Russia under the Old regime

THE PARTIAL DISMANTLING OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE

been true of the holders of the four uppermost ranks, the generalitet, who, as had been noted, in 1730 nearly to a man descended from titled Muscovite servitors. Under Peter's successors merit requirements were further lowered. For example, to encourage education, Elizabeth allowed graduates of institutions of higher learning to bypass the lowest ranks. Still, at any rate as far as the lower grades of the bureaucracy were concerned, the Petrine principle held, and the average official had to wait for a suitable vacancy before being promoted to the next higher rank.

This principle was abandoned in the early years of Catherine 11, at almost the same time that the monarchy surrendered the principle of compulsory state service and much for the same reason, namely to win support. On 19 April 1764, Catherine issued instructions that all high civil servants who had held rank uninterruptedly for seven or more years were to be promoted to the next higher rank.* Three years later, the Senate asked the Empress what she wished done about those officials who had fallen short of the seven-year requirement by a few months and remained frozen in their rank while their more fortunate colleagues had moved up a notch. Catherine gave a casual reply destined to have the most weighty consequences; she ordered the general and automatic promotion of all civil servants who had served for a minimum of seven years in a given rank. This decision, dated 13 September 1767, set a precedent which was faithfully followed; henceforth it became the rule in Russia to promote civil servants on the basis of seniority without much regard to personal qualifications, attainments, or vacancies. Later on, Catherine's son, Paul, lowered the waiting period for most ranks to three or four years; and since it had become customary to bypass Ranks 13 and 11 anyway, a civil servant now had reasonable assurance that once he had reached the lowest chin and stayed in the service without getting into trouble with his superiors, he would in good time reach the coveted eighth rank and gain for his descendants hereditary dvorianstvo. (It was partly this threat of being flooded with ennobled bureaucrats that influenced Nicholas 1 and Alexander 11 to limit hereditary dvorianstvo to the uppermost five or four ranks; see above, p. 125.) Catherine's policies put the Table of Ranks on its head; instead of rank coming with office, office now came with rank.

The Manifesto of 1762, reinforced by the Charter of 1785, deprived the monarchy of control over the landed estate; the Edict of 1767 deprived it of control of the bureaucracy. The crown henceforth no longer had any choice but to convey up the automatic escalator of promotion

* This order, of utmost importance for the history of imperial Russia, is reproduced neither in the Full Collection of Laws nor in the appropriate volume of the Senate Archive (Senatskii Arkhiv, XIV, St Petersburg, 191 o). No historian seems to have seen it, and it is known only from references.

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