depended upon patronage; for lesser office, promotions were regularly granted after
eight years of service, rather than according to merit. This deadened incentive to
perform and, as Pisar’kova notes, destroyed a“pillar”of Peter I’s vision of a merit-
based hierarchy.
Even more than in Muscovite times, then, lower-level bureaucrats worked to
support higher officers who had great power and little expertise. Local governors
possessed wide authority, according to a revised“Instruction”of 1728 that dis-
pensed with the social welfare aspirations of the ordinance of 1719. Governors were
to keep order, oversee the collection of taxes, and hold criminal court. Opportunity
for corruption expanded: governors were still supported by local communities
(kormlenie) and, as John LeDonne points out, they approved government contracts
from which they could squeeze graft.
Meanwhile, the far more numerous chancery workers below offices on the
Table of Ranks were beleaguered. In 1726 and 1727 more bureaucratic salaries
were docked: officials below heads and directors of the Colleges were deprived of
salary, to be supported by the community for higher officers and by fees for service
for lesser. Although these steps were accompanied with warnings not to demand
excess fees or gifts, the situation was untenable. Procurators appointed by the center
to oversee the quality of work were too few and too weak to exert control. There
were many in these ranks: S. M. Troitskii, using a sample of bureaucrats from
1755, suggests afive to one ratio of undersecretaries to ranked officers. As a group,
unranked chancery workers were poor; only about 31 percent of them owned any
serfs at all (descendants of Muscovite secretaries and undersecretaries could legally
own peasants), and their serf holdings constituted only 2.3 percent of all serfs. They
subsisted on fees and gifts.
These ranks werefilled by people from the interstices of Russia’s social categor-
ies. In 1755, they were overwhelmingly descended from Muscovite bureaucratic
families (about 71 percent), with the rest coming from clerical backgrounds
(7 percent), non-landed military groups (soldiers and cavalrymen of the new
model troops, 8.26 percent), and peasants, Cossacks, andraznochintsyin small
amounts. Only 4 percent of chancery workers came from gentry background. Laws
prohibited service by taxed people, but some served anyway, particularly in the
north and Siberia. Thus, most civil servants below the Table of Ranks came from
the non-taxed groups. This in principle could constitute an avenue of social
mobility if the nobility had not established a stranglehold on the ranked positions.
As salaries disappeared, the eighteenth-century state lost the professionally
trained, relatively well-paid clerks and secretaries that constituted the backbone of
Muscovite administration. Corruption soared, especially in local administration;
huge backlogs built up, most notable in the appeals court of the Senate. Local
governors acted as satraps, despite efforts by the government to enforce the
Muscovite model of two-year terms (1730). After persistent lobbying by the
nobility, in 1760 governors’terms were extended tofive years. The state also
tried to prevent governors and their kin from buying property and peasants in
the areas where they served (1740), but just as in the seventeenth century that
practice was honored in the breach and repealed in 1765. The great historian of
Army and Administration 305