Prosperity and Precarity in Imperial Russia's Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This article looks at four families living in and around the small town of Gatchina, not far from St Petersburg, Russia, in the long nineteenth century. Their family histories are recreated from archival files based in tsarist Russia's system of social estates (soslovie), supplemented by city directories, newspapers, and many other sources. Taken together, the four family histories expand our understanding of tsarist Russia's middle classes in two ways. First, they highlight the role that women played in families as economic actors and as agents of their own destiny. Second, they demonstrate the role that social mobility did and did not play in maintaining families across the long nineteenth century. In addition, they demonstrate some of the ways in which the Russian empire's experience of the nineteenth century differed from a standard Eurocentric narrative, in particular in the way that ‘archaic’ and ‘modern’ worlds existed simultaneously.