Inspired by populationism and natural law, in principle she considered revising
serfdom, in an attempt to create a prosperous and productive peasantry. Her
Instructionof 1767 decried noblemen“who, having seldom or never been upon
[their] Estates,”levy taxes that force peasants to leave villages to work and peddle,
diminishing population and agriculture. She encouraged the Free Economic Soci-
ety to discuss the institution of serfdom and to publish in 1768 a winning essay that
argued for its abolition; in the 1780s she commissioned a“draft”charter for the
state peasantry that included legal status, property rights, and governing institu-
tions, analogous to those granted to townsmen in 1785. The draft was never
promulgated, perhaps anticipating that it would inspire revolt among serfs, just as
the 1762 emancipation of the nobility had raised serfs’hopes for emancipation.
Noble attitudes, however, diverged from the Empress’s abstract Enlightenment
theory. Although they did not, as Colum Leckey describes, evolve a coherent
argument against abolition (as did American slaveholders), their views were simi-
larly patrimonial. To the extent that public discussion of the agrarian economy was
supported in the consciously apoliticalTrudyof the Free Economic Society, in
theater and other forums, Russian noblemen presented themselves as bringing a
civilizing mission to their serfs as enlightened seigneurs. Theyfloated programs for
gradual improvement in agrarian techniques, village culture, and peasant morality,
all to be accomplished within the time-honored bounds of serfdom. Only noble-
man Alexander Radishchev condemned serfdom as a violation of human rights, and
his book (published a year after the French Revolution) proved too radical for
Catherine II; Radishchev paid the price of Siberian exile. Serfdom was not ended
until advisors in the 1850s convinced Nicholas I and Alexander II of the economic
and military value of abolition, which occurred in 1861. In the eighteenth century
lord and peasant, peasant and state, worked within this framework tofind mobility
and opportunity in the interstices.
This century’s social mobility certainly complicates the concept ofsoslovie.
Certainly it mattered in day-to-day life—it determined taxation status, juridical
venue, administrative dependence, service obligations, and mobility. It opened
privileges to nobles and merchants and constrained the life chances of urban and
rural taxpayers. Butsoslovieboundaries were also penetrable: merchants aspired to
rise into the nobility, runaway peasants became landholding garrison troops.
Soslovie boundaries were also disregarded: peasants and nobles, Cossacks and
iasakpayers infringed on townsmen’s monopoly on trade. Social dynamism tran-
scended the structuring weight of formal legal categories to sustain tremendous
economic growth in this century.
Sosloviedefinitions became more sharply developed in the nineteenth century
and some argue that this approach to society helped Russia develop into what might
theoretically be called a“corporate society,”composed of institutions, groups, and
social strata directly connected to the state and more socially cohesive. But that was
yet to come. In the eighteenth century other attributes shaped individual and
collective identity: ethnicity, language, religion, region, political economy. Such
social cohesion as the empire possessed came from individuals’and groups’direct,
vertical relationships to the center around service, taxation, the law, and
372 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801