Abstract
The main emphasis in the English language historiography on the Russian gentry after emancipation has been on their economic weakness and their social and political impotence.1 The peasant emancipation changed the social and economic basis of the Russian countryside — the basis on which the landed gentry had rested (sometimes literally!) for so long. The removal of serf property, the prime source of wealth and income, was without question profound and arguably traumatic. In Terence Emmons’ terms the act ‘dealt the gentry class an economic blow from which it never recovered’;2 to quote another the act ‘was nothing short of a social cataclysm’.3 It left the gentry as a ‘losing social class baffled and bewildered by the crashing of the old order’.4
‘So here you are, you’ve returned to Russia — what precisely do you intend to do?’
‘To plough the land,’ answered Lavretsky, ‘and to strive to plough it as well as possible.’
I. Turgenev, Home of the Gentry
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Notes
A classic example is R. Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime (London, 1974). It contains a section entitled ‘Catastrophic Decline of the Dvoriane after 1861’.
See also J. Blum, ‘Russia’, in D. Spring (ed.), European Landed Elites in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1977).
T. Emmons, The Russian Gentry and Emancipation (London, 1968) p. 421.
L. Pavlovsky, Agricultural Russia on the Eve of Revolution (London, 1925) p. 99.
A. Mazour, quoted in E. Beyerley, The Europe Centric Historiography of Russia (Paris, 1974) p. 25.
Olga Crisp, ‘Horses and Management of a Large Agricultural Estate in Russia at the end of the Nineteenth Century’ in F.M.L. Thompson, Horses in European Economic History (Reading, 1983) pp. 156–76.
Roberta Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia, Government and Gentry (Princeton, 1982);
P. Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy 1850–1917 (London, 1986);
S. Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb, Illinois, 1985).
See also A. Kahan, ‘Capital Formation during the Period of Early Industrialisation in Russia, 1890–1913’ in Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. VII (Cambridge, 1978) pp. 299–300, which shows the rapid increase in capital stock, particularly in machinery and equipment, in the agricultural sector.
Most obviously Lenin in Development of Capitalism in Russia; notably also in P.I. Lyashchenko, Istoriya narodnogo khozyaistva Rossii, 2 vols, (Leningrad, 1947–8).
A.M. Anfimov, Krupnoe pomeshchich’e khozyaislvo Evropeiskoi Rossii kontsa xix — nachalo xx vv. (Moscow, 1969);
I.D. Koval’chenko, N.B. Selunskaya, B.M. Litvakov, Sotsial’no-ekonomkheskii stroi pomeshchkhego khozyaistva Evropeiskoi Rossii v epokhu kapitalizma (Moscow, 1982).
V.V. Svyatlovskii, Mobilizatsiya zemlevladeniya v Rossii (Moscow, 1907).
M. Florinsky, Russia, a History and an Interpretation (New York, 1970) p. 928.
In Germany grain duties were raised in 1879; in France they reached even higher levels. For Russian figures see Olga Crisp, Studies in the Russian Economy before 1914 (London, 1976) p. 30.
R. Bideleux, Communism and Development, (London, 1985) p. 21.
A.M. Anfimov and I.F. Makarov, ‘Novye dannye o zemlevladeniya Evropeiskoi Rossii’, Istoriya SSSR, 1 (1974) p. 87.
A.P. Korelin, ‘Dvoryanstvo v poreformennoi Rossii (1861–1904)’ Istoricheskie zapiski, 87 (1971) p. 146.
L.P. Minarik, ‘Proizkhozhdenie i sostav zemel’nykh vladenii krupneishikh pomeshchikov Rossii’ in Materialy po istorii sel’skogo khozyaistva i krest’yanstva SSSR, vol. V. (Moscow, 1962).
N.I. Vorob’ev, ‘Chastnovladel’cheskoe polevoe khozyaistvo’ Vestnik sel’skogo khozyaistva, 12, (1906) p. 4
V.I. Pronin, ‘Dokhodnost’ł pomeshchich’ego zemledeł’cheskogo khozyaistva Kaluzhskoi gubernii na rubezhe xix i xx vekov’, Ezhegodnik po agrarnoi istorii vostochnoi Evropy 1970 (Riga, 1971) p. 202.
A.M. Anfimov, Krupnoe pomeshchich’e khozyaistvo (Moscow, 1969) p. 85.
A. Meshcherskii, ‘Pis’ma kul’turnogo khozyaina’, Zemledel’cheskaya gazeta, 2 (1904) 66.
K. Bush, The English Aristocracy (Manchester, 1984) p. 173.
A.N. Chelintsev, Russkoe sel’skoe khozyaistvo pered revolyutsiei (Moscow, 1928) p. 192. Data refer to 1887.
K.N. Khodnev, ‘Iz praktiki molochnogo khozyaistva’, Vestnik Russkogo sel’skogo khozyaistva, 11 (1903) pp. 6–7.
A.S. Nifontov, Zernovoe proizvodstvo Rossii vo vtoroi polovine xix veka, (Moscow, 1974).
T.M. Kitanina, Khlebnaya lorgovlya Rossii v 1875–1914 gg. (Moscow, 1979) p. 69.
J. Simms, ‘The Crisis in Russian Agriculture at the end of the Nineteenth Century: A Different View’, Slavic Review, XXXVII (1978) p. 483.
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Munting, R. (1992). Economic Change and the Russian Gentry, 1861–1914. In: Edmondson, L., Waldron, P. (eds) Economy and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1860–1930. Studies in Russia and East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22433-3_3
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