Those nobles who did serve were not wealthy gentry; they served because they needed the salaries and the material support that communities were obliged to provide. Pisar'kova found that from 1727 to 1755, nobles with smallholdings (fewer than 100 serfs) dominated, with some polarization by 1755 (more very poor and more very wealthy, at opposite ends of the staff hierarchy). The vast majority took up civil service as a retirement sinecure, motivated by benefits promised after service was limited to twenty-five years in 1736. Pisar'kova found that in central government in the 1730s-50s, only a quarter of the officials had served solely in civil service, where they might have developed professional expertise. The rest were evenly divided between men who had served only in the army and those who had combined military and civil posts. In local government, she found that 87 percent of officials were retired military officers. This means that most noblemen in central and local office brought neither a lifetime of experience and training in the civil service nor commitment to the career.
Little progress was made in these decades in educating nobility for civil service. The 1736 law that reduced mandatory service for the nobility to twenty-five years and raised the age of service from 15 to 20 defined the educational standards for young men before starting military service. Assuming that home schooling was the norm, sons of the nobility were to be checked at age 12 for reading and writing skills and at age 16 for theology, math, and geometry, and were to be sent thereafter to specialized schools for civil and military service. Some schools were founded, primarily to help a young nobleman advance through ranks while growing up. The prestigious Cadet School was founded in 1731 with military, humanistic, and some civil service (jurisprudence) training; in the 1730s to 1750s civil service academies for noblemen (Kollegii-Junkery) operated in the Senate (for prosperous nobles with at least 100 male serfs) and the Colleges (for nobles with at least 25 serfs), but found few takers. In 1751, of 182 spots for noblemen in civil service academies, only 95 were filled. S. M. Troitskii found that by the 1750s only 20 percent of all civil servants in positions on the Table of Ranks had such formal education, more in central administration than local. In these decades, appointment for high offices depended upon patronage; for lesser office, promotions were regularly granted after eight years of service, rather than according to merit. This deadened incentive to perform and, as Pisar'kova notes, destroyed a "pillar" of Peter I's vision of a merit- based hierarchy.
Even more than in Muscovite times, then, lower-level bureaucrats worked to support higher officers who had great power and little expertise. Local governors possessed wide authority, according to a revised "Instruction" of 1728 that dispensed with the social welfare aspirations of the ordinance of 1719. Governors were to keep order, oversee the collection oftaxes, and hold criminal court. Opportunity for corruption expanded: governors were still supported by local communities (kormlenie) and, as John LeDonne points out, they approved government contracts from which they could squeeze graft.
Meanwhile, the far more numerous chancery workers below offices on the Table of Ranks were beleaguered. In 1726 and 1727 more bureaucratic salaries were docked: officials below heads and directors of the Colleges were deprived of salary, to be supported by the community for higher officers and by fees for service for lesser. Although these steps were accompanied with warnings not to demand excess fees or gifts, the situation was untenable. Procurators appointed by the center to oversee the quality of work were too few and too weak to exert control. There were many in these ranks: S. M. Troitskii, using a sample of bureaucrats from 1755, suggests a five to one ratio of undersecretaries to ranked officers. As a group, unranked chancery workers were poor; only about 31 percent of them owned any serfs at all (descendants of Muscovite secretaries and undersecretaries could legally own peasants), and their serf holdings constituted only 2.3 percent of all serfs. They subsisted on fees and gifts.
These ranks were filled by people from the interstices of Russia's social categories. In 1755, they were overwhelmingly descended from Muscovite bureaucratic families (about 71 percent), with the rest coming from clerical backgrounds (7 percent), non-landed military groups (soldiers and cavalrymen of the new model troops, 8.26 percent), and peasants, Cossacks, and raznochintsy in small amounts. Only 4 percent of chancery workers came from gentry background. Laws prohibited service by taxed people, but some served anyway, particularly in the north and Siberia. Thus, most civil servants below the Table of Ranks came from the non-taxed groups. This in principle could constitute an avenue of social mobility if the nobility had not established a stranglehold on the ranked positions.
As salaries disappeared, the eighteenth-century state lost the professionally trained, relatively well-paid clerks and secretaries that constituted the backbone of Muscovite administration. Corruption soared, especially in local administration; huge backlogs built up, most notable in the appeals court of the Senate. Local governors acted as satraps, despite efforts by the government to enforce the Muscovite model of two-year terms (1730). After persistent lobbying by the nobility, in 1760 governors' terms were extended to five years. The state also tried to prevent governors and their kin from buying property and peasants in the areas where they served (1740), but just as in the seventeenth century that practice was honored in the breach and repealed in 1765. The great historian of local administration, Iu. V. Got'e, found that in the eighteenth century local noblemen regularly served locally.
Rulers between 1725 and 1762 did little to improve civil service. In 1740 Empress Anna's government was working to provide adequate and more widely distributed civil service salaries, but war with Sweden (1741-3) cut short this effort and even forced reductions in civil service salaries to pay for war. Similarly, in 1754 Empress Elizabeth's minister P. I. Shuvalov proposed paying decent salaries to local civil servants and creating a strict system of education and promotion for officialdom but, in the face of Seven Years War expenses, the idea was shelved. Thus, from the 1730s Russia's officials were aware of problems but made little progress.
CATHERINE II BETWEEN CAMERALISM AND EMPIRE
Mercantilist and cameralist, inspired by the rationalizing urge of the Enlightenment, Catherine II resolved to create a unified empire (see Map 5). She envisioned an imperial nobility united by the same privileges, institutions, and law, a single fiscal regime of direct taxes to rectify the traditionally lighter fiscal burden of the borderlands, and a single administrative system around the empire. But, ever the pragmatist, she did not hesitate to maintain different tax and governance regimes in communities when it was economically or politically advisable to do so.
Catherine began her reign with immediate attention to the deplorable state of local government, which she attributed to geography and antiquated organization. As the population had grown, existing territorial divisions made less sense: some gubernii were huge, but underpopulated; some provinces were more populous than gubernii. Rationalizing size suited her Enlightenment proclivities. Furthermore, local government was both unresponsive to the center and unable to serve local needs. Already in 1762 Catherine II created commissions for immediate changes and more fundamental reform; after more than a decade's work, they proposed intensification through decentralization.