Enhanced control through improved record-keeping
Town governor administration operated under closer central chancellery control than had vicegerent administration in the previous century because the town governors' offices were held to higher expectations of written reporting and compliance with written instructions. The town governors were guided in their general or long-term responsibilities by written working orders (nakazy), and in more particular and non-routine matters by decree rescripts from the chancelleries; they were expected to submit frequent reports, even if all they had to relate was their progress in implementing relatively routine directives; and they had to maintain an increasingly wide range of rolls, inventories, land allotment and surveying books, court hearing inquest transcripts and account books for various indirect and direct revenues. Inventories of the archives of governors' offices generally show a significant increase in the rate of record production, especially from mid-century. This reflected the increasing demands upon the governors' offices by the central chancelleries, but also the demands upon them from the community in terms of litigation and petitioning of needs and grievances. [38]
Because the primary purpose of the governor's office was to gather and systematise information to facilitate executive decision-making in the central chancelleries and duma, the clerical staffing of the governor's offices was a crucial concern. It was the governor's clerks (pod'iachie) who produced, routed and stored all this information and kept order in the town archive and treasury. The clerks also performed important tasks in the field - supervising corvee, conducting obysk polling at inquests, conveying cash to and from Moscow, or surveying property boundaries. In some districts the governor's clerical staff was too small, too inexperienced or too poorly remunerated to maintain the flow of information required by the chancelleries. The smaller governors' offices might have only one or two clerks in permanent service and so be forced to turn over some tasks to public notaries or even press passing travellers into temporary clerical service. In the 1640s the clericate of the provincial governors' offices officially numbered no more than 775, slightly fewer than the number of clerks staffing the central chancelleries.[39] However, the total clerical manpower at work in provincial administration may have been significantly larger because this total does not include the clerks serving in the customs, liquor excise, guba and zemskii offices. Furthermore, the small clerical staffs of the smaller governorships could be compensated for by making these governorships satellites of the larger offices found in the bigger towns of the region or the capitals of regional military administrations (razriady). The larger governors' offices came to have nearly as many clerks as some Moscow chancelleries and to imitate chancellery internal organisation by distributing them among bureaux (stoly, 'desks') for specialised functions under the general direction of an experienced senior executive clerk. In the 1640s the Pskov governor's office had twenty-one clerks and by 1699 it would have fifty-four clerks, some of whom had thirty or forty years' experience.[40]
The demand for clerical manpower in the provinces after the end of the Troubles had made it necessary for Moscow to give its town governors a free hand in appointing clerks and to accept as eligible men of all kinds of backgrounds: church clerks, the sons of priests, servicemen, merchants' sons, the sons of taxpaying townsmen and state peasants and declasse itinerants. After about 1640 this was no longer affordable, for taxpayers or servicemen enrolled as clerks thereby left the tax and military service rolls. The central chancelleries therefore began tightening their control over the appointment of clerks (eventually all appointments would be controlled by the Military Chancellery). The chancelleries moved towards standardising clerical pay rates, and they gradually reduced the range of social estates and ranks eligible for clerical appointment. Cossacks and musketeers were forbidden to take service as clerks; by the i660s-i670s it was the rule that deti boiarskie could be appointed as clerks only if they had retired from military service, lacked the pomest'e lands to render military service or had not yet received formal initiation into military service. By the end of the century not even this was permitted: now no candidate could be appointed whose father had been registered in military service or on the tax rolls; only those whose fathers had been clerks were allowed to continue clerking in the governors' offices.
Thus the clericate became a closed hereditary corporation. Although this probably had the effect of slowing the growth rate of the provincial clericate, it had the advantage ofimproving clerical training and esprit de corps and making clerical service a life profession. Local clerical 'dynasties' emerged, with clerks accumulating decades of experience in the local governor's office and passing their training on to their sons, some of whom eventually worked their way up into the clericate of the central chancelleries. There was increased likelihood that clerical dynasties would tend to conduct themselves as local elites and exploit their neighbours, but clerical dynasties at least were motivated to attend closely to apprentice training out of self-interest.[41]
Local government in reconstruction and reform
The spread and systematisation of town governor administration was crucial to Patriarch Filaret's reconstruction programme (1619-33): the town governors helped reassemble and update chancellery cadastral knowledge, review the monasteries' fiscal immunities, return fugitive townsmen to the tax rolls, introduce new extraordinary taxes for military exigencies, suppress banditry and rebuild the pomest'e-based cavalry army by expediting response to petitions for entitlement award and land allotment.
In the period 1633-48 policy was made by the succession of cliques led by I. B. Cherkasskii, F. I. Sheremetev and B. I. Morozov. They gave priority to accelerating colonisation of the southern frontier and eliminating the tax-exempt social categories and enclaves in the towns. Town governor administration played an essential role in both projects.
The years 1648-54 saw town governor authority used to implement several important reforms strengthening the southern frontier defence system: the completion of most of the Belgorod Line; levies into the newly revived foreign formation infantry and cavalry regiments; the subjection of southern servicemen to the grain taxes (quarter grain, siege grain etc.) previously paid only by peasants and townsmen; and the laying of foundations for the vast Belgorod regional military administration (Belgorodskii razriad), which subordinated several town governors' offices in the south to the senior commander's office at Belgorod, not only for mobilisations and joint military operations but also for review of judicial, fiscal and land allotment matters. An equally significant reform in this period affected civil and criminal justice in governors' courts across the realm: the Ulozhenie law code (1649) greatly expanded and standardised instructions for investigations and hearings in the local courts and streamlined and further centralised judicial administration by giving the duma functions of an appellate court and by further concentrating the supervision of criminal justice matters in the Robbery Chancellery. The Ulozhenie also ended the time limit for the recovery of fugitive peasants, thereby completing the process of peasant enserfment, and provided instructions for the governors' offices to enforce enserfment by conducting mass dragnets of fugitive peasants and townsmen as well as holding hearings for fugitive remands. The fact that the zemskii sobor was no longer convened after 1653 may testify to the centre's confidence in town governor administration by this point: apparently the flow of information from governors' reports and accounts and community petitions was now considered regular and reliable enough to support decision- making in the duma and chancelleries without any need to supplement it by periodically assembling representatives of the estates to solicit their views.
38
On record-keeping in the governors' offices, see: N. N. Ogloblin, 'Provintsial'nye arkhivy v XVII veke',
40
V A. Arakcheev,
41
As there were no universities or academies to train clerks, all clerical training had to be obtained through apprenticeship within the chancellery or governor's office.