294 administrative personnel were held by persons . . . fromthe nobility, which had previously been under the hoiarstvo but had now taken its place. Having studied some of the practical aspects of the reform and reviewed the motives for its subsequent dismantling, we shall now take a look at the objective obstacles which prevented a successful adaptation of the Swedish administrative system to Russian conditions. As did Pavel Miliukov, Bogoslovskii claimed in principle that the Swedish administrative techniques were too expensive to be applicable in Russia. According to Bogoslovskii, the national resources (narodnye sredstva) did not allow for state incomes to be appropriated for the payment of salaries to a large number of officials such as was required by the new administrative structure,-*’^ It can be pointed out already here, how'ever, that the difference between the costs of the old and the new administrative systems was not enough to justify acceptance of Bogoslovskii’s thesis at face value. Before the reform, for example, the administration of the St. Petersburg guberniia cost 41,293 rubles a year, and after the introduction of the Swedish administrative structure these costs amounted to 47,816 rubles. The difference in the St. Petersburg guberniia, therefore, was only 6,523 rubles,-*’^ Nonetheless, Bogoslovskii found support for his opinion in the many complaints made by local officials about the fact that their salaries were not paid on a regular basis.-®® In other words, he felt that Sweden had the economic ability to support an extensive administrative apparatus in the provinces, but that Russia did not. What Bogoslovskii meant by “national resources” is not clear. If he meant the total surplus produced by all the Russian peasants and artisans and controlled by the crown, then his reasoning seems rather strange. And it seems especially strange if one considers it against the background of the fact that the Russian crown’s landed estates {dvortsovye zemli) had been reduced by almost half as a result of the generous donations to the service nobility during the reign of Peter the Great. The Russian historian lu. V. Got’e wrote that “those lands under the administration of the palace chancellery {dvortsovaia kantseliariia) during the eighteenth century constituted but a meager remainder of the wealth which the Moscow prikaz 'boVshoi dvorets' once administered.” A great portion of the “national resources” controlled by the crown or the state—various forms of taxes. 283 Ibid., 283. Ibid., 269. Miliukov, 462. Bogoslovskii (1902), 265. lu. V. Got’e, Ocherk istorii zemlcvladcniia v Rossii (Sergiev Posad, 1914), 86; S. M. Troitskii, “Khoziaistvo krupnogo sanovnika Rossii v pervoi chetverti XVIII v.,” in N. I. Pavlenko et al., eds., Rossiia v period reform Petra I (Moscow, 1973), 220. 285 286
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