Russia under the Old regime

66

hands almost all the basic branches of the state administration then in existence.'11

Especially striking is the evolution of the executive bureaux of Muscovite administration, the prikaiy. The term prikaz has its etymological roots in the language of the appanage domain: as noted, prikaznye liudi (men of the prikaz) (p. 45), were those domestic slaves and dependants who performed administrative functions on large domains, princely as well as private. Prikaz was the name of an office headed by such an official. With some possible minor exceptions, the earliest Muscovite prikazy seem to have been constituted only in the second half of the sixteenth century, that is a good one hundred years after Moscow had become the capital of an empire. Until that time, the administrators serving the prince - the steward (dvoretskii) and the putnye boiare - continued to carry out public administrative functions outside the prince's domain, as needed. As other appanages were conquered and annexed to Moscow, the dvory of the deposed princes were transported and reestablished in Moscow as new administrative entities: thus there appeared in Moscow special bureaux to administer Riazan, and Novgorod, and other areas. Each of these regional prikazy was a separate government, as it were, with complete authority over the territory entrusted to its charge. A similar arrangement was made in the sixteenth century for the conquered principality of Kazan, and in the seventeenth for Siberia. Thus, side by side with purely functional bureaux there appeared in Moscow bureaux formed on the territorial principle. This kind of administration prevented any region of the realm from developing organs of self-government or even a sense of local political identity. As Paul Miliukov says,

At the very inception of our institutions, we run into an immense difference from the west. There, every region constituted a compact, self-contained whole, bound together by means of special rights... Our history has failed to work out any lasting local ties or local organization. Upon their annexation by Moscow, the annexed regions at once disintegrated into atoms out of which the government could form any shapes it desired. But to begin with it was content to isolate each atom from those surrounding it and to attach it with administrative links directly to the centre.12 All of which, of course, had profound bearing on the absence in tsarist and imperial Russia of any effective regional loci of power, able to stand up to central authority.

To replace the local administrations transported to Moscow, the dvor of the Moscow prince opened branches in the main cities of the conquered principalities. These exercised both private and public functions, exactly as had been the case with the prince's own dvor inside the appanage principality. Under the pressure of expanding business, result-