Russia under the Old regime

106

hours, some for a few days, some sat in session for months or even years.

In sum, the Duma and the Assemblies may best be viewed as expedients necessary to the state until such time as it could afford an adequate bureaucratic apparatus. The Duma provided a link between the crown and the central administration, the Assembly a link between the crown and the provinces. As the bureaucratic apparatus improved, both institutions were quietly dropped.

The bureaucracy was still surprisingly small. Recent estimates put the total staff of the central administrative apparatus at the end of the seventeenth century (exclusive of scribes) at around two thousand. Over half of this number served in the four major bureaux: the Prikaz of Pomestia, the two prikazy handling government revenue (Bolshogo Dvortsa and Bolshoi Kazny) and the Razriad.16 The prikazy divided the country among themselves partly along functional, partly along geographic lines. Examples of the former kind were the four principal prikazy mentioned above; of the latter, those in charge of Siberia, Smolensk and Little Russia (the Ukraine). The administration of the countryside was entrusted to voevody (see above, p. 96). Justice independent of administration did not exist. On certain occasions - notably in the middle of the sixteenth century - the government encouraged the formation of organs of local self-government. But a closer analysis of these organs reveals that their primary function was to provide an adjunct to the rudimentary state bureaucracy, not to serve the interests of the populations, as evidenced by the fact that they owed responsibility to Moscow.1' An indispensable concomitant of a political system which made such extreme demands on society was an apparatus of control. Someone had to see to it that throughout the millions of square kilometres belonging to Muscovy the servitors turned up to do their duty, commoners stayed put in their communities, merchants paid the turnover tax. The more the state asked of it, the more society practised evasion, and the state, in Soloviev's phrase, had to engage in systematic manhunts:

The chase after human beings, after working hands, was carried out throughout the Muscovite state on a vast scale. Hunted were city people who ran away from tiaglo wherever they only could, by concealing themselves, bonding themselves [as slaves to private persons], enrolling in the ranks of lower grade clerks. Hunted were peasants who, burdened with heavy taxes, roamed individually and in droves migrated beyond 'the Rock' (the Urals). Landlords hunted for their peasants who scattered, sought concealment among other landlords, run away to the Ukraine, to the Cossacks.17

Ideally, the Muscovite state required a modern police force with all its technical resources. But since it lacked the means to maintain over its