18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 37

[cahn]

More diaries of our favorite 18th-century Prussian diary-keeper have been unearthed and have been synopsized!

January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!

Comments

Russian nobility

[mildred_of_midgard]

Contemporaries thought so too! It was a trope to pityingly/condescendingly refer to the Russian nobility as "slaves", and for the nobles to complain about their fates. Consider, for example, the ice wedding, in which one of the parties was a prince. You could not pull this off in just any country in Europe!

The (Russian) author of the more reliable-looking book on Peter's reforms I just cited makes the case that during Peter's time, at least, the nobles were *not* the ruling class, they were a differently oppressed class:

In this regard a question arises: can one call this bureaucratized, regimented nobility that was obligated to study in order then to serve and to serve in unlimited military and civil service (even those discharged from service “for old age and for wounds” for which they had often been examined by the autocrat himself were assigned to garrisons or “whoever will be suited to whichever occupation”), the ruling class-estate in the sense that we understand this, as applied to the times of Catherine the Great and Nicholas I?

It may be objected, to the contrary, that the nobles were the ruling class, for they enjoyed the right of owning lands settled by bondaged peasants whom they exploited. This is true, of course, but as applied to the Petrine era serf ownership was not the exclusive right of the noble class. Bondaged peasants and even slaves could be owned in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries by representatives of the service estate and the merchantry. Only subsequently did the nobility succeed in gaining the monopoly right on owning settled lands.

Ah! Looking at the coverage of Alexei in this book, it says "he decided on a terrible crime for a Russian subject--fleeing abroad, which was state treason." That's broader than the "civil servant committing treason and soldier committing desertion" description from that essay I cited in my original post.

Judging by some other things he says, that may actually have been one of the things changed by Catherine, I'm not sure. But since she didn't come into power until the 1760s, that's still a good half of the century.