Russia under the Old regime

CHAPTER 11 TOWARDS THE POLICE STATE

Although Russia lacks a tradition of vigorous self-government, it does not necessarily follow that it has one of bureaucratic centralism. Before the coming to power of the communist regime, Russia's officialdom was relatively small and not very effective. The obstacles to bureaucratization were formidable: the size of the country, the thin distribution of the population, difficulties of communication, and, perhaps most of all, lack of money. Russian governments were always short of cash, and that which they had they preferred to spend on the military. Under Peter the Great, the administration of Russia - already then the largest state in the world - absorbed 135,000-140,000 rubles annually, or an equivalent of between 3 and 4 per cent of the national budget.1 How paltry this sum was may be judged from the following example. Impressed by the order prevailing in Livonia, which he had recently conquered from the Swedes, Peter ordered in 1718 an inquiry into administrative practices there. The investigation revealed that the Swedish government had allotted as much money for governing this one province, measuring perhaps 50,000 square kilometres, as the Russian government was spending on the administration of the whole empire, measuring over 15 million.2 Rather than attempt the impossible and copy Swedish methods, Peter dismantled the administration of Livonia.

The Russian bureaucratic establishment loomed small not only in the country's budget; it was also insignificant in relation to the number of inhabitants. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Russia had between 11 and 13 civil servants for 10,000 people. This ratio was three to four times below that prevailing at the same time in western Europe.3 Muscovite and imperial Russias, whose bureaucracies enjoyed very wide latitude and behaved in a notoriously arbitrary fashion, were certainly administratively understaffed. The obstacles standing in the way of full-scale bureaucratization were removed only in October 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power. By that time the means of transport and communication had been modernized to the point where neither distance nor climate prevented the centre from exercising close control over the