But there may have been a second reason for the persistence of feeding: the possibility that communities were unwilling to demand its outright abolition or at least a return to its charter regulation because feeding could be turned to some community advantage under the right circumstances. Feeding deliveries were made in the name of the entire community (as what Marcel Mauss called 'total prestations') and were conducted with some ceremony as gestures of obsequy towards the person of the receiving official. Feeding payments not fixed by charter but 'negotiated' between community representatives and the receiving official, arranged at sufficiently generous rates and delivered on time in a confident and ungrudging spirit, could therefore be represented as community gifts and used to partly disarm the official (countering his demand that he be dealt with solely as an outsider present in impersonal superior official capacity, responsible only to the central government), to take his measure (gauging the limits of his greed and his readiness to bargain), to familiarise him (drawing him into a kind of honorary kinship with the community) and finally to obligate him (first in a general sense, and later, at the right moment, to specific favours reciprocating the community's hospitality). The favour sought might be permission for a delegation of petitioners to travel to Moscow, or the governor's favourable report upon the community's petition of need, but occasionally it could go as far as requesting that fines or corporal punishment be mitigated or the collection of tax arrears be postponed. In the latter instances there was the danger that feeding was suborning officials, undermining chancellery control over them. But because the centre had decided to tolerate feeding remuneration freely offered, the only means it had of counteracting this effect was to engage in its own kind of ritual gifting to the community past the suborned official. Thus the ritual of the sovereign's vouchsafe had the purpose of using gift prestation to re-establish direct personalised reciprocity of trust between sovereign and subjects and to reassert the autocracy's claim that all bounty issued from the sovereign, not from his officials, who merely distributed it on his command.
The same expenditure concerns that left the central government unwilling to suppress feeding complicated its struggle against bribery; and because tolerance of feeding permitted open collective gift prestation to officials, it was harder to ban outright other more private and particular forms of gifting that could be used to camouflage bribery. Black corruption - obvious embracery and extortion - could be prosecuted, but a large sphere of activity taking the forms of grey and white corruption (purchasing influence and services through tips, gratuities, honorances and feeding prestations) escaped regulation.
The government's commitment to struggle against bribe-taking and bribe- giving in its courts had already been proclaimed in the 1497 Sudebnik, although it took longer for the law to specify penalties and extend them to judges of the highest rank. The 1550 Sudebnik had got around to specifying punishments for litigants caught bribing judges or witnesses and for bailiffs, clerks, and secretaries falsifying bonds and court transcripts for bribes; and the 1649 Ulozhenie finally prescribed punishment for witnesses who perjured themselves for bribes (knouting) and for judges who convicted the innocent or exculpated the guilty for bribes (judges of duma rank were to be deprived of rank, while those below duma rank were to be knouted). By that point it could be said that Muscovite law clearly forbade bribes of embracery (posuly). The bribe of embracery aimed at establishing a relationship between giver and recipient which was prejudicial to state interests and to the interests of the community; it purchased influence or judgements which were denied to others and adversely affected others; and it enabled the bribe-taking official to abuse for his own gain the authority delegated to him by the sovereign, thereby defaming the reputation for impartiality of the sovereign's justice. By these tests, nearly any gift offered or accepted in the courts could potentially result in embracery if complaint of it had been made. Hence the law was most explicit in condemning bribery injudicial settings.
The law also made it a crime for officials to extort illegal payments (vziatki or nalogi i nasil'stvo). There were frequent complaints, especially in Siberia, of governors unjustly imprisoning and tormenting innocent men in order to extort ransoms, and the cash value of some ofthese ransoms was considerable - 20 or 30 roubles or more. If subjects were willing to press a charge that they had been victims of such extortion it was possible to convict a governor and get him deprived of rank or knouted and forced to make restitution to the victims and pay a fine to the treasury.
But there were also various common gift transactions which had the effect of bribes, purchasing some form of official influence yet falling short of obvious discriminatory embracery and deriving from no obvious extortion. The law continued to recognise petitioners' rights to offer officials earnest money and gratuities (pochesti, pominki) to expedite processing of their requests or express their thanks for a service performed. Earnest money and gratuities were in fact such widely accepted income for officials that clerks working in particular chancelleries which traditionally handled a heavy load of court cases or petitioners' requests were usually given lower salary entitlements on the assumption they were better positioned to supplement their pay with gifts. Naturally these clerks came to expect particular gifts for particular services rendered, that is, came to set their own schedules of fees, and such fee-charging in turn received legitimation by analogy with the kormlenie feeding tradition; it even came to be known as 'feeding from services' (kormlenie ot del).[51] Only in one context did the Ulozhenie equate the acceptance of gratuities with the crime of bribe-taking: when a commander discharged troops from service in exchange for gratuities.
This meant it was easy enough, even in a judicial setting, to disguise a bribe as an innocent gratuity provided both giver and recipient connived to support the illusion; and even if such a transaction left an injured party, he might find it difficult to demonstrate the bribe had purchased a judgement that would not have otherwise been forthcoming.
Muscovite law was not unique in struggling to maintain some distinction between innocent gift and corrupting bribe; this problem persisted elsewhere in early modern Europe, especially wherever officials depended at least in part upon fees and gratuities for remuneration. On the one hand, Moscow could not afford to ignore the problem of corruption, as it undermined central control and bureaucratic discipline and discredited the sovereign's claim to offer his subjects protection and redress; therefore there was some chance that community complaints against particularly egregious official corruption could bring about special investigations. On the other hand, Moscow recognised the remuneration of its officials depended partly upon feeding prestations, earnest money and gratuities, so it could not afford a policy of aggressive 'zero tolerance' prosecuting any kind of gifting on the grounds that it had the potential to encourage embracery or extortion; therefore Moscow continued to receive collective petitions complaining that its central chancelleries and governors' offices in general remained too easily bribable by 'strong people', and foreign observers (Olearius, Mayerberg, Perry) continued to consider the selling of verdicts common practice in Muscovite courts.