119 had been developed by the chancellery during the seventeenth century. However, the kansliordningen can only have been used to a limited extent in the drafting of the Russian legislation, since its contents were especially tailored to the organization and responsibilities of the Swedish kanslikollegium and thus did not constitute any general administrative ordinance.^'^^ Consequently, a comparison of these two pieces of legislation reveals no evidence to support the idea that the kansliordningen served as a principal model for the General Regulation either in terms of the latter’s form or its content. What is even more significant is the fact that there are no points of agreement between the two texts, although there is no doubt whatsoever that the General Regulation, and in particular its first edition, represents a codification of seventeenth-century Swedish administrative practices. But this codification cannot have been drawn up on the basis of any single piece of legislation, since no such Swedish regulation regulating the administrative functions of all the colleges existed. That which most resembled a “general regulation” was the Form of Government of 1634, a document which no longer mirrored the actual state of the Swedish administrative system. Four new colleges had been founded after the enactment of the Form of Government of 1634, and only during the subsequent years of the seventeenth century was a method of administration common to all the colleges to emerge. By the late seventeenth century, the nature and responsibilities of collegial positions were largely the same from college to college, especially in regards to the junior staff members—secretaries, notaries, and so on—who performed the same functions regardless of which college they worked for. In view of this, then, the Russian General Regulation should present a description of Swedish administrative methods as they in fact existed during the Great Northern War. The regulation was drawn up originally by someone who had studied the operations of the Swedish collegial administration at close hand, and that someone can have been no other than Heinrich Fick. From this it follows that a comparative analysis of Swedish administrative practices and the contents of the General Regulation cannot be conducted exclusively on the basis of published legislative acts when it comes to the Swedish materials. It is necessary, instead, to reconstruct the details of the administrative routines followed in the Swedish colleges with the help of archival materials and then to compare this reconstruction with the contents of the Russian General Regulation. One Russian source claims that, “in this Regulation, the positions in the colleges have been described in accordance with Swedish law” (“po onomu reglamentu, v kollegiiakh chiny napisany, protiv shvedskogo praSee the titles in the margins of the chancellery ordinance of 1661; RA, Kanslikollegiets arkiv, F: II.a. Organisation.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=