290 A consistent point in the Council’s discussions was that the previous economic situation should be restored by reducing the provincial budgets. The seventeenth-century system of administration was seen as an ideal, since in that system “there were only voevodas, and they administered all sorts of matters, both state matters and private ones, according to ukazes sent out from all the prikazy, and they were without salaries, and the administration was run better then by one person, and the people were satisfied.” In view of what has been said earlier in this chapter about the voevodas of the seventeenth century, the Council’s description amounts to so much wishful thinking, to say the least. However that may have been, this new body seems to have been determined to make great reductions in the personnel of the local administration, to dispose of the separation of juridical and administrative functions that characterized the reform of 1719, and to introduce in its place a form of administration which would place control over the administration, the collection of taxes, and Judicial affairs in the hands of one official. Oneunswervingadvocate of such a solution was Prince Menshikov, who, as president of the krigs-kollegiia and the spokesman for the officers corps, opposed any cut in the salaries of military officers. According to Menshikov, the local administration was itself the cause of the current disorders in the state finances. In the Supreme Privy Council he argued, for example, that “nowadays there are ten or more commanders over the peasants instead of one, as was the case before, namely of the military, from the soldier to the staff and the generalitet, and of the civil, from the prosecutor, the komissary, the foresters, and others, to the voevodas, whom one cannot now describe as shepherds, but rather as wolves who have infiltrated the flock.” It is characteristic of Menshikov and of the postPetrine period in general, that the explanation of the poor condition of the state treasury was not to be found in the excessive exploitation of the peasants, under the pressure of the long and costly war, by the state and the private landlords alike, but rather in the administrative system itself. The local officials were blamed for the fact that the peasants were unable to cultivate their land and that they fled their homesteads. The first reduction of personnel was decreed in July 1726, when the Supreme Privy Council issued an ukaz stating that the shtats-kontorkollegiia was to be incorporated into the kamer-kollegiia and that all the provincial bursarshlps, with the exception of those in St. Petersburg, eds., Sotsial’no—politicheskaia istoriia SSSR. Sbornik statci aspirantov i soiskatelei (Moscow & Leningrad, 1974). SIRIO, LV, 363. 200-letie Kabineta Ego Imperatorskogo Velichestva 1704—1904 (St. Petersburg, 1911), appendix, p. 47.
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