reforms, Paul I combined estate-oriented courts into single all-estate courts; he
abolished the Courts of Equity and Boards of Social Welfare (to be replaced with
medical offices), and consolidatedfiscal offices. Challenging the nobility to serve
more professionally, Paul I abolished noble assemblies at the gubernia level and
reduced noblemen’s roles onfiscal, judicial, and police boards, making the remain-
ing ones appointive rather than peer elected. In the towns he eliminated officials
selected from the community, replacing magistrates and town councils with an
institution called theratgauzwhose officials were primarily appointed and which
consolidatedfiscal and judicial roles.
Other changes moved in a different direction. Paul restored national traditions
and elites that he respected, most notably in the western borderlands. There he
declared eleven gubernii in Ukrainian, Belarus’an, and the Baltic lands (plus the
Don Cossack lands) to be special administrative areas, restoring local courts, laws,
and languages of public service (German, Polish, and Ukrainian primarily). In the
central administration he increased the number of senators (from 46 to 90) and
staff (from 272 to 782) in order to reduce the Senate’s huge backlog of appeals. His
goal, across the board, was to create a more professional, less estate-based, official-
dom and to enhance the power of state over nobility, center over province.
To support these changes Paul I laid the foundations for a professional civil
corps. He promised to raise pensions for civil servants and officers, paying for it by
doubling fees on chancery services, making this the fastest rising area of state
income in the 1790s. He introduced mandatory training and literacy standards
and created schools for noblemen to enter civil service. A decree of 1798 rescinded
laws of 1744–5 and 1771 that forbade people who paid the poll tax, such as literate
state and church peasants and townsmen, from joining the civil service; it also
exempted civil servants from the poll tax. His reign was too short to see immediate
results, but the trends he began were fulfilled by his successors. In 1802 Alexander
I brought the number of universities in the empire tofive (St. Petersburg, Moscow,
Kharkiv, Vilnius, Dorpat/Tartu) with civil service training in mind. Within the
next generation, Russia had a more literate, professional, and educated civil service,
particularly at higher ranks. One should not exaggerate the achievement;
nineteenth-century Russian novels rail against the corruption and inefficacy of
local bureaucracy. But Roderick McGrew credits Paul I with setting the founda-
tions of centralized government that would endure in the nineteenth century.
Reflecting on late eighteenth-century administrative reform, one sees steady
improvement in the ratio of population to civil servant, from about 2,000 people
per official in 1755, to about 1,400 in 1763, to about 1,000 in the early nineteenth
century. But with expansion and demographic growth, the realm was still under-
governed. Pisar’kova notes that at the end of Catherine’s reign, the empire had 37.4
million in population, and about 38,000 officials from top to chancery—one per
980 residents. At the same time, in Europe’s most bureaucratic country, France,
with 26 million people, there were 90,000 officials, one per every 290. Thus, Russia
threefold lagged behind in staffing its empire.
Russian administration in the eighteenth century maintained a balance between
tolerating differences in local communities and maintaining central control.
Army and Administration 313