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’soffices, and other public places. Governors’offices recorded
every incoming directive from Moscow in registers. Such means of communication
werefleeting, but if consistently practiced, they should have impressed the com-
munity 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 particularfields (the criminal law in
particular) in handbooks that were then included in the 1649 Lawcode.
Bureaucratic documentation was highly standardized. Offices kept some infor-
mation 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 of judicial 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 address-
ing 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
The State Wields its Power 175