146 division of labor designed to “facilitate operations’’ and thereby guarantee a more efficient administration.-® The collection of revenues was not delegated to any central or uniform administrative organ in seventeenth-century Russia, but was instead conducted by a large number of administrative units called prikazy (chancelleries). The number of prikazy varied greatly over time, since many were set up to collect some temporary tax or fee and were dismantled when their specific tasks had been completed. It is estimated that approximately eighty prikazy existed at one time or another during the seventeenth century, of which just over forty were more permanent ones.-’ Some of the prikazy were charged with functions of a purely fiscal administrative nature; the Prikaz BoPshogo prikhoda (Chancellery of the Grand Revenue), for example, collected such revenues as the customs duties in Moscow and other cities. In addition, it was also responsible for supervising weights and measures throughout the Muscovite realm.'-^ Normally, however, prikazy were charged with administering welldefined local districts. Included in their activities, in such cases, was the actual collection of greatly varying numbers of taxes and fees. Examples of such local prikazy Include the Kazanskii dvorets (Kazan’ Chancellery) and the Sihirskii prikaz (Siberian Chancellery), with the former responsible for the administration of the Kazan’ and Astrakhan’ areas and the latter responsible for the administration of Siberia. The revenues collected within these large geographical areas were used to support the local administration and the military establishment within the respective localities, while only part of them, especially furs, were sent to the prikazy in Moscow.-® Local supervision of revenue collection was carried out primarily by the voevodas appointed by each prikaz. In 1680, the fiscal administration was centralized to a certain extent in that a major portion of revenue collection was charged to a prikaz known as the BoVshaia kazna (Great Treasury).®® Captain John Perry, an English shipbuilder who entered Russian service at the end of the seventeenth century, provided the following description of the fiscal administration of the prikazy in this account of Russia under Peter the Great: -• Instruktioner II, 73. N. UsTiUGOV, “Tsentral’noe upravlenic. Prikazy,” Ocherki (1955), 366. 28 Ibid., 370. 2* I. Blekh, Ustroistvo finansovogo upravleniia v Rossii v istoricheskom ikh razvitii (St. Petersburg, 1895), 28—29. 2“ For the background of his reform see above, p. 47. 2* John Perry, The State of Russia Under the Present Czar (London, 1716), 187—190. For Perry and his narrative, see M. A. Alpatov, Russkaia istoricheskaia mysV i Zapadnaia Evropa. XVII-pervaia chelvert’ XVIII veka (Moscow, 1976), 369—373.
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