128 The Warrior Tsar. 1689-1725
:he civil branch, they suffered diminished prestige and were nevertheless
regimented on military lines. Although civil (and court) service was now for
the first time plainly differentiated from that in the armed forces, which was
a sign of prugrt::l~ Lowafds the creation of a modern bure:iucr:!cy, much cf the
:>Id Muscovite spirit survived. Until 1762/1785 Russian noblemen still lacked
any legal definition of their role in society or of their rights. They remained
:l.ependants, servitors, constantly at the beck and call of their sovereign or his
favourites. For all the Table of Ranks' pedantic insistence on regularity when
filling vacancies, those on whom the supreme authority temporarily devolved
::ould quite legitimately staff posts with their own proteges, build up patronage
networks, and so turn the system to their advantage. In a sense this was even
easier than it had been before, since the administration was now more cen-
tralized.
On the surface the Table seems to have driven the last nails into the coffin of
mestnichestvo, but iri fact it allowed it to continue in new guis~. The na'ive old-
fashioned rivalry between genealogically-conscious clansmen over precedence
at official functions gave way in the eighteenth century-to a more sinister life-
and-death struggle between highly rank-and status-conscious officers or offic-
ials over jobs, social privileges, and all the other bounties that an omnipotent
Autocrat could confer. This was progress of a kind, perhaps, but it was more
permutation than innovation. European influences affected _the elite's life-
style-its language, manners, tastes, and social conduct-but thesdexternals
did not greatly change the substance. Its role· in society had undergone little
improvement. On the contrary: the victory of Petrine absolutism obstructed
the process of moral and political maturation on which the privileged classes
had embarked in the late seventeenth century. It delayed for fifty years or so
the ultimately inevitable weakening of the ties that bound the nobility to the
state.
For that state now acquired powerful new instruments of control over those
who, by virtue of their Western-style education and exposure to an alien
environment, might be tempted to develop aspirations towards autonomous
thought. It was able to play on the petty jealousies that kept its functionaries
divided, whether these rivalries were based on family connections, economic
differences, or segregation by rank. As in an earlier age, it benefited from the
amorphousness of the servitor class, and could take action to prevent its
members from coalescing against it. In this way the absolutist state preserved
its traditional pre-eminence over society.
Last but not least, the autocracy now possessed a powerful means of physical
coercion in the shape of the new standing army-a force with which most
members of the elite at least had close connections, if indeed they did not
actually belong to it. This body of men-the largest in Europe, even if not the
best trained-was kept at a high degree of readiness with a view to possible
internal emergencies as well as international conflicts. One Western historian
recently noted: 'as war became a perpetual activity of the Russian state, so did
wang
(Wang)
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