476 Chapter XX
ations. Only “nobles” could own rural estates and serfs; or, conversely, all persons
qualified to own them were considered “noble.” Nobles formed a larger proportion
of the population than in Western Europe, a fact which carried with it numerous
corollaries; the noble estate included both great magnates and a mass of lesser gen-
try; the latter were not considered by West European noblemen as their equals; and
in Eastern Europe the noble class greatly outweighed and overshadowed the bour-
geoisie. Town and country lived under separate legal institutions. Townspeople, no-
bles, and peasants possessed different kinds of property and different rights, and
were subject to different taxes and obligations. A certain qualitative difference be-
tween town and country, characteristic of all Europe before the “bourgeois” revolu-
tion, was especially accentuated everywhere in Eastern Europe by these fundamen-
tal social and legal arrangements. Where, in addition, town and country were also of
different language, the difference or indeed the antagonism became even more pro-
nounced. Nobility, peasantry, and bourgeoisie constituted different social classes of
an obvious kind—known to all, self- perpetuating, each living to itself, and un-
changeable. There was little basis for cooperation or even communication between
them. The possibility of change in a West- European direction, “revolutionary” or
otherwise, was not very great in a world where gentleman and burgher were strang-
ers to each other, yet both regarded the peasant as a kind of brute.
Perhaps because of the lack of homogeneity within the society, or the presence
of deep estrangements, two other kinds of people took on attributes of a social
class—kinds not unknown in the West but with their peculiarities heightened in
the East—the bureaucracy and the intelligentsia. Both were mainly recruited from
the nobility, but occasionally from townsmen. Except within the shrinking con-
fines of Poland, where the reverse was true, the East European monarchies were
highly bureaucratic. The Romanov, Hapsburg, and Hohenzollern systems had been
put together, partly indeed by war, but largely by élites of government officials, who
characteristically had no local roots, were intolerant of local interests, and felt that
progress was to be accomplished by working against, not with, the natural inclina-
tions of the peoples over whom they were placed. Since local interests almost al-
ways meant the interests of serf- owning nobles, who were usually very impatient
of government, this bureaucratic attitude was not without foundation. Educated
circles shared in the same psychology. Heavily dependent on foreign books, espe-
cially French, to some degree English (and in the Slavic world German books had
the same effect), conscious of a certain superiority of other countries over their
own (or consciously concerned to deny it), troubled in their own sense of rooted-
ness or identity, lacking respect for their own people and their own society, some-
times working as employees of government, sometimes outside the government
but very critical of its operations, these educated circles of Eastern Europe were
developing into the group for which Russians in the following century coined the
word intelligentsia. Bureaucracy and intelligentsia were alike in that they drew
their strength not from below but from above or from outside; not from having a
mass of followers but from representing authority, the authority of a monarch, or
of a doctrine. Both had the psychology of an elite or a vanguard; they knew better
than anyone else what was good for the country, and were not disinclined to im-
pose their ideas.