The legacy of patrimonialism was also apparent in the structure and operations of the principal executive agencies, the ministries.
In the medieval principalities of northern Russia, where political authority was exercised by virtue of ownership, administration had been divided into puti or “paths.” Arranged geographically (territorially) rather than functionally, they served first and foremost the purposes of economic exploitation. The men in charge were stewards responsible for a given area. They had no corporate existence and they did not act as a body. Such practices survived in Russia’s administrative structure after the introduction of ministries in 1802. The administration of Russia in the nineteenth century was organized in a vertical manner, with almost no lateral links, the lines of command converging at the top, in the person of the monarch. This arrangement hampered cooperation among the ministries and hence the formulation of a coherent national policy, but it had the advantage of preventing the officialdom from acting in concert and thereby impinging on the Tsar’s autocratic prerogatives.
With one exception, the Ministry of the Interior, Russian ministries did not much differ in structure and operation from the corresponding institutions in the West. But in contrast to the West, Russia had no cabinet and no Prime Minister. There existed a so-called Committee of Ministers, which also included heads of other central agencies, with a casually appointed chairman, but it was a body with no authority. Attempts to give Russia a regular cabinet in the 1860s and again in the 1880s had no success because the Court feared such a body would weaken its authority. The very idea of a cabinet or even ministerial consultations was regarded as subversive. “Unlike other absolute monarchs,” a French observer wrote in the 1880s,
the Russian emperors have never had prime ministers. From instinct or system, in order to retain, in deed as well as in theory, their authority unimpaired, they all undertake to be their own prime ministers.… Russia, nevertheless, does feel the need of a homogeneous cabinet, as a means toward that unity of direction in which the government is so deficient … such a council, with or without official premiership, would of necessity modify all the relations between sovereign and ministers, as its members, collectively responsible, would be fatally led to assume toward the Emperor a more independent attitude. They would gradually feel responsible before society and public opinion no less than before the sovereign, who might thus slip into the part of a constitutional monarch, without the official restraint of either constitution or parliament. In fact, this reform, seemingly unassuming, would almost amount to a revolution …31
This, as we have seen, is precisely what happened in 1905, when, forced to present a united front against the newly created Duma, the monarchy consented to the creation of a Council of Ministers under a chairman who was Prime Minister in all but name. But even though it had to make this concession, it never reconciled itself to this arrangement and in a few years reverted to the old practices.
Until 1905, the ministers reported directly to the Tsar and received from him their instructions: they had no agreed-upon common policy. Such a practice inevitably gave rise to confusion, since the Tsar was bound to issue them incompatible or even contradictory orders. Under this arrangement, each minister sought the Tsar’s ear for his own ends, without regard for the concerns of his colleagues. Foreign policy was made by at least three ministries (Foreign Affairs, Finance, and War), while domestic matters were caught up in constant feuding between the ministries of the Interior and Finance. Essentially, each ministry acted as it saw fit, subject to the Tsar’s personal approval. “Being responsible to the Emperor alone, and that only individually, [the ministers] really [were] mere secretaries, almost private clerks of the Tsar.”32
Russian ministers and their associates had an even lower opinion of their status. Their diaries and private communications are filled with complaints about the medieval arrangement under which the country was treated as the Emperor’s private domain and they as his stewards. They were bitter about the way they were treated, about the peremptory manner with which the Tsar gave them instructions, and angry over the absence of regular ministerial consultations. Peter Valuev, Minister of the Interior under Alexander II, referred to Russia’s ministers as the “sovereign’s servants”—les grandes domestiques—rather than les grandes serviteurs de l’état, whose relationship to him was “Asiatic, semi-slave or primitively patriarchal.”33 It is this situation that one official had in mind when he said that Russia had “departments” (vedomstva) but no government (pravitel’stvo).34 Such was the price Russia had to pay for maintaining so late into the modern era the regime of patrimonial monarchy.
Within their bureaus, ministers enjoyed immense power: one Russian compared them to Ottoman pashas lording over their pachalícs.35 Each had in the provinces a network of functionaries responsible only to him and not to the provincial governors.36 They could hire and fire employees at will. They also had great latitude in disposing of the moneys budgeted for their ministries.
Because Russia was so visibly run by a bureaucracy, it is possible to overestimate the extent to which the country was bureaucratized. The Russian civil service was unusually top-heavy, with a high proportion of the bureaucracy located in St. Petersburg. The Empire was relatively under-administered.37
Such neglect of the provincial administration was due to fiscal constraints: Russia simply could not afford the expenditures required to administer properly a country of such distances and poor communications. After Peter I had taken Livonia from Sweden he discovered that the Swedes had spent as much on running this small province as his government allowed for administering the whole Empire: this meant that any hope of adopting Swedish administrative models had to be given up.38 In 1763, proportionate to her territory, Prussia had nearly one hundred times as many officials as Russia.39 Around 1900, the proportion of administrators in relation to the population in Russia was almost one-third that of France and one-half that of Germany.40 Because of inadequate resources, Russians adopted a very simple model of administration. They placed in each province a powerful governor, with broad discretionary powers, and deployed across the country military garrisons to help him preserve order. There were also small contingents of police and gendarmerie, and agents of such ministries as Finance, Justice, and War. But essentially the countryside was self-administering through the institution of the peasant commune, which was held collectively responsible for the payment of taxes and delivery of military recruits, and the canton or volost’, which performed simple judiciary and administrative functions. None of this cost the Treasury anything.
This meant, however, that the authority of the Imperial Government, for all practical purposes, stopped at the eighty-nine provincial capitals where the governors and their staff had offices: below that level yawned an administrative vacuum. Neither the district (uezd), into which provinces were subdivided, nor the volost’, the principal unit of rural administration, had any regular agents of the central government: these showed up periodically, on forays as it were, to carry out specific missions, usually to collect tax arrears, and then disappeared from view. Indeed, the volost’ itself was not a territorial but a social entity, since it included only peasants and not the members of the other estates living within its territory. Some intellectuals and officials, aware of the anomaly of such an arrangement, urged the government to introduce as the lowest administrative unit an all-estate volost’, but this advice was ignored because the authorities preferred that the peasants remain isolated and self-governing. In the words of one experienced bureaucrat, there was in Russia “no common unifying authority comparable to the German Landrat or French souspréfet, capable of coordinating policies in the interest of central authority”: