Russia under the Old regime

68

century as a result of western intellectual influences; but by this time the country's political ideas and practices were fully set.

Another item of evidence in favour of the contention that the Muscovite state apparatus evolved out of the domainial administration of the Muscovite princes has to do with the way Russian officials were paid. In the appanage principality, on the relatively infrequent occasions that a member of the prince's dvor had to perform duties outside the domain, (e.g. on black lands), it was assumed that his wages would be provided for by the population. Such payments, in money and kind, were called kormleniia (literally, 'feedings'). The system was retained by the tsars of Moscow. Officials of the prikazy and of other offices located in the city of Moscow and serving directly under the sovereign, were paid out of the tsar's treasury. But no funds at all were allocated for the provincial administration whose members received kormleniia in the form of regular contributions as well as fees for particular services rendered. This system, too, survived until the time when Peter 1 introduced regular salaries for state officials; however, since financial difficulties compelled Peter's immediate successors to suspend salary payments, the post-Petrine bureaucracy once again reverted in large measure to living off the land.

Thus, both in its organization and manner of rewarding its civil service the Muscovite state followed practices of the appanage principality - a fact strongly indicative of its domainial antecedents.

Further evidence for this thesis can be found in the failure of the Russians to distinguish either in theory or in practice among three types of properties; those belonging personally to the monarch, those belonging to the state, and those belonging to private persons. During the appanage period private property in land was recognized in the form of votchiny. But as will be shown in the next chapter, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Moscow monarchy succeeded in eliminating alodial holdings and making secular land tenure a form of possession conditional on state service. It is only in 1785 under Catherine 11 when Russian landholders secured clear legal title to their estates that private property in land came once again into being in Russia. Given this background it is not surprising that the kind of distinction drawn in France since the late Middle Ages between the properties of the king and those of the crown came to Russia very late:

Neither in the appanage of Moscow, nor in the Great Principality of Vladimir in which this Muscovite princely line establishes itself, nor in the Muscovite state do we find the slightest indication of the presence of state properties as something distinct from the properties of the prince. Moscow knows only the landed properties of the Great Prince, not those of the state. The properties of the Great Prince are divided into black ones and those of