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Politics without poleis emancipation and the gentry in blacksoil Russia (Tambov, 1858 – 1881)

Regkoukos, George

Awarding institution: King's College London

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Politics Without Poleis: Emancipation and the Gentry in Blacksoil Russia (Tambov, 1858 – 1881)

Georgios Regkoukos

Thesis submitted for the degree of Philosophiae Doctor (PhD) at King’s College, University of London

2019

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Table of Contents Table of Contents ...... 2 List of Tables and Figures ...... 3 List of Abbreviations ...... 4 Spelling, Romanisation and Dates ...... 6 Introduction ...... 8 Emancipation ...... 14 Structure ...... 19 Methodology ...... 23 Chapter I: Writing the history of Russia’s nobility ...... 31 Learning from the past: Nineteenth-century Historians of the Russian nobility ... 38 Homo nobilis – Definition and stratification of nobility in rural Russia ...... 47 Emancipation and the nobility or emancipation of the nobility? ...... 52 Chapter II: ‘Protectionist networks’ and the socioeconomic status of Tambov’s landowning nobility (1861-1901) ...... 68 Population & composition of the nobility in Tambov ...... 70 Types of landownership in Tambov ...... 80 Blacksoil Russia: Redistribution of wealth on a grand scale ...... 88 Tambov after Emancipation: A new (political) economy ...... 97 Local economy ...... 100 Estate viability and the problem of noble solvency in postreform Russia ...... 111 Chapter III: Sweeping reforms, 1858-1879 ...... 119 Education, career & religion in postreform Russia ...... 119 Material wealth and the estate ...... 126 The estate: An artistic and social space ...... 133 Everyday life on the postreform estate ...... 155 Philoxenia: Merry-making and sports on the noble estate ...... 165 Chapter IV: Network Analysis, a quantitative and qualitative approach to gentry networks ...... 171 Network Analysis: Visualising ties ...... 181 Network formation: Institutional factors ...... 197 Network formation: Biographical factors ...... 207 Chapter V: Politics without Poleis ...... 219 Tambov & the defeat of aristocratic opposition to reform...... 221 Conclusion: Disenchantment in the Russian province ...... 250 List of Sources ...... 262 Primary Sources ...... 262 Secondary Sources ...... 267 APPENDIX A: Archival Sources for Social Network Analysis ...... 285 APPENDIX B: Sources for formulae in Social Network Analysis & Further Reading ...... 288 3

List of Tables and Figures

Table 2. 1: Composition of the nobility in Tambov, 1858-1897 ...... 76 Table 2.2: Noble Landownership by Stratum, 1877-1905 (National) ...... 87 Table 2. 3: Distribution of noble holdings to private property in Tambov (1877) .... 91 Table 2. 4: Noble landownership by stratum 1877-1905 ...... 92 Table 2. 5: Ratio of noble to non-noble private holdings (1861-1880 average) ...... 104 Table 2. 6: Correlation of noble holdings and stratum (1861-1880 average) ...... 104 Table 2. 7: Noble landownership & land usage (estates over 50 des.) ...... 105 Table 4.1: ‘Official’ budgets in the province of Tambov broken down per uezd……204 Table 4.2: Tax-based valuation of lands in Tambov uezd (1876)……………………….205

Figure 2.1: Noble population trends 1858 – 1897 ...... 77 Figure 2.2: Ratio of noble/non-noble private landownership 1865-1877 ...... 85

Figure 4.1: A ‘raw’ network visualisation: ...... 184 Figure 4.2: The monopartite projection of Tambov’s bipartite network ...... 185 Figure 4.3: 1861 gentry network showing relative degrees of centrality (node size) and betweenness (colour) of individuals...... 187 Figure 4.4: 1861 ‘snapshot’ of the gentry network showing relative degrees of centrality (node size) and eccentricity (colour range) of individuals...... 188 Figure 4.5: Community detection in Tambov (1861) for a resolution of 0.25 ...... 191

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List of Abbreviations

 Archives

GARF: State Archive of the Russian Federation GAKO: State Archive of Kursk Oblast GATO: State Archive of Tambov Oblast IRLI RAN: Institute of Russian Literature Russian Academy of Sciences OR RGB: Manuscript Department, Russian State Library RNB: Russian National Library RGIA: Russian State Historical Archive

 Archival annotation

Annotation for archival sources follows standard practice: F. fond; Op. opis’ [to remain consistent, this is also used for OR RGB where normally ‘K.’ should be used]; r. razdel; g. god; otd. otdelenie; st. stol; d. delo; dd. dela; l. list; ll. listy; ob. Oborot

 Sources

(Am)SEER: (American) Slavonic and East European Review AmHR: American Historical Review BJPS: British Journal of Political Science CMRS: Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique EHQ: European History Quarterly JEH: Journal of Economic History JMH: Journal of Modern History PSZ: Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov SEEJ: Slavic and East European Journal SEER: The Slavonic and East European Review SDO: Statisticheskie dannye k otsenke zemel’ Tambovskoi gubernii SR: Slavic Review SSS: Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii po Tambovskoi gubernii 5

SZ: Svod Zakonov RR: Russian Review RS: Russkaia Starina VE: Vestnik Evropy TGV: Tambovskie Gubernskie Vedomosti

 Ministries, Agencies, Miscellaneous

OoH: Office of Heraldry HIMOC: His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery L.: Leningrad [in references] M.: Moscow [in references] MoI: Ministry of the Interior MoF: Ministry of Finance MoJ: Ministry of Justice OIRU: Society for the Study of the Russian Estate PSODOR: Permanent Soviet of the United Nobility of [Provincial] Assemblies SNA: Social Network Analysis SPb.: St. Petersburg [in references]

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Spelling, Romanisation and Dates

I have used UK spelling. Published titles in other usages retain their original spelling. For Russian-language sources, I have used a modified LoC1 system of romanisation: Ёё and Ээ have been Romanised as ‘e’; Йй have been romanised as ‘i’. I have ignored prereform spelling and assumed all sources and titles are spelled in the postreform manner. For Christian and Family names, I have used the English variant when it is more common (e.g. ‘Alexander II’, ‘Volkonsky’, ‘Dobrolyubov’, ‘Solovev’), but I have transliterated lesser-known names (e.g. ‘Kovalevskii’). All names are romanised when they appear in titles of printed sources. I have kept the preferred version of family names used by authors who publish in English (e.g. ‘Fedyashin’, ‘Zhuravskaya’).

Place-names are rendered in their English form (e.g. ‘Moscow’), and place-names in adjective form (e.g. ‘Kirsanovskii uezd’), are rendered in noun form, (‘Kirsanov uezd’). To avoid confusion between districts and towns, I have signalled the latter where appropriate by adding the word ‘town’.

Russian terms (e.g. dvorianstvo) are italicised and when necessary explained the first time they appear in the text. Thereafter they appear in regular font. Due to the frequency of its use, the first letter of the word ‘Emancipation’ is capitalised only when it appears in titles and in the phrases, such as ‘Emancipation Statutes’ and ‘Emancipation Manifesto’.

All dates are NS, except where specified. February Manifesto and February Statutes are exceptions.

1 http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html [Accessed August 2018]. 7

Acknowledgments

My friends and family will forgive me for acknowledging first the enormous debt I owe Stephen Lovell, Professor of Modern History at King’s College London. His ethos, which I can only hope to emulate, brings to mind the greatest author of Modern Greece, Nikos Kazantzakis. Kazantzakis described the ideal teacher as someone who becomes a bridge for his student to cross upon. I certainly could not have wished for sturdier foundations. I would also like to thank Dr Michael Rowe, Reader in European History at King’s College London, for stepping up above and beyond his nominal duties as secondary supervisor to a doctoral thesis, particularly in my earliest and most difficult years of research.

I would like to express my gratitude to my family, Goldy and Kyriakos whose constant love and support brought me where I am today, and my partner for helping me cross the finishing line. Finally, I would like to acknowledge with heartfelt gratitude the financial support of: The Department of History and the School of Arts & Humanities at King’s College London, the Economic History and Royal Historical Societies, the Centre for East-European Language Based Area Studies, and the Allan & Nesta Ferguson Trust.

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Introduction

The period of Great Reforms, also known as the ‘Era of Modernisation’ in Russian- language scholarly literature, encompasses a series of military, judicial, economic and social reforms enacted during the reign of Alexander II (1855-1881). The nomenclature used to describe these reforms is indicative of how each writer understands the causal relations leading to reform. For example, if these policies are described as a ‘modernisation’ drive, this implies a degree of agency on the part of Russian officials. If discussed in terms of reconciling ageing social structures with the complexities of late nineteenth-century European statehood, the Great Reforms become a necessary, if belated, set of measures conceived against a growing social threat ‘from below’.

Both approaches suggest that the ministries of St. Petersburg were working towards the realisation of a ‘grand plan’ aimed at turning the seemingly ‘backward’ and ‘underdeveloped’ Russian Empire into a model European state. According to this understanding of the reform process, the ultimate goal was twofold: On the one hand, it was aimed at bringing about uniform societal change and thus increase the social cohesion of a sprawling Empire. On the other, it would turn Russia into a competitive capitalist society.2 Yet regardless of one’s predilection, when it comes to the Great Reforms few would disagree that the abolition of serfdom was the most daring and fundamental among them.

Widely considered a reform akin to those of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, the abolition of serfdom in 1861 was the keystone policy of Alexander II’s reign. Whether one subscribes to the existence of a ‘grand plan’ or not, there can be little doubt that this was a positive step forward. Seen within its wider historical context, Alexander II’s liberation of the serfs was successful. The other great emancipator of the time, Abraham Lincoln, had to fight a long and bloody civil war to achieve arguably

2 V. Ia. Grosul, Russkoe obshchestvo XIII – XIX vekov: Traditsii i innovatsii, M. 2003; V. I. Matveeva (ed.), Modernizatsiia v Rossii i konflikt tsennostei, M., 1994; E. V. Popova, ‘Diskussiia 1860-kh gg. o perspektivakh razvitiia zemlevladeniia v Rossii i pozitsii D. I. Mendeleeva’, Aktual’nye problemy sotsial’nykh nauk, SPb., 2005. 9 lesser results. While not entirely bloodless and certainly not instantaneous, the Emancipation Statutes ensured the process would be at least a peaceful one.3

Broadly speaking, there exist today two antithetical interpretations of the emancipation. One approach considers it as part of an inspired legislative drive that set Russia on the path to modernity along ‘European’ norms. The opposing thesis sees in the emancipation of 1861 an abortive attempt to force the bourgeoisification of Russian society. Emancipation resulted, adherents of the latter thesis would argue, in unshackling heretofore contained revolutionary forces, thereby setting Russia on a different path, that of revolution. Knowing that Russia would experience an unprecedented economic boom in the following decades and that she would be sunk in political chaos thirty-six years after Alexander II’s untimely demise – neither approach is without its merits.4

Whether one subscribes to the former or the latter exegesis of the Emancipation Statutes and the February Manifesto, the topic is as relevant and important as ever. Understanding the reasoning behind emancipation, the gradual building of a legislative framework for manumitting millions of serfs, the process of implementation and redemption payments – all are operative to our understanding of Russia’s long nineteenth century. One could even argue that reform ‘from above’ became topical in view of Russia’s transition to a free-market economy in the early 1990s. The search for parallels in pre-Soviet political reform meant that Alexander II’s ‘Great Reforms’ quickly became saturated as a field of historical study.

Why then attempt yet another study of the abolition of serfdom in Russia and its effects on society? I would argue that the discipline was lacking the appropriate tools to

3 There were about 1,000 recorded cases of military intervention against peasant disturbances throughout the year 1861. However, the sharp decline of such cases in the second half of the year indicates that it was mostly a matter of the populace getting used to the process rather than their reaction to a structural problem within the legislation. This is not to say the law was not problematic, but rather that local societies learnt to deal with its complications in their own ways. See N. M. Druzhinin, Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie v Rossii, M., 1963-, vol 4, doc 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 28, 93. It should be noted that the use of the term ‘peaceful’ here is relative and used only by comparison to the outcome of Lincoln’s own emancipatory legislation. In fact, recent scholarship suggests that the Emancipation Reform of 1861 acted as a catalyst for peasant unrest. See E. Finkel et al., ‘Does Reform Prevent Rebellion? Evidence form Russia’s Emancipation of the Serfs’. Comparative Political Studies 48(8), 2015, 984-1019. In my analysis, I have used a similar difference-in-differences model. See p. 113 n.304. 4 A. Ia. Avrekh, Stolypin i Tret’ia Duma, M., 1968; P. G. Ryndziunskii, Utverzhdenie kapitalizma v Rossii, M. 1978; P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Otmena krepostnogo prava v Rossii, M., 1968. 10 quantify sets of social relations. This study uses network analysis as a means of providing meaningful indicators for paradigm shifts in the socio-political makeup of Russia. I aim to show that the reform drive – whether unintentionally or not – led to the growth of politically and entrepreneurially active networks or ‘proto-parties’ in the Russian countryside among hereditary nobility. While it is true that the existence or not of such proto-parties has been hotly debated both inside and outside Russian and Soviet academia,5 this study is the first to bring the considerable potential of Social Networks Analysis to bear.

In undertaking this effort, I realize that positively proving the existence of proto- parties and capitalist ventures during this period is a task far exceeding the confines of a PhD thesis. What I propose to do instead is to focus upon a statistical sample, studied within strict geographical and chronological parameters, to exemplify that the overarching question of whether proto-parties and entrepreneurial gentry existed in Russia at the time can – given sufficient resources – be answered using Social Network Analysis. In broad terms, therefore, the following pages outline primarily a case study for the feasibility of conducting historical research in Russia using this type of methodology.

In nineteenth-century Russia politics and business often overlapped, thus adding to the complexity of any historical study on the topic. Nowhere is this made more evident than in landowning classes. It makes sense therefore, that a thesis on post- emancipation society would place empirical emphasis upon the backbone of the Russian state, the provincial gentry. The shift in paradigm would mean that ‘block’ ideologies of previous decades would shatter. They were replaced by a far more nuanced set of theories which cannot really be firmly placed using such binaries as ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, or ‘slavophile’ and ‘westerniser’. The two sides of the coin, politics and business, necessitated a more flexible approach to current affairs and production models.

The reform of 1861 manifested itself as an existential shock to the landowning class and engendered a multitude of reactions: Many landowners would follow the path of

5 See Chapter I for a discussion on the relevant bibliography. 11 entrepreneurship. Others would hold on to the coat-tails of their wealthier neighbours while others still would seek to modernise their own estates as ‘prime movers’, or pioneers in their respective networks. Each coping strategy came with its own set of risks and benefits. The main difficulty facing actively entrepreneurial nobility6 for example, was coordination: Some noble landowners would strike out on their own, founding or purchasing industrial enterprises, others would form collectives and shared ventures with the merchantry.7 Perhaps the lack of coordination is due to the fact that the entrepreneurial trend was not limited to gentry whose estates neighboured major urban centres. One would assume that would be because of the underdevelopment of infrastructure and, importantly, opportunities for networking via socialisation. Yet these para-urban estates were not inundated with businesses of the ‘capitalist type’, quite the contrary. St. Petersburg’s entrepreneurial nobility accounted for only 18% of total shareholders and even less of the higher business management tier during the 1870s and 1880s.8 These statistics support the suggestion that Russia’s two main cities could be described as the rural nobility’s ‘political’ and ‘financial’ centres respectively.

Proximity to Moscow and its lucrative markets was certainly a factor encouraging noble entrepreneurship in post-emancipation Russia. The ancient capital’s neighbouring provinces were home to many landowners who wished to rationalise production, only to be hindered by the burgeoning real estate market. This was a new phenomenon in Russia, and its effects were far-reaching. Emancipation would take away some of the holdings, while lands retained had already been mortgaged after successive governments had used credit to keep the nobility in check. The parallel and equally novel growth of a ‘labour market’ redoubled the pressure on business-minded and politically active nobility.9 Whereas under serfdom marketable produce had low to no labour costs, the absence of a ready labour pool after 1861 posed a problem.

6 Nobles involved as shareholders in capitalist ventures. 7 V. I. Bovykin, Formirovanie finansovogo kapitala v Rossii. Konets XIX v. – 1908 g., M., 1984, 107 passim. 8 M. A. Salishchev ‘Dvoriane-lidery delovogo mira Sankt-Peterburga v 1914 g.’, Vestnik L. G. U. 2, 2013, 144-155. 9 The effects of emancipation and land endowments on labout mobility is still unclear. Some constraints seem to have remained – particularly for peasant women – but the overall effect of these seems to have been small. S. Nafziger, ‘Serfdom, Emancipation, and Off-farm Labour Mobility in Tsarist Russia’, Economic History of Developing Regions 27(1), 2012, 1-37 argues that the long-term impact of Emancipation on mobility depended, to a large extent, on regional variations. 12

Newly-freed peasants would not work without pay, and exchanging their labour with a share of the noble’s own produce did not solve the latter’s cashflow problem.

Altogether, the establishment and rapid growth of the twin markets – real-estate and labour – without a pre-existing, solid bourgeois class and mentality to support them had a devastating impact on parts of the nobility. In non-blacksoil provinces, such as Penza, they would lose up to a third of their holdings between 1861 and 1905.10 There was simply not enough financial capital to help nobility modernise, rationalise, or diversify its sources of income. Nevertheless, emancipation and reform did not necessarily result in financial ruin. Problems were sometimes purposefully exaggerated. Hyperbole and over-dramatisation are common features in memoirs and correspondence, so some accounts should be taken with a large pinch of salt.11 Excepting the petty nobility, few landowners would face the spectrum of starvation and exposure as a direct result of emancipation. Their complaints (which sometimes reached Alexander II) were generated by the inability of maintaining some sort of lifestyle acceptable to – and befitting – a gentle(wo)man. ‘Poverty’, ‘injustice’ and ‘hardship’ were relatively defined.12 Younger generations were less dramatic about their situation, primarily because they quickly were inculcated with new ideologies and became disillusioned with a career in state service.13

Nor can it be argued that the change was completely anodyne. Both physically and psychologically, emancipation and land reform took a real toll on Russia’s gentry. From a generational perspective, those hardest hit were the elderly and middle-aged landowners, who found it exceedingly hard to accept that without ‘entrepreneurship’ their lands would soon be forfeited to the bank (i.e. the state). Addictions intensified,

10 R. V. Fedoseev, ‘Dvorianskoe khoziaistvo Penzenskoi gubernii vo vtoroi polovine XIX – nachale XX veka: ot pomest’ia k ekonomii’; PhD thesis, Saransk, 2007, 19-20. For more on estate loss, see Chapter II. 11 ‘If only I could go a whole month without penny-counting’, lamented O. G. Bazankur, a nobleman- turned-minor official in St. Petersburg. IRLI RAN, f. 15, d. 3, l. 102 ob. 12 V. A. Veremenko, ‘Na perekrestke povsednevnosti i obshchestvennogo soznaniia (o nematerial’nykh faktorakh sotsial’nykh dvizhenii XIX-XX vv.)’, in V. N. Skvortsova and V. A. Veremeko (eds.), Povsednevnaia zhizn’ i obshchestvennoe soznanie v Rossii XIX-XX vv., SPb., 2012. 13 E. V. Shestakova, Vospominaniia vol’noslushatel’nitsy, Tallinn, 1982, 105-06. She provides the example of a gang of youths from a prosperous landowning family of Tambov by the name of Shostakovich who as students in St. Petersburg le a Spartan lifestyle: They had one room between five of them, shared one or two portions in the student canteen, and when they felt like celebrating cooked herring with potatoes. Yet in contrast to their elders, they saw nothing dramatic or out of the ordinary about their circumstances. 13 leading in turn to many cases of depression and even suicide. The silver lining was that through these difficulties noble women were forced to play a more involved role in the provincial economy. Where their male counterparts would wallow miserably in self- pity, noblewomen would show energy, skill, initiative and a sound economic mindset. The crisis also forced men to accept women’s professional (cap)abilities. With young women entering higher education, male attitudes changed rapidly; there can be no doubt that marriages of interest continued taking place throughout the reform period, but now there were noblewomen ready to renounce traditional concepts of the Russian family.14

Attitudes towards the institution of marriage were also challenged. During the 1860s- 1870s there was a spike in noble divorces as poor finances and the spread of liberal ideologies effected a radical break with the past. Within this socio-historical context, noblewomen enjoying an independent income would be naturally averse to spending it to maintain their husbands’ lifestyles. If in the first half of the nineteenth century estate management lay within the female sphere, the way couples spent its proceeds in the latter half began to reflect this.15 Financial independence and the entry of women in higher education radically altered noble couple dynamics.16 This ‘repositioning’ of traditional gender roles also helped spread new ideas about sexual equality that noblemen frequently found hard to accept.17 Whatever the case, the

14 K. Pickering Antonova, An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Rusia, Oxford, 2013 appeared while research for this thesis was underway. The author makes the point that the Russian noblewoman’s ‘sphere’ largely exceeded the restricted sense and understanding we usually associate with it (4ff.). Pickering Antonova’s chronology is somewhat different to mine and while her noble family is of the middling sort (see below for definitions), they were based in Vladimir, which is not part of the Chernozem. Other differences include the shift of focus to politics and business, as well as the application of statistical analysis for large datasets. Before Pickering Antonova’s outstanding and much-celebrated study, I consulted the following on post-emancipation family structures: V. A. Veremenko and I. A. Tropov, ‘Reformy i mikrosotsial’nye protsessy v Rossii, vtoraia polovina XIX – nachalo XX vv.’, in I. V. Kochetkov (ed.), Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskaia i politicheskaia modernizatsiia v Rossii XIX – XX vv., SPb., 2001. 15 Antonova, Ordinary, 3 passim. 16 V. A. Veremenko, Dvorianskaia sem’ia i gosudarstvennaia politika Rossii (vtoraia polovina XIX – nachalo XX vv), SPb., 2009, 406-10. 17 IRLI RAN, F. 445, d. 8-48. A set of testimonies from 1850-1870 written by male noble landowners who expressed indignation to these changes and the departure from ‘traditional family values’. They were gathered by a local landowner and publicist who was – presumably – looking to write a scathing piece on ‘new morals’. No draft of said piece survives, but evidence to a similar process exists in RGIA (as in n. 16 below) for a piece which then appeared anonymously in Den’ in February 1863. 14 presence and agency of women in business transactions and entrepreneurial projects gradually became commonplace, first in the urban centres, then in the provinces.18

Alexander’s reform-mindedness gave liberals a cause to celebrate from the earliest days of his reign A physician who served during the Crimean War stated that this was ‘a remarkable time, full of the most luminous hopes. The [Crimean War] exposed all the evils of our social structure and a new spirit breathed in Russia’.19 The promise of progressive reforms in conjunction with a universal belief in the unlimited power of science led Il’ia Melchikov, the pioneering embryologist (who was a student in the 1860s), to remark that it was a time ‘when young people eagerly devoted themselves to science and believed that in it they would find […] answers to the major questions tormenting mankind’.20 I. M. Sechenov, later to become a renowned physician, argued that a new generation of women scientists would be integral to this effort. He was one of Russia’s ‘new people’ who saw in the early Alexander the spirit of Peter and his reform from above, which they had been brought up to consider the hallmark of progress. ‘At least in Russia you can get things done!’ noted a celebrated university professor of the Medical-Surgical Academy.21 The emancipation of the serfs was seen as the culmination of the positivist thinking which underscored Russia’s ‘New Enlightenment’.

Emancipation Promulgated on February 19, 1861 [OS] the Emancipation Statutes comprised seventeen legislative acts written in nigh-unintelligible legal jargon. After all, the manumission of European Russia’s approximately twenty-two million serfs could hardly have been a rushed and simple affair.22 This is not to say, however, that the

18 OR RNB, F. 698, d. 2; RGIA, F. 1412, o 212, d. 61. These set of contracts reveal that women were party to at least twenty-three sales of woodland in Tambov between 1863 and 1880. Additionally, there are six instances where the construction of farm infrastructure (two mills, three estate roads, one stable) were commissioned by noblewomen. 19 A. A. Sinitsyn, ‘Iz vospominanii starogo vracha’, RS cliv (1913), 20 20 I. I. Mel’chikov, ‘Aleksandr Onufrevich Kovalevskii. Ocherki iz istorii nauki v Rossii’, VE xxxvii (1902), 798-99. 21 I. M. Sechenov, Avtobiograficheskie zapiski Ivana Mikhailovicha Sechenova, M. 1945, 102. A. Vucinich, Science in Russian culture, 1861-1871, Stanford, 1971, 119-29 passim; Soviet historians stressed the publicly minded progress of science. See M. M. Levit, Stanovlanie obshchestvennoi meditsiny v Rossii, M. 1974. 22 Serf numbers are sometimes hard to calculate. This figure is based on tax records from 1857-1858 and concerns European Russia’s 50 provinces, i.e. it excludes those with of special administrative status: Poland, Finland, Siberia, the Far East. In the year 1861, indentured serfs represented about one third (36.4%) of the total population. Cf. A. Bushen (ed.), Nalichnoe naselenie imperii za 1858 god. Vol. 2, 15 ideas enshrined in the legislation were new. Indeed, abolitionism had deep roots in Russian politics, dating back to 1762, if not further.23 It was discussed, naively perhaps, in terms of a ‘clean break’ with the past, whereby the Samoderzhavets,24 would free the lowliest of his subjects in a gesture of benevolent despotism.

Timing emancipation was a thorny problem. On the one hand, the new tsar had to balance the shock of defeat with a ray of hope. On the other, prematurely jolting the body politic into remedial action could backfire and cause chaos in the provinces. The Emperor had to keep his nobles on-side, at least until the transformation of Russia into a proto-bourgeois society administered by a solidly stratified, well-organised bureaucracy was complete. Invested with an aura of ‘rebirth’, this reform would be more palatable to all parties affected. Indeed, the general mood – pronouncing a new dawn – was captured in masterful artistic works of the time, the most prominent example of which was A. N. Ostrovsky’s Groza.25 In reviewing the play, famed critic and publicist Nikolai Dobrolyubov introduced an interpretative model still referenced today: Alexander II was destined to defeat the ‘Kingdom of Darkness’ and impose his will on History and the World, succeeding where Ostrovsky’s main character Ekaterina had failed.26

Dobrolyubov adhered to an ancient belief in the Emperor’s quasi-divine powers, his infallibility and misericordia. All this was secondary to what Alexander II, an astute politician and practical man, considered the best way forward. The new Emperor had to contend with the fact that his father’s deathbed exhortation to keep Russia ‘orderly, calm, and happy’ state was based on a false premise, namely that Nicholas I had not left her that way at all.27 By the accession of Alexander, military reverses, disillusionment and a general sense of foreboding were rife among all social classes. Alexander II was quick to realise that ending the Crimean War must be an absolute priority for the new regime. His advisers feared (with some justification) that prolonged fighting was pointless and that a complete defeat would finally unleash all

SPb., 1863 and N. A. Troinitskii, The Serf Population in Russia According to the 10th National Census. Translated by Elaine Herman. Newtonville, Ma., 1982. 23 Peter III’s state service reforms. 24 Autocrat. 25 The (Thunder)Storm, drama in five acts written during the summer-early autumn of 1859. 26 A. N. Ostrovsksy, Groza, M. 1960. 27 S. S. Tatishchev, Imperator Aleksandr Vtoroi, SPb., 1903, vol. 1, 140. 16 the ‘centrifugal forces […] held in check for so long by the unchallenged authority of the state’.28 Ultimately, they dreaded a complete humiliation of Russian arms, which would inevitably translate into overt critique of the ‘antiquated’ social structure underpinning the Romanov polity and specifically the institution of serfdom.

Peter the Great had sought to create an institutional framework for pre-existing ownership linkages (landpeasantsnobles). His great device tying nobility to state service may have been eminently suitable and – in certain ways – rather progressive for its time, but by the mid-nineteenth century its underlying principle of Aristotelian meritocracy (or ‘aristocracy’ in its original sense) was honoured more in the breach than in the observance. At the time of Alexander II accession to the throne, noble service had been relaxed to the extreme – even if it was widely considered the only respectable way for a young nobleman to advance in society. So why not do away with its counterpart in the lower strata? Outwardly at least, this would be justified in terms of social and economic rather than military exigency.29 Alexander and his officials were keen to couch emancipation in terms that would be palatable for the majority of landowners. The troubled circumstances surrounding the succession of Alexander’s father Nicholas I were still within living memory; pre-empting noble resistance was paramount.

If Nicholas I had ever contemplated such a radical break with Russia’s feudal past, war and sheer obstinacy had prevented him from preparing Russian society to accept the wholesale uprooting of its most fundamental institution.30 Alexander II would then have to bring about reform, albeit carefully. His February Manifesto had to be timed and phrased to perfection, lest the gentry revolt en masse. For the first few years of his reign Alexander would perform as if he were onstage. And while he was on the stage,

28 A. Rieber, ‘Alexander II: A revisionist view’, JMH 43 (1971), 42-58, 42. 29 The key piece of legislation, the Emancipation Manifesto makes only one reference to war in general and even that in a roundabout way: ‘From the soldier who nobly defends the country to the noble artisan who works in industry […].’ (PSZ 2nd series, vol. 36, no. 36490, 130-134.) 30 E. Crankshaw, The Shadow of the Winter Palace, Cambridge, Ma., 2000. The book, originally published in 1976, quickly betrays its Cold War origins: Sweeping generalisations on the Soviet state and a polemical approach to the ‘Russian psyche’ (as described by the author) do little to help the subsequent analysis of Russia’s ‘radicalisation’ in the lead-up to 1905-1917. The chronology, spanning almost a century, is a quaint methodological choice by the author. One of the few redeeming qualities of the book is that it makes a powerful case for a non-binary perception of politics in Russia during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Instead, Crankshaw argues that economic protectionism and political liberalism were not mutually exclusive, and vice versa. See Chapter II below for a more detailed analysis. 17 his administrative apparatus was getting ready for a swift change of background. Historians of the emancipation seldom fail to mention Alexander’s discrete directive to an ageing but capable Sergey Lanskoy with instructions to pave the way for reform.31 A respected career politician and all-around capable statesman, Lanskoy kept his cards close to his chest. Unless a ministry official was directly involved in the process, his first reaction to Alexander’s break with Russia’s past would come as hindsight.32

The traditional account of the legislative process belies the gentry’s involvement. Noble opposition to reform had stifled earlier attempts, forcing successive monarchs to limit its scope. Alexander I, partly inspired by emancipation reforms in the Habsburg lands, had considered a wide variety of reformist policies, but ended up liberating only the serfs of the Baltic provinces (1816-1819). His successor, Nicholas I, organised several preparatory committees, but none of them resulted in actionable proposals.33 Noble opposition to reform was presumably the most important factor in preventing earlier attempts of emancipation, and would only be overcome after Alexander II’s government used defeat in the Crimean War to argue that reform was necessary for the continued survival of Russia as a Great Power.34

All this been discussed, documented and analysed by prominent scholars for decades; the history of Russia’s landowning class in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, their contribution to reform, their role in emancipation. Yet seldom do historians of emancipation reach a consensus on its exact effects on the country. We have long known that the institution of serfdom was not at understood the same way throughout the length and breadth of Russia.35 Even neighbouring estates could – and

31 W. B. Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats 1825-1861, DeKalb Il., 1982, 173-5. 32 A. Gerschenkron, ‘Agrarian Policies and Industrialisation: Russia 1861-1917’, in M. M. Postan (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe: The Industrial Revolution and After, pt. 2, Cambridge, 1965, 708-10; A. Zaionchkovskii, Otmena krepostnogo prava v Rossii, 3rd. ed., M., 1968, 40. 33 A. N. Dolgikh, Krestianskii vopros vo vnutrennei politike Rossiiskogo samoderzhaviia v kontse 18 – pervoi tsetverti 19 vv., Lipetsk, 2006 gives an overview of discussions for emancipation before 1861. S. V. Mironenko, Stranitsy istorii samoderzhaviia, M., 1990 and A. Zaionchkovskii, Otmena krepostnogo prava v Rossii, M., 1968 both discuss tentative steps to reform under Nicholas I. 34 Noble opposition to reform was based on a combination of ideological conviction and pragmatic economic considerations. E. D. Dormar and M. J. Machina, ‘On the profitability of Russian serfdom’, JEH cliv (1984), 919-955 argued that following the dissassoction of land and serf values in the mid- nineteenth century (until which point the latter could not be sold without the former), serf value remained positive. 35 S. Nafziger, Russian Peasants and Politicians: The Political Economy of Local Agricultural Support in Nizhnii Novgorod Province, 1864-1914, Williamstown, Va., 2013; before him, T. Dennison, The 18 did - employ varying systems of labour organisation and land exploitation. Then there was the issue of ‘ownership’. In the 1850s, serfs were nowhere near as helpless and despondent as their ancestors had been. It follows that the reform process included aspects of ‘recognition’, normalisation, and institutionalisation of an already growing trend towards the establishment of labour and estate markets. This is also true for the buyout process, 36 which in many cases simply formalised pre-existing agreements between commune and landowner.

To this should be added the fact that large numbers of provincial gentry were essentially absentee landowners and that their lands were managed by their spouses of intermediaries.37 Like their serfs, gentry too had gradually experienced a relaxation of the chains Peter the Great had shackled their ancestors with. The exigencies of an increasingly globalised market, Russia’s geostrategic ranking, sustained periods of territorial expansion, the glut of arable land in the European provinces, all conspired to lead many landowners towards some form of estate rationalisation. Additionally, the evolving legal framework of serf and land ownership meant that the relationship between serf and serf owner was changing. There was little point in maintaining antagonistic viewpoints.38 By 1861 the relationship between landowners and serfs had become symbiotic. The former were happy to grant travel passes, allow communes varying degrees of autonomy in the organisation of labour, and even encouraged proto- and cottage industries. This had been made necessary, after all, by the open- field system, the sheer size of estates, and the Russian custom of parcelled inheritance.39 Delegation of management and devolution of authority were simply impossible to avoid.

The practical necessities of noble-serf symbiosis meant that by the mid-nineteenth century cooperation between the two parties had become integral to estate viability. From the serfs’ perspective, collective responsibility (krugovaia poruka) often

Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom, Cambridge, 2011, and P. Kolchin, Unfree Labour: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom, Cambridge, Ma., 1987. 36 The terms ‘buyout’ and ‘redemption’ are used interchangeably to signify the mechanism prescribed by the Statutes for the transfer of landownership from nobility to peasants. 37 For example, S. L. Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control: Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov, Chicago, Il., 1986. 38 D. Moon, The Russian Peasantry 1600-1930: The World The Peasants Made, Abingdon, 1999. 39 J. Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the 9th to the 19th century, Princeton, N. J., 1971. 19 translated into collective bargaining power, however limited in scope. Communes were represented by a cabal of peasant elders and decision-makers who were often in cahoots with the landowner and – post-emancipation – with the peace arbitrator assigned with overseeing the redemption process. From the landowners’ perspective, cooperation with the village elite was certainly seen as mutually beneficial. Consequently, one could argue that the gentry had not so much resigned themselves to a serfless future as appreciated the need for radical change.40 At the same time, both landowners and serfs already had a frame of reference for a relaxed form of unpaid labour in the status of state-owned serfs. In many ways, a state-owned serf was better off than his seigniorial counterpart. And since state serfs did not live in isolated communities, they inspired in their privately-owned class brethren some degree of security in terms of what a more relaxed serf-landowner relationship would bring.41 As for the royal serfs, these were the royalty of serfdom. Few in number and managed by a separate government department, they had received their freedom before 1861.42 In many ways, therefore, the Emancipation Statutes solidified in law pre-existing relations of production and labour. It is therefore exigent to review this and other reforms through the prism of nobility and the effect they had on noble politics and entrepreneurship.

Structure The thesis follows a broadly thematic structure. It begins with an overview of scholarly literature to date, which occupies the majority of Chapter I. Additionally, the first Chapter identifies gaps in historiography and summarises my contribution to the historiography of Russia’s ‘long nineteenth’ century. Furthermore, it introduces the reader to several key definitions and delineations germane to an analytical approach based on quantitative data. This includes working definitions for ‘nobility’ and ‘class’

40 I. D. Koval’chenko had argued that serfdom was in crisis as early as the 1950s (Krest’iane i krepostnoe khoziaistvo Riazanskoi i Tambovskoi gubernii v pervoi polovine XIX veka, M., 1959). E. D. Dormar and M. J. Machina’s ‘Profitability’ on the other hand, supported the argument that serfdom was profitable until the very end. Dennison, in Institutional Framework balanced the two views by looking into serf entrepreneurship and mobility in the nineteenth century. 41 B. N. Mironov, ‘When and why was the Russian peasantry emancipated?’ in M.L. Bush (ed.), Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage), Harlow, 1996, 324-347; Blum, op. cit., 485-488; S. Nafziger, ‘Serfdom, Emancipation, and Off-Farm Labour Mobility in Tsarist Russia’, Economic History of Developing Regions xvii (2012), 1-37. 42 They represented about 4% of the total serf population. See A. Markevich and E. Zhuravskaya, ‘The Economic Effects of the Abolition of Serfdom: Evidence from the Russian Empire’, American Economic Review cviii (2018), 1074-1117. 20 in Imperial Russia, units of analysis used,43 a guide to the basic concepts of Social Network Analysis, an explanation of why this method is suitable, complete with a list of possible pitfalls encountered when making these methodological choices. Chapter I is most useful perhaps, if read in conjunction with the Appendix on sources used for this study (Appendix A).

Chapter II looks at intraclass stratification before and after the emancipation. Its inclusion is not only logical but necessary if one is to set the socio-political stage, the context in which Tambov’s landowning gentry is analysed. By further refining the position of the sample within Tambov and examining it longitudinally, we can observe certain trends and patters of demographic and economic fluctuations which, together with the Social Network Analysis of Chapter IV may help draw valuable conclusions as to the effects emancipation and land reform had on the local gentry.

Chapter III outlines how life on the estate changed with emancipation. The considerable time lag between promulgation and reform, the rigidity of underlying political traditions and administrative infrastructure, the immaturity of the urban bourgeoisie, these were all factors delaying effective reform for at least a decade. The same factors helped along the creation and evolution of noble networks and the politicisation of gentry as a class.44 Composite proto-parties were formed and attempted to actively recruit fellow nobles by propagating manifesta of various ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ hues.

Chapters II and III together form the basis for analysis in Chapter IV, where I propose that we can detect and quantify ‘unofficial’ or ‘unattested’ relationships between a set of individuals – in this case Tambovian landowners – and analyse statistical data in such a way as to draw solid conclusions on the relative importance and influence of certain persons over others and local society as a whole. My observations and

43 As a matter of fact, the term ‘class’ is used here by convention as the closest English-language equivalent to the uniquely Russian soslovie. See n. 81 below. 44 A similar argument is advanced by R. Easley, in The Emancipation of the Serfs in Russia: Peace Arbitrators and the Development of Civil Society, New York, 2008. Easley, however, argues for the politicisation of the rural society as a whole, rather than that of the landowning gentry as a class. Integral to the implementation of the emancipation legislation, the corps of arbitrators (or mediators) also engendered the formation of horizontal networks linking autonomous social groups. A Social Networks Analysis of peace mediation (arbitration), particularly in the period of the first levy (1861-1863) could be envisaged in due course. 21 conclusions are based on Social Network Analysis. SNA is a theoretical and methodological toolbox which helps conceptualise, analyse and visualise how individual components within a network are connected. In many respects, SNA could be regarded as the quintessential enabler of interdisciplinarity, its principles being the product of a sizeable bibliographical corpus comprising social science theory, advanced statistics, even physics. Indeed, the multiplicity of scholarly uses for SNA is proof positive of usefulness and adaptability. In large part, this is because at the most basic level any group of two (dyad) or three (triad) individuals can be conceptualised as a network, essentially a set of nodes (anchor points or units) and a set of edges (connections between them). SNA has been applied to investigate the dynamics of many diverse groups: From global corporate elites through a pod of dolphins, to elite networks in Renaissance Florence.45

In the field of Modern History, scholars have used SNA to good effect: In the late 1990s, Christopher Ansell successfully managed to demonstrate how ‘interaction between networks [bourses du travail] can mediate large-scale re-alignments of social actors and provide new bases of organizational cohesion’ of an entire social class.46 For the purposes of this study, the most relevant applications of SNA are focused on interactions within elite networks and the mechanics of elite network formation.47 At the time of writing, continental and North American institutions have shown

45 E. Heemserk, F. Takes, et al., ‘Where is the global corporate elite?’, Sociologica ii (2016), 1-31; D. Lussau, et al., Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology xliv (2003), 396-405; J. F. Padgett, ‘Organizational genesis in Florentine History: Four multiple-network processes’, University of Chicago & Santa Fe Institute, 2006. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/socialorg/docs/Padgett-OrganizationalGenesis.pdf [Accessed October 2014]. As the range of examples cited above implies, applying SNA to historical study is not unheard of; in fact, J. F. Padgett’s Florentine study has now reached something of a seminal status among scholars working with SNA. A good entry-level reference work on SNA as a method of historical study can be found in S. Wasserman and K. Faust, Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications, Cambridge, 1994, and J. Scott, Social network analysis: A handbook, London, 2013. Albert-László Barabási, Network Science, 2015, http://barabasi.com/networksciencebook [Accessed September 2014]. I have respected the author’s expressed wish to be cited with his full given name instead of initials. Appendix B lists further introductory readings. Historical network analysis is usually based on extensive data-gathering projects, such as Stanford’s Mapping of the Republic of Letters (republicofletters.stanford.edu) and Early Modern Time & Networks projects, such as Athanasius (athanasius.stanford.edu). 46 C. K. Ansell, ‘The realignment of the French working class, 1887-1894’, AmJS ciii (1997), 359-90. 47 C. Kadushin, ‘Friendship among the French Financial Elite’, American Sociological Review lx (1996), 202–21; M. Duijvendak, ‘Social Networks and the Elite in North-Brabant and Groningen 1780-1910’, in P. Kooij and R. Paping (eds.), Where the Twain Meets Again. New Results of the Dutch-Russian Project on Regional Development 1750-1917, Groningen, 2004, 225–39; P. McLean, ‘Patrimonialism, Elite Networks, and Reform in Late-Eighteenth-Century Poland’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science dcxxxvi (2011), 88-110. 22 themselves readier to accept the application of SNA than their British counterparts.48 However, even against this background of proliferating historical network studies there is – as far as I am aware – no existing network study of the Russian gentry. This may be a correlate of the methodological quandaries facing scholars in this field of study.49

Chapter V builds on the results of Social Network Analysis to frame the discussion on noble politics in the long term. Modernisation, in the sense of a streamlined and efficient agrico-industrial model of production, was not a salient characteristic of Russian estate management. It was, nonetheless, within reach of the landowning gentry. By regrouping evidence presented in previous sections, Chapter V focuses on the ‘results’ or – better – the aftermath of emancipation and land reform on the local level and stress-test these conclusions against hypotheses outlined in the following paragraphs. It therefore extends far beyond the nominal end date set for this thesis and incorporates evidence from as late as 1905. This represents a conscious methodological choice; scholarship on noble politics during this latter period is more voluminous, and it makes sense to test the fruits of SNA against well-established historical interpretations of longer-term trends.

In general, this thesis hopes to reinforce attempts for a more nuanced approach to Russian history. General assumptions made regarding the general ‘backwardness’ of the later Russian Empire and the prevalence of inefficient economic models both on the local and the national levels often make little sense. It is equally hard to explain, on the basis of this supposed ‘backwardness’, the proliferation of ‘rationalised’ estates in the blacksoil provinces. It is not a given that Russian nobility would stand in the way of economic growth on the capitalist model. The story of Russia’s modernisation is the

48 CORPNET (corpnet.uva.nl) is widely held to lead the way in this direction. Recently, some headway towards internationalising academic collaboration specifically in history has been made by EHESS, via CNRS, which launched a series of seminars and workshops as well as an online publication platform (reshist.hypotheses.org/a-propos). RES-HIST is affiliated to a similar initiative by Dr. Marten Düring in Germany (historicalnetworkresearch.org). For more on the applications network analysis may have on history, see T. Brugmans et al., (eds.), The Connected Past: Challenges to Network Studies in Archaeology and History, Oxford, 2016. 49 R. M. Morrissey, ‘Archives of Connection: “Whole Network Analysis” and Social History’, Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History xlviii (2015), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01615440.2014.962208?src=recsys [Accessed January 2016]. Like Robert Morrissey observed, ‘present-day sociologists study networks by simply asking people for a list of their friends, which is a good way to find a network, or they download data from e-mail accounts or Facebook pages [...] As historians, we cannot do that’. 23 story of opportunities missed rather than the story of deeply ingrained illiberal attitudes. I will be arguing that it was possible to achieve the bourgeoisification of the Russian province, both in economic and in social terms, and that the middling nobility was instrumental in this process.

Methodology Russian history is a history of Russia’s regions.50 Today, the Chernozem or blacksoil provinces have been absorbed into the Central Federal District (tsentral’nyi federal’nyi okrug), an administrative division of the Russian Federation. Despite changes to provincial boundaries during the Soviet period, the core of what most Russians today identify as chernozem largely corresponds to what their ancestors also called chernozem. Ever since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, blacksoil provinces have traditionally served as the breadbasket of European Russia. As such, they have often been studied in terms of their impact on internal trade and food production.51 With respect to the impact of reform in particular, there exist a small number of studies, which however mostly concern life in the estate or village.52 Similarly, a recent study of estate space under Alexander II places emphasis upon the ‘labouring masses’ rather than the landowning nobility.53

Understanding precisely how conditions particular to blacksoil Russia affected the implementation of – and reactions to – reform is key to our understanding of the entire reform process.54 Furthermore, there is historiographical precedent in focusing upon the nobility as the most characteristic social group of a given region. Baltic nobles, for example, were disillusioned by earlier attempts to reform.55 There is good reason

50 Famously, for Smith-Peter, writing the history of Russia is writing the history of its regions. Smith- Peter, ‘How to Write a Region: Local and Regional Historiography’, Kritika v (2004), 527-542. [Review Essay]. 51 For an overview of the historiography of the region, see A. A. Tereshchenko, ‘Sotsial’no- ekonomicheskoe razvitie gorodov Tsentral’nogo Chernozem’ia vo vtoroi polovine XIX – nachale XX veka: 1861-1904’, doktorskaia dissertatsiia, Kursk, 2003. 52 Hoch, op. cit.; D. Kerans, Mind and Labor on the Farm in Black-Earth Russia 1861-1914, Budapest, 2001. Russian: B. G. Litvak, Russkaia derevnia v reforme 1861 goda: Chernozemnyi tsentr 1861-1895, M., 1972. To this number could be added Pickering Antonova, op. cit., albeit with the caveat that she does not specifically discuss reform. 53 Kerans, op. cit. 54 One example is the assimilated szlachta. See D. Beauvois, Le noble, le serf et le revisor, Paris, 2000. Beauvois’s study is based almost exclusively on previously unearthed documents and describes in depth how geopolitical factors affected the nobility’s reaction to emancipation. 55 The Estonian historian Juhan Kahk has convincingly presented the Baltic ‘emancipation’ as the liberation not of peasants from their estate owners, but as the liberation of estate owners from regulated relations with their serfs. (Blum, op. cit., 228-30); J. Kahk, Ostzeiskii put’ perekhoda ot feodalizma k 24 therefore to study Blacksoil Russia where land usage was a strong correlate of the interaction between noble families and network formation. When discussing post- emancipation estate solvency, we simply cannot disregard this fertile, agricultural region. Here, much like in the American South, unfree labour mattered most.

Out of all blacksoil provinces, Tambov and Kursk offer themselves most readily to a historical study that focuses on the nineteenth century.56 Tambov has been chosen as the focus of this study for several reasons: Firstly, the province was abuzz with feverish political activity in the post-emancipation period, in which context the gentry changed political camps on a regular basis. Secondly, its proximity to Moscow and good access to fluvial transportation and trade routes facilitated the importation of ideas and the fostering of a dialogue between periphery and centre.57 Thirdly, Tambov had a high concentration of noble ‘nests’.58 Fourthly, historical records show that Tambovian nobility was engaged with post-emancipation ‘politics’ and representative institutions in particular.59

It is important to note at this point that Tambov is seen as a bastion of noble conservatism. One of the recurring themes of this thesis is that a binary understanding of noble politics should be replaced with a more nuanced view. Strong counter-reform reflexes were not the preserve of conservative gentry alone. Liberals would also seek to streamline the process and push for market regulation. There is also strong evidence that gentry networks extended into ‘countryside alliances’ permeating both provincial and intra-class class barriers. Where such alliances existed beforehand, gentry tended to compromise their class-executive character, but in Tambov they were able to navigate those straits in brilliant fashion. On the face of it, these are rare and weak indicators, which is why they have not merited much scholarly attention thus far. However, seen through Social Network Analysis their cumulative and prolonged

kapitalizmu. Krest’iane i pomeshchiki Estliandii i Lifliandii v XVIII – pervoi polovine XIX veka, Talinn, 1988. 56 The others are Voronezh, Lipetsk. Belgorod, and Orel. 57 This is not to say that Tambov was immune from the bureaucratic impediments endemic to European Russia. On average, it took fourteen months for a government circular to complete the circuit Tambov- Petersburg-Tambov. See Starr, Decentralisation, 45 n.123. 58 For statistics and provenance, see figures and tables below. 59 See V. O. Ignat’ev’s report to S. S. Lanskoy, dated June 1859 and published in S. B. Okun’, Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie v Rossii, 1850-1856, M., 1962, 472 passim. In atypical fashion, Tambovians sought to increase the power of these institutions. Their support was crucial to the establishment of a Zemskaia Duma (Land Duma) in 1862. 25 impact can be reinterpreted statistically in support of the thesis that economic reform engendered a process of gentry politicisation and estate rationalisation.

Tracing the impact of these profound and prolonged changes upon Russian society is a daunting task. Given that the Russian Empire was a vast, heterogeneous country and regional variations abounded, coming up with generalisable models for network formation is difficult. Which is why it is important to note that the analytical value inherent in Social Network Analysis can open a whole new world of possibilities for the social historian: It has the potential to overcome, negate or sidestep methodological complications while at the same time integrating measurable quantitative variables that take them into account. Yet before we set off on the path to network analysis, we must first establish the social and historical context.60

Through complex pathways and imaginative research, a complete network study of Tambovian gentry became made feasible by utilising sources listed in Appendix A. Emphasis was placed upon the substantial body of statistical data gathered and published by government agencies. One of the most fundamental benefits of SNA is that it allows for this type of evidence to be weighed against other types.61 For example, in a much-quoted gubernatorial report of the time, popular unrest is blamed on the ‘mysterious, ecstatic, and myth-based hopes of the secretive peasantry’.62 The implicit premise of the report is that peasants can only be stirred out of their ‘natural inertia’ by a podstrekatel’;63 without SNA, this has been interpreted as a fantastical premise based on the report-writer’s own ideological predilections. SNA helps establish the fact that the real ‘podstrekatel’’ here was a local landowner, known for his conservative leanings. Thus, it must have been not only the liberal landholders who exhibited signs of unwavering ideology, but conservatives too. With the help of SNA, motivations become more complex; ideology detached from personal circumstance also had a profound impact on provincial politics.

60 In statistical terms, the emancipation of 1861 is considered as a dummy time variable (rendered in SNA data sheets as ‘T’). For more on this and the implications it has on the statistical/analytical model – mainly DD – see below. 61 I. A. Kristoforov posited that the use of statistical data gathered by state agencies should be weighed against other sources and that scholars should studious in checking its veracity. I. A. Khristoforov, Sud’ba reform: Russkoe krest’ianstvo v pravitel’stvennoi politike do i posle otmeny krepostnogo prava (1830-180-e gg.), M., 2011. 62 Field, ‘Jubilee’, 46-7. 63 Agitator, especially of a liberal hue. 26

This somewhat Miltonian approach to noble everydayness (everyday politics, everyday transactions, everyday life) is not so much the result of methodological choice as the unique nature of ‘class’ in Russia. Intraclass variations were more frequent and more acute than elsewhere in Europe, and so were noble economics.64 From a statistical perspective, SNA requires a more clearly defined sample; one cannot simply analyse the landowners as if they formed a homogeneous social group. Firstly, there needs to be a specifically rendered statistical sample of ‘meaningful’ cases. This means a stratum of gentry sharing similar socio-economic attributes and comparable social status. Then there needs to be a way of allowing for the change in worth measurements occurring in 1861. Thirdly, we need to consider the declining importance of the primary sector in local economies as the century draws on, accounting for seasonal/cyclical slumps. Finally, we need to examine intra-class variations in status and lifestyle; they too become more pronounced over time.

In theory, analysing a small-world network such as the nobility of Tambov in 1858- 1881 should be straightforward once the base characteristics of the sample are fixed. Petty landowners and latifundists, the two class extremes, are excluded from the statistical sample. The former were to all intents and purposes undistinguishable from their serfs. Inversely, the latter used economies of scale to bear the brunt of post- emancipation market pressures. Only gentry of the middling sort meet the twin standards of authority and dependence needed to discuss provincial network politics. Even so, the study does not include every single middling Tambovian landowner. Some persisted in following their career in state service to its natural end, while others had more significant holdings elsewhere.

Middling gentry are the most appropriate choice for a network analysis. A precise definitions of the sample is given in Chapters III and IV, where the reader may also find the requisite statistical information comparing this study’s sample to regional and national averages. By applying statistical filters to the total number of Tambovian estate-owners, we are left with 527 individuals who can be safely classified as landowners of this sort between 1851 and 1881. The sample includes a longitudinal

64 D. Lieven, Aristocracy in Europe, 1815-1914, New York, 1992. 27 element, as it spans over a generation.65 These individuals have been carefully vetted to eliminate absentee landowners; to be included in the sample, their service records must not contain any prolonged periods of absence from the province (over eighteen months) throughout the time they were running their own estates.66 The customary seasonal ‘migration’ to and from cities has not been taken into account.

For this thesis, the most important aspect of noble network analysis is the membership of ‘cliques’, discussed in terms of their political ideologies. Another salient feature of gentry network analysis is ‘prime movers’. These were members of the network, but not necessarily a clique, who carried some influence over their peers in the province and are usually in active service. Along with the latest fashions, they brought ideas, journals, and gossip from the capital. By vocation or profession, or simply because it was not yet time to retire, ‘prime movers’ were not content with the role of gentleman- farmer. They were landowners strictu senso, but the management of estates was left in the hands of their relatives, trustees, or subordinates.

In all, SNA can help overcome complexities which had heretofore led to a fragmented understanding of Russia’s provincial gentry.67 First of all, thus was a result of a paucity of sources and the lack of a digital toolbox before 1991. Secondly, there is a biased primary source base: Provincials are seldom credited with any agency in memoirs and contemporary accounts. Thirdly, gentry self-representation in contemporary accounts skewed our understanding of their worldview. For all their rhetoric of supporting the Crown, gentry self-regard after emancipation was at its lowest ebb. The sense of helplessness was unequivocal. The sense of impending doom was prevalent. Words such as razrushenie and unichtozhenie (‘destruction’, ‘annihilation’) frequently appear in contemporary accounts.

65 This is achieved by the introduction of a ‘timestamp’ attribute to edge lists (data sheets). For more information, see Appendix A. 66 The overall presence of each landowner is hard to determine. For more information on parameters set, see Appendix A. 67 Cf. (not exclusively): L. Zakharova, Samoderzhavie i otmena krepostnogo prava v Rossii, 1856-1861, M. 1984; D. Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855-1861, London, 1976; Lincoln, Vanguard, idem, Great Reforms and Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861, New York, 1968. 28

Which is why an inclusive, longitudinal study of the Russia’s backbone – the provincials – is a good idea. Nobility was foremost in the considerations of those planning and enacting reform. The ‘Land Question’ defined political debate for decades to come. As Lenin himself once remarked, this was ‘the great debate’, involving some 1,500 representatives from forty-six provinces. Whereas partial debates within each ministerial committee were limited in scope, they still allowed for the existence of partisan politics. The divide was much too great to allow for any real movement between camps, and sources do not fully reveal the myriad shades of grey in between. With Social Network Analysis, these fuzzy areas of gentry politics can be seen in relief, and the apparent contradictions therein explained. While some of the gentry were at loggerheads over the structuring of redemption payments, the same could very well be of one mind with respect to farming techniques.

SNA reveals the significance of contact between political sides, particularly on the liberal ‘front’. Something considerably bigger than the micro-interests of the province was at play here. As Steven Hoch has argued, the ‘massive shift of capital out of monopolistic state institutions’ can and should be regarded as the final step of emancipation. This implies in turn, diffusion of capital and ideas, private initiative, entrepreneurship, the existence and interplay of market forces, the privatisation of local economies.68 Social Network Analysis can help construct a more balanced view from the body of published and unpublished sources from the very provinces concerned. It can reveal the reality of emancipation ‘on the ground’. This bypasses the problem of ‘unofficial politics’, of disguised views which can easily be misconstrued and twisted – consciously by rivals or unconsciously by observers.

Without accounting for social networks, there is little point is seeking crystal-clear class divides. This lack of clarity is widely accepted as the ‘true’ state of affairs in rural Russia between 1861 and 1881 – if not further. Nor is it a topic that comes to the fore only after emancipation. In his extensive study of agrarian reforms, S. A. Kozlov concluded that in the wake of the pereselenie drive (c. 1840), provincials developed a

68 S. Hoch, ‘The banking crisis, peasant reform and economic development in Russia: 1857-1861’, AmHR xcvi (1991), 795-820.This and other essays were collated and printed together in an unabridged edition. S. Hoch, Essays in Russian Social and Economic History, Boston, 2015. No significant revisions were made. 29 keen interest in peasant byt,69 hence the mushrooming of Agrarian Societies (Moscow, Yaroslavl and Iurev initially, with many more to follow).70 In other words, provincials themselves sought to explore their new place, in land and society, in relation to both social inferiors and social superiors. The question discussed here is not so much one of identity as it is one of agency and class politics.

In turn, this helps shed some light on those persistent existential quandaries: What does it really mean to be a noble in post-emancipation Russia? Did provincials follow some sort of class-conscious political movements? What actually happened to them at the end of the period? Where did they go and how did they cope with reform? There is only one way to test the cohesion and doggedness of provincial gentry against the background of a burgeoning bourgeois society. This is to concentrate network analysis upon a group of nobles with specific characteristics. The case study chosen comprises individuals and institutions with vested economic interest in agriculture, low rates of absentee landownership, and strong intra-network ties, for only statistical consistency may be an acceptable alternative to purely qualitative analysis. It is through seemingly irrelevant material, such as service and tax records, voting patterns, and implied positions that a clear image of network dynamics can be formed. It is through extensive scrutiny of local fondy and network study that a strong case for economic/political manoeuvrability, adaptability, and political consciousness can be built. For thus far, the provincials have been relegated to a subsidiary role in the historical evolution of Russian politics under Alexander II.

Does the application of SNA suffice to prove definitively the existence of a ‘politicised’ gentry? The answer is firmly negative. If anything, it presupposes that the gentry was essentially reactive than politically proactive, and even then only took charge when their own affairs where adversely affected. But this was not tantamount to general political apathy. What has been misconstrued as lack of will to resist is in fact, good economic sense. Economics is a precise science and as such enforces a realistic outlook. Middling landowners were faced with a fait accompli – they had no conceivable interest in returning to the status quo. If anything, the gentry’s continued

69 In this context, lifestyle. 70 S. A. Kozlov, Agrarnye traditsii i novatsii v doreformennoi Rossii (tsentral′no-nechernozemnye gubernii), M., 2002. 30 hold on the refinement of natural resources (flour mills, fisheries, distilleries, hunting grounds, lumber mills, to name a few) provided little motivation to challenge the newly emancipated serfdom.

31

Chapter I: Writing the history of Russia’s nobility

Postreform nobility was the subject of scholarly research long before the dissolution of the USSR. Ever since, scholars both inside and outside of the Russian Federation have redoubled their efforts to produce even more. The drive to explore and exploit new avenues of research has been spearheaded by researchers discussing such matters as the socio-economic and political status of the nobility in the provinces; the nobility’s role in postreform society; its place within the new political-administrative system; the activities of specific noble families; and others. Renewed interest in the topic was motivated, in part, by a shoring-up of funding in Russian academia, particularly in the form of moneys earmarked for the study of specific provinces. Schematically, it is possible to discern the following categories of modern historical writing on Russian nobles: (a) Social and economic histories with particular reference to postreform commune and landowner economies, land tenure, land usage and land profitability; (b) Political histories examining the exact nature of the relationship between periphery and centre by means of looking into noble assemblies, corporations or other collective expressions of class interests. (c) Monographs on the lifestyle, traditions, ‘class mentality’, emotions and culture of the estate.71

From a historiographical perspective, Russian gentry was at first retroactively relegated to a politically irrelevant class by Soviet historians as a way of reconfirming Marxist chronology.72 After the dissolution of the USSR – and despite the tenacity of this approach – historians shifted their focus towards the evolution of Russian nobility over the centuries. The history of Russian elites in general seems to maintain

71 For a summary and discussion, see E. Barinova, Rossiiskoe dvorianstvo v nachale XX veka: ekonomicheskii status is sotsiokul’turnyi oblik, M. 2008; there are also two compendia, which may be of particular interest; the first, by Iu. Iu. Ierusalimskii and N. K. Ledneva ‘Sovremennaia otechestvennaia literature o rossiiskom dvorianstve XIX – nachal XX v.; regional’nyi aspekt’, Vestnik Iaroslavskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 2013 (1), 23-28, deals with the regional aspect; the second, by N. A. Mileshina, ‘Povsednevnaia zhizn’ rossiiskogo dvorianstvo XVIII – nachala XX stoletiia v otsenkakh sovetskikh i sovremennykh istorikov’, Izvestiia Ural’skogo federal’nogo universiteta (2010), vol. 84(5), 200-207 discussed everyday life in the provinces. 72 The standard work of reference is J. Blum’s 1961 study, especially if read in conjunction with David Moon’s discussion on research published between 1961 and 1996. Cf. J. Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century, Princeton (NJ), 1961; and D. Moon, ‘Reassessing Russian Serfdom’, EHQ 26 (1996), 483-526. 32 something of a Sonderweg status.73 Perhaps this is all a result of the long and convoluted path Russian nobility took in the second half of the nineteenth century. In contrast to French nobility, for instance, there is no clear-cut ‘break with the past’, no reckoning of any sort before 1905. In contrast to British nobility, Russia’s ‘first estate’ failed to survive in the modern world. We are therefore left with historical fragments – instantanées of gentry lifestyle, portraits of life in the country.

However prosaic the motives for revisiting Russia’s aristocratic past,74 there are also practical reasons why scholars working in Russia today would look at the era of Great Reforms. On the one hand, there needs to be a model for the transition to a market economy suitable to the country’s unique makeup and characteristics. On the other, if this model is to act as an inspiration to modern lawgivers and governments, it needs to be sufficiently ‘close’ to the modern period. This eliminates Peter the Great’s and Catherine the Great’s reforms. Only the reforms of Alexander II (who, by virtue of his name, could never be the Great) fit the bill.75 In this sense, it pays to focus one’s research efforts upon the periphery rather than the imperial centre: Moscow and St. Petersburg are hardly generalisable examples of urban development.

Emancipation and reform have been examined from ‘from above’, ‘from below’ and ‘from below’. Here, I examine it from the ‘middle’ – specifically from the perspective a middling class of landowners who coalesced into politicised networks and engaged in a fruitful (albeit ultimately condemned) effort to reinvent their class as one of honourable functionaries with a role to play in peripheral politics within Russia’s new proto-capitalist system. I suggest that the case study of the landowning elite in a blacksoil province shows great promise in terms of how useful and relevant Social Network Analysis can be to the modern historian. If we consider that emancipation affected most directly and immediately three large social groups, the ascendant bureaucracy, the peasants and the landed nobility, while the former two have been

73 V. S. Dubina makes this point in ‘”The Distinction”: Russian Nobility and Russian Elites in the European Context (The 18th-19th centuries)’, Social Evolution and History vii (2008), https://www.socionauki.ru/journal/articles/129454 [Accessed October 2017]. 74 For instance, all the better to parenthesise the Soviet period as an historical aberration. 75 See V. Shlapentokh, ‘Alexander II and Mikhail Gorbachev—Two Reformers in Historical Perspective’, Russian History xvii (1990), 395-408; sovietologists tended to find a more fruitful comparison in Khrushchev (W. J. Tomson, ‘Khrushchev and Gorbachev as reformers: A comparison’, BJPS xxiii (1993), 77-105. 33 discussed in detail, the latter has not. Or rather, it has been discussed in the wrong context – one replete with assumptions on the provincials’ inability to ‘get with the times’, to ‘adapt’, to ‘modernise’, to ‘transform’, to ‘evolve’.

Even if some degree of agency and political acumen is granted to provincials, their politics is always seen against the background of binaries: Slavophiles and Westernisers, Conservatives and Liberals, Rich and Poor. I argue that these binaries are not an accurate representation of noble politics in the late nineteenth century. By taking a detailed look into provincial politics and using the tools of Social Network Analysis, I aim to prove the merits of re-examining Russia’s provincial nobility in the time of reform as a politically (re)active, self-conscious class of people distinct from both peasants and bureaucrats yet equally involved in the implementation of reform. My goal is to dispel notions of ‘victim psychology’ saddling provincials, and to prove that the Chekhovian ideal type we so often associate with them after 1861 is precisely that: A hypothetical construct seldom applicable to most provincial estate-owners.

The examination of scholarship begins with Alfred Rieber’s summation of postreform reality: As of March 1861, Russia had been reborn as a more complexly organised society. Following the publication of Rieber’s first major book on Alexander II’s reforms,76 historians have tried to reinvent the wheel by circumventing this very simple yet inescapable fact. Rieber, in contrast to many who came after him, never went as far as to claim that social experimentation in nineteenth-century Russia, however grand and far-fetching, was geared towards the creation of a classless society. He did not argue, for example, that the reform policies were permeated by some sort of Weberian capitalist spirit. Incidentally, Rieber was among the first to argue that provincial nobility held at least some importance to the whole reform project. Ultimately, it is they who stood to lose the most as reform progressed apace. Or, if one adopts a more telescopic view, it was the flexing of the nobility’s political muscles that egged on Alexander III’s counter-reformist court.

The discussion of Russian nobility in the era of reform has sometimes led to outlandish propositions, such as Engelhardt’s attempt to explain away the growth in agricultural

76 A. J. Rieber, The Politics of Autocracy: Letters of Alexander II to Prince A. I. Bariatinskii, 1857-1864, Paris, 1966. 34 output by arguing for a redefining of seasons based on imported scientific models.77 Another widespread misconception regarding the provincial nobility of this time is their perceived needless preoccupation with luxury and lifestyle. There can be little doubt that status consumption contributed to gentry indebtedness, which was further exacerbated by refinancing and renegotiation of loans.78 According to one economic historian, the percentage of landowners who used loans to ‘modernise’ their estates in Tambov and neighbouring Ryazan was miniscule by comparison to those who invest it in status consumption.79 A more nuanced view would balance this seemingly irrational and short-sighted spending pattern with the immense importance of status and aesthetics in the estate space. Prince Polonskii, a Tambovian landowner, boasted that he had transformed an unsightly part of the steppe into ‘a different country, [with undulating] oak, birch and spruce forests; tilled grain fields peppered with groves; […] the kind of creativity that makes a man attached to a place’.80

Any attempt at social reform on a grand scale engenders confusion, much more so in a country as vast and as heterogeneous as Russian Empire. The terms of emancipation confused peasantry and nobility alike, to varying extents and with mixed results. Some would take issue with the process, others would simply take away manumission as ‘fact’, regardless of how incomplete ‘liberation’ was.81 Historiographical analyses are conditioned by regional particularities, including economic models, local market economies, labour and farm practices, personal ideologies and predilections (on the part of nobles), soil quality, even micro-climate.82 Finding common ground between

77 A. N. Engelhardt, Iz derevni: 12 pisem 1872-1887, M. 1987, 49. V. G. Shustov, ‘Sotsial’no- ekonomicheskaia transformatsiia Permskogo maiorata Stroganovykh vo vtoroi polovine XIX – nachale XX v., PhD Thesis, Ekaterinburg, 2012. 78 Borovoi, Kredit i bank Rossii, M., 1958 and S. A. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie za stoletie 1762-1855, SPb., 1906 emphasise the dual impact of supply and demand on gentry credit. 79 I. D. Koval’chenko, Krest’iane i krepostnoe khoziaistvo Riazanskoi i Tambovskoi gubernii v pervoi polovine XIX v., M., 1959. 80 S. M. Volkonskii, Moi Vospominaniia, in 2 vols., M. 2004, 34-35. 81 On the most basic level, the onus of enforcing the legislation fell upon the landowning gentry. To begin with, the types of communes remained unchanged, so emancipation did not change the process of land repartition within the commune – this was noted by Zainchkovsy in Otmena. Furthermore, the law made landlords rather than serfs responsible for producing a draft agreement for the buyouts (PSZ vol. XXXVI part 1). Finally, collective representation meant that most peasants would not engage with what was, after all, an impenetrable legal text. Landowners were given a set of deadlines to work out a settlement, which in the Western provinces were brought forward after the revolt of 1863. I. D. Koval’chenko, Krestiane i krepostnoe khoziaistvo Riazanskoi i Tambovskoi gubernii v pervoi polovine XIX v., M., 1959. One of the studies under review is Tat’iana Petrovna Timofeeva’s naology of post-revolutionary Vladimir, which should be singled out as the only state- or region-sponsored publication in the group of works under review. [Tat´iana Petrovna Timofeeva, Lezhit v razvalinakh tvoi khram…: O sud´bakh tserkovnoi arkhitektury Vladimirskogo kraia (1918-1939), 1999]. 35 disparate elements ostensibly belonging to one class (let alone analyse the topic from an inter-class perspective) is hard; what makes a ‘noble’ in nineteenth-century Russia? On what basis, with what criteria should the post-emancipation definition be given? Does reform cause nobility to be defined more in terms of its economic status and less with respect to their place in the chain of production? Removing the most basic privilege of the First Estate, the right to own souls, created a Sisyphean task of re-self- definition for the middling gentry whose post-emancipation status was not as clear- cut as that of either class extreme.

As of 1861, there was no more ‘owning of souls’, and with the absorption of the odnodvortsy in ‘wider’ petit-bourgeois society, class characteristics became even more elusive. Fuzzy areas had certainly existed before, and disparities between old lineages and the ‘great majority’ of gentry were all too well established by the time of Alexander II’s reforms. Yet the Petrine tradition held firm: Exercising influence in political matters was not necessarily a correlate of privilege.83 This allowed provincials a measure of agency, at least with respect to land reform. They were certainly active in the legislative process between Editing Commissions and the Land Captain Statute.

It follows that there must be a connecting thread, a common basis, a class consciousness of sorts joining these gentrified elements together. Could it be an apophatic reason, for example fear of a bloody revolt? It seems unlikely. The modern age, it appears, had brought the periphery and centre closer than ever, distances had shrunk, and centralisation was progressing apace. No longer could (or indeed would) the provincial nobility guarantee ‘peace in the countryside’ – which was, after all, the whole premise of their existence in the first place.84 The days of Pugachev and Stenka Razin were long gone. Now their memory served only as a stick to keep provincials in check. The carrot was either honours or loans on favourable terms. In either case, provincials were happy to receive them. Nor could provincials remain a safeguard for autocracy and medium channelling the Tsar’s unlimited power and godlike influence to millions of peasants. That mission was now carried out by an army of bureaucratic

83 For the subject of the odnodvortsy and their social status, see T. Esper, ‘The odnodvortsy and the Russian nobility’, SEER xlv (1967), 124-134. 84 One could argue that initially their task was to staff the Muscovite cavalry, for which they had received land in return. But blacksoil gentry, especially in Tambov, had been built along entirely different principles (see below). 36 servants enacting policies in the name of His Imperial Majesty. Politics changed drastically. Whereas not so long before impotent or otherwise ‘dangerous’ Emperors were removed by their nobles in discreet palace coups, Alexander II met with a violent and very public death at the hands of commoners.85

By 1881, provincials were still seen as an integral part of Russian society, and historians recognise them as such. They remain a unit of analysis, if only as a loosely defined confederation of former potentates instead of a closely defined social ‘class’. Liubov’ Ranevskaia is still very much a noblewoman, the garish Lopakhin is a recognisably upstart merchant. This difference lies at the very core of Chekhovian dramaturgy. The integral importance of the former as a ‘true’ representative of Mother Russia is juxtaposed to the latter’s treatment of a beautiful, verdant orchard that symbolises historical continuity and attachment to the land. In Chekhov’s play and in our understanding of the historical context, Lopakhin is indistinguishable from the ‘new people’ whose power rests on their profession rather than organic ties to the Russian earth. In contrast to Chekhov’s gentry, however, the real provincials mounted a prolonged and pronounced resistance to the invasion of ‘city-folk’.

Their acts of resistance, however, are seldom seen as such. It would seem rather counter-intuitive that historians should disregard what imperial functionaries of the late nineteenth century knew to be true. Why else would Alexander III take pains to reshackle the provincials to their estates? The Land Captain Statute of 1889, embodying the very pinnacle of counter-reform, was designed not to empower the provincials anew, but instead to tether them to the Ministry of Interior. They would once again serve, it seems, as a bulwark against bezvlastie86 in the countryside.87 Nevertheless, from a purely qualitative perspective, one is hard pressed to source sufficient evidence in support of this view.88

85 The public nature of Alexander’s assassination prompted many observers to remark nostalgically that replacing the Supreme Ruler was once a dignified affair. Ironically, this meant that the demise of Paul would henceforth be enriched with romantic overtones. Even the regicides would be made into atypical heroes. See the article S. Morrissey ‘The “Apparel of Innocence”: Toward a moral economy of terrorism in Late Imperial Russia’, JHM lxxxiv (2012), 607-642. 86 In this context, anarchy. 87 T. S. Pearson, Russian Officialdom in Crisis: Autocracy and Self-Government, 1861-1900, Cambridge, 1989. 88 I elaborate on this argument in Chapter V, which, as I have already pointed out in the Introduction, reaches into the 1900s. 37

The quantitatively minded historian, on the other hand, does not lack for material. Ample statistical data does exist, but to use it, one must first settle upon a unit of analysis. In this case, the network is the primary analytical unit. The network is composed of class elements, which begs the question ‘what is the gentry in this context?’ Could it be gentlemen-farmers along the British standards, or maybe some Junker-style retired minor landowners? ‘Class’ is too abstract a word to describe the uniquely Russian soslovie.89 A fluid definition of ‘class’ can be damaging when historians are seeking to agree on what exactly it is they are looking at. Not to mention that non-Marxist historians have traditionally shown a measure of trepidation with respect to the usage of ‘social class’ as pivot for historical study. A case in point is A. Stanziani’s and D. Darrow’s sizeable corpus of studies on urbanisation, which are heavily dependent upon social categorisation.90

89 Here, the use of ‘soslovie’ is preferable, in that it can be more clearly defined. (S. Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia, DeKalb, Il., 1985; A. Korelin, Dvorianstvo v poreformennoi Rossii 1861-1904 gg., M., 1979). 90 D. W. Darrow, ‘Statistics and “Sufficiency”: Toward an Intellectual History of Russia’s Rural Crisis’, Continuity and Change xvii (2002), 63-96; D. Darrow, ‘The Politics of Numbers: Statistics and the Search for a Theory of Peasant Economy in Russia, 1861-1917’ (University of Iowa, 1996) argues that increased use of statistical measurements in post-emancipation Russia did much to concretise the idea of a ‘rural crisis’. The main points of Darrow’s thesis are revised in idem, ‘The Politics of Numbers: Zemstvo Land Assessment and the Conceptualization of Russia’s Rural Economy’, RR lix (2000), 52- 75. The politics of data collection are also extensively discussed in C. Clay, ‘Ethos and Empire: The Ethnographic Expedition of the Imperial Russian Naval Ministry, 1855-62’, PhD Thesis, University of Oregon, 1989. Cf. A. Stanziani, L’économie en révolution: le cas russe, Paris, 1998; idem, ‘La professionalisation de la bureaucratie économique en Russie: les staticiens de 1870 a 1914’, in P. Guillaume (ed.), La professionalisation des classes moyennes, Bordeaux, 1996 (Catherine Evtuhov in Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society and Civilisation in Nineteenth-century Nizhnii Novgorod, Pittsburg, Pa., 2011, 307 gives n.d. but that is not accurate); and idem, ‘Staticiens, zemstva, et état dans la Russie des années 1880’, Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique xxxii (1991), 445-68; but also early 1990s: ‘Les statistiques des récoltes en Russie: 1905-1928’, Histoire et mesure vii (1992), 73-98; and 2000s: ‘Entre ville et campagne : Les ménages et les formes de travail dans les statistiques économiques russes’, CMRS xliv (2003), 57-92 ; ‘Les sources démographiques entre contrôle policier et utopies technocratiques. Le cas russe, 1870-1926’, CMRS xxviii (1997), 457-487. Overall, I consider excessive emphasis on social categorisation as hindering network analysis. That having been said, Gregory Freeze opened the door to a new understanding of postreform clergy by breaking away with the standard characterisation of them as little more than ‘an instrument of the state’. (G. Freeze, ‘The Orthodox Church and serfdom in prereform Russia’, SR iii (1989), 361-387). Neither parish priest nor the elite had the inclination to weigh in on the land question, each for different reasons. Cf. G. Freeze, ‘Subversive Piety: Religion and the Political Crisis in Late Imperial Russia’, JMH 68 (1996), 308-350 and L. Engelstein, ‘Holy Russia in Modern Times: An Essay on Orthodoxy and Cultural Change, PP 173 (2001), 129-156. Gregory Freeze never asks how exactly emancipation and reform affect religiosity – if at all. In all fairness, this was never his stated mission. Perhaps the only attempt to do so, this far, is C. Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period, Princeton, N. J., 1994). 38

The main purpose of this study is not to overturn this paradigm, even though there are encouraging indications that it can be overturned, given time space and the ability to conduct longitudinal research incorporating Social Network Analysis for a larger number of provinces over a longer period of time. Instead, I will be advancing the argument for an increasingly politicised nobility which, deprived of any tools for political expression, turns to (un)official networks as a means of promoting its interests in postreform society.91 I will do so based upon formidable scholarship on emancipation, nobility and postreform bourgeoisie.92

Learning from the past: Nineteenth-century Historians of the Russian nobility Colouring the provincials with broad strokes was a feature common among nineteenth century historians. Yet their work is useful, insomuch as it provides a first-class source for discovering both the challenges facing the provincials and the reasons why they have been consigned a minor part in defining political developments. In other words, by looking at earlier histories – particularly those by influential academics who determined the scholarship of their time and conditioned general attitudes towards the gentry at large – we can gain a glimpse of the huge divergence between what the provincials were perceived to have been, both then and now, and what they actually were. Academic regard for the gentry was largely the result of two main and opposing views of Russian society. On the loosely termed ‘liberal front’, it is possible to draw a line connecting works of the nineteenth century with a tradition of progressive and radical ideas stretching all the way back to the time of M. M. Speransky. K. D. Kavelin and the early B. N. Chicherin can be counted among adherents to that tradition.93 Even

91 The shift in consensus can be traced back to P. Gatrell’s The Tsarist Economy, 1850-1917, London, 1986, P. L. Gregory’s Before Command: An Economic History of Russia from Emancipation to the First Five-Year, Princeton, N. J., 1993, and – more recently – T. C. Owen’s Dilemmas of Russian Capitalism: Fedor Chizhov and Corporate Enterprise in the Railroad Age, Cambridge, Ma., 2005. In a posthumously published volume edited by R. Weiss, we learn that Arcadius Kahan would have categorically rejected the centripetal forces model (A. Kahan and R. Weiss (ed.), Russian Economic History: The Nineteenth Century, Chicago, Il., 1989). 92 A. Markevich, ‘Economic Development of the Russian Empire in regional perspective’, 2015, Working Paper; A. Markevich and E. Zhuravskaya, ‘Economic effects of the Abolition of serfdom. Evidence from the Russian Empire’, Working Paper; see also the joint chapter by A. Markevich and S. Nafziger in K. Hjortshøj O'Rourke and J. G. Williamson (eds.), The Spread of Modern Industry to the Periphery since 1871, Oxford, 2017, 33-62. 93 Among the latter’s most celebrated publications one can find, Oblastnye uchrezhdeniia Rossii v XVII veke (1856) and the multi-volume Istoriia politicheskikh uchenii (1869-1902). There is no better proof of the academic vitality in the two capitals than Kavelin’s – and to a lesser extent Chicherin’s – break with some aspects of liberalism in later years. But the Kadet historian A. A. Kizevetter would trace the origins of liberal thought to I. Pnin; see A. A. Kizevetter, Istoricheskie ocherki: Iz istorii politicheskikh idei, M., 1912, 55-87. 39

Herzen, that non-academic ‘publicist of genius’, can be credited with considerable astuteness for outdoing Marx and predicting a Russian Revolution.94 Within this ‘liberal’ milieu, provincial gentry were completely discounted as an agent of change.

Drawing on pre-revolutionary scholarship is inherently problematic, partially because it is politically biased. This does not necessarily mean, however, that it should be eliminated from modern histories. Indeed, as Gregory Freeze argues, the wholesale exclusion of pre-revolutionary historians from modern historical debate is as unwarranted as the unqualified adoption of their assumptions (such as on stratification and social change).95 Rather, the major problem is that Russia’s pre- revolutionary academic life, rich and colourful as it may have been, revolved around the universities. It does not provide an accurate depiction of ideological-political debate in the provinces, but not because it was overly simplistic. In fact, it was impossible for historians of the time to devote the time and effort necessary to accurately capture the infinite complexities of provincial politics.

Historical scholarship in the mid and late 1800s rises far above the old slavophile/westerniser binary, although there can be no doubt as to ideological pedigree of participants therein. In fact, the debate becomes inextricably intertwined with political thought on current affairs, much in the spirit alluded to in the preceding paragraph.96 This made for dynamically shifting academic camps, in which it is hard to discern ‘purely’ pro-reform and anti-reform stances. Each contemporary historian needs to be considered individually, with reference to his background and the evolution of his theories as events unfolded. Against this background, provincial elites in blacksoil Russia were resistant to ‘liberal’ influences almost by their very nature. As such, they were frequently discussed as a counterpoint to the ‘illuminated’ gentry- turned bureaucracy – their former neighbours – or, in the worst case, as the weak (social) link. There was no way of winning for provincials: Intelligentsia regarded them as unenlightened individuals personifying the stagnation of the state. Naturally

94 J. Gooding, Rulers and Subjects: Government and People in Russia, 1801-1991, London, 1996, 73. 95 G. Freeze, ‘The Soslovie (Estate) paradigm and Russian social history’, AmHR xci (1986), 11-36. 96 Exceptions include some ‘tonsured’ historians whose main academic interests lay in the medieval world, such as H. Bichurin, Kafarov, to name but two famous examples. No one embodies the complexity of Russian political thought more characteristically than Katkov, this ‘reactionary liberal’. M. Raeff, ‘A reactionary liberal: M. N. Katkov’, RR xi (1952), 157-162. 40 predisposed to snubbing them, they accused provincials of not playing their part in grappling with reform.

Alexander Herzen is a case in point. His initial jubilation for Alexander II’s ascension was rivalled only by his disillusionment at the scope of reform soon thereafter.97 With complete disregard to the sensitive economic balance and the role provincials played in it, he would call for far-reaching changes that would have surely meant the complete annihilation of landowners in Blacksoil Russia. In hindsight, Herzen’s attitude can be explained by his appurtenance to a much larger ‘liberal concilium’, initially headed by T. N. Granovsky, a Hegelian par excellence, and his pupils, most notably S. M. Solovev. Granovsky’s lectures – an ingenious device, it would seem, of avoiding the censors – were lauded by Herzen. When Granovsky did mention the gentry, he did so in a dismissive and derisory manner, since he considered them nothing more than an appendix of the ‘long arm of state’. There is scant evidence that Granovsky the scholar would ever consider allowing provincials the benefit of the doubt. There can be little doubt that by his reckoning, the provincial gentry would have no place at all in a liberal Russia. This is a baton that Herzen picked up after Granovsky’s death in 1855 – a baton steeped in the former’s increasing melancholy and apathy at the policies of Nicholas I after the events of 1848. With respect to provincials, Herzen would echo his mentor’s bitterness.

Herzen would eventually depart the political scene of Russian proper, and Solovev would take over as the figurehead of liberal intelligentsia.98 His proposed model of historical development conditioned by organic – ‘natural and necessary’ – factors traced the origin of nineteenth-century Russian polity to the Time of Troubles. The Istoricheskie pis’ma cast the nobility, which by this time was undergoing a process of bureaucratisation and assimilation into an ever-expanding state apparatus, as a

97 A. M. Kelly, The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen, Cambridge, Ma., 2016. 98 Interestingly, a definitive biography of Solovev is yet to be written in English. Two of his sons-in-law, N. A. Popov and P. V. Bezobrazov collected materials for such an undertaking, but they were not sufficiently removed. The former’s research was later used by N. L. Rubinstein, but he too did not publish; a printed edition of that particular pool of historical research would have to wait for some years to come, only appearing in V. V. Illeritskii’s monograph (published 1980). All this is discussed in a mediocre book by N. I. Tsimbaev, Sergei Solov’ev, M., 1990. Bezobravov published under the title S. M. Solov’ev: Ego zhizn’ i nauchno-literaturnaia deiatel’nost’, Print-on-demand edition based on the 1901 edition. 41 separate class sharing common ideas.99 Here, one can find the kernel of an idea that largely inspired this study: the presence, in the provinces, of a proactive politicised social class with unifying characteristics that consciously adaptive to change. Naturally, this kernel, this seed, would grow in the work of Solovev’s successors: the last generation of historians in the nineteenth century, which included the anti- Normanist D. I. Ilovayskii, V. O. Kliuchevskii, and S. F. Platonov. Ilovayskii paved the way for autochthonous histories by focussing first on Riazan and subsequently on Sarkel and Tmutarakan.100 Kliuchevskii was one of the first Russian historians to emphasise geographic/economic factors of historical development over socio-political ones (after Solovev, whom he succeeded). Platonov is widely regarded as the last great pre-revolutionary historian. A student of Bestuzhev-Ryumin’s, his work represents the apex of the St. Petersburg school, the first to place considerable emphasis on the collection and study of primary sources.101

The ‘liberal front’ included a distinct sub-group of historians which was initially led by F. von Adelung, an ethnic German and tutor to Nicholas I (and his brother).102 A staunch critic of the ‘Russia for the Russians’ ideology, von Adelung was influenced by his own Baltic origins which prompted him to embrace a multi-cultural approach, possibly the first of its kind on such an elevated level of discourse, and certainly the first to be voiced in the great halls of imperial palaces. While he did recognise a degree of kinship with the provincials, neither he nor his peers would deign to analyse their social importance at length. It is hard to discern whether this barely disguised disdain of the gentry, particularly blacksoil gentry, was the result of a deeply-rooted ideological preoccupation with their ‘role’ or ‘usefulness’ in local economy or simply that of a negative predisposition towards their status and ethnic backgrounds (which in Tambov, as we will see, was mostly Tartar – a fact that did not escape von Adelung). The other two historians of the sub-group, N. M. Iadrintsev and N. I. Kostomarov, were also of mixed ethnic origin.103 The former is best remembered as the co-founder,

99 For this and other references to the ideas of Solovev, see a well-written abridged edition of his works by A. A. Levandovskii and N. I. Tsimbaev, Izbrannye Trudy/Zapiski: S. M. Solov’ev, M., 1983. 100 This thread is taken up by Starr, in Decentralisation, 90 passim. 101 For additional remarks and analysis on the ‘pedigree’ of Russian historiography in the nineteenth century, see J. H. Billington, Russia in Search of Itself, Baltimore, Md., 2004, 10 passim. 102 The New Monthly Magazine, January 1862, 287. 103 D. S. von Mohrenschildt, Toward a United Sates of Russia: Plans and Projects of Federal Reconstruction of Russia in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1981, 14, 117. 42 along with G. N. Potanin, of the short-lived – moribund even – Siberian separatist movement of the 1850s and 1860s.104 In terms of the movement, provincial gentry was irrelevant, on account of the way Siberia was organised both socially and administratively. But one cannot help noticing – in Iadrintsev’s associated writings – the same dismissive attitude towards this backbone of European Russia’s agricultural production that permeated the works of Granovsky. Iadrintsev’s work, particularly the strongly democratic Eastern Review was, interestingly, published and allowed to circulate after Alexander’s assassination.105 It represents a departure from this earlier stance and a radical shift towards the way provincial gentry would be perceived in academic circles of the time. For the first time provincials are discussed as ‘capable of’ (yet not ‘prone to’) democratisation and, more importantly, they are discussed as having some degree of influence over Russia’s political future.

This was the full extent of recognition provincials received in academic circles. The ideological retrenchment of the 1870s was largely a result of the delayed effects of emancipation and inadequate access to long-term credit. It meant they would once more regress in the eyes of contemporaries to the status of ‘irrelevant’, or worse ‘obsolete’ social elements standing in the way of further reform. In this respect, Kostomarov’s legacy was expansive. It shaped – to a reasonable extent – some of the most common stereotypes currently held in lay Western societies about Russian gentry. At the core of his major œuvre, Dve russkie narodnosti, (attributing to ‘Great Rus’ ‘negative’ racial characteristics such as a tendency to autocracy and nation- building, while imbuing the ‘Lesser Rus’ i.e. Ukrainians with a more artistic, humane nature), lies the belief that ethnically Russian gentry will unfailingly stand for ‘Old Russia’ and the ‘old’ (meaning pre-emancipation) ways.106

104 An interesting episode in Russia’s long nineteenth century, discussed intermittently since the 1960s. For a historiographical review on this topic, see S. G. Marks, Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850-1917, London, 1991, Part I when he gives separatism as one of the reasons behind St. Petersburg’s backing of development drives in Siberia. 105 Iadrintsev, in Siberia as a Colony, as well with Potanin in the Sibirskoe obozrenie, often hark back to great Siberian separatists of the past. The former’s scholarship has been revived to fashion as a paragon of fearless journalism (for example in V. Petrenko’s ‘Kamennye serdtse – samoe strashnoe, chto vstrechaetsia v zhizni’, in Altaiskaia Pravda, March 1st, 2002). E. Clowes, ‘Being a Sibiriak in Contemporary Siberia: Imagined Geography and Vocabularies of Identity in Regional Writing Culture’, Region ii (2013), 47-67, 56f. 106 N. I. Kostomarov, Dve Russkie narodnosti, Kiev, 1991. Originally published in 1861, Dve russkie narodnosti attracted enmity from both sides, as it argued that the two ‘Russias’ complement each other. Kostomarov went on to lament his work’s poor reception in his autobiography. See U. Schmid, ‘Ukrainian Wallenrodism: Treason in Mykola Kostomarov’s Biography, Historiography, and Fiction’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies xxxii-xxxiii (2014), 619-35, 623 and M. Pavlyshyn, ‘For and Against a 43

Conservative historians had a much longer past and a shorter future than their more progressive colleagues and their dismissal of provincials may at first seem counterintuitive.107 That having been said, the conservative bloc’s views on Russian history were far from uniform. For example, V. I. Guerrier, a former student of Granovsky’s and major contributor to Vestnik Evropy, essentially ‘grew into’ the conservative movement. The same can be said of A. S. Suvorin, the press king who performed the most famous volte-face of the reform era.108 Instead of relaxing their critique of the provincials, both figures hardened their respective stances; this should hardly come as a surprise, for in Russian historiography it is often the case that a predominantly conservative approach (such as panslavism) can be adopted by progressive intellectuals and vice-versa. There is no zealot like a convert; and if we trace the origins of conservative historical thought in Russia back to V. N. Tatishchev, unyielding faith in autocracy can be said to have run in the conservative movement’s very bloodstream. Even in Tatishchev’s time, the provincials were not perceived well – although they were still seen as integral parts of autocratic government – and Karamzin (Russia’s own ‘Laurence Sterne’) did little to redress the imbalance, and neither did Prince M. M. Shcherbatov. Eventually their successor, M. P. Pogodin (arguably the first Russian exponent of the Normanist theory) would consider the matter of the provincials in a serious manner.109 His advocacy of their importance in Russian life is especially important to this study, because Pogodin would define historical thinking for generations to come. His intellectual victory over M. T.

Ukrainian National Literature: Kostomarov’s Sava Chalyi and its reviewers’, SEER xcii (2014), 201-227, 203. Also N. I. Kostomarov, Avtobiografiia, Kiev, 1990. 107 R. Pipes, ‘Russian Conservatism in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’, SR xxx (1971), 121- 128. I. Khristoforov, ‘Nineteenth-Century Russian Conservatism’, Russian Studies in History xlviii (2009), 56-77. 108 See E. Ambler, Russian Journalism and Politics: The Career of Alexei S. Suvorin, 1861-1881, Detroit, Mi., 1972. Marc Raeff for example places the origins of absolutist theories in the XV century. See his ‘An early theorist of absolutism: Joseph of Volokolamsk’, AmSEER viii (1949), 77-89. 109 M. Raeff, Michael Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia 1772-1839, The Hague, 1957. Richard Pipes makes a similar point in Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia: A Translation and Analysis. Originally published over five decades ago, Pipes’ remains the only edition in English. See also the collection of Speransky’s Proekty i Zapiski, edited by S. N. Valk, M. and L., 1961; V. O. Kliuchevsky, Kurs russkoi istorii, vol. v and Viazemsky’s Zapisnye knizhki (1813-1848), edited by V. S. Nechaeva, M., 1963. It is interesting to see how his compares to A. B. Lobanov-Rostovsky’s account of the reign of Paul. They were both very much the king’s men, closely associated with imperial government and occupying important ministerial posts. A similar comparison with A. A. Polovtsov, founder of the Russian Historical Society and a relation of Tatishchev’s, but first and foremost also a minister under Alexander III, would be of equal interest. For more on the political thought of Shcherbatov and his impact, see the still-relevant article by M. Raeff, ‘State and the nobility in the ideology of M. M. Shcherbatov’, AmSEER xix (1960), 363-379. 44

Kachenovskii sealed the establishment of the Normanist school and the demise of the sceptical school, much in the same way Pogodin himself took Kachenovskii’s chair.110

Pogodin would also show some propensity to borrow from slavophile theories, particularly as an editor of Moskviatin alongside Stepan Shevyrev, another ‘gentry apologist’.111 Their popularity amongst provincials themselves (as testified by library contents in Tambov and other blacksoil provinces) was firmly entrenched throughout the postreform period. Pogodin was a particular favourite, thanks to his rebuttals against Herzen and Kostomarov, in which the gentry finally took centre stage. There is ample evidence to show that Pogodin had a hand in the inception of Official Nationality. After all, N. G. Ustrialov – credited with its invention and recipient of the Demitov Prize for his efforts – had been a close friend of Pogodin’s. Can there be any doubt of the fundamental social significance of the gentry engendered by this worldview?

For some reason, the gentry as a historical quantity tended to bring out the incestuous nature of academic exchange in nineteenth-century Russia. Works appearing later in the period, such as those of N. Ia. Danilevskii,112 are set against the last great hurrah of pre-revolutionary slavophilia and, as such, positively predisposed towards provincials in the blacksoil belt.113 A distinguished member of the Petrashevsky circle and widely recognised as one of pan-slavism’s foremost ideologues, Danilevskii’s social theorems were imbued with strong religious overtones borrowed by von Bauer’s Zielstrebigkeit, resulting in a fantastical concoction, which he called ‘historical- cultural type’, by modern standards a strongly conservative theorem.114 In this model, any notion of further progressive reform is dismissed out of hand and the gentry is

110 J. L. Black, Nicholas Karamzin and Russian Society in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Russian Political and Historical Thought, Toronto, 1975. D. B. Saunders, ‘Historians and Concepts of Nationality in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia’, SEER lx (1982), 44-62, 46-47. F. Mocha, ‘The Karamzin-Lelewel Controversy’, SR xxxi (1972), 592-610, 603. 111 S. Rabow-Edling, Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism, New York, N. Y., 2006, 9. W. Leatherbarrow and D. Offord, A History of Russian Thought, Cambridge, 2010, 105 passim. 112 R. E. MacMaster, Danilevsky: A Russian Totalitarian Philosopher, Cambridge, Ma., 1967. G. C. Guins, ‘The Politics of “Pan-Slavism”’, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, viii (1949), 125-132, 127. 113 Despite being an accomplished ichthyologist and member of the Imperial Geographical Society, Danilevskii was one of the staunchest opponents to the ideas embedded in The Origins of Species. He believed that Darwinism (with its ruthless competition and relentless materialism) was peculiarly English. ‘Russia’, on the other hand, was for him a spiritual concept. See Engelstein, op. cit., 148. 114 Set forth in Rossiia i Evropa: Vzgliad na kul’turnye i politicheskie otnosheniia slavianskogo mira k germano-romanskomu, published in Zaria in 1869. I have used the 2003 abridged edition. 45 recognised once more as a pillar of autocracy, thus crucial to the state and key to its future. It is in those pro-gentry elements that none other than Bestuzhev-Ryumin found the merits of Danilevskii’s when working with A. A. Kraevskii on the moderately slavophile Otechestvennye Zapiski.115 The zapiski feature largely positive accounts of the gentry’s function in the provinces and generally seem badly disposed towards their dispossession. Bestuzhev-Ryumin’s reading of Danilevskii was combined with his allowing for ideological exchanges with the West, but more importantly for exchanges the provincials could profit from. This understanding of the gentry as a ‘malleable mass’ of provincial landowners was by this time obsolete. Sadly, Bestuzhev-Ruymin’s most exalted pupil became convinced (quite wrongly) that he was perfectly attuned with the political reality in the provinces. As a matter of fact, it may be possible to read something of Bestuzhev-Ruymin’s rendering of the gentry in the Land Captains statute enacted by said pupil, Alexander III.

On a more profane level, the bulk of late nineteenth-century studies, not only those of Bestuzhev-Ryumin’s but those of the Petersburg school in general, engendered the collection and publication of primary sources. The hosts of materialy published throughout the 1860s 1870s and 1880s, alongside the preponderance of local histories and the historians’ choice of subject-matter for their studies (land reform, zemstva, administration, etc.) point to the existence of an agitated academic eager to profit from the opportunity (extended by Alexander II) to join in the debate on ‘national affairs’, which in Russia unequivocally translates into ‘seeking an optimum path to modernity’.116 Naturally, the land question ranked high among the considerations of those who joined the debate. In turn, the role of provincial landowners fell well within the scope of any discussion on future land reform. In order to bolster their arguments and make provisions for a truly informed discussion, historians and institutions published materials, particularly during the short-lived honeymoon between society

115 N. Cornwell, V. F. Odoevsky: His Life, Times and Milieu, London, 2015, 18 passim. 116 D. P. Gavrilov (ed.), Svedeniia o sushchestvuishchem poriadke i sposobakh otpravleniia natural’nykh zemskikh povinnostei v tsentral’nykh guberniakh imperii, SPb., 1862; Ministry of Internal Affairs, Materialy po zemskomu obshchestvennomu ustroistvu (Polozhenie o zemskikh uchrezhdeniiakh), in 2 vols., SPb., 1885-6; A. I. Skrebitskii (ed.), Krest’ianskoe delo v tsarstvovanie Imperatora Alexandra II. Materialy dlia istorii osvobozhdeniia krestian, in 4 vols., Bonn, 1862-8; A. V. Romanovich-Slavatinskii, Dvorianstvo v Rossii ot nachala XVIII veka do otmeny krepostnogo prava, Kiev, 1912; N. I. Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva za sorok let, in 3 vols., SPb., 1900-1911; P. Zelenyi, ‘Khersonskoe dvorianstvo i Khersonskaia guberniia v 1862-m godu’, Severnyi Vestnik, viii (1889); A. V. Polezhaev, ‘O gubernskom nazore’, Zhurnal Ministerstva Iiustitsii v (1859). 46 and the crown. The zemstva, for example, were as eager as the historical societies to publish their proceedings, at least before imperial authorities put an end to the practice.117 As is only to be expected, any public forays into a theoretical plane where Russia is ruled by a less autocratic political system peter out following the Karakozov attempt,118 but there is ample evidence of an ongoing academic debate on the nature of power and alternatives to absolutism, which lasted well into the reign of Nicholas II.119 A case in point is the 1911 six-volume Great Reform [in the singular], published in Moscow to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Statutes. The last of its (pre-revolutionary) kind, it contained contributions by many renowned scholars. 120

Allowance should be made, finally, for the role played by historians in provincial politics of the time. These exchanges certainly impacted upon political life in the Russian province, for they were certainly known there. Although government intervention to stop the spread of ‘seditious’ ideas can by no means be discounted, studies published as early as the 1960s have shown that the infamous Third Section, ‘the talk of Europe’ according to Professor Starr, was not at all effective in suppressing free and independent thought before the end products of said thought reached the censor’s office.121 Petrashevsky’s liberal Petersburg salon may have been the most famous of its kind (largely due to the patronage of such influential figures as Kiselev),122 but it was by no means the only intellectual hotspot in the capitals, let alone the country.

117 C. Timberlake, ‘The Leningrad Collection of Zemstvo Publications’, SR xxvi (1967), 474-478. Timberlake was the first to draw attention to the zemstvo publications as a valuable primary source. 118 C. Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism, Ithaca, N. Y., 2009. Verhoeven develops an intriguing discussion on the long-term impact of this attempt ot the life of Alexander II and the feedback cycle between conservative retrenchment and radicalism it the second half of the nineteenth century. 119 See the chapter on the decline of reformist thought in Starr, Decentralisation, 336-347. 120 A. K. Dzhivelego et al. (eds.), Velikaia Reforma: Russkoe obshchestvo i krest’ianskii vopros v proshlom i nastoiashchem, in 6 vols., M., 1911. 121 Starr, op. cit., 46. See for example, the work of Robert J. Abbott on police reform, both in his unpublished PhD thesis, made available by Stanford University Press in photocopied typescript (‘Police Reform in Russia, 1858-1878’) and his article ‘Police Reform in the Russian Province of Yaroslavl, 1856- 1876’, SR xxxii (1973), 292-302. 122 J. L. Evans, The Petraševskij Circle 1845-1849, The Hague, 1974, 6 passim. 47

Homo nobilis – Definition and stratification of nobility in rural Russia The Svod Zakonov – or ‘Digest of Laws’ – which constituted the only legal framework for establishing social hierarchy in the Russian Empire, defines both what is dvorianstvo as well as the criteria for admission:

The noble dignity stems from the qualities and virtues of those ancient men who distinguished themselves by meritorious service, often turning service itself into a merit, and earned the appellation of ‘nobleman’. Nobility may derive by virtue of one’s ancestry, or by the Grace of the Monarch.123

Brockhaus and Efron’s encyclopaedic dictionary gives a more prosaic definition: Nobility is the ‘highest ruling class, and its standing is based on service to the state’.124 The law also laid out three paths to ennoblement: (i) by Imperial Decree (ii) by attainment of a specific rank in service to the state,125 and (iii) by induction into any one of three Imperial Orders of Chivalry. In theory, the dvorianstvo were the only social class legally allowed to own populated estates.126 It follows that landownership – and more specifically serf ownership – were inextricably intertwined with the gentry’s very raison d’ être. In sharp contrast to many other facets of noble life, this at least was crystal-clear; landownership was the defining characteristic of class appurtenance. In almost every aspect of Russia’s political and cultural life there was no common denominator – no ‘noble party’ as such.127

The composition of Russia’s hereditary nobility generally followed West-European patterns in its evolution from noblesse d’ epée to noblesse de robe with a few major differences. Autocracy meant that the monarch could elevate whomsoever (s)he pleased, when (s)he pleased. But there were certain customs and traditions that needed to be observed in order to maintain the dignity of the noble estate. Apart from elevation to princely status, which is an altogether different and rather complicated

123 PSZ 1857, vol. IX, b. 1, s. 1. I have approximated the translation to reflect the use of contemporary English grammar and syntax. 124 F. A. Brokgauz and I. A. Efron, Entsiklopeditskii slovar’, vol. X, SPb., 1893, 203. 125 This only applies to the first two branches of the Table of Ranks. Court service was a prerogative of the nobility to begin with. 126 The astute city-dwelling merchant or bureaucrat would always find ways around these nominal restrictions. Even so, they could hardly own fully-fledged estates with their own micro-economies. 127 The remonstrations forcing Anna Ivanovna to revoke Peter the Great’s Single Inheritance Law almost as soon as she came to power is proof enough that on this matter at least there was a large degree of class coherence and cohesion. M. L. Marrese, A Woman’s Kingdom: Noblewomen and the Control of Property in Russia 1700-1861, Ithaca and London, 2002, 30-31. 48 matter,128 Emperors at first felt obliged to follow Peter the Great’s example in insisting upon the prerequisite of state service. The downside to this was that with the expansion of the civil service throughout the nineteenth century, by the time of Alexander II’s ascension, there was already a glut in the ‘waiting room’ to hereditary status, namely ranks XIV through VIII. In 1856, therefore, the government increased the threshold to rank VI for armed forces ranks and the rank V for the civil service.129 Again, in theory it was possible to achieve hereditary status as a recipient of the Orders of St. George, St. Vladimir, St. Anne I Class, St. Stanislav I Class, or the White Eagle (for Polish subjects) but such exalted honours were seldom awarded directly. In the future, criteria would become even more stringent. As of 1887, for example, recipients of the Order of St. Vladimir I class would need at least 20 years in the service.

Aspects of noble landownership, for example the legal integration of pomest’e and votchina, remained constant throughout its pre-revolutionary history. ‘Class’ was distinct from ‘social category’: one was rather fluid; the other not at all.130 The blurring of class boundaries is an interesting social phenomenon – it would almost seem that self-promotion was the order of the day, so much so that keeping within one’s own stratum was a dictate mostly honoured in the breach than the observance. Within the ‘social category’ of dvorianstvo (which was not the preferred nomenclature of contemporary observers), there are different ‘classes’ of landowners – petty, middling, and latifundists. Watersheds between those exist only because they need to exist for statistical purposes; there is no practical way of accounting for the myriads of micro- differences in status (much less perceived differences) both within strata and between strata.

In the 1860s and 1870s, even as the social fabric of Russia was being fractured by reform, nobility came to rely upon the minutiae of caste gradation as some sort of psychological crutch, a consolation for their lost privileges. A. P. Korelin would

128 Not to mention it bestowed no real advantages of rank. 129 The conversion of military to civil rank usually took place with a rank bonus. After the 1856 reform, these ranks were Polkovnik/Kapitan I ranga in the military, and Statskii Sovetnik in the civil service. Appointment to the court followed its own system and laws and was only nominally included in the Table of Ranks. Positions in the latter were granted almost ad hoc. All ranks will appear in the text hereafter in Roman numerals and in parentheses. 130 Confino, Domaines, 12; E. K. Wirtschafter, ‘Social categories in Russian Imperial History’, CMRS l (2009), 231-250. 49 describe these minutiae in great detail: According to Russian law, the use of honorary titles was restricted to: a. The descendants of ancient Russian and Lithuanian princely families b. The descendants of those raised to hereditary from personal nobility by Russian Emperors as well as some descendants of noble birth in the Caucasus region c. Those specially awarded a title by Russian Emperors d. Those granted permission by the Emperor to use an honorary title awarded by a foreign state. Titles were divided in descending order from prince to count to baron. Naturally, counts often strived to be elevated to princely status. Such an elevation could initially happen only by means of foreign intervention.131 By itself, a hereditary title did not accord any de jure privileges, but it did provide a valuable advantage for state service careerists. According to the Russian tradition of gavelkind inheritance, titles were inherited by all direct descendants, whereas daughters getting married lost their fathers’ titles and gained titles jure uxoris.

In the post-emancipation period, recipients of honours were only seldom given rights to landownership, and by the end of Alexander II’s reign, land grants associated with noble entitlement had altogether ceased. During this time, titles lost their ancient feudal overtones and gradually came to be regarded as signs of personal distinction in service to the state. The disassociation of land from title at the most basic level may have been a postreform necessity for small-time landowners, but in no way did it bring about a democratisation of honours at the higher levels. If anything, the criteria with which the latter were awarded continuously hardened.132 The Orders, when displayed on official attire, were only one of the outward signs of nobility. Another was the personal and/or family coat of arms.133

The problem with medals and coats of arms was that the former could not be worn all the time (except by explicit permission of the Emperor), and the latter were only visible on carriages, buildings, standards and seals. Uniform was a more potent and poignant

131 Russian Emperors would turn to their ‘cousins’ in the West as by law and custom princely status was limited to a set category of individuals. This was one of the few gifts that were not in the monarch’s power to give. Once awarded the title, the bearer was then granted permission by the Russian Emperor to use it within Russia. Potemkin is perhaps the most famous example of such a case. 132 A. A. Planson, (O Dvorianstve Rossii: sovremennoe polozhenie voprosa, SPb., 1893) voices serious concerns on what these restrictions would mean for the nobility. For Planson, civil ranks and honours had lost all meaning. He argued that the practice of incorporating them in one’s signature had abated, and that far too many of them were given to provincial gentry. 133 These are discussed in more detail in page 165. 50 status symbol. When one considers the special veneration with which uniform was regarded in the Russian and the fact that the wearing of it was in most cases obligatory, the uniform becomes all the more important. Pupils in secondary and students in higher education had to wear uniforms, and so did all ranked officials. Noblemen had their own ‘civil’ uniforms for everyday wear which had to be tailored according to a specific pattern: A dark green polukaftan with a red woollen collar and cuffs embroidered with gold thread for rank and status. Buttons had to be bright and made of metal. Upon them would be embossed the gerb of the noble’s home province, as well as its full name underneath an imperial crown. Altogether, the wearer of such a uniform was readily identified as a ‘man of the court’, a dvorianin.

Non-noble civil servants aspiring to promotion also wore uniforms even when not performing official duties. This was believed to be an outward sign of dedication and loyalty, and therefore registered well with their superiors. In this case, however, the uniforms were a lot simpler and unadorned – no embroidery, no fancy buttons and – above all – if they had a sword, they were absolutely forbidden from adorning its guard with a lanyard.134 The best these underlings could hope for is cold weather, for they still had the right to wear the polukaftan with their provincial colours. There was no way one would confuse a nobleman’s uniform with that of a non-noble public servant. By the mid-nineteenth century, uniform had become an important signifier of status and much sought-after privilege; indeed, permission to wear it in retirement was considered a unique mark of honour and described as such in noblemen’s biographical notes. The various elements of a uniform passed many shades of meaning and indicated not only the position of an individual in society but also their general status with relation to their peers, a defining factor of social psychology. Uniform was an emblem.

134 Interestingly, there is – at the time of writing – no complete study of the powerful symbolism embodied in Russian military and civilian uniforms in English. This forces me to make an informed assumption as to the reason behind this quaint restriction. The lanyard’s original use was purely practical – it secured the sword to the bearer’s wrist and forearm. An officer’s, ergo nobleman’s, sword was only to be handed in to signify surrender. It follows that only an officer’s sword merits the protection offered by a lanyard. Lower-ranking soldiers did not have to worry, as the loss of their swords was bereft of symbolism. Attaching a lanyard to the sword’s guard indicates the bearer is of officer rank, ergo noble status. One implied the other and vice versa. 51

Uniform denoted social standing. It did not, however, necessarily indicate privilege. For status and privilege were two entirely different things in Imperial Russia. There was no question, for example, that a nominally lower-ranking noble in military service had precedence over a peer in the civil service.135 Even the complete ‘name’ of the Table holds a clue as to the precedence of military over civil service: ‘Table of ranks of all grades [in the] military, civil and court [branches of government]’. Military officers transitioning to civil service (normally because of advanced age or physical incapacitation) automatically received the next higher rank. This preferential treatment of the military had deep roots into Russia’s feudal past. The military had always been the pillar and pride of the Russian state, especially so after the Great Patriotic War of 1812, and a military career was the primary and worthiest occupation for a gentleman of rank. As a social element, the military existed organically in the realms of literature and art, in everyday life itself.

The government’s penchant for the military and the resulting predilection for a rigid, military-like administrational structure, as well as the universal acclaim the military uniform was met with in social circles, were all due to a variety of factors. Firstly, absolute obedience to one’s superiors was considered a virtue in Imperial Russia. Russian Emperors considered themselves first and foremost military men, their education having heavily focused on military affairs. Their boyhoods and teenagehoods were defined by the rhythms of military life. Male Romanovs were encouraged from an early stage to regard the army as the ideal organisational prototype, a model for the state, while their aesthetic predilections had been shaped under the influence of endless parades and military displays. No Russian Emperor ever wore civilian clothes unless he was travelling abroad incognito.136 The second reason behind this emphasis on the military was the image of a commanding officer who is dynamic, resourceful but does not argue with his superiors. This ‘ideal’ social figure

135 The first rank in Civil Service was the only exception. Reserved for the Chancellor and unattainable by anyone else, it stood practically removed from the rest of the hierarchy. Its military counterpart, the rank of Field Marshal, was not awarded frequently. With the exception of Grand Dukes Nicholas Nikolaevich the Elder and Mikhail Nikolaevich, who were made Field Marshals by virtue of their position as members of the Imperial Family, only four nobles would be awarded a marshal’s baton between emancipation and 1912. During Alexander II’s reign, three non-royals were named Field Marshals (a Vorontsov, a Bariatinsky and a von Berg). 136 Here one can clearly see the kernel of what Cornelius Castoriades termed the ‘stratocratic’ nature of Russian society in the twentieth century. See C. Castoriades, Socialisme ou Barbarie, Paris, 2007; idem, Devant la Guerre, Tome 1: Les réalités , Paris, 1981, 72. 52 was perceived as the most reliable and was actively projected to civil employees. Ironically, it was mostly such ‘model’ individuals who participated in the planning of the government policies during the prereform period. According to S. V. Mironenko, they generally tended toward the militarisation of the government apparatus.137

Emancipation and the nobility or emancipation of the nobility? Life in the Russian province was conditioned upon two overlocking sets of symbiotic relationships (serf landowner  autocrat). Emancipation and land reform would affect them both, but nowhere near to a similar extent. Of interest to this study are intraclass variations in responding to the sudden onslaught of market forces brought about by the advent of a serfless economy.138 Landowners translated reform into a call by ‘the powers of modernity’; as a result, they endeavoured to modernise their estates by streamlining agricultural and industrial production. Russia’s great landowning families utilised their considerable capital to carry entire uezds139 with them into the age of capitalism. Their influence in local communes was so strong, Engelhardt argues, that they convinced entire segments of the population to abandon their traditional division of the farming year and adopt a new system of seasons based on the latest agronomical treatises from Europe and the universities.140 Many of their middling brethren, who are the focus of this study, would follow suit; either by hanging emulating their latifundist neighbours or by forming co-ventures with ambitious up- and-coming bourgeois businessmen.

Despite their obvious contribution to economic development, however, the middling section of landowning nobility has received little sympathy from historians. The major assumption concerning the middling landowner is that (s)he is guided by pure economic self-interest and despite all evidence against the wisdom of doing so,

137 Mironenko, op. cit. Some government departments were completely militarised (mountains, forests, communications). In local administration, militarisation progressed apace in the first half of the century; by the end of Nicholas I’s reign, 41 out of 53 provinces had military governors. 138 R. E. Jones, Emancipation of the Russian Nobility, 1762-1785, Princeton, N. J., 1973. Jones describes these social fissions as typical of Russia’s feudal social character. There is no doubt that intraclass stratification was a defining characteristic of the nobility. Or, as Witschafter (‘Categories’, 241) argued, ‘historians [recognise] that the legally defined categories of Russian Imperial Society [do] not necessarily correspond to social and economic facts’. In G. M. Hamburg’s Politics, we see instead evidence of a substantial and dynamic debate among provincial nobility on the topic of this new proto- capitalist society. 139 Administrative subdivision of the province. 140 Engelhardt, Iz derevni, 49. 53 continues to spend mindlessly on maintaining status. This spending, we are told, is orthogonal to estate solvency or the prices of goods.141 Indeed, even the most cursory look into estate accounts should suffice to convince one that the average landowner did, in fact, spent an exorbitant amount of funds – funds he only held on credit to boot – on lifestyle. I would argue that there is a major misunderstanding here, caused by projecting our values onto a nineteenth-century society. Spending on status was caused by reasons running a lot deeper than superficial and fitful pride. On the contrary, for the middling nobleman aesthetics were all-important; an expression of taste, to be sure, but also of erudition, cultivation, influence, and the ability to maintain a network of acquaintances that would help him and his family survive the ‘apocalyptic’ reforms. In nuce, spending on lifestyle and status should be seen a reinvestment in the human and real-estate capital with the purpose of augmenting either or both in the near future. Herein lies the integral importance of ‘hidden’ social networks.

There can be little doubt that the middling landowner embarked on this mission from a disadvantage. He could not rely on economies of scale like his latifundist counterpart and, more often than not, his estates would have been collateralised at some point before 1858. On the other hand, he could form various alliances which, if successful, would yield considerable benefits in the fulness of time; these included shares in ventures or industrial works, capital in the form of dowry, ‘interest-free’ loans from network members, etc.142 It is important to point out that opportunities for such manoeuvring were not limited to the great urban centres but abounded in the countryside as well. The former suffered from an over-abundance of capitalist enterprises feeding off foreign and domestic trade and catering to domestic consumption.143 The provinces, on the other hand, provided ample opportunity for investment in modernisation. Naturally, the extent to which landowners in these provinces were ready to embrace modernity cannot be known with any degree of

141 Markevich and Zhuravskaya, ‘Economic effects’, 1091. 142 V. I. Bovykin, Formirovanie, 107 passim. An excellent discussion on commercial dynamics during this period can be found in W. C. Brumfield, B. V. Anan’ich, Iu. A. Petrov (eds.), Commerce in Russian Urban Culture, 1861-1914, Baltimore and London, 2001. 143 For example, according to M. A. Salishchev’s ‘Lidery’ the entrepreneurial nobility of St. Petersburg (i.e. shareholding nobles in capitalist ventures) accounted for only 18% of total shareholders and even less of the management tier during the 1870s and 1880s. 54 certainty. All we have to go on is evidence of those who took steps to modernise their estates, or at least discussed doing so in friendly circles.

The disparity between those who wanted to modernise and those who did not came from the pitiless forces of the newly-minted labour and real-estate markets. We can be sure that most provincials did not, in fact, modernise – but that does not necessarily mean that many of them did not wish to modernise. Capitalism does not forgive the weak; estates that had remained in the same family for countless generations were lost almost overnight, while an erstwhile ‘benevolent’ government that had extended credit for decades did so no more. Now that the serfs had been freed, the argument goes – and there was a solid bureaucratic structure to keep them in check – the nobility’s policing services of the nobility were no longer required. Therefore, the government had no incentive to continue collateralising noble estates, especially now that they came without any human capital to work them.144 The only recourse was to look to the past for some sort of understanding that would be acceptable by the peasants working the land and would ensure that landowners enjoyed some degree of financial stability. Polovnichestvo was not at all different to similar understandings under serfdom, a fact not lost to agronomists at the time.145

From a sociological perspective, structure and agency in the emancipatory process are discussed in an entirely different manner. With the influence of structure in gentry affairs clearly delineated ab initio, the key question facing scholars of Russia’s long nineteenth century is that of agency. Whereas no study of emancipation can lay claim to comprehensiveness if the gentry’s position and role is not at least considered, the degree of agency awarded Russia’s provincial landowners is invariably small, or moderate in the best of cases. What is certain is that at some point in time in the early twentieth century, the transformation of Russian gentry into a social corpus without any salient recognisable political influence was complete. The Gubernskie Vedomosti are replete with auction notices: By 1905, the cherry orchard has gone up for sale.146

144 R. V. Fedoseev, ‘Dvorianskoe khoziaistvo Penzenskoi gubernii vo vtoroi polovine XIX – nachale XX veka: ot pomset’ia k ekonomii’, PhD thesis, Saransk, 2007, 19-20. Land usage and fluctuations in estate size are discussed in detail in Chapter II. 145 Trudy Imperatorskogo Vol’nogo Ekonomicheskogo Obshchestva, 1866, vol. 4, 158. 146 This casts doubt on Hamburg’s chronology. TGV (1882-1905) show an average monthly increase of 7.3%, with the minimum being 2.3% between February and April 1884, and the maximum being 12% between September and October 1897. 55

Within this process of change, the contribution of middling nobility to Russia’s modernisation is often side-stepped. This is not because the middling nobles are underrepresented in the primary sources or indeed as models for the copious artistic- literary production of the Silver Age. Daniel Field, for example, described how landowners and imperial advisers managed to hammer out a viable arrangement for emancipation. In this description, he comes down quite definitively on the side of the government which, although not having gone as far as browbeating the landowners, certainly got its way on every step of the legislative process between 1858 and 1863. For Field, this was simply a result of the government’s stranglehold over the nobility as their creditor. Regardless of the number of associations, institutions and societies set up in the provinces to aid landowners fallen on hard times, the nobility was largely dependent upon government-issued loans.147

Yet if it were a simple matter of the government inadvertently having lulled the gentry into a false sense of security and caused, however unwittingly, their political ‘stupor’, this surely would have led to a much different outcome in the Editing Commission. Its final draft, which would eventually become law in February 1861, to say nothing of the stark reality that followed it, did in fact incorporate gentry submissions and did much to allay the fears of conservatives.148 It is hard to imagine that bureaucrats under Lanskoy would have gone to such extensive lengths in pacifying an already ‘passive’ nobility. Having said that, Field’s detailed analysis is hard to criticise, and the decision- making process that led to emancipation lies without the scope of the present study. Suffice it to say, therefore, that he could have allowed for a more active role by the gentry. Field, who was not a trained statistician, showed propensity towards quantitative work and thus favoured monographs over other secondary sources.149 He

147 See D. Field’s chapter ‘The “Great Reforms” of the 1860s’ in A. Gleason (ed.), A Companion to Russian History, Hodoken, N. J., 2014, 196-209. If ‘modernity’ is synonym to ‘Westernisation’ (which is a doubtful proposition), then ironically by trying to ‘westernise’ the country the government reinforced rather than reduced political apathy. A. Kahan made a similar point in A. Kahan, ‘The Costs of “Westernisation” in Russia: The Gentry and the Economy in the Eighteenth Century’, SR (1996), 40- 66. 148 Khristoforov, makes this point throughout Sud’ba. 149 For example, B. N. Mironov Istoriia v tsifrakh: Matematika v istoricheskikh issledovaniiakh, Leningrad, 1991 and L. V. Milov, Issledovanie ob ‘Ekonomicheskikh primechaniiakh’ k general’nomu mezhevaniiu: K istorii russkogo krest’ianstva i sel’skogo khoziaistva vtoroi poloviny XVIII v., M. 1965. Field, whose End of Serfdom was based on his Harvard PhD thesis (1969), augmented his source pool for the 1976 edition. 56 departed from earlier historiographical traditions that focused mostly on the post- emancipation peasantry and produced, for the first time, an account of how bureaucrats and gentry conceived of – and applied – the principal legislation of reform. Yet for all his minute detail on such topics as the composition of legislative committees and the corps of Peace Mediators, his ‘engineering of assent’ translates more easily into ‘engineering of consent’. Too much emphasis is placed on the higher, exalted echelons of society during the decision-making process, whereas pre- emancipation abolitionist groups (e.g. lower state officials, private individuals, career favour-seekers) are given perhaps too much credit.

At the heart of Field’s arguments lay his agreement with Herzen, who pointed out that nobility should forget about the autocracy’s dependence on them and think of their own dependency on the autocracy instead. There is considerable evidence to the effect that a sizeable number of provincial landowners had lost faith in serfdom, or to put it in Struve’s terms, gentry subscribed to the notion that ownership of a body was a morally bankrupt concept.150 Yet Daniel Field’s insistence upon a ‘perceived’ rather than pragmatic financial crisis seems to imply the exact opposite, which is rather counter-intuitive and unnecessarily definitive. Could Field have come to this conclusion by overcompensating for his secondary sources’ Marxist compulsions and trying to guide the debate away from economics? It is entirely possible.

If most scholarly analyses of the emancipation and the gentry suffer from chronological or thematic limitations, the opposite is true for the late W. Bruce Lincoln’s synthesis of the Reform Era in its latest manifestation a full twenty-five years since he first submitted it in ‘dissertation’ form.151 It is perhaps, too wide-reaching. Lincoln took the existence of strong ideological currents throughout European Russia as a given, and maybe rightly so. But did the gentry have a highly schematised view of Russian economic history, as he seems to suggest? Regardless, though his overview touches only tangentially upon provincial gentry (focusing instead on ideological factors playing a part in decision-making at the very centre), he established that political debates took place in the provinces. Moreover, he successfully argued that

150 As outlined in N. Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the Democratic and Social Revolutions, vol. 2, Chicago, 1978, 315. 151 W. B. Lincoln, The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia, DeKalb, Il., 1990. 57 these debates were also the product of earnest ideological fermentation. His penchant for using poorly defined terms (‘Right’, ‘Left’, etc., to say nothing of his idiosyncratic translation of ‘glaznost’’) notwithstanding, Lincoln set the stage beautifully.

Aside from the issue of whether provincials were an apolitical, apathetic social stratum which fell victim to its own lethargy, there remains, on a second level of analysis, the question of class homogeneity and cohesion. Indeed, choosing 1861 as the endpoint of Russian nobility is problematic; Gary Hamburg’s monograph152 on noble politics in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century is based on the premise that Alexander II’s assassination inaugurated a process of class rivalry between nobility and other strata. Despite his unchallengeable mastery of secondary sources and insightful knowledge of scholarly debate on the topic, Hamburg fails to argue convincingly why the ‘crucial period’ was the 1880s, rather than during the more politically active period preceding it. He described an ongoing process of class erosion within the context of a systemic shift away from the feudal-absolutist structure towards a proto-bourgeois society, accelerated by the emancipation. Extended to its logical conclusion, this process would also signify the beginning of the end for the Russian gentry in 1861, with the last of the nobility ‘dying off’ in the early days of the twentieth century.

Furthermore, Hamburg does not consider the retrenchment of provincial nobles around latifundists occurring as the world agrarian crisis deepened. One could argue that by 1881, gentry was ‘corralled’ into largely reactionary positions by virtue of economic adversity both in an absolute and in a comparative sense. Even as many landowners were forced to leave their lands behind and pursue an altogether different lifestyle, successful bourgeois and former peasants were transforming provincial agricultural models of production to the effect of denuding them from any element of ‘locality’; estates coming into their hands no longer had ‘personality’; there was no ‘patina’ from successive generations of owners – estates were now naught but businesses crowned by manorhouses whose sole aim was to display wealth. Hamburg’s

152 G. M. Hamburg, Politics of the Russian Nobility, 1881-1905, New Brunswick, N. J., 1984.

58 chronology makes one consider whether his inferences regarding class structure are the result of his close association with Zaionchovskii/Zakharova group.153

Much in the same vein, Terrence Emmons’s narrative of ideological diffusion insists upon ‘perceptions’ to the detriment of social or economic factors actively being considered by the gentry as part of a conscious, politicised, decision-making process.154 Emmons, at least, did not argue for an entirely passive stance, a corpus of landowners quietly submitting to their new bureaucratic overlords. There can be little doubt that alongside Gary Hamburg and Daniel Field, Emmons made a significant contribution to the debate on the nobility’s stance on emancipation with his discussion primarily a ‘party’ of liberal gentry based in Tver. His work is, however, limited in its geographical scope. On the other hand, Emmons was all too aware of ‘unofficial’ politics, undercurrents of thought influencing how local gentry conceived of emancipation. But it is also worth exploring several other issues: (1) How alliances are formed (and dissolved) among gentry; (2) how does gentry almost entirely dependent on agriculture deal with the end of free labour; and (3) is it possible to trace political regroupings and breakups without having access to primary sources for each and every member of a group.

Arguably, in seeking theoretical foundations for a discussion on gentry politics in the nineteenth century, one had better look to the German academia and – as of the 1970s and 1980s – its American offshoots. The end product was less ‘grass-roots history’ (of the Annales type) and more a strangely mixed institutional history of Russian society. Appropriately enough, the American academia’s encounter with Hegelianism in its most unadulterated form155 seems to echo a similar shift that had taken place long before, in Nicholaevan Petersburg. Neo-Hegelianist influences in twentieth-century scholarship on nineteenth-century Russia allowed for the retroactive excision of nationalist conservatism from the body politic. In other words, pre-reform Russian

153 I believe he first became acquainted with them as a young student abroad in the early 1970s. He certainly collaborated with the former on the publication of Russian Autocracy in Crisis at the end of the decade. 154 T. Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861, New York, N. Y., 1968. 155 I am referring here to the concept of ‘directed history’, more specifically directed towards human freedom, the interplay between ‘objective history’ and self-realisation and the narrative stages leading from A to B. 59 society is discussed within a historiographical framework where individual ‘stages’ of social ‘evolution’ can be isolated, dissected, analysed at length – with the ‘grand narrative’ becoming more and more a thing of the past.

This conception is universally applied and understood since it appeared in the early 1990s. Its early drive was accelerated by a persistent fascination with the emergence of a civil society in the era of perestroika and by ‘easy’ causal links with earlier liberal and émigré historiography, structured around a fundamental opposition between obshchestvennost’ and vlast’.156 Including obshchestvennost’ as part of this duality also meant bringing into sharp focus the nobility. American historians in particular showed interest in noble politics and a concern with reform as an alternative to revolution, which led them to question past assumptions.157 At the same time, within a branch of history dedicated to the study of economic models there grew a lively discussion over ‘proto-industrialisation’ and the establishment of a historically valid pattern for Russia’s economic development (namely whether it could be better understood in terms of gradual change or sharp discontinuities). The gentry is of great importance in this debate, both as an agent of industrialisation and a ‘victim’ of economic development along capitalist lines.158

Soviet academia pursued an altogether different course. Soviet scholars were interested in showing how a Marxist regime is born out of privation and oppression suffered by Russia’s peasantry. This in turn entailed studying in minute detail the birth and development of ‘progressive’ thoughts, political movements and liberal intellectual currents. Class struggle features heavily in Soviet analyses, as do the perceived origins of a ‘peasant movement’. Still, a twenty-first century historian

156 In this context, ‘society’ and ‘power’ respectively. 157 One example is R. O. Crummey (ed.), Reform in Russia and the USSR: Past and Prospects, Urbana Ill., 1989. The volume is the product of a conference held at the University of Michigan in April 1986. Another conference on reform in modern Russian history was held at the Kennan Institute in Washington, DC, in 1990. Yet another, on middle-class identity in late Imperial Russia, was held at Purdue University in 1989 and resulted in a volume edited by E. W. Clowes, S. D. Kassow, and J. L. West, Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, Princeton, N. J., 1991. 158 The idea that ‘industrialisation’ was only made possible after emancipation was challenged as early as 1985: R. L. Rudolph, ‘Agricultural Structure and Proto-Industrialization in Russia: Economic Development With Unfree Labor’, JEH xlv (1985), 47-69. Here too the peasants rather than the gentry are seen as the main driving force behind industrialisation. Also E. Melton. ‘Proto-industrialisation, serf agriculture and agrarian social structure: Two estates in nineteenth-century Russia, PP cxv (1987), 69- 106. 60 looking at the Great Reforms can profit greatly by drawing on Soviet sources and their extensive body of evidence and data relating to the economic activities of peasants and landowners alike, economic activities being of particular significance for the Marxist concept of history. An interesting by-product of Soviet preoccupation with class that has not received its share of much-merited academic attention in the West is a seemingly obsessive neo-scholastic insistence upon periodisation, inherited by modern scholars regardless of political predilections and ideological provenance.159

Admittedly, from the nobility’s perspective, reforms were ineffective in radically altering inter-class relations. Stratification remained in place, and the lower classes only received nominal legal status. This is why the peasantry has commanded so much attention in the historiography of the post-emancipation period.160 Only a handful of historians have insisted upon the importance of provincial nobility: Michael Confino’s landmark study in 1968 effectively paved the way for a complete reappraisal of noble- state relations in late nineteenth-century Russia. He argued that while historians had focussed upon the Statutes of 1861, the economic and social status of nobles had already begun to change in the late eighteenth century.161 And yet, his grass-roots research (under the direction of Roger Portal) has not been taken up by later historians at the Institute of Slavic Studies in Paris. Data on the financial standing of post- emancipation nobility incorporated in this thesis is primarily analysed based on Confino’s methodology.

This study is also partly informed by carefully crafted panoramas of nineteenth- century Russian society by V. A. Aleksandrov and A. M. Anfimov, whose notable efforts

159 For Soviet historiography of the Great Reforms until the 1960s, cf. B. G. Litvak, ‘Sovetskaia istoriografiia reformy 19 fevralia 1861 goda’, Istoriia SSSR (November-December 1960), 99-120 and A. Zaionchkovskii, ‘Sovetskaia istoriografiia reformy 1861 goda’, Voprosy Istorii ii (1961), 85-104. See also Daniel Field’s ‘The Reforms of the 1860s’, in S. H. Baron and N. Heer (eds.), Windows on the Russian Past, Columbus, Oh., 1977, 89-140. For ‘neo-scholastic periodisation’, see the opening remarks of Terence Emmons to his translation of Zaionchkovskii’s Otmena krepostnogo prava, entitled The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, Gulf Breeze, Fl., 1978, viii-x. A passing remark is also made in Gleason, op. cit., 3, but no discussion follows. For periodisation and Russian scholars, see Smith-Peter’s review of S. A. Kozlov Agrarnye traditsii, in Kritika iv (2003), 985-990; incidentally, in the first page of the review, the title is rendered mistakenly as ‘Agrarian Tradition and Innovation in pre-Reform Russia (the Central Non-Black Earth Provinces)’. 160 See for example, S. L. Hoch, ‘Did Russia’s emancipated serfs really pay too much for too little land? Statistical anomalies and long-tailed discussions’, SR lxiii (2004), 247-274. 161 M. Confino, Domaines et Seigneurs en Russie vers la fin du XVIIe siècle: Etudes de structures agraires et de mentalités économiques, Paris, 1963; idem, Systèmes agraires et progrès Agricole : L’ assolement triennal en Russie aux VIII-XIX siècles, Paris & The Hague, 1969. 61 concentrated on the everyday life of provincial landowners and peasants alike.162 Less fundamental but worthy of mention are Hoch’s work on anthropometric figures, which reflect an ‘Annales’-style penchant for sociological microscopy.163 Although the Annales scholars did not produce easily generalisable results, they established a novel methodology for archival research, well-adapted to the exigencies of federal and local archives in Russia. There can be little doubt that their work is valuable to any new study, including the present one.164 As an aside, it is worth noting that precious little attention has been paid to contemporary (gentry) perceptions of the reform era as depicted in the world of art and culture. Richard Stites tried to address this oversight by producing a detailed study of serfdom in Imperial Russia165 – yet his subject-matter only takes him as far as the late 1850s and he seems to maintain that the ‘wind of change’ sweeping Russian and émigré salons during the first half of the nineteenth century was directed only towards the emancipation, which is but one of the Great Reforms.

Scholars took a keen, almost exclusive interest in the bureaucratised elements of the gentry in post-emancipation Russia, which did not dissipate until late in the twentieth century. Discussion of the gentry has taken second place to research on the lower classes and class identities, education, economy, bureaucratisation. There is at least one study that looks at liberal politics where the gentry is given an appropriate degree of agency. But even here the larger context is one of theoretical (re)positioning and the

162 V. A, Aleksandrov, Sel’skaia obshchina v Rossii (XVII-nachalo XIX v.), M., 1976. A. M. Anfimov, Krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo Evropeiskoi Rossii 1881-1904, M., 1980. Idem, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie i klassovaia bor’ba krest’ian Evropeiskoi Rossii 1881-1904gg., M., 1984. 163 Hoch, Serfdom. 164 One example is the propensity to collect and analyse anthropometric data. A direct link to the ‘Annales’ is established by historians working towards a better understanding of men following Bloch’s observations on the importance of health. Peasant anthropometrics in particular were used to discover the effects of emancipation and whether there was indeed an ‘agriculture crisis’ in the nineteenth century. This is outlined in L. Hoch, ‘Serf diet in nineteenth-century Russia’, Agricultural History lvi (1982), 391-414; also the later and more extensive article by idem, ‘On good numbers and bad: Malthus, population trends and peasant standard of living in Late Imperial Russia’, SR liii (1994), 41-75. This data was analysed in a recent edition of B. N. Mironov, The Standard of Living and Revolutions in Russia, 1700-1917, London, 2012. Another example directly linked to the countryside is the late Professor Scott Seregny’s monograph on rural teachers (Russian Teachers and Peasant Revolution: The Politics of Education 1905, Bloomington, In., 1989) later taken up and expanded in his contribution to Modernisation and Revolution: Dilemmas of Progress in Late Imperial Russia, edited by E. H. Judge and J. Y. Simms (Jr.), New York, 1992. 165 R. Stites, Serfdom, Society and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power, London, 2008. 62 evolution of ‘autochthonous’ liberal networks.166 Heide Whelan’s monograph on the crisis of autocracy attempts, in the same vein, to discuss reform and counter-reform in tandem, a tendency Whelan shared with many Soviet scholars.167 Her focus lies upon debate in the highest echelons of government. Policy-making, not everyday struggle and adaptability to a market economy, takes centre-stage. This flies in the face of logic; there is no concrete evidence to support established assumptions about a so-called ‘uninterested’, ‘apolitical’ provincial gentry. Soviet historians are not so quick to dismiss them. For example, V. G. Chernukha has successfully argued for an organised resistance movement comprised of middling landowners against communal agriculture and peasant entrepreneurship. Realising the government had little interest in regulating peasant landownership in the postreform period, they took matters into their own hands. 168

The irrationality of selfish motivation can only infer the existence of other, deeper reasons for provincial resistance. Nor can resistance to reform be easily dismissed as the fruit of a mainly conservative ideology; for conservatives and liberals alike, the regulated farming system represented a much more pleasing alternative to bourgeois society. May 1989 marked the first attempt to introduce these arguments into scholarly debate. Soviet and Western historians of Russia came together to consider reform in the context of a conference held in the University of Pennsylvania.169 Regrettably, the proceedings were published after the USSR was dissolved, causing general awkwardness all around. The editors of that volume maintained that it was ‘the first attempt to examine within a single compass the abolition of serfdom in Russia, the many other reforms associated with that historic act, and the social and economic environment with which the reforms interacted.’170 However, studies of individual reforms and at least one volume outlining the entire reform process had appeared in

166 The larger context is one of contribution – not reaction – to modernisation. A. A. Fedyashin, Liberals under Autocracy: Modernisation and Civil Society in Russia, 1866-1904, Madison, Wi., 2012; this study is based on Fedyashin’s PhD thesis, ‘Autochthonous and Practical Liberals: Vestnik Evropy and Modernisation in Late Imperial Russia’, University of Georgetown, 2007. 167 H. W. Whelan, Alexander III and the State Council: Bureaucracy and Counter-Reform in Late Imperial Russia, New Brunswick, N. J., 1982. 168 V. G. Chernukha, Krest’ianskii vorpos v pravitel’stvennoi politike Rossii (60-70 gody XIX v.), Leningrad, 1972. 169 Ben Eklof and Larissa Zakharova first discussed the idea of a conference on the Great Reforms in 1983, two years before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. B. Eklof, J. Bushnell and L. Zakharova (eds.), Russia’s Great Reforms 1855-1881, Bloomington, In., 1991. 170 Eklof, op. cit., vii. 63 print during the Cold War.171 It would have been inconceivable, after all, that the ‘most significant episode in Russian history’ between the Peter and Lenin’s revolutionary bookends would continue to occupy a historiographical vacuum following the publication of the volume edited by Ben Eklof.172

According to this analysis, then, the reforms were intended to provide a basis for participation in the process of governing and, implicitly, to limit the powers of the autocrat. They were then supposedly truncated and ultimately aborted by the militant actions of radical revolutionaries who drove the autocracy into repression and retrenchment. The assassination of Alexander II on the very day he purportedly intended to introduce constitutional limitations on autocracy, was the true ‘turning point’ of Russia’s long nineteenth century.173 Political initiative would briefly remain with the powers that be, at least until 1905, but hereafter began a process of unshackling (thereby losing control of) an increasingly itinerant ‘agricultural proletariat’. If one is to argue that reformers would have succeeded had they not been faced with an unexpected and very sharp rise in provincial population during the 1860s and 1870s, it follows that the inherent flaw of reform was not legislative or institutional in nature, but largely accidental. Accordingly, lessons learned from Russia’s pre-revolutionary history – lessons including the limitations of the zemstva and nadzor in the countryside – were flogged as healthy alternatives to the socialist system. Preoccupation with a non-Soviet, western-type to local self-administration was an ongoing theme as early as the 1980s, when the Soviet Union began to lag behind in the global economic race.174

Further evidence regarding politics in the Russian province can be gleaned from the world of arts and letters. Turgenev’s descriptions of contemporary society for example, have been minutely dissected more than once.175 But where the depiction of

171 Lincoln, The Great Reforms. 172 Eklof, op cit. 173 R. Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, New York, N. Y., 1974, 281-315. 174 V. Nardova, Gorodskoe samoupravlenie v Rossii v 60-kh – nachale 90-kh godov XIX v.: pravitel’stvennaia politika, Leningrad, 1984. This was by no means limited to Soviet historians or the Soviet period. See for example Judith Pallot, ‘The Stolypin Reform as Administrative Utopia’, in M. K. Palat (ed.), Social Identities in Revolutionary Russia, London, 2001. 175 Cf. M. Frazier, ‘Turgenev and a proliferating French Press: the feuilleton and the feuilletoniste in A Nest of the Gentry’, SR xlix (2010), 925-243; S. J. Harrison et al., ‘Turgenev’s Later political commitments: Six letters to Beesly, 1880’, SEEJ ix (1965), 400-419; E. Lieber, ‘“Pardon, Monsieur”: Civilisation and civility in Turgenev’s The Execution of Tropmann’, SR lxvi (2007), 667-681. 64 postreform class becomes a factor, historians rarely stray from the Chekhovian noble. Pivotal moments in history have always been conducive to the creation of schematic historiographies. In this respect, this study aspires to overturn these schemata, which are often accepted uncritically. Yet one should not fall into the ‘temptation of belletristics’ (as one cultural historian put it) – by rededicating oneself to ‘the toils of empirical research and rationalist analysis’.176

Despite diminished returns on the political front, the gentry maintained its main characteristics with respect to wealth, education, and culture – albeit their monopoly on all three was a thing of the past. Such characteristics conspired to invest the First Estate with a unique set of dynamic worldviews, though the existence or not of ‘class consciousness’ as such remains a matter of contention. Seymour Becker, for example, has argued that Russian nobility in the Late Imperial period was neither politically helpless nor economically hopeless.177 He links this to the establishment of the 3rd of June system almost thirty years after Alexander II’s death.178 This is an exceedingly interesting point, and approach, however telescopic. The subject matter is, after all, the ‘fate’ of an erstwhile all-powerful social class.179 Having said that, an obvious counterargument would be that Becker’s case studies were bourgeois-in-robes-of- state, bankers, bureaucrats, intelligentsia and a handful of high-profile decision- makers with provincial roots and urban upbringing.

Provincials, the backbone of Russia’s landed gentry, do not pass Becker’s muster. They cannot be held to the same exalted standards as their more adaptable, privileged brethren. They only survived thanks to Alexander III’s counter-reforms. Alexander II’s successor could not re-enserf peasants, but his reversal of the more liberal policies ensured the continued existence of class barriers. Under his reign social mobility was hindered rather than encouraged. Which is why the gentry discussed in the following

176 C. Hesse, ‘The New Empiricism’, Cultural and Social History i (2004), 201-207. 177 S. Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Imperial Russia, DeKalb, Il., 1985. 178 The Electoral Law of 1907 turned nobility into a dominant force in provincial institutions. Becker argues, quite reasonably, that their potential to act as political agents was existent almost four decades after emancipation. As well as n. 81 above, see also M. Loukianov, ‘Conservatives and “Renewed Russia”, 1907-1914, SR lxi (2002), 762-786, 762. 179 M. N. Luk’ianov, Rossiiskii konservatizm i reforma, 1907 – 1914, Perm, 2006. For the period between 1904 and 1907, R. T. Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government, Princeton, N. J., 1983; for the gentry in particular, G. S. Doctorow, ‘The Russian Gentry and the Coup d’ etat of 3 June 1907’, CMRS xvii (1976), 43-51. 65 pages – a corpus of privileged youths coming to age in a postreform world and called upon to manage serfless estates without any guidance, for none could exist – have always been regarded as disoriented, insecure, materially and ethically impoverished. They certainly came face to face with impossible choices; ultimately, they are painted as the Chekhovian ideal-type: mal du siècle, boredom, endless friction and talent wasted, mashed in the cogs of an unfeeling bureaucratic mechanism.

If the Russian historiographical corpus could fit into the general framework of the British, American and French academiae, there would probably be little need for the present study. Russian scholars have ignored the opportunities offered by network analysis, but they have produced an immense volume of statistical data. Their focus has inadvertently been the ‘region’ rather than the ‘class’. Which is why it is not only expedient but critical that a study should focus upon the region and upon the gentry, for at the time of Great Reforms the gentry was, by all accounts, the only politically relevant social category. It should therefore be considered as a primary agent of change on both political and sociocultural levels. Network analysis enables scholars to visualise and contextualise political ideology. In the case of provincial gentry, one can turn for example to certain ‘federative’ initiatives on the local level, spurred mainly by federalist/constitutionalist ideologues (and curiously supported by slavophiles), which have – until now – been deemed irrelevant to emancipation.

At the time of writing, no one has broken ground on historical network studies focused on Russian nobility. Network formation and dynamics are consistently underplayed in favour of looking at proto-politics in the countryside. ‘Pragmatic’ factors such as estate management are favoured over intra-class interactions between members of the gentry. There is no doubting the integral importance of the former, as there is no doubting that the latter was the only conduit through which ideologies could ever flow through the province. Indeed, local press in Tambov, like local press all over the Empire, reveals the considerable agitation experienced by the landowning classes in the lead-up to emancipation and reform. Landowners were restless, distracted by their provincial micro-interests and wholly given over to petty politics, which was invariably characterised by strong liberal/conservative binaries. Here too, there is historiographical precedence. Rather extensive studies of press sources have appeared 66 since 1994,180 inspiring Larissa Zakharova to speak of ‘elementary constitutionalism’ with respect to provincial gentry, and even dating the first signs thereof back to 1858.181

In view of the above, how can a quintessentially agricultural zone be so neglected in terms of the fallout from emancipation? If anything, it should have been the case study par excellence, and its gentry the control group for all gentry in European Russia. The assumption that this was a stronghold of conservatism has never been challenged, even though it cannot stand close scrutiny. The gentry were entirely dependent on their estates. Creating a socio-political map of post-emancipation Chernozem is by no means an exercise in futility; it can be done, and it should be done if only to dispel widespread assumptions concerning the gentry’s lack of class cohesion. In this respect, I have drawn extensively from kraevedenie,182 while also avoiding further engorgement of what Bloch’s inspirationally termed déchiffreur histories.183

Despite the use of prestigious appellations to describe the subject-matter of this study (such as ‘dvorianstvo’ and ‘usad’ba’), it is worth noting that this group is nowhere near as exalted and high-ranking as their peers in the court of St. Petersburg. But neither was Tambov simply a breeding ground for chinovniki184 and the new bureaucracy. Rather, Tambovians lay somewhere in between, which is why the causes and process of their politicisation merits further analysis. There is no reason why provincials should be placed in the periphery of political decision-making in the late nineteenth century, other than to comply with the spirit of nobility histories published after H. M.

180 N. M. Balatskaia and A. I. Razdorskii (eds.), Pamiatnye knizhki gubernii i oblastei Rossiiskoi Imperii: svodnyi katalog i repertuar (1830-1917), SPb., 2008. At 645 pages, this is the second edition of a far-reaching attempt to catalogue the publications. The question of local publications has also been studied by Catherine Evthuhov in Portrait. Many of her conclusions are based on an earlier (1997) paper on Gubernskie Vedomosti and Local Culture presented to the AAASS in Seattle. At the time of writing, her original paper remains unpublished. 181 Zakharova, ‘Autocracy’, 24-25. For Emmons, inversely, increasing class amorphousness was the cause of the nobility’s failure to create a viable political organisation in postreform Russia. See his contribution to I. Banac and P. Bushkovitch (eds.), The Nobility in Russia and Eastern Europe, New Haven, Ct., 1983. 182 Kraevedenie is much more than simply a Russian form of Landesgeschichte. Jurgen Reulecke and Peter Steinbach – working in the early 1980s – expressed the view that Landesgeschichte was a conscious attempt to maintain an individual state identity in the wake of Bismarck’s unification. Kraevedenie on the other hand, is clearly not the same. 183 M. Bloch, Les caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française, in 2 vols., Paris, 1952, 1956, vol. 2, xxxi. 184 Office-holders. 67

Scott.185 In this respect, Russian gentry stands out as an aberration, and is therefore unattractive to historians. Instead, scholarship has focused upon regional histories (microhistories) and ‘broad strokes’. Interestingly, valiant attempts have been made to discuss nobility in the pre-emancipation wold, but longitudinal extensions to these efforts are lacking – for now.

In all, this thesis incorporates the first ever attempt to use Social Network Analysis for a new conceptualisation of Russian nobility to rival that of Eidel’man’s, whose ‘cultural continuities’ stood as impediments to Russia’s ‘inexorable’ march towards modernity.186 I will 7887 to show that the Russian gentry proactively engaged with institutional reform and attempted its own version of ‘modernisation’, a version which does not fit exactly into Taranovsky’s binary interpretation of reform. Where Eidel’man, Taranovsky and others, such as Hamburg have – in my view – erred is in the uncritical rejection of class analysis and the viewing of provincial gentry as a political irrelevance following the events of 1858-1863. I will argue instead that we must contend with a process of transformation, rather than erosion, which was most evident during the period immediately following emancipation. Nobles exploited the peasantry and maintained the benefits of land tenure on the basis of a feudal system. Yet at the same time they were also a stratum of agricultural capitalists who could (and in many cases did) replace the ‘bourgeoisie’ in the Russian model of economic development. The application of Social Network Analysis allows for a global view of the transformative process by integrating both quantitative and qualitative elements and tracking ideological movement within the gentry. It follows that the gentry could (and in some cases did) put Russia on a ‘different path to modernity’, unique to that country’s social and political structures.

185 V. Sollogub, ‘Chinovnik’, Russkii vestnik i (1856); Scott, H. M. (ed.), The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Northern, Central and Eastern Europe, in 2 vols., London, 2000. 186 T. Taranovksy (ed.), Reform in Russian History: Progress or Cycle?, Cambridge, 1995. Eidel’man’s various histories reveal his deep-seated belief that all connections are important – and in this respect if no in no other – he is very close to the principles underpinning Social Network Analysis. Among many other instances, one can single out N. Eidel’man, Poslednii letopisets, M., 1983, a biography of Karamzin, where Eidel’man insists that Russia spent the nineteenth century trying to ‘understand herself’ (100). In idem, Gran’ vekov. Sekretnaia dinastiia, M., 2008 one can see Eidel’man’s predilection for historical connections exemplified. 68

Chapter II: ‘Protectionist networks’ and the socioeconomic status of Tambov’s landowning nobility (1861-1901)

For most Europeans, then and now, economic protectionism and political conservatism are often interrelated. This is increasingly the case within a globalised market but was certainly not the case, as Edward Crankshaw observed long ago, during Russia’s long nineteenth century.187 This Chapter discusses the ‘Russian particularity’ by describing the characteristics of the landowning nobility, both in general terms and specifically in Tambov, in such a way as to frame a larger debate on the correlation between protectionism and conservatism, which was often inversed. It is proper to explain this by means of a detailed analysis regarding the social and economic conditions in which Tambovian or, more properly, blacksoil gentry had to face over the second half of the century. Furthermore, it is by means of such an analysis that the socioeconomic attributes of network members can be traced. In the following pages, I provide an overview the economic and social history of the region, the formation of estates, and the evolution of a market economy which conditioned gentry interactions.

In the pre-revolutionary period, the province of Tambov occupied a large part of European Russia’s blacksoil belt. Incorporated under Paul I during a generalised reorganisation of fourteen Central Russian provinces,188 Tambov’s long-standing association with industry which was reflected in the newly-minted gerb – a bee-hive with bees diversely volant, which has remained largely unchanged.189 Spanning 60,000 versts sq. (approximately 26,000 square miles), Tambov’s borders did not change much between incorporation and the 1950s. In the nineteenth century, no

187 E. Crankshaw, Shadow. 188 We know that even after 1704 when the draft system was changed from estate-based to a standing army, Russian rulers continued to cede ownership of lands and serfs as a means of ensuring the nobility’s support. This, naturally, coincided with the age of palace coups – and ended around the same time. Once the Decembrist threat had been thwarted, Nicholas I limited himself to an exchange of royal with state peasants. A. S. Nifontov, Zernovoe proizvostvo Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka po materialam ezhegodnoy statistiki urozhaev Evropeiskoi Rossii, M., 1974, 100; O. Crisp, Studies in the Russian Economy before 1914, London, 1976, 96-110. 189 The imperial crown was removed after 1917. 69 fewer than eight major waterways ran through the province, providing easy access to trade routes from and to Moscow (about 290 miles North-by-Northwest).

By the second half of the century, these waterways were already connected via a sophisticated canal system, which also gave work to itinerant peasants.190 Repin’s Barge Haulers would not look out of place in any of Tambov’s verdant and winding riverbanks. By the time Valuev had replaced Lanskoy in the MoI (April 1861), Tambov had already acquired those characteristics of provincial life later masterfully depicted in C. N. Terpigorev’s Oskudenie.191 The penname Terpigorev chose for himself, S. Atava, is a powerful indication of his intentions: He wished to paint a picture of country life as it was, while harking back to what was and lamenting what was never to be. Much like Levin’s interlocutor in the election hall, who observes that ‘new people are […] not dvorianstvo, they are administrators who have risen to noble status’, Terpigorev describes a crisis of the nobility, of the dvorianstvo, not of the landowning class. 192 This is a salient distinction.

In Russia, not all nobility was created the same. In discussing the mechanics of intra- class hierarchy, it is important to consider the differentiation between class members stemming from the way they had achieved noble status. Russian nobility was divided into: (a) Enfeoffment nobility; (b) military nobility; (c) nobility received as a result of the attainment of a specific rank in civil service or the award of a Russian Order of Merit; (d) foreign nobility; (e) nobility of ancient lineage. Categories (a) through (c) included nobles who had risen to privileged status as a reward for services rendered. Categories (d) and (e) were a vestige of Russia’s imperial expansion and the incorporation of other ancient kingdoms, such as Poland-Lithuania and the Caucasian principalities.

Even for Russia’s hereditary nobility, it was the autocrat who ultimately conferred status. The fount of honour was the Emperor’s exclusive prerogative and so direct bestowment of noble rank, albeit resented by the aristocracy, was not unheard of. By

190 N. A. Ivanova and V. Zheltova, Soslovno-klassovaia struktura Rossii v kontse XIX – nachale XX veka., M., 2004; idem, Soslovnoe obshchestvo Rossiiskoi Imperii, M., 2010. 191 S. N. Terpigorev, Oskudenie, M., 1958. The title is usually translated as ‘Impoverishment’. 192 A. Gerschenkron, ‘Time Horizon in Russian Literature’, SR xxxiv (1975), 692-715, 713. My italics.

70 the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the practice had abated. Direct ennoblements to hereditary status steadily declined – even in wartime – both absolutely and relatively to the total number of ennoblements. By 1861, the overwhelming majority of noble families consisted of the middling and high-ranking officialdom and officerdom and their numerous descendants, all of whom belonged to the second and third categories.

Population & composition of the nobility in Tambov Tambov lay at the heart of European Russia and generally followed the population patterns of its neighbouring provinces. By reason of its proximity to Moscow privately- held lands (ergo serfs) were much more prominent than state-owned (or royal) estates. This inverse correlation between distance from the imperial capitals and the size of privately-held land is very important to the way emancipation worked. Prior to 1897, census-takers in Imperial Russia were particularly interested in specifying where precisely each until resided within the province. Censi were taken by agents of the governor, not of the central government. Governors had every motive to gain a realistic picture of what their province looked like, and so were careful to map the location and condition of noble estates. On the other hand, they were also motivated to artificially inflate the province’s prosperity. Statistically, all we can do is assume that that two motives cancel each other out.

Historically, the composition of Tambov’s nobility has been well defined. By Russian standards, this was an ‘old’ province. Tambovian gentry makes for a rather uniform sample in terms of when most of the families acquired land and settled in the southern (most fertile) part of the province. This helps even out to a certain extent intraclass variations on status within the same tier. The overwhelming majority of landowners in Tambov (of all three strata), had inherited their estates from ancestors who had been given land grants as reward for service to the state. Apart from incorporating the province, Emperor Paul was also largely responsible for populating it with landed gentry. The bulk of older grants date back to the reign of Alexei Romanov, with a few infrequent gifts in between, most notably by Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.193 Noble ‘nests’ proliferated greatly during the final quarter of the eighteenth–

193 Sbornik statisticheskich svedenii po Tambovskoi gubernii, vol. XV ‘Chastnoe zemlevladenie Morshanskogo uezda’, Tambov, 1890, 5. 71 first quarter of the nineteenth centuries. The main reason behind this numerical expansion was the increase of land shares as a result of land reclamation and appropriation.

Demand-side factors also played a key role: modernisation drives resulting in population growth, economic specialisation resulting in demand from large towns and cities (such as Moscow, which Tambov fed), market booms, etc.194 On the supply side, the commercialisation of Tambovian agriculture and new farming technologies provided more opportunities for middling properties to turn a profit and morph into ‘nests’. Arrivals in the early nineteenth century were not of Russian ethnic origin and would almost immediately be caught in the sudden economic downturn that inevitably follows a sudden growth spurt. Because of its geography and by association to Moscow, Tambov was badly damaged during the Napoleonic invasion. There was a steady decline in noble population until the early 1860s. In the meantime, many Tambovian landowners returning to their war-ravaged estates had to be reclassified as meshchane and odnodvortsy.195

The proliferation of land grants in the early nineteenth century exacerbated the effects of cyclical hardship, resulting in retrenchment. Most of the middling nobility of the province had come into their fortunes by means of inheritance, so that by the mid- 1860s they represented the second, third, in rare cases even fourth generation of landowners. Although by no means ‘unfragmented’, landownership in the fertile uezds was the preserve of hereditary nobility; only rarely would an ‘outsider’ be permitted to buy up property, thus breaking up family lands. Whereas this trend was consistent throughout the Chernozem, in Tambov it was more pronounced, resulting in an unusually close-knit and complicated network of noble kinships. The incestuous nature of landownership in the province meant it would retain its ‘family-oriented’ character well into the nineteenth century. It is therefore unsurprising that the ‘shock’ of emancipation could be absorbed rather efficiently via coordinated labour and land pricing, collective exercise of influence on mediators (who were generally positively predisposed to their own peers to begin with), and – after the establishment of zemstva

194 Herbert J. Ellison, ‘Economic Modernisation in Imperial Russia: Purposes and Achievements’, JEH iv (1965), 523-540. 195 M. V. Shestakov, ‘Rossiiskoe provintsial’noe dvorianstvo v poslednei chetverti XVIII – pervoi polovine XIX vv: na materialakh Tambovskoi gubernii, PhD Thesis, Tambov, 2006, 320-25. 72

– strongly founded parties. Comparison of data collected by the Editing Commission of 1850 with post-emancipation statistical figures reveals the tenacity of middling landowners in Tambov.196

Both an ‘old’ and a fertile province, Tambov did not want for latifundists either. Representatives from most grand families in Russia owned estates somewhere in the province. There were Naryshkins, Sheremetevs, Gagarins, Golitsyns, Buturlins, Shuvalovs, Vorontsovs, Dolgorukys, Tolstoys, and Urusovs.197 Similarly, because of ‘Paulician’ land grants, Tambov was home to a large concentration of ethnically German nobles who formed the core of the middling stratum. By 1861 these landowners had already become an integral component of Russia’s landed nobility. Examples of such baronial families include the Benkendorfs, the von der Osten, as well as a cadet branch of the House of Nassau which had moved to Russia half a century earlier in the wedding train of Adolphe I. Finally, to this assembly of the elite were added scions of Tatar princelings (murzy). Documentary evidence from 1834 shows that in the province there existed as many as 83 landowning families of Tatar descent.198 The ethnic origin of families seems to have mattered for the formation of early gentry networks, but its importance dissipates in the second half of the nineteenth century, which lends further weight to the argument that class cohesion in post-reform Tambov was predicated on considerations other than rather than of the existence of ethnic kinship. Before the great negotiation of 1861-1863, and then the establishment of zemstva in 1864, network analysis shows that sympathies and antipathies between Tambovian landowners were largely private affairs caused by mostly prosaic factors, some of them completely random, such as the physical distance between estates.

Guarded as they may have been, Tambovian landowners could not completely stem the influx of various and sundry parvenus in the second half of the century. On the

196 Prilozheniia k trudam Redaktsionnykh Komissii. Svedeniia o pomeshchichikh imeniiakh. Tambovskaia guberniia, SPb., 1860. 197 The Gagarins in particular had, by reason of proximity to the province (their heartland of Obolensk was 470 km away) expanded their interests to Tambov and were successful modernisers, but Gagarin clan members steered clear of local politics. In contrast, other vysokorodnye families including the Stroganovs, the Balashovs and the Pashkovs became heavily involved. 198 Cited in N. G. Onoprienko, ‘Byt provintsial’nogo dvorianstva: Traditsii i novatsii v 50e-90e gody XIX veka (na primere tsentral’nogo chernozem’ia)’, PhD thesis, State University of Belgorod, 2007, 55. 73 other hand, as A. I. Vasil’chikov reminds his readership, ‘parvenu’ is a relative term. This great historian of imperial elites states unequivocally and with good reason that the end of the seventeenth century most of Russia’s boyar and princely families had already either died off or married into ‘new families’, being absorbed to such a great extent that only a fraction of the noblemen and women with an aristocratic surname could trace an unbroken line of ascent back to Muscovy.199 This did not stop them, however, from regarding the new elite with scorn. In their turn, the descendants of Vasil’chikovs industrial-merchant nobility would look down upon the ‘new people’ of post-emancipation Russia.

By the 1850s, the core principles of platonic-petrine aristocracy had been abandoned. Service to the state nominally remained a prerequisite for ennoblement, but entrance to the service was pretty much guaranteed to scions of landowners with connections in St. Petersburg. However, bureaucratisation radiated outwards not from St. Petersburg but from Moscow, the cradle of enlightened bureaucrats. Tambov lay in the path of the first period of bureaucratic expansion and so became home to a score of lifelong nobles. Incidentally, ‘lifelong’ nobility was responsible for some of the horse- breeding successes in the province. Approximately 67% of stables belonged to lifelong nobles.200 Tambov’s relationship with horse-breeding began as early as the seventeenth century.201 Altogether, there were an impressive 214 private stud farms between the 1700s (when records begin) and the 1900s, but they were mostly owned by wealthy merchants such as Aseevs or the Bashmakovs (former owners of gold mines in the Urals).202 Whereas middling landowners were not particularly keen to enter the supply side, they certainly helped on the demand side to create one of the finest horse- countries in Europe. Horse-breed fairs began as early as 1825 in Lebedian’, and the local horse-racing union, based out of the provincial capital, was never short of money.203 The government did its part by ordering the importation, in the 1840s, of over 100 studs from Western Europe, and soon the province was so replete with horses

199 A. I. Vasil’chikov, Chastnoe zemlevladenie v Rossii i drugikh evropeiskikh gosudarstvakh, vol. I, SPb., 1876, 486. 200 Onoprienko, op. cit., 174. 201 Z. N. Briunin, Krest’ianskoe konevodstvo v Tambovskom uezde, Tambov, 1903, 10f. 202 Horsefarms belonging to these families appear in SSS vol. 1 (Borisoglebsk). 203 I calculated the average distance between farm and market in Tambov to 25 versts, which indicates that supply and demand points were relatively close together. SDO vyp. 1 (Lipetsk), vyp. 3 (Kozlov), vyp. 4 (Lebedian’), vyp. 5 (Usman’), vyp. 7 (Borisoglebsk), vyp. (Kirsanov), vyp. 10 (Tambov). See D. Kerans, ‘The Workhorse in Peasant Agriculture: An Exploration’, RH xxvii (2000), 251-283, 259, n. 36. 74 that one of the Counts Orlov had to come up with a system for keeping track of its 50,000+ (sic) individuals.

The percentage of lifelong nobles in Tambov was rather large. Lifelong ‘letters patent’ were issued to civil servants in the lowest six ranks and bestowed certain privileges: Exemption from corporal punishment, enserfment, and conscription, as well as the right to entre noble corporations (they were, however, largely excluded from management). Courtesy titles were extended to their spouses, but not their children.204 So all things considered, they stood less than halfway between the urban classes and hereditary nobility. Lifelong nobles could not enter their names in the provincial rolls of honour, nor could they own populated estates (with a few exceptions). Korelin’s explanation for this quaint Russian institution is based on the complicated nature of the bureaucratic-civil nexus of government.205 Available positions in both branches of state service (court service being a case apart) multiplied exponentially during the nineteenth century by virtue of changes in the political system and the expansion of bureaucracy.

As the bureaucracy slowly but steadily displaced nobility in the administration of the Russian Empire, the Autocrat’s dependency on politically powerful nobles lessened. This is partly reflected by diminishing land grants and the considerable deceleration of ennoblement to hereditary status. Lifelong nobility on the other hand, was on the rise. Administrators in the highest ranks of Russia’s new ‘enlightened bureaucracy’ were keen to obtain letters patent conferring lifelong nobility. Hence grew, within the state apparatus, a body of nobles-in-waiting whence hereditary nobility could potentially reinforce its dwindling numbers. Nevertheless, despite plans and proposals to draw upon this pool of ‘volunteers’ keen for social advancement in post- emancipation Tambov, this never happened. By the mid-nineteenth century, the prospect of social advancement was little more than a reward for personal loyalty to the bureaucratic elite, as well as an incentive for junior civil servants to stay on the beaten path and show abject obedience to hierarchy.206

204 Korelin, op. cit., 35-36. TGV xiii, xxx (1859). 205 Ibid, 90f. 206 Ibid, 37. 75

For some hereditary nobles, however, parvenus were not – and should not ever aspire to be – truly ‘upper class’. It does not take a specialist in Russian history to surmise that such attitudes were the direct result of the hereditary nobility’s – particularly the middling nobility’s – insecurity as to their new place in Russian society. At best, the argument went, these lifelong nobles could hope for some function only if hereditary nobles could not be found, or if such hereditary nobles as could be found did not meet the minimum requirements for discharging said function. The Kashkarov brothers for example, a formidable pair of conservative publicists, proposed to elect as Justices of Peace members of the legal profession with experience in volost’ affairs, predominantly from among the ranks of hereditary nobility and to recruit from lifelongs only whenever there was a shortage of suitable candidates from the former.207 They clearly regarded lifelong nobles as a body foreign to the First Estate.

Evidently, data on Tambov’s landed gentry comes in varying degrees of comprehensiveness, depending on such sources as are extant. But overall, the records are more complete than those of neighbouring provinces. In Tambov, lacunae such as the specific breakdown of nobles residing in cities and those residing in uezds may not be fillable, but aggregate figures allow for an educated approximation. Gaps in records become, counter-intuitively, more frequent towards the end of this period, but it should be noted that in the 1890s, Tambov experienced one of the most catastrophic famines in history. By 1905 and 1906, new committees set up for the purpose of collecting demographic data were not even concerned with social stratification as a whole. Government statistics for those years only show the total number of denizens and the ethnic background of population, in both cities and uezds.208

207 I. Kashkarov and I. Kashkarov, Sovremennoe naznachenie russkogo dvorianstva, M., 1885, 14. 208 Statisticheskie svedenii, 2-3; Korelin, op. cit., 292-93, 298-99; L. A. Voevikov (ed.), Sbornik materialov dlia opisaniia Tambovskoi gubernii, SPb 1872, 62; M. Iablochkov, Istoriia dvorianskogo sosloviia v Rossii, SPb., 1876, 679. Unusually, Iablochkov, a jurist, chose not to include his patronymic in the original editions, a practice that has been maintained in every reprint since. 76

Table 2. 1: Composition of the nobility in Tambov, 1858-1897 HEREDITARY NOBLES LIFELONG NOBLES YEAR Urban Uezd Total Urban Uezd Total 1858 5369 3018 1859 1565 3937 5502 2933 421 3354 1863 5425 3866 1865 2356 3556 6092 4574 509 5083 1866 2352 3746 6098 4699 534 5233 1867 6163 5931 1870 6119 5521 1871 1979 4208 6187 4574 998 5672 1880 1881 4182 5963 4443 1505 5948 1897 4820 3243 8063 6655 2384 9039

Source: O. P. Pen’kova, ‘Dvorianstvo Tambovskoi gubernii (1861-1906 gg.)’, PhD Thesis, Samara, 2003, p. 39.

It is still possible to access relatively full sets of data for noble populations in Tambov throughout the reform period (1861-1874). It is tempting to conclude that a general growth trend existed during this time, but this does not take into account emigration from other provinces and natural population growth. There is considerable fluctuation to the rate of growth for Tambov’s noble population. Thus in 1859, it rose by 1.4% with respect to the year before; in 1865, however, it increased by a monumental 10.5% by comparison to 1863. Between 1865 and 1870 it remains relatively stable, but in the following decade it suffers a decline of 3.5%. Ceteris paribus, trends depicted in Fig. 2.1 are not easy to interpret. In fact, so many other factors come into play that is dangerous to make suppositions for all but the most pronounced change towards the very end of the century. To be sure, the effects of emancipation were not immediately felt.209

209 See chapter III. 77

Figure 2.1: Noble population trends 1858 – 1897

Source: Data same as Table 2.1 above.

However, when one considers population shifts in conjunction with land ownership in the province, it is made clear that as of 1897 hereditary nobility was neither exclusive nor meaningful in terms of local economy. From 1880 to 1897 there was a 28.7% increase in the number of hereditary nobles, but noble landownership decreased by 30% in the period between 1877 and 1897, accompanied by a slight decline in the Noble Land Fund (1% in 1875-1877, 0.65% in 1877-1887 and a further 1.27% in 1887-1897).210 When combined, these figures point to significant land fragmentation and rampant urbanisation (discussed in more detail below), which leads to the conclusion that Tambovian nobility engaged successful economic diversification over the fourth quarter of the century. By the late 1890s agriculture had ceased to be the local nobility’s primary source of income. The world agricultural crisis ensured that this was the case throughout blacksoil Russia. At that time, we can no longer speak confidently about the existence of ‘landed gentry’ (at least in the nineteenth-century sense it is discussed here) in the region.

210 Hamburg, Politics, 89, 91. 78

The end of landed gentry came rather suddenly. In the period 1859 – 1871 no major fluctuations occur with respect to hereditary noble population. The most noticeable leap takes place over the years 1863-1865. There can be little doubt that the delayed effects of emancipation, the creation of a real-estate market mechanism and, above all, the establishment of land councils in 1864 were all factors contributing to this sharp rise. The promise of participation in local politics energised and motivated local nobility to register, so it is entirely possible that part of the increase is due to nobles heretofore ‘hidden’ from record by various means. It is highly unlikely however, that the entire shift is due to this self-revealing. Rather, an analysis of landowner names during the biennium on the basis of zemstvo211 electoral rolls would indicate that only about 27% of ‘excess’ nobles had some form of pronounced/recorded presence in the province before emancipation.212

The population of lifelong nobles in cities versus that of uezds varied immensely from one decade to the next: seven times more lifelong nobles were found in cities than in the uezds in 1859; in 1866, the difference was nine-fold. But by 1880, the ratio had dropped to 3:1, which – coupled with the increase in the total population – means that lifelongs proliferated outside urban centres at a dramatically accelerated rate. Should urban growth have shown a parallel increase during this time, even not necessarily an analogous one, this demographic trend would be easier to interpret. Conversely, the rate of urban growth tailed off at this point. This relates directly to the acquisition of landed property; lifelongs began a ‘flight to the country’ as a direct result of emancipation and land reform in the early 1860s. An unavoidable by-product of this shift was the further blurring of lines between lifelongs and hereditaries, the key distinction among which having been removed in 1861. Contemporary observers, such as Tambov’s own famous homme de lettres – Terpigorev – lamented the moral qualities of these ‘new arrivals’. His character Osipovich in Oskudenie lent his name to a stereotype for moral bankruptcy and noble careerism, in the same vein as Tolstoy’s eponymous character in the Death of Ivan Ilyich.213

211 Zemstvo (pl. zemstva): Land councils founded in 1864 as part of the reform drive. They provided some measure of political representation on the local level. 212 See Chapters IV and V. 213 For an excellent brief analysis of Terpigorev’s work and more comparisons with Tolstoy, see A. V. Gennad’evna ‘Istoriia dvorianstva v poreformennoe vremiia v knige S. N. Terpigoreva (S. Atavy) “Oskudenie”, Vestnik KGU iii (2013), 105-109. 79

In absolute numbers, the total population of lifelongs in the province steadily grew. Between 1858 and 1897, there was a 200% increase with respect to the very the end of Nicholas I’s reign. By comparison, the population of hereditaries experienced a rather less dramatic 33% increase. While in 1858 the population of hereditaries was 43-44% greater than that of lifelongs, by the end of the century the latter had outstripped the former by 18%. In 1859, hereditaries had made up 0.28% of the province’s population. The percentage increased slightly in the years 1865-1866, reaching 0.30%, and it remained there until 1897. Subsequent years would, see a substantial decrease: in 1902-1903, only 0.23% of Tambovians were hereditary nobles, in 1904 a mere 0.16%. Inversely, the ratio of lifelong nobles to total population in the province would grow from 0.17% in 1859 to 0.33% in 1897. On the eve of constitutional reform (1905), they had suffered a marginal decline of0.02%.

Within the uezds, the population of hereditary nobility decreased substantially as reforms took hold. In 1859, hereditary nobles lived for the most part in Kozlov, out of which were based 780 individuals, the city of Tambov proper (693), in Kirsanov uezd (619), and Tambov uezd (506). They were sparsest in the city of Usman’, with a mere 30 representatives, in Temnikov (33), the cities of Kadom (35) and Borisoglebsk (41).214 In 1880 the largest concentration of hereditary nobility lived intra muros in Tambov (849 individuals), the surrounding uezd (695), and again Kozlov (567) and Kirsanov (562). The smallest concentrations remained in the same places as they had been found before, on the eve of emancipation. In all, absolute numbers changed only partially: At that time Usman’ housed 81, Borisoglebsk 93, Temnikov 33, Kadom 35.215 Hotspots for population growth among nobility were generally found in and around the province’s main urban centres and their immediate surroundings. The rate of growth there was between 2 and 2.5 times faster than elsewhere, which is only natural if one considers that this was where new railway lines were laid.

By the end of Alexander III’s reign, Tambov’s capital city was already home to 3,298 noble individuals, about 41% of the province’s total noble population and almost 70% of its city-dwelling nobility. The second largest concentration was found in Kirsanov uezd (499) and then the capital’s hinterland (465). At that time, the remote Shatsk and

214 Cited in Pen’kova, op. cit., 41. 215 I. V. Druhzhilova, op. cit., 39. 80

Spassk uezds had been left with the fewest nobles, only 62 in each.216 As a matter of fact, in terms of the national aggregate, blacksoil uezds (not just in Tambov) experienced the sharpest decline in population of hereditary nobles. As if to lend empirical support to the Chekhovian ideal-type, hereditaries had by 1897 decided to sell up or been forced to auction off most of their grand estates. Their resolve to weather the test of a market economy ultimately buckled under the weight of socioeconomic pressures. Most of them would decamp to provincial capitals or major cities in order to seek employment as civil servants. The migratory path of lifelong nobles took the opposite direction. It’s not hard to imagine had it not been for the dramatic events of 1905-1917, the genus ‘gentrified bourgeois’ would be as commonplace in the Russian countryside as it is in the English.217

Types of landownership in Tambov As a general remark, it can be said that the collection and use of statistical data in the second half of the nineteenth century carries with it a set of methodological complications. Since the eighteenth century, the responsibility for data collection had been passed on to provincial governors, who would prepare a reports backed up by statistical appendices. These reports took into account standard economic measures, such as grain productivity and output, and were the result of a very deliberate and detailed efforts.218 On the other hand, they were also subject to creative interpretation by local officials and landlords seeking to lend empirical support to their own narratives.219

With emancipation stripping Russian nobility of the right to own ‘inhabited’ estates, landowners took recourse in stubbornly holding on to nominal ownership rights to the land, until such time as the law forced them to part with it, thus delaying the redemption process. Peasant communes, for their part had a rather difficult time deciphering what was expected of them as well as what was offered them by law.220

216 Ibid, 40. 217 In this respect, I am in complete agreement with D. Lieven, who stated that we should revisit the history of the latter, for it is ‘misunderstood’, and throw off the shadow of 1917 when discussing the history of the former. D. Lieven, op. cit., 246 and xix respectively. 218 A. S. Minakov, Godovye vsepoddaneishie otchety gubernatorov: Issledovatel’skii opyt i istoriograficheskie perspektivy, SPb., 2013. 219 This process and its pitfalls is discussed by Nifontov, Zernovoe and B. G. Litvak, O dostovernosti svedenii gubernatorskikh otchetov v 19 v., M., 1977. 220 Vysochaishe Utverzhdennye E.I.V. 19 fevralia 1861 goda, SPb., 1861, 3. 81

Emancipation may have had great symbolic weight and value for former serfs, but in practice it simply meant that they were now given the right to trade their freedom with redemption payments made by the state to their former masters.221

Even so, there was seldom any significant cashflow from the State Bank to the coffers of the gentry. Had this been the case, emancipation and the redemption process could have been regarded as an unequivocally win-win situation and boon to local economic development. The tripartite transaction was handled by agents of the state and so most of the redemption funds were diverted to offset the gigantic estate debts accrued over generations of mismanagement and ill-advised spending.222 It may be plausibly argued that these two were only a number of factors contributing to gentry indebtedness and that there were many others too, often completely unrelated to the nobility itself, for example the refusal of peasant workers and communes to modernise production and implement well-laid plans for the rationalisation of crop management.223 Whereas noble landowners could have, by virtue of their position in charge of keeping order in the provinces, thought that they could keep afloat in perpetuity, the takeover of local administration by bureaucrats, industrialisation, changing patterns in domestic and foreign trade, in other words the passage of time, would shatter such illusions.

The new, serfless economy was also a cashless economy, for the state – being the primary lender – saw to it that interest and capital payments were withheld from redemption payments. In other words, the peasants paid (as a rule more than) full price for the land, but the landowners almost never received the full amount. Most pre- emancipation estates (complete with serfs) had been used as collateral for loans by sokhrannye kazny. According to P. N. Miliutin, noble borrowing against landed property had consistently increased ‘from the earliest days of lending in Russia to the

221 Ibid, 13. 222 GATO F. 168, op. 1, d. 6, 683, 684, 880-883, 1001, 1174, 1175, 1249, 1250, 2957, 4147. These Land Bank documents contain over 550 recorded cases of financial mismanagement in Tambovian estates between 1850 and 1880. It is plausible to assume that the trend extends to the period before 1850 as well as the period after 1880. S. Antonov, ‘Law and the Culture of Debt on the Eve of the Great Reforms’, PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2011, underscores the importance of networks for securing credit, which by the time of emancipation was largely independent of state institutions. 223 GATO F. 46 Op. 63 d. 15, Op. 69, d. 16, Op. 71, d. 23, 24; Op. 79, d. 22 for architectural plans on farm improvements. 82 final days of the Noble Bank’.224 This was hardly an unexpected turn of events. After all, noble debts to lending institutions had already surpassed, on aggregate, the state’s entire yearly budget as early as 1859.225 As if the denting of landowner income via redemption payments was not enough, very few landowners had the wherewithal to pursue more efficient methods of running their post-emancipation estates.226 Theoretically, even after debts had been subtracted, there was just enough capital left to ensure estate solvency by various means, including modernisation, the importation of otrabotniki and diversification of activities towards micro-scale industry and cottage industry. Yet this did not come to pass, largely as a result of the lack of capital among middling nobility.

Thus, the second half of the 1860s saw the beginnings of a massive process of exchange whereby estates would come into the hands of diverse population categories, including merchants, artisans and inordinately prosperous peasants – for every subject of the Empire now enjoyed full property rights.227 Even before emancipation the right to own ‘inhabited’ land was absolute on paper only. Many were the cases of illegal ‘enserfment’ brought to the courts before 1861, not to mention the fuzzy area in which illegitimate progeny of conscripted serfs found itself. This is by no means the same as saying that as of about 1863-1864 just about anybody would purchase an estate, simply that just about anybody could theoretically buy an estate. With most of the agriculture in blacksoil Russia based on manual (serf) labour, buying up farmland with the intention of exploiting it commercially made little sense if one did not also aspire to becoming gentrified and if one was not ready to fork out more money/produce with which to remunerate the newly freed farm labourers.

224 N. Miliukov, Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul’tury, M., 1909, 234-35. 225 S. Ia. Borovoi, ‘K voprosu o skladivanii kapitalisticheskogo uklada v Rossii v XVIII v.’, Voprosy Istorii v (1948), 67-77, 75. 226 In the beginning, there was little or no motivation to do so; the legislation was favourable. Peasants were not allowed to leave their counties without bying out land before 1870 – and given the complexities of the buyout process, few could pragmatically do so. After 1870, the constraints were such that less than one percent chose to leave the countryside without buying land. PSZ 1863 vol. XXVI, part 1 and Litvak, Russkaia derevnia. 227 State serfs and imperial serfs (not usually as distinct as the categorisation would imply) would have to wait for a while longer. G. T. Robinson, Rural Russia Under the Old Regime: A History of the Landlord-Peasant World and a Prologue to the Peasant Revolution of 1917, Berkeley, 1967. We are still waiting for a history of non-noble landownership to be written. 83

For this reason alone, and despite the ‘supply’ of land by impoverished or serfless nobles, estates were a hard sell to non-noble buyers. The timing of the growth of real estate in European Russia is, to say the least, suspicious, for it takes place after Valuev took over from Lanskoy.228 If progressive reformers and legislators under Lanskoy had hoped that eventually reform would lead to Russia following the example of other European countries, for example Britain or France,229 and experience a boom in real- estate thereby injecting capital into the economy – itself a big ‘if’ – Valuev’s subordinates must have been very pleased to know that non-noble sosloviia did not rush to buy land.230 The formers’ expectations, if true, were quite unrealistic; the very first sellers were landowners who even before emancipation had lost effective control of their property. The first piece of land sold in the province of Tambov, for example, was a 50,549 des.231 estate in Temnikov (not the most fertile uezd) which had remained mortgaged for three decades.232

There were many more such examples. Despondently indebted nobles were quick to unburden themselves and thankful for a way out of a hopeless situation. This was a long, drawn-out process. Years after emancipation, when the gramoty had finally been drawn,233 90% of estate sales in Tambov were actually forced by Moscow’s sokhrannaia kazna (whence Tambovians traditionally received loans) to cover mortgage payments.234 This is not to say that insolvent properties did not change owners after the ‘transitional’ period following emancipation, nor does it mean that as

228 Valuev’s appointment was interpreted as a move to mollify landowners. See O. N. Trubetskaia Kniaz’ V. A. Cherkaskii i ego uchastie v razreshenii krest’ianskogo voprosa: Materialy dlia biografii, M., 1901 vol. 1, 277, in which the author provides a quote from then Deputy Minister N. Miliutin attesting to the fact that Lanskoy had been replaced to placate the landowners. 229 The examples of Britain and France were often brought up in contemporary studies, such as A. I. Vasil’chikov, Zemlevladenie i zemledenie v Rossii i drugikh evropeiskikh gosudarstvakh, in 2 vols., SPb., 1876. 230 By 1887, blacksoil merchants had ‘supplanted’ more nobles than in any other region of European Russia, in the sense that 12.9% of estates had passed to their hands. For more information, see the relevant Tables below. 231 Desiatin (pl. desiatina), abbreviated as des., subdivision sazhen: Land area approximately equal to 2.7 English acres or 11,000 metres squared. Elsewhere, I am referring to the ‘treasury’ desiatin of 2,400 sq. sazhen rather than the ‘unofficial’ desiatin of 3,200 sazhen. 232 N. N. Romanov, Dvizhenie zemel’noi sobstvennosti v Tambovskoi gubernii za 1866-1886 gg., Tambov, 1889, 103. 233 Gramoty: Property deeds, in this context post-emancipation deeds drawn explicitly for the purposes of preparing redemption exchanges. A ‘transitional period’ between promulgation of the emancipation and the completion of the redemption process was defined by the PSZ 1863, vol. XXVI, part 1. 234 Sokhrannaia kazna (pl. kazny): Credit institutions. V. V. Sviridov, Sel’skokhoziaistvennye obshchestva Tambovskoi gubernii: Vtoraia polovina XIX v. – Nachaclo XX vv.’, PhD Thesis, State University of Tambov ‘G. R. Derzhavin’, 2006, 108. 84 a rule as of 1864, the ‘chaff’ of properties lost to the state had already been got rid of. Indeed, once the proper mechanism for buying and selling real-estate had been set in motion, estates for sale flooded the market. In Tambov, the flood of auctioned (non)properties would not dissipate until 1870.235

Consequently, therefore, it can be argued that buyers were predisposed to buy ‘good farmland’ for commercial purposes. Empirical data unequivocally supports this conclusion. In the mid-1860s the office of land statistics found that in Tambov nobles owned over 1.8 million des. (more precisely 1,820,941), which made up 88.4% of private landownership.236 According to the Central Statistical Committee, by 1877 there were 2,737 noble landowners in the province, collectively in control of a little more than 1.5 million des. (1,593,363). The average estate, not grossly inflated thanks to the relative sparsity of latifundia in the region, was 582.2 des.237 Six years after Alexander II’s untimely demise, a new survey was commissioned. Its findings revealed a sharp drop in noble landownership: Nobles owned 1,594,346 des., or 72.3% of the total private landownership in Tambov, or 32.6% of the total private capital. Altogether nobles lost 17.2% of their lands to other sosloviia in twenty-two years, while the average size of landholdings had decreased by 16.1%. During the same time Tambovian nobles did not, however, suffer the same series of setbacks as their peers elsewhere. In Tambov, nobles continued to control much more landed property than all other sosloviia put together. The disparity in ownership patterns was most prominent in Kirsanov, Morshansk and Temnikov uezds, and least pronounced in Borisoglebsk and Lebedian’ uezds. 238

235 Ibid, 136 passim. 236 N. N. Romanov, ‘Statisticheskii obzor Tambovskoi gubernii’, Sbornik kalendar’ Tambovskoi gubernii za 1903 g., Tambov, 1903, 259, 264-66. 237 Pen’kova, op. cit., 43. 238 Ibid, 44. 85

Figure 2.2: Ratio of noble/non-noble private landownership 1865-1877

Noble landownership in Noble landownership in Tambov (1865) Tambov (1877)

Non-noble Non-noble lands lands Noble lands Noble lands

Pie size reflects total land size, which grew by 145,293.09 des. during this time. The nobles are hereditary.239

We must also consider land usage. Owing to several factors, not least uneasiness vis- à-vis the introduction of more efficient farming techniques to offset the loss of free labour, the aggregate of arable land owned by gentry did not rise proportionally with the increase of the province’s total arable land after 1865. The intensification of this trend is consistent and synchronous with changes in real-estate market as described above. These two statistics in turn lend credence to the hypothesis that by the end of the century, commercial farming was no longer a monopoly of the gentry. Whether or not change of ownership had any significant impact on productivity is an interesting topic, worthy of further investigation.240

Tambov stands out from other blacksoil provinces as one of two provinces where the government had to step in because of crop failures.241 It should be mentioned however, that in sharp contrast to other provinces, the crop failure of 1872 was not part of a larger ‘national calamity’. It is true that around this time the USA overtook Russia as the main wheat supplier to the key British market,242 but once again this would have resulted in some sort of generalised crisis and, if anything, an abundance of unsold produce in neighbouring provinces. Rather, the shortage was limited to the local level.

239 Ibid, 44f. (composite from multiple pages). 240 The famous decade-long debate on whether there was an ‘agrarian crisis’ or not concerns data mostly from 1881 onwards and therefore lies outside the scope of the present study. 241 In 1872. The other being Orel, which suffered failures in 1867 and from 1873 through 1876. This takes into account lands in blacksoil provinces historically belonging to the original ‘black-earth’ guberniiia before being incorporated by the USSR (namely Lipetsk, Riazan and Belgorod). Kahan, History, 111. 242 B. R. Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Statistics, New York, N. Y., 1962, 232. 86

The local scope of this failure begs about the question of its true causes. There seems to be a connection, however tenuous, between crop failures and the passing of commercial agriculture to non-noble ownership. One has to consider that the agrarian economy in Russia during the first two decades after emancipation still retained some salient characteristics of its feudal past. In other words, it was not simply a question of demand and supply. On the supply side, higher grain prices would, motivate landowners to market more of their produce – but not peasant communes. Peasant communes would take advantage of the price hike to obtain the necessary amount of cash (for purchasing manufactured goods, tax and redemption payments) by selling as little of their produce as possible.

One should not be too quick to condemn the peasant communes’ apparent lack of business acumen, however. In an agrarian economy slow to mechanise production and with the spectre of famine in living memory, peasant insecurity with respect to the future and the consequent hoarding of produce irrespective of market dynamics was justified. After all, there was a noticeable decrease in the average income of peasant households during the same time.243 It is conceivable that agrarian economy could have been more entrepreneurial before emancipation, given the securities granted by the state. But this would be a counter-intuitive proposition, since most landowners had neither will nor inclination to experiment with production models. Their motivation after emancipation was obvious, not so before it.

All things considered, had Tambov’s commercial crops remained exclusively in noble hands, the shortage of 1872 would have never happened. Given that there was no noticeable change in population displacement,244 this would be the only logical explanation left. Regardless, the trend could not be reversed – Tambov’s petty gentry were becoming increasingly irrelevant to the province’s economic life, whilst middling nobility was struggling to keep abreast of developments. On a very basic level, the latter were ultimately successful: Between 1861 and 1871 they managed to resist being squeezed out of the market by the dual pressure of latifundists and new people, to say nothing of the communes. While in absolute terms, Tambovian nobility did in fact lose

243 GATO F. 26 Op. 1, d. 1627, Op. 2, l. 113, 178-183 documented observations regarding ‘Peasant Affairs’ in the province. The data is quite abstract. There is, for instance, no precise statistical information on peasant household income – but this ‘noticeable reduction’ is mentioned on 22 separate occasions. 244 See Table 2.1. 87 a significant portion of arable lands, in relative terms the middling landowners came out of the redemption process relatively unscathed, if not better placed to make economies (by trimming unwanted land and performing cash injections to their core holdings).

By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, gentry position had shifted dramatically: Surveys commissioned during 1877-1893 collected statistics for all uezds barring Elat’ma and Temnikov. Their records reflect that by the end of this period nobles owned 1,4 million des. of land (1,404,718). By 1896, they had lost a further 33,000 (32,942.8).245 At the turn of the century, tax records reveal that Tambov’s 2,576 noble-held estates covered a total area of 1.2 million des. (1,251,846), or 59.3% of privately-held lands (22.2% of private capital) in the province.246 In the twelve-year period that followed, the ratio of noble to non-noble landownership had fallen by 10.4%, and in terms of the total are of arable lands by 13%. The 1905 surveys show that in Tambov there were 2,267 noble estates (17% of private capital), with an aggregate area of 1,114,014 des., or 51.5% of privately-owned lands. The average size of holdings was 491.4 des.247 From 1887 to 1905, therefore, the ratio of noble landownership to non-noble landownership decreased by a further 20.8%, the aggregate area of noble holdings by 15.6%. The average size of holdings also dropped, by approximately 15.6%. Not only was there a decrease in the area and number of noble holdings, but also significant fragmentation. Table 2.2 shows that the phenomenon was not limited in Tambov but fell in with a national trend.

Table 2.2: Noble Landownership by Stratum, 1877-1905 (National) Owners Owners % Area Area % Stratum 1877 1905 Change 1877 1905 Change Petty 56,551 60,910 +7.7 1,924.4 1,662.6 -13.7 Middling 44,827 37,003 -17.5 16,264.7 13,218.8 -18.8 Major 13,388 9,324 -30.4 54,976.4 38,290.0 -30.4 Total 114,716 107,237 -6.6 73,63.5 53,169.3 -27.4 Source: N. A. Proskuriakova, ‘Razmeshchenie i struktura dvorianskogo zemlevladeniia Evropeiskoi Rossii v kontse XIX – nachale XX veka’, Istoriia SSSR i (1973), 66-68.

245 Romanov, ‘Statisticheskii obzor’, 259. 246 Ibid, 277. 247 Statistika zemlevladeniia 1905 g.: Vyp. XX ‘Tambovskaia guberniia’, SPb., 1912, 12-13. 88

Petty: 1-100 des., Middling 101-1,000 des., Major 1,001+ des. All areas given in 1,000 des. 248

Blacksoil Russia: Redistribution of wealth on a grand scale The average size of holdings, however, does not reflect the degree of concentration of land in latifundia, a trend becoming even more pronounced after the ‘real estate’ market takes off (1863 onwards), particularly as of the second year of the zemstvo system. Thanks to land councils, gentry coalesced into a ‘supplier group’ and their interests became (even more) aligned. New alliances were forged. Zemstvo factionalism also played a part in striking deals. Inversely, petty estates were all but wiped out, and middling estates were fragmented. This was chiefly due to direct acquisitions by latifundists, who were exceedingly well-placed to take advantage of post-emancipation sales during the early years of reform.249 This makes sense; latifundists were true paragons of the Russian polity. Knowledge of the market, strategic reserves of ready cash, connections in the bureaucracy, and immediate access to credit on favourable terms all helped them increase their portfolios in times when middling landowners faced a crisis.

By the time of emancipation, more than half of European Russia’s arable land lay in the chernozem belt, even though the provinces comprising it – Voronezh, Kursk, Orel, and Tambov – only occupied 3/5 of the total arable in Central Russia.250 At the same time, nobility owned 78.8% of total arable land in the entire region. Landownership in Tambov was more fragmented than in neighbouring provinces. In Kursk, particularly, the high degree of land concentration resulted in inconceivably large latifundia. In Graivoronsk uezd, Prince N. B. Iusipov owned 53,559.3 des. and Count D. N. Sheremetev 52,211.7. The entire noble land fund in the uezd was 139,334 des., which means all the remaining landowners together held only 33,562 des., i.e. 24%.251 For comparison, one should consider that according in 1871 the entire county of Bedfordshire could easily fit within these two latifundia alone.252

248 This table appears in Hamburg, Politics, 97 but we encountered the source separately. 249 Sbornik postanovlenii Tambovskogo gubernskogo sobraniia za 1865-1894, Tambov, 1902. Latifundist registers show upward trend throughout, thanks to land purchases, and the coalescing trend mentioned here is evident in their voting patterns, as well as their setting of the agenda. 250 Liashchenko, Istoriia, 331. 251 V. A. Shapopalov (ed.), Evoliutsiia sotsial’noi struktury obshchestva Tsentral’nogo Chernozem’ia v poreformennyi period, Belgorod, 2005, 26. 252 Encyclopaedia Britanica 1890 vol. 8, 220. 89

On the other hand, by comparison to neighbouring Tambov, middling landownership in Kursk was insignificant, with a specific weight of just 6.8% of the total. For centuries the growth of middling properties had been impeded by the existence of such massive latifundia. Not only were the latifundists some of the most powerful men and women in the land, but they could also profit significantly from economies of scale. In Belgorod province, despite the fact that the number of petty landowners made up almost 80% of the total number of gentry, they owned just 14.4% of the total land fund. Even by serf standards this subgroup of the noble soslovie was poor. In Novooskol’ uezd, the noblewoman Karamzina owned 3 des. of land, the noblewoman Goncharova 2.5 des., and the noblewoman Zhidkova 1.5.253

After 1861, the shortage of readily available funds, the almost non-existent labour market, and the limited spread of new farming technologies forced many nobles to part with large swathes of land. As a result, lease-farming arrangements became a staple arrangement on blacksoil estates. Landowners would lease large plots for small- scale farming, attempting all the while to somehow tie peasants to their lands in order to maintain a ready pool of workers whence to draw otrabotniki254 for their remaining fields. In some cases, the leasing of larger plots was seen as a way of widening so-called ‘entrepreneurial’ landownership. V. A. Shapovalov analysed almost 300 estates in Kursk province. He showed that out of 172 petty estates with a total area of 3,613 des. of land, only 14 had set up arenda systems (8.1%).255 Statistical sources indicate that, inversely, the lands of 29 out of the 79 middling estates in the province were leased out (36.7%) and, more significantly, arenda was agreed in 20 out of 37 major estates for a total of 38,859.3 des. (54%).256 From the data available, it is evident that major landowners led the way in lease farming. Traditionally, long-term leasing was favoured mostly among major and middling landowners, but all around Kursk the relative index of long-term leases was higher for the petty landowner group.257

The disparity in land concentration between Kursk and Tambov is mostly due to historical reasons, including the way each province was settled, incorporated, the

253 V. A. Shapopalov, ‘Dvorianskoe khoziaistvo Belgorodchiny nakanunie otmeny krepostnogo prava i v poreformernnyi period’, in Ocherki kraevededeniia Belgorodchiny, Belgorod, 2000, 68. 254 Otrabotnik (pl. otrabotniki): Lit. ‘outside worker’. 255 Arrenda: In this context, a land-lease agreement. GAKO F. 4, o 1, d. 55, ll. 1-16. 256 Ibid. 257 Shapopalov, Evoliutsiia, 44. 90 ethnic makeup of its population, the process by which steppe was reclaimed for farming, etc. It should be underlined that on the eve of 1861, the overwhelming majority of blacksoil gentry led a lifestyle entirely within the pale of traditionalism, which dominated each and every aspect of life on the estates. In principle, the ‘correct’ status of an estate owner remained that of a ‘planter’,258 as a result of which during the pre-reform period the social psychology of Blacksoil Russia was largely determined by, to risk an anachronism, ‘industrial’ relations. At the end of the 1850s, the economic standing of dvorianstvo in the region was directly related to soslovie corporative tradition: 80.3% of noble landownership had barshchina origins.259

Land surveyor N. N. Romanov noted that the area purchased by nobles in the period 1866-68 exceeded that sold by 30%.260 This is evidence that emancipation led to a concentration of land capital. In absolute numbers, actual loss of aggregate land by the noble estate took place in the period 1861-1866, which means that this emancipation opened the floodgates of an already highly saturated market. Acquisition trends alone, on the other hand, cannot explain regional variations within Tambov, nor variations between provinces. It needs to be seen in context and in conjunction with land value and land usage. The loss of noble lands between 1866 and 1876 in the northern part of the province was 11.8%, in the southern 9.7%; during the next decade, losses in the north amounted to 12.88%, in the south 6.06%.261 Noble loss of land progressed more rapidly in the north of the province, where it increased exponentially after emancipation, whereas the contrary happened in the southern half. The southern half is dominated by the city of Tambov, around which lie the most fertile lands in the province. So Tambov county and its neighbouring uezds had been settled earlier than their northern counterparts, which were also highly fragmented and given over mostly to horse-breeding and other husbandry interests. Post-emancipation, it was the northern, less fertile lands that landowners wished to ‘unload’ upon their hapless peasants. These are broad strokes, and it is exceedingly hard to trace the circumstances of each sale taking place in the period 1861-1879.

258 Shapopalov, Dvorianstvo, 125. 259 Barshchina or boiarshchina (rare): corvée, or labour dues owed by serfs/peasants to their landlords. The figure cited is a composite drawn from the following sources: E. P. Karnovich, Zamechatel’nye bogatstva chastnykh lits v Rossii. Ekonomicheskoe i istoricheskoe issledovanie, SPb., 1874, 135f. and A. P. Korelin, Dvorianstvo v poreformennoi Rossii. 1861-1904, M., 1979, 50f. 260 Romanov, Dvizhenie, 34. 261 Ibid, 40. 91

We can be certain that in 58% of cases, gentry lost land to other sosloviia. Urbanites, uninterested in or simply unaware of what ‘good farmland’ was about, took over the northern part of the province, where they mainly renovated manorhouses, turning them into dachas. In contrast to peasant communes, who both knew about good farmland and were only interested in the land and not the houses, urbanites imagined the creation of luxurious ‘retreats’, a romanticised version of landownership and ‘life in the countryside’ without the hassle of tending to crops. This is the only conclusion possible if one takes into account that, in purely quantitative terms, only 35% of arable land in Tambov was purchased by non-nobles. There are only twenty-three recorded cases of merchants acquiring farmland, while in absolute terms, peasantry was the largest buyer (the buyer with the most purchases). They ended up, however, buying up a mere 9.3% of good farmland in the period 1861-1879. Since the merchantry was only interested in the idea of owning land rather than commercial farming, they ended up buying much larger parcels than the peasants. They would enjoy their newly acquired/refurbished manorhouses and use the surrounding land for horse-breeding. Similarly, they found use in forestland, be it commercial, aesthetic or symbolic of status. From the sellers’ perspective, merchantry was the buyer of choice; quality of land was unimportant to them, they were happy to buy up large (useless) plots, and they had capital with which to purchase them. By comparison to the complicated, lengthy and time-consuming scheme set up by the emancipation legislation, a straightforward sale of this kind was much more preferable from the landowners’ perspective.

Table 2. 3: Distribution of noble holdings to private property in Tambov (1877) Size of Number of Landownership % of holding % of area landowners (des.) landowners (des.) Up to 10 181 1,051 6.61 0.06 10 to 50 537 15,300 19.61 0.96 51 to 100 416 31,616 15.9 1.98 101 to 500 968 245,503 35.37 15.41 501 to 1,000 307 216,167 11.22 13.57 92

Over 1,000 328 1,083,726 11.99 68.02 Total 2747 1,593,363 100 100 Source: Romanov, Dvizhenie zemel’noi sobstvennosti, 46.

The data seems to indicate that the real-estate market was entirely unregulated, which was in favour – above all – of those seeking to rationalise their production, i.e. middling landowners and latifundists. In some cases, purchases were made in order to consolidate or unite two previously separate properties into micro-economies. This was especially true for 12% of the richest noble families, which controlled 68.02% of arable lands in the province. The holdings of all landowners with 1,000 des. or less (88% of which were nobles), totalled 32%. Here too there were variations between the province’s two halves. On average, 27 years would elapse before property transfer in the north, versus 37 in the south. Transfers were less frequent in blacksoil provinces as a whole, and landowners in more fertile uezds of Tambov proper (the south) were slower to sell, while the size of plots was also a factor. Properties from 11 to 500 des. were generally faster to sell than larger holdings. 262

Table 2. 4: Noble landownership by stratum 1877-1905 (comparison between blacksoil/non-blacksoil provinces) Land Land Stratum owned % Total owned in % Total % Change (1877) 1905 Non-Blacksoil Petty 498.2 3.3 294.9 3.6 -40.9 Middling 4,644.8 30.4 2,689.0 32.6 -42,2 Major 10,115.7 66.3 5,250.2 6308 -48.1 Blacksoil Petty 880.8 5.3 612.6 5.5 -30.5 Middling 5,240.0 32.5 4,056.7 36.4 -25,2 Major 10,372.7 62.2 6,479.8 58.1 -37.6

Source: Proskuriakova, ‘Razmeshchenie i struktura dvorianskogo zemlevladeniia’, 74.263

262 Ibid, 87-90. 263 Cf. Judge and Simms, Modernisation; Hoch, Serfdom; Hamburg, Politics. 93

Frequency of sales was a determining factor for the stability of property prices in any given region. The average period of ownership for arable lands in Tambov was about 40 years, in Poltava 51, in Moscow 22.264 The motives for holding on to lands varied from region to region, but as a rule the more intensive the farming activities were, the longer landowners held on. There can be no question that farming in Tambov or Poltava was a lot more lucrative than in Moscow province, but at the same time lands in the commercial farming belt of Poltava were more profitable than those located in areas were subsistence farming was commonplace.265

Data shows that these observations are representative of trends in the entire blacksoil belt. By the dawn of the twentieth century, blacksoil nobility was no longer the single largest buyer of arable land in European Russia. Alongside the abolition of serfdom, this eventually led to an overall reduction of the noble land fund and to significant structural changes in the character of landownership. The two most readily comparable provinces to Tambov, Voronezh and Kursk, also adhered to this general rule. In Kursk, the number of noble landowners fell from 5,712 in 1877 to 4,533 in 1905, which corresponds to a total reduction in the noble land fund from 1,165,44 to 859,331 des. a 26.3% decrease.266

It is interesting to note that here, as in Tambov and Voronezh, the total size of land in noble hands fell proportionally faster than the number of noble-landowners themselves. This could have only been caused by further fragmentation of the noble estates – from the 1870s onwards, the rate of reduction in the size of noble lands decreased at an accelerated rate. In other words, the shrinking phenomenon was compounded. Indicatively, from 1877 to 1895 – a period of 18 years, the area of noble landholdings decreased by 23.7%, as supposed to 26.3% in the following decade.267 This lends credence to the hypothesis made earlier regarding the nature of change in noble landownership throughout the blacksoil belt. We can observe not only a quantitative, but also a qualitative change throughout the region. With noble

264 Romanov, Dvizhenie, 91. 265 Geografo-statisticheskoe opisanie Tambovskoi gubernii, SPb., 1870 and Geografo-statisticheskoe opisanie Poltavskoi gubernii, SPb., 1870. 266 Statistika zemlevladeniia 1905, 28. 267 Tsifrovye dannye o pozemel’noi sobstvennosti v Evropeiskoi Rossii 1887, 31. 94 landownership already fluctuating at around 50% of total private landownership at the uezd level, this is remarkable indeed.

The same pool of data also shows that the number of major landowners in the belt decreased by 64 (24.3%), the size of their lands by 107,969 des. (22.2%). Inversely, estate size grew from 2,061 to 3,077 des., largely thanks to a significant reduction in the number of middling landowners (i.e. those with holdings between 1,001 and 5,000 des.). the process of inter- and intraclass exchange of lands, in which the magnates played a major part as intermediaries and sellers, meant that this stratum would be relegated from first place in 1861 (80.2%) to second by 1905. All things considered, middling nobility would come to own – collectively – the largest ‘pot’ of privately-held lands by total size. This was none other than the middling landowners. They may have lost significant numbers (532) and land (160,029), but in Kursk, as in Voronezh and Tambov, these decreases were compensated by the transition of magnates to the middling category. Petty gentry lost 38,061 des. of land (21.45) over the same period, with the number of landowners decreasing by 583 (15.7%). Tellingly, the number of super-petty landowners (i.e. these with up to 10 des. of land), rose by 193. This indicates a process of intra-subgroup exchange of lands, much like it happened in the average stratum.268

Another salient characteristic of blacksoil landownership at this time was a sharp reduction in the size of the average estate. The noble land fund dwindled, so this was normal. Accordingly, middling landowners may have suffered losses in terms of absolute numbers and holding size, but their land capital remained proportionally the largest among all social classes. In terms of average estate size, therefore, it is interesting to see how the magnate stratum fell to second place after emancipation while the middling stratum rose to first place. Yet this is as far as trend analysis may go. It is very difficult to follow the multitudinous acts of sale, the process of transition of estates within the noble class. Network analysis may fill the gaps by allowing for educated assumptions to be made as to whether this transition was caused by market or by social forces. What we can be sure of is that intra-class redistribution led all strata

268 Data in this paragraph drawn from the same sources as Table 2.4 above. 95 to recalibrate social expectations, claims to grandeur, lifestyle, and their own social preconceptions with respect to class and its role in local societies.

Estate inventories are a major criterion for judging not only how ‘technologically evolved’ an estate was, but also of how well it was managed. Inventories are also a good way of keeping track of changes occurring in the lands of the nobility after the emancipation of the serfs.269 In the immediate postreform period, the main mass of properties in Kursk was practically devoid of the minimum necessary inventories and only in the 1880s was there any observable drive to address this. In the blacksoil uezds (Ostrogozh and Shchigrovsk), the use of implements in major and middling estates were spread unevenly. In one estate there would be more harrows, in another more ploughs and seeders, in a third there would be surplus sokhi (wooden ploughs) or molotilki (threshers). One of the reasons was that during the 1860s there had been a marked decrease in the number of landowners who recorded their estate inventories. It is possible that this was in reaction to the reform drive and an effort to conceal the exact value of their estates. Tambovian inventories compare favourably to those of Kursk.270

Another equally important indicator of the production capacity in each estate was its degree of dependence on work animals, mostly horses and mules. As expected, a brief comparative overview of noble estates in the Voronezh and Kursk provinces reveals that work animals could be found mostly in middling properties, the majority of which belonged to estate owners who commanded cash reserves. In quantitative terms, the largest increase in the number of work animals took place during the 1880s.271 But both quantitative and qualitative increase in inventories could only be brought about by means of hired labour. The scale by which so-called ‘day labourers’ were used to till lands depended on how mature the labour market in each given region was. Naturally, such ground-breaking changes in the economy of farming could not leave the planters’ lifestyle unaffected.

269 Shapopalov, Dvorianstvo, 97. 270 E. Melton. ‘Proto-industrialisation’, 72 passim. GAKO F. 52 (Statistical Committee) Op. 1 d. 13, d. 23 d. 24. 271 Ibid, 99-100. 96

If until the emancipation the material-psychological fulcrum for the concept of ‘nobility’ had been ownership of populated lands, then in the postreform period the decrease of noble landownership signified a pragmatic shift on an economic level and a substantial redefinition of production models. Local magnates faced with entirely new economic conditions had to review their perceptions of landownership, since they now had to consider rationalising the use of human workforce in order to boost profitability. These new exigencies would define the ‘bourgeois evolution’ and bring changes to the social psychology of the nobility as a whole. Awareness of the fact that traditional attitudes towards landownership could no longer be maintained might have been painful, but it led to the inevitable realisation that proprietary characteristics should be re-examined. Many nobles began to ascertain that life was, after all, possible without serfs and that everything would be settled with their new ‘rational of property’.272 As a consequence by the 1880s many middling estates were already being managed according to capitalist principles.

Patterns of land usage in Tambov were similar to those of other provinces with good access to transport networks. In such areas, there was considerable demand even for non-blacksoil lands, for there could be found forests whose commercial exploitation in conjunction with low transport overheads– would turn a tidy profit in the short- term. The sale of forested areas became commonplace and to a large extent replaced the older practice of selling only exploitation rights. The largest group of forest buyers in the first postreform decade was nobles, with merchants a distant second. There was no real momentum towards land transfer outside the noble soslovie until fairly late in Alexander II’s reign.273 It was only in the 1880s that non-arable lands effectively came to be supplied in the nascent provincial real estate markets Four years later, the closure of the Land Bank under Alexander III would remove the last institutional obstacle to peasant/communal ownership As a result, peasants began to overtake buyers from the other two sosloviia in the blacksoil belt.274 At the same time, the concentration of non- arable lands in mega-estates or latifundia continued unimpeded. And overall noble

272 Terpigorev, Oskudenie, 29. 273 Ibid, 114-15. 274 Much in the same way it happened in the Povolzh’e region. See S. Kabytov, ‘Agrarnye otnosheniia v Povolzh’e v period imperializma 1900-1917’, PhD Thesis, State University of Saratov, 1982, 31. 97 holdings still exceeded the province average by a factor of two and the smaller private holdings by a factor of ten.275

In terms of productivity, we can conclude that petty landowners were those hardest hit by the emancipation. Their representation in the legislative process was as nominal as common decency would allow; petty landowners did not rank among the government’s priorities. In the words of a contemporary publicist of note, after the emancipation these smallholders could not conceive adopting ‘the lifestyle of former serfs without being themselves utterly destroyed.276 In most cases, after the deduction of mortgage payments, redemption only yielded negligible sums, if any. Deeds were sold at 30-40% discount, while the banks sought to minimise their exposure to debentures, which were consequently sold at 20-50% below their nominal value.277 In the decades after 1861, this caused noble stratification to calcify, visualised by an increase in network cliques. Intra-class fissures became ever more visible.

Tambov after Emancipation: A new (political) economy The introduction of emancipation statutes in 1861 gave rise to a new economic model in provincial Russia. The effect emancipation had on the rural nobility cannot be understated. But it is equally hard to envisage a complete shift towards a ‘free economy’ where market forces could determine land usage and land value; the ‘old’ was done away with, but there was, effectively, no ‘new’ to take its place. Part of the gentry was financially ruined by emancipation, but that part consisted of elements with little influence on local economy. Investing in government bonds, joint business ventures, purchase of company shares yielded enough capital for the acquisition of land and convinced them of the need to diversify – which they had been largely reticent to do beforehand. It was those parts of the nobility that were chosen as peace mediators, justices, and marshals, who – ‘in dealing with common affairs, did not

275 According to the calculations of N. A. Proskuriakova, from 1877 to 1905 the aggregate area of Tambovian lands belonging to petty nobility shrank from 48,000 to 17,000 des., or 71%. Inversely, the corresponding figures for major nobility were 1,083,700/720,00 des. (or 36%) and the middling nobility 461,700/393,900 des. (or 19%). N. A. Proskuriakova, ‘Razmeshchenie i struktura dvorianskogo zemlevladeniia v Evropeiskoi Rossii v kontse XIX – nachale XX vv.’, Istoriia SSSR i (1973), 74. 276 Klevanov, op. cit., 51. 277 GATO F. 168 (Tambov branch of the Noble Land Bank), Op. 1 d.7, 8. 98 forget to take care of their own’ – as one observer remarked.278 Noble-functionaries managed to retain their holdings or even expand them.

Retrospectively, we can claim with some certainty that the more insightful landowners were those who decided upon economic diversification. Social Network Analysis helps us establish (in hindsight) whether diversifiers shared any salient traits (be they of character or characteristics) and whether they were part of the same network-within- a-network, or ‘clique’. At the same time, hypothesising exclusive causalities between reform and rationalisation would be to disregard important extraneous factors, such as the pronounced and prolonged agricultural crises hitting Russian in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Soon after the abolition of serfdom, there began a series of calamitous seasons: In 1867, 1876, and 1882, Tambov’s zemstvo held emergency meetings, in order to cope with ‘unforeseen events’, most frequently droughts. Gubernatorial reports for the same years also reflected this sense of urgency, however exaggerated, and showed substantial concern. To make matters worse, crops were time and again destroyed by hail, then insect infestations in each of these years.279 Many noble landowners would seek relief ‘from insufficient income’ by petitioning local marshals. The marshals would then turn to the zemstvo, as they felt that by their conception land councils are best suited to examine such cases and offer relief if merited.280 When farming was hampered by natural catastrophe, noble landowners took recourse not only in soslovie corporations, as they would on a personal basis, but the entire structure of local administration.

Petty nobles could not survive under the harsh post-emancipation market conditions. They could not muster the pecuniary resources necessary for managing estates, which were promptly handed over to the kazna. As the kazna was under the authority of the State Treasury, this was tantamount to land redistribution by agency of government, who dispensed with the appropriate sums.281 Funds were almost never paid promptly. Cases have been reported where nobles had to wait for years before they received them. In 1864, provincial marshal A. D. Bashmakov received a petition to ‘use his influence

278 Klevanov, op. cit., 57-58. 279 Sbornik postanovlenii Tambovskoi gubernskogo zemskogo sobraniia za 1865-1894 gg. Tambov, 1902, 724ff. 280 Ibid, 721. 281 Sviridov, op. cit., 29. 99

[so that] necessary moneys are found in order to support the continued existence of a moderate and remote’ farmstead’. The petitioner was, interestingly, a noblewoman from Temnikov called Uzbiakova, who had sold to the kazna an estate of – by pre- emancipation standards – twelve souls in 1862. Two years later, she was still waiting for the money.282 Perhaps the only tier of petty nobility which enjoyed some protection were juvenile landowners whose property was held in trust, since a strict system of checks and balances had been set in place to regulate guardianships. Luckily for them, the youngsters were protected by the post-emancipation selling spree, lest they fall victims to rapacious caretakers. Guardians were even forced to ensure that estates held in trust would generate a steady source of income until the legal heirs reached maturity.283

There can be no doubt that land reform had great impact upon the Tambovian gentry. Its effects were as pronounced and tangible as they were immediate. Tambov’s provincial marshals were, one after the other, inundated with complaints for the horrible living conditions of nobles in their constituencies, their families and – most frequently – the widows of low-ranking chinovniki, a tier of the population particularly susceptible to violent economic change. Petitioners asked for help in various kinds: Cash, debt relief, scholarships for the children (in gimnazii),284 promotions in state service, etc.285 More often than not they would preface their requests with the standard formula: ‘Not having the means to support my family and raise my children despite my service to the state, I turn to Your Excellence as the leader of nobility for Tambov province…’. 286

Adding insult to injury, the granting of relief in any form required that the petitioner first produced a ‘certificate of impoverishment’, or ‘attestation of insufficient means’. These documents carried the signature of both the head of local gendarmerie and the local marshal. Only after thus making his/her situation public would a petitioner have any claim to material aid.287 Every year, the marshals had to provide an estimate for funds required in order to cover the medical treatment of bankrupt nobles. These

282 Ibid, 30. 283 Cited in Pen’kova, 247. 284 Gymnasia, or highschools. 285 Pen’kova, 247. 286 Ibid, 50, n. 46, 247. 287 Onoprienko, op. cit., 50. 100 dishevelled individuals would drag themselves to clinics in such a pathetic state that holding a certificate of belonging to the noble soslovie became a necessary prerequisite to the process. It had become the only way these individuals could prove they belonged to the upper classes. Otherwise, their general demeanour was matched in wretchedness only by their inability to cover the moderate fees charged by their local medical practitioner.288

Through all this, there were some signs of class cohesion. For the nobility, not testifying to the effect that a peer would become impoverished was a matter of honour. Provincial archives are replete with bills of sale to credit institutions of mortgaged and re-mortgaged estates auctioned off in distant parts of the province.289 The file on mortgaged properties was so enormous than in 1864 the head of Tambov county’s gendarmerie asked gubernatorial authorities to take measures in order to stem the practice.290 The main issue here was that for the transfer of an estate’s deeds to be finalised, two fellow nobles must stand witness. Subpoenas for this purpose were issued as a matter of course, but almost never served, and even when they were, the witnesses refused to ratify the sale, despite facing a hefty fine. Within ten years from emancipation, the Senate had increased this fine from 50k. to 50r. Many nobles were simply uninterested in travelling long distances simply to officiate in a ceremony of impoverishment and social exclusion, preferring to pay the fine instead. The reasons leading to this act of civil disobedience varied greatly. But we can be sure that a feeling of social kinship and class cohesion was, in part, responsible. Gentry had no wish to assist in the expropriation of one among their number, mostly out of a deeply rooted sentiment of Christian charity. Where this was lacking, ideological permutations mattered instead.

Local economy Undoubtedly, Tambov’s economy was almost entirely dependent on the fortunes of the international grain market. Grain producers in the province preferred to earmark their

288 Ibid, 50. 289 TGV 1861-1871 advertised on average four estates on auction per issue. The average distance between Tambov city and the location of auctioned estates was 179 km, and their average size 369.3 des. suggesting that the first estates were chosen on account of remoteness and relatively small size. There was also a north/south divide. See also ‘Population & composition of the nobility in Tambov’ section above’ 290 GARF F. 109 Op. 41, d. 69 c. 6 101 crops for export, firstly because there were other ‘breadbaskets’ closer to the big cities therefore better-placed to accommodate urban demand, and secondly because the export market paid significantly better prices than the domestic market. There was also husbandry and horse-breeding in the province, though these were of secondary importance and altogether nowhere near sufficient to make up for the losses accrued during the world grain market crisis of the late 1870s. In the micro-scale of Tambov’s farming industry, fragmented production according to traditional methods was, by itself, a main contributor to the crisis; the heyday of the global grain trade had brought with it massive over-production of grains. With the stabilisation of New World markets after the American Civil War and the standardisation of transatlantic trade routes, the growing economies of Western Europe were hungrier for American produce than for Russian. This led to a prolonged agrarian crisis, the apex of which came in 1894 when the sharpest drop in grain prices took place. In terms of grain, there was no such thing as an ‘closed economy’ in Europe; thus, any crisis in world markets would eventually spread to Russian markets as well. Grain prices began to fall within the Russian Empire around the mid-1880s.291 Tambov was affected particularly hard. 292

The market crash was preceded by a significant rise in Tambovian yields, which remained largely constant throughout Alexander II’s reign,293 owing mostly to an increase in the size of arable lands. Tambovian farmers, great and small, were slow to import new technologies and adopt modern farming techniques. Instead they felled forests to turn a quick profit – a temptation to which latifundists were not impervious either. As a result, in Tambov there was a radical increase in plough-lands, meadows and pastures, while elsewhere in Russia the taming of steppe valleys proved an immense boon to cattle rearing.294 Tambovian farmers were not particularly partial to cattle – they preferred to build upon the region’s traditional emphasis upon horse husbandry and all things equine (including the usual paraphernalia, such as saddles,

291 I. Liashchenko, Istoriia narodnogo khoziaistva v SSSR, vol. II ‘Kapitalizm’, M., 1956, 84-86. 292 A zemstvo report from the period concluded that ‘the most urgent need in the present time is to consider the inability of marketing agricultural products at prices that cover production costs and make it possible to manage the farm’. Sbornik postanovlenii, vol. xcix, 1530. 293 A contentious topic among historians of Russian agriculture, grain yield ratios varied widely from one province to another. Everyone seems to agree, however that blacksoil yields averaged between 4:1 and 6:1, as supposed to the non-blacksoil yields which averaged 3:1. Koval’chenko (Krest’iane i krepostnoe, 83) calculates the yield of Gagarin’s estates from 4:1 in the least fertile demesnes of Tambov and Riazan to 5.5:1 in the most fertile demesnes. 294 Pamiatnika knizhka dlia Tamobvskoi Gubernii na 1868 g., 30-34. Also 1870 (29-35) 1871 (31-37), 1874 (28-32), 1875 (30-34). 102 harnesses, horseshoes, etc.). Although the most well-known such businesses belonged to grand families (the Luxembourgers, count Stroganov and B. I. Komsin in Tambov, L. A. Voenikov in Borisoglebsk, and count Vorontsov-Dashkov in Shatsk), the majority belonged to lifelong nobles, merchants, and city-dwellers.295 There was also some fine- fleeced sheep and pig breeding.296

The respective importance of non-farming activities in Tambov and elsewhere is directly relevant to the economic impact of emancipation as well as the formation and evolution of noble networks. In theory, estates should be largely self-sufficient and the selling or bartering of surplus produce should be more than enough for the purchasing of vitals or luxuries not produced locally. Homogeneous farming practices mean that land usage should not have played a role in network formation. On the other hand, the ‘Russian particularity’ of a fuzzy political spectrum where politically conservative forces were often economically progressive and vice-versa means that the correlation of land usage and network formation is not straightforward. Establishing patterns of land usage can, therefore, uncover any association between economic practices and network cohesion.

Land usage in the middling and grand estates can be seen in overview. Surveys conducted in the second half of the nineteenth century in ten out of the province’s twelve uezds reveal the importance of farming in estate economy for each tier.297 In Morshansk uezd, for example, three quarters of all farmland (78.4%) used for grain exports belonged to nobles. This land was not regrouped into grand latifundia but rather fragmented: Less than half was part of estates of 1,000 des. or more; petty landowners held 19.1%, while 39.19% belonged to the middling sort. As a measure of comparison, of the total farmland taken over by grain production in the province and belonging to the noble soslovie, 88.9% was owned by latifundists, a mere 0.4% by petty

295 Romanov, ‘Statisticheskii obzor’, 89. 296 Particularly in some of the largest estates, such as those of Orlov-Davidov, Chicherin, Va’dgart, Andreevskii, Gagarin, etc. Pamiatnika knizhka 1868, 135-37. 297 I. D. Koval’chenko, ‘Agrarnyi rynok i kharakter agrarnogo stroia Evropeiskoi Rossii v nachale XX v.’, Istoriia SSSR ii (1973), 52-72; cf. also idem, ‘Sootnoshenie krest’ianskogo i pomeshchich’ego khoziaistva v zemledel’cheskom proizvodstve kapitalisticheskoi Rossii’, Problemy sotsial’no- ekonomicheskoi istorii Rossii, M., 1971, 171-194; I. D. Koval’chenko and L. I. Borodkin, Vserossiiskii agrarnyi rynok XVIII-nachala XIX vv. (Opyt mnogomernogo kolichistvennogo analiza), M., 1974; I. D. Koval’chenko, N. B. Selunskaia, B. M. Litvakov, Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskii stroi pomeshchich’ego khoziaistva Evropeiskoi Rossii v epokhu kapitalizma, M., 1982. 103 nobles, and 10.7% by the middling sort. The average surface area of noble grain crops was 1,770.4 des., a highly misleading figure if we take into consideration that almost one third (29.3%) was concentrated in the hands of three magnates: the Pashkovs, the Dolgorukys, and the Vorontsov-Dashkovs. 298 The tables below show a breakdown of these figures by uezd as well as the correlation of noble holdings with their tier in each uezd.

298 Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii, 37-8. 104

Table 2. 5: Ratio of noble to non-noble private holdings (1861-1880 average) Uezd % Landowners % Private lands Average Size Morshansk 49.5 78.4 1,770.4 Kirsanov 30.1 76.1 618 Lebedian’ 20.3 59 263 Lipetsk 40.2 68 292 Tambov 30.6 70.3 725 Source: Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii, vol. xvi, 6-8 xvii, 7, xviii, 5-7 xix, 5-6

Table 2. 6: Correlation of noble holdings and stratum (1861-1880 average)

Uezd Number of landowners % Area of holdings %

Major Middling Petty Major Middling Petty Kirsanov 78.1 64.4 14.6 85.9 69 29.1 Lebedian’ 56 59 13 69 62 31 Lipetsk 58.4 63 30 68.1 73.6 43.1 Tambov 72.3 52.8 14.6 81.4 59.7 24.7 Source: As above

In terms of absolute numbers, in four out of five uezds (Lipetsk was the exception) nobles had less farmland than non-nobles, but in terms of aggregate area noble holdings were much more extensive. This was the case in all five uezds, but it was particularly apparent in Morshansk. These statistics make further sense if practices of land usage and leasing are taken into consideration. Landowners had three possibilities: They would either keep direct control of land, running a farming estate much as they would have before emancipation. They could lease the land to farmer- peasants. Alternatively, the entire estate could be given over to haymaking and pasturing, with only some plots being leased out on a yearly basis for peasants to grow a single crop. Regrettably, there is too little evidence with which to establish the relative preponderance of each solution. Much depended on the quality of the land and the personal circumstances of the landowner. The latter course of action, for example, often meant that the landowner would (or could) only maintain for his own use the 105 manor with its adjacent garden, vegetable plot, its orchards – if any, and a small part of the hayfields.299

A very small number of estates given over to commercial farming was taking place ever operated on full field capacity. Some of the farmland would be turned into meadowland and various parcels would be leased out to subsistence farmers. In general terms, there were two types of lease available: The first would be signed after collective negotiations with local peasant communes; much like they would before February 1861, peasants would – in return – perform labour on the landowner’s other fields. The second type of lease would be signed with individual tiaglos (households) for anything between one and twelve years in return for cash payments, or labour.300 The paperwork associate with each lease was rather extensive: detailed inventories of implements, livestock, seeds, etc. were written out and copied for each party, and terms specified even the method of tillage to be employed in field(s) which – by mutual agreement – was unfailingly the three-field system.

Table 2. 7: Noble landownership & land usage (estates over 50 des.) Non- Number of Commercial Majority of Uezd commercial estates farming fields leased farming Number % Number % Number % Morshansk 86 57 65 16 19.8 13 15.2 Kirsanov 300 164 54.6 46 15.4 90 30 Lebedian’ 98 53 54 9 9.7 36 36.3 Lipetsk 84 33 39.3 4 4.8 47 55.9 Tambov 279 154 50.7 26 9 64 23.3 Source: Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii, vol. xvi, 158-9, xvi, 19-20, 312-13, xvii, 14, 176-77, xviii, 12, 162-63, xix, 15-16, 322-23

It is almost impossible to identify with precision how dues in cash, labour, and combinations thereof were determined. Land statistics often cite agreements in cash, but peasants – by reason of not having any – translated those in man-hours with a

299 SSS, vol. XVI, 60. 300 Ibid, 66. 106 specific cash equivalent. Excerpts of contemporary narratives regarding other provinces would indicate that rent in Tambov was rarely paid in cash. As a matter of fact, the most common practice in the provinces is likely to have been payment in kind – a set amount of agricultural produce after harvest. Gentry landowners here, much like elsewhere in blacksoil Russia, preferred to lease out farmland yearly rather than entre long-term agreements with peasants.301 Most of the parcels would be measured in desiatina, but it was not uncommon for a tiaglo to lease a fraction thereof. It follows that the smaller the parcel the more sizeable the percentage of the harvest that went to the landowner.

With respect to labour on commercial farms, landowners preferred to use a mixed labour force consisting of permanent, daily and seasonal farmers. In Tambov, like elsewhere in European Russia, only a small percentage of farmland would be tilled by full-time permanent resident farmers. In Morshansk, for example, such was the practice only in 18% of estates.302 In the overwhelming majority of cases landowners would hire peasants from the surrounding communes, either on a fixed long-term basis or for a short-term contract simply in order to carry out such ad hoc farming duties as the season required. In estates where non-commercial farming was predominant, on the other hand, Tambovian landowners would rely on a locally sourced labour force. In many ways, nothing had really changed with emancipation; peasants would work their former masters’ fields in return for access to pasture grounds and small plots where they could grow their own crops. There can be no doubt that this hybrid system for tapping into the labour market was reminiscent of pre- reform barshchina.303

There were two sides to the coin. Landowners were equally reliant on negotiating farmland use with the surrounding communes.304 Decreasing peasant population

301 See, not exclusively: Arkhiv kniazia A. I. Vziazemskogo, SPb., 1881; K. N. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, in 3 vols, SPb., 1885-1887; D. N. Bludov, Mysli i zamechaniia, SPb., 1866; P. A. Vziazemskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, in 12 vols., SPb., 1878-1896; E. P. Kovalevskii, Gr. Bludov i ego vremia, SPb., 1866; ‘P. A. Vziazemskii Pis’ma A. F. Bychkovu’, Russkaia Starina iv (1902); ‘P. A. Vziazemskii Pis’mo P. A. Valuevu’, Krassnyi Arkhiv ii (1923); ‘S. P. Shevyrev Pis’ma P. A. Vziazemskomu’, Starina i Novizna vol. 4, SPb. 1901. 302 SSS, vol. XVI, 68f. 303 Ibid, 99ff. 304 Litvak, Russkaia derevnia, argued that changes in land use often led the peasants turning down buyout contracts in the Chernozem. E. K. Rozov, Krest’iane i krestianskoe khoziaistvo novgorodskoi 107

(itself a result of a multitude of factors, not least the emancipation) led to increased demand for labour, pushing cost upwards. In Tambov, there was – historically – only one organised division of land and only upon emancipation was there an official settlement made between master and serf. Further allocations were never carried out because of the shortage of tiaglos willing to obtain allotments. What is more, most Tambov’s peasants did not use their right to redeem all the lands granted to them by the emancipation statutes, instead limiting themselves to ¾ of des. per soul (mean figure), which was only marginally more than what they had been allocated before 1861.305 Naturally, these little parcels of land were nowhere near sufficient for survival, especially given the peasants’ almost universal inability to secure use of farming implements and beasts. They carried on with the system of communal farming instead.

Unsurprisingly, many landowners would force peasant labourers into ‘winter hire’. In winter, farmhands would offer their labour over the coming summer in return for an advance on produce or cash by the landowner. This practice, essentially a loan, would form a significant percentage, in some cases as much as half, the peasants’ entire summer income. In actual fact, this concealed form of credit lending profited the landowners; by hiring in winter, they could set the maximum wage for any given task to be carried out in the coming season. This phenomenon was omnipresent in blacksoil Russia. So much so that in a peculiar, provincial way, it turned landowners into moneylenders for their former serfs. These loans were secure; there were even insurance premiums against death, decease, or default.306

Peasants were no longer subject to corporal punishment, such as it was in the mid- nineteenth century, but they could – and often did – receive fines for a job badly done. These were just part of a grander set of controls set in place after 1861 to keep peasant masses under control. The fear of a generalised uprising was great, and so measures were put in place to ensure that peasants could neither self-organise nor see a common

gubernii nakanune reform 1861 goda i v period ee realizatsii, Novgorod, 1998 made a similar argument for Novgorod province. 305 In the province of Tambov the former barshchina peasants renounced the right to buy lands from fear of redemption payments. In all of Chernozem, Tambov had, in absolute terms, the least absorption of lands by peasants on the basis of the 1861 charter – almost 21,00 des., or 2.4%. See B. G. Litvak, Russkaia derevnia v reforme 1861 g.: Chernozemnyi tsentr, M., 1972, 175; idem, Perevorot 1861 g. v Rossii: Pochemu ne udalas’ reformatorskaia al’ternativa, M., 1991, 177-78. 306 SSS, vol. XV, 138. 108 cause in takin up arms against their former owners. The system of fines for shoddy labour or absenteeism was established – in part – as a counter-incentive to revolt and withdrawal of labour (‘striking’) by the commune. Amounts payable were based upon a system of verbal agreements and, in fewer cases, written contracts Each peasant or tiaglo were individually responsible for paying them. In some of Tambov’s largest estates there was a scale of progressively increasing fines set up to make sure that the peasants would honour their ‘debt’ obligations. Landowners could take labourers to task over faulty work, non-fulfilment of the contract, failure to appear, etc. In the estates of a middling landowner called Pashkov, for example, peasants disappearing for one day would be fined 1r., for two or three days 1.5r., and thereafter 4r. per day of work missed. Incrementally, they would be fined as much as 6r. for defaulting on the ‘loan’ contract (e.g. not bringing in the harvest). 307 It makes very little sense, therefore, to look to emancipation for reasons behind the middling nobility’s abandonment of the countryside. In the short-term, at least (i.e. up until 1881), their estates were not only viable, but likely to flourish under the rules of a labour market exceedingly favourable to the erstwhile masters. If there was indeed an exodus of such landowners from blacksoil Russia, the reason for it must lie elsewhere.

The evolution of noble landownership during the two decades which elapsed between emancipation and the assassination of Alexander certainly took place at varying speeds and degrees but within Tambov itself, it occurred almost uniformly and there is an argument to be made that this was the case for all blacksoil provinces. The new farming system was a hybrid, a curiosity, at the same time a European ‘first’ and something out of the Middle Ages, combining as it did salient characteristics of the most brutal and uncontrollable form of capitalism with the remnants of the barshchina. The setting for experimentation was not some distant commune, but all of Tambov’s uezds at the same time. The estates, on the other hand, much like the landowners who owned them, were not a uniform mass and so the system was met with varying degrees of success. In the end, the Tambovian countryside continued to be defined by the existence of latifundia, some of them surviving into the twentieth century.308 These latifundia became centres of quasi-feudal exploitation, whereas the

307 Ibid, 140. 308 Agrarnyi (zemel’nyi) vopros v sovremennoi postanovke (Sostavleno po lektsii I. V. Mozhukhina), Tambov, 1971, 12f.; A. M. Anfimov, ‘K voprosu o kharaktere agrarnogo stroia v Evropeiskoi Rossii v nachale XX veka’, Istoricheskie Zapiski lxv (1959), 119-162, 124f.; S. S. Bekhteev, Khoziaistvennye itogi 109 middling properties were turned into exemplary farming economies, distinguishable against the background of Russia’s traditional farmlands by the use of modern technologies and the employment of capitalist models of production, with a market- oriented approach to farming. And as always, it was necessity that begat invention.

Economies of scale helped larger estates to maximise the area of arable land under their control at the same time as the noble-controlled surface of arable lands in the province was diminishing. Middling landowners had to make more effective use of their inventories in labour, animals, tools and infrastructure. Tasks were allocated in such a way that division of labour was rationalised, the latest principles of agronomy were employed, and advanced machinery was utilised. This is not to say that latifundists were uniformly ‘backward-thinking’ when it came to farming. Political clout, connections in high places and official postings certainly provided a valuable advantage for those magnates minded towards modernisation, to say nothing of their uncanny ability to secure ready funds. In Tambov, count Vorontsov-Dashkov is a prime example of precisely such a magnate. ‘Model economies’ were set up, as a rule, in communes with high population density – i.e. in those communes where allotments were miniscule. Peasants here could not lead normal lives without labouring on behalf of their former masters, in whatever capacity, including by performing otrabotka. Estate profitability would therefore be boosted by the low cost of labour.309

If not emancipation and not systemic failings, what was it in the end that drove middling landowners from Tambov? As we have seen, all their estates enclosed forested areas, the exploitation of which would help rebalance finances in the short term. Yet despite that failsafe, and all the aforementioned advantages they enjoyed, neither estates nor their owners could escape that perennial bane of the agricultural industry – an interconnected, global market. At the point when the world crisis caused prices to plummet the latifundia were, as had always been, the largest borrowers of the Noble Land Bank and so their lands, mortgaged for cash, now had to be parcelled out and sold to peasants piecemeal, albeit at a considerable profit (notwithstanding the

istekshego sorokopiatiletniaia i mery k khoziaistvennomu pod’emu, in 3 vols., SPb. 1906-1911; S. M. Dubrovskii, Sel’skoe khoziaistvo i krest’ianstvo Rossii v period imperializma, M., 1975, 12-16, 123-127; Idem, Stolypinskaia zemel’naia reforma, M. 1963, 303f. credits Stolypin with making this survival possible. 309 D. I. Ismail-zade, Illarion Ivanovich Vorontsov-Dashkov, M., 1991, 20-24, 59-62 passim. 110 cost of the land itself; Vorontsov-Dashkov took this to extremes by marking up parcels as much as 250%). Even at their lowest ebb, these major proto-capitalist enterprises continued to be run according to a patriarchal model – a purely exploitative model. This is why P. S. Kabytov, a Russian specialist on agrarian history, concluded that ‘the agrarian-capitalist upheaval un rural economy [was] far from complete. Although the socio-economic system does have some capitalist traits, it is still enmeshed in the remnants of krepostnichestvo’.310

All this fermentation resulted in a new economic model which, characteristically for the transitional nature of its time – encapsulated conflicting features. We can be certain that the ruling feudal system had been completely shattered. But the transition to capitalism would not happen suddenly – a great number of estate owners continued to rely on the old, pre-reform, model of employing quasi-serf labour. There was still very much a possibility of ‘non-economic coercion’, ‘winter-hire’, hiring entire communes under the principle of ‘mutual responsibility’, corporal punishment and so on.311 The end result was a transitional type of landownership, uniting within it barshchina and capitalism. For the peasants, who for had long suffered ‘non-economic compulsion’, non-economic compulsion turned into economic necessity, and their mutually dependent relationship with their former masters ensued. In this relationship, it was naturally the landowners who were at the more advantageous position, since they owned most of the land. The peasants turned to the landowners supposedly of their own free will. Work might have had a pecuniary expression, in accordance with the market prices for labour in the given period (which is a capitalist element), but frequently peasants were remunerated not in cash, but in leased land, or farm produce (which is an element of the pre-capitalist barter system).

The land also had a new, ‘market’ measure of value. Peasants had to pay for land leased to them in accordance with market prices. Yet they often paid with their labour or farm produce instead. In one person there were combined the lease-holder and the hired labourer, and it is often difficult to understand where one status began and the other ended. There came a bizarre interweaving of the new and the old, the one overlapping

310 P. S. Kabytov, ‘Russkoe krest’ianstvo v nachale XX v.’, unp. paper, University of Samara, 1999, 18; O. P. Pen’kova, ‘Tambovskie imeniia grafa I. I. Vorontsova-Dashkova. Konets XIX – nachalo XX vv.’, Trudy Vorontsovskogo obshchestva, vyp. 4, 1999, 84-97. 311 V. Il. Lenin, ‘Razvitie kapitalizma v Rossii’, PSS, vol. III, 168. 111 with the other, the interconnection between them changing even as socioeconomic conditions changed altogether. All this ‘capitalism’ that ‘permeated and involved all types of farms’,312 was oriented towards the market, and compelled the employment, to one degree or the other, of innovations, and the development of business acumen. Land usage, on the other hand, was not really affected. With the emancipation, there began in Russia the battle of two roads to economic development. And here, in Tambov, it was neither the Prussian nor the American model that prevailed. Whereas the emancipation of Prussian serfs largely conditioned the politics of the Prussian nobility,313 the lack of a clear model upon which to base post-emancipation economic activities meant that the Russian nobility’s stance on reform was not necessarily associated with the economic effects of emancipation. It is elsewhere that we need to look for factors influencing noble politics in provincial Russia.

Arguably the main reason why middling gentry left their lands was the absence of long- term solutions for sourcing capital, particularly mortgage credit. Regardless of the direction their modernising efforts took, it was almost impossible to maintain a continuous flow of cash injections – a prerequisite for any capitalist enterprise depended so heavily on mid-term seasonal market fluctuations. The landowning nobility of Tambov, much like their peers all over Russia, repeatedly solicited the government at St. Petersburg to find ways of extending credit, suggesting long-term favourable loans, the opening of credit institutions, and a rethinking of the emancipation statutes. By the time of Alexander’s assassination, the gentry demands for cash had become incessant. Interestingly, even the most reticent landowners had been won over by the modernising party at this stage. The provincials were henceforth united in petitioning for ‘modernisation expenditure’, in other words the funds necessary to achieve a wholescale capitalist transformation of the agrarian economy.

Estate viability and the problem of noble solvency in postreform Russia Andrei Markevich and Stephen Nafzinger have attempted to show that following emancipation, the peasantry was largely better off than under serfdom.314 They base

312 Kabytov, Agrarnye otnosheniia, 170. 313 Berdahl, R. M., The Politics of the Prussian Nobility: The Development of a Conservative Ideology, 1770-1848, Princeton N. J., 1988. 314 A. Merkevich and E. Zhuravskaia, ‘The Economic Effects of the Abolition of Serfdom: Evidence from the Russian Empire’, American Economic Review cviii (2018), 1974-1117; S. Nafziger, Russian Serfdom, Emancipation, and Land Inequality: New Evidence’, 112 these conclusions on a carefully laid econometric analysis that takes into account agricultural productivity (grain to seed yield), industrial development (industrial output and employment), nutrition (calorific intake and average height), and mortality. While the empirical method used in both studies is not without its problems, it is also by far the most suitable for this task.315 Their process cannot be emulated here, since this would require an entirely new statistical survey of middling landowners in Tambov in the post-emancipation period. This does not stop us, however, from reflecting on specific effects of legislation passed in 1861-1863, namely on estate viability and solvency in a serfless economy.

The DD model is supposed to account for endogeneity.316 Since this study focuses upon a single province, it welcomes endogeneity as an important factor in noble decision- making. As we have seen Tambov and its neighbouring provinces were rich in both privately-owned lands and human capital. This agrees with the general pattern of land and serf dispersion throughout the first century of Empire, which supposes an inverse correlation between distance to each capital and the number of serfs/des. held by gentry. In turn, this led to a considerable degree of noble indebtedness. State monopoly on financial institutions and the use of serfs as collateral had been the norm since the eighteenth century. Providing credit at a fixed rate of 5% (until 1857) was a means to ensure both noble loyalty and their welfare. Given a national profitability average for estates at 5%, the worse a landowner could do is perpetually exchange profit for interest payments. In Tambov, where estate profitability was considerably higher (up to 12% or more in some cases), perpetual refinancing of collateralised estates and their serfs was theoretically possible, even more so after 1857, when the national interest rate dropped to 4%.

https://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/SerfdomEmancipationInequality_Long_May2013_2.pdf% 20 [Accessed March 2014]. 315 For suitability, see Marianne Bertrand, et al., ‘How much should we trust differences-in-differences estimates?’, 2. Accessed online at https://economics.mit.edu/files/750%20 [Accessed October 2015]. It would be interesting to test the hypothesis presented – an exercise in counterfactuals assuming that had Emancipation been abolished in 1820, by 1913 Russia would have been 1.3 times richer. An MC simulation providing different estimates (and their likelihood) for different decades (1830, 1840, 1850, etc) would have been equally interesting. 316 DD: Difference-in-differences statistical model. DD identifies a specific event (in this case emancipation), and then considers the mutations observed in affected and unaffected groups. 113

In anticipation of emancipation, however, the government stopped issuing loans in 1858, after which point it was impossible to refinance a collateralised estate. The major driving force behind noble indebtedness was status consumption. It has often been stated that the gentry spent a great deal more on things such as urban real estate, luxury goods, foreign imports, etc. than they reinvested in their land and human capital. By 1861, about 7.1 million serfs were used as collateral in 44,000 indebted estates, thus representing 63% of all human capital – with a European Russia average of 59% and Tambovian average of 67%.317 By law, redemption payments were calculated as capitalised quitrent and made to landowners in the form of special bonds carrying 5% interest.318 Therefore, a non-indebted noble had every incentive to reach an agreement with his serfs as soon as possible. A landowner with debts to the state, however, did not; before any redemption payments could be made, the state would subtract the value of the loans. Based on the percentages given above (4% interest vs. 5% profit), this would mean a 1% drop in their revenue. The percentage of gentry affected by this loss shrunk over time, however. Moreover, I will be arguing in the following Chapter that status consumption was not necessarily a correlate of low economic acumen. Rather, it was a stopgap measure which allowed for the formation and maintenance of social networks that – those involved hoped – would prove a stabilising factor in a market economy.

Gentry decision-making with respect to emancipation was a complicated process informed by several factors. Firstly, the 1861 statutes and 1863 legislation forcing a deal between communes and landowners were heavily conditioned upon a pre-existing relationship. This relationship was, in turn, dependent upon the system of labour (corvée/mixed/quitrent) and each landowner’s personal relationship with the commune. While not legally obligated, landowners could – in theory – refrain for the upwards revision of their demands under serfdom. Yet the majority of manuals available to landowners at the time, such as those by S. M. Usov, V. P. Dmitriev, and E. von Ungern-Shterenberg, insisted upon the ‘laziness’ and ‘corrupt nature’ of the serf, who tends to hide part of the produce in an effort to cheat his master.319 Similarly,

317 Skrebitskii, Krest’ianskoe, vol. 4, 218. 318 Zaionchkovsky (Otmena, 244) saw a decrease in corvee during the ‘transitional period’ after emancipation and noted that quitrent would vary widely from region to region. 319 For Usov, see W. Blackwell, Beginnings of Russian Industrialisation, 1800-1860, Princeton, N. J., 2015, 366-7; for Dmitriev, see F. Bourgholtzer, ‘Aleksandr Chayanov and Russian Berlin’, The Journal of Peasant Studies xxvi (2008), 13-53, 40f.; for Ungern-Sternberg, see K. Lust, ‘Wrecking Peasants and 114 one can argue, the serfs actually did have a strong incentive to do so – because of the so-called ‘ratchet effect’. At the same time, there was no low-cost system of monitoring serf production nor any dependable measure of its proceeds. In all, there was suspicion on both sides, and seldom did ‘enlightened landownership’ make any real difference to centuries of mistrust. The only means of offsetting this, however partially, was for landowner and labourers/commune to enter an agreement of fixed quitrent. In blacksoil Russia this was not always possible.320

The landowners who had established some measure of trust between them and the communes were in a better position to negotiate redemption contracts or, to put it more accurately, the communes were more likely to commit to a redemption contract. But the level of trust depended, in turn, on how successful had agreements between the two parties had been in the past. In Tambov, like elsewhere in European Russia, corvée was one of the options available.321 With corvée, setting up a long-term system of ‘payments’ (in labour) was not as easy as it was in a mixed or fully-quitrent arrangement. Such agreements, at any case rather rare, were conspicuously absent from the middling gentry estate redemption process. Consequently, the measure of mistrust between the two parties was not mitigated. This was one of the reasons why in about 15% of cases, buyout negotiations were still ongoing in 1881 and the government was forced to legislate an end to the process a full two decades after the original statutes had come into effect.

The other reason was that the legislation itself (from 1863 onwards) was heavily biased in favour of the landowners who were given the initiative of starting the buyout process. We know that once that happened, any debts to the State Bank or Noble Fund would be written off, and the landowner would be left without cash, quitrent payments, or indeed land whence to draw income. Inversely, a debt-free noble (which was rare, indeed) would receive, almost immediately, a sum of money equal to the value of his/her land (this too was artificially inflated). Whether they would choose to squander or reinvest that sum is another matter altogether. In short, the more heavily indebted a landowner was, the less likely he was to initiate the buyout.

Salvaging Landlords – Or Vice Versa? Wrecking in the Russian Baltic Provinces of Estland and Livland, 1780-1870’, International Review of Social History lvii (2017), 67-93. 320 Skrebitskii, vol. 4, 829. 321 Ibid, 1862-1866. 115

Emancipation led to a massive redistribution of land which, as explained in previous paragraphs, favoured the middling nobility. This was reinforced by an increase in the total acreage of privately-held land (also discussed in the previous section), which was not only the result of claiming previously untilled land (this was precious and rare in fertile provinces anyway), but also by claiming ownership of the best peasant lands. On average, the communes of European Russia lost about 6.5% of their lands in post- emancipation settlements.322 In Tambov, this ratio was 9.3%. It is plausible to assume that this redistribution would favour the landowners, who were keen to retain/gain the most fertile lands. Interestingly, Tambov does not diverge from the statistical average of buyout negotiations; in one out of two cases, a mutual agreement was finally reached, largely thanks to the efforts of intermediaries.

Most of the deals were struck well before 1881; in the blacksoil belt, quitrent was set a lot higher than interest payments to the State Bank and so it comes as a surprise that indebted landowners did not wish to procrastinate. On the one hand, we must keep in mind the serious losses the initiating party stood to suffer if no mutual agreement could be reached. In the landowners’ case, this was the 20% redemption payment. Similar disincentives applied to the peasants, though, so this is far from characteristic for one side. If anything, peasants stood to lose a great deal more if they went ahead with the buyout operation without reaching a deal. So the two sets of disincentives largely cancelled each other out and made it more profitable for both sides to reach an agreement. On the other hand, it is entirely likely that in sharp contrast to the Chekhovian ideal type, landowners recognised the opportunities extended by the abolition of serfdom. There can be little doubt that within the microscale of the province, it was their post-emancipation enterprises that were the most competitive and profitable as supposed to communal endeavours. With periodic re-distribution of communal land being the norm in Tambov, low levels of peasant literacy (in the first post-emancipation decade) and low incentive to reinvest in land and human capital, the emancipated commune was an inefficient model of agriculture.

322 Markevich ‘Economic Development’, 18. Soviet estimates give the total land lost to landowners up to 1/3. The positive coefficient of land suitability with the post-emancipation dummy does suggest an increase in arable lands following emancipation, at least in provinces with better agricultural potential. 116

Following the standard measurement for the efficiency of an agricultural production model, i.e. grain to yield ratio, is an excellent (though not trouble-free) way of illustrating the efficiency of the post-emancipation landowner estate. In contrast to the commune, they benefited from economies of scale, much better coordination, efficient decision-making independent of a voting system, and access to new technologies (largely thanks to networks and literacy). The comparison between privately-owned and communal farmland in terms of yield between 1863-1881 is an absolute measure. Yet because of the paucity of relevant data, a regression analysis and subsequent projection of results for the parts of the period are necessary.

While landowners may have been generally attracted to what they thought was a new ‘business model’, most of their number had no inkling as to how an estate could be run with contracted labourers. Instead of considering how ‘backward’ or ‘uneducated’ these rural elites were, instead of seeing their failure to modernise successfully as a failure of their class, an endemic weakness of Russia’s ‘gentlemen farmer’, we should consider that the exact opposite may be true. In fact, I would argue that most of the failed attempts to rationalise estate running – in Tambov, if not elsewhere – were made by gentry whose approach to the issue was too theoretical, rather than too backward. Their bookshelves were heavy with thick volumes on ‘new agronomy’, their desks creaking under the weight of the latest journals, their correspondence replete with references to ‘theories’ and ‘ideas’ from abroad. Ultimately, these were sorely needed to offset the effects of a catastrophic change in climate bringing droughts, seem to multiply with each passing year.323

We are often quick to condemn estate management in postreform Russia as ‘irrational’ because it was ill-suited to the economic exigencies of the time. A case in point is the calculation of produce profitability carried out by landowners on the premise that there would be a sufficient supply of tools and work animals brought in by the labourers themselves. In theory, this should work but in practice peasants were always hit hardest by such uncontrollable events as droughts, for example. They were ill-

323 See, not exclusively, the following correspondence: A. Ia. Bulgakov ‘Kaleidoskop moskovskoi zhizni (Iz pisem A. Ia. Bulgakova P. A. Viazemskomu)’, Istorichekii Vestnik v (1881); ‘F. V. Bulgarin pis’ma N. N. Grechu’, Literaturnyi Vestnik ii (1901); ‘F. V. Bulgarin Pis’mo A. V. Nikitenko’, Russkaia Starina i (1900); ‘P. A. Viazemskii Pis’ma Ia. K. Grotu. 1869-1877’, Starina i Novizna xiii (1899) and xix (1915); ‘M. A. Maksimovich Pis’ma P. A. Vziazemskomu’, Starina i Novizna iv (1901). 117 placed to cope with such difficulties, particularly in comparison to the landowners, who had some access to capital reserves with which to maintain inventories. Finding workhorses was a particular problem for working tiaglos.324 It is worth mentioning that the Land Bank, already operating out of Petersburg during the early 1860s, opened a new branch in Tambov in 1867. At the same time, throughout European Russia middling landowners banded together in joint stock ventures, thereby instituting an unofficial network of ‘caches’ whence to draw some capital on credit. This type of venture, however, was not particularly popular in Tambov, where landowners preferred more traditional sources of credit (mortgages). Those Tambovians that did opt for this alternative means for securing capital looked to Moscow, Nizhnii Novgorod and Samara (the latter as of 1873).325 This ‘understanding’ of how to use such ventures was problematic, to say the least. At any rate, it was far from sufficient to keep middling estates running throughout the postreform period. As a result, noble petitions for the opening of new long-term credit institutions persisted.

Towards the very end of the period, a new Noble Land Bank did open ‘exclusively for the support of the landed property [belonging to] hereditary nobility’.326 Countrywide, its operations were mostly limited to the offer of 11-65-year mortgages, at about 60- 65% of the land’s market value. ‘Market’ being the operative word, here, since those estimates were in fact rather favourable to the landowners. And so were interests, usually set at 1.5-3%, much lower than the budding ‘commercial bank’ standards.327 It helped that as per the Noble Bank’s founding charter, board members would also act as appraisers for their local branches. The chairman of the board may have been appointed by the Ministry of Finance (more often than not a local grandee), but the members (and two alternates) were elected by the local nobility for a three-year term.328 By its very nature, the Land Bank offered itself to network formation and, indeed, the board makeup for each province would make an excellent case study for social network analysis in the last quarter of the century. For now, however, it would be prudent to leave the discussion on credit here. The first board elections took place

324 A. Korelin, Sel’skokhoziaistvennyi kredit v Rossii v kontse XIX – nachale XX vv., M., 1988, 28. 325 Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii, vol. XV, 113-14. 326 Korelin, Sel’skokhoziaistvennyi kredit, 18. 327 Ibid, 17. 328 Pen’kova, op. cit., 67. 118 on December 6th, 1885.329 As such, interactions between its board members fall outside the scope of the present study.

329 Ibid, 67; Sbornik kalendar, 91. 119

Chapter III: Sweeping reforms, 1858-1879

By virtue of the sheer size and multitudinous intraclass variation in financial standing, the rural provinces of European Russia make for a challenging network analysis case study. Seeking a fully generalisable statistical-analytical model, readily applicable throughout, is as impractical as it is meaningless. Network analysis may only be conceived within a specific socio-political context. This Chapter presents and discusses this context with a view to frame network analysis in Chapter IV, but also as a means of providing the reader with a better understanding of the units of analysis used. Its subsidiary purpose is to build an image of postreform nobility within its natural setting – the estate. If Chapter II discussed the economic conditions in which network formation and evolution takes place, Chapter III discusses the political conditions prevailing during the same time in the Russian province, particularly in Tambov.

Few serious scholars would doubt that emancipation and land reform had a profound impact on noble lifestyles. From the perspective of the nobility, this realisation was tempered by a measure of inertia. Owing to the complexity of emancipation legislation and the government’s delay in producing an accompanying land reform, large numbers of landowners were under the mistaken impression that they could carry on living as they had for decades, if not centuries. This was made possible by the government’s lending on generous terms until 1858, and the mechanics of emancipation itself, which made sure that redemption agreements would favour the nobility. On the other hand, many nobles deplored and resented the new state of affairs, which they considered to be, in the best case, ‘unusual’ and, in the worst case, ‘tragic’. There is a degree of artificial exaggeration to such descriptions and so most of the sources containing them are good for little else than re-imagining a ‘lost world’, a world which probably only existed in the authors’ imagination to begin with.

Education, career & religion in postreform Russia The character of noble networks in the postreform period was first and foremost determined by a pre-existing system of general and vocational education for young nobles, originally set in place to ensure a continuous source whence the service could replenish its ranks. In the first instance, the institutionalised monopoly hereditary 120 nobility traditionally held on special educational privileges had largely been broken by this stage. Yet middling landowners would think twice about investing in the most expensive education for their offspring if they were not themselves ideologically predisposed to do so. This is simply because education was increasingly regarded as an investment rather than a class privilege. Meaningful and prestigious places in the service were limited, and as a rule determined by the needs of the administration and the armed forces. On the other hand, there was no shortage of menial positions offered to the lesser, provincial gentry. The entire noble class enjoyed personal and collective benefits, for which – as Herzen pointed out even from the earliest stages of the reform process – they were entirely dependent upon the privileges they had been granted by the autocracy.1 Those privileges, in turn, served a dual purpose: To safeguard the nobility’s exalted position in many key areas of everyday life; and to reinforce the nobility’s dependence upon Imperial Benevolence. As we have seen, the collective term ‘nobility’ or ‘gentry’ belies a complicated intra-class hierarchy.

For the nobility, education was partly a way to better placement in the service, and partly a status signifier. The education of noble youth was primed to encourage a specific worldview; it was above all, a class education. In post-emancipation Russia, stressing that a noble esprit de corps be maintained by means of a specific type of education became increasingly important. Gone were the days when a nobleman could rest on his laurels without trying to gain at least some understanding of culture and science. For B. N. Chicherin, education should be an inalienable class characteristic: ‘The nobility, first before other sosloviia, took to European education, at the same time formulating new customs, new interests, a new way of life. Whether this education is substantial, that is an altogether different matter. But we can surely say that the nobility is the only educated class in the Empire.’2 Then again, Chicherin was an academic unfamiliar with Danton and his views on the needs of the people.

In this respect too, it was difficult to bridge intraclass gaps in the quality and content of education available to noble children. Provincials would often educate their youngsters at home, whereas city-dwelling nobility (particularly from the capitals) had

1 N. Ia. Eidel’man, Gertsen protiv samoderzhaviia: Sekretnaia politicheskaia istoriia Rossii XVII-XIX i vol’naia pechat, M., 1973, 25 passim. 2 B. N. Chicherin, Neskol’ko Sovremennykh Voprosov, M., 1862, 24. 121 access to several well-staffed schools. This is not to say that home-schooling was tantamount to semi-literacy; Chicherin himself was home-schooled for example, and so was his erudite younger brother.3 But like today, home-schooling in Late Imperial Russia came in varying degrees of completion and quality. Neither did attending a school – however prestigious – necessarily allow one entrance to the elite. Russian schoolteachers had to overcome a plethora of institutional obstacles designed to ensure that no itinerant ‘liberals’ and ‘troublemakers’ were given a chance at a classroom full of the Empire’s elite-in-waiting. Reformers may have done away with the presence of clergy upon public education, but that did not mean they were ready to allow just any secular ideology to permeate the classroom.

Blacksoil Russia generally provided more opportunities for good schooling than other parts of European Russia: There was a large number of secondary schools for (noble) boys and girls. The first gymnasium in the region opened in Kursk in 1808. Girls had to wait until 1870. Even within the blacksoil belt, some provinces – such as Tambov – were lucky to have ‘enlightened’ governors (such as G. R. Derzhavin) who ensured that both genders would have at least some state-sponsored education available to them. By the second half of the nineteenth century both city and province could boast a mathematics school, a seminary, a gymnasium for boys, a finishing school,4 and a teachers’ training institute, along with several museums and libraries.

In this Tambov was also helped by the legislature of St. Petersburg. The Educational Statutes of 1864 were a complex piece of legislation which specified the structure ‘new age’ educational institutions of all levels should have.5 These were ‘feeder’ schools to local gymnasia, as attendance of the former meant graduates did not have to sit entrance exams for the latter. Gymnasium entrance examinations were the only way a home-schooled child could graduate to secondary education. This practice which ensured at least a measure of uniformity of knowledge bases. Most of these

3 See G. M. Hamburg, Boris Chicherin & Early Russian Liberalism 1828-1866, Stanford, Ca., 1992, 17- 41. 4 The Aleksandriiskii Institute for daughters of the nobility. 5 They were to have four classes, be divided into classical and semi-classical, etc. All this was described in great detail in the ‘Polozheniia o nachal’nykh narodnykh uchilishchakh’ (1864 and 1874) and the ‘Polozheniia o gorodskikh uchilishchakh i uchitel’skikh institutakh’ (1874). These were introduced in the SZ, then published in the Sbornik postanovlennii po Ministerstvu narodnogo prosveshcheniia, in 17 vols., SPb., 1864-1904; and the Sbornik rasporiazhenii po Ministerstvu narodnogo prosveshcheniia, SPb., in 16 vols., SPb., 1866-1907. 122 institutions, although approved by state authorities did not actually receive any support from the state budget. They existed and operated subject to the benevolence of local gentry. Philanthropy was thus a network fortifier, because it allowed for joint ventures outside the ‘market-capitalist’ system in which both men and women could take part together. This is not to say that noble philanthropists did not benefit from at least a rise in status and gains in the respect of their peers, but they did sacrifice substantial amounts in order to set up and keep the institutions running.6

Does a prevalent spirit of philanthropy suffice to justify the claim that blacksoil gentry was united in spirit by some sort of class consciousness? Probably not. Charity was, after all, a traditional burden that Russian landowners had to shoulder on account of their social position. None were under the illusion that this position was an accident of birth or, more properly, divinely ordained. It was after all, a way to ensure their own children would have a future should things go wrong. This all goes to show that society, like nature, hates a vacuum; the central government, far from assuming all the costs of welfare, actively tried to shift as many of them as possible to the landowning classes, first by means of making charity a prerequisite for the establishment of noble corporations, then by legislating it into the land assemblies.

The nobility, on the other hand, saw in corporations and welfare ventures an opportunity to make potentially useful acquaintances and invest in networks. This is not to say, however, that they were happy to shoulder the expense. In Nashe Dvorianstvo, structured around a defence of class interests, the anonymous author shies from committing to paper his meek hopes that the government will eventually step in. Instead he chose to outline, however tentatively, what ought not to be done:

6 The famous Mikhailovksy Cadet School was one case. It became the alma mater of many Tambovian nobles). These are detailed in three related publications by V. M. Krylov, Kadetskie korpusa i rossiiskie kadety, SPb., 1998; idem, ‘Mikhailovksaia artilleriiskaia akademiia i uchilishche v period voennykh reform 60-70-x gg. XIX v.’, Bombardir xi (2000), 12-15; idem, ‘Deiatel’nost’ Glavnogo artilleriiskogo upravleniia po perevooruzhenii armii i reformirovaniiu artilleriskoi promyshlennosti v khode voennykh reform 1860-1870-x gg.’, Bombardir xiii (2001), 8-13. The school was supported by a local committee of nobles which at the time of emancipation was headed by general-major M. V. Chertkov, the school’s biggest sponsor. Where nobility was found wanting in charitable sentiments, local administration – still run by nobility – did not shy from making donations a requirement; In Kursk, nobles were required to donate 12,000r. per annum for the upkeep of a school-cum-shelter for the kids of impoverished landowners. The shelter itself had been set up in a property donated by the brothers Korobkov, a pair of middling nobles, and valued at 20,000r. P. A. Berlin, Russkaia burzhiaziia v staroe i novoe vremia, M., vol. 2, 1922, 117; N. Vishniakov, Svedeniia o kupecheskom rode Vishniakovykh, M., vol. 2, 1911, 62. 123

[For the nobility to maintain its dignity], it is necessary to do the following: Give nobles the opportunity to train and educate their offspring not only in the capital, but also near their own estates, or in [provincial] urban centres, by the establishment of educational institutions with noble-only dormitories and boarding schools adapted to the spirit of noble tradition, so as to facilitate access to education. 7

A. M. Parshin, an early twentieth-century publicist, was a lot more direct in his criticism of Alexander II’s errors:

The first and foremost shortcoming of Alexander II’s reforms is that in many ways they were too advanced for the average mental and moral level of development [in Russia]. The required popular literacy; whereas the European peoples approached [modernity] from junior school, we – illiterate – had to embrace it directly from senior school. In particular, serious mistakes were made with respect to school on the primary and secondary levels. Noblemen who spend 15 years on benches are complete nincompoops when it comes to ordinary financial affairs in their own estates. The fact is that nobles held a great deal of land, which they could have exploited to make up for the loss of free serf labour. Russia should have been covered with exemplary estates, which would set the scene for the development of agricultural schools without the need for government spending. In order to achieve this, it would have been necessary to develop the study of natural sciences, agronomy in particular, in the countryside.8

It is interesting to observe that despite the time gap between these two publications, both authors drew attention to the government’s patent inability to resolve one of the most important issues plaguing postreform noble society, as a consequence of which the frustration and impoverishment of provincial nobility was exacerbated even further: Noble landowners were already aware of the fact that the new market system required of them the acquisition of specialist knowledge, knowledge that would ease their tradition to the world of bourgeois capitalist economy and help them manage their estates more efficiently.

Blacksoil nobility, Tambovians among their number, did not simply muse over the prospect of providing their youth with some sort of professional education in estate management. They also considered questions relating to the nobility’s chief activity,

7 Anonymous- ‘Chto my? Kuda my idem?’ Narodnoe bogatstvo (1), 1862. 8 A. M. Parshin, Nastoiashchee Rossii (nashi gosudarstvennye oshibki), M. 1908, 7. 124 state service. Several Tambovian essayists discussed the issue at length. A. P. Korelin quotes the following contemporary source:

The children of provincial nobles should receive secondary and tertiary education both in their own provinces and in national institutions without having to sit competitive entry examinations: [those who can] will receive well-grounded education at their own cost, and those who cannot – certified by the marshal of the nobility – be kept as boarders at the expense of either the assembly’s, the zemstvo’s or the school’s treasury. For it is local nobles who preside in all uezd institutions, and it is local nobles who are the main figures in the zemstva, they are the ones who make up the zemstvo administration – and in terms of preparation they have no other recourse than the development of their acumen by means of serious education. The educated nobleman is the cultural power of the locale, a living centre of knowledge and experience in the provincial environment.9

As the reforms made necessary by the abolition of serfdom were being implemented, the nobility, deprived of free labour, had to choose between capital investment and joining the active workforce. The types of occupation available to them were not many to begin with, but the provincial nobility in particular was beset by problems owing to their awareness of class exclusivity, already evident in the passages quoted. Naturally, this mental ankylosis was inherited by the children of noble birth born and raised in a reformed Russia.

An equally influential factor shaping the social psychology of Russian nobility was religious belief. The worldview of all precapitalistic societies had been shaped by religion. In mediaeval society, the church served as a facilitator of social synthesis as well as a mechanism sanctioning secular power and propagating the status quo. The social consciousness of Russian nobility in the postreform period is characterised by a turn en masse to the divine, non-secular interpretation of what was happening around them, and by increased disdain for earthly things such as the intricacies of the new lifestyle conditioned by a demanding economic model. This is not to say that the importance of economic activity had been disregarded by members of the ruling class, but that its place in the general system of life aspirations was not dominant. The nobles’ understanding was that labour was naught but a necessity and that God

9 A. P. Korelin., Dvorianstvo v poreformennoi Rossii 1861 – 1904gg, M. 1979, 31. 125 decreed who would carry most of its burden. As long as in their (holistic) worldview the Creator of the universe and everything on Earth was the same God, all consciousness of the world is in one way or another locked in the spiritual sphere and thus bears a distinctively moral character.

It follows that in noble consciousness the power of the tsar and the person of the tsar were sacralised. The godly origin of monarchic power was not characteristic only of the feudal period; all ensuing ideological formulations held that the power of the aristocracy strengthened autocratic power at the same time as the autocracy guaranteed the privileges of nobility. The psyche of a Russian noble was integrated into a collective. A nobleman was only aware of himself within his social group, his course in life having been programmed since birth by the simple and haphazard fact of appurtenance to a certain class. This sense of belonging was symbolic of the individual’s essence, as was the observation of the customs, traditions and rituals, the sacred and unshakable foundations of social order. Any change in custom, in behaviour or even in appearance meant a change in social status, which went against the laws of society, therefore against tsar, therefore ultimately against God.

Religious and tsarist viewpoints were interwoven, even at mass level, since the people as a whole considered them two variations of the same political consciousness, two varieties of the same principle for the formulation of a ruling ideology which was to serve the social order in postreform Russia. Since the tsar’s power was more tangible that God’s, tsarism constituted the core of socio-political thinking, subordinating to its influence all other considerations, including ecclesiastic-religious ones. Religion maintained its importance as a unifying link between different social groupings, reconciling them and providing individuals as well as society as a whole with much- needed hope. A Tambovian essayist, a staunch believer in the divinely ordained right of the Autocrat, remarked in 1878:

The worldview of the Russian people holds that all of us are subjects of the White Tsar – we belong to him personally [my emphasis]. [Individual personality] is of secondary importance and does not rise to the level of other blessings, such as the gift of life. This 126

is why the Sovereign embodies the national will, and He decides what is best for us and when; for these decisions He does not require outside help.10

In Tambov and elsewhere, the monarch stands at the very centre of a noble’s life. Like in earlier times, nobles were locked in a set of basic needs, interests and values inextricably intertwined with their service to state and crown. The pervasive and pervading idea of loyalty largely overshadowed actual class goals and interests and prevented the formation of a true political culture among nobility. Corporative pride in station was tied to and absolute deference for supreme power and proximity to the throne. Autocracy was based on a hierarchical system from which the nobility benefited greatly – first and foremost by occupying the highest posts in the state and army. As the budding bureaucracy and the provincials were jostling for power, the latter sought to occupy the higher moral ground by virtue of their centuries of service. In contrast to a functionary, a provincial had been ‘touched’ by the fount of honour; yet as the monarch embodies the state, the functionary is also, in part, an extension of the monarch’s absolute power. This impasse could only be resolved by a sense of personal connection to the tsar, something that a ‘cog in the bureaucratic machine’ could not lay claim to. In turn, the search for a personal connection to the Emperor prevented nobles from forming any type of unified front against the bureaucrats. Iu. M. Lotman underlines that:

The Table of Ranks created a military-bureaucratic machine of state administration. The power of the state rested on two figures: the officer and the official; yet the socio- cultural makeup of these two units was different. An official is a person whose very title means ‘rank’. [Chin] is Old Russian [sic] for ‘order’. An official is a salaried person, whose fortunes are directly dependent on the state. This person is tied to the administrative machine and cannot exist without it.11

Material wealth and the estate Tied to the bounty of their lands, Tambovian nobility experienced a great shift in its fortunes as a result of the reform drive. Emancipation caused a complete change of paradigm in the relationship between nobility and material wealth. In the following

10 A. A. Planson, O dvorianstvo v Rossii: sovremennoe polozhenie voprosa, SPb., 1893, 21. 11 Iu. M., Lotman, Besedy o russkoi kul’ture. Byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstvo (XVIII – XIX vv.), SPb., 1994, 12. 127 passages, it will become evident that this change can best be summed up as a process of accumulation of capital and fragmentation of lands. Tambov’s landed gentry was heavily dependent upon the ownership of fertile land – the size of the estate, in correlation with its placement within the province (not all of the province was equally fertile) was key to their social status. It is impressive to consider that within the span of a single generation, the super-ego which identified in the past with number of souls owned became in turn conditioned by the number of desiatina of land owned. For the middling nobility, shared values were often held in higher standing than ‘base’ material prosperity – and it is important to differentiate between prosperity at home and the size of holdings.

This is part of the reason why the analysis of social networks can be crucial for our understanding of the impact of reform on the lives of Russian nobles. Their position within the secular environment was determined primarily by a combination of various factors such as origin, friendships and family ties, in other words their social network. The primacy of ancestry in such considerations is clearly evidenced by the example of a petty landowner from Morshansk: I. S. Ostrozhskii-Lokhvitskii constantly referred back to the origins of his family, hoping that esteemed pedigree could strengthen his shaky position in society and secure once and for all his position in the service; this was a common device.12 In fact, it could be argued that noble social networks mediated one of the most adverse (from the nobility’s perspective) by-products of the reforms underway, namely the acute deficit of any ideas about future social order, indeed even more so that the ever-present inviolability of supreme power. For the astute observer, there were palpable, albeit barely so, apologetic overtones in the way Alexander went about preparing for his transformation of the Russian state. He felt the need to justify such a drastic step as late as 1858; the step alone of issuing an imperial command for the creation of noble commissions in the provinces, which would hold considerable legislative powers, was intended to be received as a sign of trust on the part of the Emperor to his provincial nobility.

We can only make assumptions (however informed) about the gentry’s trust in the person of the Emperor, ostensible or otherwise. Throughout the reform process,

12 Mironenko, op. cit., 159. 128

Alexander would intervene only when situation demanded it, and even then with mixed results. Once emancipation was under way, the Sovereign could minimise his involvement in politics, although he did not always choose to do so. In theory, his outward reasoning for proclaiming the emancipation was hard to argue with – not least because the Crimean defeat was evidence that some sort of deep-cut reform was necessary for the survival of the Russian Empire as a Great Power. If we assume a ‘battle for modernity’, emancipation was only half of it; the other half was land redemption, and in this respect it was impossible to couch the terms of exchange in abstract terms or base them on moral grounds – which had been the case for emancipation proper. Official guidance on this most salient topic was lined with ambiguity and many in the provinces were worried whether the government could actually guarantee stability in the face of social upheaval. The name ‘Pugachev’ begun to be whispered hither and thither. What if the state abandoned its landowning nobility to face alone the maelstrom of reform?

In Tambov and elsewhere the noble psyche became tortured by protracted and painful contradictions. Is it the will of the Sovereign to bring down one of the pillars of Autocracy? If so, then so be it. But what if it is not the Sovereign’s will? What if the Sovereign had been laid astray by a circle of evil advisors? Between 1861 and 1864, sporadic evidence drawn from the minutes of official gentry meetings is indicative of widespread shock and disbelief and not without a measure of confusion as to what was expected of the landowner elite.13 Then, the very first convocation of the newly-minted land assembly sought clarification by trying to establish a direct channel of communication with the court of St. Petersburg, largely bypassing the Daedalic corridors of power at the MoI. Resistance to reform from either side of the political spectrum (whether it was based on the premise that ‘reform does not go far enough’ or ‘reform was too much too soon’) was not, nor could ever be, resistance to the Crown.

Matters were complicated even further by the fact that the ‘target’ was not well defined. For all but the most distanced and untouchable Tambovian gentry, whosoever tried to become involved in the planning and implementation of reform could be very easily

13 Expressions of ‘shock’ and ‘surprise’ are commonplace in the following: GATO F. 143, Op. 1-9, 341- 351, 731-734. They were equally commonplace in regional meetings: GATO F. 149, Op. 1, d. 2, 11, 23, 60. 62 (Kozlov); GATO F. 150, Op. 12, d. 42, 81 (Kirsanov); GATO F. 152, Op. 1 d. 1-17, 117-133, 189, 201, 202 (Morshansk). 129 delegated to opposition to the ‘true spirit’ of reform and identified with the bureaucracy. The dichotomy between ‘bureaucrats’ and ‘gentry’ was fuzzy, not least because of the Byzantine plots weaved during the incessant infighting for political power within the bureaucracy, and the varying nature and political orientations of noble social networks in the provinces. Even so, if one is to argue for the sake of clarity that such a dichotomy did in fact exist, then the ‘gentry’s’ expressed concern for the independence of the Sovereign’s will would soon be utilised by their opponents who – already from the early stages of reform – naturally held the political initiative and had carefully implanted in the imperial court fear for the phantom of a noble ‘oligarchy’ thirsting for power. The hatching of this scheme hinged largely upon the Emperor’s own fear of conspiracies – a common feature of the Romanovs who after coming to power broke the boyars’ backs, clamped down on religious dissension, became Emperors by taming nobility.14 The ‘implicit trust’ placed by the Emperor upon his nobles was easily shaken by ghosts of the past. Middling nobility in particular was at least partially aware of this and, for fear of losing their place in provincial society, engaged with politics as the ‘opposition’ by blindly striking out to their perceived enemies. For the majority among them, naïve monarchism was the most convenient form of ideology, and one they were ready to embrace out of necessity (lack of viable alternatives) rather than because of some deep personal conviction.

This would explain why, as soon as the proper channels for political debate were opened in the form of zemstva, ideologies were quick to crystallise. In this sense, reform can be conceptualised as unique form of politicisation within an autocratic system. As B. G. Litvak noted:

The bureaucracy resolutely applied itself to finding an independent place in the system of political thinking. […]. In their conflict with the landowning nobility, bureaucrat- reformers regarded themselves as enemies of those who embraced and propagated ‘obsolete’ and irrational principles [related to the] patriarchal monarchical consciousness. Zemstvo members did not like it when bureaucrats made decisions in their stead. Bureaucrats maintained that they decided what was best for the interest of the state, not the selfish interest of the nobility.15

14 Not to mention that as a dynasty they had survived noble coups from the time of Emperor Paul to the Decembrist uprising. 15 B. G. Litvak, Russkaia, 15. 130

Eventually, this artificial struggle between two very loosely defined political quantities of the Empire would lead to the nobility’s ostracization from direct participation in decision-making on a national level. In St. Petersburg, this was perceived as beneficial to the reform process, a positive development which allowed the bureaucracy to implement compromising legislative measures providing resolution to the most pressing socio-economic problems. However, in their quest to lay, with new legislation, the groundwork for a rational model of a functioning supreme power founded on the principle of bureaucratic mediation, reformers defaulted on the existing ‘social contract’ which was squarely based on the adherence of the upper classes to the tradition of the ‘noble tsar’. By destroying this vital link, the original paradigm for noble social psychology, reformers caused serious tensions to appear in the relationship between nobility and supreme power, maybe as early as 1861, but definitely by 1864. As a result, the latter could not rely on this critical social support, necessary for this equally critical period when the empire was undergoing fundamental reform.

The reformers themselves were members of the privileged noble class and their professional-corporate interests were those of the highest caste therein. In contrast to pre-reform provincials, these influential groups were self- and class-aware. In the provinces, on the other hand, noble networks were at first so socio-psychologically weak that they could not offer any meaningful resistance neither to the disintegration of feudal relations, nor the bureaucracy’s attempt to replace them with a centrally- planned ‘vertical’ mechanism ensuring stability in the countryside in the postreform period. It was at this time that regional variations were at their most evident. The emergence of new capital, labour and land markets, the preponderance of ‘bourgeois’ characteristics in the mentality of Russian nobles now depended upon regional conditions. Agrarian mentalities such as had been born at the beginning of the previous century had now been largely reversed. Adopting the British model of gentleman-farming was nigh-on impossible; bailiffs continued to be employed regardless of service requirement, at least in the Chernozem. A middling Tambovian landowner had this to say:

Following the reforms carried out in Russia by Peter the Great, the Russian nobles entered into a new relationship with the Imperial Court and the rest of Europe and 131

soon began to feel the lack of funds pre-empting them to embrace a new way of life; income from the estates had been sufficient for their ancestors, but these new generations would no longer be satisfied and were forced to seek ways of increasing their capital. The rapid development of relations with the West and comparisons with our own local system of agriculture prompted many landowners to take up the transformation of their patrimonial estates by introducing novel and improved farming methods as well as a strict order in management. As elder relatives and underlings were completely inadequate [for the task], there began to appear caretakers. Their numbers rose sharply in the XIX century, but soon landowners began to change their minds. Most of the caretakers deserved neither respect nor the attention given them, and many were the examples of ignorance and immorality [among the latter].16

The impact of postreform reality was so strong that it radically changed the views of landed nobility, not only with regards to the question of how best to organise their estates, but more importantly with respect to the degree of actual control what they exercised actual control of on micro-economies therein. Great numbers of these nobles were forced to cast a new gaze upon their domains, this time with the eyes of a rationalising agrarian entrepreneur. In March 1861 there appeared a sensationalist text composed by another middling Tambovian who sought to convince his fellow landowners of a non-existent provincial brotherhood:

Who has not happened upon examples of kindness, even love, among our peasantry? If the morals of the people that govern them are good, peasants are honest and just. If they are not, they may face hostility or even hatred from the elders of their own village. Here in the sticks we still sometimes here such opinions: As if the muzhik was made of different bones than the high-born; as if he cannot be treated as a person; as if he only understands the stick, and even more the spirit, without a couple of cups of which he is like a beast, senseless and capricious. The nobility should set an example of morality and justice.17

Surprisingly, this opened the way to a complete reappraisal of the nobles’ relations with other social categories. This was, by no means reciprocated, a theme Dostoevsky would explore in his House of the Dead.18 Bailiffs had always been key to agricultural production and the running of estates, but reform had forced landowners ever closer

16 Anonymous, ‘Ob osnovanii dvorianskogo priiuta’, Pravitel’stvennyi Vestnik li (1875), 38. 17 N. P. Semenov, Nashe dvorianstvo, SPb., 1898, 85. 18 J. Frank, Between Religion and Rationality: Essays in Russian Literature and Culture, Princeton, N. J., 2010, 9-28. 132 to their former serfs. Their exposure to the peasantry would in turn draw in a whole range of new concepts, perhaps an entirely new ‘bourgeois-capitalist’ mentality. The bourgeois road to development lay wide open to nobles, thanks to the conspicuous lack of any other class better equipped or indeed better placed to take advantage of the market system, but many nobles failed to profit from their advantageous position. In the words of one Russian historian ‘[they] had tasted the feudal poison and could not in many cases abandon their habitual patterns of thinking’.19 Contemporaries seems to suggest that indeed certain groups of landlords from the blacksoil provinces continued to seek the welfare of their estates not in new economic mechanisms but in the dwindling privileges of their class.20

All in all, the state of provincial nobility during this transitional period was distinguished by polarisation, internal tensions, hostile, obtuse, and destructive thinking, as well as conflicting political tendencies. But it was also characterised by the birth of a new, creative type of thinking along modernising lines. Which is why the overall ‘class psychology’ presented an heterogeneous picture. If the old value system had reached a critical stage in its development and even, in some cases, appeared in hypertrophic form, then the new socio-psychological processes conditioned by reform were still in their infancy, often arising within specific social networks spontaneously, in limited or incomplete form. Direct opposition within the networks resulting from opposing sentiments towards the new state of affairs was very often limited to verbal statements and had no concrete manifestations in gesture or act.

This first stage in the formulation of a new type of personality for the Russian noble landowner, a new mentality, is reflected by written record only in minor indirect statements and passing observations, nigh-imperceptible violations of established traditional behavioural etiquette, and the untypical perception or commentary of otherwise stereotypical situations. The transformation occurring within the upper classes of the empire may have happened at different degrees, at different paces, but the nobility’s interpretation of zealousness, their dedication to devoted and distinguished service did not dissipate.

19 Parshin, op. cit., 9. 20 A. A. Planson, Sosloviia v derevnei i sovremennoi Rossii, ikh polozhenie i nuzhdy, SPb., 1899, 67.

133

The estate: An artistic and social space As an artistic and social space, the noble estate of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries rather fittingly inspired in a succession of masterful writers and poets the archetypical lishnii chelovek, a man whose literary manifestations would span an entire generation; from Eugene Onegin, through Pechorin to Goncharov, the superfluous man presents as the ultimate nihilist – infected by mal du siècle and infecting others in turn, until such time as a revelation – or death – provide resolution to the drama of his existence. The background against which such characters were sketched was, more often than not, a sleepy estate or settlement somewhere in the vast Russian countryside. Romantic and realist authors had their own distinct(ive) motives for insisting on this setting; the former for obvious reasons, the latter because it was assumed that the social distractions of Petersburg or Moscow’s serene spirituality would have shaken these ne’er-do-wells out of their lethargic ways.

Much like the superfluous man himself (as a literary and socio-historical phenomenon), so does his niche – the country estate – attract scholarly attention. To the extent that social standing among provincials was dependent upon solvency, there is no doubt that the pre-emancipation estate (Roosevelt’s ‘aristocratic playground’ and patriarchal enclave’)21 merits such attention, not least for estate-management and career in the service formed a dialectic relationship.22 The example of Timofei Tekut’ev and his General Instruction, is characteristic of a generation of nobles keen on applying the principles of state administration to estate administration. For them, no border existed between the two. Thereupon the relationship of nobility and land suffered the effects of a double emancipation; that of the serfs, and that of the gentry itself.23 To the extent that social standing among provincials was dependent upon financial standing, there can be little doubt that the gentry was psychologically worse off after 1861. Emancipation had a profound adverse impact on noble privilege. Priscilla Roosevelt’s overview of life on the estate stops just short of this historical milestone, and with good reason; could it be that her ‘third vision’ of the estate as

21 P. Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate: A Social and Cultural History, New Haven and London, 1995. 22 Service informed estate management and vice versa. This observation was first made by Confino, in Domaines, 261. 23 Jones, Emancipation. 54. 134

‘cultural arcadia’ begat the moral formation of ‘both liberalism and radicalism of the late 1860s’, as John Randolph claims? Or was this – and the other two of Roosevelt’s visions – essentially a meta-interpretation of the ‘estate phenomenon’, elicited from literature and memoir, themselves artefacts of Slavophilia?24 The manor was born ‘of mythologies’, both classical and familial, and it was here that social realities of life in late nineteenth-century Russia met poetic ideas about the meaning of life and one’s function in society. This ‘meta’ understanding of the estate reflects its true meaning to the gentry, a meaning not immediately perceivable through a superficial overview of its material features.25

In the Russian language there exist few historical analyses of the post-emancipation estate. Whether this is a result of the original OIRU’s demise in the late 1920s and early 1930s or a general lack of interest in nobility, the fact remains that most of our sources were written by contemporaries looking back to the recent past, often lamenting the demise of the ‘noble way of life’. At the same time, the usad’ba (almost as difficult to translate accurately as soslovie) is a perennial cultural phenomenon permeating Russian history. Taken here to mean ‘estate’, it was in fact a great deal more than that. But in this Chapter, ‘estate’ is taken to mean the seignorial manorhouse and its outbuildings, rather than the ‘whole’, composed of settled villages, land, forests, rivers and manufactories. For this was the ‘natural niche’ of the upper classes, and the place where they spent most of their time when in the province. In this sense, as a social and cultural space, the provincial estate becomes a sui generis object of academic study. Preoccupation with the ‘estate’ is born out of cultural and artistic consideration in the mind of the noble landlord – its material demise thereby reflecting the social demise of its owners.26

24 Cf. Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate; J. Randolph, ‘The Old Mansion: Revisiting the History of the Russian Country Estate’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1(4), 2000, 729-49. 25 S. D. Dominikov, Mat’-Zemlia i Tsar’-Gorod. Rossiia kak traditsionnoe obshchestvo, M., 2002, 577. 26 It is important to note that post-emancipation nobility and the fate of ‘noble nests’ in the provinces has attracted little, if any, scholarly attention thus far. There is for example, no equivalent to Priscilla Roosevelt’s Life on the Estate focussing upon the latter half of Alexander II’s reign. In his review of her work (among others), John Randolph does mention that ‘both the liberalism and the radicalism of the 1860s owed part of their moral formation to the “cultural arcadia” [Roosevelt’s ‘third vision’ of the country estate’. This approach echoes the following contemporary publications: N. A. Pazukhin, Sovremennoe sostoiannie Rossii i soslovnyi vopros, M., 1886; V. K. Lilenfel’d, Kak predupredit’ dvorianskoe zemlevladenie ot neminuemoy gibeli? Malen’koe issledovanie pomeshchika Penzeskoi gubernii, SPb., 1894; V. V. Iarmorkin, Zadacha dvorianstva, St 1895; A. I. Elishev, Dvorianskoe delo. Sbornik statei, M. 1898; L. M. Savelov, Dvorianskoe soslovie v ego bytovom i obshchestvennom otnoshenii, M., 1906. 135

To date, the most solid scholarly publication on this topic is 2001 collective publication entitled Dvorianskaia i kupecheskaia usad’ba v Rossii XVI-XX vv., which introduced research fundamental to the history of ‘estate culture’, an umbrella term covering socio-economic history, the history of nobility, as well as the history of material and spiritual culture.27 Any given aspect of everyday life of the various noble strata reflects the ground-breaking changes taking place in the postreform period. In the same year, there also appeared an important monograph, Russkie provintsial’nye usad’by XVIII – nachala XX veka.28 It provides very useful descriptions of the blacksoil estate, without which it would be impossible to imagine ‘estate culture’ in its entirety. This was not the first time, however, that the ‘estate phenomenon’ was described as such. Indeed, this was first discussed in Starye gody and Stolitsa i usad’ba, two journals whose objective was to record, ‘while it’s not yet too late, the sublime nature of landownership in Russia, and save what remains of it from inglorious death and destruction’.29 Then there was other published material, still used to this day to plot the position of estates throughout European Russia. Conceptually, these sources mark an important shift: in the second half of the nineteenth century, under the influence of socioeconomic reforms, one can trace the emergence of a qualitatively new stage in the development of estate culture. Grand houses of the past came into disrepair, but also increasingly came to be considered ‘cultural repositories, or – as one historian of the Russian estate put it – ‘cultural nests’.30 This function would eventually wither and cease, but in the meantime the sociocultural role of the estate remained important; and it was determined by middling landowners, their estates, their manors. This was a widely recognised state of affairs. The central government was not at all indifferent to their fate; indeed, conscious efforts were made to provide some material support for the preservation of run-down estates throughout their ‘silver age’.31

27 L. V. Ivanova, Ia. V. Vodarskiy, E. G. Istomina et al., Dvorianskaia i kupecheskaia sel’skaia usad’ba v Rossii XVI-XX vv. Istoricheskie ocherki, M., 2001. 28 No Editor, Russkie provintsial’nye usad’by XVIII – nachala XX veka, M., 2003. 29 M. A. Abaza, Otchego pomestnoe dvorianstvo razorilos’ i oskudelo i mozhno li ego podniat’ i ozhivit’, SPb., 1896. 30 N. Iu. Shevchenko, ‘Russkaia sel’skaia usad’ba (1860-e – 1917gg.), PhD Thesis, Saratov, 2010, 26. 31 GARF F. 434, O 1, D. 229 l. 225-227; Fond 434 contains the archives of the Council of the Nobility (Postoiannyi sovet ob’edinennykh dvorianskikh obshchestv). 136

As far as primary sources on the topic are concerned, namely memoirs, these mostly fall under the category of ‘pseudo-autobiographies’, a term coined by Andrew Wachtel to describe the rather oxymoronic nature of this type of work.32 Wachtel delves into the works of Tolstoy, Aksakov, Gorky, and Bunin – among many others – to show that these sources, for all their elegiac and pastoral overtones, have merits. For was the Russian nobleman in nature not a product ‘of fact and literary tradition’?33 For what was to become, under Alexander II, the liberal left and conservative right, these idyllic childhoods, in which one cannot help but detect the influence of Rousseau, became a paradise lost. One should not be quick to dismiss Wachtel’s subjects out of hand; for after all they mainly represent the very same middling nobility to which this study is dedicated, that one fifth of Russian landowners who were neither dirt poor nor grand enough to see no difference between pre- and post-emancipation Russia. Wachtel himself points out that by the time these memoirs were composed, most of the estates described therein had either been broken up or lost forever. There is therefore no reason not to draw evidence from these sources, even if this is done in a Gorkian fashion, insisting upon the intratextual rather than the content itself.

The main source of information on the estate during the second half of the nineteenth century is archival holdings in GARF, RGADA, and OR RGB.34 In their pages, memoirists never failed to underline the immense cultural significance of the provincial estate. The trivia therein, such as dress – collectively describe everyday life.35 Many scholars have already posited the ‘estate problem’ by making use of these sources, and there is very little to add to this corpus, other than to point out that the use of the term ‘phenomenon’ to describe the nineteenth-century estate seems to be a product of expediency.36 There is no reason here to break with form, or indeed with

32 A. B. Wachtel, The Battle for Childhood. Creation of a Russian Myth, Stanford, Ca., 1990. 33 Ibid, 124. 34 For example, prince S. D. Urusov (OR PRGB F. 550, Op.2 d.1); also, the following collections: GARF F.1463, Op.2 d.1617; RGADA F.1263 Op.9 d.5; RGADA F.1272 Op.3 d.29, 33, 35, 36, 37, 40, 62, 81; OR RGB F.340 Op.1 d. 21, 44; Op.32 d.10. 35 D. Blagovo, Rasskazy babuski, L. 1989; E. N. Vodovozova, Na zare zhizni, in 2 vols. M., 1964; P. P. Semenov-Tianyshanskii, Russkie memuary: Izbrannye stranitsy, multiple locations, 1826-1856 36 B. N. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVII – nachala XXv.), in 2 vols., SPb., 2003 is a late and good example of this trend, particularly because of his wide-reaching analysis. But Mironov is only the last in a long series of Russian scholars who discuss the estate’s phenotype without looking into the precise and concealed economic mechanics that made it ‘work’. D. S. Likhachev, Poeziia sadov: K semantike sadovo-parkovykh stilei, SPb., 1991, G. Iu. Sterinin, ‘Ob izuchenii kul’turnogo naslediia russkoi ussad’by’, Russkaia Usad’ba ii (1996), 10-15; V. Shukin, Mif dvorianskogo gnezda, Krakow, 1997; L. V. Ivanova (ed.), Mir russkoi usad’by: Ocherki, M. 1995. 137 the assumption that there was indeed such a thing as a ‘noble psyche’ which was ultimately invested in the estates/manorhouses of the nobility, which then became an outward expression of class identity.37 The estate was more like an organism, concealing under the skin multiple overlapping spheres of everyday and extraordinary activity. This metaphor, reflecting somewhat grandiose contemporary visions of ‘noble galaxies’ and families as its ‘planets’, has been widely circulated by I. M. Pushkareva, L. V. Ivanova, among others.38 At the time of writing, the most current research on the subject covers the general themes of family, clothing, duelling and the understanding of honour, relations with the other sosloviia, everyday activities, dwellings and furniture.39

Yet despite the profligacy of research on the estates in general, the concept of an organic connection between individual nobles and their lands is still in doubt. A limited number of its aspects were directly or indirectly examined within the framework of ethnographic analyses and the history of art. In the pre-revolutionary period, much like during Soviet era, no studies appeared on the problematic engendered by this relationship; most publications were geared towards the telling of a generic history of life in this or that region. The most noteworthy such histories relating to the blacksoil belt are those by A. A. Tankov and G. M. Veselovsky. The intrinsic value of these sources lies in their authors’ engagement with actual socio- cultural problems; most of their writings were submitted to local journals in the form of opinion pieces. This brief overview of the historiography serves to show that the

37 In more recent times, the social history of the nobility in Russia has attracted a great deal of academic interest. Monographs seem to emphasise the existence of a complex ‘noble psyche’ or state of mind particular to members of the dvorianstvo – or to put it in a different way, a ‘noble psychology’, crystallised over many centuries of tradition. But in terms of theorising the ‘estate phenomenon’, no debt is greater than that owed to B. N. Mironov, who looked at the ‘higher circle’ of problems touching the upper classes, the organisation of their corporations and the mentality of their members Dominic Lieven and Seymour Becker are rare cases of non-Russian academics who have shown particular interest in the everyday life of fin-de- siècle everyday life in the provinces from the gentry’s perspective. Naturally, the bulk of historiography on the matter stems from Russia proper. Researchers such as E. V. Lavrent’eva. E. A. Pogosian, N. A. Marchenko, Iu. M. Ovsianikov, Iu. S. Riabtsev, Iu. A. Fedosiuk, and N. I. Iakovkina, have all recently published books on the subject. The estate as a unique and specifically cultural phenomenon was the subject of study by D. S. Likhachev, G. Iu. Sterinin, V. S. Turchin, T. Kazhdan, E. N. Marainova, V. Shukin and others, who published their research both in individual volumes and collectively under Obshchestva izucheniia russkoi usad’by (OIRU)’s journal, Russkaia Usad’ba first appearing in 1992. 38 ‘Russkaia usad’ba i ee sud’by: ‘Kruglyi stol’; Material podgotovlen I. M. Pushkarevoi, Iu. A. Tikhonovym, I. A. Khristoforovym’, Otechestvennaia istoriia v (2002), 131-151. 39 V. P. Stark, Dvorianskaia sem’ia: iz istorii dvorianskikh familii Rossii, SPb., 2000; S. N. Poltorak (ed.) Khudozhestvennaia literatura kak istoriko-psikhologicheskii istochnik: Materialy XVI Mezhdynar. Naych. Konf., SPb., 2004. 138 topic of the estate as an organic entity, distinct but inextricably intertwined with the Romanov polity and provincial economy, has been studied insufficiently, at least with respect to its manifestations on the regional level. To this day, there has been no publication where one can find a complete picture of the landed gentry’s lifestyle in the provinces, especially in the blacksoil belt during the postreform period. At the same time, what research has been carried out underlines the massive cultural significance of the rural nobility and their estates for nineteenth-century Russia. A very interesting and under-exploited volume on this subject is Rossiia: Polnoe geograficheskoe opisanie nashego Otechestva.40 In its pages, it is possible to discern how localised and varied was the nature of what historians have come to call ‘nests of nobility’ in the blacksoil belt, including most importantly, nests centred around large latifundia and medium-sized estates.

The nobles’ lifestyle was severely affected by the government’s policy of eliminating class privileges. In legal terms, the status of the nobility now increasingly approached that of other sosloviia. In February 1861 the nobles may have lost their right to ‘own souls’, but the right to buy and sell uninhabited lands had been extended to non-nobles since 1801. With the reform of 1862, the nobility would lose their right to recruit uezd police and after the introduction of the zemstva in 1864 monopoly access to local administration would also cease, yet gentry would retain a leading role. What is more, after the judicial reform of the same year the nobles were brought under the jurisdiction of class-less courts. Particular attention should be paid to the loss of tax privileges, a government policy which may have been gradually implemented, but was perhaps the most painful for the nobles to accept. The introduction of successive taxes and duties, trickling down from the nobility to the lower sosloviia, is sure evidence of a sustained governmental drive towards modernisation. From 1863, the nobility began to be liable for a new national tax on urban property, from 1872 nobles had to pay a national duty on land, from 1875 they were burdened with a tax on rural lands and so on.41 In parallel, the evolution of processes particular to the capitalist mode of economic development would, within the milieu of Russian nobility, reduce the

40 V. P. Semenov, Rossiia. Polnoe geograficheskoe opisanie nashego Otechestvo. Srednerusskaia chernozemnaia oblast’, in 2 vols., SPb., 1899-1902. 41 Mironov, Sotsial’naia Istoriia, 94. 139 significance of ‘soslovnaia prazdnost’’. Following emancipation, provincial society would have to adopt a new lifestyle.

The main focal point of any estate – in the eyes of owners and society as a whole – was the manor house. Along with its environs, it formed a living space unique to the Russian nobility, since it hosted highly ritualised festivities and quiet family moments, estate administration and artistic creation. The ukaz42 ‘O vol’nosti dvorianstva’ of 1762 allowed whosoever wished to be relieved from the obligation of state service. Many who took up Peter III’s offer settled for good in their country estates. Their pecuniary prosperity, personal tastes and cultivated minds were conducive to a metamorphosis of ancestral hearths into modern domiciles, replete with new furniture, paintings, sculptures, pleasure gardens, secluded parks, ponds, canals, garden pavilions, and besedki. Most academics would agree that in nineteenth-century Russia no two estates looked or indeed were the same; each had its own history, its genealogy of owners, its household, its particular way of life, its land features and even its own legends. Yet despite their variation, estates shared the same defining fundamental characteristics and proprietary features. Estates in blacksoil provinces were no exception. It presented a kaleidoscopic image, a mosaic constructed by elements on the whole traditional, each time used to form an unrepeatable synthesis of ambition, artistic predilection and, naturally, the financial means available to estate owners.43

The lexical-semantic group of appellations used – pomest’e, imenie, usad’ba – is comprised of words used interchangeably, depending on the time period and personal inclinations of the author: For V. N. Golovina (late eighteenth century) and L. N. Engelhardt (1826) it was imenie; for F. F. Vigel’ (1850s) it was selo or derevnia; for S. N. Glinka (1847), selo or pomest’e; for V. A. Sollogub (1880s) pomest’e or usad’ba. More importantly however, Pushkin used imenie, Gogol derevnia, and Turgenev usad’ba.44 Undoubtedly, for these venerable literary figures and for many who followed them, estate and manorhouse were ‘ideals’, multi-dimensional spaces transcending by far their physical limitations. To invoke the image of the ‘estate’ in this body of literature is to project a space in time, a space replete with significance –

42 Official proclamation, decree, edict. 43 Kruglyi stol, 143. 44 S. Ia. Gekhtliar, ‘Kontsept “Dvorianskaia usad’ba” v Russkoi kul’ture: Mesto v kontseptosfere, soderzhanie, struktura’, Mir Nauki, Kul’tury, Obrozovaniia vi (2012), 18-20. 140 spiritual, cultural, philosophical, religious, aesthetic, artistic. As such, the manorhouse and its estate were endowed with a special status by society as a whole. They were ‘man-made oases’, and the mythological correlates were not few: Eden, Arcadia… Yet the landscape of the estate combined in itself ‘mythological projections and very [profane] socioeconomic realities’.45

The differences inherent in the economic standing of various social rungs in Russia would have a defining effect upon aesthetic and cultural tastes. The ‘estate ensemble’ became by itself a socio-cultural medium which defined the lifestyle of the ruling classes, the history of each estate being evident in the contents of portrait galleries and the mounds of ancestral burial grounds. It was in these spaces, as well as in the villages and fields that the relationship between noble and peasant evolved and so life on the estate is one of the most informative sources for the social history of nineteenth- century Russia as a whole. In studying the estate, therefore, it is necessary to take account of all the subtle and not-so-subtle nuances of the signifier /estate/;46 Professor Shvidovskii urged researchers to see in the estate ‘not simply evidence of material culture, but a working model of an ideal world, […] and a singular space for spiritual self-realisation’.47 This is probably a bridge too far, given that only a small number of landowners were engaged in this process of self-realisation. The sample is over- represented precisely because this was the very same gentry minority engaged in existential musings, which were then committed to paper. For the provincial majority, Shvidovskii’s interpretation would represent and over-idealisation of the nitty-gritty particularities of life on the estate.

This should not stop us, however, from considering the estate as an ensemble, just like Lotman suggested. There is no reason to abandon the living organism metaphor, as it works brilliantly: The estate was a complex organism, with sinews, nerves and veins working to carry out the main functions: production, habitation, representation. In Lotman’s view ‘the estate complex is a single complex entity comprised of separate rooms, areas, furniture, ornaments, sculptures – works of art directly interrelated

45 L. E. Gorodnova, ‘Smyslovoi continuum poniatiia “Usad’ba”, Vestnik Tambovskogo universiteta x (2010). http://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/smyslovoy-kontinuum-ponyatiya-usadba [Accessed November 2011]. 46 In standard semiotic usage, the /word/ structure connotes the signifier of that word. 47 Gorodnova, op. cit. 141 within a cultural space, and that space cannot be considered separately from the everydayness of the people who inhabited it’.48 Yet where there are constants there are also variables. In this case the lord of the estate, his/her predilections and tastes undoubtedly defined the stylistic choices made. ‘The world of the manor house’, underlines L. V. Ivanova, ‘is the fate of people, families, generations entire. To understand the character of the estate is to know the psyche of its owners’.49 As in history, so in literature the estate bears an overwhelming symbolic significance as a mirror image of its prime inhabitant. According to T. P. Kazhdan ‘the estate culture is generated by the individuality of the nobleman who seeks to build in it an ideal world, to make it reflect his ‘ego’, to dispose of the land at his own discretion, in short, to fashion a unique microclimate and surround himself with close friends’.50 Whether the estate was, or was not ‘and ideal world’, the important thing to note here is that the postreform middling landowner thought it was.

This, at least, is a specific vision of the estate passed on to us by eminently readable authors and scholars. There is some evidence, however, that estate culture also had an emphatically personal character. Let us consider, for example, the appellation or designation of estates in contemporary sources, which invariably includes the owners’ family name: Arkhangel’skoe ‘of the Iusipovs’, Kuskovo and Ostankino ‘of the Sheremetevs’, Mar’ino ‘of the Arsen’evs’. Each estate is thus seen both as profane and a spiritual space, its continued existence a reflection of the links each generation of inhabitants shared with the past. There was, after all, much more to a (sur)name than simple identification. In manorhouses built over successive generations, the footprint long-dead ancestors had left in the hallowed halls was all too tangible. Family memorabilia, papers, personal belongings and – above all – paintings formed an assemblage of pride in one’s ancestry. These physical artefacts, in conjunction with veneration of one’s ancestry, sanctified the physical space. To the informed scholar in Humanities, ancestor-worship is never bereft of metaphysical connotations, hence the sacrality of the estate.

48 Iu. M. Lotman, Khudozhestvennyi ansambl’ kak bytovoe prostranstvo, in 3 vols, Tallinn, 1993, vol. 3, 316. 49 Ivanova ‘K chitateliu’, 9. 50 T. P. Kazhdan, Khudozhestvennyi mir russkoi usad'by, M., 1977, 10. 142

In cases where the estate as a whole was given over to profitable agriculture (blacksoil estates being a case in point), this juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the prosaic, was even more pronounced. For the blacksoil gentry, the estate was both a space where social ties could be made and reinforced, a safe space for the family, a sanctuary for the independent mind – all in close proximity to one’s prime source of income. Middling estates in Tambov not conforming to any standard deviation of concentration (in some uezds they were very sparsely located, in others they were close together), the distance separating manor house and outlying buildings was decided upon careful reflection of the needs particular to each estate. As G. Iu. Sterinin points out, the contrast between the lord of the manor and his peasants was reflected in this distance between manor and other buildings in the estate, which in turn resembled that between a city and its outlying villages.51 It follows that in a middling estate given over to agriculture, spacing out the buildings was a product of expediency, the exigencies of farming, and economies. Therefore, we can assume that no outlying buildings would have been moved without good reason. In such cases as this reason was not related to a natural process of wear and tear or catastrophe, the decision to space out buildings reflected conservative inclinations – to bring them together, on the other hand, was to celebrate the new ‘communal’ spirit evangelised in postreform Russia.

All this was, naturally, subject to the availability of pecuniary means. Unless there is overwhelming evidence that the placing of buildings was changed on purpose, it is also safe to assume that the overall complex was designed primarily to aid the everyday running of the estate. The condition of the estate and associated manorhouse reflected the fortunes of the family living there. Bunin gives the following description of a family down on its luck: ‘In the fields of Tambov, there was an ancient manor house under a thatched roof, greyish-blue with age. There was a neglected garden where raspberries grew wild, and a yard with some stone slabs still visible among the weeds. In the middle, there was a trough and a table, and nearby a hut attached to a bread oven’.52 Not every estate was a true reflection of wealth. In a rapidly changing economic model of development, some gentry began to consider re-investing funds or securing loans not to maintain an outward appearance of grandiosity (as their ancestors may have

51 G. Iu. Sterinin, ‘Usad’ba v poetike russkoi kul’tury’, Russkaia Usad’ba i (1994), 258-265, 258. 52 I. A. Bunin, Sobranie sochinenii, in 13 vols., M., 1965, vol. 5, 33. 143 done), but in order to secure the future of their estates. The fact that a great deal of those funds was diverted to estate maintenance and decoration is as much revealing of the gentry’s need to maintain estate ‘culture’ as it is of their need to maintain their standard of living. This extends to heavy borrowing; we should not be so quick to tie indebtedness to managerial incompetence or, even worse, irresponsibility and frivolity. We need to consider instead the deeper meaning estate and manor house carried for its owners, as well as the multiplicity of its functions.

Blacksoil estates were particularly susceptible to sweeping changes following emancipation, and those of Tambov were no exception. But there is also hard evidence of a more ‘longitudinal’ paradigmatic shift towards the estate/manor house complex as a space dedicated both to the preservation and the creation of cultural memory. This gradual process was effectuated through socialisation. For there were as many approaches to multi-faceted ‘estate culture’ as there were landowning families. The estate is a socioeconomic and socio-cultural signifier was in effect a closed a settlement where strict rules of conduct are observed even if (particularly if) those rules specified relaxed and informal relations between residents. In this sense, manorhouse and estate (inasmuch as they exist as concrete historical forms and evolved within specific temporal and spatial coordinates) are carriers of the gentry’s socialisation. Based on this observation, we can produce a typological scheme for these estate/manorhouse complexes which, barring crown lands and frontier provinces, also reflects the stratification of gentry in European Russia as a whole:

144

(A) Major aristocratic estates of nobles holding high posts in the government and military, spanning over thousands of desiatina and peopled by hundreds of thousands of serfs.

(B) Estates of major landowners spread over no less than 1,000 des. or housing over 501 serfs.

(C) The estates of the middling nobility, between 101 and 1,000 des. in size, or housing between 101 and 500 serfs.

(D) The estates of minor/petty landowners, the size of which was under 100 des., or which housed between 10 and 100 serfs. 53

It goes without saying that completely impoverished nobles were unable to maintain estate complexes. If we consider the estate and manor house as parts of the same ensemble, the process of conservation was not typical for all nobility in blacksoil Russia; it was only carried out among the middling and upper tiers. This is because in the first place, construction and upkeep of such a complex would require the labour of at least 200 workers. The size of the workforce did not vary greatly, because estates in Tambov and other blacksoil provinces generally followed the same architectural patterns – palatial mansions located in latifundia were a different case altogether. Naturally, the building of new complexes peters out in the beginning of the nineteenth century, with only 2-3% of nobles undertaking new projects – by ‘new projects’ I am referring here to the building of something recognisable as a ‘manor house’, distinguishable from a peasant izba and fully reflective of the elite status enjoyed by its owner. This means that ‘estate culture’ in the second half of the nineteenth century was essentially contained within a mere 2-3 thousand ‘noble nests’.

Where such complexes did exist, however, the manorhouses therein were truly palatial with respect to common dwellings. A contemporary description of the estate Rakitnoe (Iusupovs) speaks of a ‘large two-storey house, more of a palace really, built in the neoclassical style so familiar to the Russian province. The windows on the first floor are all arched, bar the central three which are rectangular. The main entrance to the house is in the centre of the northern façade. Inside, there are two large winding

53 V. V. Kanishchev (ed.) Sotsial’naia istoriia rossiiskoi provintsii v kontekste modernizatsii agrarnogo obshchestva v XVIII – XIX vv., Tambov, 2002, 169. 145 staircases.’54 Another famous estate was Marin’o. It belonged to the Bariatinskiis. According to E. V. Kholodova, the manor at Marin’o was ‘renowned throughout Russia for its luxurious interior, the art collections it contains, and the general atmosphere of leisure and refinement typical of high aristocracy. Once inside, guests could access the upper floors via a grand staircase, at the bottom of which stood guard two large stone lions. The central wing of the manor was two storeys high and there was a huge ballroom, capped by a dome. Rooms in the manor numbered in the hundreds’.55

Late nineteenth-century memoirists such as V. A. Insarskii would often emphatically insist upon the opulence of manors.56 These had a number of standard features, which were also prominent in the abodes of middling landowners:

From the highway or country road, one would turn into a lane leading to the front gate of the estate, beyond which – in the distance – would rise the manor house. On either side of the house there would be symmetrical wings – one-storey structures placed either in a line with the main house or slightly in front, as if to enclose the yard to form a paradnyi dvor. The wings were often connected by galleries and passages, which was convenient, because here were located the guest and servants’ living quarters. The main house dominates the entire estate and from a distance it looked like a palace. Its main entrance was crowned by an ornate pediment above which there would be a coat of arms or monogram. There would be a belvedere, whence one could enjoy scenic views of the entire area. It would be enclosed by glass panels or left like an open colonnade. The roof of the house would always be domed. This gave [it] an air of grandeur and solemnity. Outside, in the gardens, there would not only be ornate columns, but also a variety of sculptures. Nearby, there would be outbuildings, such as pantries, stables, kennels, servant rooms, baths… The well-to-do manors would certainly also have their own chapel, as well as a stage for theatre plays and other pastimes. 57

Strict architectural standards were followed. The manor house of a middling estate in Tambov uezd was described as follows:

The manor house merged with the surrounding landscape to create a unique and mysterious world. Single-storey brick houses where an interplay of volumes concealed over forty rooms. On the ground floor of the central wing one would find

54 E. V. Kholodova, Usad’by Tambovskoi gubernii. Istoriko-arkhitekturnye ocherki, Kursk, 1997, 11. 55 Ibid, 23. 56 Ibid, 99. 57 M. V. Korotkova, Puteshestvie v istoriiu russkogo bytva, M. 2003, 148-155. 146

the main hall, a lounge and a dining room, a bandstand, a ballroom and various reception rooms. Upstairs was the library, studies and bedrooms. Servants’ quarters, pantry and kitchens were on the ground floor. Sometime before 1848, a brick church had been built and a crypt dug for it. The northern part of the estate was a hothouse of agricultural activities – three greenhouses, a gardener’s hut, herb garden. There was a landscaped park with pavilions, arbour houses, grottos, a bandstand and a theatre.58

From similar descriptions of Tambovian and other blacksoil provinces, we can synthesise a set of general remarks as to the architectural features considered ‘common’ for middling manorhouses. Traditionally, the most beautiful wing of the house contained airy rooms with plenty of light entering through large openings to the verandas. Windows would be overlooking the park and gardens. For the planning, planting and maintenance of the latter landowners would often pay more money than for the house itself. From the descriptions available, we can be certain that no two estate pleasure parks in Tambov looked the same. Their design would vary greatly depending on the tastes of their owners and the prevailing fad of the time. The parks, spreading on one or both sides of the manor house, would have a distinctively symmetrical plan. The house would open up to a parter – an open garden space with flowerbeds and well-tended lawns. In Spassk uezd, we are told that the Stankeniches had gardens ‘beautifully planned. The entrance gate led to a wide alley, stretching towards the house proper, in front of which there were countless flowerbeds and several metal sofas’.59

Tambov’s fertile soil and rolling hills helped a great deal with garden planning. The parter itself would divide into paths covered with pebbles from nearby waterways or gravel especially brought in, the whole peppered with flowerbeds for all seasons; Tambovians were particularly fond of obmanki – human-like figurines shaped to fool the eye into thinking they were real people. It is not certain why they showed such a propensity, but we can be certain that because most of these estates were old (by Russian standards), French influence was strong; the laws would, as a rule, be formed into geometric shapes and contain entire flowery compositions made to look like various birds or animals. As befitted a region with good water supply, fountains were

58 Kholodova, Usad’by Tambovskoi gubernii, 27. 59 Ibid, 31. 147 also a staple feature: ‘outside the window of the master bedroom there stood a large stone fountain, at the centre of which there was a stone podium; upon it stood a crane with its beak open, and out of the beak poured forth water. Around the fountain there were stone rosaries’.60

At regular intervals, the alleys would split into forks leading to pavilions. Paysage gardens would follow natural landscape features creating uneven spaces over hills and snaking around large wooded areas. Tradition dictated that some patches of forest would be left untouched to stand as reminders of important events in the estate’s history. The manor Anna of the Rostophchin-Bariatinskis was ‘beautifully constructed – [elements came together to form] a unique piece of art. Its lawns were surrounded by copses, left standing all around the perimeter of the gardens. Techniques of the paysage were used to place a mixture of hardwood and softwood in such a way that the whole was homogenous, harmonious. The manorial parks were constrained on the one side by a waterway and on the other by the copses, so it was impossible to create large ponds because the copse trees could not be cut down.’ These trees were memorial trees, planted by successive generations of the owners’ ancestors. The description continues: ‘But the entire complex was surrounded by a beautiful natural forest and it stood on a hill [so that] there were great views of the surrounding floodplain [of the river Bitiug]. This respect for the memorial trees and placement of the manor house in this setting greatly increased its artistic merits’.61

Tambovian landowners, much like their blacksoil neighbours adored water features – they considered them an integral part of their pleasure gardens. Whether by reason of economies or by reason of respect for nature (Russian landowners often imagined themselves in a symbiotic relationship with her), natural reservoirs were much preferred over artificial ones.62 Waterways, rivulets, and ponds already present in the land were usually respected, even surrounded with such features as to ‘bring out their natural beauty’ and promote them as integral parts of the whole. Gentry and their guests were always on the lookout for lovely bathing spots – winter or summer – and

60 Kholodova, op. cit, 45. 61 Kholodova, op. cit. 44. 62 Indeed, as early as the Romantic era Russian landowners – conscious of their Europeanised ways, stressed their connection to nature as a counterbalance. Not even Pushkin was exempt. See P. R. Roosevelt, ‘Tatiana’s Garden: Noble Sensibilities and Estate Park Design in the Romantic Era’. SR xlix (1990), 335-349. 148 islets capable of supporting chainye domiki, a favourite setting for relaxation and discussion. The dvorianins would, without fail, also spend a great deal of time boating. For that purpose, they peppered their land with bridges and causeways, so as to sail between rivulets, basins and natural gullies unperturbed. N.P. Karolinskii, a landowner from Tambov, owned an estate whose water features were the envy of the entire province: ‘The pond stood motionless and shiny like a mirror, bar a few tiny – almost imperceptible ripples. Its edges were overgrown with thick greenery, which hang over the waterway that fed it. The waterway itself snaked away in the distance, now full of twists and turns, now straight like an arrow. After a sharp bend, the greenery receded to reveal the most beautiful, tranquil little bay. All around it stood old birch and dark fir trees. Sailing around the bay, we could sometimes make out in the distance islets joined by small stone bridges. 63

It is reasonable to assume that many amongst the Tambov’s middling nobility would have had access to a copy of the Sadovii slovar’.64 Naturally, their ideas regarding pleasure gardens reflected those of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In terms of these spaces, at least, they were not particularly prone to experimentation:

It is proper for the manorhouse to stand between the courtyard and the garden, directly opposite the main driveway, and for service buildings to be placed on either side; these include any storerooms, stables, pens, and servant quarters. The main pathway to the front of the manorhouse should be planted with trees: Specifically ash, oak, linden, maple, or acacia. Outbuildings should be placed perimetrically to the masters’ courtyard: This includes any greenhouses, conservatories, out-kitchens and bakeries, or sheds. The garden proper should be behind the manorhouse, with wood-panelled partery leading away into flowerbeds and – maybe – a vegetable patch or two. Botanical gardens should be separate and enclosed by a wall.65

The overall effect was similar throughout the province, so contemporary memoirs are often filled with similar accounts. A typical description would be the following, by N. Davydov:

63 Kholodova, op. cit., 33. 64 A. I. Frolov, ‘Chastnye kollektsii dvorianskikh usadeb (vtoraia polovina XIX – nachalo XX vv), Russkaia Usad’ba ii (1996), 69-78; L. N. Letiagin ‘Russkaia usad’ba: mif, mir, sud’ba’, Russkaia Usad’ba iv (1998), 253-59. 65 Riabtsev, Khrestomatiia po istorii kul’tury, 215-177. 149

The Kulevatov estate resembled a hive, built up as it was with residential and non- residential buildings. The manor house was large, with two storeys containing about thirty rooms, not counting hallways, waiting and storage spaces; there was a large outbuilding used by the local clinic, more buildings in the yard, a flour mill powered by water and its adjacent buildings, for joinery, metalwork, carpentry, ironmongery. There was a farmyard with a barn, a few sheds – and the baths. The manor house was flanked by two separate gardens joined by an alley of crushed limestone. Through one of the gardens, the alley led to a stone chapel; concealed behind it were the gardeners’ sheds, orchards blistering with cherry and pear trees, greenhouses. Adjacent [to a separate cabin where lived the owner’s father] there was also a winter garden.66

In Tambov, middling estates were rather well-furnished and can be said to have been almost completely autonomous in terms of market provisions. Thanks to the nature of farming in the province, in conjunction with existing intra-province market networks, these estate micro-economies remained in place even after Emancipation – albeit with a different labour structure. Middling Tambovian landowners continued to rely on farmer’s fayres and town markets for their yearly supply of coffee, sugar, rice, raisins and prunes (Tambov was particularly well-known for its prune wine). Naturally, it was neither the lord nor the lady of the house that would ensure these procurements, but the estate foreman – and it is in such instances that most of the embezzlement happened.

In terms of labour, too, the post-emancipation estate could in theory maintain its autonomy from the budding ‘national’ job market; Tambovians had employed serfs in specialised tasks over successive generations, and crafts were often passed from fathers to sons. We know, for example, that in at least six different middling estates former serfs remained employed in a variety of functions, including weavers, lace- makers, embroiders, dressmakers, cobblers, coopers, carpenters, wall-painters, even musicians and singers. In the manorhouse itself, Tambovian nobility would still rely upon household serfs-become-servants; joiners and turners, tailors, masons, coachmen, grooms, gardeners, cooks, maids, bakers, etc. It is important to note that the pre-emancipation ‘women’s’ wing’ of the manorhouse remained active with peasant girls and women weaving cloth, embroidering fabrics and generally producing

66 N. V., Davydov, ‘Iz pomeshchich’ei zhizni proshlogo stoletiia’, Golos Minuvshego ii (1916) 192-195. 150 craftwork that could then be sold for a small profit. Estate owners would either pay these former serfs wages and keep the profit, or – as was more often the case – negotiate to keep a percentage of the profits/goods for themselves. Finally, emancipation made employing a medic and an accountant (or more) even more necessary. What distinguishes the middling (and larger) estates from their impoverished peers is that emancipation brought small or no change in the number of staff employed. In spite of the need to pay them wages, landowners kept these serft on as employees because they were necessary for the upkeep of their estates and, more importantly, the maintenance of status. In one post-emancipation estate in Tambov uezd, we are told that the (paid) serf-servants still numbered in the many dozens, and that these included some highly specialised workers whose services could not have conceivably been required all that often, such as plasterers.67

Most researchers and contemporaries point out the significance of placing the manor house within the larger complex. It was often erected on a natural elevation,68 and if there were not any naturally-occurring elevations, the owners would create an artificial one, great, almost forbidding, cost. Set upon its hill, the house would often become a promontory allowing residents a direct view towards the lands, from which to observe fieldwork being carried out below and life unrolling in the surrounding serf settlements.69 Often the manor was close to peasant settlements but not so close that the noise and smells reached inside. As a result, manor and izbas were separated by at least a few hundred sazhens.70

In sharp contrast to other noble strata, the middling estate’s owner had, on the one hand, the luxury of choices when it came to estate-building, but on the other hand, the responsibility to make sensible choices that maximised the natural resources of his lands. This inescapable reality led to the rise of two distinct types of manorhouses in Tambov, and then again with very few differences between them. Middling landowners would generally shirk from trying to reinvent the wheel when it came to their family nests, and so followed ancient and established practices that not only worked, but also provided a universal background against which comparisons of status

67 Insarskii, Vospominaniia, 302. 68 Russkie provintsial’nye usad’by XVIII – nachala XX veka, 125. 69 Ibid, 8-9. 70 Obolenskii, Kartinki proshlogo, 108. 151 and luxury could be made. One type of manorhouse, more akin to the ‘traditional style’, was arranged in a ‘star’ pattern – radiating outwards from a central wing built directly on top of the pantries (this helped keep the temperature within the latter at cavern- like levels). There was not one, but several staircases leading to the mezzanine and upper storey.

The focal point of the manorhouse was the ballroom, located at the very centre and surrounded by the owner’s living quarters: ‘Climbing the steps of a wide stone porch under the leafy canopy, one arrives at the spacious forecourt… to the left, there was a door leading to the servants’ quarters. Nearby that, a partition and a cupboard behind it [where the outdoor tea and dinner service was presumably kept, alongside cleaning implements, such as brooms and cloths – my note]. Inside the main door, a welcoming yet average-sized hall, and to one side a small ladder leading to the mezzanine [this is where the doorman and grooms or footmen would access the main entrance from. Further inside, a drawing room with two large windows and two coal burners. This served as a family dining room. A door to one side opened to a corridor leading to the [posterior] side of the house, where a room was similarly dispositioned. That one was used as an intimate living room. It was here that the landowner’s children received their first lessons. From here, through yet another access door, one could reach the ‘office’ of the owner, itself opening up to the leafy canopy we encountered as we entered the house.71

The second type was built along an axial line. Its main distinguishing feature was the long gallery extending from the front of the house to the back along its longitudinal side. That corridor would be lit by three to four (sometimes less, sometimes more) windows with wooden panels and wide sills (for sitting), the various rooms would be branching out on either side. Ideally, sleeping quarters/areas would face south, working/socialising areas east and dining areas west, with the entrance facing north. At any case, care was taken to present the visitor with the long side of the house first, so the pathway to the house would be perpendicular to the main door. Were this not possible, for example because of the orientation of access roads, then the pathway would form a 90-degree turn, its first – parallel – part cleverly disguised by tall trees.

71 A. A. Fet, Vospominaniia, M. 1983, 35. 152

This is how a contemporary traveller described such a manor house: ‘A large building made of wood crowned by a disproportionately steep and high roof; it was clear that the house had not been painted in quite a while; over the years, the exterior of the walls had taken on a dark ashen hue. The anterior façade towered over a high foundation planted directly in the midst of a wild, overgrown garden. The posterior side almost reached the ground [it is clear that the house followed a natural elevation on the ground and the owners had taken care that the visitor saw the ‘larger’ side first – my note]. Inside, a central corridor opened up to an undeterminable number of rooms of all sizes, the first of which was a so-called “reception room” […], the last being a remote and forgotten pantry’.72

From these and other testimonials, we can observe that emancipation – at least for the first twenty years or so – did not have a significant impact on the disposition of Tambov’s lordly manors. These remained essentially conglomerations of disparate living and working spaces, complicated and diverse in their makeup. If anything, post- emancipation Tambov witnessed a ‘professionalisation’ of space in the manorhouse. Old studies, where generations of nobles took to ‘truda i vdokhoven’ia’ (work and recreation), were transformed into, for lack of a better description, ‘business hubs’, nerve centres for the new capitalist micro-economy of the estate. Their placement, by convention non-frontal, did not change. But middling landowners took to expanding them, both in terms of size and in terms of the furnishings. Whereas the old study would only have the essentials, i.e. one or maybe two oak/redwood tables, a divan, an armchair, and a writing cabinet, the post-emancipation study would necessarily be open to more people. It therefore had to reflect the owner’s active professional, ‘business’ life. A waiting area or room was added, which would also usually include a chair or desk for the lord’s valet/attendant, safety deposit boxes became norm (because wages were paid out of the office), more furniture and, often, a grander working desk were brought in.

Traditionally, the rhythm of life on the estate had been decided in this very office. Now rational administration was needed more than ever; reports on investments and spending, the carrying out of work by waged labourers, as well as correspondence, not

72 Fet, Vospominaniia, 49. 153 only to friends and family, but an ever-increasing network of business partners, overseers, lawyers, fellow zemstvo members, and various officials – all this came and went from the lord’s ‘study’. Most of the lichnye fondy we have at our disposal from this period, particularly those amassed after a sudden death or departure, reflect an increased interest in project-planning and management on the part of middling nobility in the post-emancipation period. Whereas their forebearers had limited themselves to garden planning and park designs with a view to stand out among their peers, the new generation of nobility was a lot more practically-minded. At the forefront of their concerns – if these fondy are anything to go by – was credit and debt, the search for additional income, rationalisation of estate management, and politics. It should be underlined that the lady of the house too, made additional use of her office space. We can see that, in general, this stratum of noble ladies – married or otherwise related to the lord of the manor –also became more active as time went by.

It has often been remarked that the ‘salon’ mentality that was so prevalent in Western Europe before 1789 survived in Russia for longer.73 Between Borodino and Crimea, this is what most middling salons and ballrooms would be like: ‘The multiple windows inevitably looking out the front yard were placed opposite mirrors – the more the better. The pillars and other elements of the room were painted in cold tones; white, blue, and halcyon were prevalent’. Sofas with hardwood backs were considered – even at this early stage – a sign of poverty, so was the lack of satin in the curtains and other upholstery. ‘In the salon, there should be all sorts of soft, cushioned corner settees, pouffes and armchairs, whereas the lacquered floor should be covered by large fluffy carpets’. 74

The post-emancipation manor retained some of these structural elements, such as the windows and earthy tones, but did away with unnecessary opulence. As grand balls in the province became rarer, smaller, intimate gatherings became the norm. ‘Events’ of a prescribed duration, with a beginning and an end were shunned in favour of an ‘open house’ mentality, where guests would come and go throughout the day, sharing meals or tea. Accordingly, great carpets and the many pieces of sitting furniture in the ballroom were done away with – unless for their decorative value, or moved into the

73 Fet, Vospominaniia, 37. 74 N. A. Marchenko, Primety miloi stariny, M. 2001, 90. 154 salon. If until the mid-nineteenth century these manors would be the setting for grand official occasions, celebrations and ceremonies, in post-emancipation times they would gradually acquire a more intimate, matter-of-factly character. Similarly, as noble parenting became less strict and regimented, the manorhouse became a family space, where children would frolic, the whole family and friends would engage in games, and neighbours would attend recitals and literary/poetry nights.

Significantly, the bulk of primary evidence at our disposal on the topic of estate decoration is derived, counterintuitively, from non-everyday occasions for it was during such occasions that memoirists were able to observe first-hand how their peers lived their lives. Therefore, we have endless descriptions of meals and gatherings. Having said that, there is no reason to assume that the importance of the dining table, albeit somewhat artificially inflated, was not as great as these memoirs would lead us to believe. In the middling manorhouse, the dining room was a largeish, floodlit area designed to host populous festivities and grand occasions. As the main showpiece of the house, the dining room was by far the most variedly decorated of the lot. Yet from the poorest to the richest house, the existence of a long buffet table was considered a sine qua non. Let us not forget that it was here, in the Russian province, that sequential meal service (what A. B. Kurakin termed ‘service à la russe’) was born. The existence of such a buffet was a practical necessity.

Middling households had, by virtue of their placement, auxiliary spaces but not the necessary means to connect them with the dining room via intricate passageways, as was the case of their richer counterparts. So these spaces had to be carefully disguised and concealed. Interestingly, this subterfuge came to be regarded, in post- emancipation times, as a dividing feature between those nobles who believed in a ‘new classless Russia’ and those who wished to return to the status quo. For the former, efforts to conceal ‘the cogs’ of meal service were considered highly ostentatious. Utensils, crockery, chinaware, and all things necessary for the entertainment of guests were heretofore placed out for all to see and use. Naturally, the cutting down in number of servants and increased intimacy of such gatherings was also a factor.

155

Everyday life on the postreform estate In most estates, as a rule, traditions regarding ‘sacrosanct’ mealtimes were observed in the day’s menus, which were replete with as many ‘traditional’ Russian dishes as were made possible by the provisions stored in a standard larder. Both the memoir and artistic literature of the age are filled with descriptions featuring assortments of traditional dishes – meats, farinose bakes, vegetables and fish. In every country estate, pride of place on the laden table went to such Russian staples as cereals, soups, kvas75 and liqueurs, along with a veritable abundance of foodstuffs made available by subsistence farming. Little had changed by the 1860s, and we can imagine that mealtimes on the estate would still somewhat resemble Aksakov’s idealised memories of a peaceful childhood: ‘We dined on the third hour’, he remembers; ‘grandfather had beetroot soup, fish, crayfish, porridge with milk.76’ In the summertime dessert was berries and cream or yoghurt with seasonal fruits: ‘We had ice cream with fruit for dessert’.77 In the winter one would have jams or preserves, dried fruit and nuts – those stable features of Russian cuisine. The middling gentry were partial to a cup of digestive tea or coffee in ‘civilised company’: ‘[after dinner] we were served coffee on the balcony’.78 Poorer gentry would have to content themselves with various types of kvas.

In terms of quality, if not quantity, the provincial landowner’s table was modest by the standards of the age. It was set with simple dishes, such as soups, cereals, jellies, chargrilled fish, meat or poultry/fowl, mushroom soup, pirogi with cabbage, and the ever-present porridge; dessert was processed fruit (dried or preserved in sugar) and – depending on the season – cranberries, cherries and jams thereof. Kvas was another staple: flavoured with juniper berries, cloudberries, red currants, rowanberries, or birch sap, it was consumed in large quantities. Even so, among the petty gentry there were households where ‘need reigned everywhere, constantly: sometimes they lacked tea, or flour to make dough and pastries, or even firewood.’79 Still, they made do with what they had, honouring as best they could the rich tradition of Russian hospitality. This is how a contemporary observer described his stay at an impoverished

75 Commonly spelled ‘kvass’ in English. A fermented drink made of (usually) rye bread, sometimes flavoured with fruits. 76 S. T. Aksakov, Detskie gody Bagrova-vnuka, 67. 77 V. A., Zhukovskii, PSS, M., vol. XIV, 893. 78 Ibid. 79 I. I. Iakovkina, Russkoe dovrianstvo pervoi poloviny XIX veka, 70. 156 nobleman’s house: ‘[He said to me:] What can I treat you to, batushka? I would offer tea, but we have neither tea nor a samovar. We used to, but not anymore. Oh, wait, I just remembered there was something… and he disappeared into the next room. I heard him rummaging around a chest, fumbling over its contents for a long while. When he re-emerged, he was carrying a bottle. He examined it from all sides, even peering through it against the light, wiped it on the tail of his frock and placed it on the table. Then he went back into that room and this time returned with what was probably his only remaining glass. He began slowly unwrapping the rags in which it was wrapped. Finally, he removed the cork from the bottle and poured into the glass some sort of dark and thick liquid. “This is homemade brandy” – he explained – “We keep it for the most dear and refined guests. Exquisite!” He poured me a glass and, pushing towards me, said: “Taste it!” I could not stop myself from asking for another one.’80

Life on the estate for all strata of nobility revolved around mealtimes. One landowner from Tambov would later describe an ordinary day on his paternal estate in the following manner:

‘After breakfast I joined the kinds in the orangery, and after lunch we played together. In the evening we read an entire pile of beautifully-written correspondence […] and life carried on as normal. The following day I had coffee and after about 10am, started talking with Petr Frolovich about various enjoyable and useful things; then, from 11am I made Andriusha write dictation, and then I put my papers in order. After lunch I read the newspapers, then had a conversation about astronomy with the children, following which we had tea, which was quite enjoyable. There it is, my entire day’.81

In this particular example, we can also see how this landowner makes a point of mentioning that he spent time with his family, especially the children.

(Pre)occupation with the young ones was a characteristic of the new, post- emancipation generation. The nostalgic musings of Obolenski about his grandfather’s estate are a case in point: ‘In grandfather’s house everything was done as if [we were in the Army]. In the mornings, he would wake up in his bedroom and call for his

80 Zhukovskii, op. cit., 885-886. 81 Davydov, op. cit., 195. 157 manservant. For this purpose, a bell wire had been fitted connecting the bedroom to the kitchens. From the bedside wall hung a wide ribbon, decorated with beads and leading to a handle, which my grandfather could pull still sitting up in his bed. Petr, his valet, would then would enter into the bedroom, carrying my grandfather’s morning dress for the day and fresh water for him to wash with’.82 The paterfamilias of the estate would hardly be seen by the junior members, while his time and space were inviolate. As Alexander II’s reforms progressed, modernity was quick to catch up with middling nobility, and instances when landowners spending time with their children multiplied.

One would assume that provincials spent their lives in cultural inactivity. Distance from cultural centres, the need to manage lands more directly after emancipation, the establishment of zemstva, the propagation of schools and the displacement of the nobility from administrative centres by the ever-growing bureaucracy, were all factors increasing the time nobles spent on their estates. Some middling – but mostly petty – Tambovian landowners could, and did, lead unsociable lives, practically withdrawn from society. But even they would spend all their leisure time by carrying out free- flowing conversations about the weather with a few select friends or their serfs; they would talk about agriculture and business playing at cards, occasionally interspersing these symposia with hours of pleasurable inactivity, what Russians call nichegodelanie (lit. the act of doing nothing). This is how, for example, V. S. Myshetskii described the gentry of Tambov: ‘How do our pomeshchiki live? They drink, they eat, they sleep, abandoning themselves to a carefree life consisting of various amusements, games of chance, boozing (sic), then resting, riding horses, taking their carriages out for a drive in the countryside, etc.’83

This everydayness, however, was not typical of at least half the soslovie. Noblewomen led somewhat different lives. Emancipation brought the need to supervise housework and, in some cases, get more hands-on with it. Cleanliness and meal preparation were the noblewoman’s domain, and this was true even in those rare cases when a noblewoman was in charge of her own affairs. On top of managing her estates, she would also have to organise and allocate what was, at the time, considered ‘women’s

82 Obolenskii, Kartinki Proshlogo, 110. 83 Zhukovskii, PSS, vol. 14, 903. 158 work’ – in effect the entire logistical support for the everyday running of both manor house and the estate as a whole. Unsurprisingly, therefore, noblewomen were more adept in carrying out logistical and entrepreneurial operations in the post- emancipation ‘market’ model. Most of the craftwork produced in the estate for sale in market was carried out by female servants. Goncharov’s fictional character was realistic: ‘For three hours she [the estate’s mistress] was wittering on with Averka [a female serf], instructing her how her tailors should take the fabric from her husband’s sweater to fashion a jacket for Iliusha [the couple’s son]. Then she went out to the servant girls asking each one how much lace she had managed to produce on day designated for lace-making, upon which she resolved to take a walk in the orchard. But there was a practical reason behind that – she wished to see how the apples were coming along and instruct the gardeners which branches to cut, which trees to inculcate, etc.’84

The role of noblewomen in the estate’s self-contained micro-economy should never be underestimated. They were responsible for seeing the entire estate through the winter, predominantly by organising the collection and storage of supplies, as well as the preparation of various non-perishable foodstuffs. One may interject that serf families and peasant communities would cater for themselves, which in any case is not entirely true. But even so, estate owners were part of an extended network consisting of family and friends residing in the cities. As the winter drew close, even as early as harvest- time, a noblewoman’s thoughts would turn towards ‘her parents, who lived in Moscow. She would deliver all sorts of catering supplies in the form of jams, dried figs, canned berries and other fruit, pickles, etc. This was used eventually used up by her parents along with other products from Kulevatov, such as flour, cereals, vegetables, oil, fowl and other such provisions, were brought to them in Moscow by the cartload’.85

Emancipation signified a change in the way landed gentry dealt with local suppliers. These were not former serfs who could be essentially forced into exchanging labour for land, but independent tradesmen who could now plight their trade in a ‘free’ market. To be sure, these were there even before emancipation but now, apart from a marked inflation in the cost of their services, everything had to be arranged within the context

84 Goncharov, Oblomov, 104. 85 Davydov, op. cit., 190. 159 of a cash economy. The manorhouse was expensive to run – and maintain – and, along with the estate’s cottage manufactories, represented a ‘closed economic system’, whereby proceeds from operations went into raw materials and everyday needs. These are the accounts we have for a middling Tambovian estate located not far from the town of Elat’ma: carpenter’s shop – 14r. 28½k.; for the bull from the plant [one would assume for breeding] – 6 roubles; for 15 pounds of fat – 58k.; another 58k. to the millers; 4r. 30k. for grazing [to the shepherd]; to the Koshelev widow 1r. 77k. for clothes; to Matrena Sil’nikova 1r. for shoes; to little Nikifor Kolesnikov for a jacket 4r. 28½k.; for the [servants’] corned beef 30k.; two locks for the hay-barn 50k,; for salt 60k.; for pots and jugs 16¼k.; offal for mince 1r.; glass panes for the house and storm- boards 58k.; pork for the Christmas meal 20k.; Total [expenses]: 38r.40k.’86 Correspondingly, the proceeds needed to fund these expenses came from: the sale of ¾ of a pound of rye – 2r.14k.; ¼ of a cart of hay – 2r.80¼k.; of pound of oats – 2r.; 8 sazhen of wood – 14r.; 10 pounds of oil 3r. 57k.; 3 kadochki [pales] of cheese 90½k.; for a cow with a heifer – 6r.; for two quarters of buckwheat 1r.60k. – for ¾ of ‘winter wheat’ – 5¼r. ; for 7 geese – 1r. 50k.; for the rent of 1¾ des. of land – 15r.; Total proceeds: 55r. 91k.87

Naturally, the largest generator of expenses – by far – were children and dependents, including protégés. The fragmentation of estates in post-emancipation Russia meant that children and lands held in trust remained a frequent phenomenon, and presented their own legal complications, since someone other than the guardian would often control the protégé’s inheritance. Substantial amounts had to be paid for the satisfaction of debts and associated interest. On the other hand, labour had been exchanged for land during the redemption process, and each estate operated as a self- sufficient unit, so there was little need to hire external contractors. The expenses of maintaining gardens and orchards were negligible and something similar can be said about hygiene and cleanliness, at least as far as the manorhouse was concerned. To what extent these were prioritised however, largely depended upon each nobleman’s status. The petty gentry of Tambov, for example, ‘rarely kept their houses clean. Most of them live in dirty, sloppy conditions. In fact, there are cobwebs in every nook and cranny, and dust everywhere […], there are greasy stains on the upholstery and

86 GATO F. 148 Op. 1 d. 8 l. 762 recto. 87 Ibid, l. 762 verso. 160 furniture […] all sorts of containers and bottles, cans dropped willy-nilly, filthy rags in every room. This was a most commonplace occurrence’.88

On the other side of the scale, there were those who prided themselves in propriety – and these were not necessarily members of the local aristocracy’s upper tiers. The same observer who left this damning report admitted there were exceptions to the rule: ‘I went to visit one of the landowners in Elat’ma district […]. This was a surprisingly young fellow, already married and with three kids. What struck me most was firstly the extraordinary cleanliness [of the place], the tidiness and accuracy [in the placement of everything]. This was the case everywhere, absolutely in every place one looked. Secondly, the wonderfully original and tasteful way the house was decorated. He invited me in every room, the living room, the lounge, the dining room, and finally the kitchen. On cleanliness and tidiness, I am going to say no more: Cookware, metal pieces in particular, simply shone bright. And everything else too, sparkled.’89 One is tempted to challenge the view that lowly nobles lived in poorly-kept homes. There is more evidence in Obolenskii’s memoirs: ‘Two large windows flooded the dining room with morning sunshine. Against the wall between them stood a big old settee and in front of it an oval table. The samovar, its surface shining like a mirror, was already boiling, letting slip thin columns of steam. An appetising smell flooded the room; it came from the buns the cook would bake fresh every day.’90 Then again, the very fact that both memoirists saw fit to note the extraordinariness of propriety in the houses they visited indicates it was worthy of note.

In order to complete the picture of rural life in nineteenth-century Black-Earth Russia, we also need to consider the external appearance of noblemen and noblewomen, both on the estate and elsewhere. Attire has always reflected, on a social and psychological level, appurtenance to a specific class. Fashion in the provincial estate was dictated, first and foremost, by the style reigning in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg, then Moscow, then the nearest urban centre – usually the provincial capital. So men’s fashion dictated they wear frock-coats, tight around the waist and chest, with long tails reaching to the knees. This fashion was also adopted in the countryside, but the

88 Ibid. 89 Zhukovskii, op. cit., 901-903. 90 Obolenskii, Kartinki proshlogo, 110. 161

‘provincial’ style was considerable lacklustre; one’s provincial origins were obvious in the frock’s cut, the choice of fabric, even the placement of buttons. In informal settings, when milling about the manor house or the estate in general, gentry would feel more comfortable in loosely-fitting waistcoats and pantaloons, whereas they also wore comfortable – almost heel-less – shoes. Frock-coats worn inside the house were more likely to have extremely long tails – almost touching the floor. Collars were always buttoned.91

In the Black-Earth provinces, the gentry’s dress sense could be described as ‘archaic’. For a great length of time fashions never moved on from the cuts used during the first half of the century. It is fitting therefore that one of the most popular types of clothing was called the arkhaluk (usually rendered in English as ‘arkhalig’). It a unisex outerwear made out of a dense silk or cotton fabric, ornamented by variously coloured stripes in the fringes. It was considered an ‘informal’ dress style in the cities, but many among the provincial gentry did not bother changing when venturing out of their estates. D. P. Ivanov, describing life in the provinces during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, wrote: ‘I remember in the Thirties there was this landlord, Khomiakov, who would visit other noblemen’s houses in a plush arkhaluk’.92 In wintertime, many nobles wore bekeshi (usually rendered in English as ‘bekishe’) – a type of short overcoat with ruffles on the spine and fur-trimmed edges around the collar. When travelling, they opted to clad themselves in bear furs and leather, tsince wearing another coat would increase the weight disproportionally to the added insulation it would provide. Life in the countryside, on the estate, allowed for little privacy (in the modern sense), yet one was constantly surrounded by a circle of friends and relatives. Thus, many noblemen grasped this opportunity to wear simple, comfortable clothes. Dressing gowns were a particular favourite, especially among the older gentry; ‘grandfather, in his dressing gown…’ is one of the most commonly occurring phrases in contemporary memoirs.93

Women’s fashions, in sharp contrast to those of men, were incredibly varied. Any astute contemporary observer would invariably identify links between provincial

91 Ibid. 92 Dvorianskaia i kupecheskaia cel’skaia ycad’ba v Rossii XVI-XX vv., 367. 93 Obolenskii, op. cit., 110. 162 fashion and that of cities, albeit with a time lag between them. The diversity of styles, cuts, materials and types of dresses a noblewoman possessed depended – naturally – on her position within class hierarchy as did the different number of separate ‘occasions’ she recognised as meriting a separate dress. Despite the city’s indisputable appeal (‘To Moscow, my sisters, to Moscow!’) for the noblewoman of the province, there was also a large variety of dresses of purely provincial style. They were characterised, unsurprisingly perhaps, mostly by free-form cuts and the usage of simple, homespun fabrics. The majority of middling and petty noblewomen in the provinces would wear a type of cloak named after the Italian word for hood – kapoty. This was a loosely fitted dress with sleeves that zipped through; it was reminiscent of the male khalat or dressing gown. The dress was originally designed to be worn on the street – hence the hood – but gradually became the provincial noblewoman’s ‘dress of choice’ for informal occasions in the manor house and surrounding lands. Traditionally, it was made of a cloth of tightly woven silk trimmed with fur.94

One of the most predominant types of female attire in the estates was the salop – a long overcoat embodying the nobility’s panache for ‘unaffected simplicity’ – which was the fundamental principle of nineteenth-century noble dress, possibly as a reaction to French fashions following the Napoleonic invasion and the perceived flamboyance of Catherine’s and Paul’s Courts. The salop was invariably lined and had either wide or tight-fitting sleeves tightened with by cords. It was costly, as it required the use of both velvet and fur for lining and trimming. Like the dressing gown, the salop is everywhere in the literature, along with the katsaveika – a short jacket worn by women in provinces like the ones under consideration, where the style of living could be best described as ‘traditional’ or overly patriarchal.95 In the summer, noblewomen would wear an equally varied selection of garments made of batiste, muslin or percale – usually white in hue. Silk and woollen scarves or ‘shawls’ were very popular, worn either at home or during social calls. Later the term ‘shawl’ was used to designate a wide silken fabric with a printed floral pattern that became an indispensable feature of a lady’s attire. Despite all this, some of the middling gentry persisted in living modestly: ‘My sister and I wore simple homespun everyday clothes. Only on Sundays

94 Dvorianskaia i kupecheskaia sel’skaia ycad’ba v Rossii XVI-XX vv., 370. 95 Ibid, 370. 163 did we wear our calico dresses’.96 Petty nobility had, no other choice but to wear ‘unpretentious’ clothes. ‘For everyday dress, the children would wear their father’s or mother’s resized old clothes that populated the children’s unflattering “wardrobes”. Fur coats and overcoats, winter and summer salop, frock coat, women’s dresses […] shawls and scarves.’97 ‘Girls would go around in dresses made of cotton or muslin re- sewn over time with a lot of ‘margin’. These were handed down from one daughter to another, possibly even a third, despite the fact that the fabric had long ago faded so that the added ‘margin’ would be of an entirely different colour.98 There were families that ‘wouldn’t buy new clothes for an entire year, refashioning everything from their old ones’.99

As indicated in previous pages, dress was also related to rank. Rank was an important element in the gentry’s social life within the province as well as without. For the serviceman, ranks were symbols of his position in the ruling class, a measure of power concentrated in his hands, tangible proof of superiority over those who are born to serve, not to rule. As a result, achievements within the bureaucratic system would effectively supersede even the title of dvorianin. In the minds of noble-born servicemen, the power of rank was not only a criterion by which all forms of civil service were measured, but also a judgement on the entire life’s work of any given person. The service collective subjugated class self-consciousness to bureaucratic value and by so doing it reinforced the shift from a group mentality to an individualist one. Rank, which appeared as the most important class value, sanctioned by the supreme authority, was not only simply on the visiting card of the service nobleman, an indicator of his position in society and significance as a functionary, but also proof that its holder possessed certain universal virtues. The place a nobleman occupies in the system of service ranks therefore became a comprehensive characteristic of his personality. This unwavering dedication to the outward trappings of a career in service controlled – and to a large extent dictated – the behaviour of the individual.

In the postreform province, rank and position bore the mark of emancipation and epitomised the process society as a whole was undergoing. For the cynical, if not

96 Quoted in Iakovina, Russkoe dvorianstvo pervoi poloviny XIX veka, 58. 97 Nazimov, V provintsii i v Moskve, 77. 98 Ibid, 77. 99 Iz nedavnego proshlogo. I, 252. 164 downright malignant, observer the hallmarks of a corrupt bureaucracy were now even more prevalent:

The historical flaws of our bureaucracy – disrespect for the individual, bribery, rudeness and violent methods [sic] – are born out of disrespect for the natural law. In Russia, the bureaucracy’s oligarchic nature is even more visible than in the West. In other countries, talent and knowledge pave one’s way through university to literary and scientific achievement, to publication, to the bar, to parliament. Here we have academia, and literature, and publications, but they are in thrall to an administrative cabal that holds them by force. In the West, bureaucracy is considered a body of

professionals, here we have a poorly weak professional and general education. 100

Orders, universally displayed on official and unofficial attire alike, were only one of the outward signs of nobility. Another was the personal and/or family coat of arms. In contrast to the United Kingdom, where personal devices are designed and assigned by the Colleges of Arms, coats of arms in the Russian Empire emphasised noble status through the careful use of certain symbols and emblems describing the type of service the holder had rendered and the place of his family in the noble hierarchy. They were a great deal more descriptive than West-European ones. Pointedly, Alexander II himself approved the first major stylistic changes on the Imperial Eagle since its inception (in its form as ‘Imperial Russian Eagle’ rather than its Byzantine counterpart bequeathed by Sophia Paleologina to Ivan the Great) by Peter the Great. Then, Alexander III approved what was fated to be the final version of the Imperial Coat of Arms in 1882.101

Attire was only one constituent part of an elaborate system of social conventions that Russian nobility had to abide by. Provincials in particular had to contend themselves with a rigid communication system that permeated all spheres of life, from conjugal to social. Life in the provinces was quiet, far removed from the noise of St. Petersburg’s ‘high society’; some would call it dull.

100 V. M. Gesen, Iskliuchitel’noe polozhenie, SPb., 1908, 400. 101 It should be noted that, arguably, the Romanovs had use of the most venerable escutcheon in Europe, since its use can be traced via an unbroken line to the Paleologi rulers of Byzantium and as such is the only eagle with plausible pretentions to imperial Roman ancestry. However, their dynasty would carry on the tradition of making to varying extends stylistic changes or complete overhauls for much longer than any other European monarchy in order to reflect the growing power and influence of the Empire. In contrast to modern times, idle boasts could not be reflected on official state symbols, so these changes had profound significance and meaning. 165

Philoxenia: Merry-making and sports on the noble estate Thus any type of communication with relatives, friends or business associates would provide provincial gentry with some much-needed distraction, which is why these interactions would often reach hyperbole in their intensity – if not in their substance. Gentry, both men and women, were happy to welcome a new face through their doorstep. Yet they were most satisfied by visiting, and being visited by, old relations and old friends, conversation with whom promised to be pleasant, meaningful and honest. This is not to say, however, that all of provincial gentry were social animals. One of Tambov’s most prolific memoirists, V. S. Mysherskii, had this to say about a famous recluse by the name of Korolinskii: ‘He’ s a loner; he won’t visit anyone nor invite anyone to his house, nor does he admit any visitors’.102 Another Tambovian, N. Davydov, would later describe the everyday routine of his father: ‘We had few visitors and then again only rarely; in this respect, life differed from the norms of the time, when landowners paying visits to each other was quite an ordinary phenomenon. [This is because] father did not like drinking nor did he allow it in the house, so that vodka was never placed on the table’.103

More frequently, however, individuals were subjected to forced hospitality: ‘[…] driving around from one landlord’s [house] to another’s, who wouldn’t let them leave, involving them in endless fetes.104 Visits to a provincial estate would seldom last for a single day. In most cases, members of the gentry would visit each other’s houses for a week or more. On the blacksoil belt, the marshals of nobility in Kursk were famous for inviting other magnates ‘as a matter of course not for a few hours but for multiple days, during which they feasted, amused themselves, slept, and woke up again to feast and amuse themselves’.105 ‘Three days was the shortest possible time that anyone could remain, and during that time it was exceedingly difficult to get away, needless to say except in case of emergency. The most popular nobles would stay for a week, or two, and then leave straight for another estate where they were expected.’106 With such hyperbolic customs, parties invited had to assemble a remarkable inventory of their

102 Ibid, 252. 103 Davydov, op. cit., 194. 104 Insarskii, Vospominaniia, 307. 105 Ibid, 308. 106 Insarskii, Vospominaniia, 315. 166 own household goods, which travelled with them wherever they went. Gentlemen would employ valets carrying all the necessities that would allow their masters to follow the regular routines of home. Ladies would travel with a company of maids and a wardrobe including everything they would conceivably need for a prolonged stay.

To an external observer all this would seem excessive and hard to understand. These were, after all, private affairs at the middling level; but such ‘private affairs’ carried the very real promise of a betterment in one’s social status – perhaps not with respect to the regional soslovie, at least not at first. But three or more generations of successful ‘networking’ during such ‘private affairs’ would significantly better the lot of the entire family. Most obviously, these parties against provincial, turn-of-the-century ennui, were first-class opportunities for matches to be made. I find that one of the most interesting, humanising, and in the end accurate gauge of the significance each party would have for the host and his/her guests was in fact coined by none other than the household staff – formerly the manorial serfs, now enlisted to perform the duties of footmen, stable men, and gardeners à l’ anglaise, against a meagre wage: ‘The other day we had, brother, guests: 600 horses’, exclaimed one former serf to his friend from a neighbouring estate; this led to a rather predictable response on the part of his interlocutor: ‘Brother, last summer, there came to ours [sic] for the Feast of the Ascension a party of almost 1,000 horses!’ 107

To be sure, a historian of the peasantry would have a great deal to say about this one- upmanship and the quaint sense of ownership betrayed by the choice of possessive personal pronouns. Philoxenia – hosting traditions, were deeply rooted in the psyche of the Russian peasant and lord alike. Memoirs written in the second half of the nineteenth century describe how excessively hospitable nobles could be. This was a correlate of these traditions, the knowledge that travellers and visitors would be weary after travelling the huge expanses of the Russian province, and the need for company as a means of breaking the boring rhythm of everyday life. Little had changed since the age of Pushkin, when landowners entertaining guests ‘would treat them to all the amazing gifts of Russian cuisine, so much so that the guests would be bereft of the ability to do anything else until nightfall.108 Well into the second half of the nineteenth

107 Ibid, 315-16. 108 Quoted in Lavrent’eva, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ dvorianstva, 455. 167 century, a memoirist would feel overwhelmed by the constant urgings to partake of food and drink: ‘as soon as I had finished coffee, I found myself being offered tea’.109

This did not change with emancipation – nor was there any conceivable reason that it would. The expense of entertaining guests and travellers was not all that great in the grand scheme of things, not to mention that when family and friends visited from the imperial capitals, it was a matter of provincial honour that they be fed with the best the country had to offer. This understandable, partly because in the provinces such means as to provide other high-quality entertainment were lacking. ‘The relatives from Petersburg, in their simplicity, thought the [ceremony of] force-fed dinner was over, but they were sorely mistaken. Guests stood up from the table and followed the host into the living room [only to find there] a table groaning under the burden of desserts. Everyone enjoyed these treats […]. Guests, fearing for their health, were even forced to drink cups of coffee topped with thick cream.’110 Often guests would arrive interchangeably to one estate for someone’s name day, to another for a religious holiday, to yet another for a birthday, etc. Often for a noble’s name day celebrations ‘there [would appear] a mass of guests and we started celebrating. We ate, drank and made merry until nightfall.’111

Naturally, the higher one was in gentry hierarchy, the more wealth was on display. Joyous occasions were celebrated with outmost luxuriance. On the name day of a magnate in Kursk, the party lasted for twelve hours: ‘At 4pm we sat at the dinner table under an awning in the garden, which was richly decorated with garlands of fresh flowers. The walls too were adorned with the interwoven monograms of those hosting the feast, fashioned from flowers. The music was booming, men were shouting, women were silent, girls were whispering…’112 It is hard to render the playfulness and tongue- in-cheek character of this charming, colourful description in English. One element that stands out is the use of the word ‘guilty’ – vynovaty – when referring to the hosts. The memoirist was well aware that this was a ‘guilty’ pleasure available only to the fortunate few. One of the telling characteristics of gentry hospitality throughout this period was the abundance of refreshments to which guests were invited. Within the

109 Kostomarov, Ocherk domasheni zhizn’ i nravov velikorusskogo naroda, 78. 110 Quoted in Lavrent’eva, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ dvorianstva, 455. 111 Zhukovskii, op. cit., 905. 112 Quoted in Iakovina, Russkoe dvorianstvo XIX veka, 64. 168 context of the self-contained estate the cost of organising ‘refreshments’ was inexpensive. ‘Homemade ham, salted beef, ducks, turkeys, geese, cabbage, carrot, butter – nothing was purchased [at the market].113 In poor estates and rich alike, there was almost an endless number of everyday drinks: ‘in this poor landowner’s cellar there could be found March beer and kvas of various kinds’.114

Usually the guests were given a rough guide of the types of entertainment devised for their visit, the games, the dancing, the hunting, etc. In the memoirs of V. A. Insarskii one can find the following description of a typical gathering of gentry: ‘There is merry- making everywhere. We had as many horses and carriages as were needed. Some [of us] listened to the bands playing music, others the choir singing, others yet went out hunting with hounds’.115 ‘There was this time when uncle invited guests who had come for his name day to take a walk with him. We all descended from the mountain towards the river, crossed the bridge and then followed the riverbed across the meadow. For us, it was very important that an orchestra would accompany us playing songs of Russia, which it had practiced for the occasion and which gave our great outing an aura of solemnity. After we had come back to the house from the walk, tea was served on large trays and after tea the evening ended with a game of forfeits’, remembers A. V. Shepkina.116

Hunting remained the gentry’s traditional pastime. In Russia hunting was considered the nobility’s favourite and primary distraction, especially for the provincial gentry: ‘There wasn’t a nobleman [in the land] who didn’t own at least a few hounds.’117 As always, there were exceptions to the general rule. In his memoirs, N. Davydov noted that ‘father was not a keen hunter and for that reason on the estate there were not the usual kennels and hunting pavilions’.118 For some landowners who lived in the countryside, hunting became a strong passion, in pursuit of which they readily expended massive sums, effort and time. As autumn fell, estates were getting ready for the hunting season. Usually the organiser of the season’s first and most grandiose hunt

113 Ibid, 63. 114 Dubrovin, Russkaia zhizn’, 23. 115 Insarsklii, Vospominaniia, 308. 116 Shepkina, 392-393. 117 Iakovina, Russkoe dvrorianstvo pervoi poloviny XIX veka, 62. 118 Davydov, op. cit., 193. 169 was a local magnate, whose manor house transformed into a meeting-place for all the neighbours. V. A. Insarskii’s memoirs contain the following description:

From October 1st M. S. Demenkov would declare his grandiose hunt open. For this purpose, there came to stay with him not only hunters from the environs, but also hunters from neighbouring provinces with their men, horses, and dogs. Hunting played a major role in the corporeal [sic] well-being of our gentry. After a hearty breakfast, the entire company of hunters would take their places on the equipages and horses that had been made ready for them, and then congregated on the agreed place. Then they made off for the hunting grounds surrounded by packs of dogs – greyhounds and beagles. Everyone belonged to a hunting party, and between those parties there was a long-standing rivalry.119

Once the hunt was over, the entire company would return to the manor house, where they would feast again, then dance, sleep and doze to wake up and eat yet again, drink and make merry.

Whether for hunting or generic celebrations, invitations were extended to fellow members of the noble class according to a universally accepted set of strict rules. Contemporary memoirs repeatedly refer to cases when the host would ‘beg’ his/her guests to stay ‘at least overnight’. Particularly hospitable hosts would give their guests ‘something for the road’ (which was a in reality more than ‘something’ – usually a bucket of cured fish or pickled apples) even if the ‘road’ was no more than a few versts until the neighbouring estate. True to the fleeting human nature, one gentleman- farmer would see some of his guests off ‘with sincere regret’; for others he wrote he would hardly have time to ‘miss’ them or that their departure ‘liberated’ him. In any case, social visits and the reception of guests was one of the most fundamental components of gentry life in the provinces.

It is with respect to this attitude that the importance of social calls becomes most evident. For most of the year, the atmosphere of Moscow was conspicuously absent from the provinces; there was no way peer pressure could affect the behaviour of provincial nobles within their own estates. Holidaying in (family) estates in the countryside, however, was a major channel of spreading the ‘urban’ atmosphere to the

119 Insarskii, Vospominaniia, 312. 170 provinces. Come summertime, children, relatives, and guests who had become members of either capital’s literary and artistic circles would descent on the countryside in droves, spreading their liberal ideas, for example on the matter of serfdom. This is easily traceable by means of social network analysis, more specifically diffusion patterns. But textual sources can be as indicative; after 1861, it was made clear to provincials that they ‘were expected’ to be kind to peasants. Therefore memoirs suddenly began to fill with anecdotes such as the following: ‘Mama treated her servants very sensitively; she became involved in their family affairs, advised and assisted them, and defended the offended. From us she asked that we always be courteous and helpful with the help and not burden them with unnecessary requirements’.120 It helped that the pushkinian reformation of Russian letters had raised peasants, who were previously ‘invisible’ in memoir literature, from obscurity.

To summarise, the estate phenomenon in the nineteenth century was multifaceted. The estate itself was not simply a ‘nest of nobility, but a peculiar space of exploration, a space where ideological fermentation met the conservation of dominant features of national culture. It was a unique sociocultural environment, in which gentry could attempt to reconcile knowledge emerging in a post-emancipation world with their own aspirations and personal tastes, both of which had room to develop, as did their relationship to their social milieu.121 Our understanding of this phenomenon can surely only be enriched by considering the existential connotations that saturated ‘estate spaces’ once serfs had been made free. Middling nobility had to adjust, not simply in terms of how they managed their estates and a transition into a cash economy, but also in terms of their everyday lives. While certain age-old elements, such as hospitality, remained many others were replaced with new mores, and a new understanding of how an estate should work given the existence of a labour market.

120 Iz nedavnego proshlogo, 247, 258. 121 E. Barinova, Rossiiskoe dvorianstvo v nachale 20 veka: ekonomicheskii status i sotsiokul’turnyi oblik, M., 2008, 30. 171

Chapter IV: Network Analysis, a quantitative and qualitative approach to gentry networks

Autocracy made it hard to define noble politics with any of clarity. The relaxation of censorship (1865) or, rather, the substitution of post-publication censorship for pre- publication censorship, gave the publicly minded members of the landowning gentry a platform to discuss their views on agrarian reform. This did not mean that they were also given a free hand in forming and running their own political parties strictu senso. Appurtenance to wider, national or regional societies – for example the OIRU – was certainly allowed and it is via those societies that noble networks were formed. The permutaions of network analysis takes into account social connections, providing a plausible explanation of how they were used as a surrogate for formal political parties and as viaducts of ideological fermentation in the province.

Noble politics in Russia seldom lends itself to abstraction. If during the transitionary period between emancipation and the promulgation of redemption legislation (1861- 1863) provincials contemplated a serfless future and sought out the best redemption agreements, the period immediately following the establishment of land councils allowed them some measure of self-representation in the local political scene that would not be strictly bound to the issue of land or the issue of credit. Here, I consider provincial noble networks as an ideas-exchange mechanism and the birthplace of noble politics. The main argument advanced in the following pages is that provincial politics were not conditioned upon a binary. ‘Conservative’ and ‘liberal’ labels are to abstract to describe the complexity of political ideologies, identities and platforms advanced and propagated by gentry network proto-parties. Rather, I suggest that a further, supplementary division be made, between ‘modernisers’ and ‘protectionists’ – those who sought to rationalise production using experimental methods or methods imported from abroad, and those who sought to find ways of resuming agricultural production using traditional ‘reformed’ means more suitable to a serfless economy.

The process of political division and subdivision is defined by the nobility’s coalescing into social networks. On the surface, there is no shortage of sources whence to draw evidence for the existence (and dynamics) of provincial noble networks. Throughout 172 the period 1861-1881, Tambov was home to publicists, activists, statemen, even historians and archivists of all ideological hues. The province’s scientific archives commission (the largest of its kind in Russia) is a case in point; its publications were geared towards showing that ‘nobility at birth is important to the existence of a natural aristocracy, even if all other privileges such as wealth, power, and honours are of moderate value’. In the same tone there is regret at the loss of the gentry’s ancient privileges: ‘The rights of the nobility evolved alongside the institutions of state, thereby almost entwining one with the other. The influx of [baser] elements into the nobility is completely alien to its fundamental spirit. The study is replete with remonstrations against any assertion that the gentry has no future and sees a way out from the existing situation by standing guard for the traditions and be an unwavering support to the monarch.1 The ‘protectionist’ network sought the patronage of the highest authority, not only in order to reinforce its legitimacy but also as a way to by-pass ‘by decree’ bureaucratic obstacles set by the opposition.

The building blocks of any network are nodes and edges. This means that network data is only as good as the least dependable set of attributes for any particular node or edge within the network. The provincial archive of Tambov (GATO) contains alphabetical registers for local gentry dating back to the eighteenth century. This concentrated pool of information usually attracts the attention of Russian historians and genealogists seeking information on gentry lifestyle throughout the pre-revolutionary period. GATO’s records are dependable, having more than once been used to establish parameters for longitudinal socio-demographic studies. 161 is the key fund; regrouped under the general designation ‘Council of Tambov’s Noble Deputies’, and organised by uezd,2 it contains entries made per the 1785 ‘Zhalovannaia gramota’ by Chancery operatives under the uezd marshal. Records were religiously kept until the 1890s, becoming more complex with time, which made sense given the shifting social and political position of the nobility within the province (and the empire), to say nothing

1 Nortsov, A. N., ‘Materialy po istorii Tamboskogo, Penzenskogo i Saratovskogo dvorianstva’, Izvestiia Tambovskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi komissii xxvii (1904), 1904, 1-18. Naturally, this is not the first time the commission’s work was used in historical study. What differs on this instance is the way it is used, alongside other archival material from provincial and central archives. Put simply, it is all used to synthesise a complete image of provincial politics even for members of the landowning nobility who left no outward expression of their political inclinations or, if they did, this was lost to posterity.

2 In the following order: Elat’ma, Kirsanov, Kozlov, Lebedian’, Lipetsk, Borisoglebsk, Morshansk, Spassk, Tambov, Shatsk, Temnikov, and Usman’. 173 of its composition. For example, the spisok originally contained information such as number and locations of serfs (of either gender) owned by each noble(wo)man, so it had to be abandoned in favour of records compiled by the Revision Committees. Primarily used as a voters’ register in noble assemblies, local authorities would eventually abandon the old spisok in favour of the noble register, which suited their needs much better.

The spisok’s original table format contained seven columns, the first of which details the surname, patronymic and age of each person. The second includes marital status (in case of a married nobleman, the age and place of origin of their spouse). The third details the composition of the nobleperson’s family (names, ages, if in state service and where, sometimes even the marital status of the extended family members). The fourth column is the widest, as it contains the number of serfs (of each sex) owned, and the means by which these serfs came to be acquired by the nobleman (inheritance, purchase, dowry, etc.) according to the latest revision. The location of owned serfs (village, settlement) is also specified here. The fifth column is reserved for the place of residence or abode (the estate in which the nobleman in question mainly lives). The sixth specifies the rank (suo jure or jure uxoris). The seventh – where the named noble serve(d) and occasionally where his sons served. It is interesting to note that all the information contained in the spisok was actually provided by the nobles themselves by means of supplementary entries into local nobility registers. The purpose of this data was to allow for local noble assemblies to keep track of the status and activities of each member. The entries for 1860-1861 are used here to create the first, chronologically, visualisation of the social network.

The method of transposing raw data into a workable format largely depends on the types of results one is seeking to obtain from network analysis. There is a ‘node list’ and an ‘edge list’ associated with all SNA, but the exact way of translating the data in the spisok into workable lists is concomitant to the study’s aim, i.e. the identification of network cliques and the tracking of their progress through time.3 Personal details such as name, surname, and patronymic are used to identify individual nodes, establish a family timeline and build a node list. Information on kinship and

3 Appendix A provides an overview of this process. 174 professional ties (third and seventh columns) is used to build a list of edges. Serfs owned or, after 1861, size of land owned, helps with selecting middling landowners and establish rates of absenteeism (fifth column). Theoretically, each node can have a minimum of one attribute, namely an identification number usually assigned in ascending order. But for the analysis to be meaningful, one needs to consider any number of other attributes, such as a timestamp which allows filtering nodes according to the time (year/month) they become meaningful to the network (for example, a noble landowner comes into his/her inheritance and begins forming independent relations within the network, or when a noble-official retires to tend to his estates).4

In its embryonic form, the database allows for a number of simple statistical calculations to be made. These include the mean ages of paterfamiliae, age gaps between family or network members, number of children per family, etc., as well as some simple deductions, such as the social background and status of network members, or the status differential between spouses.5. Social historians can, for instance, access statistical data on divorce rates over time, or fluctuations of the professional and civil status of families over successive generations. Furthermore, by adding a ‘location’ attribute to nodes, it is made possible to trace the distribution of estates across the province, sort them by size, determine patterns of land usage and/or whether they were used as primary or secondary residences based on a set of criteria decided by the researcher. I have created a simple algorithm allowing the projection of networks upon a map of late nineteenth-century Tambov; deductions can be made as to the correlation between land fertility and noble politics or entrepreneurship.

Whereas the nodes are a rather straightforward affair, compiling a list of edges is a great deal more complicated. What the network analyst defines as ‘relation’ between two or more nodes has a great bearing on the analysis, because it is used in the calculation of several key statistical measures. Let us consider the following hypothetical example: The service records of Iakov Smirnov6 reveal he served on the 5th squadron of the Pavlograd Hussars before they were transferred to the reserve, sometime between 1860 and 1863. The service records of another nobleman by the

4 See List of Sources section below. 5 I have released the datasets I compiled via an open-access sharing platform for Gephi users. 6 A fictional generic name used for demonstration purposes and in order to avoid confusion with a real individual. 175 name of Maksim Petrov show he was sent as a representative of the government to enforce the emancipation of 1864 in the Vistula provinces, largely considered to be directed against the szlachta, as punishment for their role in the January uprising. There is no direct evidence, such as correspondence, linking the two noblemen, and they do not share a familiar relationship. There is a short overlap of a few weeks when they were both serving in Łomża. They both visited the offices of the newly installed administrative centre to speak to visit von Berg’s adjutant on official business. SNA will identify this indirect connection.

This example helps illustrate how SNA incorporates basic indirect relations within a historical network. Now suppose that the two nobles are middling landowners from Tambov. The use of this connection should be reflected on the edge list, or more precisely since there is no direct link, in the resulting sociogram. In constructing the Tambovian network, I have taken into account these service connections (in a more sophisticated form), because they are indicative of pre-existing relations which may have begun outside the province proper, but had a bearing on noble interaction within the specified geographical place and time (Tambov, 1858-1889). Entries from the spisok on a nobleman’s place of service thus not only become important but are also assigned a relative weighted value. Alongside more direct relationships (such as marriage ties), this allows for the establishment of links (edges) between nobles (nodes). This is a crucial component of the network, because it takes into account interactions we have no physical evidence for. On the other hand, interactions within framework are conditioned by a multitude of other factors (such as for example status differential), not to mention they are involuntary, in contrast to social club memberships or friendships, which reflect conscious choices.

In the Tambovian network, the latter type of connection is considered as having more relative ‘weight’ than the former. Methodologically, the researcher has a choice of defining the nature of the edges used. As we have seen, not all edges are created equal. They can also be ‘directed’, as for example in the case of hierarchies or clear subjugation of one individual to another (when one landowner owes money to another, for example). In this study, which incorporates a longitudinal component, the following-up of civil status/official functions supplemented by unofficial engagements is important to the construction of the network. Noble-nodes receive an attribute- 176 marker if they are in Tambov on retirement, which in the Russian Empire could be intermittent. During these periods of absence from service, these individuals play the role of gentlemen-farmers or men of leisure, or both – they certainly continue to socialise well into old age. They are at the core of provincial society, which remains organised largely around nuclear patriarchy. Nominally and actually the heads of households, business was conducted in their name and their input was generally valued.

There were many instances where generational conflicts arose, particularly in the least fertile estates. As reforms were underway, the prospect of parsing one’s inheritance became less attractive, resulting in a change of demographic trends. Data from the list in digital format can be used to determine various interesting indices for Tambovian noble families.7 For example, it can be shown that they had 2.84 children on average. At the same time, it becomes easy to locate interesting exceptions to the general rule. Nikita Fedorovich Saltykov, a widowed captain in retirement aged 56 from the village of Dmitrievskoe (Kobylianka) in the okrug of Tambov, had 10 children (sons Aleksandr 24, Ivan 22, Aleksei 21, Nikolai 20, Petr 19, Mikhail 16, Andrei 14, Vasilii 7, Fedor 2, and a daughter Anna 9).8 This was an uncharacteristically large brood. In terms of SNA, Saltykov’s expansive family would artificially inflate his degree of centrality within the network and cause statistical irregularities. In such a small network cases like Saltykov’s could skew the average distance between nodes. It is therefore prudent to eliminate them from the sample.

Marriage is perhaps the most important link between two individuals in the network. Consequently, it is assigned a value of 3, like all familial ties of the first and second degrees. According to the previous argument regarding the importance of voluntary association and the nature of marriage alliances between nobles in nineteenth-century Russia, this weight factor may at first seem counter-intuitive. On the other hand, one must take into account that association by marriage resulted in social obligations, instances in which either spouse (the men especially) simply had to form and maintain social ties. It is the inevitability of those indirect ties, their number and frequency which leads to marriage being assigned more relative weight. Service obligations and

7 GATO F. 161, Op. 1, d. 22. 8 GATO F. 161, Op. 1, d. 22, l. 118ob. 177 prevailing mores meant that the overwhelming majority of marriages were sealed with an age gap between 0 and 5 years on the husband’s side. But in Tambov, about 40% of noble marriages were concluded with an age gap of 10 years or more on the husband’s side. Deviations from this norm have to be explained by convenience, expediency, urgency or personal proclivity. In other words, the circumstances of exceptions were as varied as the exceptions themselves; Iakov Nikitich Subochev was married age 29 to the daughter of Ensign Rodion Rodionovich Levashev, Martha, who was 32.9. There is nothing in the archives to justify this unusual pairing. In contrast to non-nobles, noblemen were not prone to marry early, even if the national average shows that a little earlier, at the turning point between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, early marriages were the norm across the social spectrum. Before Catherine’s reforms, noblemen had to abide by Peter the Great’s requirement for lifetime service and good education. If they were thought to ‘shy’ from the latter, their right to marry was revoked. Upon entering service, noblemen of the officer class were, as a rule, stationed away from their native counties, and their ties with them weakened as a result, brief sojourns while on leave notwithstanding. Leaves of absence were also generally hard to acquire. 10

Given the preference of provincial noblemen for a military career (as it was regarded as more prestigious and a faster track for advancement – both of which provincial gentry had a deficit of), they tended to marry later and among their local peers. Once married, they retired from service to settle in their estates and raise a family. Noblemen in the civil service may have been stationed in or close to urban centres, but they were even less reluctant to marry, possibly because the attractions of urban life encouraged their desire to remain bachelors for longer. When they did, eventually marry, they had fewer children than any other professional class in any other soslovie.11 Average trends in peasant marriages provides a sharp contrast: Age difference between spouses was traditionally considered to be optimum at around 2-3 years.12 What does this all signify for network formation? Obviously, noble ladies of marriageable age and their parents would be on the lookout for suitors of rank and means, both of which could typically only be acquired via long-term service. Hence,

9 GATO F. 161, Op. 1, d. 22, l. 127ob. 10 S. F. Platonov, Polnyi kurs lektsii po russkoi istorii, SPb., 1999, 534. 11 Mironov, op. cit, vol. 1, 179. 12 Ibid, 164. 178 age brackets for these suitors were correspondingly higher than their peasant or merchant counterparts.

This all applied, for most part, in the case of the first marriage. Age difference meant that the first spouse would soon perish; specifically, as noble girls married relatively early in their lives (even at twelve or thirteen years of age), their development was stymied by the exacting conditions of married life. The nobleman’s second marriage, which typically followed within the first two-three years of widowhood, was a lot less constrictive in terms of either the characteristics or the social milieu whence the second spouse would originate. It could be either another, more mature, noblewoman (e.g. a fellow widower) or a woman of a different social class entirely. Second marriages, devoid of political significance, are eliminated from the sample. It makes sense that the nobility would be keen to build intra- rather than inter-class marriage ties, but there were some cases where noblemen married ‘beneath them’, taking a wife from the merchant or freeholder (odnodvortsy) class. Noblemen who joined themselves with the merchantry, the peasantry or even the clergy in this way were most likely impoverished, landless or otherwise incapacitated (members of Tambov city’s invalid population, for example). In this way, Petr Ivanovich Zakusin, 55, was married to Paraskevi – a peasant’s daughter – with whom he lived out his days in Tambov’s invalid hospice, never owning any serfs.13 Such alliances are also excluded from the sample.

The bulk of noble-to-noble interactions was official in nature and scope, and there can is no surer way of establishing ties than by consulting zemstvo archives. The land reform of 1864 gave these councils various and sundry powers, some of them precisely defined, while others were less so. As a rule, all aspects of the legislation that could be misconstrued as instances of ‘devolution’ were minutely detailed so as to make sure this was not open to misinterpretation; the power of the government, by right of the Emperor, was supreme. Those aspects of zemstvo functions that had to do with finances – and of them there were money – were generally less detailed. To add to the confusion, rural zemstva were essentially organs of self-government, but zemstva closer to major urban areas had to contend with existing administrative structures.

13 GATO, F. 161, d. 22, l. 45ob. The bride’s name, interestingly, remained in the original Greek form rather than the Russified ‘Praskovia’. 179

Regardless, their remit ranged from poverty and hunger relief to public health and insurance, to infrastructure and education. During debates, it is easy to identify political factions on either end of the spectrum on the basis of voting patterns. What is more, it becomes possible to identify two supra-factions, namely ‘modernisers’ – landowners who adopted an entrepreneurial and innovative approach to farming, and ‘traditionalists’ – those who were less keen on improvisation. This is because zemstva were also dealing with improvements in economy and farming; marketable produce, husbandry, seed improvement. As the analysis below reveals, the politically ‘liberal’ wing does not necessary overlap with the ‘moderniser’ community. In fact, the latter was rather mixed; it was entirely possible for two landowners to cross swords during a debate on debt relief and form an alliance over subsiding cattle breeding.

When considering all this, we must not forget the inherently elitist nature of zemstvo leadership. The powers that be made no secret of their outlook: ‘the first priority of [our provincial] zemstvo should be to aid rural estates with the administration of their natural [sic] duties’, declared governor Garin in December 1866.14 Could he have possibly meant the latifundia, not really few and far between but certainly universally in no urgent need of aid either, or the struggling estates of the petty gentry that clearly had no future? We can stipulate that the inference he made here was that the zemstvo should primarily make sure that Tambov’s middling gentry survived the reforms. As such, zemstvo debates on most matters are a first-rate source for exploring the dynamics of middling networks in fine detail. This extends to the resolution of conflicts resulting from poor coordination between nobles themselves, such as reported violations of rules regarding parity in allocating funds for infrastructure.15 For the resolution process to work, accountability was key. The audits commission was tasked with presenting regular reports to the provincial assembly. For example, they reported the construction of three bridges in the province between 1867 and 1868, and the undertaking of a new one in Usman’.16

Infrastructure is also crucial to network formation and evolution. Both the process of its construction and that of its maintenance were also of particular interest to middling

14 A. N. Lebedev (ed.), Sbornik postanovlenii Tambovskogo gubernskogo zemskogo sobraniia za 1865- 1894 gg., Tambov, 1902, 1. 15 GATO F. 145, Op. 1, d. 19, l. 40, 96-97. 16 GATO F. 145, Op. 1, d. 19. 180 gentry members. With one notable exception, the administration of railways was centralised. But when it came to roads, decisions were made on the uezd level in consultation with peasant communes and estate owners. While some zemstvo projects (such as a cattle breeding programme) were ad hoc and assigned funds accordingly, improving infrastructure was a constant process. Network cohesion increased drastically after1870, when the government instructed zemstva to come up with their own postal system. Until that point, they had relied on government post, but now they were in charge of their own communications system, they could exercise complete autonomy in decision-making. Coordination between communities improves radically, because the zemstvo post could cover a much larger area than its imperial counterpart. With postal stations in every urban centre, it was inherently reliable and in time the zemstva themselves would come to rely on it.17

Data on communications from the zemstva archives can be supplemented with data relating to other instances of institutional interactions. The provincial government, the office of the marshal, the Noble Land Bank, as well as local educational institutions all inform the sociogram, which in turn may reveal of specific attitudes to reform. Education too should be factored into the larger analytical context. Considered in conjunction with gender, the education of noble women being limited and taking place exclusively within the province, that of men often less limited and taking place in institutions elsewhere.18 That is not to say that links between nobles should be discusses solely against the background of their interactions within the province. Ideally, their encounters outside Tambov should be taken into consideration as well. But this may not be practical. The resulting graph would contain over 4,800 connections between individuals. Such a large dataset would result in statistical errors, beginning with inaccurate community detection (see below) and lead to false conclusions with respect to how networks evolved over time.

17 Already from the very first year of its inception, the provincial assembly sent via this system amounts in excess of 340r. So in terms of network analysis, there is a clear distinction between pre-1870 and post-1870 interaction (edges) between constituent communities of the provincial network. Voevikov, Sbornik materialov, 164. 18 F. 168 ‘Tambovskogo otdelenii gosudarstvennogo dvorianskogo zemel’nogo banka’; F. 161 ‘Tambovskii gubernskii predvoditel’ dvorianstva’; F. 107 ‘Tambovskaia gubernskaia muzhkaia gimnaziia’. 181

Network Analysis: Visualising ties The social network consisting of middling Tambovian gentry includes a set of relational ties, linkages between actors, which act as conduits for the flow of communication or esteem through the network structure. These ties can either constrain actors (if, for example, they are hierarchical) or provide opportunities (especially for financial transactions). There can be little, if any, doubt that social networks have a huge significance in nineteenth-century Russian society as a whole, and this significance is propounded even more on the province level. SNA is a great means of uncovering these networks and, more importantly, plotting interactions taking place within them. When compiled with a view to longitudinal study, these sets of data on noble interaction represent a unique infrastructure for the diffusion/contagion of such varied phenomena as fashions, tastes, and reactions to reform. In this sense, SNA is applied here in an effort to interpret the gentry network as a whole, and map the diffusion of political ‘activity’ in postreform Tambov.

The assumption underpinning this analysis is that far from being a randomly distributed structure, Tambov’s noble network has clearly defined properties or ‘attributes’ expressed as weight (for edges) or degree of centrality (for nodes). In other words the unit of analysis is the entire Tambov network rather than individual components therein, be they nodes or edges. Furthermore, as is typical for such networks, the degree distribution is subject to a Power Law. This essentially means that we can empirically expect some nodes to act as ‘hubs’ between various gentry subgroups. These ‘hubs’ are not necessarily the only connecting points between subgroups, in other words they do not necessarily have to be ‘brokers’. What is more, neither ‘hubs’ nor ‘brokers’ have to be ‘first movers’. In fact, it is more than likely that first movers are not so firmly connected with subgroups. They can, for example, be Muscovite grandees whose activities are reported in local press and have no ties to the Tambov network, or whose townhouses were visited by a non-Tambovian who then went on to pay a social visit to a relative or acquaintance in Tambov. In any case, ‘first movers’ are tangential to the findings of this study. It is more important is to uncover by what means and to what extent the middling gentry of Tambov is divided into separate ‘communities’ on the basis of political leanings.

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Parameters set for this network are based on a set of generally accepted interpretations of the integral importance social ties had in nineteenth-century Russian society, particularly in the provinces. The middling gentry of Tambov is plotted as a bipartite undirected weighted network originally consisting of 102 nodes, representing individuals and organisations via which they were connected. Ties between individuals (or individuals and organisations, or organisations and organisations) are assigned a weight of 1 if they are institutional/professional, a weight of 2 if they are social, and a weight of 3 if they are familial. Multiple ties between nodes have a compounded effect, so that two individuals engaging in a financial transaction who also know each other socially share a tie with a weight of 3. Ties between nodes are defined here as: (a) evaluation of one individual by another (e.g. in publications, but not memoirs; memoirs would mean ties would have to be directed); (b) Association or affiliation (e.g. in the zemstva, local administration, via benefaction or state service). In its ‘raw’ form, the network includes nodes of two distinct types (individuals and organisations), which makes it hard to measure the centrality of nodes and gauge the statistical significance of ties. For example, local noble assemblies would have a high degree of centrality as by definition all the nobles examined here would automatically have a tie linking them to the node ‘Assembly’. This does not mean much. In order to draw any meaningful conclusions, the bipartite network needs to be ‘projected’ unto a monopartite configuration. The open-source algorithm used involves a calculation of edge weights on the basis of eliminating one type of node and ‘transforming’ the paths that existed between remaining nodes and deleted nodes into edge weights.19

Even so, plotting these relationships alone means very little. The network needs to be interpreted, analysed by quanta: as a whole, on the subgroup/community level, on the node level. In other words it makes no sense to use anything other than the entire network as a main unit of analysis; the subject-matter is relationships and interactions, not any of the network’s’ constituent parts in isolation. The conclusions drawn from this study apply to the entire set of actors following the principles of a complex systems approach: Behaviours emerging from observing the entire network differ substantially from behaviours observed on the level of individuals. There is also

19 For more on the intricacies and issues inherent in monopartite projection of bipartite graphs see S. Fabio et al. ‘Inferring monopartite projections of bipartite networks: an entropy-based approach’ https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.02481 [Accessed August 2016].

183 a longitudinal element to this analysis, expressed as a node attribute (‘timestamp’), which allows for tracking a pattern of diffusion through communities over time. Communities are defined as a sets of nodes more closely connected to each other than with other nodes and their importance within the network will become readily apparent in the following (para)graphs.

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Figure 4.1: A ‘raw’ network visualisation: Tambov’s middling gentry and local institutions

The figure above contains 118 nodes, each representing an individual from the middling nobility or an organisation through which these individuals share an institutional link. The ties between them are represented by concave lines (edges) whose width furthermore indicates their weight. The highlighted area shows two individuals sharing a particularly strong tie. This is typical of family members who act as proxies for each other, thereby sharing familial, social, and financial ties.

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Figure 4.2: The monopartite projection of Tambov’s bipartite network

Using the projection algorithm, the number of nodes is reduced to 86, which corresponds to the total number of individual nobles in the study. Once this network has been made homogeneous, we can start applying statistical values, beginning with degree centrality. Degree centrality is measure indicating the importance of each node with respect to other nodes in the graph structure. This ‘importance’ is quantitative rather than qualitative, as it reflects only the total number of edges for any given node – that means, in turn, that degree centrality is a measure heavily biased towards the community, the ‘local’. One would expect that individuals such as the local and 186 provincial marshals of the nobility would have a disproportionally high degree of centrality, and indeed – as Fig. 4.3 shows, that is clearly the case. In order to offset inherent bias, we need to apply a further measure called betweenness centrality, a computation of the number of shortest paths running through a node. This is a powerful indication of brokerage position/power based on the principle that the shorter the path between two nodes the more direct influence they can exercise on each other. And since by its inception the network is undirected, there is initially no way of telling which individual is in a position of influence and which is the ‘subservient’ individual. When, however, nodes are identified by name and function, the superimposition of degree and betweenness centrality yields an interesting sociogram.

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Figure 4.3: 1861 gentry network showing relative degrees of centrality (node size) and betweenness (colour) of individuals.

It is interesting to observe that the individuals with high degree of centrality (denoted as larger nodes) are also those with high degree of betweenness (denoted as a brighter colour). These nodes are identified as the marshals of nobility for each uezd, with the marshal of Tambov being the most ‘prominent’ (degree centrality of 27 and betweenness centrality of 44814.39). At the same time, it is evident that not all subgroups are connected between them, in other words that the middling Tambovian gentry did not form a maximum clique (a community where all possible ties between nodes can be drawn). This is only to be expected, as there is either no evidence of ties 188 between, for example, A. Iu. Kudriavtsev from Kirsanov and K. V. Desnitskii from Usman’. If no ties are drawn, the distance between nodes is considered to be infinite and in order to make up for this statistical complication, a third measure needs to be employed: Eccentricity centrality. Eccentricity measures the shortest longest path between nodes, or the maximum distance between any given node and all the other nodes, thus incorporating the worst-case isolated nodes. In other words, the higher a node’s eccentricity, the more ‘removed’ that node is from the most isolated node.

Figure 4.4: 1861 ‘snapshot’ of the gentry network showing relative degrees of centrality (node size) and eccentricity (colour range) of individuals.

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With an eccentricity of 11, the Marshal of Tambov uezd is more removed from the most isolated noble in the network than the Marshal for Shatsk, who has an eccentricity of 10. The latter was an interesting personality by the name of A. E. Voronstov- Veliaminov. During the Crimean War he had served in the army as an Ensign of the Guards attached to an Artillery Brigade, but never saw any action as he was posted to the Baltic Coast. After the war, he retired with the rank of lieutenant at his own request ‘to help run [his] family’s estates’. Upon his return to Shatsk he proved himself an able administrator, with a panache for local affairs. He was elected in 1860, actively taking part in peasant reform and thereby earning various official and unofficial accolades in 1863-64. He was re-elected in 1864 and again in 1866, but this was not the usual case of running essentially unopposed. One can easily detect from the sociogram above that Voronstov-Veliaminov was well-connected to key network members. Additionally, he remained connected throughout the period, serving variously as Marshal, head of the district school council, zemstvo member and chairman, and head of the executive for Shatsk in 1865-68. He must have been universally respected because in 1880 the citizens of Elat’ma (capital of another district), made him an honorary citizen of their town.

Another useful product of SNA is community detection, which can be achieved using a number of different methods, including clique-based, hierarchical clustering, and divisive (centrality-based) algorithms.20 For the purposes of detecting communities in the Tambov network, a modularity maximisation algorithm was used.21 The Gephi software allows for the resolution of detection to be set by the user, in other words how ‘hard’ the algorithm should look for communities. The higher the resolution setting, the fewer communities will be detected. All this is subject to the size of the network as a whole, which in this case is considered ‘small’, as it contains – in the best case – around 100 nodes. By scaling resolution, it is possible to determine how communities are nested. One would expect that gentry from the same uezd would belong to the similar modularity classes and would therefore appear in the same community subgraph. This is not, however, entirely the case. It’s quite clear that the nodes with a higher degree of centrality (individuals with the most connections, denote in Fig. 4.5

20 All relevant mathematical formulae can be found in Appendix A. 21 V. D. Blondel et al., ‘Fast unfolding of communities in large networks’, Journal of Statistical Mechanics (2008) https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-5468/2008/10/P10008/meta [Accessed January 2017]. 190 as larger-sized nodes) form a community unto themselves, to which is furthermore attached a sizeable number of relatively isolated individuals. It is equally clear that the degree centrality of these individuals does not correspond directly with their power of brokerage. Unique links among community subgraphs (e.g. Kil’dishev and Evsiukov) would have enjoyed a lot more influence on the local level. This seeming paradox, which leads to the counterintuitive conclusion that a lesser noble(wo)man’s actions would be more ‘impactful’ for a community than those of a local grandee, can be explained by the fragmented nature of noble-to-noble interactions.

Once community detection algorithms have been applied, it remains to place a ‘label’ on each one. This is where data from the spisok and institutions (see above) becomes relevant. If the theory is correct, then one would expect that the proclivities of individuals belonging to the same community would be of a similar tone or disposition towards current affairs. Taking for example the community marked in black below, we can look at the case of I. V. Il’eshev, a noble based out of Kirsanov uezd. His diaries reveal a general enmity towards emancipation, coupled with a sense of dread, which manifests itself in his attempting to protect valuables and create a cache of produce reserves.22 Around the same time, Iu. A. Gordianov committed to paper his taking similar measures. Gardenin, Shipov and Levashov expressed, either privately or publicly, similarly inimical thoughts with respect to emancipation.23 Although there exists little evidence of what the remaining members of that community thought, marriage ties (e. g. Bogdanov – Rall’) and appurtenance to the same gambling clubs (e.g. Ardashov) would suggest that they too shared the same sentiments. It would not be illogical to assume that in the case of Il’eshev and Gordianov there was an exchange of ideas, since Il’eshev also records a meeting between the two.24 It should be underlined that at this stage deciding whether Tambovians were leaning towards conservatism or liberalism is largely irrelevant.

22 GATO F. 163, Op. 2, d. 1, l. 3. 23 Ibid. 24 GATO F. 163, Op. 2, d. 12, l. 2. 191

Figure 4.5: Community detection in Tambov (1861) for a resolution of 0.25

It is inconceivable that entire communities would be completely unconnected to the rest of the network, if only because they are being represented in the provincial assembly. The fact that brokers are missing from this graph indicates that brokerage lay in the hands of individuals not included in the study, ergo not nobles of the middling sort. As a rule, the missing nodes bridging communities would be latifundists. In turn, the high rates of absenteeism among the latter means that communities remained largely unconnected, socially independent of each other at the same time as being socially dependent upon the well-off broker and interdependent with other members of the same community. The stronger the ties between nodes in each subgraph, the stronger the interdependency. And although it is true that not every 192 individual in the network left complete records of their activities, there exist powerful indications that the more interdependent communities were relatively wealthier and more conservative in their views than the less interdependent communities. As reforms were underway, it is interesting that to see whether the middling gentry of Tambov regrouped into stronger communities or instead became politically and socially fragmented. Longitudinal analysis of the communities shows that a decade after emancipation, there was a larger number of noble communities.

This shift is radical and revealing of strong political undercurrents. It is certainly not compatible with a view of the landowning gentry as ‘stagnant’, or ‘resigned’. In terms of the individuals themselves, we can observe fewer ‘uncommitted’ noblemen and fewer unconnected communities. This makes sense when we consider the overwhelmingly weighty results of successive institutional interactions. Within these ten years, not only have we have seen the establishment of zemstva but also a large number of decisions made collectively, thus allowing us to place formerly noncommittal individuals firmly within a community, whether that be ‘liberal’, ‘conservative’, ‘modernising’ or ‘traditionalist’. It is also interesting to observe that edges between individuals within these communities are reinforced, which suggests that social ties come to bear following political activities. In other words, the social pairing of noble couples becomes less dependent on station and prestige and more dependent on political like-mindedness. Given the importance of extended family networks (including the all-important in-laws) in Russian politics, we can assume that with reforms underway it became all the more important to form marriage alliances between families sharing similar political outlooks.

By 1881, however, the same communities show a tendency towards coagulation into broader movements. This might be a result of the delayed effects of emancipation, or reform in general. For as we have seen, there was a considerable time lag between the enactment of reform and change on the micro level. For a time, nobles could continue to manoeuvre independently. But as class character changed during the latter stage of Alexander’s reign, when more and more formerly comfortable families fell by the wayside, the character of politics in Tambov also changed. The broader, twenty-year view, makes sense. Reform caused Tambovians to redefine themselves both politically (as seen by shifting positions in institutions) and socially (as seen by shifting attitudes 193 towards marriage). It is during this time that they mostly exhibited characteristics of mobility and the engagement, although if the former crystallised, the latter would remain after 1881. If it seems that at the time of fragmentation it was easier for nobles to navigate the political waters, the resolve of their ideas would be tested during the time of community consolidation that followed. Many were the instances of individuals shifting from one political position towards its antipodal opposite. In a self-conscious society, this too makes sense. And we should not be too hasty to condemn this as political slothfulness. The transition from one community to another needs to be gradual and due to a good cause. Otherwise the noble concerned risks social alienation. We can observe a number of these nobles actually suffering the results of careless association with the ‘wrong’ community in their degree of eccentricity.

If certain communities would seem firmly set throughout the period, it should be underlined that this may only concern one of the two major groupings discussed here. Usually this would be the modernist/traditionalist dichotomy, for this would naturally be a correlate of one’s character rather than one’s politics. Even so, there are enough instances of transfusion between these two supra-communities to justify speaking of experimentation. In this respect, we may expect to encounter nobles who attempt to introduce new techniques only to be disappointed and nobles who become convinced of the success of said techniques over time. It is therefore important to identify the ‘prime movers’ by name. In SNA, this is made possible through an examination of diffusion patterns. Methodologically, however, this is a rather weak approach. The reason for this is that in order to discuss diffusion, it is necessary to make assumptions on the basis of probability. This in turn entails a degree of unquantifiable assumptions. The premise behind diffusion is to assign a degree of possibility that it will take place once out of ‘x’ times two individuals in the network interact.

Where data is widely available, for example between Leontovich and Venevytov above, the assumption made on this probability can be strong. In this case there is an archival trail connecting the two; return visits, socialising and, ultimately, kinship. In the period between May 1870 and May 1871, there are 65 recorded meetings between them, as well as an unknown number of additional meetings, either in the wings of zemstvo meetings or in private. For every ten such meetings, the probability that a 194 specific idea of Leontovich’s would be passed to Venevytov and vice versa becomes stronger. This allows for synthetic politics. As the following graphs indicate, politically ‘liberal’ communities could intersect with economically ‘traditionalist’ groups, as could ‘conservatives’ with ‘modernisers’. This seemingly contradictory behaviour be explained by diffusion analysis. What is more, instances of diffusion reinforce the idea that middling gentry were actively pursuing solutions to the problems engendered by reform on a collective level. This does not mean that there were no cases where differences in ideology where so irreconcilable that diffusion could never take place. But it does mean that, to the extent that diffusion does take place, this is not a gentry collective showing signs of sclerosis.

Looking back to the main argument underscoring this study, i.e. that the Chekhovian archetype of a ‘provincial’ is not an accurate reflection of the political reality in blacksoil Russia, SNA findings seem to lend considerable support. Furthermore, there is no reason to assume that these are not generalisable for other blacksoil provinces, even European Russia as a whole. If future study extends the samples, both in terms of numbers and in terms of geography, including for example the latifundists and looking at Black-Earth provinces as a whole, then there could form a body of empirical proof that the dominant interpretation of the provincial gentry’s activities and position in the time of Great Reforms is entirely without merit.

Communities may have been a significant element of network formation and evolution, but it also pays to see how ties between specific individuals changed over time compose a shifting pattern of local elites-within-the-elite. There should be no confusion between these individuals – who enjoyed a high degree of influence over their peers, and ‘prime movers’ – who enjoyed a greater degree of autonomy. A new seed may be introduced to the province by an itinerant merchant for example, who only has a limited number of transactions with an eccentric element of the network. Or a specific political argument may be introduced by an equally eccentric element who happens to have ties with the imperial capital. But it only when individuals with high degree of centrality weigh in that these new elements take effect. In fact, we can trace each fluctuation of attitudes to a change in degree centrality of key individuals. These would invariably be the few latifundists included in the study – namely marshals of the nobility. Although it is interesting to see the change visualised in a graph, this is 195 nothing unexpected or, indeed, nothing new. What is new, however, is the existence of network leaders around which gravitated a continuously fluctuating group of peers. A parallel would be Speakers Corner in Hyde Park. Passers-by approach them to hear their speech, and decide whether to remain or move along to the next speaker. SNA helps identify these ‘speakers’, who also change at regular intervals.

Statistical methods cannot pinpoint the exact time when speakers change. Such an exercise would be rather difficult and counter-productive. What becomes evident from the sociograms above is that – alongside some constants – some landowners became central to the network. Closer inspection of the timeframe and the landowners themselves indicates that their interchange happened before rather than after a general trend shift in the network. In other words that these changes in centrality were proactive rather than reactive, thereby lending more support to the view that provincials could set trends as well as they could follow them. Always barring those individuals whose centrality is inflated by their institutional position (here marked by red circles), the node with the biggest centrality in the conservative camp for 1865 is Khomiakov. It happens that Khomiakov joined the zemstvo administration a year later.25 Around the same time, the ‘modernisers’ found a leader in the person of I. I. Zubarov, a confirmed liberal who wished to revolutionise grain production and had published a number of articles and pamphlets to that effect.26 Shortly after the centrality shift, a number of middling estates in Tambov would try – with a mixed degree of success – to adopt a new farming technique.27

More importantly, however, towards the end of the period the centrality shifts become more pronounced, which is a reflection of both the cumulative weight of intense dialogue (partly thanks to better communications and the increase of debates) and the general shift towards larger communities discussed above. A closer look at the two camp leaders for 1881 shows that even though their importance within their respective communities is great, the ‘conservative’ leader – D. A. Gerasimov – has a higher degree centrality than this counterpart. Which means that overall within the entire network, he and his party take precedence over the liberals. At this point it would be prudent to

25 GATO F. 4, Op. 1, d. 1730, Ch. 1, l. 85; d. 1781, Ch. 1, l. 26. 26 GATO F. 4, Op. 1, d. 1730, Ch. 1, l. 87ob. 27 GATO F. 4, Op. 1, d. 1906, l. 37. 196 stress the fragmentary nature of these observations and the unforeseeable, violent circumstances which led to a change in government six years later. With these caveats in mind, it would not be far-fetched to argue that a grass-roots turn to more conservative policies was perhaps already underway at the time of Alexander’s death and that, consequently, this trend was in place before the accession of Alexander III. To the extent that chronological precedence may be evidence of causality, would it not also follow that Alexander III’s counter-reforms were enacted on the basis of a general hankering for them ‘from below’? Inversely, would it not be the case that Alexander II’s earliest constitutional experiments be based on an understanding that there was a strongly favourable undercurrent among the nobility? Indeed, a comparison between the sociograms for 1881 and for 1875 reveals that in the latter liberals were cumulatively more central to the network than conservatives. This is not immediately evident because the liberal ‘leader’ – the same Zubarov who led the ‘modernisers’ – is still lagging in terms of centrality score with respect to his conservative rival. But this is a result of the principles underscoring liberal politics and an aversion to centralisation. As the sociogram shows, in 1875 liberals were more central, less eccentric and by far more strongly interconnected than conservatives.

There can be little doubt that the challenging attitude this study adopted vis-à-vis the current historiographical corpus must have some basis in fact. In the first place, it is impossible to maintain that post-emancipation gentry politics in Tambov were lethargic. There is alternative explanation for changes in community membership other than political mobility; neither is it possible to otherwise explain the accelerated rate by which they took place other than active and constant engagement with political debate. In the second place, it is impossible to maintain that post-emancipation gentry in Tambov adopted a passive stance to reform. Their engagement over time only intensifies, as is attested by the accentuation and multiplication of ties within political camps and the turnover of ‘leaders’ both on community and on whole-network level. It might even be possible to argue that since these shifts chronologically precede larger shifts in the national political life of Russia, there might be an argument to be made that – overall and collectively – middling gentry in Russia was able to predict, if not directly cause change on a national level.

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Network formation: Institutional factors Whereas Social Networks Analysis necessitates some measure of informed conjecture, the activities of Tambov’s zemstva are, as the most concrete manifestation of noble politics in the region, eminently suitable for constructing an analytical framework that helps us understand how network dynamics developed over time. By their inception, zemstva had been created to administer the economic affairs of each province and country. There was no real horizontal integration from the uezd to the province level, which was a happy accident since, as contemporaries never failed to observe ‘the circle of [zemstva] interest turned out to be very wide; they had to bring food to the people by establishing “bread lines”, found and manage charitable institutions, get rid of the beggars by building alms houses, deal in property insurance, and promote the development of local trade and industry’.28 Over the period 1864-1881, there can be no doubt that Tambov’s zemstva rose to the tasks at hand; nor can there be any doubt that the local nobility was responsible. For a number of reasons, Tambovian zemstva were especially preoccupied with public health, which – given future developments in this very province – is not without a trace of historical irony. In the first instance, they created a network of institutions akin to ‘nursing schools’, interlocked with each other in preparation of first- and second-tier medical staff.

In farming too, Tambovian nobles contributed greatly by means of zemstva-enacted policies and practices. In the short-term, we have evidence of measures taken to reduce the mortality of cattle (a bane in the province throughout the nineteenth century), improve breeds, and protect crops from seasonal and opportunistic pests. These measures were coupled with efforts to promote public education; farming schools were founded and in those schools peasants were taught basic measures of hygiene and some level of basic literacy and numeracy. It is indicative that at the opening of the first zemstvo in the province, the governor used his inaugural address to prioritise, unequivocally, ‘the facilitation of the third estate in the performance of their natural duties’.29 These duties consisted of farming and husbandry – but also all sorts of other types of manual labour, such as the building and improvement of infrastructure which, incidentally, also fell within the zemstvo’s remit. In the noble mind, emancipation did not erase the correlation between spiritual enlightenment and work ethics. These two

28 Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva, vol. 1, 686. 29 I. I. Dubasov, Ocherki iz istorii Tambovskogo kraia, Tambov, 1993, 391 198 were inextricably intertwined which is why, more often than not, we encounter gentry associating the ‘spiritual and moral raising’ of rural poor with their material raising from utter poverty.

To be sure, class interest was a major factor in noble zemstvo decision-making. But in realising that as a collective they could achieve more, Tambov’s nobility did not shy from pursuing economic development, even when this was at odds with the founding principles of the zemstvo. We have seen how the central government sought to eliminate all trace of ‘grassroot politics’ from the land councils, hence the lack of vertical and horizontal integration. It was only natural however, that some measure of intra-zemstvo coordination would rise out of the need to coordinate efforts in public health and infrastructure. We know, for example, that Tambovian gentry overwhelmingly voted in favour of establishing correspondence with their peers in Saratov for the purpose of building a rail line connecting these two provinces.30 The Griaz-Borisoglebsk line was one of the first commercial-passenger lines in the provinces. Particular attention was paid to the building of railways between villages and uezd capitals, where zemstva meetings were held.

Network members now found it easier to travel through the province, not only to take part in the new institution, but also for social calls. This led to an explosive increase in noble subgroups and the shrinking of average network paths. In 1868, the Auditing Commission reported to the provincial assembly that over the last year, zemstva had completed the construction of three bridges and a ferry terminal in Kuz’minskii.31 Financial reports from 1864 through 1880 show that maintenance of roads, let alone railroads, was costly. We can observe a 23% increase in maintenance cost per mile of carriage road throughout this period, and a 15.5% rise in the cost of maintenance per mile of railway. This realisation led zemstvo members to become more introspective; every uezd in the province gradually looked to itself rather than other councils, and refused to enter into synergies for the betterment of infrastructure on a provincial level. Provincial highways were maintained at considerable cost at the expense of the central government. As of 1868, we also observe a slight of hand; zemstva reclassified a great number of roads connecting villages and towns as ‘rural’ roads. Their upkeep

30 The line is still in operation today. 31 GATO F. 143, Op. 4, d. 10, l. 39. 199 therefore fell squarely upon the shoulders of village communes and individual landowners.

It is worth noting that this practice was stemmed by Alexander III, under whose reign roads were yet again reclassified so as to fall under the purview of local zemstva. For example, in 1883 the Elat’ma zemstvo would allocate 100 roubles for development work on a 150-mile stretch of road running through the uezd. These instances, however, were occasioned not by the zemstva themselves but from even more local authorities who lacked the funds for the upkeep and petitioned the former for support.32 As such, cash grants were conditional upon the gentry’s benevolence. That very same year, for example, the landowners of Temnikov essentially vetoed a request to repair a country road that had been reclassified as such by the Ministry of Communications. They were actually able to return it to its previous status and could therefore argue that its maintenance should be entrusted to ‘owners of nearby cottages and adjacent village communes’. No mention was made of the landowning gentry whose estates were also served by this road.33 Infrastructure was a major preoccupation from the outset for the politicising entry. In the very first financial report for the provincial zemstvo, the amount of money spent on this undertaking alone was estimated at 55,000 roubles.34 Granted, a large measure of spending on infrastructure was necessary, since this was one of the institutional obligations of the land councils.

Another means of zemstvo integration and synchronisation, closely associated with their oversight on communications, was the post. As of 1870, largely because of systemic abuse, the central government stopped offering zemstva free use of the imperial postal service. Instead, it offered them the opportunity to run their own mail, which in turn meant the expansion of its reach over enormous distances previously bereft of such means of communication. Here too the gentry’s political determination had a profound impact on the social, technological, and economic evolution of the Russian province. Unlike the imperial postal service, zemstvo mail was based on out- of-the-way stations and offices, which made for more efficient connections, both in the

32 GATO F. 143, Op. 3, d. 11, l. 59. 33 Ibid, l. 69. 34 GATO F. 103, Op. 1, d. 10, l. 7. 200 literal sense and in the network sense. There can be no doubt that the exchange of business letters, soon followed by exchange of news, then political opinions and commentaries on social affairs, encouraged interest in developments on provincial, then national level. In other words, through the zemstvo gentry’s efforts, activism as a whole was helped throughout Russia. Was this an entirely accidental by-product of the zemstva? There is some evidence it was not.

First of all, there is the matter of inordinate spending on postal services. In the first year alone, records show that zemstvo budgeted over 340 roubles for post deliveries over the road network, and an equally hefty sum for post delivered by rail.35 The detail and attention that gentry members paid to the design of postal stations is surprising: Two full years before being allowed their own post, the Tambov uezd zemstvo was already involved in long discussions as to the prospect of setting one up, with various members from the nobility presenting their plans for rural and central post offices. These ‘devices for the purpose of establishing constant communication between counties, as well as uninterrupted delivery of government correspondence to all destinations’, were designed to address existing complaints raised by members ‘about the late and inefficient delivery of packages’, in view of having to support the new institution of Justices of the Peace.36 Themselves a manifestation of the concept of Rechtsstaat, which large sections of the nobility either readily and wholeheartedly adopted or had to be seen adopting, JPs encouraged the improvement of existing communications networks. In Tambov, the mail services of Borisoglebsk, Kirsanov and Kozlov, were largely hailed by the provincial zemstvo as models of efficiency and punctuality.37

Following emancipation and the establishment of a labour market, Tambovian gentry acquired a sense of the free market’s cyclicality. ‘Bread lines’ (in the literal sense of seed-to-mill subsidies) had existed long before the zemstva. But after 1864, these were now planned on uezd and provincial levels. They were different to the direct handing out of bread and the maintenance of food stocks, which also fell under the jurisdiction of the zemstva. In Tambov’s case, the famine appearing in the 1890s cannot be blamed

35 GATO F. 143, Op. 3, d. 10, l. 76. 36 GATO F. 143, Op. 1, l. 38-44. 37 GATO F. 145, Op. 1, d. 19, l. 40. 201 on the zemstva.38 From 1864 through 1881, physical subsidies of seed, grain and free milling were reduced in favour of cash loans to peasants, which the latter largely failed to repay. Zemstvo administrators thought that the former serfs were now capable of using these budgets to their benefit, with a look to future needs. Sadly, these moneys were squandered. As a result, the zemstvo’s entire effort to ensure food supplies for the province was deemed, in retrospect, a complete failure. The shift from seed and other physical subsidies to monetary loans was decided on the provincial, then uezd levels and voted for by the majority of gentry members. In this sense, the gentry should bear at least part of the responsibility for the system’s failure, particularly as before 1880, food stocks were deemed to have been ‘adequately maintained’.39

That year was marked by a generalised crop failure. The governor at the time, Baron Frederick, opened the provincial assembly by reminding them that ‘If the zemstvo cannot prevent crop failures, then it is their duty to palliate the loss of harvest as a result to damage done to the grain by harmful insects and drought.40 His speech was met with approval by the gentry.41 At any rate, the ensuing world grain crisis and famine that hit Tambov in the 1890s falls outside the chronological margins of this study. What is certain is that on the administrational front, Tambov’s zemstvo marked a series of important successes. On the one hand, we have seen how nobility – particularly the middling kind – was frustrated by the rise of bureaucracy; it is logical to assume therefore, that the last thing they should wish for once they took charge of their own affairs thanks to the land councils, was to add to it. They were, nevertheless, instrumental into voting for the formation of a Statistical Bureau, whose purpose it was to collect and collate information about the province’s economy.42 By 1888, the Bureau had achieved a great deal, so that Baron Frederick felt obligated to mention it in his inaugural speech.43

When discussing zemstvo history, it is important to remember that notionally at least duties paid for collective services were nothing new. The gentry was well acquainted with the expenditure involved – an obligation they had for a long time shared with

38 Ibid, l. 96-97. 39 Otnoshenie Tambovskoi gubernskoi zemskoi upravy ot 18 sentiabria 1878 g., 95 40 SSS, vol. 7, 230ff. 41 Lebedev, op. cit, 16. 42 A. A. Danilov, Istoriia Rossii XIX – XX vv. Spravochnye materialy, M., 1997, 297. 43 Danilov, Istoriia Rossii, 273. 202 their serfs. Tax pro quo was a concept far older than the institution of land councils, particularly familiar to the propertied classes. We have legislation to that effect from as early as 1802 and 1805, as well as the 1851 Charter delineating which payments from the gentry and other stakeholders would be used for what purposes. Most of the obligations of the zemstvo were carried out thanks to contributions made by these very same stakeholders. This included everything from maintenance of public property to vaccinations and the upkeep of military buildings. Additionally, the very congregation of land councils invoked considerable administrative costs; they too would have to be covered by the zemstvo budget. In the preparatory stages of reform, the government decided to wash its hands off the matter, leaving the zemstva to formulate their own budgets. Given the primacy and domination of the gentry in the councils, this essentially meant that those who paid the most in actually got to decide how the funds would be spent.

Tambov’s and other zemstva simply adopted the provisos of the 1851 Charter as the basis for in-payments. Local authorities in Russia had not been in charge of taxation since the XV century and then again the entire system was in its infancy. In this respect, zemstva were not entirely free; budget policies had to abide by Articles 91-104 of the 1864 legislation. According to these regulations, zemstva had to take into account local needs and sources of funding before deciding on any expenditure. Yet if the letter of the law was followed in this respect, its spirit, namely the prioritisation of the peoples’ needs, was often not. Methodologically, the main problem is that these budgets – while by no means fictitious – were approximate, and there is no way of knowing actual zemstvo expenditure.

As an incorporated public entity, the land council had the power to impose direct taxes, which were then weighed against specific expenses. Tax districts were then divided up into ‘profitable’ and ‘unprofitable’ on the basis of income-expenditure ratios. Gentry majority made sure that the rates were favourable to them, if not visibly so. Even a cursory look at the property tax rates mostly applicable to the landowning gentry (i.e. farmland, forest land, cottage industry buildings, silos, and manor houses) can determine quite easily that those were taxed disproportionally low with respect to properties mostly owned by other social strata, namely merchants and rich peasants (townhouses, premise licenses, trade patents, factories, etc.). Moreover, the products 203 in which traded the latter were also subject to double excise – once from the government and once from the zemstvo, which was not the case with the main commercially available product – vodka. In all, if one imagines ‘tax zones’ or districts, the most heavily ones would certainly have been those enclosed within city limits.

From the mid-1870s onwards, merchants and financially solvent landowners took to making frequent donations to the zemstva in return for increased prestige and the opportunity to become known as local ‘benefactors’. Usually, however, these donations were earmarked for specific purposes, be they public health or education (the most popular causes of the rich), or replenishment of food stocks (which became very popular towards the end of the period). This added to the already rather ad hoc nature of zemstvo finances. ‘Obligatory expenses’ were sometimes massaged in order to be transferred to the ‘optional category’. In this exchange, as in most other zemstvo business, it was the gentry members would determine the outcome. Tambov’s zemstva were some of the most steadily solvent in the country, yet they still had to petition St. Petersburg for the alleviation of their financial burden. This makes sense if one looks at the overall costs of zemstvo activities: In 1877, the ‘obligatory’ costs of each uezd as a percentage of the total were as follows: Tambov uezd 43.5%, Borisoglebsk 52.7%, Kozlov 49.7%, Lipetsk 60.4%, Lebedian’ 47.2%, Usman’ 38.1%, Kirsanov 49.7%, Morshansk 49.3%, Spassk uezd 55.3%, Shatsk uezd 47.8%, Elat’ma 34.9%, and Temnikov 56.4%. On average, this breakdown is considered level by comparison to other provinces.44 In addition to government intervention, not always to the benefit of the zemstva (as for example additional legislation in 1865 allowing the province governor increased input in zemstvo finances), zemstvo had to deal with the changing nature of taxable property.

In previous Chapters, I have shown how landownership in the province changed over the period under consideration. Whereas noble landownership became more fragmented, the total aggregate of arable lands increased. So in the province as a whole, taxable farmland went from 5,500,100 des. in 1868 to over 555,800,000 in 1881. In parallel, tax rates went up – precisely because they were decided by gentry members who lost land in favour of other strata and therefore were on average better

44 GATO F. 143, Op. 3, d. 30, l. 6. 204 off even with the new rates – from 9.4k/des. in 1868 to 23.6k/des. in 1885, a 251.06% increase. Specifically, communal land (belonging to villages and rural societies) was taxed on average at 80r./des., estate land at 73r./des., and industrial land at 77r./des.45

A comparison with the European Russian average would not be fair here, as the majority of the latter lies outside the Chernozem and therefore was taxed more favourably. More properly, one must take into account the average cost of land from province to province; in the period 1864-1881, the average appraisal per des. in communal lands fluctuated from 30 to 108 roubles. For privately owned land, the average was between 25 to 108 roubles. Four out of Tambov’s uezds were priced at the maximum for both categories, the rest were priced at the maximum only in the latter. Noble corporations saw to it that the zemstvo was burdened with as many ‘non- essential’ activities as possible. Over time, they shirked off responsibility for the upkeep of schools, hospices, and other services of ‘secondary’ importance, such as libraries.

Table 4.1: ‘Official’ budgets in the province of Tambov per uezd46 Uezd 1877 (roubles) 1881 (roubles) 1. Tambov 159500 222100 2. Kozlov 103400 175500 3. Lipetsk 75400 106600 4. Lebedian’ 75000 87200 5. Usman’ 79100 109600 6. Borisoglebsk 115000 205600 7. Kirsanov 99900 129300 8. Morshansk 153900 150700 9. Shatsk 55400 84300 10. Spassk 65500 79600 11. Elat’ma 61900 70300 12. Temnikov 75300 114000

45 Data in this paragraph: GATO F.4, Op.1, d.1729, l.260-280. 46 Druzhilova, ‘Zemstvo Tambovskoi gubernii’, 223. 205

The figures in Table 5.1 show that the tendency for zemstvo budgets to increase was constant. Morshansk uezd is an aberration, and rather difficult to explain with the available data. But if one were to make an informed conjecture, this exception to the rule was due to the passage of a significant amount of lands to the state by means of defaulting on loans. Morshansk was the least valuable and profitable uezd, so landowners tended to part with their lands there before they parted with others. As, however, we have no solid data on loan defaults per uezd, this is only an assumption.

Table 4.2: Tax-based valuation of lands in Tambov uezd (1876)47 Taxable Asset Taxable Total Asset Total Tax Yield Holdings Value Income (Roubles) (Roubles) (Roubles) 1. Land Desiatina Landowners 312918 10952130 866782.80 36838.23 Peasants 402962 11713513 1116204.74 47438.62 City-dwellers 1273 44555 3526.21 149.85 2. Forest Desiatina Landowners 15241 533435 42217.57 1794.22 Peasants 18116 634,060 50181.32 2132.69 City-dwellers 925 32375 2562.25 108.88 3. Other Property Urban - 1198112 1187072 5018.06 Rural - - 100981.70 4291.69 4. Commercial To the

Licenses, etc. treasury 30674.071/2 134423.75

Total 25242603.75 128446.311/2

Interestingly, the zemstvo budgeting commission, almost entirely composed of landowning gentry, showed considerable financial acumen in planning the zemstvo finances. Expenses for the same year (‘obligatory’ and ‘optional’ as described above,

47 Druzhilova, ‘Zemstvo Tambovskoi gubernii’, 226. 206 were as follows: Road maintenance and building – 18,421r. 23k.; Water crossings – 25,076r. 35k.; civil administration and public buildings – 2,875r.; JPs and premises they used – 24,063r. On the ‘optional’ side, compensation for zemstvo members – 12,390r.; zemstvo premises and payment of interest to the Land Bank – 1,400r.; medical expenses undertaken by the zemstvo – 34,697r. 80k.; public education – 22,910r. 2k.; fees of trade deputations – 300r.; rewards for killing wolves – 200r.; allowance for the poor – 1,000r.; the total amount set aside for contingencies is surprisingly high – 2,493r. 70k.48 There was a budget surplus of 11,828r. 89k. from the fiscal year 1875, so by simple calculation the zemstvo needed to receive 136,396r. and 47k. to cover the total expenses for 1876. In all, the zemstvo ran a budgetary surplus for two years running. Notably, these were two years characteristic of the entire period.

A great deal on noble politics can be deduced from debates on the zemstva’s public welfare activities, starting with education. While it is true that Tambovian councils increased their spending on public education in the 1860s and 1870s, the increase was less considerable when compared to say, that of funds allocated to infrastructure. Let us consider the same two-year period as before: In 1875, expenses for the opening and maintenance of schools were set at 15,000r.; the following year, at 15,65r. In the provincial zemstvo, the debate of October 10th, 1875 resulted in funding teacher training with 1,200r., and an additional 360r. for two yearly bursaries in the Samara Seminary. A resolution passed on September 30th, 1874, had only allowed for 1,000r. to be spent on the Tambov School of Crafts, while a year earlier – on September 28th, 1873 – the same amount had been earmarked for the women’s gymnasium. None of these grants came from private donations to the zemstvo, but some grants were specifically given to named individuals. For example, in 1873 the Tambov zemstvo voted to pay a certain nurse Nasonova the amount of 50r. per year ‘to send her son to the gymnasium’. From the mid-1870s, economies were sought: as of 1875, no more funds would be given for killing wolves, those funds being diverted to a competition for new threshing machines (200r. previously earmarked for wolf killings) and a donation to the Society for the Assistance of Shipwrecked Mariners (100 roubles previously earmarked wolf killings). In 1876, the 2,493.70r. set aside for contingencies

48 GATO, F. 143, Op. 1, d. 150, l. 1-5. 207 were not absorbed and were therefore redistributed to the maintenance of hospitals (777.78r.), epidemic protection (1,000r.), and the poor.

These frequent redistributions are indicative of the zemstvo majority’s shifting and evolving priorities. Collective security – public health, epidemics, and moral obligations (the poor, although this was meant in part as an anti-crime measure and in part as a measure to combat vagrancy) trumped public education. With the passage of time, land councils seemed to stabilise and expenditure rose in proportion with tax income. The fact that the managers of the zemstvo – gentry – were themselves major taxpayers protected the lesser taxpaying strata from widespread abuse. Such taxes as were raised generated income that the zemstva, in Tambov at least, reinvested in local society. The search for expansion in the zemstva’s areas of responsibility continued well into the 1880s, but the government started pushing back; this is not to say that it sought to clash with the councils but rather that it played the taxation card to pacify the landowning gentry. The main financial burden of the zemstva would therefore continue to be borne by peasant communes.

Network formation: Biographical factors The biographical notes in GATO and GARF are for the most part self-serving lists of achievements, but at the same time allow us to draw some statistical conclusions on the nature of the Tambovian nobility’s relationship with state service and local politics. In the pages that follow, I propose to discuss the lives and times of certain individuals who distinguished themselves in local governance and administration. This process will test my original hypothesis that noble politics – at least on the local level – became ever more pronounced after emancipation and that nobles themselves were not strictly guided by economic self-interest and pedigree. All the nobles I will be discussing here were members of hereditary nobility and landowners in their own right. As such, they were not really constrained by monetary and solvency issues, but were free to act as their (political) conscience dictated. Some of the names are introduced here for the first time while others are certainly familiar to the reader from previous Chapters.

There are broadly two categories of noble-politicians in Tambov: Those who engaged with legal affairs and those who pursued intellectual interests. The latter group includes educators, or those who decided to take up positions relating to the 208 upbringing of younger generations. The former category seems to have been more successful in the eyes of government – which we can deduce from the large number of honours and promotions they received. In this respect, the gap between the two categories is rather impressive: Prince Cholokaev,49 scion of an old noble family from Morshansk, for example, started as an administrator of the Shatsk district’s schools almost directly upon his graduation from the University of Moscow in 1853. In three short years, he advanced three ranks – from Provincial Registrar (XIII) to Collegial Secretary (X). But it would seem that the civil service did not agree with him, and he chose to resign in 1856. These resignations, of which there were many, were not resignations in the modern – definitive sense. Rather, they were variously timed breaks from state service, usually at the postholder’s own request, granted for a number of reasons.

Firstly, by the mid-1800s, the government had no shortage of capable and enthusiastic administrators recruited from the lower strata – employees who were glad to receive a placement. Secondly, the government stood to gain nothing from alienating the landowning classes and essentially forcing them to stay in service. Thirdly, the provincial nobility’s role as a regional peacekeeper, guarantor of stability and symbiote of Autocracy was never entirely usurped by the up-and-coming enlightened bureaucracy. Fourthly, now that the nobility had been ‘emancipated’, there was a tacit understanding with the government that they needed to tend to their family estates. Sure enough, the overwhelming majority of Tambovian retirees quoted some obscure ‘personal circumstances’ forcing them out of service. Yet their departure from state service did not also mean their eschewing of all socio-political activities; Prince Cholokaev was one of the first to ‘throw his hat in the ring’ for consideration as Peace Mediator – a position he comfortably and easily won. Thereupon begins a common pattern of ‘dabbling’ into politics – once on the provincial stage, once on the national stage, which would see him – and many others of his ilk – serving as Peace Mediators, then Justices of the Peace, zemstvo administrators and marshals of the nobility. Cholokaev was elected provincial magistrate as well (1870), a position he never resigned from.

49 GATO F. 161, Op. 1, d. 8448, l. 1-12; d. 8712, l. 1-20; d. 8760, l. 98, 102-105; F. 143, Op. 1, d. 150, l. 9- 10, 38-41. 209

The meting of justice in the provinces did not seem to be the exclusive prerogative of those versed in Law. It often coincided with political placements in the first curia by virtue of the candidates also being part of the landowning elite. On this instance, we can be sure that Prince Cholokaev commanded the respect of lord and peasant alike; he became known as an honest broker distinguished for his financial acumen and common sense, which is why he was put in charge of the zemstvo budget in 1881. As of 1890, he becomes president of the provincial zemstvo. By now a State Councillor (IV) and recipient of the Order of St. Stanislav I Class and the Order of St. Vladimir III Class, Cholokaev was a well-established member of the local political elite. His princely dignity and age entitled him to more honours than average: He received medals on the occasion of the coronation of Alexander III and Nicholas II, a bronze medal to commemorate seven decades since the War of 1812, and a number of minor honours.50 Towards the very end of his career (and life), Prince Cholokaev would also receive the Order of St. Anne I Class, while merely a year before the constitutional revolt of 1905, he was elected as a member-plenipotentiary to the National Noble Assembly to represent the province of Tambov.

While I have mentioned two main categories of noble-politicians, it is only natural to question this division by pointing out that many a landowner started the career as neither a lawyer nor an intellectual, but as a soldier. While it is true that many Tambovians served in the military, there is plenty of evidence that the military life was not, overall, to their liking. They had after all fertile, generally well-organised, and solvent estates to return to. Then there were those forced into service by world events. Lev Vladimirovich Vysheslavtsev was just such a case.51 Born in 1830 to a middling family of hereditary nobles, he graduated with honours from Moscow’s Philological Faculty and then forced to take part in the Crimean War, where he rose to the rank of Lieutenant. After the war, Vysheslavtsev quickly submitted a letter of resignation according to the standard wording: ‘I wish to resign from my duties in order to assist my family and elderly father with the management of our estates’. This is not to say that he wished to shirk his social responsibilities but, rather, that he wished to occupy himself with land management. For that reason, he enthusiastically took up the

50 A commemorative medal for the War of 1853-1856, and two medals for ‘work to introduce the Regulations of February 19, 1861’ and ‘the instruction of state-owned peasants’. 51 V. A. Kuchenkova, Tambovskie gordodskie nekropoli, Tambov, 2000, 17. 210 position of Peace Mediator. To be sure, many Peace Mediators around European Russia were keen to take up the post as a means of self-promotion and enrichment. But Vysheslavtsev was certainly not such a case. A liberal at heart, and characterised as such by contemporary and modern historians,52 he managed to be recognised as fair and impartial – an extraordinary feat in a province like Tambov. In this respect, he carried on his family’s ancient tradition: The Vysheslavtsev clan had for generations been contributors to the province’s institutions of social welfare.

The latest scion was no exception: Lev Vladimirovich came into an inheritance from a distant relative, which he was quick to turn over to the Empress Elizabeth sanatorium for the terminally ill (an institution he had a hand in creating, with a capacity of 100 patients). Part of his duties was to manage contributions and donations from other nobles. So when Fedor Dmitrievich Khvoshchinsky,53 a lynchpin of the provincial gentry network, donated some property, Vysheslavtsev was quick to turn into an annex to the sanatorium. Both nobles were elected to the local (district) zemstva from the very start of the institution, but Vysheslavtsev was by far the most consistent; having been named as head of the district administration in 1872, he never left the post. Khvoshchinsky, on the other hand, was a careerist and – one could argue – an arrivistic personality. It is possible that his appurtenance to Tambov’s middling nobility was part of the reason behind his strong motives to excel in service. A Moscow Law Faculty graduate, Khvoshchinsky was unique in starting off his career straight at the local level of his home province, namely as a clerk to the Noble Assembly with the rank of Provincial Registrar (XIII). He soon realised that his pedigree – and liberal politics – would become an obstacle to rapid advancement. The only way he could realise his ambitions of becoming a local paragon would be to gain the favour of the nobility’s liberal wing.

In 1866, six years into a ‘retirement’ during which he had carefully cultivated a network of influential acquaintances, Khvoshchinsky staged a comeback to Tambovian politics, specifically the increasingly powerless noble assembly. Thanks to his background in legal studies, he was able to convince his fellow noblemen that he was more deserving

52 Ibid. 19. 53 GATO, F. 161, Op. 1, d. 8142, l. 1-4; d. 8346, l. 1-6; Adres-kalendar’ sluzhashchikh v Tambovskoi gubernii lits na 1878 g. 211 than a ‘grand’ noble of becoming a district magistrate. Already a Justice of the Peace (the first of two terms), and now a magistrate, he secures a place in the provincial zemstvo’s administration. These elected offices were considered by law as noble ‘service’, so Khvoshchinsky was able to claim the right to retire in 1881, after twenty- one years of service. That same year, he was returned to the noble assembly of his home district for a full three-year term, as part of a balancing act whereby the relative power of the liberal and conservative wings in the zemstvo would be mirrored in the assembly as well. He was elected for a further two terms in 1884 and 1887, year during which he was called upon to become Acting Marshal of the Nobility (July to September). He was elected to the post the following December. This was typical of a marshalship’s ‘handover’. When the holder of the office became indisposed, retired for good, or died, his successor would serve in an interim capacity before being confirmed to the post.

Marshals were elected by extraordinary plena of the noble assemblies, for the simple reason that there was no knowing when the current marshal’s tenure would come to an end. This would frequently not coincide with the official length of tenure. Khvoshchinsky, however, wished only to use this position as a springboard for the realisation of his ‘liberal dream’ and soon sought a more meaningful position. This turned out to be the chairmanship of the magistrature (‘chief justice’) of the entire province, a post he held from October 6th 1885 to October 8th 1886, a year of major changes in his life: Not only was he elected a member of the provincial zemstvo, but he was also married to Mariia Petrovna Bulgakova, daughter of State Councillor (IV) P. A. Bulgakov, one of the most influential members of Tambov’s nobility on a national scale. For a middling noble like Khvoshchinsky, this was an elevating alliance. But other than a son, Nikolai, this union did not favour him with any positions or honours he had not himself earned by his work as a jurist. His final rank was that of Collegial Councillor (VI), and he was never properly knighted – having received an Order of St. Stanislav II Class in 1889. It is logical to assume, at this point that this was due to Khvoshchinsky’s liberal politics. For otherwise, he fulfilled all necessary preconditions for further recognition. On the other hand, a prestigious marriage, influence over interpretation of the law, and reaching sixth rank in the Table of Ranks were by no means minor achievements.

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Several Tambovians dedicated their lives to the public good irrespective of the state structure. An example of such a nobleman was Prince Sergey Mikhailovich Volkonsky,54 literally a child of the emancipation who was born on a winter night in 1860. His aristocratic family needs little introduction: They held huge estates in Yaroslavl, Nizhnii Novgorod, Saratov, and Tambov. Sergey Volkonsky graduated from the prestigious University of St. Petersburg in 1884 – itself an indication of his high status at birth – with a degree in History from the Faculty of Philology. He was almost immediately named kamer-iunker to His Imperial Majesty’s Court – another title deserved for high nobility, not the least blemished by its abuse and correlation to Pushkin’s untimely death. While still in Court service, uniquely among his fellow Tambovians discussed in this chapter, Volkonsky was seconded to the Ministry of Education and promoted to Collegial Secretary (X).

The Prince was impatient to become involved in local politics by means of become a member of Tambov’s zemstvo. We know this because he confided his frustration to his diary when, in the year 1885 when he finally becomes eligible for election, there were no zemstvo elections. As a consolation prize, fellow nobles of Borisoglebsk made him an honorary Justice of the Peace and chairman of the Justices of Peace in one fell swoop. The next year, he was duly elected to the land assembly, uniting in his person the leadership of the judiciary with the leadership of the administrative branches of local government. In 1886 and again in 1889, by request of the Ministry of Education, he was named a trustee of the Alexandrovskii School. In between his postings, he is promoted to Titular Chancellor (IX) by order of the Senate. Soon afterwards, he stood for election as marshal of Borisoglebsk, but he soon tires of local politics. In 1893, the same Ministry, now rebranded as Ministry for Public Enlightenment, made him a representative to the Chicago World Fair.

For much of the rest of his life, Prince Volkonsky was active outside Tambov. It is interesting to see, however, how he fared after the Revolution of 1917 as a means of exemplifying my earlier assertion regarding the nobility’s dedication to causes regardless of socio-political standing. In America Volkonsky became acquainted with

54 GATO F. 161, Op. 1, d. 8346, l. 121-131; Brokgauz, F. A. and Yefron, I. A., Entsiklopeditskii slovar’, vol. 3, 447; V. Boikov, ‘Geroi serebrianogo veka’ Nashe Nasledie iv (1991), 54-58; S. M. Volkonskii, ‘Moi vospominaniia’, Nashe Nasledie iv (1991), 65-70. 213 various personalities, through which he secured an invitation to return by the Lowell Institute in 1896. While abroad, Volkonsky led an active life, lecturing in various institutions and reporting on political developments back home, at the same time as delivering courses on Russian history and literature throughout the United States. Upon his return, now a well-travelled, mature and experienced functionary of international repute, he did not go back to provincial politics. Instead, he stayed in his St. Petersburg palace and devoted himself to his favourite art form, the theatre. He gained some fame as a theatrical writer. It was Volkonsky who, at the head of the Imperial Theatre, introduced Diaghilev to his first joint venture. But their relationship soon turned sour, and Volkonsky was summarily dismissed, the authorities coming down firmly on the side of Diaghilev who had by now become an established name and procurer of ballerinas to the Imperial harem. No longer restrained from official associations, Volkonsky took to writing, lecturing and critiquing. The events of 1917 find the Prince back home at Borisoglebsk, where he was on a short visit. He is forced to flee abroad. A year later, he returns and briefly lectures on the art of reading and Russian literature in the Tambov People’s University, moving to Moscow in the autumn of 1918. He stayed there almost until the end of the Civil War, teaching, writing and generally meeting with the Who’s Who of Moscow’s literary circles, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Tsvetaeva and Zvyginstev. In December 1921, Prince Volkonsky left Russia never to return. He lived in Germany, Italy, and France where he was even director of the Russian Conservatory in Paris for a brief time. Finally, he settled in the United States and died in Richmond, full of years, in 1937.

Famous and influential as he was, Volkonsky’s life and works (or those if any other Tambovian bar perhaps Terpigorev) could not but lay in the shade of Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin, one of Imperial Russia’s greatest theoreticians.55 Born to rich Tambovian landowners and the descendant of an ancient bloodline, Chicherin received his early education at home. In 1844, he enrols in the Law Faculty in Moscow, where he was taught by (and acquainted with) venerable names in Russian academia: Solovev, Kavelin, Granovsky.56 Upon his graduation five years later he attempted to emulate his

55 V. D. Zor’kin, Chicherin, M., 1984; N. M. Pirumova, Zemskoe liberal’noe dvizhenie. Sotsial’nye korny i evoliutsiia do nachala XX veka, M., 1977, 264; L. M. Iskra, Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin o poreformennom razvitii Rossii, kapitalizme, sotsializme, Voronezh, 1999. 56 Chicherin was fortunate enough to have been born slightly later than the ‘Old Guard’ of Russial liberalism, but not so late as to reach maturity (both physical and academic) under Alexander III. This certainly excacerrbated his intellectual isolation, but also offered him a unique opportunity to refine his 214 instructors but failed to be considered for the submission of a postgraduate thesis. He would finally succeed in 1856; two years later he was invited to take up the chair of Public Law in his alma mater. In 1861, he became Head of Department, and from 1863 engaged as Public Law tutor to the tsesarevich, Nicholas. The latter’s death was as tragic as it was unexpected. The heir’s death also signalled Chicherin’s return to full- time academia. In 1868 he resigned in protest to government politics and resettled in Kirsanov, which would hence be the new ‘capital’ of his family’s expansive landholdings. The rhythm of provincial life suited Chicherin, as it was conducive to prolific writing.

The splendidly ornate Italianate manorhouse Boris Nikolaevich called home soon became Tambov’s cultural heartland and a magnet for renowned visitors from all over Russia. Yet Chicherin himself devoted part of his time to local politics. As a member of the district and then provincial zemstva, he was rather vocal in his opposition to conservatism and an enthusiastic participant in debates. This pretty much sums up the remainder of his life, which continued in the same way unabated bar from a brief spell when he served as mayor of Moscow (January 1882 – July 1883). Upon his return, Chicherin devoted himself to research – not just public law, but also advanced mathematics. His most famous and widely-known works were written during this ‘silver period’ of his life: Science and Religion, Mysticism in Science, Positivist Philosophy and the Union of Sciences, Foundations of Logic and Metaphysics, and others. At the turn of the decade, he began composing his Memoirs.

Boris Chicherin had a younger and lesser-known brother who continued in state service until a ripe old age despite having some sort of recurring ailment or chronic disease (the name of which is never specified in the archives or correspondence between them; this, and other evidence such as the intermittent nature of the disease leads one to speculate whether it was a sexually-transmitted infection). In the analysis of the Tambovian network, Chicherin the Younger enjoys a higher degree of centrality than his brother, who may have been an influential academic and writer – not to mention tutor to the heir – but once retired from service for good only had indirect

teachers’ ideologies. He was, for example, neither burdened by Granovsky’s religiosity nor the political pragmatism of Kavelin. Cf. G. M. Hamburg, Boris Chicherin and R. Easley, ‘Opening Public Space: The Peace Arbitrator and Rural Politicization, 1861-1864’, SR lxi (2002), 707-731, 722. 215 influence over political developments. Not so for Chicherin the Younger, who continued to grow and improve upon his network of connections throughout his life.

Sergey Nikolaevich Chicherin57 received, like his famous brother, a comprehensive and modern education at home and would also enrol at university, this time in the Philological Faculty of the University of Moscow to read History. After his graduation, he went straight into state service, specifically HIMOC and more specifically the Polish office.58 The ill-fated January Insurrection found him in Warsaw, near the heart of developments – he was later to receive an Imperial Commendation for his role during this time, accompanied by a bronze commemorative medal. His involvement in Polish politics would continue as a member of the legislative commission on land reform in the Western fringes of the Russian Empire (known as the Krasnotava Commission). There can be little doubt that Chicherin the Elder was an influential publicist, but this Chicherin held considerable political clout as a decision-maker. In early 1865, having successfully completed his mission to Poland, he went into early retirement, by reason of ‘ill health’. This does not seem to have been a formulaic excuse for escaping to the countryside. Four months into 1865 S. N. Chicherin returned to service (HIMOC’s Finance Department) with a promotion to Collegiate Secretary. Thereupon followed a transfer to the old capital at his own request. We can surmise that he desired to be in closer proximity with his family’s estates, while also assisting at the setting up of the new Treasury Office.

S. N. Chicherin would gradually reduce his involvement in national administration and become involved in local affairs. In February 1867, now a Titular Councillor (IX), he once again returned to his Tambovian estates. His own holdings in two uezds (Kozlov, Tambov) were of the middling sort. With his brother’s support, he was elected a Justice of the Peace in 1869. He then petitioned for a return to service, which took place in 1871; by this time, he was an established high-ranking executive in the Ministry of Finance with the rank of Collegiate Assessor (VIII); having given ample proof of his ability and trustworthiness, he was seconded to the MoI and stationed in Kherson with another financial control portfolio. Although not explicitly stated in his

57 GATO F. 161, Op. 1, d. 7907, l. 21-32 Adres-kalendar’ sluzhashchikh v Tambovskoi gubernii lits na 1874, 1877, 1880, 1883, 1887, 1889 gg. 58 The younger Chicherin partially acted as a model for the hypothetical example on p. 176. 216 service records, his efforts against waste and corruption did not make him any friends in the southern provinces. In Chicherin the Younger, we find a political agent of the ‘new age’ – neither an enlightened bureaucrat per se, nor a typical landowner. His curriculum exemplifies the (ultimately abortive) attempt by provincial nobility to stay relevant and mutate into a class of ‘honourable functionaries’ bereft of all traits of bureaucracy which were perceived as ‘dishonourable’.

It may be because not many landowners envisaged themselves in that niche, or maybe because they were ultimately absorbed into the rising urban bourgeoisie that this type of noble-functionary has not been widely discussed by scholars. Again, the presence of binaries inhibits our understanding of such ‘mixed’ cases; S. N. Chicherin would use his political connections to secure a representation to Tambov by the MoJ’s Department of Peasant Affairs. It is conceivable that he had sought to return permanently to the province without forfeiting the power of office; in the late 1870s, he was made responsible for the infrastructure tending to the wounded returning from the front. All the while, he served in a variety of elected offices (a magistrate for Kozlov since 1874 and the provincial zemstvo, a marshal as of 1878). In 1880, his health forced him to finally retire for good.

It should be stressed that social (network) ties may have been formed by inadvertent association but grew by the participants’ own volition. Social life in the provinces was guided by strict rules, and it should be said that noblemen and their families did not usually miss out on a chance to mix during events. The significance of these ties must be examined on a case-by-case basis to establish its statistical ‘weight’. It is in such cases when the status differential between any two or more noblemen becomes most evident. Consider for example Mikhail Vasilyevich Nekliudov,59 who graduated from Moscow University in 1850. In contrast to some of the other notables discussed here, he would only enter service in the office of Moscow’s Governor-General with the relatively low rank (XII) and portfolio (a mid-ranking clerk). But Nekliudov managed to secure a secondment which would give him immense influence within the Tambovian network; in 1851, he was sent to serve in the administration of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, a position which promised access to important church

59 GATO F. 161, Op. 1, d. 8256, l. 91-106; d. 8346, l. 89-98; d. 8448, l. 82-9. 217 networks and the chance to influence local government. By his own admission, this allowed him to retire early – as of 1853 – with a generous pension. He in turn used this, and proceeds from his estates, to become elected deputy in Elat’ma (1857). Interestingly, he fell out of favour with his fellow landowners over his poor handling of the preparations for emancipation. In 1860 he was not even nominated, and in 1863 he stood for election and lost. His return to prominence in local politics would have to wait a further three years, during which the political climate in Tambovian networks shifts radically. Once installed, he would serve for a further, impressive, twenty-five years.

The versatility of noble state service helped establish, grow and reinforce networks of useful connections in the administrative machine. Its mixed character often found manifestations in the combination of civil and military posts; rare were the cases when a nobleman would be a purely ‘military’ man. In the case of Fedor Alekseevich Durasov,60 not even handsome pensions would convince him to limit himself to one role and then retire. As a young ensign, he had fought in the Caucasus with an infantry regiment. For years he took part in operations, until he was dismissed with the rank of lieutenant in 1845 – citing the usual ‘personal reasons’ for asking to leave. As of 1853, when his fellow landowners at Lebedian’ elected him deputy for the first time, Durasov embarked on a long and relatively problem-free service to the province, which did not end until 1869 apart from a brief spell in 1855-1857 when he served in the Tambov militia, for which he received the Order of St. Stanislav III Class, a bronze commemorative medal and a ribbon of the Order of St. Andrew. As a Peace Mediator, he served honourably and with distinction, for which he was awarded the Order of St. Stanislav II Class. In 1871, he served as a magistrate for eight years, at the end of which he failed to win re-election, which was a rare occurrence. Durasov is yet another example of a noble-functionary wearing ‘two hats’ – he had some holdings in Lebedian’ which allowed him to vote and stand for office at the first curia, as well as property in the town of Lipetsk valued at 5,000r., which allowed him to vote in the second curia for that uezd. He actually managed to serve in two zemstva at the same time, thereby becoming an important part of the province-wide political network. In the late 1870s, he would serve as a member of the local administration, general inspector of schools

60 GATO F. 181. Op. 1, d. 7870, l. 13-20; d. 8-32, l. 41-59. 218 and, finally, marshal of the nobility for the uezd – in which capacity he would also chair zemstvo meetings. The OoH granted him an armorial device in 1880, when he reached the V rank.

In conclusion, we can observe that while fuzzy areas had always existed between social strata in Russia, and disparities between the oldest of lineages and the ‘great majority’ of gentry were all too well established, holding influence in political matters was not, at this stage in time, a correlate of privilege. Intraclass political alliances were made more palatable by the dread of class extinction and, as of 1864, they were also made easier. What we can observe via SNA is a ‘meeting of minds’ and policies, whereby latifundists and middling gentry come together to jointly discuss and resolve problems in local self-administration. This was the ‘modern’ political elite reformers had envisaged, or at least the beginning of one. And while it existed in potentia until 1905, it never materialised in any significant way because of a large, ever-expanding, essentially landless (individually at least) itinerant mass of peasants over whom it had next to no control. It is interesting to imagine what would have happened if emancipation and reform had gone further: If, in other words, reformers had released landowners from the responsibility to negotiate with the commune, and thereby instituted a direct, market-driven relationship without intermediaries between these two classes. Because of artistic and cultural ideal types crafted by literary masters, such as Karenina or Goryanchikov, we tend to think of absolute dichotomies in Russian society, which are in turn represented as internalised struggles between two or more distinct ‘identities’. In reality, outside their formulaic and highly formalised personae – the ones surviving in the written record – Russian noble identity was a lot more fluid. This is why an alignment within the market system was never inherently unworkable.

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Chapter V: Politics without Poleis

The main hypothesis stipulated here is that provincial gentry reacted to emancipation and land reform by reaffirming its status as a social and political paragon of the Russian state. This process then engendered a radical redistribution of social capital within the noble estate and led to the formation of networks composed of middling landowners which we could arguably call proto-parties. Bookended by the rise of enlightened bureaucrats and the counter-reform drive under Alexander III, the formation and evolution of noble social networks between 1858 and 1881 echoed similar processes elsewhere in Europe, but was also predicated upon a rigid social hierarchy and the confines of an autocratic polity. Noble networks in all their varied manifestations were in many ways the last effort to find a uniquely ‘Russian’ path towards a bourgeois society. The failure of noble proto-parties to coalesce into something more concrete signalled, in more ways than one, the end of a centuries-old lifestyle and the beginning of societal decomposition which ultimately spiralled into revolution. Chapters I through III outlined the social composition of the province and the overall effect it had on estate viability and solvency following emancipation. Chapter IV indicated that there existed strong political undercurrents which did not – because they could not – find outward, tangible manifestations within the larger context of the Romanov polity. They therefore had to be uncovered by means of statistical network analysis. The final Chapter explores the aftermath of ‘noble politics’ in Tambov and the changing conditions which led to the failure of liberal politics in the Chernozem.

It has been demonstrated that the politicisation of provincial gentry was accompanied by the formation of advanced social networks whose composition did not adhere to a straight division between the ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ fronts, neither strict pre- emancipation intraclass divisions. Rather, noble politics were greatly nuanced, and there is evidence of attempts to follow the ‘capitalist path to development’, particularly in my case study of Tambov’s middling n0bility. Both notionally and geographically, Tambov was central to the process. Evidence points to the existence of loosely defined political ‘camps’ akin to West-European bourgeois democratic ‘parties’. These are defined here as groups promulgating a unique vision of the empire’s future, a ‘political 220 programme’, and a distinct ‘plan of action’. One would assume that an analysis of zemstva debates would suffice to show as much.61 But zemstva are only one part of the gentry’s political history – for soon after their establishment the MoI co-opted them as a means of political expression. It bound them in law and buried them under a mountain of responsibilities so that in the end the provincials were nominally ceded the initiative without the MoI relinquishing any real power it wielded over the political process. Overworked and burdened with a huge portfolio as the zemstva were, none of their responsibilities could be said to have had an impact on politics on the national scale. In a brilliant example of political manoeuvring, the court of St. Petersburg allowed nobility to manage local affairs while also avoiding (they thought) the growth of grass-roots political movements. It did so by disengaging from the micro-political scene at the same time as setting institutional blocks to the growth of any one noble group into a regional, let alone national, political ‘party’. The lessons learned from gentry resistance during the period 1861-1863 were not lost on Valuev.

Upon his ascension to the empire’s key governmental post, Valuev and his underlings saw to it that the Ministry would set the agenda of political debate on a gentry still trying to get to grips with the new economy. Their mistake was inviting the provincial gentry to form a representative legislative corpus and collectively consider ‘stumbling blocks’ to land reform. Moreover, they allowed Russia’s nobility to outwardly and collectively voice any concerns they may have had. Naturally, the middling nobility grasped this opportunity to use their unique combination of numbers and influence to artificially skew the consensus. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the question of credit surfaced as the single most important issue on their minds. In their attempt to force the government’s hand, they hinted that nothing could be solved if more money was not on the table (essentially by returning to a serfless version of the pre-1858 loans system, which by this time was entirely impossible). Their protestations were put forward in a well-organised and timely fashion, while the iron was still hot.62

Throughout European Russia, middling gentry spearheaded the effort to bring together a resistance movement, and make its voice heard. These efforts stalled when members of provincial assemblies started disagreeing between themselves as to how

61 Such analyses already exist. Cf. Druzhilova, ‘Zemstvo’ and Onoprienko, ‘Byt’. 62 RGIA, F. 908, Op. 1. d. 155. l. 83-83ob.; f. 982 Op. 1 d. 46. l. 1-2. 221 far the ‘resistance’ could go without touching upon the fundamental rights of the monarchy. The problem was that in 1861-1863 gentry had to deal with a formidable power bloc composed of Valuev and his army of MoI minions, on the one hand, and the charismatic person of Alexander II on the other. This was no 1905, when the Emperor would seem like ‘a pathetic provincial actor cast in [a role] which did not become him’.63 Soon after the first rumblings of a ‘united opposition’ and possible use of the government’s own weapon – debt and credit – against the government itself, the St. Petersburg bloc put a swift end to the provincial gentry’s aspirations.

Yet this is not a study of how effective resistance was; rather, it is a study of the resistance itself, and the process by which it begat a new political class that would regain pre-eminence in affairs of state and become once again, the ‘only politically relevant class’ in the Empire. In the blacksoil belt, where estates were still profitable and viable without free labour, local gentry attempted to bring together opposition groups and form them into ‘networks’, whose existence would continue well beyond Alexander II’s reign. It is even conceivable that these networks would form the basis of revolutionary undercurrents instrumental in bringing about the events of 1905- 1917.64 For this to become evident, it is necessary to trace the trajectory of noble politics in Tambov from 1858 until the dawn of the twentieth century.

Tambov & the defeat of aristocratic opposition to reform ‘Aristocratic opposition to reform’ is not tantamount to ‘aristocratic opposition to emancipation’. This is simply a matter of political pragmatism; if there were any members of the gentry who wished to re-enslave the serfs, they must have been few and far between and certainly not of any statistical significance. Let us not forget that apart from the sheer outlandishness of such a proposition, freeing the serfs was the will of the Emperor, whose own serfs had already been made free. Also, provincials seldom dealt in binaries; it is much better to become embroiled in a debate over the nature and premises of land reform than it is to engage in a theoretical, ultimately pointless and academic debate on the merits of emancipation. On that note, one should

63 L. G. Zakharova, ‘Krizis samoderzhaviia nakanune revoliutsii 1905 g.,’ Voprosy Istorii viii (1972), 119- 40. See also A. Ia. Avrekh, Tsarizm nakanune sverzheniia, M., 1989, 19-21. 64 This is not a novel contention. J. P. LeDonne argued that nobility had possessed the ‘ability to impose a consensus on the nature of social relationships and to frame policies expressing the consensus’ until the dawn of the nineteenth century. J. P. LeDonne, Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762-1796, Princeton, N. J., 1984, 82. 222 bear in mind that in the following paragraphs terms such as ‘party’, ‘conservative’, and ‘aristocratic’ need to be used with caution. The word ‘party’ within the context of Russian political history does not imply a concrete and well-defined presence in national or local politics. Contemporaries used the term varyingly, but certainly not in the British sense of the word. Above all, nineteenth-century authors stressed that nothing of the kind can have existed in Russia, not least because it was not permissible by law, but also because of the many degrees of separation between its constituent social forces. This separation could take many forms: personal (whereby there was enmity between two families or individuals), geographical, or institutional (where the difference in rank and power was so vast that there was no possibility of an inter pares debate).

Let us first consider the ‘conservatives’. Tambov’s ‘conservative party’ emphatically tried to solicit support among high-ranking members of government, especially on a ministerial level. However, those ministers who were most likely to show sympathy for the landowners’ cause, Valuev and Dolgorukov, also had an obligation to stifle all and sundry expressions of ‘political activism’ among the nobility. This is probably why Valuev was largely written off as a potential supporter of conservatism. There grew between him and noble landowners across the land a feeling of deep mistrust, potently summarised by an unnamed agent of the III Directorate, who unceremoniously declared the Minister had built a ‘Chinese Wall’ between himself and his subordinates.65 Provincial dissatisfaction with Valuev reached a new peak in the aftermath of the 1865 Moscow Assembly. In the eyes of many attending nobles, he was reduced to a mere representative of the same bureaucracy that sought to curb their rights even further. For example, when A. A. Kireev and Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich (whose adjutant he was) were discussing Valuev’s 1863 ‘constitutional project’, Kireev refused to believe – at first – that the very notion of such a project could ever exist in Russia.66

The lack of clarity in Valuev’s plans regarding the establishment of representative institutions notwithstanding, ‘politics’ was already present in the provinces. It had entered everyday life as early as the immediate prereform era, when the epithets

65 GARF F.109, sekr. arkh., Op. 1, d. 1735, l. 1 ob. 66 OR RGB F. 126, Op. 1, d. 3, l. 8. 223

‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ enter the Russian political lexicon for the first time. The complex set of ideas and positions associated with proponents of ‘conservatism’ and ‘liberalism’ quickly became the subject of intense ideological speculation. Take for example Den’ and Ivan Sergeeivich Aksakov’s repeated attempts to redefine nobility and seek a functioning role for in postreform Russia. In typically bleak fashion, Aksakov exhorted his fellow aristocrats to ‘abandon all memory of olden times, all sense of pride and class exclusiveness’ and ‘eliminate all barriers that separate [us] from the people in a political and in a moral sense’. They are to settle, eventually, upon a new course and embrace a ‘fresh attitude towards other sosloviia’. Or, as Aksakov put it in one of the most characteristic passages highlighting the confusion which reigned during those first tentative steps towards organised resistance to reform: ‘nobles should protest an ‘act that means [our] destruction [unichtozhenie] as a class’.67

Aksakov’s remark on looking to the future for a solution could be adopted by ‘liberals’, his latter calls for protest by the ‘conservatives’.68 This was a purposefully confusing position; his primary aim was to engender some sort of debate, not to come down strongly in favour of one or the other ‘extreme’ position. In a society where one’s welfare depended largely on the formation and expansion of networks, being definitive on one’s views could prove disastrous. Being non-committal, on the other hand, could – and in fact did – help one’s ambitions. Only high-profile individuals such as the founders of the conservative block could afford to be adamant with respect to their views on government policy.

Herein lies the importance of networks. In the provinces, political self-definition was a much simpler affair. Individual landowners had an established presence and strong ties with their communities; their leanings could hardly have been kept a secret, at least in most cases that fell within the ‘acceptable’ spectrum (in other words radical views may or may not have been hidden from the public, but they were almost certainly expressed in private). Early Chicherin was just such a case. His articles in Novoe Vremia (subsequently bound in a separate edition), would reaffirm, time and again,

67 I. S. Aksakov, Den’ ii and ix (December 1861): ‘Shto takoe teper’ russkoe dvorianstvo’ and ‘Eshcho raz o russkom dvorianstve’. 68 The use of quotation marks around these two terms should henceforth be assumed. 224 that the abolition of serfdom would not necessarily precipitate the destruction of the first estate. At the same time, however, he stressed the need for further reform, to be spurred on primarily by the financial and intellectual elites in the provinces.69 Both Aksakov and Chicherin were at this stage kept at a distance by the powers that be. The former and his platform, Den’, were disowned by the government, the latter and Severnaia Pochta entered a period of crisis when the journal’s editor published an announcement to the effect that Chicherin’s views did not ‘not reflect the position of the government’.70

As of 1863, the government had very little to fear from the country’s provincial nobility. It was not until about a year before Alexander II’s assassination that the spectre of a landless, aimless, and generally debased mass of nobles congregating in the cities really made an impact upon the high-ranking bureaucracy. Not by chance did this coincide with a change at the top: Presumably, the prospect of having to deal with all these nominally entitled people was one of the main concerns behind Loris-Melikov’s constitutional project, which would have surely ‘defanged’ the new-fangled ‘aristocratic opposition’ to reform. Incidentally, it was also around this time that Tambovian gentry veered inexorably towards the right. If the landowners, who were still primarily reliant upon agriculture, had at first been convinced by the liberals that there was a way to negotiate life in postreform Russia, the danger to their maiorati pushed the majority firmly, once again, into the loyalist fold, much to the chagrin of the liberal party.

The maiorati were crucial to provincial gentry. Each landowner had a maioratus, a holding immune from repossession that could not be sold, even in the event of default. One could say it was the ‘bare minimum’ making a noble landowner. Asking for credit based on that was therefore tantamount to asking for a state subsidy for the upkeep of noble lifestyle. There was a general sense of expediency in safeguarding the gentry’s privileges and maintaining its class purity.71 Before long, the maioratus came to be

69 B. N. Chicherin, Neskol’ko, 88-90, 105-108. 70 Den’. 15, Severnaia Pochta 10, both 1862. 71 I. Kashkarov and I. Kashkarov, op. cit.; A. I. Yelishev, Dvorianskoe delo, M., 1898; A. I. Klevanov, Tri sovremennykh voprosa: O vospitanii, sotsializm, kommunizm – o dvorianstve po povodu stoletiia dvorianskoi gramoty, Kiev, 1885; A. D. Pazukhin, Sovremennoe sostoianie; Semenov, N. , Nashe dvorianstvo, SPb., 1898; L. M Savelov, Dvorianskoe soslovie v bytovom i obshchestvennom otnoshenii, M., 1906; , D. D. Khotiantsev., K dvorianstvu, M., 1908. 225 identified with the existence of the landowning class. In 1885, for example, a former landowner from Kozlov by the name of A. I. Klevanov, stated in his dedication of a book to the provincial marshal: ‘[...] the period from April 25 1785 through February 19 1861, or the time of the nobility’s dominance, was the time of Russian power, but with the weakening of the nobility public affairs have entered a time of disorder […] Things are so bad, you’d think the Vikings have once again taken to the sea’. Not without a hint of self-pity, he continues to attest that the ‘vast majority of noble landowners have been utterly ruined, their lands have been taken over by merchants and burghers who exploit and impoverish the local population. Driving landowners to bankruptcy brought no benefit to the peasants, since a few among them have enriched themselves at the expense of their fellow man’.72 Typically, the reason given for this disastrous state of affairs is the ‘complete absence of credit’. Klevanov draws the conclusion that, in the 24 years that had elapsed between the emancipation and his letter to the marshal, the gentry had lost a lot of ground and even the very character of a soslovie.

In postreform Russia, when provincial gentry was faced with the loss of legal privileges, the theme of an intangible, ethereal class ‘purity’ charged with a ‘historic mission’ to save Russia (from a danger that was never specified even as the first grass- roots revolutionary movements made their first appearance) became a substitute for real privilege. The brothers Kashkarov described the First Estate as the result of a ‘historical process whereby a soslovie of the best Russian individuals [is forged by] the mental and moral potency of the Russian narod’. They reach the conclusion that the needs of the Russia’s nobility are – in fact – indiscernible from the needs of the hoi polloi. Russia’s great moral decline, they argued, was a direct result of the nobility’s ‘direct removal from a position of influence upon the country’s ‘social and moral development’. The only way out from their current ‘difficult and isolated’ position in society was for the nobility to return to their abandoned estates – but this time they would be armed with the power to create substantial, meaningful, corporations. These corporations should in turn be given authority over local and communal self- government, as well powers of appointment to various positions in the organs of local government.73

72 Cited in Pen’kova, op. cit., 7-8. 73 Kashkarov and Kashkarov, op. cit., 5, 9-13, 15. 226

Such ‘fireworks’ were hardly enough to distract from the nobility’s actual loss of status and political relevance. Having said his piece on the history of Russia’s nobility, Klevanov goes on to expose the inherent shortcomings of the First Estate and its corporate organisations. In a Shakespearean reference (which at the time had not acquired cliché overtones), he asks: ‘To be or not to be? – that is the question facing our nobles. The answer to it will ultimately come with time’. Klevanov subscribed to an increasingly popular notion among Tambovians, who – it should be reminded – had already reconciled themselves with the influx of lower classes into their soslovie and in many cases taken advantage of it by forming marriage alliances and joint ventures – that ‘new blood’ was the nobility’s only chance for survival.

For Klevanov and other like-minded individuals, the salvation of the soslovie lay not in economic protectionism on the side of the government, not in the artificial preservation of the ‘soslovie’ purity of its members, but, inversely, in its infusion with healthy, fresh members from outside with a property qualification (holdings of at least 500 des. of land and a university degree). They would be amalgamated in their local zemstvo and give the prospect of achieving a leading position among the local nobility as a motive.74 Tractati with similar clauses regarding the aversion of the long-term deprivation of land from the gentry, composed by leading figures, appeared almost simultaneously in neighbouring provinces – Simbirsk (P. V. Priklonskii), Kazan (N. E. Boratynskii), Poltava (A. V. Meshchersky), and others. They all insisted upon the establishment of protected estates, which were neither to be mortgaged nor sold.75 This congruence of self-interest with class interest should not be interpreted manichaestically as a ‘conservative’ approach.

Tambovians boasted a strong presence in the political circles of St. Petersburg. Tambov province was the heartland of the Bezobrazov clan – the most famous member of which clan – V. P. Bezobrazov – occupied an instrumental place in the Geographic Society’s Political Economy Committee. This was essentially a body whose weekly

74 Klevanov, op. cit., 50-59, 63-66. 75 Zapiska gvardii poruchika Petra Vasil’evicha Priklonskogo, Simbirsk, 1899; N. E. Boratynskii (in some sources Baratynskii), Iz gubernii, SPb., 1888; Doklad Poltaskogo Gubernskogo Predvoditelia Dvorianstva gubernskomu sobraniu po delu o svobode zaveshchaishii zapovednikh imenii 5 dekambria 1888 goda., Poltava, 1888. 227 seminars in St. Petersburg attracted a diverse group of people: Intellectuals, agronomists, economists, bureaucrats, etc. The minutes published in the Society’s Zapiski were essentially an advertisement of the Great Reforms.76

Bezobrazov was notorious f0r having adopted an unreconciliatory and intransigent stance against further liberal reforms. Once, he even went as far as to challenge their basis in law.77 As we have seen, however, empirical evidence from Tambov – including estate solvency, yield and noble lifestyle – did not really support his arguments against further liberal reform. This is partly why contemporaries who never visited the province (or did, but did not have access to raw economic data) and therefore modern historians, have been quick to speak of Tambov as a ‘hotbed of conservatism’ in provincial politics. Bezobrazov was able to make it work because he had been partly brought up in Tambov by his distant relative, A. M. Bezobrazov. The latter, with whom he maintained a lifelong correspondence, was Governor of Tambov, Yaroslavl’ and, at the apex of his career, St. Petersburg.

While Bezobrazov cannot be credited (or blamed, depending on one’s viewpoint) with single-handedly winning over Tambov for the conservatives, he did manage to convince many of his fellow counter-reformists that the provinces were worth fighting for, that the ‘liberal flood’ can be stemmed. Using his position in the Geographical Society, he made sure that his platform of counter-reformist proposals was brought to, and discussed by, provincial zemstva; his drafting of the Biziukin memorandum to the Pskov assembly is a well-known case in point. And whereas Biziukin had been a talentless yet dedicated conservative, Bezobrazov would also employ the formidable A. D. Platonov as his standard-bearer in the capital, while the mastermind himself remained strategically located in Moscow whence he could keep an eye on things by virtue of his position in the provincial assembly.78 It should be reminded that if the ‘liberals’ could claim a centre anywhere in Imperial Russia during the Great Reforms, that was the old capital. Here nobility was already engaged in a heated debate even four months before the Statutes were pronounced.

76 The word ‘committee’ belies this thinktank, which was adjunct to the Geographical Society. See J. Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Society: Science, Patriotism and Civil Society, Cambridge Ma., 2009, 118 passim. 77 Autocracy or otherwise. This is, perhaps, a distant echo of the uber-conservative opposition to Nicholas II’s Instrument of Abdication? 78 GARF. F. 109, I eks. 1862 g. d. 33. ch. 2. l. 1-1 ob.; OR RNB F. 124. Ed. khr. 365. l. 1-2. 228

There were many more instances where a Tambovian is found debating Russia’s future in the salons of power. V. P. Orlov-Davydov, in whose ‘safe hands’ the counter- reformist conservative movement had entrusted they key battleground of St. Petersburg, was essentially given his talking notes by a Tambovian. Orlov-Davydov had already become famous in their circles by exchanging blows with Valuev over the latter’s pleas for moderation; ‘lest the nobility switches over to the Reds’, Orlov- Davydov argued, the counter-reform front must remain strong, immovable. It is the government’s job to win the provincials over by any means necessary. 79 Once again, we see evidence of the important place ‘periphery’ occupied in the considerations of policy-shapers. It should come as no surprise, given the dire financial straits most of the provincial gentry were in, that Orlov-Davydov and the conservative counter- reformists chose to focus upon the issue of land redemption by peasants. The following extract from one of his fiery speeches is telling: ‘You cannot expect that the landowners take up the business of running their farmsteads [sic] in the midst of a population fundamentally hostile to them. No one is arguing that the major landowners stand to be ruined, they have enough money to buy up more land. But they will be reduced to a position of insignificance in the affairs of state.’80

The counter-reformists’ plan had been drafted by V. A. Kraiinskii. Alongside the correspondence between Kraiinskii, his political master and Valuev (which includes some long-winded letters to and from the rapidly aging Dolgorukov), there exist early drafts of memoranda sent to three members of Tambov’s middling nobility. These memoranda would later form the corpus of an opposition ‘platform’ that one cannot fail to recognise as such. One of the Tambovians contributed the following passage to the memoranda: ‘Reform was carried out under the influence of a certain very powerful “democratic party” [sic], which joined rather well its communist ideas with the emancipation of the peasants, recruiting in its defence [the entire mechanism] Press, academia and censorship.’ They managed to ‘divide government and nobility’, he argues, ‘while encouraging antagonism between the two estates – noblemen and peasants’. This was followed by accusations that ‘democratic agents spread rumours that the government is made strong by the support of the army and the masses [both

79 RGADA, F. 1273, Op. 1, d. 5, l. 177. 80 OR RGB, F. 219, Op. 85, d.21, l. 56-56 ob. 229 of which are] utterly devoted to it’.81 Kraiinskii is rightly credited with compiling the conservative counter-reformist programme in its entirety, but Tambovians were an inextricable part of the process.

While such anecdotal evidence is nowhere near sufficient to prove that the periphery, namely Tambov, was able to shape national politics, it is at least indicative of the fact that Tambov was considered a hotbed of political activity, if not a ‘weathervane’ province by opposition leaders. For example, Bezobrazov (who loved to make kites out of the ‘spectre of classlessness’ and fly them over the assembled nobility) had been inspired to write a sensationalist piece entitled ‘Aristocracy and the interests of nobility’ (1859) after a longish stay in a Tambovian middling estate. He would return to the principles outlined therein time and again over the course of twenty years. As time went by, Bezobrazov would become all the more furious at the situation and, naturally, the ‘liberals’ who were to blame for it. He insisted that dissolution of an entire social class would inevitably lead to an omnipotent bureaucracy taking over the state and turning it into an interventionist construct, a ‘classless’ apparatus. Naturally liberals were, by Bezobrazov’s reckoning, nowhere to be found in the blacksoil provinces. Their base was Moscow and any other provinces with a considerable bourgeois element.

These ‘capitalist’ provinces were, momentarily at least, lost to the counter-reformists. After all, had the ‘liberals’ not proposed such revolutionary concepts as government reform, separation of powers, and the elimination of any privileged status for the nobility long before measures to these effects had been enacted (in the form of legislative initiatives)? And while the danger inherent in expressing such notions prematurely and openly would make them particularly hard to trace in archives, flare- ups in the conservative opposition’s literary output can be a good indication of a strong liberal momentum. Such proponents of conservatism as Unkovskii, Shreter, and Koshelev redoubled their efforts – throughout the early 1860s – to counter streams of liberal thought whenever and wherever they came across them. Which is what prompted (the liberal) Obolenskii to opine that finally the nobility must either ‘die off or get with the times’.82

81 OR RGB, F. 219, Op. 101, d. 32, l., 7 ob.; Op. 52. d. 42, l. 1-2 82 Prilozheniia k trudam Redaktsionnykh komissii po krest’ianskomu delu, vol. 3, SPb., 1860, 13. 230

Admittedly, while the existence of common interest groups during this turbulent time cannot be doubted, the impossibility of properly organising means of political expression under Autocracy determined not only the fuzzy shape of these proto- parties, but also limited the political tools at their disposal. Traditionally, the Russian political system was rife with backdoor intrigues, accompanied by a never-ceasing search for a ‘champion’ or patron at the highest levels of government. But these time- honoured methods were joined in the reform era by new opportunities for political mobilisation: the flowering of the political press under Alexander II, the spread of new publications, the opportunity for nobles to utilise an idiomorphic ‘tribune’ in zemskie and dvorianskie sobraniia, their corporations, and the various societies (either pre- existing or newly-formed, such as charities local finances, famine relief), all pointed towards a form of struggle reminiscent of parliamentary democracies elsewhere in Europe. What we see, in the 1860s and 1870s, is the evolution of a new political culture, a new political consciousness formulated on the basis of real exigencies.

By the late nineteenth century, the large majority of Russia’s provincial gentry, including that of Tambov, had coalesced into antipodal camps. The process of fragmentation, then conscious and cautious adoption of political views on the basis of complex ideological leanings had come to an end. The era of complicated politics was over; now there was but one divide, and it would grow to be an enormous, unbridgeable gap by 1905. Even so, there was a final attempt if not at reconciliation at least at coordination in the period 1900-1905. As regional, then a national assemblies were called, Land Captains came under heavy criticism because by this time it was obvious their goal was to extend the bureaucracy’s reach in the provinces to the detriment of their fellow nobles. The captaincies had come to signify more government control on landownership. The marshal of Kirsanov, L. V. Dashkevich, suggested a volost’ reform directed towards preparing the ground for an overall administrative overhaul. The general thrust of further reform, he maintained should be aimed at ‘bringing down the wall separating peasants from the other sosloviia with which they live side by side [read nobility]’. The volost’ was key, for it was only on this level that the facility existed for ‘classes to meet on a daily basis’. He concluded there was no such thing as micro-level government as yet; ‘our local administration is a ghost, flying in the clouds without any real foundation’. A passionate proponent of grass-roots 231 intervention, Dashkevich maintained that a volost’ reform would lead to a reform of the uezd and, presumably, the province and the country as a whole.83

At the dawn of the twentieth century, as the ‘class struggle in the village’ intensified, and the politicisation of the peasantry gained pace, the debate on the place of the gentry in the life of the state, economic policy, as well as the paths to resolve the agrarian question, became increasingly heated. V. N. Snezhkov, the delegate of Tambov’s gentry to the PSODOR, put forth the idea of bringing together Russia’s gentry in one ‘powerful union’, which would become the only organisation capable of finding a ‘realistic’ way out of the political impasse. In his eyes, the main cause behind revolutionary turbulence was the fact that Russia’s nobility ‘had not risen to the height of its exalted position’. This was right-wing criticism of the highest calibre, the paradoxical position of which are only evident with the benefit of hindsight: ‘The highest posts in government, the army, the local administration – both in the provinces and in the capitals – they are all in the hands of the nobility. And where are the personalities, the leaders, the talent, the courage of initiative, the ability to unite around oneself and act? Everything is now merged into a grey blur.’ Having hypothesised the absence in Russia of conservative social groupings, without which there could not exist a healthy social structure, he regarded the gentry as an organic, battle-ready force, which must realise its potential by closing ranks around the person of the tsar and standing at the head of all other sosloviia.84 Another characteristic of the ‘protectionist network’ was evidently insistence upon the creation of powerful , institutionally recognised, corporations whose aim would be to reaffirm the authority of the nobility by increments, first on the local, then the regional and national scale.

Both Dashkevich and Oznobishin belonged to a larger group of Tambovian nobles who embraced the principle of reform in local administration by means of micro-level land unions focussing on ‘notary, justiciary, policing and administrative’ activities. Another exponent of similar ideas was V. M. Andreevskii, a noble landowner of the middling sort, but it was clear his suggestions were spurred by more prosaic motives. Financial considerations, he argued, meant the uezd was too large and unwieldy an administrative unit, impossible to manage. Issues appearing left, right and centre over

83 L. V. Dashkevich, Gosudarstvennye izbiratel’nye zakony. Agrarnyi perevorot. Sel’skii sud. M., 1900. 84 V.N. Snezhkov, Pravitel’stvo, 6-10, 12-16, 19-20. 232 so large an expanse had resulted in deadlock: ‘Employees in our uezds’ administrations are suffering under an impossibly heavy workload’, he contended.85 Neither Andreevskii nor his aforementioned colleagues concerned themselves with the palpable benefits of uezd administration, benefits that were none too obvious to the nobility but crucial for the lower classes. Famine relief was a case in point.

As if to balance out plans for restructuring from micro-scale upwards, there arose at the same time among Tambovian gentry a party seeking to end the crisis by means of forming a pan-Russian union along ideological, i.e. nationalist-patriotic lines. Organised in the so-called ‘Union of the Russian People’, these were mostly middling noble landowners who had gravitated towards each other, as by their nature, in the run-up to the Moscow Assembly. Indeed, there is strong evidence linking that Assembly’s agenda and the programmes for economic reform drawn by the Kozlov and Tambov branches of the ‘Union’. The Union’s predominantly noble members admitted a number of merchants and prosperous peasants, which lends further support to arguments made above with regards to the abandonment of class entrenchment and a shift towards capital and bourgeoisification of provincial gentry.86 The Union’s programme raised, in the first instance, issues of policy: how best to ensure the continued existence of a powerful monarchy, the primacy of Orthodoxy, the disenfranchisement of Jews. Its members called for the enactment of far-reaching reforms in the various composite realms of local administration, including the abrogation of provinces and the introduction of oblasts, self-governing cities and uezds, the establishment of all-inclusive parish councils, etc.

The Union’s motto may have been ‘liberty and order’, which to a modern observer should sound deeply conservative if not reactionary, but within the context of late- nineteenth century Russian politics it was a simple reflection of widespread anxiety and fear of chaos. Both motto and programme belied the Union’s predominantly economic objectives, geared towards redressing what its members thought of as the ‘imbalance’ brought about in the countryside in the time period between Manifestos – February 1861 and October 1905. In contrast to the more conservative wings of the nobility, members of the Union took account of the changing nature in relations of

85 GATO F. R-5328, Op. 1 d.7, l.61-62. 86 Ibid, l.54-59. 233 production – yet more evidence of the bourgeois-capitalist mind-set. Their programme of economic reforms sought to restore the equilibrium between industry and farming, to introduce a monetary system independent from the stock exchange (widely perceived as a front for state intervention in regional economies), and tax breaks for those in need. At the same time, however, the Union also looked favourably upon the state monopoly on banks, insurance and railway construction. This expansive programme left no stone unturned: the problems facing manufactories and the cottage industry, primary education, and the courts are all discussed in turn.87

This assemblage of diffuse pronouncements is impossible to categorise firmly in one camp or another. But as the adhesive keeping the Union together was none other than nationalism and seeing how its members were a ‘higher class’ of people, the government naturally lent its support. Enter Tambov’s infamous governor, a shady careerist called Vladimir von-der Launits, who considered it his mission to promote the Union’s agenda. For example, he extended multiple invitations to a local lawyer by the name of Luzhenovskii who had never before served in administration to join the provincial governing board with the rank of Councillor. This was a high honour indeed, as well as a mark of Launits’ political astuteness; the lawyer Luzhenovskii was one of the Union’s local leaders and its foremost ideologue.

An ardent supporter of peasant inclusion, involvement and representation in uezd government during the turbulent year of 1905, Luzhenovskii boasted impeccable credentials as a ‘friend of the people’. A member of the Union, he also enjoyed the governor’s complete trust.88 This goes to show that both central and peripheral governing authorities did not shy from promoting meritorious, capable and outspoken figures who were otherwise disadvantaged (for example on account of their pedigree or means), provided these same figures could then use their considerable influence to promote the administration’s interests. There was, after all, little fear that those ‘gifted’ individuals would go rogue, for that would immediately and irrevocably damage their relationship with the government, severing the patron-client relationship. Thus it was that Luzhenovksii, a man of obscure descent, few means and no experience in the

87 The Union’s complete political programme is located at GARF F.990 Op. 2 d.490 l.1-2. See D. C. Rawson, Russian Rightists and the Revolution of 1905, SR xlv (1996), 88-89. 88 N. N. Zhedenov, Gavriil Nikolaevich Luzhenovskii, SPb., 1910, 49-50, 62, 94. 234 service of the state, found himself vested with one of the highest ranks in local administration.

Launits, his benefactor, was without doubt one of the shadiest, shiftiest politicians of his time. His entire career exemplified the integral importance of what in Regency England one would call ‘interest’ and what historians of Russia have traditionally referred to as ‘patronage’. A member of Russia’s hereditary nobility, Launits was descended – as his surname suggests – from a family with Germanic roots. In this case, they hailed from Courland, but it was thanks to the maternal side of his family that Launits was able to join the ranks of prominent nobility. His mother had strong connections with the Chernozem; her father had been marshal for Elat’ma, in which lay the estate of Kargashino. It was by virtue of this inheritance that Launits, the future governor and a man of inconsiderable means, was entered into Tambov’s Roll of Nobility. Indeed, his name was included in the first section, reserved for the most distinguished nobles, on July 8, 1888. 89 The first half of his career was otherwise uneventful and rather typical for a man of his standing. He served in the Corps of Pages, following which he spent almost two decades of his life in the army. Having taken part in the war of 1877-78, he was awarded the Order of St. Anna IV Class with the inscription ‘for courage’. It is well worth mentioning that as far as honours are concerned, this was a rather banal one. The IV Class insignia were born on the pommel of the bearer’s sword, the guard of which would also be decorated with a knot in the colours of the Order’s ribbon (bright red and gold). He retired from service with the rank of colonel ‘with the right to wear his uniform’.90

Launits would not stay in retirement for long. At first, he settled in Kargashino and tried his hand at agriculture in order to, as one biographer put it, ‘serve his native soil […] and improve his understanding of local culture by means of association and conversation with peasants; in his estate, he would demonstrate his skill as an exemplary manager’.91 Turgenev’s Kirsanov springs to mind, although Launits was driven by more prosaic motives. ‘Rationalisation’ was of no import for an estate neglected for decades and which had, for that very reason, been given almost entirely

89 GATO F.161 Op. 1 d.8234 l.1, 17; K. Bogoiavlenskii, Borets-muchenik za Sviatuiu Rus’ v smutnuiu godinu: Sankt-Peterburgskii gradonachal’nik Vladimir Fedorovich fon-der Launits, Tambov, 1912. 90 Uchrezhdenie ordenov i drugikh znakov otlichiia, Part II Clause 1§4. 91 Bogoiavlenskii, op. cit., 23-24. 235 over to long-term lease. Launits, fresh out of army service, found the going hard. The very same year as he settled in it, 1887, he posted an advertisement for its re- mortgaging. The announcement reflects that the estate boasted well-built farming installations, modern tools imported from Western Europe, as well as a cheap and plentiful local labour supply.

Land prices in these regions of European Russia had always remained quite high, and by extension long-term arenda yielded steady profits. Although the village bearing the same name – Kargashino – withered at some point after the 1930s and does not exist anymore, the land there is still fertile. In the nineteenth century, however, farm yields would have depended mostly on the use of proper, i.e. costly, fertilizer.92 In November 1887, Tambov’s Noble Land Bank decided to request a court mandate on payments overdue. After that, Launits made repeated applications for remortgaging and more favourable terms. Finally, in 1901 on account of ‘non-payment of arrears exceeding the terms of mortgage’, the estate was scheduled for sale by public auction, initially set for May 8th. The auction would never take place. For some reason, the Land Bank decided to allow re-mortgaging.93

Despite the outcome, this throws considerable doubt on Launits’s managerial skills. How could he ever be an ‘exemplary model’ to the peasants with their rented plots of land, their miserable finances and inability to secure credit on favourable terms? It would appear that Launits did, in fact, try to engage the peasants in the manor house and in the field. He fancied he could teach his fellow man of the land, the muzhik, about life and about agriculture. Once he became convinced that the connection to the peasant-labourers had been ‘reaffirmed and strengthened’, once he became certain of the ‘muzhik and his needs’, the social experiment came to an abrupt end.94 Apart from ‘love of peasants’, religion was Launits’ other main preoccupation and in contrast to the ‘love’, the zealotry would never dissipate. He paid for the restoration of the local church and the construction of a ‘vicarage’ to house the village priest. In his Kharkov estate, he became laboured in the construction of a chapel for the parish church, which then doubled as a school. It was there that he first became engaged in public affairs.

92 GATO F.168 Op. 1 d.683, l.1-18. 93 Ibid d.683 l.17-44. 94 Bogoiavlenskii, op. cit., 23-24. 236

As a marshal of the provincial nobility over three consecutive terms (1894-1900), he used the assemblies as a tribune against socialism, pronouncing himself in favour of ‘active participation in the zemstvo’ and ‘addressing the peasants’ need of education’. This education, however, was meant to perpetuate the traditional ‘peasant lifestyle’, at the time under attack by subversive teachings. One of his biographers, and there were many, noted that Launits was trying to persuade his peers to ‘steer clear of activism and pursue the administrative route’ to find satisfaction for their various grievances.95

Events took a different turn. As Prince A. D. Golitsyn noted in his memoirs, the Kharkovian landowners eventually had enough of Launits and voted him out.96 Launits had a few contacts in the MVD and throughout his career as marshal of the nobility he made sure to pose as the quintessentially passionate servant of the throne. As a result, he secured the support of both local bureaucracy and the Minister of Internal Affairs, Dmitry Sipiagin (von Plehve’s lesser-known predecessor). He first offered Launits a stopgap posting as vice-governor of Arkhangel’sk (November 29, 1901), in which he served briefly before being made ‘acting governor’ of Tambov (August 1902). Grasping a rare opportunity, the ‘acting governor’ managed to carry through a brilliantly organised festival in honour of Saint Serafim of Sarov, whose remains were laid out for public pilgrimage. In July 1903 a grandiose and rather theatrical spectacle was staged with the help of a large number of locals. It was hardly a grand affair, but it served its purpose brilliantly, as Launits was noticed by the bureaucratic hierarchy. In August 1903, he was confirmed as Tambov’s new provincial governor.97 During the festivities, Launits had purposefully delayed announcing the closure of the nearby Voznesenskii ironworks, fearful of popular outrage at the hundreds of lay-offs that would surely follow. 98

Order and safety assured, this spell of ‘organised fun’ caught the attention of the Tsar, hence Launits’ immediate promotion to which was added the court rank of Stallmeister.99 Launits’s credo has been described as follows: ‘The convictions of a man are his “holy of holies”. I cannot touch them when they concern private belief, even if

95 Ibid, 30-32. 96 A. D. Golitsyn, ‘Dvorianskoe sobranie Khar’kovskoi gubernii 1900 goda’, Dvorianskoe sobranie: Istoriko-publitskisticheskii i literaturno-khudozhestvennyi almanakh 4 (1996), 126-128. 97 GATO F.4 Op. 1 d.5284 l.12; Bogoiavlenskii, op. cit., 33. 98 Bogoiavlenskii, op. cit., 43-47. 99 GATO F.4 Op. 1 d.5284 l.16; Bogoiavlenskii, op. cit., 47. 237 it is completely opposite to mine. If, however, they transcend the boundary of law and lead said man to actively pursue illicit activities, I will unflinchingly exact from him severe punishment’.100 As his handling of the 1905 peasant uprising showed, this was no idle threat. The number of his admirers in administration grew as a result; when he was called to the post of gradonachal’nik101 of the capital, many contemporary observers believed this to be a result of a thankful government appreciative of his skills that wanted to keep such a competent man close to the Throne. The marshal of Saratov province, N. A. Pavlov, however, thought differently: He dismissed the panegyrics as void of substance and revealed that the offer of mayorship came from a government ‘fearful of Launits that wanted a mayor they could easily throw… on a bomb’.102

To be sure, even if Pavlov’s somewhat hostile interpretation was correct, there can be little doubt Launits’s loyalty to the ancien régime was almost fanatical. The government of St. Petersburg soon came to realise that nobles who shared his views were few and far between, particularly in the provinces. The ideological map of Russia’s nobility, including that of Tambov’s, had changed radically since the first reforms had been enacted in the 1860s. Many among that number now actively propagated ideas that surpassed even the wildest fantasies of Herzen’s liberal generation: curtailment of the Sovereign’s powers, civil liberties, economic reforms that would finally place Russian on the path to economic development on the Prussian model. In the zemstva and councils, the rift between ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ deepened; ‘oft-times even the simplest of questions relating to economic measures gave rise to heated debate’ – wrote Andreevskii.103

The congruence of social and economic policy meant that the zemstva were more than likely to overreach their mandate. Ill-equipped to handle such fundamental matters as an ‘empire-wide economic strategy’, their members soon realised that the boundaries between the centre and the periphery – the national and the local – had been blurred. The gentry would invariably regard the problem from the perspective of its own position in the both uezd and gubernatorial councils in the future. Chicherin, as one of the most active and influential notables stood on the premise of proportional

100 Bogoiavlenskii, op. cit., 35. 101 Mayor. 102 N. A. Pavlov, ‘Vladimir Fedorovich fon-der Launits’, Russkoe znamia v (no year) 103 GATO F. R-5328 d.7 l.23. 238 representation. Agriculture was the heart and soul of the provinces and given its historic origins and tradition in Russia, peasant representation in the councils was – in Chicherin’s view – too limited. The peasants ‘composed a more or less silent mass that followed the directions of more educated members’. At the highest level, the gubernatorial zemstvo, there were hardly any representatives of purely ‘peasant’ extraction; it was, essentially, a ‘noble assembly’.104 Chicherin also noted the newfound ability of the collective to regulate itself according to more moderate lines. It would appear, however, that this was not the result of a majoritarian turn towards the centre, but a balancing act made necessary by the increasingly radical ‘left-wing’ elements therein. The councils, in the end, became dominated by ‘people with a moderate philosophy and practical disposition. […] The conservative element prevailed, but it showed no obsession with the past and adopted humanitarian [sic] views.’105

The preponderance of the liberal element attested by Fischer and Saunders (although not so clearly by Cavender)106 in Tver has long conditioned historians of the reforms to consider a North-South divide as something of a given quantity. This, however, may not be strictly the case. For a variety of reasons, not least historical ties and geographic proximity coupled with improved infrastructure, it is entirely possible that the chernozem also housed a mightily liberal caucus of nobles that chose Moscow to act as its proxy. It could be argued that the chernozem nobility was late to join the liberal camp. But once they had done so, they did not lack in passion or dedication with respect to their Tverian peers. A significant part of Tambov’s zemtsy107 – led by Iu. A. Novosil’tsev, V. M. Petrovo-Solovovo and V. I. Vernadskii – would go on to form the core of various left-wing post-1905 formations, including the Kadets. Of the aforementioned liberals, the most well-known was, perhaps, Vernadskii who, by the

104 Chicherin, Vospominaniia, 24, 286-87. According to Zakharova’s data in 1866 79% of the provinces deputies were hereditary nobles; the national average was 73.6%. See Zakharova, L. G., Zemskaia kontrreforma 1890 g., M., 1968, 166. Druzhilova concurs – see ‘Zemstvo Tambovskoi gubernii’, 97. After the introduction of the new guidelines on land institutions (1864) noble deputies were 93% of the total (the national average was 87%). See also Pirumova, Zemskoe liberal’noe dvizhenie, 76-77. 105 Chicherin, Vospominaniia, 30. 106 Cf. Fischer, Liberalism, Sanders, Reaction and Reform, and M. Cavender, Nest of the Gentry: Family, Estate, and Local Loyalties in Provincial Russia, Newark, N. J., 2007; D. Saunders, Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform: 1801-1881, London, 1992. Saunders is in two minds about the importance of intellectual movements; on the one hand, he regards the importance of Russian intelligentsia as overinflated in both Soviet and Western historiography, and on the other he stresses its importance in shaping the conceptual universe in which populist movements would grow during the latter half of the nineteenth century. 107 Zemstvo members. 239

1890s had achieved something of a reputation as a capable scientific mind. His base of operations was Morshansk uezd, which he represented in the provincial council. He could be credited with ‘introducing’ constitutionalism in the zemstvo, chiefly by means of a liberal kruzok – or ‘intimate circle’ – called Beseda.

Beseda was one of the quasi-legal political groupuscules that sprang out all over European Russia in the late nineteenth century. It encapsulated the most liberal wing of Tambov’s zemstvo in its entirety and its members all shared a penchant for political activism. Their professed aim was to stir up public opinion and garner support among local societies. It is interesting that membership was not extended to those who simply professed liberal views, but only to such members of the gentry that could provide evidence of having put these views in practice on their estates. Beseda was unique in that its members felt change should on the one hand come ‘from below’ rather than ‘from above’, but on the other that it should also be the product of an ‘enlightened’ populace. Students of Marxism-Leninism would surely recognize the principle: an enlightened population exercises pressure on the local level via local organisations (zemstva) which then come together to exercise a proportionally much stronger amount of pressure on Tsar and government.

For members of Beseda, communication was key; they hoped to establish a network linking all local and provincial councils via which they can then exchange information and coordinate activities. It has to be underlined however, that this was no proto- socialism: Activism stopped at the local level. Outside the provincial boundaries, petitioning was the only way forward. It is baffling that given the centrality of Tambov in strengthening ties between liberals from across European Russia,108 the province has been relegated to the group of steadfastly ‘conservative’ bastions. The zemstvo assembly called in Moscow, for example, came as a result of Tambovian zemtsy’s initiative.109 Moscow was the natural choice for a meeting-ground, for by virtue of its history and centrality to the ‘true’ Russia – rural Russia – it would magnify their voice a hundredfold.

108 For example, Klevanov’s open epistulae presented and discussed in Chapter III were swiftly seconded by potentates in provinces far and wide; V. Priklosnskii (Simbirsk), N. E. Boratynskii (Kazan), and A. V. Meshcherskii (marshal of the Poltava nobility). All three were especially vocal in their defense of the ‘inviolability’ of the maiorati. Zapiska gvardii poruchika Petra Vasil’evicha Priklonskogo, Simbirsk, 1899, 5-7; GATO F. 161, o 1, d. 8248, l. 136-143. 109 Pirumova, Zemskoe liberal’noe dvizhenie., 205-207. 240

Against the background of an ever-intensifying class struggle, the search for ways to promote legitimate congruous action could hardly succeed. Momentum for the liberal cause was gathered mostly following the Tambov famine in 1891-1892,110 during which noble networks laboured in tandem to organise relief. In Morshansk and Kirsanov uezds, the most-hard hit areas of the province, a network of support radiated from the estate of V. I. Vernadskii, who was the organisational mind beyond liberal activities. His personal friends and peers, also members of Beseda, then took over to bring help to various localities. These were A. A. Kornilov, L. A. Obol’ianikov and others.111 Already a professor of Moscow University, Vernadskii divided his time between politics and academia. He was the centre of liberal thinking in Tambov and a major conduit of liberalism between all blacksoil provinces. His main political activities revolved around the construction of a zemstvo network that would link Tambov and other regions of Russia with the liberal press. Petrovo-Solovovo was in charge of ‘relations’ with the latter. Largely thanks to their activities, Tambov’s zemstvo entered its heyday. The zemtsy of various provinces began exchanging information on council debates and their inner workings, including the composition and placement of factions.

There can be little doubt that both Vernadskii and Petrovo-Solovo were pushing a liberal agenda. Their correspondence reveals an ambitious plan of action that would carry Beseda’s influence into provinces as far as Chernigov. In his letter of April 5th, 1895 Petrovo-Solovovo thanked Vernadskii for having sent him the ‘address to Chernigov zemstvo’, which the former had found to be very good. Petrovo-Solovo notes with satisfaction that ‘a new spirit took over Russia […] Oral accounts from various places reached me, all imbued with a note of discontent, with a desire for change […] The duty of all noble and intelligent people […] is to exhaust all lawful means of directing [social] forces towards a consciously progressive and steady flow. Abrupt changes and leaps are as dangerous, in my opinion, as stagnation and reaction. Let’s not forget that we are dealing with the first timid steps of a new national consciousness’.112

110 B. Rock, ‘A province in crisis: The Russian famine in Tambov, 1891-1892’, PhD Thesis, UCL 2016. 111 GATO F.52, Op. 1, d. 1-12. 112 ARAN F.518, Op. 3, d.1225, l. 11-12. 241

It is only to be expected that the fragile balance between the powerful conservative element and the increasingly populous ‘up and coming’ liberal front could have never been achieved if the continued existence of the monarchy had become a stumbling block. After all, we must remember that the main exponents of liberalism in Tambov and other zemstva were gentry. The liberal zemtsy did not consider republicanism, at least not openly. They were mostly preoccupied with the need to reform the existing state structure and even if they were motivated by constitutionalism, the issue of a constitution was not explicitly discussed. It is clear, on the other hand, that extra- zemstvo constitutionalists saw in the liberal front represented by ‘acceptable’ organisations such as Beseda a valuable Trojan Horse for their entry into mainstream national politics. The liberal zemtsy harboured no illusions as to that fact. They were happy, it would seem, to acquiesce, hence the intensive campaigning in the zemstva for a moratorium on corporal punishment in the period 1895-1900. Provincial zemstva seemed to have been obsessed with it. In January 1896 Petrovo-Solovovo even discussed the possibility of raising the issue in the upcoming Assembly. He wrote to Prince N. N. Cholokaev and then discussed this communication with Vernadskii: ‘There are rumours that the abolition of corporal punishment will be announced at the coronation. You’d think that doing away with flogging would not be a mercy bestowed during a coronation but, a gift to be appreciated [by the people] but, rather, a step [made necessary] by public opinion.’ The idea was that the liberal bloc would organise tandem interventions in their respective zemstva and noble assemblies, running a relentless campaign until the issue was brought forth on a national level.113 Yet the plan fell through almost immediately after its inception. On February 8th, 1897 the Tambov provincial assembly’s debate concluded with a vote in which 128 delegates voted against and 52 in favour of raising the question of corporal punishment in the national Assembly.114

In the end, it fell upon the more erudite and affluent members of Russia’s provincial elite to convince their middling brethren on the eve of either political camp. We have already observed how over time the influence of rank and pedigree dissipated to reveal a political landscape less conditioned upon patronage and more informed by individual ideologies. Chicherin’s ‘cautious steps forward’ would eventually be

113 Ibid, l. 19-20. 114 GATO F.4, Op. 1, d.4954, l. 120. 242 abandoned in favour of open debate on the granting of a constitution and wholesale (read ‘national’) political reform. While Chicherin the Elder would take care to reaffirm constantly his monarchist credentials, the new generations of provincials would not be taken in by romantic monarchism. They needed a new ally against encroachment by the ‘lower classes’, and they found it in the second generation of Russia’s ‘enlightened bureaucracy’. For all his meanderings, Chicherin should be credited with showing the way; the bureaucracy was for him valuable ‘if not [for] its moral prowess then its internal consistency and its ability to operate, to maintain order, to attach itself to the state and support it’. He was patently referring to the culmination of a phenomenon with roots in the early nineteenth, if not late eighteenth century: A caste of competent operatives spread throughout European Russia who had played an integral role in resolving a large number of problems resulting from the erstwhile chaotic, ad-hoc and generally problematic local administration.115

There is a dose of political pragmatism in this admission. Still, more important was the antagonistic relationship between bureaucracy (and its further expansion) and the ‘corporative structure of class’ (and community), in other words noble corporations.116 If the government wished to hear the true ‘voices of the provinces’, Chicherin suggested, then they should invite provincial gentry to the capital. As a prerequisite, the government should work along four main axes: (a) Naming experts who would be tasked with the scientific study of specific socio-political pathogens; (b) Naming representatives or deputies who would be tasked with representing each of the sosloviia; (c) Assigning permanent representatives of the provincial gentry to the State Council.; (d) Summoning a consultative assembly formed by representatives from all the sosloviia. In order to dispel any suspicion that these proposals were a Trojan horse for constitutionalists, Chicherin unfailingly underlined – to a hyperbolic degree – that there is nothing therein ‘incompatible with autocratic power’.117

As time passed and the political situation became more fluid however, Russia was plagued with successive crises in government and widespread popular unrest. Chicherin’s response was to throw his usual caution to the wind and come out

115 Ibid, 170-174. 116 Ibid, 126-29. 117 Chicherin ‘Nashe nastoiashchee’, 49. 243 unequivocally in favour of a political ‘body’ that would represent ‘the healthiest forces in the land’, i.e. provincial gentry, composed of two representatives from each province who would take their place in the Gossovet.118 The representatives would be there in a consultative capacity. It was imperative that the Sovereign’s autocratic power remained inviolate. In deference to the council, Chicherin specified that the presence of representatives from the provinces would not encroach in the least upon its members’ rights, traditionally extended by the Sovereign himself.119 It is clear that Chicherin was far from being a ‘constitutionalist’, at least at this stage, but neither did he share his peers’ misgivings on institutionally-established permanent representation in government. There was no risk, according to Chicherin, that this ‘assembly’ would be a backdoor for constitutionalism in Russia – that ‘the people of the land, united in strong numbers and unsatisfied with their advisory capacity, would seek to obtain [political] rights’. There were no other guarantees – and none was needed – apart from the relationship of trust which bounded government and governed, which rested on reciprocity. Representation would finally bring to an end the self-perpetuating cycle of mutual alienation.120

These views cost Chicherin his mayoral position in Moscow. But they also formed the basis for the Tambovian gentry’s political activities in the 1880s and 1890s – one could even say well into the twentieth century – adopted, as they were, by both ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’. Naturally the former would selectively read from Chicherin’s ‘old testament’, plucking out especially those passages that reaffirmed the necessity of autocracy. The latter began, it would seem, from the new sociology Chicherin produced in the 1880s and 1890s, taking his writings in a far more radical direction that, one would imagine, the author himself had intended. His high profile inspired nigh-religious fervour, stirred passions, and created competition among the gentry over who had the right to exclusively interpret Chicherin’s various pronouncements on the state of affairs. In sharp contrast to Herzen, Chicherin was never in danger of becoming a non-entity, an irrelevant and insubstantial ‘relic’ of his time. He was liberally used, both as a pillar of aristocratic conservatism and as support for constitutionalists. Once again with the benefit of hindsight all this may be

118 State Council. 119 Ibid, 50. 120 Ibid, 42. 244 dismissed as tangential to the political course Russia would take after 1905, but these debates were of fundamental importance within the context of the time.

If the late 1870s saw the struggle between government and intelligentsia, then the late 1890s saw the antagonism between the prosperous classes and the populous classes. This was nothing less than a change in the economic and the ideological, and as a result the political, paradigm of Russian society. If we assume that the transposition of value capital from land to money is one of the main characteristics of a bourgeois society, then the 1990s witnessed the bourgeoisification of provincial gentry, which now shared a common purpose with the prosperous urban classes and the affluent peasants. This new divide along economic rather than class self-interest culminated in such expressions of a common understanding as the joint reactions to the 1905-1906 agrarian reforms.

Protracted intra-class conflict was quite obviously one of the long-term destabilising factors in early-twentieth century Russia. It is equally obvious that the true impact of these developments cannot be understood if they are studied out of context: The war of 1878-1879 largely reinforced the bond between raznochintsy and the budding intellectuals; the conflict of 1904-1905, on the other hand, brought about in the villages what was essentially civil strife, albeit not one born of intra-class conflict. Throughout this period, various noble political groups feverishly looked for a way out of the economic and political impasse. Composed by members of the aristocratic elite, they were led by individuals seemingly obsessed with the notion of unity and the spectre of revolution. Predictably, some sought to resolve Russia’s social problems by means of installing a dictatorship that would crack down on all ‘agitators’ and ‘foreigners’ who had infested the ranks of government (the Sovereign remaining immune). Others dreamed of a liberal society and a constitutional monarchy, or even the proclamation of a republican government that would enact a series of economic reforms, lightening the load of peasantry and workers. They dreamt, in short, of a government that could finally set Russia on the path towards capitalist development. Both the former and the latter had no doubt that they alone could know the needs of the Russian people, they alone could decide on their behalf; it was the conservatives, however, who most of all excelled in ‘aggressive defence’.

245

In many ways, this was the swansong of gentry liberalism in the zemstva. Provincial gentry continued to become involved in politics in their capacity as zemtsy at least until 1905-1906. Yet this was not the end of political activism altogether. For a variety of external reasons that surpass the chronological and thematic confines of this study, zemstvo liberals among provincial gentry chose to adopt other forms of struggle to further their cause. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the former ‘zemstvo politicians’ sought alternative paths towards a peaceful resolution of class grievances and an exit from the governmental crisis. There was no avoiding the revolutionary expressions of the popular masses, however, most of all the peasantry. The gentry’s later political and social unions tried to operate over an expanding rift between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ as well as splintering and factionalism within the liberal camp. Further intensification of societal pressures then led to the radicalisation of Tambov’s liberal gentry. Exceptionally, Petrovo-Solovovo would enter the Central Committee of the ‘Oktobrist’ (or ‘Union of 17 October’) party and founded its Tambovian branch. The branch’s charter specified that no person would be admitted ‘supporting either the conservation of absolute autocratic monarchy or the institution of a democratic republic’.121 His more radical peers from the days of Beseda and the alliance with the constitutionalists in the zemstvo united to form a new constitutional- democratic party, which would become known to posterity as the Kadet Party. Tellingly, one of the Kadet Party’s first provincial branches was set up in Tambov and run by Novosilt’sev who would go on to become one of the most influential Kadets in Russia. 122

On a more profane level, both academics and ‘politically active’ members of Russia’s gentry had begun contemplating how they would ‘fit in’ to this brave new world. Tambov’s Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin was the quintessential amalgamation of the two – an academic and a politician – but above all an aristocratic nobleman. In other words, it would be very hard to argue that he exemplified the ‘average’ Tambovian landowner (as described in Chapter II), although his influence on the nobility not just of Tambov but all of European Russia was quite significant. As one of the most prominent exponents of moderate conservatism of his time, Chicherin came forth with an original argument against the notion of a necessary connection between

121 Istoriia politicheskikh partii Tsentral’nogo Chernozem’ia, 37, 40; GARF F.115 Op.1 d.1 l.1. 122 OPI GIM F.385 Op.1 ed. khr. 1 l.13-14. 246 emancipation and the obliteration of the noble soslovie. His syllogism reflected anxieties expressed by the majority of his peers. In Neskol’ko sovremennykh voprosov, for example, we come across the following passage:

The suppression of age-old institutions when life itself does not require this to happen in an urgent fashion is a manifestation of the political frivolity [that has proved] so costly to the common folk. The nobility of modern Russia has traditions, prejudices and a soul that has developed over the course of centuries […]. All this cannot [simply] disappear with the abolition of serfdom.123

The Russian nobility, Chicherin argued, ‘more than any other class, has acquired European education and adopted new morals, beliefs and interests’. For this reason, it ‘occupies a fundamental and elevated position in society and in the state’. In addition, he credited the nobility with possessing a deeper understanding of the historical process that led to the development of nineteenth Russian society. As educated, ‘enlightened’ individuals, nobles understood their privileged position in relation to and as a direct result of their age-old function as pillars of the autocratic regime. This salient characteristic, he maintained, meant the nobility was ‘solely capable of political leadership (edistvenno vozmozhnym politicheskim dvigatelem)’.124 The preservation of the soslovie’s exalted position should be of paramount importance both to the government and the people of Russia.

In this study I demonstrated that Chicherin’s sociology sometimes suffers from inconsistencies (mostly) with regards to the most pressing matter of the time (for his class at least), that is, the question of the best course available to Russia’s landed gentry. Even as he was making the claims summarised in the preceding paragraph, he acknowledged that the nobility had entered a precarious, transitory phase during which it had failed to acclimatise in the new socio-political environment. For this reason, he turned to the state’s verkhovnaia vlast’ – the Supreme Authority of the Emperor – urging him to keep other classes in check, lest they set their minds upon further enfranchisement and expansion of their already sufficient (he argued) freedoms. In order to maintain the balance he also pleaded with those elements of the nobility seeking solace in isolation not to attempt a return to the past.

123 Chicherin, Nesol’ko sovremmenykh voprosov, М. 1862, 88-90. 124 Ibid, 90. 247

The most dangerous aspect for any class, and for the people as a whole, is an intransigent state of mind and [a sense of] exclusivity with respect to other classes […] A close-minded class inevitably disassociates itself from the community of the nation […], ceases to be a useful member of the entire organism, becomes an alien excrescence.125

Of particular relevance are Chicherin’s thoughts on the right of Noble Assemblies to expand their membership. He insisted that only ‘Law and the Supreme Authority of the State’ (an admittedly curious distinction within an autocracy) can set the conditions of appurtenance to the highest soslovie, on the premise that ‘nobility is Russia’s nobility’ rather than the nobility of each individual province. Chicherin recognises the right to advancement of the meritorious few, either by virtue of their education or by virtue of their property. Admission to the nobility should be reserved for those who had either received university education or owned property of at least 500 des. On the basis of data presented in the previous chapter, this definition would have excluded the large majority of the existing soslovie.126 It is quite noteworthy that Chicherin never advocated a radical reform of the First Estate but rather its gradual replenishment by social elements more able to adapt to changing socioeconomic circumstances, in other words more educated. Continuing in the same vein as the passage above, this became the ‘social organism’s’ mechanism for survival; an influx of ‘new men’ would be necessary for the continued existence of the soslovie as a whole.

This was a major point of contention between Chicherin’s followers and his right-wing critics. He would meet ‘extreme conservatism’ with caustic remarks, for example: ‘One can only save [a building with] solid foundations. […] When a building’s foundations are compromised, one must support it anew. Otherwise it will collapse – sooner or later. Our [provincial] nobility cannot hover in the air; it needs a material basis for its power and status’. In order to survive, the nobility needs to ‘incorporate new elements’. Chicherin’s choice of words was careful, but there was no hiding his long-standing conviction that hereditary nobility should under no circumstances be replenished, as a matter of course, from the ranks of service nobility. In the Chicherian social vision, the

125 Chicerin., Neskol’ko, 99-100. 126 Ibid, 105-108. 248 latter’s role was to become the kernel of a new middle class.127 Keenly aware that this ‘middle class’ would act as a holding agent, keeping together the fabric of Russian society, he also felt the need to advocate further reform in local government. Separate, quasi-independent institutions should be created for the landed gentry – institutions that would address their monetary and political needs and would lie without the purview of local government.

Organs of local administration should be representative of – but not proportionate with – the social makeup of each province: ‘The nobility [may only be] a minority of the national population [narodonaseleniia – the choice of this composite word incorporating ‘narod’ is interesting], but for minorities a separate representative institution can be a major advantage’.128 The class divide is essential; the nobility’s exalted position is vital to autocratic rule. Its privileges were ‘unnaturally’ restrained by bureaucratic proizvol.129 Using a peculiar ‘king of the hill’ type of argument, Chicherin predicted that in societies where class boundaries are blurred, it is the bureaucracy that tends to achieve a dominant position, for it is the only centripetal force.130 Despite all this, Chicherin was becoming increasingly exasperated with the lack of political will exhibited by his peers, and this exasperation made itself felt in his writings even as early as the 1870s. The government was faced with an increasingly acute crisis and it needed politically active individuals gifted with ‘administrative acumen’ (gosudarstvennykh umakh) – only they could stem the tide. The erstwhile source of such individuals had been exhausted. ‘Nashe nastoiashchee polozhenie’ makes this very point; to Chicherin’s chagrin, the nobility who, since time immemorial had shown ‘exceptional vigour and humility’ was nowhere to be seen.131

In the late 1870s, when conservative circles were advancing the nobility’s revival as the most pressing and urgent issue in political life, Chicherin revisited the idea of nobility as a concrete ‘class’ in the Western sense. The tenets of contemporary societal restructuring demanded that the Russian noble should become similar to his European brethren – in Chicherin’s eyes – a pioneer of social, scientific, and fiscal progress. In

127 Ibid, 108-109. 128 Chicerin., Neskol’ko,121-123. 129 Proizvol: Arbitrariness. B. N. Chicherin, O narodnom predstavitel’stve, M., 1866, 425. 130 Chicherin, Neskol’ko, 174. 131 B. N. Chicherin, ‘Nashe nastoiashchee polozhenie’, Rodina 11-12 (1992), 49. 249 this respect, the blame for the nobility’s decadence is placed squarely upon the shoulders of Alexander II’s government but not the Emperor himself. Chicherin argued that it had sapped the nobility’s independence, curiously providing in evidence the institution of Land Captains.132 One is led to believe that this most Russian of attitudes (displacing blame from Alexander to the governing circle of bureaucrats) was embraced by the ‘politically active’ gentry across the spectrum. For some reason they ignored that the government po soveshchaniiu – in concert and in agreement with – the uezd marshals had proceeded to appoint local grandees to these positions. In other words, the Land Captains were members of the same (mostly) hereditary nobility that had dominated political and social life in the provinces since time immemorial, most lately in collusion with their anointed representatives – the marshals. Whereas in contrast to the latter they received a not-insubstantial government salary, their transformation into ‘functionaries’ with a strong dependency on St. Petersburg was far from complete. In fact, monies received in wages would serve equally well to promote the interests of the very same class so beloved by Chicherin and the assemblage of liberals over which he presided. Even ‘liberals’ could show quite ‘conservative’ proclivities when class privileges were concerned.

Then again Chicherin was known to incorporate certain elements of unreserved Realpolitik into his sociological arguments. His appraisal of the 1861 reform was generally positive; he made the claim that the nobility’s position had improved in the decade which had elapsed and its welfare – by which he meant ‘affluence’ – had been maintained, even improved. As for the huge numbers of landowners who had been deprived of their properties – his exact word was ‘lishilis’’ – that was their own fault. They had fallen, it would appear, victims to their own managerial incompetence. With regards to the interdependence of nobility and state, Chicherin notes that the symbiosis could only be served by nobility able to stand on its own two feet. The dying should submit to their fate. The survivors would form the kernel of a new class comprised of independent landowners who would fill leading positions within local administration. They would then become able to exercise significant influence over Russia’s public life.

Once again Chicherin insisted that the nobility alone was capable of forming such a

132 Chicherin’s argument is quoted and summed up in Iu. B. Solov’ev, Samoderzhavie i dvorianstvo v kontse XIX veka, L., 1973, 253. 250 new class in Russia, for ‘those prosperous and well-educated merchants [kupechestvo] as can be found exist only in the capital and a few large cities’, which incidentally is another reason why the destruction of the nobility would spell disaster for the entire country. Yet he remained equally convinced that there could be no reversal, no revival of the ‘old world’; ‘universal [sic] enfranchisement, [means that] the degeneration of the estate system [soslovnyi stroi] is only a matter of time’. He perceived only two possible outcomes: either a significant part of Russia’s nobility would diversify its activities and outlook by means of adaptation to new realities under the tutelage of the aristocratic grandees, or the nobility in its entirety would sink into oblivion. Ever the optimist, he called once more for the ‘old nobility’ to enfold ‘the new’ and create a unified class of landed sobstvenniki.133 To risk anachronism, one could argue that Chicherin called for nothing less than a disenchantment of Russian society in the sense that he insisted upon a ‘programmatic liberation of the mind [with relation to] the betterment of material conditions’.134 While not straying so far as to refuse the divine right of kingship (or autocracy, for that matter), his political pragmatism demanded that the nobility shed any notion of a ‘magical’ return to the past.

Conclusion: Disenchantment in the Russian province Whereas traditionally policy shifts in Russia had radiated outwards from the centre and emancipation was no different, subsequent reforms (not least the zemstva) would create a space for the politicisation of the propertied classes. This was politics without poleis, a closely-regulated and contained political landscape within which, however, Russia’s landowners could finally take charge of their own affairs and grow a political consciousness. In these debates, to deny the necessity for overarching, deep reform was destructive. To deny the need for change was anachronistic. Fissures arose not because the groups concerned and immediately affected by the reforms were tempted to remain outside the fray, but because irreconcilable differences developed over the direction change should take. Regardless of the manifest existence of these groups, contemporaries still had to choose the words they used to describe them for maximum effect: ‘the aristocratic party’, ‘oligarchs’, ‘planters’, or even ‘our home-grown Tories’,

133 Solov’ev, Samoderzhavie, 253-54, 257. 134 Chicerin’s early ‘Disenchantment’ is understood here in the weberian sense of neo-Kantian melancholic Romanticism rather than Adorno’s neo-Marxist ideal type of the ‘cultivated intellectual’. For an analysis of these types, see H. C. Greisman, ‘“Disenchantment of the World”: Romanticism, Aesthetics and Sociological Theory’, The British Journal of Sociology xxvii (1976), 495-507. 251 thereupon entered the political lexicon of nineteenth-century Russia. This terminology was invariably the product of liberal minds at work. Tambov became one of the first provinces where such derogatory terms were used with any degree of frequency. Overall, however, the liberal opposition opted for the more neutral ‘aristocratic party’ much more frequently than other terms. There can be little doubt that during the preparatory, consultative stages of the emancipation, its fever enveloped not only those gubernatorial committees tasked with hammering out the details of the reform, but also those elements of previously inactive, insubstantial, uninterested or uninfluential nobility that wished to stand up for their ancient rights.

For both counter- and pro-reformists, comparison with West-European countries would become inevitably the basis for many an argument on reform. These were always contained within interventions on agrarian matters, seemingly devoid of political overtones. But it was rather obvious that a deeper point was being made. The stratagem was used to best effect by the most educated strata among the nobility. In this sense too, the provincials sometimes led the way. The sheer volume of work undertaken by the central authorities in charge of regulating public platforms and the press meant they had little time for provincial gazettes. Besides, it would have been difficult for any urban bureaucrat to justify knowing better than a planter when it came to agriculture. A striking example of precisely such a noble was I. V. Saburov from Penza, an influential landowner, who penned a great number of articles and treatises on agrarian economy in which in which he analysed his thoughts on the ‘western model for economic development’:

Improving the lives of peasants within their communities, i.e. the abolition of serfdom, and [noble] landownership represent, in our view, two completely different concepts, entirely unrelated to each other. The nobility […] as the western example shows, based on monarchist and conservative principles, must maintain unmitigated influence over landed capital in the Empire. 135

Even though the British model of landownership in the first half of the nineteenth century was rather popular in noble circles, it represented more of an ideal type and an example to be emulated. It was largely considered as the antipodal system to the

135 OR RGB, F. 219, Op. 81, D. 13, l. 1-2. 252 quintessentially ‘French’ rule of centralisation, the deprivation of the nobility of any political significance, and – as a result – constant political upheaval.136

During its early stages, opposition to the Western (anti-)paradigm still dominated the debate on reform, which was now joined by such elements of the nobility that had not previously shown any signs of political activism.137 In Tambov, landowner G. B. Blank published as early as 1856 theses that can only be termed ‘traditionalist’ in nature and content. In ‘Russkii pomeshchichii krest’ianin’ he spoke of peasants and landowners forming ‘a patriarchal family unity’, condemning ‘blind followers and extollers of certain Western ideas’. He goes on to reject the West-European experience of emancipation as a process which ‘drove peasants from the land’ and led to a rise in ‘vagrancy’ and an increase of ‘the proletariat’.138 Largely seen by contemporaries as a manifesto in favour of serfdom, Blank’s contribution set the tone for more stringent opposition elsewhere in Russia. It should be added that Blank would later play a significant part in the consultative committees of 1872 where he served alongside another 180 individuals, hand-picked, it would seem, for their profound knowledge of noble history, rights, and customs. There he met with the Bezobrazov, Orlov-Davydov, Bobrinksii, and Apraksin, thereby solidifying his overall importance in the provincial conservative network.

In the wake of intense and dynamic polemics by landowning gentry in the provinces, new ideas were tested, a new understanding of politics emerged, and new methods of

136 Despite the best intentions of Saburov and his fellow conservatives, a proper ‘organ’ for their party was never officially established. Such tentative efforts as were undertaken in the late 1850s/early 1860s never really culminated (e.g. the Zhurnal zemlevladel’tsev edited by Saburov and his compatriot landowner A. D. Zheltukhin brilliantly analysed in N. M. Druzhinin, Izbrannye Trudy. Sotsial’no- ekonomicheskaia istoriia Rossii, M., 1987). 137 There has been a tendency to consider ‘modern’ and ‘western’ as synonyms. If one were to substitute the latter for the former, ‘relatively’ modern industrial and business practices were on the rise as early as 1865. This observation has never been challenged ever since Rashin. Cf. A. G. Rashin, Formirovanie promyshlenogo proletariat v Rossii: Statistiko-ekonomicheskie ocherki, M., 1940; W. L. Blackwell, The Industrialization of Russia, New York, N.Y., 1970; C. Black et al. (eds.), The Modernization of Japan and Russia: A Comparative Study, New Haven, Ct. 1975; B. Anderson, Internal Migration during Modernization in Late Nineteenth-century Russia, Princeton, N. J., 1980, 47 passim; A. Stanziani, ‘The Traveling Panopticon: Labor Institutions and Labor Practices in Russia and Britain in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Comparative Studies in Society and History li (2009), 715-741. ‘Catching up with the West’ was a constant theme in Russian historiography: Gatrell, 1986, Ekloff et al. 1994, but most importantly the ‘father’ of this trend, Gerschenkron, 1962: “Economic development in a backward country such as Russia can be viewed as a series of attempts to find—or to create— substitutes for those factors which in more advanced countries had substantially facilitated economic development, but which were lacking in conditions of Russian backwardness’ (123). 138 Trudy imperatorskogo vol’nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva, June 1856, vol. 2, no. 6, 117-129. 253 political struggle were adopted. Contemporaries used antithetical dualities (binaries), such as ‘progressives’ and ‘reactionaries’, ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’. The existence of fuzzy areas between ‘parties’ is a recurring theme in the literature, with good reason. ‘Krepostniki’ predominantly opposed the emancipation, but within their ranks there were those who – while accepting its inevitability – argued for massive redemption payments or landless emancipation. Similarly, the ‘progressive party’ included members of varyingly liberal views. But can ‘party’ ever be a suitable umbrella term for a disparate collection of people reacting to the situation around them? Or did ‘parties’ essentially represent the interests of influential groups among the middling and higher landowning gentry? Clarifying this point would shed light on how various political programmes evolved and spread throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. In the first place, one must consider those aspects of reform which generated the most resistance from the conservative party – issues such as redemption payments, division of land, peasant collectives and local administration. Political changes taking place in the first half of the 1860s resulted in noble corporations becoming entirely dependent upon central government, and their already apparent political powerlessness was exacerbated. United in the face of adversity, the nobility, this erstwhile loose confederation of people grouped under the term ‘soslovie’ and held together by tradition was finally beginning to resemble a social class in the Western sense of the term.139

In scholarly studies, the absence of noble class unity is repeatedly stressed. On the one hand, it is hard to disagree with Alfred Rieber’s view that the nobility did not coalesce into a united front in order to defend its privileges in the wake of the Crimean War.140 On the other, it is interesting to contemplate the series of efforts made – against this very background – to unite ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ forces into political parties. These were joint ventures of the nobility for the nobility. It was only during the 1860s

139 Nevertheless, this process of transformation would remain incomplete. Overall, the conclusions reached by Gregory Freeze in the late 70s have been fiercely debated. The contributions of Michael Confino, Elise Wirtschafter and Robert E. Johnson in the CMRS form the corpus of the latest additions to a wide-reaching debate that falls outside the limited scope of this study. Cf. G. Freeze, ‘The Soslovie (Estate) paradigm’, 24-25; M. Confino, ‘The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm: Reflections on some open questions’, CMRS xlix (2008), 681-699; Wirtschafter, ‘Categories’; R. E. Johnson, ‘Paradigms, categories or fuzzy algorithms? Making sense of soslovie and class in Russia’, CMRS li (2010), 461-466. 140 A. Rieber, ‘Sotsial’naia identifikatsiia i politicheskaia volia; russkoe dvorianstvo ot Petra I do 1861 g., in A. Zaionchkovskii 1904-1983. Stat’i, publikatsii i vospominaniia o nem, M., 1998, 308; V. G. Chernukha, ‘Bor’ba v verkhakh po voprosam vnytrennei politiki tsarisma (ser. 70-x gg. XIX v.)’, Istoricheskie zapiski, cxvi (1988), 161-186, 183. 254 and 1870s that these mixed groups became more vocal. Their influence on the struggle for power, and the extent of their proximity to the ‘upper echelons’ of St. Petersburg’s administrative pyramid, is rather unclear. The existence of proto-parties was nonetheless palpable and crucial to the development of the provincial political scenery. Some of the ideas born of these provincial groups were carried out by such prominent figures of Alexander II’s court as Valuev, Count Shuvalov, and Prince Bariatinskii.

Throughout the postreform period, this elusive group remained behind the scenes, for it wished to avoid being perceived as yet another force pushing against reform ‘from the right’. What is certain, however, is that Shuvalov was either party to their deliberations, or at least sympathetic to their cause, because it was only after his influence over governmental affairs became decisive (1866) that their strangely mixed views gained political traction. In the event, neither Shuvalov nor the provincials on whom his power rested yielded any tangible results. In other words, we see no palpable counter-reform policy ‘victories’ that can be entirely attributed to this united opposition movement. Conclusively, the 1860s and 1870s were undoubtedly a period when the pendulum of Russian politics oscillated definitively towards the ‘visage’ of liberal reform, or what V. G. Chernukha termed ‘the liberal agenda’.

From the very beginning, the abolition of serfdom gave rise to fundamental quandaries about the Russian nobility’s role and significance within a rapidly changing society. While the very definition of what constitutes the noble soslovie was in flux, many scrambled to find new sources of normativity and in this respect alone, their search predates that of their western counterparts by at least three decades.141 The emancipation severed in one fell swoop the tethers of nobility to their ancient past and cast in doubt their ability to pursue a continued and independent existence in the Empire. If the rise of the bureaucracy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries presented a formidable challenger to the nobility as a primarily political elite, the emancipation statutes destroyed every hope that the nobility would somehow remain the incarnation of the aristoi in the Platonic sense. How were Russia’s nobles supposed to keep the guardianship of honour and morals if they were deprived of the very essence of what set them apart from the ‘lower classes’?

141 M. Ecksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Boston & New York, 1989; cf. C. M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge, 1996. 255

Tambovian nobles threw themselves into the debate with much flair. One of the province’s most prominent noblemen, Prince D. N. Tsertelev, would follow in Chicherin’s footsteps and attempt to answer the social question during the 1880s and 1890s, when national debate on the ‘issue’ had gained fresh momentum following the assassination of Alexander and the accession of a new Tsar. Tsertelev was the scion of an Ossetian/Kartlian family of notables who had fled before the advancing Ottoman armies in the train of Vakhtang VI. Invested with the princely dignity extended to all Bagrationids, Tsertelev served as marshal of the nobility for Spassk uezd. Born into a generation that first saw the light on the eve of emancipation, he had been educated in Moscow and Leipzig, where he obtained his doctoral degree. For a brief period, he served as editor of the journals Delo and Russkii Vestnik. Like many of his erudite contemporaries and peers, Tsertelev dabbled in poetry (naturally) and philosophy (less so); apparently his main influence was Schopenhauer.142 In 1878 he became actively involved in gentry politics by securing membership in a veritable array of committees and commissions: okladnaia, smetnaia, revisionnaia, otsenochnaia and so on.143

Tsertelev’s views were mostly conservative, yet there is disparity between his publications and his orations. The structure of his articles is certainly modelled on Chicherin to the extent that he also pleads with his peers for unity. Where he differs from Chicherin, and where he really becomes a product of his own age, is the choice of target. Tsertelev tries to inspire a united front in the face of a new enemy, which he described as ‘the evil eating away at the body of society’: Socialism. He proposes the formation of a committee charged with identifying those measures that would be most effective against this most heinous bane of gentryfolk. The main problem arising from his admittedly very vocal exhortations is whether the zemstvo had the necessary authority to discuss such matters, whether in fact combatting political extremism formed part of its mandate. Which is why his choice of tribune is puzzling: In writing, he shows moderation; in speech, he engages in polemics. One would expect that such matters as the budding socialist movement should be left to local policing authorities – the ‘long arm’ of St. Petersburg. Nevertheless, such an anti-socialist committee was

142 GATO F.153 Op. 1 d.32 l.98. 143 Sbornik postanovlennii Tamboskogo gubernskogo zemskogo sobraniia, Tambov, 1902, vol. 1, 41- 43, 49, 56, 118, 120, 123, 541. 256 finally formed by resolution of the zemstvo. Tsertelev himself was a member and so was Chicherin.144 Conversely, when the question of abolishing corporal punishment was raised in the zemstvo a few years later (1894), Tsertelev opposed the motion. He opined that this matter did not fall within the assembly’s established purview.145

Tsertelev expanded on his views about class in an article entitled ‘K voprosu o sovremennom polozheniia russkogo dvorianstva’, to which he added – as an afterthought perhaps – ‘concerning the articles of B. N. Chicherin’. It appeared in Sankt-peterburgskie vedomosti and can be best summarised as an attack on Chicherin’s thesis regarding the moribund nature of a socio-political system based on the feudal institution of serfdom. For Tsertelev, the class divide was not a systemic weakness; instead, a revival of sharp class divisions would ensure the future development of the Russian state. State and class were inexorably intertwined: the former’s survival depended on the latter’s revival. Much like Chicherin, albeit unwittingly, Tsertelev also provides strange evidence in support of his argument. His views were explained as the fruit of observations made in society at large. Antagonism over scarce economic resources was the plague of contemporary life. The revived class system would, according to him, redress the nefarious inconsistencies between civil and natural law thus ensuring that the provincial gentry would not come in direct conflict with the masses. Bringing down class barriers, he argued, would only result in economic antagonism reappearing ‘with a vengeance’, as it would represent the only field where inequality would be possible and thus more acutely felt. Tsertelev held that by restoring the class system and barriers to social mobility, Russia would be spared the travails of the ‘unprepared’ bourgeois classes in the West.146

As the 1800s turned into the 1900s, following widespread peasant unrest and the workers’ revolt – which to an informed observer would seem to sharpen the ancien régime’s contradictions and deepen the crisis in government – Tsertelev insisted on these views. That is not to say that he was completely bereft of pragmatism. During the meeting of the marshals of the nobility in January 1906 (the Assembly), he gave a bleak outlook for Tambov’s landed gentry. The report he presented dealt exclusively with the

144 Ibid vol. 2, 1676. 145 Ibid, 1209-1210. 146 Solov’ev, op. cit., 261-262. 257 issue of class. The October Manifesto represented a serious threat to the aristocratic elite, since it meant the passing of power to a group of ‘hurriedly and haphazardly elected individuals’ whose aim was none other than to uproot the verkhovnaia vlast’ (whose faithful servant – the nobility – would undoubtedly follow) and bring about a new Time of Troubles.147 In order to keep the foundations of state intact, only unlimited autocratic power would serve. The nobility as a soslovie should therefore consolidate its forces into a pan-Russian union and dispose them in the fight against revolutionary parties. Tsertelev’s criticism of the upper classes hinges mostly on the fact they have failed to do so already. According to this report, the reason behind this inopportune time lag was that the nobility was not favourably predisposed to take advantage of the (newly acquired) freedoms of association extended them by the Tsar. There was an element of ‘class selfishness’ (which can equally be read as ‘class consciousness’) and lack of propensity to ‘rush into things’. A Congress of the Nobility, whose members had real ties to the land, would be more meaningful than ‘the various platforms raised by individuals who do not see anything beyond the chancelleries of St. Petersburg and [the threat from] foreign revolutionary centres’.148

It is little wonder, therefore, that Tsertelev would become one of the most active participants in the Moscow Assembly. Deputies from 29 provinces were invited and the Prince was tasked with representing the interests of provincial gentry from Tambov and Kursk. As one would expect, he objected fiercely to ‘liberal’ accusations that nobility was the source of all evil in Russia. His main argument revolved around a sharp distinction made between the ‘real nobility’, which is ‘propertied, living on the land [and] has nothing in common with those functionaries who crowd the [corridors of] St. Petersburg’s ministries. Between the latter and the former, he proclaimed, there are no links, no shared ‘traditions’.149 Tsertelev was a fervent advocate of the course championed by P. S. Sheremet’ev (himself scion of a family that has little need for introductions), who opposed the referral of the land question to the Tsar’s judgement. The majority, unsurprisingly, disagreed. For them the agrarian question was the very reason for the Congress’s convocation – nobles had amassed in Moscow with an aim to form a unified front for the preservation of their right to land tenure. The mechanics of

147 GATO F.161 Op. 1 d.9090 l.26. 148 GATO F.161 Op. 1 d.9090 l. 28, 29. 149 Trudy i s’ezda Upolnomochennykh Dvorianskikh obshchestv 29 gubernii 21-28 maia 1906 goda. SPb., 1906, 6-7. 258 privilege, their basis in history, mattered little to landowners on the verge of becoming destitute. Tsertelev, on the other hand, was worried that if the nobility chose to highlight the agrarian question then accusations of self-centredness were bound to be raised. It would appear that Russian nobles only considered such issues as those touching upon their class privileges and only cared about protecting individual interests – not the common good.

Given his earlier admonitions about ‘class selfishness’, this posed an interesting dilemma for Tsertelev. ‘The agrarian question is pressing, no doubt’, he said, ‘however it should concern other institutions as well, not just this Assembly. […] Focussing on the agrarian question at the same time as we are facing unresolved political issues, at the same time as attempts are made to destroy the very autocratic power that is – and forever will remain – the very foundation of Russia – that is hardly befitting the nobility. [Instead, it is our duty to] raise our voices in support of autocracy’, he concluded.150 His proposal was seconded by another Tambovian, a certain V. N. Snezhkov: ‘Our address to the Tsar must touch exclusively on the issue of policy. We need to point out the means [by which can be achieved social] healing’.151

This Szezhkov, who was a relatively affluent landowner of the middling sort from Kozlov uezd, freely admitted belonging to the ‘extreme right-wing party’. In the provincial assemblies he had stooped to ‘moderate’ Tsertelev’s view that nobility should embrace the newly acquired civil liberties for the purposes of political unification. Furthermore, Snezhkov was also in favour of a pan-Russian Assembly whose purpose would be to draft a memorandum and present it to the Tsar without having to rely on intermediaries. He was not thwarted by the fact that the Tsar had already received thousands of memoranda, for in his eyes those were a sorry ‘collection of lifeless, hackneyed greetings and congratulatory notes’. The fact of the matter was, Snezhkov maintained, that from June 15th, 1905 onwards, ‘the government’s course had veered sharply to the left’, and as a result their conservative programme had become liberal, even radical’.152

150 Ibid. 151 Trudy i s’ezda, 69. 152 GATO F.161 Op. 1 d.9090 l.31. 259

His criticism was focused on those elements within the nobility that had taken part in the ‘so-called liberation movement’. ‘Following the Manifesto of October 17th the Russian nobility ought to have raised its voice and restrained the government: […] Embracing proizvol in defence of the state’s foundations is not only useless, but also harmful’. Snezhkov also maintained that the Assembly of the nobility could wield real political power and that ‘substantial progress requires [the application] of conservative as well as liberal principles’.153 He hoped that within the framework of the Assembly, political groups for the centre and right could meet in unity and advance the cause against anarchist and socialist doctrines. Snezhkov would deny the notion of ‘class selfishness’ pertaining to Russian gentry.154 ‘The nobility values its privileges only to the extent that they are necessary for the naturally-ordained growth of the [Russian] state and [it] has always been ready to sacrifice them if that should be deemed beneficial to the state.’ He called for the nobility from all of Russia to form a political and professional union.155

In this he was supported by B. G. Blank, who was nevertheless categorically opposed to the notion advertised by Snezhkov and like-mined individuals that the ‘All-Russian Congress of the Nobility should be subsumed under the category of “unions” [pod kategoriiu soiuzov]’.156 A staunch supporter of the nobility’s class privileges, he naturally protested against its merger with other social strata, for this would signal ‘an unthinkable demise’. Much like he had done in the provincial assemblies, Blank told the Moscow assembly that it should not concern itself with the agrarian question but rather, with the task of maintaining class purity. He did not shy from embarking on an anti-Semitic rant quite unbecoming of his exalted position: ‘the anarchy destroying our state and social system […] is a result of their actions’.157 Both he and Tsertelev were eventually superseded by the majority; the Assembly had been called in Moscow to discuss a specific agenda that included social issues (the nobility’s place within the new Russian society under formation), unity (class unity via noble societies and institutions), land distribution (peasant land tenure, collectives, the shortage of arable land), and money (dissecting the activities of the Land Bank and compensation for the

153 Ibid, l.32-33. 154 See Chapter IV. 155 GATO F.161 Op. 1 d.9090, l.33. 156 GATO F.161 Op. 1 d.9090, l.34. 157 GATO F.161 Op. 1 d.9090, l.34. 260 victims of the peasant uprising).158

For the historian, the Noble Assembly is an excellent source for comparisons between Tambov and other provinces of European Russia. The majority of provincial landowners taking part in the Assembly, including those of Tambov, considered the agrarian question to be primarily a political question. Whenever the prospect of a collective policy was raised, most of the deputies translated this as ‘what is our response to the land issue’. They could hardly afford to concern themselves with minoritarian prejudices over ‘class selfishness’. The Assembly marks the final watershed in Russian noble politics, but it does so not because political consciousness was finally made manifest but because the nobility at large decided that their main concern should not be disguised behind pronouncements about their duty and honour.

This unprecedented departure from tradition can be interpreted as signalling that the ties of obeisance with the throne were well and truly severed. The majority of nobles felt that landownership – noble landownership – formed both the primary support of autocratic power and its framework so it needs to be preserved without undergoing even the smallest of changes. It follows that the final draft of the Assembly’s address to the Tsar focused on the agrarian question. Primarily a summary of the main points discussed, and left unresolved, the address ended with a general aphorism on the ‘expropriation of private lands’, which had spelled the demise of provincial gentry. The nobles did pledge to ‘never abandon’ their nests and ‘fight to the bitter end against the revolutionaries. There, in the village, [we] will ceaselessly labour for the enlightenment of the primitive and deceitful peasant society’. Peasants are, on the other hand, also the nobles’ ‘brethren’ (sobratii) in rural labour.159 This seems to revert back to the patriarchal connotations of pre-emancipation rhetoric.

Five months after the Assembly dissolved, Snezhkov who had been an active participant, would chastise his peers for not keeping their promise not to fly their provincial nests. Clerks in the Land Bank could hardly keep up with the volume of contracts for estate sales. Summing up the outcome of the Assembly, Snezhkov would bitterly confess that his hopes for a single, powerful union were shaken. The ‘politically

158 GATO F.161, Op.1, d.9090, l.10. 159 V. N. Snezhkov, Pravitel’stvo, 6-7. 261 conscious’ were no more. The Assembly’s tepid rallying cry had failed to stimulate resistance from the provincials. Neither were there any ‘serious organisational initiatives by the marshals’, geared towards the ‘revitalising noble institutions’.160 Considering that the objective was to stay clear of anything that would strike as ‘class selfishness’, Snezhkov saw a conspicuous lack of sanity among his peers, particularly in the absence of conservative political groups, ‘without which there can exist no healthy state organism’. By law and custom the nobility should become exactly such a conservative fortress; refusal to take part in political struggle ‘would be unethical’.161

In a sense, noble politics had come full circle. In the immediate pre-revolutionary period, the lines between ‘conservatism’ and ‘liberalism’ were drawn anew. For the nobility, class self-interest is set aside in the face of political annihilation. For the government, a return to the old socio-political alliance was the only recourse left. Betrayed by the enlightened bureaucrats, abandoned by the bourgeoisie, destabilised by a weak Sovereign, the monarchy sought to renew its connection to its ancient pillar – the nobility – for support. But it was too little, too late. Forgotten, impoverished, defanged, what landowning nobility remained in the provinces was unable to stem the tide of change. It is no accident therefore, that the final pre-revolutionary years were characterised by a return to spiritualism and renewed faith in the Church. In other words, that nobility should turn to fist pillar of Russia’s official political doctrine. As of 1906, the signatories of the renewed social contract were acutely aware only a miracle could save them.

160 Ibid, 12-13. 161 Chicherin, Neskol’ko, 169. 262

List of Sources

Primary Sources a. Archival Sources

Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House)/Russian Academy of Sciences (IRLI RAN), Archival fund 445

Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGDA), Archival Funds 1263, 1272, 1273

Russian Academy of Sciences (ARAN), Archival Fund 518

Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA), Archival Funds 908, 1412

State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), Archival Funds 109, 115, 434, 990, 1463

State Archive of the Tambov Province (GATO), Archival Funds 4, 52, 103, 109, 143, 145, 153, 161, 163, 168, 181 R-5328

State Archive of the Kursk Province (GAKO), Archival Funds 4, 163

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263

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Published primary sources include all works published within a generation of the study’s chronological timeframe. The cut-off year is 1923. Compilations sometimes do not always have a named editor.

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Batiushkov, K. N., Sochineniia, in 3 vols., SPb., 1885-1887 Bekhteev, S. S., Khoziaistvennye itogi istekshego sorokopiatiletniaia i mery k khoziaistvennomu pod’emu, in 3 vols., SPb., 1906-1911 Bludov, D. N., Mysli i zamechaniia, SPb., 1866 Bogoiavlenskii K., Borets-muchenik za Sviatuiu Rus’ v smutnuiu godinu: Sankt- Peterburgskii gradonachal’nik Vladimir Fedorovich fon-der Launits, Tambov, 1912 Boratynskii, N. E., Iz gubernii, SPb., 1888 Briunin, Z. N., Krest’ianskoe konevodstvo v Tambovskom uezde, Tambov, 1903 Brokgauz, F. A. and Yefron, I. A., Entsiklopeditskii slovar’, multiple volumes, SPb., multiple years 264

Bulgakov, A. Ia., ‘Kaleidoskop moskovskoi zhizni (Iz pisem A. Ia. Bulgakova P. A. Viazemskomu)’, Istorichekii Vestnik v (1881) Bushen, A. (ed.), Nalichnoe naselenie imperii za 1858 god, SPb., 1863

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Dashkevich, L. V., Gosudarstvennye izbiratel’nye zakony. Agrarnyi perevorot. Sel’skii sud. M., 1909 Dzhivelego, A. K. et al. (eds.), Velikaia Reforma: Russkoe obshchestvo i krest’ianskii vopros v proshlom i nastoiashchem, in 6 vols., M., 1911

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Gavrilov, D. P. (ed.), Svedeniia o sushchestvuishchem poriadke i sposobakh otpravleniia natural’nykh zemskikh povinnostei v tsentral’nykh guberniakh imperii, SPb., 1862 Geografo-statisticheskoe opisanie Poltavskoi gubernii, SPb., 1870 Geografo-statisticheskoe opisanie Tambovskoi gubernii, SPb., 1870 Gesen, V. M., Iskliuchitel’noe polozhenie, SPb., 1908

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Savelov, L. M., Dvorianskoe soslovie v bytovom i obshchestvennom otnoshenii, M., 1906 Sbornik postanovlenii Tambovskoi gubernskogo zemskogo sobraniia za 1865-1894 gg. Tambov, 1902 Sbornik postanovlennii po Ministerstvu narodnogo prosveshcheniia, SPb., in 17 vols. 1864-1904 Sbornik rasporiazhenii po Ministerstvu narodnogo prosveshcheniia, SPb., in 16 vols., 1866-1907 Sbornik statistickeskikh svedenii po Tambovskoi gubernii, in 7 vols., multiple years 266

Semenov, N.P., Nashe dvorianstvo, SPb., 1898 ______, (ed.,) Polnoe geograficheskoe opisanie nashego Otechestva, SPb., 1899-1914 Semenov-Tianyshanskii, P. P., Russkie memuary: Izbrannye stranitsy, multiple locations, 1826-1856 Sinitsyn, A. ‘Iz vospominanii starogo vracha’, RS cliv (1913), 20-25 Skrebitskii, A. I. (ed.), Krest’ianskoe delo v tsarstvovanie Imperatora Alexandra II. Materialy dlia istorii osvobozhdeniia krestian, Bonn, 1862-1868 Statisticheskie dannye k otsenke zemel’ Tambovskoi gubernii, Tambov, 1897-1902 Svod Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii (unofficial edition), in 16 vols. abridged and edited by A. F. Volkov and Iu. D. Filippov, SPb., 1899

Trudy Imperatorskogo Vol’nogo Ekonomicheskogo Obshchestva, 1866, vol. 4, SPb., 1906 Trubetskaia, O. N., Kniaz’ V. A. Cherkaskii i ego uchastie v razreshenii krest’ianskogo voprosa: Materialy dlia biografii, in 2 vols., M., 1901

Vasil’chikov, A. I., Chastnoe zemlevladenie v Rossii i drugikh evropeiskikh gosudarstvakh, vol. I, SPb., 1876 Veselovskii, N. I., Istoriia zemstva za sorok let, in 3 vols., SPb., 1909-1911 Vishniakov, N., Svedeniia o kupecheskom rode Vishniakovykh, M., vol. 2, 1911 Voevikov, L. A. (ed.) Sbornik materialov dlia opisaniia Tambovskoi gubernii, SPb. 1872 Vysochaishe Utverzhdennye E.I.V. 19 fevralia 1861 goda, SPb., 1861 Vziazemskii, P. A., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, in 12 vols., SPb., 1878-1896

Yelishev, A. I., Dvorianskoe delo, M., 1898

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______, Poslednii letopisets, M., 1983 ______, Gertsen protiv samoderzhaviia: Sekretnaia politicheskaia istoriia Rossii XVII-XIX i vol’naia pechat, M., 1973 Eklof, B., Bushnell J., and Zakharova, L. (eds.), Russia’s Great Reforms 1855-1881, Bloomington, In., 1991 Ellison, H. J., ‘Economic Modernisation in Imperial Russia: Purposes and Achievements’, JEH iv (1965), 523-540 Emmons, T., The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, Gulf Breeze, Fl., 1978 ______, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861, New York, N. Y., 1968 Engelstein, L. ‘Holy Russia in Modern Times: An Essay on Orthodoxy and Cultural Change, PP clxxii (2001), 129-156 Esper, T., ‘The odnodvortsy and the Russian nobility’, SEER xlv (1967), 124-134 Evans, J. L., The Petraševskij Circle 1845-1849, The Hague, 1974 Evtuhov, C., Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society and Civilisation in Nineteenth-century Nizhnii Novgorod, Pittsburg, Pa., 2011

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APPENDIX A: Archival Sources for Social Network Analysis

Edges (connections) drawn between individuals named in the following fondy and opisy. Edges weighed on a scale of 1-5, depending on the closeness of the relationship. For professional affiliations, edges weighted as follows:

Weight of 1 assigned to relationships < 1 year or < 20 instances of interaction over the period Weight of 2 assigned to relationships < 3 years or < 100 instances of interaction over the period Weight of 3 assigned to relationships < 5 years or < 500 instances of interaction over the time period.

No professional relationships assigned a weight of 4 or 5. Professional relationships longer than 5 years are categorised as ‘friendships’ and an additional weight of 1 is added to the edge to reflect the addition of a professional aspect to the relationship. This has the obvious drawback of including long-term hierarchical or filial relationships in the number of ‘friendships’. However, as the edges are not directed, this is of no statistical significance.

Familial relationships of the 1st through 3rd degrees are assigned a weight of 5, more distant familial relationships weights of 4 through 2, with a gradation on the basis of how ‘close’ the relationship was.

Weights are cumulative.

1) State Archive of the Russian Federation – Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF): F.115 (Union of 17 October); F. 434 Permanent Council of the United Noble Associations; F. 1137 G. V. Vernadskii; F. 5102 A. A. Kornilov

286

2) Russian Academy of Sciences Archive – Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk (ARAN): F. 518 V. I. Vernadski; State Historical Museum (Manuscripts) F. 385 Iu. A. Novosil’tsev

3) State Archive of the Tambov Province – Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Tambovskoi Oblasti (GATO): F. 2 Government of Tambov Province, particularly opisy 70, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 95; F. 4 Gubernatorial Chancellery of Tambov, particularly opis 1; F. 26 combining holdings of Tambov Department for Rural Affairs and Tambov Department for governance, particularly opisy 1 and 2; F. 63 Provincial Statistical Committee of Tambov, particularly opis 1; F. 107 Tambov Gymnasium for Boys, particularly opis 1; F. 118 Aleksandriiskii Institute for Young Ladies (from the nobility), particularly opis 1; F. 143 Provincial Government, particularly opis 1; F. 161 Marshal of the Nobility for Tambov Province, particularly opis 1; F. 168 Tambov Branch of the Noble Land Bank, particularly opis 1;

4) Official statistics: (a) Records of functionaries in Tambov province (Adres- kalendar’ sluzhashchikh v Tambovskoi gubernii) for 1873, 1877, 1879, 1880, 1884. All editions printed in Tambov, no year of publication (b) Surveys for Tambov Province generated by the Office of the Governor (Obzor Tambovskoi gubernii za XXXX god. Prilozhenie ko Vsepoddanneishemu otchetu Tambovskogo gubernatora) for 1878, 1880, 1881 and 1882. All editions printed in Tambov in their respective years. (c) Yearbooks for Tambov Province (Pamiatnaia kniga dlia Tambovskoi gubernii) for 1861, 1864, 1866, 1868, 1873, 1879, 1894. All editions printed in Tambov in their respective years. (d) Statistical Tables of the Russian Empire (Statisticheskie tablitsy Rossiiskoi Imperii), SPb. 1863 and Statisticheskie vremennik Rossiskoi Imperii, 2 series, 1866-1875.

Methodology: Each of the 527 individuals are given an identifier which helps trace the archive where they were first encountered but does not impact on the statistical analysis. This takes the form of Archive Name – Opis/Delo – Unique number (ascending). An Excel table is created with the following columns: Identifier, Name, Surname, Patronymic, and Timestamp. These are the attributes that are considered in 287 network analysis, but the table also contains columns detailing estate size, years active, age, gender, education, and number of children. A simpler process is repeated for institutions. The two are then combined in a .csv file, which becomes the node list. A second .csv file is prepared detailing the relationships, with columns for Origin, Target, and Weight. The two .csv files are inputted in Gephi as ‘Node List’ and ‘Edge List’. Gephi then produces sociograms and statistical figures for the relationships in the network. This was conceived as an undirected network, so Origin and Target are statistically unimportant. However, it is not only good practice but also useful for possible extensions to the study to have a record of the sense of relationships plotted. 288

APPENDIX B: Sources for formulae in Social Network Analysis & Further Reading162

1) Understanding Network Analysis: Easley, D. and Kleinberg, J., Networks, crowds, and markets: Reasoning about a highly connected world. Cambridge, 2010. Available online: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/ Zafarani, Reza, Mohammad Ali Abbasi and Huan Liu. Social media mining: An introduction. Cambridge, 2014. Available online: http://dmml.asu.edu/smm/

2) SNA formulae and basic concepts http://corpnet.uva.nl/kings/snakings2016-eelke.pdf http://corpnet.uva.nl/kings/snakings2016-frank.pdf http://corpnet.uva.nl/kings/tutorial-visualization.pdf http://corpnet.uva.nl/kings/tutorial-projection.pdf http://corpnet.uva.nl/kings/tutorial-ucinet.pdf

3) Further reading on bipartite networks and projection https://toreopsahl.com/tnet/two-mode-networks/ https://toreopsahl.com/tnet/two-mode-networks/projection/ https://toreopsahl.com/2009/05/01/projecting-two-mode-networks-onto- weighted-one-mode-networks/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipartite_network_projection

162 I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to Frank Takes of Leiden University for his help in bettering my understanding of the method and providing sources for self-study. If readers are interested in social network analysis, they may wish to visit the SOCNET newsgroup: http://www.insna.org/socnet.html