* Pososhkof, “O skudosti i bogatstve.”

After Peter’s death the system was gradually relaxed, but the Noblesse could not be satisfied by partial concessions.  Russia had in the meantime moved, as it were, out of Asia into Europe, and had become one of the great European Powers.  The upper classes had been gradually learning something of the fashions, the literature, the institutions, and the moral conceptions of Western Europe, and the nobles naturally compared the class to which they belonged with the aristocracies of Germany and France.  For those who were influenced by the new foreign ideas the comparison was humiliating.  In the West the Noblesse was a free and privileged class, proud of its liberty, its rights, and its culture; whereas in Russia the nobles were servants of the State, without privileges, without dignity, subject to corporal punishment, and burdened with onerous duties from which there was no escape.  Thus arose in that section of the Noblesse which had some acquaintance with Western civilisation a feeling of discontent, and a desire to gain a social position similar to that of the nobles in France and Germany.  These aspirations were in part realised by Peter III., who in 1762 abolished the principle of obligatory service.  His consort, Catherine II., went much farther in the same direction, and inaugurated a new epoch in the history of the Dvoryanstvo, a period in which its duties and obligations fell into the background, and its rights and privileges came to the front.

Catherine had good reason to favour the Noblesse.  As a foreigner and a usurper, raised to the throne by a Court conspiracy, she could not awaken in the masses that semi-religious veneration which the legitimate Tsars have always enjoyed, and consequently she had to seek support in the upper classes, who were less rigid and uncompromising in their conceptions of legitimacy.  She confirmed, therefore, the ukaz which abolished obligatory service of the nobles, and sought to gain their voluntary service by honours and rewards.  In her manifestoes she always spoke of them in the most flattering terms; and tried to convince them that the welfare of the country depended on their loyalty and devotion.  Though she had no intention of ceding any of her political power, she formed the nobles of each province into a corporation, with periodical assemblies, which were supposed to resemble the French Provincial Parliaments, and entrusted to each of these corporations a large part of the local administration.  By these and similar means, aided by her masculine energy and feminine tact, she made herself very popular, and completely changed the old conceptions about the public service.  Formerly service had been looked on as a burden; now it came to be looked on as a privilege.  Thousands who had retired to their estates after the publication of the liberation edict now flocked back and sought appointments, and this tendency was greatly increased by the brilliant campaigns against the Turks, which excited the patriotic feelings and gave plentiful opportunities of promotion.  “Not only landed proprietors,” it is said in a comedy of the time,* “but all men, even shopkeepers and cobblers, aim at becoming officers, and the man who has passed his whole life without official rank seems to be not a human being.”