Noble Landownership in 18th-Century Russia: Revisiting the Economic and Sociopolitical Consequences of Partible Inheritance

Abstract

Noble Landownership in 18th-Century RussiaRevisiting the Economic and Sociopolitical Consequences of Partible Inheritance Sergey Chernikov (bio) Translated by Aleksei Tereshchenko The idea that partible inheritance had a negative influence on the economic well-being of noble families is well known; it was set out in the famous Law of Single Inheritance published by Peter the Great in 1714.1 Most historians believe that after a few generations, the absence of primogeniture led to a catastrophic reduction in the size of landed property belonging to the descendants of noblemen, even to their complete ruin.2 Several works demonstrate that the practice of partible inheritance undermined the independence of landowners, making the nobles dependent on the state and their opposition to the crown impossible.3 Scholars who have adopted [End Page 277] a more moderate point of view have pointed out that the negative effects of such fragmentation of landed property were to a large extent offset by the acquisition of new lands through inheritance, purchase, or the receipt of dowries.4 A key strand of the discussion is the Law of Single Inheritance itself. Many still adhere to the popular opinion—based on a Senate report of 9 December 1730—that the law was often infringed. M. D. Rabinovich and G. V. Kalashnikov, however, analyzed the wealth of Russian army officers between 1720 and 1745 and found that the law was implemented with regard to the inheritance of real estate.5 I have also calculated how much fragmentation of landed estates took place in the first half of the 18th century.6 At the same time, many questions have not received sufficient attention. For instance, how did the fragmentation of landed property affect agricultural productivity? Were five small estates, each with 20 serf “souls,” the economic equivalent of a large, unfragmented hereditary estate with 100 souls? Is there a connection between the size (population) of a noble estate, the labor resources of a peasant family, the allocation of serfs’ obligations, and the amount of unpaid taxes? The first part of my article addresses these questions. It is based on the results of household censuses from the early 1730s conducted in the St. Petersburg region (Ingermanland guberniia) and in the South, in the fertile black-soil lands of Sloboda Ukraine. Never before have revision documents and tax collectors’ data been used to study the economic and social impact of the fragmentation of noble estates. My calculations show that large estates were economically more efficient, and that the only way to keep the fragmented estates profitable was to intensify the exploitation of peasants and to bring new lands under cultivation. These results provide the basis for the second part of my work. The analysis of interrelationships among models of inheritance, the profitability of noble estates, and peasant labor resources allows me to show why the introduction of single inheritance and the elimination of the old model of service (pomest’e) [End Page 278] land tenure were united to create the Law of Single Inheritance. Until now, these key decisions by Peter the Great have been studied separately. As I show, the distribution of conditional service lands (pomestnye razdachi) in the 16th and 17th centuries was in essence a compensatory mechanism that diminished the negative effects of the fragmentation of hereditary estates (votchiny). As a result, the 1714 Law of Single Inheritance can be interpreted as an attempt by Peter to save the profitability of noble estates in a situation where land resources were becoming scarce. The second part of the article also deals with the economic and sociopolitical impact of the abrogation of the Law of Single Inheritance through an analysis of the new situation confronted by nobles after 1731, when they were able to resume the practice of partible inheritance. On the one hand, the state no longer helped nobles by assigning large-scale service land grants. The growing dependence of lower-income gentry (the majority of nobles) on state salaries appears to be one of the main reasons that led the authorities to stop compelling nobles to serve.7 On the other hand, the desire of nobles to keep their fragmented estates profitable led them to demand more from...