Nevertheless Moscow's experts kept the system running by developing strategies to ride herd on inexpert governors (and in the seventeenth century, on honorific heads of chanceries who were not professionally expert). One was to require collegiality; administrative and judicial decisions were to be made collectively by panels of governor and scribes or chancery head and secretaries. In practice, secretaries and undersecretaries served longer in place than did their military governor partners (locally, undersecretaries averaged four years to the governor's one or two), and thus were in a position to provide expertise and oversight. Scribes at the center and in the provinces were trained in the law, which was straightforward and readily disseminated. The 1497, 1550, and 1589 codes were brief handbooks of fines, sanctions and procedures, while the Lawcode of 1649 was much more comprehensive, with chapters on political crime, criminal law, land- holding, serfdom, and judicial procedure (its longest chapter). A printed book, the 1649 Code was widely dispersed and stayed in use for more than a century.
Another means for the bureaucracy to ride herd on unprofessional judges was the format ofofficial correspondence. This was intentionally didactic as well as efficient in a roundabout way. Written exchanges between offices were required to reiterate—word for word—previous communications and orders before adding the next step of information or resolution. Case transcripts, written in rolled-up scroll form, became longer and longer, analogous to today's online e-mail chains. As scribes read aloud to often illiterate local governors orders from the center in the course of a case, and as they read to judges full case transcripts in preparation for verdict, procedures and norms were being repeatedly spelled out, instructing these amateur judges in the law. Equally importantly, such redundancy also maintained continuity ofknowledge in a case that might have been going on across the terms of several governors and office staff.
Disseminating important tsarist directives and news in a setting of limited literacy and almost no printing culture was a challenge. Only at mid-seventeenth century was printing used and then primarily for church service books and thousands of forms for the appointment of priests, archbishops, and deacons in the 1650s. As for secular documents, as Simon Franklin notes, the Lawcode of 1649 was the only complete administrative book published in the seventeenth century, followed by publications of some land charters and privileges from the 1670s. Governors used a variety of other means to disseminate state decrees. Provincial practice mimicked that in Moscow, where major decrees were announced to the court elite in the Kremlin as well as in public places, and copies were distributed among the many chanceries. In provincial centers, town criers announced decrees and news in public squares through the community; when felons were punished, a crowd was gathered and the verdict was read aloud. If a man were executed, the verdict was posted by the scaffold. Handwritten copies of important directives were also posted in market squares, by city gates, on city walls, by the governor's offices, and other public places. Governors' offices recorded every incoming directive from Moscow in registers. Such means ofcommunication were fleeting, but if consistently practiced, they should have impressed the community with the tsar's presence.
Muscovy's chancery system has been criticized as inefficient according to the modern Weberian model in which bureaucratic offices are uniform in design and "rationally" limited to one function. Despite its diversity in structure and function, Moscow's bureaucracy was highly professional because of strict training, effective oversight, and more or less adequate compensation. Clerks were trained in central Kremlin chanceries in a rigorous series of career stages, each of which could last several years; the Chancery of Land Records (Pomestnyi prikaz), for example, created its own school for clerks in land law. Chanceries compiled standards of bureaucratic work and substantive law in their particular fields (the criminal law in particular) in handbooks that were then included in the 1649 Lawcode.
Bureaucratic documentation was highly standardized. Offices kept some information in book form as registers, but much day-to-day chancery work came as petitions on individual sheets of paper that were glued together into a scroll as the case developed. By the sixteenth century the formulaic template ofjudicial petitions had been worked out; its rhetoric was couched in direct and personal supplication to the ruler, identified with a long and exact title, by the petitioners who adopted a self-deprecating diminutive name and sobriquet according to social class. As noted in Chapter 6, servitors called themselves the tsar's "slaves," actually an honorific relationship; taxpayers called themselves his "orphans" and clerics his "intercessor." An eminent Prince Ivan Mikhailovich became "your slave Ivashko" when addressing the tsar, for example. Stock phrases were used at the beginning and end of each document, pointing out the petitioner's loyal service, suffering in battle, dire financial straits, and the like, ending in a direct plea, "grant me your favor." Other documents were also standardized, such as the format of military muster books, interrogation transcripts, land records, and the like.
The language of official paperwork was a chancery Russian close to vernacular, and by the seventeenth century bureaucratic handwriting was a standard cursive (skoropis), with consistently used conventions of abbreviation. Punctuation and spelling varied, as it did in manuscripts and printing at this time in Europe. Through the seventeenth century the Kremlin bureaucracy evolved increasingly complex procedures of assembling, proof-reading, signing off, and recording documents, with the goal of protecting documents' integrity. Registers of incoming and outgoing documents, as well as expenditure books, were assiduously kept. Harsh penalties were levied for fraudulent documents; scribes were forbidden to take work home, and hours of work were defined by law in the second half of the seventeenth century. Governors were required to make a reckoning of records and finances when they left office, and were periodically audited. A weakness was in document archiving: piles of scrolls were difficult to label, store, and retrieve.
Muscovy tried to compensate bureaucrats sufficiently to prevent corruption. In principle chanceries provided decent salaries, provisions in kind, and, for the highest bureaucrats, the ability to own land, a right nearly exclusive to the military servitor class in the seventeenth century. They were considered "servitors" to the tsar, not taxpayers. But official promises of land and salary grants were not always fulfilled; by the second half of the seventeenth century, salaries were given less and less regularly and bureaucrats, particularly locally, more and more relied on income from fees and the obligatory material support provided by communities (food, housing, labor). This support, called kormlenie, a form of collective responsibility for the community, was construed as a form of gift, creating a reciprocal "economy of exchange" that could be manipulated by the community to its advantage. Brian Davies has uncovered an instance when a community refused to accept a new governor since he rejected their gifts; "we cannot work with him," they reported, if he failed to accept their largesse. Conversely, this community obligation could also slip into extortion by underpaid officials, and extensive sections of all major lawcodes (1497, 1550, 1649) were devoted to punishment for official malfeasance. Nevertheless, complaints about corruption were endemic; Moscow prosecuted vigorously but did not fix the problem structurally. Bureaucracy played third fiddle to staffing the army and preserving the taxpaying basis to support it.