41 and expenditures of this prikaz, and most other prikazy had “desks” corresponding to this one.-'* There were no formal instructions or regulations for the administration, but rather it appears the routines of the various prikazy developed entirely from usage and custom. No diaries or minutes were kept concerning the matters brought before, or dealt with in, the chancelleries, and thus it is difficult to reconstruct the routines followed by the prikaz personnel. Moreover, it is not even known whether the employees were bound to any regular working hours.-” With an administrative structure such as this, of course, it was impossible to know anything about how a specific matter would be dealt with, or even how long it might take. The nature of the work in the chancelleries was largely shaped by a special manner of document storage, the stolbets, which was simply a scroll of folio sheets pasted one to another. One scroll might be as long as several hundred meters, but it had the decided advantage of being relatively easy to store. However, in view of its physical form it was also difficult to work with. For example, no tables of contents or indexes were maintained, and thus each prikaz official had to rely on his own memory to know what the various scrolls contained. In viewof the fact that each scroll contained extremely diverse types of records, this was no easy task. However, this method of keeping records could, at the same time, prove to be convenient, since it was easy to “forget about" a scroll if one wished to. It was to this that M. N. Tikhomirov attributed “the disorder In the prikazy and the red tape and fraud of the prikazy which existed all the time. Books, too, were used in the chancelleries, although a book could easily be transformed into a scroll, just as a scroll could be cut up and bound into a book. The book form was used above all in cases where it was not possible to use scrolls. Documents to which the personnel had to refer frequently were therefore collected into books, as was the case with the socalled ukaznyc knigi, which recorded in chronological order the tsar’s ukazes to the individual prikazy. In contrast to the scroll, which consisted of a more or less chaotic collection of oftentimes entirely different types of documents, the book represented a systematically arranged collection of documents.^" From what has been said here, it is obvious that no uniform norms existed for the tasks performed in the seventeenth-century Russian administration. Administrative activity was characterized by an unwieldiness and ” 28 -® N. P. Eroshkin, Ocherki istorii gosndarstvennykh uchrezhdenii dorevoUutsionnoi Rossii (Moscow, 1960), 55. M. N. Tikhomirov, Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo XV—XVII vekov (Moscow, 1973), 353. Ibid., 360. Ibid., 370.
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