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Ill No one has studied how these initial moves toward training civil servants in Russia were followed up, but it is doubtful that any sort of effective training program was ever set up within the colleges. Not only were the regular employees of the colleges themselves uncertain as to how the new administrative procedures were to be executed, but it soon became apparent that recruiting college junkers was no easy matter. Apparently because of shortcomings in their levels of literacy, many of the young noblemen mustered for the task could not be used in the civil service, while still others preferred a military career as a more traditional field of service.-**- As N. F. Demidova expressed it, the idea of the junker system had been “to create qualified cadres of a strong civil service nobility. of noblemen into civil and military service was based also included an obligation to learn the skills required for such service. A school was organized in the Senate in 1721 for the training of junior college personnel, the so-called sluzhiteli, to which “the prikaz people are required to send their children.” The college junkers, too, were to attend classes at this school,-***’ but the measure nonetheless failed. A year later a legislative document could state that “this training has not gained any foothold when it comes to civil matters, and especially not in economic questions. The Petrine government’s attempts to create a competent cadre of Russian collegial officials led to no dazzling results, largely because of the simple fact that Russia lacked a secular educational tradition. As late as the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was the church which provided most academic training. Only when the civil administration became important in a strategic sense for supplying the regular army and the navy during Peter’s reign did the need for systematic training of administrative personnel become apparent. During the first decades of the eighteenth century, a number of schools were established to provide instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic for children of the nobility and of the prikaz officials (pod'iachie).-^'^ But the instruction provided by these The general service obligation upon which the recruitment " 293 294 296 A. Romanovich-Slovatinskii, Dvoriaiistvo Rossii ot nachala XVIII v. do otmen} krcpostnogo prava (St. Petersburg, 1870), 136—137. Troitskii (1974), 270; Demidova, 229. 292 Demidova, 229. Pavlenko, 74. -«•’ ZA (no. 290), 242. PSZ, VI, no. 3,896, p. 499. M. Vladimirski-Budanov, Gosudarstvo i narodnoe obrazovanie v Rossii XVIII-go veka (laroslavP, 1874), 19—20, 101, 246, 276—278; P. Pekarskii, Nauka i literaturu pri Petre Velikom (2 v., St. Petersburg, 1862), I, 122; Pavel N. Miliukov, “Secular Schools under Peter the Great,” in Marc Raeff, ed., Peter the Great: Reformer or 2tt:i 29» 297

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