55 tsar had assigned it to perform.'*^ In this way there was established a central organ of control which had the ability to supervise, and to some extent even to coordinate, the activities of the prikaz administration. A number of Duma members eventually began to meet regularly in the Blizhniaia kantseliariia, and soon they were referred to as the konziliia ministrov. According to an opinion extant in Soviet historiography, this council of ministers constituted a transitional form between the old Duma and the Senate that Peter created in 1711.®” Thus it is possible to see in the origin of the council of ministers yet another expression of Peter’s attempts to limit the political influence of the old council of magnates. The council of ministers was an executive body which, in contrast to the Duma, usually met without Peter present and whose principal task was to see to it that the tsar’s decisions were communicated to the units concerned and carried out by them. In 1707, Peter issued an ukaz ordering that minutes of the meetings of the council were to be kept and were to be signed by each “minister,” “for by this the foolishness of each one would be evident.”®^ When in 1708 the council of ministers met in the Blizhniaia kantseliariia under the chairmanship of Tsarevich Aleksei it had fourteen members, the majority of whom were both members of the Duma and heads of prikazy. However, even men who were not members of the Duma were appointed “ministers.” Thus, for example. Prince F. lu. Romodanovskii, who was mentioned above, became the leader of the council in spite of the fact that he held a low rank, that of stoVnik, in comparison with the members of the Duma. The other prikaz heads, those who did not sit on the council of ministers, were to report to the Blizhniaia kantseliariia three times a week for consultations.®- A series of measures were taken at the beginning of the eighteenth century to make the workings of the prikazy more rational and efficient.®® Among other things, Peter decreed in an ukaz in 1702 that the prikaz employees were “not to write as in the earlier manner on scrolls, because all matters in the prikazy are to be bound in books, and not in scrolls. ” 84 Kliuchevskii (1882), 451. D. S. Baburin, “Reforma vysshikh i tsentral’nykh organov gosudarstvennogo upravIcniia,” Ocherki (1954), 304—305. ZA (no. 238), 196. Baburin, 304. Brown, 547—549. '*■* ZA (no. 236), 195. Already in 1700, Peter had ordered that books (tetradi) rather than scrolls should be used, "since in the prikazy many acts are missing from the scrolls thanks to the carelessness of the pod’iachie, and others thanks to the enterprise of the petitioners.” However, the reform was not implemented at that time, since a large
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