Two Russias

The blue façade in the photograph is the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, taken by Florstein in 2012. It is a later view of a noble palace, not a room list from the 1750s, and it is not the Winter Palace of Elizabeth’s reign. Use it anyway, as a scale. This is the architecture of the Russia that attended court, distilled alcohol, ordered Western clothes, and needed someone else to bring in the rye. The other Russia does not have a façade this long. It has strips of land, a household of bound people, and a landlord who is often not there.

This page is society between 1725 and 1762, not Catherine II’s later peasant war, not the Charter to the Nobility of 1785, and not the seventeenth-century legal origin of serfdom. Those stories have other chapters. Here the question is how the unstable courts of the last five pages sat on a country that was already two countries. Coups changed the names in the Winter Palace. They did not harvest a field.

Service noblemen were also landlords and serf owners. The majority of them, however, were quite poor. Chief among the reasons were the low productivity of Russian agriculture, absentee management, and the scattered, splintered character of the landholdings. The average small or middling estate yielded only the bare necessities for the survival of the serviceman’s family. As long as he remained in service, away from the estate, and without capital, he could do little to improve his property. Any change in the agrarian routine would have had to be accepted by his peasant-serfs and by the noble neighbours among whose lands his own lay scattered in an inextricable patchwork.

He thus depended on the ruler for additional income, either as a salary or as grants of land and serfs in reward for service. The salary was not very large, it was often in kind — furs — and it was paid out rather irregularly. Lands and serfs could be obtained only from the ruler, and most went to favourites, courtiers or high dignitaries. Service did provide extras: uniforms, sometimes lodgings, and greater accessibility to court, cultural life and education for children. So the nobleman remained in service and took little direct interest in his estates and serfs. Poverty at that rank is easy to miss if the eye stays on palaces. It is the ordinary condition of the men who staffed the coups.

That absenteeism is the hinge between the two Russias. The man who needed a coup to go well was often the same man whose village never saw him. Promotion, marriage, a cadet school for a son, a monopoly, a gift of souls — those were the prizes of the capital. The estate, left to peasants, kept traditional patterns of agriculture and made modernisation of productivity almost impossible. A court could look European in the evening. A field could not be commanded into a Norfolk rotation from a barracks in St Petersburg. Peter III’s March 1762 relief from compulsory service belongs in this picture as a legal change at the top, not as a sudden appearance of improving landlords in the strips. Six months could not restock capital or consolidate patches of land. It could only alter who owed the state a body.

Aleksey Venetsianov’s sleeping shepherd boy, painted between 1823 and 1826, is a later, idealised rural scene. It is not an eyewitness view of an eighteenth-century village, and it should not be asked to stand in for a tax roll. Use it for the pastoral that city eyes liked to put on peasants. Then put it aside. The documented countryside of 1725–62 is harsher and more specific than a nap under a tree.

Landlords were obtaining still greater power over their serfs. The full weight of those powers fell on the household serfs, whose number increased because masters used them as domestics and craftsmen in town houses to make the Western-style objects with which the service elite surrounded itself. A masquerade coat, a piece of furniture, a polished interior — someone bound to a household had often made or maintained the thing. When noblemen established factories or secured estates in newly conquered border areas, they transferred their serfs without regard for family or village ties. Elizabeth’s victories in the southwest, the settlement of Ukraine, the widening interference in Poland, even the brief occupation of Berlin, had a social underside: bodies moved because a landlord had a new claim. The operation of most estates, in the landlord’s absence, was left to the peasants. Tradition continued. Improvement did not.

Elizabeth’s chief adviser, Pyotr Shuvalov, tried to pull some of the nobility into mining and manufacturing with exclusive privileges and monopolies. He began to dismantle internal tariffs so local trade could develop. He strengthened the landlord’s control over all the resources on an estate and gave nobles the right to distill alcohol. These were not peasant reforms. They were attempts to make the poor, absent, service landlord into an economic actor without first making him present. A monopoly can enrich a name. It does not plough a scattered strip. Distilling rights sit on the same estate as барщина. The two Russias were not two centuries. They were two uses of the same people: as a labour force in the village and as a market, a distillery, a factory intake, or a household workshop in the landlord’s other life.

Mikhail Shibanov painted a celebration of a wedding contract in 1777, in Catherine II’s reign, now in the Tretyakov. Use it for village custom — dress, a timber room, a contract that is also a feast — and date it honestly. It is later than this chapter’s last coup. It is still closer to peasant life than a palace façade. Do not treat it as a document of 1730, and do not treat it as proof of ease. A wedding picture can be tender and still sit inside serfdom.

One Russia changed emperors in the night. The other paid in labour days, whether the night had gone well or not.

Put the two Russias back against the political weather of 1725–62 and the chapter closes without stealing the next one. Guards and favourites decided who wore the crown. The Table of Ranks decided, on paper, who could rise. The estate, poorly managed from a distance, decided what most people ate. Household serfs stitched the Western surface of the upper world. Field serfs kept the lower one alive. Shuvalov’s privileges and Peter III’s noble liberty were adjustments inside the first Russia. They did not abolish the second. Catherine II would inherit both, and she would have her own answers — enlightenment language, a wider empire, a Cossack-peasant war, a thicker serfdom. Those answers are not due here. Here the honest last sentence is smaller. For thirty-seven years the empire could not change a ruler quietly. It could, and did, leave the harvest to people who would never see the coronation portrait.

If this era has a unity, it is that split, not a smooth line of German and Russian names. Catherine I and Peter II, Anna and Ivan VI, Elizabeth, Peter III: each reign was a different answer to Peter’s unfinished succession. None of them was an answer to absentee strips, household bondage, or a salary paid in furs. Read the coups as the history of the first Russia. Read this page as the history that made the coups look, from the village, like weather in another climate. The next chapter opens on a woman who had just used the Guards, the Senate and the Church. She would have to govern both Russias. She had not yet begun.

Household serfs are the hinge inside the hinge. Their numbers rose because town houses needed domestics and craftsmen who could produce a Western surface: clothes, furniture, the small objects that made a service family look like the court it served. Field serfs remained the older majority, running the estate when the owner was away, paying in labour days, keeping traditional agriculture because no one present had capital or authority enough to change it. When a nobleman opened a factory or took land in a newly held border district, he moved people without regard to family or village. Shuvalov’s monopolies and distilling rights tried to make that same nobleman a producer. They did not make him a resident. Internal tariffs began to come down so that local trade could thicken. The village still owed барщина. Trade and labour dues can live in the same year. They did, and the gap between them is the whole of this page.

Do not wait for Pugachev on this page, or for a charter that will later freeze noble privilege in Catherine II’s language. The two Russias of 1725–62 are already complete as a social fact: a service elite that was often poor, absent and hungry for gifts, and a peasantry that kept the harvest, staffed the households, and could be relocated when a factory or a frontier required it. Palace coups decided which names received the gifts. They did not decide whether the rye came in. That was never their job. A reader who has followed the widow, the boy, the conditions, the daughter and the six months already knows how the first Russia changed hands. This page is the second Russia, which did not change hands, and did not need to, because it had never been asked.

Keep the pictures honest at the end as at the start. A later palace photograph is not Elizabeth’s Winter Palace. A sleeping shepherd is not a tax roll. A wedding contract painted in 1777 is not 1730. They still show the split the prose has been arguing: display and labour, court distance and village nearness, a façade and a timber room. Between them sit the scattered strips, the household workshops, the monopolies and the барщина. That is enough society for one era. The next numbered chapter will have to govern it.