The administrative order of pre-1917 Russia rested on a peculiar system of farming out which resembled neither bureaucratic centralism nor self-government. Its prototype was the Muscovite institution of'feeding' (kormlenie), which gave the civil service virtually free rein to exploit the country, demanding only that it turn over to the state its fixed share. What happened to the surplus squeezed out of the population did not much concern the crown. Catherine 11 explained the system with charming candour to the French Ambassador as it applied to her court establishment:
The King of France never knows precisely the amount of his expenditure; nothing is regulated or fixed beforehand. My plan, on the contrary, is as follows: I fix an annual sum, which is always the same, for the expenses of my table, furniture, theatres and fetes, my stables, and in short, my whole household. I order the various tables in my palace to be served with a particular quantity of wine, and a particular number of dishes. It is the same in all other branches of this administration. So long as I am supplied exactly, in quantity and quality with what I have ordered, and no one complains of neglect on the subject, I am satisfied; I think it of little consequence whether out of the fixed sum I am cheated through cunning or economy...* Essentially, the same system prevailed throughout the Russian government, at any rate until the second half of the nineteenth century.
The notorious venality of Russian officials, especially those working in the provinces, and most of all in provinces far removed from the capital cities, was due not to some peculiar characteristic of the Russian national character or even to the low calibre of the people who chose a bureaucratic career. It was inherent in a government which, lacking funds to pay for the administration, not only had for centuries paid its civil servants no salary, but had insisted that they 'feed themselves from official business' {kormiatsia ot del). In Muscovite Russia, the right of civil servants to line their pockets was to some extent regulated by the strict limits imposed on the length of time anyone could hold a provincial administrative post. To make certain that voevody appointed to lucrative Siberian posts did not exceed what were regarded as reasonable levels of extortion, the government set up on the main road leading from Siberia to Moscow pickets which searched returning voevody and their families and confiscated the surplus. To avoid them, enterprising governors returned by back roads, stealing home like thieves in the night.
282
Peter the Great made a valiant effort to put an end to this whole system under which officials, while nominally serving the crown, were actually petty satraps mainly concerned with their private well-being. In 1714 he forbade the granting of pomestia to officials employed in the bureaux of the central administration and outlawed the whole practice of 'feedings' for the provincial functionaries. Henceforth, all state employees were to receive a salary. The reform did not succeed for want of money. Even under Peter's strict regime only officials of the central bureaux in St Petersburg and Moscow received their salaries, and irregularly at that; provincial bureaucrats continued to live off the land exactly as before. In 1723, a quarter of the funds budgeted for the civil service was sequestered to help reduce the general deficit. The Austrian diplomat, J.G. Korb, reports that in Peter's time Russian functionaries had to bribe their own colleagues to obtain the salaries due to them. Under Peter's immediate successors the situation deteriorated further as the state treasury fell into disarray. In 1727, for example, salary payments for most categories of chancery scribes (podd'iachie) were officially abolished, and the functionaries affected told to fend for themselves. Matters improved somewhat under Catherine n who took a keen interest in provincial administration, authorizing an appreciable increase in moneys allotted for it; in 1767, nearly a quarter of the budget was set aside for that purpose. Steps were also taken to ensure that officials received their salaries on time. But the basic problem remained. During Catherine's reign and after it, civil service salaries were so low that most officials could not depend on them to meet their basic living expenses, and had to look around for additional income. In the reign of Alexander 1, lower clerks received from one to four rubles' salary a month, a sum equivalent to between six pence and two shillings in English currency of the time. Even making allowance for the cheapness of food and services in Russia, this was far from enough to support a family. Furthermore, salaries were paid in paper money (assignats), which not long after their first emission in 1768 began to be discounted and in the reign of Alexander 1 circulated in terms of silver currency for as little as a fifth of their face value. The reforms of Peter and Catherine did not, therefore, alter either the economic situation of the bureaucracy, or the bureaucracy's relationship to society resulting from it. Like agents of the Mongol khans, chinovniki entrusted with provincial administration functioned primarily as collectors of taxes and recruits; they were not 'public servants' at alclass="underline"
In consequence of the absence of an abstract, independent idea of the state, the officials did not serve 'the state', but took care first of themselves and then of the tsar; and in consequence of the identity of the bureaucracy and the state the officials lacked the capacity to distinguish private from governmental property.5
283
In old-regime Russia, therefore, corruption of public servants was not an aberration, a departure from prevailing norm, such as is common in most countries; it was part and parcel of the regular system of administration. Russian officials had been accustomed since the founding of the Kievan state to live off the land. The central government, hard as it tried, lacked the wherewithal to change this custom. And so it went on.
During the centuries over which it had been practised, bribery in Russia developed an elaborate etiquette. A distinction was drawn between 'innocent incomes' (bezgreshnye dokhody), and 'sinful incomes' (greshnye dokhody). The criterion used to separate one from the other was the nature of the victim. 'Sinful' were 'incomes' derived at the expense of the crown, such as embezzlement of government funds or deliberate falsification of some data required by a central office. 'Innocent incomes' were obtained at society's cost; they included proceeds of extortion, sums received by judges to settle a trial in favour of one person rather than another, and, most commonly, tips taken to expedite a citizen's business with the government. (The English word 'tip' is actually an acronym formed of the first letters of the words 'To Insure Promptness', marked on bowls in eighteenth-century English coffee-houses.) It was not unusual for the recipient of a 'sinful' bribe to follow an unwritten tariff and return change. Government inspectors could be quite ruthless prosecuting officials guilty of damaging state interests, certainly under Peter and his followers. They rarely interceded where the injured party was an ordinary citizen.
The higher an official's rank, the greater were his opportunities of amassing a fortune at society's expense. The variety of devices used was so great that no more than a few can be mentioned by way of illustration. A Deputy Governor, among whose responsibilities lay certification of the vodka sold in his province, might attest - if suitably bribed by distillers - as unadulterated vodka which in fact had been mixed with water. Since the victim in this instance was the consumer, no prosecutions followed even if by some chance the deed was uncovered. Governors in the more remote provinces sometimes accused a wealthy local merchant of a fictitious crime and then ordered him to be arrested and held in jail until he paid up. Bribing was a subtle and even gracious art. It was considered in better taste to bribe indirectly. For example, one could offer a generous donation to a 'charitable' cause, chaired by the official's wife; or sell him a piece of property at a fraction of its actual value; or buy something from him (e.g. a painting) for a sum far in excess of its value. The novelist, M.E.Saltykov-Shchedrin, who held the post of Deputy Governor in the Tver and Riazan provinces early in the reign of Alexander n, wrote that money was better invested in bribes