complex procedures of assembling, proof-reading, signing off, and recording docu-
ments, 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 andfinances
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, calledkormlenie, 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 notfix the problem structurally. Bureaucracy played thirdfiddle
to staffing the army and preserving the taxpaying basis to support it.
Bureaucrats working in central chanceries and local offices were almost the entire
repository of secular literacy in the realm. Artisans and merchants were as literate as
they needed to be for trade, and clergy were versed in Slavonic-based liturgical
languages and texts. But there were no lawyers or formal notaries, as in contem-
porary Europe, China, or the Ottoman empire. The only notarial exceptions were
scribes on large estates (lay and ecclesiastical) and small unions of scribes working
for fees in towns who were knowledgeable of official document format, formulae,
and administrative procedure. These men were the only sources of legal advice
available to the general public, save for moonlighting chancery scribes.
Secretaries working in central chancelleries could amass great expertise in their
chosenfield, such as the law, international relations and foreign languages, and
fiscal administration, but in the seventeenth century they faced the challenge of
social rank. Power and prestige accrued only to military men with landed estates—
boyars and provincial gentry. Bureaucrats served them, but even the highest
secretaries were considered inferior to the military elite. This was enforced
symbolically as well as economically. Until 1680, secretaries could not use the
patronymic, an honorific allowed to the military elite; in audiences in chanceries,
secretaries stood while military governors sat. Bureaucrats were excluded from the
176 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801