Russia under the Old regime

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far-flung provinces. Nor was money any longer a problem; the expropriation in the name of socialism of the country's productive wealth assured the new government of all the resources it needed for administrative purposes, while at the same time providing it with a legitimate excuse for the building up of an immense bureaucratic apparatus on which to spend them.

The administrative order of pre-1917 Russia rested on a peculiar system of farming out which resembled neither bureaucratic centralism nor self-government. Its prototype was the Muscovite institution of'feeding' (kormlenie), which gave the civil service virtually free rein to exploit the country, demanding only that it turn over to the state its fixed share. What happened to the surplus squeezed out of the population did not much concern the crown. Catherine 11 explained the system with charming candour to the French Ambassador as it applied to her court establishment:

The King of France never knows precisely the amount of his expenditure; nothing is regulated or fixed beforehand. My plan, on the contrary, is as follows: I fix an annual sum, which is always the same, for the expenses of my table, furniture, theatres and fetes, my stables, and in short, my whole household. I order the various tables in my palace to be served with a particular quantity of wine, and a particular number of dishes. It is the same in all other branches of this administration. So long as I am supplied exactly, in quantity and quality with what I have ordered, and no one complains of neglect on the subject, I am satisfied; I think it of little consequence whether out of the fixed sum I am cheated through cunning or economy...* Essentially, the same system prevailed throughout the Russian government, at any rate until the second half of the nineteenth century.

The notorious venality of Russian officials, especially those working in the provinces, and most of all in provinces far removed from the capital cities, was due not to some peculiar characteristic of the Russian national character or even to the low calibre of the people who chose a bureaucratic career. It was inherent in a government which, lacking funds to pay for the administration, not only had for centuries paid its civil servants no salary, but had insisted that they 'feed themselves from official business' {kormiatsia ot del). In Muscovite Russia, the right of civil servants to line their pockets was to some extent regulated by the strict limits imposed on the length of time anyone could hold a provincial administrative post. To make certain that voevody appointed to lucrative Siberian posts did not exceed what were regarded as reasonable levels of extortion, the government set up on the main road leading from Siberia to Moscow pickets which searched returning voevody and their families and confiscated the surplus. To avoid them, enterprising governors returned by back roads, stealing home like thieves in the night.