The end-of-term audit was also recognised as an opportunity for the inhabitants to file complaint against the outgoing governor and askhis replacement to begin an investigation. In the Siberian towns the opportunity to file complaint was an especially important supplement to other central control measures and was accompanied by a special rituaclass="underline" each new governor was under instruction to invite community representatives to a bienvenue feast, ply them with food and drink - expressly identified as largesse provided by the tsar himself, not by his governor - and then read them the 'sovereign's declaration of vouchsafe' (gosudarevo zhalovannoe slovo), an address promising them the new governor would protect them against extortion and oppression and investigate whatever complaints they chose to bring against the outgoing governor.
The chancelleries sometimes sent down from Moscow special inquisitors (syshchiki) to investigate specific complaints of corruption or abuse of authority made in collective petitions from the community or in denunciations by associate governors, clerks or other subordinate officials. The inquisitors made audits, took witness testimony, polled the community by poval'nyi obysk, reported up, and then implemented whatever penalty Moscow decreed. A good number of inquest records have been preserved, especially from Siberia, and some are quite long and painstaking and produced verdicts giving victims of governor corruption meaningful relief. But when victims failed to get redress they charged the inquisitor with failing to take particular crucial testimonies or misrecording or forging testimonies. In other instances inquests dragged on for years without result.
The struggles against governor malfeasance therefore had to employ preventive measures as well. The tendency over the course of the century was towards standardising the length of town governor terms - to two years in most towns under the authority of the Military Chancellery, with extensions of one or two years for merit or upon the petition of local inhabitants unwilling to risk possibly greater exploitation under a new governor. Besides providing more appointment opportunities to nobles seeking respite from army and court duty, appointing for shorter terms gave governors less time to build local clientage machines and drive their districts to revolt with their extortion and oppression. Governor terms in the larger and more strategic towns, in territorial razriad capitals and in distant Siberian towns were usually longer, to provide greater continuity in frontier defence and diplomatic operations and to reduce opportunities for governors homebound from Siberian posts to smuggle contraband furs in their baggage.
To check abuse of power it was also frequent practice to appoint to the larger towns and razriad capitals a senior governor and one to three associate town governors (tovarishchi) or secretaries on instruction to operate collegially, 'acting together as one, without dissension'.[46] Actual procedures for collegial decision-making were not spelled out (and so may not always have been observed in practice), but it was usually stipulated that the senior governor could put his seal on official acts only in the presence of his associates, that court cases had to be heard by senior governors and their associates together and resolved by unanimous verdict and that a senior governor or one or more of his associates had the right to challenge other kinds of decisions reached unilaterally without consultation.
An especially important means of minimising opportunities for governor malfeasance was sharpening the division of labour between central and local government. Maximum separation of policy-making from policy implementation was sought, with the former centralised in the chancelleries and duma at Moscow and the latter left to the town governors. Governors were forbidden to set entitlement rates on their own initiative, without express authorisation from Moscow. Even many routine expenditures could not be made without prior chancellery authorisation. The 1670s saw efforts to remove the governors' offices further from the business of collecting taxes and entrusting collection to elected elders and deputies. In most capital criminal cases sentence of death could be made only by the Robbery Chancellery, and the governors of middling and smaller towns were usually restricted from hearing civil cases over a certain rouble value. Some of these restrictions were routinised in governors' working orders, while others were imposed in particular circumstances, by special decree. The centre reserved for itself practically any decision which, if left entirely up to the governor's discretion, might become a tiagost', that is, a ruinous burden on the community. The exceptions were matters requiring immediate local response, such as military emergencies. Working orders tried to specify such circumstances in advance and instruct governors that in responding to these exigencies they could consider themselves free to act 'according to the matter at hand, and as God so enlightens them', provided they make immediate report to Moscow afterwards.
The practice of concentrating executive decision-making in the central government did not much reduce the range of tasks the governor was responsible for implementing - he still investigated and heard court cases and carried out sentences on them, even if the sentence was pronounced at Moscow - so it could be said the governor was still expected to be omni-competent even if forbidden opportunities tempting him to assert omnipotence. Centralising decision-making at Moscow of course had the disadvantage of encouraging prevarication among the town governors, who instead of acting in timely fashion would write repeatedly to Moscow asking for further clarification as to what they were supposed to do. But the sacrifice of speed to central control was exactly the kind of cost an autocracy was willing to pay, preferable to accepting increased abuse of authority, the higher price that would have attached to entrusting greater discretion to the governors.
Given that executive decision-making was increasingly concentrated at Moscow, ever greater emphasis had to be placed on the reportorial function of the s"ezzhaia izba clericate. The governors and their clerks had to make more frequent and detailed reports to Moscow and submit extracts from or copies of their account books. More attention was given to documenting other matters in which the chancelleries had shown less interest in the first half of the century: keeping accurate trial records and obysk polling records, updating prisoner lists, inventorying confiscated property, compiling logs of interrogations of travellers and new settlers, issuing travel passes (now detailed enough to serve almost as passports) and submitting more informative protocols on the elections of customs deputies and jail guards. Ideally, the increased flow of information from such record-keeping would support the centralisation of decision-making at Moscow, making it more realistic and proactive; any contradictions or omissions discovered in audits and record checks would expose instances of governor malfeasance; and by making information-gathering and reporting the primary function of the s"ezzhaia izba some further devolution of district-level administrative authority from the governors to their clerks could be expected, thereby partly compensating for the governors' comparative inexperience.
46