17
Soslovie, Serfs, and Society on the Move
The development of society in the Russian empire in the eighteenth century is full
of contradictions. On the one hand, at a time when estate structures in Europe were
weakening, the Russian state was consciously creating privileged social estates.
Starting in Peter I’s reign, the poll taxfixed people into a small number of social
categories, the better to tax them; mass recruitment into the army created a tax-free
but socially vulnerable status of“soldier”and soldier’s children; religious reform
started a process of forging a hereditary clerical estate; the Table of Ranks and urban
reform planted seeds of a self-conscious nobility and bourgeoisie. Catherine II’s
charters of 1785 solidified the corporate status of each of these groups. By the
end of the eighteenth century the wordsoslovie, interpreted variously as“order”or
“estate,”was in use to define most, but not all, of the empire’s social groupings in
terms of their service obligations, taxation status, place of residence, community of
association, and mobility.
On the other hand, the century’s explosive change destabilized legal categories.
Imperial expansion brought dozens of groups with unique ethnic, class, or religious
status. Demographic growth and a booming economy pushed everyone into trade
and production, crossing the boundaries ofsoslovie—serfs and state peasants traded,
merchants purchased serfs through noble intermediaries, nobles invested in mines
and factories. As Alison Smith chronicles, some formally petitioned to join a new
soslovie, while most simply seized opportunity where they found it. Historians have
labored over what to make of these contradictions: didsosloviematter? Were
sosloviiathe equivalent of European“estates”? Did grouping society bysoslovie
enhance cohesion or constrain change?
Research in social and cultural history, microhistory, local and regional history,
and other approaches that look behind grand paradigms to lived experience has
revealed tremendousfluidity in society and identity in the early modern Russian
empire. Legal categories and recognized groups proliferated: noble, merchant and
clergy, soldier, peasant and serf,iasakpayer, Baltic Junker, Cossack, German
colonizer, Indian and Bukharan merchants. But even within these social groups,
life circumstances gave individuals tremendous diversity—region, ethnicity, reli-
gion, economic activity. Not all peasants, not all serfs, not all townsmen, were alike.
Often economic opportunity and education counted more than legal category:
provincial gentry had more in common with a well-educated local merchant than
with a more impoverished nobleman, for example. We will explore Russia’s
eighteenth-century social diversity in this and the next chapter, beginning with
collective population change across the empire.