Russian and local norms to form the foundations of an Imperial law in certain
important areas such as property and family law.”The case was similar for Grand
Duchy and Right Bank Ukraine lands annexed in the last partitions; in the six new
gubernii, local courts continued to use law and language from the Commonwealth.
In Livland, Estland, and Vyborg, by introducing this reform and the 1785 Charter
to the Nobility Catherine II intended to undermine the Junker nobility and open
the door for non-German nobles to serve in local government and for Russian
language and law to be used at the gubernia level. But at the local level German and
Swedish law and language endured.
BUREAUCRATIC PERSONNEL
L. F. Pisar’kova estimates that at the end of Catherine’s reign, there were more than
3,700 mostly new offices, particularly at the lower level (compared to Peter I’stotalof
about 700 offices), requiring about 10,000 to 11,000 men at Table of Rank status,
about 11,000 to 12,000 selected estate representatives, about 19,000 chancery
workers, and several thousand lesser employees. In practice she found that in 1786
at the gubernia level, 35 percent of the positions went to members of the nobility,
26 percent to townsmen, and 39 percent to peasants, and at the district level,
33 percent to nobles, 42 percent to townsmen, and 25 percent to peasants.
Chancery positions werefilled by seminarians and priests’sons, other non-taxed
people, and even taxed people despite prohibitions on this. A particularly striking
example was Catherine’s advisor, Jacob Sievers, who, as governor-general of Nov-
gorod and Tver’, openly hired taxed people for chancery work. This happened
elsewhere and the state, in Pisar’kova’s words,“turned a blind eye.”All in all,
finding qualified people was difficult. Pisar’kova notes drily that in the seventeenth
century it would have been impossible tofind an illiterate bureaucrat (save for the
governor), but that in the eighteenth century, it was common.
John LeDonne calls the nobility the big winner in these reforms, evidence of its
triumph as a“ruling class.”Local nobility selected from their own number a huge
array of new offices: ten representatives to the higher Land Court and two members
of the Equity Courts; two district judges, two police land captains, two represen-
tatives to the lower land courts. Noblemenfilled the higher appointed offices as
well, and the class also acquired new positions in the 1785 Charter to the Nobility
for those territories with sufficient residents of this estate. Marshalls of the Nobility
were elected at the district and gubernia levels; the gubernia Marshal was affirmed
by and reported directly to the ruler. Local nobles oversaw heraldic record keeping
for the noble estate and maintained public works projects.
The reform’s emphasis on locally selected representatives evidenced Catherine’s
vision of more engaged government, but it also exacerbated the dearth of profes-
sionalism in the civil service. The quality of bureaucrats rose only as much as the
nobility possessed appropriate education and experience. As we have seen, at the
local level retired military men predominated and even appointees to higher offices
were primarily (80 percent) retired military. But the eighteenth-century nobility
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