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veteran of the wars against the Swedes, in 1705 he became Russia's first appointed count (graf) - a title Peter imported from Europe as part of his campaign to Westernize the Russian aristocracy. Boris was the last of the old boyars, the leading noblemen of Muscovy whose wealth and power derived from the favour of the Tsar (they had all but disappeared by the end of Peter's reign as newly titled nobles superseded them). Russia did not have a gentry in the Western sense -an independent class of landowners that could act as a counterbalance to the power of the Tsar. From the sixteenth century the state had swept away the quasi-feudal rights of the local princes and turned all nobles (dvoriane) into servants of the court (dvor). Muscovy was conceived as a patrimonial state, owned by the Tsar as his personal fiefdom, and the noble was legally defined as the Tsar's 'slave'.* For his services the nobleman was given land and serfs, but not as outright or allodial property, as in the West, and only on condition that he served the Tsar. The slightest suspicion of disloyalty could lead to demotion and the loss of his estates.

Before the eighteenth century Russia had no grand noble palaces. Most of the Tsar's servitors lived in wooden houses, not much bigger than peasant huts, with simple furniture and clay or wooden pots. According to Adam Olearius, the Duke of Holstein's envoy to Muscovy during the 1630s, few Russian noblemen had feather beds; instead, 'they lie on benches covered with cushions, straw, mats, or clothes; in winter they sleep on flat-topped stoves… [lying] with their servants… the chickens and the pigs'.²⁷ The nobleman seldom visited his various estates. Despatched from one place to another in the Tsar's vast empire, he had neither the time nor the inclination to put down roots in one locality. He looked upon his estates as a source of revenue, to be readily exchanged or sold. The beautiful estate of Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula, for example, exchanged hands over twenty times during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It was lost in games of cards and drinking bouts, sold to different people at the same time, loaned and bartered, mortgaged and remortgaged, until after

*Even as late as the nineteenth century noblemen of every rank, including counts and barons, were required to sign off their letters to the Tsar with the formulaic phrase 'Your Humble Slave'.

2. Seventeenth-century Muscovite costumes. Engraving, 1669

years of legal wrangling to settle all the questions of its ownership, it was bought by the Volkonsky family in the 1760s and eventually passed down through his mother to the novelist Tolstoy.²⁸ Because of this constant state of flux there was little real investment by the nobles in the land, no general movement to develop estates or erect palaces, and none of what took place in Western Europe from medieval times: the gradual concentration of a family domain in one locality, with property passed down from one generation to the next, and ties built up with the community.

The cultural advancement of the Muscovite boyars was well behind that of the European nobles in the seventeenth century. Olearius considered them 'among the barbarians… [with] crude opinions about the elevated natural sciences and arts'.²⁹ Dr Collins complained that 'they know not how to eat peas and carrots boiled but, like swine, eat them shells and all'.³⁰ This backwardness was in part the result of the Mongol occupation of Russia from about 1230 to the middle of the fifteenth century. The Tatars left a profound trace on boyar customs