308 The Military Selllements(mining, road transport) were run on military lines and with much assistance
by army personnel. Large areas of the empire, notably sensitive border regions
that had recently been annexed and were populated largely by ethnic min-
orities, were placed under what was essentially a system of military govern-
ment. The following summary remarks can do only partial justice to a large
topic.57
We may concentrate on local government, since in a vast empire with poor
communications it was the district (uyezd) and provincial (guberniya)
authorities that were most likely to come into contact with the tsar's subjects.
Significantly, it was precisely such officials, rather than those at the centre,
who tended to have military backgrounds and to approach their civil tasks in
an unimaginatively mechanistic or disciplinarian spirit. Only gradually were
they superseded by men with a broader education and outlook.
Peter I's successors relaxed his unduly coercive and militarized system of
provincial government. In 1727 /8 they also abolished, ostensibly on grounds of
expense, the provintsiya as an intermediate level of local administration, and
from then until 1775 rural Russia was ruled much as it had been in the seven-
teenth century. In the district the chief figure once again became the voivode
or commander. He had broad police, fiscal, and judicial powers. These were
not clearly distinguished from those of his superior, the governor (guber-
nator), so that neither the latter nor the officials of the procuracy could ensure
that his actions conformed to the law, or even to the central authorities'
wishes. The voivodes had a well-deserved reputation for corrupt practices;
they were grossly underpaid and as before were tacitly expected to 'feed'
themselves at the inhabitants' expense.^58
In our context the important point is that eighteenth-century voivodes were
almost invariably former staff officers (usually colonels).^59 They executed
their functions with the aid of the garrison troops stationed in their district
(which they commanded). Soldiers were used to quell minor disorders, put
down banditry, catch fugitive peasants, enforce collection of taxes (especially
arrears), and so on. In 1727 military officers were removed from poll-tax col-
lection, but this experiment lasted only five years; thereafter two to three
officers would normally be detailed for such work at the provincial, and one at
l^7 De.,pite the Soviet taboo on study of Imperial Russian militarism, pioneering work has been
done on the bureaucracy by S. M. Troibky and other~ which sheds light on our subject. Still more
useful is the contribution made by several Western students of the civil service, notably W. McK.
Pintner, H.-J. Torke, R. Wortman, and J.P. LeDonne. None of these scholars, however, has yet
tackled the military aspect per se and its importance is generally underrated. Quantified studies of
the civil service rest on analysi~ of career records (for11111/yumye .1pisk1), and in the absence of
similar data for officers the following survey is necessarily somewhat impressionistic.
5H The classic study is Yu. V. Got"yc, /storiya oblastno~o upruvle11iya v Rossii ot Petra I do
Yekateri11y II, 2 vob., Mo'>cow/Moscow and Leningrad, 1913-41, who provides numerous
examples; see esp. i. 86-9, 107-9. For the first moves: Vyazemsky, Verkhovnyy taynyy sovet,
pp. 339-42.
59 In Siberia, however, he might '>Omctimcs be an illiterate cx-Cossa<.:k or even a former serf-or
so the government complained: PSZ x. 77JO ( 12 Jan. 17.19); Troitsky, Russkiyabsolyutizm, p. 136.