Catherine’s urge to impose an empire-wide standard, to forge an imperial nobility,
and to rationalize governance was always tempered by recognition of the limits of
the possible in local conditions. The state became more interventionist toward the
end of the century (urban planning, canal building, etc.) but its goal was never
particularly to improve conditions in the localities, despite rhetoric from Peter I and
Catherine II about social service. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Russian
empire still featured significant regional variation in administrative structure, in
law, and in institutions of governance.
Nevertheless the state maintained the institutions that it needed to control the
empire on its terms. It perpetuated a centralized bureaucratic network that
accomplished its fundamental tasks of revenue collection, military recruitment,
and local control. With the 1775 administrative reforms it standardized its
administrative framework to a great degree and improved the connection between
government and populace. Most significantly, unlike its Ottoman and French
counterparts in the eighteenth century, Russia never farmed out administrative
office, and thus never lost its grip on local control, despite noble predominance
in local office. There was no venality of political office. All areas, from center
to periphery, were under the authority of a governor and governor-general;
all subjects were subordinate to the emperor’s taxes, his criminal law, his
bureaucratic procedures. Even when Paul I exempted some western territories
from the 1775 administrative reforms, these lands were still overseen by
Moscow-appointed governorsand subject to the center’s taxation and military
demands. This conscious projection of central control gave the Russian empire
enduring power.
*****
On the eighteenth-century military: Carol Belkin Stevens,Russia’s Wars of Emergence,
1460 – 1730 (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007); John L. H. Keep,Soldiers of the Tsar:
Army and Society in Russia, 1462– 1874 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985);
William C. Fuller,Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600– 1914 (New York: Free Press,
1992); articles by Paul Bushkovitch,“The Romanov Transformation, 1613– 1725 ”and
Bruce W. Menning,“The Imperial Russian Army, 1725–1796,”in Frederick W. Kagan
and Robin Higham, eds.,The Military History of Tsarist Russia(New York and Basing-
stoke: Palgrave, 2002). Debate over“garrison state”: Walter Pintner,“The Burden of
Defense in Imperial Russia, 1725–1914,”Russian Review43 (1984): 231–59; Richard
Hellie,The Economy and Material Culture of Russia, 1600– 1725 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999); Janet M. Hartley,Russia, 1762–1825: Military Power, the State,
and the People(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008).
An English translation of the Emancipation Decree of the nobility in 1762, the Organic
Law of 1775, and the 1785 Charter to Nobility are in Vol. 1 of Paul Dukes,Russia under
Catherine the Great, 2 vols. (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1977). On
the cumulative tax burden on peasant households, see Robert E. Jones,Bread upon the
Waters: The St. Petersburg Grain Trade and the Russian Economy, 1703– 1811 (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013).
Classics in Russian on the bureaucracy by Pisarkova and Demidova (see Chapter 9) are
joined by S. M. Troitskii,Russkii absoliutizm i dvorianstvo v XVIII V.: Formirovanie
biurokratii(Moscow: Nauka, 1974).314 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801