Tsar Peter Alexeyevich (a.k.a. “the Great”) strongly believed that everyone in his country should serve the State. The nobility was required to perform a term of military or civil service (the former, naturally, bestowed greater honor). Merchants and artisans had to participate in the construction of fortresses and, most importantly, the city of St. Petersburg, whatever sacrifices that might entail. There even came a time when the construction of stone buildings was banned throughout Russia except for the new northern capital, and stone masons, carpenters, and anyone else who could prove useful in erecting a city in a swamp was brought to the site of the future capital, to help make its avenues and palaces a reality.
The peasants were, of course, also required to do their part. Some percentage of them was now pressed into a lifetime of military service, a term that was later reduced to 25 years, which did not, generally, leave much life to live. And if a fortress or road happened to be built near a particular village, the peasants would be driven from their fields to work on it, or if a manufacturing facility was placed nearby, the entire village could be “attached” to the factory. The household tax was replaced with a soul tax, in other words a tax on each male, regardless of age. Before Peter’s reign, the family had been the unit of taxation, so grown children often continued living with their parents as a means to dodging taxes. By switching the unit of taxation to each male “soul,” Peter was able to immediately boost revenues to support the army and his expanding government apparatus.*
Peter’s subjects were not exactly thrilled with these measures. The peasants came up with all sorts of ways to try to escape the onerous duties being placed on them and to evade military service. Artisans naturally did not want to leave hearth and home for the frigid banks of the Gulf of Finland. And the nobility was not at all pleased at the prospect of handing over their young sons to serve in the military, especially as they would be starting at the lowest ranks, and, on top of that, might be sent abroad to some distant, strange, and frightening lands.
But Peter did not waver. If his subjects were uncivilized and ignorant, he had to force them down the road of Progress, never mind if that road would be built upon the bones of the thousands upon thousands who did not have the fortitude to survive it. Of course, all those who tried to evade military recruitment or construction duties were brutally punished, even the nobility. But at the same time the emperor did try to make the idea of service appealing to his subjects, to give them some incentive to work hard on behalf of the State.
To this end, a decree was issued mandating primogeniture, in other words giving the exclusive right of inheritance to one son of a noble family. The rest would have to find their own path toward wealth and honor, an innovation that forced them to look at government service in a whole new light. But Peter did not stop there.
In 1722 a famous document was released, the Table of Ranks, which remained in force, albeit with a few changes, until the 1917 revolution. The idea behind it was simple: all positions within the government, both military and civilian, would be divided into 14 ranks. Here we see Peter I’s eternal striving for order and simplicity, his lifelong effort to subordinate life to an easily diagrammed system.
But that was not the only appeal of the Table of Ranks. It rewarded the faithful and prolonged performance of duty, and allowed those who served to advance up the ladder “for longevity of service.” After a certain number of years a civil servant or member of the military would automatically move up one rung of the ladder. And this advance could be accelerated: for exceptional service one could skip a rung or be promoted ahead of schedule. The incentive for effort was plain. Furthermore, non-nobles who managed to serve their way into the Table of Ranks (by reaching at least the lowest rung, which at first went by the ridiculous sounding name fendrik and later, after Peter’s death, became praporshchik, usually translated as ensign or warrant officer) could earn hereditary nobility with all the attendant benefits.
Civil service was less dangerous and thus less highly valued, so here hereditary nobility could only be earned after moving up to the eighth rank (Collegiate Assessor), but the important thing was that it could still be earned. This system, it should be noted, reflected another of Peter’s core ideas, his belief in using talented people from every segment of society and not relying exclusively on aristocrats, many of whom the tsar saw as opposing his reforms. It was part of the enactment’s intention to endow capable men “with eagerness for service and to give honor to them, rather than have it obtained by the insolent and idle.”
And so, 14 ranks, 14 steps, 14 rungs of a ladder to success, became an important part of Russian society. Civil servants and members of the military spent their lives climbing the ladder, some more rapidly than others. Suddenly there was a real incentive to devote oneself to the State.
True, Peter did not anticipate how quickly his countrymen would find ways to circumvent the system. Soon after his death people started enrolling their children in government service at birth, so that by the time a child grew up enough to actually perform duties he would already have attained the rank of an officer (his years as a common soldier being passed in the safety of the nursery). And then military academies were introduced where one could simultaneously both study and (supposedly) serve and, again, attain the rank of officer before truly entering service.
In 1762, thirty-seven years after Peter’s death, another Peter, the Third, issued a Manifesto to Emancipate the Nobility. This decree freed the aristocracy from governmental service and allowed nobles to live where they pleased, even abroad. The tight rein on the nobility was removed.
There was also a separate system of court ranks. Courtiers performed the “hard work” of appearing at court and attending ceremonial events, and the longer they fulfilled these functions the more rewards were showered upon them and the higher up the ladder they rose. When, in the early nineteenth century, Mikhail Speransky convinced the tsar that service at court should not be treated as equivalent to civil or military service, aristocratic fury reached such a fevered pitch that it became a contributing factor in Speransky’s dismissal.
Decades passed and the throne saw a series of rulers come and go. The rank men needed to attain to earn hereditary nobility changed, but the principle remained the same: in order to have a career in Russia, one had to advance up the Table of Ranks. In hierarchical Russian society, upward mobility meant moving closer to the coveted status of noble. However ironic it may seem, this symbol of hierarchical rigidity was actually a beacon of opportunity in Russia for men of ability, whatever their birth.
* Later, those souls became valuable collateral for loans, a fact that formed the basis for Nikolai Gogol’s novel, Dead Souls.
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