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Кто кормил московских дворян? О структуре душевладений дворян Московской губернии в 1812 г.
Basing on a new self-compiled dataset the article reveals features of the distribution of the Moscow nobility’s property in the beginning of the 19th century. New archival sources, noble tax returns, allow to take into account all estates of a landowner throughout the whole Russia that was never done before because of lack of sources. The statistical analysis convincingly demonstrates that the share of Moscow nobility whose estates were located in more than one province was significant, what leads to three fundamentally important conclusions. Firstly, the number of poor nobility in Russia seems to be exaggerated, till now the property of an aristocrat in each province was treated as a separate property so small subordinate estates were analyzed as main estates therefore the number of “poor” nobility was growing, but only on paper. Secondly, the share of female property was not just significant, but amounted to almost 50 %, especially in the category of poor nobility. Thirdly, we cautiously assume that the number of nobility in Russia is overstated if we rely on the assessment of noble property in one province as an independent unit of analysis.