waves, searching for the most effective taxation structure. Muscovy’s bureaucracy
had arguably been top-heavy with central administration, and Peter initially kept
this structure, adding and consolidating chanceries. Around 1708 he changed
course to decentralization, dividing up the realm into eight gubernii, abolishing
most central chanceries and assigning their duties to the gubernii. Gubernii were
charged with supporting regiments with recruits, horses, uniforms, and upkeep;
virtually martial law, it failed and around 1718, with the Great Northern War
wrapping up, Peter embarked on his most enduring initiatives, adapting Swedish
models. A centralized model was restored: a new (1711) Senate oversaw Colleges to
which were subordinate governors in the now eleven gubernii, subdivided into 45
provinces and around 175uezdyor districts. This stage of reform notably created an
independent judiciary, separated from administrative offices. The judicial hierarchy
went from provincial courts to Superior Courts (ultimately twelve around the
realm) to the Justice College, which was in turn overseen by the Senate.
Petrine bureaucracy ballooned. Around 1700 there were about 360 central and
local chanceries and offices; by 1726 there were about 1,700 different offices from
Colleges tokontoryand chanceries. Developing the Muscovite principle of unpaid
service, local taxpayers provided lower-level staff and local nobles were made to
serve as“assessors,”that is, colleagues, in administrative,fiscal, and judicial offices.
A 1719“Instruction”to governors assigned loftyPolizeistaatgoals of building
institutions of public health, welfare, and education in addition to their traditional
administrative, military, and judicial work. This effort to provide social welfare was
stillborn until Catherine II’s reforms raised the issue again; the sole systematic
efforts by the state to provide aid to the poor went to soldiers and their families;
otherwise monasteries, churches, communes, and families were expected to provide
for the destitute and abandoned.
One of the most striking indications of how fundamentally the bureaucracy was
transformed appears at the level of paperwork, where more rational, professional
practices were introduced. Scrolls were abandoned as wasteful of paper and impos-
sible to archive properly, replaced with bound notebooks. Registers of documents
were to be kept for different functions (incoming decrees,fiscal expenditures, court
cases) and labelled for easy retrieval. The very script in which bureaucrats wrote was
changed, probably in response to the development of a simplified Cyrillic“civic
script”for printing. Bureaucratic formulae were changed from Muscovy’s humble,
personalized rhetoric to a confident, declarative address; the Muscovite practice of
litigants calling themselves by self-deprecating names was dropped. In truePoli-
zeistaatform, Peter issued aGeneral Regulationin 1720 that defined bureaucratic
roles and standardized work practices; a law of 1724 defined how local offices
should be physically arranged (staff, equipment, lawcodes, and archived docu-
ments). Such change in deeply engrained practices, from handwriting and archiving
to office management, is usually difficult to implement; that Peter’s administration
retrained Muscovy’s bureaucratic corps in one generation speaks of the forced-
march pace of change.
As the cost of central administration alone rose in the 1720s by two to three
times, the state economized at the expense of bureaucracy. Pressed to pay for war,
Army and Administration 301