to friends and favorites, and state expenditures vastly outstripped revenue. Admin-
istrative reform added new costs: in 1763 and 1764 salaries for civil servants, central
and local, were instituted or raised and pensions for nobles were increased. With the
many-fold multiplication of salaried offices in the 1775 administrative reform,
expenditures on the state apparatus rose by 2.4 times from 1764 to 1782. In
1785, about 36 percent of state expenditures went to the army, navy, and garrison
troops, 36 percent to civil administration, and 10 percent to the imperial court. All
this expenditure was beyond the budget: as noted in Chapter 14, Walter Pintner
found military expenditures alone exceeding all net income by 1791 and, as Janet
Hartley argued, Russian rulers were so consumed with warfare from Peter’s time
through the Napoleonic period that theirfiscal and administrative reforms could
hardly be systematic.
Until Catherine II’s reign, the state’sfinancial apparatus was uncoordinated. Peter
I’s last era of reforms had left a simple central administration of about ten Colleges,
the Synod, and relatively few other central offices, topped by the Senate. But after his
death the central administration became top-heavy: overfifty different agencies were
empowered to collect taxes by 1760, for example. Separate Colleges collected
income from vodka and salt sales, customs, and trade; military Colleges collected
income from the poll tax since it was dedicated to the army; separate offices managed
income and expenditures of the court and its lands. Each such agency operated with
its own estimated budget; there was no Finance Ministry, Finance Minister, or
empire-wide oversight. When Peter III in 1761 and Catherine II in 1762 each came
into power and requested empire-wide budgetary reports, local and central offices
were unable to provide them. Catherine II focused immediately on the problem of
information gathering, insisting in 1763 that tables of organization and budgets
be created for civil administration and in 1765 for military. Realistic accounts
of expenditures were compiled in 1769, 1773, 1776–7, and annually after that,
and from 1780 a unified annual national budget (civilian, army, navy, and court
expenses) was produced.
Catherine understood the need to create a centralized hierarchy offiscal institu-
tions and afiscally expert corps of bureaucrats who could carry out collections,
budgeting, and auditing. Throughout her reign but particularly in the window of
time between wars (1774–87), she set to major reforms. In 1773 she centralized
statefinances in the Expedition (i.e. Office) of State Revenues; by 1780 it was the
state’s major Treasury organization, divided into departments for income, expend-
iture, audits, and arrears, all subordinate to the procurator-general. She unified the
empire’sfiscal administration in reforms of 1775–80s, transferring mostfiscal
duties to the gubernii; central agencies were gradually phased out (those that
remained withfiscal responsibilities—primarily having to do with the Court and
Military—were put under the procurator-general’s oversight). The key institution
in each gubernia and all districts was the Treasury, which was made directly
responsible to the procuracy-general in St. Petersburg to forestall abuses of the
old system of governors. Surveillance in the form of information gathering—
population, maps, harvests, food prices, and the like—became the central task of
the new institutions. District Treasury offices kept tax rolls and population statistics
Fiscal Policy and Trade 317