Muscovite society had always known people who escapedfixed social statuses
despite the state’s efforts to record and tax them; sources call them“wandering
people”(guliashchie)or“people of various ranks”(liudi raznykh chinov). These
generally were poor vagrants. By the early eighteenth century a new designation was
becoming current, initially derogatory but ultimately official—raznochintsy(people
of“various social statuses”). Documents from as early as 1701 and 1718 use the
term to refer to lower class people not registered in taxpaying communes or not
members of the clerical estate.Raznochintsygenerally avoided the poll tax since they
hailed from non-taxed groups. They could be literate sons of clergy, often semin-
arians; they were civil servants who did not reach ennobling ranks in the Table of
Ranks; they were children of people who had achieved personal, not hereditary,
nobility. Retired soldiers, soldiers’wives, and soldiers’sons alsofit here, although
they were technically in a social/military category of their own; soldiers’sons could
serve in the army or do artisanal or bureaucratic work needed by regiments.
Soldiers’wives were in a much more difficult situation; technically“free,”as Elise
Wirtschafter has discussed, their separation from commune and community gen-
erally condemned them to poverty, labor in manufacturing, or even prostitution.
Eveniasakpayers in Siberia found the term applied to them. But the term became
particularly appropriate for the increasing number of educated non-nobles in all
walks of life: traveling traders, shop assistants and laborers, successful merchants,
university professors, and artists. Never formally legally defined, the term was
nevertheless used in the 1767Instruction. At the time of thefirst poll tax (1719)
raznochintsyconstituted 1.6 percent of the population, and grew to 2.6 percent by
1795, as noted in Chapter 17.
Even small towns reflected such social change: Aleksander Kamenskii found a
small number of raznochintsy in early eighteenth-century Bezhetsk, including
peasants and landless peasants (bobyli) who had moved from local monastic villages,
retired soldiers and their widows, retired officials and children of clerics, all of
whom sought employment and sustenance by working for townsmen or setting up
in trade. A particularly fertilefield for such social transformation was opened up by
cultural Europeanization. Even though schools were founded for nobles (Cadet
Schools and other regimental schools) and noble families tutored at home and
educated their sons abroad, education was by no means limited to the nobility.
Peter I’s vocational schools produced engineers and surveyors. Founded by Empress
Elizabeth in 1757, the Academy of Arts offered a rigorous training program for
artists, greatly in demand by the rulers’court and courts of wealthy nobles, along
with musicians, singers, theatrical troupes, architects, poets, and panegyricists.
From the mid-eighteenth century and particularly with Catherine II’s patronage
of the Enlightenment, venues for literary publication and theatrical presentations
proliferated.
While many of Russia’s literary leaders—Aleksandr Sumarokov, Denis Fonvizin,
Alexander Radishchev—and most of the intellectuals in the capitals and provincial
centers were noblemen, their numbers were enriched by many people who tran-
scended their social categories of birth. Russia’s great poet and theorist of language
and versification, V. K. Trediakovskii (1703–69), was born the son of a priest in
376 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801