Birth of the Military Intelligentsia 233
Paul, and then by the brutal manner in which it was terminated in the coup
d'etat of 1 l March 1801-in which more officers were involved than had been
the case in any of the several eighteenth-century 'palace revolutions'.
Peter TIT'.c: 'ch:irtf'r of liberties' (1762) was certainly a landmark in the
history of the dvoryanstvo, but its impact should not be exaggerated. The state
took measures to protect its interests and to ensure a continued supply~
officers.^4 As two recent writers put it, 'the hallowed tradition of a servic
nobility ... , by now crumbling in the West, had been upheld in Russia' ·
Indeed, the problem for the authorities was not a shortfall but rather an over·
abundance of young men with high ambitions but poor qualifications for posi-
tions of command. This was the reason for the presence of large numbers of/
supernumeraries (sverkhkomplektnye), especially in the guards or in other
favoured regiments. These men usually stayed at home until an opportunit~'
arose for them to secure military employment, although some actually followed
their units into the field in the hope of winning preferment more quickly.
When casualties were heavy, as they were during the Napoleonic Wars, the
pressure became less acute.
The existence of supernumeraries, and also the official practice of maintain-
ing the armed forces below establishment strength in peacetime-at a level
which was not made public-make it difficult to ascertain just how large a pro-
portion of dvoryane continued to serve after 1762. One cannot simply set the
number of officer vacancies in the shtaty against the figure for male noblemen
(recently put ar 108,000, of all age~. in 1782).^6 W. Pintner believes it to have
been a mere 27 per cent (including civil servants) in 1800, but agrees that his
estimate needs refinement.^7 We need to know the length of time served, at
various junctures, by nobles in different income groups. The proportion of
servitors was certainly significant, and must have been greater among the mass
of impoverished gentry than among the (relatively few) aristocrats. The latter
might don uniform largely for reasons of social prestige, but for the former
state service was almost a sine qua non. It was the only way of earning a living
and supporting one's family in conditions markedly superior to those of one's
serfs. For such men the right to apply for discharge papers-which applied
only in peacetime and was beset by wearisome bureaucratic formalities-seems
to have been important less for material than for psychological reasons. It was
a symbol of gentry privilege vis-a-vis commoners, to whom it was denied,
rather than a tangible opportunity. Unless such officers or NCOs were wounded
or fell sick, sheer economic necessity obliged them to soldier on until they had
completed the regulation term of 25 years. This term had been set by a decree
(^4) PSZ xv. 11444 (18 Feb. 1762); Kalachov, Materialy, i. 38; Dukes, Catherine and Nobility,
pp. 42-5; Jones, Emancipation, pp. 27-34, 277; Raeff, 'Peter III', pp. 1291-4; Rexhauser, Besitz-
verhtiltnisse, p. 50.
s Karnendrowsky and Griffiths, 'Trading Nobility', p. 217.
6 Kabuzan and Troitsky, 'lzmeneniya', p. 158.
7 Pintner, •Russia as a Great Power', p. 35.