The noblemen of the perm province in the XVIII – early XX centuries: quantity, composition, landed property

The article traces the dynamics of quantity and composition of the upper classes in the Perm province as well as their property. The published statistic information of the Central and Local Statistical Committee is not always comparable and therefore is not accurate enough. Besides, the number of estates and landowners is not always evident as those data are not differentiated. The ratio of nobility in the Perm province was inferior to other classes (by the mid-XIX century noblemen comprised 0.27% of the population; by the end of the century they amounted only 0.16%). The percentage of noble landowners was also insignificant. On the whole, the upper class in the province was presented by landless serving noblemen. They were officials who had come to the Urals mainly to fulfill their service duties. Another group consisted of noble plant owners (the Demidovs, the Yakovlevs, the Turchaninovs) who possessed lands according to the session law and got the nobility status due to their personal qualities, diligence and persistence. The representatives of aristocracy who purchased their landed property according to the manorial law were the next group of landowners (the Vsevolzhskiys, the Golitsyns, the Shakhovskys). Some of the landholders represented foreign noble families (e.g. the Poles) who had appeared in the Urals due to a number of circumstances. The prevalence of large-scale property was a peculiarity of Perm noble landowning. Vast tracts of land were concentrated in the hands of the largest noble families whose estates were located in several districts of the province. Although the process of land ownership’s transition to other classes became more widespread by the beginning of the XX century, the majority of nobles retained their ancestral property. Simultaneously there was a process of estates’ fragmentation among their heirs. On the whole, the investigated processes in the Perm province developed according to historical processes all over Russia and were determined by deep modernization shifts.