As the cost of central administration alone rose in the 1720s by two to three times, the state economized at the expense of bureaucracy. Pressed to pay for war, already in 1700 salaries for some chanceries were docked. Salary was often underpaid or not paid at alclass="underline" scribes were expected to provide their own ink, candles, sand (for blotting the paper), and even firewood. The state often demanded extraordinary levies for war from chancery staff, recruited lower bureaucrats into the army, or exacted high fines on scribes to buy themselves out of recruitment. L. F. Pisar'kova eloquently describes how governors pleaded with Moscow to send salary for their poverty-stricken scribes. Petrine administrative reforms had created a more rational ordering of administration, but the economic wherewithal to support it was lacking.
Russia also struggled to fulfill another of Peter's goals, that of making civil officialdom equally prestigious to military service. He had in mind the European model of civil service professionals, but those powerful middle classes had emerged out of a centuries-long development of universities, judiciaries, and professions, whereas Muscovite bureaucrats learned their skills on the job. Lacking universities (Moscow University was founded in 1755), substitutes were created: Navigation and Artillery schools (1701), Medicine (1707), Engineering (1712), Mining (1716), Naval Arts (1720). A school for foreign languages, founded in 1703 by the Chancery of Foreign Affairs, was oriented towards civil service; a German Lutheran, Pastor Johann Ernst Gluck (d. 1705), ran a more general school in the German Quarter around 1703. The Church was urged to open schools for children of all ranks in the bishoprics, and some were created. Decrees, such as the Table of Ranks (1722) and General Regulation (1720), urged the gentry to send their children to Colleges and chanceries to learn bureaucratic skills; orders around 1714-16 mandated that children of the military elite and of bureaucrats (secretaries and undersecretaries) be trained in writing and arithmetic. In November 1721 a school was created to educate noblemen for chancery service.
But government policy was contradictory, openly favoring military over civil service careers in key aspects. Decrees of 1715 and 1722 mandated that salaries for military and chancery service were to be equal, but by December 1724 salaries in colleges and other central institutions were half of those of military officers of the same rank; in the provinces, civil servants earned a quarter of the military pay scale. Officers were enticed to join the civil service only with the promise of receiving their army level of pay (a situation that lasted until 1763). Furthermore, salaries stagnated as prices rose and inflation rose in subsequent decades. Peter's signature social legislation, the Table of Ranks, gave clear preference to military service. The Table, as detailed in Chapter 21, defined parallel hierarchies—military, civil, and court—of fourteen ranks, each of which was given an honorific name (privy councilor and the like) and matched to job positions. The Table awarded hereditary nobility to any man who attained a military officer rank that was the equivalent of the lowest rank (14), whereas in the civil service, hereditary nobility accrued only to those who climbed to rank 8; the lower six ranks (14-9) in civil service bestowed nobility on the individual, but not his descendants. Furthermore, the old Muscovite bureaucracy was treated poorly: the few state secretaries (dumnye d'iaki) were put in ranks 6 and 8, giving them hereditary nobility but putting them distinctly below other posts in the civil service. Muscovy's senior scribes (d'iaki) were renamed "secretaries," but the Table left their status ambiguous; a law of 1724 allowed them hereditary nobility, but throughout the century nobles tried to close this loophole. All other Muscovite chancery workers, undersecretaries in particular, ranked below the Table. So Russia's administration struggled to meet the model of a well-ordered police state.
OFFICIALDOM BETWEEN PETER AND CATHERINE
From 1725 to 1762, Russia's rulers paid little constructive attention to civil administration, squeezing it for resources to pay for pressing needs. As we have seen, within a year Peter's successors were retrenching his expensive programs, particularly non-military. They consolidated judiciary and administration, returning to the Muscovite model of all-purpose, unprofessional governors. The number of gubernii was reduced by 1728 from 11 to 9, divided into a total of 28 provinces (down from 45) and about 170 districts (uezdy). Staffing was even more reduced, particularly at the crucial level of undersecretaries, the heart-blood of chancery work where expertise might be lodged. At the end of the seventeenth century, there were 1,900; under Peter I, 1,200, but in the late 1720s only 660. The immediate effect was striking: in 1698 there were three times more employees in central agencies than in 1726; in local agencies, 1.5 more; in all, twice as many workers in government offices in 1698 than 1726. An already "under-governed" realm had become even less well served: in 1698 there was one state employee for every 2,250 people, but in 1726 there was one per 3,400.
As in Muscovy, but even less well supported, governors were placed at the district, provincial, and gubernia level, each with a small garrison and each with broad autonomies and little hierarchical subordination to governors at other levels. Each heard criminal cases; until 1764 military commanders collected taxes from village officials who actually apportioned and collected the funds, but after that, governors did this role. As in Muscovite times, for assistance in rural policing, governors relied on local forces (state peasant village organization, landlords' bailiffs, parish priests); they also oversaw police duties in towns, but the actual work was done by neighborhoods, who organized gate watch, fire safety, and street maintenance.
Understaffed and underfunded, bureaucracy became notoriously bad, not only because the initial retrenchment strained the system, but also because the bureaucratic apparatus kept growing in the 1730s to 1750s. It grew in the direction of centralization, reflecting concentration of power in the center, failure of executive vision, and the nobility's clamoring for prestigious and lucrative high office. Powerful "Departments" were added to the Senate, paralleling the Colleges, for military, fiscal, judicial, and borderland issues; new chanceries and kontory were created for functional (criminal and civil law) and regional (Siberia, Livonia) issues. Between 1726 and 1742 numbers of central administrative staff rose by four times, with highest offices (those listed on the Table of Ranks, or chinovniki) climbing by 4.5 times. At the same time, local governments were not sufficiently staffed to handle the work coming from myriad institutions in the capitals: one governor complained that he received orders from fifty-four different offices in the capitals.
Noblemen dominated in the highest offices for their salary, prestige, and access to noble status, but, as we discuss in this chapter, they had little professional training and commitment to the work. Two Russian scholars, S. M. Troitskii and L. F. Pisar'kova, have done prosopographical analysis of the eighteenth-century civil service. Pisar'kova confirmed Troitskii's data that showed relatively few non- noble civil servants in high rank from the 1730s through 1750s. In central offices, about 88 percent of the top four ranks and about 77 percent of the next four ranks were filled by nobles. Only the ranks that did not give hereditary nobility (ranks 9-14), were predominantly non-noble (about 65 percent), including descendants of Muscovite bureaucratic families, raznochintsy ("people of various ranks," a growing social group of literate urban people, discussed in Chapter 18), clerics, and others. For local offices, in 1740, she found about 96 percent filled by noblemen and in 1755, about 83 percent.