Of course we know that the Russian nobility owned a huge amount of land, especially before the Emancipation of the Serfs, but also afterwards. But I was wondering: Exaxtly what was the relationship between noble status / titles and land? Were the nobles' estates just like any other property or were they bound up in majorats, entails, fideicommissi or fiefs governed by specific rules of jurisdiction, inheritance etc., just as they to a varying degree often were in Western Europe?
Was there in Imperial Russia a distinction between a mere titular count and a substantive count with property attached to his title? If so, was that property referred to as a county?
For comparison:
In ancien-régime France, all noble titles were attached to land. If a titled nobleman sold his land, he couldn't use his title anymore. After the Bourbon restoration, titles were purely titular and had no attachment to land, just as the case had been in Britain for centuries. British peers often had and have family estates that are entailed and thus inherited by primogeniture, but the entail is wholly independent of the peerage title. In Scandinavia and Germany you have a kind of mixed system, were some titles were attached to majorats or fideicommissi (termed fiefs, baronies and counties in Denmark-Norway), some entailed properties (German Rittergüter, Danish-Norwegian stamhus) were not attached to any titles and many titles were merely titular.
