Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762-1796

by John P. LeDonne

Overview

This book explores thoroughly the reforms of Russian administration from 1775 to 1785, this work also reaches beyond Catherine's reign to challenge established opinions on the nature of eighteenth-century Russian government and the autocracy of the tsars.

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691612102
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Studies of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University , #665
Pages:	428
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.90(d)

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Ruling Russia

Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762â"1796

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By John P. Ledonne

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05425-4

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CHAPTER 1

PART I

THE SETTING

It is not as easy as you think ... [to see your will fulfilled]. In the first place, my orders would not be carried out unless they were the kind of orders which could be carried out; you know with what prudence and circumspection I act in the promulgation of my laws. I examine the circumstances, I take advice, I consult the enlightened part of the people, and in this way I find out what sort of effect my laws will have. And when I am already convinced, in advance, of general approval, I issue my orders, and have the pleasure of observing what you call blind obedience. And that is the foundation of unlimited power. But believe me, they would not obey blindly were orders not adopted to customs, to the opinion of the people, and were I to follow only my own wishes, without thinking of the consequences. In the second place, you delude yourself if you think that everything is done only to gratify me. On the contrary, it is I who must seek to oblige everyone, according to his deserts, merits, tastes, and habits; ... it is much easier to please everyone than to get everyone to please you.

Catherine's Remarks
TO HER Secretary, V. Popov.
Quoted in N. Shil'der,
Imperator Aleksandr I,
vol. I, 2 79-280.

THE ISSUES

Our understanding of a given historical situation is often clouded by the indiscriminate use of the troublesome concepts of class, ruling class, state, and bureaucracy. On the one hand, the social sciences need definitions expressing the inner simplicity of a complex aggregate of phenomena; on the other, the flow of history keeps creating original combinations that escape deciphering. The result is that definitions often become rigid constructs unable to encompass the wealth and variety of social relationships; and the attempt to adapt them to changing conditions threatens to destroy their consistency and to render them unrecognizable. Therefore, the meaning of terms to be used in this study of a historical period must be clearly stated at the outset.

In a preindustrial society such as Russia, a social class was a distinct group occupying a definite position in the social hierarchy, with a specific function to fulfill, and with a consciousness of its peculiar status. Function, consciousness, and status were thus fundamental criteria. Social and economic functions still served a narrow spectrum of stable needs and conferred a status rigidly defined in accordance with the system of values characteristic of that society. But the highest — because the most responsible and the most comprehensive — function was the political, by which is meant setting the goals which a human collectivity pursued at a given time; working out programs of action to reach them (in which fiscal considerations are of the utmost importance); settling disputes in ways acceptable to maintain the social compact; and protecting the peace against attacks on the core of the ideological consensus and the security of individuals.

If every social function important enough to attract a substantial group capable of developing a consciousness of its separateness and insistent upon the creation of privileges to define and protect it generated a social class, it follows that the exercise of political responsibilities had to be vested in a political class. What distinguished a preindustrial society was the monopoly of the political function by the ruling class, and the sharper division separating the constituent classes of that society, imbedded in a vertical structure governed by the principle of strict social hierarchy. The ruling class, then, embodied in its totality the moral unity of a definite human collectivity; it harmonized diversified interests and resolved group conflicts. And the ultimate justification of its existence was protection of the collectivity against external danger.

The ruling class was not a caste founded upon the principle of religious or racial exclusiveness, nor an army of occupation, alien to the society in which it operated. It possessed a social constitution by which it formulated the social relationships between its constituent elements and coopted new members; it worked out a political constitution by which it apportioned political responsibilities at various levels; and it sought ways to define the character of its symbiosis with the rest of society.

If, as Raymond Aron suggests, the term "ruling class" is not suitable to describe the political class of a modern society, where a small group of elites share the political function, it is eminently relevant to the analysis of a preindustrial society. It does not follow that in such a society the ruling class was so homogeneous that its constituent parts could not be distinguished. The process of modernization, by diversifying socio-economic functions, dislocates the traditional hierarchy, creates free-floating status groups with a claim to a share in the political function and enough power to enforce their claims, and ultimately produces a ruling class in which the autonomy of each constituent group becomes so strong as to end the pretense of homogeneity. At an earlier time, however, the small size of the ruling class in relation to the rest of society, coupled with its monopoly of the political function and the consciousness of its exclusive privileges, still imposed a unity overriding every tendency to internal differentiation.

The Russian ruling class, which reached maturity in the reign of Catherine, had its origin in the massive social revolution engineered by the policies of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century. A new class of "servitors," supporters of an assertive ruling house against the political claims of certain well-established aristocratic families, was consolidated by the political disintegration of the Times of Troubles and the initial weakness of the new Romanov dynasty. With the passage of time the structure of this new ruling class came to resemble a cone. At the top stood the Romanov house, itself the product of that same social revolution which engendered the ruling class. Tsars continued until the eighteenth century to marry native members of that class, a practice which the keeping of a favorite by the eighteenth-century empresses resembled in a slightly different form. By the 1750s a top stratum of the ruling class had crystallized, consisting of the Naryshkins, the Saltykovs, the Golitsyns, and the Vorontsovs, among others, together with their own related families, extremely stable from one generation to another, whose supremacy was unchallengeable short of a political revolution directed against the ruling house itself.

Ranking just below this top leadership and gathered as it were in a circle around it stood the officer corps, i.e., those whose occupation embodied the very function that defined the ruling class, the defense of the collectivity against foreign (and domestic) enemies. The importance of this first sub-group was capital. In no other country perhaps had the sense of insecurity been so pervasive as in Russia, where national unity was achieved against odds that seemed overwhelming on more than one occasion, and where the threat of a mobile frontier was coupled with the tantalizing challenge of the proximate sea. The officer corps was, to use Suzanne Keller's term in a different context, a strategic elite within the ruling class, wielding an influence extending far beyond the administration of the army and military planning. Officers did not constitute a technical corps but a political association which placed its members at all levels of responsibility. Conversely, even those members of the ruling class who did not make the army a career received their education in the Cadet Corps, from which they graduated to serve their stint in the army, then retired after receiving what amounted to a certificate of admission to the social core of the ruling class. Count Langeron, who left us such interesting memoirs on the composition of the Russian army, emphasized this predominantly social and political character of the officer corps. They were "servitors" indeed, but servitors who set the tone and defined the options of political life.

There were three more constituent groups within the ruling class, of inferior status but gravitating around the core with which they were inextricably bound. One consisted of those nobles — for it must be obvious that by ruling class is meant the dvorianstvo — who did not serve either in the army or the civil service but chose to remain on their estates. They belonged to the ruling class by right and had inherited their status, but they did not take part in the political responsibilities of their class, unless the public power they exercised as private individuals over their peasants be looked upon as a political activity. They were the reserve of the ruling class, a pool from which officers were selected whenever a nobleman chose to enter the wider world. Another subgroup included those who served exclusively in the civil service. Few hereditary nobles still chose that path in the eighteenth century, and this group consisted of men whose origin was diverse and who had entered the ruling class by a process of cooptation whenever the demand rose for this essentially secretarial personnel. The last group does not quite fit in the conical structure of concentric circles arranged in order of decreasing status because its members are found everywhere. It consisted of members of the ruling classes of the various borderlands — Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, and the tribal leadership of Turkic hordes along the southeastern and Siberian borders. They were found at court as favorites, in the officer corps, where they were initiated into the social and the religious world of the Great Russian ruling class, and they were leaders in their native territories; probably few had yet joined the secretarial staff, and this chiefly among the interpreters.

The internal dynamism of the ruling class was generated by radial channels of influence, intertwined and overlapping, originating at the very top of the cone or anywhere below it. These channels fostered social mobility by creating incentives: ruling families, including the Romanov house, built parties and cliques to strengthen their hand in the division of the spoils; subordinate families sought upward mobility by a more active participation in the politics of their class. The central location of Moscow, the fusion of ethnicity and religion, the geographical uniformity of central Russia and the unstable frontier surrounding it generated centripetal forces favoring leadership and imposing obedience. The Russian nobility, as Helmut Rüss has shown in a very suggestive book, never was provincial and always displayed a strong anti-regionalist bias. Irresistibly drawn toward Moscow, its field of action was the entire national territory and its political commitment a total one. The scattering of its properties all over central Russia, its lack of attachment to particular communities, was the reverse side of an intense commitment to the unity of the Russian land and to the integrity of its leadership.

The ruling class, then, was not a completely homogeneous body, socially, culturally, or materially. A wide chasm separated the great lord at Court from the petty noble without means, the officer who knew from his travels the wide expanse of the Russian land — not to mention the allurements of Poland and the dangers of the Turkish frontier — from the hidebound landowner on some distant estate in the interior. The crucial factor, however, was not the inevitable gradation of status within such a ruling class, but the overwhelming consciousness of its exclusive monopoly over the exercise of the political function and of its exclusive privilege in the ownership of peasant labor to turn into wealth the possession of land. This alone justifies calling the Russian nobility a ruling class.

What gave a fundamental unity to the two and a half centuries stretching from the accession of the Romanov dynasty to the reign of Alexander II was the existence of serfdom. It kept expanding against a seemingly contradictory background of gradual economic development and rising national power, reached its apogee in the reign of Catherine, then receded during the first fifty years of the nineteenth century. In such an overwhelmingly agrarian socioeconomic order the range of rewards was very narrow. The possession of money still depended in most cases on the ownership of land and of peasants to till it, peasants bound to a master as the guarantee of his income. "The unification of the elite is inseparable from the concentration of all economic power in its hands," and the history of the period witnessed the expansion of the ruling class as the chief beneficiary of serfdom. The old system of conditional tenure by which the ruling house had sought to bind its supporters gradually but inexorably gave way to full ownership, as the ruling house abandoned its age-old claims to the ownership of all the land in favor of a system of property law based on the marketability of land. The progress of the idea that landed property, once distributed from the pool of state lands as a reward for services, might remain in the family of the original beneficiary reflected the growing strength of the landed nobility as a whole vis-à-vis the presumptive claims of the ruling house. It was certainly no coincidence that the first massive grants of land in full ownership took place in 1610 and 1612, when insecure rulers were seeking political support, and that the almost complete disappearance of conditional tenure in the heart of central Russia by the end of the seventeenth century ran parallel to the consolidation of the Romanov dynasty. Against such a background Peter the Great's order of 1714, abolishing the distinction between conditional and hereditary tenure, i.e., allowing the latter to supersede the former, merely gave legislative sanction to a fait accompli.

The growth of landownership paralleled with the extension of serfdom. Veselovskii has described in masterful fashion how over some twenty-five years the peasants' right to move was gradually restricted and how it would take another fifty years (until the Code of 1649) before the peasants lost their illusion that the prohibition was only temporary. The extension of serfdom reached its completion in the reign of Catherine, in the neat and almost even division of the peasant world between the serfs of private landowners and all others, including those of the ruling house. Its victory was so complete, even if it soon proved to have been a Pyrrhic one, that serfdom was not a negotiable issue in the eighteenth century. It was the social creed of the ruling class and the cement of its unity. Not all members of that class owned serfs, it is true, but all enjoyed the prescriptive right to acquire them if the opportunity presented itself. In the absence of other rewards, those who did not or could not afford to own serfs were compelled to participate directly in the exercise of the political function. They received an income in the form of a salary, together with the more important perquisites resulting from bribery and extortion, officially discouraged but unofficially taken for granted. Although that salary had the same source as the landowners' income: taxes levied upon either all peasants (the capitation) or upon the so-called state peasants kept, so to speak, in trust for the needs of the ruling class (the quitrent), the ownership of land and peasants sustained the existence of a subgroup within the ruling class characterized by a more exalted class consciousness and with interests that did not always coincide with those of their non-possessing brethren. However, despite differences in the origin of the constituent groups making up the ruling class and in their status within it, there existed a fundamental unity on essentials: the social order was inviolable; serfdom and the ruling class were interdependent; and social membership in the ruling class gave power to use public resources for private purposes.

That the ruling class was not a caste implies that it was open to outsiders when circumstances required. The core could always draw upon the landowners to rejuvenate its ranks and replace casualties, but demand and supply were not always in equal relation. As Russia's international prominence rose and the responsibilities of its ruling class widened, the demand for additional members grew accordingly. Thus, there was constantly at work what Mosca has called the "democratic tendency" by which a ruling class replenishes itself from the social classes whose status is closest to its own, a tendency most likely to prevail in unsettled times and in periods of economic expansion. The complaint of Vasilii Tatishchev in the 1730s and of Mikhail Shcherbatov in the 1760s against the influx of outsiders into the nobility is adequate testimony of the existence of social mobility and of the disquiet of the socially conservative at this incipient threat to the relative homogeneity of the ruling class.

The main channel of access to the ruling class was the army, and the criterion was either administrative talent, valor in battle, or crass favoritism. The soldiers and non-commissioned officers constituted an inexhaustible reserve of men who already belonged to the structure of power since the army was the coercive arm of the ruling class. Those who were already hereditary members and served in the ranks suffered no social disability and were admitted into the officer corps as a matter of course. The others had to wait until they were coopted by army and corps commanders or the College of War, but even then they were assigned to positions that were not part of the command hierarchy of the officer corps, such as adjutants, quartermasters, and law clerks (auditory) of the courts-martial. 11 Yet, cooptation into the officer corps made them ipso facto hereditary members of the ruling class. The inferior status of those who entered by cooptation into the secretarial staff resulted from the fact that these men were admitted only for their lifetime and did not bequeath their status to their children (except in rare instances, when they were promoted to positions of considerable responsibility). Preference was given to sons of clergy, merchants, and others who belonged to that intermediate zone separating the ruling class from the great mass of Russians required to pay the capitation, that badge of social inferiority. Thus access to the social core of the ruling class required a stage of apprenticeship, either in the army or in the menial tasks of that class. Exceptions only confirmed the rule. Direct access to the core from the merchant class or even the peasantry was possible. The soldiers who served in the Life Company that supported Elizabeth on that fateful night of November 1741 became hereditary noblemen. Dispensing ranks among merchants' sons who served pro forma in the Guard seems to have become an ordinary phenomenon bordering on scandal in the reign of Catherine.11 On the whole, however, access to the ruling class was not a matter of right, but a social privilege granted by cooptation for subjective or political reasons.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Preface, pg. vii
• Table Of Contents, pg. xi
• Abbreviations, pg. xv
• Chapter I. The Issues, pg. 3
• Chapter II. The Imperial Government, 1762-1774, pg. 23
• Chapter III. The Imperial Government, 1774-796, pg. 57
• Chapter I. Police Organization, pg. 85
• Chapter II. The Jurisdiction Of The Police, pg. 102
• Chapter III. The Powers Of The Police, pg. 123
• Chapter I. Judicial Organization, pg. 145
• Chapter II. Judicial Procedure, pg. 166
• Chapter III. Punishments, pg. 184
• Chapter I. Financial Agencies, pg. 205
• Chapter II. The Expenditure Budget, pg. 226
• Chapter III. The Revenue Budget, pg. 245
• Chapter I. Introduction, pg. 269
• Chapter II. The Eastern Borderlands, pg. 277
• Chapter III. The Southern Borderlands, pg. 291
• Chapter IV. The Western Borderlands, pg. 316
• Conclusion, pg. 343
• Appendices, pg. 355
• Glossary, pg. 369
• Bibliography, pg. 371
• Index, pg. 405