179 formance of the various duties of the college prevented the kamer-kollegiia itself from organizing its business in a satisfactory manner. The economic and social realities of Russian society had proven that it was impossible to adopt a foreign system of fiscal administration in its entirety.188 2. The shfats-kontor-kollegiia 2.1. Introduction An important aspect of the power apparatus developed by the absolute monarchy was the planning of state finances. With the help of annual budget estimates, royal chancelleries sought to create a stable basis for the payment of salaries and other expenses for the administration, the army, and the navy. The compilation of the state budget was a task of the first Importance for the absolute monarch, since the very existence of his regime was dependent upon whether he was able, on a regular basis, to find the necessary resources to pay the salaries of his military officers and civil servants. Absolute monarchs were therefore continuously trying to find ways—and a simplified and systematic system of taxation was one of them—to increase their incomes and to distribute them according to a system of priority spending. The Swedish decision in 1680 to resume crown ownership of estates previously alienated by the state, the so-called reduktionen, may serve as an example. It is an established fact that this decision against the interest of the aristocracy was reached and executed with the support of those groups among the nobility which supported themselves primarily by means of the salaries they derived from military or civil service. As a result of the extensive donation and sale of crown estates and rents, above all to the aristocracy, during the seventeenth century, the economic base for the payment of crown salaries was reduced. Things even went so far that the payment of salaries was discontinued either in part or in full. The crown’s fiscal strength was restored through the reduktionen, since the agrarian rents previously alienated to the nobility could now be used to support the administration and the armed forces. It was in connection with this reduktionen that the statskontoret, hitherto part of the Regarding the organization and responsibilities of the kamer-kollegiia up to the time of its disbandment in 1784/85, see N. D. Chechulin, Ocherki po istorii russkikh finansov v tsarstvovanie Ekateriny 11 (St. Petersburg, 1906), 17—78. In accordance with the ukaz of May 11, 1723, which required that all the colleges draft instructions on the basis of the instruktsiia for the admiralteiskaia kollegiia, the kamer-kollegiia drafted new instructions for itself based largely on the instruktsiia of 1719. It is not known what happened to these instructions. TsGADA, f. 16 delo 178 1. 25. See BogoSLOVSKii (1902), 33—34 note 1. 188
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=