Chancery positions were filled by seminarians and priests' sons, other non-taxed people, and even taxed people despite prohibitions on this. A particularly striking example was Catherine's advisor, Jacob Sievers, who, as governor-general of Novgorod and Tver', openly hired taxed people for chancery work. This happened elsewhere and the state, in Pisar'kova's words, "turned a blind eye." All in all, finding qualified people was difficult. Pisar'kova notes drily that in the seventeenth century it would have been impossible to find an illiterate bureaucrat (save for the governor), but that in the eighteenth century, it was common.
John LeDonne calls the nobility the big winner in these reforms, evidence of its triumph as a "ruling class." Local nobility selected from their own number a huge array of new offices: ten representatives to the higher Land Court and two members of the Equity Courts; two district judges, two police land captains, two representatives to the lower land courts. Noblemen filled the higher appointed offices as well, and the class also acquired new positions in the 1785 Charter to the Nobility for those territories with sufficient residents of this estate. Marshalls of the Nobility were elected at the district and gubernia levels; the gubernia Marshal was affirmed by and reported directly to the ruler. Local nobles oversaw heraldic record keeping for the noble estate and maintained public works projects.
The reform's emphasis on locally selected representatives evidenced Catherine's vision of more engaged government, but it also exacerbated the dearth of professionalism in the civil service. The quality of bureaucrats rose only as much as the nobility possessed appropriate education and experience. As we have seen, at the local level retired military men predominated and even appointees to higher offices were primarily (80 percent) retired military. But the eighteenth-century nobility was better educated than their seventeenth-century counterparts, bringing more talent and career experience to administration, evidenced by governors' conscientious efforts to implement the local reform.
Catherine II recognized the need for professionalism; hoping for social mobility, she abolished the various schools for noblemen (Junkery) in the Senate and Colleges for lack of noble patronage, and directed Moscow University, the Academy of Sciences, and a secondary school in Kazan to offer classes in civil skills for lower class people. Furthermore, the increased ability to travel abroad for education after the 1762 ending of mandatory service gave noblemen access to education for civil service. But progress towards professionalism was slow. Elise Wirtschafter argues that gradually a class of civil servants, coming from noble background but identifying with state and monarchy, was being forged from late eighteenth century onward. But she cautions that as a group, the elite families who dominated the highest positions, civil or military, always identified more as rural nobles than as civil servants, despite their education.
REFORMS OF PAUL I
Catherine's reforms created a denser geographical arrangement of the huge empire and attempted to create a rational and uniform administrative structure across the empire. Not all problems had been solved, however. Noble governors and board members retained ample power in their fiscal, judicial, and police oversight; governors approved public contracts, confirmed local offices, reviewed judicial decisions. Corruption still loomed, since in the late eighteenth century the state indiscriminately issued paper money (assignats) and inflation decimated salaries (as discussed in Chapter 15). Oversight of personnel was weak.
When Paul I came to power in 1796, he faced a crushing state debt and a decentralizing reform program with which he fundamentally disagreed. Paul believed that Catherine II had yielded too much power to localities and nobility and had ballooned the state into an inefficient and expensive apparatus. He embarked on streamlining and centralizing reforms. Following up on some steps already taken in recent years, he restored some colleges, particularly for economic issues (Commerce, State Domains, etc.); he abolished the office of governor-general as an unnecessary and expensive sop to the nobility; he reduced the number of gubernii from 50 to 41 (plus the Don Cossack Host), doing so by eliminating one in Siberia, three in the Black Sea steppe, two in Ukraine, and one in the north and consolidating others. At the district level he consolidated 143 districts into neighboring ones, reducing to a total of 429 (Alexander I restored many).
Paul rejected much of the elective principle of the reforms, streamlining and focusing power in appointed officials. He eliminated, for example, peasant and native representatives on local police boards and district level raspravy (but his successor Alexander I's government restored lower-level native involvement, in realistic assessment of the difficulty of creating a single, homogeneous system empire-wide). Undercutting the privileged position of the nobility in Catherine's reforms, Paul I combined estate-oriented courts into single all-estate courts; he abolished the Courts of Equity and Boards of Social Welfare (to be replaced with medical offices), and consolidated fiscal offices. Challenging the nobility to serve more professionally, Paul I abolished noble assemblies at the gubernia level and reduced noblemen's roles on fiscal, judicial, and police boards, making the remaining ones appointive rather than peer elected. In the towns he eliminated officials selected from the community, replacing magistrates and town councils with an institution called the ratgauz whose officials were primarily appointed and which consolidated fiscal and judicial roles.
Other changes moved in a different direction. Paul restored national traditions and elites that he respected, most notably in the western borderlands. There he declared eleven gubernii in Ukrainian, Belarus'an, and the Baltic lands (plus the Don Cossack lands) to be special administrative areas, restoring local courts, laws, and languages of public service (German, Polish, and Ukrainian primarily). In the central administration he increased the number of senators (from 46 to 90) and staff (from 272 to 782) in order to reduce the Senate's huge backlog of appeals. His goal, across the board, was to create a more professional, less estate-based, officialdom and to enhance the power of state over nobility, center over province.
To support these changes Paul I laid the foundations for a professional civil corps. He promised to raise pensions for civil servants and officers, paying for it by doubling fees on chancery services, making this the fastest rising area of state income in the 1790s. He introduced mandatory training and literacy standards and created schools for noblemen to enter civil service. A decree of 1798 rescinded laws of 1744-5 and 1771 that forbade people who paid the poll tax, such as literate state and church peasants and townsmen, from joining the civil service; it also exempted civil servants from the poll tax. His reign was too short to see immediate results, but the trends he began were fulfilled by his successors. In 1802 Alexander I brought the number of universities in the empire to five (St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkiv, Vilnius, Dorpat/Tartu) with civil service training in mind. Within the next generation, Russia had a more literate, professional, and educated civil service, particularly at higher ranks. One should not exaggerate the achievement; nineteenth-century Russian novels rail against the corruption and inefficacy of local bureaucracy. But Roderick McGrew credits Paul I with setting the foundations of centralized government that would endure in the nineteenth century.