Chapter III: The Nobility

The very word nobility in connection with Russia is misleading. There is no English word which is the equivalent of the Russian word for nobility—_dvorianstvo_. In French, there are two words, _noblesse de cour_, which correspond to the Russian word.

The Russian word _dvorianin_, which we translate, for want of a better word, noble, means a man attached to a Court, and courtier would be the right translation, if courtier did not happen to mean something else. The Russian noble is a Court servant, who is entitled by the service he renders to the State to an hereditary rank. Nobility accrues by right to the man who has reached a certain definite step or _tchin_ in the army or in the civil service.

The service, moreover, is open to everybody who can pass a certificate examination at the end of his school time. During the whole of the eighteenth century, and the first part of the nineteenth century, from the reign of Peter the Great to the end of the reign of Alexander I., every single officer of the nobility army, and every single civil servant holding an equivalent rank, became _ipso facto_ a noble.

The lowest rank in the army, that of an ensign, conferred the right of nobility.[2]

Later on, in 1822, in 1845, and in 1855, the grade which conferred hereditary nobility was raised.

The net result of all this is that (_a_) the nobility as a class is enormous (in European Russia the hereditary nobility number about 600,000); (_b_) there can be nothing aristocratic about such a nobility.

This does not mean that the descendants of old families do not exist in Russia. Such families exist, and are, perhaps, more ancient than any in Europe. Moreover, a certain number of names and families stand out amidst the encircling obscurity, some of them illustrious with an almost fabulous antiquity, like names in a saga or an epic, and others illustrious from great services rendered in more modern times. Russian history is “bright with names that men remember”; on the one hand names recalling those of the Knights of the Round Table or the heroes of the Niebelungenlied, on the other hand names resembling that, say, of the Duke of Wellington.

Titles have little to do with the matter: amongst this little band of the illustrious, some of the families have titles of recent origin; others, again, almost incredibly remote both in lineage and fame, have no titles at all.

The great mass of the nobility have neither title nor any outward sign to distinguish them from the herd of nobles, with the exception of the collateral branches of the royal family.

Russia was originally a conglomeration of small principalities (all descending from, all collateral branches of, one prince), grouped at one time under the leadership of Kiev, and later on absorbed by the principality of Moscow, which eventually became first a kingdom, and then _the_ kingdom. When Moscow absorbed all the minor principalities, the princes, bereft of their principalities, still retained their titles. “Prince” is, therefore, the only true Russian title that exists in Russia.

The titles of graf (count) and baron are borrowed from Western Europe. There is no word either for count or baron in the Russian language, and the German terms are used. These titles are confined to a few families, and are either titles of recent creation, conferred by the sovereign for special services, or they denote families of foreign extraction and origin.

About two-thirds of the princely families descend from the ancient sovereigns of Russia, and about forty of them go as far back as Rurick, the oldest of all Russian sovereigns. Such are the families of the Dolgoruky, Bariatinsky, Obolensky, Gortchakov, Khovansky, Galitsin, Trubetskoy.

As far as lineage and antiquity are concerned, these families are as old as any in Europe; but in spite of the existence of these ancient families, whose ramifications are innumerable (for instance, there are about three or four hundred Galitsins, male and female), there is no such thing in Russia as a political aristocracy.

One of the causes of this state of things is probably the democratic system which prevails in every Russian family, be it that of a prince or of a peasant, of dividing property equally amongst the whole family; and as the title is likewise inherited by every member of the family as the process of subdivision goes on, it sometimes happens that the sole inheritance of the descendant of an illustrious family is his name.

One would have thought this constant process of subdivision must have ultimately decimated all the large estates in Russia. It probably would have done so had it not been for the size of the country, the perpetual opening out of new territory, the unceasing colonization of such remnants, and the consequent rise in the value of land.

Moreover, the division of property is made among the male members of the family only. The female members of a family receive only a fourteenth share of the patrimony; they receive a marriage portion, and sometimes nothing besides.[3]

There is also in Russia, as everywhere else, what the French would call “_une aristocratie mondaine_.” Even here there is less spirit of caste than in other European countries. It is impossible to define what constitutes and what limits this society in Russia, just as it is impossible to define what constitutes the limits of any such society anywhere. It has nothing necessarily to do with the governing class, and nothing to do with the great mass of the nobility, and nothing necessarily to do with illustrious names or services, and is hall-marked neither by wealth nor by titles, but by a freemasonry of manner and culture. It is a society consisting of many separate groups, which live their own life and touch each other at certain points. Thus in St. Petersburg there is an _erste Gesellschaft_, who all talk French as a matter of course, and very often English as well, and who at one time talked French better than their own language. The younger generation of this class, however, know Russian well.

Thus it is that in speaking of the Russian nobility as a whole and as a class—and it is a vast class—the English reader must put out of his head all ideas of aristocracy such as it existed in England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, and realize the following facts:—

1. The noble in Russia is a State servant.

2. Any one can enter the State service if he passes the requisite
examination.

3. The attainment of a certain rank in the State service carries
with it the rights of hereditary nobility.

4. There is no political aristocracy in Russia.

5. Until 1861 only the nobility had the right to own land in
Russia.

6. There is no such thing as a territorial aristocracy in Russia.

How is it, then, that if until this year 1861 the nobility alone had the right of owning land in Russia, there is no such thing as a territorial aristocracy? And how is it, if innumerable descendants of old princely families exist at the present moment in Russia, there is no such thing as a political aristocracy?

The answer to these two questions is to be found in the history of the past, and, without going into any elaborate historical disquisition, the roots of the matter are fairly easy to trace.

In the earlier times of Russian history, long before the invasion of the Tartars, before the Norman Conquest in England, Russia was divided into principalities, which were governed by princes. Every prince had a body of followers, who constituted around his person a kind of armed militia. This militia was called the _druzhina_. Its members were free. They could serve whom they pleased. They could pass from the service of one prince to another. Out of this class of armed servants arose the _boyars_, who were likewise the voluntary servants of the princes, and who could serve whichever prince they pleased. They were naturally inclined to choose the richest and most powerful prince, and thus they were attracted to the Court of Moscow, and thus the minor principalities became weaker in resources and poorer in followers, and were gradually absorbed one after another by the Grand Duchy of Moscow. And when Moscow became the central and predominant kingdom of Russia, the boyars became the servants of the Tsar of Moscow. But the boyars did not serve the monarch for nothing; in return for their service they received land. Originally the servants of the princes were remunerated for their services by receiving allotments of land, which passed from father to son, as well as by money, and the revenues accruing from certain Government appointments. Had the boyars continued to possess hereditary allotments, and nothing but hereditary allotments, they might have grown into a caste of territorial aristocrats. As it was, as Russia grew bigger, and when Northern Russia was annexed to the kingdom of Moscow, the only new sources of capital were the immense stretches of new land acquired by the Tsar of Moscow. Henceforward the Tsar, instead of giving the boyars hereditary allotments of land in return for their service, gave them temporary allotments of land in the newly-acquired territory. These allotments were in theory supposed to belong to the Tsar’s servant so long, and so long only, as he served, but in practice they generally belonged to the owner during the whole of his lifetime. A grant of land of this kind was called a _pomestie_ (manor), and the owner of it a _pomeshchik_, which came in the course of time to be, and is at present, the ordinary Russian word for a landowner.

Thus the Tsar accomplished at one swoop many different objects. He distributed the men of service in the interior and at the frontier of the country, and by granting them only the temporary lease of the land in distant parts of the country, he prevented the growth of a strong landed aristocracy whose existence and rivalry he feared. He made these newly-created landowners into a barrier against foreign invasion, and into an instrument of national defence; the land became a means for the upkeep of the army, since the landowners constituted the army, and the armed servant in return for his service received land, which, in addition to being a wage, made that service possible by giving him a means of upkeep.

The principle was established that the servant of the State should be rewarded for his services by the possession of land; and soon the corollary followed that the owner of land _must_ serve.

Hereditary holdings still existed; but gradually the right of administrating them came to depend on service. In the sixteenth century, in the kingdom of Moscow, all owners of hereditary holdings were State servants. A man who inherited a holding was obliged to serve if he wished to continue to possess the hereditary ownership of it.

Thus it was that the nobility in Russia acquired the dual nature of landowner and servant of the State. The servant of the State became a landowner, and only on the condition of being a servant of the State, as has already been stated.

The result of all this was that the nobility took no roots in the land. Their interest was at Court. Their land was merely their pay. Thus no landed or territorial aristocracy came into existence, as in other European countries. In Russia there are no feudal castles, no families taking their names from places, no titles derived from property, no _von_ and _zu_, no _de_, no Lord So-and-So of So-and-So; comparatively few stone houses. The noble generally lives in a wooden house, which has the nature of a temporary makeshift residence.

Nevertheless there was an obstinate attempt on the part of the Russian nobility to form a political aristocracy.

The boyars, grouping themselves round the throne of Moscow, attempted to do this. They organized themselves into a complicated hierarchy, according to which precedence depended on the pedigree of their forefathers. The duties and position of each boyar was written down in a complicated kind of peerage called “books of pedigree.” His rank had to remain exactly what that of his forefathers had been.

Organized in this fashion, the boyars became an hereditary, stationary, and exclusive caste, perpetually quarrelling over questions of pedigree, the rights and wrongs of which were extremely difficult to determine.

By the time Ivan the Terrible came to the throne (1547) the boyars were individually powerful, but the very nature of such an organization precluded all idea of solidarity and union. Every single noble wished to be _primus inter pares_. Every family was at war with its equals. Ivan the Terrible dealt with the boyars individually by cutting off their heads. The books of pedigree were abolished in the reign of Peter the Great’s predecessor, and the name boyar was abolished by Peter the Great.

Henceforward the service of your forefathers was no longer of any account. Neither lineage nor rank counted any longer. Your rank depended henceforth on your _tchin_—that is to say, the post you held in the service of the State; and that, in its turn, depended on your personal merit, on the nature of your service. The Russian nobility became a class of State servants in which the hereditary principle ceased to exist; and although some of the privileges which Peter the Great took away from the hereditary nobility were restored to them by his successors, the great fabric of the State service which he created still exists. So does the _tchin_, with its fourteen grades, created by Peter the Great. A boy leaving his college or gymnasium, and having passed what the Germans call his _abiturienten examen_, and what in some of our public schools is called a certificate examination, has access to the lowest rung of the official ladder.

University degrees confer a _tchin_ on the student, and with every fresh diploma he receives he ascends a further rung of the ladder. For instance, a son of a peasant, if he goes to school, passes his examinations, and finishes his course at the university, may serve, say, in the department of Railway Traffic Organization, and by ascending one grade of the ladder after another, he may, partly by luck and partly by merit, end by being Minister of Finance or Prime Minister.

The successors of Peter the Great exempted the nobility from compulsory service; and Catherine II. not only confirmed this exemption, but increased and enlarged the privileges of the nobility. She made the nobility into a privileged class. In order to prepare the way for local self-government, she created intermediate powers between the throne and the people, and gave the nobility a part to play in local administration, and roped in the merchants to co-operate with them, thus endeavouring to form a _bourgeoisie_. The nobility enjoyed the privilege of appointing local justices of the peace and local officials. The administration of every district had to pass through the hands of the nobility in the shape of a marshal, in some respects a kind of lord-lieutenant[4]; one presided over every district, and one over every province, and both were elected by the Assembly of Nobles. The theory was that the influence of the marshals of the nobility would counterbalance the action of the governor of the province, an official appointed directly by the Crown. This was the theory, and a theory it more or less remained owing to the apathy of the nobility, who failed to take full advantage of their privileged situation. Nevertheless the nobility did play a considerable part in local administration; and consequently, in proportion as they tended to become bureaucrats, they ceased being landowners. They had less and less time to look after their property. They ceased, for the greater part, to be practical and practising landowners, and they left the management of their estates in the hands of their stewards, and often used their estates as a means of raising money, so that in 1859, on the eve of the emancipation, two-thirds of the estates and the nobility were in pawn, and the remaining third was often mortgaged to individuals.

The privileges granted to the nobility by the successors of Peter the Great could not fail to affect the peasantry. The peasants were at this time tethered to the soil. Peter the Great had tightened the bonds which attached them to the soil, and Catherine II. had done nothing to loosen their bonds. In fact, the situation of the peasants, instead of improving, had grown worse. The rights of the master over the serf had been extended. The master had the power of dealing administratively with the serf; he could banish him to Siberia, sentence him to penal servitude, and could sell him apart from the land. The situation of the serf was not only crying out for reform, but the peasants knew and complained that the whole logical principle of the case for serfdom had been violated.

The peasantry rightly considered that serfdom was a temporary measure coinciding with the compulsory service of the nobility. If the nobility ceased to serve the Tsar, logically they should cease to serve the nobility, because the nobility were only given the land on condition of serving the Tsar, and on that condition alone, and the peasants belonged to the land.

The discontent of the peasants expressed itself in risings, which were sometimes serious, and the moral feeling against the existence of serfdom became stronger and stronger. And since the nobles were too much occupied with other affairs to look after their estates in person, and their serfs in a patriarchal fashion, there was, as has already been said in Chapter I., no possible argument left in favour of serfdom.

Nevertheless, as Catherine II. saw clearly, the emancipation of the serfs could only be carried out with the co-operation of the nobility. In her reign the time had not come for this, because the nobility were opposed to the reform. The reform came about in 1861, and by it the nobility lost the unique privilege of being the only class in Russia able to own land, and the access to landed proprietorship in Russia was thrown open to all classes.

When the immense act of expropriation which the emancipation of the serfs entailed took place, about half the landowners in Russia disappeared. Quite a new and mixed class of landowners came into existence: merchants and absentee landowners who leased their land to the peasants, and finally those who sunk their capital in the land and tried to carry on agriculture on rational principles.

I have already spoken of the result of absentee landownership in Russia, and the further sales of land which were made to the peasants in 1905, and of the exemption of the peasantry from compulsory communal land tenure. Looking back on the situation now, one is aware that the landed nobility in Russia is being slowly and gradually oozed out of existence; it is being subjected to a slow process of expropriation in favour of the peasants, the merchants, and the new capitalists; and in the course of time, as soon as the peasantry has the means, the capital, and the knowledge to compete with it on equal terms, the nobility as a caste of landowners will disappear altogether.

The two questions which I put towards the beginning of this chapter: How is it there exists no political aristocracy in Russia? and, How is it that there exists no territorial aristocracy, in spite of the fact that until 1861 the nobility had the exclusive right of owning the land? can perhaps be answered thus:—

There is no political aristocracy in Russia, because as far back as we can see in Russian history we find no traces of that spirit of caste and solidarity which creates a compact body, sharing a common outlook, and pursuing a definite political and social aim. As far back as we can see in Russian history the nobles were State servants, and when they were given privileges which were not dependent on service, they were powerless to make themselves into anything else. They had neither the instinct nor the desire to do so.

There have in Russian history been aristocrats, but no aristocracy; and when those aristocrats were powerful, they were bound together by no _esprit de corps_, and by no common object: thus it was easy for the Crown to disintegrate them.

There has been no territorial aristocracy, because the land was a temporary loan made to the nobility in return for service. When the service ceased to be compulsory, the land was at once reclaimed by its original owners, the men who tilled it. A hundred years after service ceased to be compulsory for the nobles the peasants were given back a great part of the land, and ever since then they have been gradually getting back more and more of it, and in the course of time there is no doubt that they will end by getting back all of it.

The Russian nobility is a thing apart. An aristocracy on the Western European pattern no more exists in Russia than do feudal castles on the European pattern. There is an analogy between the flat uniform surface of the landscape in Russia, the absence of sharp mountain ranges and deep valleys, of variety and variegated features, and the nature of Russian institutions. The Russian nobility is, like the Russian landscape, devoid of sharp features—all one level. It is democratic, and averse to the prominence of individual personalities. All the features that are characteristic of aristocratic tendencies, such as primogeniture, spirit of caste, class exclusiveness, do not exist. The Russian nobility is democratic, and it lacks the salient features and the sharp and defined character which has distinguished in the past the nobility in the other countries of Europe.

It may very likely now occur to the reader to ask if there is not and never has been such a thing as a political aristocracy in Russia; and if the Russian nobility is so democratic, why was there ever any discontent in Russia? Why was there such a thing as Nihilism and a revolutionary movement?

It would seem at first sight that a system in which rank was entirely dependent on merit, and in which the service was open to everybody, left nothing to be desired, as far as democracy is concerned. In certain respects it is obviously democratic, in others it is fatal to all free democracy.

The principle, of course, is as democratic as possible; but what happens in practice? In practice you have a gigantic machine worked by a governing class of officials which is absolutely uncontrolled by public opinion.

Any one can get into the governing class, that is true; but nobody who is not in it can check its action, and at one period nobody could even criticize it. The result is the triumph of bureaucracy at the expense of any kind of democracy or of any kind of aristocracy; while the only thing that profits by it is arbitrary despotism. And though the system is theoretically favourable to the advancement of merit, it is a thousand times more favourable to mediocrity, routine, office-hunting, officialdom, red tape, to the stifling of all individual initiative, and the shirking of all moral responsibility. The chief evil result of the system was the uncontrolled arbitrary character of the central government and the local administration as carried on by the provincial governors and other officials of the Government; and it was against this arbitrariness that public opinion in Russia revolted, and expressed itself either by militant acts of revolt, assassinations, or explosions, or peaceably in a demand for political reform. And in this peaceable demand the nobility played an important part.

I have already said that Catherine II. gave privileges to the nobility with the idea of preparing the way for local self-government. She knew that in her time such institutions could only be elementary, and that real local self-government was impossible, since besides the nobility and the merchants, the rest of the population were serfs; but she determined to lay the foundations of self-government, and to prepare the way for the future. She gave the nobility privileges which in other countries must certainly have led to a conflict with the Crown; but in her time nothing of the kind happened, since the nobility took no advantage of their situation. But the situation which she created did ultimately lead to a conflict with the Crown, because it was the organs of the local self-government which voiced the demand for representative institutions in Russia, and headed the movement which obtained them. The first step towards local self-government was made by Catherine II., the second step was made by Alexander II. In 1864, in addition to the Assemblies of Nobles, Zemstvos (county councils) were created, containing representatives of every class; later, the nobility and the peasants elected their representatives. Every district of every government or province was given a Zemstvo, or county council; and above this (and formed from the district councils) each government or province was given a county council. Both the district and the provincial county councils were presided over by the marshals of the nobility.

Here were the means and the instrument at least of checking the uncontrolled action of the bureaucratic machine; but the natural corollary of local self-government—namely, central political representation—was for the time lacking. Moreover, from time to time the officials appointed by the Government were given powers to check the action of the county councils.

Ten years passed. The enthusiasm which greeted the era of reform in the ’sixties died out in a smoke of disillusion, and a revolutionary movement sprang up, and a Nihilist fever, culminating in the assassination of the Emperor Alexander II. in 1881, when he was on the eve of granting a constitution to Russia. This shelved all question of reform for another twenty-five years; a period of sheer reaction followed; and it was not until the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 that the public discontent found expression in a manner which had to be reckoned with.

It was now that the Zemstvos played a supremely important part. They headed the constitutional demand for reform, which had developed side by side with a revolutionary movement. And they obtained first the promise of a consultative House of Representatives, and finally, on October 17, 1905, a charter promising to the people the foundations of civic liberty, the convocation of a Duma, and the promise that no laws should in future be passed without receiving the sanction of the representatives of the nation. The rank and file of the army which brought this to pass were the whole of the educated middle class of Russia, but its leaders and spokesmen were the members of the nobility in the county councils. It was not the nobility as a class which acted and brought this about, but the instruments of local government, the county councils; and every single organ of local government, each county council, had at the head of it a member of the nobility. So far, then, from acting as a separate caste, the Russian nobility, in the movement and demand for reform and emancipation, simply expressed the opinion of the man in the street; and this was all the easier, for the simplest definition of the Russian noble, and one which sums up the whole matter, is that in Russia the noble is almost every tenth man in the street.