The Social Identity of the Courtiers and Nobility under Peter the Great

This article examines one of the aspects of the social identity of the Russian nobility in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The author regards social identity as a set of retrospective practices of self-naming, the person’s self-identification, and social identification by the state, rank groups, and society. Referring to new material from archival sources and published correspondence, the author studies the semantics of little-known service categories of tsaredvortsy (courtiers) and clarifies the history of the words denoting them. Peter I treated seventeenth-century “service” terminology pragmatically and tried to perpetuate the word tsaredvortsy to denote servicepeople of all kinds. In the early eighteenth century, as the word shlyakhetskiye (originating from the Polish word Szlachta) was spreading in translated documents and letters, the tsar introduced the neologism to use among service people. Сlerks and the nobility already knew the word. Simultaneously, service vocabulary to refer to courtiers and “city noblemen” was developing in the official documentation. The article examines such examples of office vocabulary as lyudi polkovoy sluzhby, lyudi nalitso, nachalnye lyudi, otstavnye, kryzhovniki, pod krestom, and v stolovykh netyakh. Hundreds of representatives of military and service people referred to themselves as byteishchiki or as being v chetvertyakh or v statyakh. The author examines the practices of classifying service people as byteishchiki with reference to authentic statistics and the biography of I. N. and V. N. Tatishchev and officers of the Azov Dragoon Regiment. The author concludes that by the beginning of the 1720s, most service categories of tsaredvortsy had lost their relevance but they remained in the memory of the nobility while tsaredvortsy themselves became recruited again.