269 It seems that the Russians had difficulty acquiring a copy of the Swedish instruktion for landshövdingar. One source informs us that it was not among the materials Heinrich Pick brought back from Sweden,-®** although this is quite remarkable considering the fact that it contained important information about the entire Swedish administrative system and would therefore have been considered an important source of Information for the Russian reformers. When one considers the great insight into Swedish administrative routines that Pick demonstrated, this shortcoming can hardly be attributed to any oversight on his part. It is more likely that Pick was unable to gain access to the instruktion during his stay in Stockholm, for it had not been published and each landshövding was given a personal copy for safekeeping during his termof office. On November 15, 1718, however. General Jacob Bruce, who had been sent to Åland for peace negotiations with the Swedes,-*® reported that he had finally succeeded in getting hold of a copy of the Swedish instruktion for provincial governors. Bruce reported that he had gotten this document through a friend, probably an official in the Swedish local administration, on the condition “that no one either among [the Swedes] or anyone fromour suite should learn of it,” and that the document should be returned as soon as it had been copied. The general had sent off to Åbo “in order to find a person who could translate [the instruktion^ into German, or at least copy it in Swedish.” Bruce promised that the document would be sent to St. Petersburg as soon as possible, and in order to emphasize its importance he offered the following description of its contents: I hope that this news will be especially useful {zelo nadobno) for the colleges, for in it are named not only the maintenance of the artillery, but also how the naval and military people {morskie i sukhoputnye sluzhiteli) receive their support in the districts; further (it speaks) in detail about all sorts of provincial and civil affairs, about academies, about hospitals, about schools, about orphans {sirotstvo), about poor and vagrant people, about the maintenance of bridges and roads, about the mails, about mining and other things, in short about everything that has to do with the possession and governance {vladenie i upotreblenie) of the province. In conclusion. General Bruce added that, in exchange for certain gifts, such as sable and fox skins, it would be possible to obtain further information about the Swedish administrative system through his contact in FinThere was, however, a Swedish instruktion for landsfiskaler from 1714, which may have served as a source for the comparable Russian instruktsiia, since it was among the material available in Russia at the time of the reforms; see Cederberg, Beilage 1, 4. ZA (no. 53), 62. Solov’ev, IX, 192—193. ZA (no. 53), 62. 210
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