Russia under the Old regime

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Peter the Great made a valiant effort to put an end to this whole system under which officials, while nominally serving the crown, were actually petty satraps mainly concerned with their private well-being. In 1714 he forbade the granting of pomestia to officials employed in the bureaux of the central administration and outlawed the whole practice of 'feedings' for the provincial functionaries. Henceforth, all state employees were to receive a salary. The reform did not succeed for want of money. Even under Peter's strict regime only officials of the central bureaux in St Petersburg and Moscow received their salaries, and irregularly at that; provincial bureaucrats continued to live off the land exactly as before. In 1723, a quarter of the funds budgeted for the civil service was sequestered to help reduce the general deficit. The Austrian diplomat, J.G. Korb, reports that in Peter's time Russian functionaries had to bribe their own colleagues to obtain the salaries due to them. Under Peter's immediate successors the situation deteriorated further as the state treasury fell into disarray. In 1727, for example, salary payments for most categories of chancery scribes (podd'iachie) were officially abolished, and the functionaries affected told to fend for themselves. Matters improved somewhat under Catherine n who took a keen interest in provincial administration, authorizing an appreciable increase in moneys allotted for it; in 1767, nearly a quarter of the budget was set aside for that purpose. Steps were also taken to ensure that officials received their salaries on time. But the basic problem remained. During Catherine's reign and after it, civil service salaries were so low that most officials could not depend on them to meet their basic living expenses, and had to look around for additional income. In the reign of Alexander 1, lower clerks received from one to four rubles' salary a month, a sum equivalent to between six pence and two shillings in English currency of the time. Even making allowance for the cheapness of food and services in Russia, this was far from enough to support a family. Furthermore, salaries were paid in paper money (assignats), which not long after their first emission in 1768 began to be discounted and in the reign of Alexander 1 circulated in terms of silver currency for as little as a fifth of their face value. The reforms of Peter and Catherine did not, therefore, alter either the economic situation of the bureaucracy, or the bureaucracy's relationship to society resulting from it. Like agents of the Mongol khans, chinovniki entrusted with provincial administration functioned primarily as collectors of taxes and recruits; they were not 'public servants' at all:

In consequence of the absence of an abstract, independent idea of the state, the officials did not serve 'the state', but took care first of themselves and then of the tsar; and in consequence of the identity of the bureaucracy and the state the officials lacked the capacity to distinguish private from governmental property.5