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Central government

zhand p. shakibi

Introduction

A study of the central government of the Russian Empire sheds light on three important issues in the imperial era. How well did the institutions handle the challenge of modernisation from above? How did the autocracy’s and bureaucracy’s view of their respective roles in society change over time? What were the major challenges related to effective governance from the centre and how did the monarchy and bureaucracy handle them? By extension a solid understanding of the workings of central government helps to determine the extent to which it and its personnel held responsibility for the collapse of the Romanov regime.

Peter the Great’s reform of the central government marked the beginning of the imperial bureaucracy’s evolution on two different but equally important and mutually linked levels. The ministerial bureaucracy from the early nineteenth century staffed the so-called subordinate organs (podchinennye organy), which at least theoretically handled activities in a designated field, such as finance or foreign affairs. The supreme organs (verkhovnye organy) had the responsibility to manage and co-ordinate the activities of the subordinate organs. The effectiveness of government depended on cadres at least as much as institutions. Indeed, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, well-known conservative and tutor to the last two emperors, Alexander III and Nicholas II, frequently stressed, ‘Institutions are of no importance. Everything depends on individuals.’1 Whilst his categorical rejection of the role of institutions is highly debatable, we do need to take into account the dynamic between institutions and human agents, the most important of whom was the emperor, in order

1 P. A. Zaionchkovskii (ed.), Dnevnik gosudarstvennogo sekretaria A.A. Polovtsova, 2 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 1966) vol. I, p. 315.

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to obtain a more coherent understanding of how the central organs actually functioned.2

Subordinate organs (podchinennye organy)

For most of his reign Peter the Great (1689–1725), occupied with transforming Russia into a great European power, relied primarily on the form of central government he had inherited. His predecessors, the first Romanovs, governed through some forty chancelleries (prikazy) which constituted the heart of the central governing organs. Noble servitors, often of boyar level, headed the prikazy: under them served non-noble cadres. Responsibilities and jurisdictions of the prikazy greatly overlapped and frequently contradicted each other, making difficult even relatively efficient government, including the extraction from society of resources needed to support Peter’s military campaigns.

Peter, who had acquainted himself with the bureaucratic machines of some of the great powers of Europe, understood that this unwieldy structure could not help him realise his goal of making Russia a major European power. Like many of his fellow monarchs, Peter believed that more effective governing institutions provided the best mechanism for solving economic and societal ills. As a result, in the last seven years of his reign (1718–25) Peter set his sights on introducing radical change in Russia’s central governing organs, a process which marked the end of the country’s patrimonial state.

His plan on the one hand of founding a system of subordinate organs operating on rational concepts of administration similar to those of Western and Central Europe, and on the other hand of maintenance of the autocracy’s establishment of the norms and rules for the bureaucracy remained a goal of Russia’s monarchs until the end of the dynasty. However, as time would show, the concentration of absolute power in the hands of the emperor made realisation of this goal difficult. Peter’s immediate concern was improvement of the government’s taxing mechanism, establishment of budgetary controls and supervision over expenditures. Along with this came

2 For good basic reference texts see: A. Turgeva, Vysshie organi gosudarstvennoi vlasti i upravleniia Rossii IX–XX vv. (Moscow: S-ZAGS, 2000); D. N. Shilov, Gosudarstvennie deiateli Rossiliskoi Imperii, 1 802–1 91 7 (St Petersburg: European University Press, 2003); O. Chustiakov (ed.), Gosudarstvennii stroi Rossiiskoi Imperii nakanune krusheniia (Moscow: Izd. MGU, 1995); J. LeDonne, Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1 7 62– 1 7 96 (London: Princeton University Press, 1984); G. Mironov, Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo XIX vek (Moscow: Nauka, 1995); M. Raeff, ‘The Bureaucratic Phenomena of Imperial Russia’, AHR 84 (1979); G. Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government (Urbana: University of Indiana Press, 1973). P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Pravitel’stvennii apparat samoderzhavnoi Rossii v XIX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1977).

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greater centralisation of power and increased governmental penetration into society.

The heart of the system of subordinate organs was the colleges. Initially there were Foreign Affairs, War, Navy (which also looked after gun manufacture and the forests), Mining (which was also charged with the minting of money), Manufacture, Revenue, Control, State Expenditure, Commerce and Justice.3 Each college was headed by a president chosen by Peter from his closest associates under whom in turn served a small group of ten to eleven trained officials who collectively took decisions within the college’s purview.4 A poor level of co-ordination between the individual college’s various departments characterised the new system. However, the colleges were an improvement on the previous prikaz system. One of the major reasons for the emergence of the Russian Empire as a great power in the eighteenth century was this new administrative structure which proved effective in tax collection and military recruitment.5 At the same time the Ottoman Empire’s failure to copy such reforms played a large role in its decline.6 But a great degree of overlapping remained. Frequently one area of activity fell under the jurisdiction of several colleges. That government was not divided into administrative, judicial, legislative and fiscal functions, but rather into blocks of activities helped create the conditions for institutional autonomous existence and also for poor responsiveness to co-ordination and integration from above.

During the remainder of the eighteenth century these centrifugal tendencies strengthened. Increasingly, individual heads of the colleges in private meetings with the monarch enacted policy in a haphazard manner. However the real power of the colleges and their ability to make policy were dependent to a large degree on the monarch and the influence of various groups around him or her. Not infrequently a college was charged with implementing policies which it had played no part in making. Whether the colleges made policy or the monarch and his or her closest servitors did so, overall co-ordination was poor. Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96) weakened the colleges with her Statute of Provincial Reforms of 1775 which transferred most of the their responsibilities to provincial governors. However, the central bureaucracy

3Throughout the eighteenth century various colleges appeared and then were abolished according to the needs of the time.

4Several small departments handling various aspects of a college’s portfolio made up each college. Moreover, attached to each college was a chancellery which handled administrative issues.

5L. Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) pp. 133–5. However, Hughes adds: ‘If the grand aim of the exercise was to impose order’ and ‘to make Russia better governed’ Peter’s reforms were not very successful.

6D. Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (London: John Murray, 2000), p. 140.

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remained. During the eighteenth century its size increased in conjunction with a growing professionalism, thereby providing a springboard for the next major change in the subordinate organs under Alexander I.

Ministerial government

Alexander I (r.1801–25) established Russia’s ministerial system which lasted until the collapse of the Romanov dynasty in February 1917.7 The young emperor initially toyed with the idea of constitutional change but soon showed a preference for administrative reform which he saw as more essential for effective government and Russia’s modernisation and less threatening to his autocratic power.

Alexander replaced what remained of Peter’s collegiate system with ministries, a step which reinforced centralised power. He intended the ministries to be the highest subordinate organs headed by individual ministers who were appointed by and responsible to the emperor alone. The initial ministries were War, Navy, Foreign Affairs, Justice, Internal Affairs, Finance, Commerce, and Education. The number of ministries did not differ greatly until the beginning of the twentieth century. The founding of a ministerial system with its relatively clear responsibilities, specialised functions and internal structure represented an important step in the evolution of Russia’s subordinate organs. Moreover, unlike the collegiate system where decisions were at least theoretically taken collectively within each college, a single minister directed a ministry, thereby increasing administrative efficiency.

Regular ministerial reports, written and oral, constituted the heart of the new system. Ministers met individually with the emperor to deliver oral reports and make policy decisions on matters at least theoretically directly related only to their own ministerial portfolio. The emperors preferred this arrangement for it provided them the opportunity to exercise direct personal influence over the administration of the empire. In addition, the emperors ensured for themselves a central and pivotal role in the running of government by ensuring they were the only ones privy to the activities and policies of all the ministries. Ministers also had the right to propose legislation and to participate in discussions over proposed laws.

The establishment of the ministerial system laid the groundwork for the emergence of a large and functionally differentiated bureaucratic apparatus. Alexander I and his successor, Nicholas I (r. 1825–55) also established universities and lycees´ to train future high-level bureaucrats, increasingly seen as

7J. Hartley, Alexander I (London: Longman, 1994); S.V. Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy: politicheskaia bor’ba v Rossii v nachale XIX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1989).

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the key to better government. Under Nicholas I and Alexander II (r. 1855–81) the bureaucratic machine grew immensely in size and became more professional, especially at the higher and middle ranks.8 In 1847 Count S. S. Uvarov bemoaned that the bureaucracy as an institution had acquired a sovereignty of its own capable of rivalling that of the monarch. The increasing bureaucratisation had created a noble bureaucratic elite which the landed nobility viewed as a threat to its interests and its access to the monarch. As the nineteenth century progressed, much of the bureaucratic class came to regard the landed nobility as a relic of a bygone era and an obstacle to the further development of Russia. Beginning already during the reign of Catherine II and intensifying in the nineteenth century the landed nobility fought with the bureaucracy for influence over the emperor. At the same time, many of the senior officials came from land-owning families. Accompanying this process was increasing emphasis on the bureaucracy’s role as catalyst for social and/or economic change, which began to take serious shape as a result of Catherine II’s thoughts on enlightened despotism and gained irreversible momentum with the Emancipation of the Serfs and the Great Reforms under Alexander II. Consequently the bureaucracy’s view of itself began to evolve. The bureaucrats of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries regarded themselves as personal servitors of the tsar. By the last half of the nineteenth century the class of professional bureaucrats felt a genuine institutional loyalty, an esprit de corps. This institutional identity and the idea of service to the state as public officials began to compete with the person of the monarch for the bureaucracy’s ultimate loyalty.

Modernisation from above, however, created administrative problems between the subordinate organs. Given the absence of public forums or parliamentary institutions, debates over the desirability and form of modernisation, and over how to handle its socioeconomic consequences took place within the bureaucratic structures, posing a challenge to bureaucratic efficiency.9 The best-known cleavage emerged between the two most powerful subordinate organs, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. One of the greatest struggles between them dealt with labour issues around the turn of the twentieth century and had its origins in the priorities of the

8 See: W. B. Lincoln, Nicholas I: Autocrat of All the Russias (London: University of Indiana Press, 1977) and The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy and the Politics of Change

(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990); L. N. Viskochov, Imperator Nikolai I (St Petersburg: Izd. SPbU, 2003).

9H. W. Whelan, Alexander III and The State Council (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982); D. T. Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1 802–1 881 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

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respective ministries. The prime responsibility of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was the maintenance of public order throughout the Empire. Moreover, many aristocrats, who believed that the autocracy had a responsibility to look after the wellbeing of the less fortunate in Russian society (namely the peasants and workers) staffed this ministry. They regarded worker disturbances, which became more frequent towards the end of the nineteenth century, as the logical consequence of the labourers’ poor working conditions and pay, and therefore saw the factory owners as exploiters. While meeting striking workers with force, the Ministry of Interior supported policies which aimed at improving the lot of the worker at the expense of the emerging class of industrialists.

The Ministry of Finance’s primary responsibility was the rapid industrialisation of Russia, which its head Sergei Witte regarded as essential if Russia was to avoid becoming a second-rate power and provider of natural resources to the great powers of Europe. To achieve this goal a Russian class of industrialists was needed, as was foreign investment. Witte regarded the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ view on the labour problem as damaging for the realisation of the greater goal of industrialisation. The Ministry of Internal Affairs responded that the strikes derived from the workers’ conditions and posed a serious political danger. In the absence of co-ordination from above these two ministries spent much time and energy either waging a bureaucratic struggle to gain control over the labour problem or following their respective and ultimately contradictory labour policies. One result of this administrative chaos was the large worker rebellions during the 1905 Revolution.

The conclusion can be reached that modernisation from above strengthened the process of atomisation of the ministries, each of which pursued its own policies, purpose and courses of action. This is not to say, however, that ministers were at each other’s throats most of the time. Inevitably they understood the necessity of collaboration in most cases. A set of informal, unwritten procedures to regulate their relationship with each other emerged over time. In addition whenever a threat to overall ministerial integrity emerged, such as excessive influence of a figure outside of government, the bureaucratic esprit de corps worked to check it. The ministries had been established with the purpose of reorganising government into a single administrative system. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century the ministerial bureaucracy was capable of making and implementing policy but also had evolved into separate organisations, each with its own purpose which strengthened the need for stable and efficient supreme co-ordinating organs.

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