The Landowners

Abstract

The economic significance of the landed class (pomeshchiki)¹ had declined considerably by the First World War; but politically they still represented one of the major bulwarks of the autocratic state. The number of landowning families had changed little since the beginning of the century, yet the percentage of nobles belonging to landowning families had declined sharply (from 54–55 per cent in 1895 to 36–37 per cent in 1912) with many nobles now engaged in non-agricultural activities.² Moreover, the dynamism of a society undergoing economic and social transformation was reflected in inter-class mobility, clearly apparent in the half century before the revolution when the social composition of the pomeshchiki had begun to change. As a result of economic pressures in the late nineteenth century some members of the landlord class had become impoverished or had moved into state service and the professions. The landlord class was simultaneously replenished by an influx of individuals engaged in the new commercial, industrial and financial spheres of society. Thus, with the upsurge of industrial development from the mid-1880s, a new kind of pomeshchik had emerged from the indigenous and foreign bourgeoisie. At the time of the February revolution, the landed class still dominated the Russian countryside politically, even though it was now of mixed social composition in terms of origin and estate (soslovie).