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My current book project is tentatively titled A Society of Societies: Estates and Social Mobility in Imperial Russia. In it, I examine the mechanism of changing legal social estate (soslovie or sostoianie) during the imperial period by looking at official records and petitions housed in local archives around Russia.

Membership in a legal social estate defined individuals’ rights and responsibilities vis-à-vis their fellows and the imperial state. Although most subjects of the Russian Empire belonged to the soslovie into which they were born, some changed that birth identity, either through specific service to the state, or through bureaucratic means.

The title refers to the mechanism of membership in a soslovie. Individuals were not just "peasants" or "townspeople." Instead, they were peasants from a specific village in a specific place, or townspeople from a specific town. They were members of specific town or village estate societies (soslovnye obshchestva) before they were members of estates in the abstract.

 

Publications on the subject, or that have come out of my research into sosloviia:

  • “‘The Freedom to Choose a Way of Life’: Fugitives, Borders, and Imperial Amnesties in Russia,” Journal of Modern History 83, no. 2 (June 2011): 243-71 (access via JSTOR)
  • “The Shifting Place of Women in Imperial Russia’s Social Order,” Cahiers du Monde russe 51, no. 2-3 (April-September 2010): 1-16

 
last updated September 2011
University of Toronto University of Toronto Department of History