229 According to the personnel budget for 1696, provincial governors were to receive a salary of 1,500 dsmt per annum, which placed them in the exclusive circle of the somewhat more than one hundred forty civil servants with salaries of 900 dsmt or more. The salaries of this very small group amounted to approximately ten percent of the state’s total salary budget,'^*^ With the introduction of absolute monarchy in 1680, local administrative officials were placed in what amounted legally to a situation of personal obedience to the monarch himself. This fact emerges most clearly in the oaths of office which civil servants had to swear upon assuming their positions. The provincial governor was viewed as the king’s deputy in the province, or, as it was put in the preamble to the instruktion of 1687, “the king (Kungl. Maj:t) has most graciously entrusted and left to the provincial governor the administration of the entire province. The outward form of the Russian administrative organization on the local level during the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century has already been dealt with to a certain extent in this study,^® but, as an introduction to the provincial administrative reform of 1719, the local administrative apparatus will be described in detail below. Local control was exercised by a voevoda administration which was set up systematically throughout the widespread territories of the Russian state after the so-called “time of troubles.” The voevoda, whose original duty had had a military character (^;oe^’od^^ =military commander), was given extensive powers. Within his territorial jurisdiction, the uezd, he was to exercise military, administrative, and judicial functions on the strength of his position as the senior official in the district. The voevoda was to supervise the collection of taxes and the fulfillment of other duties imposed upon the local population. In addition, he was to serve as the senior judge of his uezd in both civil and criminal cases. The number of voevodas grew with the number of districts or uezdy, and it is estimated that the average number of voevodas during this period was approximately one hundred fiftyThese officials, who were appointed by the prikazy in Moscow, were recruited primarily from the service nobility. The voevodaships were very profitable and were there- ” 29 RA, Statskontorets arkiv, Huvudarkivet, 1696 års personalstat. Instruktioner /, 300. See above, p. 146—147. N. F. Demidova, ‘‘Biurokratizatsiia gosudarstvennogo apparata absoliutizma v XVII—XVIII vv.,” in N. M. Druzhinin, ed. Absoliutizm v Rossii (XVII—XVIII vv.). Sbornik statei k 70-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia i 40-letiiu nauchnoi i pedagogicheskoi deiatel’nosti B.B. Kafengauza (Moscow, 1964), 214.
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