Collective actor or rhetoric figure? “The nobility” and “the state” in political process of the 18th century in Russia

The article is devoted to the problems of historical study of social role of the nobility and the state as collective actors in the 18th century in Russia. As a rule, historians are constructing the collective actors on the basis of presumably group belongings or on the basis of presumably shared group interests. The notion about struggle of interests between the collective actors is fundamental for the most of explanatory models in political history. Analyzing the basic concepts of the present-day historiography, the author shows that the references to the significant collective actors could not be verified in the majority of cases: the “nobility” appears, in fact, as a set of fragmented territorial corporate groups, while the “state” was usually represented in practice by the narrow circle of the central elite or even by the lonesome figure of the Emperor hypothetically having knowledge of the valid interest of the “state”. In addition, both the nobility and the state bureaucracy were overlapping each other, since in the most of situations the nobles were leading the bureaucratic institutions, especially at the top of the Imperial hierarchy. The author points at the communicative character of the political process, which means that the large collective actors were in fact the rhetoric figures, who were constituted within the framework of political communication of the relatively narrow groups of elite. The final conclusion is that both “state” and “nobility” might not be seen as the actors, but rather as the rhetorical figures, which were used by the certain groups of elite to implement their political practices.