State Power, Social Life, and Russian Nobles in the 18th Century

Abstract

The Europeanized elite, the Russian nobility, the provincial nobility, the court nobility, elite and lesser nobles, hereditary and service nobles, landowning and landless nobles, educated society (obshchestvo or publika), and “people of various ranks” (raznochintsy)—these familiar terms illustrate the multiplicity of social realities that defined Russia’s educated and service classes in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Historians and literary scholars long have understood that the Russian elite cannot be equated solely with the service and/or landowning nobilities. Merchants and educated non-noble servicemen, though bounded by institutions such as serfdom and the Petrine Table of Ranks, also aspired to the legal and cultural status of hereditary noble. Whatever the economic circumstances and cultural accretions attained by upwardly mobile individuals, hereditary nobility writ large remained the primary embodiment of the state-initiated project of Europeanization. The significant number of unrequited claimants to noble status illustrates the dynamics of aspiration: 560 out of 1,000 petitioners seeking to enter military service with noble rights in 1820; 3,215 petitioners seeking confirmation of noble status by the Ministry of Justice in 1845 (compared to 3,332 who were