The Russian Revolution полностью

Within their bureaus, ministers enjoyed immense power: one Russian compared them to Ottoman pashas lording over their pachalícs.³⁵ Each had in the provinces a network of functionaries responsible only to him and not to the provincial governors.³⁶ They could hire and fire employees at will. They also had great latitude in disposing of the moneys budgeted for their ministries.

Because Russia was so visibly run by a bureaucracy, it is possible to overestimate the extent to which the country was bureaucratized. The Russian civil service was unusually top-heavy, with a high proportion of the bureaucracy located in St. Petersburg. The Empire was relatively under-administered.³⁷

Such neglect of the provincial administration was due to fiscal constraints: Russia simply could not afford the expenditures required to administer properly a country of such distances and poor communications. After Peter I had taken Livonia from Sweden he discovered that the Swedes had spent as much on running this small province as his government allowed for administering the whole Empire: this meant that any hope of adopting Swedish administrative models had to be given up.³⁸ In 1763, proportionate to her territory, Prussia had nearly one hundred times as many officials as Russia.³⁹ Around 1900, the proportion of administrators in relation to the population in Russia was almost one-third that of France and one-half that of Germany.⁴⁰ Because of inadequate resources, Russians adopted a very simple model of administration. They placed in each province a powerful governor, with broad discretionary powers, and deployed across the country military garrisons to help him preserve order. There were also small contingents of police and gendarmerie, and agents of such ministries as Finance, Justice, and War. But essentially the countryside was self-administering through the institution of the peasant commune, which was held collectively responsible for the payment of taxes and delivery of military recruits, and the canton or volost’, which performed simple judiciary and administrative functions. None of this cost the Treasury anything.

This meant, however, that the authority of the Imperial Government, for all practical purposes, stopped at the eighty-nine provincial capitals where the governors and their staff had offices: below that level yawned an administrative vacuum. Neither the district (uezd), into which provinces were subdivided, nor the volost’, the principal unit of rural administration, had any regular agents of the central government: these showed up periodically, on forays as it were, to carry out specific missions, usually to collect tax arrears, and then disappeared from view. Indeed, the volost’ itself was not a territorial but a social entity, since it included only peasants and not the members of the other estates living within its territory. Some intellectuals and officials, aware of the anomaly of such an arrangement, urged the government to introduce as the lowest administrative unit an all-estate volost’, but this advice was ignored because the authorities preferred that the peasants remain isolated and self-governing. In the words of one experienced bureaucrat, there was in Russia “no common unifying authority comparable to the German Landrat or French souspréfet, capable of coordinating policies in the interest of central authority”:

There was no apparatus of local administration but only officials of various [central] agencies: financial, judiciary, forestry, postal, etc., who were unconnected, or else the executive organs of various types of self-government, dependent more on the voters than on the government. There was no common binding authority.⁴¹

The absence of government agents in the small towns and the countryside would make itself painfully felt after 1905, when, attempting to win majorities in the new parliament, the monarchy found it had no mechanism to mobilize potential supporters against the ubiquitous liberal and radical intelligentsia.

In terms of its attitudes and programs, the Imperial bureaucracy can be divided into three groups.

The majority of chinovniki, especially those serving in the provinces, were careerists pure and simple, who joined to benefit from the prestige and privileges that went with government service. Monarchists in 1916, in 1917 most of them would place themselves at the disposal first of the Provisional Government and then of the Bolsheviks. They usually supplemented their meager salaries with bribes and tips.* It is difficult to speak of their having an ideology or mentality, save to say that they saw themselves as responsible for protecting the state from “society.”*