Introduction The last decade of Peter the Great’s forty-three-year reign (1682—1725) witnessed a series of attempts to reform the Russian state administration in a profound way. Hampered by its extreme functional fragmentation, the old administrative system was dismantled to make room for a rational and unitary administration characterized by a systematic, institutional division of responsibilities and by an internal division of labor based on standard operating procedures. These administrative reforms, carried out to implement a centralization of power, were expressions of the efforts of an absolutist monarchy to create a total unity of political and military power. The systematic reconstruction of the administrative system coincided chronologically with the final consolidation of permanent regular military forces in the Russian empire. The maintenance of standing military and naval forces involved in lengthy and extremely costly warfarenot only required increased economic resources, mobilized for the most part through more intensive state taxation, but it also required extensive organizational measures to create the conditions necessary for the unitary administration of state funds and for fiscal planning based on regularized accounting and auditing procedures. Thus, administration in general, and fiscal administration in particular, were assigned much greater importance than had previously been the case in Russia. This is illustrated by the following excerpt from a draft document concerning the rank relationships between the staff positions in the newly established governmental organs: ^ Spain had many lands, fleets, and armies, but, because she lacked a regular division and an established administration in her councils, her great machine and power {velikaia makhina i sila) fell into decline and did not come into any order. According to the author of this document, then, Spain’s misfortune resuited from the fact that the Spanish regime did not understand the importance of establishing and developing a regularized state administration.- ‘ TsGADA, f. 370 delo 16 11. 52—52v. - For a discussion of the role played by the administration in Spain’s development during the later part of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, see, John Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs (2 v., Oxford, 1964—1969), II, 267—273.
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