knowledge, critical thinking, and freedom of conscience. It was this approach that
characterized much of what we see as Enlightenment thought in Russia—a simul-
taneously Christian and Enlightenment focus on the“dignity and perfectibility of
the individual”and a moral approach to social and political questions. In this
educated nobles were joined by non-nobles (raznochintsy), forging an“intellectual
life”that joined Russia with the diverse concerns of the Republic of Letters across
the continent.
AN OPEN IMPERIAL NOBILITY
Before the eighteenth century Russia certainly had an elite, but it did not have a
nobility, in the sense of a self-conscious and legally privileged social estate. Peter I
introduced that powerful idea. Perhaps from association with Europeans in his
youth, certainly from his travels in Europe’s leading economic and political powers
(Netherlands, England, Prussia, Paris, Vienna), Peter learned the value of inter-
mediary social groups—nobilities, bourgeoisies, town councils, clergy, notaries,
lawyers, and university professoriate. These groups, defined by legal privileges and/
or de facto by centuries of corporate tradition, provided social leadership for
absolutist, reforming rulers to push state-building projects of the sort Peter envi-
sioned for Russia. Peter brought this idea to Russia: he declared himself“first
servant of the state”and urged his military men and bureaucrats to serve“the
common good”and to embrace change, not tradition. As Marc Raeff has pointed
out, however, Russia was weak on such corporate bodies—it had no independent
municipalities, no privileged nobility, no professional notarial, lawyerly, or schol-
arly classes. The corporate groups that it did have—Ukrainian, Don and Iaik
Cossacks, Old Believers—were not nationwide in scope nor necessarily oriented
towards the state’s interests. Peter, then, set out to create such corporate bodies. He
tried unsuccessfully in three urban reforms to forge an autonomous urban class, but
succeeded with the nobility.
From the start of his reign Peter I readily promoted capable individuals from any
social background, but primarily relied on the existing military elite—boyars and
gentry—and bureaucratic class as the core of his new noble elite. These social
groups, after all, had been hearing ideas of the“common good”and the virtue of
public service since the 1680s from Ukrainian-educated clerics at court. Peter
worked to institutionalize the elite’s sense of self with status and privileges: he
gave them security of landholding in 1714 by equating service tenure land (po-
mest’e) with hereditary; he provided salaries for service; he maintained their tax-free
status by exempting them from the poll tax in 1718. Significantly, he introduced
the concept of“nobility”in 1722 in the context of defining obligations of service.
The Table of Ranks is replete with a tension between privileged noble status and
access by service. It defined the highest ranks in the military, civil, and imperial
court services that constituted the state’s elite, eradicating the old Muscovite status
division between civil and military service and opening up status and its privileges
to anyone who achieved these high ranks. The Table was composed of three ladders
428 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801