Russia under the Old regime

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The administrative apparatus of Muscovite Russia was remarkably simple.

The tsar had a council, called either Duma or Boiare ('boyars'). (The familiar 'Boyar Duma' is a neologism, introduced by nineteenth-century historians.) Its antecedents recede to the Norman period, when it was customary for princes to hold consultations with the elder members of their druzhiny. During the appanage period, such councils were mostly staffed by the servitors charged with administering the princely domains and collection of taxes, and known as putnye boiare. With the growth of the monarchy, the Council of the Great Prince of Moscow was expanded to include, in addition to his close relatives and chief officials, also representatives of the leading pedigreed clans. In the fourteenth, fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth century, the Duma was pronouncedly aristocratic, but as the power of the great clans waned, their representatives were gradually replaced by ordinary service personnel. In the seventeenth century, merit rather than ancestry tended to decide who was asked to sit in the Duma.

Russian historians have spilled much ink over the question whether the Duma enjoyed legislative and administrative power, or whether it merely ratified decisions taken by others. The evidence seems to support the latter view. The Duma lacked some of the most important characteristics of institutions known to wield effective political power. Its composition was unstable in the extreme; not only did its membership turn over with great rapidity, but the numbers varied wildly, sometimes rising as high as 167, sometimes sinking as low as 2. There was no regular calendar of sessions. No records were kept of the debates and the main evidence of the Duma's participation in decision-making is the formula attached to many decrees: 'the tsar ordered and the boyars affirmed' (tsar'ukazal a boiare prigovorili). The Duma had no prescribed sphere of activity. The quiet, almost unnoticed way in which it went out of existence in 1711 indicates that it failed to develop a corporate spirit and did not greatly matter to the service elite. For all these reasons, the Duma is best regarded not as a counterweight to royal authority but as its instrumentality; a proto-cabinet rather than a proto-parliament. Its main importance lay in the opportunity it afforded high officials to participate in the formulation of policies which they were obliged to carry out. It was particularly active whenever the government confronted major foreign policy decisions, and the country's leading diplomats issued from its ranks. Towards the end of its existence, in the late seventeenth century, it increasingly assumed responsibility over the prikazy and over questions of justice. (The Code of 1649 was drafted by a Duma subcommittee.) It thus moved toward the functions of the Senate, which in 1711 replaced it.