Bloodlines of Power: Family Background and Elite Career Advancement in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Bureaucracy and Army

This dataset contains individual-level career histories of senior civil servants and generals in the Russian Empire during the nineteenth century (1800–1881). It is based on the complete published Seniority Lists of civil and military elites and linked genealogical sources. The sample is restricted to individuals with confirmed paternal background, including only cases where a father’s membership in the civil or military elite is positively verified or where it is reliably established that the father did not belong to the elite. The data record timing of promotions within the Table of Ranks, elite attainment, institutional affiliation, noble titles, and family background, and are designed to support replication and further research on intergenerational mobility and elite reproduction.