97 higher ranking d’iaki received considerably higher salaries, which ranged in 1675/76 from 600 chet^ and 60 rubles to 1,000 chet' and 215 rubles. The distribution of service lands was administered by the Pomestnyi prikaz, while each prikaz determined and paid out its own cash salaries fromthe tax revenues, fees, and other funds it administered.^^® With the exception of the salaries paid in the form of service lands, therefore, there was no centrally directed regulation of state salaries. Greater restrictions were placed on the distribution of service lands as reimbursement for service in the prikazy during the second half of the seventeenth century. A. V. Chernov, who studied the Pomestnyi prikaz, was of the opinion that “the successive reduction of landowning among the pod’iachie was the result of a removal of non-nobles from the circle of landowners and a nobiliary mobilization of service and patrimonial lands.” The practice of distributing land in return for service was abolished entirely in 1714. Instead, cash salaries supplemented by the distribution of grain were introduced as the sole form of reimbursement.^^® Uniform annual salaries were assigned to officials in the local administration in 1715, with governors to receive 1,200 rubles and 600 chetverP of grain (1 chetverP—2.099 hectoliters) and provincial councillors to receive 120 rubles and 120 chetverP of grain.-^^ The reason for this measure, according to S. M. Troitskii, was that the state’s real estate reserves had been depleted by the frequent donations of land during the second half of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries.-^- In broader terms, however, this retreat from the practice of granting land as compensation for state service should be viewed, as Chernov pointed out, in the context of the nobility’s attempts to reserve to itself the right to possess land and serfs. The salary reform of 1714 broke the earlier connection between civil service and the ownership of land, and it came to affect lower officials in the administration in particular. The measure also led to a situation in which civil servants found themselves dependent upon the state, since they now had to rely completely on their cash and commodity salaries for their subsistence.^^® In this latter respect, the new salary policy was entirely in line with the efforts of the absolutist state to transform the administrative apparatus into an obedient Instrument. Demidova, 219—220. Chernov (1957), 241. For the social background of the prikaz personnel, see Demidova, 217—218. Demidova, 229. P. N. Mrochek-Drozdovskii, Oblastnoe upravlenie Rossii XVIII v. (Moscow, 1876), 71. Troitskii (1974), 253. Demidova, 230. 239 240 243 7 - Peteraou
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