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The Social Characteristics of the Early Nineteenth-Century Russian Bureaucracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Walter M. Pintner
Walter M. Pintner*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Extract

Serious scholarly study of the imperial Russian civil service is almost entirely the product of the past decade, and although several important works have appeared, virtually no quantitative material on the social characteristics of the bureaucracy is available. The imperial government did not publish and probably did not compile statistics on such matters as the social origin, wealth, religion, or education of its civil employees, but the raw data for a partial compilation are available in personnel records (formuliarnie spiski) of individual officials, which are preserved in the Central State Historical Archive in Leningrad.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , September 1970 , pp. 429 - 443
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1970

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References

1. Recent contributions to the study of the imperial civil service before the great reforms include Erik, Amburger, Geschichte der Behordenorganisation Riisslands von Peter dem Grossen bis 1917 (Leiden, 1966)Google Scholar; Demidova, N. F., “Biurokratizatsiia gosudarstvennogo apparata absoliutizma v XVII-XVIII vv.,” in Absoliutizm v Rossii (XVIIXVIII w.) [a Festschrift for B. B. Kafengauz] (Moscow, 1964), pp. 206–42 Google Scholar; James E. Hassell, “The Vicissitudes of Russian Administrative Reform : 1762-1801” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1967); Robert E. Jones, “The Russian Gentry and the Provincial Reform of 1775” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1968); Marc, Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia : The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (New York, 1966)Google Scholar, and his earlier articles cited therein; Shtrange, M. M., Demokraticheskaia intelligentsiia Rossii v XVIII veke (Moscow, 1965)Google Scholar; Torke, Hans-Joachim, “Das russische Beamtentum in der ersten Halfte des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Forschungen zur osteurop'dischen Geschichte, vol. 13 (Berlin, 1967)Google Scholar; and Troitsky, S. M., “Materialy perepisi chinovnikov v 1754-1756 gg. kak istochnik po sotsial'no-politicheskoi i kul'turnoi istorii Rossii XVIII v.,” Arkheograficheskii eshegodnik sa 1967 god (Moscow, 1969), pp. 132–48 Google Scholar. The institutional framework of imperial personnel records is described in Z. I., Malkova and M. A., Pliukhina, “Dokumenty vyshikh i tsentral'nykh uchrezhdenii XlX-nachala XX v. kak istochnik biograficheskikh svedenii,” Nekotorye voprosy isucheniia istoricheskikh dokumentov XIXnachala XX v. : Sbornik statei (Leningrad, 1967)Google Scholar. For other countries the literature, both quantitative and nonquantitative, is extensive.

2. With the exception of a few files in fond 1, 374, General-prokuror senata, all of the records used are in fond 1, 349 of TsGIA, which contains some twenty-two thousand items apparently put together in the late nineteenth century. Only a small portion of the individual dela are complete volumes for a single agency and therefore useful for this study. The author is deeply grateful to the staff of the TsGIA for its help in locating the material needed, a difficult task in the absence of a detailed inventory. The volumes of service records were originally produced in response to legislation requiring each government agency to provide the Heraldry Office with lists of its employees. Starting in 1788 the lists were supposed to include all officials in the Table of Ranks and were to be filed annually. The amount of information required on each person was periodically increased over the years. By the mid-nineteenth century the record of a senior official could easily fill a thirty-page booklet. Legislation on this subject is summarized in the Svod zakonov (1842), vol. 3, bk. 1, sec. 6, chap. 4, statutes 1408-17, pp. 254-55. The major laws are as follows : Polnoe sobranie zakonov, I, 1764, no. 12, 030; 1771, no. 13, 690; 1788, no. 16, 641; 1794, no. 17, 216; 1798, no. 18, 440; 1813, no. 25, 381; 1817, no. 27, 116; II, 1834, no. 7, 595.

3. I used most of the complete files that were located for me in TsGlA, with the exception of some specialized technical agencies. No files from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Army, or Navy were located. Because of the inadequate inventory it is impossible to be sure what remains in the fond unexamined. A few of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century files in the Senate are not complete departments but lists of men who had served a specified number of years and were therefore eligible for promotioa

4. Jones, “Russian Gentry,” pp. 44-47.

5. Throughout this discussion the fourteen levels in the Table of Ranks will be grouped as follows : “top” one to five, “upper middle” six to eight, “lower middle” nine to eleven, “bottom” twelve to fourteen. Rank one was held only by the minister of foreign affairs and rank two by a small number of the most senior statesmen. The “top” category is thus actually ranks three to five (privy councilor, actual state councilor, and state councilor). Rank eleven was never used in this period and rank thirteen only rarely. The usual promotion pattern was fourteen, twelve, ten, and thence up by single steps.

6. Below the lowest (fourteenth) rank there were at least four commonly used titles (in ascending order) : pistsar, kopeeist, podkantsliarist, and kantsliarist. Many men held all of these before reaching the first rung of the Table of Ranks, and ended their careers at a very low level.

7. Of this group 34 percent started at ranks fourteen, thirteen, or twelve, 42 percent at rank ten, and 24 percent at rank nine.

8. The early stages of this process are discussed by James Flynn, T, “The Universities, the Gentry, and the Russian Imperial Services, 1815-1825,” Canadian Slavic Studies, 2, no. 4 (Winter 1968) : 486–503.Google Scholar

9. As in Gogol's Dead Souls and Alexander Herzen's account of his residence in Viatka, Byloe i dumy, pt. 2, chaps. 25 and 26.

10. The service records indicate the social status or occupation of the official's father. For convenience, “noble,” “churchman,” or “service man” shall be used to mean “noble's son,” “son of a priest or other church worker,” and “son of a junior military officer or civil servant.“

11. Until the 1830s achievement of even the fourteenth rank in military service entitled a man to hereditary noble status (the eighth rank was required in civil service). However, only children born after the achievement of the required rank were ennobled. The large group of bureaucrats who were is oberofitsersikh detei suggests that there was a substantial group of noncommissioned officers who reached the lowest commissioned rank so late in life that most or all of their children had already been born and therefore did not benefit from their father's eventual ennoblement

12. They reach a maximum of 14 percent in the files for various Senate departments for 1798-1806. By chance, these files include that most famous of all priest's sons, Michael Speransky. See TsGIA, fond 1, 374, opis’ 2, delo 1, 397, list 798.

13. Despite the extensive detail in the service records, place of birth is not one of the items recorded. Individuals are classified as foreign if they or their fathers are so listed under the social origin category. There is probably some undercounting, but not enough to make a substantial difference.

14. They can be readily identified, because religion (Orthodox, Lutheran, and Catholic) was consistently reported (in the mid-nineteenth century). Individuals with German (or Polish) names but Orthodox religion are not included with the Lutheran and Catholic groups on the assumption that conversion implied a substantial degree of cultural Russianization. Only two other religions were reported, the Armenian church (three individuals) and the Presbyterian, represented by one man of “Persian noble birth.” Non-Christians were excluded from state service.

15. For example, of ten top-level officials in the Ministry of Interior, Economic Department, four were Lutherans, the highest proportion in any agency. The Roman Catholic— presumably largely Polish—group was not strikingly different from the Orthodox in any major respect.

16. The figures on serf ownership include male peasants owned by the official, his parents, and his wife. Uninhabited land and urban houses were also reported on the records but they add little to the picture presented by serf ownership. House ownership was fairly common in the provinces (about one-third of the officials had houses) but much less common in St. Petersburg, where only 15 percent owned houses. The serf-owning noble was the least likely of all groups to own an urban house.

17. Of course, some of these men could have come from families who had recently liquidated their serfholdings, but it seems unlikely that the bulk of such a large group would fall in that category.

18. There is some indication that within the noble group in provincial civil service, between the beginning and the middle of the nineteenth century, there was an increase in the proportion of men without serfs. During this same period the percentage of nobles in provincial service markedly declined. At both the beginning and the middle of the century there was a larger proportion of small serfholders (one to one hundred serfs) in the provinces than in the central agencies. What probably happened was that the retired military officers with large estates who were active in provincial service at the beginning of the century were no longer involved by the 1850s, and the nobility was more and more attracted to service in central agencies.

19. “Higher education” is defined as at least one year's study at a university or equivalent institution such as the Institute of Transport Engineers. Virtually all higher education was obtained in Russian institutions; only two individuals studied abroad. “Elite education” includes the Corps of Pages school, the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceé, and one or two provincial schools designated as “lyceés.” Of the total of seventy men with “elite” education, twenty-four attended the provincial lycees. A graduate of one of these elite institutions, particularly the two in St. Petersburg, had status and advantage that exceeded that of a university graduate, even though these schools were formally secondary schools, not institutions of higher learning. Data on education in the mid-nineteenth century is less complete than other important attributes. Information is available on 1, 525 officials. By agency it is reasonably complete for the Ministry of the Interior (Department of General Affairs), the Ministry of Justice, the various Senate departments, the Chancellery of the Ministry of State Domains, all of the Vladimir agencies, and interior and justice offices in Voronezh. Other agencies are represented either partially or not at all. It is reasonable to assume that those who did not list their education were less well educated in most cases than those who did. Thus the percentage with “home” or “elementary” as the highest level reached would rise if full data were available.

20. All data on education refers to the most advanced level reached. Thus home education is clearly an inferior form of training in most cases. The majority of the wealthy who had tutors at home presumably attended some outside institutions at a later stage of their education.

21. Jones, “Russian Gentry,” pp. 66-69.

22. Flynn, “The Universities, the Gentry, and Russian Imperial Service,” pp. 492-96; Torke, “Das russische Beamtentum,” pp. 168-69.

23. Even among the most elite group of nobles that can be identified, those who had attended the Tsarskoe Selo Lycee or the school of the Imperial Corps of Pages, 48 percent had no serfs at all in their families.

24. The clergy and other employees of the Orthodox Church were, of course, not strictly government workers, but in view of the close ties between state and church it seems reasonable to regard them as a specialized branch of state service. Whether or not this view is accepted, the system was a closed one that included the churchmen as a component.