Russia under the Old regime

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officials who had logged a prescribed number of years in one rank. In this manner, the bureaucracy secured a stranglehold on the apparatus of state, and through it, on the inhabitants of state and crown lands for whose administration it was responsible. Already at the time keen observers noted the disastrous effects of such a system. Among them was a political imigri from one of the most aristocratic houses, Prince Peter Dolgorukov. Writing on the eve of the Great Reforms of the 1860s, he urged the abolition of chin as a prerequisite to any meaningful improvement of conditions in Russia:

The Emperor of All the Russias, the would-be Autocrat, finds himself utterly deprived of the right, claimed not only by all constitutional monarchs but even by presidents of republics, the right to choose his functionaries. In Russia, to hold a position, it is necessary to hold a corresponding rank. If the sovereign finds an honest individual, capable of performing a certain function but lacking in the rank required for the position he cannot appoint him. This institution is the most powerful guarantee given to nullity, to servility, to corruption. Hence, of all reforms it is the one most antipathetic to the all-powerful bureaucracy. Of all the abuses, chin is the most difficult to uproot because it has so many and such influential defenders. In Russia, merit is a great obstacle to a man's advancement... In all civilized countries, a person who has devoted ten or fifteen years of his life to study, to travels, to agriculture, industry and commerce, a person who has gained specialized knowledge and is well acquainted with his country, such a person will come to occupy a public post where he is able to perform useful work. In Russia, it is quite different. A man who has left the service for several years cannot rejoin it except at a rank which he had held at the moment of his resignation. Someone who has never been in the service cannot enter it except at the lowest rank, regardless of his age and merit, while a scoundrel, a semi-moron, provided that he never leaves the service, will end up by attaining the highest ranks. From this derives the singular anomaly that in the midst of the Russian nation, so intelligent, endowed with such admirable qualities, where the spirit, so to speak, roams the villages, the administration is distinguished by an ineptitude, which, invariably increasing as one approaches the highest ranks, ends up in certain high administrative echelons by degenerating into veritable semi-idiodsm.*13 The judgement, for all its impassioned harshness, cannot be faulted in

* This system of automatic promotion through seniority later penetrated the armed forces, and contributed to the lowering of the quality of the officer staff. Solzhenitsyn blames on it the Russian disasters in the First World War: 'The Russian army perished because of seniority - the supreme indisputable reckoning and the order of promoting by seniority. As long as you did not make a slip, as long as you did not offend your superiors, the very march of time would bring you at the appropriate time the desired next chin, and with the chin, the assignment. And everybody so accepted this wisdom... that colonel hurried to learn of another colonel and general of another general not where he had fought but from what year, month, and day dated his seniority, i.e. at what stage of promotion he was towards his next appointment': August 1914, Chapter 12.