238 exception of A. D. Menshikov of the St. Petersburg guberniia, came from the old boiar class."^ The guberniia administration was to begin functioning as of 1710, and at the beginning of 1709 Peter wrote the following to the new governors: We send you herewith a register of the shall assume from the voevodas, burgomasters, and other officials, all revenues and expenditures, as well as all accounts ivedeniia), and yourself supervise everything, so that at the beginning of the coming year, 1710, God grant it, you may without fail {bessporno) undertake everything, and the functions may be carried out without interruption. And therefore this year has been devoted to a preparation {ispravlenie, censure, correction), and until next year everything shall be as it has been. The collection of taxes was thus transferred from the Ratusha and the prikazy to the eight guberniia bursaries. Simultaneously, the maintenance of the army was organized, with the support of all the regiments divided up among the eight gubernii. Each guberniia was to provide for the upkeep of its own military units. Instead of delivering the tax revenues to the central administration in Moscow, as had been done previously, the revenues were to be applied to cover the expected expenditures by the guberniia itself.The guberniia administration became operative in 1711."“ According to the plans, the administration was to be divided along functional lines into four spheres of activity under the supervision of the governor. An ober-komendant was to be given charge of the military affairs of the guberniia, while the collection of taxes was to be divided between an ober-komissar and an ober-proviant, or master of provisions. The ober-komissar was to supervise the collection of taxes paid in cash, while the master of provisions was to supervise the collection of taxes in kind. The judicial authority within the guberniia, finally, was to be exercised by a landrikhter, or provincial judge."' This system was never established in practice. The governor combined in his own person all the functions of the guberniia administration. He served as the commander of the armed forces in his guberniia, as well as functioning as the highest authority in both administrative and judicial guberniia, in which you 1713—1714, the number of gubernii was increased to eleven when the Nizhegorodskaia, Astrakhanskaia, and Rizhskaia gubernii were created. A large portion of the Smolensk guberniia was transferred to the last of these three new units. '•'* Reinhard WiTTRAM, Peter 1. Czar and Kaiser (2 v., Göttingen, 1964), II, 104. PiB, IX: 1, 91. Pavel Miliukov, Gosudarstvennoe khoziaistvo Rossii v pervoi chetverti XVIII v. (2nd ed., St. Petersburg, 1905), 289, 296. ■« Ibid., 294. Ibid., 264—265.
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