The Stremoukhovs. Local Nobility and Administrative Apparatus of the Russian Empire in the 19th-early 20th Century
The Stremoukhovs. Local Nobility and Administrative Apparatus of the Russian Empire in the 19th-early 20th Century

Summary/Abstract: Using the example of the old Stremoukhov family, which belonged to the provincial aristocracy, the author tries to illustrate the peculiarities of the relationship between the state power apparatus and the nobility. The nobility in the social system of the Russian state existed as a class that monopolized property rights to manage the state. The economic and social well-being of the entire nobility and its individual members was directly related to the membership in this class and the position held in it, the degree of well-being depended on the position held within the apparatus of power and personal merits, which a given member achieved for it. The collapse of the old system of relations between the state and the nobility at the beginning of the 18th century leads to the transformation of the nobility from a class to an estate, membership in which was conditioned by birth rights. The land, which was the economic basis of the nobility, undergone a transformation from being a temporary property to an inheritable one. Although the nobility gained in that way independence from the burden of state service, the state service continued to have existential significance for the nobility, which is reflected in Russian noble heraldry. The decline of the nobility as a class is associated with the reforms of the state apparatus in the first half of the 19th century, which paved the way into it for the educated representatives of the unprivileged estates, and the agrarian crisis in the second half of the 19th century, which undermined the economic basis of the nobility. The aristocratic local nobility begins to be removed from the state administration apparatus by a proletarianized bureaucracy formed by impoverished old nobility and landless raznochintsy, who has become the new ruling class. The history of the Stremoukhov family, spread over five centuries, demonstrates, in many ways common to all Russian nobility, the processes of transformation of the Moscow nobles into provincial landowners, then into professional bureaucrats and declassified nobles.

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