Remuneration consisted of salary, expense accounts, and living quarters or a suitable housing allowance. Salary differentials were enormous, officials in Rank 1 receiving over thirty times the pay of those in Rank 14. Few officials held landed properties or had other sources of private income: in 1902, even of those in the four topmost ranks, only one in three owned land.29 On leaving the service, like faithful domestics high officials usually were given monetary rewards by the Tsar; thus, Minister of Justice Nicholas Maklakov received on his retirement 20,000 rubles, Minister of the Interior Peter Durnovo, 50,000, and the Court’s favorite, Prime Minister Ivan Goremykin, 100,000.30 For distinguished service there were also other rewards, notably medals of various designations, strictly graded in order of importance and precedence: their description occupies no fewer than 869 paragraphs in the Service Regulations.
The civil service was thus a closed caste, separated from the rest of society, access to which and promotion within which were strictly regulated on the basis of social origin, education, and seniority. This caste—225,000 strong in 1900, including members of the police and the gendarmerie—was a personal staff of the monarch subject neither to the laws of the land nor to any external supervision. It served at the monarch’s pleasure. The institution was a carryover from medieval times, before the emergence of a distinction between the person of the ruler and the institution of the state.
The legacy of patrimonialism was also apparent in the structure and operations of the principal executive agencies, the ministries.
In the medieval principalities of northern Russia, where political authority was exercised by virtue of ownership, administration had been divided into puti or “paths.” Arranged geographically (territorially) rather than functionally, they served first and foremost the purposes of economic exploitation. The men in charge were stewards responsible for a given area. They had no corporate existence and they did not act as a body. Such practices survived in Russia’s administrative structure after the introduction of ministries in 1802. The administration of Russia in the nineteenth century was organized in a vertical manner, with almost no lateral links, the lines of command converging at the top, in the person of the monarch. This arrangement hampered cooperation among the ministries and hence the formulation of a coherent national policy, but it had the advantage of preventing the officialdom from acting in concert and thereby impinging on the Tsar’s autocratic prerogatives.
With one exception, the Ministry of the Interior, Russian ministries did not much differ in structure and operation from the corresponding institutions in the West. But in contrast to the West, Russia had no cabinet and no Prime Minister. There existed a so-called Committee of Ministers, which also included heads of other central agencies, with a casually appointed chairman, but it was a body with no authority. Attempts to give Russia a regular cabinet in the 1860s and again in the 1880s had no success because the Court feared such a body would weaken its authority. The very idea of a cabinet or even ministerial consultations was regarded as subversive. “Unlike other absolute monarchs,” a French observer wrote in the 1880s,
the Russian emperors have never had prime ministers. From instinct or system, in order to retain, in deed as well as in theory, their authority unimpaired, they all undertake to be their own prime ministers.… Russia, nevertheless, does feel the need of a homogeneous cabinet, as a means toward that unity of direction in which the government is so deficient … such a council, with or without official premiership, would of necessity modify all the relations between sovereign and ministers, as its members, collectively responsible, would be fatally led to assume toward the Emperor a more independent attitude. They would gradually feel responsible before society and public opinion no less than before the sovereign, who might thus slip into the part of a constitutional monarch, without the official restraint of either constitution or parliament. In fact, this reform, seemingly unassuming, would almost amount to a revolution …
31
This, as we have seen, is precisely what happened in 1905, when, forced to present a united front against the newly created Duma, the monarchy consented to the creation of a Council of Ministers under a chairman who was Prime Minister in all but name. But even though it had to make this concession, it never reconciled itself to this arrangement and in a few years reverted to the old practices.
Until 1905, the ministers reported directly to the Tsar and received from him their instructions: they had no agreed-upon common policy. Such a practice inevitably gave rise to confusion, since the Tsar was bound to issue them incompatible or even contradictory orders. Under this arrangement, each minister sought the Tsar’s ear for his own ends, without regard for the concerns of his colleagues. Foreign policy was made by at least three ministries (Foreign Affairs, Finance, and War), while domestic matters were caught up in constant feuding between the ministries of the Interior and Finance. Essentially, each ministry acted as it saw fit, subject to the Tsar’s personal approval. “Being responsible to the Emperor alone, and that only individually, [the ministers] really [were] mere secretaries, almost private clerks of the Tsar.”32
Russian ministers and their associates had an even lower opinion of their status. Their diaries and private communications are filled with complaints about the medieval arrangement under which the country was treated as the Emperor’s private domain and they as his stewards. They were bitter about the way they were treated, about the peremptory manner with which the Tsar gave them instructions, and angry over the absence of regular ministerial consultations. Peter Valuev, Minister of the Interior under Alexander II, referred to Russia’s ministers as the “sovereign’s servants”—les grandes domestiques—rather than les grandes serviteurs de l’état, whose relationship to him was “Asiatic, semi-slave or primitively patriarchal.”33 It is this situation that one official had in mind when he said that Russia had “departments” (vedomstva) but no government (pravitel’stvo).34 Such was the price Russia had to pay for maintaining so late into the modern era the regime of patrimonial monarchy.
Within their bureaus, ministers enjoyed immense power: one Russian compared them to Ottoman pashas lording over their pachalícs.35 Each had in the provinces a network of functionaries responsible only to him and not to the provincial governors.36 They could hire and fire employees at will. They also had great latitude in disposing of the moneys budgeted for their ministries.
Because Russia was so visibly run by a bureaucracy, it is possible to overestimate the extent to which the country was bureaucratized. The Russian civil service was unusually top-heavy, with a high proportion of the bureaucracy located in St. Petersburg. The Empire was relatively under-administered.37
Such neglect of the provincial administration was due to fiscal constraints: Russia simply could not afford the expenditures required to administer properly a country of such distances and poor communications. After Peter I had taken Livonia from Sweden he discovered that the Swedes had spent as much on running this small province as his government allowed for administering the whole Empire: this meant that any hope of adopting Swedish administrative models had to be given up.38 In 1763, proportionate to her territory, Prussia had nearly one hundred times as many officials as Russia.39 Around 1900, the proportion of administrators in relation to the population in Russia was almost one-third that of France and one-half that of Germany.40 Because of inadequate resources, Russians adopted a very simple model of administration. They placed in each province a powerful governor, with broad discretionary powers, and deployed across the country military garrisons to help him preserve order. There were also small contingents of police and gendarmerie, and agents of such ministries as Finance, Justice, and War. But essentially the countryside was self-administering through the institution of the peasant commune, which was held collectively responsible for the payment of taxes and delivery of military recruits, and the canton or volost’, which performed simple judiciary and administrative functions. None of this cost the Treasury anything.
> This meant, however, that the authority of the Imperial Government, for all practical purposes, stopped at the eighty-nine provincial capitals where the governors and their staff had offices: below that level yawned an administrative vacuum. Neither the district (uezd), into which provinces were subdivided, nor the volost’, the principal unit of rural administration, had any regular agents of the central government: these showed up periodically, on forays as it were, to carry out specific missions, usually to collect tax arrears, and then disappeared from view. Indeed, the volost’ itself was not a territorial but a social entity, since it included only peasants and not the members of the other estates living within its territory. Some intellectuals and officials, aware of the anomaly of such an arrangement, urged the government to introduce as the lowest administrative unit an all-estate volost’, but this advice was ignored because the authorities preferred that the peasants remain isolated and self-governing. In the words of one experienced bureaucrat, there was in Russia “no common unifying authority comparable to the German Landrat or French souspréfet, capable of coordinating policies in the interest of central authority”:
There was no apparatus of local administration but only officials of various [central] agencies: financial, judiciary, forestry, postal, etc., who were unconnected, or else the executive organs of various types of self-government, dependent more on the voters than on the government. There was no common binding authority.
41
The absence of government agents in the small towns and the countryside would make itself painfully felt after 1905, when, attempting to win majorities in the new parliament, the monarchy found it had no mechanism to mobilize potential supporters against the ubiquitous liberal and radical intelligentsia.
In terms of its attitudes and programs, the Imperial bureaucracy can be divided into three groups.
The majority of chinovniki, especially those serving in the provinces, were careerists pure and simple, who joined to benefit from the prestige and privileges that went with government service. Monarchists in 1916, in 1917 most of them would place themselves at the disposal first of the Provisional Government and then of the Bolsheviks. They usually supplemented their meager salaries with bribes and tips.* It is difficult to speak of their having an ideology or mentality, save to say that they saw themselves as responsible for protecting the state from “society.”*
There was a wide gulf separating the provincial officialdom from that ensconced in the ministries and chanceries of St. Petersburg. One historian notes that “men who started work in the provinces rarely moved to central agencies. In the provinces at mid-century, only at the highest levels do we find any significant group that had started work in the center.”42 This situation did not change in the final decades of the old regime.
It is in the higher ranks of St. Petersburg officialdom that one can discover something resembling an ideology. Before the Revolution this was not considered a subject worthy of investigation, since the intelligentsia considered it to be obvious that Russia’s bureaucrats were a herd of self-seeking dunderheads. Events were to prove the intelligentsia a poor judge in such matters: for on coming to power in February 1917, it allowed the state and society to disintegrate in a matter of two or at most four months—the same state and society that the bureaucrats had somehow managed to keep intact for centuries. Clearly, they knew something that the intelligentsia did not. The Menshevik Theodore Dan had the honesty to admit in retrospect that “the extreme reactionaries of the tsarist bureaucracy much sooner and better grasped the driving forces and the social content of [the] coming revolution than all the Russian ‘professional revolutionaries,’ and, in particular, the Russian Marxist Social Democrats.”43
Theodore Taranovsky distinguishes in the upper layers of the Russian bureaucracy toward the end of the nineteenth century two principal groups: one which espoused the ideal of a police state (Polizeistaat), the other which wanted a state based on the rule of law (Rechtsstaat).44 They agreed that Russia required firm autocratic authority, but the former stressed repression, while the latter preferred to bring society into some kind of limited partnership. Their differing programs derived from different perceptions of the population: the right-wing conservatives saw it as a savage mob while the liberal-conservatives felt it could be nurtured and taught citizenship. By and large, the more liberal bureaucrats were better educated, many of them having completed legal and other professional training. The conservatives tended to be administrative “generalists,” lacking in professional skills or higher education.
The advocates of the police state saw Russia as under permanent siege by her inhabitants, believed ready to pounce and tear the country apart at the slightest hint that government authority was weakening. To prevent this from happening, Russia had to be ruled with an iron hand. They were not troubled by charges of arbitrary behavior: that which their opponents labeled “arbitrariness” (proizvol) they saw as the correct technique for managing a country as spacious and undisciplined as Russia. Law to them was an instrument of administration rather than a higher principle binding both rulers and ruled, in the spirit of the police chief of Nicholas I who hearing complaints that his agents were acting unlawfully retorted, “Laws are written for subjects, not for the government!”45 They treated all criticism of the bureaucracy by “society” as camouflage to disguise the critics’ political ambitions.
The police state, as they conceived it, was an eighteenth-century mechanism, managed by professionals, which provided minimum opportunity for the free play of political, social, and economic forces. They objected to every institution and procedure that disturbed administrative unity and the smooth functioning of the bureaucratic chain of command, such as the independent judiciary and organs of local self-government. To the extent that such institutions had a right to exist, they had to be subordinated to the bureaucracy. They opposed glasnost’ on the grounds that revelations of dissent within the government or admission of failure would undermine its most precious asset, namely prestige. Centralized bureaucratic administration was in their view unavoidable until such time as “the population’s general level has risen, until there [are] in the provinces enough genuine public servants, until society [has developed] intelligent attitudes toward the nation’s problems.”46 Officials of this school pleaded for time without indicating how, under their strict tutelage, the population could ever develop “intelligent attitudes toward the nation’s problems.” They wanted to preserve the existing social caste system, with the leading role assigned to the landed gentry and the peasantry kept isolated. Their headquarters were in the Ministry of the Interior.
The bureaucratic conservatives and their supporters on the extreme right wing of public opinion relied heavily on anti-Semitism as an instrument of politics. Although modern anti-Semitism originated in France and Germany, it is in Russia that it first entered official ideology. To the conservatives, Jews presented the single most dangerous threat to that political and social stability which they regarded as the main concern of state policy. Jews destabilized Russia in two capacities: as revolutionaries and as capitalists. The police authorities were convinced that they formed the principal element in the revolutionary parties: Nicholas II only echoed them when he claimed that nine-tenths of the revolutionaries and socialists in Russia were Jews.47 But Jews also upset the socioeconomic equilibrium of Russia by introducing free market operations. The obvious contradiction in the claim that the members of the same religious group were both beneficiaries and mortal foes of capitalism was resolved in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a scurrilous forgery concocted at the end of the nineteenth century by the tsarist police, which claimed that in the pursuit of their alleged historic mission—the destruction of Christianity and world domination—Jews resorted to every conceivable means, even to the extent of organizing pogroms against themselves. The monarchists, “lacking a monarch who could have embodied the autocratic principle with vigor and infectious conviction, … had only anti-Semitism and the notion
of universal evil, with the Jews as its carriers, to make sense of a world which was escaping their control and intellectual grasp.”48 The infamous Beilis case, prosecuted in the courts in 1913, in which an obscure Kievan Jew was charged with the “ritual murder” of a Ukrainian youth, was the culmination of this desperate search for a scapegoat.* Although (with some minor exceptions) the Imperial Government did not encourage, let alone instigate, anti-Jewish pogroms, its unconcealed policy of discrimination against Jews and tolerance of anti-Semitic propaganda conveyed to the population the impression that it approved of them.
Liberal-conservative bureaucrats rejected such a system as hopelessly out of date. In their judgment, a country as complex and dynamic as modern Russia could not be governed by bureaucratic whim, in disregard of the law and without popular involvement. The liberal-conservative trend in the bureaucracy first emerged, in the 1860s, at the time of the Great Reforms. It was reinforced by the emancipation of serfs in 1861, which deprived the monarchy of the services of 100,000 serf-owning landlords who had previously performed on its behalf, free of charge, a variety of administrative functions in the countryside. At that time P. A. Valuev was of the opinion that
already now, in the conduct of administration, the Sovereign is Autocrat in name only; that is, autocracy manifests itself only in bursts, in flashes. But given the growing complexity of the administrative mechanism, the more important questions of government elude, and must of necessity elude, the Sovereign’s immediate attention.
49
Which was to say that the sheer mass of administrative business required authority to be more widely distributed.
The liberal-conservatives conceded that the Tsar had to remain the exclusive source of laws, but they insisted that laws, once promulgated, were binding on all the officials included. This was the distinguishing quality of the Rechtsstaat. They also had a higher opinion of Russia’s capacity for self-government and wanted the educated part of the population to be brought into participation in a consultative capacity. They disliked the estate system as an anachronism, preferring that the country move toward common and egalitarian citizenship. They attached particular importance to the gradual elimination of the special status and isolation of the peasantry. The liberal-conservatives had their bastions in the Council of State (which framed laws), the Senate (the highest court of appeals), and the ministries of Justice and Finance.50
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