Colonel V. A. Pashkov and the Late Nineteenth-Century Protestant Movement in Russia, Jan M. Surer, 1999

the early 1800's in some cases. 16 Nobles also joined merchants' and clergymen's sons in taking advantage of new educational and vocational opportunities, including those in the ever-expanding civil service bureaucracy and in the professions. New ranks of teachers, doctors, lawyers, and agronomists found ready employment as hirees of the new provincial councils, the zemstvos. 12 Becker, p. 10. 13 Ibid., pp. 9-10 and 172. 14 Dominic Lieven, The Aristocracy in Europe. 1815-1914 . Columbia University Press, New York, 1992, p. 80. 15 Lieven, The Aristocracy , p. 95. I am uncertain whether this figure represents the city of St. Petersburg only or the entire province. 16 See Lieven, The Aristocracy , pp. 124-125, for an account of noble involvement in mining, for example. Manning lists the "commercial concerns" of the authors of nobles' memoirs she consulted, p. 406, n.77. 19 Thus, the higher nobility's role was clearly changing. They now shared some of their former exclusive privileges and had lost their role as "wielders of the state's police, juridical, and tax powers vis-a-vis their own serfs." 17 Those who did continue as landowners, however, necessarily remained involved with the peasants as the "land question" grew in intensity over the ensuing decades. Under the terms of Emancipation, former serfs acquired land from their former masters via an allotment system; the amount of land varied from district to district. 18 For this land and for the peasants the gentry received compensation in the form of government bonds, which were in effect a loan from the government to the peasants to be repaid over a period of forty-nine years. The already existing peasant communes became the new governing force in the peasants' lives. These communes were the true owners of their new lands and the overseers of the redemption payment process. 19 The obligations to this payment process kept the commune together. The inadequacy of the peasants' land allotments left them with the need to rent or to work gentry lands, so that in effect they were still under obrok . By the end of the nineteenth century, two thirds of all the arable land in private hands was rented by peasants, who were often unable to 17 Becker, p. 25. 18 Pushkarev, p. 136. Pushkarev, p. 140. 19 20 pay the rent..they owed their former masters. 20 For many, existence was a struggle and famine a genuine, and sometimes realized, threat. Thus, peasant poverty and the continuing gulf between them and the educated classes were seen as major social problems. 21 The intelligentsia: a new class Even before the emancipation reform, other government policies had been the cause of accelerating social change. In particular, the expansion of the university system under Alexander I (1801-1825) and the greater emphasis on education as a gualification for state service had helped to create a new "class" of articulate citizens. Alexander