Российское дворянство в начале XX века: Экономический статус и социо-культурный облик по Е. П. Баринова (review)

381 Ab Imperio, 4/2009 Seymour BECKER Е. П. Баринова. Российское дворянство в начале XX века: Экономический статус и социо- культурный облик. Москва: “РОС- СПЭН”, 2008. 351 с. Указатель имен. ISBN: 978-5-8243-0936-2. Barinova’s stated aim is to approach pre-Revolutionary Russia’s noble question from a different angle from those used in 1) the late Soviet monographs by A. P. Korelin, Iu. B. Solov’ev, and V. S. Diakin, which focused on “the higher aristocratic and bureaucratic circles of the country and gave little attention to specific local noble societies” and in 2) the Russian articles and dissertations, mostly from 1980–2001, which dealt with the influential role of the United Nobility in forming government policy, but not with that of “the separate guberniia noble societies in the United Nobiity’s activity” (Pp. 13-16). She makes good on her promise through her exhaustive use of the archival and printed materials of the provincial noble assemblies and of the correspondence and memoirs of participants in them. Her use of these sources, however , is questionable. She plucks from them quotations useful to her arguments, jumping back and forth in time throughout the quarter-century preceding World War I, sometimes not even dating her source. In using memoirs, Barinova does not take into account the date – often long past the remembered event – or the place – usually in emigration – of writing. Moreover, her evidence falls far short of fulfilling her goal of explaining the nobility’s “consciousness,” “mentalitet,” “mental’nost’,” its “totality of ideas, beliefs, experiences of the spirit,” its “cast of mind.” These are concepts, like “modernization,” “transformation,” and “systemic crisis,” which she repeats endlessly but without satisfactory definitions. Attempting to clothe her analysis in a scientific garb, she succeeds only in exhausting and exasperating her reader with terms and generaliza- 382 Рецензии/Reviews tions largely devoid of substantial content. The twelve tables that constitute appendices to Barinova’s study give significant insight into her methods. The first four tables illustrate 1) the declining number of hereditary nobles in the period 1858–1914 in nineteen gubernii (six Central NonBlack Soil, six Central Black Soil, five Volga region, plus Moscow and St. Petersburg); 2) noble landholding in 1905 as a percent of all private landholding and private landholding as a percent of total acreage in seventeen of the preceding gubernii, without Moscow and Petersburg; 3) the absolute decline in acreage of noble landholding in 1877–1914 in the six Central Black Soil gubernii; and 4) the distribution by size (small, medium, large) in 1905 of noble landholdings in the fiveVolga gubernii and five of the six Central Black Soil gubernii (without Riazan). Barinova gives no explanation for her selection of different gubernii for each of the tables, or for her exclusion of the majority of the fifty gubernii in European Russia. Typical examples of the tables in the remaining seven appendices are numbers five and six. Table five classifies the nobility’s negative and positive ideas about its economic position , social status, political position, and its psychological mood, based on content-analysis of a sample of landed nobles’ correspondence and the speeches they delivered in noble and zemstvo assemblies. The sample is not identified as to size, the period from which it was taken, or anything else.Table six quantifies the personal data, lifestyle, and public service of seven named nobles (including one prince, one count, and one baron), based on content-analysis of every fifth page of text from their memoirs. Such appendices give evidence of Barinova’s methodology, undermining rather than supporting any claim that her book might make to be a work of serious scholarship. She notes that one school of foreign historians, namely R. Manning, L. Haimson, and R. Edelman, have ascribed “the decline of the nobility” to “the estate’s irrational behavior,” but that the present reviewer differs from these three: “In S. Becker’s work is most fully set forth a second point of view” – that the noble estate experienced a “gradual successful adaptation to new social relationships.”1 In the remainder of her book,2 Barinova accepts the conventional wisdom of Soviet his1 P. 16, citing both editions of my book: “Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia . Decalb [sic]: Northern Illinois Univ. Press. 1985. P. 171-173”, and (without page references...