permanently quietened the peasants' spirit of revolt because they did not regard it as a just or adequate emancipation and, increasingly land-hungry, asserted their right to the land that had been withheld. Moreover, the peasants who migrated to towns and became workers were often young, freed from family constraints but still unused to the discipline of the factory, and bearing the resentments and frustrations that go with dislocation and incomplete assimilation to an unfamiliar environment.' To some extent, the Russian working class was revolutionary just because it had not had time to acquire the `trade-union consciousness' of which Lenin wrote-to become a settled industrial proletariat, capable of protecting its interests by non-revolutionary means, and understanding the opportunities for upward mobility that modern urban societies offer those with some education and skills.
However, the `modern' characteristics of Russian society, even in the urban sector and the upper educated strata, were still very incomplete. It was often said that Russia had no middle class; and indeed its business and commercial class remained comparatively weak, though professions, associations, and other signs of an emerging civil society could be discerned.' Despite increasing professionalization of the state bureaucracy, its upper ranks remained dominated by the nobility, traditionally the state's service class. Service prerogatives were all the more important to the nobility because of its economic decline as a landowning group after the abolition of serfdom: only a minority of noble landowners had successfully made the transition to capitalist, market-oriented agriculture.
The schizoid nature of Russian society in the early twentieth century is well illustrated by the bewildering variety of selfidentifications offered by subscribers to the city directories of St Petersburg, the largest and most modern of Russia's cities. Some subscribers kept to the traditional forms and identified themselves by social estate and rank ('hereditary noble', `merchant of the First Guild', `honoured citizen', `State Counsellor'). Others clearly belonged to the new world, and described themselves in terms of profession and type of employment ('stockbroker', 'mechanical engineer', `company director', or, as representative of Russia's achievements in female emancipation, `woman doctor'). A third group consisted of persons who were uncertain which world they belonged to, identifying themselves by estate in one year's directory and by profession in the next, or even giving both identifications at once, like the subscriber who listed himself quaintly as `nobleman, dentist'.'
In less formal contexts, educated Russians would often describe themselves as members of the intelligentsia. Sociologically, this was a very slippery concept, but in broad terms the word `intelligentsia' described a Westernized educated elite, alienated from the rest of Russian society by its education and from Russia's autocratic regime by its radical ideology. However, the Russian intelligentsia did not see itself as an elite, but rather as a classless group united by moral concern for the betterment of society, the capacity for `critical thought', and, in particular, a critical, semi-oppositionist attitude to the regime. The term came into common use around the middle of the nineteenth century, but the genesis of the concept may be found in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when the nobility was released from the obligation of compulsory service to the state, and some of its members, educated but finding their education under-utilized, developed an alternative ethos of obligation to `serve the people'.' Ideally (though not altogether in practice), intelligentsia membership and bureaucratic service were incompatible. The Russian revolutionary movement of the second half of the nineteenth century, characterized by small-scale conspiratorial organization to fight the autocracy and thus