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The
social structure of the pre-Petrine Russia was based on a
hierarchy of social estates. In Russia, in contrast to the
countries of western Europe, the system of social estates
played a much greater role in determining the nature of the
State. Social estates (such as, the landed nobility, the clergy,
the merchants, the peasantry, the townsmen) were large social
classes whose position in society was fixed in law and whose
obligations or privileges were hereditary. Similar to the
countries of western Europe, the social estate structure in
Russia had emerged mainly under the influence of economic
relations. However, as in most pre-modern societies, the Russian
government used social estate labels to describe legal, rather
than socio-economic classes of the population in order to fix
people’s place within a rigid, hierarchical social structure.
Each person, depending on the social estate that he belonged to,
had a precise legal status carrying with it particular rights
and duties. |
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Compared with western Europe, the role of the
Russian State in molding the social structure was very
significant. In order to understand how Russian society worked
as a whole, it is important to see the State and the social
estates as parts of one integrated system, in which various
classes performed specific social functions and shared
obligations in respect to one another and in respect to the
State. |
In the
period of the formation and growth of the Russian centralized state
certain factors encouraged the emergence and legal codification of a
specific system of social organization. Chief among these
factors was the vital need for a speedy mobilization of economic and
human resources in extremely difficult conditions, when the
population was scattered over a huge territory, Russian regions were
isolated from one another, market relations were at a primitive
level, and there was a constant threat of foreign invasion.
In the West,
the lack of spare territories and a high density of population
sharpened social contradictions and led to the consolidation of
social estates, speeding up the process of the legislative
codification of the rights and obligations of social estates and of
their individual members.
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By contrast, during the formation of the Russian centralized state,
social tensions were somewhat defused thanks to the ‘safety-valve’
of the migration of population to the fringes of the Russian lands. The
opposition elements traditionally used the fringe territories as
their power bases. The outlying regions often turned into dangerous
centers of antigovernment revolts, peasant and Cossack
movements. |
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In Western
Europe, the organized migration of population was one of the
measures that helped ease social conflicts. It was sponsored by the
Church or by the government and took the form of religious crusades,
sea expeditions to discover and colonize new lands, or an enforced
exile of the discontented and socially undesirable elements to
colonies. By contrast, the main concern of the Russian ruling
circles was exactly the opposite: to check the migration of the
population to the outskirts of the empire. The need for maximum
mobilization of economic and human resources conditioned the active
role of the State in the process of the formation and legislative
regulation of social estates. The State in Russia played a vital
role in ensuring the consensus and rational functioning of the
entire social structure.
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Tsarist Russia |
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