Abstract
In Woe from Wit, Alexander Griboedov’s character Famusov describes the central role of the family in Imperial Russia:
Very few people work with me who aren’t relations
Most of them are my sister’s children,
Or else my sister-in-law’s; there’s only one exception—
Molchalin—that’s because he is so capable
But when it comes to putting up a name
For a nice post, or some small decoration,
One has to think of kith and kin!1
Russia was not unique in this, of course. Aristocratic societies across Europe relied on family ties and patronage for positions at the court, in the church, and in the military. Nepotism was the rule, rather than the exception, and family members were bound together by their successes and failures, politically, economically, and socially.2
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Notes
Alexander Griboedov, “Woe from Wit,” in The Government Inspector and Other Russian Plays, trans. with an introduction by Joshua Cooper (London: Penguin, 1972; reprint, 1990), 152; Meehan-Waters’ research confirms this impression, revealing that the large majority of those in the top four military and civil ranks in 1730 were related to someone else in the top ranks;
see Brenda Meehan-Waters, Autocracy and Aristocracy, The Russian Service Elite of 1730 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982), 170–203. Other historians have also stressed the importance of clan ties in noble political and social life;
see Nancy Shields Kollman, Kinship and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987);
Gustave Alef, “The Origins of Muscovite Autocracy: the Age of Ivan III,” Forschungen zur osteuropaischen Geschichte 39 (Berlin, 1986);
Robert O. Crummey, Aristocrats and Servitors (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983);
John Le Donne, “Ruling Families in the Russian Political Order, 1689–1825,” Cahiers du monde russe et sovietique, 18 (July–December, 1987): 233–322.
Jonathan Powis, Aristocracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 1–15.
Ralph Gibson and Martin Blinkhorn, eds., Landownership and Power in Modern Europe (London: HarperCollins, 1991), 3–16; Powis, 24–25;
M.L. Bush, Noble Privilege (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983, 2–3, 21);
Dominic Lieven, The Aristocracy in Europe, 1815–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 74–100.
Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966), 46;
Seymour Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985), 29–31;
A. Romanovich-Slavatinskii, Dvorianstvo v Rossii ot nachala XVIII veka do otmeny krepostnago prava (St. Petersburg: Tip. Ministerstva Vnutrennykh Del, 1870), 165–167;
Colum Leckey, “Provincial Readers and Agrarian Reform, 1760s-70s: The Case of Sloboda Ukraine,” Russian Review 61, no.4 (October 2002), 538–539.
Michel Confino, Domaines et seigneurs en Russie vers la fin du XVIIIe siecle. Étude de structures agraires et de mentalités économiques (Paris: Institut d’études slaves de l’Université de Paris, 1963). This idea is also supported by
S.A. Korf, Dvorianstvo i ego soslovnoe upravlenie za stoletie 1762–1855 godov (St. Petersburg: Tip. Trenke Fiusno, 1906), 13–14,
and Romanovich-Slavatinskii, 198; John Halit Brown, “A Provincial Landowner: A. T. Bolotov (1738–1833)” Ph.D. diss. (Princeton University, 1977), 59, 72, 83. See, also, Edgar Melton, “Enlightened Seigniorialism and Its Dilemma in Serf Russia, 1750–1830.” Journal of Modern History 62, no.94 (December 1990): 675–708;
Priscilla Roosevelt, Life on the Russian Country Estate (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 3.
Lawrence Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 411–412;
Martyn Rady, Nobility, Land and Service in Medieval Hungary (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 109.
There is a vast literature that deals in whole, or in part, with the subject of European inheritance practices. See, e.g., Janos M. Bak, ed., History and Society in Central Europe, Nobilities in Central and Eastern Europe: Kinship, Property and Privilege (Budapest: Hajnal István Alapítvány, 1994);
John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London: Routledge, 1995);
Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993);
Robert Forster, The Nobility of Toulouse in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Economic Study (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960);
Rebecca Gates-Coon, The Landed Estates of the Esterházy Princes: Hungary During the Reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994);
John Habbakkuk, Marriage, Debt and the Estates System: English Landownership, 1650–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994);
David Herlihy, “Land, Family and Women in Continental Europe, 701–1200,” Tradition 18 (1962): 89–120;
Thomas Kuehn, “Some Ambiguities of Female Inheritance Ideology in the Renaissance,” Continuity and Change2, no.1 (May 1987): 11–36;
Gregory Pedlow, “Marriage, Family Size and Inheritance among Hessian Nobles, 1650–1900”: Journal of Family History7, no.4 (Winter 1982): 333–352;
David Warren Sabean, Property, Production, and Family in Neckerhausen, 1700–1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
Eileen Spring, Law, Land and Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300–1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 9. Bush, Noble Privilege, 192, 198;
Barbara English and John Saville, Strict Settlement, A Guide for Historians (Hull: University of Hull Press, 1983), 13–24;
Robert Wheaton, “Affinity and Descent in Seventeenth-Century Bordeaux,” 119, and “Introduction: Recent Trends in the Historical Study of the French Family,” 15, in Family and Sexuality in French History, ed. Robert Wheaton and Tamara K. Hareven (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980);
Andrés Barrera-González, “Eldest and Younger Siblings in a Stem-Family System: The Case of Rural Catalonia,” Continuity and Change 7, no.3 (1992); 335–336;
José Manuel Pérez García, “Rural Family Life in La Huerta de Valencia During the Eighteenth Century,” Continuity and Change 7, no.1 (1992); 81–82, 85;
Judith J. Hurwich, “Inheritance Practices in Early Modern Germany,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no.4 (Spring 1993): 711–718.
Joan Thirsk, “The European Debate on Customs of Inheritance, 1500–1700,” 177–191 and J.P Cooper, “Patterns of Inheritance and Settlement by Great Landowners from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” 192–327 in Family and Inheritance, Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200–1800, ed. Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E.P Thompson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976);
English and Saville , 13–24; Lloyd Bonfield, “‘Affective Families’, ‘Open Elites’ and Family Settlements in Early Modern England,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 39, no.3 (August 1986): 346–347; Forster, 124;
J.V. Becket, The Aristocracy in England, 1660–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 58.
V.O. Kliuchevskii, Kurs russkoi istorii, Sochineniia v deviati tomakh 4 (Moscow: Mysl’, 1989), 78–80;
Nikolai P. Pavlov-Silvanskii, Feodalizm v Rossii (Moscow: Nauka, 1988), 109–116, 450–471;
Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 84–85, 168–188;
Robert O. Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy 1304–1613 (London: Longman, 1987), 108–109.
Laws in many countries distinguished between family-inherited land and land acquired by other means; Erik Fügedi, “Kinship and Privilege: The Social System of Medieval Hungarian Nobility as Defined in Customary Law,” in History and Society in Central Europe, Nobilties in Central and Eastern Europe: Kinship, Property and Privilege, ed. Janos M. Bak (Budapest: Hajnal István Alapítvány, 1994), 60; Blum, 81.
Chapter 17, Article 1 in Rchard Hellie, trans. and ed., The Muscovite Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649. Part I: Text and Translation (Irvine, CA: C. Schlacks, 1988); Polnoe sobranie zakonov (Moscow: Gos. Tip., 1830), 2: 765; 1: 34; 2: 764.
PSZ 2: 634, art. 6; Russkaia Pravda, art. 95, in George Vernadsky, trans., Medieval Russian Laws (New York: Octagon Books, 1965); Nikolai Rozhdestvenskii, Istoricheskoe izlozhenie russkago zakonodatel’stva o nasledstve (St. Petersburg, 1839), 34; PSZ1: 32; Ulozhenie 17: 4; PSZ2: 860, sec. 2, art. 1.
Jerome Blum has presented data from the cadastral survey of Tver’, which in 1540 listed 318 votchinyas belonging to 659 owners. Eight years later the same votchiny were held by 771 owners. Over the same period of time, the average holding decreased in size as well, in one district from 970 chetverts per individual to 176 chetverts; Blum, 172; Kivelson, “The Effects of Partible Inheritance,” 205–206; Paul Dukes, Catherine the Great and the Russian Nobility (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 100;
A.B. Anikin, Muza i mamona: sotsial’no-ekonomicheskie motivy u Pushkina (Moscow: Mysl’, 1989), 196–197; Rossiiskoe zakonodatel’stvo 4: 296.
Romanovich Slavatinskii, 251–252; L.R Lewitter, “Commentary,” in The Book of Poverty and Wealth, by Ivan Pososhkov (London: Athlone, 1987), 132; PSZ 8: 5653; PSZ4: 2796.
Robin Bisha, “The Promise of Patriarchy: Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” Ph.D. diss. (Indiana University, 1993), 143–144; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 83–87.
Raymond Carr, Spain, 1808–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 176, 255;
J.P Cooper, “Patterns of Inheritance and Settlement by Great Landowners from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” in Family and Inheritance, 276; Margaret H. Darrow, Revolution in the House: Family, Class, and Inheritance in Southern France, 1775–1825 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 16, 70;
A.W. Simpson, A History of the Land Law, 2nd. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 276.
William Wagner, Marriage, Property and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 258.
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Farrow, L.A. (2005). The Ties that Bind: The Role of the Russian Clan in Inheritance and Property Law. In: McCaffray, S.P., Melancon, M. (eds) Russia in the European Context, 1789–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982261_2
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