From aristocratic past to public heritage: A comparative case study of Russian and Irish country houses since the revolutions.'
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Terence A. Dooley (National University of Ireland Maynooth)
Christian Noack (University of Amsterdam)
‘From aristocratic past to public heritage: A comparative case study of
Russian and Irish country houses since the revolutions.’
Introduction
‘The storm’, the final chapter of Priscilla Roosevelt’s pioneering study on the Russian
estate, begins with speculation on how the country’s stately homes might look today if
noble culture in 1917 had not been ‘so savagely put to death.’ 1 The picture she evokes
bears many resemblances to the situation in England and Ireland in the present:
‘… there would certainly be fewer grand estate houses than in 1916, their
maintenance perhaps financed by paying guests or reproductions of
Ostankino treasures or Yusupov porcelain… many of Russia’s manor houses,
as elsewhere, would undoubtedly have disintegrated, been sold and converted
to other uses, or razed to make way for housing developments…’ 2
To date, the bulk of comparative research on Russian estates has focused on England,
rather than on Ireland. John Randolph, for example, has devoted a long review essay to
Roosevelt’s Country Estate and Peter Mandler’s seminal study on the Rise and Fall of the
Stately Home. Randolph’s starting point is the obvious contrast with the situation in
England where ‘two million members swell the ranks of the English country house’s
defending army, the might National Trust’, while ‘Russia’s humiliated ruins can only
echo Chaadaev’s famous judgement: “We do not even have homes”.’ 3
Arguably, a comparison of the Russian and Irish cases might be just as instructive, if not
more so. In Ireland, an aristocratic culture, largely perceived as English and alien, lost its
hegemonic position between 1916 and 1923 during a period of socio-political upheaval
and civil war. This was contemporaneous with the decline of Russian gentry culture. As
we will demonstrate in our paper, much of the built heritage, most particularly in the
form of the country house, was lost and in the decades which followed a negative
political and public attitude towards big houses prevailed. The splendour in which some
houses present themselves today is somewhat misleading; in the Irish case, for example,
it has been spawned by years of the so-called Celtic Tiger and a reappraisal of their
heritage position within the national patrimony. As to the Russian case, Randolph, based
on Mandler’s recommendation to study heritage making in the longue durée, had already
speculated about a possible continuation of ‘beautiful [estate] life’ under Soviet
conditions after 1917. We will try to demonstrate that elements of the nobility’s cultural
arcadia indeed survived the burning of houses during the revolutions and the civil war.
1
Priscilla Roosevelt: Life on the Russian Country Estate: A Social and Cultural History (New Haven and
London, 1995) p. 330.
2
Roosevelt, Country Estate, p. 329.
3
John Randolph, “The Old Mansion: Revisiting the History of the Russian Country Estate”, Kritika 1,4
(2000), pp. 729-749, quotes pp. 729-730.
1Subsequently the physical structures of the manor houses were preserved partly for
practical purposes, and partly because of a reinterpretation of Russian culture during the
Soviet period. 4
The Irish case: an introduction. 5
In July 2003, the then Minister for Education and Science, Noel Dempsey TD [Fianna
Fáil], was happy to tell his audience in Trim Castle, county Meath:
The built heritage in Ireland is a fundamental and treasured part of our
national identity. It encapsulates historic linkages within and beyond our
shores, and illustrates a strong sense of our identity within a common
European and, indeed, a broader global inheritance. 6
But in fact it was only at the turn of the 21st century that Irish politicians had, in general,
become comfortable with the idea that country houses should be regarded as part of the
Irish national patrimony. The aim of the first part of this paper is to demonstrate how
older memories and traditional nationalist perceptions had to fade before country houses
in Ireland could become popular visitor centres. The section which follow examine the
origins of these perceptions, discuss how they impacted negatively on government policy
towards the preservation of country houses in the immediate post-independence period,
and finally explore the confluence of factors which over the last few decades have
changed these perceptions so that the country house in Ireland is now less perceived as a
symbol of colonial oppression and more as an important aspect of Ireland’s built heritage.
In Ireland the reasons for the decline of the country house, or ‘big house’ (a term that
ambiguously embodies deference and alienation), had mostly to do with the changing
socio-political and economic circumstances of Irish landlords from the late 1870s as
shrinking estates, vanishing incomes (first rental and then investment) and the growth of
democracy coincided with the extraordinary upheavals of the extended Land War from
the late 1870s, the Great War of 1914-18, the Irish revolution of 1916-23, and the
worldwide economic depression that followed, not to mention more personal reasons of
family misfortune. 7 In the midst of all of this there was another phenomenon in this
decline: the reinvention of the Irish nation from the late nineteenth century and the role it
played in fostering political and popular resentment towards country houses in
independent Ireland. 8 While in Europe, aristocratic mansions, chateaux, Schlösser and
villas were all victims of political destruction at different times, by the twentieth century
4
Randolph, “Old mansion”, pp. 747-749.
5
Much of what follows in this discussion of Ireland is a translation of Terence Dooley, ‘National
patrimony and political perceptions of the Irish country house in post-independence Ireland’ in Terence
Dooley (ed.), Ireland’s polemical past: views of Irish history in honour of R.V. Comerford (Dublin, 2010),
pp. 192-212; for a wider discussion on the reasons for the fall of the Irish landed class, see Terence Dooley,
The decline of the Big House in Ireland: a Study of Irish Landed Families, 1860-1960 (Dublin, 2001); also
Terence Dooley and Christopher Ridgway (eds.), The Irish country house: its past, present and future
(Dublin, 2010).
6
www.education.ie [1 Nov. 2007].
7
Dooley, The Decline of the Big House.
8
On the subject of inventing the nation see R.V. Comerford’s magisterial Ireland (London and New York,
2003).
2there was more of a sense that they could be regarded ‘as national rather than specifically
aristocratic property’ than was the case in post-independence Ireland, where there was a
widely held perception amongst politicians (and the wider public) that country houses
were (former) bastions of alien power built upon a feudal rackrenting economy and with
this perception came all the attendant consequences that threatened their survival. 9
Land wars and revolution, 1879-1923
The general case stated is that for Irish nationalists of the late nineteenth century, country
houses became the physical representations in their locales of a landlord system that was
despised for social, economic and political reasons. This had not always been the case.
The Young Irelander, Thomas Davis (1814-45), for example, seems to have had little
difficulty in appreciating the aesthetic qualities of country houses and their picturesque
surroundings. When extolling the natural beauty of the Munster Blackwater Valley,
Davis wrote: ‘There is every combination that can be produced by the elements that enter
into the picturesque: rocks, verdant slopes with the triumphs of art superadded, and made
visible in magnificent houses and beautiful villas, with their decorated lawns and
pleasure-grounds’. 10 As late as 1882 a radical separatist and despiser of landlordism, John
Devoy, could still praise the duke of Leinster’s ‘handsome seat, called Carton, with its
beautiful grounds’ and write of Lismore: ‘it ill behoves us to pass from the place without
paying a tribute to the general air of comfort that pervades …’ 11
However, as the Land War intensified so did violent anti-landlord rhetoric that portended
what lay ahead for country houses. This rhetoric was successful in creating the perception
that landlords were the initiators of Ireland’s social, economic and political problems and
those who practised this rhetoric - whether in speech or print - were purposeful in their
intent to alienate the landlord class from the wider nationalist community.
Periodicals and the emerging popular literature represented landlords as ‘territorial
monsters’, 12 or as ‘absentee, rack-renting, depopulating … making … laws in a foreign
parliament for their miserable serfs at home’. 13 They were charged with ‘Celtic
depopulation’ and the spoliation of the ‘Celtic fatherland’, a reflection of the fact that
since the 1840s the Celt had become synonymous with a Gaelic Ireland that predated the
plantations. 14 By the time Michael Davitt (1846-1906), founder of the Land League,
published his version of its story in The Fall of Feudalism (1904), the growth of Irish
nationalism and the emergence of the Irish Ireland movement from the 1880s had
witnessed the re-imagination of the Irish nation as exclusively nationalist, Gaelic and
catholic, so there was no room for landlords in the national collectivity. 15
The essential point in all of this is that from the Land War era nationalists from all
spheres of Irish society perpetuated the stereotypical representation of Irish landlords as
alien oppressors more widely than before and from that emerged the perception that the
9
Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven and London, 1997), p. 3.
10
Thomas Davis, Literary and Historical Essays (1846), p. 215; quoted in Comerford, Ireland, p. 240.
11
John Devoy, The Land of Eire (New York, 1882), pp 50, 102.
12
Patrick Lavelle, The Irish Landlord Since the Revolution (Dublin, 1870), p. 259.
13
Michael Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland (New York, 1904), p. xvii.
14
Lavelle, The Irish Landlord, p. 273; Davitt, Fall of Feudalism, p. xii; Comerford, Ireland, p. 70.
15
Comerford, Ireland, p. 9.
3country house could not be regarded as part of the national patrimony. Instead it was
represented as the house of plenty, gathered and stored at the expense of the
impoverished outside its demesne walls and so the Connaught Telegraph proclaimed in
1879:
Our magnates revel in luxury, unknown to the kings of other countries. Their
mansions, widespread pleasure grounds, and ornamental gardens are truly
magnificent, while their tenants whose wretched huts are the only blemishes
on the beautiful view, which lies open from the site of each lordly residence,
pine away in all but utter destitution. 16
As the Land War generation gave way to the revolutionary generation of the post-1916
period it bequeathed the ancestral resentments that intensified the alienation of Irish
landlords. IRA veterans later claimed they had been reared on stories of English
oppression (more often than not associated with landlord oppression.) Famed Tipperary
IRA leader, Dan Breen recalled the influence of Charlie Walshe (Cormac Breathnach,
later Lord Mayor of Dublin), who taught a generation of revolutionaries including
himself, Dinny Lacey, Seán Treacy and Seán Hogan: ‘the naked facts about the English
conquest of Ireland and the manner in which our country was held in bondage’.17
Similarly, Liam Deasy’s teacher: ‘strove constantly to rid us of the attitude of servility
and subservience towards the landed gentry which was encouraged by this class, and in
its place he endeavoured to plant a sense of self-respect and independence’. 18 Tom Barry
grew up to resent the big houses of west Cork in which ‘lived the leading British loyalist,
secure and affluent in his many acres, enclosed by high demesne walls’. 19
In total over 300 big houses were burned from the beginning of the War of Independence
in 1920 to the end of the Civil War in 1923. 20 When the arson campaign reached various
peaks there were occasional outcries but they came mainly from to-be-expected sources
such as the editor of the Irish Times, representatives of various church bodies, fellow
country house owners, and the occasional old constitutional nationalist of the moribund
Home Rule party. 21 After independence, Free State government policy, official and
otherwise, was unsympathetic in terms of compensating big house owners for the losses
suffered or in any way encouraging in terms of helping them to rebuild. 22 The draft of a
statement to be delivered to the Dáil by President W.T. Cosgrave in March 1923 pointed
out that: ‘Practically every claim for financial accommodation to economic interest is
accompanied by a statement [from Loyalists] that the government can find millions to
16
Connaught Telegraph, 30 Aug. 1879.
17
Dan Breen. My Fight for Irish Freedom (Dublin, 1981 ed. [first ed., 1924]), p. 9.
18
Liam Deasy, Towards Ireland Free:The West Cork Brigade in the War of Independence (Cork, 1973), p.
2.
19
Tom Barry, Guerilla Days in Ireland (Dublin, 1981 ed. [first ed., 1949]), p. 6.
20
This is the number estimated by Dooley in The Decline of the Big House in Ireland, pp. 286-87; however
a recent study by James S Donnelly Jr. for houses burned in Cork over the same period, and using a more
extensive range of sources suggests the need to re-appraise the national figures; James S. Donnelly Jr,, “Big
House Burnings in County Cork during the Irish revolution, 1920-21”, Éire-Ireland 47,3&4 (2012) pp.
141-97.
21
Dooley, The Decline of the Big House in Ireland, pp. 192-95.
22
Ibid., pp. 197-207.
4compensate a class which never benefited the nation and drew its revenue from rents and
lands etc. etc.’ 23 The definition of nation quite clearly excluded the former ascendancy.
There were many other damaging consequences of the arson attacks on big houses; much
of their valuable contents also went up in flames. Financial exigencies had meant that
contents had been disappearing from Ireland since the passing of the Settled Land Act
(Ireland) in 1882 to make their way across the Atlantic to adorn the homes of rising
plutocratic families such as the Vanderbilts, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. There was
no public outcry then or for almost a century more.
But the IRA gangs who ransacked country houses during the Troubles were not
‘barbarians’ or ‘philistines’ as Cornelia Adair thought the men who raided Glenveagh in
August 1920 and who ‘injured four oil paintings of some value and tore up a group
photograph that had Lord Kitchener in it’. 24 They knew what Kitchener represented to
them – an iconic figure of the empire that they fought – while the oil paintings were just
as symbolic of an alien culture as her big house. Their historical (or material) value was
irrelevant to men who shared none of Cornelia Adair’s cultural outlook. And, yet, there is
something of a great irony in the fact that in the post-independence decades local people
flocked to big house auctions and bought what could be described as mementoes while
the prized artefacts went mainly abroad.
There is little point in speculating about what might have been had a Home Rule
parliament come into existence after the Great War but it is arguable that those who
succeeded to power had little of the cultural experience of Parnell or Redmond.
Separatists had no time for the trappings of aristocracy. From the perspective of the big
house, democratisation and the reinvention of the nation in the post-Land War era meant
that successive governments in independent Ireland were anything but sympathetic in
their attitudes or policies towards them. It was not the destruction of a minority of big
houses (probably less than 10 per cent) during the revolutionary period that was most
significant, but rather the abandonment and/or demolition of a much higher proportion in
the decades that followed.
Government attitudes in Ireland post independence
One of the great social issues that faced the first independent government was still the
redistribution of land. Through a succession of land acts from 1923 to 1965 country
houses and their surrounding demesnes and estates had, in the majority of cases, to make
way for the farming interest. 25 During Dáil debates it was commonly remarked that the
division of estates was the righting of a great historical wrong and a natural conclusion of
the Land War of the 1880s.
23
Draft of statement to be delivered by President W.T. Cosgrave to Dáil Éireann, 26 Mar. 1923 (National
Archive of Ireland, Dept of Taoiseach files, S2188).
24
Cornelia Adair to Mr Roberts, 2 August 1920 (on public display, Glenveigh Castle).
25
For a more detailed discussion of this topic see Terence Dooley, “The Land for the People”: The Land
Question in Independent Ireland (Dublin, 2004).
5When Patrick Hogan (1891-1936), Minister for Lands, introduced the 1923 land bill
to Dáil Éireann, Deputy J. Bourke (Tipperary, Coalition Treaty) proudly
pronounced:
I believe that implicit in this event alone is the undoing of the conquest of
Ireland. For the conquest of Ireland was the conquest of the land of Ireland,
the wresting of the lands of Ireland, held by Irish tenure, from the people of
Ireland by foreigners who held by foreign tenure from a foreign king. In this
even may be seen an outward sign and symbol of the victory of the Gael over
the Gaul (recte Gall), the victory of the descendants of the clansmen … I
believe that this measure represents an honest and, so far as it goes, a
successful effort to deal with the remainder of the agrarian difficulty, one of
the worst legacies of British misrule in Ireland. I believe when all the equities
are taken into consideration that it does justice to the landlord; I believe it
does very full justice to the tenant, and I believe that it does honour to the
political capacity of the nation, and I for one am very glad to support it. 26
In a society where land redistribution was the perceived key to financial security the
big house was only an obstacle to be removed, physically if necessary. Almost a
century before, Thomas Davis had lamented the pillaging of ancient sites in
nineteenth-century Ireland: ‘All classes, creeds and politics are to blame in this. The
peasant lugs down a pillar for his sty, the farmer for his gate, the priest for his
chapel, the minister for his glebe.’ The same might equally be applied to country
houses in the twentieth century, only then the farmer used the country house for his
sty and the Land Commission recommended their demolition and the use of their
material for the erection of labourers’ cottages. In 1944, the Minister for Lands,
Seán Moylan (Fianna Fáil) informed the Dáil: ‘Residences on lands acquired by the
Land Commission for division which are not suitable for disposal to allottees may
be demolished in order to provide material for building smaller houses for allottees
or may be sold by public auction’. 27 Three years before Moylan had shown his hand
in much stronger terms when he told the same body:
But, in general, the majority of these big houses that I know, and I am very
familiar with them, are not structurally sound, have no artistic value and no
historic interest. From my unregenerate point of view, I choose to regard
them as tombstones of a departed ascendancy and the sooner they go down
the better. They are no use. 28
Inherent in Moylan’s reply was the type of cultural alienation that characterised
nationalist attitudes towards country houses over generations. The former ascendancy’s
own realisation of that meant that they were faced with what L.P. Curtis Jr has described
as ‘a hard choice between self-imposed exile and accommodation with their new
masters’. 29 Many preferred to stay away permanently; others to come over only
26
Dáil Debates, vol. 3, 28 May 1923, 1164-5.
27
Dáil Debates, vol. 92, 23 Feb. 1944; www.oireachtas-debates.gov.ie/plweb-
cgi/fastweb?stae_id=1227534811&view [24 Nov. 2008].
28
Dáil Debates, vol. 93, 2 May 1944, 1852.
29
L. Perry Curtis Jr., “The Last Gasp of Southern Unionism: Lord Ashtown of Woodlawn” in Eire-Ireland,
vol. 40,3&4 (2005), p. 140.
6occasionally because like Andrew Devonshire of Lismore Castle they felt apart from the
nation:
Even after living there [Lismore] for part of each year for the past fifty years,
and counting many Irishmen as my friends, I don’t feel included in their
Irishness. The truth is that any Englishman, even one whose family have
owned property in Ireland over the centuries, is still regarded as English….
But for me the Republic is a mistress rather than a wife, to be visited but not
to live with. 30
Country houses as part of the Irish patrimony
Essentially built heritage can be interpreted as ‘a physical legacy of the past belonging,
however abstractly, to the citizenry of the present by virtue of its contribution to national
history’ 31 Heritage can be used to exclude as well as include and in the early years of
independence ascendancy cultural artefacts were not presented as an acceptable part of ‘a
narrative of national achievement’. 32 So there remained for decades the widely held
perception that the architectural grandeur of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
symbolised the dominant elitism of landlords built to the impoverishment of the Irish
people. Historical associations overrode architectural significance.
Fairly typical in respect of the apathy shown towards the preservation of country houses
was the case of Muckross House in Killarney donated to the State in 1932. The then vice-
president of the Executive Council praised the Bourn Vincents ‘for their great generosity
and for the fine example of public spirit which they have set’, while W.T. Cosgrave saw
it as ‘a very remarkable gift, a very generous gift and a very princely gift.’ 33 But
successive governments did nothing with Muckross House (except to strip it of many of
its contents to furnish the president’s residence at Aras an Uachtarain) and at one stage in
the 1950s a despondent report in the Irish Times read: ‘Muckross house remains a silent
and lonely sentinel on the shore of the Middle lake. As successive government have
failed to find a use for it, it seems it will eventually fall into decay.’ 34 It was not until
1964 that the house was opened to the public; today it is one of the main tourist
attractions in southwest Ireland.
In the early decades of independence successive governments simply never formulated
any policies for houses that came into their possession. Before the introduction of proper
planning laws, work was carried out in many of these state-owned houses with very little
regard for good conservation practice. Their character and fabric suffered greatly as they
were converted from residences into research centres (Johnstown Castle, County
30
Andrew Devonshire, Accidents of Fortune (Norwich, 2004), pp. 108-09.
31
Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home, p. 7.
32
Comerford, Ireland, pp. 46, 249. It should, of course, be remembered that attitudes were not much
different at this time in Britain, where, it has been argued: “All too easily accusations of privilege are aimed
at the country house – that it encouraged and nurtured a parasitical society supported by an exploited
working class, that the leisured way of life of one was achieved by the labour of the other”; Harry Teggin,
“Domus Britannicus: What Future for the Country House?” in The Architect’s Journal, 24 Jan. 1979, p.
166.
33
Dáil Debates, vol, 45, 7 Dec. 1932, 947-48.
34
Irish Times, 29 June 1954.
7Wexford), agricultural training colleges (Ballyhaise, County Cavan), prisons (Shelton
Abbey, County Wicklow) and so on. 35
Unlike the landscape, big houses were not perceived to belong to the national patrimony
– whereas in Britain it became possible to ‘float the idea that aristocratic property was in
some magical and strictly intangible way the people’s property also’ 36 - and so the state
was slow to concern itself with spending money on their protection. This remained the
case until around the 1970s when the tourist industry realised the potential of country
houses but even then it was primarily those such as Muckross, Killarney House and
Glenveagh in Donegal that came with attractive gardens and large parklands. On the
introduction of the National Monuments Bill in 1929, 37 which more or less legislated that
ruins were preferable to intact buildings, Timothy Sheehy (West Cork) emphasised the
need to preserve what was left of O’Sullivan Beare’s castle at Castlehaven:
It was the castle from which O’Sullivan Beare, after his last grand and great
struggle for Irish liberty, sailed away to Spain. It has now only the
foundations left, but they are sacred to the country, and by this Bill,
introduced by the government, they can be preserved; … they will be there a
monument to the younger generation of what was done in the good old times
to save our independence and win it.38
He thanked God that ‘the nation [was now] in our own hands’ and that the ‘monuments to
the heroism of our forefathers’ would be preserved. ‘Our hands’ obviously excluded the
former landed ruling class and ‘our forefathers’ were of the old Gaelic ruling class such
as O’Sullivan Beare who following the defeat of the Gaelic chiefs at Kinsale in 1601
made the heroic march with 1,000 of his followers from Cork to Leitrim.
The prevailing attitude to the preservation of country houses should, of course, be
understood in the context of a political climate that was still highly charged and where
the mindsets and ideologies of those in government were still dictated to a large extent by
emotive memories of Land War and British oppression, brought to the forefront by some
deputy or other almost every time land or the establishment of an Irish republic were
being debated. Just as importantly, the government was forced for decades after
independence to wear a financial straitjacket. There could be no expenditure on the
preservation of country houses when so many other social issues had to be addressed.
When, during a debate on the land question in 1948, Deputy Charles Fagan (Independent,
Longford-Westmeath) made the rare point in the Dáil that ‘It was a crying shame for the
past 15 or 20 years to see mansions and big houses pulled down’, he was shouted down
by Dublin South-Central representative, Con Lehane: ‘It is not mansions we want, but
houses for our people.’ 39
35
See Terence Dooley, A Future for Irish Historic Houses: A Study of Fifty Houses (Dublin, 2003), p. 23.
36
See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven and London, 1992), pp. 174-77.
37
An act to make provision for the protection and preservation of national monuments and for the
preservation of archaeological objects in Saorstat Éireann and to make provision for other matters
connected with the matters aforesaid, no. 2/1930 [26 Feb. 1930].
38
Dáil Debates, vol. 32, 24 Oct. 1929, 251.
39
Dáil Debates, Vol. 111, 03 June 1948, 400.
8Social priority was most clearly articulated in the Dáil chambers in 1970 by Kevin
Boland, then Fianna Fáil Minister for Local Government, in his now infamous ‘belted
earls speech’. 40 Much quoted as an attack on the Irish Georgian Society and its
supporters, this speech is best understood in the context of its time. Boland claimed:
…it is desirable to preserve as much as is feasible of the Georgian area of my
native city…. I agree also that there are many examples of Georgian
architecture outside the city of Dublin which are well worth preserving if
possible and I also accept unreservedly that this is part of our national
heritage, but it is part only. 41
It was merely a token gesture when, in fact, Boland was more annoyed that ‘the antics’ of
a handful of aesthetes and students had hijacked media attention for the preservation of
Georgian Dublin. He perceived these to be a minority – as the wider public would have
done – and so he told the Dáil:
I think the impressive facades of those Georgian houses, the sweeping
staircases, the fine stucco work, the Adam fireplaces and so on are well worth
preserving but I think it is no harm to remind people who make a fetish of
those things and who yearn after the days of gracious living that they denote
that each example also involved a dark and gloomy basement and an
insanitary back lane hovel. 42
He made it quite clear that social concerns outweighed preservation:
I make no apology whatever for saying that the physical needs of the people
must get priority over the aesthetic needs of Lord and Lady Guinness and
Deputies Dr FitzGerald, Dr Browne, Desmond and all the other Deputy
doctors that we have. I make no apology for saying that, desirable as is the
preservation of old buildings of architectural merit, while I am Minister for
Local Government and while the needs of the people for housing, water and
sewerage services remain unfulfilled, not one penny of the capital allocation
that it is possible to make available to my department will be spent on such
preservation, desirable as it is.43
The years that followed were characterised by soaring inflation, energy shortages and
lack of confidence in modern economic development. Public finances were tight in the
midst of continuing recession and so the government paid very little attention to the
preservationist lobby. Country houses were crumbling as a result of harsh tax regimes
that made it more expedient to demolish them (or at least strip them of their roofs) than
pay exorbitantly high local government rates. By the early 1970s hundreds of the great
Irish houses had disappeared: Tudenham in Westmeath; Dartrey in Monaghan;
40
It should also be understood that Boland was one of the more extreme nationalists in Fianna Fail. His
father, Gerald, was a founding member of the party and his uncle, Harry, a prominent revolutionary figure
was killed in the Civil War. Kevin Boland would resign his cabinet position later in 1970 in solidarity with
Neil Blaney and Charles Haughey over their sacking from government for their alleged involvement in
gunrunning for the Provisional IRA.
41
Dáil debates, vol. 245, 11 Mar. 1970, 167.
42
Dáil debates, vol. 245, 11 Mar. 1970, 168-69.
43
Dáil debates, vol. 245, 11 Mar. 1970, 168.
9Dunsandle in Galway; Frenchpark in Roscommon; and Dromore in Limerick, to name
but a few. 44 In the 1970s Malahide and its contents were offered to the state in lieu of the
Talbot de Malahide family’s tax liability, but under the instructions of the Minister for
Finance, Richie Ryan, the house and chattels were auctioned. As far as Ryan and the
government were concerned these were not national possessions and the national benefit
lay not in preserving the historical remnants of a medieval hall but rather in converting
the contents, through sale, into revenue to be spent on education, social welfare and so
on. It should not be overlooked that in all of this, owners shared some responsibility for
their impotency to lobby governments for the protection of their homes.
Changing perceptions in Ireland
So where and when did it all change and how did Ireland arrive at a position in 2003 for
the then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern TD, to proclaim?
…the ‘Big House’ has a special place in Irish architectural history. Once
considered not to be part of our patrimony, these magnificent eighteenth and
nineteenth century houses, built by Irish builders, are now increasingly
valued for their architectural significance and for the wealth of superb
interior decoration created mainly by Irish craftspeople…. The survival of
this important part of Ireland’s built heritage is of major concern to
Government. 45
The clue to changing political (and public) attitudes lies very much in Ahern’s use of the
term ‘Irish’ in the above quotation: he emphasised that they were built by ‘Irish builders’,
decorated by ‘Irish craftspeople’ and they held ‘a special place in Irish architectural
history’. Less than half a century before preservationists first realised that this could be
the key in unlocking political mindsets (and government coffers); the big house would
have to be re-imagined as a part of the national patrimony. In 1957, when Desmond
Guinness suggested the re-founding of the Irish Georgian Society in a letter to the Irish
Times he stated that the function of the new organisation, amongst other things, would be
‘to awaken an interest in Ireland’s heritage of Georgian architecture’. 46 To influence
change the argument had to be formulated (in the case of many individual houses even
invented) that country houses owed as much to Irish influence as English influence.
This caused difficulties within and without the country house. Within, there remained a
preference for all things English. Most had failed or deliberately avoided integration into
Irish society despite the best efforts of such as Elizabeth Bowen to convince that ‘a
barrier has two sides’. 47 For most, Britain was still their spiritual home and in more
practical terms the location of their children’s education in public schools and the outlet
for their career ambitions.
44
For a more comprehensive listing, though by no means exhaustive, see The knight of Glin, D.J. Griffin
and N.K. Robinson, Vanishing Country Houses of Ireland (Dublin, 1988).
45
Bertie Ahern, “Foreword” in Dooley, A Future for Irish Historic Houses, p. 2.
46
See Robert O’Byrne, The Irish Georgian Society: A Celebration (Dublin, 2008).
47
Elizabeth Bowen, “The big house” in Hermione Lee (ed.), The Mulberry Tree: Writing of Elizabeth
Bowen (London, 1986), p. 30.
10Without, the idea that the country house should be regarded as part of the national
patrimony was never going to be an easy sell. The only thing those propounding this
ideology had in their favour was that the 1960s brought other changes to Ireland. It was a
time of relative economic prosperity and increased optimism. Ireland was becoming
increasingly urbanised and less obsessed with the land question (the last major land act
was passed in 1965.) Society became less denominationalised. This began with the
Catholic Church’s loss of influence on public culture; in the republic religion and
nationality were no longer synonymous and as Vincent Comerford explains: the
‘moderation of politico-historical attitudes to the so-called ‘ascendancy’ was also coming
into play’. 48 Educational improvements, most notably the introduction of free primary
and secondary education for all in 1967, gradually widened support amongst an
increasingly enlightened and better-educated audience. Even though Kevin Boland’s
speech came in 1970, the tide had begun to change, slowly.
Three years after Boland’s speech Ireland joined the European Economic Union. This
was crucial because now the architectural significance of the Irish country house had to
be seen in a much wider European context. It could now be said that Ireland ‘belonged’
to Europe as opposed to Britain and this new link had no historical contamination.
Moreover, from a public and private perspective, European money was too important to
ignore international charters and conventions that were intended to inform and influence
government policy and legislation for protecting the architectural heritage. 49 In some
cases Ireland was slow to sign up to these charters (almost twenty years in the case of
UNESCO’s Convention concerning the protection of the world cultural and national
heritage and in 1976 Ireland was the only EEC member without an official national
buildings record 50) but by 1991 the government eventually accepted that ‘each state party
to the convention recognises that the duty of ensuring identification, protection,
conservation, preservation and transmission to future generations of this heritage belongs
primarily to that state.’ 51
In the interim the Irish government, responding to increased pressure from
preservationists, did introduce various schemes that brought some respite to country
house owners. Grants became available through central and local authorities or state
bodies such as Bord Fáilte (illustrating a new dimension that the tourist value of the
country house was now perceived to be worth exploring), while funds allocated to the
Office of Public Works for the conservation of buildings of ancient, historic and
architectural merit increased from £580,000 in 1973-4 to £1.7 million in 1976. 52
But although support was increasing so also was the number of country houses in
difficulty. In February 1974 the white paper on capital taxation, introduced ostensibly to
redistribute wealth, had grave implications for historic houses, contents and gardens. By
48
Comerford, Ireland, pp. 118, 249.
49
Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government (DoEHLG), Architectural heritage
protection: guidelines for planning authorities (Dublin, 2004), p. 14.
50
Knight of Glin et al., Vanishing Country Houses, p. 8. In the same year, the establishment of the Irish
Architectural Archive by Edward McParland and Nicholas Robinson helped fill this gap.
51
DoEHLG, Architectural heritage protection, p. 14.
52
Edward McParland and Nicholas Robinson (eds.), Heritage at Risk: A Digest of An Taisce’s Report on
the Future of Historic Houses, Gardens and Collections in the Republic of Ireland (Dublin, 1977), p. 30.
111977 at least fifteen country houses were put up for sale or abandoned while 1976
became ‘the year in which the fine art collections of the big houses have come up for
auction’. 53 In response to the crisis, An Taisce the National Trust for Ireland published
Heritage at risk (edited by Edward McParland and Nicholas Robinson) in 1977 and
emphasised that ‘The architectural heritage as represented by surviving country houses
within the state is of European, not merely national, importance.’ The report hailed big
houses as: ‘the works of Irish and other architects of major artistic significance’. 54
Successive governments responded to some of the recommendations of Heritage at risk
in the form of tax concessions announced in the 1978 budget and later section 19 of the
Finance Act 1982 (later section 482 of the 1997 Taxes Consolidation Act) which allowed
owners to offset the cost of repairs for historic houses against tax liabilities and afforded
relief from capital taxes on the condition that the public was given reasonable access. 55
By 2005, 200 properties (not all country houses) were availing of section 482. 56A
succession of other reports and influential publications followed, all of which highlighted
the need to secure the future for country houses, especially those in the ownership of the
original families with important surviving collections.
In 1987 the Heritage Advisory Committee was set up by the Taoiseach, Dr Garret
FitzGerald (Fine Gael): ‘to advise government on the conservation of Ireland’s
architectural heritage and the disbursement of funds from the national lottery towards the
maintenance and repair of privately held historic buildings’. 57 His successor, Charles J.
Haughey (Fianna Fail) established the National Heritage Council with a wider brief to
cover archaeology, heritage gardens, landscape and wildlife as well as historic properties.
Government attention to the built heritage had increased significantly over the previous
fifteen years but it was still uneven: lobbyists considered that successive governments
during this period were ‘attentive if not always encouraging.’ 58 This was arguably
understandable in a time of stringency of public spending. The 1980s will be remembered
for lots of other reasons other than the unevenness of government response to the
protection of the built heritage.
In 1988, taking a lead from The destruction of the country house 1875-1975 exhibition in
London over ten years before, a similar exhibition was organised in Dublin accompanied
by the publication the same year of Vanishing country houses of Ireland (edited by the
Knight of Glin, Nicholas Robinson and David Griffin.) It is notable that in Ireland the
term ‘vanishing’ was used instead of ‘destruction’ possibly because it was more
politically neutral. 59 There was a suggestion here that Ireland was now progressing along
53
Gabrielle Williams to editor in Irish Times, 8 Jan. 1977; quoted in McParland, Robinson, Heritage at
Risk, p. 16.
54
McParland, Robinson, Heritage at Risk, p. 9.
55
The influence of developments in England cannot be disregarded in this respect; see John Cornforth’s
hugely influential report, Country Houses of Britain: Can They Survive? (1974) and idem., The Country
Houses of England 1948-1998 (London, 1998), p. 6.
56
Irish Independent, 22 Mar. 2006.
57
Knight of Glin et al., Vanishing country houses, p. 7.
58
Ibid., p. vi.
59
My thanks to Christopher Ridgway for sharing his thoughts with me on this point.
12the same lines as England where: ‘a broader, younger and less metropolitan constituency
was being mobilised behind the cause of the country house’. 60
Each of these reports and publications had one thing in common; they all referred to the
‘losses to the national heritage’ that the continued destruction of country houses would
represent. The Irish Historic Properties had as its objective the protection of ‘what little
remains of a once great national heritage of architecture, gardens and collections’ and
urged in 1985 that ‘we, as a nation’ should ‘act now’. 61 The official guide of the Historic
Irish Tourist Houses and Gardens Association claimed to be ‘serving a national purpose
by helping to provide living history’. 62 It was just as careful as other organisations and
report writers not to allude to a colonial past. Instead HITHA argued that ‘Irish houses …
provide unique insights into Irish history’. Houses such as Clonalis were promoted as ‘the
home of the descendants of the last high kings of Ireland, the O’Conor Don, and his Irish
manuscripts and books dating from the 13th century’ and Lissadell as the home of Irish
revolutionaries Countess Markievicz and Eva Gore Booth. 63 In 1988, the knight of Glin
diluted the colonial influence when he wrote in Vanishing Country Houses of Ireland:
‘Even if the upper classes were considered ‘foreign’, the craftsmen and builders were
Irishmen. The naïve assumption that these houses are to be seen as merely memorials to
outdated colonialism should be resisted because they are in fact treasure houses of Irish
skills.’ 64 In 1992, a National Heritage Council report argued that many of the master
craftsmen and architects who worked on the great houses of Ireland were foreign but
‘these skills were soon passed on to Irish craftsmen who added an Irish dimension to
further enrich our heritage’. 65
Thus by the late 1980s the re-imagining of the Irish country house was well under way
and country house owners were beginning to feel optimistic that ‘the political attitude
towards the owners of heritage property has changed and at least the will is there to
consider their problem’. 66 By the spring of 1991, one of the most prominent of these,
Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, was buoyed by the fact that the then Taoiseach,
Charles J. Haughey, was: ‘concerned about the future of heritage properties and has
suggested to the [National Heritage] Council that a dialogue should start to discuss the
problem of historic properties and taxes and is particularly interested in properties that
have remained in the same family and with some of their contents’. 67 The Knight’s home,
Glin Castle in Limerick, was one of the very few Irish country houses in the ownership of
the original family at a time when it was being expostulated in Britain that ‘from a
national policy point of view, the most cost effective way of preserving intact a country’s
heritage of historic houses, together with their contents and surrounding demesnes, is to
60
Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home, p. 406.
61
K.B. Nowlan and Lewis Clohessy (eds), Report of the Irish Historic Properties Committee: Safeguarding
Heritage Houses (1985), pp. 3, 5.
62
Historic Irish Tourist Houses and Gardens Association (HITHA), Castles, Houses and Gardens of
Ireland open to the Public (n.d.), p. 1.
63
Ibid., pp 2, 78.
64
Knight of Glin et al., Vanishing Country Houses, p. 28.
65
National Heritage Council, Report of Sub Committee (Heritage Properties) on Legislative Provisions
Designed to Assist the Maintenance and Succession to Heritage Properties (Dublin, 1992), p. 3.
66
Susan Kellet to Lord Henry Mount Charles, 7 Nov. 1991 (in private possession).
67
Desmond FitzGerald to Susan Kellet, 13 Apr. 1991 (in private possession).
13encourage their associated families to remain in custody and possession of their
inheritance’. 68
A quarter of a century after joining Europe and signing up to various charters and
manifestoes it was important for politicians to represent the Irish government as a
champion not just of Irish heritage but European heritage as well. In 2003, exactly eighty
years after the ending of the Civil War in Ireland, the culmination of lobbying manifested
itself in the Irish government’s decision to form an Irish Heritage Trust ‘a charity [that]
has been created to care for historic properties, houses and gardens throughout Ireland.’
This decision arose from the recommendations of a report jointly commissioned by the
government and the Irish Georgian Society and published in 2003.69 It happened because
of the confluence of a number of factors that included the re-imagining of the Irish
country house; increased urbanisation and the simultaneous decline of the land question;
sustained lobbying by various interested bodies; an increased public awareness and
appreciation of the built heritage fostered by educational developments, in particular the
establishment of the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates at the
National University of Ireland Maynooth in 2004, the only private-public (with the
support of the Office of Public Works) venture in Ireland and the United Kingdom at that
time. Beyond that, the dramatic expansion in publications that have often breached
academic and popular divides; the efforts of numerous enlightened civil servants in the
Office of Public Works and the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local
Government who strove to influence government policy and frame appropriate legislation
that has been crucial in the protection of the surviving country houses. 70 Finally the
added impact of the Celtic Tiger economy has made it fashionable amongst the new
wealth elite in Ireland to purchase and restore a country house to original grandeur so that
houses such as Abbey Leix in Laois, Stackallen in Meath, Castle Hyde in Cork and
Castletown Cox in County Kilkenny were rescued. Others benefited from their adaptation
as guest houses or from more commercial ventures, most notably the sensitively restored
Carton House in Kildare. 71 One of the most interesting and important private acquisitions
was Strokestown Park House in Roscommon. In 1979, a local businessman, Jim Callery,
bought it with the intention of demolishing it and expanding his garage business but his
discovery of the house’s archive in situ changed his mind. 72 Today, its role is very
different, incorporating as it does the National Famine Museum, and presenting a very
different big house history, in this case the story of the Great Famine of 1845-51.
While in the past houses that had passed into state ownership such as Muckross had been
left dormant for decades or their historic fabric compromised through their
68
Nicholas Prins to Lord Killanin, chairman of National Heritage Council, 9 Jan. 1991 (in private
possession).
69
Dooley, A Future for Irish Historic Houses? (Dublin, 2003).
70
Most importantly the Architectural Heritage (National Inventory) and Historic Monuments Act, 1999,
and the Planning and Development Act 2000.
71
On Carton, see Christopher Ridgway, Country Life, 18 Feb. 2009; Ian Lumley, “Parklands and gardens”
in An Taisce (Summer, 2007), p. 13; James Howley, “Carton: from ducal mansion to country house hotel”
in Irish Arts Review (Spring, 2007); for houses that have been adapted see www.hidden-ireland.com; see
also Bord Failte, Tourism Development Plan, 1976-80.
72
Jim Callery speaking at Second Annual Historic Houses of Ireland Conference, NUI Maynooth, 11 Sept.
2004.
14redevelopment as training colleges, schools, prisons and so on, there was a post-1990s
move towards restoring country houses for the benefit and enjoyment of the state and the
public. The two most notable examples in the 1990s and the early part of the twentieth
century were/are Farmleigh and Castletown, both of which have been restored at
enormous (and sometimes controversial) expense by the Office of Public Works. But
while in 2005 the government provided €10.6 million in grant schemes and other state
supports to private individuals, and funding of €32 million was provided to the OPW for
heritage sites and properties under its protection, the state was simply not in a position to
buy other important houses that came onto the market. Rather significantly, the 2003 sale
of Lissadell in County Sligo into private ownership happened amidst widespread calls
from the public for the government to buy it.
On 3rd July 2006 at Russborough House, Co. Wicklow, the Minister for the
Environment, Heritage and Local Government, officially launched the Irish Heritage
Trust as a limited company with charitable status to be governed by an independent board
and with state support for the initial years. On twentieth December 2007, the Trust started
caring for its first property, Fota House in County Cork. Serious questions may remain
about Fianna Fáil’s ambiguous preservation policies that has seen the government praised
on the one hand for its increased generosity (in legislative and financial terms) and on the
other derided for its failure to restrict damaging development, 73 and in the present
economic climate the Trust may face many challenges but it is to be presumed that one of
these will not be the denial of Irish country houses as part of the national patrimony, even
given the fact that the nation is something of a chameleon.
Russia 74
At first glance there are some astonishing parallels between the histories of the Anglo-
Irish and Russian nobilities and the fate of ‘big house’ culture in the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Arguably, in both cases the early nineteenth century had seen the
flowering of estate culture in the Russian case and its continuation in the Irish case,
largely at the expense of the political, social and economic degradation of the lower
classes/peasantries. In Russia and Ireland, the nobility and the peasantry were sharply
distinguished in social terms, even if they lived closely knitted together on the estates.
The political and economic status of the Russian muzhiks as serfs was even lower than
that of the Irish tenants. Except for the periphery of the Russian empire, gentry and
peasantry were, however, not divided by religion. In many parts of the Imperial
borderlands the non-Russian nobility had been assimilated to Orthodoxy and Russian
culture, while the peasantry retained many aspects of the indigenous cultures. 75 Still, the
cultural gap between the westernised nobility on the one hand, and the traditional world
of the peasantry on the other, was at least comparable to the gaps which existed between
73
Frank McDonald, “Taoiseach’s Espousal of the Big House Is at Odds with Government Record” in Irish
Times, 5 Dec. 2005.
74
Some of the thoughts in this section have been drawn from Christian Noack, “Imperiale Geschichte und
nationales Erbe. Zur Aneignung von Adelssitzen und Adelskultur in Russland und Irland,” in: G.
Hausmann, A. Rustemeyer (eds) Wege zum Imperienvergleich. Ansätze und Beispiele aus osteuropäischer
Perspektive. Festschrift für Professor Andreas Kappeler zum 65. Geburtstag (Berlin, 2009) pp. 339-362.
75
This is not true, however, for the Baltic provinces and the former Polish lands.
15the protestant gentry and their catholic tenants in Ireland. Similar to the majority of
nationalist Irish tenants, the serfs in the Russian Empire regarded the gentry as foreign
intruders that had seized land once owned by their ancestors. They hoped that a good and
just Tsar would restore them in their rights some day. 76
The country mansion (or the usad’ba 77 in Russian) varied significantly in size depending
on the financial position of individual owners. As in Ireland it constituted the economic
and social centre of noble life. Beginning with old princely families or favourites of the
Tsars and Tsarinas, the magnates had begun to copy the palaces of the Imperial family in
the second half of the eighteenth century. They erected enormous estate houses in
classical or neo-baroque styles with extensive wings; ornate and impressive interiors
particularly stairways; and their parks, designed with their own hunting grounds, had
splendid driveways, and usually their own private churches. As the usad’ba was the focal
point of a demesne, barns, stables and other outbuildings for servants and agricultural
needs were close by. As a form of imitation, many owners of smaller estates copied the
sumptuous lifestyle of the patriarchal magnates. While their country houses were much
smaller - usually wooden structures of one or two storeys – these owners invariably
imitated the magnate’s ensembles on a more modest scale. House interiors and
surrounding parklands were designed to host visiting neighbouring nobles and to impress
them with displays of grandeur and taste; during the first half of the nineteenth century,
the usad’by became the symbol of noble extravagance. Probably even more than in
Ireland, servants of peasant origin were omnipresent, even in the most unassuming
households. 78 Whether or not the usad’by has been the self-proclaimed island of western
culture in the sea of peasant ignorance, has recently become the object of an intense
debate among historians. Critics point at the contemporary origins of the cliché and
suggest a mutual saturation of western ‘high’ and Russian ‘low’ culture. 79
Decline
The Crimean War and the ensuing reforms, including the liberation of the serfs in the
1860s, represented an important watershed in the history of Russian estates. In the wake
of the reforms, the nobility transferred almost half of the land it had owned to the
peasantry, receiving generous financial compensation from the state. The new peasant
owners repaid annuities to the state in much the same way that Irish tenant farmers did
under the various land purchase acts. Much of the capital received by the nobility went,
76
Carsten Goehrke, Russischer Alltag, Vol. 2 Auf dem Weg in die Moderne (Zurich, 2003) pp. 255-257. On
the serfs’ obligations cf. David Moon, The Russian Peasantry 1600-1930. The World the Peasants Made
(Harlow, 1999), pp. 66-117.
77
On the history of the term see Randolph, “Old mansion”, p. 732; Irina M. Pushkareva, “The Rural Noble
Country House in Postreform Russia,” Russian Studies in History, 42,1 (2003), pp. 52-86, here p. 53.
78
Daniel Field, The End of Serfdom. Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1955-1961, (Cambridge Mass.,
1976), pp. 8-35; Goehrke, Russischer Alltag, pp. 41-4, 116-7, 120-1, 130; Roosevelt, Country Estate,
passim.
79
Michael Hughes, “The Russian Nobility and the Russian Countryside: Ambivalence and Orientations,”
Journal of European Studies 36,2 (2006), pp. 115-37; For thorough critique of the psychological
interpretation, suggested among others by Marc Raeff, and of Jurii Lotman’s approach to estate culture see
Michelle Lamarche Marrese, “‘The Poetics of Everyday Behaviour’ Revisited: Lotman, Gender and the
Evolution of Russian Noble Identity,” Kritika 11,4 (2010), pp. 701-739.
16as in Ireland, to repay extensive mortgages taken out by the nobility over previous
generations. A significant minority of the gentry quickly adapted to the new economic
lifestyle and began to progress the agricultural economy, specialising, for example, in the
production of tillage crops for export. However, the traditional gentry mentality of
wanting to exploit unpaid labour remained and some found it extremely to adapt to
changing circumstances. These landowners either sold or leased their land to the
peasantry; many of them migrated to the towns and cities and found occupation in the
civil service or the army. 80
Whichever option was chosen by the gentry, the further development of the usad’ba as
the focal point of noble civilisation and culture was compromised: while the first group
involved itself in sober and business-like activities, abandoning extravagance excesses
and waste, the second group proved increasingly incapable of sustaining the old lifestyle.
(Chekhov’s Cherry orchard and many other novels and plays from late nineteenth
century provide ample evidence of this.) As in Ireland, late nineteenth-century Russia
saw the abandonment of a number of manor houses and parks which subsequently fell
into dereliction and decay. 81
Estate culture continued to display vitality only in the houses of the magnate families, or -
and here we touch upon an important difference between Ireland and Russia - in the
circles dominated by industrialists and intellectuals who bought abandoned estates during
the last third of the nineteenth century. These upwardly mobile groups in Russian society
bore little resemblance to the Victorian industrial entrepreneurs in England who came
from middle class backgrounds and who purchased country houses as their fortunes
increased; instead the successful Russian manufacturers largely came from a peasant
background, and it was not until the second generation, raised in the capital cities and
provided with excellent education, that the Morozovs or Tretiakovs would begin to
acquire country estates. 82
Indeed, education is an important factor in the transformation of Russian estate culture
which occurred during the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the
twentieth centuries. During the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century, the
nobility was the only social group with access to at least rudimentary education (which,
by the way, was compulsory for state service.) The expansion of the educational system,
the bureaucratisation of the empire and, above all, the modernisation processes in the
wake of the great reforms of the 1860s and 1870s created a new educated elite, the
80
Seymour Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 1985), pp. 7-14; Manfred
Hildermeier, “Der Russische Adel von 1700 bis 1917”, in H.-U. Wehler (ed.) Europäischer Adel 1700-
1950 (Göttingen, 1990) p. 191-3. Classical Soviet Studies on the demesne economy comprise A.M.
Anfimov, Krupnoe pomeshchech’e khoziaistvo Evropeiskoi Rossii (Moscow, 1969) and M.N. Druzhinin,
Russkaia derevnia na perelome (Moscow, 1978)
81
Roosevelt, Life on the Country Estate, p. 320. Pushkareva writes that the number of country estates
owned by the nobility in European Russia dropped from 59,000 in 1877 to 39,000 in 1915. The steepest
decline occurred in the years after the revolution of 1905. Pushkareva, “The Rural Noble Country House”,
p. 81 note 1. On the burning of estates see also Laura Victoir, “Creating and Preserving a Myth: Changing
Attitudes About Country Estates in Late Imperial Russia,” Revolutionary Russia 25,1 (2012), pp. 61-85,
here p. 65.
82
Pushkareva, “The Rural Noble Country House”, pp. 56, 61; Victoir, “Creating and Preserving a Myth,”
p. 69.
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