What Was the United Nobility?

GEOFFREY A. HOSKING and ROBERTA THOMPSON MANNING

Recent Soviet historians seem to agree that the so-called United Nobility had a strong influence on Stolypin’s government. E. D. Chermen-skii describes it as the “initiator and inspirer” of the June Third coup, while A. Ia. Avrekh sees it as “the guiding ideological center” of all the “Black Hundred-monarchist organizations.” More recently V. S. Dia-kin has shown that it also exercised great influence in opposing Stolypin’s policies. We have tried in our own researches to indicate that it played a major role in both establishing and then frustrating the Third of June system.¹

No one, however, has yet attempted to describe what the United Nobility actually was, how it came into being and how it operated. Was it a federation of the provincial nobles’ associations? In some ways, yes, since most of those associations were represented at its regular congresses, but not entirely, since some were not. In any case, many of the leaders of the United Nobility repudiated the idea that their political powers were dependent on the associations. Was it a landowners’ union? Again, in some ways, yes, since its members were large landowners,² and much of its activity was directed to the defense of private landed property. Yet the United Nobility never succeeded in developing an agricultural or commercial side to its activity, nor did its members accept to their ranks the growing class of private landowners who were not nobles. Perhaps, then, it was really a kind of political party? The United Nobility certainly had policies on a wide range of political issues and tried to influence the government in favor of those policies. But it never put itself forward as a party at the ballot, nor did it associate itself electorally with any of the Duma parties. In fact, as a body, the United Nobility is exceedingly difficult to classify, and it is symptomatic that it had no proper name: “United Nobility” is only an appellation of convenience. The published reports of its congresses appeared under the unwieldy title of “Proceedings of the nth Congress of Delegates of 29 (or whatever) Nobles’ Associations.”

It may help us to understand the peculiarities of the United Nobility if we compare it with a German political organization that at first sight looks rather similar, and that some members of the United Nobility took as their model—namely, the Bund der Landwirte or Agrarian League, as it is often known in English.

The Bund der Landwirte was established in Berlin in 1893 as a direct reaction to the German government’s policy of lowering tariffs on imported grain. This step weakened both Junkers and peasant farmers at a time when their economic position was already declining as a result of the growth of industry and international finance. The Bund had, at its height, 200,000-300,000 members organized in an elaborate hierarchical network of provincial and local branches; it had its own internal newsheets and strong influence over one of the most important national daily newspapers, the Deutsche Tageszeitung; and it was closely associated with a Reichstag party, the Conservatives, for whom it provided an organization, mass membership, and publicity. Its outlook was monarchist and conservative, but its published program was confined mainly to economic questions, leaving the political ones to the Conservatives. Its members were landowners and farmers of all kinds, the great majority of them medium and small peasants, but the leadership was always firmly in the hands of the large estate owners, who used the organization successfully for their own purposes. It pursued some purely economic and commercial ends, such as the promotion of cheap credit, the arrangement of bulk purchasing, and the provision of insurance and agricultural advice; and, in fact, it absorbed a number of existing regional agrarian associations.³

As we explore the structure of the United Nobility, it will become apparent that it was a very different type of organization. Some preconditions of these differences immediately suggest themselves. The economic position of the landed nobility was much weaker in Russia than in Germany, where the Junkers had generally adjusted well to the demands of commercial agriculture, hiring local peasants as wage laborers. Some Russian landowners, especially in the west, had made a similar adjustment as the economic pressures of the post-Emancipation era forced increasing numbers of noble proprietors to involve themselves personally as never before in agriculture and the daily management of their family estates. But the large majority still ran their estates by semifeudal practices, with the peasants rendering labor services of one sort or another or renting areas of the estate to work on short leases.⁴

The political role of the Russian nobility was a curious mixture of autonomy and dependence. Although the nobility in Russia had possessed their own local corporate associations since the charter granted to them by Catherine the Great, these organizations did not play much of an independent political role before 1905, having no right to concern themselves with general political questions or to coordinate their activities on the national level. In fact, the associations of the nobility were actually integrated into the state apparatus, since the main elective officials of these bodies, the provincial and county marshals of the nobility, were required by law to perform a number of important administrative functions in the localities. The marshals served as members ex officio of all the main local bureaucratic committees; moreover, at the county level, the marshal was—until the end of the Old Regime—the senior ranking official as well as the only administrative figure capable of coordinating governmental functions, since he alone was included by law on all governing bodies from the zemstvo to the local draft board.⁵ The overall effect of these arrangements was that the Russian nobility combined administrative experience, responsibility, and pride in state service with almost total political passivity.

The nobility’s traditional indifference to politics outside the state administration was, however, undermined by the economic decline, which assumed crisis proportions around the turn of the twentieth century. In 1896 the marshals of the nobility began to convene annual conferences to discuss the economic problems of the nobility and to put political pressure on the national government to intervene in their behalf; and in 1904–1905 the marshals and many local noble assemblies, like most other segments of Russian society, were carried away by the Liberation Movement, adding their voice to the general clamor for the establishment of representative government in Russia. Yet, despite this brief foray into the political arena, the Russian nobility in 1906 was far more accustomed to administrative intrigues than to the more open give-and-take of modern electoral politics.

Finally, the Russian nobility was not only far weaker and accustomed to very different political practices than its German counterpart; the political situation in the two countries was completely different. By the 1890s Germany had had nearly half a century’s experience with parliaments of one sort or another, whereas the United Nobility was created in the middle of a revolution, an upheaval with economic implications, certainly, but beyond everything else an event that threatened the whole social and political fabric. The United Nobility—as its organizers readily admitted—was created to combat revolution, not to counter an unfavorable tariff policy.

The organizational antecedents of the United Nobility were threefold:

1. noblemen of a conservative bent in and out of the government, who began to organize themselves in the course of 1905 to combat the then dominant liberal and constitutional tendencies;

2. the congresses of landowners that arose in the wake of the 1905 peasant disorders to demand more government protection for landed property;

3. the semiofficial gatherings of the provincial marshals of the nobility, which had convened annually since 1896.

To be sure, all of these streams overlap to some degree. As we shall see, the same names appear repeatedly throughout our discussion. The men who were later to become the United Nobility experimented with several political forums before finding one that was viable and that suited their needs.

The first political group to anticipate the methods of the United Nobility and to contain a significant number of its future leaders was the St. Petersburg-based Patriotic Union (Otechestvennyi soiuz). This organization arose in the spring of 1905, soon after the government had capitulated to the demands of the Liberation Movement by promising in the February 18 Rescript to convene a national representative assembly. Seeking to defend the prerogatives of the autocrat and the privileges of the nobility from the dominant reformist element in the state bureaucracy, the Patriotic Union advocated the foundation of a purely consultative—not legislative—assembly, elected by estates (thus preserving the power of the tsar and ensuring a political role for the numerically small nobility).⁶

In spite of its well-formulated political program and occasional public appeals, the Patriotic Union was in no sense a political party but, rather, a small, select gathering of thirty to forty prominent society figures and high officials, especially former officials of the traditionally conservative Ministry of the Interior, many of whom had recently been dismissed or demoted by Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Pleve’s liberally inclined successor as Minister of the Interior. All the men concerned had been previously associated with the anti-Witte salon of K. F. Golovin. They now met regularly in the sumptuous home of Count A. A. Bobrinskii, the former long-term provincial marshal of St. Petersburg and the future chairman of the United Nobility.⁷ Like Bobrinskii, most of these men—or their close relatives—were to be associated in some way with the United Nobility. In fact, the dominant leadership of the nobles’ organization virtually throughout its existence—the two chairmen of the United Nobility in the 1906-16 period (Bobrinskii and A. P. Strukov) as well as their chief assistant, A. A. Naryshkin—were veterans of the Patriotic Union, while its bureaucratic members did not hesitate to cooperate with the nobles’ organization from their high positions in the government or the State Council. As far as we can tell, the members of the Patriotic Union were all large landowners, if not actual landed magnates, owners of enormous latifundia of more than 5,000 desiatiny. Many came from families that had been prominent in Russian politics since the eighteenth century, if not earlier. All were accustomed, by virtue of their family position as well as by the offices they held, to move in the highest reaches of St. Petersburg society and the state bureaucracy. Quite a few of them held high court appointments or worked in the court administration in addition to their many official positions. Consequently the Patriotic Union should be regarded as the last organized beachhead of aristocratic influence in a political order increasingly dominated by professional bureaucrats recruited from outside the hereditary landed nobility.⁸

The social composition of the Patriotic Union greatly influenced its mode of operation. It did not seek public support but attempted to influence privately the delicate operations of the autocratic-bureaucratic government. After sending a deputation to the emperor in June 1905 and submitting its program to the Peterhof Conference, which met in July to discuss the election law for the new national assembly, a number of the members of the Union (Bobrinskii, Naryshkin, Strukov, N. A. Pavlov, A. S. Stishinskii and Prince A. A. Shirinskii-Shikhmatov) were invited to participate in the conference. Here they argued vigorously—though unsuccessfully—for an estate-based electoral system. We see here a foreshadowing not only of the leadership of the United Nobility and its political program but also of its political methods—the use of highly placed persons and institutions to influence government policy.

In addition to the Patriotic Union, another of the ephemeral right-wing groups of 1905, the Union of Russian Men (Soiuz russkikh liudei), is of interest. For this organization, too, attracted many men subsequently associated with the United Nobility, including two of Russia’s largest landowners, Count P. S. Sheremetev and Prince A. G. Shcher-batov; S. F. Sharapov, a publicist well known for his spirited defense of noble agricultural interests; and the marshals of Moscow and St. Petersburg provinces, Prince P. N. Trubetskoi and Count V. V. Gudovich. The Union of Russian Men espoused a somewhat more moderate political program than the Patriotic Union, welcoming the February 18 Rescript as the first step toward the establishment of a zemskii so-bor, a purely advisory body based on the traditional estates of Russian society, through which the tsar could resume the communication with his people long obstructed by the bureaucracy.⁹ The Union of Russian Men, like the Patriotic Union, hoped to limit the power and the electorate of the new national assembly, and, indeed, some of its members joined the Patriotic Union in a deputation to impress these views on the emperor in the summer of 1905.¹⁰ But the Union of Russian Men tended to operate quite differently, seeking support not only in government circles and at the imperial court but also in the local zemstvos and noble associations. Such tactics, too, were to enter the political repertory of the future United Nobility.

Another major contributor to the formation of the United Nobility was the All-Russian Union of Landowners. The initiative for the formation of such an organization came from provincial landowners in Samara and Saratov provinces, among them A. A. Chermodurov, N. A. Pavlov, and the Saratov provincial marshal, N. F. Mel’nikov—all men who were to play prominent roles in the future nobles’ organization. Living in one of the most unruly areas of the empire, they were naturally primarily concerned with the defense of their estates against the peasant movement, which culminated in the massive disorders of October-November 1905. After a series of local and regional meetings, a national conference of landowners under the chairmanship of Prince A. G. Shchertbatov was convened in Moscow from November 17-20, at the very height of the 1905 agrarian unrest.¹¹

This congress attracted 203 landowners from 33 provinces, including many names subsequently associated with the United Nobility. This was the first gathering of noble landowners to declare itself in favor of ending official support for the peasant land commune (obshchina), advocating instead the encouragement of private peasant landholdings as a remedy for peasant land hunger. In this way, the Union of Landowners blazed a trail that the United Nobility and the government would later follow; and they did so at a time when a number of important state officials, including Prime Minister Witte and his Minister of Agriculture, Kutler, as well as the influential D. F. Trepov, were recommending the compulsory expropriation of all private lands now rented out to peasants as the only means to curb agrarian unrest. While a few participants in the congress also accepted such measures, the overwhelming majority of the delegates affirmed the inviolability of private property as an absolute principle.¹² The meeting went on to condemn the government for its inactivity in the face of the peasant rebellions and recommended the stationing of cavalry and mounted police in the countryside and the punishment of entire peasant communities from which peasant rebels were known to have come.¹³

Although primarily concerned with the land question, this congress nevertheless took its place among the right-wing political gatherings of 1905, accepting Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality as its basic political principles, “not open to dispute or discussion.” It also received greetings from the new Union of Russian People and the Russian Assembly (Russkoe sobranie); and Prince Shcherbatov announced that the Union of Landowners would affiliate itself with the All-People’s Russian Union, the right wing’s counterpart to the Union of Liberation, which was established in the autumn of 1905 to coordinate the activities of all political groups engaged in combating the revolution.¹⁴ Indeed, two representatives of the Union of Landowners—Chermodu-rov and Pavlov—participated in a deputation sent by the All-Russian Union to the emperor, which condemned the Duma as the brainchild of the westernized Petersburg bureaucracy and recommended instead the convocation of a zemskii sobor. The emperor, while listening to the deputation “with sympathy,” nevertheless maintained that the October Manifesto represented his irrevocable will.¹⁵

The second congress of the Union of Landowners met in February 1906 and publicly attacked the Kutler land reform program by name, calling it “not only an act of unprecedented violence to the broad class of landowners who are faithful to Your Throne but also a threat to the peasants and the exchequer.” The congress, following in the footsteps of a number of local noble associations, petitioned the Emperor to reaffirm the sanctity of private property and to dismiss Kutler’s protector, “the all-powerful bureaucrat Witte.”¹⁶

After this congress, the Union of Landowners gradually fizzled out, only surviving long enough to distribute copies of Stolypin’s land decree of November 9, 1906 (wholly in keeping with its own anticommunal ideals) to a number of peasants. To be sure, there were periodic attempts on the part of the United Nobility in the 1906–1908 period to revive this organization. But the Union at best lived a shadowy existence, attracting by 1908 no more than fifty-three members nationwide.¹⁷ In his memoirs, N. A. Pavlov, one of its founders, blamed himself for the decline of the Union of Landowners, attributing its early demise to the number of nonlandowning elements that he had invited to the first congress in hope of profiting from their political influence. Because of their presence, he argued, the congress bogged down in fruitless political controversies and never got on with the essential economic task of developing private agriculture.¹⁸ This is certainly true and rendered the Union swiftly redundant.

There was another anomaly in the Union of Landowners. In theory it was intended to be an all-estate body, uniting noble landowners with landed proprietors from other estates of Russian society, with the aim not only of political agitation but also of promoting good husbandry. Initially, considerable efforts were made—at least verbally—to attract non-noble landowners, especially peasants. Indeed, the United Nobility became involved in efforts to prop up the Union in hopes of contributing to the emergence of a Russian counterpart to the Bund der Landwirte.¹⁹ However, the social tensions between the landed nobility and the peasantry after the 1905 agrarian disorders greatly complicated the problems of founding a landowners’ association along the lines of the German model. While the peasantry as a whole was quiescent after 1907, and individual peasants were quite willing to enter traditional client-patron relationships with neighboring noblemen for their own personal advantage, considerable peasant hostility toward the landed nobility persisted after 1905; and many peasants remained committed to a “black partition,” as was quite evident from the numerous demands for a more favorable allotment of lands made by peasant deputies in the Third Duma.²⁰

As long as such deeply rooted peasant land hunger existed, there was simply no way for the nobility and peasantry to unite in defense of their other, common economic interests. Therefore, it is not surprising that nobody who was not in fact a nobleman attended any of the congresses of the Union of Landowners. But if the Union of Landowners was to remain predominantly or entirely noble in composition, then it was duplicating functions that could be performed by the noble associations, by themselves and for their own benefit.

Consequently, the political side of the work of the Landowners’ Union gave way to a broader initiative aimed at bringing together the uncoordinated noble associations in defense of the interests of the noble estate as a whole. At their annual meetings the provincial marshals had, in spite of the official prohibition, sometimes discussed general political problems; and in any case the decrees of February 18, 1905, implictly annulled the prohibition, so that the marshals were able to assume an overtly political role.²¹ They reacted to the confused situation of the spring of 1905 by trying to reach among themselves some kind of consensus to present as the view of the nation’s “leading estate.” On March 26, twenty-six of them met in Moscow to discuss a memorandum prepared by D. N. Shipov, Prince P. N. Trubetskoi, and M. A. Stakhovich: this document was based on the minority opinion of the Zemstvo Congress of November 1904 and rested on the principle that there should be a purely consultative popular assembly selected by a limited franchise favoring the nobility.²² The marshals approved the memorandum and sent the emperor an address requesting further reforms and emphasizing their loyalty and desire to work with the government. In June, after the Tsushima debacle, twenty-five provincial marshals met in St. Petersburg and decided to back the petition of the recent May Coalition Zemstvo Congress with a far more critical address that projected a picture of a general loss of confidence in the government, which had “come to represent something alien, hostile, and unbearable.” Trubetskoi and Gudovich presented this statement to the emperor, and Trubetskoi allowed himself some rather sharp remarks. This incident—and the marshals’ apparent willingness to coordinate their activities with those of the far more liberal Zemstvo Congress—appears to have caused some segments of the nobility to regard Trubetskoi and Gudovich as politically unreliable and possibly even constitutionalists at heart (a suspicion strengthened by the well-known views of Trubetskoi’s brother Sergei, the liberal rector of Moscow University).²³

One influential local figure who felt this way was A. N. Naumov, the recently elected marshal of Samara province and the founder of the Samara Party of Order. In November 1905 Naumov and Prince V. N. Volkonskii, a county marshal in Shchatsk (Tambov province), both of whom were members of the executive board of the Union of Landowners, urged Trubetskoi to take steps to establish some kind of union of the entire landowning nobility.²⁴ Trubetskoi was sufficiently impressed to call a national conference of marshals, county as well as provincial, which met in Moscow on January 7-11, 1906. Although this congress endorsed a moderate Octobrist-like political program calling for the speedy convocation of the State Duma, firm measures against revolutionary unrest, and the preservation of the territorial integrity of the Russian Empire, the attention of the marshals was clearly focused on the agrarian question. Meeting in a city still under martial law and dominated by the memory of the recent workers’ insurrection and street fighting,²⁵ the congress took its cue from the Union of Landowners. They responded to Trubetskoi’s revelations that the Minister of Agriculture, Kutler, was preparing a bill for the expropriation of all private lands now rented to peasants by dismissing any idea of compulsory expropriation and insisting that only the elimination of the peasant land commune could solve the agrarian question in Russia.²⁶ Since the resolution of the congress won the favorable attention of the emperor, and both Kutler and his patron Witte were soon dismissed from their posts, the January conference of marshals and the meetings of the Union of Landowners were important turning points in the determination of the government’s agrarian program.²⁷

The marshals, however, took no action on the issue that had inspired their conferences in the first place—the need for the establishment of some more permanent form of nobles’ organization. Indeed, this question was not even raised by the marshals in January, and there is evidence that their inactivity reflected the opposition of at least their leaders to the political organization of the nobility. Immediately after the marshals dispersed, a call for the convocation of a national nobles’ congress was issued once more in the localities—this time by the Tambov and Kursk noble assemblies. This appeal was rapidly endorsed by nine other noble associations, while only five reacted negatively to the idea.²⁸ Nevertheless, the marshals, who continued to meet periodically throughout the spring of 1906 to plan for the nobility’s first elections to the State Council, still managed to avoid acting on the issue by referring the matter back to the provinces, on the grounds that the voice of the local nobility had yet to be heard.²⁹ Only in early April, after twenty-six of the thirty-five provincial noble associations considering this issue had expressed themselves in favor of a nobles’ congress and had already begun electing representatives to such a meeting, did the marshals reluctantly give in and sanction in principle the formation of a permanent nobles’ union.³⁰ Even then, no actual steps to convene such a congress were taken until the end of the month, on the very eve of the opening of the First State Duma.

The motives of the marshals in obstructing the political unification of the nobility were quite complex. While the marshals rightly feared the emergence of a potential organizational rival that might usurp their role as the traditional spokesmen of the nobility, their opposition to the organization of what was to become the United Nobility was more political than institutional in character. From the very first, the movement to unify the nobility was directed against the political role the provincial marshals had played in 1905. In this way, the foundation of the United Nobility should be regarded in part as the nobility’s counterpart to the rank-and-file revolt against the leadership of the Liberation Movement currently under way in the zemstvos. For throughout 1905, the marshals, albeit with some reservations, had generally adhered to the liberal opposition to the Old Regime. Their most prominent national leaders—Trubetskoi, Gudovich, and Stakhovich—were political moderates who had long favored the establishment of representative government in Russia and strongly supported the new political order established by the October Manifesto. Indeed, Gudovich and Stakhovich were members of the Central Committee of the new Union of 17 October. And Trubetskoi, while never a member of the party, was a close personal friend of the Octobrist leader Guchkov: at the January conference of marshals, he tried—unsuccessfully—to persuade his colleagues to adhere formally as a group to the Octobrist Union.³¹

The most vociferous champions of the unification of the nobility in the winter of 1906 were men of quite a different political complexion. If we have to pin a political label on them, that of “reactionary” or “far right” may well be the most appropriate. Certainly they were opponents of the new political order as it currently existed. Though they generally favored the existence of representative institutions to offset the power and influence of the hated bureaucracy, many of them feared that the recent October Manifesto had conferred far too much power on the State Duma, and they were most uneasy about the recent expansion of the Duma electorate (the law of December 11, 1905). Their fears were not groundless, for the new legislative chamber selected under the December 11 franchise was predominantly peasant in its social composition and overwhelmingly committed to a new allotment of land for the peasantry. Thus it is not surprising that the proponents of a nobles’ congress hoped to use the new organization as a political counterweight to the Duma, a rival “State Nobles’ Duma,” as one of them described the coming congress.³² Accordingly, the chief advocates of a national nobles’ association among the Tambov nobility, Prince D. N. Tsertelev and V. N. Snezhkov, argued that the nobles’ congress should assemble before the Duma convened so that the nobility might “raise its voice among the hubbub while there are still no elected representatives.” That way, they maintained, the nobility might be able to influence state policies on a number of key issues (which were clearly in the Duma’s domain), such as the agrarian question and the preservation of “the leading influence” of the nobility in local government.³³

Consequently, it is not surprising that the liberals and moderates among the marshals, under the leadership of Trubetskoi, Gudovich, and Stakhovich, spared no efforts in attempting to delay the organization of the nobility until well after the Duma had convened, maintaining that the expression of “the real feelings” and “one-sided views” of the nobility would be “untimely,” if not outright “dangerous,” in view of the Duma elections, which were currently under way. Stakhovich in particular feared that the political intervention of a conservative nobles’ congress might encourage anti-Duma forces within the government.³⁴ Even after the elections were over and the marshals capitulated to provincial pressures and actually convened a steering committee on April 20 to make the final preparations for the congress, Trubetskoi and Gudovich continued to try to divert the nobility from a political confrontation with the Duma. Under their influence, the nobles’ congress was scheduled to meet in Moscow, well away from the center of government, and participants were strictly limited to the elected representatives of the local noble associations, who they hoped would be a more moderate lot than the many right-wing spokesmen currently attempting to use the organized nobility for their own political ends.

At this point, however, a number of right-wing noblemen managed to intervene and take over the steering committee of the nobles’ congress. To do this, they utilized a new political organization, the Circle of Nobles Loyal to Their Oath (kruzhok dvorian vernykh prisiage). This association, whose curious name refers to the oath to the monarch taken by all those entering state service, first arose in Moscow in early February as a purely local organization committed to the unification of the nobility around a conservative political program.³⁵ In the wake of the general reorganization of the right after its disastrous defeat in the Duma elections, the Circle was converted by the Kursk marshal. Count V. F. Dorrer, and a number of other noble activists close to the Monarchical Party into a national organization, a rallying point and pressure group for the more conservative noblemen.³⁶ By conveniently scheduling the first national congress of the Circle of Nobles to overlap with the first meeting of the steering committee of the nobles’ congress,³⁷ the Circle leaders were able to overwhelm the committee with an influx of new members, forcing Trubetskoi by its second session to turn over the chairmanship to Prince N. F. Kasatkin-Rostovskii, a member of the Patriotic Union and a close political associate of Count Dorrer.³⁸

Under the leadership of Kasatkin-Rostovskii, the committee immediately reversed all its previous decisions. Setting at long last a final date for the congress (May 21), the committee turned its back on noble traditions and decided to move the site of the congress from Moscow (where the marshals had traditionally met) to St. Petersburg, the seat of the government and the legislative organs; and it decided to co-opt members and invite to the congress “persons not elected in the localities who can be useful to the cause of the congress.”³⁹ Exercising its new powers, the bureau forthwith co-opted several members of the former Patriotic Union—Count A. A. Bobrinskii, Senator A. A. Naryshkin and K. F. Golovin—⁴⁰ while pointedly denying the provincial marshals of the nobility the right to attend the congress as official delegates unless specifically elected for this purpose in the localities. Subsequently, a number of other members of the Patriotic Union were invited to the congress. These men, who were noted more for their connections at the imperial court and among high officialdom than for their ties with the provincial nobility, were to play a disproportionately large role in the affairs of the United Nobility. The Nizhnii Novgorod zemstvo activist and secretary to the Permanent Council of the United Nobility, A. I. Zybin, went so far as to maintain that “if these people had not been allowed to attend the first congress, then the unification of the nobility would not have taken place.”⁴¹

The organization known as the United Nobility was, in spite of its generally accepted name, never representative of the nobility as a whole. This is true in particular of the first congress, even if one excludes the sixty-one co-opted delegates, who were divided equally among noble agrarian experts (all known opponents of the peasant land commune), high officials and ex-officials largely from the Ministry of the Interior, and prominent conservative activists of noble origins who could not manage to get elected in their home provinces (Bobrinskii and V. M. Purishkevich are good examples of this latter type).⁴² Only twenty-nine of the thirty-nine provincial noble associations with elected marshals (and hence eligible to participate in the congress) were represented. Six provincial associations refused to send delegates as they disapproved of the congress’s being called at all,⁴³ while four others simply ignored the invitation.⁴⁴ Since the abstaining provinces were generally located on the borderlands of the empire or in the forest belt of the Central Industrial and Lake districts, the congress, its debates, policies, and executive organs were dominated by the nobles of the Central Agricultural Region, Novorossiia, and the Volga, the very areas that had borne the brunt of the recent peasant disorders.

Sociologically, the United Nobility appears to have been a political alliance between prominent absentee magnates from St. Petersburg (Bobrinskii and Co.) and larger provincial landowners, many of whom were actively involved in the public affairs of their home provinces.⁴⁵ M. Menshikov, the well-known columnist for the moderate daily Novoe vremia, described the participants in the first congress of the United Nobility quite accurately as “our aristocracy.”⁴⁶

Almost all the delegates for whom we have data came from the top 10-20 percent of the landed nobility in regard to landed wealth, and over half of them from the top 4 percent (see table 1).⁴⁷

TABLE 1.

Distribution of the personal landholdings of participants in the First Congress of the United Nobility and those of the landed nobility as a whole, compared.

The half dozen or so exceptions to this general rule were overwhelmingly members of large landowning families in their home provinces. Thus the nobles’ congress brought together quite a few members of the top “one hundred” landowning families of the Russian Empire, the power elite of the Old Regime, who collectively owned 40 percent of all noble landholdings and now contributed such founding figures of the United Nobility as Count A. A. Bobrinskii, A. A. Naryshkin, A. P. Strukov, Count P. S. Sheremetev, Prince S. S. Abamalek-Lazarev, and N. P. Sukhomlinov.⁴⁸

Thus, most of the delegates to the first congress not only originated from the provinces most affected by agrarian unrest, but they represented the stratum of the landed nobility (large proprietors with more than 500 desiatiny of land) who appear to have been the chief victims of these disorders.⁴⁹ It is not surprising, therefore, that the provincial delegates as well as those co-opted were staunchly conservative, if not outright reactionary.⁵⁰ Nevertheless no public offensive against the Duma was undertaken at this time. This restraint was due to, in the words of the Permanent Council (the executive organ of the congress), “the respect for the principle of a legislative institution,” which prevailed among the congress participants.⁵¹ Also, most delegates apparently greatly feared the political consequences of the dissolution of the Duma, which they all assumed would lead to a revival of the mass worker and peasant disorders of the previous autumn.⁵²

However, the Duma and “its one-sided composition” were vigorously criticized from the podium of the nobles’ congress; and the meeting did not hesitate to take sides in the mounting political conflict between the national assembly and the Goremykin government. The congress strongly asserted its support for the government, openly hailed the emperor as “Autocrat” (thus reaffirming his power over the national assembly), and established a commission to work out a new Duma electoral law, “which would secure the representation of the real needs of the people, especially landowners.”⁵³ The delegates then concentrated their attention firmly on the agrarian question, the issue of prime importance to the peasant-dominated First Duma. Stressing the economic contributions of the agricultural enterprises of the nobility and totally rejecting the compulsory expropriation schemes favored by all Duma factions, even the nobles among them, the United Nobility demanded instead what was to become known as the “Stolypin” land reform—the abolition of the peasant land commune.⁵⁴

Quite naturally under these conditions, the conflicts with the liberal and moderate marshals that preceded the formation of the United Nobility carried over into the congress itself. Prince P. N. Trubetskoi made one last-ditch attempt to delay the political unification of the nobility, by objecting to the organizational proposals of the steering committee. Most notably, he objected to the establishment of a strong executive organ, the Permanent Council, which was to be endowed with the right to co-opt members and make representations to the government on all matters. Maintaining that such a strong executive body would usurp the powers of the local noble associations, Trubetskoi insisted that these proposals should be thoroughly discussed in the localities before being accepted by the congress. Judging from Trubetskoi’s past political actions, it is quite likely that he was in fact opposed not so much to a strong executive organ as such as to the political uses to which it might be put. His apprehensions were not misplaced, for the Permanent Council elected by the First Congress was dominated by men of extreme right-wing political persuasions, who provided eight of the fifteen-man Council; and the body did play an important part in the events leading to the dissolution of the First Duma. However, the general sentiment of the nobles’ congress was clearly against Trubetskoi. The meeting adopted the steering committee’s plan of organization without referring the matter back to the provincial associations on the grounds that the nobility must act rapidly, having been so slow to unite in the past and being now the least politically organized of any social group in Russia.⁵⁵

Late in the proceedings, the moderate marshals mounted a counterattack. A group of twenty-three of them, predominantly county marshals, led by Gudovich, attempted to undermine the political influence of the congress by casting doubts on its representative nature. Charging that the delegates had been selected in a most haphazard fashion and that eight provincial noble associations were not represented at all,⁵⁶ the twenty-three maintained that the congress lacked a mandate to consider political issues and should simply concentrate its energies on the establishment of a formal organization for the nobility, referring all matters of substance back to the noble associations in the localities.⁵⁷ The protesters, who were overwhelmingly Octobrists (mainly on the party’s left flank), their close associates, or members of the moderate Octobrist-oriented center group of the State Council, were apparently seeking once again to prevent a conflict between the organized nobility and the legislative chamber.⁵⁸ These men, whose ranks included a number of First Duma deputies (including the sole Kadet at the nobles’ congress, the Kharkov provincial marshal G. A. Firsov) insisted that the congress should not take any substantive stand at all on the key agrarian question but should confine itself to a request that the agrarian project drafted by the Duma be submitted for the consideration of the local noble associations before being enacted into law.⁵⁹

In the end, however, all the marshals got for their pains was a barrage of attacks, both for their “liberalism” during 1905 and for their recent efforts to delay the unification of the nobility. In the course of these attacks, N. E. Markov of Kursk and S. S. Bekhteev of Kazan went so far as to maintain that only the newly founded United Nobility, not “the self-appointed marshals,” had the right to speak out in the name of the nobility,⁶⁰ whereupon Trubetskoi withdrew from the congress in protest, and fourteen other highly conservative provincial marshals (including Markov’s political associate Count Dorrer) came to the defense of their office, forcing Markov and Bekhteev to apologize in public for their remarks.⁶¹

After this apology, a majority of the provincial marshals present decided to remain in the nobles’ congress “in the interest of . . . creating a united Russian nobility.”⁶² But the tension between the United Nobility and the marshals did not immediately subside. While the marshals were given the right to attend sessions of the Permanent Council, they were initially allowed to vote only on matters concerning the province they represented.⁶³ Nevertheless, the conflict gradually abated by the end of the year. The marshals tacitly accepted their position as local agents of the Permanent Council; in return in November 1906 they were given full voting rights at Council meetings.⁶⁴ By this time, however, most of the liberal and moderate marshals of 1905–1906 had come up for reelection and were being replaced by far more conservative men,⁶⁵ thus removing the political differences between the marshals and the nobles’ congress that had inspired the conflict in the first place. Those few moderates who remained in office after 1907 were generally won over to the goals and methods of the United Nobility through the flow of political events, most notably the peasant disturbances accompanying the agrarian debates in the first two Dumas, the impunity with which the government was able to dissolve the First Duma, and the experience of the elections to the Second Duma, when moderate and conservative elements, despite improved organization, failed to make significant gains over the first elections. The dissenting and abstaining provincial noble associations, too, gradually accepted the leadership of the Permanent Council. The last holdout—St. Petersburg—joined the United Nobility at the end of 1911.⁶⁶

Thus, the United Nobility eventually achieved a semblance of unity and organization (as great, perhaps, as that achieved by any noble-dominated political group during the Duma monarchy). Each year, through 1915, a congress of its members, elected as seemed appropriate to each local association, would meet in St. Petersburg in February or March to debate the major political issues of the day. The congresses were often conveniently scheduled to coincide with major political events, such as the sessions of the Council on the Local Economy. Protocols and resolutions of these conferences were meticulously published and presented to the emperor, while some of the keynote speeches and reports were printed separately as brochures. All of this material was widely disseminated among the provincial nobility and provided a valuable political resource for conservative noblemen, enabling this generally inarticulate stratum to express their ideas more forcibly and coherently in zemstvo and legislative debates (thus possibly contributing to the growth of right-wing influence among the provincial nobility after 1905). In a deliberate move, the Permanent Council also distributed its reports and congress proceedings to high government officials, people prominent in the social world of St. Petersburg, and members of the royal family (including the Dowager Empress and the Grand Dukes).⁶⁷ In addition, the congresses were always widely reported in the press. The United Nobility could, no doubt, have sought a broader base for its public relations if it had published its own newspaper (and this was frequently discussed during the early years),⁶⁸ but the idea was eventually dropped for lack of funding.

Besides, the United Nobility evidently did not require mass support, to judge by the extraordinary number of measures they espoused that were subsequently adopted by the government. In 1906–1907 alone, the political interventions of the United Nobility contributed to the dissolution of the First Duma, the Stolypin agrarian decrees, the establishment of roving military tribunals in areas of agrarian unrest, and, finally, the promulgation of the new electoral law of June 3, 1907. Of course, it is exceptionally difficult to prove beyond any doubt that these acts resulted from the interventions of the United Nobility, since the decisive battles were waged not in the press or public meeting places but in the cabinets of ministers, the salons of St. Petersburg, and the reception halls of the imperial court, places where public records were rarely kept. In fact the full impact of the organization on the course of Russian politics may never be definitely determined. What is known, however, is that the Permanent Council and individual members of the United Nobility, both in public statements and private communications, liked to claim credit for these governmental acts;⁶⁹ and the acts concerned often closely followed the political intervention of the nobles’ organization. The timing is most suggestive in the case of the dissolution of the First Duma, for the Permanent Council as a body visited key government figures (both the Minister of the Interior Stolypin and Prime Minister Goremykin) to discuss agrarian matters between June 14 and 19, shortly before the government issued its June 20 communiqué on the land question, prohibiting any form of compulsory expropriation and thus provoking the final confrontation with the Duma.⁷⁰ The memoirs of the future prime minister, Count V. V. Kokovtsev (then Minister of Finance), indicate that the government’s final decision to dissolve the First State Duma, instead of attempting to meet its demands, was made precisely during this period—in the interval between June 15 and June 20.⁷¹ Certainly the timing of these interventions alone suggests at the very least that the United Nobility was one of the forces pushing the government toward dissolution.

The United Nobility was in large part able to achieve such notable success because of the tactical flexibility conferred on the organization by the nature of its membership. Thus, it could, with equal facility, exert behind-the-scenes pressure on the central government, place political pressure on the government from without by mobilizing the local zemstvos and noble associations behind a common program of political demands, and/or work within the established legislative institutions, especially the upper house of the Russian parliament, the State Council. All these political tactics were utilized by the nobles’ congress at one time or another.

Elite pressure—i.e., a direct appeal to the emperor or a high government official on the part of the nobles’ congress or its Permanent Council—appears to have been utilized most frequently, although not exclusively, in the early period of the organization’s existence (especially 1906). Beginning in 1910 the noble organization’s access to the emperor was actually formalized. In that year the nobles’ congress began to adopt loyal addresses to the tsar on an annual basis, which were personally transmitted to Nicholas II by the Chairman of the Permanent Council, who then proceeded to inform the monarch of the deliberations and opinions of the United Nobility.⁷² With this rather ritualized exception, such an approach to politics was usually reserved for times of political crises, when the United Nobility and its members felt themselves particularly threatened by measures under consideration and immediate action was of utmost importance. It appears, however, that if such elite interventions were to be effective, the United Nobility required highly placed associates within the imperial government willing to work for them. These were provided for the nobles’ congress by the personal connections of its members, particularly those men who had come from the now defunct Patriotic Union. In 1906 two former members of the Patriotic Union—A. S. Stishinskii, Kutler’s successor at the Main Administration of Agriculture and Land Settlement, and V. I. Gurko, Deputy Minister of the Interior and the architect of the future “Stolypin” land reform—were actual members of the Goremykin government.

Notwithstanding their high posts, the two men, who were among the members of the government most adamantly opposed to political concessions to the Duma, continued to maintain intimate relations with their former political associates (such as Count Bobrinskii), who now stood at the head of the nobles’ organization. Stishinskii went so far as to allow the First Congress of the United Nobility to meet in his office at the Main Administration of Agriculture,⁷³ while Gurko graced the congress with his presence and received a standing ovation for his recent tough rejoinder to the Duma on the land question.⁷⁴ Such ties between government figures and groups in society had been an integral feature of bureaucratic politics in Russia from the period of the Great Reforms, if not earlier. Since the support of groups in society could greatly strengthen an official’s political hand and advance his program and/or career, government officials occasionally even sought out such alliances. Relationships of this kind enabled the United Nobility to demand—and usually immediately receive—interviews and audiences with the most highly placed government officials.⁷⁵ Furthermore, these contacts also enabled the nobles’ organization to know when its political interventions on a given matter could be most effective.⁷⁶ The political interventions of the United Nobility were never haphazard but were carefully coordinated with parallel campaigns conducted by the organization’s current political allies in the government. Whenever the latter deemed it “inopportune” to continue to press for particular policies, the Permanent Council of the nobles’ congress would prudently refrain from launching a political offensive on that front no matter how inflamed were the opinions of its provincial constituents. The best example of such calculated restraint was the refusal of the Permanent Council in the autumn of 1906 to press on with its campaign for further revisions of the Duma electoral law, although a large majority of Council members favored such revisions, and many local noble associations were clamoring for action.⁷⁷

When it was impractical to undertake elite interventions with the government, the organization tended to rely more heavily on its provincial components.⁷⁸ At such times, the nobles’ union rather selfconsciously resorted to the tactics of the now defunct Liberation Movement, striving to influence the government from without by mobilizing the local zemstvos and noble associations behind its political demands. Such activities on the part of the United Nobility were most characteristic of the organization in the early Stolypin years (especially 1907). At this time, the United Nobility’s allies, Stishinskii and Gurko, had been removed by Stolypin from the government, and it seemed to many in the nobles’ association that their main opponent was not so much the revolutionary movement as a reformist-minded government bent on reaching a political accommodation with the Duma.’⁷⁹ For the new Stolypin administration not only prepared a large body of reform measures, which it then proceeded to introduce in the Duma, but it also allowed the second national assembly—to the surprise of many noble activists—to continue in operation somewhat longer than its predecessor. Therefore, the nobles’ organization in this period generally refrained from making direct representations to the government, preferring to concentrate their forces on a public campaign within the zemstvos and noble associations against the Prime Minister’s local reform projects.

The local reform projects were selected by the United Nobility as the target for their campaign partly because “the preservation of the leading influence of the nobility in the localities” was one of the main aims of the nobles’ organization from its very inception, but also because these bills represented one of Stolypin’s most far-reaching efforts to cooperate with moderate reformers in the Duma. Therefore, a campaign launched by the United Nobility in coordination with the State Council right to have these bills withdrawn from the Duma for preliminary consideration by local zemstvos and noble associations struck at the heart of the prime minister’s relationship with the national assembly. Moreover, the campaign against the local reforms culminated in the convocation of the 1907 Zemstvo Congress, an assembly that many members of the United Nobility hoped would go beyond the local reforms and draft a new electoral law for the national assembly, if the Duma were not dismissed by the time the congress convened.⁸⁰ In this way, the involvement of the United Nobility in the organization of this congress contributed to the dissolution of the Duma (which occurred two days before the zemstvo congress was originally scheduled to meet) and to the immediate publication of a new electoral law by government fiat to forestall any possibility of the zemstvo congress’s assuming this task.

The nobility’s campaign against Stolypin’s local reforms did not stop with the June Third coup d’état. The government’s reform projects were soundly criticized by the two sessions of the 1907 Zemstvo Congress in June and August, and the campaign for preliminary consideration continued in the zemstvo and noble associations until Stolypin capitulated to their demands on November 16 by establishing within the Ministry of the Interior the Council on the Affairs of the Local Economy,⁸¹ empowered to review all bills on local government before they were submitted to the Duma. This quasi-legislative body included elected representatives of the thirty-four provincial zemstvos and selected provincial governors (to which some marshals of the nobility and city duma representatives were subsequently added). Thus, the political pressures of the nobility also helped bring about the foundation of a pre-Duma, if not a third legislative house in the Russian political order.

With the June Third coup d’état and the foundation of the Council on the Affairs of the Local Economy, the political activity of the United Nobility entered a new phase. Henceforth, the organization primarily—but not exclusively—sought its political ends through the existing legislative organs. Initially, it appears that the organization staked many hopes on the Third Duma and its new composition. The Permanent Council went so far as to maintain in the autumn of 1907 that “future legislative work should remain in the hands of the legislative institution—the State Duma,” an evaluation of the political situation that left remarkably little scope for the usual behind-the-scenes machinations of the nobles’ organization.⁸² But relatively few members of the United Nobility—only twenty-two of the participants in the First Congress—were elected to this five hundred-man chamber.⁸³ Consequently the organization could exert little influence within the Duma⁸⁴ and soon directed its attention elsewhere.

At first the nobles’ organization possessed only a little more influence within the Council on the Local Economy than it had in the Duma. The original thirty-four delegates elected to this body from the zemstvos were evenly divided between people close to the Octobrist Union and men of the right (at least ten of the latter were members of the United Nobility). Under these conditions, the Council, which included twenty-two members appointed by the government, was inclined initially to accept the essence of Stolypin’s local reform projects (i.e., the replacement of the current estate-based electoral system with a more democratic suffrage), although they did want to substitute a rather low landed-property qualification for voting in place of the tax-based franchise favored by the government.⁸⁵ However, after the Fourth Congress of the United Nobility (meeting in March 1908) passed a resolution denying that any basic changes in local institutions were necessary or desirable and sent a special delegation to convey these sentiments to the emperor,⁸⁶ a number of provincial marshals of the nobility—at least eight, possibly more—were suddenly added to the Council. Since all the marshals concerned were active members of the United Nobility and apparently acted as a solid bloc, they provided a nucleus of leadership for the opposition to the government.

At any rate, after the addition of the marshals, the only way that the government could salvage any part of its reform program was through the mobilization of all the appointed members on the Council, who were then pressured to vote for the government’s project. This was done in December 1908 in order to pass Stolypin’s project on the uezdnyi nachal’nik, an appointed official who was to supersede the marshal of the nobility as the chief administrative figure in the county. The bill was passed over the opposition of a majority of “public” members of the Council from the nobility (all the marshals and a solid majority of the zemstvo delegates). The twenty-seven dissenting delegates immediately issued a protest,⁸⁷ which was endorsed by the Fifth Congress of the United Nobility,⁸⁸ after which nothing more was heard of this project. When Stolypin’s county zemstvo bill was brought up for a vote in March 1909, the marshals were present in full force, and a number warned against “the bureaucratization” of the zemstvo, which they maintained this measure would entail. This time, the opposition won a majority in the Council, leaving Stolypin, who had presided over the proceedings, to storm furiously out of the chamber.⁸⁹ Although the Council continued to meet throughout the Stolypin period, it played thereafter a far less crucial political role and was formally dissolved by the Kokovtsov administration.⁹⁰

Therefore, the most reliable and important of the United Nobility’s weapons in the post-1907 period was the influence of its members in the State Council. As a result of the reform of the State Council in 1906, the nobility from the first enjoyed a dominant position in the elective half of the chamber, occupying almost three-quarters of the seats (seventy-two out of ninety-eight). The close interrelationship between the United Nobility and the State Council can be appreciated from the following figures: members of the nobles’ congress accounted for between a third and a fifth of the total membership of the upper house throughout the 1905-17 period (sixty-five members in 1906, forty-four in 1912, forty-six in 1914, for example).⁹¹ This was a striking degree of dominance of a major state institution for an organization that could be regarded as only a faction within the nobility. The members of the United Nobility in the upper house did not form a special group, however, but took their place in both the right and center groups, especially the right-wing subgroup of the center, which coalesced in 1907 around Stolypin’s brother-in-law, A. B. Neidgardt, a member of the Permanent Council of the United Nobility. Members of the nobles’ organization were also prominent among the founders of the right group in the State Council, which included such stalwarts of the United Nobility (and previously the Patriotic Union) as Prince Kasatkin-Rostovskii, F. D. Samarin, O. R. Ekesparre, Count D. A. Olsuf’ev, A. P. Strukov, and A. A. Naryshkin.⁹² Here they were joined by other veterans of the Patriotic Union from among the appointed members of the Council, such as A. S. Stishinskii and V. F. Stiurmer, who had already cooperated with the nobles’ organization in its 1907 campaign against Stolypin’s local reform projects.⁹³

While divided among the political groups of the chamber, members of the United Nobility in the State Council continued quite naturally to keep in touch with one another, and occasionally they acted in concert on issues of vital concern to the landed nobility along lines previously indicated by the nobles’ congresses. Indeed, the existence of such ties between Council members, cutting across factional lines, was one of the factors that prevented the emergence of a fully developed party system in the upper house. Because of the composition of the State Council, the nobles’ organization found it easiest of all to work through members close to the government. We find the United Nobility represented by former veterans of the Patriotic Union among the appointed members of the upper house, most of whom had served in the Ministry of the Interior under Pleve. The most notable of these was A. S. Stishinskii, a man associated with the introduction of the land captains and other administrative counterreforms of the 1890s.

The debates on local government in the State Council provide a good illustration of how the United Nobility functioned in the upper house on issues of vital concern to the provincial nobility. Stolypin’s defeats in the Council on the Affairs of the Local Economy did not wholly predetermine the fate of his local reforms, since in many cases the Duma enthusiastically restored incisions that the government had made in these bills at the suggestion of the Council. This was most noticeably the case in the reform of local justice and the establishment of a district (volost) zemstvo, both of which came before the State Council in a form that the United Nobility at its congresses had already declared unacceptable. In the case of local justice, the Duma recommended over the adamant objections of the Fourth Congress of the United Nobility⁹⁴ that both the district peasant court and the judicial powers of the land captains be abolished, and their functions turned over to new justices of the peace, elected by the county zemstvos. When the Duma’s bill came up for discussion in the State Council in 1911, the United Nobility’s reluctance to see the district court abolished was reasserted in the Judicial Committee of the upper house under the leadership of A. S. Stishinskii.⁹⁵ In the face of this opposition, Stolypin unexpectedly capitulated and, reversing his previous policy, publicly spoke out in favor of the peasant district court. Under these conditions, the State Council substantially revised the Duma’s bill, and in the end, the peasant district court was not abolished but merely somewhat reformed.⁹⁶

The United Nobility was, however, less successful in its attempts to preserve the judicial powers of the land captain, quite possibly because this time the organization was unable to win over the government to its views. The quality of the land captains had been deteriorating rapidly in recent years as the economic decline of the nobility sharply reduced the ranks of noble landowners from whom these officials were traditionally selected, and it was apparent to the government that it was in the state interest that some of the tasks of the land captains be delegated to other institutions. Since the government, especially in the Stolypin period, controlled the votes of a sizable proportion of the appointed members of the State Council, who were subject to annual reappointment, the nobles’ organization had little chance to prevail. Nevertheless a number of members of the United Nobility (Prince A. N. Lobanov-Rostovskii, A. A. Naryshkin, la. N. Ofrosimov, M. Ia. Govorukho-Otrok, and of course Stishinskii) spoke out vigorously on this issue, insisting that the land captain’s unique mixture of judicial and administrative functions was essential for the preservation of order in the countryside.⁹⁷ But the government won out in the end: the majority of the upper house voted to strip the land captain of his judicial functions, thus reestablishing the principle of the separation of powers in the localities.⁹⁸ In short, it would seem that the support or opposition of the government was sometimes a crucial factor in determining the political success or failure of the United Nobility in the upper house.

The United Nobility was more fortunate in its opposition to the district zemstvo bill, which was passed by the Duma in 1912. Makarov and Maklakov, Stolypin’s successors at the Ministry of the Interior, who were generally reluctant to interfere in the deliberations of the upper house or to infringe on the vital interests of established groups in Russian society, did not actively intervene to salvage this bill.⁹⁹ The bill, passed by the Third Duma, would have transformed the purely peasant district administration into an all-estate body, representing all local inhabitants and possessing considerably more independence from the local administration than the current institutions, which were subject to the administrative tutelage and manipulation of the noble land captains. Such an independent, all-estate, but still peasant-dominated district government would have exercised considerable powers (including that of taxation) over local noble landowners. Consequently, it is not surprising that the Eighth Congress of the United Nobility, meeting in 1912, declared the measure “unacceptable” in its entirety, and that members of the United Nobility, spearheaded once again by their highly vociferous spokesman, Stishinskii, led the attack on this bill on the floor of the upper house. A few members of the United Nobility (Gurko, D. V. Kalachov, and Count D. A. Olsuf’ev) wanted to see the bill proceed to a second reading in view of the manifest deficiencies of the existing district administration. But the other members of the nobles’ organization speaking on this bill (I. E. Rako-vich, D. D. Levshin, Neidgardt, Strukov, V. I. Karpov, and Bobrinskii) called for its immediate rejection on the grounds that the proposed institutions would readily fall into the hands of the radical third element, since the nobility’s ranks were rapidly thinning, and the new independent peasant proprietors (presumably being created by the Stolypin land legislation) had not yet appeared in sufficient numbers to provide the district zemstvo with reliable personnel.¹⁰⁰ Thereupon the house without further ado rejected the Duma’s bill by a fairly slim majority (seventy-seven to seventy-one),¹⁰¹ members of the nobles’ organization obviously providing the margin of defeat. Hence, it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that thanks to the intervention of the United Nobility, the land captains and village elders under their supervision continued to rule the Russian countryside until the fall of the Old Regime.

The extent of the United Nobility’s influence over education reforms, another area of interest to moderate reformers like Stolypin, is more questionable. Yet here again we find the nobles’ organization conducting a spirited campaign against the proposed reforms, which was widely publicized in the press, while its members in the State Council, speaking in close accordance with the resolutions of the nobles’ congresses, helped alter the course of the reforms. The introduction of compulsory primary education was particularly hard fought, even after it had been piloted through the Duma by the enthusiastic Octobrists, with the initial support of the Ministry of Education and most sections of urban public opinion. What worried the United Nobility about the program as it emerged from the Duma was, first, the secularization of education entailed in the Duma’s subordination of the existing parish school network of the Orthodox Church (currently controlled by the Holy Synod) to new local school councils under the Ministry of Education. Second, the nobles’ organization objected to the Duma’s provision for elementary education in local languages in non-Russian areas. They were also concerned with the mounting costs of education envisioned by the bill (which proposed to raise the credits allocated to the Ministry of Education by ten million roubles annually) and by the Duma’s proposal to allow graduates of primary schools to transfer automatically to higher levels of education without having first to pass an entrance examination.¹⁰² According to V. M. Purishkevich, this latter measure would allow “the simple peasant to stray from his own background, to become a crow in peacock’s feathers and then a revolutionary.”¹⁰³

In the State Council, members of the United Nobility appeared less united over these issues than over those concerning local government, presumably because their own estate interests were less directly involved. Nevertheless, most of the speakers associated with the nobles’ congress expressed themselves in ways predictable from these resolutions, although they did not address themselves to all issues of concern to the United Nobility. For example, only Count D. A. Olsufev spoke against allowing students to transfer directly from primary to secondary schools without an intervening examination, despite the inflated rhetoric that had greeted this proposal at the nobles’ congress. In addition, a co-opted member of the United Nobility, N. A. Zverev,¹⁰⁴ the official reporter for the Education Commission of the upper house, introduced a series of amendments to the Duma’s legislation along lines previously suggested by the nobles’ organization. Two amendments, supported by all United Nobility members speaking on this bill and ultimately adopted by the State Council, limited education in native languages to the first two years of schooling and reserved 1.5 million roubles of the annual 10-million-rouble increment for the schools of the Holy Synod.¹⁰⁵ In both these cases of political success, the nobles’ organization had received support from elements within the government. The first amendment, interestingly enough, was endorsed by the Minister of Education, Kasso, whose recent repressive policies toward Moscow University were enthusiastically backed by the United Nobility, while Prime Minister Kokovtsev supported the second amendment. The alteration of this bill by the upper house meant that the legislative chambers of the Old Regime never enacted universal primary education into law, since the two houses were unable to work out an acceptable compromise version.¹⁰⁶

In agrarian, local government, and educational matters, then, the United Nobility can be said to have exercised definite, though varying, degrees of influence on state policies. It is doubtful whether they did so in other areas. They never discussed military or foreign affairs, even when these raised controversial issues and were debated in the legislative chambers. Perhaps they were restrained here by the conviction that these questions lay outside the nobility’s jurisdiction, falling entirely within the emperor’s prerogatives. Even in areas where the United Nobility’s influence was clear, however, it is possible to overestimate it and to misunderstand its nature. The nobles’ organization never “dictated to” or “manipulated” the government; they simply worked within the Russian political system as it had evolved over the years (both before and after 1905), articulating the political interests of the upper strata of the landed nobility and throwing their support to elements favoring similar policies within the government. In the process both the United Nobility and its bureaucratic allies profited from this alliance of mutual convenience at the expense of the legislative institutions, especially the Duma.

Yet the political successes of the United Nobility led to the gradual abandonment of its extraconstitutional role, as the State Council took over the function of aggregating and articulating right-wing views with the advantage of its legislative authority. Thereafter the United Nobility, while remaining a focus for the respectable right wing of the landed nobility, ceased to make an independent political contribution. After the death of its adversary, Stolypin, attendance at the nobles’ congresses declined markedly, while their members appeared increasingly unsure of the scope and nature of the political role that the organization could play¹⁰⁷ or even precisely whom it should represent. At its last congresses, the United Nobility began to discuss whether successful landowners of other estates should not be admitted to augment the ranks of the now rapidly declining nobility.¹⁰⁸ Perhaps having attained its original goals, the United Nobility would eventually have faded away, had not the World War and its new political challenges intervened.

It also appears that the United Nobility was always much less effective on economic questions than on political matters. To be sure, the Stolypin land reform was passed at the nobility’s instigation, and the government in the end did take effective measures to restore law and order in the countryside after the 1905 peasant rebellions. But the United Nobility never did succeed in changing the policies of the Peasants’ Land Bank, which was held accountable by many noblemen for the extreme rapidity of the economic decline of the nobility after 1905. Nor did the nobles’ organization ever manage to obtain government compensation for the victims of the agrarian disorders¹⁰⁹ or a reduction in the import tariff, which they felt discriminated against the agricultural sector and made it more difficult to find foreign customers for their agricultural produce. These issues, one would think, were of utmost importance to the membership of the United Nobility, who, by virtue of their large landholdings, were among the leading exporters of agricultural products, the chief victims of the agrarian unrest, and the group most likely to engage in mass panic land sales after 1905.¹¹⁰ The congresses did indeed take up these matters¹¹¹ and repeatedly appealed to the government. But the economic decline of the nobility proceeded more rapidly than ever during these years, leaving the last prewar congress to discuss once more “the crisis of private agriculture” with virtually no achievements to its credit in this sphere. The sole source of relief for noble landowners after 1905 came from a direction never mentioned at the congresses of the United Nobility—the vast sums of state funds poured into agriculture via the noble-dominated zemstvos.

Why was this so? In part, we think the United Nobility’s relative lack of economic success reflects the nature and aims of the organization. Its political preoccupations always outweighed its economic concerns, as can be seen from the much greater amount of time that the congresses devoted to political as opposed to economic issues. Nevertheless, the idea of an economic union of landowners, not necessarily only nobles, never entirely faded. Even after the original Union of Landowners had collapsed, despite the support rendered it by the nobles’ organization, N. A. Pavlov produced another scheme for an economic union at a meeting of the Permanent Council in 1910. By this time, the economic position of the nobility was the subject of annual debates at the nobles’ congresses. While most members of the United Nobility—true to the established principles of the organization—felt that the best way to improve the position of the nobility was to influence government financial policies, Pavlov maintained that with good organization and well-conducted husbandry, noble landowners could themselves overcome many of their problems. Inspired by the example of the Bund der Landwirte, he recommended that the United Nobility set up a nationwide agricultural cooperative to arrange cheap credit on flexible terms, organize the grain trade without relying on middlemen, undertake the bulk purchasing of agricultural machinery from abroad, and make available agricultural advice, legal aid, and insurance.¹¹² He also announced that the foreign banking firm of van Setters was prepared to offer the United Nobility up to four million roubles at 4½ percent interest to get such a union under way.

However, the nobles’ organization, particularly its leadership, reacted rather coolly to this scheme. Even many partisans of an economic union of some sort, like V. N. Snezhkov of Tambov, thought such activities were better left to the zemstvos, which possessed the requisite capital (thanks to the influx of state funds mentioned above) and an all-estate composition.¹¹³ Although Pavlov’s idea was approved in principle by two congresses (the Seventh and the Eighth), it was never implemented. On the suggestion of the Permanent Council, Pavlov’s proposal was constantly referred back to the localities (where it aroused little enthusiasm) or to a commission for further refinement. Consequently, nothing more came of the proposal, and Pavlov withdrew from the nobles’ organization to his estate to write his highly polemical memoirs in hopes of converting the younger generation of noble proprietors to his ideas.

In part, the opposition to Pavlov’s scheme stemmed from the fact that his plans were ill formulated and highly confusing. Pavlov apparently was not at all clear in his own mind about the future goals and composition of his union. Although he originally conceived of it as a purely economic association, Pavlov subsequently began to stress the political tasks that it could perform, seeing a union of landowners as the only group in Russia able effectively to combat the growing militancy and organization of the proletariat through its control over food supplies for the cities.¹¹⁴ Likewise, he sometimes talked of a union of purely noble landowners, only to contradict himself at other times by maintaining that his union would include persons of “all estates.”¹¹⁵ The only thing that was clear was that Pavlov’s plans for a union in 1910-12 did not include ordinary peasants, unlike the plans of his original 1906 union and the practices of his professed model, the Bund der Landwirte. He insisted that only those possessing a capital of at least three hundred roubles would be allowed to join: by his own estimate, those meeting this qualification would have to be at least “medium proprietors.”¹¹⁶ This is another example of the distrust that still existed between the Russian nobility and peasantry as late as 1912.

There is another basic reason why the noble’s organization did not implement Pavlov’s scheme: he was advocating a mode of activity that the United Nobility found foreign to their nature. Their political method par excellence was discreet pressure on the government through the use of personal contacts and elite institutions. In his proposals for a union, Pavlov was asking them to do something quite different, to break their ties to the government and launch out on their own in a world of purely economic values. To be sure, such values had come to play an ever larger role in the lives of Russian noblemen as the economic conditions of the post-Emancipation era forced increasing numbers of them to renounce traditional careers in state service and to involve themselves directly in agricultural affairs. Nevertheless, much of the traditional value system and thought patterns of the service estate, “the Petersburg psychology” as Pavlov disdainfully dubbed them in his memoirs, continued to influence noble landowners under the new conditions of life. Noble proprietors were by and large simply not the independent and self-reliant types that Pavlov’s plans for a union of landowners required. Rather, they continued to look to the state, which their ancestors had traditionally served, rather than to themselves for their salvation; and even the most agriculturally oriented among them continued to regard public service of some sort, even if only in local elective office, as no less important than their agricultural concerns.¹¹⁷ Such attitudes were especially entrenched among the absentee magnates (Bobrinskii and Co.) who dominated the executive organs of the United Nobility; but they were also shared by the more provincially oriented members of the nobles’ organization. Therefore, Pavlov was politically and psychologically out of step with the nobles’ organization when he told them forthrightly: “We can expect nothing from anyone.”¹¹⁸ The whole organization of the United Nobility was geared to get things from people in the government: that was its raison d’être, and that is why it found Pavlov’s scheme unattractive.

Returning to our initial comparison with the Bund der Landwirte, we think a number of conclusions can be stated that summarize the characteristics of the United Nobility. First, the organization was set up in response not so much to economic challenges as to political ones: the 1905 Revolution, the attacks on noble landed property, the weakened position of the nobility in the new political order of 1905–1906.

Thus, its economic aims were subsidiary and its main drive was always in the political field. On the other hand, while the United Nobility had a tolerably coherent conservative and monarchist outlook and policies on a broad range of issues, it was not a political party. Indeed, it avoided close association with any political party in an attempt to preserve its character as a traditional estate corporation. It exerted its influence through elite contacts, particularly in the Ministry of the Interior, and state institutions, especially the State Council. For this reason the United Nobility had no organization other than the Permanent Council and the annual congresses. It did not generate a system of mass communications through a newspaper or even an internal newsletter, confining itself to the publication of the proceedings of its congresses and to personal contact with bureaucratic elites and figures around the imperial court. Its membership tended to come from the upper strata of the landed nobility. Moves to attract non-nobles or smallholders and to make the United Nobility into the nucleus of an agrarian union were all abortive. Nor did the organization ever succeed in developing a purely commercial and agricultural side to its activities.

The United Nobility reflected, in fact, the ambiguous and transitional phase through which the Russian social and political order was currently passing. In a genuine autocracy, it would not have existed at all. In a full-blown parliamentary system, it would either have had to become purely a farmers’ lobby or to have sought a mass base in some political party. In a society still based on traditional estates, it would have represented the noble estate unambiguously; in a society where estates had disappeared altogether, it could have represented a class-based economic interest. But Russia was in transition from an autocracy to a parliamentary form of government and from an estate-based to a class-based social order, with all the ambiguities which that transition entailed. These ambiguities were faithfully reproduced in the curious organization that has gone down in history as the United Nobility.

NOTES

1. E. D. Chermenskii, Istoriia SSSR (period imperializma), 2d edition (Moscow, 1965), pp.318–19; A. Ia. Avrekh, Tsarizm i tret’eiiunskaia sistema (Moscow, 1966), p.17; V. S. Diakin, “Stolypin i dvorianstvo,” in Problemy krest’ianskogo zemlevladeniia i vnutrennei politiki Rossii (Leningrad, 1972); G. A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1904-14 (Cambridge, 1973), esp. chapters 2, 3, and 6; and Roberta T. Manning, “The Russian Provincial Gentry in Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1905-07” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1975), esp. chapters 5-8.

2. In this essay, we adhere to the standard Soviet definition of “large landowner,” regarding any individual who possessed 500 desiatiny or over as a large landed proprietor.

3. On the Bund der Landwirte, see S. R. Tirrell, German Agrarian Politics after Bismarck (New York, 1952); Thomas Nipperdey, Die Organisation der deutschen Parteien vor 1918 (Düsseldorf, 1961), pp.249–50; Hannelore Horn, Der Kampf urn den Bau des Mittelland-kanals: eine politische Untersuchung über die Rolle eines wirtschaftlichen Interessenvervandes im Preussen Wilhelms II (Köln, 1964), pp.8–33.

4. Manning, “The Russian Provincial Gentry,” pp.4–47.

5. For the role of the marshal of the nobility, see M. A. Katkov, Rol’ uezd-nykh predvoditelei dvorianstva v gosudarstvennom upravlenii Rossii. K voprosu o reforme uezdnogo upravleniia (Moscow, 1914).

6. The advocacy of such a program on the part of the Patriotic Union was by no means an act of political opportunism, provoked by the events of 1904–1905. Many members of this organization had favored the establishment of a similar representative body with the same limited powers and electoral base since the early 1880s. See K. F. Golovin, Vospominaniia (St. Petersburg, 1908-11), vol. II, pp.114–18.

7. Apart from Bobrinskii (who was to become a Deputy Minister of the Interior and a Minister of Agriculture), this organization included: Senator A. A. Naryshkin (an Orel zemstvo deputy and former provincial governor), A. P. Strukov (a former and future provincial marshal of the nobility in Ekaterinoslav and the head of the Office on the Affairs of the Nobility in the Ministry of the Interior), S. S. Bekhteev (head of the zemstvo section of the Ministry of the Interior, 1902–1904), V. I. Gurko (a Deputy Minister of the Interior in 1906), N. A. Khvostov (Oberprokurator of the Second Department of the Senate and the father of a future Minister of the Interior), A. D. Zinoviev (provincial marshal of the nobility in St. Petersburg, 1897–1903; former St. Petersburg Governor and Deputy Minister of the Interior, 19021904), A. S. Stishinskii (former Deputy Minister of the Interior, 1899–1904), Prince A. A. Shirinskii-Shikhmatov (Governor of Tver Province), N. A. Pavlov (Saratov landowner; provincial correspondent for Moskovskie vedomosti and Grazhdanin; and a special duty clerk in the Ministry of the Interior until the end of 1904), F. D. Samarin (a uezd marshal of the nobility and zemstvo deputy in Moscow province and a member of the Bulygin Commission), N. F. Kasatkin-Rostovskii (former Kursk marshal of the nobility, 189094). In addition, many of these men served in the Senate or on the State Council. The reader should note that both the provincial governors and the marshals of the nobility were subordinated to the Ministry of the Interior. The Patriotic Union was originally founded by V. F. Stiurmer (Director of the Department of General Affairs of the Ministry of the Interior), but he soon left the organization (when, according to Gurko, he found that he could not use it to advance his candidacy for the premiership). Hence the authors believe that the Patriotic Union may have grown out of the anti-Witte (or pro-Pleve) clique in the Ministry of the Interior and their allies in St. Petersburg society and among the provincial nobility. This group apparently maintained remarkable continuity as a distinct faction within the Russian government, from the 1890s to the fall of the Old Regime. Therefore it merits closer study, for this group may not only have played a role in the counterreforms of 1889-90 but also have provided the nucleus of the opposition to the policies of the reformist Prime Minister, P. A. Stolypin (1906-11), as well as some of the “dark forces” operating on the monarchy in the last days of the Old Regime, when many veterans of the Patriotic Union or their close associates were appointed to cabinet posts. V. I. Gurko, Features and Figures of the Past: Government and Opinion in the Reign of Nicholas II (Stanford, 1939), pp.383–85); Petergofskie soveshchaniia (Petrograd, 1917); “Dnevniki A. A. Polovtseva,” Krasnyi arkhiv, vol. IV, p.108; and P. P. Mendeleev, Svet i teni v moei zhizni 1864–1933: obryvki vospominanii (mss. in the Columbia University Russian Archive), notebook HI, pp.49–50.

8. A. P. Korelin, “Dvorianstvo v poreformennoi Rossii (1861–1904 g.g.), Istoricheskie zapiski, vol. 87, pp.91–173; N. A. Rubakin, “Rossiiskoe dvorianstvo v tsifrakh (Iz etiudov o chistoi publike,” Trudovoi put, 1907, nos. 11 and 12; N. A. Rubakin, Rossiia v tsifrakh (St. Petersburg, 1912).

9. V. Levitskii, “Pravye partii,” in Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii v nachale XX veka (edited by L. Martov and others) (St. Petersburg, 1909’11), II, pp.366–70; Hans Rogger, “The Formation of the Russian Right,” California Slavic Studies, vol. III (1964), pp.80–83. On Shcherbatov, see L. P. Minarik, “Proiskhozhdenie i sostav zemel’nykh vladenii krupneishikh pomeshchikov Rossii kontsa XIX veka-nachale XX veka,” Materialy po istorii sel’skogo khoziaistva i krest’ianstva SSSR, vol. 6 (1965), p.393.

10. The programs of the two organizations appear to have differed slightly, although the difference is a subtle one. The Union of Russian Men seemed much more sincerely committed to the foundation of a national assembly than the Patriotic Union, even though they, too, wished to preserve the autocratic powers of the emperor. They were also willing to base elections on something other than estates, advocating curiae of “customary groupings,” determined by actual life style rather than by outmoded legal definitions (such a system, however, would have resembled an estate-based franchise in many ways).

11. Zhurnal zasedaniia s”ezda uchreditelei vserossiiskogo soiuza zemlevladel’tsev 17 noiabria 1905 g. (Moscow, 1906), p.6.

12. Ibid., pp.20–30.

13. Ibid., pp.10–11, 30-33.

14. Ibid., pp.7, 9, 37.

15. Ibid., pp.37–40; Zhurnal zasedanii s”ezda vserossiiskogo soiuza zemlevladel’tsev, 12-16 fevralia 1906 g. (Moscow, 1906), pp.8–9; and Rogger, “The Formation of the Russian Right,” p.83.

16. Zhurnal zasedanii . . . 12-16 fevralia 1906 g., pp. 140, 142-43.

17. Novoe vremia, nos. 10884–10886, Jul. 3 (16)–5 (18), 1906, and no. 10893, Jul. 12 (25), 1906, pp.3–4, and Zhurnal zasedaniia soveta vserossiiskago soiuza zemel’nykh sobstvennikov 14-go maia 1908 goda (St. Petersburg, 1909).

18. N. A. Pavlov, Zapiski zemlevladel’tsa (Petrograd, 1915), pp.248–49.

19. Trudy vtorogo s”ezda upolnomochennykh dvorianskikh obshchestv 31 gubernii 14-18 noiabria 1906 g. (St. Petersburg, 1906), pp.122–28.

20. Only one of the fifty peasant deputies who spoke on the Stolypin land legislation failed to maintain that the abolition of the land commune in itself would not remedy peasant land hunger unless it were accompanied by a new allotment of land. Russia: Gosudarstvennaia duma. Stenograficheskie otchety. Tretii sozyv sessiia II, ch. i, 171-1666, ch. ii, 705–2303 and sessiia III, ch. i, 105-252.

21. A. P. Korelin, “Rossiiskoe dvorianstvo i ego soslovnaia organizatsiia,” Istoriia SSSR, 1971, no. 5, p.80.

22. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 1/303, 11. 15-16. See also Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment, pp.30–32.

23. See Manning, “The Russian Provincial Gentry,” pp.223–26; O. Trubet-skaia, Kniaz’ S. N. Trubetskoi: vospominaniia sestry (New York, 1953), pp.149–50; S. Iu. Witte, Vospominaniia (Moscow, i960), vol. II, p.390; A. N. Naumov, Iz utselevshikh vospominanii (New York, 1954-55), vol. II, p.45; D. N. Shipov, Vospominaniia i dumy o perezhitom (Moscow, 1918), pp.297 et seq.; Gurko, pp.380–81.

24. Naumov, II, pp.45–46.

25. Ibid., p.63.

26. The congress was even highly reluctant to accept the steering committee’s suggestion that compulsory expropriation might be permissible under certain conditions to allow access to waterholes, etc. At any rate, the congress initially rejected this point, accepting it only after the issue had been raised once more by the leadership of the congress. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 1/303, p. 19–20.

27. Ibid., pp.15–16. See also Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment, pp.3–32.

28. Three other noble associations took no official position on this question. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 2/1, 1906 11. 9-10 and 23-129; TSGIA fond 1283, opis 1, delo 12 (1906), 11. 34-35.

29. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 2/1, 1906, pp.9–19.

30. Ibid., 21-23.

31. Ibid., delo 1/303 11. 3-4.

32. Kruzhok dvorian vernykh prisiage: otchet s’ezda 22-25 aprelia 1906 goda s prilozheniiami (Moscow, 1906), p.15.

33. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 2/1, 1906, pp.121–31. See also the report that Snezhkov submitted for the consideration of the First Congress of the United Nobility. Kruzhok dvorian: Znachenie dvorianstva v sovremen-noi Rossii (Moscow, 1906). Similar views were also expressed by other spokesmen for a nobles’ congress in the localities, especially the Kursk nobility, which had already as early as June 1905 petitioned the emperor for an advisory Duma elected by estates. Levitskii, p.361.

34. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 2/1, 1906, 11. 9-19.

35. Novoe vremia, no. 10739, Feb. 5 (18), 1906, p.2. The relationship between the Circle and the Patriotic Union is unclear, although there was some overlap of membership.

36. Kruzhok dvorian vernykh prisiage otchet, pp.6, 10.

37. The Circle was aided in this endeavor by the casual nature of the membership of the steering committee. Prince Trubetskoi on April 6 had called upon the local noble associations to send delegates to the committee, but he failed to specify precisely how these delegates were to be selected. Consequently anybody from an unrepresented province could simply declare himself a delegate from that region. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 1/2, 1906, p.23.

38. Ibid., delo 3/3, 1906, pp.17–24 and Doklady sobraniia predvoditelei i deputatov dvorianstva S-Petersburgskoi gubernii 18 fevralia 1907 g. (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp.7–12.

39. Zhurnal podgotovitel’noi kommissii in Trudy 1-ogo s”ezda upolnomo-chennykh dvorianskikh obshchestv 29 gubernii (henceforth cited as Trudy pervago s”ezda), 2d edition (St. Petersburg, 1910), pp.177–80.

40. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 10, pp.141, 143.

41. Ibid., delo 76, 1906, p.85.

42. For a list of the participants in the First Congress of the United Nobility, see Ibid., delo 5/4, 1906, pp.278–82.

43. The provinces concerned were Vladimir, Kostroma, Novgorod, Orel, Penza, and Estland.

44. The noble associations concerned were those of Voronezh, Tver, Kurland, and Orenburg. Non-Russian nobles (except from the Baltic) were not invited to the nobles’ congress. It is interesting that the internal opposition to the policies of the Permanent Council tended to come from roughly the same geographic region as most of the dissenting or abstaining noble associations.

45. On the basis of woefully incomplete biographical data (covering approximately half the delegates), we found seventy uezd marshals of the nobility, thirty-three provincial marshals, forty-eight zemstvo deputies, and thirty-seven justices of the peace among the participants in the First Congress of the United Nobility.

46. Novoe vremia, no. 10854, June 3/16, 1906, p.4.

47. The attentive reader has, no doubt, noted that this table compares two different quantities—the distribution of landed wealth among members of the United Nobility and the distribution of landed estates owned by noble proprietors. Individual nobles, especially the more wealthy, could and frequently did own more than one estate. However, as far as we know no aggregate data exists on the distribution of total landholdings among noble proprietors, and the table that we have compiled does clearly establish in any case that members of the United Nobility tended overwhelmingly to come from the wealthiest Russian landowners.

Landholding data were available for 107 of the 221 men attending the First Congress (including 98 of the 133 elected delegates). Our sample seems to have been a fairly typical cross section of the congress, not necessarily only the wealthiest participants, since we have no landholding data for a number of men (like F. D. Samarin and Count P. S. Sheremetev) whose families are known to have owned tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of desiatiny of land. Also, our information may very well show many of the participants to be less wealthy than they actually were. For Vsia Rossiia, one of our major sources for the landholdings of the nobility, is a list of addresses of landowners and only lists the size of the estate on which a landowner actually resided, eliminating all other holdings (which were often not inconsiderable, since the Russian nobility was renowned for its many, scattered landholdings). Finally, we have made no attempt to take into account family holdings, although these, no doubt, are of great importance in determining which strata of the landed nobility a particular individual belongs to.

48. Our list would be far longer had we possessed sufficient data to trace the cadet branches of the one hundred families. For a description of this group, see L. P. Minarik, “Kharateristika krupneishikh zemlevladel’tsev Rossii kontsa XIX-nachala XX v.,” Ezhegodnik po agrarnoi istorii vostoch-noi evropy 1963 g. (Vilna, 1964), pp.693–708; “Proiskhozhdenie i sostav zemel’nykh vladenii krupneishikh pomeshchikov Rossii kontsa XIX-nachala XXv,” Materialy po istorii sel’skogo khoziaistva i krest’ianstva SSSR, sbornik 6 (Moscow, 1965), pp.356–95; and “Sostav i istoriia zemlevladeniia krupnei-skikh pomeshchikov Rossii,” in ibid., sbornik 7.

49. S. N. Prokopovich, Agrarnyi krizis i meropriiatiia pravitel’stva (Moscow, 1912), pp.113–18.

50. Novoe vremia, no. 10850, May 30/June 12, 1906, p.3.

51. Zapiska soveta ob”edinennykh dvorianskikh obshchestv ob usloviiakh vozniknoveniia i o deiatel’nosti ob”edinennago dvorianstva (St. Petersburg, 1907), p.13.

52. See, for example, Trudy pervago s”ezda, pp.7, 67, 79, 72-73, 77-78, 81-82.

53. Ibid., pp.84, 116-18; TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 3/304, 1906, p.7; Zapiska soveta, p.14; Ob”iavleniia soveta ob”edinennykh dvorianskikh obshchestv (St. Petersburg, 1906), p.2; and Novoe vremia, no. 10843, May 23/June 5, 1906, p.3.

54. Svod postanovlenii 1-X s’ezdov upolnomochennykh ob’edinennykh dvorianskikh obshchestv 1906-14 g.g. (Petrograd, 1914), p.1-4, 92.

55. Trudy pervago s”ezda, pp.11–12.

56. The First Congress of the United Nobility, however, appears to have been more representative than most of the 1905 congresses of this sort. Many noble associations selected their representatives to the congress at the time of the State Council elections; others chose their delegates less systematically. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 1/2, pp.56–115, 148-62, and delo 5/4, 1906, pp.1–5.

57. Trudy pervago s”ezda, p.8; and Novoe vremia, No. 10845, May 25/June 7, 1906, p.4.

58. The signatories of this protest can be divided as follows:

1. The Petersburg group: Count V. V. Gudovich, the provincial marshal of St. Petersburg and member of the Octobrist Central Committee; N. Shu-bin-Pozdeev, uezd marshal of St. Petersburg; Lev Aleksandrovich Zinoviev, marshal of Peterhof uezd; Evgenii N. Shvarts, marshal of Novoladozhskii uezd; Count G. N. Sivers, marshal of Iamburg uezd; N. P. Pykhochev, representative of the Shlissel’burg nobility;

2. The Chernigov group: Count V. A. Musin-Pushkin, marshal of Sosnit-skii uezd, member of the Octobrist party; V. I. Krinskii, Kozeletskii uezd marshal; P. P. Markovich, Glukhovskii uezd marshal; Vasilii Khanenko, Sta-rogubskii uezd marshal; Pavel Aleksandrovich Abalashev, Novozykhovskii uezd marshal;

3. First Duma deputies: M. A. Stakhovich, Octobrist, Orel marshal; Prince I. A. Kurakin, Octobrist, Iaroslavl marshal; Nikolai N. Andreev, Octobrist, Vologda marshal; N. A. Khomiakov, Octobrist, Sychevskii uezd marshal (Smolensk); Count P. A. Geiden, Octobrist, Opochetskii uezd marshal (Pskov); Prince N. S. Volkonskii, Octobrist, Riazan’ representative; G. A. Firsov, Kadet, Kharkov marshal;

4. The State Council Center: Prince P. P. Golitsyn, Novgorod marshal; I. N. Leontovich, Lubenskii uezd marshal (Poltava), Octobrist; Prince P. N. Trubetskoi, Moscow marshal; Prince Repnin, Kiev marshal;

5. Other: P. A. Belevich, Kremenchug uezd marshal (Poltava), may very well have been an Octobrist or have possessed close ties with them, for a number of prominent Octobrist families (the Leontovich, Kapnists, and Li-zogubs) resided in his uezd.

59. This protest may very well have been rooted in social and geographic differences among the nobility as well as political ones. The protesters (like the provinces abstaining from joining the United Nobility) tended to come from provinces to the north of Moscow, where peasant land hunger—and agrarian disturbances—were much less severe. The exceptions mainly came from Chernigov and Poltava, regions renowned for the large concentration of petty noble proprietors residing there, who, some maintained, were not at all adverse to seeing peasant land hunger satisfied through the compulsory expropriation of the lands of their larger, more prosperous neighbors. See, for example, the letters of Count A. A. Uvarov to Novoe vremia, no. 10859, May 30/June 12, 1906, p.3 and no. 10854, June 3/16, 1906, p.4. The protesters collectively, however, appear to have been no less wealthy than the remainder of the congress.

60. Trudy pervago s’ezda, pp.12–14.

61. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 4/304, 1906, 1. 2.

62. Trudy pervago s”ezda, pp.16–17.

63. Ibid., p.27.

64. Svod postanovlenii, p.83.

65. Manning, “The Russian Provincial Gentry,” pp.460–62.

66. It is quite possible that St. Petersburg was the last noble association to join the United Nobility because it included in its ranks many highly placed officials, opposed to the formation of a national nobles’ organization capable of intervening at a moment’s notice in the intricate power plays of bureaucratic politics.

67. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 250, 1906, p.169, and delo 93, 1906, P-37

68. Ibid., delo 76, 1906, pp.11–12, 16, 28-29, 69-70, and delo 10, pp.11, 103-104.

69. For example, see ibid., delo 15/10, pp.1–2, delo 93-94, 1906–1907, p.38; Zapiska soveta ob”edinennykh dvorianskikh obshchestv ob usloviiakh vozniknoveniia i deiatel’nosti ob”edinennago dvorianstva (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp.1-24; V. Snezhkov, Ob”edinennoe dvorianstvo (St. Petersburg, 1909); Russkiia vedomosti, nos. 5-6, Jan. 9-10, 1906; nos. 10-14 (Dec. 30, 1906-Jan. 5, 1907) and no. 16 (January 9, 1907) pp.1–2; Rech’, Jan. 4, 1907; and Postoiannyi sovet ob”edinennykh dvorianskikh obshchestv: Materialy po voprosam voznikshim na s”ezde gubernskikh predvoditelei 5-7 ianvaria 1907 goda (no date). See also the remarks made by Martov and Pavlov at the Seventh Congress of the United Nobility in 1911. Quoted in Maxim Kovalevskii, Chem Rossiia obiazana soiuzu ob’edinnennago dvorianstva (St. Petersburg, 1914), pp.23–25.

70. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 75/305, pp.9–15, and delo 15/10, 1908–1909, p.1.

71. The government’s decision to dissolve the Duma was by no means a foregone conclusion even at this late date. On June 15 Nicholas II showed Kokovtsev a list of new government ministers who, he had been assured by the Court Minister Baron Fredericks and D. F. Trepov, the Court Commandant, could get along with the Duma better than the present government. Nicholas seemed genuinely undecided what to do about this list, which consisted in the main of prominent members of the Kadet Party. The appointment of such a government would have gone a long way to meet the Duma’s demand for a responsible ministry and would have probably changed the political history of Russia. Kokovtsev, I, pp.197–211.

72. Svod postanovlenii, pp.17–22, and A. A. Bobrinskii, “Dnevnik,” Kras-nyi arkhiv, vol. XXVI (1928), p.147.

73. Naumov, II, p.76.

74. Trudy pervago s’ezda, p. 18.

75. In the first eighteen months of its existence, the Permanent Council of the United Nobility was formally received by Prime Ministers Goremykin and Stolypin (the latter when he was still only Minister of the Interior), V. A. Vasil’chikov, Stishinskii’s successor at the Main Administration of Agriculture, and by the management of the Peasant’s Land Bank. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 75/3-5, pp.9–16, and delo 76,1906, pp.45–46,111-12.

76. The leaders of the United Nobility appear to have been extremely well informed about developments within the inner circles of the government. In fact, they were sometimes better informed than officials who occupied important positions of power in the public eye. For example, Stolypin’s successor as prime minister, Count V. V. Kokovtsev, first learned of his impending dismissal from the premiership in early 1914 from the former permanent chairman of the United Nobility, Count A. A. Bobrinskii, at this time a leader of the right faction in the State Council. Earlier Kokovtsev had heard insistent rumors of his impending forced retirement but he could not bring himself to believe any of them until he heard the same thing from Count Bobrinskii, “a man,” according to Kokovtsev, “who never shoots the breeze [nikogda ne govoriashchago na veter] . . . and who has reliable sources of information.” Kokovtsev, II, p.275.

77. Ibid., p.6, and delo 75/305, 1906–1907, p.16.

78. Precisely at the time the United Nobility began to adopt such tactics, the role of its provincial component was vastly strengthened. The provincial marshals of the nobility were granted full voting rights in the Permanent Council, and the practice of co-option was severely limited to no more than ten persons per congress. When the Circle of Nobles protested against this move in the name of “landless nobles,” who had no political rights in the zemstvos and noble associations and hence were useless to the nobles’ organization in its new phase of activity, the Circle was told firmly that the United Nobility was an organization of the landed nobility. See Manning, “The Russian Provincial Gentry,” pp.458–61.

79. See, for example, the remarks of Prince Tsertelev to the Permanent Council. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 76, 1906, p.95.

80. These events are discussed in some detail in Manning, “The Russian Provincial Gentry,” chapter 7.

81. Zhurnaly tverskago ocherednogo gubernskago zemskago sobraniia sessii 1907 goda (18-19 dekabria) i chrezvychainago sobraniia 16-17 maia 1907 goda i prilozheniia k nim (Tver, 1908), pp.15–16, and 6-i material po vo-prosu o mestnoi reforme: postanovleniia chrezvychainykh i ocherednykh gubernskikh dvorianskikh sobranii po voprosu o mestnoi reforme (St. Petersburg, 1908).

82. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 15/10, 1908–1909, pp.1–2.

83. The organization did little better in the Fourth State Duma. Only twelve participants in the First Congress of the United Nobility served in that chamber.

84. Nonetheless, the United Nobility never turned against the reconstituted Duma, adamantly refusing to follow the lead of its permanent council chairman, Count A. A. Bobrinskii, who wanted the nobles’ organization to retaliate in 1910 for the many attacks on the landed nobility made from the Duma podium by launching a public offensive against that chamber, including demands for further revisions in the Duma electoral law. Quite possibly the United Nobility’s reluctance to take the offensive can be explained by the fact that the authority of the Duma could easily be curbed by the other legislative institutions (in which the nobles’ organization possessed considerably more influence). Avrekh, pp.491–94.

85. See the report of council member P. Koropochinskii on the activity of the council before the marshals were added. Reforma mestnago samou-pravleniia po rabotam Soveta po Delam Mestnago Khoziaistva: Doklad XXXIV ocheredomy Ufimskomu gubernskomu zemskomu sobraniiu pred-stavitelia Ufimskago zemstva P. Koropochinskago (Ufa, 1909).

86. In addition, the congress resolved that the consideration of the local reform projects by the Council on the Affairs of the Local Economy could not be considered an adequate substitute for the review of these projects by the local zemstvos and noble associations. Svod postanovlenii, pp.333–35. The deputation sent by the Fourth Congress of the United Nobility consisted of Bobrinskii, Naryshkin, and two provincial marshals of the nobility (A. D. Samarin of Moscow and S. M. Prutchenko of Nizhnii Novgorod), both of whom were subsequently added to the Council. Kratkii obzor deiatel’nosti upolnomochennykh dvorianskikh obshchestv za 1907-1908/1908/1909 Upolnomochennago Moskovskago Dvorianstva grafa Chernysheva-Bezobrazova (St. Petersburg, 1909), p.21.

87. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 19/69, p.50.

88. Trudy piatago s”ezda upolnomochennykh dvorianskikh obshchestv 32 gubernii s 17 fevralia po 23 fevralia 1909 g. (St. Petersburg, 1909), pp.11031, 281-84.

89. Naumov, II, pp.133–38.

90. N. Mel’nikov, 19 let na zemskoi sluzhbe (avtobiograficheskiia nabroski i vospominaniia) (unpublished mss. in the Columbia University Russian Archive), p.348.

91. Members of the United Nobility virtually monopolized the elections from the nobility to the State Council in the 1906–14 period, accounting for eighteen out of the eighteen delegates in 1906, sixteen out of eighteen in 1912, and fourteen out of eighteen in 1914. They usually provided about half of the zemstvo representatives to this body. However, it would be wrong to regard this interlinking membership simply as the result of the singleminded infiltration of a state institution on the part of the nobles’ organization. The members of the United Nobility were in the main men of considerable political experience with both bureaucratic and provincial connections. Most of them would no doubt have been elected to the State Council even had the United Nobility not existed.

92. “Dnevnik A. A. Polovtseva,” Krasnyi Arkhiv No. IV (1923), pp.107-108, 116-17.

93. As far as we can tell, Stishinskii and Shtiurmer were the first to call for the preliminary consideration of Stolypin’s local reform projects in the zemstvos and noble associations. They were also appointed to the United Nobility’s commission on local reforms. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 76, 1906/07, 88-92, and Svod postanovlenii, p.30.

94. Ibid., pp.48–52, and Trudy chetvertago s’ezda upolnomochennykh dvorianskikh obshchestv 32 gubernii s 9 po 16 marta 1908 g. (St. Petersburg, 1909), pp.151–226.

95. Stishinskii was a leading figure on the judicial committee of the State Council.

96. Russia. Council of the Empire. Stenograficheskie otchety (St. Petersburg, 1911-12) sessiia 7, esp. cols 1756-60 (henceforth cited as GSSO) and Naumov, II, pp.161–62.

97. GSSO 7 (1911-12), cols 1773-88, 1846-55, 1903-17, 1925-33, 1965.

98. It is possible that members of the United Nobility might have been included in this majority; but without voting lists that were not available to us, we cannot tell. Ibid., 1846-55, 1903-17, 1925-33, 1965.

99. Hosking, pp.168–69. Earlier the government had supported the district zemstvo bill.

100. GSSO 9. (1913-14), 2200-12, 2238-47, 2261-66, 2308-19, 2217-26, 2302-8, 2319-25, 2332-27.

101. Ibid., 2394.

102. Svod postanovlenii, pp.59–61, and Trudy piatago s”ezda, pp.110–33, 282, 315-37.

103. Trudy shestago s”ezda upolnomochennykh dvorianskikh obshchestv 33 gubernii s 14 marta po 20 marta 1910 g. (St. Petersburg, 1910), p.388.

104. N. A. Zverev is yet another official who had served in the Ministry of the Interior under Pleve (as head of the Chief Administration on the Affairs of the Press) and who proved willing to work with the nobles’ organization. He came from a peasant family in Novgorod province and was given an education by the Khotiainintsev family, local landowners who were closely associated with the United Nobility. Gurko, pp.88–89 and 638.

105. GSSO 7, 2695–2714, 2999–3010, 3019-30, 3048, 1149-59, 1218-28, 1344.

106. Hosking, p. 178.

107. Rech’, no. 68, Mar. 10, 1912, p.6, and Trudy vos’mago s”ezda upolnomochennykh dvorianskikh obshchestv 37 gubernii s 5 marta po 11 marta 1912 g.

108. Ibid., pp.150–94 and Trudy deviatago s’ezda upolnomochennykh dvorianskikh obshchestv 39 gubernii s 3 marta po 9 marta 1913 g. (St. Petersburg, 1913), pp.31–52.

109. The most the victims of the disorders ever received were government loans under the Law of March 15, 1906. These, however, had to be repaid, and the United Nobility deserves no credit for this measure, which was adopted before the nobles’ organization came into existence. TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 227/22, pp.3–13.

110. S. N. Prokopovich, Agrarnyi krizis i meropriiatiia pravitel’stva (Moscow, 1912) pp.113–18, and I. G. Drozdov, Sud’by dvorianskago zemlevladeniia v Rossii i tendentsii k ego mobilizatsii (Petrograd, 1917), pp.49–71.

111. Trudy pervago s”ezda, pp.127–35; Trudy vtorago s”ezda, pp.82–85, 108-109; Trudy tret’iago s”ezda upolnomochennykh dvorianskikh obshchestv 32 gubernii s 27 marta po 2 aprelia 1907 g. (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp.21092; Trudy chetvertago s”ezda, p.138; Trudy piatago s”ezda, pp.43–95, 155-308, 12-26; Trudy shestago s”ezda, pp.98–112, 301-25; Trudy vos’mago s”ezda, pp.211, 262-81; Trudy desiatago s”ezda upolnomochennykh dvorianskikh obshchestv 39 gubernii s 2 marta po 6 marta 1914 g. (St. Petersburg, 1914), p.14.

112. TSGAOR fond 434 opis 1, delo 80/307, pp.42–43; Pavlov’s report to the Permanent Council, November 12, 1910. See also his Zapiski zemlevla-del’tsa, Trudy sedmago s”ezda, p.226.

113. Snezhkov had long been advocating such a zemstvo organization. See his report to the Fourth Congress of the United Nobility. V. Snezhkov, Zemstvo i zemlia (St. Petersburg, 1907); TSGAOR fond 434, opis 1, delo 93/94, 1906-12, pp.201–37, and Trudy vos’mago s”ezda, p.23.

114. Ibid., pp.17–21.

115. V sovete ob”edinennago dvorianstva (no date); Zhurnal zasedaniia komissii dlia vyrabotki ustava po proektu N. A. Pavlova ob ob’edinenii dvorianstva na pochve ekonomicheskoi 16-go maia 1911 goda (St. Petersburg, 1912), and Izvlechenie iz perepiski N. A. Pavlova s sovetom (no date).

116. Trudy vos’mago s”ezda, p.371. Also it seems that he wanted the nobles to fight the unionization of agricultural laborers.

117. Manning, “The Russian Provincial Gentry,” pp.48–49.

118. Pavlov, Zapiska, 7. Pavlov’s motives in urging the nobility to be independent of the government are unclear. Having grown up in “the milieu” of St. Petersburg, as he put it, he left the capital at a rather young age (nineteen) to devote himself full time to agriculture, a pursuit in which he ultimately attained reasonable success. Hence, his provincial roots were far deeper than those of many other United Nobility leaders. Also, he was almost alone among the members of the Permanent Council in never serving in the legislative chambers, and he was much less involved in the affairs of his local zemstvo and noble association than one would expect from a man in his position. However, he had not always been as wary of the government or indifferent to officeholding as he was in 1910-12. In the opening years of the century, he had served as a special duty clerk (without a salary) in the Ministry of the Interior, flooding the government with a long series of proposals and suggestions, none of which were accepted, according to Gurko. Perhaps his views of the government were influenced by this experience, coupled with the events of 1905, when the government proved itself incapable of defending the property of noble landowners from the peasant rebellions. See Gurko, pp.213, 643, and Pavlov, op. cit.