Russia under the Old regime

67

ing from Moscow's uninterrupted territorial growth, the household administration of the Prince constituted itself into the Bureau of the Large Household (Prikaz Bol'shogo Dvortsa), the first prikaz about which there is solid information and certainly the most important. Even so Moscow expanded at such a rapid rate that the task exceeded the capacities of the domestic staff of the Prince. In time, therefore, a rudimentary state administration began to emerge, separate from the household. The first to detach itself was the Treasury {Kazennyi Prikaz)", subsequently, other officials formed their own bureaux as well.13

Through its evolution, the Muscovite administration retained strong traces of the old domainial system of administration out of which it had grown out. Like the appanage puti (p. 45), the Moscow prikazy were organized in accord with the sources of revenue rather than according to some principle of public responsibility. And the reason for this was that, just like the management of an estate, they were set up to extract goods and services. As before, too, each prikaz had assigned to it its own means of financial support, and each continued to dispense justice to the people within its competence. These relics of the appanage period remained embedded in the Russian system of government until the time when Peter I, following western examples, introduced the principle of administrative rationalism and created a national budget.

In the west, the machinery of state administration also grew out of the apparatus managing the royal estates. But what is striking about Russia is how late domainial institutions transformed themselves into public ones. In France, the differentiation was completed by the fourteenth century; in Russia it only began in the eighteenth. This lag assumes considerable importance if one bears in mind that these two countries began to constitute themselves into national states at approximately the same time, i.e. around 1300. Secondly, in Russia the distinction between the domainial and the public spheres always remained very vague, and this fact could not but influence the conduct of the administration. Western feudalism created a number of institutions (courts, curia regis, Estates General) which by the mere fact of having separate identities from the king's household administration strengthened the sense of a public order. Sir Thomas Smith, a sixteenth-century English constitutional theorist, put the matter very well when he described sovereignty as resulting from the fusion of the king and the nation occurring when Parliament was in session. In Russia, the state administration came into being not because of a recognition that prince and state were things apart, requiring separate institutional expression, but rather because the prince's household staff no longer could handle the whole job. Recognition of the separate identity of ruler and state - natural to any country with a feudal past - came to Russia only in the eighteenth