RB 29

56 The old Muscovite use of scrolls, which not only limited the efficiency of the prikazy, but also reduced the possibility of being able to monitor their affairs, was thus to be abolished. Instead, each chancellery was to keep its papers readily available in easily accessible books. These changes in the administrative routines of the prikazy, however, did not suffice to transform the old administrative organization into the strictly centralized state apparatus that the absolutist state needed in order to carry out its policies. Therefore, it is possible to perceive in the Petrine government’s measures concerning the prikazy a determination to reduce their influence—especially when it came to the administration of finances—which eventually led to the final dismantling of the prikaz system. Peter B. Brown has described the motive behind this administrative policy in the following incisive manner:®^ Peter discarded the chancelleries primarily because of their inability to provide Russia sufficient military and financial support. But he jettisoned them also because they had become the preserve of the Muscovite upper service class, which increasingly became obsolete and unfit for state service and distorted the rationale for government administration. However, it should be emphasized even more strongly that these two motives cannot be separated, but rather that they were united in an inseparable manner, as has been demonstrated in the earlier part of this study. A turning point in the development of the prikaz administration came in 1708—1710 with a thorough reform of the local administration, the so-called guberniia reform, which divided the country into eight large administrative areas, or gubernii. The primary reasons for this reform had to do with military finances. Supplying the army was decentralized and charged to the eight guberniia treasuries, which at the same time became the recipients of the taxes collected in those jurisdictions. In this way the time-consuming detour via the prikaz treasuries in Moscow was avoided, and the military units were thus able to receive the food and equipment they needed more rapidly and with greater certainty. The result was that the prikaz administration began to fall apart. The Ratusha was deprived of its position as a central organ for the administration of finances, just as the regional administrative prikazy, such as the Sibirskii prikaz and the Kazanskii Dvorets, became more or less obsolete, since their functions were assumed by the governors. The majority of the prikazy did in fact survive the guberniia reform, but many of them were transformed into amount of paper had just been prepared for scrolls and this was to be used up first; Chernov (1957), 247—248. Brown, 513—514.

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