Contenu du sommaire : Famille et mobilité sociale en Russie, XVIe - XVIIIe siècles

The article studies the history of the Streshnev and Miloslavskii families in the first half of the seventeenth century. It shows the successful careers of these families at court and the influence of family and clan ties on their social mobility. The author concludes that the confirmation of the Streshnev and Miloslavskii families at the court had begun long before the marriages of Tsar Mikhail Fëdorovich with Evdokiia Streshneva (1626) and of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich with Mariia Miloslavskaia (1648). The Streshnev and Miloslavskii families were not obscure and powerless before the royal weddings of 1626 and 1648 as earlier studies have suggested. The author traces the process of integration of these families as royal relatives in the boyar and court elite.

In the seventeenth century, the Odoevskii princes belonged to the upper crust of the Muscovite elite. On the basis of unpublished documents, the article reconstructs the history of four generations of the family starting with Nikita Ivanovich Odoevskii, one of the most notorious boyars of the pre‑Petrine era. The author shows how each generation strove to maintain family traditions by reproducing, as much as possible, their father's and grand‑father's careers. They thus secured their position in the top Duma ranks and the tsar's close circle. In that respect, Peter's reign marked a breaking point in a behavioral pattern in which younger generations were inspired by their forebears. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the Odoevskii princes built their careers following their personal tastes and preferences and were remembered as “mediocre” people, notorious for “fawning” and “cheating at cards.”

The 68 letters received by Ivan Belin, solicitor (striapchii) for the Intercession of the Virgin (Pokrovskii) Monastery in Suzdal´, from March 1673 to January 1674, especially among them 30 letters from his father, Vasilii Belin, a much more experienced solicitor for the same convent, help to understand how these lay servants of the Church dealt with the secular business of their employer. Available tools ranged from the ordinary, matter‑of‑course bribe (“pay what it takes”) to the overall mobilization of relatives, friends and well‑wishers to placate a senior, out‑of‑reach official and adversary. In all, 166 individuals, including the authors, addressees and bearers of the letters, are mentioned in the correspondence, thus providing a fair sample of Muscovite society, as seen by the solicitors. Quite a number of them belong to the Belin network, carefully kept in working order by mutual favours and occasional presents – to be sure, the most valuable of the family's possessions.

The paper studies the history of the Pankrat´evs, a family of merchants and entrepreneurs, from the second half of the sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth centuries. Analysis of various official and private sources (administrative and chancery documents, commemoration books, private correspondence) shows the family's fast social mobility.
In less than two centuries, a number of representatives of the Pankrat´ev house ascended from simple residents dwelling in Galich to the highest nobility of St. Petersburg, going through several social‑juridical statuses, from the traders of the “merchant hundred” corporation to gosti to representatives of the chancellery administration and functionaries of various state institutions of the first half of the eighteenth century. Their well‑thought family strategies permitting to establish relations with other families of rich merchants, as well as with the members of the highest chancellery bureaucracy and military nobility of the post‑Petrine era were essential for the expansion of their prosperous trade and manufacturing activities, as well as for the improvement of their social position in Russian society.
In conclusion, the author points out the necessity to develop prosopographical studies of the families of the prosperous merchant class of the seventeenth century in order to find out if the destinies of the Pankrat´ev family were typical for the Russian society of the period.

The essay aims at reconstructing the story of a family of eighteenth‑century Russian provincial merchants. It reveals the meaning of social status in the local society and family network for choosing vital strategies, and the use of social mobility possibilities on the one hand, and the influence of certain vital circumstances on the other. The Reviakin family story also demonstrates that the different variants of social mobility greatly depended on the initial financial position and economic activity of family members, and on the distribution of the family's resources. The factors that supported the stability of the family through several generations are also mentioned.

The article reconstructs the lives of Siberian deti boiarskie Ivan and Fëdor Tomilov and their immediate descendants within the framework of the current historiographical debate on the descriptive principles of Russian society in the early modern era. From the mid seventeenth century to the early 1720s, the Tomilov brothers specialized in running peasant settlements (slobody). They very often got appointed in settlements where they had vested economic interests. Their careers are characteristic of only part of Siberian deti boiarskie: this points to the existence of variations in the types of service and in lifestyles within this social category.
It comes out from the various descriptions of conflicts recorded in the Verkhotur´e governor's office and Siberian Chancellery archives that the Tomilovs enjoyed support from members of various social groups who, for some of them, were relatives. At the same time, opponents from lower rungs (belomestnye cossacks, peasants) did not forget their lower social status. The Tomilovs, thanks to their connections with members of other social groups, successfully adapted to the state's social legislation, which sometimes proved disadvantageous. However, after Peter's reforms, Ivan's descendants, who served in the newly formed Tobol´sk Dragoon Regiment, had less difficulty keeping their privileged status than Fëdor's, who held on to their traditional way of life as deti boiarskie running settlements.
Thus, biographical and microhistorical approaches permit both to problematize and corroborate the “grand narratives” of social history based on traditional terminology and focusing on state policy.

The article tells the story of the rise of four generations of the Shagarov family from low‑level service status (cossack) in a Muscovite borderland to noble status in eighteenth‑century Russia. The text focuses on key moments and events in the family's rise. In addition to questions of social (and geographical) mobility, the authors discuss the connections between service, economic entrepreneurship, personalized authority relationships, networks of patronage and protection, the salience of local conditions and relationships (and how they related to the center), the development of the Muscovite bureaucracy (especially questions of professionalization and the relationship between provincial and Moscow service), administrative effectiveness and corruption, and finally the ongoing motif of regular government. On the whole, the reader will see how an ambitious family navigated the “system,” what they did to survive and thrive, how they struggled, how social mobility more broadly could be achieved, how crucial economic success was to success in service and to the process of ennoblement, and how servitors experienced the Table of Ranks and other Petrine reforms.
The authors show that upward mobility did not depend entirely on statist or tsarist mechanisms. By highlighting the multiple mechanisms and pathways to mobility that the Shagarovs worked and experienced, this article demonstrates how individuals and/or families (in this case family solidarity was a critical factor in success) could take charge of their own future and take advantage of the changing conditions and opportunities that arose.

Based on a wide‑ranging corpus of published and unpublished sources, the article analyzes the impact of various factors on the careers of Russian generals between 1730 and 1763 (social origin, kinship, education, career path, etc.). Statistical analysis shows that in the generation of the military elite living at the time of Peter the Great's reforms and the Great Northern Wars, careers mainly depended on social origin, family ties and patronage. Such factors as skills, experience, or professionalism played but a small role except for foreigners. The key to the success of Peter's reforms was the creation of new conditions for the upcoming generation of the military‑service gentry (Table of Ranks, lifelong service, compulsory education). The Russian elite did not adapt to the state's new requirements until the second third of the eighteenth century.

Up to the present, the reasoning behind the choice of marriage partners in boyar clans has remained a historiographical mystery. Re‑thinking the historiographically anachronistic definition of “clan,” the author treats this concept as not being identical to the notion of “lineage” or “family,” but rather as an alliance of several families founded on marriage ties and common landholdings.
In the article, marriage strategies are examined on the basis of data on the Sheremet´ev, Odoevskii and Cherkasskii families. These lineages created strong family ties. Most research in this area is focused on the importance of government service and the monarch's favor. The author, in contrast, foregrounds the importance of the following family values: (1) the continuation of the family line through healthy male progeny; (2) the support of this progeny through landholdings; (3) the continuous religious commemoration of all the deceased; and (4) the maintenance of the glorious memoria of the family. In the article, the above values are examined as the foundation of boyar family strategy.
The article also reveals variations in the marriage strategies of two branches of the Sheremet´ev line. One branch, the Sheremet´ev‑Odoevskii‑Cherkasskii, did not have any marriages with persons outside the highest boyar elite. The landholdings of this clan were maintained within its control. Daughters played an important role in this process through their dowries, which were inherited by their children and grandchildren. This clan was characterized by its particular custom of passing on the greater mass of landholdings to one heir, with the smaller parts going to the rest. Looking at another branch of the Sheremet´ev family, the author notes that this branch did not limit their choice of marriage partners to the boyar elite. They often took brides from gentry families. Marriage strategy was defined by circumstance. If the logic of boyar marriage choice is still not totally clarified, we may nonetheless assert that it was not one and the same for all boyar clans.

Based on new archival material, the article analyzes 44 lawsuits over property rights and describes five particular cases which reveal the specifics of intra‑family and intra‑clan relations among the provincial nobility of the Orël and Tula governments in the eighteenth century. The article aims, first, to reveal the importance of documents on property litigations as a source for family history reconstruction and, second, to analyze the role of such litigations in the functioning of the family. The discussed cases show that conflicts over ownership were part of the daily lives of provincial nobles in the eighteenth century – frequent complications in matters of inheritance, especially as a result of childless marriage, being a case in point. The nuclear family constituted a provincial nobleman's immediate surroundings, but the extended family, or clan, did not lose its significance either. The article shows that, due to property litigations, noblemen kept documents confirming their belonging to the clan, closely followed changes in its structure, and positioned themselves as its rightful members. Thus, conflict would oftentimes become an important aspect of the clan's framework, not only creating some tensions within it, but also cementing it as a social unit, maintaining its relevance and viability.

State Councillor Avraam Stepanovich Sverchkov was a key figure in the legislative commissions between the 1720s and early 1740s. In 1755, he bequeathed a considerable part of his property to the newly established Moscow University. Reconstructed on the basis of a lawsuit over this legacy, the history of Sverchkov's family and kinship relations suggests that the category of bureaucrats he belonged to gave precedence to and valued the nuclear family. Coming from unprivileged estates and not being members of chancellery service families, these bureaucrats climbed the hierarchy ladder thanks to their professional skills, and independently built their careers, friendships, matrimonial and other strategies, advancing in service through personal contacts, knowledge and experience. Active participants in the actual implementation of state reforms in the first half of the eighteenth century, Sverchkov and officials like him formed the higher level of office employees in a variety of central institutions and ensured undisturbed operation of all the units of the state machine. Acquiring hereditary nobility through their service, these collegiate officials reduced the field of social and family interaction to the nuclear family to the exclusion of vertical kinship relations. Their social capital, career progress, material well‑being and security were interrelated and depended on two generations (parents and children) integrated in a complex system of social contacts.

The study is designed to check an assumption according to which donors to monasteries were interested in being present “with the saints” at as many places as possible in order to secure the spiritual advantage of commemoration for their relatives. Comparison of documents from different monasteries appears to be the most promising methodology to learn more about the distribution of donations.
The author starts with the table in the appendix to the edition of the book of feasts (Kormovaia kniga) of the Iosifo‑Volokolamskii monastery that dates from 1581. The table contains 216 entries of persons who were commemorated by an annual korm at that time. According to the donation books and feast books of the Troitse‑Sergiev, Kirillov, and Simonov monasteries, 72 of these persons were commemorated in one or more of these cloisters. The results of the differentiation of the data by “estates,” gender, by lay persons and by monks fit with the results of former research on the basis of other source groups. The higher the estate, the higher the share of women, the lower the share of monks, and the more probable the presence at different monasteries. The distribution of commemorations at other monasteries reflects the dominating position of the Troitse‑Sergiev monastery. Donors tended to concentrate their large donations on one monastery and avoid scattering their fortunes. Last, the author argues that in general the network of places at which people from Muscovy were used to being commemorated is contained within the territory of Muscovy.

The article analyzes a new source on the relations between Muscovy and the Khanate of Crimea – a list of names of Muscovite captives who returned home with the help of the Muscovite envoy Timofei Khotunskii. The particularity of this list is the predominance of female captives (554 female versus 169 male captives). The female captives, as classical non‑combatants, give a representative picture of the losses of the Muscovite civil population from incursions by the Tatars of Crimea and permit to locate the regions that were the most damaged by these incursions.
The study helps to understand the logic of the Muscovite and Tatar authorities. The Crimean policy makers viewed captivity and slavery as a profitable matter and were not opposed to releasing old captives, who were useless to their owners. The Muscovite policy makers present the opposite logic: they proceeded to the repatriation of any Muscovite captives, including the elderly and young mothers with children, even though this population group needed social assistance from the state. The demographic policies of these early modern states thus seem to be opposite to one another – the Crimean policy makers systematically proceeded to expulse people, while the Muscovite policy makers practiced an “open‑door” policy.