Научная конференция "Россия - Британия"

D. Lieven
London School of Economics, Fellow of the British Academy

I shall start by putting tsarist elites in a global context. I will compare them to the ruling elites of the Ottoman Empire, and to those of Ming and Ching China. Though there are interesting parallels, the comparison brings out just how firmly tsarist aristocracy followed a fundamentally European pattern. This is obviously true in cultural terms, and especially by the nineteenth century, but it is even largely true in seventeenth-century structural terms too.

Within Europe on the other hand, Russian and England were in most ways at opposite ends of the aristocratic spectrum: this is in itself important, since Anglophone historians have traditionally been inclined to measure aristocracy against a supposedly English norm. In fact in many ways England was as deviant in one direction as Russia was in the other. The most significant distinction between the two aristocracies was the political one, which can to some extent be boiled down to the feudal tradition in England (reflected eg in parliamentary institutions) and its absence in Russia. This is a great historical clichЁ¦: like most clichЁ¦s it is mostly true. But there were other key reasons for difference too: one which I would like to highlight is the differing impact of empire on the two aristocracies.

In the nineteenth century England became a model for Russian aristocrats, and indeed for much of the European aristocracy as a whole. This was true in the times of Karamzin and the Slavophiles, and it remained true among aristocratic political leaders in the eras both of Alexander II and of the Duma monarchy. This was partly because the British peerage was the richest, most powerful and most privileged aristocratic elite in Europe. In no other country was the aristocracy so completely a ruling class in the full sense of the word. The fact that the United Kingdom itself was the richest and most powerful country in the world added lustre and legitimacy to the British aristocracy and to the role it played in British society and politics. Russian aristocrats lusted after the English combination in which aristocrats possessed absolute security of property, guaranteed civil liberties, the lionЎЇs share of political power, and huge social deference and respect. They adopted elements of British aristocratic culture and manners.

The failure to create an English-style liberal-aristocratic constitutional and political order in Russia (despite the wishes of many aristocrats) was owed to many factors. Most basically, the Russian aristocracy never had collective institutions through which it could define or impose its own interests and viewpoints. The aristocracy was also too dependent on the state for the growth and subsequent preservation of its wealth. Initially this had much to do with partible inheritance, the limited possibilities of Russian agriculture, and the enormous handouts by Romanov monarchs which were the fruits of successful territorial expansion. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, it above all stemmed from the aristocracyЎЇs dependence on the state for defence of its property against social revolution.

In many ways the closest that the Russian landowning elite came to English-style aristocratic liberalism was in the zemstvo movement of 1900-1905 and in the Duma monarchy era. In the late-nineteenth century, however, the British landowning class was much stronger in the countryside than was its Russian equivalent. In the 1870s British aristocrats still owned 75% of the land in England and Wales. The defence of property and order could also rely on a huge middle class, which in the countryside meant a large group of wealthy tenant-farmers on aristocratic estates. By 1900 aristocrats owned far less of the Russian countryside and found themselves in confrontation with a communal peasantry which was much less differentiated than its German and French equivalents (and which had disappeared centuries before in England).

By this era, securing property (especially big aristocratic estates) on EuropeЎЇs Ў°second-worldЎ± periphery was much more difficult than in wealthy Ў°first-worldЎ± England and Scotland (there were interesting Russian parallels with BritainЎЇs own Irish Ў°second worldЎ±). The social and political context in which the Russian aristocracy had to operate was far closer to Spain, Italy and Hungary than to Britain. In all of these countries the survival of aristocracy after the First World War was owed to successful counter-revolution and subsequent authoritarian rule.