made to undermine elite families’abilities to build factions by marriage (he decreed
that affianced couples should have a longer period within which to consider a
marriage match arranged by parents, and he made divorce more difficult to obtain).
Women’s social position rose because of enhanced property rights. As Michele
Marrese showed, women’s dowries became legally defined as inheritance, not a
maintenance allowance, women’s rights to control their property and wealth were
legally defended, and women became increasingly involved in the purchase and
transfer of landed property and serfs in their own names. All this was done in part to
keep property within the social class, and clever families used women’s ability to
own land to shield property from the men’s indebtedness and to mitigate the effects
of partible inheritance. Widows and married women acted independently in the
economy. With their husbands away at war, many noble women, like their
seventeenth-century predecessors, became responsible estate managers. One need
only read the memoirs of Princess Catherine Dashkova to see a woman skillfully
deploying her land and wealth over a lifetime of wealth and deprivation. Marrese
concluded that in the eighteenth century women owned about as much land as
men, they behaved as men did in disposing of property and taking care of the
interests of sons and daughters.
CONSOLIDATING THE NOBILITY
With such diversity of wealth as well as identities, the Russian nobility leaned on
time-honored strategies used by aristocracies everywhere to maintain cohesion.
Jonathan Powis has argued that to maintain an elite class over time, just as or
more important than legal charters (England’s Magna Carta 1215, Hungary’s
similar edict of 1222, Poland’s myriad charters to the nobility) were political,
social, and cultural strategies. They included winning preferential or exclusive
access to political power and economic resources, developing social practices of
exclusivity (marriage within the estate, for example) and cultural markers that
distinguished them from other social groups (dress, leisure activities). The Musco-
vite elite deployed many of these strategies, as discussed in Chapter 9, and the
newly self-conscious nobility continued to do so in the eighteenth century.
Across the century the state deferred economically to the nobility by not raising
the poll tax between 1724 and 1796 (at which point inflation dulled the impact of
the raise), despite mounting statefinancial burdens. As we have seen, landlords
steadily raised quitrent and service exactions on serfs, faster than did the state on its
peasants. Eighteenth-century rulers further bolstered the nobility between 1740
and 1801 by bestowing more than a million male peasants with their families on
nobles. Empresses Anna and Elizabeth assiduously cemented noble exclusivity in
ownership of land and serfs in decrees of 1730, 1743, 1746, 1754, 1758, 1760.
(There was some slippage here: noblemen stood in as front men for merchants,
raznochintsy, and even serfs to purchase land and labor.) Across the century nobles
squeezed merchants out of economic opportunity or impinged on merchants’
traditional roles in trade and manufacturing. Between 1721 and 1762 merchants
432 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801