Barinova’s stated aim is to approach pre-Revolutionary Russia’s noble question from a different angle from those used in 1) the late Soviet monographs by A. P. Korelin, Iu. B. Solov’ev, and V. S. Diakin, which focused on “the higher aristocratic and bureaucratic circles of the country and gave little attention to specific local noble societies” and in 2) the Russian articles and dissertations, mostly from 1980–2001, which dealt with the influential role of the United Nobility in forming government policy, but not with that of “the separate guberniia noble societies in the United Nobiity’s activity” (Pp. 13-16). She makes good on her promise through her exhaustive use of the archival and printed materials of the provincial noble assemblies and of the correspondence and memoirs of participants in them.
Her use of these sources, however, is questionable. She plucks from them quotations useful to her arguments, jumping back and forth in time throughout the quarter-century preceding World War I, sometimes not even dating her source. In using memoirs, Barinova does not take into account the date – often long past the remembered event – or the place – usually in emigration – of writing. Moreover, her evidence falls far short of fulfilling her goal of explaining the nobility’s “consciousness,” “mentalitet,” “mental’nost’,” its “totality of ideas, beliefs, experiences of the spirit,” its “cast of mind.” These are concepts, like “modernization,” “transformation,” and “systemic crisis,” which she repeats endlessly but without satisfactory definitions. Attempting to clothe her analysis in a scientific garb, she succeeds only in exhausting and exasperating her reader with terms and generalizations largely devoid of substantial content.
The twelve tables that constitute appendices to Barinova’s study give significant insight into her methods. The first four tables illustrate 1) the declining number of hereditary nobles in the period 1858–1914 in nineteen gubernii (six Central Non-Black Soil, six Central Black Soil, five Volga region, plus Moscow and St. Petersburg); 2) noble landholding in 1905 as a percent of all private landholding and private landholding as a percent of total acreage in seventeen of the preceding gubernii, without Moscow and Petersburg; 3) the absolute decline in acreage of noble landholding in 1877–1914 in the six Central Black Soil gubernii; and 4) the distribution by size (small, medium, large) in 1905 of noble landholdings in the five Volga gubernii and five of the six Central Black Soil gubernii (without Riazan). Barinova gives no explanation for her selection of different gubernii for each of the tables, or for her exclusion of the majority of the fifty gubernii in European Russia.
Typical examples of the tables in the remaining seven appendices are numbers five and six. Table five classifies the nobility’s negative and positive ideas about its economic position, social status, political position, and its psychological mood, based on content-analysis of a sample of landed nobles’ correspondence and the speeches they delivered in noble and zemstvo assemblies. The sample is not identified as to size, the period from which it was taken, or anything else. Table six quantifies the personal data, lifestyle, and public service of seven named nobles (including one prince, one count, and one baron), based on content-analysis of every fifth page of text from their memoirs. Such appendices give evidence of Barinova’s methodology, undermining rather than supporting any claim that her book might make to be a work of serious scholarship.
She notes that one school of foreign historians, namely R. Manning, L. Haimson, and R. Edelman, have ascribed “the decline of the nobility” to “the estate’s irrational behavior,” but that the present reviewer differs from these three: “In S. Becker’s work is most fully set forth a second point of view” – that the noble estate experienced a “gradual successful adaptation to new social relationships.”^[1] In the remainder of her book,^[2] Barinova accepts the conventional wisdom of Soviet historians and of Manning, Haimson, and Edelman. She implicitly rejects my revisionist approach without ever acknowledging the statistical data my book presents on nobles’ sales and purchases of land, the changing ratio of their indebtedness to the value of their landholdings, and their use of capital received from mortgaging and selling their land. Nor does she offer countervailing evidence to my data. An author is always flattered to find that his book has been referred to by a subsequent student of the same topic, but he cannot avoid questioning why that student neither adopts his thesis nor argues effectively against it.
The above shortcomings are not the only ones that detract from the value of Barinova’s volume. It is infused with romantic nostalgia about the Russian nobility, to the extent that it often reads more as a work of historical fiction than as an objective work of scholarship. Most of the nobility, she repeatedly claims, were endowed, both genetically and by parental upbringing, with endless virtues: “High moral principles, Christian morality, the code of noble honor, feelings of faithfulness to duty and to one’s word, responsibility,” “the ideals of Orthodox monarchy, of service to the motherland, of defense of the fatherland,” a natural “connection with the narod and with vlast’,” “reason, honor, dignity,” “integrity, simplicity,” “independence, courage,” “duty,” “moral discipline,” “service to tsar and fatherland and the fulfillment of Christian precepts” (Pp. 7, 67-68, 74, 79, 162, 318). These qualities, plus the nobles’ “abilities to accommodate themselves to changing historical conditions…and economic innovations” made “In many respects the direction of Russia’s historical development over the course of centuries” dependent on the noble estate (P. 5). To emphasize this point, Barinova titles chapter seven, the longest in her book, “The Nobility in the Service of Russia,” and devotes it to brief biographies of twenty nobles born in 1830–1870.
For Barinova, moreover, the study of the nobility is not only an exercise in nostalgia but is directly relevant to the problems faced by post-Soviet Russia: “Problems connected with the history of the Russian nobility have acquired anew political topicality, starting with the 1990s. The rebirth of noble assemblies, the appearance of monarchist parties have breathed life into the idea of returning to the former, pre-Revolutionary form of government” (P. 7).
Despite her nostalgia about the nobility and her belief in its relevance to today’s problems, Barinova does not present a consistent argument about the estate’s role in, and responsibility for, the collapse of Russia’s old regime. Contradicting her initial encomium to the nobility’s ability to adjust to changing conditions, one of the major themes of her book is the estate’s inability to do just that at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She does not fault the nobility alone – or rather the provincial pomeshchiki whom she regards as the only true nobles – for the crisis they were unable to surmount. Both the liberal nobles and those who had abandoned the countryside for positions in the central bureaucracy as agents of the regime allegedly betrayed the interests of their estate. Liberals, “who objectively reflected the interests of the country’s capitalist development” and lacked a “significant social base,” did so by advocating the abolition of the nobility’s privileged role in local and central administration, the granting of equal rights to the peasantry, the abolition of the system of social estates, and the transition to representative, constitutional government (Pp. 53, 65, 130, 316).
The regime, on the other hand, “impeded the full, or even any essential [partial] legalization of various groups” not part of itself, especially those closest to it. It continued to act as the condescending patron toward its oppressed suppliant pomeshchiki, preferring to cooperate “with representatives of the broader society” (P. 76). Nevertheless, “The conservative nobility,” which, Barinova claims, “spoke in the name of the whole estate,” placed exaggerated hopes on “government help to the estate for its economic and political revival” – the same government it blamed for “all the transformations in society,” and for being more attentive to the bureaucracy than to the nobility as a whole. The result, she argues, was that the first estate failed to develop any “real initiative” of its own, lost hope in the future, became apathetic, its political will paralyzed.
And yet Barinova points to the United Nobility as the product of just such an initiative, by which the conservative pomeshchiki aimed “to obtain from the authorities more independence for the activity of their corporate estate organizations and to endow these with a statewide character.” She also credits the nobility’s extreme right wing with the realization that the economy had to be reconstructed along Western lines (Pp. 316-319).
What are Barinova’s conclusions from her attempts to penetrate the landed nobility’s psychology? That the nobility, to which Russia owed so much and which exhibited such admirable characteristics, was the victim of Russia’s modernization. It was unable to adapt to the new economic and social conditions (an arguable point), and even to overcome its internal divisions – between liberals and conservatives, between provincial landowners and bureaucrats. Nor was the government willing effectively to respond to the nobility’s needs. That the old regime collapsed because it failed to cope with the challenges posed by a modernizing society is a truism, to which Barinova has added nothing. As for responsibility for that failure, in her concluding sentence she places it equally on her much admired pomeshchiki and on the government. It was, she claims, the inflexible policy of both that “facilitated the crisis and collapse of the state system” (P. 323).