already in 1700 salaries for some chanceries were docked. Salary was often under-
paid or not paid at all: scribes were expected to provide their own ink, candles, sand
(for blotting the paper), and evenfirewood. The state often demanded extraordin-
ary levies for war from chancery staff, recruited lower bureaucrats into the army, or
exacted highfines on scribes to buy themselves out of recruitment. L. F. Pisar’kova
eloquently describes how governors pleaded with Moscow to send salary for
their poverty-stricken scribes. Petrine administrative reforms had created a more
rational ordering of administration, but the economic wherewithal to support it
was lacking.
Russia also struggled to fulfill another of Peter’s goals, that of making civil
officialdom equally prestigious to military service. He had in mind the European
model of civil service professionals, but those powerful middle classes had emerged
out of a centuries-long development of universities, judiciaries, and professions,
whereas Muscovite bureaucrats learned their skills on the job. Lacking universities
(Moscow University was founded in 1755), substitutes were created: Navigation
and Artillery schools (1701), Medicine (1707), Engineering (1712), Mining
(1716), Naval Arts (1720). A school for foreign languages, founded in 1703 by
the Chancery of Foreign Affairs, was oriented towards civil service; a German
Lutheran, Pastor Johann Ernst Glück (d. 1705), ran a more general school in the
German Quarter around 1703. The Church was urged to open schools for children
of all ranks in the bishoprics, and some were created. Decrees, such as the Table of
Ranks (1722) andGeneral Regulation(1720), urged the gentry to send their
children to Colleges and chanceries to learn bureaucratic skills; orders around
1714 – 16 mandated that children of the military elite and of bureaucrats (secretaries
and undersecretaries) be trained in writing and arithmetic. In November 1721 a
school was created to educate noblemen for chancery service.
But government policy was contradictory, openly favoring military over civil
service careers in key aspects. Decrees of 1715 and 1722 mandated that salaries for
military and chancery service were to be equal, but by December 1724 salaries in
colleges and other central institutions were half of those of military officers of the
same rank; in the provinces, civil servants earned a quarter of the military pay scale.
Officers were enticed to join the civil service only with the promise of receiving
their army level of pay (a situation that lasted until 1763). Furthermore, salaries
stagnated as prices rose and inflation rose in subsequent decades. Peter’s signature
social legislation, the Table of Ranks, gave clear preference to military service. The
Table, as detailed in Chapter 21, defined parallel hierarchies—military, civil, and
court—of fourteen ranks, each of which was given an honorific name (privy
councilor and the like) and matched to job positions. The Table awarded hereditary
nobility to any man who attained a military officer rank that was the equivalent of
the lowest rank (14), whereas in the civil service, hereditary nobility accrued only to
those who climbed to rank 8; the lower six ranks (14–9) in civil service bestowed
nobility on the individual, but not his descendants. Furthermore, the old Musco-
vite bureaucracy was treated poorly: the few state secretaries (dumnye d’iaki) were
put in ranks 6 and 8, giving them hereditary nobility but putting them distinctly
below other posts in the civil service. Muscovy’s senior scribes (d’iaki) were
302 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801