VI. The Administration of Foreign Affairs In Russia’s new collegial system of administration, the counterpart of the Swedish kanslikollegium was the kollegiia inostrannykh del, or college of foreign affairs. At the outset, when the collegial reform was in the process of being drafted for the first time, the Swedish designation itself had been used; in the first draft of the General Regulation, therefore, this new organ was referred to as the kantseliarnoi kolegiium} Since the responsibilities of this college, in its Russian version, lay primarily in the field of foreign affairs, however, the designation kollegiia inostrannykh del was soon adopted. Before turning to the genesis of Peter’s new instrument for the conduct of diplomatic affairs, a few words about the background of its Swedish prototype seem in order. The royal chancellery at Stockholm predated the reign of Gustav II Adolf, of course, but the accession charter he signed upon assuming the throne in 1611 included a passage requiring the king to relinquish exclusive control of that office; the five ancient officers of the medieval Swedish state, that is, the steward, the marshal, the admiral, the chancellor, and the treasurer, were to be resurrected in the persons of five aristocrats, and the appropriate organs of administration were to be placed under their supervision.- Axel Oxenstierna, the foremost aristocratic statesman in Sweden and now chancellor of the realm, introduced radical changes in the chancellery right from the beginning of 1612, when he forced the non-noble secretaries Nils Chesnecopherus and Erik Elofsson to leave and assumed personal direction of the day to day business of that office. This purge of Chesnecopherus and Elofsson symbolized the adamant opposition of the Swedish aristocracy to the sixteenth-century royal practice of allowing the administration to be run by non-noble * ZA (no. 400), 414. See p. 365. - See 1611 .irs kungaförsäkmn, art. 5, SRF, 198.
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