As personal servants of the Tsar, officials of the Imperial civil service stood above the law. A chinovnik could be indicted and put on trial only with the permission of his superior.22 Lacking such authorization, the judiciary was powerless to indict officials. Permission to try officials was rarely forthcoming, and this for two reasons. Since all appointments were made, at any rate in theory, by the Tsar, the failure of a bureaucrat properly to perform his duties reflected adversely on the Tsar’s judgment. Second, there was always the risk that if he were allowed to defend himself in court, the accused official could implicate his superiors. In practice, therefore, guilty officials were quietly transferred to another post or, if sufficiently distinguished, promoted to impressive but meaningless positions in the Senate or Council of State.23 In such matters the Tsar himself had to bow to custom. Following a train accident in which he almost lost his life, Alexander III wanted to bring to trial the Minister of Transport. He was ultimately dissuaded on the grounds that a public trial of a minister who had held his post for fourteen years would mean that he had “undeservedly enjoyed the confidence of the monarch”24—that is, that the Tsar had shown poor judgment. In the eyes of some contemporaries, the unaccountability of the Russian officialdom to the law or any body external to itself represented the principal difference between the Russian and Western European civil services. In fact, it was only one of many manifestations of the patrimonial spirit still embedded in the Russian state.
The Russian bureaucracy, especially in the last years of the monarchy, had in its ranks many well-educated and dedicated officials. These were especially numerous in the ministries and the agencies located in St. Petersburg. Bernard Pares, the English historian of Russia, on his frequent visits there before 1917, observed that when out of uniform a chinovnik often turned out to be an intellectual, troubled by the same thoughts that agitated society at large. In uniform, however, while performing his duties, he was expected to act haughtily and insolently.* The conditions of service, especially the absence of security, did, in fact, encourage servility toward superiors and rudeness toward everyone else. To the outside world, a chinovnik was expected to act with complete self-assurance:
Always the underlying intent was to present the “Government” as an all-wise, deliberate and ultimately infallible group of servants of the state, selflessly working in unison with the monarch for the best interests of Russia.25
An essential element of this self-image was secrecy, which helped maintain the illusion of an authority that knew neither discord nor failures. There was nothing that the bureaucracy dreaded more than glasnost’, or the open conduct of public affairs, for which public opinion had been clamoring since the middle of the nineteenth century.
Beginning in 1722, when Peter the Great introduced the Table of Ranks, Russia’s officialdom was divided into hierarchic grades called chiny, of which nominally there were fourteen but in fact only twelve, Ranks 11 and 13 having fallen into disuse. It had been Peter’s intention that as officials qualified for higher responsibilities they would receive the rank appropriate to the office they occupied. But the system quickly became perverted, with the result that Russia acquired a civil service ranking system that was probably unique in the world. To gain the support of the bureaucracy for her dubious claim to the throne, Catherine II introduced in the 1760s the principle of automatic promotion: henceforth, the holder of a chin was advanced to the next higher grade on the basis of seniority, after he had held a given rank a specified length of time, regardless of whether or not he was assigned greater responsibilities. Unlike the usual practice in bureaucratic establishments where a person moves up in grade as he assumes higher duties, in Imperial Russia he rose in grade more or less automatically, without regard to his functions: promotion was not from post to post, but from rank to rank.26 This made the Russian civil service a closed caste: with minor exceptions, to be eligible for a government position one had to hold chin.27 Ordinary subjects, no matter how well qualified, were excluded from participating in the country’s administration, except in the rare instances of direct appointment by the Tsar. Only those willing and able to make it a lifelong career were able to join the government. Others were barred from public service and therefore deprived of opportunities to acquire administrative experience.
