handle the work coming from myriad institutions in the capitals: one governor
complained that he received orders fromfifty-four different offices in the capitals.
Noblemen dominated in the highest offices for their salary, prestige, and access
to noble status, but, as we discuss in this chapter, they had little professional
training and commitment to the work. Two Russian scholars, S. M. Troitskii
and L. F. Pisar’kova, have done prosopographical analysis of the eighteenth-century
civil service. Pisar’kova confirmed Troitskii’s data that showed relatively few non-
noble civil servants in high rank from the 1730s through 1750s. In central offices,
about 88 percent of the top four ranks and about 77 percent of the next four ranks
werefilled by nobles. Only the ranks that did not give hereditary nobility (ranks
9 – 14), were predominantly non-noble (about 65 percent), including descendants
of Muscovite bureaucratic families,raznochintsy (“people of various ranks,”a
growing social group of literate urban people, discussed in Chapter 18), clerics,
and others. For local offices, in 1740, she found about 96 percent filled by
noblemen and in 1755, about 83 percent.
Those nobles who did serve were not wealthy gentry; they served because they
needed the salaries and the material support that communities were obliged to
provide. Pisar’kova found that from 1727 to 1755, nobles with smallholdings
(fewer than 100 serfs) dominated, with some polarization by 1755 (more very
poor and more very wealthy, at opposite ends of the staff hierarchy). The vast
majority took up civil service as a retirement sinecure, motivated by benefits
promised after service was limited to twenty-five years in 1736. Pisar’kova found
that in central government in the 1730s–50s, only a quarter of the officials had
served solely in civil service, where they might have developed professional expert-
ise. The rest were evenly divided between men who had served only in the army and
those who had combined military and civil posts. In local government, she found
that 87 percent of officials were retired military officers. This means that most
noblemen in central and local office brought neither a lifetime of experience and
training in the civil service nor commitment to the career.
Little progress was made in these decades in educating nobility for civil service.
The 1736 law that reduced mandatory service for the nobility to twenty-five years
and raised the age of service from 15 to 20 defined the educational standards for
young men before starting military service. Assuming that home schooling was the
norm, sons of the nobility were to be checked at age 12 for reading and writing
skills and at age 16 for theology, math, and geometry, and were to be sent thereafter
to specialized schools for civil and military service. Some schools were founded,
primarily to help a young nobleman advance through ranks while growing up. The
prestigious Cadet School was founded in 1731 with military, humanistic, and some
civil service (jurisprudence) training; in the 1730s to 1750s civil service academies
for noblemen (Kollegii-Junkery) operated in the Senate (for prosperous nobles with
at least 100 male serfs) and the Colleges (for nobles with at least 25 serfs), but found
few takers. In 1751, of 182 spots for noblemen in civil service academies, only 95
werefilled. S. M. Troitskii found that by the 1750s only 20 percent of all civil
servants in positions on the Table of Ranks had such formal education, more in
central administration than local. In these decades, appointment for high offices
304 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801