Russia under the Old regime

THE PARTIAL DISMANTLING OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE

its essential charge. It suggests, incidentally, an important cause for the estrangement of Russia's educated classes from the state. Attempts to correct the situation, were, of course, made because every monarch in the nineteenth century wished to regain control over his civil service, so lightheartedly forfeited by Catherine. The most celebrated of these was an order issued by Alexander 1 in 1809 on the advice of M. M. Speranskii, requiring officials to pass examinations before qualifying for promotion to Rank 8, as well as permitting, also by means of examinations, direct advancement from Rank 8 to Rank 5. But this and similar attempts always broke against the solid resistance of the bureaucratic establishment.

From the 1760s onwards a kind of dyarchy was introduced into Russia which until then had been governed in a strictly hierarchical fashion from a single centre. The monarch continued to enjoy unlimited authority in the sphere of foreign policy and the right to dispose of at his pleasure that part of the revenues which actually reached the Treasury. In governing the country, however, he was severely constrained by the power of his one-time servitors - dvoriane and chinovniki. In effect, the population of Russia was turned over to these two groups for exploitation. Their respective areas of competence were fairly well delineated. One historian divides post-Catherinian Russia in two parts, one of which he calls dvoriane-run (dvorianskie), the other bureaucratic (chinovnye), depending on the proportion of each group in the region's population. In the former category he includes twenty-eight provinces concentrated in the geographic centre of the country, the heartland of serfdom. As one moved outward from the centre, towards the borderlands, the bureaucrats took over.14 Herzen who had been twice in provincial exile noted a similar phenomenon: 'The power of the governor', he observes in his Memoirs, 'generally grows in direct proportion to the distance from St Petersburg, but it grows at a geometric rate in the provinces where there is no dvorianstvo, such as Perm, Viatka, and Siberia.'16

Having conceded the direct exploitation of the country to some 100,000 landlords and 50,000 bureaucrats with their respective families, staffs, and hangers-on, the monarchy assumed towards the country at large an attitude more like that of an occupying power than of an absolute monarchy in the western sense. It no longer interceded on behalf of the population of commoners against the elite's abuses even in that limited sense in which it had done so in Muscovy. Indeed, in his legislation Peter referred to the landlords' serfs as their 'subjects' (poddanye), employing a term from the vocabulary of public law to describe what seemingly was a purely private relationship. At the same time, as will be noted (p. 181) dvoriane in dealing with the crown were in the habit of calling themselves 'slaves' (raby). 'If slaves were called subjects, then