The results of this push for greater documentation from the governors' offices were mixed. There was clearly a great increase in the volume of s"ezzhaia izba record production after mid-century, especially in the larger towns; some of it was in response to the chancelleries' increased demands for documentation, but some of it was also in response to expanded grievance and need petitioning from the local population. There are some signs already by the 1660s that the flow of information to Moscow had so expanded as to exceed the processing capabilities of certain chancelleries. This was dealt with by restructuring higher administration, in three ways: by forming new territorial razriady so that financial accounting and supervision of judicial matters could be undertaken at the regional level, by razriad commanders standing between the town governors and the central chancelleries; by further subordinating other military-function chancelleries to the great Military Chancellery, so as to streamline and improve co-ordination of military administration; and by creating a Privy Chancellery and Auditing Chancellery to gather intelligence on commanders and town governors, conduct audits of the governors' offices and other chancelleries and investigate malfeasance and red tape.
On the other hand many s"ezzhaia izba and guba, zemskii, customs and excise offices were not up to the chancelleries' demands for fuller, more reliable and timelier reporting and accounting. They fell months or years behind in submitting annual accounts, failed to record important information like vacant entitlements or property boundaries, or miscounted when tallying servicemen or cash and grain reserves. Governors blamed these failures on clerks who were 'drunkards and brawlers . . . stupid and unable to write'.[47] The clerks in turn could complain of the unreliable information provided by the lower prikaznye liudi and elected officials, who were often outright illiterate (at Kazan' in 1627 the fortifications steward, one of the two musketeer captains, the customs chief, one of the two tavern chiefs, one of the two zemskii elders and eighteen of the nineteen customs and tavern deputies were illiterate).[48] We also find instances of governors accused by their own clerks and other subordinates of seriously neglecting their responsibilities.
A large part of chancellery communications to the provinces therefore comprised warnings and rebukes about delays or errors in submitting annual accounts. The chancelleries obviously could not afford to rely entirely upon official reporting and accounting to catch error, and certainly not to expose abuse of authority and corruption in local administration. B. N. Chicherin and other liberal historians attributed the persistence of error and malfeasance to the underdevelopment of bureaucratic rationality in central administration, to the centre's inability to articulate a General Regulation and enforce it through regular control mechanisms.[49] Actually, the central chancelleries had developed and were continuing to develop a wide range of measures to enhance central control and combat malfeasance. The system's real weakness was at the local level, and derived from cadre inadequacy rather than insufficient attention to central control measures: the centre still did not receive enough reliable and timely information because most districts had too few experienced clerks, and too often inattentive as well as inexperienced governors; and for lack of revenue the centre was unable adequately to remunerate either governors or clerks, thereby giving them greater reason to embezzle and especially to prey upon the community through bribe-taking, extortion and excessive feeding.
The political economy of corruption
The practice of permitting officials in the provinces to take part of their remuneration in the form of feedings in cash and kind collected from the communities they governed had not actually been abolished everywhere in the reform of 1555-6. Only certain cantons and districts, mostly in northern Muscovy, appear to have availed themselves of that reform by purchasing their removal from vicegerent jurisdiction and the right to elect their own zemskii officials in exchange for quit-rent payments, equivalent to the old feeding norms, paid into the central chancelleries. The military exigencies of the Livonian war and Troubles discouraged the further expansion of zemskii self-government: it was more important to free up the middle service class for campaign duty and to militarise local government in the frontier districts by expanding the powers of their fortifications stewards or placing them under annually appointed commandants or town governors. In fact the practice of feeding enjoyed a revival from the 1570s. Vicegerents and feeding obligations were now officially restored in certain towns and districts which had gone on feeding quit-rent just a few years before. Shares of feeding quit-rent revenues from particular regions were officially awarded to certain powerful boyars (the Shuiskiis, Boris Godunov). In most instances, however, the revival of feeding was not officially decreed but privately arranged between officials and the communities they governed, the feeding rates set by custom and negotiation. The centre now exercised less direct control over feedings than before, since feeding arrangements were no longer defined by charter or revenue list as those before 1556 had been. A 1620 decree attempted to criminalise feeding but quickly proved unenforceable, above all because of the treasury's continued need to keep down costs for salary remuneration; so the central government thereafter had to content itself with threatening penalties upon officials convicted of illegal exactions, without any clear identification in the law of what constituted these.[50] Determining what was an acceptable feeding rate and what was an illegal feeding exaction was left up to the community; the central government did not intervene unless it received complaints of extortionate feeding demands so heavy as to leave the community with too little to meet its tax obligations to Moscow.
Because feeding transactions were no longer regulated by charter or revenue list one can only guess as to the spread and scale of feeding of town governors and their staffs in the seventeenth century. Anecdotal evidence from investigation records and the expenditure books kept by zemskii officials in the north suggest the practice was common there and the amounts involved often considerable. If Moscow's toleration of feeding was only tacit, it was not much concealed. It was not unknown for a servitor to petition for appointment as town governor on grounds he needed feeding income ('I beg leave to go out and feed') and to request posting to a particular district on the basis of its feeding yield. Upon completing his term as town governor of Kostroma, one Moscow dvorianin complained his appointment had yielded him far less than the 500-600 roubles' feeding previous governors had received; Moscow agreed to find him another appointment after its investigation confirmed that the 400 roubles of feeding he had received at Kostroma had been with community consent: 'He took what they brought him, and plundered no one.'iS
Many othertowngovernors and prikaznyeliudi didplunderthe communities in their charge, using their power to quash petitions and order jailings and beatings of community representatives in order to extort wildly excessive feedings. This appears to have happened on such a scale as to suggest the town governors treated feeding as a strategy of semi-feudal rent-taking - further evidence that feudal techniques of governance had not been fully supplanted by state bureaucratic techniques.
47
S. V Bakhrushin, 'Ocherki po istorii krasnoiarskogo uezda v XVII v.', in his
48
S. I. Porfir'ev,
p. 4.
49
B. N. Chicherin,
50