108 Another problem was that the former prikaz personnel were not skilled in the procedures inherent in the collegial form of administration, such as the keeping of minutes, the registering of documents, and so on. In this context it is useful to refer to a report on working conditions in the kamer-kollcgiia presented to the Senate in 1723 by Stefan Kochius, the secretary of that college. Illustrating the confusion which could reign when a Russian collegial official did not comprehend the task he was asked to perform, Kochius pointed out that in Sweden and in other countries the registrar of a college was considered “the heart of the college,” since “all the secrets of the college” were in his possession. The secretary wrote that: Here in the kamer-kollcgiia there is a registrar who was appointed from among the pod^iachie; but no proper register has been set up yet, for 1) the greater part of the letters of the college are in the hands of the pod’iachie [and] 2) during the five years that have gone by no ordinance has been issued about this, and no suitable office has been set up with boxes for the register, where records and correspondence might be kept in a natural alphabetical order. Kochius reported that it sometimes took two or three days to find a given file in the kamer-kollegiia.^^^ It was, of course, impossible to achieve efficiency in the college as long as the register, one of the administrative system’s most vital elements, did not function at all. It had been foreseen that the recruiting of competent staff members for the colleges would present certain difficulties, however, and therefore a series of measures had been taken to solve this problem. Peter had issued an ukaz in January 1716 decreeing that thirty or forty young pod’iachie should be sent to Königsberg to learn the German language in preparation for employment in the colleges.Another more radical, and previously tested, method was to recruit foreign specialists to establish operating procedures for the colleges and to train their Russian colleagues in the performance of the various administrative tasks. Several people were sent abroad (and especially to the German states and the Baltic provinces) to recruit men with experience in administrative work. These efforts did not succeed as well as had been expected, however, and, even in spite of attempts to recruit Swedish prisoners of war for service in the colleges, the quotas for foreign office holders set by the collegial budgets were not met. Heinrich Pick proposed a solution which was to produce results over 283 TsGADA, f. 248 delo 38 1. 77. ZA (no. 258), 215; TsGADA, f. 248 delo 606 1. 197v. See p. 135. 282 28
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