gentry joined bureaucratic work. In the north, state peasants staffed offices; on the
frontiers, provincial gentry and contract servitors (Cossacks, musketeers) took these
roles. A 1707 survey of undersecretaries in the Chancery of Land Affairs demon-
strates this social mobility: 31 percent were from hereditary chancery families,
30 percent from clerical families, 14 percent from provincial gentry, 7 percent were
slaves, 6 percent were taxed townsmen, 4 percent were from families of artisans
employed at the court, 3 percent were contract servitors, and 2 percent were foreign
prisoners of war.
As noted in Chapter 7, in addition to salary bureaucrats were supported by local
communities with housing,fixed deliveries of food, and gifts (opening a slippery
slope to corruption). Communities also supported other officials sent to serve in the
provinces—governors, holders of salt and alcohol monopolies, short-term census
takers, and the like—with similar upkeep, called feeding (kormlenie). This system
endured through the eighteenth century, and marked another way in which the
state supported army and administration on the cheap.
In many early modern states alongside military-based nobilities there developed a
powerful and socially prestigious civil service elite composed of lawyers, notaries,
and other educated professionals (as in the Frenchnoblesse de robe). This did not
happen in Muscovy. Relatively few undersecretaries advanced to the rank of
secretary (d’iak), and that social status never found equal footing with military
men. Quite the contrary. Military men penetrated into chancery service at the
center, taking leadership positions in most of the chanceries, except for those few
that required such specialized knowledge—the Military Service and Foreign Affairs
chanceries, as well as the tsar’s Privy Chancery—that they continued to be led by
trained bureaucrats. By the 1680s almost half of thedi’akiin central offices came
from the conciliar elite or Moscow list, and early in the eighteenth century the
proportion rose to 60 percent. But men from these military backgrounds still
disdained chancery service per se, shunned the lowly role of undersecretary, and
played their roles as leaders, not bureaucratic experts. Civil service continued to be
undervalued.
LESSER MILITARY SERVITORS
The state was constantly challenged to recruit men to fulfill new needs, but to do so
in a way that did not dilute the status of the highest and that was affordable in a
state with limited resources. There were simply not the resources to give grants of
land and serfs to all the military men the state needed. As military reform created
demand for different sorts of units (artillery, musketeers, garrison Cossacks, new
model infantry), the state developed a status that fell between the landed elite and
the taxpayers. Men in these ranks were free of tax, but they could not own serfs or
land. They were compensated with cash salaries, grain requisitions, and weaponry.
Some also received land awarded collectively to their community (musketeers,
Cossacks) that they would farm on the side to support themselves; they were also
allowed to trade in the petty retail market. This model was expedient and
216 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801