The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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2,762 in 1698; undersecretaries (poddiachie) from 575 to 2,648. Local offices
expanded with empire—in total in 1626 there were 185; in 1645, 212; in 1677,
295; in 1698, 302. Regionally, their number in the center remained at 54 and in
the north around 20 throughout the seventeenth century, but in the northwest and
western borders (including Ukraine) numbers rose from 25 in 1626 to 45 in 1698;
local offices on the southern steppe rose from 44 in 1626, 84 in 1664, to 95 in
1698; those to the southeast, down the Volga and in Siberia increased from 42 in
1626, to 77 in 1664, and 87 in 1698. Thus, local government offices almost
doubled on the western frontier and more than doubled on the south, southeast,
and east. Still, Kremlin-based bureaucrats outnumbered all local ones. In the 1640s
1,611 bureaucrats were divided between 837 in Moscow and 774 locally; similarly,
in the 1690s, 2,739 Moscow bureaucrats and 1,918 local officials made up the
4,657 total bureaucrats. The bureaucracy had grown, in other words, 2.4 times in
thosefive decades, with expertise clustered at the center. Russia’s bureaucratic
network was a light spider-web cast over a vast space.
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 straightfor-
ward and readily disseminated. The 1497, 1550, and 1589 codes were brief
handbooks offines, 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 of official 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 of knowledge 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


174 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801

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