 7-8. s LOII, f. 36, d. 398, p. 472.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

of themselves, being ashamed to hold a rank that they considered beneath them.10 The higher a nobleman's chin, the greater his salary, power, and prestige. High ranks were held by generals, ambassadors, and impor­ tant statesmen; low ranks were the marks of junior officers and clerks. Inevitably such disparities produced differences of interest and outlook. High-ranking offi­ cials tended to identify their interests with those of the state rather than with those of the nobility as a class. Thus a selfish effort to secure economic monopolies for the nobility at the expense of the merchant class could be rejected by the Senate even though that body was composed exclusively of nobles.11 On some contested issues, the men at the top tended to stress personal achievement over class prerogative, while those of lesser achievements identified their hopes with the interests of the dvorianstvo as a class. A nobleman's opinion of state institutions and their operation was also likely to be influenced by his rank in the service hierarchy. Those who had not achieved positions of power and influence opposed centralization, subordination, and bureaucracy, while those who commanded the central institutions of the state favored a system that concentrated power in their own hands. High-ranking officials tended to re­ gard governmental affairs as their private domain and often had little sympathy for the aspirations of other nobles to share some of that power. Thus A. A. Viazemsky, Catherine's procurator-general of the Senate and chief bureaucrat, opposed what he termed "the in­ volvement of a mass of petty nobles into political mat10 James Hassell, "Implementation of the Russian Table of Ranks During the Eighteenth Century," SR, xxix, no. 2 (June 1970),290. 11 Rubinshtein, IZ, xxxvin: 239.

The Nobility from 1700-1762

ters that are none of their business."12 Others, such as the Shuvalov brothers, who had dominated the gov­ ernment in the 1750s, wanted to divide the dvorianstvo by separating the rich and powerful nobles from the great mass of servitors. The most important division within the ranks of the eighteenth century nobility, however, was the difference between rich nobles and poor ones. The disparity of wealth was enormous. Count Sheremetev, the richest man in Russia at the end of the eighteenth century, owned 185,610 serfs of both sexes, and one of the Vorontsovs owned 54,730.13 In contrast, 62 percent of the Russian nobles of Catherine's time, a sizable majority, owned fewer than 30 male serfs. Another 21 percent owned more than 30 but fewer than 100 male serfs. Only 16 percent of the nobles owned more than 100 male serfs apiece, enough to be considered moderately wealthy by the standard of the time. Really rich noble­ men, those who owned more than 1,000 male serfs apiece, comprised only 1 percent of the total member­ ship of the dvorianstvo.14 As one might expect, the in­ terests of the rich nobles were not always identical with 12 D. I. Ilovaisky, "Graf Iakov Sivers," Sochineniia (M., 1884), pp. 565-66. 13 Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1961), p. 370. 14 V. I. Semevsky, Krestiane ν tsarstvovanie imp. Ekateriny II, I (SPB., 1903), 32. Semevsky's figures are based on the incomplete results of the revision census of 1777. Some no­ tion of what those figures mean can be derived from the in­ struction (nakaz) of the nobility of Kerensk to the Legislative Commission convened in 1767, which complained that a re­ tired lieutenant or captain who owned thirty revision serfs could not maintain his accustomed standard of living. SIRlO, LXVIII: 446.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

those of their poorer peers. To cite one example of what must be termed "class conflict" within the ranks of the nobility, the poor nobles of certain regions complained in 1767 that they were being victimized by their rich absentee neighbors, whose agents would steal their serfs and encroach upon their land and then use money and influence to prevent the poor nobles from obtain­ ing justice in the courts.15 Of all the factors affecting the status of noblemen in eighteenth century Russia, a lengthy pedigree was the least important and the one least certain to be associated with the others. A family like the Stroganovs could enjoy great wealth and high office even though its nobil­ ity was of rather recent origin. Several members of the governing elite, in fact, could trace their nobility back no farther than the reign of Peter the Great. A direct descendant of Rurik or Gedemin, on the other hand, might easily be both poor and insignificant. Indeed, when someone mentioned a member of one of the an­ cient aristocratic families, it was customary to indicate whether he was a rich Golitsyn, Dolgoruky, Volkonsky, etc. or a poor one.16 Wealth and high office, on the other hand, were so closely associated as to be all but synonymous with each other and with a third criterion of distinction, edu­ cation. Some men did rise from humble origins to high positions in the government, but for the most part mem­ bership in the ruling elite tended to be hereditary since 15 See the following instructions to the Legislative Com­ mission convened in 1767: Opochka, S1RI0, xiv: 270-71; Vologda, xiv: 464; Simbirsk, LXVIII : 8-9; Dankov, LXVIII: 335-37; Riask, LXVIII: 373, 381-82; Livin, LXVIII: 402-3, 405-6; Insara, LXVIII: 423-24; Valuek, LXVIII: 570-71; Ryl'sk, LXVIII: 621. 16 J. Blum, p. 376.

The Nobility from 1700-1762

men who were rich and powerful had the wealth and connections to provide their sons with the means to quick advancement. Aksakov explained, for instance, that his grandfather eventually quit the service because high ranks in the army were difficult to obtain unless one had passed through the lower ranks in childhood.17 That was possible only for the sons of the elite, who were often enrolled in the guards regiments at birth, promoted to corporal while scarcely out of infancy, and promoted again to sergeant at the commencement of their education.18 Education at the Cadet Corps in the capital, which entitled a young nobleman to enter the service with the rank of lieutenant, was also a privilege reserved for the sons of the elite. Less influential mem­ bers of the nobility sought but failed to win similar privileges for their sons. While the poorer nobles had difficulty providing their sons with any education at all, wealthier nobles could send theirs to schools in the capital or hire private tutors for them. The very wealthy could afford to send their sons abroad to foreign uni­ versities where they could acquire the kind of educa­ tion and culture that led to rapid promotions in the service. The race is not always to the swift, and in the competition for chin a father's wealth could provide his son with a considerable if not insurmountable head start. By the same token, high-ranking officials found it relatively easy to acquire wealth. The opportunities for graft and bribery alone were enough to insure the as­ sociation of high office and personal wealth. Alexander Menshikov, the favorite of Peter the Great, is reputed 17

Aksakov, p. 6. Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth Century Nobility (N.Y., 1966), p. 122. 18

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility to have been a baker's apprentice prior to entering gov­ ernment service, but he eventually became one of the richest men in Russia. Roman Vorontsov, whose ability to turn an administrative post into a source of extra income earned him the nickname of "Big Pocket" (Ro­ man BoFshoi Karman), entered service as a very rich man and became much richer. In spite of the state's repeated efforts to eliminate such practices, corruption, bribery, and "gift-giving" remained an endemic and generally accepted characteristic of the Russian gov­ ernment. Influential statesmen could also use their of­ fice to secure contracts, monopolies, and other advan­ tages from the state as the Shuvalovs had done during the reign of Elizabeth. Even without those additional benefits that a Menshikov or a Shuvalov could wring from it, high office returned handsome financial rewards to its occupant. For example, a provincial governorgeneral received 2,250 rubles a year in salary prior to 1775.19 After 1775 the same official received 600 revi­ sion serfs at the time of his appointment and 1,800 rubles annually.20 The close association between great wealth and high office was understood, approved of, and even fostered by the government of eighteenth century Russia. Catherine herself once wrote that "a disproportion between hon­ ors and wealth" weakened a monarchical state. Even in the intermediate ranks the state expected a man's 19 This figure is taken from a Senate report on the costs of local and provincial government prior to the reform of 1775. LOII1 f. 36, d. 401, p. 296. 20 This figure is taken from Senate documents listing the salaries of provincial officials in the newly reformed provinces of Kursk, Nizhnii Novgorod, Tambov, and Voronezh. TsGADA, f. 259, kn. 4191, pp. 175, 224, 321, and 379.

The Nobility from 1700-1762

wealth to be roughly commensurate with his rank. Thus Governor-General Sievers of Novgorod wrote Catherine that the anomaly of a retired lieutenant's owning a thousand serfs while a retired major who lived nearby owned but twenty was "disconcerting."21 To guarantee a correspondence of wealth with honors, M. L. Vorontsov once proposed that the estates of the great families be entailed and that nobles of great dis­ tinction be given as many as five thousand revision serfs apiece in accordance with their titles and status.22 In practice, the government came very close to doing what Vorontsov recommended. The rulers of eighteenth century Russia usually gave large gifts of land and serfs to the men who distinguished themselves in their serv­ ice. Although historians have generally treated that practice as a deplorable symptom of favoritism and corruption, it might better be described as a device for integrating a statesman risen from obscurity into the ranks of the governing elite by providing him with an economic status that would be in keeping with his po­ litical importance.23 Similar measures were taken to im­ prove the pedigree of low-born statesmen and give them the kind of social prestige that people associated with aristocratic birth. The state could not ennoble his an­ cestors retroactively, but it could and often did confer 21 Letter from Sievers to Catherine, 21 April 1777. TsGADA, f. 168, d. 153, p. 5. 22 LOII, f. 36, d. 400, p. 208. This point was included in the proposal that Vorontsov submitted to the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility in 1763. 23 Arcadius Kahan, "The Costs of Westernization in Rus­ sia: The Gentry and the Economy in the Eighteenth Cen­ tury," SR, xxv, no. 1 (March 1966), 63. Catherine and Paul reportedly gave a total of 385,770 serfs to 111 recipients. J. Blum, p. 357.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

an aristocratic title—prince, count, or baron—on the man himself. From the time of Peter the Great, who began the practice, until the middle of the nineteenth century, the tsars created fourteen princes, seventy counts, and ten barons.24 Thus a baker's apprentice be­ came Prince Menshikov, a once obscure nobleman became Prince Potemkin, and a priest's son became Count Speransky. Through such means as the bestowal of riches and titles, the state maintained the homo­ geneity of the governing elite even as it recruited talent from other sources. One can, therefore, identify the governing elite as a distinct element or stratum within the eighteenth cen­ tury Russian nobility, "separated," as one historian has written, "from the lower nobility and from ordinary people by its manners, its life style, and even its lan­ guage."25 Its members were predictably wealthy, edu­ cated, cultured, socially prestigious, and politically im­ portant. They lived in the capitals and in other centers of governmental activity rather than on their estates. They were nobles of the city, of the army, or of the court, but seldom, save in times of exile or some other calamity, did they spend much time in the provinces.26 Nobility, for them, was concentrated in people like themselves, and they tended to identify more with their own circle and with the state than with the other mem24Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace, Russia, ι (London, Paris, N.Y., and Melbourne, 1905), 396. 25 N. Kalachev, "Kriticheskii razbor sochineniia professora A. Romanovich-Slavatinsky: Dvorianstvo ν Rossii ot nachala XVIII veka do otmeny krepostnago prava," Materialy dlia istorii russkago dvorianstva, ι (SPB., 1885), 28. 26 August von Haxthausen, The Russian Empire, Its People, Institutions, and Resources, n (London, 1856), 209-10.

The Nobility from 1700-1762

bers of the dvorianstvo. That same identification was also valid in reverse, for if the Russian state can be said to have represented the interests of any one par­ ticular class or group, they were those of the governing elite rather than those of the nobility as a whole.27 At the other extreme from the elite, there existed a much more numerous but less influential group of petty noblemen. A petty nobleman was poor by definition, and because he was poor he was virtually certain to have little or no education; because he was uneducated, he typically failed to advance very high in the Table of Ranks; and because he could not rise to even a modestly lucrative post in the service, he remained poor. For him life was a struggle to fulfill his social, legal, and eco­ nomic obligations and to hold onto the distinction of belonging to the nobility, which in some cases was all that separated him from the upper levels of the free peasantry. Like the great noble, he too was a servant of the state, but unlike the former, his personal influ­ ence on the state or its policies was negligible. As a general rule, it is fair to say that the state recognized his interests only when they coincided with those of the higher nobility or with those of the state itself. The enormous gap between the elite and the petty nobility was filled by a continuous gradation of noble­ men of intermediate wealth and importance. The "mid­ dling" nobles did not enjoy the powers and comforts of the elite, but neither did they suffer the frustration and distress of the petty nobles. For that reason noblemen who owned between fifty and five hundred serfs are sometimes referred to as "typical" nobles even though they amounted statistically to less than one-third of the total membership of that class. In general, nobles who 27 Kahan, SR, xxv: 28.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility began in those circumstances might expect to finish their careers as staff officers or middle-echelon bureau­ crats, but because their wealth and education varied so widely between the upper and lower extremes, their careers were less predictable than those of either the elite or the petty nobility. Their lives were not very far removed from those of the petty nobility, but they were better, sufficiently better that "middling" nobles could imagine themselves entering the upper reaches of the dvonanstvo. As Kalachov has put it, the middling no­ bles were "united with the petty nobles by their basic interests and with the great nobles by their preten­ sions."28 The differences between the various groups of nobles were real, and it is of the utmost importance that they be borne in mind whenever one writes of the eighteenth century Russian nobility. It is not legitimate to write that "the nobility" favored or opposed a certain policy or a certain ruler as though the nobility were one en­ tity with a single set of interests and opinions.29 One 28

Kalachev, i: 28. Divisions within the Russian nobility have generally been ignored in legal and political studies of the dvorianstvo, even in the best of them such as Α. V. Romanovich-Slavatinsky, Dvori­ anstvo ν Rossii ot nachala XVIII veka do otmeny krepostnago prava (Kiev, 1912), and S. A. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie za stoletie 1762-1861 (SBP., 1906). Perhaps that is so because the unity of the nobility was greater from a legal standpoint than from any other. Paul Dukes, Catherine the Great and the Russian Nobility (Cambridge, 1967), shows significant differences among the nobles, but he does not relate them to identifiable divisions with the ranks of the nobility. In fact he says explicitly (p. 23) that "there is generally more evidence of cohesion than disunity between the lower and higher dvorianstvo." Since wealth represented one of the most important lines of division within the nobility, 29

The Nobility from 1700-1762

cannot assume, for example, that a demand put forward by the lesser nobility—to have their sons enter the army as officers, for example—was certain to triumph be­ cause the men who ran the state were also nobles or that the feelings of the elite—opposition to Peter III or to Paul, let us say—were necessarily shared by the nobil­ ity as a whole. As the record of Catherine's Legislative Commission shows, there were few issues on which the nobility spoke with one voice or with anything resem­ bling a consensus. In 1730 groups within the nobility had even come into direct conflict. In reaction to the sudden and unexpected death of Peter II the members of the Supreme Privy Council tried to seize the real powers of the autocracy for themselves by placing re­ strictions on Peter's successor, the empress Anna. Rep­ resenting only a small clique within the ruling elite, the members of the council were opposed by other members of the elite and by the great mass of ordinary noble­ men. The lesser nobles, many of whom had assembled in Moscow for the wedding of Peter II, made it clear that they preferred the rule of one autocrat to the rule of a small band of great lords. As they saw it, their own interests and those of the clique that was trying to seize control of the state were sufficiently opposed to make the fact that both groups were legally members of the same class irrelevant. The peculiar circum­ stances of 1730 were never repeated. The subsequent palace revolutions of the eighteenth century were car­ ried out by factions of the ruling elite in their own ineconomic historians such as Semevsky, Blum, and Confino generally emphasize differences within the dvorianstvo more than political and legal historians do, but they, on the other hand, usually have little to say about the non-economic con­ sequences of those differences.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility terest or for what they believed to be the good of the state. Unorganized, the overwhelming majority of no­ blemen took no part in court politics. The existence of serious cleavages within the nobil­ ity of eighteenth century Russia was not unusual: simi­ lar divisions existed within the nobility of every Euro­ pean state in the eighteenth century. What was unusual was the absence of any formal or legal division of the Russian nobility. Legally and formally the dvorianstvo was a single entity. Though the ranks of the nobility extended "from the steps of the throne to the threshold of the peasant's hut," all of its members had the same status before the law and were possessed of identical rights, privileges, and obligations. The unity of the nobility, forged as it was by Peter the Great, lay in the obligation of all its members to spend the greater part of their lives in the service of the state. The burden of service borne by every nobleman was also the legal and theoretical justification for all of the nobility's rights and privileges, especially the essential privilege of own­ ing lands and serfs. Within a few years of Peter's death, however, the service requirement of the nobility began to diminish until it was formally abolished in 1762. Its disappearance called into question all of the legisla­ tion that had been based upon it and so produced the "confusion" that Catherine and her advisers felt obliged to resolve. SERVICE, THE STATE, AND THE NOBILITY FROM 1700 ΤΟ 1762

In the first two decades of the eighteenth century, state service had become the central fact of the Russian nobleman's life. Obligatory service in itself was nothing

The Nobility from 1700-1762

new—Russian nobles had been required to serve the state since the sixteenth century—but the conditions at­ tached to state service by Peter the Great made a drastic change in the nature of that service and in its effect on the nobility. Before Peter's time, the nobles had served the state, for the most part, on an occasional or tem­ porary basis. Most had served in the militia, going off to war when that was required and returning home at the end of the war and possibly at the end of each sum­ mer's campaign. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, the changing nature of war and the extension of Russia's frontiers had made service of that kind inadequate to the military needs of the state. The Great Northern War against Sweden lasted twenty-one years and required the mobilization of the entire Rus­ sian nation. To carry on the war and the other projects associated with it, Peter was forced to make the maxi­ mum possible use of Russia's resources, especially its manpower. The peasants were made to bear the major burden of fighting, supporting, and paying for the war, but officers and officials were needed to direct the peas­ ants and execute the orders and policies of the state, and for that Peter turned to the nobility. By his order, every nobleman was obligated to serve the state con­ tinuously from early adolescence unto death or in­ firmity. State service ceased to be a sometime avocation and became a lifelong career. Peter's mobilization of Russia touched upon every aspect of the nobleman's life. To watch over the no­ bles and see that they were being employed efficiently, Peter established the Heraldry Office, whose orders de­ termined the type and duration of the noble's education, his assignment to a service post, the amount of his sal­ ary, the date of his retirement, and his movement from

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

one place to another. In his early youth, the Russian nobleman was expected to educate himself in prepara­ tion for the service. Until he had learned to read and write, a nobleman remained a minor in the eyes of the law and could not marry, inherit property, or become an officer.30 At intervals, the young nobleman had to appear for an inspection or smotr, and, depending on the results, he would be ordered either to continue his education or to report for active duty at an assigned post. Except for occasional furloughs and leaves, he would then continue in the service for as long as he was physically able. If he were excused from active duty for any reason, temporary or permanent, the nobleman had to carry with him an official passport authorizing his absence from service; otherwise he would be subject to immediate arrest. Peter's mobilization of Russia also modified the no­ bleman's role as serf owner and landlord. As state offi­ cials concentrated on matters of greater priority, they withdrew from the countryside, leaving the serf owner or his steward to serve as the government for his peas­ ants. For his serfs, the noble became master, tax col­ lector, draft board, and judge. In other respects, how­ ever, the nobleman's control over his property was strictly limited by the state's regulations. The land and its products were treated as national resources to be used in accordance with the purposes and policies of the state. A nobleman's landownings had to be regis­ tered with the Estates College, which had to approve of 30 Raeff, Origins, p. 132. That rule was the inspiration for Fonfizin's comedy The Minor, in which Mitrofan Prostakov, the sixteen-year-old protagonist, is forced to learn to read and write, contrary to his natural inclinations, in order to marry the girl he loves.

The Nobility from 1700-1762

all changes made subsequent to registration, i.e. sale, purchase, inheritance, the alteration of boundary lines, or the movement for serfs from one estate to another, even if both were owned by the same lord. Any minerals found on the estate belonged not to the nobleman but to the state, and their exploitation was controlled by the Mining College. The same was true of the forests, which were supervised by the Admiralty or the Manu­ facturing College. The nobleman's right to market products grown or manufactured on his estate was reg­ ulated by the Commerce College. His power to bequeath his estate to heirs of his choosing was restricted by Peter's law of entail. Thus the nobleman's property rights were as limited, as conditional, and as subordi­ nate to the demands of the state as his personal rights. Peter's service requirement also had the effect of making the Russian noble an absentee landlord, whose life was focused on his regiment or his service post rather than on his estate or his native locality. Except for those who avoided service illegally, only the very young, the very old, and the disabled resided on their estates longer than the length of a furlough. Conse­ quently, the management of a nobleman's estate within the confines of the state's regulations was normally the responsibility of his mother, his aged or disabled father, his wife, or a steward. A prime illustration of the nobil­ ity's divorce from the countryside and its concerns is provided by Peter's unsuccessful attempts to involve those nobles who were not on active duty in the opera­ tions of local government. Repeatedly, Peter tried to make use of even the non-serving nobles by having them accept elected posts as komissars, whose duties were to collect the poll tax, keep order, and perform other minor duties, or as members of the nobles' councils and Iand-

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

raty that Peter intended as a check on the provincial governors and other appointed officials, but in every case his efforts failed.31 Few nobles lived in the prov­ inces in Peter's time, and those who did were either incompetent or uninterested in local matters.32 The serv­ ice demands of the state were so great in comparison to the supply of manpower available that the efforts and attention of the nobles were completely absorbed by the state service to the exclusion of other concerns like es­ tate management and local government. 31 Peter's attempts to involve retired nobles in local and provincial government led to the enactment of a confusing se­ ries of repetitive, contradictory, and generally ineffectual de­ crees. Nevertheless, three main efforts can be discerned. The first, in 1702, required the election of nobles' councils com­ posed of two, three, or four noblemen who were to act as colleagues of the governor in each guberniia (PSZ no. 1900). In a subsequent reorganization of provincial administration, the councils were replaced by landraty, a conscious imitation of the land councils of the Baltic Germans (PSZ no. 2673). In 1724, the landraty were abolished, and local land komissars, mentioned in legislation since 1719, were to be elected there­ after in every uezd or county (PSZ no. 4533). The election of komissars was more of an obligation than a privilege and was not received with favor by the nobles. They avoided service as komissars, and the normal practice was to have the state official appoint a local nobleman to the post and compel him to serve. After Peter's death, the office became appointive in law as well as in fact. See Μ. M. Bogoslavsky, Oblastnaia reforma Petra Velikago (M., 1902), especially pp. 404-23. See also Iu. V. Got'e, Istoriia oblastnago upravleniia ν Rossii ot Petra I do Ekateriny II, I (M., 1913), 80-83. 32 In one of the last elections held under the law of Peter the Great, the nobles of Klin uezd were called together in January 1729 for the purpose of electing a komissar. Only seven men appeared, and at least two of them were illiterate. Got'e, i: 80.

The Nobility from 1700-1762

In time, however, Peter's efforts to increase the size of the nobility and to use its service more efficiently began to produce the desired effect. As the number of servitors rose relative to the demand, the state found it possible to require less service from each individual nobleman. After Peter's death, his service requirement was gradually reduced and finally was rescinded alto­ gether. Historians have generally viewed the decline of the service requirement through the eyes of the nobil­ ity and have seen it as the "liberation" of the dvorianstvo. According to the usual explanation of its de­ cline, the series of weak rulers who followed Peter tried to please the nobles and win their support by acceding to their desire for the reduction or abolition of the service requirement.33 The problem with such an ex­ planation, superficially persuasive though it might be, is that it fails to relate changes in the service require­ ment to the needs and interests of the state and thus ignores the essential reason for the very existence of compulsory service. To begin at the beginning, Peter the Great had forced the nobles to render lifetime serv­ ice to the state, not for any political reason and certainly not because he was trying to displease the nobles or provoke their opposition, but because he needed more army officers and civil servants than the old system of service was capable of supplying. Over the centuries, Peter's service requirement was only one of many meas­ ures taken by the Russian government to provide the state with an adequate supply of servicemen, and there is no reason to assume that the subsequent modification and elimination of his requirement must be explained 33 This commonly held view of the "rise of the nobility" be­ tween 1725 and 1785 is cogently summarized and attacked in Raeff, Origins, pp. 10-12.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

as though the changes, but not the requirement, were unusual and extraordinary. Whether they are looked at in such a historical perspective or are treated as indi­ vidual acts, modifications in the nobility's service obli­ gation from 1725 to 1762 can be explained more easily and more sensibly if they are seen as the results of the state's efforts to bring the supply of manpower into bal­ ance with the demand rather than as the results of political "deals" between the various sovereigns and the dvorianstvo. The first mitigation of Peter's service requirement came during the reigns of his two immediate successors, Catherine I and Peter II, when the state began to allow the nobles to take leaves of absence of up to a year in length. The nobleman on leave was free to attend to manorial and familial matters during that year, but he was to receive no salary. That arrangement benefited the state as well as the nobleman since it reduced the amount of money that the state had to pay out in salaries for service that was not needed or was in excess of re­ quirements. That the interest of the state was the para­ mount motive behind that amendment of Peter's service requirement can be inferred from the circumstances of its adoption: in the first place, the idea originated with the Supreme Privy Council, dominated by Menshikov and his allies, none of whom were associated closely with the aspirations of the Russian nobility; secondly, the policy was adopted during an interlude of peace, at a time when the demand for manpower was consider­ ably less than it had been when the original requirement was imposed; and lastly, the state adopted the practice of granting year-long leaves without defining it in prin­ ciple or codifying it as law, thereby reserving the right

The Nobility from 1700-1762

to interpret and apply the policy to suit its own inter­ ests.34 A second modification of Peter's service requirement was introduced in 1736 by the government of the em­ press Anna. At that time the state allowed every family with more than one son to keep one son at home to man­ age the affairs of the family, provided he took a position in the provincial civil service. It also specified twentyfive years rather than life as the duration of compulsory service, after which a nobleman might honorably retire to his estate. It is tempting, given the circumstances that had accompanied Anna's elevation to power in 1730, to see the law of 1736 as a reward for the political support that the rank and file of the nobility had given her in the accession crisis of 1730; however, the weight of the evidence is against such an interpretation. In 1730 Anna was supported by the guards regiments, by members of the ruling elite who were not members of the cabal against her, and by the many members of the nobility who had already gathered in Moscow or who later assembled in other locations to voice their opin­ ions. The support given Anna by the middle and lesser nobility is significant to the historian because of the statements that the assembled nobles drafted and be­ cause the attempt of the rank and file of the nobility to involve themselves in a palace revolution was unique, but of the three groups supporting Anna, they were the least significant and the least able to demand a "payoff" once they had dispersed. That fact was reflected in An­ na's treatment of her supporters: the guards, whose support was crucial, were quickly paid off with honors and promotions; the powerful statesmen who had sided 34Bogoslavsky,

p. 485; Raeff, Origins, pp. 61-62.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

with Anna, men like Ostermann, Golovkin, Prokopovich, Iaguzhensky, and Lowenwolde, received high of­ fice in the new reign plus valuable gifts of cash and property; but the first act that could be called a benefit to the mass of the nobility was not taken until 1736, and even so, the connection between the aspirations of the nobility and the decision of the state is tenuous. Had the government wanted to reward the nobility, there were other desires included in the petitions of 1730, such as the request that sons of nobles be allowed to enter the service as officers, to which the nobility seemed to at­ tach greater importance. Reduction of the service re­ quirement had not been one of the nobles' most promi­ nent demands, but it was the only one adopted by Anna's government.35 Nor did the law of 1736 sound like a concession to the nobility: instead of citing the happy consequences that it would have for the nobles, the law spoke of the benefits that would accrue to the nation when the noblemen were allowed to devote more time to the management of their estates. Implementation of the law, moreover, was held up until the conclusion of the war with Turkey in 1740, and then when too many nobles tried to take advantage of its provisions, the government gave the law a very narrow interpretation that restricted the number of retirements. The law of 1736 and two supplements issued the following year also prescribed a rigorous program for the training, educating, and examining of young noblemen that was designed to make them more useful when they were on active duty.36 Thus, although Anna's government was not unaware of the nobles' desire for a shorter and easier service requirement, that consideration was sec35 36

Raeff, Origins, pp. 66-70. PSZ nos. 7142, 7171, 7182.

The Nobility from 1700-1762

ondary to its aim of using the service of the nobility more efficiently and productively for the benefit of state and nation. When seen from the viewpoint of the state, the mod­ ifications in the service requirement that were intro­ duced under Catherine I, Peter II, and Anna can be justified as sensible administrative measures, as efforts consistent with those of Peter the Great to regulate the supply of officers and officials and bring it into greater equilibrium with the demand. When the examination is focused on the state's actions rather than its legisla­ tion, the functional relationship between the state's need for servitors and the demands that it made on the nobility is even more apparent. In peacetime the state was often lax about enforcing its requirements, allow­ ing noblemen to evade service, to retire prematurely, or to abuse the taking of extended leaves of absence; in time of war, however, it was much more demanding, sometimes to the point of ignoring the legal limits on compulsory service and returning to the policies of Peter the Great. The latter situation prevailed from 1758 to 1762 and again from 1798 to 1801. Less apparent, however, is the connection between the interests of the state and the abolition of compulsory service decreed by Peter III in February 1762. Solov'ev, in fact, claimed that Peter III had sacrificed the inter­ ests of the state irresponsibly in order to win popularity among the nobles,37 and, with one exception, historians who have gone beyond Solov'ev's treatment of the Mani­ festo have explained the motives behind its enactment in political terms without considering the question of its effect on the state service. Pointing to the similarities 37

XIIi

S. M. Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, (M., 1965), 12-13.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

between Peter Ill's Manifesto on the Liberty of the Nobility and the article on the status of the nobility that the Legislative Commission under the chairman­ ship of Roman Vorontsov was then preparing, Vernadsky saw the Manifesto as the work of the Vorontsov faction, whose goal was the elevation and aggran­ dizement of the dvorianstvo.38 Reversing Vernadsky's interpretation of the relationship between the two doc­ uments, the Soviet historian N. L. Rubinshtein has shown that the Manifesto itself was the work of D. V. Volkov and A. I. Glebov, allies of the Shuvalovs and opponents of the Vorontsovs. Rubinshtein, therefore, presented the Manifesto as a counterproposal offered as a substitute for the economic privileges that Vorontsov's proposal would have conferred upon the nobil­ ity.39 The nearest Rubinshtein came to relating the Manifesto to the interests of the state, however, was his implication that the government of Peter III under the leadership of Volkov, the tsar's private secretary, and Glebov, the procurator-general of the Senate, be­ lieved the abolition of compulsory service to be less harmful to those interests than the program advanced by the Vorontsovs. Unlike the historians who have written about it, the 38 G. V. Vernadsky, "Manifest Petra III ο vol'nosti dvorianskoi i zakonodatel'naia komissiia 1754-1766gg.," Istoricheskoe Obozrenie, xx (1915), 51-59. Vernadsky's contention that Roman Vorontsov had originated the idea of the Manifesto is supported by the testimony of Μ. M. Shcherbatov, O povrezhdenii nravov ν Rossii (London, 1858), p. 77, and of Cath­ erine II, Memoirs of Catherine the Great (N.Y., 1935), p. 337. However, Peter Ill's tutor, Staehlin, insisted that it had originated with the tsar himself. Romanovich-Slavatinsky, p. 156. 39 Rubinshtein, IZ, xxxvm: 239.

The Nobility from 1700-1762

Manifesto of Peter III focused its attention on the ef­ fect that the abolition of compulsory service for the nobles would have on the service itself. The prologue stated that the tsar expected no shortage of servitors to develop as a result of the freedom conferred on the nobles by the Manifesto. That expectation was based, it explained, on his estimation of the nobles' own sense of social responsibility. External compulsion, it said, had been necessary in the time of Peter the Great be­ cause the nobles of that time had been too ignorant and too shortsighted to understand that the common good depended on their contribution to the national effort; since then, however, the education and enlightenment promoted by Peter and his successors had made the nobles aware of their responsibility, had made them want to serve. As the nobility had matured under the tutelage of the state, the compulsion to serve had been "internalized" to such an extent that external compul­ sion was no longer necessary, or as the Manifesto put it: Manners have improved, knowledge has replaced il­ literacy; devotion and zeal for military affairs has re­ sulted in the appearance of many experienced and brave generals; civil and political concerns have at­ tracted many intelligent people; noble thoughts have penetrated the hearts of all true Russian patriots who have revealed toward Us their unlimited love, devo­ tion, zeal, and fervor. Because of all these reasons, We judge it to be no longer necessary to compel the nobles into service as has been the practice hitherto.40 io PSZ no. 11444. For convenient reference, all quotations are from the translation of Basil Dmytryshyn (ed.), Imperial Russia: A Source Book, 1700-1917 (N.Y. et al., 1967), pp. 57-60.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

To supplement the individual's sense of duty, the Manifesto recognized social pressure, the desire for es­ teem and the fear of disgrace, as a substitute for physi­ cal compulsion. Although he was no longer required to enlist in the service under threat of force, a nobleman who did not enlist was liable to public censure and os­ tracism. The concluding words of the Manifesto are these: We hope that in return for this act Russian nobles, realizing what great concern we have shown toward them and toward their descendants, will continue to serve Us loyally and zealously and will not withdraw from Our service; on the contrary, that they will seek the service eagerly and will continue it as long as possible, and will educate their children attentively in useful knowledge; those who will not perform any service will also lead purposeless lives and will not educate their children in any useful subject. Such people, who are not concerned with the general good, We recommend that all Our faithful subjects despise and avoid. We will not allow such people any access to Our court, nor will We tolerate their presence at public assemblies and festivals.41 The Manifesto also took care to guard the vital inter­ ests of the state against the abuse of liberty on the part of the nobility. Although the Manifesto proclaimed in the name of Peter III that "we grant freedom and lib­ erty to the entire Russian nobility . . . , from this moment and forever, to all future generations," it then proceeded to list a number of conditions that limited the exercise of that freedom and contradicted such phrases as "the entire Russian nobility" and "from this 41 Ibid.,

article 9.

The Nobility from 1700-1762

moment." An immediate mass exodus from the service was precluded by a stipulation that "those serving in the army should not ask for release or furlough during a campaign or three months before a campaign; they should wait for release until the end of the war; those serving in the army may request release or retirement permits from their superiors and must wait for these permits; those serving Us in various capacities in the first eight ranks must apply for their release directly to Us; other ranks will be released by the departments for which they work."42 In other words, no one pres­ ently in the service could retire until the state agreed that it could dispense with his services. Another limitation on the freedom of nobles to leave the service was the Manifesto's proviso that noblemen presently serving as privates and noncommissioned offi­ cers in the army could not retire until they had won commissions or had put in twelve years of service in the ranks. The requirement of Peter I that retired nobles in the provinces of St. Petersburg and Moscow assist the Senate and the Heraldry Office was retained by the Manifesto, but it was changed from an individ­ ual obligation to a collective one: henceforth the nobles of those provinces should choose among themselves the requisite number of men for those duties. Noblemen discharged from the service were granted permission to travel abroad and to enter the service of foreign governments, but they were required to return home at the command of the Russian government or else suf­ fer the confiscation of their estates.43 Like Anna's law of 1736, the Manifesto combined a reduction in the total amount of service demanded of the nobility with a program for improving the quality 42 Ibid.,

1.

43 Ibid.,

8, 6, and 4.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

of noble service through better training and education. Despite the abolition of compulsory service, parents were ordered to present their sons to the Heraldry Office when they reached the age of twelve, together with a report on their previous education and stated plans for continuing that education. A nobleman who allowed his son or sons to grow up without an education was threatened with the unspecified "wrath" of the tsar. The Manifesto also provided that noblemen who owned fewer than one thousand serfs (about 99 percent of the total) could send their sons to study at the Cadet Corps in St. Petersburg. Even though a reform of the Cadet Corps was soon begun, the enrollment of more than a tiny fraction of those made eligible by the Mani­ festo was obviously impossible in the foreseeable fu­ ture, and therefore, that provision must be considered either as wishful thinking or as an out-and-out lie on the part of the government. "Following his education," the Manifesto continued, "each nobleman will assume his rank in accordance with his dignity and reward, and subsequently may enter and continue his service as indi­ cated above."44 In relating the Manifesto on the Liberty of the Nobil­ ity to the motives and goals of the government, its contents should be measured against its omissions. The Manifesto confined its attention to service and servicerelated activities like education and foreign travel. Had it been intended as a bribe to win the support of the nobility or as an alternative to the economic privileges sought by the Vorontsovs, as Rubinshtein contends, the Manifesto would logically have focused its attention on the nobility, as the Charter of Catherine II subsequently did, without limiting itself to the subject of service. It «Ibid., 7.

The Nobility from 1700-1762

could have contained a catalogue of other new privi­ leges desired by the nobles, such as security from con­ fiscation and immunity from corporal punishment, that would have delighted and gratified the nobles as much as, or more than, the abolition of compulsory service. The Manifesto could have, and logically would have, taken that kind of approach if the pleasure of the nobles had been its primary consideration. The subject of that act, however, was not the nobility, but the relationship of the nobility to the service. The Manifesto was certainly not an isolated whim of the government unrelated to other concerns of Peter III and his associates, but in trying to relate it to other concerns, historians as diverse as Solov'ev, Vernadsky, and Rubinshtein have chosen the wrong ones in point­ ing to the tsar's desire for popularity, class conflict over economic issues, court politics, and the struggle of fac­ tions and personalities. The concern of the Manifesto, as its content reveals, was an issue of administration and governmental responsibility that transcended those considerations; it was a concern for the future of the state service subsequent to Russia's withdrawal from the Seven Years' War. Russia did not withdraw for­ mally from that war for another month after the pro­ mulgation of the Manifesto, but the tsar's intention to take Russia out of the coalition against Prussia had already been declared. Moreover, since it expressly pro­ hibited resignations in time of war, the Manifesto be­ came effective, so far as noblemen presently in the service were concerned, on the day after the formal cessation of hostilities. The coming peace foretold a sharp decline in the demand for service which would mean an excess of noble servitors in the employ of the state unless some action were taken to eliminate it. The

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

acute financial difficulties created by the Seven Years' War demanded the removal of excess noblemen from the payrolls for simple economic reasons. Arising out of that situation, the Manifesto tried to deal with the problem of demobilization and effect a smooth transi­ tion from a wartime to a peacetime service. It proposed to reduce the surplus of nobles in the service by allow­ ing those who really wanted to leave the service to do so, provided they could obtain the approval of their su­ periors. By choosing that method of demobilization, the state could kill two birds with one stone: it would give the nobles a welcome chance to decide their own fu­ tures for a change, and, more importantly, it would leave the state with an officer corps and a bureaucracy staffed exclusively by volunteers. The elimination of conscripted noblemen dissatisfied with the service of­ fered the state an opportunity to improve the morale, discipline, and professionalism of the service itself. In such a context, RaefFs argument that the Mani­ festo was aimed at reorganizing the state service along bureaucratic lines and replacing the service gentry with a professional meritocracy is persuasive. In that connec­ tion, the word "emancipation" to describe the effect of the Manifesto would acquire a double significance, for at the same time that the state was emancipating the nobles from compulsory service, it was, as Raeff points out, "emancipating itself from dependence on the nobil­ ity as a class."45 That contention gains support from the Manifesto itself, which exuded confidence that the state would have all the servitors it needed and implied that henceforth nobles would have to compete for posts in the state service. It said, for example, that 45 Marc

Raeff, "The Domestic Policies of Peter III and His Overthrow," AHR, LXXV, no. 5 (June 1970), 1291-94.

The Nobility from 1700-1762

military men who left the army might enlist in the civil service, "provided there is a vacancy for them." They might also re-enlist in the army at a later date, "provided they prove worthy to those ranks to which they belong." Similarly, Russian nobles who had served foreign governments in various capacities might then enlist in the Russian service "provided there is a va­ cancy" and if they had proved their capabilities, they would be accepted "as vacancies develop."46 The same tone of patronizing confidence is apparent in the Mani­ festo's statement that "all nobles who are presently in Our service may continue as long as they wish or as long as their health may permit them."47 The implica­ tion of those statements is that the situation that had prevailed in the days of Peter the Great had been re­ versed and that the state now expected to have more noblemen in its service or seeking employment than it needed. As a result, the state would no longer have to welcome every available nobleman into its service; it could afford to pick and choose. In effect, the Manifesto was another step, albeit a smaller one than the Table of Ranks, toward the development of a state service based on individual merit rather than hereditary pre­ rogative. Reform of the state service along the lines envi­ sioned by the Manifesto was begun in small but indica­ tive ways during the brief reign of Peter III. He made no secret of his contempt for the Russian army and proposed to improve it by importing German soldiers and by tightening discipline and professionalism, as he understood them. He insisted on higher standards of performance in parade and on maneuvers and on con46 Manifesto, 47

articles 2, 3, and 5. Ibid., prologue.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

stant practice as a means of meeting those standards. What is more, he imposed his demands on the officers as well as the troops and forced those who thought themselves above such activities and who had conse­ quently neglected them to take part in his drills and to perfect their performance. He was even planning to remove the guards from what he considered the soft life of St. Petersburg and send them into the field. In the civil service, Peter adopted the recommendation of the Senate that meritorious clerks be rewarded with promotions even though it might entail the ennoble­ ment of a commoner, and his government began ac­ tively to recruit officials from among the graduates of the University of Moscow and other educational insti­ tutions, irrespective of their class origins.48 A reform of the Cadet Corps was begun, and additional schools for the training of officers and officials were established.49 Professionalization of the state service was an intelli­ gent and praiseworthy goal, but that should not obscure the tactless, haphazard, and reckless manner in which Peter III and his government pursued it. The same dis­ tinction should be drawn between the basic idea of the Manifesto and the form in which that idea was trans­ lated into law. Although Peter III can be applauded for his intention to carry out the postwar demobilization in a way that would improve the quality of the service, the act abolishing compulsory service for the nobility must be criticized for its narrow focus and for the abrupt and irresponsible manner in which it was introduced. In attempting to solve the problem of demobilization, the Manifesto created a host of new problems that it made no attempt to solve. Could the state be so confident in 48

Raeff, AHR, LXXV: 1293. p. 1294.

49 Ibid.,

The Nobility from 1700-1762 advance that there would be no shortage of servitors in the future? When Peter announced his intention to abolish compulsory service to the Senate on 17 January 1762, he had said that all noblemen would have to pre­ sent themselves for duty in time of war, but that provi­ sion was not written into the Manifesto.50 The abolition of compulsory service also implied a change in the status of the nobility, which was predicated on the as­ sumption that the nobles would spend most of their lives in the service of the state. Under existing legisla­ tion, there was no place in Russian society for a nonserving nobleman. Was the state to create a new role for such people, or was it to allow them to go their own way once they were no longer useful? Again, Peter's statement to the Senate had mentioned redefinition of the nobles' status as part of his plan to abolish compul­ sory service, but that intention was not carried over into the Manifesto. The concluding words of the Manifesto indicated that nobles who were of no use to their coun­ try were to be despised and scorned, but the Manifesto failed to deal with the related question of privileges that were not earned by service. If some nobles were of no use to their country, what justification was there for wasting the nation's productive resources, i.e. land and serf labor, on them? The Manifesto gave no attention to any of those prob­ lems. Peter's earlier statement to the Senate indicated that he was at least aware of the problems raised by his "emancipation" of the dvorianstvo, and perhaps, given more time, he might have tried to resolve them. For Peter III, however, time came to an end some three 50 Peter's statement to the Senate, garbled and ungrammatical, is recorded in Zhurnal i protokoly Senata, TsGADA, f. 248, kn. 3426, p. 312.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

months after the promulgation of the Manifesto. In June 1762, he was overthrown by a conspiracy headed by his wife and supported by the guards regiments. A few days later he was murdered. In taking possession of the throne, Catherine II inherited the Manifesto on the Liberty of the Nobility and the responsibility for working out its consequences and solving the problems it had raised.

The "Emancipated" Nobility THE MANIFESTO AND THE NOBLES

T

o understand and appreciate Catherine's han­ dling of the problems generated by the Mani­ festo of Peter III, one must first of all consider the condition and the attitudes of the "emancipated" nobility. As one might expect, the practical and psycho­ logical effects of that act were as diverse as the nobles themselves and tended to reflect existing differences within the dvorianstvo. The higher a nobleman's per­ sonal or familial status, the less his relationship to the service and to the state was likely to be affected by the abolition of compulsory service. On the whole, the Man­ ifesto's confident depiction of the Russian nobleman as a public-spirited patriot eager to serve the state was an accurate portrayal of the higher nobility. In their fam­ ilies, service to the state was a venerable tradition, and in their circles, a man with no service rank or with a low one was ordinarily ashamed to show his face in public.1 Blessed with the advantages of wealth, educa­ tion, and connections, they looked upon service as the road to glory, power, and still greater riches, and they seldom left it of their own volition so long as they were physically able to perform their duties.2 "Some fam1 N. D. Chechulin, Russkoe provintsiaPnoe obshchestvo vo vtoroi polovine XVIII veka (SPB., 1889), p. 103; Hassell, SR, xxix: 290. 2 Raeff, Origins, p. 69. Raefifs conclusion is based upon his extensive examination of eighteenth century memoirs.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

ilies, including mine," wrote the memoirist F. F. Vigel', "believed that separation from the service involved hu­ miliation and the loss of one's self-respect."3 Paradoxically, many members of the higher nobility celebrated the promulgation of the Manifesto, even though they had no intention of exercising the rights it had conferred upon them. Glebov wanted the Senate to erect a golden statue to Peter III to commemorate the occasion.4 Prince Dashkov expressed the same idea and reportedly cried tears of joy while telling the tsa­ rina about Peter's proclamation.5 The nobles of Mos­ cow chose P. P. Sumarokov, brother of the famous poet, to deliver an address thanking the tsar on behalf of the dvorianstvo, and songs and odes were composed in praise of his beneficence.® Since the higher nobles re­ joiced in the possession of a freedom that few of them cared to exercise, it is important to distinguish between the practical and the psychological impact that the Man­ ifesto had on them. What they extolled was the ab­ stract idea of liberty that it seemed to endorse. The Manifesto's declaration that henceforth the state would respect the nobility, that it would treat them as mature and responsible men and remove them from a demean­ ing tutelage appropriate to children and other unen­ lightened folk, struck a responsive chord in the minds and hearts of educated noblemen. Not only did it grat­ ify their self-esteem, it satisfied ideals that they had developed in the course of their education in European literature and thought, ideals that permeated the intel­ lectual Zeitgeist of the second half of the eighteenth »F. F. Vigel', Zapiski, ι (M., 1891), 159. ^ TsGADA, f. 248, kn. 3427, p. 316. 5 Memoirs of Catherine the Great, p. 337. 6 Romanovich-Slavatinsky, pp. 200-201.

The iiEmancipated" Nobility

century: a love of liberty and an abhorrence of des­ potism. In the attitudes of the higher nobles, reaction­ ary and progressive sentiments were often intermingled, sometimes within the same individual. Some admired the feudal privileges of the western European nobles that were exclusive and hereditary; others sympathized with the ideas of freedom and equality advanced by the French philosophes,7 but both sentiments produced a desire to see the nobility endowed with legal rights and the government free from tyranny and despotism. The attitude of the higher nobility toward the Manifesto explains the seemingly ironic fact that some of its mem­ bers joined in the conspiracy to overthrow its author, and many others hailed his deposition. The popularity of the Manifesto was more than counterbalanced by Peter's tyrannical treatment of the guards, his demo­ tion of the Senate, and his creation of a private police force.8 Those acts were far more pertinent to the lives of the upper nobility than the gratifying but irrelevant liberty announced by the Manifesto. At the other end of the social spectrum, the petty nobility had a very different reaction to the Manifesto. For a nobleman without wealth, education, or family connections, the service was a dead-end street rather than a road to opportunity. It could be costly as well as frustrating. While in service, he had to maintain two households, one on his estate and the other wherever he might be posted. His wife and family constituted an additional financial burden if they lived with him at 7 Ν. M. Druzhinin, "Prosveshchennyi absoliutizm ν Rossii," Absoliutizm ν Rossii, XVII-XV1II vv., sbornik stafei k semidesiatiletiiu nauchnoi i pedagogicheskoi deiateVnosti Β. B. Kafengauza (M., 1964), p. 433. 8 Raeff, AHR, LXXV: 1302-9.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

his post, and an additional emotional strain if they did not. If his estate had more than just a few serfs, the nobleman in service had to hire someone else to man­ age it and take his chances of being cheated into the bargain. The direct costs of service were also consider­ able. In 1771, a group of more than two hundred young nobles who wanted to enter the army found themselves unable to do so because they could not afford to pur­ chase the boots and uniforms they would need.9 In 1800 when the wars against revolutionary France increased the demand for officers, the emperor Paul ordered the conscription of all nobles who had never been in the service. When the governor of Kursk attempted to carry out that order, he found that in one uezd or county there were ninety-one nobles who had never been in service, and when he demanded to know the reason for their unpatriotic behavior, he was informed by the local marshal of the nobility that the young men in question had not enlisted in the army because they were too poor to buy the necessary equipment.10 Small landowners who saw no future for themselves in the service had been evading service by one means or another through­ out the eighteenth century.11 We know less about them, 9

J. Blum, pp. 375-76. Report from the governor of Kursk to the procuratorgeneral of the Senate, 31 May 1800 (TsGIAL, f. 1374, d. 2219, p. 4). The noblemen in question had an average age of 23 and owned an average of 4.6 serfs apiece. 11 V. Grigor'ev, Reforma mestnago upravleniia pri Ekaterine II, uchrezhdeniia ο gubemiiakh 7 noiabria 1775 (SPB., 1910), p. 91. Between the introduction of compulsory service by Peter I and its abolition by Peter III, the Russian govern­ ment enacted some twenty decrees against noblemen who were violating that requirement. Romanovich-Slavatinsky, pp. 18790. 10

The "'Emancipated''' Nobility

however, than we know about the higher nobles for the simple reason that they were much less inclined to write revealing or introspective letters or to publish their memoirs for posterity. In 1762 it was the same type of poor nobleman without hope of advancement who, after having fought in the Seven Years' War, was eager to take advantage of Peter's law allowing him to quit the service and return to his estate. Though he made use of it, the petty nobleman found the right to retire from the service to be at best a negative means of improving his lot, one that left him as poor, as worth­ less, and as frustrated, though in a different context, as before.12 With respect to the nobles and the service, therefore, the Manifesto produced approximately the effect that the government presumably had wanted: it induced many of those who were least able and least ambitious and who were no longer needed to quit the service and retire to their estates. There were exceptions, of course. Many of the very poorest nobles may have decided to remain in the service for want of a decent home to re­ tire to. Also, some very competent members of the "middling" nobility may have resigned because, like Bolotov, they were tired and wanted to rest. They were likely to instill the idea of service into their sons, how­ ever. Bolotov himself eventually enlisted in the provin12

Romanovich-Slavatinsky, p. 202, quotes the following passage from the letter of a petty nobleman to his son: "They say that the nobility has been given its freedom, but who the devil (God forgive me) knows what kind of freedom? They have given us freedom, but no one is allowed to do just as he pleases; you can't steal land from your neighbor. . . . There aren't a hundred people who aren't saying that the old way was better than this new one. All the new freedom means is freedom to quit the service or go abroad."

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

cial civil service, where his education and connections enabled him to secure a good position. The most con­ spicuous and significant result of the Manifesto, there­ fore, was the exodus of petty noblemen from the serv­ ice to the provinces. The migration of noblemen to the provinces is a mat­ ter of some controversy among historians. Korf and Romanovich-Slavatinsky were the leading proponents of what might be called the "cataclysmic theory," which maintained that the Manifesto of Peter III was respon­ sible for the sudden and rapid development of a provin­ cial nobility, a class of small landowners who lived on their estates year round and whose lives were centered around the management of their estates rather than the duties of state service.13 In opposition to that interpreta­ tion other historians have advanced what might be called the "gradualist theory," which de-emphasized the Manifesto of Peter III and asserted that noblemen had been settling in the provinces gradually and contin­ uously since 1725. Thus Grigor'ev, in attacking Korfs view, argued that evasion of service, earlier retirement, and lax enforcement of the service requirement had led to the development of a provincial nobility long before 1762.14 While one must concede Grigor'ev's point that certainly not all nobles were in service at all times and that logically, therefore, some noblemen must have been living on their estates prior to 1762, he offers no evidence to show that the number of nobles living in the provinces before 1762 was sufficient to justify his at­ tack on Korf. Another argument against the view of 13

Korf, pp. 13-14; Romanovich-Slavatinsky, p. 198. See Grigor'ev's review of Korfs book in Zhurnal ministerstva iustitsii (January 1907), pp. 345-50; also Reforma, p. 91. 14

The u Emancipated" Nobility

Korf and Romanovich-Slavatinsky was advanced by Got'e, who pointed out that between 1725 and 1762 several proposals for the reform of local administration had called for the transfer of governmental responsibili­ ties to the local nobles.15 One cannot infer the presence of a provincial nobility from those proposals, however, because one cannot assume that those proposals were sound. We know for a fact that Peter the Great had tried as late as 1724 to delegate administrative respon­ sibilities to the local nobles and that his efforts had failed precisely because there were so few nobles living in the provinces. Perhaps that was also the reason why the proposals that Got'e cites were all rejected. Whereas the interpretations of Grigor'ev and Got'e rely heavily upon deduction and inference, the view that there were few noblemen living in the provinces prior to 1762 can be supported by an important piece of empirical evidence contained in the memoirs of A. T. Bolotov. In 1760 Bolotov made a rare journey into the provinces to visit the home of his sister in the vicinity of Tver'. Recalling that visit in 1789, he wrote: "At that time things were different than they are now; the great number of noblemen living on their estates that one sees everywhere at present was not to be found any­ where then: all the nobles were in military service, and the only ones living in the countryside were old men who were no longer able to serve and others, who for some reason, whether illness or injury, had retired, and such cases, all told, were few."16 The presence of a few noblemen in the provinces earlier than 1762 in no way undermines the contention 15 Got'e, Istoriia oblastnogo upravleniia, I i (M. and L., 1941), 155-56. Dukes, p. 44, endorses Got'e's interpretation. 16 Bolotov, i: 147; Chechulin, Obshchestvo, p. 27.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility that the Manifesto of Peter III produced a rapid and decisive increase in the number of nobles living on their estates and that, consequently, the emergence of a pro­ vincial nobility as a significant element of Russian soci­ ety can be dated from 1762. Moreover, since the ter­ mination of the Seven Years' War and the activation of the Manifesto's retirement clause were simultaneous and interrelated events, Dukes' objection that it was the end of the war rather than the Manifesto that caused the movement to the provinces is irrelevant.17 The point is that upon coming to power Catherine II was con­ fronted with a situation unprecedented in eighteenth century Russia, the emergence of a provincial nobility, privileged yet separated from the state service, whose way of life was in conflict with the laws and institutions established by Peter the Great. For Catherine and her government, that was the major problem arising out of the Manifesto, and thus the condition and attitudes of the provincial nobles ought to be examined closely be­ fore the government's attempts to solve that problem are considered. THE NAKAZY OF 1767

While inferences about the nobles who resigned from the service after 1762 must be drawn from evidence that is both indirect and fragmentary, conclusions about the nobles who were living in the provinces five years after the enactment of the Manifesto can be based on a sub­ stantial body of factual information, for in 1767 the provincial nobles of the Russian Empire described themselves, their circumstances, and their ambitions in the more than one hundred nakazy or instructions that 17 Dukes,

p. 44.

The "Emancipated" Nobility they submitted to the Legislative Commission convened by Catherine II. The nobles' nakazy were written in response to Catherine's decree of 14 December 1766, which ordered the nobles to prepare for the Legislative Commission by meeting together in the chief town of their uezd or county. Participation in the meeting was open to all who owned an estate in that uezd. Women could attend and take part if they were the heads of their households. The guardians of minors could act in the names of their wards. Those who could not attend in person because of illness, service obligations, or some other reason, could submit a written declaration of his preferences in the elections to be held and have it counted as an official vote. At the meeting, the nobles were to elect a marshal (predvoditef) to preside over the assembly, a delegate who would go to Moscow to participate in the work of the Legislative Commission, and five men who were to compose the nakaz or instruc­ tion that was to accompany the delegate. The instruc­ tion was to inform the commission of the general needs of the nobles and make suggestions about the content of the new law code that the commission was to draft. When the committee of five had finished their work, the instruction was to be submitted to the assembled nobles for their approval, after which it was to be signed by all who had attended the meeting.18 Edited and published a hundred years or so later by the Impe­ rial Russian Historical Society, the nobles' nakazy of 1767 are a mine of information about the provincial nobility of Russia between the "emancipation" of 1767 and the Charter to the Nobility promulgated in 1785.19 Because the decree of 14 December 1766 required 18 19

PSZ no. 12801. SIRIO, iv, VIII, xiv, LXVIII, XCIII.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

that an uezd contain a minimum of fifteen noble land­ owners for an election meeting to be held, some areas sent no instruction to the Legislative Commission. That was especially true of the frontier regions like Siberia, Viatka, or Astrakhan. Even in the more central regions, however, attendance at the meetings was so small in some cases, as in that of the Zvenigorod uezd of Mos­ cow where only two noblemen appeared, that the elec­ tions were cancelled. In some other instances of inade­ quate attendance, the nobles of more than one uezd met together to draft an instruction and elect a delegate. Thus the three uezdy of Serpukov, Tarusa, and Obolensk in the province of Moscow elected one delegate and wrote one nakaz. In the oversized uezd of Nov­ gorod, on the other hand, five meetings were held in different districts and produced five delegates and five instructions. The total number of nakazy written by the nobles in 1767 amounted to 158. By compiling the information contained in the nobles' nakazy it is possible to arrive at a composite characteri­ zation of the Russian provincial nobility in the year 1767. Not all of the 158 instructions are suitable for that purpose, however, since some of them reflect pecu­ liar circumstances that were not typical of the Russian provincial nobility. In some regions, the nobles claimed a special relationship to the imperial government and insisted that any new code of laws written for the Rus­ sian nobility would not apply to them. Thus the Ger­ man nobles of the Baltic provinces, the Swedish lords of the Vyborg region, and the Polish-Ukrainian gentry of Malorossiia submitted instructions demanding con­ firmation of their historic, particular rights and privi­ leges given them by the kings of Sweden and Poland and said little or nothing that might be related to the

The "Emancipated" Nobility

common problems described by nobles from other prov­ inces.20 The instruction written by the "gentry of Smo­ lensk residing in the province of Ufa" was similarly particularistic.21 Although they did not claim traditional rights of that nature, the nobles of Novorossiia also composed their instructions within a frame of reference peculiar to themselves.22 On the other hand, the instruc­ tions from Smolensk and from the region of the Ukraine known as Slabodskaia Ukraina were not lim­ ited by parochial considerations and touched on prob­ lems common to the great majority of Russian noble­ men.23 When the instructions that are mainly or exclusively particularistic are discounted, the 134 nakazy that re­ main are seen to reflect a generally common set of cir­ cumstances and problems. In several cases they bor­ rowed ideas and words from each other, copying whole articles and in four cases, the entire document. But even when there was no direct borrowing and little or no contact between the nobles of different uezdy, their in­ structions are frequently similar in content because the concerns about which they wrote were so widespread. Those concerns are visible in a comparison of the in­ struction from the Vodskaia Piatina of Novgorod near the Polish border with that from the uezd of Temnikov in the province (guberniia) of Voronezh on the eastern frontier. The two were more than seven hundred miles apart, a fact which is evident in the concern of the for­ mer with the flight of serfs to Poland and that of the latter with purchasing land from the Tatars, yet many 20

SIRIO, Lxvni: 45-94, 127-238. SIRIO, XCIII : 12-13. 22 SIRIO, xciii: 13-44. ii SIRIO, xiv: 413-57 and LXVIII : 251-324. 21

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

of their concerns were identical, e.g. government restric­ tions on the production and sale of alcohol, the ineffi­ ciencies of the courts, and the breakdown of law and order.24 It is true that the decree of 14 December 1766 had ordered the nobles to address their instructions to general rather than particular matters, but it is still surprising to see how general and how widespread the problems of the provincial nobles were. The decree of 14 December 1766 had opened the meetings at which the nakazy were drafted to all nobles who owned an estate in a particular uezd, not just to those who were in residence there. In practice, however, noblemen who actually lived on their estates played a greater role in the election meetings and especially in the writing of the nakazy than did those who were on active duty.25 Incomplete figures show that at best only 25 percent of the eligible nobles actually attended the meetings and that participation by only 5 or 10 percent was common.26 In their efforts to secure a large attend­ ance, state officials tried to make certain that all who 24

SIRIO, xiv: 253-59 and LXVIII : 450-56. V. I. Veretennikov, "K istorii sostavleniia dvorianskikh nakazov ν ekaterininskuiu komissiiu 1767 g.," Zapisok Kharkovskago Universiteta (1911), p. 14. However, A. Florovsky is correct in pointing out that the signers of the nakazy cannot be totally identified with those nobles who had been resigning from the service since 1762. Florovsky's own contention, Sostav zakonodatePnoi komissii 1767 g. (Odessa, 1915), pp. 278-79, that fewer than half of the signers were retired is invalidated by the fact, which he himself has noted (pp. 27273) that retirement was cited inconsistently in the signature lists. 26 See the incomplete tabulations of Florovsky, pp. 263-66, and M. A. Lipinsky, "Novyia dannyia dlia istorii ekaterininskoi komissii Ο sochinenii proekta novogo ulozheniia," ZMNP , CCLI (June 1887), 249-50. 25

The "Emancipated" Nobility were available, chiefly those living in the area, were present at the meetings. Even so, the number of noble­ men present was often smaller than the number of noblemen living in the uezd at the time.27 It was rela­ tively convenient for those living on their estates to attend, but those on active duty had first to obtain leave and then travel hundreds of miles, in most cases over bad roads (and the elections were held in the Spring when many roads were impassable), to reach a provin­ cial center that seldom was worthy of being called a town. Consequently, although there were conspicuous exceptions, few noblemen on active duty took the trou­ ble to attend the meetings. Many voted in absentia, many others simply ignored the whole business.28 Only in the immediate vicinity of Moscow and St. Petersburg did large numbers of nobles on active duty attend the meetings, and in the case of Moscow they appear to have been far more interested in the voting than in the writing of an instruction: 134 noblemen participated in the election of a deputy to the commission, but only 47 of them bothered to sign the nakaz. 29 On the other hand, the number of provincial nobles elected to serve as deputies to the commission was smaller than their preponderance in the election meet­ ings implied. Of the 165 deputies, including replace27

In Volokolamsk 15 noblemen lived on their estates, but only 6 attended the elections. In Mozhaisk 30 noblemen lived on their estates, but only 12 attended the elections. Lipinsky, loc. cit. 28 In Zvenigorod there were 80 estate owners, but none of them attended the elections and only 51 voted in absentia. Of 63 estate owners in Gorokhovetsk, of whom 7 were in permanent residence, 6 attended the elections and 4 submitted postal bal­ lots. Lipinsky, loc. cit. 29 SIRIO, iv: 234-36.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

ments, elected by the nobles, 37 were high government officials and 75 held military ranks equivalent to or higher than that of major, whereas only 19 were men who had clearly retired from the service.30 The list of nobles' delegates included the names of fifteen senators, eleven generals, members of the administrative colleges, heads of government commissions, and provincial ad­ ministrators. Among the notables were General P. I. Panin, General Villebois, General Bruce, General Bibikov, General Rennenkampf, Admiral Golitsyn and such high ranking statesmen as A. P. Mel'gunov, Roman Vorontsov, Z. G. Chernyshev, D. V. Volkov, and Greg­ ory Orlov. Thus, even though some of the provincial nobles complained in their instructions that the wealthy and powerful nobles controlled the state and sometimes took unfair advantage of them, many constituencies chose rich and important noblemen to serve as their delegates to the Legislative Commission. The election of so many notables indicates that the discontent of the provincial nobles was not so great as to outweigh the deference that they felt for their bet­ ters.31 Apparently satisfied with the opportunity to in­ form the empress of their needs, they showed little interest in pressing their demands at the commission it30

Florovsky, pp. 306-9. See also V. Sergeevich, "Otkuda neudachi ekaterininskoi zakonodatel'noi komissii," VE, 1878, no. 1, p. 207. For the complete list of nobles' delegates to the Legislative Commission see M. Longinov, "Materialy dlia istorii komissii ο sochinenii proekta novago ulozheniia, spisok gospodam deputatam," RV, vol. xxxvi (December 1861), appendix, or Μ. T. Beliavsky, Kresfianskii vopros ν Rossii nakanune vosstaniia E. I. Pugacheva (M., 1965), pp. 356-59. 31 Florovsky, pp. 279-80. Lipinsky, ZMNP, CCLI : 287, con­ cluded that governmental interference in the elections was minimal.

The "Emancipated" Nobility

self. Bolotov, who believed that the commission would involve much stress and turmoil without yielding any good result, declined election as a deputy.32 Another nobleman reportedly declined on the grounds that the Manifesto of Peter III had freed the nobles from com­ pulsory service.33 In Gorokhovetsk, when none of the five noblemen in attendance would agree to serve, they elected one of those who had voted in absentia.34 A glaring exception that proves the general rule occurred in Zaraisk, where a petty nobleman by the name of Kondarev (also spelled Kondyrev) campaigned ac­ tively for his own election as a delegate, claiming that he needed the 400 rubles a year salary in order to sup­ port himself and his family. By playing on the resent­ ments and grievances of the lesser nobles and by appeal­ ing openly JFor the votes of illiterates and those who had never been in the service, Kondarev succeeded in de­ feating Senator A. P. Mel'gunov, who had been ex­ pected to win easily. Kondarev's actions so scandalized some of his fellow noblemen that they actually tried to have his election overturned.35 Echoes of the same atti­ tude can be detected in the proud declaration of P. I. Rychkov, a well-known author and man of letters, that although he lost the election in Orenburg by two votes, two major-generals and seven colonels had voted for him.36 Heavily influenced by their own sense of propri­ ety, the provincial nobles apparently felt that a typical provincial who was poor in manners and education as well as wealth would be out of place at a gathering like the Legislative Commission. Unfamiliar with rep32

Bolotov, ii: 654. Chechulin, Obshchestvo, p. 66. 34Lipinsky, ZMNP, CCLI : 246. 35 Ibid., pp. 280-83. 36 Dukes, p. 71. 33

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

resentative institutions and electoral politics, the provin­ cial nobles were more interested in electing men who were "worthy" of the office than in electing delegates who would faithfully represent their own views and concerns. Since education and rank were the most visi­ ble indications of worthiness, that meant that almost all of the delegates were members of the middle or upper nobility. Class differences between the delegates and their con­ stituents should neither be exaggerated nor overlooked. On the one hand, it is true that most of the nobles' dele­ gates were "middling" nobles who were much more fa­ miliar with provincial conditions than were the members of the governing elite and it is also true that on many issues the different groupings of nobles were in agree­ ment.37 It is also true, however, that the speeches of the delegates did not always mirror the concerns of their constituents. To cite examples, both the inadequacies of local administration and the restrictions on the produc­ tion and sale of alcohol that appear so prominently in the nakazy were all but ignored at the commission. Whether that reflects a different outlook or simply the different conditions under which each was composed cannot be determined: the delegates' speeches were in­ fluenced by the government's agenda and by the course of the debate whereas the authors of the nakazy were not limited in any similar way, but whatever the reason, the nobles' nakazy reveal the attitudes and concerns of the provincial nobles more accurately than do the speeches of their delegates. The value of the nakazy is somewhat diminished by 37 la. Abramov, "Soslovnye nuzhdy, zhelaniia i stremleniia ν epochu ekaterininskoi komissii 1767-1769," Severnyi Vestnik (April 1886), p. 150.

The "Emancipated" Nobility their lack of uniformity. The state required only that they speak of general as opposed to individual concerns and that they be signed by those present at the meeting. The nobles, with some help from state officials, followed those guidelines in different ways. In some cases those who signed the instruction gave their service rank; in others they did not. Retirement was sometimes noted and sometimes ignored with a total disregard of con­ sistency: a retired nobleman might preface his service rank with the word "retired" (otstavnoi) on the nakaz but omit it in signing the voters list while another pres­ ent at the same meeting might do the opposite and note it on the voters list but not on the nakaz. When one nobleman signed for another, the reason was sometimes given and sometimes not. Some instructions gave the number or even the names of those who had voted in absentia, but most did not. Similarly, the concerns of the nobles were discussed in no particular order or num­ ber. Some instructions were very thorough in listing and explaining twenty or more problems whereas some mentioned only four or five. The instruction from Mu­ rom said that except for the operation of the courts, which ought to be improved, everything was as it should be and was quite satisfactory to the local nobles,38 but it is difficult to believe that the problems that so vexed the nobles in the uezdy that surrounded Murom stopped at the borders of that uezd. Obviously, the instructions were whatever the nobles chose to make of them, and the only information they provide is that which the nobles themselves saw fit to volunteer. Their data, therefore, cannot be treated as though they were the results of a census questionnaire or an opinion poll that could be converted into a statistical profile of the pross SIRIO, ν II:

510.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility vincial nobility. One can only say that at least so many of the signers were retired or illiterate or had not at­ tained their majority and that at least so many of the instructions treated local administration, the alcohol laws, or the quartering of troops as major concerns of the nobles. Just because a particular nakaz made no mention of the courts or of the condition of the roads, one cannot conclude that in that uezd the nobles were satisfied with both. That may have been the case, or the nobles might not have considered the instruction an appropriate place to mention that particular problem, or the problem may have been of such low priority in comparison to other problems that they simply over­ looked it. In most cases we simply cannot know what the nakazy do not tell us. What they do tell us may be incomplete and disorganized, but it is, nevertheless, a detailed and first-hand description of rural Russia and of the provincial nobility in the year 1767. THE PROVINCIAL NOBLES

From the signature lists appended to the instructions it is possible to learn something about the service rec­ ords of the provincial nobles. An overwhelming major­ ity of the signers prefaced their names with a service rank, indicating that they were currently in the service or had retired. After examining some 4,500 signatures on 122 nakazy from the central regions, Florovsky cal­ culated that only 7 percent gave no service rank, and their is no way of telling how many of those belonged to minors. Civil ranks were associated with only 8 per­ cent of the signatures, and military ranks with another 80 percent; the rest could not be identified. A majority

The "Emancipated" Nobility of the military men held ranks from the fourteenth through the eighth, that is from lieutenant through sec­ ond major. A smaller but still sizable group consisted of privates and noncommissioned officers.39 The ranks of the signers would certainly have been lower still but for two provisions of Peter Ill's Manifesto—one for­ bidding noblemen below the rank of lieutenant to re­ tire until they had served a minimum of twelve years, and another granting a nobleman who had served at least one year in a commissioned rank an automatic promotion of one rank at the time of his retirement.40 The proportion of retired noblemen to those on active duty cannot be ascertained from the signature lists be­ cause of the inconsistencies in recording retirement that have already been discussed. In some cases, however, the number of recorded retirements was quite high. In Liubim, 25 of the 38 signers prefaced their service ranks with the designation "retired"; in Beloozero 40 of the 50 signers did likewise; and in Smolensk 25 of 46.41 Those were the highest instances; in other cases explicit mention of retirement was less frequent or was omitted altogether. The fragmentary evidence about retirement presented by the signature lists can be sup­ plemented with that taken from the texts of the instruc­ tions. Seven nakazy specifically mentioned the problems associated with retirement as one of their chief con39Florovsky,

pp. 274-76. A caveat: nobles with civil ranks often used the corresponding military title because it carried more prestige, and therefore Florovsky's computation, which is based on the signature lists, may well be inaccurate. The state disapproved of the substitution of one title for another and tried repeatedly to stop it. Hassell, SR, xxix: 290. 40 PSZ no. 11444, articles 8 and 2. 41 Florovsky, p. 227.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

cerns.42 Even more indicative, although less precise, is the outlook that is implicit throughout all of the in­ structions. All were concerned with the problems that the nobles faced as provincial landowners, but very few had anything to say about the problems faced by noble­ men in the state service, and those who did wrote about problems that noblemen encountered in entering the service or leaving it, rather than those derived from the service itself. Thus some of the instructions requested permission for young nobles to enter the army as offi­ cers without having to serve in the ranks, and some re­ quested pensions for those who had retired, but none requested higher pay or faster promotions or the right to choose one's assignment. With respect to the service, the chief concern of the men who wrote and signed the instructions was to secure greater opportunities for their sons to achieve success than they themselves had had. In particular, many of them wanted their sons to have the kind of education that would enable them to rise more rapidly through the Table of Ranks. That many of the signers had not received decent educations is apparent from the high incidence of total illiteracy among them. On twenty-five nakazy it was specifically noted that a nobleman had to have another sign the document for him because he was illiterate, the terminology being "potomu chto on gramote i pisat' ne umeet" or "za neimeniem ego gramote" or some vari­ ation thereof.43 That the illiterates in question were not 42 SIRIO,

xiv: 265 (Opochka); xiv: 375-76 (Pskov);

LXVIII : 269-70 (Kharkov); LXVIII : 282 (Sumy); LXVIII: 367 (Usman'); LXVIII: 446 (Kerensk); LXVIII: 491 (Novo-

sil')· 43 Illiterates were clearly identified in the signature lists of the following nakazy. Kostroma, Sudislav, Medyn and Kaluga,

The "Emancipated" Nobility little children is clear from the fact that a service rank preceded most of their names and the word "retired" preceded some of them. Moreover, minors whose sig­ natures were recorded by proxy on the same instruction with those of illiterates were commonly identified as minors. Explicit mention of illiteracy in the signature lists of twenty-five nakazy does not mean that illiteracy did not exist in those uezdy where it was not mentioned. In the texts of the instructions from Vologda, Viazemskii, and the Vodskaia Piatina of Novgorod, special as­ sistance was sought for the large number of illiterate nobles who lived there, but in the signature lists proxies were recorded without explanation.44 More than 500 un­ explained proxies were recorded on sixty-one instruc­ tions on which the total number of signatures was just over 2,300. Since minors, those who were ill, and those who were blind also had their names recorded by proxy, we must assume that some of the unexplained proxies were on behalf of noblemen in one of those categories. We may also assume, however, that a large percentage of them were on behalf of noblemen who were illiterate. Taking only those twenty-five instructions on which the proxies of illiterates were clearly identified, we find that a total of 160 out of 951 signers, or one in six, was illiterate. The highest incidence of illiteracy in any one uezd was recorded in Ufa, where thirty-seven out of sixty-nine noblemen had been unable to write their own names.45 High as they are, such figures do not include Liubim, Iur'ev, Maloiaroslavets, Zaraisk, Serpukhov-TarusaObolensk, Vereia, Suzdal', Mozhaisk, Vladimir, Beloozero, Dorogobuzh, Parfen'evo, Galich, Arzamas, Akhtyr, Usman', Kozlov, Insara, Kasimov, Temnikov, Ryl'sk, and Ufa. 41SIRIO, Xiv: 253 and 258, 443 and 454-55, 464 and 467. 45

SIR/O, XCIII: 10-11.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

the number of functional illiterates, men who could sign their names but were otherwise unable to read or write. Success in the state service depended heavily upon education, and education, in turn, depended heavily upon family wealth. If many of the provincial nobles were uneducated, the primary reason was that they were poor. Forty-one instructions addressed themselves specifically to problems faced by poor nobles or petty landlords (malopomestnye).48 The instruction from Kadyi stated that in that uezd poor nobles outnumbered substantial ones/7 That of the Vodskaia Piatina of Nov­ gorod claimed that the majority of nobles there owned "scarcely one serf."48 Three nakazy, those of Usman', Kerensk, and Novosil' asked that the state pay its for­ mer servitors a pension or provide them with some other source of income because so many retired officers were living in abject poverty.49 The instructions seldom mentioned poverty for its own sake. Usually it was cited as the basis for some specific request or statement of grievance. For example, certain prices and taxes were singled out as being espe­ cially onerous to the poor. Several instructions requested 46 The following instructions refer explicitly to the problems of poor nobles and/or petty landowners: Borovsk, Medyn and Kaluga, Liubim, Zaraisk, Pereslavl'-Riazan, Kadyi, Vereia, Pronsk, Kashin, Epifan, Uglich, Kashira, Dedilovo, Vodskaia Piatina of Novgorod, Derevskaia Piatina of Novgorod, Opochka, Obonezhskaia Piatina of Novgorod, Roslavl', Dorogobuzh, Viazemskii, Vologda, Parfen'evo, Galich, Simbirsk, Kazan', Sumy, Dankov, Voronezh, Usman', Riazhsk, Livin, Kozlov, Insara, Nizhnii Lomov, Verkhnii Lomov, Novosil', Kursk, Valuiki, Putivil', Ryl'sk, Belgorod. 48 SIRIO, xiv: 256. « SIRIO, iv: 352. 4 9 SIRIO, Lxviii: 367, 446, 491.

The "Emancipated" Nobility

that the government lower the price of salt, that it estab­ lish fixed (and lower) prices for such commodities as grain, lard, iron, and leather, and that it increase the domestic supply of such goods by forbidding their ex­ port beyond the boundaries of the empire.50 The three ruble fee charged for filing a petition with the courts or with government agencies was also protested on the grounds that it was especially burdensome to poor no­ bles and that it put them at a disadvantage vis-a-vis rich nobles.51 The tax on steambaths was also objected to on the grounds that at the flat rate of so many rubles per bath, impoverished noblemen were obliged to pay as much as rich ones, a condition that several instruc­ tions protested as unfair.52 The bias of the nobles' in­ structions in favor of the lesser nobility is also apparent in the form of taxation that several of them recom­ mended for adoption, a serf tax under which each estate owner would have to pay a given number of kopeks for every male serf registered in his name.53 In most cases, the instructions that urged the levying of a tax on serfs then proposed that the money be spent to provide the provinces with policemen, schools, hospitals, surveyors, and other facilities and services, so that in effect, the bulk of the taxes would be paid by the rich absentee landlords, but would be expanded for the benefit of "those living in the country," as the instruction from 50 For the most complete and concise request of this type see the instruction from Krapivna, SIRIO, VIII: 557-58. 51 For example see the instruction from Uglich, SIRIO, VIII: 470. 52 For example see the instruction from Vereia, SIRIO, iv: 379. 5 3 SIRIO, iv: 292 (Medyn and Kaluga); VIII : 485 (Ka­ shira); viii: 530 (Dedilovo); xiv: 493-94 (Viazemskii).

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

Opochka put it "either from necessity or because they have no other home."54 A number of instructions also claimed that rich ab­ sentee nobles and their agents cheated and exploited the poorer nobles in a variety of ways: by treating com­ mon property such as forests, pastures, and waters as their private property and denying the poorer nobles their right to use them, by spoiling the unfenced fields of the poor with their flocks and herds, by claiming and then seizing lands from the poor, and by stealing and luring away their peasants.55 The most bitter complaint of the nakazy, however, was that the poor had no legal redress against the rich, because the latter controlled the Estates College and the courts and used their influ­ ence to deny justice to the poorer nobles. As the instruc­ tion from Epifan described the situation: ". . . and these powerful landlords use other people's property with insolence and impunity and grow rich, anticipa­ ting that even if they are condemned by a court, only small penalties will be imposed for the land and serfs and estates [they have taken]; and even those penalties that are imposed on the guilty are not carried out because the courts are in the hands of the powerful and do not insist."56 A number of instructions proposed in addition that the poorer nobles be defended from the rapacity of mer­ chants and manufacturers. Not only did those people 54

SIRIO, xiv: 265. viii: 449 (Epifan); vm: 526-27 (Dedilovo); xiv: 270 (Opochka); xiv: 429 (Roslavl'); xiv: 464-65 (Vologda); LXVIII: 8-9 (Simbirsk); LXVIII: 335-37 (Dankov); LXVIII: 373-74, 381-83 (Riazhsk); LXVIII: 402-3, 405-6 (Livin); LXVIII: 423-24 (Insara); LXVIII: 570-71 (Valuiki); LXVIII: 621-2 (Ryl'sk); LXVIII: 647 (Belgorod). 58 SIRIO, VIII : 449. ss SIRIO,

The "Emancipated" Nobility

sell their wares at prices that seemed exorbitant to the nobles, but they frequently cheated the nobles and their peasants by using false weights and measures.57 In some places, it was claimed, the owners of iron and glass factories were cutting down the forests and thus depriv­ ing the nobles of the timber and firewood that they needed. Several instructions proposed that manufac­ turers be forbidden to cut timber in the future,58 and that of Tula, where the concentration of factories was especially great, went so far as to propose that all man­ ufacturing enterprises be banished from the vicinity of Moscow to a distance of 200 versts (132 miles).59 Others complained that manufacturers were welcoming fugitive serfs into their factories and, with the com­ plicity of the Manufacturing College, were making their recovery difficult and costly if not impossible.60 Still others complained that some manufacturers were not restricting themselves to manufacturing as the law required but were buying land and using serf labor to engage in agriculture.61 Such abuses were all the harder to take, as some instructions explained, because a noble­ man with a grievance against a manufacturer could not accuse him in the local court, but had to lodge a com­ plaint with the Manufacturing College or the Mining College in either Moscow or St. Petersburg. Not only were those agencies remote from the great majority of 57 SIRIO, iv: 239 (Borovsk); iv: 294 (Medyn and Kaluga); iv: 362 (Serpukhov-Tarusa-Obolensk); vm: 542 (Aleksin); VIII: 561 (Krapivna); LXVIII: 16-17 (Penza); LXVIII: 51920 (Orlov ). 58 SIRIO, iv: 292-93 (Medyn and Kaluga); iv: 312 (Iaroslavl'); LXVIII: 370-71 (Usman'). 0 9 SIRIO, IV : 407-8. 60 For example, SIRIO, LXVIII : 458 (Shatsk). 61 For example, SIRIO, VIII : 562-63 (Krapivna).

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility nobles, but in the opinion of some, they conspired with the manufacturers to deprive the nobles of justice.62 The ownership or use of serf labor by other classes, and especially by merchants and manufacturers, was a very sore point with the authors of the nobles' nakazy. The goal of the provincial nobles, as spelled out in their instructions, was to reinforce the barriers that separated them from other classes and defend the exclusivity of their privileges from the incursions of other classes. The instruction from Kashin stated the general demand for exclusivity in proposing that "general privileges be given to people of every class, to the nobility, to the merchants, and to the raznochintsy [people who were neither nobles nor merchants, nor peasants], and each class should have its own advantages, and one should not infringe upon the prerogatives of another, but each should make use of the privileges it is given."63 The most fundamental privilege of the nobility, of course, was the right to exploit serf labor, a right that the instruction from Periaslavl'-Zaleskii sought to pro­ tect from the incursions of "merchants {kupechestvo), townsmen (meschanstvo), non-noble landowners (odnodvortsy), and various other types of commoners."64 The nobles were particularly intent upon keeping that right out of the hands of manufacturers, lest they com­ pete in the same labor market as the nobles, reduce the supply available to the nobles, and drive up the price of serfs. A few nakazy expressed a willingness to let the manufacturers keep the serfs that were already in their possession, but many more were in favor of forcing 62 SIRIO,

iv: 324 (Maloiaroslavets); iv: 345 (Zaraisk, copied from Maloiaroslavets); iv: 348 (Pereslavl'-Riazan, copied from Maloiaroslavets); LXVIII: 613-14 (Belev). 63 SIRIO, xiv: 460. 64 SIRIO, vm: 495.

The u Emancipated''' Nobility

manufacturers to dispose of all their serfs and hire the labor they needed.65 If that were to happen, the nobles would be able to buy the manufacturers' serfs under favorable conditions. Moreover, since the manufactur­ ers would then be forced to hire peasants as wage labor­ ers, they would in most cases be furnishing the nobles' serfs and therefore, the nobles themselves with an addi­ tional source of income. Although they were directed against other classes, such proposals were essentially defensive because their primary aim was to protect the nobles from the adverse effects of competition with other groups. Protection was needed, as the provincial nobles saw the situation, because they felt that their present position was not a competitive one. Restricting the rights of other classes was only one of the ways in which the provincial nobles sought to defend themselves from the threat of competition. They also sought to limit competition within the nobility by holding down the number of noblemen. While trying to keep their privileges distinct from those of other classes, they also wanted to preserve the value of that distinction by preventing the members of other classes from crossing over into the nobility on an individual basis through the Table of Ranks. Although the late eighteenth century in Russia is not generally regarded as a period of great social mobility, a surprising num­ ber of the nobles' instructions treated the entrance of 65 For

example, the instruction from Krapivna, SlRlO, VIII: 562-63, was one of the few willing to let manufacturers own serfs under certain conditions. More typical were instructions like that of Klin, SIRIO, iv: 260, which recommended that all serfs owned by manufacturers be turned over to the state, or that of Lukh, SIRIO, viii: 483, which advocated their com­ pulsory sale to the nobility.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

new men into the nobility as a serious threat to the status of those who were nobles already. The nakaz of Pereiaslavl'-Zalesskii explained, for example: "Many men who are not nobles but raznochintsy, having at­ tained officers' rank and higher through various services to the state and having obtained capital by various means, buy up villages, and that purchase of villages by raznochintsy disquiets the nobles because the num­ ber of villages in their families is diminishing and is naturally declining in the entire corpus of the dvorianStrooyw For the most part, the nobles' instructions that sought restrictions on the ennoblement of commoners did not assert the primacy of birth and lineage; indeed, they often requested that families already ennobled through the Table of Ranks be registered by the state and fur­ nished with proof of their status. The arguments of the nakazy against the ennoblement of commoners in the future were not ideological, as were some of those ad­ vanced in the debates at the Legislative Commission; they were blatantly selfish. Having once obtained priv­ ileged status for themselves and their heirs, the nobles wanted to preserve the value of that status and preserve it from excessive dilution. A few instructions proposed that the nobility as it was presently constituted be closed off in one way or another, either by distinguish­ ing between old families and parvenus in some way or by forbidding those ennobled in the future to buy land and serfs.67 On the other hand, a few also defended the Table of Ranks and the automatic enrollment of officers « β SIRIO, viii: 495. 67 For examples, SIRIO, LXVIII : 444. (Kerensk); LXVIII: 622-23 (Ryl'sk).

The "Emancipated" Nobility

as members of the nobility.68 The majority of those ex­ pressing an opinion, however, felt that the state should restrict the ennoblement of commoners without elim­ inating it entirely. Instead of an officer becoming a no­ bleman automatically, they proposed that ennoblement occur only upon the explicit order of the sovereign, an order confirmed by the grant of a diploma, coat-of-arms, or patent. The issuance of such proofs of nobility, it was argued, would solve other problems as well: it would prevent commoners from passing themselves off as nobles, and it would protect the status of nobles whose nobility might be questioned.69 Since it was not always possible to tell a petty nobleman from a com­ moner by his appearance, his demeanor, or the condi­ tions of his life, the petty nobles wanted the state to make the distinction more formal and more rigid. Like the owners of an inefficient industry seeking barriers to free trade, the provincial nobles sought barriers to social mobility in order to protect a status that they felt was in danger of losing its value. THE WOULD-BE GENTRY

Asking that the opportunities of other classes be re­ stricted was only one of the ways in which the provin68 For

example, SIRIO, LXVIII : 575-76 (Valuiki). iv: 240 (Borovsk); iv: 245 (Kostroma); iv: 277 (Mikhailov); iv: 287 (Medyn and Kaluga); iv: 295 (Liubim); iv: 353 (Rostov); vm: 257-58 (Romanov); vm: 477-79 (Lukh); vm: 486 (Kashira); vni: 492 (Odoev); VIII: 536 (Aleksin); LXVIII: 280 (Sumy); LXVIII: 364 (Usman'); LXVIII: 608-9 (Starooskol); LXVIII: 619 (Mtsensk); LXVIII : 621 (Ryl'sk). The instruction from Usman', LXVIII: 371-72, complained that twenty of the thirty-five noblemen present at the election had never received patents of nobility. e 3 SIRIO,

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility cial nobles tried to avert the decline of their own status. More important to their cause were their demands that the state correct the conditions that were responsible for the destitution and demoralization of the provincial nobles and that it increase their opportunities to be­ come prosperous and productive members of society. Significant in that respect were the nobles' requests for help in improving the chances for their sons to make successful careers in the state service. Taking the nega­ tive approach, the nakaz of Kerensk proposed that all service positions that conferred officer's rank upon the holder be reserved for Russian nobles, to the exclusion of both commoners and foreigners.70 More positive was the request of twenty-seven instructions that the state enable the sons of the petty nobility to compete for higher posts in the service by providing them with de­ cent educations.71 The provision of the Manifesto on the Liberty of the Nobility that permitted nobles own­ ing fewer than one thousand serfs to send their sons to the Cadet Corps was meaningless to the provincial 70 SIRIO, 71 SIRIO,

LXVIII : 443.

iv: 246 (Kostroma); iv: 489 (Medyn and Ka­ luga): iv: 295 (Liubim); iv: 363 (Serpukhov-Tarusa-Obolensk); iv: 381 (Vereia); iv: 405-6 (Tula); iv: 468 (Kashin); VIII: 485-86 (Kashira); xiv: 257 (Vodskaia Piatina of Novgorod); xiv: 262 (Derevskaia Piatina of Novgorod); xiv: 276 (Opochka); xiv: 327 (Tver'); xiv: 330 (Obonezhskaia Piatina of Novgorod); xiv: 357 (Bezhetskaia Piatina of Novgorod); xiv: 400-401 (Pskov); xiv: 422 (Smolensk); xiv: 433 (Dorogobuzh); xiv: 489-90 (Parfen'evo); xiv: 495 (Galich); LXVIII: 116 (Alator); LXVIII: 257 (Akhtyr); LXVIII : 276-77 (Sumy); LXVIII : 388 (Riazhsk); LXVIII: 549 (Kursk); LXVIII: 556-57 (Trubchevsk); LXVIII: 610-11 (Belev); LXVIII: 658 (Belgorod).

The "Emancipated" Nobility nobles. In the first place, there were not nearly enough vacancies in the Cadet Corps, and in the second place, the great majority of provincial nobles could not afford to send their sons to St. Petersburg and provide them with food, clothing, and living allowances. Their pov­ erty likewise prevented them from hiring tutors for their sons. Under existing conditions, the best the pro­ vincial nobles could do was to get someone, the local priest, a relative, or themselves, to teach their sons to read, write, and do simple arithmetic, and even that was not always possible, as the prevalence of illiteracy among the signers of the instructions indicates. More­ over, simple literacy by itself was insufficient. The in­ structions made it clear that by "education" they meant a modern European education that included instruction in such subjects as geometry and foreign languages.72 The nakaz of Vereia stated the case for state-supported education particularly well, requesting that for the benefit of the fatherland, the empress build state supported schools in every town for the educa­ tion of poor nobles in foreign languages and other studies that are useful to society, to which nobles who cannot provide such an education at their own ex­ pense, because of their poverty, can send their sons for instruction, and from which in time may come dividends to the state and benefits to society. Although various schools for the children of nobles have been established by Her Imperial Highness and now exist in St. Petersburg and Moscow, it is well known that most of the nobles are not wealthy and, being poor, for examples, SIRIO, iv: 363 ( Serpukhov-TarusaObolensk); iv: 381 (Vereia); iv: 468 (Kashin); and VIII: 485-86 (Kashira). 72 See,

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

are scattered throughout the countryside far from St. Petersburg and Moscow and are unable to send their children there; and so the children of these poor no­ bles, living with their fathers and receiving no educa­ tion, come to their majority ignorant (and many as a consequence of their poverty have not even studied reading and writing) and can do nothing but enlist as common soldiers.73 Most of the instructions that asked for the establish­ ment of provincial schools had in mind something more than just a free education for their sons. Apparently the poverty of many provincial nobles was so acute that they were unable to support their sons away from home, even in some nearby town. The instruction from Serpukov-Tarusa-Obolensk argued, for example, that "many children of poor nobles who own but a small piece of land remain uneducated because of their poverty and lack of means. They should be given not just the oppor­ tunity to obtain an education, but also a subsistence allotment to meet their needs."74 In their request for subsidized education, the provin­ cial nobles were asking the state to rescue their sons from the continuing cycle of poverty, ignorance, failure in the service, and again poverty, in which they had found themselves trapped. State service in eighteenth century Russia offered the best opportunity for improv­ ing one's social and economic standing, and the provin­ cial nobles wanted their sons to be better prepared to take advantage of that opportunity than they themselves had been. A few instructions went so far as to combine a request for free education with a proposal that young noblemen be given service ranks commensurate with ™ SIRIO, iv: 381.

74

SIRIO, iv: 363.

The "Emancipated" Nobility

their educations so that they might enter the service as officers rather than common soldiers.75 In the long run, education would help their sons attain a greater measure of success and prosperity, but for themselves, the provincial nobles wanted the oppor­ tunity to become prosperous and productive in civilian life. Thus they asked the state to create opportunities for the owners of estates to earn a better living and to live happily and comfortably in the provinces. Several instructions asked that nobles be allowed to open mills and other industrial enterprises on their lands without interference from the Manufacturing, Mining, and Commerce Colleges. Some wealthy nobles had already begun to manufacture on their estates, but legally and traditionally that activity had been reserved for the merchant class. Thus, if some of the nobles had their way, the merchants would be forbidden to own serfs or engage in agriculture while the nobles would be al­ lowed to invade the fields of enterprise that had tradi­ tionally been reserved for the merchants.76 On the whole, however, the nobles were less interested in branching out into manufacturing and commerce than they were in improving their position in their own traditional pursuits, state service and agriculture. Even their interest in manufacturing and commerce was con­ nected to agriculture since it centered around the con­ version of agricultural and mineral products into proc­ essed goods which they could then market as linen rather than flax or woolen fabric instead of wool. A l s SIRIO,

iv: 362-63 (Serpukhov-Tarusa-Obelensk): vm: 488 (Epifan); xiv: 275-76 (Opochka); LXVIII: 657-58 (Belgorod). l t e SIRIO, iv: 260 (Klin); xiv: 252 (Viaz'ma); xiv: 37576 (Pskov).

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

related question was the production and sale of alcohol, an activity customarily reserved for the nobles. Cath­ erine's law of 1765 had restated the right of the nobles to make alcohol, but it had restricted their right to dispose of the product. They were not allowed to transport alco­ hol to the towns for sale or even for their own use. Instead they were compelled to sell whatever alcohol was not intended for consumption on their own estates to concessionaires who had an imperial monopoly on its distribution and sale to consumers. That law, the nobles argued, restricted their markets and depressed the price that they were paid for alcoholic beverages. Nearly half of the nobles' instructions asked that the nobles be al­ lowed greater freedom in the manufacture and transport of intoxicants, and a somewhat smaller number pro­ posed that the entire alcohol trade be turned over to the nobles." The instructions also proposed ways for the state to help the nobles derive greater profits from agriculture itself. Several of them proposed that the state sell to retired noblemen the recently secularized lands and serfs of the church.78 The instructions from Venev' and Krapivna suggested that the state deport free peasants who owned their own land to the southern and eastern frontiers and then sell their lands to the nobles.79 Nobles from the frontier regions made similar requests regard­ ing the Cossacks, the Tatars, and the Bashkirs.80 The 77

For an example see the instruction from Krapivna, SIRlO, VIII: 559-60. 7 s SlRlO, VIII : 559 (Krapivna); xiv: 244 (Kopor'e); LXVIII: 443 (Kerensk); LXVIII: 558-59 (Trubchevsk). 7 9 SIRIO, IV : 342-3; VIII : 556. 8 0 SIRIO, LXVIII : 447 (Kasimov); LXVIII : 463-64 (Efremov); LXVIII: 529-30 (Karachev); LXVIII: 545-48 (Kursk); XCIII: 4-6 (Orenburg); XCIII: 8-10 (Ufa).

T h e "Emancipated n Nobility

nobles of Zaraisk and Pereslavl'-Riazan wanted permis­ sion to buy land from non-nobles and non-Russians with­ out having to ask the consent of the Estates College or some other governmental agency.81 To provide the no­ bles with the capital needed to buy more land and serfs, and to finance agricultural improvements, several in­ structions asked the state to establish credit institutions in the provinces similar to the ones that the empress Elizabeth had opened in St. Petersburg and Moscow.82 The provincial nobles also asked that the state help them contend with the problem of poor harvests by in­ creasing the supply of grain that would be available under those conditions. In rural Russia, grain shortages were endemic and famines were commonplace. The in­ struction from Uglich claimed, for example, that the crops there had failed for three successive years.83 To alleviate the hardship and hunger brought on by crop failures, several instructions asked the state to forbid or at least restrict the requisitioning of grain for the army and the foraging and quartering that accompanied the movement of troops.84 A few others proposed that doSi SIRIO, iv: 346-49. s 2 SIRIO, viii: 480 (Kashira); vm: 510 (Dmitrov); xiv: 422 (Smolensk); xiv: 461-62 (Vologda); xiv: 489 (Parfen'evo); xiv: 495 (Galich); LXVIII : 32 (Kazan'); LXVIII: 526-27 (Orlov); LXVIII: 634 (Kerensk). It is also quite pos­ sible, as Augustine has suggested, that the nobles wanted such loans for consumption rather than investment. Wilson R. Augustine, "Notes toward a Portrait of the Eighteenth Cen­ tury Russian Nobility," CSS, iv, no. 3 (Fall 1970), 393-95. SIRIO, VIII : 473. s i SlRIO, iv: 422 (Likhvin); viii: 243 (Kopor'e; XIV: 246 (Shliussel'burg); xiv: 248 (Iamburg); XIV: 404 (Toropets and Kholm); LXVIII: 121 (Kurmish); LXVIII: 267 (Kharkov); LXVIII: 286-87 (Ostrogozh); LXVIII: 304 (IziUM); LXVIII: 554 (Chern).

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

mestic supplies be increased by the enactment of a ban on the export of grain from the empire.85 The most com­ mon and practical proposal, however, was that the state build and maintain granaries that would purchase grain from the local landowners in times of plenty, store it, and then sell it at reasonable prices whenever the har­ vests were insufficient.88 Some thirty-five instructions also pointed out that the state could help the provincial nobles by building and maintaining roads, bridges, and fords at its own ex­ pense with hired labor instead of conscripting serf labor from the local nobles. Moreover, they said, the condi­ tion of provincial roads, bridges, and fords was deplor­ able, and if the state would improve their condition it would be a great benefit to the provinces and to the no­ bles who lived there.87 For the retired nobleman to become a prosperous country squire, it was necessary that the state allow him to manage his property as he saw fit without re­ straint or interference from the government. Under the 85 SIRIO,

iv: 384 (Bezhetsk). The creation of such granaries was proposed in twentyfour nakazy. For examples see the following: SIRIO, iv: 204 (Medyn and Kaluga); vm: 546 (Mozhaisk); xiv: 413 (BeIaia); Lxvm: 531 (Karachev). See also Augustine, CSS, iv: 410-19. Detailed studies of Russian agriculture and the rural economy in the eighteenth century are available in N. L. Rubinshtein, SePskoe khozhiaistroo Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII v. (M., 1957); Michael Confino, SystSmes agraires et progres agricole: Uassolement triennal en Russie aux XVIlIXIX siecles (Paris and The Hague, 1969); and Confino's ear­ lier book, Domaines et seigneurs en Russie vers la fin du XVllI Steele (Paris, 1963). 87 For examples see the following: SIRIO, iv: 239-40 (Borovsk); vm: 473-74 (Uglich); xiv: 269 (Opochka); LXVIII: 327-28 (Kadom). 86

The "Emancipated" Nobility

laws of Peter the Great that were still in effect, the nobleman's property rights were quite limited. His es­ tate was not his private property; it was a form of compensation for his service to the state, a piece of land and a number of serfs over which the state had given him limited economic rights so that he would be able to devote most of his own time to the state service. The Manifesto of Peter III had ended the nobleman's obligation to serve, but it had not altered the existing theory of land tenure. By 1767, the nobles were de­ manding that such an alteration be made. Having shifted their attention from the state service to the management of their estates, they wanted to control those estates as though they were their private prop­ erty. Twelve instructions made a direct plea for full ownership and control; many others made the same plea indirectly in requesting specific ownership rights.88 Among the rights that the nobles wanted but did not possess were: the right to acquire and dispose of land and serfs freely, the right to use freely every resource found on their estates, forests, waters, minerals, game, and peasants, and the right to treat their peasants as chattel ("movable property") separate and separable from the land ("immovable property").89 One of the greatest limitations on the property rights of the nobility was the state's law on inheritance. Upon s s SIRIO,

iv: 227 (Moscow); iv: 426 (Kashin); vm: 495 (Pereslav'-Zalesskii); vni: 507-8 (Dmitrov); xiv: 243 (Kopor'e); xiv: 446-49 (Viazemskii); xiv: 459-60 (Vo­ logda); LXVIII: 246 (Kharkov); LXVIII: 345 (Dankov); LXVIII : 385 (Riazhsk); LXVIII : 393-94 (Volkov); LXVIII: 532-33 (Karachev). 89 For examples see the following: SIRIO, iv: 363 (Serpukhov-Tarusa-Obolensk); iv: 368 (Vereia); iv: 423 (Poshekhon'); LXVIII: 345 (Dankov); LXVIII: 443 (Kerensk).

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

the death of a nobleman, his property was divided among his heirs according to a formula prescribed by the law without regard to the wishes of the deceased. Prior to the reforms of Peter the Great, it had been traditional for a man's property to be divided equally among his heirs. That tradition, however, had led to the constant subdivision of estates and to both the en­ largement and impoverishment of the nobility. When Peter the Great had reorganized and restructured the nobility with the intention of transforming it into an hereditary service class, he had abolished the tradition of equal inheritance, replacing it with the Western cus­ tom of entail, under which all or most of a nobleman's property passed to but a single heir. Single inheritance was unpopular with the Russian nobility, however, and they succeeded in winning its repeal in 1731. In repeal­ ing Peter's law, however, Anna had not given the nobles testimonial freedom, but had instead prescribed a new legal formula for dividing the property of a deceased noble.90 Particularly onerous to the nobility, as many of the instructions explained, was the legal requirement that property transferred to a son by his parents should not revert to the parents upon the death of that son, but was to pass to his descendants or to other relatives. Moreover, while Anna's law worked well enough in cases that corresponded to its provisions, it was an end­ less source of disputes in families that were in any way unusual and which, because of remarriage, adoption, or premature death, did not fit the pattern envisioned by the law. Attempts to provide for such exceptions to the norm had only complicated matters further. Vexed in very personal ways by that state of affairs, the provincial nobles attacked the state's laws on inheritance in sixty9» PSZ no. 5717.

The "Emancipated" Nobility

seven of the instructions that they wrote in 1767. Some asked for the correction of specific defects; others pro­ posed that the nobles be granted complete testimonial freedom in the disposal of their property. That proposal was clearly stated in the instruction from Dmitrov, which said: We dare to ask Her Imperial Highness to carry out Her maternal intentions by enacting a law that would give every nobleman complete control over his estate without any distinction being made between movable and immovable property or between family property, inherited property and acquired property, so that every nobleman may bequeath his private property, regardless of its type or character, to his children, his relations, his in-laws, his wife, or someone else of either sex—to whomever he thinks deserving while he lives or designates at the time of his death—with­ out limitation.91 A further, and in many respects, a greater problem for the noble landowner was the absence of legal records that would give him a clear title to his estate. The inher­ itance laws, centuries of subdivision, and the absence of detailed and accessible records had produced chaos in the countryside and, in many cases, had made it impos­ sible for a landowner to be certain of the extent or the boundaries of his property. As a result, land disputes and litigation were absorbing a disproportionate amount of the landowner's time, energy, and money. Aksakov wrote that his grandfather left his native area in order to avoid property disputes with his neighbors and moved to the eastern frontier, where he purchased an estate that he thought would be completely free of such prob81

SIRIO,

VIIi:

508.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

lems, yet within a few years, he too, found himself at law with his neighbors.92 That his case was no excep­ tion can be clearly seen in the testimony of the instruc­ tions. Forty-five instructions cited land disputes as a major problem and others referred to them in connec­ tion with other matters.93 According to some instruc­ tions, land disputes between noblemen often flared into violence in which houses were burned and people were beaten and sometimes killed.94 The state had shown some awareness of the problem and in 1754 and again in 1765 had ordered a national survey of private landholdings, but by 1767 only a few uezdy had been prop­ erly surveyed (according to the instruction from Vladi­ mir, only one out of fifty-five uezdy in the guberniia of Moscow had been surveyed), and even so the work of the government surveyors had tended to produce as many disputes as it had resolved. The answer, the no­ bles believed, was to settle land disputes quickly at the local level through some local agency or institution, be it a land court run by the nobles, a special land court attached to the provincial administration, a local sur­ veyor's office, a local office for the registry of deeds, or some combination thereof. On the whole, the provincial nobles were less concerned with how quarrels and law­ suits over property should be settled than with settling them quickly and decisively. Among the most serious and immediate of the pro­ vincial nobleman's problems was the threat posed to his 92

Aksakov, p. 9. For examples see the following: SIRIO, iv: 398-99 (Tula); VIII: 462 (Uglich); xiv: 449-50 (Viazemskii); LXVIII: 401 (Livin). For further discussion see Augustine, CSS, iv: 381-82, 395-402. 94For example see SIRIO, viii: 549-51 (Vladimir). 93

The "Emancipated? Nobility

property and even his very life by gangs of fugitive serfs and army deserters who roamed the countryside robbing, burning, and killing. Outlaws and brigands were cited as a major problem in forty-nine instructions from all regions of the empire, and were singled out by some as the gravest problem confronting the local no­ bility.95 According to their instructions the nobles in some areas were afraid to live on their estates and so had rented quarters in the nearest town.96 Thus attacked and terrorized by local jacqueries, the provincial nobles blamed the state administration for their plight, com­ plaining that the provincial officials who were supposed to maintain law and order in the countryside were either unable or unwilling to catch and punish the outlaws.87 Hoping to establish himself securely as a provincial landowner and become a prosperous country squire, the poor nobleman, by his own testimony, encountered nu­ merous obstacles that prevented him from attaining the security and prosperity he desired. The underlying cause of his frustration, he felt, was the state's attitude toward the nobility and toward provincial Russia, for while the state governed the nobleman more than he would have wished, restricting his opportunities and interfering with his efforts to manage his estate as he thought best, it governed the provinces too little, neg­ lecting them and doing little to improve their condition. For centuries, but especially since the reforms of Peter the Great, the Russian government had drawn taxes 95Forexamplesseethefollowing:

SIBlO, iv: 337 (Veriea);

VIII: 465 (Uglich); xiv: 265 (Opochka); LXVIII: 13 (Pen­ za); LXVIII: 37-38 (Sviazhsk); xcni: 9 (Ufa). 98For examples see SIRIO, LXVIII : 19 (Penza). 97For examples see the following: xiv: 339, 346-47 (Shelonskaia Piatina of Novgorod); xiv: 352-54 (Bezhetskaia Piatina of Novgorod); LXVIII: 418 (Kozlov).

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

and recruits and other resources from the provinces and had spent them on the court and the capital and the army. It spent no more on the provinces than it had to spend in order to exploit them. Consequently, though the state took what it needed from the provinces, it failed to provide them with the facilites that the provin­ cial nobles wanted and needed: roads, bridges, grana­ ries, banks, schools, hospitals, drugstores, surveyors, judges, and police. The nobles' instructions character­ ized provincial administration in Russia as being in­ competent, ineffective, and altogether inadequate. No aspect of provincial administration was so vehe­ mently criticized in the instructions as the courts and their administration of justice. Indeed, no other topic received as much attention from as many instructions as the provincial nobleman's inability to obtain a prompt and honest decision from a court, a complaint that was raised in 80 out of the 134 instructions under considera­ tion.98 Deeply involved in inheritance and property dis­ putes, the provincial landowner commonly had to wait ten to twenty years or more for a final verdict on his case, and often by that time, the circumstances of the case had changed or the principals had died, and a new suit would have to be initiated. The seriousness of the nobles1 complaints against the courts is apparent in the words of the nakaz from Dankov, which asked: That in the first place we, the obedient slaves of Your Imperial Majesty, may see the enactment of civil laws that will enable the poor and indigent to obtain from the courts, without red tape and without delay, re98 For examples see the following: SIRIO, iv: 318 (Iur'ev); iv: 400-401 (Tula); vm: 497 (Pereslavl'-Zalesskii); xiv: 363 (Novyi Torzhok); LXVIII: 26-28 (Kazan'); LXVIII: 113 (Alator); xcm: 3 (Orenburg).

The "Emancipated" Nobility

dress against the sneaky deceptions of the great land­ owners, .... And thus do the poor and helpless plead in every way, for they have been at law for ten or twenty years and more without receiving any satis­ faction from the powers that be. And this is so be­ cause of the ensnarements of deceivers, because of the failure of the courts to render a decision within the time allotted, and because of appeals from the uezd to the provintsiia, and from the provintsiia to the guberniia, and from the guberniia to the Justice College and from the Justice College to the Senate, as a result of apparent errors in the investigations and decisions. Receiving no satisfaction, they endure want and dep­ rivation because of these deficiencies and because of the numerous appeals that are seldom, if ever, con­ cluded." The court system that the provincial nobles found so unresponsive to their needs had been established by Peter the Great in 1719. With the failure of his efforts to check the authority of provincial officials from below through the nobles' councils and landraty, Peter had instituted a system of provincial administration that called for strict supervision from above; thus the courts at every level of administration were subordinated to those at the next highest level, and all of the provincial courts were ultimately subordinated to the Justice Col­ lege, which in turn was subordinate to the Senate, the chief supervisory organ of the imperial government. Because authority under such a system was so central­ ized, lesser officials were often afraid to make any deci­ sion that might get them into trouble with their supe­ riors, and, as a result, problems tended to move up 89

SIRIO, LXVIII: 334-35.

Emancipation of the Russian 'Nobility

through the chain of command and overburden the in­ stitutions at the top of the administrative pyramid. For example, during her first months in power Catherine II had noted that the Senate spent six weeks hearing and deciding a dispute over pasturage rights in the provin­ cial town of Mozhaisk.100 In the opinion of the provincial nobles a system so paralyzed by red tape was incapable of rendering justice. Its complexities enabled the rich and powerful nobles to take unfair advantage of the lesser nobility. The great lords, they complained, could afford to make constant appeals (at three rubles per petition) until they had obtained a decision favorable to themselves. To make those appeals, they could afford to hire skilled lawyers, who presumably produced the "sneaky deceptions" cited in the instruction from Dankov. To redress that particular inequity, the instruction from Vereia sought free legal assistance to keep the poor and ignorant nobles from being victimized by the rich nobles and their hired lawyers.101 Even so, some provin­ cial nobles were convinced that they could not win a suit against a rich noble because the lower courts were too susceptible to bribery and the higher organs of gov­ ernment were controlled by the rich and powerful nobles who had little sympathy for provincials. The instruc­ tion from Iaroslavl' claimed that many provincial nobles preferred to endure insult and injury rather than go to court, or if the situation grew intolerable, were inclined to take the law into their own hands.102 The courts were not the only organs of government to be criticized by the provincial nobles in their nakazy, however. A number of instructions also attacked the Colleges of Mining, Manufacturing, Commerce, and 100

RA, 1865, p. 471. SIRIO, iv: 305-6.

101

SIRIO, iv: 379.

The "Emancipated" Nobility

Estates. All four, they claimed, were remote from the provincial nobles and their concerns, yet they held the power to make crucial decisions affecting those con­ cerns.103 The Mining, Manufacturing, and Commerce Colleges were the only agencies that could satisfy any grievance or complaint that a nobleman might have against a merchant or a manufacturer. They also held the power to permit or forbid a nobleman to engage in certain kinds of economic activity. The Estates College had the final say in matters involving changes in the nobleman's holdings of land and serfs. His ownership of an estate was registered with the Estates College and any change that he might want to make in its dimen­ sions, any change involving the purchase, sale, or trans­ fer of property, had to be approved by that agency. The provincial nobles felt that delay and frustration that resulted from the extreme centralization of those agen­ cies were a needless burden on the provincial nobility, and they proposed an end to the laws that required them to conduct essential business through the agencies of the central government. Some proposed that a noble­ man be allowed to accuse a merchant or a manufacturer before a local civil court, just as he would accuse anyone 103 Forty-one nakazy complained about the excessive centrali­ zation of administration in the hands of the colleges. For exam­ ples see the following: iv: 387 (Pronsk); VIII: 480 (Uglich); xiv: 306-9 (Pustorzheva); LXVIII : 340-41 (Dankov); LXVIII: 362 (Voronezh); LXVIII : 383 (Riazhsk). Augustine, CSS, iv: 384-88, sees these complaints as being levied not just against centralization but against rational, bureaucratic admin­ istration in general. In his opinion, the nobles wanted adminis­ tration that would be more personal and informal as well as local. The nakazy do contain statements that support Au­ gustine's inference, but their emphasis was on convenience and accessibility.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

else.104 Others proposed that the restrictions on eco­ nomic activity enforced by the central colleges be abol­ ished.105 Eighteen instructions suggested that the Es­ tates College should be decentralized and that estates should be registered at the local or provincial level, where it would be easier for the landowners to conduct their business and where the records would be more easily accessible.108 The agencies and personnel of local and provincial administration also received a generous measure of crit­ icism in the nobles' instructions. They complained that provincial officials were too few in number and too poor in quality to administer the provinces in an effective manner. Moreover, since they were responsible only to the central government, they were at best indifferent and at worst injurious to the interests of the local nobil­ ity. Faults of omission, failure to stop brigandage or preserve the forests or repair the roads, were cited along with faults of commission such as extortion, corruption, ignorance, alcoholism, and even atheism.107 Whether 1 0 i SIRIO, iv: 324 (Maloiaroslavets); iv: 345 (Zaraisk); iv: 348 (Pereslavl'-Riazan). 1 0 5 SIRIO, iv: 363 (Serpukhov-Tarusa-Obolensk); xiv: 323 (Ustiuzhna). 1 0 6 SIRIO, iv: 406-7 (Tula); iv: 445 (Likhvin); vm: 523-24 (Dedilovo); vm: 534 (Suzdal'); vm: 538 (Aleksin); vm: 563-64 (Krapivna); xiv: 419 (Smolensk); xiv: 489 (Parfen'evo); LXVIII: 25 (Kazan'); LXVIII: 105 (Nizhnii Novgorod); LXVIII: 264 (Kharkov); LXVIII: 511-12 (Orlov); LXVIII : 550-51 (Kursk); LXVIII : 554-55 (Chern); LXVIII: 574 (Valuiki); LXVIII: 604 (Starooskol); LXVIII: 634 (Kromy); LXVIII: 651 (Belgorod). 107 For examples of the various complaints see the follow­ ing: SIRIO, IV: 379 (Vereia); vm: 517-18 (Meshchovsk); xiv: 318-19 (Zubtsovsk); xiv: 351 (Bezhetskaia Piatina of Novgorod); LXVIII: 113 (Alator); LXVIII: 418 (Kozlov).

The "Emancipated" Nobility

the officials simply had too much to do, or whether they did it badly, the result, according to the provincial no­ bles, was the same: an almost total absence of effective, beneficial government. The instructions' deep concern with provincial prob­ lems often went beyond the voicing of complaints to the proposing of solutions. In many instances, to be sure, the nobles merely asked that the state do something to improve the conditions that the provincial nobles were troubled about, that it expend more money and man­ power on their behalf, but in many other instances, the noble landowners asked only that they be allowed to take the initiative and do for themselves those things that needed doing. Faced with the long-standing indif­ ference of the state, more than half of the instructions asked that the provincial nobles be allowed to take con­ certed and constructive actions on their own behalf. Having been called together for the purpose of electing a marshal and a delegate to the Legislative Commission, the provincial nobles asked that they be allowed to elect certain provincial officials in the same manner and take over responsibility for some of the functions that the officials appointed by the state were neglecting or mis­ managing. Within the general consensus that certain officials ought to be chosen by the provincial nobles, the instruc­ tions exhibited wide differences of opinion as to the role that officials elected by the nobles ought to play, and the titles and duties assigned to such officials varied greatly from one instruction to another. Some proposed that the nobles and their concerns be separated from the state administration to the greatest extent possible. State officials, in their opinion, should be restricted to matters in which the state had a primary interest, while those

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

matters in which the nobles had a primary interest would be dealt with by the nobles or their elected rep­ resentatives.108 Under such a division of authority, the nobles would take over such operations as recording membership in the dvorianstvo, registering the owner­ ship of land, resolving land disputes between estate owners, managing the forests, overseeing the education and training of young nobles, and assisting noble wid­ ows and orphans. In some cases, the functions that the nobles wanted to appropriate crossed the imprecise line between class government and public administration to include such operations as the maintenance of roads and bridges and the suppression of brigandage. Some in­ structions proposed that those duties be given to the marshal of the nobility, but others proposed the election of a different man or men with different titles, such as komissar, opekun, and nachalnik.109 Some also sug­ gested the election of a nobles' court that would exercise various executive or judicial functions.110 A second group of instructions wanted the nobles to take over some or all of the public administration within the uezd. Eight proposed the election of a landrat, a council chosen by the nobility, that would supervise 108

The clearest statement of this proposal is to be found in the instruction from Zubtsovsk, SIRIO, xiv: 318-19. 109 For examples see the following: for strong marshal: SIRIO, iv: 256-57 (Klin) and iv: 272 (Mikhailov); for opekun: iv: 436 (Peremyshl'and Vorotinsk) and xiv: 281-82 Rzhev-Volodimir); for nachalnik·. iv: 355 (Rostov); for komissar·. IV: 290 (Medyn and Kaluga) and LXVIII: 9 (Simbirsk). 110 The election of some kind of nobles' court was pro­ posed in a total of eighty nakazy. For examples, see the follow­ ing: SIRIO, iv: 279-81 (Sudislav); vni: 501-2 (Dmitrov); Xiv: 405 (Toropets and Kholm); LXVIII: 448 (Kasimov).

The "Emancipated" Nobility and direct the various agencies of local administra­ tion.111 A few proposed that the state continue to ap­ point the head of the uezd administration, the voevoda, but that his assistants be elected by the local nobles and charged with specific responsibilities.112 The most am­ bitious proposal for involving the nobles in local admin­ istration called for the voevoda to be elected by the local nobility instead of being appointed by the state. In all, 14 out of 134 nakazy, or slightly more than 10 percent, called for the election of the voevoda by the nobility, a proposal which would have given the nobles control of the lowest units of government.113 It might be argued that in proposing the election of landraty, komissars, and other officials, the provincial nobles were trying to revive the reforms that Peter the Great had tried to introduce, but the differences between the intentions of Peter the Great and the proposals of the provincial nobility are more signifi­ cant than the similarities. Those differences are clearly illustrated by the duties that each wanted to assign to the elected komissars: whereas Peter had wanted 111 SIRIO,

iv: 237-38 (Borovsk); iv: 340 (Venev'); vni: 497 (Pereslavl'-Zalesskii); xiv: 246 (Shliussel'burg); xiv: 494 (Galich); LXVIII: 7 (Simbirsk); LXVIII: 428 (Nizhnii Lomov); LXVIII: 617-18 (Mtsensk). 112 SIRIO, viii: 497 (Pereslavl'-Zalesskii); vm: 514 (Serpaisk); xiv: 443-44 (Viazemskii); xiv: 482 (Chukholm); xiv: 498 (Sudai); LXVIII : 329 (Kadom); LXVIII: 565 (Valuiki); LXVIII: 611 (Belev). 113 SIRIO, iv: 266 (Kozel'sk); iv: 282 (Sudislav); iv: 3078 (Iaroslavl'); iv: 329 (Kolomenskoe); iv: 383 (Bezhetsk); iv: 410-11 (Tula); vm: 484 (Kashira); vm: 488 (Odoev); vm: 517-18 (Meshchovsk); vm: 559 (Krapivna); xiv: 460 (Vologda); LXVIII: 113 (Alator); LXVIII: 447-48 (Kasimov); LXVIII: 528-29 (Karachev).

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility the komissar to help the state by carrying out such operations as the collection of the poll tax, the nobles' instructions wanted the komissar to do things that would benefit the local nobles, such as arresting run­ away serfs or supervising the use of the forests. In their conception of the komissar's role, as in many of their proposals, the nobles were advancing a program that was implicitly anti-Petrine. The Petrine regime was organized around the basic principle that everyone, including the sovereign himself, must serve the state. The program advanced by the provincial nobles in their instructions, however, reversed that principle by asking the state to serve the interests of the provincial nobility. With the sole exception of their request for state-sup­ ported education, which they connected to the interests of the state by explaining that it would increase the competence of the young men entering the state service, the instructions did not argue that the changes they were seeking would be in the best interests of the state. On the contrary, those changes were intended for the benefit of the provincial nobility irrespective of the wel­ fare of the state or its interests. The evidence of the nobles' nakazy contradicts any notion that the Manifesto of Peter III marked another upward step in the "ascendency of the nobility" or that Russia after the death of Peter the Great was in reality a "nobles' state," a government of the nobles, by the nobles, for the nobles. It is true that Russia was gov­ erned by an elite within the nobility, a group whose interests were very closely identified with the state and vice versa, but that elite consisted of men who, because they were able, educated, wealthy, and well connected possessed advantages that would have made them the governing class in eighteenth century England or, for

The "Emancipated" Nobility

that matter, in eighteenth century America. What was true in the case of the elite, however, was not applicable to the nobility as a whole. The nakazy gave no indica­ tion that the dvorianstvo viewed itself as an ascendent class or that it believed that the state was being run in the interest of all the nobles. On the contrary, the no­ bles' instructions of 1767 indicate that the provincial nobility saw itself as a marginal class threatened with the loss of its economic and social status, and their com­ plaints against almost every aspect and every institution of the Russian state with the sole exception of the autoc­ racy itself indicate that the provincial nobles certainly did not think of the state as being controlled by them­ selves or by men sympathetic to their interests. In the opinion of the men who wrote and signed the nobles' instructions of 1767, both the central and provincial administration, the bureaucracy, the courts, and the Table of Ranks all functioned in a manner that was damaging to the provincial nobility. The nobles' nakazy also contradict the view that the Manifesto of Peter III created a "privileged, landown­ ing class" or a "privileged leisure class."114 The over­ riding complaint of the nakazy was that under existing conditions, conditions that the state had created or was at least willing to tolerate, the "emancipated" nobility was prevented from becoming a landed gentry, prosper­ ous, happy, secure, and capable of playing an important role in provincial society. The Manifesto of Peter III had allowed the nobles to quit their role as servants of the state if they chose, but it had not given them any new 114 Such is the contention, for example, of Romanovich-Slavatinsky, p. 198, and of Richard Pipes, KaramzirCs Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia: A Translation and Analysis (Cam­ bridge, Mass., 1959), p. 15.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

role in which they might be happier or more success­ ful. The laws and practices of the state, they protested, gave the nobleman who had left the service no oppor­ tunity to be useful and productive in civilian life, and consequently those who had been superfluous in the service were no less superfluous in their retirement. For the poor nobleman, the "liberty" to which the upper nobility attached so much importance was a very restric­ tive and uncomfortable condition. As the instruction from Pskov explained: "The Russian nobility has only the freedom not to serve, and that alone, but having neither the resources nor the power for anything else, they live on their estates with a few poor possessions and many dependents; and even if someone wants to work at something that would be useful to the fatherland, his capability and his inclination are constrained to perish for want of means on the one hand and for want of per­ mission on the other."115 Far from feeling that they were part of the ruling class, the provincial nobles felt cut off from the state. Their dissatisfaction with existing conditions was frus­ trated by the fact that under those conditions they could do nothing but complain and appeal to the empress. Their future depended not upon themselves but upon Catherine II and on the way in which she chose to com­ plete the emancipation of the nobility. 115

SIRIO, xiv: 375-76.

Ill

The Politics of Usurpation

A POLITIC EVASION

T

AKEN as a whole, the reign of Catherine II ap­ pears in retrospect to have been the "golden age" of the dvorianstvo, a period in which the state committed itself to the support of the nobility and satis­ fied many if not all of the nobles' ambitions. Conse­ quently, there is a tendency among historians to see Catherine's favorable treatment of the nobles as one con­ sistent policy and to attribute that policy either to Cath­ erine's personal predilections or to political exigencies that compelled a usurper to buy the support of the no­ bility in order to remain on the throne.1 Such an inter1

For examples see I. A. Porai-Koshits, Ocherki istorii russkago dvorianstva ot poloviny IX do kontsa XVIII veka (SPB., 1874), p. 165; A. A. Kizevetter, "Pervoe piatiletie pravleniia Ekateriny II," Sbornik statei posviashchennykh P. N. Miliukovu (Prague, 1929), pp. 309-25; Sir Bernard Pares, A History of Russia (N.Y., 1937), p. 239; and Dukes, p. 165. A number of other historians, on the contrary, believe that there was considerable tension between Catherine and the nobility during the first decade or so of her reign. For examples see Paul Miliukov, Ocherki po istorii russkoi kultury, HI (Paris, 1930), 371; G. Gukovsky, Ocherki po istorii russkoi literatury XVIII veka: dvorianskaia fronda ν literature 1750 kh—1760 kh godov (M., 1936), passim; Μ. V. Pokrovsky, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen in Izbrannye proizvedeniia, II (M., 1965), 149; Georg Sacke, "Zur Charakteristik der gesetzgebende Kommission Katharinas II von Russland," Archiv fiir Kulturgeschichte, xxi, no. 2 (1931), 161-91.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility pretation, however, fails to account for the fact that virtually all of the legislation on which Catherine's reputation as the benefactress of the nobility is based was enacted in the 1770s and 1780s, by which time her possession of the throne was established and relatively secure, whereas little if any of it dates from the 1760s, when her position was relatively insecure and conces­ sions to the nobles would have made more sense politi­ cally. Contrary to what one would expect if one as­ sumes that political insecurity underlay Catherine's treatment of the nobility, one finds that in the first years of her reign Catherine resisted the demands of the nobles for greater rights and privileges and refused to separate privilege from service to the state. That she was able to do so in spite of her political insecurity is both an indication of her political skills and a telling comment on the power of the nobility, which is often thought to have dominated Catherine and her govern­ ment. The legal status of the nobility was already a volatile political issue when Catherine seized the throne in June 1762. In 1760, the Legislative Commission that the empress Elizabeth had set up to codify and revise the laws of the empire had come under the domination of Roman Vorontsov and a group of nobles who sought to turn the new law code into a vehicle for the enhance­ ment and elevation of the nobility. In its proposed draft of the new code, the Legislative Commission had in­ cluded a chapter that defined the rights, privileges, and obligations of the dvorianstvo in a manner that was ex­ ceedingly favorable to the interests of the nobility. Chapter Twenty-Two of the law code, as drafted by Vorontsov and his associates, would have established the dvorianstvo as a closed corporation or estate (so-

The Politics of Usurpation slovie), freed from compulsory service and endowed with exclusive economic privileges, including monopo­ lies on the ownership of land and serfs, on the sale of agricultural products, on the ownership of metallurgi­ cal enterprises and glass factories, on the building of new factories of any kind, and on the manufacture and sale of alcohol.2 Beneficial to the nobles, Chapter Twen­ ty-Two ran counter to the interests of the state: it would have ruined much of the merchant class, on which the state depended for much of its revenue; it would have reduced the already limited opportunities for social mo­ bility, of which the state was historically both the bene­ ficiary and defender; and it would have subsidized the incompetence of many nobles by stifling the initiative of enterprising commoners. Putting the interests of the state above those of the dvorianstvo, the government of Peter III rejected all of Chapter Twenty-Two except for its proposal to abolish compulsory service. The Senate also rejected parts of it on 27 February 1762, when it allowed the merchants to build new factories employing hired labor while forbidding them to purchase serfs.3 Rebuffed in its attempts to win approval of Chapter Twenty-Two, the Legislative Commission continued its work under the chairmanship of Roman Vorontsov and awaited instructions from the new empress. Although rejected by Peter III, Chapter Twenty-Two remained available as one answer to the questions about the fu­ ture of the nobility that had been raised by the Mani­ festo on the Liberty of the Nobility, an answer that had the support of most of the lower and middle nobility and some members of the upper nobility as well. Privately Catherine opposed the ideas embodied in 2 Rubinshtein, 3 Ibid.

IZ, xxxvm: 238-40.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

Chapter Twenty-Two of the code drafted by the Legis­ lative Commission. She hated monopolies and believed that they ruined a nation's economy.4 Regarding the le­ gal status of the dvorianstvo, Catherine believed that the nobility existed for the benefit of the state, not the other way around, and therefore was opposed to the extension of privileges that were not related to the serv­ ice of the state or the benefit of the nation. In the per­ sonal notes on the subject of "nobility" that she wrote in the early 1760s, Catherine examined the position of the nobility from the utilitarian standpoint of a head of state, wondering how best to manage and utilize that class so as to derive the greatest benefits for the state and the nation. Attempting to determine the essence of nobility, the common factor that entitled certain men to membership in the privileged class, Catherine compiled a list of sixty-nine different categories of nobility that were to be found in the various states of Europe. Her categories included hereditary nobles, paternal nobles, personal nobles, nobles by patent, nobles of the sword, nobles of the robe, city nobles, and many others. Re­ viewing her list, she concluded that in every case nobil­ ity was a distinction conferred by a head of state on those who had performed some service in the interest of the state. She also compiled a list of twenty-three privileges enjoyed by members of the nobility: it in­ cluded titles, decorations, distinctive costumes, land tenure, and other rewards, but not the kind of privileges that Vorontsov and his associates had sought to bestow on the dvorianstvo.B The same attitude was revealed in Catherine's reac­ tion to the Manifesto on the Liberty of the Nobility. She * Memoirs of Catherine the Great, p. 370. s

TsGADA, f. 10, d. 19, pp. 497-512.

The Politics of Usurpation

later recalled that she had first heard of its promulga­ tion as she was on her way to attend a memorial service for the late Empress Elizabeth. Suddenly Prince Dashkov had rushed up to her, crying tears of joy, and told her that the tsar had given the nobles their freedom. Coldly and sarcastically Catherine had asked him, "Had you been serfs until now?" In private she noted that "the nobles were all agog about their new freedom and had forgotten that it was owing to their army service that their ancestors had acquired the ranks and property which they themselves had now inherited."8 Upon coming to power, Catherine had to decide whether to confirm or repeal the legislation of Peter III, including the Manifesto on the Liberty of the Nobility. She disapproved of that Manifesto because it went against her belief that legal privileges should always be linked with public service and utility. If the nobles were not compelled to serve, some of them were certain to become social parasites, consuming the resources of the nation yet contributing nothing to its well-being. Furthermore, it was still not certain that a sharp in­ crease in the demand for manpower might not at some future date leave the state with a shortage of servitors. Had she been completely free to decide the issue, Cath­ erine most likely would have repealed the Manifesto. To do so, however, would have been dangerous politi­ cally, for the Manifesto was very popular with the higher nobility, whose political influence was greater than that of any other group in society. It would have been especially dangerous for Catherine at that time since her possession of the throne was still tenuous and depended on the good will of the guards, the leading statesmen, and the nobles of the court and the capital. β

Memoirs of Catherine the Great, p. 377.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

Her dilemma was noted by the French ambassador, who informed his government that "the tsarina still has not confirmed the decree of Peter III on the subject of 'liberty.' She has promised to ratify that bequest. Sen­ sible people are not at all in favor of her carrying out that formality since she would prove that that false grant of liberty is itself precarious, but the tsarina is aware of all that she gains for herself and her successors by promising to carry it out."7 Catherine's own aware­ ness of her difficulty was indicated in a memorandum that she sent to Nikita Panin in February 1763. "The nobles are muttering because their liberty has not been confirmed," she wrote, "therefore we must not forget to take some action."8 That "action" was taken on 11 February 1763. Under pressure to take a step that she considered unwise, Cath­ erine, like many administrators before and after her, moved to evade that pressure by appointing a commis­ sion to study the problem and make recommendations. Under the circumstances, it was a masterful move. In the first place, the appointment of a commission made it possible for Catherine to avoid making any immediate decision of her own while reminding the nobles that their liberty had not been forgotten. It also gave her time in which to establish herself more firmly in power before she accepted responsibility for making a contro­ versial decision. The appointment of a special commis­ sion on the status of the nobility also enabled Catherine to take that issue out of the hands of the Legislative Commission: in the same month that she appointed the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility, Catherine 7 Quoted in V. A. Bil'basov, lstoriia Ekateriny Vtoroi, (Berlin, 1890), 220. 8 SIRIO, vii: 231.

Ii

The Politics of Usurpation

ordered that the papers of the Legislative Commission be sent to the Academy of Sciences for preservation. Though it retained a nominal existence, the commission headed by Roman Vorontsov lost its practical signifi­ cance.9 However, Catherine appointed Roman Vorontsov's brother Michael to the new commission, and by instructing the new commission to produce "a new guar­ antee of the favor of the monarchy" and by implying that the Manifesto of Peter III was inadequate, she held out the hope that part or all of the program drafted by Vorontsov and his associates might still be adopted. Finally, in setting up the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility, Catherine chose the same eight men that she had previously nominated for membership on the Imperial Council. That council still had not been created, but by turning the important question of the nobility's status over to those same eight men, Catherine was able to sustain their hopes for power and influence in the same manner that she was sustaining the hopes of the Vorontsovs and of the nobility as a whole. It was by sustaining hopes through the use of such techniques that Catherine avoided the fate of some other monarchs of eighteenth century Russia and secured her possession of the throne. For that reason, Catherine's handling of the nobility's emancipation from compulsory service must be considered in the larger context of her struggle to survive as Russia's ruler and to establish and consoli­ date her control over the state. THE IMPERIAL COUNCIL

During the first eighteen months of her reign, Cath­ erine's personal authority over the government was cirβ

Rubinshtein, IZ, xxxvni: 251.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

cumscribed by her need to placate the ambitions of others and retain the support of the men around her. Having come to power by means of a coup d'etat, the new empress had no legitimate claim to the throne. Since Catherine had no connection to the ruling dynasty other than her marriage to the man she had forcibly deposed, her rule at the outset was based upon de facto possession of the crown and depended upon the contin­ ued loyalty and support of the men who had helped her win it. That loyalty was not to be taken for granted: for the most part her co-conspirators had supported Catherine because they saw in her an instrument for furthering their own ambitions and for replacing a rule they detested with one that might be more to their lik­ ing. United, the men who had elevated Catherine II to the throne might easily have dominated the new empress and, through her, the government of Russia. Consider­ ing the precedents in Russian history since the death of Peter the Great, it would not have been unreasonable to expect the new empress to be a figurehead who would allow others to wield the actual powers of the monarchy. That had certainly happened in the case of Catherine I, and, to a lesser degree, in the cases of Anna and Eliza­ beth, the other tsarinas of the eighteenth century. What saved Catherine II from the fate of Catherine I was the fact that the men who had brought her to power were divided among themselves—that and Catherine's abil­ ity to maintain a balance of power among them. The division within the ranks of Catherine's support­ ers was personified by the rivalry between Nikita Panin and Gregory Orlov. It was a conflict of policy as well as personality. Panin was one of a group of men who had come to regard themselves as professional states-

The Politics of Usurpation

men. As such, they believed that governmental affairs should be conducted in an orderly, institutionalized manner through established channels by experienced professionals like themselves. What they opposed was personal despotism on the part of a monarch and the domination of the government by "accidental people," men from outside the governing elite whose power was derived from personal connections to the monarch rather than from experience or expertise, men like Menshikov, Biron, Shuvalov, and other favorites who had domi­ nated the government of Russia at various times during the eighteenth century. Peter III had offended the pro­ fessional statesmen and had threatened them by dimin­ ishing the authority of the Senate and replacing that traditional authority with new ones in which the role of the Russian governing elite was to be much less im­ portant, by establishing a police network responsible to the person of the emperor rather than to the regular institutions of government, and by staffing his govern­ ment with personal favorites, including a number of his German relatives.10 That Panin and his associates con­ sidered the overthrow of June 1762 a revolution against Peter III rather than a revolution in favor of Catherine II was evident in his proposal that Peter III be replaced by his young son Paul, with Catherine acting only as regent.11 Gregory Orlov, on the other hand, was the lover and presumably the favorite of the new empress. A poor and 10 Raeff, AHR, LXXV: 1302-10. On the views of Panin and his associates see also David Ransel, "The 'Memoirs' of Count Miinnich," SR, xxx, no. 4 (December 1970), 845. 11 Memoirs of Catherine the Great, p. 342; E. R. Dashkova, Memoirs of the Princess Dashkaw, Lady of Honour to Cath­ erine II, ι (London, 1840), 60.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

obscure officer in the Preobrazhenskii Regiment, Orlov's importance lay in the great popularity that he and his four brothers enjoyed among the guards. Mistreated by Peter III and threatened with transfer away from the capital and replacement by Holsteiners, the guards regiments had been brought over to Catherine's side by the Orlovs and had supplied the armed might that in­ sured the success of her coup. Orlov's ambition, there­ fore, was the opposite of Panin's: he cherished hopes of becoming the new favorite, of dominating Catherine and, through her, the state. The full extent of his ambi­ tion in that regard was revealed in his proposal that the widowed Catherine become his wife.12 Disunity among her associates made it possible for Catherine to play one of them off against the other, re­ tain the balance of power, and consolidate her own posi­ tion. As Chechulin has correctly observed, Catherine's dependence on the men around her as a group did not mean that she was dependent on any one individual or faction.13 After the coup, the political situation was fur­ ther complicated by the inclusion in the government of some statesmen who had served Peter III and some who had served Elizabeth. Among the former were A. I. Glebov, and the brothers Michael and Roman Vorontsov, and among the latter la. P. Shakhovskoy and A. P. Bestuzhev-Riumin. The inclusion of those statesmen not only broadened the base of Catherine's government, it also diluted her dependence on the men who had brought her to power and increased the contests for per12

Bil'basov, n: 296. On the split between the factions sup­ porting Catherine see Ransel, SR, xxx: 844-45. 13 N. D. Chechulin, Proekt Imperatorskago soveta ν pervyi god tsarstvovaniia Ekateriny II (SPB., 1894), pp. 9-10.

The Politics of Usurpation

sonal and factional advantage, for the rivalry between Glebov and Shakhovskoy and between the Vorontsovs and Bestvizhev was easily as strong as the rivalry be­ tween Panin and Orlov. In their competition the various rivals and factions tended to negate each other, and in blocking each other's ambitions, they preserved Cather­ ine's independence. Thus Panin's plan to establish a regency was vetoed by other members of the conspiracy against Peter III, including the Orlovs, and Gregory Orlov's scheme of marrying the new empress was blocked by widespread opposition within the govern­ ment, with Panin in particular vowing that "Madame Orlov will never be the empress of Russia."14 It was in this context that Catherine, who needed to sustain the hopes of all factions, considered the creation of an Impe­ rial Council. Less than two months after the coup d'etat of 28 June 1762, Catherine indicated that she planned to create an Imperial Council, a governmental institution that would serve as an intermediary between the monarch and the Senate and play an important role in managing the af­ fairs of state.15 A decree ordering the creation of such 14 Bil'basov,

n: 296. On the internal struggle among Cath­ erine's supporters and the alignment of persons and factions therein see Ransel, SR, xxx: 844-45, and his previous article "Nikita Panin's Imperial Council Project and the Struggle of Hierarchy Groups at the Court of Catherine II," CSS, iv: 454-55. 15 The first mention of the Imperial Council appears in a decree of 31 August 1762 recalling A. P. Bestuzhev-Riumin from exile and restoring him to favor. It read in part: "Above all We name him First Imperial Councillor and first member of Our new Imperial Council to be established at Our court." SIRIO, vii: 143.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

a council was drawn up by Nikita Panin and signed by the empress on 28 December 1763, but it was never put into effect. As described in Panin's project, the Imperial Council was to be a sort of collegial cabinet that would oversee and manage all of the affairs of state at a level immediately below that of the autocrat but above the Senate and all other agencies of government. It was to consist of six to eight members appointed by the mon­ arch. Four of those members were to be in charge of specific areas of government: foreign affairs, internal affairs, the army, and the navy. To simplify the admin­ istrative channels through which the council was to di­ rect the state, the Senate was to be divided into six departments, originally entitled "ministries" in Panin's first draft but subsequently changed to departments at Catherine's command. The council was to be the only direct link between the sovereign and the state admin­ istration and every law, every decree, and every decision was to be signed both by the sovereign and by the ap­ propriate member of the council.18 By channeling the power of the autocracy in such a manner, the Imperial Council would limit personal intervention in the affairs of state and eliminate interference by favorites or "acci­ dental" people. Historians such as Solov'ev, Bil'basov, and Kliuchevsky have seen the proposed creation of the Imperial Council as an attempt, originating with Panin, to limit the power of the autocracy and turn control of the state 16 Both

drafts of Panin's project, together with related memoranda and a discussion of the proposal were published in SIRlO, vii: 200-221. An English translation of the final draft is available in Marc Raeff, Plans for Political Reform in Imperial Russia, 1730-1905 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), pp. 53-68.

The Politics of Usurpation

over to an oligarchy or an aristocracy.17 That interpre­ tation, however, has been effectively countered by Chechulin and Ransel,who have shown rather convincingly that Panin was in no position to force Catherine to ac­ cept anything against her will. Pointing to the memo­ randum that Panin submitted along with his project, Chechulin even argued that the idea of creating an Im­ perial Council had originated with Catherine herself and that Panin had drafted his project in response to her request.18 Having rejected the contention that Cath­ erine had signed Panin's project under duress, Ransel offers the alternative explanation that Catherine con­ ceived of the project in strictly administrative terms as a means of reforming the procedures of government. In his opinion Catherine eventually rejected Panin's proj­ ect out of deference to the opinions of others, including General Villebois, who saw the Imperial Council as a device that would limit the autocracy and incline the government toward aristocracy or oligarchy. While he doubts that Catherine was persuaded by these argu­ ments, Ransel believes that she was unwilling to pro­ ceed in the face of such outspoken opposition.19 Ransel's interpretation is possible but not entirely persuasive. Of the four opinions that Ransel cites, those of Bestuzhev-Riumin and one of the Vorontsovs ex­ pressed reservations, not objections, and the fact that Bestuzhev and one of the Vorontsovs were to be ap­ pointed to the council was likely to persuade them to favor its creation. The other opinions, one from an un17 Solov'ev, XIII : 141-50; Bil'basov, ir. 135-43; V. 0. Kliuchevsky, Kurs Russkoi Istorii, ν (Μ., 1937), 21. For further examples see Ransel, CSS, iv: 443, n. 1. 18 Chechulin, pp. 3-4. " Ransel, CSS, iv: 447-50.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

known source and the other from Villebois, seem hardly sufficient to dissuade Catherine from a course of action to which she had committed herself when she signed the project. Ransel is undoubtedly correct in discounting the possibility that these opinions opened Catherine's eyes to threats of which she herself had been una­ ware at the time she signed the project, for it is diffi­ cult to believe that Catherine could fail to understand the political implications of any document.20 But if Catherine was not naive, neither was she impetuous. Why then did she sign Panin's project and draw up the list of members who were to be named to the Impe­ rial Council before she had asked Villebois and the others for their advice? If Catherine found it unwise to ignore that advice, did she think it any less unwise to raise the hopes of Panin and the others and then dis­ appoint them? The theories of Ransel and Chechulin fail to account for the fact that Catherine's handling of the Imperial Council affair was totally out of keeping with her habitual caution in such matters. Solov'ev and Bil'basov had no such difficulty in explaining her behav­ ior. They believed that Catherine always opposed the project but that she signed it to appease Panin and then deliberately delayed its implementation until she felt secure enough to repudiate it. Chechulin in particular could not accept that interpretation because he believed that Catherine herself had proposed the creation of the Imperial Council. He failed to consider the possibility 20

Ibid., p. 450. An impressive example of Catherine's po­ litical sophistication is the use that she made of Montesquieu in drafting her Instruction to the Legislative Commission. See F. V. Taranovsky, "Politicheskaia doktrina ν nakaze Imperatritsy Ekateriny II," Sbornik statei posviashchennyi M. F. Vladimirskomu-Budanovu (Kiev, 1904), pp. 44-86.

The Politics of Usurpation

that Catherine might have wanted to avoid the imple­ mentation of a reform that she herself had proposed. And yet, given the political situation that had resulted from the coup of 28 June 1762 it is entirely possible that Catherine could have proposed the creation of the Imperial Council, signed Panin's project, and named the eight members with a total lack of sincerity, that the whole affair was a political ploy, a promise that she had no intention of keeping. As described in Panin's project, the Imperial Council would not have limited the power of the monarch so much as it would have shared the exercise of that power with the members of the council. The council was to have been subordinate to the autocrat, a point that the project made explicitly clear,21 but in the absence of personal intervention by the ruler it would have been the most important institution of government and would have managed the affairs of state. In effect, the creation of the Imperial Coimcil would have institution­ alized and perpetuated the existing relationship be­ tween Catherine and the members of her government, a relationship characterized by cooperation between the empress and the men around her. Given the unsettled political situation in which Catherine's personal author­ ity had not been clearly established, her willingness to 21

Article 4 states: "The Imperial Council is nothing but the institution in which We labor for the sake of the Empire." Article 6 states: "The establishment of this Imperial Council has and cannot have any other purpose than to enable the sovereign to extend his personal concern to all aspects of the state in order to legislate for the best interests of the common weal." Article 11 states: "From this it may be seen that noth­ ing may issue from the Imperial Council except over the mon­ arch's own signature." Translation from Raeff, Plans for Po­ litical Reform, pp. 66-67.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

create a body like the Imperial Council, a willingness that was common knowledge in government circles, was a politically significant gesture, an indication that she did not intend to govern tyrannically as did Peter III or through favorites as did Anna and Elizabeth but would govern in close association with her important statesmen and share the direction of state affairs with them. In view of those circumstances, Catherine's han­ dling of the Imperial Council affair should not be sep­ arated from her need to sustain the ambitions of the men whose disenchantment with her rule was to be feared. It was clearly in Catherine's interest to reassure her collaborators of the security of their positions by promising to create the Imperial Council. The close connection between the political situation at court and the proposed creation of the Imperial Coun­ cil was reflected in the list of members that Catherine had nominated. As envisioned by Catherine, the council would have epitomized the kind of coalition government that she had maintained since coming to power. Her nominees were: A. P. Bestuzhev-Riumin, K. G. Razumovsky, M. L. Vorontsov, la. P. Shakhovskoy, Ν. I. Panin, Z. G. Chernyshev, M. N. Volkonsky, and G. G. Orlov.22 Five of the proposed members had helped raise Catherine to the throne; one (Vorontsov) had been as­ sociated with Peter III; and two (Bestuzhev and Sha­ khovskoy) had held high office under Elizabeth; Panin and Orlov were rivals, as were Vorontsov and Bestu­ zhev, yet all of them were being promised an important position in Catherine's government and, therefore, all would have reason to support that government and to support Catherine. Also consistent with the hypothesis that Catherine 22 SIRIO,

vii: 201, 232.

The Politics of Usurpation

wanted certain people to believe that she was planning to create an Imperial Council without really wanting to create it was her conduct after 28 December 1762. Hav­ ing signed Panin's project and nominated the members of the council, Catherine took no further steps toward implementing the project, but she did not terminate the affair quickly with an explicit rejection. On the con­ trary, she allowed Panin and the others to believe that the Imperial Council, or at least the idea of cooperation between monarch and statesmen that it embodied, was still alive. As Chechulin has shown, Panin's project was still being discussed and opinions on it were still being solicited as late as 8 February 1763.23 And, on 11 Feb­ ruary, Catherine named the same eight men that she had proposed for membership on the Imperial Council to the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility. The identity of membership between the council and the commission is obviously more than a coincidence. In the absence of direct evidence, two explanations for that identity are possible: either Panin's project had been rejected and the appointment of the same eight people to the new commission was a consolation award to soften the blow to their ambitions, as Ransel suggests, or the project had not been explicitly rejected and the appointment of those eight men to the new commission was being offered as an interim substitute to keep them from becoming impatient. In either case, Catherine's action of 11 February was intended to placate and re­ assure the men nominated for membership on the Im­ perial Council by giving them a major issue to deal with and thus keep them occupied and confident that they were to play an important role in Catherine's gov­ ernment. The problem of what to do about the Mani23

Chechuliii, pp. 5-6.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

festo of Peter III thus became entangled with the ques­ tion of the Imperial Council and with the still delicate relationship between Catherine and the top officials in her government. THE COMMISSION ON THE FREEDOM OF THE NOBILITY

The decree of 11 February 1763 establishing the Com­ mission on the Freedom of the Nobility contained the following statement of the commission's purpose and objectives: The former Emperor Peter III gave the Russian nobil­ ity its freedom, but as that act still restricts that free­ dom in several respects more than the general welfare of the fatherland and of Our service may presently re­ quire, in view of the already altered position of the goveftiment and the upbringing of the younger gen­ eration of nobles, We order you who are gathered to­ gether at Our court to examine that act, and, in order to bring its contents into better competition, to consult among yourselves by what special, particular ruling of Ours the Russian nobility might receive for poster­ ity a new guarantee from Our hand that Our mon­ archy is well disposed toward it. And so that a rea­ soned policy might be the basis for all of this, it is necessary, in view of the right to freedom that has been conferred upon the nobles, to institute certain articles which would direct their love of honor to Our benefit and to that of our beloved fatherland.24

Catherine's instruction to the commission was ambig­ uous and, in some respects, deceptive. In the first place, Z i SIRlO, vii: 232-33; also PSZ no. 11735.

The Politics of Usurpation

although her private comments and the last sentence of her instruction to the commission indicated that Cather­ ine disapproved of the Manifesto of Peter III because it had abolished compulsory service in an irresponsible manner, the first part of the instruction strongly sug­ gested that Catherine disapproved of the Manifesto be­ cause it had not gone far enough in conferring liberty upon the nobles. Secondly, although Catherine had res­ ervations about the privileges that the Manifesto had given the nobles, her mention of "a new guarantee that Our monarchy is well disposed toward it" and of bring­ ing the contents of the Manifesto "into better comple­ tion" implied that Catherine wanted to confer additional privileges on the nobility. Thirdly, there was some in­ consistency between the first sentence, which implied that the state might have even less need to compel the nobles to serve than Peter III had thought, and the last sentence, which expressed concern that the freedom given the nobility might damage the interests of the state unless some action were taken to limit it. Lastly, the phrase "certain articles which would direct their love of honor to Our benefit and to that of our beloved fatherland" was as vague and open to interpretations of all kinds as the phrase "a new guarantee that Our monarchy is well disposed toward it." Was the empress suggesting that the state should offer additional rewards to those nobles who volunteered for state service and thus in effect discriminate against those who did not? Perhaps, but not necessarily. Or was Catherine suggest­ ing that the state create a new role outside the service in which the nobility could make itself useful to the state and to the nation? That interpretation was like­ wise possible. The ambiguity of Catherine's instruction to the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility re-

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

sembles, on a smaller scale, the ambiguity of her more famous instruction to the Legislative Commission of 1767. The ambiguity of both appears deliberate, for Catherine was quite capable of making herself under­ stood when she wanted to. Her instructions to the gov­ ernors-general of 1764, for example, were clear, precise, and detailed. The differences between the two types of instructions represent differences of intention. Orders like her instructions to the governors-general were statements of positions that she had taken, of decisions that she had made and was prepared to implement. Her instructions to the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility and to the Legislative Commission on the other hand, were issued far in advance of a final decision on the topics they covered. Instructions of that type en­ abled Catherine to raise controversial issues and discuss them in a general, abstract way without having to take a clear, and therefore assailable position on them. The lack of clear and precise instructions enabled the members of the commission to formulate their own pro­ posals for redefining the status of the dvonanstvo. At least two of them, Vorontsov and Bestuzhev, submitted written proposals for the commission's consideration. Vorontsov proposed that the state stop treating all no­ blemen alike and reward them according to their de­ serts. In his opinion the decision to serve or not to serve should be left up to the individual nobleman, but those who chose to serve should be treated better than those who chose not to and those who continued to serve should be treated better than those who retired early. Just what rewards ought to be attached to service was not spelled out in Vorontsov's proposal. He was more specific, however, about the way in which the upper nobility, which he identified with the possession of aris-

The Politics of Usurpation tocratic titles, should be separated from the mass of ordinary noblemen. Princes, he thought, should be given as many as 5,000 serfs to insure their status, and counts and barons should be given a smaller number in proportion to the importance of their titles. He fur­ ther proposed that the status of the upper nobility be defended by entailing the estates of aristocratic fam­ ilies. In effect, Vorontsov's plan would have divided the dvorianstvo into an aristocratic elite, whose status was preserved by the state, and a service gentry whose wealth and privileges would depend in large measure on his service to the state. To make certain that privi­ leges granted by the state were not wasted, Vorontsov proposed that the provision of the Manifesto that al­ lowed a Russian nobleman to serve a foreign govern­ ment be repealed.25 The proposals of Bestuzhev-Riumin agreed in some respects with those of Vorontsov and differed in others. Like Vorontsov, Bestuzhev was in favor of distinguish­ ing nobles who served the state from those who did not. He urged that precedence in all matters be given to nobles who had served a minimum of seven years and had attained officer's rank. Those who avoided service entirely should, in Bestuzhev's opinion, be denied per25LOII,

f. 32, d. 400, pp. 206-8. Rubinshtein, p. 251, strongly implies that M. L. Vorontsov submitted to the Com­ mission on the Freedom of the Nobility a program of economic privileges similar to the program that had been drafted by the Legislative Commission under the chairmanship of his brother, but a look at what M. L. Vorontsov actually proposed would have shown Rubinshtein that he was wrong. Although Rubin­ shtein mentions Bestuzhev's proposal, he seems strangely ig­ norant of Vorontsov's. Had he consulted it, he would have had to change his interpretation of the Commission on the Free­ dom of the Nobility.

Ill

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

mission to purchase land. As for new privileges that might be conferred upon the nobility, Bestuzhev pro­ posed that the nobles be given unlimited authority over their serfs, greater control over their land, the right to a trial in all criminal cases, the right to be defended in such cases by an advocate of one's own choosing, free­ dom from torture, and security against the confiscation of one's property. To prevent retired noblemen from sinking into a life of indolence and isolation, Bestuzhev recommended that the provincial nobles be enrolled in a corporate organization that could play an active role in local affairs. Officers elected by that organization could settle disputes among its members and could look after the affairs of noble widows and orphans. Through their organization, the local nobles would also elect the public officials of the uezd and thus fill the administra­ tive posts with retired servicemen. By participating in local government, he argued, nobles who had retired from the service could make themselves useful to the state and promote their own interests at the same time.26 The majority of the commission, however, did not believe that additional enactments to reconcile the lib­ erty of the nobility with the interests of the state were 26 Bestuzhev's proposals are discussed in Solov'ev, xm: 222-23 and in Korf, p. 9. The ambiguity of Catherine's in­ struction to the commission is well illustrated by these two discussions. Solov'ev claimed that "Bestuzhev understood the meaning of Catherine's instruction: find a means of attracting the nobility to state service in the absence of obligatory serv­ ice." Korf, on the other hand, saw no connection between Catherine's instruction and Bestuzhev's proposals and claimed that Bestuzhev was simply championing the cause of greater freedom and autonomy for the dvorianstvo. In Korf's opinion, Bestuzhev wanted ". . . self-government for the nobility and the separation of the nobility from the central government.''

The Politics of Usurpation

necessary, and the proposals that Vorontsov and Bestuzhev had offered for making the one more compatible with the other were discussed and rejected.27 Although the commission acknowledged in its report that its aims were "to rid the freedom of the nobility from restriction and unite that freedom with service to the fatherland," the report was concerned almost exclusively with the first of those objectives.28 The commission explained that efforts to encourage the nobles to enlist in the serv­ ice were unnecessary because the nobles would continue to serve the state of their own free will: '. . . for no other reason, but only from a deeply rooted and visible love of honor, which does not limit the freedom of the nobility in any way, but from which every self-respecting nobleman, seeing himself able in his youth, not only wants to serve, but refuses to re­ main home for any reason, accepting service as a favor that is awarded only once. A small number of nobles who live in poverty and isolation are still not included in this, but in time they will undoubtedly follow the example of those who are well brought up and will be awakened by those rights that Your Imperial Majesty will give to the entire nobility.'29

Although the commission found it unnecessary to strengthen the ties between the nobility and service, it 27

Vorontsov's recommendations were discussed on March 5 (SIRlO, VII: 238). The date on which Bestuzhev's recom­ mendations were discussed is not known. 28 The commission's report is published in SIRIO, vn: 23864. The original manuscript is in TsGADA, f. 10, d. 20, pp. 1-37. Other documents pertaining to the work of the com­ mission are to be found in TsGADA, f. 16, d. 235. 29 From the preface to the report of the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility, SIRIO, vii: 238-39.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

offered several proposals for completing the freedom of the nobility and assuring it of the favor of the mon­ archy. After specifying the means by which noble sta­ tus could legally be acquired—inheritance, the personal grant of the sovereign, and service—the commission's report restated the nobleman's right to decide for him­ self whether he would serve and for how long, the only difference between serving and non-serving nobles being that the former would be entitled to a salary (articles 1-6). With respect to foreign service and emigration, the commission's report disagreed entirely with the view of Vorontsov and recommended that Russian nobles be given complete freedom to travel abroad and to enter the service of foreign governments (articles 7-8). The report implied that the experience and education that the nobleman could gain abroad would benefit Russia upon his return, but it also recommended that a noble­ man be allowed to sell his estate to the government and emigrate abroad, never to return, if that were his wish (articles 9-12). In the opinion of the commission, no nobleman should ever be imprisoned without a trial nor be denied the right to name another nobleman as his advocate. Under no circumstances should a nobleman convicted of a crime be subjected to corporal punish­ ment, nor should his family be made to suffer through the confiscation of his property. By the same reasoning, the children of a convicted nobleman ought not to be tainted in any way with their father's crime (articles 13-17). The report also proposed that every nobleman be allowed to do as he wished with his own property without interference from the state. That included the right to pass it on to his heirs in whatever manner and proportion he might desire (articles 18-21). The report of the Commission on the Freedom of the

The Politics of Usurpation Nobility reflected the position and outlook of its authors. In thinking about the Russian nobility, they thought primarily of men like themselves, of the high nobility that was wealthy, educated, and politically and socially prominent. Their families did enter the service for love of honor, but they were virtually assured of honor, high positions, and other rewards. The same could not be said of all noblemen. Similarly, the civil rights that the commission proposed to confer on the entire nobility were important primarily to the members of the govern­ ing elite, the group that was involved in politics and court intrigue, the group whose members often found themselves in trouble when their faction fell into dis­ favor or when the monarch they had supported was overthrown in one of the palace revolutions that were so frequent in eighteenth century Russia. The civil rights mentioned in the commission's report were de­ signed to protect men like the members of the commis­ sion from the consequences of a fall from favor: they would protect the accused from arbitrary reprisal, they would protect his family from harm, and, should worse come to worse, they would enable a man fallen from favor to leave the country unharmed and in possession of his wealth. It was the governing elite rather than the dvonanstvo as a whole whose members might consider emigration just as the sons of the elite were the ones who were interested in going abroad to study or to enter the service of a foreign state. Though not unwelcome, the rights that the commission sought to secure for the entire nobility were largely irrelevant to the nobles who were really affected by the emancipation, the relatively poor nobles of the provinces. Whereas the commission's report showed no concern about the allegedly small number of noblemen who were living in poverty and

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility isolation, the nobles' nakazy of 1767 were interested mainly in that group, which, according to some of them, constituted a majority of the dvorianstvo. The nobles who were to write the instructions of 1767 were not concerned about studying abroad or entering the serv­ ice of foreign governments; they were concerned about the absence of schools in the provinces and the conse­ quent failure of their sons to make successful careers in the service of the Russian government. Indeed, the only significant overlap between the report of the Commis­ sion on the Freedom of the Nobility and the nobles1 na­ kazy of 1767 was the desire for increased property rights, an assertion of the one interest that virtually all nobles, regardless of their station, had in common. On 18 March 1763, five weeks after its appointment, the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility submit­ ted its report to the empress. Its recommendations, how­ ever, did not meet with her approval. In her instruc­ tions, Catherine had told the commission that a sound policy required the reinforcement of the tie between the nobility and the state. In its report, however, the commission had replied that in reality no such reinforce­ ment was necessary. Having thus ignored Catherine's major concern, the report had recommended greater rights and privileges for all nobles. Instead of telling the empress what to do with nobles who did not serve the state, the commission had told her what she could do for the nobles, especially for the kind of noblemen who ordinarily had no desire to quit their posts. Having failed to suggest a substitute for compulsion as a means of directing the mass of nobles into the service of the state, the commission had proposed that members of the elite, the most desirable recruits for that service, be allowed to travel abroad, to enter the service of foreign

The Politics of Usurpation

governments, and to emigrate from Russia. In the mar­ gins of the report Catherine wrote comments denigrat­ ing the commission's recommendations on foreign travel and emigration and portraying the nobleman traveling abroad as a frivolous, self-indulgent, pleasure-seeking vagabond.30 For seven months Catherine took no action on the commission's report. Those who were interested in its fact were held in suspense. Then, on 11 October, she sent the report back to the commission with instructions that another version was to be prepared.31 The mem­ bers of the commission, however, were unwilling to make a second effort without some clearer indication of the empress's wishes. Accordingly, on 15 October, they sent Catherine a memorandum asking her to spell out her objections to the first report and to state her posi­ tion on the status of the nobility. "We dare to inform Your Majesty," they wrote, "that laws cannot be com­ posed without knowing exactly and in detail those lib­ erties which Your Majesty generously wishes to confer upon the dvorianstvo," and concluded by saying, "We await Your Imperial Majesty's royal decision on these matters."32 Catherine made no reply. The matter had reached an impasse. The commission was unable and unwilling to proceed without clear and detailed instructions, but if Catherine were to have stated clearly what her position on the status of the nobility was, the job would have been done, and there would have been no need for a commis­ sion. For the time being the effort to answer the ques­ tions raised by the Manifesto of Peter III had come to an end. 30 Solov'ev, xiii: 224. 31 SIRIO, vn: 265. 3 2 SIRIO, VIi: 265-66.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

Although the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility had failed to solve the problems raised by the Manifesto, it had served its purpose in another sense. It had reassured both the nominees to the Imperial Council and the nobility as a whole that they had not been forgotten; it had averted pressure for a decision on the nobles' emancipation from compulsory service; and it had given Catherine time to consolidate her posi­ tion as head of the government. By the time she re­ turned the report to the commission, Catherine was already more secure upon the throne and more confident in her exercise of power.33 THE CONSOLIDATION OF POWER

Her rejection of the report of the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility was the first open indication that Catherine II did not intend to share the autocrat's personal responsibility for the management of govern­ mental affairs with her close collaborators. The final indication was the Senate reform of 15 December 1763, which ignored the proposals of Nikita Panin for depart­ ments headed by Imperial Council members and sub­ ordinated the Senate directly to the monarch and her agent, the procurator-general of the Senate. As envis­ aged in the Imperial Council Project that Panin had drafted, the Senate would have been divided into de33

On Catherine's consolidation of power see V. A. Petrova, "Politicheskaia bor'ba vokrug senatskoi reformy 1763 goda," Vestnik Leningradskogo Universiteta, v m , no. 2 ( 1 9 6 7 ) , 57-66 and V. G. Shcheglov, Gosudarstvennyi sovet ν Rossii ν osobennosti ν tsarstvovannii Imperatora Aleksandra I, n (Iaroslavl', 1892), 54-58. For the effects of that struggle on Russia's foreign policy see Ransel, SR, xxx: 850-51.

The Politics of Usurpation

partments headed by one man, whose position would have been tantamount to that of a minister; indeed, Panin's first draft had referred to the divisions of the Senate as "ministries." According to Panin, the depart­ ment heads, together with other members without port­ folio, would have comprised the Imperial Council, which would have resembled a collegial cabinet. In the actual reform, however, the Senate was divided into six collegial departments, all of which were placed under the supervision of one man, the procurator-general, and his assistants. The procurator-general, in turn, was di­ rectly subordinate to the empress. The reformed Senate, therefore, remained a bureaucratic extension of Cather­ ine's personal rule. Associated with the Senate reform of 1763 were sev­ eral changes of personnel that also served to strengthen Catherine's personal control over the government. For the first eighteen months of her reign, the new empress had worked almost exclusively with statesmen who had risen to prominence under Elizabeth or Peter III or who had taken part in the coup of 28 June 1762. Late in 1763 and early in 1764, however, she began to place new men in positions of importance in the government. Four new members were added to the Senate, N. P. Sheremet'ev, N. A. Korf, M. P. Skavronsky, and A. I. Ushakov, all of whom were thought to be loyal to Cath­ erine personally.34 Other changes of personnel resulted in the demotion or dismissal of men who had very recently held positions of great importance. D. V. Volkov, the close adviser and personal secretary of Peter III failed to ingratiate himself into Catherine's government and instead accepted appointment as governor of the fron­ tier province of Kazan'. Bestuzhev-Riumin lost a strug 34 Petrova,

op. cit., p. 62.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

gle with Panin over foreign policy and was removed from the government. In December M. L. Vorontsov, who no longer held any post of importance, left the country. In January Chernyshev was strongly repri­ manded by Catherine and told of her displeasure with his conduct, a rebuke he survived and eventually recov­ ered from. Finally, in January 1764, Glebov, the close associate of Peter III, who had retained the post of procurator-general of the Senate in Catherine's govern­ ment, was dismissed. The Senate reform had made the procurator-general the most important official in the government, and it was essential, therefore, that Cath­ erine fill it with a man of her own choosing who would act as her personal agent. Accordingly, in February 1764 Catherine named A. A. Viazemsky to replace Glebov. Thirty-six years old at the time of his appoint­ ment, Viazemsky was the first of Catherine's talented discoveries. From 1764 until his death in 1795, Viazemsky served as intermediary between Catherine and the Senate and directed the internal affairs of the em­ pire. Tireless, incorruptible, and unquestioningly loyal to the empress, he was a perfect choice for the office. Catherine's actions in late 1763 and early 1764 amounted to a personal takeover of the government, a sequel to the coup of June 1762. Some of the men on whose support she had depended in the early days re­ mained in positions of power and importance: Panin's influence in foreign affairs was unrivaled after the dis­ missal of Bestuzhev, and Orlov remained her favorite for several years more, receiving wealth, honor, and im­ portant responsibilities, but they did so as subordinates, not associates or colleagues. Catherine's subsequent re­ lationship with them was described in the secret instruc­ tion that she sent to Viazemsky in February 1764 as he

The Politics of Usurpation

prepared to assume his duties: "You will find two par­ ties in the Senate," she wrote, "but from my side a sound policy requires that neither be respected in the least, but treat them with firmness and they will dis­ appear more quickly; I have watched them with one eye always open, [and] have used these people for one mat­ ter or another according to their abilities."35 The significance of the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility should not be exaggerated: it failed to solve the question raised by the Manifesto, and was probably intended chiefly as a diversionary tactic. Nev­ ertheless, the history of the commission points to a num­ ber of important points about Catherine's policy toward the Russian nobility. First, a comparison of the com­ mission's report with the nobles' nakazy of 1767 reveals that the nobility was not a unified political force with a political program and a common set of goals. Secondly, the fact that Catherine, in power for less than eighteen months, could reject a proposal on nobles' rights sub­ mitted to her by eight prominent noblemen who were also important figures in the government should serve to sever the connection that some historians have tried to make between her political insecurity as a usurper and her later policy that favored the interests of the nobility. Finally, the commission's acceptance of Cath­ erine's rebuff with only the slightest remonstrance indi­ cates that those nobles whose political support really mattered were either unable or unwilling (probably both) to force Catherine to expand the rights and priv­ ileges of the nobility. Far from acting as the agents of a resurgent nobility, the guards and the important s s SIRIO, vii: 346. It is clear from the context of the memorandum that the two parties to which Catherine was referring were the factions of Panin and Orlov.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility statesmen appear to have been far more concerned with how Catherine treated them as individuals and as guardsmen and statesmen than with how she treated the nobility as a class. The superficial theory of an ascendent nobility wringing political concessions from an autocrat who was politically insecure does not fit the fact of Catherine's reign, and the explanation for her treatment of the dvorianstvo should be sought else­ where.

The Legislative Commission

"COME, LET US REASON TOGETHER" HE next attempt to redefine the legal status of the dvorianstvo was made in conjunction with the Legislative Commission that Catherine convened in 1767. Unlike the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility, however, the Legislative Commission was to deal with that issue in the context of a general reform and reorganization of the empire. Russia's domestic problems were so intertwined that any attempt to solve one of them was certain to affect the others. Any change in the status of the nobility, for example, would affect the other classes and many of the state's institutions. Rather than a series of piecemeal reforms, therefore, Catherine now aimed at nothing less than a comprehen­ sive and coordinated reconstitution of the state and the nation. She seems to have understood, however, that a reform of that magnitude had no chance of success without the cooperation and approval of her subjects, and so to win them she summoned representatives of the various classes of subjects and of the various insti­ tutions of government to a legislative commission, hop­ ing that they could be led to agree on a plan for the reform and improvement of the empire. "We cannot but assume," she wrote, "that every honorable man of the community wants or will want to see his native land at the acme of happiness, glory, security, and tranquility."1

T

1 PSZ

no. 12949, article 2. An English translation of Cath-

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

She hoped that the Legislative Commission, if properly inspired and guided, would arrive at solutions to Rus­ sia's internal problems in a manner that would generate a minimum of conflict and a maximum of public sup­ port. The immediate, ostensible purpose of the Legislative Commission was the compilation of a new code of laws. The last codification had been carried out in 1649, and since then laws, decrees, regulations, directives, orders, and other guides to proper and legal conduct had piled up chaotically without any system and often without any knowledge or understanding of the relationship of one enactment to another. None of the reforms of Peter the Great, for example, had ever been digested or assim­ ilated into a comprehensive statement of the law. Such confusion and contradiction in the laws had added im­ mensely to the difficulty of governing Russia, and the need for a revised, up-to-date codification had long been recognized. In 1700 Peter the Great had appointed a commission to revise the code of 1649 and bring it into agreement with more recent enactments. Although the commission eventually published a collection of all the laws that had been introduced since 1649, Peter was not satisfied with its work and appointed a new com­ mission in 1714. Nothing ever came of that commis­ sion, however, and in 1718 Peter abandoned the notion of revising the old code and bringing it up to date and appointed a commission that was ordered to draft an entirely new code of laws, using Peter's decrees and the example of other nations, especially Sweden, as models. erine's instruction to the Legislative Commission is available in W. Γ. Reddaway (ed.), Documents of Catherine the Great (Cambridge, 1931). On the Legislative Commission as an instrument of reform see Morrison, CSS, iv: 464-84.

The Legislative Commission

Thus, in addition to codifying and digesting existing legislation, the legislative commission was to become a vehicle for reform. It failed to achieve either result, however. Peter II added a new innovation by inviting the nobles to elect delegates who would participate in the work of his legislative commissions, but their reluc­ tance sabotaged his efforts. Expanding on that prece­ dent, Anna attempted to involve representatives of both the nobility and the mercantile class in the work of her legislative commission but was able to achieve no greater success than her predecessors. In 1754 Eliza­ beth made still another attempt to rewrite the law books, appointing eight men to a supervisory commis­ sion that was to direct the work of subcommissions. That commission actually composed a few articles of a new code—only to have them rejected by the empress. In 1761 Elizabeth convoked her second legislative com­ mission, ordering the nobles and merchants to elect representatives to it. Many of the expected delegates had never appeared, however, and those who did were often in violent disagreement over the conflicting inter­ ests of the nobles and the merchants. The delegates were finally sent home in January 1763, and the work of that commission was soon brought to a halt. Eliza­ beth's commission retained a nominal, vestigial exist­ ence until 1766, when it was formally disbanded and the convocation of the new commission was announced.2 2 For a detailed but superficial history of legislative com­ missions in eighteenth century Russia see V. N. Latkin, ZakonodatePnye komissii ν Rossii ν XVIIl st. (SPB., 1887). On Elizabeth's second commission see Morrison, CSS, iv: 467-69, and Rubinshtein, IZ, xxxvm: 228-32. Catherine's decree of 14 December ordering the convocation of a new commission is recorded as PSZ no. 12801.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

For the most part, therefore, Catherine's attempt to revise the nation's laws by means of a legislative com­ mission was a direct continuation of an effort that had been underway for more than half a century. Typically, however, she introduced a number of changes that made her commission different from its predecessors. One im­ portant innovation was the significance that she openly attached to her commission. Whereas previous commis­ sions had met in relative obscurity, Catherine promoted hers as the event of the century and did her utmost to focus the attention of the nation upon it. Her public statements proclaimed exaggerated hopes for its suc­ cess. Her orders required her citizens, exclusive of the serfs, to think about the commission and its work by having them meet together to draft instructions and elect delegates to the commission. She also ruled that the commission was to meet in Moscow, the old capital, the city that popular tradition associated with historic events such as the coronation of tsars and the composi­ tion of the law code of 1649.3 Finally, when all of the preparations had been completed, Catherine staged the opening of the Legislative Commission as a public cer­ emony with all of the pomp and fanfare appropriate to a momentous occasion. A second innovation that was not unrelated to the first was the provision for increased public participation in the work of the commission. Representatives of the nobility and the merchants had been summoned to every Legislative Commission since the days of Peter II and Anna, but neither group had shown any enthusiasm for their duties, and the delegates who arrived at the 3 On the symbolic significance of Moscow see Hans Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth Century Russia (Cam­ bridge, Mass., 1960), pp. 9-20.

The Legislative Commission

commission had generally been deficient in both num­ bers and ability. Catherine encouraged greater public participation in two ways. First, she expanded the suf­ frage and increased the number of delegates to be elected: the electoral law of 14 December 1766 called for the election of one delegate by each of the following constituencies: the officials in every department of gov­ ernment, the nobles of every uezd in which fifteen or more were registered as the owners of estates, the taxpaying citizens of every town, the owners of one home­ stead ( odnodvortsy ) and the state peasants ( chernososhnie) of every provintsiia, the cossacks of every command, and the non-Christian peoples other than Jews of every provintsiia where applicable. Secondly, the empress, aware no doubt of the great lack of inter­ est in previous elections, provided incentives for her subjects to seek election to the commission: every dele­ gate was to receive a salary, ranging from 400 rubles per year for nobles to 22 rubles a year for peasants, cos­ sacks, and heathens, an honorific form of address, a special insignia, immunity from arrest other than at the personal command of the sovereign, and the assurance that anyone who committed a crime against his person was to be punished twofold.4 Catherine's staging of the Legislative Commission as a public event was a departure from her original plan as well as from precedent. The law of 14 Decem­ ber 1766 passed through some seven drafts before the final version was revealed to the public. In the first draft, it had called for the delegates to be elected only from the nobles, merchants, and officials of the central and provincial administration. When the delegates had assembled, they were to have chosen five men to do the 4

PSZ no. 12801.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility actual writing of the law code. Only after the code had been composed was it to be voted on by the assembly as a whole before being sent to the empress for confir­ mation. The commission was to have met in St. Peters­ burg rather than Moscow, and the instructions from the throne were to have been transmitted to the dele­ gates in strictest secrecy.5 When contrasted with her original plan, Catherine's innovations take on added significance. The choice of Moscow rather than St. Petersburg as the site of the commission and the broadening of public participation strengthened the connection between Catherine's com­ mission and Russian tradition by recalling the zemskie sobory, the proto-parliamentary assemblages of the six­ teenth and seventeenth centuries. Not only had a zemskii sobor drafted the law code of 1649, but previous sobory had confirmed the accession of tsars like Boris Godunov and Michael Romanov who, like Catherine, were not of the royal line. Catherine's call for greater public in­ volvement in the work of the commission was both a means of reassuring her subjects that she did not intend to rule despotically or make major decisions without consulting them and a technique for developing a con­ sensus behind the reforms that were to emerge from the commission. Similarly, Catherine's instruction, on which she labored for more than two years, was much more than an ostentatious display of learning; it was a means of guiding the commission, of acquainting it with the best ideas available and provoking the kind of thought and discussion that could generate consen­ sus. A clue to Catherine's handling of the Legislative Commission is provided by the explanation that she her­ self later gave of the relationship between autocracy and β

Florovsky, pp. 8-12.

The Legislative Commission

public opinion. Having been told that her power was limitless and that her subjects appeared to obey her every order blindly and without question, Catherine re­ plied: "It is not so easy as you think. In the first place my commands are not carried out with exactitude un­ less it is convenient to do so. You know yourself with what care, with what circumspection, I proceed to the issuance of my legislation. I examine the circumstances, I consider the thoughts of informed sectors of the pop­ ulace, and I decide in conjunction with them the results that my decree should produce. When I am finally con­ vinced of the general welfare, I give my order and have the satisfaction of seeing what you term blind obedi­ ence. And that is the basis of my unlimited power. But you can be sure that they do not obey me when the order is not in line with their customs and when I would fol­ low one of my desires without thinking of the conse­ quences."6 More succinctly, she asserted in article 58 of her instruction to the Legislative Commission that in order "to introduce better laws, one must prepare the minds of the people to receive them." Elsewhere she had written: "Often it is better to inspire a reform than to enforce it."7 Catherine's willingness to consult others and to in­ clude them in the preparation of her reforms did not, however, mean that she was willing to share with any­ one the ultimate power to make the final decision. Her instruction to the commission insisted that power must be vested in the person of the autocrat. Indeed, as Taranovsky has shown, her instruction was an apology for a certain kind of autocratic rule. Since she had seized Catherine addressed these words to V. S. Popov, whose letter to Alexander I quoting them appears in RA, 1891, p. 5. 7 Memoirs of Catherine the Great, p. 386. β

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the throne by force and since any assertion of divine right or dynastic theory would therefore have been most inappropriate, Catherine took pains to justify her auto­ cratic rule in terms of natural law and the furtherance of the public welfare. To do so, she borrowed exten­ sively from the writings of French and German intellec­ tuals, especially Montesquieu, quoting them verbatim or paraphrasing them closely when their words suited her purpose and modifying or even reversing their meaning when they did not.8 She agreed that a monarch should consult both the wishes of his people and the welfare of the nation before making a decision, but in the final analysis, he and he alone must have the author­ ity to decide, especially in a state such as Russia. As she expressed it in articles 10 and 11 of her instruction to the commission: "The sovereign is absolute, for no authority save that which is concentrated in his person can act with a vigor proportionate to the extent of so vast a realm. . . . Every other form of government would not only be harmful to Russia but would prove to be its complete ruination." The organization of the Legislative Commission re­ flected Catherine's belief in consultative autocracy. Al­ though the delegates were called together for the pur­ pose of drafting a new law code, the empress and her agents retained control of the decision-making machin­ ery of the commission. Viazemsky was empowered to examine all of the proposals that were to come before the commission and reject any that he found contrary to the laws of God, the church, nature, the people, the state, or the family and thus was given great latitude to veto any proposal that might be unwelcome to the 8 Taranovsky in Sbornik statei posviashchennyi M. F. Vladimirskomu-Budanovu, pp. 44-86.

The Legislative Commission

sovereign. He was also to review the nominations for any office within the commission and could add addi­ tional nominees of his own choosing. What that meant in practical terms was apparent in the choosing of a marshal to preside over the commission. To the list of names nominated by the delegates Viazemsky added that of General A. I. Bibikov. In the balloting, Bibikov finished fourth out of five, but the three men above him in the tally, Gregory Orlov, Ivan Orlov, and Z. G. Chernyshev, all asked to be excused. Catherine allowed them to withdraw and then declared that Bibikov had been elected marshal. Six months earlier, the French diplo­ mat Rossignol had informed his government that Bibi­ kov would be chosen to preside over the Legislative Commission.® The power of the delegates to affect the content of the law code was also limited by the commission's rules of procedure. The General Assembly of the commission, in which all of the delegates took part contained more than five hundred members and included peasants, cossacks, and even some Asiatic tribesmen who did not understand the Russian language. Thus the General Assembly was much too large and unwieldy a body to initiate or compose the many articles that were to go into the proposed code of laws. Those functions were therefore delegated to subcommittees, called particular commissions, that were to be appointed in the following manner: the delegates to the General Assembly would nominate a certain number of its members, usually two or three times the number to be selected, and Bibikov and Viazemsky would then add one additional nomina­ tion each. The list of nominees would then be presented to the empress, who would choose from it the men who 9

SlRlO,

CXLi:

219.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

were to serve on the particular commission.10 In such a manner Catherine could be certain that Bibikov, Viazemsky, and cooperative delegates to the assembly would provide her with enough acceptable nominees so that she could simply overlook nominees in whom she lacked confidence. In all there were to be nineteen particular commis­ sions: sixteen to draft the articles of the proposed law code and three to supervise and coordinate the work of the others. The Analyzing Commission was to examine and place at the disposal of the other particular com­ missions the sources to be used in composing the arti­ cles of the new code: existing laws, foreign laws, the instruction from the throne, the instructions brought by the delegates from their constituencies, and the dis­ cussions of the General Assembly. The Expediting Commission was to edit the work of the other commis­ sions in order to make certain that the articles of the new code were correct and proper in grammar, spelling, and style. The Directing Commission, led by Viazemsky, was to control the content of those same articles, making certain that they were legal, logical, and in keeping with the purposes of the commission.11 Once they had been drafted, edited, and reviewed by the par­ ticular commissions, the articles proposed for inclusion in the new law code were submitted to the General Assembly for approval. Under Bibikov's supervision, the General Assembly could debate the proposals of the particular commissions and could vote either to accept them, in which case they would be sent to the empress for confirmation, or to reject them, in which case they would be returned to the Directing Commission. The Gen1 0 SIRIO, 11

iv: 67-69; Dukes, pp. 80-81. Beliavsky, pp. 176-78; Morrison, CSS, iv: 467-68.

The Legislative Commission

eral Assembly, however, had no authority to revise, add to, delete from, or otherwise amend any article brought before it. In effect, the delegates could reject an article and prevent its inclusion in the code, but they could not originate articles or even parts of articles on their own, a function that was carefully reserved for appointees of the crown. The positive influence of the General Assem­ bly on the content of the code was therefore limited to the discussion of issues and the reflection of public opin­ ion, both of which were to influence the particular com­ missions in their work. Such were the limits of Cath­ erine's concessions to public opinion: she did not want to go against the wishes of the public, but neither would she allow those wishes to lead her and the government into taking actions against their will and better judg­ ment. Instead, she hoped that after due consideration and discussion the representatives of the public would come around to her way of thinking and accept her wishes as their own. THE CLASH OF OPPOSING VIEWS

Of the many controversial issues that were to come before the Legislative Commission of 1767-1769, two in particular were crucial to the future of the nobility: the legal status of nobles and that of their serfs. Those two issues, moreover, were joined together by the still more fundamental problem of serfdom itself, a problem that had attained the proportions of a national crisis in the early 1760s. Conflict between serfs and masters had been intensi­ fied first by the strains of the Seven Years' War and then by the Manifesto of Peter III. Those noblemen who had abandoned their military careers in 1762 had turned

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

their attention to the management of their estates in an effort to increase the profitability of their one remain­ ing source of income. That effort, undertaken by re­ tired army officers accustomed to military discipline, could not help but inflict greater hardships and discom­ forts on an enserfed peasantry that was already over­ burdened. The peasants in turn reacted not only to the demands of their masters but also to the emancipation of their masters from state service. The Manifesto of Peter III had destroyed the formulation that the serfs serve the nobles and the nobles serve the state, which had traditionally been accepted as the justification for serfdom. In the peasant villages news of the Manifesto of Peter III was accompanied by rumors that that act had also freed the serfs from bondage, or that the eman­ cipation of the serfs was imminent, or that Peter III had been planning to emancipate the serfs but that the nobles had murdered him to prevent him from carrying out that plan. In that tense and volatile situation con­ flict flared into violence and rural Russia was engulfed by warfare between the classes. Catherine II later wrote that at the time of her accession "almost all of the ec­ clesiastical and factory serfs were openly disobedient of authority and those belonging to the nobles were be­ ginning to join them." She added that she detected "a great discontent" with existing conditions, as evidenced by the thousands of peasants who presented her with petitions asking for a redress of grievances.12 In its de­ cree of 8 October 1762, the Senate also observed that "many peasants, having been enticed by the lies and rumors that have been spread by useless and deceitful persons, have renounced their duties to their rightful 12

RA, 1865, pp. 470-71.

The Legislative Commission

masters and to the authorities to which they are subject, and have taken to folly and adventure."13 Upon coming to power Catherine II was at once con­ fronted with the immediate crisis of peasant rebellion and with the more profound and lasting problem of serfdom itself. In her accession manifesto of 3 July 1762 she had attempted to reassure the serf owners and to dispel the false rumors that were circulating among the peasants, announcing: "We intend to preserve in­ violate the estates and the property of the nobility and to hold the peasants to the obligations that they owe."14 Those words were soon backed up by the dispatch of infantry and artillery, freed from external combat by Russia's withdrawal from the Seven Years' War, against the rebels. General Bibikov, in particular, distinguished himself by his energetic and brutal prosecution of mili­ tary operations against peasant jacqueries, and it was A. A. Viazemsky's "pacification" of the Ural iron work­ ers that first attracted the attention of the empress and led to his appointment as procurator-general of the Sen­ ate. In January 1765 Catherine took further repressive action by allowing the serf owners, at their own discre­ tion, to turn troublesome peasants over to the state for transportation to Siberia.15 Although she acted ruthlessly to suppress peasant violence, Catherine was not unaware of the evils and dangers of serfdom. At the same time that her armies were suppressing peasant revolts, she rejected a pro­ posal of the Senate that would have forsworn all state interference in the relationship between masters and serfs and given the nobles unlimited authority over their " PSZ no. 11678 (8 October 1762). " PSZ no. 11593. 15 PSZ no. 12311 (17 January 1765).

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

peasants.16 That refusal was significant, for at the be­ ginning of her reign Catherine, who would enact a similar provision in 1785 and finally go down in history as the monarch who had completed the dehumanization of the Russian serf, apparently harbored intentions that were very different from the policy that she was ulti­ mately to adopt. Among her miscellaneous notes on various subjects, Catherine recorded the following ob­ servations on serfdom: "It is against the Christian reli­ gion and justice to make slaves out of men born free. All peasants who were formerly slaves are freed by a council in Germany, France, Spain, etc. To carry out such a revolution would not make one popular with the landowners, filled as they are with obstinacy and prej­ udice. But here is an easy solution; to make a rule from now on for anyone selling land, that at the moment the new owner takes possession, all serfs are declared free. In about a hundred years all the land, or at least most of it, will have changed hands and thus we should have a free nation."17 The same feeling that serfdom was morally wrong was reflected in Catherine's comment on Sumarokov's essay on serfdom. Arguing in favor of serfdom, the poet had written "Our base people have no noble feelings." In the margin of the manuscript Catherine had responded "Nor can they have under present conditions."18 Expressions of sentiment in that vein should not be taken too seriously perhaps, but the same cannot be said of Catherine's memorandum to Viazemsky in which she described the misery of the 16 Beliavsky, pp. 92-93. In a memorandum to Viazemsky, Catherine termed that proposal 'Vindictive." Os^mnadtsatyi vek, istoricheskii sbornik, in (M., 1869), 390. 17 Memoirs of Catherine the Great, pp. 379-80. 18

SIRIO,

x: 86.

The Legislative Commission

serfs as a clear and present danger to the security of the state. Describing the problems confronting the gov­ ernment, she wrote: 8. The situation with the nobles' serfs is so critical that there is no escape except through secrecy and humanitarian enactments. 9. A general emancipation from that inhuman and intolerable burden will not be forthcoming, but since it [serfdom] is not constrained by the law nor by any­ thing else, it follows that every minor matter may drive them to despair; therefore to issue the vindic­ tive law that he Senate has dreamed up will not lead to harmony. Amen. 10. I ask you to be very careful not to hasten the calamity that will come soon enough in any event unless measures are not taken in new legislation to avert its dangerous consequences. 11. If we do not agree to reduce this inhumanity and ameliorate the unbearable position of the human race, then 12. sooner or later they will do it against our will.19 From such statements it appears that Catherine wanted to mitigate the evils of serfdom without arous­ ing excessive expectations among the serfs or hostility among the nobles. Believing also that it would be futile for her to try to impose her own will against the wishes of the public, which in this case was all but synonymous with the nobility, she set out to influence public opin­ ion, to create a climate of opinion in which the nobles might agree to certain reforms that would improve the lot of the serfs. Important in that respect was the cre­ ation of the Free Economic Society. Chartered in 1765, 19

Os^mnadtsatyi vek,

hi: 390.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

the Free Economic Society was to promote the develop­ ment of the Russian economy through the spread of use­ ful information and ideas; consequently, much of its work consisted of trying to acquaint Russians with the economic techniques and institutions of western Eu­ rope, where serfdom no longer existed but where eco­ nomic productivity was much greater than in Russia. In 1765, within months of the founding of the Free Economic Society, Catherine proposed that it offer a prize for the best essay on the question "Whether it is of greater benefit to society for the peasant to own land or only movable property, and how far should his rights to this or that property be extended?"20 More than 160 essays were submitted by Russians and western Euro­ peans, and the publication of most of the essays in the pages of the society's journal provided its readers with a discussion of the question of master-serf relationships from a wide variety of viewpoints. First prize was awarded to Professor Bearde de l'Abaye of Aachen University, who proposed that the serfs should own very small plots of land as their private property. Such ownership, he argued, would benefit the masters even more than it would benefit the serfs, for, tied to his vil­ lage by the ownership of his small plot, the serf would be less inclined to run away, even when the master in­ creased his burdens, and since the serfs plot would be too small for his subsistence, he would have to rent additional land from the noble or work for him as a hired laborer, which would make him more productive and easier to exploit than he would be under the exist20 Romanovich-Slavatinsky, p. 383; V. V. Oreshkin, VoPnoe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo ν Rossii 1765-1917 (Μ., 1963), pp. 59-63; A. I. Khodnev, Istoriia imperatorskago voPnogo ekonomicheskago obshchestva (SPB., 1865), pp. 26-30.

The Legislative Commission

ing system.21 Cynical and unhumanitarian, l'Abaye's es­ say nevertheless presented the sort of argument that would be most likely to persuade Russian noblemen to agree to a law allowing their serfs to own private prop­ erty—which may have been the reason for its selection as the best entry. Second prize was awarded to A. Ia. Polenov, who expressed far more concern for the wel­ fare of the peasants and less for the prosperity of the serf owners than l'Abaye. Polenov argued that serfdom was morally wrong, and that the state should correct its evils by giving the serfs education, the protection of the laws, and a stake in society in the form of property. If his proposals were adopted, he predicted that the nation would grow more prosperous and the state more secure.22 He did not maintain that the nobles would benefit from his proposals, only that they should not suffer losses that would be too great or too rapid. Though it awarded Polenov second prize, the Free Eco­ nomic Society refused to publish his essay on the grounds that it was too immoderate, a decision that it also made in the case of an essay that spoke too strongly in favor of serfdom and the authority of noble masters. Catherine's other attempt to influence public opinion and promote discussion of changes in the legal status of the serfs was her instruction to the Legislative Com­ mission. An earlier version of her instruction apparently contained statements and suggestions on the peasant question that her own advisers found too radical. Fear­ ing that such statements would provoke the delegates of the nobility and make them hostile to the empress, 21 Trudy voTnogo ekonomicheskago obshchestva k pooshchreniiu ν Rossii zemledeliia i domostroitePstva, vm (SPB., 1766), 51-52. 22 RA, 1865, pp. 504-41, 558-614.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

her advisers persuaded her to delete sections that seemed excessively provocative.23 What remained after the more extreme passages had been omitted or revised was an attack, not upon serfdom, but upon the undesir­ able consequences and dangers of peasant servitude in its present form. In articles 269-70, she condemned the lords' collection of revenue by means that impoverished the peasants and drove them from the land, concluding, "It is highly necessary that the law should prescribe to the masters a more judicious method of collecting their revenues and oblige them to levy a tax that tends least to separate the peasant from his house and family; by that means agriculture would become more extensive and the population of the empire would increase." A more extensive discussion of serfdom was pre­ sented in Chapter Eleven of Catherine's instruction, which avoided specific recommendations but which called the problem to the attention of the delegates and hinted at possible reforms. Chapter Eleven, which was one of the very few to have no title of its own, began by asserting the principle that in a society some must gov­ ern and others must obey. It then stated that since the welfare of all classes of citizens was the responsibility of the sovereign, "We are obliged to alleviate the situation of our Subjects to the extent that sound reason will permit." It then proceeded immediately to the subject of slavery, asserting that people should not be reduced to slavery except in the most extreme circumstances and then only for public rather than private benefit. "The civil laws," it went on, "ought to guard on the one hand against abuses of slavery and on the other against the dangers that may arise from it." Thus the first five 2 3 SIRIO , x: 75-80; xxvn: 175.

The Legislative Commission articles of Chapter Eleven established the justification for the state to interfere in the relationship between masters and serfs and regulate that relationship through its laws. Catherine then reminded the commission that Peter the Great had ruled that nobles who tortured their serfs were to be treated as lunatics and placed in the care of a keeper, and said that she did not know why that provision had never been enforced. She also con­ trasted the condition of slaves in Sparta and Rome with their condition in Athens, where they were protected by the law. Her next statement that "a great many slaves should never be enfranchised all at once nor by a general law" may have been a covert suggestion that the enfran­ chisement, i.e. liberation, of slaves through a gradual process might not be a bad idea, but if it was such a hint, it was certainly a subtle one. More direct was the suggestion that "a law giving some private property to a slave might be beneficial to the public welfare." Fi­ nally, the chapter on slavery concluded with the state­ ment: "However, it is still very necessary to eliminate those conditions that have incited slaves to rebel against their masters, but until those causes are determined it will be impossible for the laws to prevent occurrences of that kind even though the tranquility of both [mas­ ters and serfs] depends upon it." But what were the causes of peasant rebellion? That, it seems, is what Catherine wanted the members of the commission to ask themselves. She seems to have believed that if the commission, and especially the delegates of the nobility, really thought about serfdom they could not help but see that the existing situation was very dangerous and that changes were in order. At the very least she hoped that the master-serf relationship would be governed by

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

law and that the new law code would recognize the serf as a citizen with certain legal rights, however minimal they might be. If Catherine had held serious hopes that the Legisla­ tive Commission could produce a program for easing the lot of the serfs that even the delegates of the nobility would support, those hopes were destined to disappoint­ ment, for although the lesser and middling nobles agreed with her assessment that the situation in the countryside was dangerous, their idea of corrective measures was the opposite of Catherine's. The legal status of privately owned serfs was not a separate item on the agenda of the Legislative Commission but came before the General Assembly as it discussed other is­ sues to which it was related. The future of serfdom was debated on two occasions, in May 1768 in the prelim­ inary discussion of law enforcement and justice and again in September 1768 in the debates on the project on the rights of the nobility. Support for reforming the institution of serfdom came from several commoners, especially the free peasant A. D. Maslov, but their an­ tagonism toward the nobility only produced hostility among the nobles' delegates, and Marshal Bibikov tried unsuccessfully to keep them out of the debates. Of the nobles themselves, only three, G. S. Korob'in, la. P. Kozel'sky, and L. N. Tatishchev, spoke out strongly against the evils and dangers of serfdom in its present form. Korob'in, officially the delegate of the Kozlov nobil­ ity, is suspected by Miliukov, Dukes, and others of be­ ing Catherine's mouthpiece, her instrument for testing the reaction of the commission to her own views.24 The 24Miliukov, HI : 326; Dukes, p. 120. On the other hand, Beliavsky, p. 210, rejects that suspicion outright. Basing his

The Legislative Commission

ideas that Korob'in propounded to the Legislative Com­ mission were indeed similar to those expressed by Cath­ erine in her instruction, and it is also true that Korob'in had been appointed to the commission after the man originally chosen by the Kozlov nobility had resigned. Moreover, if Catherine wanted the commission to con­ sider legislation that would affect the status of the serfs —and it is fairly certain that she did—she must have been growing impatient by May 1768 and may well have tried to prompt the delegates through an agent. The evidence tying Korob'in to Catherine is circum­ stantial and inconclusive, but if he was not consciously acting as her tool, he served her purpose all the same. The debate on serfdom actually began when the dele­ gate of the Liubim nobility, N. Tolmachev, broke into the discussion of law enforcement and court procedure to ask whether incidence of serf flight might be reduced by prohibiting the sale of individual serfs apart from their villages or at least apart from their families.25 In the ensuing argument over the causes of serf flight, three deputies of the free peasantry, Dziubin, Maslov, and Gridin, attributed the flight of peasants to the op­ pressive acts of the noble estate owners, and another free peasant, V. N. Kipensky, suggested that they regu­ late the labor duties that serfs owed to their masters.26 In reply, three noblemen, Glazov, Vyrodov, and Stearguments solely on Bibikov's respective treatment of the two sides, Beliavsky then goes on to argue (p. 248) that Catherine was in league with Shcherbatov rather than Korob'in. In the light of Catherine's recorded views on the nobility and on serf­ dom and of Shcherbatov's subsequent opposition to Catherine's policies, Beliavsky's allegation requires much more substantia­ tion than he has given it. 25 SIRIO, xiv: 123-24. 28 SIRIO, xxxii: 43, 50, 370-71, 399-400.

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panov, maintained that harsh, oppressive treatment of serfs by their masters was exceptional and was only a minor cause of peasant flights. The really important causes of serf flights, they insisted, were taxes and other exactions imposed by the state and the base character of the peasants themselves: their drunkenness, laziness, and lack of discipline.27 At that point Korob'in spoke up in rebuttal to his fellow noblemen, arguing that peasants ran away because the misery and unbearable conditions created by their masters left them no alter­ native. Cruel, demanding landlords were all too com­ mon, he asserted, and the law should set limits to their authority and to their exactions, not for the sake of the peasants alone, but for the prosperity and security of the entire nation. "The landlord's unlimited power over his serfs must be broken," he proclaimed, adding that "every serf owner should be informed that he can no longer demand from his peasants any more than is re­ quired by law." He further proposed that the serfs be allowed to own property of their own, outside the con­ trol of their masters. As justification for his proposals, Korob'in cited Chapters Eleven and Twelve of Cather­ ine's instruction.28 Korob'in's proposals were attacked as irresponsible by several delegates of the nobility. In reply, Kozel'sky, the delegate of the Dnepr Hussar regiment and the brother of an important Russian philosophe, voiced his support of Korob'in's ideas and in some respects went even further in offering proposals of his own. He argued that the tyranny that a master could exercise over his serfs should be tempered by the law and that it would be both proper and feasible for the state to regulate the « SIRIO, XXXH: 390-91, 395-96, 401-5. 28 SIRIO, xxxii: 408-10.

The Legislative Commission

amount of labor or money that a serf should have to de­ liver to his lord. Kozel'sky suggested that two days' labor per week would be appropriate, depending on lo­ cal conditions. He further proposed that serfs be given property rights not only to movable items but to land. If the serf had a stake in society, Kozel'sky asserted, he would be less inclined to run away and more likely to develop into a sober and responsible citizen.29 After Kozel'sky's speech and some replies by other delegates, the Legislative Commission turned its atten­ tion to other topics and did not debate serfdom again until it took up the question of the rights of the nobility. Catherine had asked the commission to compose a com­ prehensive article on the rights of the dvorianstvo, but typically her instruction had offered little indication of her own thinking. Chapter Fifteen, entitled "On the Nobility" defined "nobility" as "an appellation of honor, which distinguishes those who are adorned with it from all other people of inferior status." It explained that "Virtue with merit elevates people to the status of no­ bles," and said that nobility might be acquired through military and civil service, an apparent defense of the Table of Ranks. That chapter also asserted that nobility could be lost through conduct unbecoming to a noble­ man, such as treason, robbery, perjury, and fraud, but it said nothing specific about the prerogatives of the nobility other than that they should be based upon the essential attributes of nobility, which it listed as "virtue, honor, merit, love of and loyalty to country, and, con­ sequently, love of and loyalty to its sovereign." Following a preliminary discussion by the General Assembly in September 1767, the question of the nobles' status under law had been turned over to the Particular 29

SIRIO, xxxvi: 494-501.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

Commission on Civic Classes, whose membership is not known. The project drafted by that commission was then examined and revised by the Directing Commis­ sion, and on IO July 1768 Marshal Bibikov announced that the projected article on the rights and privileges of the nobility was ready for the consideration and ap­ proval of the General Assembly. The article that the Directing Commission presented to the General Assem­ bly consisted of two parts, the first defining nobility and the qualifications for membership in that class, and the second listing the rights and privileges of the nobility. The first part defined nobles as those people who were descended from noble ancestors or who had been en­ nobled for service by the monarch. Thus it endorsed the Table of Ranks, as Catherine's instruction had done. It also followed her instruction in listing the qualities of nobility and the crimes for which noble status could be rescinded. The second part of the project would have confirmed the nobles' freedom from compulsory service, requiring only that those who were serving or who had served be given precedence in all matters over those who had not served. By its provisions nobles would be free to travel abroad, to serve foreign governments, and to ask the government for permission to emigrate. In criminal cases the nobles were to be free from corporal punishment and were to have the right to a trial and to representation by a lawyer. As economic rights the sec­ ond part of the project listed exemption from taxation and the ownership of land, serfs, factories, and all game and fish taken on their land. Passing from personal to corporate rights, it allowed the nobles of every uezd to assemble, to elect a land court, to keep the archives of the local nobility, and to build and maintain a school.

The Legislative Commission

Finally it stated that the rights of the nobility were ex­ clusive to that class and to its members.30 Catherine must certainly have approved of the proj­ ect on the status of the nobility that was submitted to the Legislative Commission. She had selected the mem­ bers of both the Particular Commission on Civic Classes and the Directing Commission, and in the case of the latter, all five members, General Chernyshev, Ivan Orlov, Dmitry Volkov, Nicholas Murav'ev, and the bishop of Tver', were officials who depended on Catherine's favor and patronage. It is most unlikely, therefore, that any proposal that did not have Catherine's approval could have been presented to the General Assembly. One must wonder, therefore, why Catherine would have endorsed that project, having previously rejected the report on the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobil­ ity. In the first place, the project submitted to the Leg­ islative Commission toned down the objectionable pro­ vision giving nobles the right to emigrate, requiring them to ask the government for permission first, and it encouraged noblemen to serve by offering precedence in all matters to those who had entered the service vol­ untarily. It is also possible that Catherine had changed her own mind on the emancipation of the nobility. More probable, however, is the likelihood that Catherine was willing to make certain concessions in order to get the nobles to agree to some minor reforms of serfdom that were also embodied in the project. Article twelve of that project had listed as one of the rights of the nobil­ ity the right to own villages "in accordance with the law," and the Directing Commission had added a note explaining that the extent of the nobleman's power over i0 SIRIO,

xxxii: 575-85.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

the villages in his possession would be determined by the Particular Commission on Nobles' Estates. Article seventeen gave nobles permission to liberate their serfs individually and voluntarily, and article thirteen stated that noblemen would be allowed to convert their serf villages into free villages at their own discretion but could not convert free villages into serf villages. Articles fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen also spoke of "free vil­ lages" without defining that term although it appears from the context that they would be villages in which the lands would belong to the noble but the peasants themselves would be free. However timid they may ap­ pear in retrospect, those provisions were clearly aimed at a diminution of serfdom. The project on the status of the nobility, therefore, had the appearance of a compromise package in which provisions that would restrict and diminish serfdom were balanced by provisions extending the rights and privileges of the nobility in other directions. Though the delegates might object to specific provisions, it was hoped that they would accept the project as a whole. In bringing the project before the General Assembly Bibikov announced that it would be read through once and then the delegates would vote on whether to accept it or reject it. That ruling, however, produced a rebel­ lion among the delegates, and he was unable to carry it out. When several delegates rose to challenge that ruling and demand the right to debate each article at length before voting to accept it or reject it, they were rebuffed, but soon the clamor of dissatisfaction was so great that the session was adjourned. When the sessions resumed, Bibikov agreed to permit debate and voting on the individual items of the project. In the following thirteen sessions the individual articles of the project

The Legislative Commission

were attacked and denounced from all sides and any possibility of agreement or consensus was destroyed. On the one hand, a sizable group of commoners at­ tacked the project on the grounds that it was far too generous to the nobility. Professor Ursinus, the delegate from the town of Tartu, and I. Antonov, the delegate from the town of Iaransk, attacked hereditary distinc­ tion and its possession by descendants of noblemen who themselves "have displayed no service to the father­ land," claiming that it contradicted both Catherine's instruction and sound reason. They therefore proposed that the nobles should either enter the service or lose their status as nobles. The arguments of Ursinus and Antonov were endorsed by eight cossacks, three farmersoldiers, two odnodvortsy, and two free peasants.31 In subsequent debates, the commoners in opposition to the project attacked virtually every provision of it and sought to have the articles revised in a manner that would be much less favorable to the interests of the nobility. A sizable body of nobles' delegates, on the other hand, attacked every provision that seemed to them to be det­ rimental to the interests of the nobility. Those interests, they felt, were threatened by some of the project's pro­ visions and by commoners like Ursinus who wanted to make the project even more inimical to the interests of the nobles. Their leader, Μ. M. Shcherbatov, later wrote of the Legislative Commission: "Several of the cossacks and peasants sought in their proposals to take away the very air that the nobles and merchants breathed; the merchants sought to extend their rights at the expense of the noble landowners; and even the nobles, though they were moderate and confined their 31

SIRIO, xxxii: 183-85, 188, 210-211; xxxvi: 302.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

discussions almost exclusively to general principles dur­ ing the two years that the commission was in session, tried to usurp each other's rights."32 In Shcherbatov's view, the Russian nobility was a superior race of men.33 The valor and heroism of the nobility throughout Russia's history had not only dem­ onstrated the natural superiority of the nobles; it had also made Russia a great nation. To harm the nobility, therefore, would be tantamount to destroying the source of Russia's greatness. For the state to promote the inter­ ests of the peasants, the merchants, or any other class of commoners at the expense of the nobles, it would logically have to patronize people who were inferior and devalue those who were superior, thereby committing a violation of natural law that would inevitably lead to the ruin of Russia. On those grounds, Shcherbatov con­ demned the Table of Ranks and the ennoblement of com­ moners.34 He also opposed the provision of the project that spoke of the nobles' owning serfs "in accordance with the law." The nobles, he argued, should have com­ plete control over their peasants: not only was that their just due; it was also best for the nation. If some noble­ men mistreated their serfs, that was the exception rather than the rule; it was to be deplored, but it should be dealt with by the nobility itself and not by the state. In the same vein, Shcherbatov opposed those provisions of the project that would have allowed noblemen to liber32 Μ. M. Shcherbatov, "Razmyshleniia ο zakonodatel'stve voobshche," Sochineniia Shcherbatova, ι (SPB., 1896), 366. 33 See, for example, his speech to the commission in which he responded to the charge that all noblemen had been com­ moners at one time. SIRIO, iv: 193. 34 SIRIO , iv: 150-55.

The Legislative Commission

ate their serfs and those that spoke of "free villages." He argued that freedom for the serfs in any degree or form, even if it should result from the voluntary acts of noblemen, would be ruinous to society: freedom was contagious and difficult to arrest once it had begun to spread and develop; from even the smallest beginnings it would subvert and eventually destroy the principle of subordination on which Russian civilization was founded, and the result would be ruin and chaos, a new Time of Troubles.35 While members of the governing elite took a suspi­ ciously small part in the debates and the members of the Directing Commission in particular sat in silence, Korob'in became the chief defender of the project on the nobility. He defended the right of the nobles not to enter the service of the state, he defended the Table of Ranks, and he defended restrictions on the power of serf owners, voluntary manumission, and "free vil­ lages." Responding to Shcherbatov's attacks on the proj­ ect, Korob'in argued that voluntary manumission and the existence of free villages were not likely to harm either the nobles or the state and ought at least to be tried. He then lost his temper and made some remarks to Shcherbatov that were not recorded in the minutes but for which he was reprimanded by Bibikov. At that point, Tatishchev, the delegate of the Izium nobility and an official in the central administration, spoke up in favor of an emancipated peasantry, boldly asserting: "It is Her [Catherine's] wish that the serfs should be free." At that Bibikov sternly reminded Tatishchev that the commission was discussing the rights of the nobil­ ity and not the emancipation of the peasantry. Tati35

SIR10, xxxii: 83-85; xxxvi: 26-29.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

shchev then went on to argue that the abolition of serf­ dom was not likely to ruin the nobility since it certainly had not done so in England and other lands where it had been carried out. At that point Bibikov cut Tatishchev off, reminding the delegates that they were to speak about Russia, not England, and turned the floor over to Shcherbatov.36 Under the circumstances Bibikov's reprimands were discreet, for while the government hoped to bring master-serf relations under the jurisdiction of the state and to make small improvements in the lot of the serfs, it wanted to do so in concert with the nobles themselves and did not want to have itself associated with talk of emancipation or with the anti-noble faction within the commission. By September 1768 it was apparent that a majority of the nobles' delegates were hostile to the ideas of Korob'in, Kozel'sky, and Tatishchev. A con­ sensus had developed among the nobles' delegates but it was quite the opposite of the one that Catherine had hoped for. In a sense the commission had indeed served as a sounding board for Catherine's moderately pro­ gressive views on the serf question, and even if she was not pleased by what she heard, she now knew how mat­ ters stood. Previously Catherine had been aware that there were conflicting opinions about the future of serf­ dom, that some nobles favored reforms that would im­ prove the lot of the peasants while others were opposed, but the nobles' instructions to the commission and the speeches of the nobles' delegates made it clear that sen­ timents in favor of reform were limited chiefly to St. Petersburg, to the governing elite, and to the group that Druzhinin has aptly characterized as "the uppermost stratum of the nobility, which had accepted bourgeois 36 SIRIO, xxxvi: 26-28.

The Legislative Commission

notions about political freedom and civic equality,"37 whereas the great majority of noblemen were passion­ ately defensive about their serf rights and were strong­ ly opposed to any legal interference in the existing relationship between masters and serfs. The discussions of the Legislative Commission had uncovered the basic tensions and hostilities that divided Russian society, and the government recoiled from such divisiveness in fear of its consequences.38 On 6 October 1768 the debate on the status of the nobility was broken off and the project was returned to the Directing Com­ mission without comment or instruction. The General Assembly limped on in futility until 18 December 1768, when it was prorogued with the explanation that the outbreak of war with Turkey necessitated the postpone­ ment of its labors. The particular commissions, on the 37 "Prosveshchennyi absoliutizm ν Rossii," in Ν. M. Druzhinin, Ν. I. Pavlenko, and L. V. Cherepnin (eds.), Absoli­ utizm ν Rossii, XVIl-XVIII vv., sbornik statei k semidesiati-

letiiu nauchnoi i pedagogicheskoi dieteTnosti B. B. Kafengauza

(M., 1964), p. 433. Among the nobles and officials who pro­ posed legal restrictions on the serf owner's authority one can include—in addition to Korob'in, Kozel'sky, Tatishchev, and Polenov—the following: D. A. Golitsyn, diplomat and acade­ mician, Nikita Panin, Catherine's close adviser, Senator I. P. Elagin, and Jacob Sievers, the governor-general of Novgorod. On Golitsyn's views see I. A. Pashkov, Istoriia russkoi ekonomicheskoi mysli, ι (M., 1955), 519-21. On Panin's see Beliavsky, p. 302. On Elagin's see Druzhinin in Absoliutizm, pp. 433-44. On Sievers' see Karl Blum, Ein russischer Staatsmann: Des Grafen Jakob Johann Sievers Denkwiirdigkeiten zur Geschichte Russlands, ι (Leipzig and Heidelberg, 1857), 290-

91, 393-95. 38 These fears were expressed in Catherine's undated letter to Bibikov published in Zapiski ο zhizni i shluzhbe A. I. Bibikova (M., 1865), pp. 56-57.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

other hand, were given additional instructions and con­ tinued their work until 4 December 1774.39 With the dismissal of the Legislative Commission, Catherine's efforts to share responsibility for deciding the fate of the nobility came to an end. CATHERINE AND THE NOBILITY: THE PROBLEM

Although Catherine's efforts to redefine the status of the dvorianstvo through a legislative commission re­ sulted in failure, they had clarified the nature of the problem. The strict identity between membership in the nobility, service to the state, and privilege that had been forged by Peter the Great had begun to deteriorate by the 1760s and threatened to deteriorate even more in the future. As a result, the nobleman's place in society was becoming less and less clear. Since the time of Peter the Great, the Russian nobleman had been iden­ tified with state service and, consequently, with the state itself, but by the 1760s it was becoming possible to distinguish between the state and its agents on the one hand and the nobility on the other. Although an extensive similarity of interest remained, both the state and the nobles were aware that the two parties were currently set on different paths that would lead them farther and farther apart. The problem lay in the fact that the government of Catherine II and the rank and file of the nobility already had different interests and looked at the future of the nobility from two different points of view. 39 Lipinsky, ZMNP, CCLI : 233-36. On the work and ac­ complishments of the particular commissions after the dis­ missal of the General Assembly, see Morrison, CSS, iv: 48284.

The Legislative Commission

Catherine was not unsympathetic toward the nobil­ ity. In her private notes she once wrote: I must admit that though free of prejudice and of a philosophical trend of mind, I have a great inclination to respect families of ancient descent. I suffer when I see them reduced to poverty and long to re-establish them in their former condition. It would be possible to restore their former lustre by bestowing rank and decorations on the head of the family so long as he can claim some quality, and by granting him pensions and even land, according to necessity and position, on the condition that they should only be passed on to the eldest son and remain inalienable.40 Even in that statement, however, she had insisted that any man who would receive the favor of the state would have to "claim some quality." If that were true for the oldest and most aristocratic families, whom Catherine had in mind when she wrote that passage, what did it imply for those who were less eminent? Although she regarded a hereditary nobility as a valuable asset to a hereditary monarchy, Catherine did not believe that every single nobleman was therefore valuable to the state. In her private notes on nobility she had in fact written: "Too numerous a nobility makes a monarchic state less powerful," because "in time it comes to pass that a majority become poor," and a large, impoverished nobility was more of a burden than an asset.41 It ap­ pears, therefore, that even though Catherine valued blue blood for its own sake and believed that the nobil­ ity should receive favorable treatment from the state, 40

Memoirs of Catherine the Great, p. 379.

41

TsGADA, f. 10, d. 19, p. 496.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

she nevertheless placed a premium on individual talent and ability and ultimately on usefulness to the state. Having explained in her instruction to the Legislative Commission that autocracy was justified because it was essential to the general welfare and common good of the nation, she was not prepared to go beyond that for­ mula in justifying the privileged status of the nobility. The state and the nobility had many interests in com­ mon, and therefore Catherine was prepared to treat the nobles with consideration, to give them advantages, to wish them well, and to encourage them to public serv­ ice and to useful work. But the state also had other interests that did not coincide with those of the nobility, and where the two diverged, Catherine sought to pro­ mote those of the state without injuring those of the nobility any more than was necessary. The state had an interest in the development of a flourishing merchant class, whose activities and whose prosperity promoted the economic well-being of the nation and provided the state with revenue; it had an interest in the develop­ ment of a bureaucracy that would serve the interests of the state and not those of any particular class; it had an interest in allowing commoners of exceptional talent to contribute to the public welfare and in offering them incentives, including the possibility of ennoblement; and in the long run it had an interest in treating the privately owned serfs as citizens, protected by the law and governed by the state rather than the nobility. While Catherine wished to assure the nobles of "the favor of the monarchy," she was unwilling to guarantee their future well-being at the expense of the state's in­ terests. The state would treat the nobles as well as its interests permitted, but its own interests were to be paramount.

The Legislative Commission In return, many noblemen resented the independence of the state and its neglect of them and their present and future well-being. In their nakazy and their speeches to the Legislative Commission they seldom missed an op­ portunity to remind the state of all that their ancestors had done for it and of how much it owed to the nobility. Like the geese in Krylov's fable, they demanded better treatment because of what they were rather than be­ cause of what they could do. Confronted by a growing bureaucracy, upwardly mobile commoners, and an en­ terprising merchant class, and fearfully jealous of their serf rights, many noblemen wanted the state to change the direction in which it was moving and to serve the interests of the dvorianstvo by giving the nobles even greater advantages over other classes, by subsiziding the nobles, and by protecting them against failure and decline. It was that outlook that characterized what some historians have termed the dvorianskaia fronda, the "nobles' opposition" to Catherine and to the policies of the Russian government in the 1760s. Disagreeing with Kizevetter and others who saw Cath­ erine's favoritism for the nobility as typical of her entire reign, historians as diverse as Miliukov, Pokrovsky, Gukovsky, and Sacke have called attention to the fric­ tion and mutual dislike that characterized Catherine's relationship with certain elements of the nobility during the first ten years of her reign. Their interpretation is supported by the evidence of the nakazy and of the ses­ sions of the Legislative Commission, which show that even if Catherine had taken few if any overt moves against the nobility, many noblemen were nevertheless dissatisfied with the direction of government policy and were demanding a change in its treatment of the dvor­ ianstvo. Where those historians overstep the mark is in

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

trying to connect that opposition to Catherine and her policies with political factions or persons within the government. Miliukov is least guilty in that respect, but he does include the Vorontsovs among the opposi­ tion.42 Pokrovsky identified General Peter Panin, Nikita's brother, as a major figure in the nobles' opposi­ tion to Catherine.43 Gukovsky and Sacke went so far as to identify Nikita Panin, one of the highest officials in Catherine's government as the leader of the nobles' opposition.44 Neither the Panins nor the Vorontsovs can be con­ nected to the nobles' opposition within the Legislative Commission, however. Nikita Panin declined election to the commission and so played no part in its debates. With I. P. Elagin he was the author of a project that would have brought the master-serf relationship under the purview of the law.45 Even though it was quite gen­ erous to the landlords in allowing a maximum of four days' labor that could legally be demanded of the serf, such a project separated Panin from those nobles who wanted no legal interference in their serf rights at all. Peter Panin was elected to the commission as the dele­ gate of the Moscow nobility, but he made no effort to lead or even to join the nobles' opposition. In one of his few statements to the commisison, P. I. Panin agreed that harsh, oppressive treatment by noble masters was a major cause of peasant flight,46 a remark that would 42 Miliukov,

HI: 270. Izbrannye proizvedeniia, ii: 149-50. 44 Gukovsky, pp. 7-8, 124-53; Sacke, Archiv fiir Kulturgeschichte, xxx: 161-91. 45 Beliavsky, p. 302. 48 S. M. Solov'ev, "Rasskazy iz russkoi istorii XVII veka 1767 god," RV, xxxv: 314-17. 43Pokrovsky,

The Legislative Commission

place him in agreement with Korob'in rather than Shcherbatov. In his effort to link P. I. Panin to the nobles' opposition to Catherine, Pokrovsky cited the well-known fact that Panin and the empress disliked each other personally, but he neglected to mention the fact that P. I. Panin and M. M. Shcherbatov also dis­ liked each other.47 Roman Vorontsov, the other promi­ nent statesman whose name has been linked with the nobles' opposition, was probably the most likely candi­ date for leadership of that opposition. He had served as president of the last legislative commission and in that capacity he had originated the idea of emancipating the nobility from compulsory service and had drafted an article on the nobles and their privileges that was as favorable to the interests of the nobility as it was preju­ dicial to the interests of other classes. One might expect, therefore, that he would advance that same program at the new Legislative Commission; indeed, Rubinshtein claims that Vorontsov continued to work for his pro­ gram after it had been rejected, but in discussing Cath­ erine's Legislative Commission, Rubinshtein wrote that a program similar to Vorontsov's was put forward by "M. M. Shcherbatov and several other representatives of the nobility."48 What Rubinshtein carefully avoided mentioning was the fact that Roman Vorontsov served as a delegate to that commission without raising his voice to support the ideas that he had championed at the previous commission. In all probability his conduct at the Legislative Commission was not unrelated to the fact that he was later made a provincial governor-gen­ eral and that his two sons rose rapidly to important posts in Catherine's government. 47

V. Fursenko, "M. M. Shcherbatov," RBS, xxiv: 109. XXXVIII : 240.

48IZ,

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The very thought that Catherine would have toler­ ated within her government opposition of the kind that Sacke in particular has suggested is preposterous. By 1768 Catherine was in complete command of the Rus­ sian government.49 She had dismissed Bestuzhev and Glebov and had delivered a stern reprimand to Chernyshev. In 1772 she would even exile Gregory Orlov, the man to whom she was most indebted for her eleva­ tion to the throne, from the capital because he had a love affair with another woman. In that same year a conspiracy among the guards was rooted out and sup­ pressed.50 For an ambitious statesman it made no sense to identify oneself with the opposition to Catherine's policies or wishes. In that respect the example of R. L. Vorontsov is a clear contrast with that of the one states­ man of any note who did join and lead the nobles' oppo­ sition, Μ. M. Shcherbatov. A senator and the head of the Heraldry Office before the commission, Shcherba­ tov thereafter became discouraged with his slow ad­ vancement and with what he regarded as Catherine's neglect of his talent. Shcherbatov retired from govern­ ment service altogether and returned to Moscow, where he spent his time writing, among other things, criti­ cisms of Catherine and her policies that he had the good sense not to publish.51 49

For corroborating evidence, see the dispatch of the British ambassador to his government, published in SIRIO, xn: 335. 50Pokrovsky, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, II : 118-19. 51 No good biography of Shcherbatov has yet been written. The work of I. A. Fedosev, Iz istorii russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli XVIII stoletiia: M. M. Shcherbatov (M., 1967) is most unsatisfactory. Much useful information is provided in the introduction and notes to A. Lentin (ed. and trans.), On the Corruption of Morals in Russia by M. M. Shcherbatov (Cam­ bridge, 1969). See also the article in RBS, xxiv, cited above.

The Legislative Commission

The opposition to Catherine on the issue of the nobil­ ity's rights and privileges was not headed by any im­ portant statesman. Its spokesmen were not politicians but intellectuals like Shcherbatov, who was an histo­ rian and a political theorist, and Sumarokov the poet. Its adherents were not numerous in St. Petersburg but in Moscow and the provinces. Its headquarters was Moscow, where noblemen who held no important office but who nevertheless had considerable wealth and edu­ cation tended to congregate. By 1768 Catherine had united the government behind her leadership, but she remained unpopular in Moscow. In return, the empress despised the nobility of Moscow, of whom she once wrote, "The nobles who live there are excessively fond of the place, and no wonder: they live in idleness and luxury and become effeminate."52 On the whole, the members of the nobles' opposition were neither statesmen, nor intellectuals, nor members of the elite in any sense but members of the middle and lesser nobility, who lived neither in St. Petersburg nor in Moscow but on their estates in the provinces. Prom­ inent in the nobles' faction within the Legislative Com­ mission, for example, was I. M. Kondarev, the man who had organized the small landlords of Zaraisk into a voting block in order to defeat Senator Mel'gunov in the elections to the commission.53 Indicative also is the argument that A. Alfimov, the delegate from Kurmysh, made against Tolmachev's suggestion that the law for­ bid the sale of serfs apart from their villages and fam­ ilies: Alfimov objected that such a law would ruin the 52

Memoirs of Catherine the Great , p. 365.

53 See,

for example, his speech against restricting the au­ thority of landlords over their serfs, SIRIO, xxxn: 60-61, or his speech on the causes of serf flight, xxxn: 429.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

owners of small estates [my italics].54 Similarly, when Korob'in insisted that the noble landlords were to blame for the flight of so many peasants, four of the nobles who took issue with that statement, Opochinin, Nekliudov, Pokhvisnev, and Glazov, attacked Korob'in's cred­ ibility on the grounds that he had spent very little time in the countryside and knew next to nothing about con­ ditions in the provinces.55 It was above all the senti­ ments of such nobles that intellectuals like Shcherbatov rationalized and cast in the form of a philosophical argu­ ment. Unlike Shcherbatov, however, the average Rus­ sian nobleman knew little about natural law or history, but he did know that he had less income than he thought he needed, that commoners were encroaching on his prerogatives from all sides and were threatening to devalue or destroy them, that his serfs were lazy, stubborn, and not to be trusted, and that it would not go well with him if his power over them were weakened or restrained. It was not Shcherbatov's premises or his theories that expressed the consensus of the nobles dele­ gates to the Legislative Commission; it was his conclu­ sions. Lastly it should be noted that the nobles' opposition was not really a fronde, that the term refers not so much to the actions of a number of noblemen as to their atti­ tude and outlook. It posed no direct political threat to Catherine or her government, but since it represented the sentiments of an important element of the popula­ tion, it was nevertheless a force that Catherine, who preferred to rule by consensus, was forced to consider and to reckon with. In effect, Catherine and the nobility stalemated each other. Catherine resisted the nobles' des i SIRIO, 55

xxv: 134.

SIRIO , XXXIi: 416, 419-23, 429, 450.

The Legislative Commission

mands for preferment that would have sacrificed the interests of the state and of other classes, and the nobles in turn resisted every attempt to curtail their preroga­ tives, especially their authority over the enserfed peas­ antry. And so, as of 1768, the questions that the Mani­ festo of Peter III had raised about the future of the nobility remained unanswered.

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774

THE THREAT TO THE NOBILITY HILE the controversy over the future role of the dvorianstvo awaited its resolution, the ad­ ministrative reforms that threatened to erode the privileged standing of the dvorianstvo continued their advance. The professionalization of the state serv­ ice and the expansion of the imperial bureaucracy in­ creased the autonomy and capability of the state and lessened its dependence on the owners of hereditary es­ tates. It was that development, more than any other, that gave rise to questions about the future status of the nobility, for ultimately that status was based upon the nobility's value to the state, on the state's inability to carry out its operations without the help of the dvorianstvo. At the root of all the questions about the nobility lay the still more fundamental question of how Russia was to be governed—whether through a hierarchy of semiindependent classes and institutions, or through a direct extension of the autocratic state. Under the first system, the authorities intermediate between the sovereign and the people are chosen not by the sovereign but by some other means such as election or heredity; the subordina­ tion of those intermediate authorities to the central au­ thority is limited; and government is traditional and per­ sonal rather than formal and institutional. Under the second system, the intermediate authorities are agents

W

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774

of the state selected by the central authority according to its own criteria, usually loyalty, obedience, or ability; authority is linear, with each authority obedient directly to the next highest authority and ultimately, through a chain of command, to the sovereign; and government is conducted according to formal rules and procedures prescribed from above and imposed throughout the en­ tire system. The advantages of the latter system to a centralized monarchy are obvious, but its adoption de­ pends upon the state's ability to create, support, and supervise an administrative apparatus that can reach from the steps of the throne into every corner of the nation. Like those of the other absolutist states of Europe, the government of Russia had been evolving for cen­ turies in the direction of centralized, bureaucratic gov­ ernment. In the early eighteenth century that trend had entered a new phase with the reforms of Peter the Great. Peter rationalized the state administration and increased its formal subordination to the central authority. Those reforms, however, were made compatible with the tra­ ditional class structure: on the one hand they created an administrative system that was thoroughly bureau­ cratic in its structures and methods, but on the other hand they identified the personnel of that system with the hereditary nobility, both by making the nobles serve and by providing for the ennoblement of servitors. The governing body, therefore, combined the attributes of a bureaucracy with those of a hereditary nobility. More importantly, the state administration did not attempt to reach below a certain level of government as the state's inability to deal directly with each individual citizen led it to rely upon auxiliary agencies—the church, the urban corporations, and the nobility—to

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

perform the functions of government at the lowest lev­ els. Indeed, the governing authority of the serf owner as intermediary between the state and his peasants was increased by Peter's reforms. Peter's compromise succeeded in reconciling bureau­ cratic methods of administration with the traditional class structure of Russian society. It won the accept­ ance of both the state and the nobility and endured, with few modifications and few challenges, for half a century. By the 1760s, however, pressures for a revi­ sion of that compromise were mounting. In all strata of the nobility there was a desire for greater freedom from state control, a desire to see the growth of bureauc­ racy restricted and reversed. Among the upper nobility, influenced by the thought of the enlightenment, that desire was directed toward the attainment of civil liber­ ties, of legal rights that would limit the state's control over their lives. Among the provincial nobles that de­ sire was more likely to be directed toward the expan­ sion of their economic rights and privileges, toward greater freedom in estate management, serf ownership, and other kinds of economic activity. As the nobles' nakazy of 1767 showed, the provincial nobles on the whole were hostile to the state bureaucracy and wanted many of its functions delegated either to the individual nobleman or to a collective association of nobles. At the same time, however, the financial pressures of war and international competition were impelling the state to make its administrative system more rational, more effective, and more responsive to the needs of the state. While the strains of the Seven Years' War had made such a move necessary, the increased quality and quantity of available manpower had also made it possible. Further rationalization of the state service threatened the

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774

position of the nobility in two ways: in the first place, in­ creased professionalization of the service, which had already begun with the Manifesto of Peter III, threat­ ened to end the strict identification between the nobility and the service class. If the two were separated, was privilege to reside with the personnel of the state serv­ ice or with the members of the hereditary nobility? Were the nobles to receive greater privileges for less service and in some cases for no service at all? The nobles' desire for a favorable answer to both of those questions contradicted the principle that the privileges of the nobles were justified by their service to the state, a principle that the nobles themselves accepted. Their consciousness of that contradiction may in fact account for some of the positions that noblemen took in the de­ bates at the Legislative Commission. Korob'in, who had attacked the nobles' unlimited authority over their serfs, had also spoken in favor of the nobles' right not to serve the state, whereas Ivan Vyrodov of the Belgorod nobil­ ity, who had argued in favor of the nobles' serf rights, had opposed the abolition of compulsory service on the grounds that the nobles should be made to serve the state in payment for their privileges.1 Other noblemen had tried to gloss over the contradiction by revising the definition of service, emphasizing the service that they or their ancestors had performed in the past or that the nobility as a whole continued to perform or arguing, like Shcherbatov, that the nobles were valuable to the state—even if they did not actually enter the service— because of their intrinsic superiority to ordinary men. Ordinary men, however, were not persuaded by those arguments. At the commission, Ursinus and other com­ moners had pressed for a strict application of the prin1 SIRIO, XXXII: 53-55; xxxvi: 13.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

ciple that privilege was justified by individual service to the state by proposing that noblemen who failed to serve be made to forfeit all of their privileges. Although documentary evidence is lacking, it is possible that the serfs too were aware of the principle that the nobles' privileges were justified by their service and that word of the emancipation of the nobles had influenced their attempts to emancipate themselves in 1762-1763. Later, in 1773-1774, Pugachev's claim to be Peter III would enable him to exploit the expectations that were associ­ ated with the author of the Manifesto on the Liberty of the Nobility.2 The second threat to the nobles was the increased competence that a professional bureaucracy would give the state. If their own separation from the service pro­ vided the state with the moral grounds to diminish their power over their serfs, the growth of bureaucracy would give the state the physical means of doing so. An inef­ fective bureaucracy forced the state to rely on the serf owners to govern the serfs, but as the state's adminis­ trative apparatus expanded and improved, its ability to interpose itself between masters and serfs would in­ crease. Eventually the state would be able to govern the serfs through its own agencies, treating them as citizens and recognizing their rights under the law. Both the existence of a competent bureaucracy and the 2 Raeff, "Pugachev's Rebellion," in R. Forster and J. Greene (eds.), Preconditions of Revolutions in Early Modern Eu­ rope (Baltimore and London, 1970), pp. 169-71, challenges the accepted formulation that the emancipation of the nobles led the serfs to expect their own emancipation. While agree­ ing that the peasants and other oppressed groups associated freedom with the name of Peter III, he attributes that associa­ tion to Peter's decree on ecclesiastical serfs and his toleration of the Old Belief rather than the Manifesto.

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774 end of serfdom lay far in the future, but as the bureauc­ racy assumed the powers and responsibilities of the serf owners, the possibility and indeed the likelihood of an eventual emancipation was certain to increase. In the 1760s the idea that the growth of bureaucracy threatened to curtail the nobleman's authority over his serfs was not so farfetched as it may seem in the light of subsequent history. A possible model for the state's future treatment of the nobility was provided by its recent treatment of the clergy. Until the 1760s the Holy Synod, episcopates, monasteries, and individual churches had owned more than one million serfs. The Orthodox Church had been the largest single owner of land and serfs in Russia, and its relationship to the autocracy had resembled that of the nobility even though its subordination was more advanced. The church's ownership of land and serfs, moreover, had been justified on the grounds that the clergy performed religious and social services for the state and the nation. A further similarity between the church and the dvorianstvo was the fact that the church rather than the state had governed the ecclesiastical serfs. At the beginning of Catherine's reign, however, the state had carried out the plans formulated under Elizabeth and Peter III and had secularized the lands and serfs of the church, which it had proceeded to manage and govern through its own agencies. The clergy, deprived of independent means of support, had become yet another branch of the state administration. In the case of the church, the state had clearly interposed itself between the serfs and their for­ mer masters. In a different fashion it had also interposed itself between the factory serfs and their masters, and it was not difficult to see the formation of a precedent that could also be applied to the serfs of the nobility.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

The empress herself had made mild suggestions about bringing the nobles' serfs under the purview of the law, and at the Legislative Commission the free peasant del­ egate A. D. Maslov had advanced that trend of thought to its logical conclusion, urging that the lands and serfs of the nobles be taken from them and be placed under the control of the state administration.3 The growth of bureaucracy, therefore, threatened the nobleman's control and ownership of his land and serfs at the same time that the professionalization of the state service threatened to replace the traditional service class supported by its ownership of land and serfs with a corps of salaried employees. It threatened, in short, to drive the dvorianstvo down the same road that had al­ ready been traversed by the clergy. It was the direction of the state's policy, rather than any single step that the state had already taken, that the nobles opposed in their instructions and their speeches to the Legislative Commission. With some comprehension of where the state's policies were leading, the nobles who opposed those policies refused to allow the first steps and sought to erect barriers to future moves in that direction. As an alternative to the course being followed by the state, those nobles wanted to reinforce the role of social classes and of the nobility in particular by converting the serfs of the nobility into private property, i.e. slaves, outside the jurisdiction of the law, by guaranteeing the perpet­ uation and the exclusivity of the nobles' privileges, and by turning the lowest levels of administration and the institutions of local government over to the nobility. In making that last proposal, the nobles' nakazy had of­ fered abundant evidence that at the lowest levels of government the bureaucratic and class principles were s SIRIO, xxxii: 513-17.

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774

already in conflict. They complained that local officials, even though they were noblemen themselves, acted as bureaucrats and served the interests of the state rather than, and sometimes in opposition to, the interests of the nobles who lived under their jurisdiction. The fact that almost all bureaucrats were also noblemen was no assurance that they would not act against the local no­ bles any more than the fact that the majority of soldiers were serfs offered assurances that the army would not fire on the peasants. In both cases the men at the bottom of the chain of command tended to follow the orders of their superiors rather than feelings of solidarity with other members of their class. Sacke, S. A. Pokrovsky, and other historians have noticed that the administrative policies pursued by the Russian government in the 1760s ran counter to the class interest of the nobility, but in asserting that the development of bureaucracy was promoted as a counter­ attack against a nobility that was trying to limit the autocracy and give Russia an aristocratic form of govern­ ment, they have confused cause and effect.4 The growth of bureaucracy had an internal logic of its own. From the standpoint of its own self-interest the autocracy had every reason to want to create an administrative system that would extend its direct control over the nation and increase its revenues and its power. Instead of trying consciously to injure the nobles, Catherine tended to regret the harmful effects that her reforms would have on the hereditary nobility and tried to accommodate the 4 Sacke, "Die gesetzgebende Kommission Katharinas II, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Absolutismus in Russland," Jahrbiicher fiir Geschiehte Osteuropas, v, no. 2 (1940), 58; S. A. Pokrovsky, Iuridicheskie proizvedeniia progressivnykh myslitelei, ι (M., 1959) 5-14.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

interests and aspirations of the nobles whenever she could do so without sacrificing the interests of the state. Her sympathy for the nobles, however, was outweighed by her desire for a greater, more prosperous, and more powerful Russia, a desire that led her to oppose the special privileges of any group, be it the clergy, mer­ chant monopolists, or the nobility, that were harmful to the welfare and development of the nation as a whole. The administrative reforms of the 1760s and the corre­ sponding growth of bureaucracy were undertaken as necessary ends in themselves and were the cause of the nobles' opposition to Catherine's policies rather than a response thereto. They had been under consideration since the early 1750s, and their enactment had begun with the Manifesto of Peter III. ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM 1762-1768

In 1769 Catherine described the Russian government at the time of her takeover as having been on the verge of collapse and the state administration as having been practically incapable of performing its duties.5 In an­ other description written in 1779 and in a list of her own accomplishments written sometime after 1781, she provided specific details that substantiate her earlier statement. In 1762, according to Catherine, the state had operated at a deficit of 7,000,000 rubles, and its credit was exhausted. The army in Prussia had not been paid for eight months, and the state had told its civil servants to support themselves with state monies in lieu of their unpaid salaries. In her estimation, the cause of the state's financial troubles was its failure to make full and proper use of its assets: private persons held mo5 TsGADA,

f. 10, d. 17, pp. 3-5.

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774

nopolies on important branches of manufacture and commerce; too many serfs were in the hands of nonservitors like the clergy; the collection of taxes had been farmed out for much less than it was worth because the state had no more effective means of collecting them. The root cause of those difficulties, however, was the incompetence of the state's institutions and officials and the lack of order and intelligence in its operations. As Catherine pointed out, no one knew for certain what the total revenue of the state actually was. In 1762, the Senate's records showed receipts of 16,000,000 rubles, but two years later, when Catherine ordered Viazemsky and Mel'gunov to perform an audit, they discovered re­ ceipts totaling 28,000,000 rubles. The Senate, which was supposed to supervise the entire system of admin­ istration, was described by Catherine as being "apa­ thetic and deaf" regarding the affairs of state. Because it was not divided into departments, the Senate could not deal with more than one matter at a time. Then, instead of working from reports and abstracts prepared by subordinates, the Senate dealt with each item of business in full, reading all of the documents and hear­ ing all of the testimony itself. The result was a shock­ ing misallocation of attention and an enormous waste of time: the Senate would often give its undivided at­ tention for weeks at a time to a very minor matter while matters of serious importance to the state and the nation were neglected. So mired in detail and trivia, the Senate had little comprehension of the overall system of admin­ istration. For example, although it was responsible for appointing and supervising town officials, it kept no registery of towns and did not know for certain how many towns the empire contained. Indeed, it did not even have a map of the empire until Catherine provided

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

it with one at her own expense. Under such conditions, the Senate was practically incapable of supervising the government. Corruption was rampant, and officials did as they pleased. Catherine noted among her criticisms that it had become proverbial for officials to "wait for the third decree" because no one ever acted on the first two, and unless it was critically important, the matter was likely to be forgotten.6 Consequently, the govern­ ment was often forced to rely on the army to perform essential tasks of internal administration.7 Catherine set out to improve the efficiency and capa­ bility of the government through increased centraliza­ tion and closer supervision from above. Her first step was to improve the competence of the Senate so that it could serve as the nerve center of the government and provide the essential link between the autocracy and its bureaucratic extensions. On 2 July 1762 she ruled that in matters requiring only an interpretation of existing regulations a decision of the Senate signed by a mini­ mum of four senators would suffice.8 That ruling amounted to a division of labor between the empress and the Senate, which was to act as her surrogate in applying the general command or policy of the sover­ eign to specific problems of administration. Before the Senate could fulfill that function, however, certain other reforms would be necessary: first, some institution had to be placed over the Senate to direct its activities, over­ come its inertia, prevent it from getting bogged down 8 "Razskaz imperatritsy Ekateriny II ο pervikh piati godakh eia tsarstvovanniia," RA, 1865, pp. 470-80; Memoirs of Cath­ erine the Great, pp. 370-71. 7 On the use of the army in internal administration see Morrison, CSS, xv: 464-71. 8 Raefif, AHR, LXXV: 1291-94.

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774

in trivial details, and make certain that its actions were in line with the policies of the sovereign; secondly, the internal operations of the Senate had to be reformed so that it could cope more effectively with the volume of business demanding its attention; and thirdly, commu­ nication between the Senate and the lower echelons of the bureaucracy had to be improved. All of those conditions were met within the first five years of Catherine's reign. After rejecting the idea of an Imperial Council, Catherine filled the gap between her­ self and the Senate by strengthening the role of the procurator-general and by filling that office with A. A. Viazemsky, who was ideally suited to the task of super­ vising the bureaucracy and making it responsive to the policies of the monarch. The procedures of the Senate were improved by the reform of 15 December 1763, which divided the Senate into six specialized depart­ ments. The First Department, by far the most impor­ tant, was to oversee the vital operations of government through its supervision of the Holy Synod, the Heraldry Office, the College of State Revenue, the College of Economy, the College of Census Revision, the Mining College, the Manufacturing College, and the Commerce College. The Second Department was to deal with ap­ peals and petitions; the Third, with educational and cultural affairs and "German affairs," meaning the af­ fairs of Lifland, Estland, and Vyborg; and the Fourth, with the army and navy. The Fifth and Sixth Depart­ ments were to be branch offices in Moscow. The procurator-general was to direct the First Department in person, and his assistants were to head the other five.® The Senate was provided with additional clerks and secretaries to handle its paper work and was encouraged sPSZ

no. 11989.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

to deal with general issues and leave routine matters to the subordinate agencies and officials. Its procedures for hearing cases and keeping records were shortened to conserve its time and effort, and its control over the bureaucracy was increased by orders threatening sub­ ordinate officials with penalties up to and including dis­ missal if they did not submit prompt and regular reports on their activities.10 A second campaign of administrative reform centered on the office of governor or governor-general, the top executive position in provincial administration. As in the case of the Senate, Catherine concentrated on im­ proving administration at the highest level with the expectation that the superior agency would then bring about reform at the lower levels through its supervision and control over subordinate agencies. Catherine began her efforts to improve provincial administration on 21 April 1764 with the promulgation of her Instruction to the Governors. Noting that "except for commanding troops, supervising the administrative departments, ad­ ministering justice and carrying out orders, the duties of the governors have never been defined," the empress proceeded to list the duties that governors would be expected to perform in the future. Some of those, of course, were activities in which they had been engaged since the creation of the office by Peter the Great in 1702; others, however, were quite new and had been conceived during Catherine's recent study of provincial administration. Conspicuous in the latter category were her orders to gather information essential to the opera­ tion of a centralized, bureaucratic administration. The governor was to see that an accurate map of his guberniia was drawn up and that an accurate census was 10 PSZ

no. 11598 (5 July 1762).

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774

conducted. In addition he was to study the people, cus­ toms, commerce, agriculture, etc. of the guberniia and describe them in his reports to the Senate. The gov­ ernor's administrative responsibilities were also in­ creased. In addition to managing finances, collecting taxes, gathering recruits for the army, and supervising the courts and other organs of government, the gov­ ernor and his subordinates were to build and maintain the roads, bridges, fords, and waterways, supervise the prisons, orphanages, schools, and hospitals, devise means of fighting fires, gather horses for the army, and promote the happiness, well-being, industry, and moral character of the inhabitants.11 A governor, in short, was to be the provincial version of an enlightened despot. Just as her efforts to upgrade the performance of the Senate depended heavily on the personal qualities of the procurator-general, so did Catherine's attempt to im­ prove provincial administration depend on the caliber of men chosen to serve as governors and governors-gen­ eral. Accordingly, Catherine tried to fill those positions with the best men she could find. Among her more out­ standing appointments were General P. A. Rumiantsev in Malorussia, Michael Volkonsky in Moscow, and Ja­ cob Sievers in Novgorod. Sievers' appointment is worthy of special interest because it revealed Cather­ ine's concern with the details of provincial administra­ tion and because it was to have an important influence on her subsequent reforms. A Baltic German, Sievers had served in the diplomatic service for eleven years and had been posted in Copenhagen, Vienna, and Lon­ don. In 1755 he had resigned from the foreign service to enter the army where, under the patronage of his uncle, General Karl Sievers, he had risen to the rank 11 PSZ

no. 12137.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

of major general. When Catherine looked about for a replacement for the governor-general of Novgorod, she passed over thirty other candidates and named Sievers to that post on 20 April 1764, the day before she issued her Instruction to the Governors. Upon his appointment Sievers went to St. Petersburg to consult Catherine about his duties and was granted more than twenty personal audiences, some of several hours duration.12 Obviously impressed, the empress wanted to continue their ex­ change of ideas and gave him permission to correspond with her directly without having to send his letters through the Senate.13 While that privilege greatly en­ hanced Sievers' influence, it also earned him the enmity of the Senate and in particular of Viazemsky, who re­ sented his ability to bypass the Senate and violate the chain of command.14 In many ways Sievers turned out to be the perfect lieutenant of enlightened despotism, work­ ing tirelessly on the problems of internal administration such as water communications, urban planning, road construction, forest management, the promotion of commerce, and the building of schools. His obsession with work injured his health and destroyed his mar­ riage, but before his retirement in 1781, he had left a permanent mark on nearly every aspect of internal ad­ ministration in which he had taken an interest.15 The third way in which Catherine tried to improve the efficiency and capability of the government was 12

Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii, xm: 418. "Graf Iakov Sivers," Sochineniia (M., 1884), p. 466. 14 On the friction between Sievers and the Senate see K. Blum, II: 329. 15 In addition to Ilovaisky and K. Blum see A. Cherkas, "Sievers," RBS xvni: 409. 13Ilovaisky,

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774

through a reform of the civil service. In the same de­ cree of 15 December 1763 that divided the Senate into departments, she introduced new regulations applicable to the civil service as a whole. The Table of Ranks was reorganized, the number of employees was increased by some 25 percent to a total of 16,000, salaries were pro­ vided for all officials, salaries were raised, and pension benefits were made available to an increased number of officials.16 With the state prepared to support its servitors on a regular and adequate basis, Catherine's government cracked down on corruption. The governorgeneral of Smolensk and his assistants were prosecuted for accepting bribes, the governor of Belgorod was pros­ ecuted for corruption with regard to the alcohol monop­ oly, and lesser officials were prosecuted for similar of­ fenses elsewhere.17 Not that the Russian civil service became a model of honesty—corruption remained en­ demic, and favoritism and patronage were accepted without question—but corruption, malfeasance, and in­ competence were reduced to levels that were tolerable in contrast to those of previous reigns. The results of Catherine's administrative reforms in the period 1762-1768 are impressive. Instead of a yearly deficit of 7,000,000 rubles, the state's accounts were showing a peacetime surplus in excess of 5,000,000 rubles a year. Most of the outstanding debts of previous reigns had been paid off, and the credit of the govern­ ment had been reestablished.18 There was also a dra­ matic increase in the state's capacity to administer and govern. Within five years, the state's own officials, tied directly to the monarch by the red tape of bureaucracy, « PSZ no. 11989. 17 Dukes, p. 166. 18 Memoirs of Catherine the Great, pp. 370-71.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

had replaced the army in the collection of the poll tax and the revision of the census rolls, the tax farmers in the collection of the tariff, and the church in the manage­ ment of its former lands and serfs. More and more of the populace was coming into contact with the state directly through the bureaucracy rather than through some other agency.19 Both Catherine and the nobles, therefore, had good reason to wonder if in the foreseeable future the state might not begin to take away some of the quasigovernmental power that Peter the Great and his prede­ cessors had left in the hands of the landowning nobility. THE LIMITATIONS OF BUREAUCRATIC ABSOLUTISM

Although they were correct in their understanding that eventually the growth of bureaucratic absolutism would threaten to diminish the authority of the serf owners, both Catherine and the nobles were wrong in projecting the rapid expansion of recent years into the future and in overestimating the future capabilities of the state administration. Not only were the remaining inadequacies of that administration enormous, but they would also be much more difficult to eliminate than, say, the inefficiency of the Senate. By 1767 the Russian gov­ ernment was operating fairly well at its upper levels where it was in close contact with the empress, but in the provinces and localities, where it actually came into contact with the population, it was pitifully inadequate. The optimistic impression created by a recital of all that Catherine had done in five years to improve adminis­ tration, contrasts sharply with the impression created 19

M. S. Aleksandrov, Gosudarstvo, biurokratiia i absoliutizm ν istorii Rossii (M. and Petrograd, 1919), p. 101.

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774

by the nobles' nakazy and their description of how much more needed to be done. By itself the testimony of the nobles nakazy might be suspect as the special pleading of a particular interest group, but it is corroborated by the testimony of the state's own officials. In their reports to the central government, provincial officials openly admitted their inability to cope with the problems con­ fronting the administration and complained that they lacked the money and the manpower that they would need in order to provide adequate administration for the territories under their jurisdiction.20 When Jacob Sievers took over in Novgorod, for example, he found him­ self in charge of a guberniia that stretched from the Polish border to the shores of the White Sea, yet in all that vast expanse there was no postal service, no land police, and only one decent road, the main highway from St. Petersburg to Moscow, which bisected the guberniia. Of the hundreds of petitions that local resi­ dents addressed to the governor-general each year, Sievers' predecessor had been able to act on only two or three.21 A major defect of the administrative system, even after Catherine's expansion of the bureaucracy, was the shortage of administrative personnel, a condition that Catherine finally recognized in the preface to the pro­ vincial reform of 1775, when she admitted that "be­ cause of the great extent of several provinces there is both an insufficiency of administration and a shortage 20 Got'e, "Otzyvy gubernatorov shestidesiatykh godov xviii veka ob oblastnom upravlenii," Sbornik statei ν chest"1 Μ. K. Liubavskago (Petrograd, 1917), pp. 19-31. 21 Ilovaisky, Sochineniia, pp. 466-70, and "Novgorodskaia guberniia sto let tomy nazad," RV, LII, no. 12 (1862), 479505.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

of people capable of administering."22 To cite figures, the Russian civil service employed a total of 16,500 civil servants in both the central and provincial adminis­ tration in 1763, at the time of Catherine's first reform.23 By comparison, contemporary Prussia with less than 1 percent of the land area of the Russian Empire was administered by 14,000 civil servants.24 In 1774 the number of officials in the provincial bureaucracy alone came to 12,712, an increase of slightly more than 1,000 since 1763 but still less than half the number that would be employed in 1781, after a crisis in the prov­ inces had forced Catherine to change her approach to provincial reform.25 What is more, the deficiency of ad­ ministrative personnel was greatest at the bottom rungs of the bureaucratic ladder, where the operations of gov­ ernment brought it into its closest and most direct con­ tact with the populace. To cite one crucial example, in 1774, twelve years after Catherine's accession, the num­ ber of land komissars, provincial officials whose duties included the preservation of law and order, stood at only 117, and in some provinces there simply were no komis­ sars at all.26 Moreover, the administrative shortcomings that re­ mained after Catherine's original reforms were virtually incapable of solution within the framework of bureau22

PSZ no. 14392, preface. Jones, "Catherine II and the Reform of Provincial Administration: A Question of Motivation," CSS, iv, no. 3 (1970),502. 2iMax BeloflF, The Age of Absolutism, 1660-1850 (Lon­ don, 1954), p. 114. 25 Jones, CSS, iv: 503. 26 From a Senate report on local and provincial administra­ tion preserved among the papers of the Vorontsov family, LOII, f. 36, d. 401, p. 312. 23 Robert

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774 cratic absolutism, for the willingness and the ability of the central government to recruit, pay, and supervise large numbers of additional officials in the lowest ad­ ministrative positions were limited by the very nature of the system. In the first place, there was the question of the state's priorities in the expenditure of its limited resources. The problems described by the provincial nobles in their nakazy looked very different when seen through the eyes of the government in St. Petersburg, which was interested primarily in the collection of taxes for the treasury and recruits for the army. Given the limited supply of money and manpower, the central government insisted that provincial administrators con­ centrate the use of those resources on matters that were most important to the central government. For exam­ ple, when Sievers requested more money and more man­ power to attack the local problems that he had described in his reports, the Senate rejected his request.27 Instead, Catherine wrote Sievers a letter of encouragement, praising him for the good work he was doing, and sent him a private supplement to the Instruction to the Gov­ ernors in which she gave him additional advice on how to manage the forests, improve the communications, and otherwise make more efficient use of the resources already at his disposal.28 Eventually, however, Sievers succeeded in convincing the government in St. Peters­ burg that provincial administration had to be brought closer to the people in order to be effective. In support of his argument that an uezd should not contain more than 30,000 male inhabitants, Sievers argued that it would facilitate the collection of taxes and the admin­ istration of justice, and secured the Senate's permission 27 28

RBS, xviii: 409. Ilovaisky, Sochineniia, pp. 467-70; K. Blum, i: 173-82.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility to divide the guberniia of Novgorod into smaller units.29 Subsequently the Senate even agreed to his proposal to divide the single guberniia of Novgorod into two or more gubernii.30 It can truthfully be said, therefore, that the central government did recognize the value of bring­ ing administration closer to the inhabitants even if it did not assign a very high priority to that undertaking and that it was moving in that direction before the pro­ vincial reform introduced in 1775. Even when the state was willing to expand the pro­ vincial bureaucracy, however, there still remained the practical difficulty of recruiting a sufficient number of civil servants competent to perform the tasks of admin­ istration. The centralization of the state's administrative system made efficient use of the available talent by moving the most competent men to higher positions of wider authority, but it also made the staffing of the lowest offices more difficult since few people of any ability wanted to serve at the bottom of the bureau­ cratic ladder. Thus it was easier to find fifty men able and willing to perform the duties of senator or gov­ ernor than to find hundreds of men able and willing to perform the duties of komissar or town clerk or county judge. Men of talent and ambition preferred to enlist in the army or the diplomatic corps or the central ad­ ministration rather than work in the provinces, where 29 TsGADA, f. 248, kn. 369/3940, p. 3. This proposal was implemented three years later, in 1772, with the creation of four new uezdy in the guberniia of Novgorod. PSZ no. 13780 (2 AprU 1772). 30 Prior to 1775, one new guberniia, Pskov, had been formed by adding former Polish territory to one of the former provintsii of Novgorod. A plan to carve another new guberniia, Tver', out of Novgorod had been approved but had not been carried out by 1775.

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774

the pay was low, the opportunities for advancement were fewer, and the social life had little or nothing to offer. Consequently, as Got'e has shown, the state re­ cruited the majority of its provincial officials from the local nobility.31 The refusal of provincial nobles to ac­ cept minor posts from the state was, therefore, a major obstacle to any expansion of the provincial bureaucracy. Sievers explained that problem in a letter to Catherine in January 1767, in which he wrote: "Since the nobility was freed from all compulsory service, the provincial government has had great difficulty finding people for the endless number of positions that it must constantly fill."32 Therein lay the major harm done to the state by the emancipation of the nobility from compulsory state service: the state suffered no real shortage of noble vol­ unteers for the army or for the more desirable posts in the civil service, but it did encounter an insufficient number of volunteers for the less desirable posts in the provincial bureaucracy. The willingness of the provin­ cial nobles to accept such posts was, therefore, a limita­ tion on the expansion of bureaucratic absolutism. Faced with such a limitation, the state sometimes violated the spirit and even the letter of its own laws. Two months after Sievers complained about the effect that the eman­ cipation was having on provincial administration, the Senate in effect repealed a section of the Manifesto of Peter III. Two young noblemen had appealed their con­ scription on the grounds that the Manifesto had freed them from compulsory service, and their case was con­ sidered so significant that the Senate was asked for a ruling. Disdainfully, the Senate agreed that the young 31

Got'e, Istoriia, I i : 383. 32 TsGADA, f. 16, d. 785, pp. 14-15.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

noblemen were in the right and ratified their immunity from conscription, but it denied their request that they be given discharge papers and passports, and, more sig­ nificantly, it instructed the Heraldry Office not to accept similar appeals in the future.33 As the problem of re­ cruiting provincial civil servants intensified during the Turkish War, the state also began to impose adminis­ trative duties on the marshals of the nobility, even though the marshals were not public officials. In 1771 and 1772 the state ordered the marshals to collect mili­ tary conscripts and deliver them to the induction cen­ ters, to assist the local officials in preventing the spread of epidemics, and to aid in the suppression of contra­ band.34 Duties such as those were properly the re­ sponsibility of land komissars, but in the absence of komissars they were delegated to the marshals. In some cases, provincial officials simply ignored the Manifesto of Peter III when it was necessary to fill certain posts in the administration. Two of the nobles' nakazy of 1767 in fact complained that the state officials in their areas were forcing retired noblemen to serve as land komissars against their will.35 The slight improvement in provincial administration that could be gained through the use of such illegal and extra-legal expe­ dients could scarcely justify their use except as a last resort. Forcing men to take office against their will was presumably better than leaving the posts vacant, but an official appointed under duress was not likely to become an energetic and conscientious servant of either the pub­ lic or the state. The same nakazy that protested the im38 PSZ no. 13087. nos. 13651 (2 September 1771), 13662 (25 Sep­ tember 1771), and 13748 (14 January 1772). 35 SIRIO, xiv: 416-17 (Belaia) and 428 (RosIavl'). s i PSZ

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774 pressment of nobles into service as komissars also pointed out that such komissars considered their duties a burden and performed them reluctantly and grudg­ ingly. The state's inability to control the actions of minor officials was a further limitation on the growth of bu­ reaucratic absolutism: control and supervision were supposed to come from above, through the many levels of the chain of command, but in practice the state was unable to extend its control and supervision to the low­ est levels of the bureaucracy. The sovereign's ability to impose her will on the government was diluted as her commands traveled downward through the chain of command and outward from the capital. The empress could keep a close watch on the procurator-general, and the procurator-general could keep a close watch on the Senate, and the Senate on the administrative colleges and the provincial governors, and so on, but by the time such supervision reached the level of a local voevoda, who administered from a town that might well be more than a hundred or two hundred miles from the office of his superior, its effect had been lost. For the local voe­ voda and his subordinates the supervision of their supe­ riors was usually sufficiently stringent to keep them from doing anything that they pleased, but it was not sufficient to keep them from doing as little as possible. For men pressed into service as komissars—subordi­ nates of the local voevoda—pressure to work conscien­ tiously at their duties was almost nonexistent since they had no hope of being promoted and no fear of being fired. As it approached the lowest levels in the chain of command, therefore, the state's ability to improve the quality and capability of administration tended to reach the point of diminishing returns.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility AN ALTERNATIVE TO BUREAUCRATIC ABSOLUTISM

Even as the state continued its piecemeal expansion of the provincial bureaucracy, critics of that policy were proposing an alternative policy of turning all or part of local administration over to the local nobility. Pro­ ponents of that alternative argued that the central gov­ ernment should not attempt to control all administration directly through the bureaucracy but should rely on elected representatives of the nobility to carry on admin­ istrative operations in rural localities. In shedding its responsibility for local administration, the state would of course be forfeiting some of its control as well. Among those who proposed that local officials be elected by the nobility were the provincial nobles them­ selves. As was shown in Chapter Two, more than half of the nakazy that the nobles sent to the Legislative Commission in 1767 had proposed the election of some kind of local official ranging in importance from the voevoda, the head of local administration, to media­ tor of nobles' disputes or guardian of noble orphans. Most often they proposed the election of some kind of court or judge who would resolve land disputes and of some official, whatever his title, whose duties would approximate those of a komissar. The election of public officials by the provincial nobility would serve the inter­ ests of the provincial nobles in a number of ways. In the first place, it would eliminate some of the disad­ vantages that they encountered in dealing with local officials over whom they had no control. Friction be­ tween state officials and the local nobility was already a source of concern to the local nobles in 1767, and it

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774 promised to intensify as the state expanded the bureauc­ racy and its authority. Secondly, the election of officials and judges from their own ranks would give the local nobles a measure of power in dealing with members of other groups, merchants, free peasants, and rich, ab­ sentee nobles. The nobles' nakazy complained that the organs of the central government, especially the courts and the colleges, discriminated against provincial no­ bles in favor of those other groups; if the courts and institutions of local government were controlled by the provincial nobility, on the other hand, that discrimina­ tion could be stopped or even reversed. Then, if a poor, provincial nobleman got involved in a dispute with a commoner or an absentee nobleman, the case would be decided not by a bureaucracy sympathetic to those other groups but by his friends, neighbors, and fellow suf­ ferers among the provincial nobility. Control of local government would eliminate some of the threats to the interests of the provincial nobles, but in a more positive sense, it could also provide the provincial nobles with better, more effective government. Elected officials re­ sponsible to the local nobility would presumably have to tend to the problems that afflicted their constituents instead of just obeying the commands of the central government. Officials responsible to the local nobles were likely to be responsive to them as well. Being local men themselves, such officials would also be likely to have greater sympathy for the local nobles and greater understanding of local problems. It is not difficult to understand, therefore, why many provincial nobles fa­ vored the election of provincial officials by the nobility. While the outlook of important government officials differed from that of the provincial nobles, some of them

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

were also in favor of having local officials elected by the provincial nobles. In his proposals to the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility, Bestuzhev-Riumin had recommended that retired noblemen who settled in the provinces be enrolled in a corporate organization that would elect the public officials of the uezd, including the voevoda. Concern for the interests of the provincial nobles may have influenced Bestuzhev's thinking on provincial reform, but his chief concern was to recon­ cile those interests with the interests of the state and thereby solve some of the problems raised by the Mani­ festo of Peter III. Catherine had asked the commission to make the freedom of the nobles consistent with serv­ ice to the state; Bestuzhev's answer was to have the no­ bles serve their own interests and those of the state simultaneously by making them responsible for the operations of local government. While allowing the nobles to reside on their estates and giving them an administration that would be more responsive to their interests, such a reform would also free the state from the burden of recruiting and supervising a host of petty officials. The majority of the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility rejected Bestuzhev's proposal, but one other member, Shakhovskoy, had recently made a sim­ ilar proposal in a somewhat different context. At Cath­ erine's invitation the former procurator-general of the Senate had submitted a memorandum on local govern­ ment in which he had stressed the importance of ex­ panding local administration and increasing the num­ ber of local officials. To accomplish that goal easily and rapidly, Shakhovskoy proposed that komissars and as­ sistants to the voevoda, but not the voevoda himself, be

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774

elected by the nobles who resided in each uezd.se More clearly than Bestuzhev, Shakhovskoy was not trying to promote the interests of the provincial nobility so much as he was trying to serve the interests of the state by providing it with a new source of manpower in the very area of administration where additional manpower was needed most. Shakhovskoy's other recommendations were accepted by the empress and incorporated into her Instruction to the Governors, but his proposal for the election of public officials by the local nobility was re­ jected. Instead, Catherine had decided to improve local administration in the traditional way by expanding the bureaucracy. Throughout the period from 1762 to 1775, however, the most consistent advocate of sharing administrative responsibilities with the provincial nobility was neither Bestuzhev, who had lost all influence with Catherine by December 1763, nor Shakhovskoy, who had retired in 1765, nor any member of the provincial nobility; it was Jacob Sievers, whose efforts to improve conditions in the guberntia of Novgorod have already been discussed. Those efforts had led Sievers to believe that the state was squandering one of its resources by failing to make efficient use of the service class, the nobility. He was particularly annoyed that the state administration was suffering from a shortage of manpower while the local nobles, whose privileges were supposed to stem from service to the state, were living in idleness on their es­ tates. In Sievers' opinion, the provincial nobles "have been loafing since 1762 and have all but lost interest in 38 Got'e, lstoriia, n: 166. See also his posthumous article in A. I. Baranovich et al. (eds.), Ocherki istorii SSSR XVIII v., vtoraia polovina (M., 1956), p. 275.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

the public good and in their duty to their country."37 Since he could not legally force the nobles to accept posts in the administration, Sievers faced on the provin­ cial level the same problem that had been troubling Catherine and the national government since 1762— that of finding a means of inducing the nobles to serve the state in the absence of direct compulsion. Sievers's solution to that problem was to modify the existing definition of state service and propose new forms of service through which retired and non-serving nobles might contribute to the welfare of the state and the nation. Sievers found that since the provincial no­ bles suffered from existing conditions in the provinces they had a direct interest in their improvement even though they were unwilling to accept appointment to minor posts in the bureaucracy, to be ordered about by their superiors, and to be overloaded with responsibili­ ties in which they had no personal interest. In that atti­ tude Sievers saw the possibility of getting the nobles to work with the government on projects of mutual con­ cern without actually becoming part of the bureaucracy. Having grown up in the Baltic region, where the Ger­ man barons played a significant, yet independent role in local government, he knew that the local nobility could be used as an auxiliary to the bureaucracy, coop­ erating with the appointees of the central government while remaining outside the formal chain of command. If such a relationship could be established between the state and the nobility in Russia, then the manpower, talent, and initiative of noblemen who were not mem­ bers of the state service would not have to be lost to the 37 Sievers used these words in praising the provincial reform of 1775 for putting such men to work. Chechulin, Obshchestvo, p. 70.

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774

state but could be used instead to supplement the ef­ forts of the state service and increase its potential for accomplishment. Accordingly, one of the first recommendations that Sievers made after acquanting himself with conditions in Novgorod was that responsibility for conducting the land survey be delegated to the nobles because, in his words, "they will enjoy the fruits of it."38 In other words, if the nobles would not work for the state, they might at least lighten its work load by doing as much as possible for themselves. Although the central govern­ ment ignored his proposal about the survey, Sievers con­ tinued to suggest ways in which the nobles might serve their own interests and those of the state by helping to solve local problems. In 1767 he attended the elections to the Legislative Commission and was impressed both by the large number of noblemen who attended and by their concern with many of the very same problems that concerned him.39 As a result, when the nobles assembled in January 1769 to elect a new marshal, Sievers addressed the gathering and proposed that the nobles contribute money to finance the construction of a much-needed road from Novgorod to Moscow. The nobles endorsed his idea and agreed among themselves to contribute to the project at the rate of ten kopeks for every male serf that each of them owned.40 Since the nobles would not be in charge of constructing the road, the central government made no objection. Having succeeded in that attempt to enlist the coop38

Ilovaisky, Sochineniia, p. 467. Letter from Sievers to Catherine dated March 1767. TsGADA, f. 16, d. 785, p. 67. 40 Letter from Sievers to Catherine of 25 January 1769. TsGADA, f. 16, d. 785, p. 165. 39

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

eration of the local nobility, Sievers was encouraged to go even farther. No regular assembly of the nobility was scheduled to convene before January 1771, but in December 1769 a combination of circumstances brought an unusually large number of noblemen into the city of Novgorod. Taking advantage of the oppor­ tunity, Sievers called them together and suggested that they help put an end to brigandage in the uezd of Nov­ gorod by electing and paying their own land komissars. Already alarmed about the breakdown of law and order in the countryside, the nobles agreed to elect komissars and to contribute one kopek per male serf each to pay their salaries.41 The central government, feeling the strains imposed on the state administration by the Turkish War, did not interfere.42 In general, however, the dominant opinion in the highest circles of the central administration was against turning administrative responsibilities over to the local nobility under ordinary conditions. In the spring of 1773, the government called for the election of a land court by the nobles in two provinces formed mostly on the territory recently annexed from Poland, but in the summer of 1774, when it ordered the creation of four new komissariats in the province of St. Petersburg, it 41 Letter from. Sievers to Catherine of 13 December 1769. TsGADA, f. 16, d. 785, p. 165. 42 My earlier contention, CSS, iv: 505, that these komis­ sariats were abolished by order of the central government is probably incorrect. It was based on the Senate report of 1774, which listed the guberniia of Novgorod as having only one komissar (LOII, f. 36, d. 401, p. 309). The report was con­ cerned primarily with the costs of local administration and therefore probably did not include the elected komissars in Nov­ gorod because they were paid by the local nobles.

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774

required that they be filled by appointment.43 The atti­ tude of officials in the central government is not difficult to understand. Looking at local administration from the capital, their perspective was different from that of the local nobles or provincial officials.44 From their point of view, the existing bureaucratic system of administration was preferable because it permitted no outside interfer­ ence in the orders and policies of the central government and because it gave priority to the interests of the state. Needless to say, it also concentrated power in the hands of those who controlled the central institutions of govern­ ment, the autocrat and the governing elite, which tended to regard government and politics as its own special preserve. Thus in 1775, after Catherine had decided to expand the local nobles' role in local affairs, Viazemsky continued to oppose such a move on the grounds that it would mean the intrusion of a mass of provincial no­ blemen into matters that were properly the concern of the state and its officials.45 In spite of its shortcomings i 3 P S Z no. 13977 (8 May 1773) ordered the election of nobles' land courts in Mogilev and Pskov. I can find no evi­ dence that this law was ever put into effect before it was super­ seded by the reform of 1775. In drafting the reform of 1775, Catherine did not refer to the courts in Mogilev and Pskov nor study them as she did those of England and of the Baltic Germans. The decree ordering the appointment of four komissars in St. Petersburg was never published in the PoPnoe Sobranie Zakonov. The original decree is to be found among Catherine's papers in TsGADA, f. 10, d. 267, pp. 1-24. 44 Thus Sievers once wrote Catherine that he felt that much of the labor that he invested in amassing detailed, empirical knowledge of local conditions was wasted because, as he put it, "The Senate will always believe that it sees better with its telescope than I with my eyes." K. Blum, i: 387. 45 Ilovaisky, Sochineniia, pp. 565-66. Viazemsky's opposi-

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

and in spite of the many proposals that the provincial nobles be given a role in government, bureaucratic abso­ lutism, based on direct subordination through the chain of command, remained the policy of the Russian state until 1774-1775.46 THE FAILURE OF BUREAUCRATIC ABSOLUTISM

So long as provincial Russia produced adequate rev­ enue for the treasury and enough recruits for the army and so long as the other vital interests of the state were not affected, the Russian government saw no reason to abandon or modify the bureaucratic system of adminis­ tration that had achieved such remarkable and rapid results between 1763 and 1768. In the early 1770s, however, new pressures revealed the dangerous inade­ quacies of that system and forced the state to revise its administrative policy. During the war with Turkey the state had to reinforce the bureaucracy with the army and the marshals of the nobility, and in 1774, the Pugachev Revolt and the peasant jacqueries associated with it exposed the weakness of the existing system as a clear and present danger to the security and even the very survival of the state. Until 1774, the central government had looked upon the obvious breakdown of law and order in the prov­ inces as a matter of relatively minor importance, but when isolated acts of violence against the provincial tion to the reform of 1775, which called for the election of local officials, is described in Dashkova, Memoirs, i: 316-17. 46 On the number of proposals for involving the local nobles in government and administration see M. P. Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia, "Sotsial'naia sushchnost' oblastnoi reformy Ekateriny II," Absoliutizm ν Rossii, p. 464.

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774

nobles became associated with insurrection against the government, the government came to regard internal security as a matter of the highest priority, to which other considerations would be sacrificed if necessary. Fear of revolution and of what the masses might do if they were not kept in their place led the state to look upon the noble serf owner as an ally, as a fellow de­ fender of the established order. In that respect the Pugachev Revolt succeeded where the pleas of the no­ bles themselves had failed: it led the state to alter its policies, to treat the nobles as partners of the state even when they were not actually enrolled in the state serv­ ice, and to regard the fate of the nobility as a matter of vital concern to the Russian government. The uprising began in September 1773 in the steppe country north of the Caspian Sea along the Ural River, which was then known as the Yaik. There the discon­ tented of the frontier region, cossacks, religious dis­ senters, and ethnic minorities united in revolt under the standard of an illiterate Don Cossack by the name of Emelian Pugachev, who claimed to be the deposed Em­ peror Peter III. After routing the local agents of the government, Pugachev and his band moved up the river and laid siege to the frontier capital of Orenburg in the first week of October 1773. In St. Petersburg, the gov­ ernment took the news seriously but calmly. It was ac­ customed to dealing with small-scale revolts in the hin­ terland. Preoccupied with the Turkish War and the recent partition of Poland, the government ordered a detachment of troops into action against the rebels and assumed that the revolt would be quelled in a few weeks time. Pugachev was not to be disposed of so easily, how­ ever. He soon routed the overconfident forces sent

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

against him, tightened his siege of Orenburg, and be­ gan to spread his influence and seditious propaganda into neighboring provinces. When she learned of the fate of the forces she had sent against the rebels, Cath­ erine realized that the threat was far more serious than she had first imagined and took steps to deal with it in an appropriate manner. General Bibikov, who had experience in that kind of operation, was ordered to launch a major offensive against the rebels that would include cavalry and artillery units, and D. V. Volkov, who had served as a governor in that area, was sent to direct the activities of the civil administration. In a care­ fully planned and well-executed offensive, Bibikov de­ stroyed Pugachev's forces, and the leader himself was fortunate to escape with his life. Believing the worst to be over, the government forces began the task of search­ ing out and destroying the last remnants of the revolt. Once again, however, the government had made its assumptions prematurely. Pugachev had fled north and east to the territory of the Bashkirs, where his agents had already been at work inciting the inhabitants to join the war against the Russian government. While the government's efforts to restore order diminished rapidly after the death of General Bibikov on 9 April, Pugachev was busy organizing a new army composed mainly of Bashkirs and fugitives from the Ural iron factories. Then late in June he suddenly reappeared on the Volga, overrunning outposts and urging the serfs to join his rebellion. On 12 July his forces stormed the important frontier city of Kazan', some two hundred miles from Nizhnii Novgorod and some five hundred miles from Moscow. Pugachev's reappearance on the middle Volga de­ stroyed what was left of the government's complacency.

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774

A peace with Turkey was hastily concluded on 10 July, freeing men and supplies and enabling the Russian gov­ ernment to devote its attention and its energies to the struggle against the rebels. In September, even though the danger had begun to recede, the English ambassa­ dor informed his government that "until the rebellion is suppressed and the mind of the people calmed, the complete attention of the government will be restricted by the internal affairs of the empire."47 Catherine later wrote to Voltaire that "Pugachev has caused me much trouble this year; I have been compelled to follow this affair with uninterrupted attention for more than six weeks."48 To combat and destroy the rebels, Catherine decided to replace Bibikov with another eminent commander who could formulate and pursue an overall strategy in the same manner. Her choice revealed the importance that she attached to the mission, for she chose General P. I. Panin, a man she openly disliked and who disliked her in return. An excessively proud man with a sharp tongue, Panin had left the service during the Turkish War because he felt that he was being slighted by the government. Since his retirement he had settled on his estate near Moscow and was so critical of the empress and her policies that Catherine wrote Potemkin of her chagrin at having to confer so important a post on a man who had insulted her.49 Personal feelings aside, Panin was the right man for the job, however. Besides being a good general and an able military strategist, he was a competent administrator. Before his break with Catherine, Panin had helped to formulate and carry out the army reform that had followed the end « S1R10, xxx: 58. 4a SIRIO, xm: 420.

48

SIRlO, xm: 435.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

of the Seven Years' War; he had helped draft a plan for the administration of Novorossiia; and he had made a study of the fugitive serf question. Moreover, Peter Panin was liked or at least respected by the nobles of Moscow, who were disgruntled with Catherine's poli­ cies and alarmed by the government's failure to sup­ press the rebellion. So strained were the relations between the two that Catherine and General Panin dealt with each other through Nikita Panin. When the subject of the com­ mand against Pugachev was put to him, General Panin agreed to accept the post only if certain conditions were met, the first of which was plenipotentiary power over civil as well as military affairs, including the power of life and death over the rebels and the civilian population of the affected areas.50 Catherine agreed to Panin's terms but limited his exercise of authority to the gubernii of Kazan', Nizhnii Novgorod, and Orenburg. On 29 July 1774, Panin was appointed commander-in-chief of the operations against the insurgents.51 The military threat was soon disposed of. General Mikhel'son, who had been pursuing the rebel army for months, finally administered a crushing defeat to the rebel forces on 24 August, and Pugachev himself was taken prisoner a few weeks later. Even so, the job of restoring order was far from complete. Pugachev's scat­ tered supporters had to be rounded up, small isolated bands of rebels had to be wiped out, and measures had to be taken to insure that no repetition of the uprising could occur. Panin directed those operations with ruthlessness and severity. On a larger scale Catherine faced 50

Letter from P. I. Panin to N. I. Panin of 26 June 1774.

SIRIO, iv. 76. w SIRIO, iv. 76.

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774 the task of reevaluating her policies toward the nobility and toward the bureaucracy in the light of the recent revolt. If the fear engendered by the Pugachev Revolt seems disproportionate to its scattered military successes, the explanation is that the principal threat posed by the re­ volt was not military in the same sense that the threat posed by the Ottoman Empire was military. The insur­ rection had such a strong effect on the government because it confronted it with far more terrifying threat of social war. From the beginning, but especially after his appearance on the middle Volga in June 1774, Pugachev had proposed to lead the outcast and down­ trodden of Russian society—cossacks, religious dissi­ dents, ethnic minorities, factory workers, the urban poor, the poor clergy, and, most frightening of all, the serfs—against the "establishment"—Catherine, the no­ bles, and the church. The division was often blurred by the individual decision of noblemen to join the rebels or of serfs to remain loyal to the government and their master, but it was plain enough to affect the thinking of everyone involved. Pugachev's manifestoes openly called upon the urban poor and the serfs to rid themselves of their oppressors.62 Thus it was not a tra­ ditional war with accepted rules of conduct or a recog­ nized frontier that confronted the government: the pu­ gachevshchina struck greater fear into the hearts of the rulers than any foreign war. Every government official, every serf owner, every rich man ran the risk of being isolated, overwhelmed, and murdered by the masses. Often only the rumor that their deliverance was 52 See, for example, his manifesto of July 1774, in S. A. Golubtsov (ed.), Pugachevshchina, ι (M. and L., 1926), 40-41.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

near at hand was enough to incite the peasants to rise up and murder their masters in an unorganized and un­ coordinated jacquerie, the so-called "pugachevshchina without Pugachev." According to incomplete figures, the rebels put to death 1,572 serf owners plus their wives and children, 237 clergymen, and 1,037 officers and state officials.53 Little wonder that the uprising pro­ duced fear in the government and among the nobles. The effect of the Pugachev Revolt was to unite those it attacked, making Catherine and the nobles forget their differences in the presence of a common foe. Even as the nobles called upon the government to deliver them from danger, the government was urging the nobles to share in the work of suppressing the revolt and join it as an ally in the common cause. A Senate proclamation of 9 December 1774 called upon the no­ bles to assist the government in preventing the spread of the rebellion. The words of that proclamation indi­ cated that such assistance would be regarded as a form of service to the state: "By this they [the nobles] will prove their real fidelity to her Imperial Majesty, real love for the fatherland, and show themselves deserving of the distinguished title which their praiseworthy ancestors received for their fidelity, zeal, love, and dili­ gence for the sovereign."54 At the time of his appoint­ ment to the command against the rebels, Catherine in­ structed General Bibikov to enlist the aid of the local nobility, who could be expected to help since they had 63 John Alexander, Autocratic Politics in a National Crisis: The Imperial Russian Government and Pugachev's Revolt, 1773-1775 (Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana U. Press, 1969), pp. 211-12. 54 Alexander, p. 78.

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774 so much to fear from the rebels.55 Accordingly, Bibikov summoned the almost panic-stricken nobles of Kazan' to a meeting on 1 January 1774 at which he informed them of the situation and asked for their help and coop­ eration. In reply, the nobles of Kazan' offered to provide, equip, and support a cavalry force of some three hun­ dred men. The nobles of Penza, Simbirsk, and Sviiazhsk and the merchants of Kazan' responded to Bibikov's pleas in the same manner.56 The efforts of the Kazan' nobility were given lengthy and favorable treat­ ment in the pages of Sanktpeterburgskie Vedomosti, as Catherine and her government sought to emphasize the alliance between the state and the provincial nobil­ ity.57 Significantly, in her decrees against the rebels Catherine began referring to herself as a "landlord of Kazan'." Prince Shcherbatov was commissioned to write a history of impostors and false kings, ostensibly to place the Pugachev Revolt in context and more subtly to heal some of the wounds opened at the Legislative Commission. Peter Panin, the Moscow nobility's dele­ gate to that commission was given the command against Pugachev, and it was to Moscow, the headquarters of the nobles' opposition that Catherine traveled in Jan­ uary 1775, immediately after the beheading of Puga­ chev, to celebrate the victory of the establishment. With her instinctive genius for public relations, Catherine entered Moscow in the guise of a conquering hero, ad­ vertising the defeat of Pugachev as a victory for Russia, for Catherine, and for the nobility. The rebellion had 55

Letter from Catherine to Bibikov of 29 November 1773.

SIRIO, XIII: 370. 56Alexander, 57Alexander,

pp. 87-88. pp. 119-20.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

produced a volte-face in the relations between Catherine and the dvorianstvo. Catherine had to turn to the nobility for aid in crush­ ing the rebellion for the simple reason that the state administration was utterly incapable of coping with the crisis. Captain Mavrin, whom Bibikov had named to head a secret commission on the causes of the revolt, reported to Catherine in May 1774 that the success of the insurrection was in large measure due to the laxity and incompetence of local and provincial officials, that in the absence of effective energetic government the rebellion had spread rapidly and without hindrance.58 Mavrin's observations were confirmed by General Panin: on 6 September 1774 he recommended that local and provincial administration be reformed in the inter­ est of greater security.59 As his efforts to restore order to the affected areas brought him into closer contact with the civil administration, Panin became increas­ ingly indignant about the ill effects that its laxity and incompetence were having on the provinces. On 3 Octo­ ber he wrote angrily to the governors of Kazan', Nizhnii Novgorod, and Orenburg denouncing the provincial bu­ reaucracy and calling for a review of its personnel. He told them: . . . it is my impression that it is doubtful if the civil authorities know anything at all about the greater part of their duties or care very much, and because of this the thread of government rule is broken. They carry out Her Majesty's work complaining of red tape, taking bribes, quarreling among themselves, and not knowing what to do. Because of this, nothing is needed so much as people chosen for each assign58

Alexander, pp. 143-44.

59 SIRIO,

ν ι: 131-35.

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774 ment on the basis of competence and ability. There­ fore, I commission you to do the following in the guberniia that is entrusted to you: make a list of the members of the administrative staff and of all those who work in the departments, showing who entered service when, what rank he has attained and where it was awarded, whether he is a nobleman or a raznochinets, and including notes on each individual, stating whether the rank he has been given is appro­ priate or whether he has been given duties for which he is not competent.60 A week later, on 10 October, Panin wrote the empress that corruption in government, especially in the courts, was impeding his efforts to restore order.61 Panin made no recommendations of his own for im­ proving provincial administration, but with his report of 2 November he forwarded the proposals of Governor P. S. Meshchersky of Kazan'. Meshchersky had been in office for only three months and consequently felt no responsibility for the incompetence of which Panin had complained nor any need to defend the existing system of administration. On the contrary, his analysis of its weaknesses was more penetrating than Panin's. The basic problem, in his opinion, was that the state admin­ istration was spread too thinly over too vast an area. Dis­ tance and the number of duties that the officials were expected to perform made it impossible for them to govern thoroughly and effectively. To correct that fault Meshchersky proposed that the provincial government be divided into three separate departments, each with its own special function: the first would deal with police 6° Pugachevshchina, in (M. and L., 1931), 320. 61 SIRIO, Vi : 162-64.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

matters, the collection of the poll tax, and the induction of recruits; the second would manage the salt and alco­ hol monopolies; and the third would direct the civil and criminal courts. Secondly, Meshchersky proposed that the number of subdivisions be multiplied to reduce both the area that local officials would have to admin­ ister and the amount of work that each would be respon­ sible for. Lastly, he proposed that each uezd be divided into komissariats in which the komissars would be "elected by the nobles from among themselves or chosen in some appropriate manner." To insure order and tranquility the implementation of this last measure was an absolute necessity since at present, he pointed out, "land police are never in sight."62 Catherine ap­ proved of Meshchersky's recommendations and gave him permission to implement them without delay.63 A second set of proposals for the reform of provincial administration was submitted by M. N. Volkonsky, the governor-general of Moscow. Whereas Meshchersky's proposals were directed specifically to improving the administration of Kazan' guberniia, Volkonsky's recom­ mended a general, nationwide reform. Although his own guberniia had experienced little of the pugachevshchina, Volkonsky also made it clear that there was a direct connection between his suggestions for reform and the recent insurrection, arguing that the Pugachev Revolt had exposed the need for such a reform. First of all, Volkonsky urged that much of the power that was presently concentrated in the agencies of the central 62 TsGADA, f. 6, d. 501, pp. 1-3. Meshchersky's proposals are also summarized in Panin's report of 2 November 1774., SIRIO, Vi: 179. 63 Letter from Catherine to P. I. Panin of 20 November 1774. SIRIO, Vi: 179.

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774 government to be delegated to the provincial officials so that they might deal swiftly and effectively with prob­ lems without having to clear every decision with the capital. In particular he advocated abolition of the su­ pervisory colleges other than those that dealt with the army, the navy, and foreign affairs and the distribution of their powers to agencies at the guberniia level. To make administration more effective, Volkonsky also urged that all units be reduced in size. A guberniia, he believed, should contain 300,000 to 400,000 inhabit­ ants. It should be headed by a governor-general chosen from the army and provided with an adequate salary and an expense account. Below him the administration should be divided into four collegial departments, each with its own specific responsibilities. At the lowest level, Volkonsky proposed that the government be vested in the hands of a land court appointed by the governorgeneral. The land court would supervise the forests, the roads, and the land police, but the execution of its deci­ sions would be the responsibility of a land komissar elected by the local nobility.64 Catherine personally concurred in the criticisms that Mavrin, Panin, Meshchersky, and Volkonsky leveled at the bureaucracy. In her reply to Panin's letter of 6 Sep­ tember, she wrote: "I must say in answer to you that I consider the weak conduct of civil and military offi­ cials in various localities to be as injurious to the public welfare as Pugachev and the rabble he has collected.1'65 64

SIRIO, v: 122-27.

e5 SIRIO, Vi :

135. The word that Catherine used to desig­ nate Pugachev's followers was "svolich," translated here as "the rabble he has collected." In current usage "svolich" means "garbage" and is a forceful, almost indecent expression. In the eighteenth century, however, the connotations of the word

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

In the preliminary draft of her statement on the trial of Pugachev that she wrote in December 1774, Catherine indicted the conduct of local officials in even stronger terms, charging that "weakness, laziness, negligence, idleness, disputes, disagreements, corruption, and in­ justice on the part of officials" had contributed greatly to the success of the uprising, yet adding that "every­ where that the scoundrels encountered firmness and defense, there they obtained no success." Having re­ leased her anger, Catherine deleted those criticisms from the published version of the decree.66 In substance, the criticisms of the state administra­ tion made in 1774 were not new. Evidence of the bu­ reaucracy's inability to provide effective government had existed in quantity for several years. The nobles' nakazy of 1767, for example, had more to say about the shortcomings of local and provincial administration than the reports of Mavrin and Panin. The difference was that the Pugachev Revolt had brought those short­ comings to the attention of the central government in such a way that it could not overlook or forget them. Accordingly, Catherine made provincial reform the government's first priority after the suppression of the rebellion. Late in the summer of 1774, Catherine had written Sievers of her intention to go to Moscow to work on a plan for reforming the administration of the empire.67 On 16 January 1775, less than one week after Pugachev's execution, Catherine left Tsarskoe Selo for were not so strong, and it meant a collection of diverse items or a motley assemblage of some sort. 66The preliminary draft is published in SIRIO, xxvii: 9-10. The official decree, from which Catherine's criticisms were deleted appears as PSZ no. 14230. 67 Ilovaisky, Sochineniia, pp. 537-38.

Bureaucratic Absolutism 1762-1774

Moscow. On the 18th she arrived in Novgorod, where Sievers was added to her entourage, and on the 25th she made her triumphal entry into Moscow. After cele­ brating the victory of the "establishment," she devoted her full attention to the promised reform of provincial administration, a reform that would continue and strengthen the alliance between the state and the nobil­ ity that had been renewed by the Pugachev Revolt.

The Provincial Reform of 1775

THE COMPOSITION OF THE LAW HE sweeping reform of provincial administration

that followed the Pugachev Revolt was embod­ ied in a single statute, The Fundamental Law for the Administration of the Provinces of the All-Rus­ sian Empire (Uchrezhdeniia dlia Upravleniia Gubernii Vcerossiiskoi Imperii), enacted on 7 November 1775. For the remainder of her reign, that law was to serve as the cornerstone of Catherine's domestic policies: it created an administrative structure that was to last un­ til the 1860s and in some respects until 1917; it became the basis of her subsequent reforms of state finance; it led to efforts to stimulate the development of towns and of the provinces in general; and it prepared the way for a redefinition of the nobility's place in law and society. At one and the same time, the Fundamental Law was both the culmination of Catherine's earlier efforts at re­ form and the beginning of a new era in domestic affairs. The inauguration of a new period in Catherine's reign was evident in the very manner in which the pro­ vincial reform was drafted. In composing and imple­ menting that law Catherine made no attempt to transfer responsibility to a subordinate agency or to gener­ ate a prior consensus within the government or among the public at large. In contrast to her earlier practices, Catherine appointed no special committee, summoned no legislative commission, and made no long, cautious

T h e Provincial Reform of 1775

study of the issue's many aspects and ramifications. The Fundamental Law was written in less than nine months,1 and although it contained 215 quarto pages of printing, was divided into 31 chapters and 491 arti­ cles, and had passed through some six drafts, most of the actual composition was done by the empress herself. Of the more than 1,200 work sheets preserved in the state archives, more than half are in Catherine's own hand, and many of the rest were written by clerks and secretaries working under her direction.2 The empress personally controlled the content of the law, accepting or rejecting the ideas and contributions of others. The Senate did not see the law until it was completed and presented in its final form for confirmation. By 1775 there was no longer any doubt that Cather­ ine was an autocrat in fact as well as in name and that she was personally in control of the Russian govern­ ment. The political climate had changed completely since 1762: no longer was Catherine a usurper depend­ ent on the support of others and having to balance fac­ tion against faction and to preen the self-esteem of her statesmen in order to preserve and increase her hold on power. In 1772 Grand Duke Paul had attained his ma­ jority without gaining the throne or increasing his au­ thority in any way. Catherine had refused to share the least iota of power with her son, and it was obvious to 1 In a letter to Voltaire written "at the end of 1775," Cath­ erine claimed that she personally had spent five months com­ posing the Fundamental Law (SIRIO, xxvn: 57). Actually the work began in January 1775 and was not finally com­ pleted until October. 2Alexander, p. 311, n. 33. The source of Alexander's in­ formation is the unpublished candidate dissertation of M. P. Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia, "Uchrezhdenie ο guberniakh 1775 goda i ego klassovaia sushchnost," (M., 1964).

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

all that Paul and his erstwhile supporters were incapa­ ble of demanding or seizing that power. Of the men responsible for her elevation to the throne, Panin and Orlov were still members of the government, but both had been put in their place and were completely de­ pendent on Catherine's favor. Her personal rule was strengthened in recent years as increasingly she had filled important positions with men like A. A. Bezborodko and G. A. Potemkin, whose dependence on her was total. The Pugachev Revolt had at last been sup­ pressed, and the long-threatening storm of peasant dis­ content had broken and subsided. The war with Turkey had been ended by the Treaty of Kuchuck-Kainarji, which, together with the partition of Poland, had ex­ panded Russia's frontier to the west and south and en­ abled Catherine to claim credit for increasing Russia's international power and prestige. Having weathered the crises of the early 1770s, Catherine took up the work of reform with a new attitude of confidence and resolve. A comprehensive reform of provincial administration had been thought of, talked about, and procrastinated over for more than twenty years. In that period, accord­ ing to Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia, no fewer than seventeen projects had been drafted, both by individuals and by agencies of the government, including the Senate.3 Since the authors of those projects had already studied the provincial administration, diagnosed its defects, and prescribed various remedies, Catherine did not have to study the problem of provincial reform from scratch but could draw instead upon the wealth of knowledge that had already been amassed. In addition, a committee of the Legislative Commission, the Particular Commission on the Order of the State, had worked on the problem 3 Absoliutizm ν Rossii, p. 462.

The Provincial Reform of 1775

of provincial administration from 1768 until its dismis­ sal in 1771. Although its work was unfinished, that body had formulated several principles that had been developed in Catherine's earlier, piecemeal reforms of administration, including the multiplication, consolida­ tion, and standardization of administrative units and the separation of powers and functions among the govern­ mental agencies.4 The Legislative Commission also fur­ nished Catherine with a digest of the instructions that the various classes had sent to the commission and which had been read and edited by the Analyzing Com­ mission.5 Indeed, even though the Fundamental Law was Cath­ erine's personal creation, there is scarcely one idea in all of the 491 articles that can be said to have originated with the empress herself. Catherine has no claim to fame as an original thinker, as a creator of ideas; she collected ideas in the way that other women collect reci­ pes, borrowing the best ideas she could find and adapt­ ing them to her purposes. In composing the Fundamen­ tal Law for the Administration of the Provinces, she borrowed not only from earlier reform projects and the materials of the Legislative Commission, but from the examples of England and the Baltic provinces and from the advice given her by people like Desnitsky, Sievers, and Volkonsky. One of Catherine's advisers on provincial reform was Professor S. E. Desnitsky, Russia's leading legal expert. 4

Got'e, Istoriia,

Ii:

229-50; Morrison, CSS, I V : 482-84. has found evidence which suggests that a digest of the nakazy was prepared for Catherine's use and that it influenced the content of the Fundamental Law, especially the provisions dealing with the land police. Absoliutizm ν Rossii, pp. 470-73. 5 Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

With Catherine's assistance and encouragement he had introduced the study of jurisprudence into the curricu­ lum at Moscow University and had organized the Fac­ ulty of Law at that institution. In February 1768 he had presented Catherine with a proposal for a total over­ haul of the Russian judicial system in which he had rec­ ommended, among other measures, the decentralization of the Justice College into judicial centers that would be closer to the populace and the separation of the courts from administration.6 In 1775 Desnitsky advised Cath­ erine on legal and judicial matters and may have written or helped to write several of the articles on courts and legal procedure.7 Catherine's most important adviser on the composi­ tion of the Fundamental Law, however, was Jacob Sievers, with whom she had been discussing the problems of provincial administration for the past decade. Cather­ ine had brought Sievers with her from Novgorod to Moscow specifically to advise her on the details of pro­ vincial reform. In later years Sievers was to claim that he alone had assisted Catherine in the composition of the Fundamental Law to the exclusion of everyone else, including his old enemy Viazemsky, who had to submit his proposals on the reform to Sievers, who passed them on to the empress.8 That Viazemsky, the procuratorβ S. Ε. Desnitsky, "Predstavlenie ob uchrezhedenii zakonodatel'noi, suditel'noi i nakazatel'noi vlasti ν Rossiiskoi Imperii," edited by A. Uspensky and published in Zapiski Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, vn, no. 4 (1905). 7 Grigor'ev, pp. 179-83 and 254-55. In particular, Grigor'ev believes that Desnitsky wrote the section dealing with habeus corpus. 8 K . Blum, ii: 66. In one of his memoranda to Catherine Sievers wrote: "Would your Imperial Majesty not deign to cast an eye on the proposal of the Procurator-General regarding the

The Provincial Reform of 1775

general of the Senate should be subordinated in such a manner to a provincial governor must have been a bit­ ter pill for him to swallow, but his opposition to Sievers' ideas on provincial reform were a matter of record, and Catherine had chosen to work closely with Sievers. While much of Sievers1 advice was given in personal consultation with the empress, there is sufficient written evidence to show that his influence on the Fundamental Law was considerable.1' By comparing the wording of the two documents, Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia has shown, for example, that the section of the Fundamental Law deal­ ing with city government was based on a memorandum that Sievers had drafted.10 It was Sievers who per­ suaded Catherine to simplify the three-tiered system of guberniia, provintsiia, uezd into a two-tiered system by dispensing with the provintsiia as a unit of administra­ tion.11 Her reliance on Sievers is further illustrated by uezd. supervisors, which I have discussed with him? . . . one could perhaps derive from it something for the Lower Land Court." TsGADA, f. 10, d. 332, p. 18. 9 On Sievers' influence see Korf, Dvorianstvo, p. 138; Ilovaisky, Sochineniia, pp. 548 and 551; K. Blum, II: 107-9; Miliukov, Ocherki, m: 384; and Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia in Absoliutizm, pp. 475-81. 10 Absoliutizm ν Rossii, pp. 475-76. 11 In answer to questions from Catherine about the size and number of administrative units, Sievers replied that Nov­ gorod guberniia should not be divided into provintsiia after the reform and that affairs that were presently handled at the provintsiia level could be handled better at the guberniia level. Also, he explained, "The judge of the Lower Land Court is nothing but a police executive. There is no need for this office to be created at the provintsiia level. By its very nature this office is subordinate to the Uezd Court, as it is to be called in the new scheme, which is the court of first instance for all sorts of processes. Your Imperial Majesty has placed appeal

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility the note that she sent to him in the spring of 1775: hav­ ing run into difficulty in working out some of the details of the reform, Catherine turned to Sievers for help, writing: "This is the most stupid article of all—my head hurts from it. This endless rumination is very dry and boring. To tell the truth, I am already at the end of my Latin, and I do not know what to do about the Lower Court, the Board of Public Welfare, and the Conscience Court. One word from your excellency on these subjects would be a ray of light, bringing order out of chaos, as when the world was created."12 Catherine's work sheets provide further evidence of Sievers' influence on the Fundamental Law. In the midst of one draft of an article on the establishment of the courts, Catherine made a note that she should "work this out with Sievers."13 Another work sheet referred specifically to plans of implementing the reform in the guberniia of Tver', which was to be under Sievers' ju­ risdiction.14 Moreover, in June 1775 Sievers was awarded 20,000 rubles and the Order of Alexander Nevsky for his services to the state, and in November, in the provintsiia in the Superior Land Court. That would make four Superior Land Courts in the guberniia, a number for which it would be difficult to find the requisite number of judges and impossible to reelect them every three years. In view of that difficulty, would Your Imperial Majesty not agree that only one Superior Land Court seated in the guberniia is necessary?" TsGADA, f. 10, d. 332, p. 14. 12 Quoted in Ilovaisky, Sochineniia, p. 545. 13 TsGADA, f. 10, d. 332b, p. 14. 14 TsGADA, f. 10, d. 332d, pp. 59-62. This evidence would tend to support K. Blum's assertion that Sievers once claimed that Catherine had originally intended to introduce the reform into the guberniia of Tver' as an experiment be­ fore introducing it into other gubernii. Ein russischer Staatsmann, n: 66.

The Provincial Reform of 1775 on the very day that the Fundamental Law was intro­ duced, Sievers was appointed governor-general of Tver', Novgorod, Olonets, and Pskov and was given the honor of being the first to put the reform into practice.15 Prince M. N. Volkonsky, the governor-general of Moscow, was not so intimately involved in the prepa­ ration of the reform as Sievers, yet he was responsible for inspiring several of its provisions. His proposal for a reform of provincial administration was submitted to Catherine in January 1775, and Catherine, who was then hard at work on the Fundamental Law wrote him four months later to thank him for his suggestions, upon which she commented favorably.16 Thus it appears that Catherine read Volkonsky's proposals at the very time that the provisions of the Fundamental Law were being formulated. The influence of his proposals is most vis­ ibly evident in article 1, which determined that every guberniia was to contain 300,000 to 400,000 inhabit­ ants, the exact figure suggested by Volkonsky in con­ trast to the 450,000 to 600,000 suggested by the Partic­ ular Commission on the Order of the State. There is also a close resemblance between the departments of the guberniia administration that were organized under the Fundamental Law and those described in Volkon­ sky's proposals. In her letter thanking Volkonsky for his advice, Catherine remarked that several of his proposals called to mind the institutions of the Baltic provinces, where the German barons elected their own courts, komissars, and landraty, and those institutions, she opined, had brought happiness to the people of that region for hun15 16

Ilovaisky, Sochineniia, pp. 537-38; PSZ no. 14400. Os^mnadtsatyi vek, i: 160-61.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility dreds of years.17 Ever since the time of Peter the Great, the elected institutions of the Baltic Germans had of­ fered Russians a model for the reform of their own pro­ vincial institutions, and that model was very much on Catherine's mind at the time she was at work on the Fundamental Law. One source of Baltic German influ­ ence was Sievers, her close collaborator on provincial reform, who had been born and reared in Estland. An­ other was Governor Braun of Lifland, whose memoran­ dum on the courts of that province was sent to the empress at her request in 1775. Also, in the summer of that same year she summoned the president of the Est­ land landrat to Moscow for consultations. His advice had little or no effect on the provisions of the Funda­ mental Law, but Braun's influence is apparent in the new system of elected courts described in that law: in several instances their very names were direct Russian translations of the names of the Baltic courts described in Braun's memorandum, e.g. Verkhnii Zemskii Sud for LJberlandgericht.1* Another foreign model with which Catherine was fa­ miliar and from which she borrowed in drafting the Fundamental Law was that of England. Admiration for English institutions, which was to become widespread among the Russian elite in the first half of the nine­ teenth century, was already discernible in Catherine's time. For example, in 1766 M. L. Vorontsov had sent Catherine a memorandum on the laws of King Alfred the Great in which he had praised English institutions and practices such as the county courts, trial by a jury " Ibid. 18 la. Ia. Zutis, Ostzeiskii vopros ν XVlll v. (Riga, 1946), pp. 389-412; Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia in Absoliutizm ν Rossii, pp. 469-70.

The Provincial Reform of 1775

of one's peers, habeas corpus, and the high regard for civil liberty and recommended them to Catherine as be­ ing worthy of emulation.19 Sievers also was familiar with the government of England, having served there for seven years in the diplomatic corps, and like Vorontsov he admired the English idea of liberty. Desnitsky had studied law in Britain from 1760 to 1767 and had received a doctorate of laws from the University of Glasgow. His admiration for the British legal system led him to produce a three-volume translation of Blackstone's Commentaries, which was to begin appearing in 1780. Catherine herself was very much interested in English laws and judicial practices, to which she had been introduced by Montesquieu. From Montesquieu she had progressed to Blackstone. In a letter to Grimm dated 4 August 1776, Catherine wrote that she had been reading Blackstone for two years, which would mean that she had started reading him in the summer of 1774, at just about the same time that she had def­ initely decided to undertake a thorough reform of pro­ vincial government and administration.20 In her custom­ ary fashion, Catherine took 385 pages of notes on her reading of Blackstone in which she expressed interest in such institutions as the county court, the chancellery court, and the office of sheriff.21 19

LOII, f. 36, d. 368, pp. 219-20. SIRIO, xxiii: 52. 21 A description and a synopsis of these notes is given in RA, 1908, no. 2, p. 169. The direct influence of Blackstone on the Fundamental Law may not have been very great since it ap­ pears that some of these notes at least were made after the Fundamental Law had already taken shape. For example, Catherine compared the office of sheriff as described in Black­ stone with the office of kapitan-ispravnik, a term for komissar 20

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

Together all of those sources provided Catherine with the models, examples, and ideas from which she created the Fundamental Law for the Administration of the Provinces. It would be a mistake, however, to regard her borrowing as either a slavish copying of foreign practices or a plagiarism of other men's ideas, for in the final analysis it was Catherine who determined the con­ tent of the law, as she chose carefully among her sources, editing them and modifying them to meet Rus­ sia's needs and to suit her own purposes. Her statement about Blackstone's book, "It is my thread which I di­ vide in my own way," applies to the other sources as well.22 It is even more important to distinguish between the sources of the Fundamental Law and the causes of the provincial reform. The provincial reform was not undertaken because the nobles' nakazy had called for it or because Sievers recommended it, or because Catherine had been reading Blackstone, but once the decision to go ahead with a major reform of provincial administra­ tion had been made, Catherine turned to them for knowledge and inspiration, and they became the sources of the law or, more correctly, of its provisions. THE SUBSTANCE OF REFORM

Prior to the reform of 1775, Russia was divided into 25 gubernii that varied greatly in both size and popula­ tion. In general those gubernii represented blocks of territory that had been annexed one by one to the Rus­ sian Empire and the Principality of Moscow through­ out the centuries, and only in rare instances, as in the that Catherine did not begin to employ until the final drafts of the Fundamental Law. 22 Catherine to Grimm, 4 August 1776. SIRIO, xxm: 52.

The Provincial Reform of 1775

Baltic, did a guberniia coincide with a distinct ethnic, geographical, or historical entity. The 25 gubernii were divided into 68 provintsii, which served as the basic units of taxation and finance, and they in turn were di­ vided into a total of 169 uezdy.2S Although it was likely to be very extensive in area, an uezd was the basic unit of administration for all matters except finance. The number of uezdy per provintsiia and of provintsii per guberniia varied considerably from one area to another and the size and shape of all units were unpredictable and were unrelated to any rational or practical consid­ eration.24 Each guberniia was headed by a governor or governor-general appointed by the crown. Each provin­ tsiia and each uezd was administered by a voevoda and a staff of associates appointed by the Senate. Even after the reform of 1764, the subordination of one level of administration to the next and the division of authority between officials was incomplete, and lesser officials often sought to undermine the authority of their supe­ riors. The provincial reform of 1775 rationalized and sim­ plified the administrative structure of the Russian Empire. Focusing its attention on the guberniia, the Fundamental Law ordered the creation of gubernii that 23 From a Senate report on the status of provincial ad­ ministration prior to the introduction of the Fundamental Law. LOII, f. 36. d. 401, p. 312. 24 The same "irrational" pattern is visible in the states of the United States. A crucial difference, however, lies in the fact that the states and counties of the United States are not primarily units of the central administration: the central gov­ ernment does not appropriate their budgets, nor do they serve as units for the collection of taxes and recruits. In a centralized state, on the other hand, especially one as vast as eighteenth century Russia, standardization is far more essential.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility would be smaller, more numerous, and more uniform in population. Under its provisions, each guberniia was to contain not more than 400,000 nor less than 300,000 revision souls, a provision that necessitated the consoli­ dation and redivision of the existing gubernii, especially in the central regions. The 25 gubernii in existence in 1775 were subsequently divided into 41 new ones, and the addition of new territories to the empire brought the total number to 50 by the end of Catherine's reign. The provintsiia was abolished as a unit of administration, and its functions were transferred to the reformed gu­ berniia. In some cases, as in Moscow and Kazan' for example, the former provintsiia was simply raised to the rank of a guberniia under the new setup, but in other cases new lines had to be drawn that cut across the previous boundaries. The new guberniia was to be divided into uezdy that were to contain no more than 30,000 and no fewer than 20,000 revision souls each, making 10 to 20 uezdy per guberniia. As with the gu­ berniia, the reform had the effect of making the new uezdy smaller in area while increasing their overall number. The 169 uezdy of 1775 became 374 by 1785, and the number rose with the addition of new territories to a total of 493 by the end of Catherine's reign. The reform of 1775 concentrated administrative pow­ ers and responsibilities in the hands of guberniia offi­ cials. Important functions that had been centralized in the national capitals were now decentralized and relo­ cated in the guberniia capitals. The Justice and Estates Colleges saw all of their responsibilities distributed in that fashion and were abolished after the implementa­ tion of the reform. On the other hand, the provintsiia was abolished as a unit of administration; the uezd was left without an executive head; and governmental opera-

The Provincial Reform of 1775

tions that had been carried on at that level were cen­ tralized at the guberniia level. By taking duties and powers both from above and below and concentrating them in the new guberniia, Catherine hoped to improve the ability of guberniia officials to deal decisively with local and provincial problems. The chief administrator of each new guberniia was to be the governor-general or namestnik. Although the law said nothing about it, a governor-general was nor­ mally placed in charge of two or more gubernii.25 Thus Sievers eventually had four gubernii, Novgorod, Tver', Olonets, and Pskov, under his supervision, as did Potemkin in Novorossiia, while Rumiantsev in Malorossiia had three. In practice, the governor-general was to become the viceroy of the tsar: appointed directly by the sovereign, he was responsible for all governmental oper­ ations in the territory entrusted to him. He made all of the major decisions within the guberniia, and it was he who dealt with the government in St. Petersburg. A governor-general was allowed to bypass the Senate and address the monarch directly under certain circum­ stances, and when he was in St. Petersburg he had the right to sit with the Senate and take part in its discus­ sions as an ex officio member. So important was the post of governor-general that Catherine regularly filled it with some of her most illustrious and most capable statesmen, e.g. Sievers, Rumiantsev, Mel'gunov, Volkonsky, R. I. Vorontsov, G. A. Potemkin and P.S. Potemkin. Under the command of the governor-general each 28 See V. Γ. Zheludkov, "Vvedenie gubernskoi reformy 1775 goda," in V. N. Bernadsky (ed.), Ocherki po istorii klassovoi bor'by i obshchestvenno-politicheskoi mysli Rossii trefei chertverti XVIII v. (L., 1962), pp. 201-3.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility single guberniia was to be headed by a governor or pravitel\ the executive in charge of day-to-day opera­ tions, who was to head the administration in the absence of the governor-general. Other officials of the guberniia under the Fundamental Law were the vice-governor, a treasurer, a procurator, a surveyor, and the director of the economy, who was to administer the lands and peas­ ants confiscated from the Church. In addition there were to be three departments or chambers (palaty), which were to deal with specific areas of administration in the manner of the colleges at the national level. The Depart­ ment of Finance, to be composed of the vice-governor, the director of the economy, the treasurer, a councillor, and two assessors, was to supervise and record the col­ lection of state revenue. The Department of Criminal Affairs and the Department of Civil Affairs, each of which was to be staffed by a president and two council­ lors, were to assume the functions of the Justice and Estates Colleges. The remaining agencies of the re­ formed guberniia were to be a Board of Public Welfare (Prikaz Obshchestvennago Prizreniia), which was to create and run public and charitable institutions, the Conscience Court, the Superior Land Court, The Gu­ berniia Magistracy, and the Superior Rasprava, the last three being the class courts of the nobles, the burghers, and the free peasants, respectively. At the uezd level the agencies of government were to consist of a surveyor, a treasurer, a doctor, a druggist, courts for the three official classes of free citizens, the Uezd Court, the City Magistracy, and the Lower Ras­ prava, and the urban and rural police. In the towns the maintenance of law and order was to be the responsibil­ ity of the military commandant or, if there was no gar­ rison, of a chief of police (gorodnichii) appointed by

The Provincial Reform of 1775

the Senate. In the countryside the police agency was to be the Lower Land Court, which—despite its name— was not a court, composed of the ispravnik, a new name for the old office of komissar, and four deputies. The agencies of both the uezd and the guberniia were to be supplied with assistants, solicitors, and secretaries, and all of the officials were to be paid an annual salary by the state. Most, but not all, of the positions also con­ ferred a prescribed rank upon the officials who held them. Having listed the various agencies and officials of lo­ cal and provincial government, the Fundamental Law proceeded to describe their functions and duties. The law's effort to define as precisely as possible the role and the authority of every official and institution was a di­ rect consequence of Catherine's concern for legality. For Catherine the difference between absolutism, in which she believed, and tyranny, which she condemned, was the existence of "law," or prescribed procedures, that re­ placed arbitrary despotism based on individual whim with rational rules of conduct.26 In her private notes Catherine once defined "civil law" as "the regulation of civil conduct that ordains legality and forbids illegal­ ity."27 In line with that belief, Catherine sought to limit the power of every official with a legal definition of his au­ thority. To the same end the Fundamental Law also cre­ ated a division of powers among the agencies of provin­ cial government. After condemning the combination and confusion of functions that often resulted under the exist­ ing system of administration in its preamble, the Funda­ mental Law expressly ordered the various agencies of provincial government not to meddle in each other's 26 TsGADA, f. 10, d. 17, pp. 167-213. « TsGADA, f. 10, d. 17, p. 168.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

affairs.28 For that same reason, the Departments of Fi­ nance, Criminal Affairs, and Civil Affairs were separated from the executive office of the guberniia, and the treas­ urer and the presidents of the other two departments were to be appointed by the central government and not the governor-general. The governor-general, moreover, was forbidden to interfere with the courts, which were to be subordinate to the Department of Criminal and Civil Affairs.29 A further separation of powers was encour­ aged by the provisions calling for the election of the courts by the local inhabitants. In all of these aspects, the provincial reform of 1775 merely accelerated reform efforts that had been under way for many years. Efforts to reduce the size of the administrative units had already increased the number of gubernii from fifteen to twenty-five between 1762 and 1775, and Sievers had been allowed to create new uezdy within his guberniia. The effort to define and prescribe the duties of agencies and officials had begun in 1764 with the Instruction to the Governors. Separation of powers had been included in the law of 8 May 1773 on the courts in Mogilev and Pskov. In those respects, therefore, the Pugachev Revolt can only be said to have led to a more rapid and extensive implementation of policies and principles that had already been formu­ lated. In order to carry out that implementation, however, Catherine had to devise some way of overcoming the chronic shortage of manpower that had restricted the expansion of provincial administration in the past. In calling for the multiplication of administrative units, a division of powers, and greater activity on the part of 28 29

PSZ no. 14392, article 130. PSZ no. 14392, article 85.

The Provincial Reform of 1775

the administration, the Fundamental Law was also call­ ing for a drastic increase in the number of provincial officials. In the twenty-year period from 1775 to 1795 the implementation of the Fundamental Law caused the number of posts in the provincial administration to double, to increase from 12,712 in 1774 to an estimated 27,000 by the end of Catherine's reign.30 It was easier to create posts, however, than to fill them. Given the difficulty that the state had had in recruiting civil serv­ ants prior to 1775, one can safely say that it would have been virtually impossible to effect the expansion of the provincial bureaucracy envisioned by the Fundamental Law without changing the existing method of recruit­ ment or the conditions of service. The Fundamental Law met the increased demand for manpower by allowing certain officials to be elected by the local inhabitants, thus creating a new form of state service. The most numerous officials to be elected under the new law were the members of the various class courts. The nobles were called upon to elect the ten members of the Superior Land Court in each guberniia and the two members of the Uezd Court in each uezd. The burghers were to elect the six members of the Gu­ berniia Magistracy and the six members of the City Magistracy. The free peasants were to elect the eight members of the Superior Rasprava and the eight mem­ bers of the Lower Rasprava, but unlike the nobles and the burghers, the peasants could elect members of the other free classes to serve on their courts.31 The election of class deputies to the various courts was neither a drastic step away from bureaucratic absolutism nor a reversal of previous policies. According to the first 30 Jones, 31

CSS, iv: 511. PSZ no. 14392, articles 65, 67, 72, 73, 75.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

drafts of the reform, the presidents or judges of all of the courts were to be appointed officials, while the elected delegates would fill the role of a jury.32 Courts of that nature would be consistent with Catherine's ad­ miration of the English practice of trying an accused man before a jury of his peers.33 It was also consistent with her desire to separate the courts and their opera­ tions from the administrative and executive depart­ ments, and it had a precedent in the law of 8 May 1773 on the courts of Mogilev and Pskov. From the standpoint of efficiency, the new courts also had much to recommend them. Since they were to deal primarily with cases that involved petty crimes and mis­ demeanors or civil suits involving contracts, inherit­ ances, and boundary disputes, the new courts would re­ lieve the state of having to try cases in which it had no real interest. By allowing the judicial appointees of the state to concentrate on important cases and by resolving those cases which they, as local residents and peers of the defendants, would be better qualified to judge, the elected class courts would presumably improve the qual­ ity and efficiency of the judicial system and eliminate the snarl of litigation that had jammed the courts and made them ineffective in the past. The state, moreover, would retain sufficient control over the courts through the appointed presidents or judges, through the possi32 TsGADA,

f. 10, d. 332d. p. 4. her notes on nobility Catherine had written: "The criminal law of England includes no torture of any kind, and each citizen has the right to be judged by his peers. After having accorded the accused all legitimate means of defense, one assembles a jury composed of a certain number of peers" (TsGADA, f. 10, d. 19, p. 489). Montesquieu, cited two pages later, is the probable source. 33 In

The Provincial Reform of 1775 bility of appeal to the Department of Criminal or Civil Affairs, and through the requirement that all elections to the courts be subject to confirmation by the gov­ ernor.34 In each guberniia there was also to be a Conscience Court (Sovestnyi Sud), whose president was to be ap­ pointed by the governor-general from nominees pre­ sented to him by the class courts, and whose six mem­ bers were to be elected by the three constituent classes: two each by the nobles, burghers, and free peasants. The Conscience Court was to accept and act upon citi­ zens' appeals for redress of grievances. It was empow­ ered to issue orders, including writs of habeas corpus, to the lesser courts and to public officials.35 An apparent attempt to introduce into Russia the notion of equity that Catherine had discovered in her reading of Montes­ quieu and possibly Blackstone,36 the Conscience Court was the most "liberal" of Catherine's innovations and also the least practical. After a few years it simply ceased to function. The Board of Public Welfare was organized in a manner similar to that of the Conscience Court. Its pres­ ident was to be the governor and its members two of 34 35

PSZ no. 14392, articles 65, 67, 72, 73, 75. PSZ no. 14392, articles 395-404.

38 Among Catherine's work sheets on provincial reform is a note in French which reads: "One sometimes confuses equity with justice, but the latter seems designed to compensate or punish in accordance with certain laws or established rules rather than in accordance with the varying circumstances of an action. It is for that reason that the English have a Court of Chancellery or equity to temper the severity of the letter of the law and to countenance an affair that is to be dealt with solely by the rule of equity or conscience. TsGADA, f. 10, d. 332a, p. 1.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility the delegates to each of the guberniia class courts. In addition, the marshal of the nobility and the Head (Glava) of the Urban Corporation were to participate in the work of the Board of Public Welfare whenever it would be appropriate for them to do so. The purpose of the board was to construct and operate the following institutions: public schools, orphanages, hospitals, poor houses, lazar houses, insane asylums, workhouses, and jails. For that purpose it was to receive a grant of 15,000 rubles from the treasury, which it could then lend to the local nobles, using the profits from its lending opera­ tions plus contributions from private citizens to carry on its charitable works.37 The land police, known misleadingly as the Lower Land Court, was to have four deputies, two elected by the nobility and two by the free peasants. More clearly than any of the other elected officials that have been discussed so far, the deputies to the Lower Land Court were to be public officials with executive responsibili­ ties. Like all of the others, however, they were to be only associates or assistants in the agencies in which they served. They were to be under the direction of the ispravnik, originally called the "judge" of the Lower Land Court, in the same way that the elected members of the various courts were to be under the direction of appointed judges or the members of the Board of Pub­ lic Welfare under the governor. The clearest retreat from bureaucratic absolutism contained in the Fundamental Law was the provision ordering the judge of the Uezd Court and the ispravnik, the chief of the land police, to be elected by the nobility of each uezd. Although they were subordinate to ap­ pointed officials at the guberniia level, the positions of 37 PSZ no. 14392, articles 378-94.

The Provincial Reform of 1775 judge of the Uezd Court and of the ispravnik differed from other elected offices in that they had no immediate supervisor. At the uezd level both were responsible for the operation of an agency of government, a responsibil­ ity delegated to no other elected officials or to anyone else who was not a part of the bureaucratic chain of command. Accordingly, it was with great reluctance that Catherine took the step of making those positions elec­ tive. The provisions of the Fundamental Law dealing with the ispravnik were clearly modeled on the decree of 6 May 1774, which had created four komissariats in the guberniia of St. Petersburg—with the significant exception that the law of 1774 had called for the chief of the land police to be appointed whereas that of 1775 called for him to be elected by the nobility.38 The great reluctance with which Catherine made that post elective can be seen in the fact that in the first draft of the Fun­ damental Law both the judge of the Uezd Court and the judge of the Lower Land Court (the ispravnik) were to be appointed. That provision was carried over into the second draft, which originally called for both officials "to be appointed by the governor." That phrase was then crossed out, and the phrase "are to be elected every three years by the nobles" was inserted in its place.39 Under the circumstances, it would appear that the election of the judge of the Uezd Court and the isprav­ nik was decided on the basis of expediency rather than policy. The multiplication of uezdy required by the Fundamental Law meant the recruitment of several hundred judges and ispravniki. These positions would best be filled with local noblemen who would be familiar 38

TsGADA, f. 10, d. 267, p. 1.

39

TsGADA, f. 10, d. 332d, p. 4 and d. 32, p. 31.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

with local conditions, but past experience with the re­ cruitment of komissars had shown that local noblemen were reluctant to accept such positions and that they performed their duties grudgingly if compelled to ac­ cept them. Neither condition promised to produce the improvement in local administration desired by the state. That consideration was particularly important in the case of the ispravnik, who, as chief of the land po­ lice, was responsible for the maintenance of order in the countryside. All elected officials were to be chosen for three-year terms and were eligible for reelection without limit. All elections, however, were subject to confirmation by the governor. Once in office, elected officials were to be treated like any other officials. Their salaries were to be paid by the state, and those elected by the nobles and the burghers (but not the free peasants) were to receive a predetermined position in the Table of Ranks, ranging from the seventh rank for members of the Supe­ rior Land Court to the fourteenth for the lesser officials of the towns.40 Elective service was crucial to the success of the pro­ vincial reform since it was to provide the additional manpower that the reform required. It was her realiza­ tion of that fact that had induced the empress to permit the election of komissars and judges and to drop the provintsiia as a unit of administration because of the virtual impossibility of electing the requisite number of judges. The vital importance of elective service was even more clearly apparent in the implementation of the reform. The opening of the new gubernii was made synonymous with the class elections, especially those of the nobility, and the election meetings received more 40

PSZ no. 14392, articles 50-58.

The Provincial Reform of 1775 attention in the reports of the governors-general on the implementation of the reform than all of its other as­ pects put together. Even considerations that were ap­ parently mechanical such as the drawing of boundaries were affected: in 1779 R. I. Vorontsov wrote Catherine that in reforming the guberniia of Vladimir, "I did not watch over the regular outline of an uezd so much as I strove to see that in each uezd there would be a num­ ber of noblemen sufficient to carry out public service."41 The reason for such intense concern is visible in statis­ tics showing the relationship of elective service to the provincial bureaucracy: of the 15,000 or so officials added to provincial government between 1775 and 1796, 10,608 were elected officials supplied by the local residents. That total consisted of 2,704 peasants, 3,851 burghers, and 4,053 noblemen. Whereas there had been 117 land komissars in 1774, by 1796 there were 493 ispravniki backed by 1,972 deputies.42 In addition to the impressive number of officials that it added to pro­ vincial government, elective service also enabled the state to redirect the efforts of its appointed officials away from matters like the resolution of land disputes and the pursuit of brigands and toward tasks, like the collection of taxes, in which they were more interested and for which they were better qualified. The provincial reform of 1775 was also the first real indication of a new attitude toward the provinces and TsGADA, f. 16, d. 636, p. 16 ab. f. 10, d. 17, p. 525. These figures on the number of elected public officials were appended to Catherine's notes on law and local government. The list of elected officials is not in Catherine's hand and was probably compiled by a secretary for the purpose of allowing the empress to measure the effect of elective service. 41

42 TsGADA,

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility their inhabitants. For the next twelve years the develop­ ment of the provinces became one of the leading priori­ ties of the Russian government. Expenditures on provin­ cial administration rose from 1,712,465 rubles in 1774 to 5,618,957 rubles in 1785.43 In that same period the government established 216 provincial towns and at­ tempted to develop them into centers of administration, commerce, culture, and civilization. Such facts are in­ dicative of a new policy toward the provinces, a policy based on cooperation between the state on the one hand and the richer townsmen and the nobles on the other. In addition to elective service the Fundamental Law contained other indications that the state was beginning to regard the richer townsmen and the provincial nobles as allies and as auxiliary sources of quasi-governmental activity. Thus, although neither the marshal of the no­ bility nor the head of the urban corporation was a state official in the strict sense of the term, both were assigned a place in the Table of Ranks, and both were called upon to cooperate with the Board of Public Welfare from time to time. The class institutions of the burghers and the nobles were also given an additional function by the Fundamental Law. In the towns an Orphans Court (Sirotskii Sud), composed of the head of the urban corporation and two members of the City Magistracy, was to look after the widows and orphans of the town and manage their property. A similar institution, the Dvorianskaia Opeka, consisting of the marshal and the two members of the Uezd Court, was to take care of noble widows and orphans in the same manner. Al43 The figure for 1774 is given in LOII, f. 36, d. 401, p. 312. The figure for 1785 has been calculated by Zheludkov, p. 63 on the basis of the financial data given in PSZ no. 17494, Table v i .

The Provincial Reform of 1775

though small, the role that the Fundamental Law as­ signed to the class organizations of the burghers and the nobles represented an important step in their devel­ opment as auxiliaries to and substitutes for the state bureaucracy. THE REFORM AND THE NOBILITY

Since the provincial reform of 1775 was a turning point in the relations between the state and the dvorianstvo, it is important to examine closely its effect on the nobility. In comparison, the reform was less significant as a turning point in the state's treatment of the burgh­ ers even though the Fundamental Law drew numerous parallels between the roles it allotted to the two classes. In the first place, the reform made no serious change in the previous position of the towns and their inhabitants; in most cases it simply stated that under the Fundamen­ tal Law town officials were to be chosen in the same manner as before. City magistracies and other elected agencies in the towns had existed since the time of Peter the Great, and, if anything, their role in the govern­ ment of the towns was reduced by the Fundamental Law.44 Secondly, the reform created no executive official comparable to the ispravnik who would be responsible to the burghers: it assigned police powers in a town to the military commandant or, in the absence of a garri­ son, to a gorodnichii appointed by the Senate. Cather­ ine's laws of 17 March and 25 May 1775 show that her government looked upon the wealthy merchants as a privileged group, but their role as allies of the state was economic and financial more than it was administrative 44I.

I . D i t i a t i n , Ustroistvo i upravlenie gorodov Rossii, i: Goroda Rossii ν XVIII stoletii (SPB., 1875), 380, 394.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

in nature. Throughout her reign Catherine's desire to cooperate on urban affairs with the wealthy townsmen was frustrated by her competing tendency to rely on the bureaucracy and the police. While differences did exist, the contrast between the state's treatment of the burghers and its treatment of the nobles should not be exaggerated. The areas of gov­ ernment and administration in which the state modified its insistence on bureaucratic absolutism in favor of re­ liance on the provincial nobility were few, and they were carefully and narrowly limited by the provisions of the Fundamental Law. The state, for example, retained total control over the purse strings: all officials who collected taxes or handled state monies were to be its own appointees. Indeed, the reform of 1775 increased the bureaucratic character of financial administration.45 On the other side of the ledger, the state appropriated all expenditures and paid the salaries of all officials, in­ cluding those elected by the local residents. The inde­ pendence of elected officials was further circumscribed by their subordination to appointed officials. Thus even though the ispravnik and the judge of the Uezd Court were the head of governmental agencies, the former was subordinated directly to the governor, and the latter could be overruled by the Superior Land Court, whose judge was appointed, or by the criminal and civil depart­ ments of the guberniia administration. Their subordina­ tion was completed by the requirement that all elected officials be confirmed in office by the governor or gover­ nor-general, who could thus force uncooperative officials to relinquish their posts at the end of their three-year 45 James A. Duran, "The reform of Financial Administration in Russia during the Reign of Catherine II," CSS, iv, no. 3 (1970), 495-96.

The Provincial Reform of 1775 terms. Under so many limitations, elected officials were unable to promote the interests of their constituents if those interests contradicted the wishes of the state and its officials. The decision to leave the uezd with no exec­ utive head ended some of the tension between the local voevoda and the local nobility that had existed prior to 1775, but it also ignored the proposal of several nakazy that the voevoda be elected by the nobility. Although the provincial reform of 1775 decreased the amount of centralized control exercised by officials of the central government and ended the control that the local voevoda had previously exercised, it relocated those powers in the hands of bureaucrats at the guberniia level, not in the assembly of the nobility. The reform of 1775 also entailed an expansion of the provincial bureaucracy, as the state sacrificed certain areas of government to the local residents in order to concentrate on other areas. Consequently, after 1775 there was a great demand for solicitors, secretaries, ac­ countants, surveyors, and other kinds of officials. That demand, plus the creation of elective service which ab­ sorbed many of the provincial nobles who might other­ wise have accepted appointive positions, made it impos­ sible for the state to continue staffing the provincial bureaucracy with retired noblemen. By 1779, the re­ form of 1775 was only half completed, but already the state was facing serious difficulties in staffing the pro­ vincial bureaucracy. Catherine attacked that problem in her decree of 9 January 1779, in which she stated: "We wish to inform the governors-general of their obligation to instill in the youth of the nobility a desire to enter the service of the state. We have no doubt that Our wish will be entirely fulfilled under the zealous care of Our governors-general, but for the immediate present, the

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility activities of Our institutions still cause great difficulty in quickly redressing the lack of provincial civil serv­ ants." Accordingly, the decree empowered the gover­ nors-general to hire the sons of priests or merchants and graduates of Moscow University and the Vospitatefnyi Dom. Commoners in those categories were henceforth to be accepted into the provincial bureaucracy on the same basis as noblemen.46 Where the need for service­ men was especially great, the empress even assented to the hiring of free peasants to fill vacancies in the pro­ vincial bureaucracy, provided that they were hired as day workers and were not included in the Table of Ranks.47 Thus, although that was not its intention, the provincial reform was responsible for promoting the di­ vergence of the provincial bureaucracy from the provin­ cial nobility, an effect that would have important conse­ quences in the next century.48 The provincial reform of 1775, therefore, amounted to a reorganization and redirection of bureaucratic ab­ solutism rather than its abandonment. Realistically, the state had acknowledged the limitations of bureaucratic absolutism, and had made an accommodation with the provincial nobles and the wealthy merchants, but in no way did it permit any real infringement on the powers and prerogatives of the autocracy.40 The reform stopped far short of satisfying all the demands that the nobles had made in 1767: it did not provide for the election i e PSZ

no. 14831. Viatskoi Gubernii, 1780-1880 (Viatka, 1892),

4 7 Stoletie

p. 13. 48 Walter Pintner, "The Social Characteristics of the Early Nineteenth Century Russian Bureaucracy," SR, xxix, no. 3 (September 1970), pp. 430-43. 49 Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia in Absolutizm ν Rossii, p. 470.

The Provincial Reform of 1775

of the voevoda nor of a landrat by the nobility, nor did it expand the role of the marshal or the nobles' assem­ bly to anything like the extent envisioned in many of the nobles nakazy. Both the reactionary Shcherbatov and the liberal Vinsky criticized the reform for not having given the nobles more autonomy, more freedom, and a greater role in local government.50 The criticisms of noble intellectuals like Shcherbatov and Vinsky notwithstanding, the rank and file of the provincial nobility had ample cause to celebrate the enactment of the provincial reform, for despite its short­ comings from their point of view, it did go a long way toward satisfying their most immediate grievances. It did provide for more land police and thus promised to curtail the brigandage that many of the nakazy had cited as their most serious problem. Moreover, the choice of the head of the land police rested primarily with the nobles themselves: provided only that the gov­ ernor-general accepted their decision, they could select an ispravnik who would look after their interests and could replace him at the end of three years if his per­ formance in office did not measure up to their expecta­ tions. The new courts also satisfied the demands of 1767 and promised to improve the administration of justice. Likewise, the appointment of a surveyor in each guberniia with subordinate surveyors in every uezd promised to remedy another complaint of the provincial nobility, the confusion that gave rise to incessant and intermi­ nable disputes over the ownership of land. Thus al­ though the Fundamental Law gave the nobles only a very limited amount of control over local government, it also offered them greater services and convenience. 50

Shcherbatov, Sochineniia, I. 295-96; G. S. Vinsky, Moe Vremia: zapiski G.S. Vinskago (SPB., 1914), p. 43.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

Matters that previously had been neglected or had forced the provincial nobleman to deal with some gov­ ernment office in distant Moscow or St. Petersburg could now be dealt with in the capital of his own guberniia. The provincial reform of 1775 also offered the pro­ vincial nobles the possibility of financial assistance. Sal­ aries for elective service ranged from 360 rubles per year for the members of the Superior Land Court to 200 rubles a year for the two noble deputies of the ispravnik.51 In the last quarter of the eighteenth century 200 rubles a year was roughly equivalent to the obrok that a nobleman might receive from forty or fifty serfs. The section of the law dealing with wardship stipulated that a nobleman appointed to manage the property of a noble widow or orphan was entitled to keep 5 percent of the annual income from that property for himself.52 The marshal of the nobility also received 150 rubles a year as head of the Dvorianskaia Opeka.5S In addition, the Board of Public Welfare was empowered to lend money at interest to local noblemen who were willing to put up their estates as security, thus satisfying in part the request of several nakazy that the state estab­ lish credit institutions in the provinces similar to the nobles' banks in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Perhaps even more important than any individual as­ pect of the provincial reform was the effect that the reform as a whole had on the provincial nobility. For 51 From Senate records on the salaries paid to provincial officials, TsGADA, f. 259, kn. 4191, pp. 175-77 (Kursk), 224-27 (Nizhnii Novgorod), 321-25 (Tambov), 379-81 (Voronezh). 52 PSZ no. 14392, article 222. 53 TsGADA, f. 259, kn. 4191, p. 226.

The Provincial Reform of 1775 the first time since the nobles had begun to settle the provinces in large numbers, the state was expressing concern for the condition of the provinces, not just for their administration but also for the welfare and happi­ ness of their inhabitants. The section of the Fundamen­ tal Law dealing with the Board of Public Welfare en­ visioned the eventual creation of schools, hospitals, and other facilities whose absence from the provinces had been criticized in many of the nakazy. The Fundamental Law also required the existence of a town in the midst of every 20,000 to 30,000 inhabitants, a provision that promised to end the deep isolation of many parts of the countryside as the towns, whether old or newly founded, were developed into centers of government, commerce, and civilized social life. Among the officials to be ap­ pointed to the staff of the uezd administration seated in each of those towns were a doctor, a druggist, and an assistant druggist. Of particular gratification to the provincial nobles was the concern that the reform showed for the nobility as a class. Even the somewhat limited concern shown in the Fundamental Law was significant in contrast to the state's previous attitude, which the provincial nobles had seen as one of indifference and neglect. Coming on the heels of victories over Turkey and Pugachev, the provincial reform appeared as a further expansion of the cooperation between the state and the nobility that had come into being during the pugachevshchina. In calling upon the nobility to assist the state in the govern­ ing of the provinces and in acknowledging the govern­ ment's fear of rebellion and lawlessness, the Fundamen­ tal Law was a clear indication that Catherine would have to abandon any thought she may have had about weakening the nobleman's power over his serfs. Having

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility survived the pugachevshchina, serfdom was the strong­ er for it. The Fundamental Law was above all a symbol that the tension and estrangement between Catherine's government and the provincial nobility that had existed in previous years was to be replaced by a spirit of alli­ ance and cooperation. It was in that spirit that the the nobles of several provinces wanted to erect a statue of Catherine to commemorate the provincial reform. A delegation of noblemen from Smolensk told the empress that in their opinion the provincial reform had "estab­ lished their well-being and that of their descendants beyond the lot of mortal men" and that it had "reinstated our golden age." Similarly, in a letter to Sanktpeterburgskie vedomosti written in 1777 a nobleman from Pskov said that he and his fellows were unanimously in favor of the reform because it would "exterminate arguments and deceptions and unite the nobility with unbreakable bonds and institute general tranquility and prosperity."54 In the same tone and spirit Andrei Bolotov wrote of the period after 1775: "In all justice that epoch was the most memorable in all the modern his­ tory of society, and its currents produced a great change in everyone. . . . Life was so good and so happy—espe­ cially in the first three or six years after the reform of the provinces—and was so pleasant for us that it re­ mains forever unforgettable."55 Bolotov and the others were right. The reform of 1775 signaled the beginning of a new era in the history of the dvorianstvo, an era that with some exaggeration would go down in history as the "golden age" of the 54

Quoted by Zheludkov in Bernadsky (ed.), Ocherki po istorii klassovoi bor'by, pp. 221-22. 55 Quoted in Miliukov, Ocherki, H I : 387.

The Provincial Reform of 1775

Russian nobility. The reform of 1775 marked the be­ ginning of the state's new policy toward the dvorianstvo; the succeeding decade would see the evolution and final culmination of that policy.

The State and the Nobility 1775-1785

THE FIRST ELECTIONS N presenting the Fundamental Law to the Senate

I

on 7 November 1775 Catherine assured the sena­ tors that the reform would improve provincial ad­ ministration and the overall condition of the provinces, but she admitted that its implementation would en­ tail some difficulty and that some unforeseen changes or adjustments might have to be made. She proposed, therefore, that the reform first be tested in the guberniia of Tver' and that then, after it had been tried in practice and any mistakes or problems had been identified and corrected, the reform could be introduced throughout the empire. The senators were opposed to a long trial period, however, and pleaded with her not to delay the reform on that account.1 With the memory of the pugachevshchina fresh in their minds, the senators were im­ patient to see the conditions that had encouraged the revolt corrected and anxious lest this new plan for pro­ vincial reform share the fate of its many predecessors. After some discussion, the empress and the Senate agreed that Tver' and Smolensk should serve as models for the implementation of the reform, but that it should then be extended to other gubernii without the long and careful evaluation that Catherine had suggested.2 As governor-general of Tver', Sievers was entrusted 1

K. Blum, ii: 66. f. 259, kn. 4191, pp. 112-17.

2 TsGADA,

The State

the Nobility 1775-1785

with the responsibility of bringing the reform to life. In December 1775 the surveying of the new guberniia and its subdivisions was begun, and Sievers began the reorganization of the executive administration.3 As those undertakings neared their completion, the date for the official opening of the new guberniia was scheduled to coincide with the elections of the nobility. Since the Fundamental Law had said next to nothing about those elections, the manner in which Sievers conducted them would be of great significance, for in working out the procedures for the elections and in defining the role of the marshals and the assembly, Sievers would establish the precedents that would be followed throughout the empire.4 The first elections of the nobility under the Funda­ mental Law were held in Tver' in January 1776. From the 12th to the 15th of that month Sievers conferred with the marshals and arranged the details of the as­ sembly and the elections with them.5 At that time they presented him with a list containing the names of 482 noblemen who had already registered to vote,6 and an­ other 80 would register before the actual beginning of the elections.7 On the 16th, the nobles assembled in the cathedral for the celebration of a solemn religious serv3

PSZ no. 14404 (4 December 1775). 11 February 1776, Governor P. V. Zavadovsky of Smolensk, the second guberniia to be reformed in accordance with the Fundamental Law, informed Catherine that he was ready to implement the reform and was awaiting Sievers' re­ ports on the elections in Tver'. LOII, f. 36, d. 1162, p. 340. 5 Letter from Sievers to Catherine of 17 January 1776. TsGADA, f. 16, d. 788 part 1, pp. 1-2. 6 Ilovaisky, Sochineniia, p. 556. 7 Letter from Sievers to Catherine of 23 January 1776. TsGADA, f. 16, d. 788 part 1, p. 3. 4On

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

ice that was to consecrate the opening of the guberniia. The religious service was followed by other ceremonies and formalities, including the welcoming address of the governor-general, in which Sievers explained the impor­ tance of the reform and described the benefits that it would bring to the provinces in general and to the no­ bility in particular. When he had finished, the Funda­ mental Law was read aloud in its entirety.8 On the morning of the 16th, before the elections that were to begin that afternoon, Sievers met with the mar­ shals and informed them of a change that he planned to make in the election rules. He told them that "although nothing has been said in the new law about the rights of petty landowners and of those who own no serfs nor of the election of petty noblemen to office," he would nevertheless insist on the imposition of a property qual­ ification : any nobleman would be allowed to attend the assembly, but the privilege of running for office and of voting for marshals would be restricted to those who owned a minimum of twenty revision serfs, and the privilege of voting for the other offices would be re­ stricted to those who owned at least ten.9 Sievers made that ruling on his own authority without any guidance from the law or instruction from the empress, which may explain why he failed to mention it in his reports until three years later. Since no mention was made of it in his reports on the first elections, the property qual­ ification that Sievers had imposed was not copied by the other governors-general. In 1779 the marshal of the nobility attempted to apply it to the elections in Kaluga, 8

Ibid. See also Ilovaisky, Sochineniia, p. 556. Letter from Sievers to Catherine, undated but after 1780. TsGADA, f. 16, d. 788 part 2, p. 125. 9

The State &? the Nobility 1775-1785

but the petty nobles protested, and the governor-gen­ eral ruled in their favor.10 In the gubernii under his authority Sievers insisted upon it until his retirement in 1781, after which it was rescinded.11 The elections of the nobility began on the afternoon of the 18th and continued until the 22nd. The new marshals of the uezd were chosen first, after which Sievers stepped aside and allowed them to preside over the remaining elections.12 Officials were elected in the following order: ispravniks, judges of the Uezd Court, deputies to the Lower Land Court, members of the Uezd Court, members of the Superior Land Court, and members of the Conscience Court.13 When the balloting for those offices had been concluded, Sievers went be­ fore the assembly once again to propose the election of a marshal for the entire guberniia. Although article 432 of the Fundamental Law alluded to the existence of a marshal at the guberniia level, no law prior to 1785 had ever ordered the election of such an officer or explained how that post had come into being, a circumstance that has puzzled several historians of the reform.14 The ex­ planation is that Sievers called for the election of a 10

Report of Governor-General Krechetnikov on the first elections in Kaluga in December 1779. TsGADA, f. 16, d. 727 part 1, p. 6. 11 Thus the report on the election of 1797 shows that some of the officials elected by the nobility owned fewer than ten serfs. TsGlAL, f. 1374, d. 269, pp. 105-7. 12 Letter from Sievers to Catherine of 23 January 1776. TsGADA, f. 16, d. 788 part 1, p. 3. 13 Ilovaisky, Sochineniia, p. 556. 14 Grigor'ev, p. 230, and Romanovich-Slavatinsky, p. 443, express consternation over the absence of any decree ordering the election of a guberniia marshal.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility guberniia marshal without any official instruction, and the other governors-general then followed his example. He assumed, correctly no doubt, that the absence of a direct order for the election of a guberniia marshal was a mere oversight and proceeded on his own authority to correct it, explaining that "although the election of a guberniia marshal of the nobility is not expressly pre­ scribed by anything in the new law, it is obviously implied."15 He thereupon established the precedent of choosing the guberniia marshal from among the uezd marshals and then electing a new marshal to replace the one who had been promoted. With conclusion of the elections, the festivities that came to be associated with assembly time began. A Te Deum mass in the cathedral marked the close of the assembly. Later that day, the noblemen, their wives, and their families were the guests of the governor-general at a great banquet held in honor of the occasion. That same evening there was a masked ball followed by a supper.16 The government willingly bore the costs of the merrymaking and did its best to turn the meetings of the nobility into a great social event. That particular aspect of the state's policy served a twofold purpose: it helped to attract large numbers of noblemen to the elections, and it encouraged the development in the provinces of the kind of urbane social life that Catherine regarded as the hallmark of civilized society. The social functions supported by the state were soon supple­ mented with private receptions and balls, and the gath15

Letter from Sievers to Catherine, undated but after 1780. TsGADA, f. 16, d. 788 part 2, p. 138. 18 Letter from Sievers to Catherine of 30 January 1776. TsGADA, f. 16, d. 788 part 1, p. 4.

The State & the Nobility 1775-1785

ering of the nobility became major social occasions for the provincial nobles and their families. Wives showed off their finery, marriageable daughters were presented, and the noblemen exchanged gossip and discussed busi­ ness. The Moscow assembly in particular became such an important social affair that nobles from other prov­ inces poured into the city just to participate in the fes­ tivities associated with it.17 The empress also sought to enhance the prestige of the elections by favoring them with her personal atten­ tion. During the first elections in Novgorod in Decem­ ber 1776, for example, Catherine sent a personal word of encouragement and commendation to the assembled nobles in which she told those "high-minded sons of the fatherland" that Sievers' report of the "gratitude and zeal with which the nobles of Novgorod had come to­ gether" had given her "a satisfying feeling of fulfill­ ment."13 At the conclusion of the elections, she also wrote a special letter of congratulations to the newly elected marshal of the guberniia.19 At the end of each of the first election meetings a delegation of nobles would be sent to St. Petersburg to meet the empress and thank her for the reform. Catherine invariably found the time to talk with them in person and to return their thanks and their flattery. Starting with Tver', it also became the custom at the conclusion of the first elections to propose building a statue to Catherine in gratitude for the provincial reform of 1775. In each case Catherine would thank the nobles for their intentions 17

Miliukov, Ocherki, HI : 387; F. F. Vigel', Vospominaniia, ι (M., 1864), 184. 18 LOII, f. 36, d. 400, p. 254. 19 LOII, f. 36, d. 400, p. 300.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

and propose that the money for the statue be given in­ stead to the Board of Public Welfare for the support of its social work.20 When all of the ceremonies and festivities were over, the noblemen of Tver' dispersed to their homes. On 30 January 1776 the newly elected courts began their work, and the guberniia of Tver' began to operate in compliance with the Fundamental Law. Sievers was ecstatic over the successful implementation of the re­ form. He was especially pleased about the nobles' will­ ingness to attend the elections and to be elected to office since it vindicated his long-standing argument that the state should seek the help and cooperation of the provin­ cial nobility. He drew similar conclusions about the elec­ tions in Novgorod in December 1776 and about those in Olonets one year later.21 The reports of the governors-general show that the pattern set by Sievers in Tver' was repeated throughout the empire.22 After Tver' the gubernii of Great Russia 20 TsGADA, f. 16, d. 788 part 1, pp. 5, 11-12, 32. See also Zheludkov in Bernadsky (ed.), Ocherki po istorii klassovoi bofby, pp. 221-22. 21Letters from Sievers to Catherine of 23 January 1776, 19 December 1776, and 18 December 1777. TsGADA, f. 16, d. 788 part 1, pp. 3, 30-31, 85-86. 22 In addition to Sievers' reports on the first elections in Tver', Novgorod, Olonets, and Pskov, the reports on the open­ ing of the following gubernii have been consulted: Smolensk, TsGADA, f. 16, d. 949 and LOII, f. 36, d. 1162; Kaluga, TsGADA, f. 16, d. 729 part 1; Vladimir, Riazan', and Orlov, TsGADA, f. 259, kn. 4191; Nizhnii Novgorod, TsGADA, f. 16, d. 777; Voronezh, Kursk, and St. Petersburg, TsGADA, f. 259, kn. 4222 and Iaroslavl', TsGADA, f. 16, d. 1012. The first elections are also discussed by Zheludkov in Bernadsky (ed.), Ocherki po istorii klassovoi bor'by, pp. 214-23.

The State &? the Nobility 1775-1785

and White Russia were opened one by one, concluding with Moscow in 1782. From 1781 to 1784 the new or­ der was extended into the Baltic region, Russian Fin­ land, and the Ukraine. In 1786-1787 it was introduced into the Caucasus and the Crimea.23 In areas like Arkhangel in the far north and Siberia to the east, the elec­ tion of officials by the nobility had to be modified or omitted because of the rarity of nobles in those areas. Along the eastern frontier, in Perm, Nizhnii Novgorod, Voronezh, Astrakhan, Orenburg, Samara, and Vologda, the scarcity of noblemen forced the responsible officials to fill some of the elected offices by appointment.24 By the end of Catherine's reign, however, the eastward mi­ gration of noblemen had made the reform operative in those areas.25 In the settled regions of the empire, the only irregularities occurred in the guberniia of St. Pe­ tersburg, and they were corrected in the second elec­ tions.26 The central government paid great attention to the elections of the nobility. The empress often examined the reports of the governors-general in person. The great care with which she did so is apparent in her 28Zheludkov in Bernadsky (ed.), Ocherki po istorii klassovoi bor'by, p. 201. 24 Grigor'ev, pp. 316-17; Romanovich-Slavatinsky, p. 488. In Viatka, for example, only 61 noblemen attended the first elections, and the governor-general had to appoint both the ispravnik and the judge of the Uezd Court in every uezd. Stoletie Viatskoi gubernii, pp. 15-21. 25 The reports from Nizhnii Novgorod and Voronezh on the elections of 1797 show that all of the officials to be elected by the nobles were elected. TsGIAL, f. 1374, d. 269, pp. 17881 and 191-93. 28 TsGADA, f. 259, kn. 4222, pp. 163-65.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

comments in the margin of the report submitted by Governor-General Kurakin of St. Petersburg, where there had been irregularities: "Why had only one dele­ gate to the Uezd Court been elected, rather than two as the law prescribes? In the uezd of Oranienbaum Konstantinov has been elected ispravnik·, if he is the one who is in my book, such a lazy man has been elected with undue haste. Moreover, the deputies to the Lower Land Court are missing in the uezd of Shliussel'burg, and the same is true of one deputy in Iamburg and in Narva."27 Where the elections satisfied her expectations, on the other hand, the empress often sent her personal congratulations to the governor-general.28 In 1780 Cath­ erine decided to take a closer look at the operation of the reformed gubernii. Taking with her a party of fif­ teen of the highest dignitaries of the state, including Potemkin, the royal favorite, and Bezborodko, her per­ sonal secretary, Catherine traveled through the guber­ nii of St. Petersburg, Pskov, Polotsk, Mogilev, Smo­ lensk, and Novgorod. At every stop she interviewed the officials, both appointed and elected, where the men she had brought with her inspected the records and papers of the various agencies and courts.29 Catherine also be­ gan the practice of sending members of the Senate into the provinces as inspectors-general (revizory) to check up on the activities of the provincial administration. In 1783, surveillance of the provinces by the capital was increased by a decree ordering the governors-general to 27

SIRIO , XXVII : 58-79. See, for example, her letter to P. S. Potemkin on the opening of Saratov in 1781. SIRIO, xxvii: 187-88. 29 SIRIO, i: 384-420. 28

The State & the Nobility 1775-1785

report to the Senate twice each month and to include information about elective as well as appointive institu­ tions.30 The concern of the central government for the ad­ ministration of the provinces after the introduction of the provincial reform is a clear indication that it was determined to make the reform a reality by insisting on compliance with the Fundamental Law and supplemen­ tary instructions. That was true with respect to the no­ bility no less than the state officials. The state flattered the nobles and took pains to see that they gave the re­ form a welcome reception, but ultimately the standard by which the elective aspect of the reform was judged was not the pleasure that it gave the nobles but the number and quality of the officials it provided and the contribution that it was making to the improvement of provincial administration. THE STATE'S SATISFACTION WITH THE REFORM

In evaluating the success of the Fundamental Law and of elective service in particular, close attention must be paid to the date of the evaluation. There is little doubt that elective service was a failure in the long run: evi­ dence from the nineteenth century clearly indicates that elective service was held in general disrepute and that it was one of the worst aspects of provincial adminis­ tration. That evaluation should not be applied retroac­ tively to the eighteenth century, however, for the bulk of the evidence from Catherine's own time indicates that during the first two decades of its operation elective 30

PSZ no. 15812 (21 August 1783).

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility service was a success and was recognized as such by the imperial government. The surviving opinions of Catherine's contemporaries are all but unanimous in their praise of elective service. Writing in 1809, Prince Th.N. Golitsyn appraised the provincial reform of 1775 in the following terms: The empire has profited greatly from that law. Previ­ ously, one voevoda and his associates administered the entire guberniia, and its affairs were tangled and frus­ trating. The nobles who lived in the country did not have the means to educate their children, and com­ municating little among themselves, they lived in idle­ ness and were of no use to the fatherland; manners failed to improve and remained coarse, especially in remote regions; neither the peasants nor the lords had an understanding of social order or of the ability need­ ed for industry. A certain amount of needed enlighten­ ment was thus spread by a socially useful means. Con­ sidering the extent of our empire and the ferocity of our people, the introduction of the land police was a necessity. Since that time, less is actually heard of any sort of evil doing.31 In a similar vein, Princess Dashkov, writing in 1806, praised the reform for bringing "order and civilization" to the provinces and spoke with particular enthusiasm of the new courts that Catherine had created.32 Bolotov and Karamzin also praised the reform of 1775, which is not surprising in view of their strong loyalty to the dvorianstvo and its interests, but even a liberal opponent 31 "Zapiski

Kniazia Theodora Nikolaevicha Golitsyna," RA, 1874, pp. 316-17. 32 Memoirs of the Princess Dashkaw, i: 316-17.

The State 6? the Nobility 1775-1785 of Catherine's regime like Vinsky had to admit that the reform had had a beneficial effect on the provinces.33 The favorable judgment of contemporaries is sup­ ported by independent evidence. With regard to cultural development, Catherine found during her inspection tour of 1780 that the Boards of Public Welfare were increasing their capital and building schools and other public institutions. There were plans for a school in Pskov. In Polotsk there were already six schools with an enrollment of 330. In Mogilev, there were 838 pupils in thirty-two schools, but many of them were parochial schools run by the Roman Catholic Church and cannot, for that reason, be credited to the provincial reform. Smolensk had 359 pupils in school, and enrollment in Novgorod was 1,113.34 By that time a school had also been constructed in Tver'. Catherine's hope of develop­ ing the provincial towns into centers of culture and social life as well as commerce and administration was meeting with some success. Of Tver' and Novgorod, Sievers wrote: "Little by little the nobility is acquiring taste—it is congregating in the towns and building houses there." Derzhavin described the settlement of Tambov by the nobility in similar terms.35 The develop­ ment of the provinces was slow, and seen in retrospect, it was inadequate to Russia's real needs, but seen in the perspective of the nakazy of 1767 and the conditions they described, the development that took place in the two decades after 1775 constituted a substantial im­ provement. More important from the state's point of view, how­ ever, was the improvement in provincial administration 33 34

Vinsky, p. 41.

SlRlO, i: 394-95, 401, 408, 412-13, 419. 35 Miliukov, Ocherki, i: 388.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility that contemporaries were noticing, an improvement that depended on the willingness of the provincial nobles to participate in the elections and provide the state with qualified officials in sufficient number. Again, the evi­ dence corroborates the verdict of the memoirists. The reports of the governors-general show that in the wellsettled regions of the empire attendance at the first elec­ tions ran between 400 and 800 per guberniia and 35 to 75 per uezd. Statistics on attendance alone do not prove the success of elective service, however. If it was to be successful, elective service required the participation of noblemen competent to perform the duties of elected officials. The only data pertaining to the competence of the provincial nobles attending the elections are the sta­ tistics on service ranks. These show that the ranks of those attending the meetings were higher on the whole than they had been in 1767 and that middle and uppermiddle grade officers constituted a significant element if not a majority of the assemblies. In Kaluga, for ex­ ample, 127 noblemen out of the 425 who attended the elections had attained the eighth service rank (major, collegiate assessor) or a higher one.36 In Olonets, it was 115 out of 401.37 Attendance at the first elections in Novgorod in December 1776 was broken down accord­ ing to service ranks as shown in the list on p. 257. In the opinion of the state's officials the caliber of the men attending the elections and of those elected to office was quite satisfactory. The domination of the assem­ blies by the poor and uneducated that Sievers had feared did not occur. In most instances, the men elected to of­ fice had held higher ranks in the state service than those 38 37

TsGADA, f. 16, d. 729, p. 22. TsGADA, f. 16, d. 788 part 1, p. 83.

The State Rank

the Nobility 1775-1785 Number of Noblemen38

Third Fourth Fifth Sixth Seventh Eighth Ninth Tenth Twelfth Thirteenth Fourteenth Sergeant Sergeant, second class Corporal Private Never in Service

1 4 4 16 20 109 101 9 75 71 104 12 14 3 6 94 Total

643

conferred by their new offices. Sievers emphasized that point in his report to Catherine on the success of the first elections in Tver', telling her: "Far from finding people reluctant or opposed to leaving their retreats and their indolence to prepare themselves for the new insti­ tutions, [I found] the majority eager for the commis­ sions that Your Majesty has just created, and I may say 38

Report of Sievers to the Senate, December 1776 (LOII, f. 36, d. 400, p. 280). There is a slight discrepancy between this total and the figure of 625 given in Sievers' letter to Catherine of 11 December 1776. TsGADA, f. 168, d. 144, p. 14.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

that all of those who have been elected to posts in the judges, and ispravniki—are all peo­ ple of recognized merit, most having filled positions in the service that confer a rank equal to or greater than those to which they have been elected by their con­ freres."39 Melgunov made a similar appraisal of the first elec­ tions in Iaroslavl', reporting that all of the officials elected by the nobles were "loved and respected by the confreres" and that everyone understood the post of ispravnik to be so important that they elected to that office people of the highest merit.40 Of the gubernii of Tula and Kaluga, which he inspected in 1785, Senator A. R. Vorontsov wrote that "one might say that good people have been elected to almost every office."41 The effect of elective service on provincial adminis­ tration is difficult to measure empirically; nevertheless, Catherine attempted to gauge its effect during her tour of inspection in 1780. She told the examiners who ac­ companied her to see if all the posts prescribed by the Fundamental Law had been established, to see if they had been filled, to find out if the courts were operating in accordance with the law, and to determine the extent of the judicial backlog. The answers to the first three questions were affirmative in all cases. Regarding the fourth, the inspectors found that in Pskov there were 233 cases of all kinds pending in the guberniia courts and 79 in the uezd courts; in Polotsk there were 20 cases on the docket of the guberniia courts and 210 on those of the uezd courts; in Mogilev, the figures were

uezdy—marshals,

39 Letter from Sievers to Catherine of 23 January 1776. TsGADA, f. 16, d. 788 part 1, p. 3. 10 TsGADA, f. 16, d. 1012 part 1, p. 45. 41 LOII, f. 36, d. 399, p. 565.

The State &f the Nobility 1775-1785

57 and 265 respectively; in Smolensk, 130 and 437; and in Novgorod, there were 248 cases awaiting a decision in the guberniia courts and an undetermined number in the uezd courts.42 Considering that cases in all stages of the judicial process were included in those figures and that the new courts were still working their way through the backlog of cases that had developed under the old system, those results speak well for the new courts. In 1788, Bolotov became involved in litigation, and despite some delay caused by a jurisdictional dis­ pute, he found that the courts functioned efficiently.43 The findings of Catherine's inspectors and Bolotov's account of his experience with the new courts contrast sharply with the exasperated complaints about court procedure and judicial red tape that appeared so fre­ quently in the nobles' nakazy of 1767. After examining the results of the provincial reform, the empress and her agents expressed their satisfaction with its operation. Her governors-general, some of whom disapproved of elective service on principle, la­ beled that innovation a success and declared their satis­ faction with the reform.44 Inspectors-general sent into the provinces to check up on provincial administration concurred in that evaluation: although they found fault with the conduct of some officials and the operations of some agencies, they were quite satisfied with the new system of administration as a whole. More significantly, after evaluating the success of the reform, Catherine overcame her reservations about elective service and her doubts about the immediate implementation of the Fun­ damental Law and became convinced that the direction 42

SIRIO, i: 394-95, 401, 408, 412-13, 419. Bolotov, iv: 414. 44 LOII, f. 36, d. 398, pp. 490-505.

43

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

she had taken was the right one. In September 1780, soon after her tour of inspection through the provinces, Catherine called upon the governors-general to complete the implementation of the reform, citing the "benefit and utility" that it had already brought to the empire/5 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROVINCIAL ASSEMBLIES

The state's endorsement of elective service was accom­ panied by a shift in its attitude toward the provincial nobility. In the ten years that followed the introduc­ tion of the provincial reform, the nobility of each guberniia was recognized as a semi-autonomous corporation with its own ofiicers and institutions. The Fundamental Law gave little indication of the subsequent develop­ ment of the nobles' assembly: concentrating on the im­ provement of provincial administration, the law con­ cerned itself with the elected officials rather than the nobility. The chief mention of the dvorianstvo as a functional entity occurred in its statements that suchand-such an official was to be elected every three years by the nobility. The law did increase the importance of the marshal somewhat, but it said nothing at all about the assembly as an institution of class government. As for the procedures by which the various officials were to be elected, the Fundamental Law said only that they were to be the same as those established by the decree of 14 December 1766 on the election of delegates to the Legislative Commission.46 The law of 14 December 1766 has been pointed to by 45PSZ

no. 15068 (26 September 1780). instruction was given in a note (primechanie) that followed Chapter III of the Fundamental Law. PSZ no. 14392. 46That

The State & the Nobility 1775-1785

some historians as the beginning of the corporate or­ ganization of the nobility.47 In truth, however, the class organization created at that time was so rudimentary that it can be seen as a corporate institution only in the retrospective light of its later development. The law of 14 December 1766 had ordered the election of marshals in every uezd, but the only duty it had assigned to him was that of presiding at future assemblies of the nobil­ ity. When the two-year terms prescribed by the law were about to expire, new elections were called for by special decree until finally in 1771 a decree had ordered the election of marshals every two years on a regular basis.48 From all of those decrees it appears that the existence of marshals and the convening of assemblies were intended to serve the purposes of the state rather than those of the nobles themselves. The law of 14 De­ cember 1766, for example, ordered the marshal to pre­ side at all future gatherings of the nobility "that the state may have to convoke." Seen in that context, the marshals and the assemblies appear as devices for pre­ venting the dispersal and disintegration of the nobility that the state feared would result from the Manifesto of Peter III. They provided the machinery that enabled the state to address the nobles in a group rather than individually and to inform them of its desires and com­ mands. The use of the marshals to check the spread of epidemics and collect recruits for the army was a fur­ ther illustration that the state saw the class organization of the nobility, such as it was, as a means of getting the provincial nobles to do the bidding of the state. That conception of the nobles' assembly was carried 47

See for example Korf, pp. 17-20. nos. 13111 (21 May 1768), 13600 (21 April 1771), and 13661 (26 September 1771). i s PSZ

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

over into the Fundamental Law. The governors-general were to direct the assembly and see that it satisfied the demands of the law, and all initiative was to rest with the state and its agents. Nothing other than the selec­ tion of the designated officials was to be left to the dis­ cretion of the nobles, who were to assemble, vote, cele­ brate, and go home in obedience to the state's command. As envisioned by the Fundamental Law, the only dif­ ference between the elections that were to be held after 1775 and those that had been held in 1767 was that now the nobles were being called upon to elect officials and judges rather than delegates to a legislative com­ mission. A letter that Catherine wrote to Sievers in April 1777 makes it clear that the state's only interest in the assem­ blies was as a means to the selection of qualified offi­ cials. In it the empress asked the governor-general what he thought of allowing the governors-general to dismiss elected officials at their own discretion so that the state would not have to be saddled for three years with an incompetent official simply because the assembly of the nobility had made an unwise selection. She also won­ dered if the assignment of an official rank to an elected office ought to be continued since in some instances a man could attain a higher rank through the elections than he had been capable of earning in the service. Sev­ enteen months after the promulgation of the Funda­ mental Law Catherine was still concerned that she might have gone too far in the roles that she had as­ signed to the nobles and their elected officials. Sievers, however, succeeded in persuading her not to make any changes in the law that might downgrade elective serv­ ice in the eyes of the nobles. The ranks assigned to elective offices, he argued, were necessary incentives for

The State &f the Nobility 1775-1785

the nobles to seek election, and the dismissal by the governor-general of an official elected by the assembly would, in his words, "degrade and humiliate" the no­ bility.49 Sievers' view of elective service and of the involve­ ment of the nobles in provincial affairs was broader than Catherine's in that it was not focused exclusively on the results of the elections as the principal criterion for measuring the success of the reform. As his reply to Catherine's questions showed, Sievers considered the quality of the individual officials elected by the nobility to be less important than the general attitude and mo­ rale of the nobility itself. His acts and statements indi­ cate that Sievers believed that the success of the provin­ cial reform depended on the nobility's acceptance of elective service and that that acceptance depended in turn on the encouragement and respect that the state accorded the nobility. Sievers' insight was essentially sound. In the final analysis, the real difference between elective service and the previous method of recruitment was psychological. The initial, enthusiastic reception that the nobles gave to the provincial reform was based more on the general impression that the reform marked the dawn of a new era in the relationship between the state and the nobil­ ity than on any great interest in elective service per se. Bolotov's memoirs provide a neat example of that atti­ tude. Delighted by the provincial reform, Bolotov at­ tended the first elections in Tula in December 1777. He was impressed by the ceremonies, enjoyed the fes­ tivities, and was pleased to meet many of his old friends and acquaintances, but he was bored by the elections 49 Letter from Sievers to Catherine of 21 April 1777. TsGADA, f. 168, d. 153, p. 5.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

themselves and noted only that they seemed to take a very long time. At a subsequent assembly, he left the hall before the elections had been completed, explaining that "it all took a very long time, and I was getting hungry."50 Understanding something of the psychology of the provincial landowners, Catherine and Sievers had taken pains to embellish the election meetings with religious ceremonies, parties, and other inducements. A further incentive, Sievers believed, would be to enhance the sig­ nificance of the assemblies themselves since the more important the assemblies became, the more interest the nobles were likely to take in them. Properly developed, Sievers argued, the nobles' assembly could become an auxiliary of the state administration, helping to improve conditions in the provinces. In support of his arguments that the corporate role of the nobility be enhanced, Sievers cited the enthusias­ tic and responsible attitude that the nobles had dis­ played in the first elections. In conducting those elec­ tions, he had treated the marshals and the assemblies with greater deference than either law or precedent re­ quired. Before the elections began, he met with the mar­ shals and worked out the various details and procedures in cooperation with them. In the elections of 1767, on the other hand, the responsible state officials had made all of the arrangements and in some cases had been ordered not to consult the nobles about any decision they might make.51 When Sievers decided to impose a property qualification on the right to participate in the elections, he announced his intention to the marshals in private beforehand. Since he had already made the deci50Bolotov,

HI : 718-28 and iv: 104. ZMNP , CCLI : 272.

51 Lipinsky,

The State

the Nobility 1775-1785

sion, his consultation with the marshals was only a gesture of respect and courtesy, but such tokens were important in building the morale of the nobility. After the opening ceremonies and the election of new mar­ shals, Sievers left the assembly and allowed the mar­ shals to conduct the remaining elections. That action was consistent with the law of 14 December 1766, which had said that the marshal was to preside at all future meetings of the nobility, but since the governorgeneral was responsible for implementing the Funda­ mental Law, Sievers had the authority to continue pre­ siding had he chosen to do so. Instead, he chose to demonstrate to both the nobility and the government that the nobles were capable of managing their own af­ fairs, a theme on which he would elaborate in future elections. A further step in the development of the nobles' as­ sembly was taken at the elections held in Olonets in December 1777. When the elections had been con­ cluded and the nobles had satisfied the commands of the state, Sievers allowed them to meet in session once again to discuss a matter of importance to themselves— the construction of a school for the sons of poor noble­ men. The assembled noblemen discussed the problem and agreed to build and support such a school as a col­ lective undertaking of the nobility: each nobleman was to contribute five kopeks for every revision serf in his possession to a common fund to be managed by the guberniia marshal. Sievers regarded the action of the Olonets assembly as a personal triumph, as a vindica­ tion of his argument that the state should accord the nobles greater autonomy and initiative. He presented the news of the Olonets assembly's decision to Cather­ ine like a master craftsman unveiling a masterpiece,

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

writing: "Behold Most Gracious Sovereign, the monu­ ment that I dedicate to Your Majesty—I dare to con­ gratulate myself upon it—to have elevated the soul of your subjects."52 Sievers' actions in regard to the nobles' assembly and its officers were given legal sanction in November 1778. Anticipating the second round of elections in Tver', Sievers wrote to Catherine on 24 October 1778 and asked her to rule on a number of questions that had arisen during the first elections.53 Catherine replied to Sievers' questions and then published both his ques­ tions and answers in the form of a general decree that was to guide all of her governors-general in conducting future elections.54 Her decree of 25 November placed the primary responsibility for conducting the elections in the hands of the nobles' assembly and its marshals rather than the governor-general and authorized the as­ sembly to conduct business in the name of the nobility. The governor-general henceforth was to have as little to do with the assembly as possible. Instead of address­ ing the opening session, he was to give any instructions he might have to the marshals for transmission to the assembly. If he had something to say to the nobles di­ rectly, he was to communicate with them in writing. The governor-general was not to attend the elections but was to "leave them completely free in the elections." The marshals were to conduct the balloting and to ad52

Letter from Sievers to Catherine of 21 December 1777. TsGADA, f. 16, d. 788 part 1, p. 81. 53 TsGADA, f. 16, d. 788 part 1, pp. 102-13. 54 Catherine had written her reply to Sievers' questions by 5 November 1778 (LOII9 f. 36, d. 400, pp. 249-51). The general decree, in the form of questions and answers but making no mention of Sievers as the source of the questions, was promulgated on 25 November. PSZ no. 14816.

The State & the Nobility 1775-1785

minister the oath to the newly elected officials. An addi­ tional upgrading of the voting was Catherine's ruling that in the case of collegial bodies like the courts, preced­ ence was to be given to the member who had received the largest number of votes in the election rather than the one who had earned the highest rank in the state service. Asked if a nobleman elected by the assembly could decline that honor, Catherine ruled that the as­ sembly had the power to excuse him or to compel him to serve. That determination made it clear that the nobles were collectively responsible for providing the state with the officials required by the Fundamental Law and were to decide among themselves, without in­ terference from the state, which of their number were to fill the elective offices. The assembly could even elect a man who was not present at the elections provided he owned an estate in the appropriate locality. If a noble­ man were to be elected to office in more than one local­ ity, however, he would have the right to choose which post he would accept. Asked if the nobles might recon­ vene after the elections to discuss common problems, decide on cooperative actions, or petition the crown, Catherine answered tersely: "It is permitted." She also granted the nobles permission to maintain their own treasury and to levy voluntary assessments.55 Catherine's decree of 25 November 1778 has not received the attention accorded the decree calling for the election of delegates to the Legislative Commission or the Fundamental Law or the Charter to the Nobility, yet it is no less a milestone in the history of her policy toward the nobility. It established the assembly of the nobility as an institution, transforming a congregation of nobles gathered together to do the bidding of the B5

PSZ no. 14816 (25 November 1778).

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

state into a corporate body. The decree of 25 November 1778 thus constitutes an essential link between the Fun­ damental Law and the Charter, for once the assembly of the nobility had been defined as a corporate organ with legal rights and powers, the general problem of the nobles status under law was well on its way toward solution. The new rules governing the nobles' assembly were first applied in the elections held in Tver' in January 1779. Neither Sievers nor the governor attended the sessions of the assembly, and Sievers wrote Catherine of the pride and satisfaction he derived from seeing the nobles conduct their own affairs. Men of property, he argued, were the natural allies of the state, and the state would benefit from allowing them to work independ­ ently for the common good.58 Liberty, Sievers believed, could accomplish great things, but it should only be entrusted to those who would use it responsibly. Thus he noted approvingly that the marshals on their own authority had imposed the property qualifications that he had introduced at the first elections and had seated those with limited franchise at the back of the hall. In addition, the marshals had prevented noblemen under seLetter from Sievers to Catherine of 11 January 1779 (TsGADA, f. 16, d. 788 part 2, pp. 1-3). Writing in French, Sievers used English words to convey his meaning more pre­ cisely: "Liberty et Property sont toujours ma devise et ma (sic) but, et Fidelity et Loyality Ies moyens pour y parvenir." In all likelihood Sievers' use of English also indicates that consciously or unconsciously his model was England. In an­ other letter written on 12 March 1780 Sievers referred to England as ". . . that country which is without contradiction the most enlightened in Europe at present." TsGADA, f. 5, d. 130, p. 11.

The State &f the Nobility 1775-1785 the age of twenty-five from taking part in the elections.57 The real news in Sievers' report on the second elections in Tver', however, was that the assembly had recon­ vened after the elections and had discussed the creation of a school, the improvement of the roads, and the stor­ age of grain for use in time of famine. Agreement had been reached on several points, and petitions expressing the consensus of the assembly had been drafted and would be sent to the empress.58 The nobles had also agreed among themselves to an assessment of ten ko­ peks per revision serf to build and support a school for the education of young noblemen. Sievers estimated that if only five kopeks were contributed for each of the 122,547 serfs in the guberniia, the Board of Public Welfare would be able to finance the education of 200 young noblemen.59 Sievers attached great importance to the actions of the Tver' assembly, to its initiatives, and to its respon­ sible use of the liberty that the state had given the nobles. In the willingness of an enlightened nobility and an enlightened government to work together for the common good Sievers saw great promise for the fu­ ture of Russia. In a letter written from Tver' less than two weeks after the close of the assembly of 1779, Sievers told Senator A. R. Vorontsov: "I am persuaded that Your Excellency wanted very much to share in the great success of the assembly of the nobles of this prov­ ince concerning the public welfare, the cause of human­ ity, and the natural rights of a man of power, matters [about which] I consult and [for which] I plead, mat57 TsGADA,

f. 16, d. 788 part 1, p. 241. f. 16, d. 788 part 1, p. 228. 59 TsGADA, f. 16, d. 788 part 1, p. 248. 58 TsGADA,

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

ters that will open a new epoch in the history of this empire."60 If the decree of 25 November 1778 was not quite the turning point in the history of the Russian Empire that Sievers hoped and believed it would be, it was at least a turning point in Catherine's attitude toward the as­ semblies of the provincial nobility. At Sievers' urging she had adopted a favorable attitude toward the assem­ blies and continued in succeeding years to expand and defend their prerogatives. By the time Sievers left office in 1781, his view of the nobles' assembly had been firmly incorporated into Catherine's policy. In March 1781, a ruling that elected officials could continue to draw their state pensions made elective service more at­ tractive to retired noblemen, especially those who had attained substantial rank in the service before retiring.61 A retired nobleman could not reenlist in the regular service without temporarily forfeiting his pension. In October 1781, Catherine temporarily placed the power to determine who was and who was not a nobleman in the hands of the provincial marshals. Asked by Governor-General Rumiantsev of Malorossiia to define "no­ bleman" with reference to participation in the assem­ blies, Catherine replied that until such time as the state should issue a comprehensive law on the nobility, ad­ mission to the assemblies was to be regulated by the marshals.62 A few weeks later, Sievers successor re­ ceived a similar answer to his questions about the age and property requirements that had been imposed dur­ ing Sievers' tenure in office. Catherine replied that pend­ ing the promulgation of a comprehensive law on the β» LOII, f. 36, d. 1188, pp. 110-11. e i PSZ no. 15140 (24 March 1781). 62 PSZ no. 15265 (26 October 1781).

The State £? the Nobility 1775-1785

nobility, such questions were to be decided by the as­ semblies.63 In addition to allowing the nobles to decide internal questions of membership and participation, Catherine began to insist that the election of the officials desig­ nated by the Fundamental Law was a genuine prerog­ ative of the nobility. In November 1781, she ruled that a new election would have to be held to fill the unex­ pired term of a marshal who had died in office.64 Two years later that ruling was extended to cover all of the officials elected by the nobility, and the governor-gen­ eral was expressly prohibited from filling the vacancy by appointment.65 In June 1782 a governor-general was forbidden to dismiss any official elected by the nobility prior to the expiration of his term of office, as some gov­ ernors-general, acting on their own authority, had tried to do. At the same time the state repeated its order that neither the governor-general nor the governor was to attend the elections.66 That prohibition was restated in even stronger terms in November 1788 when it came to the attention of the government that a provincial gov­ ernor had attended the assembly of the nobility and had openly interfered in the elections. Such conduct was de­ nounced, and the declaration that "Her Imperial Maj­ esty wishes to leave the nobility completely free in its elections" was restated with emphasis. In addition, the state tried to secure the independence of the assemblies by ruling that any future disputes that might arise be­ tween an assembly and any appointed official, including the governor-general, were to be settled by the courts ™PSZ no. 15280 (18 November 1781). Ibid. 6 5 PSZ no. 15763 (19 June 1783). 66 PSZ no. 15477 (25 June 1782). 64

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

in accordance with the law.67 In other words, the nobles' assembly was empowered to bring an appointed official before a court if he tried to overstep the limits of his authority and encroach upon the prerogatives of the assembly. Only eleven years had passed between that order and Catherine's question to Sievers, asking if the governor-general should not be allowed to replace offi­ cials elected by the nobles if he felt that they had chosen unwisely. 87 PSZ

no. 16713 (28 November 1788).

The Resolution of the Problem,

THE CHARTER TO THE NOBILITY

T

HE questions raised by the Manifesto of Peter III

were finally answered in 1785 with the enact­ ment of Catherine's Charter to the Nobility. A comprehensive statute defining the nobility and its role in Russian society, the Charter resolved by fiat the is­ sues that had generated so much controversy in the 1760s, the issues that both the Commission on the Free­ dom of the Nobility and the Legislative Commission had grappled with in vain. By 1785, however, those is­ sues were much less controversial. In the aftermath of the Pugachev Revolt official attitudes toward bureacracy, serfdom, and the value of the provincial nobility had shifted, and since 1775 the policies pursued by Catherine's government had been leading toward great­ er and greater accommodation with the dvorianstvo. In those altered circumstances, Catherine was able to com­ pose the Charter to the Nobility out of existing laws and proposals simply by completing, coordinating, and con­ firming them. As one scholar has noted, the Charter to the Nobility contained very little that was new or origi­ nal,1 yet its promulgation was a landmark in the history of the Russian Empire, for it completed the transforma­ tion of the nobility's role that was begun in 1762 and 1

K.N.V., "Dvorianskaia gramota," Istoricheskii Vestnik, xix. 619-46.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

inaugurated a new status quo that would last until 1861.

The sources of the Charter to the Nobility are clearly apparent and were sometimes referred to by name in the text of the document. The Manifesto of Peter III, the report of the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobil­ ity, the proposal on the rights of the nobility that had been discussed at the Legislative Commission, the sub­ sequent project drafted by the Particular Commission on the Analysis of the Kinds of State Inhabitants, the Fundamental Law for the Administration of the Prov­ inces, the subsequent laws that had expanded and de­ fined the role of the nobles' assembly, and official rul­ ings on individual matters related to the rights of the nobility all contributed to its content. As with the In­ struction to the Legislative Commission and the Fun­ damental Law for the Administration of the Provinces, however, Catherine did more than simply glue together the sources she had collected. Provisions were amended and details were altered to make the various points in­ cluded in the Charter consistent with each other and with Catherine's view of nobility and its proper place in society. In drafting the Charter Catherine was an ex­ perienced and seasoned ruler working deliberately on a specific and well-explored subject. As a result, the Char­ ter was a much more complete and polished composi­ tion than either the Instruction to the Legislative Com­ mission or the Fundamental Law for the Administration of the Provinces. Carefully written over the course of several years, the Charter to the Nobility and its com­ panion, the Charter to the Towns, were to be the twin masterpieces of Catherine's legislative craftsmanship, the everlastingly glorious achievements of the enlight-

Resolution of the Problem

ened lawgiver. With a triumphant flourish they were presented to the world on Catherine's fifty-sixth birth­ day, 21 April 1785. Preceded by an introduction citing the nobility's con­ tribution to the greatness of the Russian Empire, the Charter was divided into four sections: the first dealt with the legal status of the individual nobleman, the second with the corporate status of the dvorianstvo, the third with the official registration of noblemen and their families, and the fourth with proofs of nobility. Logi­ cally and methodically organized in accordance with their separate themes, the four sections were comple­ mentary parts of the greater whole. A point in any one section was often modified and elaborated upon by points in one or more of the other sections. For exam­ ple, the general definition of nobility given in the first section was clarified by specific instructions given in the second and third sections. Similarly, many of the per­ sonal rights conferred upon noblemen as individuals— their right to a trial, for example—were comprehensi­ ble only within the context of some corporate function of the nobility as a whole, in this case the election of class courts. To cite another example, the nobleman's relationship to state service was defined in the first sec­ tion, but points in Sections Two and Three added im­ portant clarifications and amendments to that definition. For that reason, the various provisions of the Charter can only be understood in the context of their relation­ ship to each other and to the document as a whole. The Charter began with a definition of nobility as "a hereditary distinction derived from the quality and vir­ tue of outstanding men of former times who distin­ guished themselves by their deeds and who, having

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

thereby made their service worthy of honor, acquired the title of nobility for their posterity."2 That definition reaffirmed the policy of the state, consistent throughout the eighteenth century, that nobility was a hereditary status conferred as a reward for service to the state. Subsequent articles made it clear that that policy was to operate in the future as it had in the past. The Char­ ter quoted Peter the Great's decree of 16 January 1721, which stated that "all commissioned officers who were not born into the nobility, together with their children and their descendants, are nobles and must be given patents of nobility." In a further reaffirmation of the Table of Ranks, the Charter insisted that "all civil serv­ ants, be they Russian or foreign, who hold or attain the first eight ranks, together with their children and de­ scendants, are to be regarded for all time as being equal to the best and oldest nobility in all honors and advan­ tages, even though they be base born commoners."3 Overruling those nobles who wanted to create an oli­ garchy or an aristocracy within the dvorianstvo and those who wanted to make the dvorianstvo a closed, ex­ clusively hereditary caste, Catherine insisted upon the legal equality of noblemen and reasserted the principle of ennobling commoners as a reward for service to the state. However, the Charter's adamant defense of the Table of Ranks was tempered by a provision calling for the registration of noble families in one of six separate cate­ gories according to manner in which their nobility had been acquired. Those who had received the membership in the nobility within the last one hundred years through the personal grant of the monarch were to be listed in 2PSZ 3 Ibid.,

no. 16187 (The Charter to the Nobility), article 1. articles 78-79.

Resolution of the Problem the first category; those who had acquired it through military service were to be listed in the second category; and those who had acquired it through civil service were to be listed in the third. Families whose nobility was of foreign origin were to be listed in the fourth category; those entitled to use the titles prince, count, and baron were to be listed in the fifth, and those whose nobility had been established for more than a century were to be entered in the sixth.4 The sixfold division of the nobility enabled those nobles whose families were entered in one of the latter three categories to go on believing that they were the "true" nobility and that families entered in one of the first three sections were their social inferiors. Thus the Charter's insistence on the legal equality and uniformity of the dvorianstvo was tempered by its tacit recognition of social discrimina­ tion. Membership in the nobility was to be registered in the Book of Nobility that was to be compiled by the Association of Nobles in each guberniia. Anyone want­ ing to establish his nobility was to present the evidence on which his claim was based to a committee composed of the guberniia marshal and one deputy elected by the nobles of each uezd. According to Section Four of the Charter, the following were to be recognized as proof of nobility: a charter, diploma, or patent of nobility is­ sued in the name of the tsar or his government, evidence that the man in question or one of his direct ancestors had served the state in some capacity that implied no­ bility, evidence of membership in some group, e.g. senior civil servants, that had been ennobled en masse by royal decree, evidence that a direct ancestor had been given a noble estate by the crown, evidence that * Ibid., articles 76-90.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

one's father or grandfather had owned populated vil­ lages, or testimony by twelve noble witnesses that one's father and grandfather had been accepted as equals by the noblemen of the region.5 If the marshal and the deputies found an applicant's credentials unconvincing, they were to return them with a written explanation and deny him registration in the Book of Nobility until such time as he could provide satisfactory documentation. If they accepted his evidence, on the other hand, they were to give him a certificate verifying his status as a nobleman and enroll him and his family in the appro­ priate section of the Book of Nobility.6 Once established, membership in the nobility was to be permanent and secure. It was not to be rescinded by any arbitrary action of the state, but it could be for­ feited by the nobleman himself through the commission of some crime deemed incompatible with membership in the dvorianstvo. The Charter specified that convic­ tion for perjury, treason, banditry, theft, deceit, or for any crime normally entailing corporal punishment or loss of honor, or the proven incitement of others to com­ mit such crimes could result in a nobleman's being stripped of his title and his privileged status. Before that could happen, however, the accused offender would have to be convicted by a jury of his peers and the ver­ dict would have to be reviewed by the Senate and con­ firmed by the monarch.7 The safeguards against deprivation of status also ap­ plied to deprivation of property and life. A nobleman was not to be deprived of either without due process of law: a trial by a jury of his peers and, in all capital 5 Ibid., 7

articles 91-92. Ibid., articles 2-9.

6 Ibid.,

articles 83-85.

Resolution of the Problem

cases at least, review and confirmation by the Senate and the Crown. A nobleman was not to be subjected to corporal punishment for any reason, and a ten-year statute of limitations was to be applied to all crimes of which a nobleman might be accused.8 In the event of a conviction, punishment was to be personal, and the children of an offender were not to be tainted in any way with the crime of their father.9 For the first time since Catherine's accession, the Manifesto of Peter III was given official confirmation. Articles 17 and 18 of the Charter confirmed both "the liberty and freedom of the Russian nobility, hereditar­ ily and forever" and "the right of noblemen now in service to continue to serve or to ask for their discharge according to the regulations established for that pur­ pose." The nobleman's freedom from compulsory serv­ ice, however, was compromised by other articles of the Charter. Article 20 made it clear that the nobleman's right not to serve was subordinate to the well-being of the state and was not to be exercised in opposition to the national interest. The requirement that the noble­ man accept service in times of crisis emphasized the conditional nature of his liberty and of all his rights and privileges, stating: But since the title and the privileged status of the no­ bility are obtained, in the future as in the past and present, by labors useful to the empire and the throne, and since the very existence of dvorianstvo is depend­ ent on the security of the fatherland and the throne, therefore, in every hour of need, whenever the autoc8 9

Ibid., articles 10-16. Ibid., articles 2, 5, and 23.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility racy requires the service of the nobility for the com­ mon good, every Russian nobleman is obligated, at the first call from the autocracy, to spare neither his labor nor his very life in the service of the state. Moreover, while retirement from the service was openly endorsed, total avoidance of service, though le­ gal, was discouraged. Both article 20 and the preamble emphasized that service to the state was the source of all the nobility's rights and privileges. Article 64 ap­ plied that doctrine to participation in the corporate ac­ tivities of the nobility: it stated that a nobleman who had not served and who had not earned officer's rank might attend the assemblies of the nobility, but he could not sit with those who had earned a service com­ mission and could neither vote in the elections nor be elected to any office. Once again, the Charter was mak­ ing use of the corporate activity of the dvorianstvo to modify the application of the rights that it gave to indi­ vidual noblemen, counting on social pressures to cor­ rect the formal provisions of the law. In the eyes of the law all nobles were to be regarded as equal, but in the eyes of their peers noblemen who had not earned com­ missions in the service were to be treated as inferiors, as second-class nobles. For some noblemen such social sanctions were more compelling than the legal sanctions that they had replaced. Thus in 1800 Alexei Kurakin, then only sixteen years old, wrote his brother that he would rather remain hidden in his quarters for a hun­ dred years than appear in public in his sergeant's uni­ form, explaining that the actual rank and title were less important than the humiliation attached to not being an officer.10 If we can believe Karamzin, many young 10

Arkhiv kniazia F.A. Kurakina, VH (Saratov, 1900), 247.

Resolution of the Problem

nobles entered the service in order not to lose their place and their voice in the nobles' assembly.11 The Charter also allowed Russian nobles to travel abroad and enter the service of foreign governments, but unlike the report of the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility, it said nothing about any right to emi­ grate from Russia. Indeed, the Charter specified that noblemen in the service of foreign governments were also subject to mobilization in times of crisis and were to return home immediately when summoned by the Russian government.12 With respect to the liberty of the nobility, therefore, Catherine's Charter restated in a somewhat different and more specific form the essential ideas embodied in the Manifesto of Peter III: every nobleman was ex­ pected to enlist in the service for a period of time or suffer public humiliation, but after obtaining a commis­ sion he might retire honorably, subject to recall in times of emergency. The Charter was very different from the Manifesto, however, in its concern for the retired no­ bleman—both as a landowner and as a member of a corporate society. In answer to the complaint of several nakazy that retired noblemen were often condemned to poverty by economic restrictions that prevented them from deriving sufficient income from their estates, the Charter revised those restrictions in a manner favorable to the nobles. In the first place, the Charter made a sig­ nificant change in the theory of tenure with reference to a nobleman's estate (imenie). Prior to 1785, the law had regarded a nobleman's estate as a national resource whose use and income had been turned over to a noble­ man in partial compensation for his service, and his 11 Porai-Koshits, 12 The

p. 182. Charter to the Nobility, articles 19-20.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility rights over it had been restricted by law. The Charter, on the contrary, converted the imenie into the private property of the individual nobleman and his family. The noble was given the right to sign his name as the lord of his estate, and it was not to be taken from him or damaged in any way without due process of law. Should the owner of an estate be convicted of a crime, the estate was to devolve upon his heir or heirs. The nobleman's property rights were to be limited only by the rights of his family and heirs. In that respect, the Charter recognized two separate categories of property: that which the nobleman had acquired through his own efforts, which he was free to bequeath, sell, or give away as he saw fit, and that which he had inherited, which could only be disposed of in accordance with existing legal prescriptions. The nobleman was also free to buy land and serfs without asking the state's permis­ sion, and all problems and disputes arising from the ownership of noble property were to be judged by the local courts rather than the Estates College, which had atrophied since the provincial reform of 1775.13 In addition to full legal ownership of everything found within the boundaries of his estate—fields, for­ ests, waters, minerals, and serfs—the nobleman was given the right to make full economic and commercial use of them and their products. He could establish mines, mills, and factories on his estate without having to ask permission, and under certain conditions he could organize an annual fair. Moreover, a nobleman was empowered to sell the produce of his fields, forests, wa­ ters, mines, mills, and factories and the handicrafts of his serfs on the open market or export them abroad. He could also own a house or houses in town and could 13 Ibid.,

articles 21-26.

Resolution of the Problem

have the municipal law code applied to himself and his urban property. Nobles' houses were to be free from all quartering of troops, and nobles were to be exempt from the payment of all personal taxes.14 In its grant of economic rights and privileges, the Charter officially recognized that the dvorianstvo was a landed nobility whose ownership of land and serfs had replaced state service as its essential attribute. In con­ trast to the Manifesto of Peter III, which had allowed a nobleman to terminate his career in the service but had given him nothing to take its place, the Charter to the Nobility recognized estate ownership as being not only a legitimate and honorable occupation but as the primary characteristic of nobility, on which laws defin­ ing and governing that class were to be based. The state now looked upon the Russian nobleman as an es­ tate owner who was expected to spend several years in the service rather than as a servitor supported in part through the ownership of an estate.15 The shift in em­ phasis from state service to estate ownership is illus­ trated by the provision that each nobleman was to be enrolled in the nobility of the guberniia in which he owned an estate. Thus landless nobles were excluded from membership in the provincial associations and from their corporate activities. On the other hand, no­ bles who owned estates but had never been in the serv­ ice were to be enrolled in their local association and 14

Ibid., articles 27-36. same conception of the nobleman as the ruler and guardian of his serfs rather than as a servitor was apparent in the comic operas produced for the Russian stage in the 1780s and 1790s. Marshal S. Shatz, "The Noble Landowner in Russian Comic Operas of the Time of Catherine the Great: The Patriarchal Image," CSS, hi, no. 1 (Spring 1969), 37. 15 The

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility admitted to its assemblies even though their participa­ tion in its affairs was to be restricted. Landless nobles did not become a large or significant group in Russia until the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and although they enjoyed the same personal rights as other noblemen, they were never looked upon as "real" nobles by the state, by other nobles, or, in most cases, by themselves. They remained an anomalous exception to the general rule that made the word "nobleman" (dvorianin) synonymous with "estate owner" (pomeshchik). The Charter's second corrective to the Manifesto of Peter III was the requirement that the estate owners of each guberniia be enrolled in a corporate association. An outgrowth of the nobles' assembly, the Association of Nobles (sobranie dvorianstva) was chartered as a legal entity with rights, obligations, and liability before the law. The association would continue to elect the officials named in the Fundamental Law, and, in addi­ tion, it was to maintain its own headquarters, compile its own archives and records, operate its own printing press, record information about its members, collect and disperse monies, provide for noble widows and orphans, petition the government, and direct corporate activities that would serve the interests of its members. The asso­ ciation was to be run by its own elected officers: a mar­ shal, his deputies, a secretary, and a treasurer.16 The activities of the associations of nobles were an important part of Catherine's solution to the problems raised by the Manifesto of Peter III. By 1785 she was willing to resolve those problems in a manner that she would have rejected as late as 1768. The evolution of her policy in those years can be attributed to two sig16

Ibid., articles 37-71.

Resolution of the Problem nificant occurrences: first, the pugachevshchina had led her to believe that the noble serf owner was the ally of the state and that his support of the status quo was in itself a form of service; and second, the development of the nobles' corporate society had provided her with a convenient means of dealing with the nobles after their emancipation. Like the peasant commune after 1861, the association of nobles was to limit the possibly dan­ gerous effects of emancipation by replacing individual obedience to an external authority with collective re­ sponsibility. As described in the Charter to the Nobil­ ity, the activities of the associations were to be a sub­ stitute for compulsory service and bureaucratic red tape. Corporate institutions were to assume several respon­ sibilities of the state bureaucracy. Instead of the Estates College or the Justice College, the nobleman would henceforth deal with the courts elected by the local nobility. Article 58 of the Charter gave the Superior Land Court of each guberniia jurisdiction over "all civil and criminal matters, complaints, and litigations lodged either by or against a nobleman and involving his es­ tate, his privileges, his rights, his honor, or a disputed will or inheritance." That provision only confirmed and completed a process begun in 1775; an unprecedented innovation was the transfer to the associations of respon­ sibilities that had previously rested with the Heraldry Office. Henceforth, the gathering of information about each nobleman was to be done at the time of his regis­ tration in the dvorianstvo. After examining each no­ bleman's credentials and certifying his nobility, the marshal and the deputies were to record the following information: his marital status, his wife's name, the number and sex of his children, his service rank, whether

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

he was retired or on active duty, and whether he lived on his estate or was an absentee landowner. Those data were to be entered next to the nobleman's name in the Book of Nobility, which was to be produced in tripli­ cate, with one copy to be retained in the association's archives, a second to be turned over to the guberniia administration, and a third to be sent to the Senate for use by the Heraldry Office.17 By registering and gather­ ing information about every estate owner, the Associa­ tion of Nobles made it possible for the state to keep track of the nobles even though they no longer spent the major portion of their lives in the service and were scat­ tered over the vast expanses of provincial Russia. The establishments of the associations enabled the state to deal only with some forty corporations rather than the thousands upon thousands of individual noblemen. In some respects compulsory membership in the As­ sociation of Nobles was also a substitute for compulsory service. Through social pressure and discrimination, the association was to prod the reluctant nobleman into enlisting in the state service and winning officer's rank. Through its elections, the association was to be respon­ sible for staffing the nobles' courts and the land police with noblemen who had retired from the state service. Through its corporate activities such as the care of widows and orphans and the building of schools, the association would enable the nobles to contribute to the welfare and development of the nation through means other than state service. Finally, the association was to replace the service unit as a means of bringing the pro­ vincial nobles out of their isolation and absorption in personal concerns and getting them to associate with their fellows and to think about public affairs. Together 17 Ibid.,

articles 74-75, 89.

Resolution of the Problem

with Catherine's new appreciation of the noble serf owner as a defender of order and stability, the role as­ signed to the Association of Nobles enabled Catherine to believe that the Charter satisfied the demand that she had made of the Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility in 1763: that it had reconciled the freedom and privileges of the nobility with the needs and inter­ ests of the state. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CHARTER

In her private notes on law and government, Cather­ ine portrayed the Charter to the Nobility and its com­ panion, the Charter to the Towns, as the crowning achievements of her domestic policy and claimed that through them she had conferred "happiness, tranquil­ ity, and the blessings of civilization" on the citizens of her empire.18 In the context of contemporary thought her pride and self-satisfaction were largely justified. From a strictly technical standpoint, the Charter to the Nobility would have been a credit to any monarch who believed in enlightened absolutism. By applying gen­ eral rules and principles, she had replaced chaos and confusion with order and system, reducing literally hun­ dreds of repetitive and contradictory laws to one clear and comprehensive statute. Like Catherine's achieve­ ments in such fields as town government, town plan­ ning, provincial administration, and public finance, the Charter to the Nobility imposed a rational, comprehen­ sive, and comprehensible order on public affairs and thus satisfied a goal that Catherine had set in 1766 with the convocation of the Legislative Commission. The creation of such laws, moreover, was more than just 18

TsGADA, f. 10, d. 17, pp. 49-51.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

another eighteenth century fad like chinoiserie, Ossianism, or sentimentality—it was supposed to bring pros­ perity and well-being to the nation and happiness and security to its people, aims that were explicitly acknowl­ edged in the preamble to another "charter" of the pe­ riod, the Constitution of the United States of America. Thus one can easily understand why contemporary pub­ lic opinion in Russia, dominated as it was by an edu­ cated elite steeped in the doctrines of contemporary European thought, extolled the Charter for promoting "the common good" and the "profit and benefit" of the empire and the "eternal bliss" of its people.19 Intimately connected with the creation of a rational civil order was another aspect of the Zeitgeist of the 1780s, the desire to abolish tyranny and guarantee civil liberty. The connection of the two in contemporary thought was repeated in Catherine's own thinking. "Liberty," she had written under the direct influence of Montesquieu "is the right to do all that the laws per­ mit." Similarly, she had once defined "civil law" as "the regulation of civil conduct by the autocratic and legis­ lative powers that ordain legality and forbid illegal­ ity."20 The eighteenth century belief that the law lib­ erated men by making known to them what they could and could not do was reflected in Section One of the Charter to the Nobility with its grant of specific rights and liberties. As a legal guarantee of civil liberty, un­ derstood as security from arbitrary and illegal acts by the state and its officials, the Charter resembles two other important documents of the period, the American 19 1.1. Ditiatin, Stafi po istorii russkago prava (SPB, 1895 ), p. 52. 20 TsGADA, f. 10, d. 19, p. 494 and d. 17, p. 168.

Resolution of the Problem

Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Catherine's Charter to the Nobility owes much of its reputation as a progressive act to the interpretation given it by liberal historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Influenced by the Whig view of English constitutional history and seeing the political evolution of England as a model for their own country, Russian liberals like Ditiatin interpreted the Charter to the Nobility in much the same way that English lib­ erals like Hallam had interpreted the Magna Carta. In their writings the Charter became the first step toward the creation of the liberal, constitutional regime that they desired. They argued that the Charter, by emanci­ pating the nobles and endowing them with civil liber­ ties, had set in motion an evolutionary process that would eventually extend those liberties to all citizens.21 What the liberal view ignored were the reactionary as­ pects of the Charter, which was not a truly progressive document like the Bill of Rights or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen but a combination of progressive and reactionary elements. The Charter did confer a measure of civil liberty on the nobility, but it did not in any way presage the extension of that lib­ erty to the citizenry in general. On the contrary, in contrast to the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, both of which affirmed the equality of all citizens before the law, the Charter per­ petuated and reinforced the division of the Russian pop­ ulace into separate classes or estates. That aspect of Catherine's Charter was not inspired by the progressive 21 The

clearest statement of this thesis is to be found in Ditiatin, Stafi, pp. 104-5.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

thought of the Enlightenment but by medieval concepts that progressive thinkers of the time were denouncing as an outmoded carry-over from the age of feudalism. Catherine's charters not only recognized the inequal­ ity of different classes of citizens, they added to it. The most salient manifestation of the widening gap between the privileged and non-privileged classes was Cather­ ine's failure to promulgate the Charter to the State Peasants that she had drafted as the complement of the other two charters.22 Prior to 1785, Catherine's treat­ ment of the state peasants had been one of the most pro­ gressive accomplishments of her reign. She had freed thousands of them from their enserfment to the church, had made it possible under certain conditions for them to become townsmen, and had defended their limited freedom from the encroachments of the nobility. In the decree on elections to the Legislative Commission and in the Fundamental Law for the Administration of the Provinces she had recognized them as one of the three categories of enfranchised citizens. In 1785, however, she stopped short of conferring rights and liberty upon them. Perhaps she remembered that the deputies of the free peasants had been so outspokenly radical in their speeches at the Legislative Commission and that some of those deputies had subsequently taken part in the pugachevshchina23 and feared therefore to give them liberty of any kind. Whatever her reason, Catherine re­ fused to continue their evolution as free citizens and made it clear that the difference between the free peas22 The unpromulgated Charter to the State Peasants was subsequently implemented in Novorossiia (New Russia), the area on the Black Sea littoral that was colonized and developed under Potemkin's direction. PSZ no. 16603. 23 Beliavsky, Kresfianskii vopros, p. 245, n. 2.

Resolution of the Problem

ants on the one hand and the nobles and merchants on the other was a difference of kind rather than one of degree. The evolution that Catherine began in 1764 came to a halt in 1785 and was not resumed until the creation of the Ministry of State Domains in 1837. The most reactionary aspect of the Charter, however, was its treatment of the enserfed peasantry. As part of a nobleman's estate, his serfs were recognized officially as his private property and as such were placed beyond the reach of the state and its officials. Thus at the same time that the Russian state strove to protect the nobles from arbitrary tyranny by placing them under the pro­ tection of the law, it did the exact opposite in the case of the serfs, exempting them, as property, from the pro­ tection of the law and consigning them to the arbitrary despotism of the serf owner. With the promulgation of the Charter to the Nobility the legal status of the Rus­ sian serf reached its nadir; he had become a slave. When compared with established practice, the Char­ ter's relegation of the serfs to slavery seems insignifi­ cant, a theoretical distinction that made no practical difference. When contrasted with Catherine's previous views on the serf question, however, it appears as a retreat of considerable magnitude. Catherine had never thought seriously of abolishing serfdom, which under the circumstances would have been impossible, but she had condemned slavery as an evil and had wanted to limit that evil by interposing the law and the authority of the state between the serf and his master. In 1785, however, she renounced that hope completely. The reason behind the change in the government's attitude on the serf question was fear, fear of the peas­ ant masses, of a recurrence of the pugachevshchina. That fear led Catherine and like-minded statesmen and

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

noblemen to abandon any intention of reducing the tyranny under which the enserfed population lived. Given a choice between controlling the serfs in a man­ ner conducive to abuses and eliminating abuses in a way that might bring about a loss of control, Catherine saw the former as the lesser of the two evils. After 1774 she made no more proposals, not even in private, for mitigating even the most flagrant evils of serfdom. The Pugachev Revolt had had on her an effect similar to that which Nat Turner's Rebellion was to have on the Vir­ ginia Legislature in 1831, when it abandoned all inten­ tion of abolishing slavery for fear of what the slaves might do if they were not suppressed. After Pugachev, fear of revolution became the chief concern of domestic politics, dispelling the tension between Catherine and the nobles' opposition and uniting them in an alliance whose cornerstone was the suppression of the serfs. The French Revolution, which might have served as a warn­ ing that opposition to the special privileges of the nobil­ ity was a threat to a monarchy that defended those priv­ ileges, had the opposite effect: it further strengthened the conviction that the monarchy and the nobility were allies in a social war waged by the masses. In such a context the Pugachev Revolt and French Revolution were used to justify the very privileges that they set out to destroy. Thus in a letter to Catherine written in the early 1790s A. R. Vorontsov supported his com­ plaint that the Charter had not gone far enough in rec­ ognizing the nobility's value to the state by reminding her that Stenka Razin, Pugachev, and the French Rev­ olutionaries, all of whom had tried to overthrow their lawful monarch, had concentrated their attacks on the nobility, which Vorontsov characterized as "the strong-

Resolution of the Problem

est pillar of monarchy."24 By the 1790s Catherine was willing to overlook the fallacy of such an argument. Her attempts to base a progressive domestic policy on har­ mony and consensus had been thwarted by the opposi­ tion of the nobles and the rebellion of the serfs, and she had forsaken them. Embittered by the failure of enlight­ ened absolutism to resolve social conflicts peacefully and rationally, Catherine renounced the very ideals of the European Enlightenment. In a letter to Grimm dated 11 February 1794 she wrote: "You were right in not wanting to be counted among the philosophes, for experience has shown that all of that leads to ruin; no matter what they say or do, the world will never cease to need authority . . . it is better to endure the tyranny of one man than the insanity of the multitude .. ."25 The alliance between the state and the serf-owning nobility consummated in Catherine's Charter was ultimately harmful to everyone involved. The previous alliance that had lasted from the beginning of the eighteenth century to 1762 had tied the right to exploit land and serf labor to service, to a positive contribution to the wel­ fare of the state. The alliance formulated in the 1770s and 1780s on the other hand, was defensive and reac­ tionary in that it tied those same rights of exploitation to the defense of the state against its own subjects. At that point the autocracy ceased to be the progres­ sive force that it had been throughout most of Russia's history; it ceased to look ahead to new accomplish­ ments and devoted its energies and resources to the defense of the status quo. Rather than leave uncom­ petitive and unproductive members of the nobility to 24

LOII, f. 36, d. 398, p. 470. xxiii: 503.

2 5 SIRIO,

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

their fate, as it had started to do in 1762 and as it was finally forced to do in 1861, the Russian state com­ mitted itself for the next seventy-five years to the de­ fense of the nobility's economic and social position. Funds that might have been used for constructive pur­ poses or invested in the more productive sectors of the economy were used instead to subsidize the nobility.26 Talented commoners were handicapped so that the no­ bles might retain their preeminence in education and in the state service,27 yet all of the state's efforts failed to prevent the decline of the provincial nobility. Sheltered and at the same time stifled by the autocracy, the rank and file of the nobility clung defensively to their privi­ leges and showed little initiative or enterprise. By 1831 the provincial assemblies, which had satisfied or ex­ ceeded the state's expectations in Catherine's time, had become so overrun with impoverished, incompetent no­ blemen seeking office solely for the sake of the salary it paid that they were generally held in contempt by men of talent and ability.28 In that year the government of Nicholas I tried to return control of the associations to their more substantial and presumably more compe­ tent members by imposing a property qualification on participation in the elections.29 Nevertheless, the Min26 Walter M. Pintner, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas 1 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1967), pp. 25-38. 27 James T. Flynn, "The Universities, the Gentry, and the Russian Imperial Services, 1815-1825," CSS, u, no. 4 (Winter 1968), 486-503. 28 Haxthausen, ii: 198-213; N. Th. Dubrovin, "Russkaia zhizn'v nachale XIX veka," RS, 1899, no. 7, pp. 555-56; Romanovich-Slavatinsky, p. 498; Korf, pp. 334-55; Μ. M. Kovalevsky, Russian Political Institutions (Chicago, 1902), pp. 141-42. 29PSZ (Second Collection) no. 4989 (6 December 1831).

Resolution of the Problem

istry of the Interior informed the tsar in 1842 that its studies had shown that officials elected by the provincial nobles were usually less competent and less reliable than those appointed directly by the bureaucracy, the majority of whom were of non-noble origin.30 By the time it was revised in the 1860s, the policy of subsi­ dizing the provincial nobles and depending on them to keep order in the countryside had contributed greatly to the comparative social and economic stagnation that Russia had endured for almost three-quarters of a cen­ tury. As the foregoing indicates, the nobility also failed over the long run to benefit from the arrangement em­ bodied in the Charter to the Nobility. The state's sup­ port of the dvorianstvo and its interests slowed the eco­ nomic and social decline of the nobility, but it failed to halt or reverse it. What was ultimately worse, the protection of the government debilitated the nobility by sheltering it from the challenge of having to exert itself to save itself. Russian nobles came to rely too heavily on state support, and when it failed, they had little else to rely on. Excessive dependence on the autocracy also left the nobles incapable of opposing the autocracy. They suffered what economists would call an "opportu­ nity cost" when they allowed the opposition that mani­ fested itself at the Legislative Commission to subside before they had won some measure of participation in political affairs. Those who subsequently hailed the Charter to the Nobility as Russia's Magna Carta over­ looked that all important difference between the two documents: that the one was a unilateral grant and the other a bilateral contract between two opposing forces. 30Ditiatin, StatH, p. 95; Pintner, SR, xxix, no. 3 (Septem­ ber 1970), 433-34, 442-43.

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

Having accepted the Charter as a free gift from the au­ tocracy, the nobles had no power to prevent its subse­ quent abrogation. The indifference of the provincial nobles to matters that did not bear directly on their economic and social status was reflected in the subsequent history of their associations. To someone unfamiliar with the mentality of the Russian provincial noble, the role assigned to those associations by the Charter might seem like a dangerous gamble for an autocracy determined to main­ tain its monopoly of political power. A Frenchman who had seen the course that revolution had taken in his own country visited the assembly of the St. Petersburg no­ bility in 1792 and made that exact assessment. Al­ though he was certain that the good will that then existed between Catherine and the nobility gave her little to fear personally, he thought that the very exist­ ence of such bodies would mean difficulties for her suc­ cessors. "If there is ever a revolution in a part of the Russian Empire," he wrote, "these assemblies will be its cradle."31 Vinsky saw the same possibilities, but he also saw the reason why they were not to be taken seri­ ously: "Had a similar law been enacted in some other European country," he wrote of the Charter, "every­ thing would inevitably have been changed for the bet­ ter, but Catherine knew her Russians well and firmly believed that they would not only fail to use the liberty they had been given to command their well-being but would fail as well to understand either the content or the use of her bequest." Of the associations themselves, he added that "the spir31

A. Fortia de Pilas, Voyage de deux Frangais fait en Ie nord de PEurope en 1792, iv (Paris, 1795), 61-62.

Resolution of the Problem it of servitude and ignorance directed, bent and twisted them like a pliable rose-willow."32 Catherine's own dis­ trust of the nobles' corporate societies had yielded at first only to expediency and only later to a degree of confidence. To keep them from being stifled by her offi­ cials, Catherine had defended their independence in some matters, but to keep them from ever getting out of hand she had also restricted it in others. Accordingly, the Charter determined that the governor-general was to make the final selection of the guberniia marshal from two candidates nominated by the assembly. It also prescribed legal penalties that were to be imposed on any association that made a proposal or passed a resolu­ tion that conflicted with existing statutes.33 Catherine wanted the associations to be active in public affairs and at the same time to be completely passive about political matters, not understanding, perhaps, how difficult it would be to separate the two. Nor was there any reason to believe that her conception of the associations and their role would direct the policy of her successors. Paul stripped the associations of almost all of the functions and virtually rescinded the Charter itself, yet so sub­ servient were they that one and only one of the associ­ ations made any remonstrance.34 Alexander restored the Charter in its entirety, but the spirit of cooperation and encouragement that Catherine had created was never restored. His Minister of the Interior, A. B. Kurakin, despised the provincial assemblies and ruled against them whenever they come into conflict with his subor­ dinates.35 In addition to the negative attitude of the 32

Vinsky, pp. 61-62. Charter to the Nobility, articles 39 and 49. 84 Klochkov, p. 463. 33 The

Emancipation of the Russian Nobility

bureaucracy, the morale of the associations was weak­ ened by the wars in which Russia was engaged almost without interruption from 1787 to 1815. Those con­ flicts redirected the attention of the more energetic and ambitious nobles away from provincial concerns toward military service. As early as 1802 the state had begun to note with disapproval the fact that noblemen who were best qualified for elective office avoided the elec­ tions and paid little attention to the corporate activities of the nobility.36 The state's intermittent attempts to revitalize the associations all ended in failure and the state, partly out of necessity and partly out of its own predilection for direct subordination, relied more and more on the bureaucracy. After their brief, initial suc­ cess in Catherine's time, the associations never again showed much energy or vigor until the 1850s, when government policy once again posed a threat to the nobles' serf rights. In spite of its harmful effects, it is difficult to see how Catherine's settlement of the nobility question could have been very different under the circumstances. Given continued stability and security, her government might have found a more progressive and more socially dy­ namic solution to that question. In the 1760s she had sought such a solution—one that would prevent the nobles from living in subsidized idleness and would, at the same time, begin to bring their serfs under the protection of the law. Her desire, however, was not suf­ ficient to cope with the difficulties that stood in the way of its realization. By itself, the frightened, narrow ob35 Korf, pp. 343-45; Romanovich-Slavatinsky, p. 456; I. E. Andreevsky, O namestnikakh, voevodakh i gubematorakh (SPB., 1864), p. 150. 38 PSZ no. 20381.

Resolution of the Problem

stinacy of the provincial nobles might have been re­ sisted and overcome, but the possibility of such a strug­ gle was precluded by the threat of insurrection and social war and by the state's inability to govern the country­ side without the help of the serf owners. Those condi­ tions left Catherine and her successors with no practical alternative to cooperation with the provincial nobles and kept them from interfering with the serf regime. Alexander I and Nicholas I would also recognize the evils and disadvantages of serfdom, but, like Catherine, they too would fail to restrict the powers of the serf owners, for until the Russian government had devel­ oped an adequate bureaucracy or found some other means of governing the peasants, it was forced to rely on the provincial nobles. Seen in that perspective, Cath­ erine's settlement with the nobility appears as an intelli­ gent effort to make the best of the situation that the Pugachev Rebellion and the failure of bureaucratic ab­ solutism had created. Forced to accept the provincial noble as a privileged serf owner freed from compulsory service to the state, she attempted to use the nobles' associations to promote the development of the prov­ inces and to counteract the selfish, unsocial instincts of the individual nobleman. That more did not come of her efforts was not so much her fault as that of her successors and even more of the provincial nobles them­ selves.

Bibliography

THE FOLLOWING is a consolidated listing of all primary and secondary sources cited in this book. Descriptions and discussions of the sources are given in the appropri­ ate sections of the text and notes. I. ARCHIVES

Archival citations are given in the following form: f.—fond (category or collection), d.—delo (matter, af­ fair) , p.—page or paper. The English p. has been sub­ stituted for the Russian 1.—list (page or sheet) to avoid confusion with numerals. The abbreviation ob.— oborot has been used when necessary to indicate the re­ verse or back of a numbered page. A. Leningradskoe Otdelenie Instituta Istorii Akademii Nauk SSSR (LOII). f. 36 (Vorontsovykh). The papers of the Vorontsov family constitute a large, diverse, and valuable collec­ tion of documents including, in addition to private pa­ pers and items of correspondence, materials related to the official positions filled by members of the family. Projects and correspondence on public d. 398 affairs. A. R. Vorontsov's reports on provincial d. 399 inspections. Miscellaneous papers and letters. d. 400 State papers. d. 401 A. R. Vorontsov's reports on provincial d. 478 inspections.

Bibliography d. 1162

Reports of provincial officials to the Senate. d. 1188 Letters. f. TsentraFnyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Drevnikh Aktov (TsGADA). This is the principal repository for state papers written before 1796. f. 5 (razriad 5) Gosarkhiv (Perepiska vysochaishikh osob s chastnymi litsami). d. 130 Correspondence between Catherine II and J. J. Sievers. f. 6 (raziad 6) Gosarkhiv d. 501 Meshchersky's project on provincial re­ form. f. 10 (razriad 10) Gosarkhiv (KabinetEkaterinyII i ego prodolzhenie). d. 17 Catherine's notes on law and govern­ ment. d. 19 Catherine's notes on "la noblesse." d. 20 Report of the Commission on the Lib­ erty of the Nobility. d. 21 Text of Instruction to the Governors, d. 32 Materials associated with the writings of the Fundamental Law for the Ad­ ministration of the Provinces, d. 136 Materials associated with the writing of the Fundamental Law. d. 332 Materials associated with the writing of the Fundamental Law. d. 332a Materials associated with the writing of the Fundamental Law. d. 332b Materials associated with the writing of the Fundamental Law. d. 332g Materials associated with the writing of the Fundamental Law.

Bibhography

d. 332d

Materials associated with the writing of the Fundamental Law. Text of an unpublished decree ordering d. 267 the appointment of four komissars in St. Petersburg guberniia. f. 16 (razriad 16) Gosarkhiv (Vnutrennee Upravlenie). Papers of Commission on the Liberty of d. 235 the Nobility. Final Drafts of the Fundamental Law d. 377 of 1775. Reports of Governor-General R. L. Vod. 636 rontsov. d. 725 Reports of governors-general. Reports of governors-general. d. 727 Reports of Governor-General Krechetd. 729 nikov. Reports of governors-general. d. 777 Correspondence between Catherine II d. 785 and Sievers. Reports of Governor-General Sievers. d. 788 Reports of governors-general. d. 949 d. 1012 Reports of governors-general. f. 168 (Snosheniia russkikh gosudarei s pravitel'stvennymi i s dolzhnostnymi litsami po Vnutrennim delam). d. 144 Correspondence between Catherine II and Sievers. d. 153 Correspondence between Catherine II and Sievers. f. 248 (kantseliariia Pravitel'stvuiushego Senata). kn. 369/3940 Correspondence between Gov­ ernor-General Sievers and the Senate.

Bibliography kn. 3426 Zhurnal i protokol Senata. f. 259 (Pervyi Departament Pravitel'stvuiushego Senata). kn. 4222 Correspondence of Senate with provincial officials. kn. 4191 Reports of governors-general. C. TsentraVnyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv. Leningrad (TsGIAL). This is the principal repository for state papers written between 1796 and 1917. f. 1167 (Zhurnal Komiteta 6 Dekabria) d. 130 Studies and assessments of local gov­ ernment. d. 139 Studies and assessments of nobles' as­ sociations. d. 228 Studies and assessments of nobles' as­ sociations. f. 1374 (general-prokuror Senata) d. 269 Reports of governors-general, d. 2219 Correspondence of procurator-general with provincial officials. II. Published Sources Aksakov, S. T. Chronicle of a Russian Family (London and N.Y., E. P. Dutton and Co., 1924). Bartenev, P. I. (ed.). Os^mnadtsatyi vek: istoricheskii sbornik, vols, Ι and HI (M., 1886-69). Bibikov, A. A. Zapiski ο zhizni i sluzhbe Aleksandra IPicha Bibikova (M., 1865). Bolotov, A. T. Zhizn 1 i prikliucheniia Andreia Bolotova, opisannye samim im dlia svoikh potomkov 17381793, 4 vols. (SPB., 1870-73). [Catherine the Great]. Memoirs of Catherine the Great, edited by D. Maroger (N.Y., Macmillan, 1955).

Bibliography In addition to Catherine's autobiography to 1759, this volume contains letters, notes, memoranda, etc. of Catherine. [Dashkova, E. R.]. Memoirs of the Princess Dashkaw, Lady of Honour to Catherine II, edited by Mrs. W. Bradford, 2 vols. (London, Henry Colbyrn, 1840). Desnitsky, S. E. "Predstavlenie ob uchrezhdenii zakonodatel'noi, suditel'noi i nakazatel'noi vlasti ν Rossiskoi Imperii," edited by A. Uspensky, Zapiski Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, vol. vii (1905), no. 4. Dmytryshyn, Basil (ed.). Imperial Russia: A Source Book, 1700-1917 (N.Y. et al., Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, 1967). Dubrovin, N. Th. "Russkaia zhizn' ν nachale XIX veka," RS, 1899, no. 7. Fortia de Pilas, A. Voyage de deux Francais fait en Ie nord de VEurope en 1792, vol. iv (Paris, 1795). Golubtsov, S. A. (ed.). Pugachevshchina, vols, ι and πι (M. and L., 1926). Haxthausen, Baron August von. The Russian Empire: Its People, Institutions, and Resources, vol. n (London, Chapman and Hall, 1856). [Kurakin, F. A.]. Arkhiv kniazia F. A. Kurakina, vol. VIIi (Saratov, 1900). Polnoe Sobranie zakonov Rossiskoi imperrii s 1649 goda, first series, vols, vi, vn, and χνπι-χχιν (SPB., 1836). In the notes laws are cited by their assigned number in the series of collected laws. RaeiF, Marc (ed.). Plans for Political Reform in Im­ perial Russia, 1730-1905 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966).

Bibliography Reddaway, W. F. (ed.). Documents of Catherine the Great (Cambridge, Cambridge U. Press, 1931). Russkaia Starina, 1899, no. 7. Contains the memoir of N. Th. Dubrovin, "Russkaia zhizn' ν nachale XIX veka." Russkii Arkhiv, 1865,1874,1891. Thevolumefor 1865 contains Catherine's remarks on her first five years in power and Polenov's essay on serfdom. The volume for 1874 contains the memoirs of Prince Th. N. Golitsyn. The volume for 1891 contains Popov's letter to Alexander I recounting a tale of Catherine II. Shcherbatov, Μ. Μ. O povrezhdenii nravov ν Rossii (London, 1858). . Sochineniia Shcherbatova, edited by I. P. Khrushcheva, vol. ι (SPB., 1896). . On the Corruption of Morals in Russia, edited and translated by A. Lentin (Cambridge, Cam­ bridge U. Press, 1969). Sbornik lmperatorskago Russkago Istoricheskago Obshchestva, vols, ιν, ν, vi, vn, vm, x, xn, xm, xiv, XIX, XXIII, XXIV, XXVI, XXVII, XXXII, XXXVI, LXVIII,

(SPB., 1868-1914). In its journal the Imperial Russian Historical Society published a vast quantity of documentary material on the reign of Catherine II. Particularly useful for this study were the nobles' nakazy of 1767 published in vol­ umes iv, vm, xiv, lxviii, and xciii; and the record of the Legislative Commission, published in vol­ umes xxii and xxxvi. Trudy voPnogo ekonomieheskago obshchestva k pooshchreniiu ν Rossii zemledeliia i domostroiteVstva, vol. vm (SPB., 1766). xciii, CXLi

Bibliography Vigel', F. F. Zapiski, vol. ι (M., 1891). Vinsky, G. S. Moe Vremia: zapiski G. S. Vinskago (SPB., 1914). Wallace, Sir Donald Mackenzie. Russia, vol. ι (Lon­ don, Paris, N.Y. and Melbourne, Cassell and Co., 1905). III. SECONDARY SOURCES Abramov, la. "Soslovnye nuzhdy zhelaniia i stremleniia ν epochu ekaterininskoi komissii 1767-1796," Severnyi Vestnik (April 1886). Aleksandrov, M. S. Gosudarstvo, biurokratiia i absoliutizm ν istorii Rossii (M. and Petrograd, 1919). Alexander, John. Autocratic Politics in a National Cri­ sis: the Imperial Russian Government and Pugachev's Revolt, 1773-1775 (Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana U. Press, 1969). Andreevsky, I. Ε. O namestnikakh, voevodakh i gubernatorakh (SPB., 1864). Augustine, Wilson R. "Notes toward a Portrait of the Eighteenth Century Russian Nobility," CSS, iv, no. 3 (Fall 1970). Baranovich, A. I. et al. (eds.). Ocherki istorii SSSR, XVIIl ν«, vtoraia polovina (M., 1956). Beliavsky, M. T. Kresfianskii vopros ν Rossii nakanune vosstaniia E. I. Pugacheva (M., 1965). Beloff, Max. The Age of Absolutism, 1660-1850 (Lon­ don, Hutchinson and Co., 1954). Bernadsky, V. N. (ed.). Ocherki po istorii klassovoi bor'by i obshchestvenno-politicheskoi mysli Rossii trefei chertverti XVlII v. (L., 1962). Bil'basov, V. A. Istoriia Ekateriny Vtoroi (Berlin, 1890).

Bibliography Blum, Jerome. Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, Princeton U. Press, 1961). Blum, Karl. Ein russischer Staatsmann: Des Grafen Jakob Johann Sievers Denkwiirdigkeiten zur Geschichte Russlands, vols, ι and Ii (Leipzig and Heidelberg, 1857). Bogoslavsky, M. M. Oblastnaia reforma Petra Velikago (M., 1902). Chechulin, N. D. Proekt imperatorskago soveta ν pervyi god tsarstvovaniia Ekateriny II (SPB., 1894). . Russkoe provintsiaVnoe obshchestvo vo vtoroi polovine XVIII veka (SPB., 1889). Cherkas, A. "Sivers, Iakov," RBS, xvni: 407-12. Confino, Michael. Domaines et seigneurs en Russie vers la fin du XVIII Steele: etude de structures agraires et de mentalites economique (Paris, 1963). . Systems agraires et progres agricole: Vassolement triennal en Russie aux XVIII-XIX siecles (Paris and The Hague, Mouton, 1969). Ditiatin, I. I. Stat 1 I po istorii russkago prava (SPB., 1895). . Ustroistvo i upravlenie gorodov Rossii, vol. i: Goroda Rossii ν XVIII stoletie (SPB., 1875). Druzhinin, Ν. M., Ν. I. Pavlenko, and L. V. Cherepnin (eds.). Absoliutizm ν Rossii XVII-XVIII vv. sbornik statei k semidesiatiletiiu so dna rozhdeniia i sorokaniatiletiiu nauchnoi i pedagogicheskoi deiateFnosti B.B. Kafengauza (M., 1964). An impor­ tant collection of articles on Russian political and administrative history in the 17th and 18th cen­ turies. Dukes, Paul. Catherine the Great and the Russian No­ bility (Cambridge, Cambridge U. Press, 1967).

Bibliography Duran, James A. "The Reform of Financial Adminis­ tration in Russia during the Reign of Catherine II," CSS, iv, no. 3 (Fall 1970). Fedosov, I. A. Iz istorii russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli XVIII stoletiia: M. M. Shcherbatov (M., 1967). Florovsky, M. Sostav zakonodateVnoi kommissii 1767 g. (Odessa, 1915). Flynn, James T. "The Universities, the Gentry, and the Russian Imperial Services, 1815-1825," CSS, π, no. 4 (Winter 1968). Fursenko, V. "Shcherbatov, Mikhail," RBS, xxiv: 10413. Got'e, Iu. V. Istoriia oblastnago upravleniia ν Rossii ot Petra I do Ekateriny II, vol. ι (M., 1913) and vol. π (M. and L., 1941). . "Otzyvy gubernatorov shestidesiatykh godov xviii veka ob oblastnom upravlenii," Sbornik statei ν chest M. K. Liubavskago (Petrograd, 1917). Grigor'ev, V. "Baron S. A. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie za stoletie 1762-1861," Zhurnal ministerstva iustitsii, January 1907. A review of Korf's book in which Grigor'ev makes explicit their disagreements on the Manifesto of Peter III and other points. . Reforma mestnago upravleniia pri EkateHne II, uchrezhdeniia ο guberniakh 7 noiabria 1775 (SPB., 1910). Gukovsky, G. Ocherki po istorii russkoi literatury XVlII veka, dvorianskaia fronda ν literature 1750kh-1760kh godov (M., 1936). Hassel, James. "Implementation of the Russian Table of R a n k s d u r i n g t h e E i g h t e e n t h C e n t u r y , " S R , xxix, no. 2 (June 1970). Ilovaisky, D. I. Sochineniia (M., 1884).

Bibliography . "Novgorodskaia guberniia sto let tomy nazad," RV, LVIIi, no. 12. Jones, Robert. "Catherine II and the Reform of Provin­ cial Administration: A Question of Motivation," CSS, iv, no. 3 (Fall 1970). Kabuzan, V. M. Narodnaslenie Rossii ν XVlII-pervoi polovine XIX v. (M., 1963). Kahan, Arcadius. "The Costs of Westernization in Rus­ sia: the Gentry and the Economy in the Eight­ eenth Century," SR, xxv, no. 1 (March 1966). Kalachev, N. Materialy dlia istorii russkago dvorianstva, vols, ι and Ii (SPB., 1885). Khodnev, A. I. Istoriia imperatorskago voFnago ekonomicheskago obshchestva (SPB., 1865). Kizevetter, A. A. "Pervoe piatiletie pravleniia Ekateriny II," Sbornik statei posviashchennykh P. N. Miliukovu (Prague, 1929). Kliuchevsky, V. 0. Kurs russkoi istorii, vol. ν (Μ., 1937). Kovalevsky, Μ. Μ. Russian Political Institutions (Chi­ cago, 1902). Korf, S. A. Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie za stoletie 1762-1861 (SPB., 1906). Latkin, V. N. ZakonodateVnye komissii ν Rossii ν XVIII st., 3 vols. (SPB., 1887). Lipinsky, M. A. "Novye dannye dlia istorii ekaterininskoi komissii ο sochinenii proekta novago ulozheniia," ZMNP, CCLI, no. 6 (June 1887). Morrison, Kerry. "Catherine II's Legislative Commis­ sion: an Administrative Interpretation," CSS, rv, no. 3 (Fall 1970). Miliukov, Paul. Ocherki po istorii russkoi kultury, vol. πι (Paris, 1930).

Bibliography Oreshkin, V. V. VoPnoe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo ν Rossii 1765-1917 (Μ., 1963). Pares, Sir Bernard. A History of Russia (N.Y., Alfred A. Knopf, 1937). Pashkov, I. A. Istoriia russkoi ekonomicheskoi mysli, vol. ι (M., 1955). Petrova, V. A. "Politicheskaia bor'ba vokrug senatskoi reformy 1763 goda," Vestnik Leningradskogo Universiteta, vin (1967). Pintner, Walter M. Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I (Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell U. Press, 1967). . "The Social Characteristics of the Early Nine­ teenth Century Russian Bureaucracy," SR, vol. xxix, no. 3 (September 1970). Pipes, Richard (ed. and trans.). KaramzirCs Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia: A Translation and Analysis (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard U. Press, 1959). Pokrovsky, M. N. Izbrannye proizvedeniia, vol. π: Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen (M., 1965). Pokrovsky, S. A. Iuridicheskie proizvedeniia progressivnykh mysliteliefvoh ι (M., 1959). Porai-Koshits, I. A. Ocherki istorii russkago dvorianstva ot poloviny IX do kontsa XVIII veka (SPB., 1874). Raeff, Marc. "The Domestic Policies of Peter III and His Overthrow," AHR1 LXXV, no. 5 (June 1970). . Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth Century Nobility (N.Y., Harcourt, Brace, and World and Co., 1966). . "Pugachev's Rebellion," in Forster, Robert and Jack Greene (eds.), Preconditions of Revolutions in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1970).

Bibliography Ransel, David. "Nikita Panin's Imperial Council Proj­ ect and the Struggle of Hierarchy Groups at the Court of Catherine II," CSS, iv, no. 3 (Fall 1970). . "The 'Memoirs' of Count Miinnich," SR, xxx, no. 4 (December 1970). Rogger, Hans. National Consciousness in Eighteenth Century Russia (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard U. Press, 1960). Romanovich-Slavatinsky, Α. V. Dvorianstvo ν Rossii ot nachala XVIII veka do otmeny krepostnago prava (Kiev, 1912). Rubinshtein, N. L. SeFskoe khozhiaistvo Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVIII v. (M., 1957). . "Ulozhenaia komissia 1754-1766 gg. i ee proekt novogo ulozheniia Ό sostoianii poddannykh voobshche,' " IZ, vol. xxxvm (1951). Sacke, Georg. "Die gesetzgebende Kommission Katharinas Π; ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Absolutismus in Russland," Jahrbiicher fur Geschiehte Osteuropas, no. 2 (1940). . "Zur Characteristik der gesetzgebenden kommission Katharinas II vorf Russland," Archiv fiir Kulturgeschichte, vol. xxi (1931). Semevsky, V. I. Krestiane ν tsarstvovanie imp. Ekateriny II, vol. ι (SPB., 1903). Shatz, Marshal S. "The Noble Landowner in Russian Comic Opera of the Time of Catherine the Great: The Patriarchal Image," CSS, hi, no. 1 (Spring 1969). Shcheglov, V. G. Gosudarstvennyi sovet ν Rossii ν osobennosti ν tsarstvovanii Imperatora Aleksandra I, vol. π (Iaroslavl', 1892). Shtrange, M. M. Demokratieheskaia intelligentsiia Rossii ν XVIlI veke (M., 1965).

Bibliography Solov'ev, S. Μ. Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, vol. XiII (M., 1965). . "Rasskazy iz russkoi istorii XVIII veka 1767 god," RV, xxxv. Stoletie Viatskoi Gubernii, 1780-1880 (Viatka, 1892). Taranovsky, F. V. "Politicheskaia doktrina ν nakaze Imperatritsy Ekateriny II," Sbornik statei posviashchchennyi M. F. Vladimirskomu-Budanovu (Kiev, 1904). Veretennikov, V. I. "K istorii sostavleniia dvorianskikh nakazov ν ekaterininskuiu komissiiu 1767 g.," Zapisok Kharkovskago Universiteta (1911). Vernadsky, G. V. "Manifest Petra III ο vol'nosti dvorianskoi i zakonodatel'naia komissiia 1754-1766 gg.," Istoricheskoe Obozrenie, vol. xx (1915). Zutis, la. Ia. Ostzeiskii vopros ν XVlII v. (Riga, 1946).

Index

absentee landlords, 21,61, 62, 286. See also estates, residence on Akhtyr uezd, instruction of, 58n, 68n Aksakov, S. T., 7, 11,77 Alator uezd, instruction of, 68n,80n, 84n, 87n alcohol, 50, 54, 56, 72, 93 Aleksin uezd, instruction of, 63n, 67n, 84n Alexander I, 129n, 297, 299 Alfimov, A., 161 Analysing Commission, 132, 213. See also particular commissions Anna, Empress, 17, 25, 26, 27, 76,98, 106, 125 Antonov, I., 149 archives, of provincial nobility, 146,284, 286 Arkhangel guberniia, 251 army, and provincial administration, 174, 180,196 Arzamas uezd, instruction of, 58n assembly of nobility, 237, 239, 256, 257, 260-61, 266, 268, 2 7 1 , 2 7 4 , 2 8 1 , 284, 294 Association of Nobles, 277, 284,286-87 Astrakhan guberniia, 48, 251 Baltic region, 48, 213, 217, 251

Bashkirs, 72, 198 Bearde de l'Abaye, 138 Belev uezd, instruction of, 64n, 68n, 87n Belgorod guberniia, 179 Belgorod uezd, 167; instruction of, 60n, 62n, 68n, 7In, 84n Beloozero uezd, instruction of, 57,58n Bestuzhev-Riumin, A. P., 100-101, 103, 106,110, 111, 113, 120,160, 190-91 Bezborodko, A. A., 212, 252 Bezhetsk uezd, instruction of, 74n, 87n Bezhetskaia Piatina of Novgorod, instruction of, 68n, 79n,84n Bibikov, A. I., 52; and Legislative Commission of 1767-69, 131, 132, 135, 142, 146, 148, 151, 153; and Pugachev Revolt, 197-99, 202, 204 Bil'basov, V. A., 102, 104 Biron, E., 99 Blacks tone, William, 219-20, 229 Board of Public Welfare, 216, 224, 229, 230, 234, 240-41, 250, 255, 269 boiar, 5, 6 Bolotov, A. T., 43, 45, 53, 242, 258, 263

313

Index Borovsk uezd, instruction of, 60η,63η,67n, 74n, 87n Braun, Iu., 218 bribery, 11, 12. See also corruption bridges, see roads brigands, 79, 84, 86, 194, 233, 239 bureaucracy, 8, 34, 89, 156, 157, 164-66, 167, 168, 175, 181, 182, 184,185, 187, 188-89, 192, 196, 204, 207, 233, 236-38, 273, 285, 294, 288-89; growth and expansion of, 168-71, 189, 191, 227, 237 bureaucrats, 8, 16, 171. See also civil servants, officials burghers, 64, 224, 227, 229, 233, 234, 235-36, 290. See also towns Cadet Corps, 11, 32, 36, 68. See also education Catherine I, 24, 27, 98 Catherine II, and administra­ tive reform, 172-73, 175, 180; and autocracy, 129; and co-conspirators, 98100, 106, 118-19; and elections of nobility, 249, 251, 259, 262; and Mani­ festo of Peter III, 28, 38, 94, 96; and nobility, 4, 18, 91-92,94, 117,121, 145, 155, 157, 162,201,204, 267, 274; and peasant revolts, 134-35; and pro­

vincial nobles, 46, 90, 242, 262-64, 270; and public opinion, 133, 139; and Pugachev Revolt, 198-204, 207-8; and serfdom, 13542, 152, 291; security in power, 92, 95, 97-100, 118, 121, 160,162,211 centralization, 8, 83n, 174, 184 Charter to the Nobility, 32, 47, 267, 273-97 Charter to the Towns, 274, 287 Chechulin, N. D., 100, 103, 104,107 Chern uezd, instruction of, 73n,84n Chernyshev, Z. G., 52, 120, 131,147 Chicherin, D. I., 5 chin, see service rank Chukholm uezd, instruction of, 87n City Magistracy, 224, 227, 235 civil liberty, 115, 166, 219, 282. See also liberty civil servants, 3, 6, 23, 172, 277; nos. of, 182; recruit­ ment of, 184, 277. See also bureaucrats, officials civil service, 25, 43, 179, 277. See also bureaucracy clergy, 169-70, 172, 201, 202, 238 College of Census Revision, 175 College of Economy, 175

Index College of State Revenue, 175 Commerce College, 21, 71, 82, 175 Commission on the Freedom of the Nobility, 13, 96, 107-18, 121, 123, 147, 190, 273,274,281,287 Conscience Court, 216, 224, 229 corporal punishment, 33, 114, 278,279 corruption, 12, 13, 174, 179, 205,207 cossacks, 72, 127, 149, 197, 201

courts, election of, 86, 146, 188, 194-95, 226, 228, 275, 285; complaints against, 10, 62, 80-82, 205; of Baltic Germans, 217-18; supervision of, 177 credit institutions, 73, 240 Crimea, 251 Dankov uezd, instruction of, 10η, 60n, 62n, 75n, 80, 82,83n Dashkov, Prince, 40, 95 Dashkov, Princess, 254 Dedilovo uezd, instruction of, 60n, 6 In, 62n, 84n delegates to Legislative Com­ mission, election of, 47-48, 50-54, 85; power of, 131, 133 Derevskaia Piatina of Nov­ gorod, instruction of, 64n, 68n

Desnitsky, S. E., 213-14, 219 despotism, 41, 99, 291. See also tyranny Directing Commission, 146, 147, 151, 153. See also particular commissions Ditiatin, I. I., 289 Dmitrov uezd, instruction of, 73n, 75n, 77, 86n Dorogobuzh uezd, instruction of, 58n, 60n, 68n Dukes, Paul, 46, 142 dvorianskaia fronda, see nobles' opposition dvorianstvo, see nobility Dziubin, 143 education, and nobility, 10-11, 15-16, 19-20, 26, 30, 32, 39-41, 53-54, 58, 60, 68-71, 86, 88, 114, 269; and serfs, 139 Efrimov uezd, instruction of, 72n Elagin, I. P., 158 elections of provincial nobility under law of 1775, 245-51 elite, 10-11, 25, 54, 88-89, 99, 111, 115, 151-53, 162, 195,218,288 Elizabeth, Empress, 4, 73, 95, 98, 100, 106, 119, 125,126,169 emigration, 114, 115, 117, 146,147, 281 England, 89, 152, 195, 213, 218-20, 268 enlightened absolutism, 287, 293

Index enlightened despot, 177, 178 enlightenment, 166, 289, 293 ennoblement, 5, 6, 36, 66-67, 114, 145, 150, 156, 165, 276. See also Table of Ranks Epifan uezd, instruction of, 60n, 62n,71n estates, bequeathal of, 21; bestowal of, 278; confisca­ tion of, 31, 33; entail of, 13, 21, 111; management of, 21, 22, 26, 42, 44, 75, 79, 134, 166; ownership of, 4, 6, 47, 50, 75, 79, 281-82, 283; residence on, 14, 21, 44, 45-46, 50, 191, 286; sale of, 114 Estates College, 62, 73, 83-84, 222, 224, 282, 285 Estland, 175. See also Baltic region Expediting Commission, 132. See also particular com­ missions factories, 63, 93, 282. See also manufacturers famine, 73 festivities during provincial elections, 248-50 Finland, 251 Florovsky, Α. V., 56 forests, 21, 62, 63, 84, 86, 88, 178, 207, 282 France, 42 Free Economic Society, 137-39 French Revolution, 292

Galich uezd, instruction of, 58η, 60η, 68n, 73n, 87n Gedemin, descendants of, 5, 10 Glazov, M., 144, 162 Glebov, A. I., 28, 40, 100101,120, 160 Godunov, Boris, 128 Golitsyn, M. M., 52 Golitsyn, Th. N., 254 Golovkin, 26 Gorokhovetsk uezd, 53 Got'e, Iu. V., 45, 185 governor-general, 176-77, 181, 207, 221-26, 251, 252, 297; and assemblies of nobility, 271-72; and elections of nobility, 246, 266; and Senate, 221, 223, 252; reports of, 177, 233; salary of, 12n granaries, 74, 80 Gridin, 143 Grigor'ev, V., 44-45 Grimm, 220n, 293 guards, 11, 25, 36, 38, 41, 95,100,121, 160 guberniia, extent or size of, 181, 207, 215n, 217, 220-22; number of, 22022, 226; officials of, 222-25 Guberniia Magistracy, 224, 227 Gukovsky, T., 157 habeus corpus, 229 Heraldry Office, 19, 31, 32, 160, 175, 186, 285, 286 Holy Synod, 169, 175

Index Iamurg uezd, instruction of, 73n Iaroslavl' guberniia, 258 Iaroslavl' uezd, instruction of, 82 illiteracy, 22, 29, 53, 56, 58-60, 69 Imperial Council, 97, 101-8, 118-19, 175 inheritance, 76-77, 228, 285; disputes over, 76, 80 Insara uezd, instruction of, lOn, 58n, 60n, 62n Instruction of Catherine II to Legislative Commission of 1767-69, 128, 129, 14041, 143-45, 149-56, 274 Instruction to Governors of 21 April 1764, 110, 176-77, 183,191,226 instructions of nobles to Legislative Commission of 1767-69, 46-90, 110, 116, 170, 181,183; writing of, 47; numbers of, 48; purpose, 47; signers of, 47, 51, 55-56, 58, 69, 89, 116; use of, 132 Iransk, 148 ispravnik, 219n, 225, 230, 231-33, 235, 236, 239, 240, 247, 252, 258. See also komissar, Lower Land Court, police Iur'ev uezd, 58n, 80n Izium uezd, instruction of, 73n judges, see courts jury, 228, 278, 279

Justice College, 81, 222, 224, 285 Kadom uezd, instruction of, 74n, 87n Kadyi uezd, instruction of, 60 Kalachov, N., 16 Kaluga guberniia, elections in, 247, 256, 258 Kaluga uezd, instruction of, see Medyn uezd, instruction of Karachev uezd, instruction of, 72n, 74n, 75n, 87n Karamzin, N., 254, 280 Kashin uezd, instruction of, 6On, 64, 68n, 69n, 75n Kashira uezd, instruction of, 6In, 67n, 68n, 69n, 73n, 87n Kasimov uezd, instruction of, 58n, 72n, 86n, 87n Kazan', city, 198 Kazan' guberniia, 119-200, 203-5, 222 Kazan' uezd, instruction of, 60n, 73n, 80n, 84n Kerensk uezd, instruction of, 9n, 58n, 60, 66n, 68, 72n, 73n, 75n Kharkov uezd, instruction of, 58n, 73n, 75n, 84n Kipensky, V. N., 143 Kizevetter, A. A., 157 Klin uezd, 22; instruction of, 65n, 71n, 86n Kliuchevsky, V. O., 102 Kolomenskoe uezd, instruction of, 87 komissar, 21, 22, 86, 187,

317

Index komissar ( cont.) 188, 219, 225, 233; duties of, 182, 186; election of, 87, 188, 190, 194,206, 207, 232; in Baltic region, 217; numbers of 182. See also ispravnik, Lower Land Court, police Kondarev, I. M., 53, 161 Kopor'e uezd, instruction of, 72n, 73n, 75n Korf, Ν. A., 119 Korf, S. A., 44-45 Korob'in, G. S., 142-44, 151, 152, 159, 162, 167 Kostroma uezd, instruction of, 60n, 67n, 68n Kozel'sk uezd, instruction of, 87n Kozel'sky, la. P., 142, 14445, 152 Kozlov uezd, instruction of, 58η, 60n, 79n, 85n, 142 Krapivna uezd, instruction of, 61n, 63n, 65n, 72, 72n, 84n, 87 Krechetnikov, P., 247n Kromy uezd, instruction of, 84n Kurakin, Alexander, 252 Kurakin, Alexis, 280, 297 Kurmysh uezd, 161; instruc­ tion of, 73n Kursk guberniia, 12n, 42 Kursk uezd, instruction of, 60η, 68n, 72n, 84n land, given by state, 13; dis­ putes over, 77-78, 80, 86, 188, 228, 233, 239, 282;

ownership of, 18, 75, 93, 146, 283; peasants' owner­ ship of, 138; purchase of, 66, 73, 75, 112, 182; theft of, 43, 62. See also estates landrat, 11-12, 22, 81, 86, 87, 217-18, 239 law and order, 50, 79, 196. See also brigands lawyers, 82 legislative commission, of Elizabeth, 4, 28, 92, 96; of 1767-79, and nobility, 7, 145-51; and serfdom,, 14245, 147-53; end of, 15354; General Assembly of, 131-33, 146, 147, 148, 153, 154n; organization of, 130; staging of, 126-27 legislative commissions, his­ tory of, 124-26 liberty, 30, 40-41, 86, 89, 96, 109, 112, 117, 268, 269, 279, 281, 288-90, 296. See also civil liberty Lifland, 175, 218 Likhvin uezd, instruction of, 73n, 84n Liubim uezd, instruction of, 57, 58η, 60n, 67n, 68n, 143 Livin uezd, instruction of, 10η, 60n, 62n, 78n Lower Land Court, 215n, 225, 230, 231, 252. See also ispravnik, police Lower Rasprava, 224, 227 Lukh uezd, instruction of, 65n, 67n

Index Maloiaroslavets uezd, instruc­ tion of, 58n, 64n, 84n Malorossiia, 48, 177, 223, 270 Manifesto of Peter III on the Liberty of the Nobility, 35-45,53,57,68,75,88, 89, 93-97, 107-9, 111, 117, 121, 133, 162,167, 168, 172, 185, 186,261, 273,274,279,283,284 manpower, 19, 22, 24, 95, 166, 181, 191-92, 226, 232. See also servitors manufacturers, 62-65, 83 Manufacturing College, 21, 63, 71, 82, 175 marshal of the nobility, 42, 85, 86, 230, 234,239, 245-46, 257, 260-61, 270, 277, 284, 285, 297; and elections, 264-66, 268; and provincial administra­ tion, 186, 196; election of, 47, 271 Maslov, A. D., 142-43, 170 Mavrin, S. I., 204, 208 Medyn uezd and Kaluga uezd, combined instruction of, 58n, 60n, 6In, 63n, 67η, 68n, 74n, 86n Mel'gunov, A. P., 52, 53, 161,173,223,257 Menshikov, A., 11, 14, 24, 99 merchants, 8, 62-64, 71, 83, 93, 127, 149, 150,156, 157, 172, 189, 235, 238, 291 Meshchersky, P. S., 205

Meshchovsk uezd, instruction of, 85n, 87n mestnichestvo, 5 Mikhailov uezd, instruction of, 67n, 86n Mikhel'son, I. I., 200 Miliukov, P., 142, 157 Mining College, 21, 63, 71, 82, 175 minors, 20, 47, 59 Mogilev guberniia, 195, 226, 228, 252, 255, 258 monopoly, 8, 12, 72, 93, 94, 172-73, 206, 296 Montesquieu, 104, 130, 219, 228, 229 Moscow, city, 40, 47, 63, 73, 126, 128,158, 160,161, 175, 199, 200 Moscow guberniia, 31, 48, 78, 177, 206, 217, 222, 249, 251 Moscow uezd, instruction of, 75n Moscow University, 36, 214, 238 Mozhaisk uezd, 82; instruc­ tion of, 58n, 74n Mtsensk uezd, instruction of, 67n, 87n Murav'ev, N., 147 Murom uezd, instruction of, 55 Nakaz of Catherine II, see Instruction of Catherine II nakazy to Legislative Com­ mission of 1767-69, see instructions natural law, 130, 150, 162

Index Nekliudov, L, 162 Nicholas I, 294., 299 Nizhnii Lomov uezd, instruc­ tion of, 60n, 87n Nizhnii Novgorod guberniia, 12n, 200, 204,251 Nizhnii Novgorod uezd, in­ struction of, 84n nobility, and ancestry, 7; and the state, 79, 90, 156-57, 235-36, 239-43, 283, 285, 293; "ascendency" of, 23, 88, 122; assembly of, see assembly of nobility; Asso­ ciation of, see Association of Nobles; composition of, 5-6; corporate organization of, 261, 274, 297; decline of, 294-95; definition of, 4, 146, 273, 275; divisions within, 7, 9, 14, 16-18; equality of, 276, 277, 280; golden age of, 91, 242; higher, 15, 39-41, 43, 95, 115; importance of, 3; landless, 284; legal status of, 3-5, 18, 37, 92-96, 110, 123, 133, 147-48, 154, 164, 210, 268, 275; lesser or lower, 14, 17, 25, 53, 61, 82, 93, 161; mem­ bership in, 4, 86, 93, 154, 271, 278; middling, 15-16, 25, 43, 54, 93, 142, 161; Moscovite, 5; non-serving, 21, 37, 42, 53, 114, 168, 192; of Western Europe, 5, 6, 18, 41, 93; petty, 8, 15, 16,41,43-45, 53, 60, 67, 68, 246; poor,

9-11, 15, 60-62, 69-70, 79, 82, 155, 189; proofs of, 67, 276-77; provincial, 4348, 51-56, 112, 115, 166, 185, 188-92, 195, 196, 197, 203, 237-42, 249, 250, 256, 260, 261,273, 294-96, 299; registration of, 275, 276, 278, 285, 286; retired, 50, 52, 55, 57, 74, 112, 186, 190, 192,237, 270, 281,286; rich, 9, 11, 52, 61-62, 82; to elite, 8, 14, 115; to petty nobles, 8, 15; unity of, 18; upper, 54, 90, 93, 110-11, 166 nobles' opposition, 157-62, 172, 203, 292 Novgorod, city, 194, 209 Novgorod guberniia, 48, 177, 181, 191, 193, 217, 223; elections in, 249-50, 252, 255, 256-57, 258 Novgorod uezd, 194 Novorossiia, 49, 223, 290n Novosil uezd, instruction of, 60

Novyi Torzhok uezd, instruc­ tion of, 80n Obolensk uezd, 40; instruc­ tion of, see Serpukov Obonezhskaia Piatina of Nov­ gorod, instruction of, 6On,

68n Odoev uezd, instruction of, 67n, 87n officials, elected, 236, 256, 260, 263, 271, 294; elec-

Index tion of, 188-91, 228, 23032; numbers of, 227, 233; recruitment of, 36, 183-86; salaries of, 179, 225, 232, 236, 239. See also bureau­ crats, civil servants Olonets guberniia, 217, 223; elections in, 250, 256, 265 Opochinin, A., 162 Opochka uezd, instruction of, 5n, 58n, 60n, 62, 71n, 74n, 79n Orenburg guberniia, 200, 204, 251 Orenburg, town, 197 Orenburg uezd, 53, instruc­ tion of, 72n, 80n Orlov, G. G., 52, 98-100, 106, 120, 121n, 131, 160, 212 Orlov, I. G., 131, 147 Orlov uezd, instruction of, 63n, 73n, 84n Orlovs, 100 orphans, 86, 112, 234, 240, 284, 286 Ostrogozh uezd, instruction of, 73n palace revolutions, 17, 25, 115 Panin, N. I., 5, 96, 98-99, 101, 102-7, 118, 120, 121n,158,159 Panin, P. I., 52, 158, 199200, 203-8 Parfen'evo uezd, instruction of, 58η, 60η, 68n, 73n, 84n Particular Commission on Nobles' Estates, 148

Particular Commission on the Analysis of the Kinds of State Inhabitants, 274 Particular Commission on the Order of the State, 212, 217 particular commissions, 131, 132, 154n patents of nobility, see nobil­ ity, proofs of Paul, Emperor, 13n, 17, 42, 99, 211, 297 Pavlova-Sil'vanskaia, M. P., 212, 215 peasants, see serfs peasants, free, 15, 72, 127, 142, 149, 189, 224, 227, 229-30, 233, 238 peasants, state, see peasants, free pensions, 60, 155, 179 Penza guberniia, 203 Penza uezd, instruction of, 63n, 79n Peremyshl' uezd and Vorotinsk uezd, instruction of, 86 Pereslavl'-Riazan uezd, in­ struction of, 60n, 64n, 73, 84n Pereslavl'-Zaleskii uezd, in­ struction of, 66, 75n, 80n, 87n Perm guberniia, 251 Peter I, also Peter the Great, and the nobility, 3-4, 6-7, 10-11, 14, 18-19, 22-24, 27, 29, 35, 42n, 45-46, 154, 165, 180,276 Peter II, 17, 27, 125, 126

Index Peter III, 17, 27-33, 35-38, 39-41, 42n, 93, 100, 106, 108, 119, 120, 168, 169, 197. See also Manifesto Pokhvisnev, A., 162 Pokrovsky, M. N., 157, 159 Pokrovsky, S. A., 171 Poland, 48, 49, 194, 197, 212 Polenov, A. Ia., 139 police, 80, 215n, 236; land or rural, 206-7, 224, 230, 231, 232, 239, 254, 286; urban, 224, 235. See also ispravnik, komissar, Lower Land Court Polotsk gubemiia, 252, 255, 258 Popov, V. S., 129n Poshekhon' uezd, instruction of, 75n Potemkin, G. S., 14, 199, 212,223,252,290n Potemkin, P. S., 223 poverty, 60, 70, 113, 281. See also nobles, poor priests, see clergy procurator-general of Senate, 29,42n,119,120,135, 175, 177, 187, 190. See also Glebov, Viazemsky Pronsk uezd, instruction of, 60n,83n property, confiscation of, 112, 114; deprivation of, 279; private, 75, 170, 282, 291. See also estates, land, property rights property qualification in elec­

tions of nobility, 246-47, 265, 268, 294 property rights, of nobles, 21, 282; of peasants, 138-39, 141, 144-45. See also property Prussia, 4, 33, 172, 182 Pskov gubemiia, 195n, 217, 223, 226, 228, 242; elec­ tions in, 252, 255, 258 Pskov uezd, instruction of, 58n, 68n, 71n, 90 public opinion, 128-29, 133, 139 public welfare, 130, 269 Pugachev, E. I., 168, 197201, 203, 207, 208 Pugachev Revolt, 196-203, 209-10, 212, 226, 241, 244, 285, 290,291,292, 299 Pugachevshchina, see Puga­ chev Revolt Pustorzheva uezd, instruction of, 83n Putivil' uezd, instruction of, 60n Raeff, M., 34 Ransel, D., 103, 104, 107 raznochintsy, 64, 66, 205 red tape, 80, 82, 179, 204, 258, 285 Rennenkampf, General, 52 Riazhsk uezd, instruction of, 10η, 60η, 62n, 68n, 75n, 83n roads, 51, 56, 74, 80, 177, 181, 193,207, 269

Index Romanovich-Slavatinsky, Α., 44-45 Romanov uezd, instruction of, 67n Roslavl' uezd, instruction of, 60n, 62n Rossignol, Ambassador, 131 Rostov uezd, instruction of, 67n, 86n Rubinshtein, N. L., 28, 32, 33, 159 Rumiantsev, P. A., 177, 233, 270 Rurik, descendants of, 5, 7, 10 Rychkov, P. I., 53 Ryl'sk uezd, instruction of, 10η, 58η, 60n, 62n, 66n, 67n Rzhev-Volodimir uezd, in­ struction of, 86n Sacke, G., 157, 160, 171 Samara guberniia, 251 schools, 11, 61, 69-70, 80, 116, 146, 177, 178, 230, 241, 255, 265, 269, 286. See also education Senate, 8, 12n, 31, 36, 37, 40, 41, 81, 82, 99, 102, 182n, 202; and administra­ tion, 173-78, 180, 187, 278, 279; and provincial reform, 211-12, 244; and serfdom, 134, 137. See also procurator-general Senate Reform of December 1763, 118-20

serfdom, 133-145, 147-153, 241, 273, 291 serf flight, 49, 143-44, 158, 162. See also, serfs, fugitive serfs, and masters, 112, 13334, 141, 143-44, 152, 153, 158, 168,283,291. See also serfdom; bestowal by state, 12-13, 111; fac­ tory, 64-65, 134, 146, 169; fugitive, 63, 79, 88 (see also serf flight); of church, 72, 134, 168, 169, 180; ownership of, 4, 9, 13, 15, 18, 20, 64-65, 75, 283; purchase of, 66, 73, 75, 282; sale of, 143, 162; theft of, 10, 62 Serpaisk uezd, instruction of, 87n Serpukov uezd, Tarusa uezd, and Obolensk uezd, in­ struction of, 48, 58n, 63n, 68η,69η, 71n, 75n, 84n service, as basis of nobles' legal status, 18, 37, 283; as justification for nobles' privileges, 92, 95, 111, 114, 154, 167-68, 191, 280; as opportunity, 41, 70; avoidance of, 21, 22, 42, 111, 280; before Peter I, 19; compulsory, 32, 36, 39, 42, 93, 97, 118, 146, 167,185,279,285,299 (see also service require­ ment); costs of, 42; elec­ tive, 22, 232-34, 237,

Index

service (cont.) 240, 253, 256, 259,260, 262-63, 270; enlistment in, 26, 30, 35, 164, 167, 170; professionalization of, 34, 164, 167, 170; pro­ motion in, 11, 57-58; retirement from, 11, 27, 31, 39, 43, 57-58, 280; rewards of, 12-13, 109-10, 276; under laws of Peter I, 19-20, 22 service rank, 6-8, 11-13, 31, 39,54,55,257, 262,267, 285 service requirement, 6, 18-37; abolition of, 27, 29, 32; enforcement of, 27, 44; of Peter I, 21-23; reduction of, 24-25. See also service, compulsory servitors, 9, 27, 29, 33, 34, 37, 95, 165, 179. See also manpower Seven Years' War, 3, 33-34, 43,46,133,135, 166, 199 Shakhovskoy, la. P., 100-101, 190-91 Shcherbatov, Μ. M., 28n, 143, 149-51, 159, 160, 161, 162, 167, 239 Shelonskaia Piatina of Nov­ gorod, instruction of, 79n Sheremetev, 9, 119 Shluissel'burg uezd, instruc­ tion of, 73n, 87n Shuvalov, P. I., 4 Shuvalovs, 9, 12, 28 Siberia, 48 Sievers, Jacob, 13, 208, 223;

and assemblies of the nobil­ ity, 264-66, 268-70; and elective service under the Fundamental Law, 26264; and the composition of the Fundamental Law, 213, 214-17, 218, 219, 220; and the implementa­ tion of the Fundamental Law, 244-50; 257-58; and provincial reform before 1775, 177-78, 181, 183, 185-86, 191-95, 226; and the Senate, 178, 183-84, 195 Sievers, Karl, 177 Simbirsk uezd, 203; instruc­ tion of, 10η, 60n, 62n, 86n,87n Slabodskaia Ukraina, 49 Skavronsky, M. P., 119 Smolensk guberniia, 49, 57, 179, 242, 244, 252,255, 258 Smolensk uezd, instruction of, 68n, 73n, 84n Solov'ev, S. M., 27, 33, 102, 104 Staehlin, 28n Starooskol' uezd, instruction of, 67n, 84n Stepanov, I., 144 St. Petersburg, city, 36, 63, 68, 73, 128, 152,161 St. Petersburg guberniia, 31, 231, 252 St. Petersburg uezd, 194-95 Stroganov, 10 Sudai uezd, instruction of, 87n

Index Sudislav, 58n, 86n, 87n Sumarokov, A., 40, 161 Sumy uezd, instruction of, 58η, 60n, 67n, 68n Superior Land Court, 215n, 224, 227, 232, 236, 240, 285 Superior Rasprava, 224, 227 Supreme Privy Council, 17, 24 survey, 61, 78 surveyor, 78, 80, 224, 237, 239 Suzdal' uezd, instruction of, 58n, 84n Sviazhsk uezd, instruction of, 79a Sweden, 19, 48, 124

troops, quartering of, 56, 73, 283 Trubchevsk uezd, instruction of, 68n, 72n Tula guberniia, 258, 263 Tula uezd, instruction of, 63, 68η, 80n, 84n, 87n Turkey, 26, 153, 196, 199, 212,241 Tver' guberniia, 45, 255; and the Fundamental Law, 216, 217, 223, 244; elec­ tions in, 245-50, 257, 266, 268-69 Tver' uezd, instruction of, 68n tyranny, 41, 288, 291-93. See also despotism

Table of Ranks, 6, 7, 15, 35, 65-66, 89, 145, 146, 150, 151, 179, 232, 234, 238, 276. See also ennoblement Tambov guberniia, 12n Tarusa uezd, 48; instruction of, see Serpukov uezd Tatars, 49 Tatishchev, L. N., 142, 151, 152 Temnikov uezd, instruction of, 49, 58n Tolmachev, N., 143, 161 Toropets uezd and Kholm uezd, instruction of, 73n, 86n towns, 51, 173, 210, 234, 235, 241, 255, 282, 287 townsmen, see burghers travel, foreign, 31, 32, 114, 117, 146, 181

uezd, division of, 206; extent or size of, 183, 221-22; number of, 221-22; offi­ cials of, 224-25 Ufa guberniia, 49 Ufa uezd, instruction of, 58n, 59 Uglich uezd, instruction of, 60n, 6In, 73, 74n, 78n, 79n, 83n urban corporation, 165, 230, 234. See also towns Ursinus, 149, 167 Ushakov, A. I., 119 Usman' uezd, instruction of, 58n, 60, 63n, 67n Ustiuzhna uezd, instruction of, 84n Uezd Court, 224, 227, 230, 231, 236, 252

Index Valuiki uezd, instruction of, lOn, 60n, 62n, 67n, 84n, 87n Venev' uezd, instruction of, 87n Vereia uezd, instruction of, 58n, 60n, 62, 68n, 69n, 75n, 79n, 82, 85n Verkhnii Lomov uezd, instruction of, 6 On Vernadsky, G. V., 28, 33 Viatka guberniia, 48, 251 Viazemskii uezd, instruction of, 60n, 61n, 75n, 78n, 87n Viazemsky, A. A., 8, 120, 130-32, 135, 173, 175, 178, 195, 214 Viazma uezd, instruction of, 71n Villebois, 52, 103-4 Vinsky, G. S., 239, 255, 296 Vladimir guberniia, 233 Vladimir uezd, instruction of, 58n, 78 Vodskaia Piatina of Novgorod, instruction of, 49, 60n, 68n voevoda, 87, 187, 188, 221, 237, 239, 254; proposed election of, 87, 190 Volkonsky, M., 177, 206, 222,213,217 Volkov, D. V., 28, 52, 119, 147, 198

Volkov uezd, instruction of, 75n Vologda guberniia, 251 Vologda uezd, instruction of, lOn, 60n, 62n, 73n, 87n Voltaire, 199, 21 In Voronezh guberniia, 49, 251 Voronezh uezd, instruction of, 12n, 60n, 83n Vorontsov, A. R., 258, 269, 292 Vorontsov, M. L., 13, 97, 100, 106, 110-11, 113, 120, 218 Vorontsov, R. L., 5, 12, 28, 92-94, 97, 100, 159, 160, 223,233 Vorontsov, S. R., 7 Vorontsovs, 28, 32, 52, 97, 101, 103, 158, 182 VospitatePnyi Dom, 238 Vyborg uezd, 48, 175 Vyrodov, I., 144, 167 wealth, 9-13, 15-16, 39, 41, 60, 111, 115 Zaraisk uezd, 53, 161; instruction of, 58n, 60n, 73, 84n Zavadovsky, P. V., 245 Zubtsovsk uezd, instruction of, 85n, 86 Zvenigorod uezd, instruction of, 48

326