ra Survey of the Russian Manuscript Sources All the Russian manuscript sources used in this study are to be found among the collections of the Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Drevnikh Aktov (TsGADA) in Moscow. The following survey is meant to provide the reader with some insights into the contents of the most important collections (fondy) and into the conditions under which this research was conducted. Fond 9—Kabinet Petra Velikogo This collection of documents is very important for anyone studying the Petrine administrative reforms. The kabinet was the tsar’s personal chancellery and Russia’s highest legislative organ, and N. A. Voskresenskii called it the “main laboratory for legislative activity during the second half of Peter I’s reign” (ZA, 4). Materials concerning the foreign models for the administrative reforms were assembled in the kabinet, and it was there that the reforms were planned. It is in this collection that one finds such things as Heinrich Pick’s memoranda describing the Swedish administrative system and preliminary drafts of Petrine legislation, the latter of which are often annotated with the tsar’s own resolutions. This collection is divided into two sections, the first of which, numbering sixty-five volumes, contains copies of documents originating in the kabinet, and the second of which, numbering ninety-five volumes (of which volumes 1—70 and 90—95 stem from Peter’s reign), contains the documents sent to the kabinet by other organs and officials. My opportunities for studying these materials were limited, since I was not granted access to the catalogues listing the holdings in this collection. Because of this, it was only possible to order materials on the basis of information gathered from the footnotes of studies published earlier. Although this unsatisfactory situation was somewhat alleviated by the fact that some of the documents in this collection have been published, many important documents con-
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