The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History

IN A SERIES OF LECTURES delivered nearly a century ago, Vasilii 0. Kliuchevskii, the dean of prerevolutionary Russian historians, complained that scholars had studied particular groups in Russia but not the larger social structure.1 Since then historians have written many more studies of specific groups but have yet to reconsider traditional assumptions and ideas about prerevolutionary Russian society that still pervade the historiography. The persistence of antiquated sociological views, for the most part formulated in the second half of the nineteenth century, stands in striking contrast to other fields of European history, where stratification, terminology, and patterns of social change have been the focus of a continuing and much-needed debate. But in Russian historiography the fundamental conceptions of prerevolutionary historians have been uncritically preserved, even in the most sophisticated studies of individual groups, and historians have casually used such basic terms as class and interchangeably.2 At the core of prerevolutionary historiography is a cluster of ideas about Russia's peculiar system of 4estates (sosloviia; in the singular, soslovie) and their development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The traditional conception of the social structure posited the existence of four main estates (nobility, clergy, townspeople, and peasantry)-a model not unlike the formal structure of medieval Europe. Such a simple system, which seemed logical enough in preindustrial Russia, enjoyed widespread acceptance in both scholarly and popular writings. To quote one historian-journalist, writing in 1859, Every estate has its own role in the state: the clergy pray, the nobles serve in war and peace, the peasants plough and feed the people, and the merchants are the means that provide each with what it needs.'3 The idea of four estates was, moreover, explicitly recognized in Russian