53 guarantee the maintenance of the regular military forces, which he had created at the beginning of the eighteenth century and on whose loyalty the stability of his regime ultimately rested. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, the Duma lost its direct Influence over political decisions and more or less languished. Characteristic of the situation was the fact that when Peter went off on his first European tour in 1697 he left the government of Moscow in the hands of Prince F. III. Romodanovskli, who was not a member of the Duma. In spite of this fact, Romodanovskii was able to exercise great influence with the Duma and was even able to participate in its activities."- During the period 1692—1702, the membership of the Duma fell from one hundred eighty-two to eighty-six, and by 1708 it had fallen to fifty-one because of the fact that almost no new appointments were made when old Duma members died, or entered monasteries, or fell into disgrace."^ One exception was the elevation of I. A. Musin-Pushkin to the position of boiar in 1699, but this seems to have been the last such appointment.'^ One can also see that the close personal ties that had existed earlier between the Duma and the prikazy were weakened during this period. When the Duma met in April 1701, only a minority of the membership present were prikaz judges. Of the forty members participating in the meetings of the Duma, only seven were heads of prikazy. Instead, the tsar issued an ordinance stating that the judges “each week on Friday shall come with their business to a General"skii dvor at Preobrazhenskoe, and even if there is no business they shall come.”^^ In these regular meetings with the heads of the prikazy, Peter had found a way to gain direct control over the activities of the executive organs of the central administration, while at the same time removing the Duma from the political decision-making process even more. Another sign of the Duma’s reduced status was that its legislative authority gradually slid into the hands of the tsar. While the Duma did continue to participate in the process of legislation, the acts which were passed by the Duma alone or jointly with the tsar during this period were few in number and of secondary importance. Instead, Peter acted as an independent legislator, issuing legislative acts, or so-called imennye ukazy, which bore only his Kliuchevskii (1882), 447. Robert O. Crummey, “Peter and the Boiar Aristocracy, 1689—1700,” CanadianAmerican Slavic Studies, 8 (1974), 277, argues that one should not attach too much significance to the fact that the number of Duma members was limited more and more during the period, since the Duma had had a much smaller number of members during the earlier part of the seventeenth century. At the accession of Aleksei Mikhailovich there were only thirty-one members. Bogoslovskii, IV, 249, and Kliuchevskii (1882), 453. Bogoslovskii, IV, 257.
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