was better educated than their seventeenth-century counterparts, bringing more
talent and career experience to administration, evidenced by governors’conscien-
tious efforts to implement the local reform.
Catherine II recognized the need for professionalism; hoping for social mobility,
she abolished the various schools for noblemen (Junkery) in the Senate and Colleges
for lack of noble patronage, and directed Moscow University, the Academy of
Sciences, and a secondary school in Kazan to offer classes in civil skills for lower
class people. Furthermore, the increased ability to travel abroad for education after
the 1762 ending of mandatory service gave noblemen access to education for civil
service. But progress towards professionalism was slow. Elise Wirtschafter argues
that gradually a class of civil servants, coming from noble background but identi-
fying with state and monarchy, was being forged from late eighteenth century
onward. But she cautions that as a group, the elite families who dominated the
highest positions, civil or military, always identified more as rural nobles than as
civil servants, despite their education.
REFORMS OF PAUL I
Catherine’s reforms created a denser geographical arrangement of the huge empire
and attempted to create a rational and uniform administrative structure across the
empire. Not all problems had been solved, however. Noble governors and board
members retained ample power in their fiscal, judicial, and police oversight;
governors approved public contracts, confirmed local offices, reviewed judicial
decisions. Corruption still loomed, since in the late eighteenth century the state
indiscriminately issued paper money (assignats) and inflation decimated salaries (as
discussed in Chapter 15). Oversight of personnel was weak.
When Paul I came to power in 1796, he faced a crushing state debt and
a decentralizing reform program with which he fundamentally disagreed. Paul
believed that Catherine II had yielded too much power to localities and nobility
and had ballooned the state into an inefficient and expensive apparatus. He
embarked on streamlining and centralizing reforms. Following up on some steps
already taken in recent years, he restored some colleges, particularly for economic
issues (Commerce, State Domains, etc.); he abolished the office of governor-general
as an unnecessary and expensive sop to the nobility; he reduced the number of
gubernii from 50 to 41 (plus the Don Cossack Host), doing so by eliminating one
in Siberia, three in the Black Sea steppe, two in Ukraine, and one in the north
and consolidating others. At the district level he consolidated 143 districts into
neighboring ones, reducing to a total of 429 (Alexander I restored many).
Paul rejected much of the elective principle of the reforms, streamlining and
focusing power in appointed officials. He eliminated, for example, peasant and
native representatives on local police boards and district levelraspravy(but his
successor Alexander I’s government restored lower-level native involvement, in
realistic assessment of the difficulty of creating a single, homogeneous system
empire-wide). Undercutting the privileged position of the nobility in Catherine’s
312 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801