Griffiths, David, and Munro, George E., tr. and eds. (1993). Catherine II’s Charters of 1785 to the Nobility and the Towns. Bakersfield, CA: Charles Schlacks. Munro, George E. (1989). “The Charter to the Towns Reconsidered: The St. Petersburg Connection.” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 23:17-34.
The Charter of the Nobility (often referred to as The Charter to the Nobility) was issued by Catherine the Great in 1785. The Charter should not be seen as an isolated document. Rather it is the product of a broad legislative and administrative agenda. Related documents that link the Charter are those that formed the Legislative Commission of 1767, the actual Statute of Local Administration of 1775, and the Charter to the Towns (also called Charter of the Cities) of 1785.
The eighteenth century in Russia, as in Europe, saw substantial advancement in the power, wealth, and prestige of the nobility. In Russia, this impetus came after 1725, the year of Peter the Great’s death. Through various means, including personal dictate and the Table of Ranks (1722), Peter was able to enforce considerable adherence to the practice of two things he deemed necessary: compulsory state service and advancement by merit, not lineage. His death signified that the nobility would immediately begin to reclaim its privileges.
This process united the Russian nobility despite its disparate makeup. By 1762, when Peter III was on the throne, just prior to Catherine the Great’s accession, a law was passed emancipating the nobles from compulsory service to the state. Catherine’s rule (1762-1796) was decidedly pro-aristocracy. Whether the measures she undertook were seen in the context of modernizing Russian administration or in advancing reform, they were not detrimental to the nobility’s agenda. The aristocrats were in the ascendancy, Catherine was a supreme pragmatist, and the state was satisfied with being able to partially regularize the affairs of its principal class. Specialists often point out that this regularization led to a semblance of the rule of law in an autocratic state. Specific rights and duties were clearly defined. When one looks at the actual Charter of the Nobility, one sees what appears to be an extension of rights.
Isabel de Madariaga (1990) accurately breaks down the rights by category. In terms of personal rights, the Charter guaranteed the nobles trial by their peers, no corporal punishment, freedom from the poll tax, freedom from compulsory army duty, the right to travel abroad, and the right to enter foreign service. (This is a partial list.) Property rights were enhanced by allowing the nobles to exploit their mineral and forest resources. Manufacturing on their own land was permitted and the right to
CHASTUSHKA
purchase serfs was reinforced. As for corporate rights, the nobility’s rights of assembly were solidified and they were given the privilege of directly petitioning the empress. Historically, the upper nobility exercised this right anyway, whether it was written or not.
The Charter clearly was not a new concession to the nobility. But it consolidated numerous conditions and prerogatives. It is important to observe that serious advancement in power and prestige was still linked to government service.
The principal effects of the Charter are not always precisely traceable since so many varied elements intersected. Yet, it is safe to say that the aristocracy’s role in local and regional affairs was magnified. The central government’s apparatus for these political functions could thus be partially trimmed. Some authors indicate a potential distancing between the central and provincial governments. It is not clear how much administrative unification or cohesion resulted at either level of government because of the Charter’s promulgation. See also: CATHERINE II; CHARTER OF THE CITIES; PETER I
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jones, R. E. (1973). The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Madariaga, Isabel de. (1990). Catherine the Great: A Short History. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. Raeff, Marc (1966). The Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth Century Nobility. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.
A very popular modern Russian folk lyrical miniature or short song performed solo or by a chorus in a monothematic style. Deriving from the Russian word chasto meaning “rapid,” the chastushka is very simple in structure, usually consisting of four-line stanzas that are repetitively sung at a rapid tempo. It had its origins in simple and repetitive rhythmic peasant songs, usually based on folk sayings and proverbs and performed as overtures to dance music cycles. The advent of the balalaika (a two- and later three-string musical instrument) in the eighteenth century, which was mainly used to accompany dance performances, helped to crystallize the chastushka into a new musical genre sometime at the turn of the nineteenth century. From the mid-nineteenth century, the harmonica came to play an increasingly important role as an accompanying instrument and soon became the standard. Today, chastushki are of four main types: the four- and six-line lyrical, satirical (sometimes obscene), etc. accompanied choral songs; dance songs; paradoxical and fable songs; and two-line “suffering” or lamentation songs. The satirical chastushki have been the most common, in large part because of their amusing and didactic nature as well as their use in expressing socio-political thoughts of the day. The growing social and political grievances, particularly after the Great Reforms of 1861 and industrialization, were commonly expressed in these chastushki that satirized the tsarist regime, the nobles, and the Church. In this way, the chas-tushka became a vehicle for venting the growing frustration of the peasants and industrial workers. Its peasant origins and simple structure made the chastushka a very attractive form of spreading Soviet propaganda and engineering a new “socially and politically conscious” Soviet citizen after the Revolutions of 1917. See also: FOLK MUSIC
ROMAN K. KOVALEV
(1888-1937), pseudonym Ivan Kremnev, theoretician of the peasant family farm, leading chair of agricultural economics in Soviet Russia in the 1920s.
Born in Moscow, Alexander Chayanov entered the famous Moscow Agricultural Institute in 1906 (known as the Petrovsky Agricultural Academy from 1917 to 1923 and as the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy since 1923) and graduated with a diploma in agricultural economics in 1911. Appointed associate professor in 1913, he became full professor and chair of the agricultural organization in 1918, and worked at the academy until his arrest in 1930. In 1919 he was appointed director of the Seminar of Agricultural Economy. In 1922 this institution became the Research Institute for Agricultural Economics and Politics. As director, Chayanov gathered an illustrious body of reCHEBRIKOV, VIKTOR MIKHAILOVICH searchers. Often traveling abroad from 1911 onward, he became an internationally recognized specialist in his field, forming a network of correspondence in more than sixty countries. Chayanov actively participated in the Russian cooperative movement, filling leading positions during World War I and after the Revolution. From 1917 onward, he also took part in shaping agricultural policy, drafting plans for agricultural development at the Peoples Commissariat for Agriculture and the State Planning Commission.
Accused of being the head of the “Toiling Peasant Party,” Chayanov was arrested in 1930. Only in 1987 did details of his further fate become known. Although the planned show trial never took place, he was sentenced to five years in prison in 1931 and exiled to Kazakhstan. Released due to his poor state of health, Chayanov worked from 1933 to 1935 in the Kazakh Agricultural Institute in Alma-Ata, teaching statistics. In connection with the show trial against Bukharin, he was newly arrested in March 1937, sentenced to death October 3, 1937, and shot the same day in Alma-Ata.
Belonging to the “neopopulist tradition,” in the 1920s Chayanov became the most eminent theoretician of its Organization and Production School of Agricultural Doctrine. His fundamental work, Peasant Farm Organization (1925), was published in an earlier form in 1923 in Berlin. Emphasizing the viability of peasant agriculture and its ability to survive, he posited a special economic behavior of peasant households that relied almost exclusively on the labor of family members. Unlike the capitalist enterprise, the peasant family worked for a living, not for a profit, thus the degree of “self-exploitation” was determined not by capitalist criteria but by a hedonic calculus. He envisioned the modernization of traditional small farming not as part of capitalist or socialist development, but as part of a peasant process of raising the technical level of agricultural production through agricultural extension work
