236 vich (1676—1682). He wrote that the nobility had even been given the right to elect the voevodas and that:®- one of the main reasons the country is being ruined is that when voevodas are sent to the towns not upon their merits and deserts, but when towns are sold by those who have the power to do so. As was the case at the beginning of Peter the Great’s reign, the prices (oklaciy) were determined in the Razriadnyi prikaz and the Kazanskii dvorets as to how much was to be taken for each town, and he who paid, he got them (the towns), too. The voevodas relied upon their vendors (prodavtsy), they plundered unabashedly, and even though people complained about them, they were defended vigorously by he who sold the town (prodavets goroda). For this reason. Tsar Feodor Alekseevich decided that the nobility (shliakhetstvo) should elect (izbirat’) the voevodas. It has not been possible to find any support in the sources for Tatishchev’s statement about the right of the nobility to vote in connection with the appointment of voevodas. The service nobility only participated in the election of the so-called gubnye starosty, who had police and judicial (criminal law) functions within a district largely corresponding to the voevoda’s uezd.^^ The gubnyc starosty, who were recruited from among the service nobility, were to carry out their duties independently of the voevoda administration. However, practical experience showed that they were unable to defend their independence from the powerful voevodas. The so-called guhnye starosty were finally abolished in connection with the reform of 1702 mentioned above.®'* Let us for a moment return to the quotation from Tatishchev, which is also interesting from another point of view. The picture he provides of the community of interests between the voevodas and the prikazy in the administration of the state actually mirrors his own social position and the interests of the service nobility to which he belonged. Tatishchev, who has been referred to as a leading ideologue of the service nobility,®^ depicted Peter the Great’s absolutism as a regime established in the interest of his own social group. The reform of 1702 was not carried out in the manner that had been intended, since the nobiliar councillors to the voevoda, the voevodskie V. N. Tatishchev, Istoriia Rossiiskaia, edited by A. I. Andreev (7 v., Leningrad, 1962—1968), VII, 334. For a historiographical introduction to Tatishchev’s works on Russian history, see N. L. Rubinshtein, Ritsskaia istoriografiia (Moscow, 1941), 74—86. ** S. F. Platonov, Lektsii po russkoi istorii (10th ed., Petrograd, 1917), 458—459; Chicherin, 453. Richard Hellie, Enserfmcnt and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago, 1971), 71—72, 303 note 187. See S. M. Troitskii, Russkii absoliutizm i dvorianstvo XVIII v. (Moscow, 1974), 134, and A. I. Iukht, “V. N. Tatishchev o reformakh Petra I," in V. T. Pashuto, ed., Obshchestvo i gosudarstvo v feodaVnoi Rossii. Sbornik statei v chest’ 70-letiia akad. L. V. Cherepnina (Moscow, 1975), 209—218.
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