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12 century that Russian historians first interested themselves seriously in the historical development of administrative institutions. Ideologically, the state school was part of Westernism (zapadnichestvo), whose champions, in contrast to those of slavophilism {slavianofiVstvo), asserted Russia’s kinship with Western Europe and promoted closer political and cultural ties with the West.^‘ A fundamental assumption among historians of the state school, and especially among legal historians, was that the historical process is encapsuled in the development of the political structure from the patriarchal clan society to the modern bureaucratic state,^^ With this assumption as their point of departure, these historians mainly devoted their research to the development of Russian administrative structures. Drawing upon Hegel for their philosophy of history, the members of the state school were also influenced by the organic theories of the historical school. The members of the state school published a number of works on adminstrative history, including that of A. D. Gradovskii, who laid the foundation for subsequent research on the Russian period of reform.^^ He carried on the state school’s Westernist ideas and held the contemporary Western European bourgeois state structure as his ideal.^^ According to Gradovskii, the collegial reform was Peter’s own work. The tsar’s goal was to achieve uniformity in the administration and to liquidate the arbitrariness which had characterized personal rule in the old Russia.^^ He noted that the reform of the central administration came only: when the theory of state had been completely worked out or shaped in the mind of the ingenious legislator, that is, when the entire mass of government institutions was prepared to submit to one guiding idea. This had to happen at the time when Peter had renounced the national way of life entirely and, under the Concerning the state school, see K. L. Rubinshtein, Russkaia istoriografiia (Moscow, 1941), 290—312, and Joseph L. Black, “The ‘State-School’ Interpretation of Russian History: A Re-Appraisal of Its Genetic Origins,” Jahrbiicher fiir Geschichte Östeuropas, 21 (1973), 509—530. Black, 510. This work was first published in 1866. I have used A. D. Gradovskii, “Vysshaia administratsiia Rossii XVIII v. i general-prokurory,” in idem, Sobranie sochinenii (9 v., St. Petersburg, 1899—1908), I. Other works on administrative history deserving mention are B. Chicherin, Oblastnye uchrezhdeniia Rossii v XVII veke (Moscow, 1856), I. Diti.atin, Ustroistvo i upravlenie gorodov Rossii. Goroda Rossii v XVIII stoletii (St. Petersburg, 1875), P. N. Mrochek-Drozdovskii, Oblastnoe upravlenie Rossii XVIII V. (Moscow, 1876), and S. Petrovskii, O senate v tsarstvovanie Petra Velikogo (Moscow, 1876). Rubinshtein, 363. Gradovskii, 107. Ibid., no.

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