SUMMARY:

This article explores legislative and administrative practices that were meant to create a basis for the Russian estate system. These practices emerged as part of a larger effort to create a “well organized police state,” while estates were simultaneously considered – in the spirit of the 18th century Enlightenment – important in preventing despotic. In the Russian context, this meant overcoming fluid borders between different social groups as well as inconsistencies in correlation between estate status and economic role. It also meant accommodating serfdom. Beginning in 1775, Catherine II’s government attempted to make rules that made the urban estate more flexible and nuanced. At the same time, decrees providing for new rules to regulate the influx of the peasants into the cities were aimed at improving “the quality” of this immigration, setting up property or fiscal censes. In accordance with agro-centric, physiocratic ideas, the acceptance of peasants into the city or town estate (meshchane) was viewed as endangering the fiscal health of the state. Thus, the social structure of empire was programmed to prevent the upward social mobility of peasants, while at the same guaranteeing that “meshchane” would not slip down the social ladder (though, indeed, upward social mobility was also made difficult for them). Peasants were only allowed into the merchants’ estate, not that of “meshchane.” The latter estate, despite its supposedly urban character, remained identical with the peasantry in terms of its fiscal (and often economic) role.