Russia under the Old regime

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of a district official I am.' Nothing of the kind. You'd get right through to them by acting gently and appealing to pity. 'But, sire, couldn't you at least wait until the Feast of Intercession?' And, of course, down on their knees they would go. 'One can wait, sure, why not, that depends only on us. But what am I going to say to my superiors? Judge for yourselves.' So the fellows would return to the assembly. There they would talk some more and then scatter to their homes. A couple of hours later you would look out and see the village official bringing you, as a reward for your willingness to be patient with taxes, ten kopecks per soul. And since the district had some four thousand souls, you'd end up with 400 rubles, sometimes more... And you'd head back home with a gayer heart.* Chinovniki like this one populate the pages of Russian literature from Gogol to Chekhov, some good-natured and gentle, others overbearing and brutal, but both types living off the land as if they were foreign conquerors among a subjugated race. Their society resembled a closed order. They tended to associate only with their own kind, fawning on superiors (nachal'stvo) and bullying inferiors. They loved the hierarchical stratification of chiny, with its automatic promotions, of which they were part, and regarded all existence outside their system as wild anarchy. They instinctively ejected from their midst the overzealous and scrupulous because the system required all to be implicated in bribery so as to create a bond of mutual responsibility. Just as drunks do not like sober companions, thieves feel uncomfortable in the presence of honest men.

Like any self-contained, hierarchical order, the Russian civil service evolved an elaborate set of symbols to distinguish the ranks among each other. The symbolism was formalized in the reign of Nicholas 1 and spelled out in 869 solid paragraphs in Volume I of the Code of Laws. For ceremonial purposes, the ranks were grouped into several categories, each of which had to be addressed by an appropriate title, all translations from the German. The holders of the top two ranks had to be called 'Your High Excellency' (Euer Hochwohlgeboren or Vashe Vysokoprevos-khoditel'stvo), those in Ranks 3 and 4, 'Your Excellency' (Euer Wohlgeboren or Vashe Prevoskhoditel'stvo) and so down the scale, with holders of Rank 9 to 14 being addressed simply as 'Your Honour' (Euer Wurden or Vashe Blagorodie). With each rank category went also an appropriate uniform, specified to the last sartorial detail: promotion from white to black trousers was an event of cataclysmic proportion in a chinovnik's life. Holders of medals and orders (St Vladimir, St Anne, St George, etc., with their several classes) were also entitled to elaborate distinctions.

Honest public officials were to be found almost exclusively in the centre, in ministerial offices or their equivalent. The idea of office-holding