88 who has studied the seventeenth-century prikaz personnel, has found “many examples of cases where the d'iaki were also changed when one judge was removed and another appointed, and where a judge transferred to another prikaz took the d’iaki with him. councillors and assessors were to be chosen according to a special procedure “so that they are not [the president’s] relatives or his own creatures {kreotury). service records and demonstrated ability, rather than on the basis of birth and client relationships, as had previously been the case. The collegial principle of decision-making itself, the reaching of decisions on the basis of the majority of the votes cast, was to serve as a guarantee that the presidents would be prohibited fromattaining the more or less unlimited power which the prikaz judges had been able to acquire. The arbitrary actions of the judges and d'iaki were to become a thing of the past, and the collective method of reaching decisions was to serve as a means of control to this end. Indeed, one finds this thought expressed by the tsar in the introduction to his ukaz concerning the reform of the court systemin 1718: Colleges have been established, that is, groups of many persons instead of prikazy in which the presidents or chairmen do not have the sort of power held by the old judges, who did as they wished. In the colleges, the president cannot do anything without the consent of his colleagues, just as the other responsibilities are so great that they eliminate the old high-handedness. In the colleges, therefore. ” 194 Appointments to office were to be made on the basis of ” 195 196 On December 15, 1717, Peter announced his appointments of the presidents of the colleges, as well as of some of the vice presidents. The backgrounds of the presidents were quite varied, but common to them all was membership in the tsar’s innermost circle (“fledglings in Peter’s nest [ptentsy gnezda Petra]”) and had thereby reached very influential positions in the armed services and in the state administration.^®' The extensive donations of land and peasants these men received fromthe tsar also bear witness to their prominent positions. Peter made the following appointments on December 15: 198 199 Bogoiavlenskii (1937), 230. ZA (no. 264), 219. ZA (no. 61), 66. K. V. SiVKOV, “Ptentsy Petra,” Sbornik Tri veka (6 v., Moscow, 1912—1913), III, 87—110. i9i 195 196 See, for example, the list of donations of crown lands {dvortsovye zemli) made during the period 1700—1711 in N. Ustrialov, Istoriia tsarstvovaniia Petra Velikogo (5 V., St. Petersburg, 1858—1863), I, 397. ZA (no. 265), 220. 198 199
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