21. Nobility, Culture, and Intellectual Life
The eighteenth century has been called the“golden age of the nobility.”But who
were Russia’s nobles? Like many imperial elites, Russia’s noble estate was open,
porous, and highly diverse. After all, Peter I founded it with a Table of Ranks that
offered nobility to anyone who earned his way up the ranks. Although this might
seem inimical to the social exclusivity that nobility promises, it is a tension that
elites constantly negotiate. Circulation of elites always happens—families die out,
dynasties change, states expand, new skills are needed in government. In order to
endure, an elite has to establish solidarity and create an identity. This challenge for
Russia’s nobility was all the more steep because of the fast pace of social and
economic change in the century when it was created and because of what might be
called the amorphousness of Russia’s social categories.
Elise Wirtschafter has pointed out the deep ambiguity in defining the nobility in
eighteenth-century Russia. Few of the attributes of nobility in Russia were truly
exclusive to that class. Freedom from the poll tax was a cardinal privilege, but not
exclusive to nobles—merchants, clergy, some non-noble military servicemen, some
bureaucrats andraznochintsywere also free of it. Meanwhile, alongside the nobility
in this century an educated elite of non-noble birth emerged. The nobility’s claim
to exclusive ownership of land and serfs was earned only in the mid-eighteenth
century, and often honored in the breach. And a man who worked his whole life in
the civil service, earning hereditary nobility but never owning land or serfs, was
equally a nobleman. Only with the Charter of 1785 were registers of noblemen
established, but enforcement mechanisms for claims to nobility were weak there-
after and this class was always dynamic. Individuals entered it by service up the
ranks and appointment by the ruler, and they left it due to impoverishment or
disgrace. And the state, even as it freed the nobility from mandatory service, always
encouraged service to justify noble privileges.
Faced with such diversity, Russia’s nobility forged cohesion around political and
economic privileges, but primarily around culture. Over the eighteenth century the
nobility was marked by its Europeanized dress, habits of daily life, education,
creative expression and philosophical concerns. The culture which they embraced
is loosely called Enlightenment, but Elise Wirtschafter wisely reminds us that there
were many Enlightenments in eighteenth-century Europe, not simply the familiar
radical French one. Each culture encountering the Enlightenment shaped its
preoccupations with rational thought, universal values, open-mindedness tofit
existing value systems. Thus religious Enlightenment developed across Europe, a
principled effort to conjoin spiritual belief (revelation, dogma) with scientific