This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Politics without poleis emancipation and the gentry in blacksoil Russia (Tambov, 1858 – 1881) Regkoukos, George Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). 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Oct. 2021 1 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 2 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 4 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] 6 Spelling, Romanisation and Dates I have used UK spelling. 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