no other documents, and to do so with appropriate diligence and loyalty, through which they may make themselves capable of being employed in commissions here and there as needs may require, and then wait until other important positions of the realm become available. The counterparts to the Swedish auskultanter in the Russian colleges were called college junkers. A special chapter in the General Regulation entitled “Concerning young people for training in the chancellery” stated that young sons of the nobility and of prikaz officials “who wish to serve in the chancelleries and offices in the future shall, in proportion to each college, be given admittance ahead of time and be trained to that they may learn the diligent copying of letters and mathematics, and in the event of a vacancy they will be able to be employed if they are fit for service and are of good nature and behavior. The junkers were also included in the Table of Ranks of 1722, which stated that each college was to accept six or seven young noblemen as copyists and then have them pass through the various positions in the hierarchy, step by step.-®® This clause in the Table of Ranks was modeled on a clause in the comparable Swedish document; in connection with the drawing up of the Russian table of ranks, Heinrich Pick had noted in a memorandum entitled “Concerning the upbringing of young noblemen in Sweden and their employment in service” that noblemen of “about sixteen or seventeen years of age become chancellerists in the state colleges and in this way go through all the positions, noblemen serve, without exception, in all the positions in the colleges from the lowest and least important on up must have appealed to Peter, for he had applied this system for some time in the military, where all young noblemen accepted as officer candidates began their careers as privates and advanced in rank step by step from there on.-^® Only demonstrated ability was to bring promotion to higher rank, and the tsar was able to point to his own case as a didactic example. He emphasized on many occasions the fact that he had begun his own military career as a private, and that he had only been promoted to higher ranks when he had proven ready for such promotion. In connection with his history of the Swedish war, Peter noted that he “began serving as an artillerist during the first campaign against Azov when the tower was taken. ” 287 The idea of having ” 289 291 2A (no. 400), 501. SS8 VI, no. 3,890, p. 491. See also V. A. Evreinov, Grazhdanskoe chinoproizvodstvo V Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1888), 39. TsGADA, f. 370 delo 18 1. 9. Troitskii (1974), 43. N. I. Pavlenko, “Petr 1,” in idem et a!., eds., Rossiia v period reform Petra 1 (Moscow, 1973), 41—42. 289 290
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