RB 29

20 for the reforms he was about to implement,"' Without presenting any reason for doing so, Berendts stated that the source which Miliukov had analyzed in detail, and upon which he had based his conclusions, was in fact a description of the French administrative system. V. Ogorodnikov summarized the prerevolutionary Russian studies of the Petrine administration in a historiographical survey published in 1917."® In his opinion, the transition from the old prikaz administration to the new collegial administration had been dealt with too briefly and in too biased a manner by those who had treated it. He was especially critical of Miliukov, whose erroneous interpretation of the collegial reforms had become so widespread in the historical profession. According to Ogorodnikov, Miliukov had paid much too little attention to earlier research findings. While Miliukov’s work was admirable in viewof the huge amount of material upon which it was based, he had failed to structure the sources and to analyze them, and therefore Ogorodnikov felt that his book contained a number of contradictions."® Above all, Ogordnikov rejected Miliukov’s thesis that the old administrative apparatus had already dissolved long before the collegial reform, pointing out that several of the old administrative organs were absorbed into the new collegial administration. According to Ogorodnikov, Miliukov himself had shown that certain prikazy had been active right up to the time they were replaced by the colleges. Ogorodnikov emphasized that if the origin, structure, and activities of the colleges were to be understood, it would be necessary, first of all, to determine the foreign influence on the instructions for the colleges. Thus, according to him, the primary task for any historian choosing to study the Petrine colleges was to find out how the texts of the instructions had been drawn up, who had drawn them up, and what materials they had used as their basic data. One question that had been neglected almost completely, observed Ogorodnikov, was the composition of the college staffs. Reconstructing their composition would be fruitful, since the civil servants, both foreigners and Russians, brought with them experiences and opinions from their earlier positions which, Ogorodnikov assumed, must have influenced the practical operation of the colleges.®® Such a study would therefore reveal to what extent the instructions were actually followed in the colleges. Ogorodnikov’s historiographical essay placed the administrative reforms Berendts (1896), 18. V. Ogorodnikov, Iz istorii voprosa o tsentraVnykh uchrezhdeniiakh pri Petre Velikom (Kazan’, 1917). ■» Ibid., 29. 8» Ibid., 32.

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