During the Thirteen Years War expenditure on army pay (particularly upon the more expensive foreign formation regiments, which accounted for some 75-80 per cent) increased enormously, exceeding a million roubles annually by 1663, about four times what army service allowances had totalled in 1632.[42]The sharp rise in tax rates and infantry levy quotas in the war years was all the harder to bear because grain taxes and infantry conscription no longer fell only upon men of draft (tiaglye liudi) traditionally defined, and because ruinous inflation had resulted from the government's decision to debase coinage. The governors' offices came under great pressure to keep cash, grain and manpower resources flowing while at the same time policing against desertion, taxpayer flight and riot. To tighten central control over their accounting and policing two new chancelleries with broad investigatory powers were created: a Privy Chancellery (founded in 1654) and an Auditing Chancellery (founded in 1656). A second great regional military administration was also established at Sevsk to further co-ordinate resource mobilisation and military operations on the southern frontier.
The Andrusovo Armistice (1667) did not lead to any significant relief from high grain taxation and infantry conscription rates. It remained necessary to garrison eastern Ukraine, to keep Moscow's puppet hetmans Mnogogreshnyi and Samoilovich in power and hold Hetman Doroshenko at bay; it was also necessary to defend against the Crimean Tatars by reinforcing the Belgorod Line and sending troops down the Donto assist (and control) the Don cossacks; and in 1674 a Muscovite army had to take the field in western Ukraine to defeat Doroshenko, who was now actively supported by Ottoman forces. The defeat ofDoroshenko led immediately to the first Russo-Turkish war (1676-81), which depopulated much of eastern Ukraine and deterred the Ottomans from invading western Ukraine but also revealed the need to reform Muscovite military and fiscal practices. More regional military administrations were therefore formed (the Riazan', Tambov, Kazan', Smolensk and Vladimir razriady). A new Iziuma Line was built to extend the southern frontier defence a further 160 kilometres southward and shield military colonisation in Sloboda Ukraine. In 1678-80 six new foreign formation cavalry and ten new foreign formation infantry regiments were created, while the number of southern servicemen in the traditional formation cavalry was reduced by limiting eligibility to prosperous men holding at least twenty-four peasant households and therefore presumably able to maintain themselves in service from their pomest'ia alone, without cash allowances. To meet the higher costs for new foreign formation troop pay, a major reform of state finances was undertaken. It started with a new general cadastral survey (1677-9), the first since 1646; led to the decision (1679) to shift to the assessment of direct taxes by household, thereby abandoning the old method of assessing by sokha (i.e. by area and productive capacity of cultivated land); saw the amalgamation of a number of minor direct taxes into a single 'musketeers' money' tax for the army; and culminated in the founding of the Grand Treasury and the production of the first rudimentary state budget (1680). The simplification of direct taxation enhanced central chancellery control and permitted a further division of labour over fiscal matters at the local level, with the town governors' offices made responsible largely for recording and actual collection of taxes left to elected community representatives.
Efforts at bureaucratic rationalisation
Over the course of the seventeenth century voevoda administration came to display more of the characteristics of rational bureaucratic organisation. It was already significantly differentiated: official duties were distinguished from the pursuit of personal interests, it being an already long-established principle that the governor's office (the s"ezzhaia izba, assembly house) was separate from his residence (voevodskii dvor) and that he was forbidden to hold documents or the town seal at the latter; and there was some formal division of labour, at least within the larger offices - horizontally, in the form of discrete clerkships or even bureaux with specialised functions, and vertically, with supervising signatory clerks, document clerks and secretaries reporting in turn to the governor. By mid-century it had even become the tendency to rename the governor's office a prikaznaia izba in recognition that its organisation was increasingly resembling that of a small chancellery. Office work was subject to various integrating mechanisms promoting standardised practice: there was a comprehensive and fairly consistent repertory of routines for handling incoming business, recording expenditures and services performed and reporting up important information and unresolved business; and although there was as yet no uniform written General Regulation covering all aspects of office work, that sphere of activity where written regulations were most necessary - the administration of justice - had finally received a comprehensive code of procedures with the promulgation of the Ulozhenie. Surety bonding, oaths ofconduct, annual and end-of-term audits and investigations went some way towards tightening constraints over the conduct of governors and their staffs. To enhance co-ordination and compensate for the limited effectiveness of central control mechanisms, most executive decision-making was removed from the governors' offices and located above them in the chancelleries, with ultimate executive policy-making removed to an even higher level, above the central chancellery bureaucracy, in the duma counselling circle.
But in one important respect voevoda administration resisted full bureaucratic rationalisation. Although clerical staffs were expanding and office work undergoing further regulation in the governors' offices, neither process was sufficiently advanced to fully compensate for the fact that the organising link between the central and provincial clericates - the gorodovye voevody - were not themselves career administrative specialists. Those appointed as town governors were court notables serving only avocationally, without any special training for the task, as an occasional respite from their field army and court duties. There was no Muscovite noblesse de robe, trained in the law and seeking promotion to nobility through the path of judicial and administrative service, from which to draw in filling town governorships.
This by itself presented an obstacle to further centralisation of command- and-control, as avocational administration by notables is generally thought to have been slower, less precise, and less unified than fully bureaucratised administration, being 'less bound to schemata and more formless ... and also because it is less dependent upon superiors'.[43] Notables were more inclined to ignore bureaucratic rules and abuse their authority because they were not permanently subordinated to bureaucratic superiors, had not internalised a bureaucratic ethos of impersonalised objectivised service to the organisation and its larger mission, and meanwhile claimed social status above that of professional bureaucrats. And in Muscovy the problem was further exacerbated by the fact that town governor duty carried less honour and less remuneration than other forms of state service and so was less likely to be sought by notables pursuing promotion and influence at court.
42
J. L. H. Keep,
43
Max Weber,