social rigidity ignored the ‘middle grounds’ of each estate, sorting different professions on the peripheries into a sort of social ‘cubby-hole’, failing to anchor the rising middle class to a social identity. The rising industrialists, professional classes and artists, the burzhuaziia (bourgeoisies), were perhaps defined by what they were not; “They were not gentry, not chinovniki (bureaucrats), not peasants. Their place meshed poorly, if at all, with traditional soslovie categories”. 117 Social rigidity in this sense has been described as the foundation of a ‘sedimentary society’ in which the autocratic state system attempted to impose order to social fluctuations through a number of top-down reforms. 118 Alfred Rieber argued that social reform in Imperial Russia was almost always initiated from above in an irregular, arbitrary manner that fluctuated depending on bureaucratic unity, resistance from the populace, the distraction of foreign wars, or the succession of rulers. 119 This arbitrariness meant that social reform was hardly ever permanent; everything that was enacted could just as easily be overturned or ignored. One such example was the codification of the Svod Zakonov in 1832, which looked to reinstate and clarify the Ulozhenie of 1649 that had fallen into disuse. The codification clarified and systematised the soslovie system but also looked to eliminate repetition; whenever contradictory laws were encountered they were simply removed in favour of the most recently 117 Edith W. Clowes, Samual D. Kassow and James L. West, Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 4. 118 Alfred J. Rieber, “The Sedimentary Society” in Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 343-366. 119 idem. p. 364.
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