Week 12 Lecture: Nobility and Peasantry, the 18th Century

Portrait difference  two different cultures within 60/80 years – Clean-shaven, chivalric or
military dress

Consolidation and Differentiation of Nobility

1. Unifying effect of Peter’s I Poll Tax – elite DON’T pay, so you see a hegemony form
out of those who are exempt from this tax.
2. Survival of ‘Old’ Princely families [Lusupov, Gagrin, Sheremetev, Stroganov]
3. Descendants of the middling service class [Military administrative elite]
4. Rise of (landless) service nobility after 1762 – created via Catherine who are civil
administrative  1800 – 1850: Civil Service becomes distinct professional career
requiring specialized training.

Civic leadership?

1722: Table of Ranks – Peter obliged all servitors to climb these tables, to Rank 1: Field
Marshal

1762: ‘Emancipation of nobility’ – one of Peter III’s few achievements – service was
voluntary rather than compulsory, you still couldn’t refuse, was trying to coax people away
from central colleges (there’s enough people there), and get them to return to provinces to
work where they are needed

1775: Provincial Reform – divides up country into provinces, equal to population, and then
into districts, and then even further smaller units  nobility would be driving force behind
new form of provincial admin to avoid problems Peter faced, Gov closer to people therefore.

Nobility XXX have distinct rights set out in any way – no constituted body – FEAR nobles
could rise up against, and could create constituted body to do this.

1785: Charter to the nobility – NOT concession, not giving away, codifying rights of the
nobility – leads to Peace and Prosperity, Catherine moving away from forcible ideals of Peter
and more coaxing them away.

Noble Critics

Noble Self-Interest (Parochialism in 1767): Interested in their own estates

Resentment of merchant social climbers: Restricted who could be a noble, fears of

usurpment

Objected to 2 main things:

1. Opposition to war – expensive, troops going back and from (funded by estates, and
destruction of noble estates as loss of troops/behaviour)
2. Favouritism – Petchunkin (1774), P then selects the next men, and so this causes
problem amongst leading nobles
Catherine trying to create civic leadership, but issues from nobles – unless they can push out
other nobles  nothing changes, its just shifting power dynamics.

Europeanisation and self-fashioning

Travel – 400 to 600 passports given out in a year

Reading habits – variety of western literature

Material and cultural consumption

Palace architecture/creation of new palaces

Nobles now becoming self-consciously Europeanized.

Debate over luxury – argue that its good for stimulating the economy//source of decadence

Personal Correspondence and individual freedom of choice

Correspondence letters deemed to be a very Euro ideal – patronage ideas – also BOTH
genders contributed too.

Most in French – Nobles became foreigners in their own country (isolated from rest of
society – beginnings of the split amongst the groups) – and was simply a means of
communication, with no necessary connection to patriotic feelings.

Serf Ownership in 1762

51% landowners own fewer than 20 Serfs:

- 21 to 100: 31%
- 101 to 500: 15%
- 501 to 1000: 2%
- 1000+: 1%

Grander estates, more detailed accounts were bailiffs wrote down accounts of it.

Consolidation and Differentiation of Peasantry

Peasantry divided into:

- Serfs – people owned by their value, bought and sold, almost anything can be done
to them = integral part of the system, but never included in any legislation as were
not legally people.
- State Peasants – emerging from PtG – DID have legal rights and were recognized by
the law, their life not radically different
- Court Peasants – belong to imperial court/monarch
- Church Peasants – church owns significant number of peasants, monastery peasants
- Economic Peasants – monastery peasants who became state peasants when
Catherine secularized the church
Serfs = 1719 (3.19 mil, 55.8%), 1762 (4.42 mil, 55.5%), 1795 (5.69 mil, 54.5%), 1857 (6.7 Mil,
41.8%)

State Peasants = 1719 (1.2 mil, 21.5%), 1762 (2.03 mil, 25.5%), 1795 (4.25 mil, 40.8%), 1857
(8.36 mil, 52.4%)

Church = 1719 (791.7k), 1744 (898.4k), 1762 (1.03 mil)

Mos serfs were in the long settled lands around Moscow, state peasants were in periphery
where Russia had expanded – type of labour depended on type of land that they occupied.

Black soil land more fertile, more agricultural labour system

Non-black soil lands = payment in lieu of labour, cash or kind

Peasants were organised into patriarchal peasant communes – led by men, is more
Slavophile system, where your acting brotherly, or is it highly competitive where you fight for
resources?

Beggars

Problems created by vagrants

Solutions = military recruitment//denial

Official lack of sympathy under Elizabeth and Catherine II

Sympathetic paintings by Ivan Ermenev – depicted as gentle figures, suggests new interest in
the peasantry

Peasant revolts

Till 1773 had been: Small-scale, geographically widespread, unco-ordinated

EXCEPT: Pugachev revolt (1773 – 1775), pulls all cultural attention and creates a binary view
of the peasantry [Salt of the Earth v Nasty Counterculture]:

- Not a peasant War

- Anti-state rather than anti-serfdom against increased regulation/taxation
- Geographically periphery
- Led by Cossack freebooter/Pretender to the throne, claimed to be Peter III
- Classic old-style revolt, reminiscent of 17th Century Muscovy.