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

eer. 4 Merchants, a sub-category of the urban estate, held semi- privileged status. That is, they could substitute monetary payments for the poll tax, compulsory labor, and military conscription. The lowest stratum of the urban estate, the meshchane or artisans and laborers, and the peasant estate 2 Roberta T. Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government . Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1982, p. 408, n. 5. 3 Seymour Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia , Northern Illinois University Press, Dekalb, Illinois, 1985, p. 17. 4 Becker, pp. 18-19. 15 lacked all of these privileges. 5 The hereditary nobles remained a fairly stable and minuscule proportion of the population throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1858 this proportion stood at 1.0%, in 1897 at 0.9%. The proportion of the nobility as a whole also shifted little, from 1.5% to 1.4%. 6 These figures suggest a feudal society in which the vast majority was bound in rural poverty and ignorance. On the whole, this was true of pre-emancipation Russia. Yet the noble estate itself was not entirely the stable and socially prominent group it was in other European nations. E. K. Wirtschafter stresses both the permeable and unstable nature of the nobility and the chances for downward as well as upward mobility. "What distinguished Russia from other, presumably European, states was not the rigidity but the plasticity of social delineations." 7 Alan Kimball illuminates the cause of this permeability, the mixing of rank (chin) and estate, a process in which "service rank and social status were so seriously diced, sliced, and blended by the early nineteenth century in Russia that it is virtually impossible to separate them." 8 Nevertheless, these social distinctions had concrete 5 Becker, p. 17. 6 Ibid., p. 18. 7 E. K. Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia . Northern Illinois University Press, Dekalb, Illinois, 1997, pp. 30-31 and 67. 8 Alan Kimball, "Alexander Herzen and the Native Lineage of the Russian Revolution," in Charles E. Timberlake, ed., Religious and Secular Forces in Late Tsarist Russia . University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1992, pp. 110-111. manifestations. The defining privilege of the nobility was the right to own land and serfs, as we-have seen.- This privilege was exercised in greatly varying degrees: in 1859, 40% of this legal class owned fewer than 20 serfs, while only 3% possessed 1300 or more. 9 While the poorer landlords often shared much of the physical work of their establishments, wealthier landlords, who were away much of the time on civil or military service, typically did not devote much personal attention to the management of their lands. Such landlords left that task to managers and simply collected the income acquired via obrok (payment from a serf in cash or in kind) or from their estates' produce made by t