196 the chief accountant in each province was to submit an annual proposal for the revenues available in his locality and the expenditures it would be necessary to make during the coming year. These reports were to be submitted by September 1 for the provinces in Sweden proper, and by October 1 for the Finnish and Baltic provinces. The materials sent to the statskontoret were then compared with the budget for the previous year in order to identify any changes, and then so-called extracts were drawn up, in which the proposed revenues and expenditures were carefully weighed against one another. In priniciple, each province’s expenditures were to be covered by its own revenues, a fact made clear by the stipulation that the provincial officials should not only indicate the revenues w^hich would be available, but also indicate how they were to be allocated. As we shall see below, the same principle was instituted in the Russian fiscal administration. As a rule, the task of drawing up the budget was completed in January, when the special budgets, the appropriations, and the general dispositions were presented to the king for his signature. The duly signed special budgets and dispositions were then sent to the appropriate localities where they were to be executed in accordance with the royal instructions. Thereafter, the special budgets were collected into a bound volume with the rubric “personnel budget” or “special budget.” This, too, was signed by the king, and the appropriations budget was also bound in a special volume. The rank order of the various items of expenditure was not regulated by any instructions, but was instead the product of practices developed during the seventeenth century. From this description of the process of drawing up the budget it is clear that the statskontoret weighed needs for appropriations against the available incomes. Thus, the method was not mechanically divided so that fixed items of expenditure were first listed and then the revenues fitted to them. The relationship between the special and appropriations budgets w'as established in one organic context. The Russian instruktsHa utilized a terminology parallel to that of the Swedish one. The special budget {specialstaten) was translated as the osoblivyi shtat, the appropriations budget (anordningsstaten) as the opredeliteVnyi shtat, and the general disposition {generaldispositionen) as the general"nyi ekstrakt. The term general"nyi shtat was also used. The process of drawing up the budget in the shtats-kontor-kollegiia was to begin by calculating the funds needed for the coming year. The various special budgets were to be arranged in a certain order under dlfferent rubrics or titles. The model for this arrangement was the Swedish “Statskontorets skrivelse 1697,“ Loenbom V, 49. ZA (no. 424, section 4:4), 593. 239 240 239
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