231 where they were appointed the Sum of 3 or 4,000 Rubles upon their being advanced to their Governments, more or less, according to the Ability of the Place; besides what they privately gave in Presents to the Diacks or the Chancellors belonging to the head Office, or Precause, in Mosco, from which they were sent, and yet these Weywods, or Governors, were commonly known to make themselves rich within the Term of three Years above mention’d; by which (to say no more) it may easily be conjectured what Equity they practised towards the Czar, and towards the People committed to their Power. It is clear from Perry’s account that there was a strong mutual dependence between the central prikaz administration and the voevodas. Historians have even gone so far as to portray the voevoda as an agent of the prikaz which appointed him.^*^ It is argued that he was to execute the decisions and judgements reached in the prikazy, but in reality the prikazy were unable to exercise any effective control over the activities of the voevodas. They often developed very personalized regimes characterized by the individual voevoda’s aim of deriving as much personal profit as possible from his term of office. This created strong antagonisms between the local administration and the groups of service nobility and businessmen who were becoming more and more influential both economically and socially as the century went on.'*” As was discussed in some detail earlier in this study, strong dissatisfaction with the local administration emerged within these groups. Complaints about the excesses of the voevodas and powerful landowners became more and more common over the course of the century. At the Zemskii sobor held in Azov in 1642, the merchants complained to the tsar that “all sorts of people in the towns have become poor and totally destitute from your state voevodas {gosudarevy voevody), and the merchants who travel to the cities for their trade have lost their wares while travelling through because the voevodas have detained them and used violence.” The voevoda saw a lucrative source of income in those merchants who came into his uezd while conducting their business, and he often required themto pay him high fees just for the privilege of pursuing that business.'*'*^ The complaint made at the Zemskii sobor in Azov also serves as an example of the economic transformation through which Russian society was going during the seventeenth century, that is, with the formation of a unified domestic market. Merchants extended their activities to wider •*® P. Mrochek-Drozdovskii, Oblastnoe upravlenie Rossii XVIII veka do uchrezhdenii o guberniiakh (Moscow, 1876), 10—11. For the misuse of power by the voevodas, see Chicherin, 310—330. ■" Sobranic gosudarstvennykh gramot i dogovorov khraniashchikhsia v gosudarstvennoi kollegii inostrannykh del (5 v., Moscow, 1813—1828), III, no. 113, p. 395. Chicherin, 313.
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