shipbuilder had occasion to test this advice. Arriving late at work one morning, he found Peter already there. He considered running home and sending word that he was sick, but then he remembered the advice and walked directly up to Peter. "You see, my friend, that I am here before you," said Peter, looking up. "I am to blame, Sire," replied Neplyuev. "Last night, I was with people and 1 stayed up very late and I was late getting up." Peter seized him by the shoulder and squeezed it hard. Neplyuev was convinced that he was doomed. "Thanks, my boy, for telling the truth," said the Tsar. "God will forgive you. All of us are human."
But Neplyuev was not long in this assignment either. Because of his language skills, he was frequently used as a translator, and in January 1721, still only twenty-eight, he was sent as Russian ambassador to Constantinople, returning home in 1734 to enjoy the estates which Peter had granted him in his absence. Eventually he became a senator. In 1774, during the reign of Catherine the Great, he died at the age of eighty.
Near the end of his reign, in 1722, Peter embodied his passionate belief in meritocracy in a permanent institutional framework, the famous Table of Ranks of the Russian Empire, which set before all young men entering service three parallel ladders of official ranks in the three branches of state service— military, civil and court. Each ladder had fourteen ranks, and each rank had a corresponding rank in the other two. Everyone was to begin his service on the bottom rung, and promotion was to depend not on birth or social status, but strictly on merit and length of service. Thereafter, at least in theory, nobility was of no importance in Russia, and honors and office were open to everyone. The noble titles of Old Russia were not abolished, but they carried no special privileges or distinctions. Commoners and foreigners were encouraged to apply for higher service, and soldiers, sailors, secretaries and clerks who merited notice were given appropriate positions on the Table of Ranks, where, once included, they competed, supposedly on equal terms, with Russian noblemen. Commoners who reached the lowest rank— i.e., the fourteenth on the military table, or the eighth on the civil or court ladder—were granted the status of "hereditary nobleman," with the right to own serfs and to pass along to their sons the right to enter state service at the bottom rank.
Thus, Peter, who had always given more weight to ability than to birth and who himself had worked his way up through the ranks in the army and the navy, passed his belief along to succeeding generations. This reform endured, and, despite subsequent alterations and inevitable corrosion by special favors and promotions won by bribes, it remained the basis of class structure in the Russian empire. Position on the Table of Ranks largely displaced birth as the measure of a man's worth, new blood was constantly brought into the army and the bureaucracy, and a man whose father had been a poor landowner or even a serf-soldier from the faraway Volga might find himself rubbing elbows with men who bore the oldest names in Russian history.*
On paper, as written in the decrees which flowed from Peter's pen, the reforms in administration might conceivably have made the Russian government function like the wheels of a watch. That it did not function this way was due not only to slowness to grasp or unwillingness to change, but also to many layers of corruption in government. Corruption affected not only the finances of the state but its basic efficiency. It made the imported administrative systems, already awkward to understand, almost impossible to operate.
Bribery and embezzlement were traditional in Russian public life, and public service was routinely looked upon as a means of gaining private profit. This practice was so accepted that Russian officials were paid little or no salary; it was taken for granted that they would make their living by accepting bribes. In Peter's time, only a handful of men in government were said to be honest and imbued with the idea of conscientious service to the state— Sheremetev, Repnin, Rumyantsov, Makarov, Osterman and Yaguzhinsky. The others were loyal to Peter personally, but regarded the state as a cow to be milked.
As a result, the majority of administrators were motivated less by a sense of service to the state than by desire for private gain, mingled with the effort to escape detection and punishment. Thus, two powerful negative motives, greed and fear, became the predominant features of Peter's bureaucrats. There were chances
*Ironically, under the Table of Ranks, Lenin, born Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, was an hereditary Russian nobleman. This title was inherited from his father, Ilya, the son of a serf, who had gone to Kazan University and become an educator. Taking over responsibility for primary education in Simbirsk province on the Volga in 1874, he raised the number of primary schools in the province from 20 to 434 in fourteen years. For this achievement, he was promoted to the rank of Actual State Councillor in the civil service, the fourth rank from the top and the equivalent of a major general in the army. When Lenin's elder brother Alexander Ulyanov was executed in 1887 for attempting to assassinate Tsar Alexander HI, the title passed automatically to the future founder of the Soviet state. In 1892, when Lenin, at twenty-one, applied to St. Petersburg for permission to take examinations in law, he signed himself "Nobleman Vladimir Ulyanov."
for immense riches—the vast wealth of Menshikov was an example; there was also a very good chance of torture, the scaffold or the wheel. Yet, whatever Peter did—urge, persuade, cajole, threaten, punish-—seemed to make little difference. He realized that force was not enough. "I can turn dice not too badly with my chisel," he said sadly, "but I cannot turn mules with my cudgel."
Disappointment followed disappointment, not only at the highest levels. Once, Peter elevated an honest lawyer to a judgeship. In this new position, where his decision could become an object of bribery, the new judge became corrupt. When Peter found out, he not only absolved the judge, but doubled his salary to prevent further temptation. At the same time, however, the Tsar promised that if the judge ever again betrayed his trust, he would surely hang. The judge fervently promised that Peter's faith was justified—and soon afterward accepted another bribe. Peter hanged him.
The Tsar accepted that he could not enforce complete honesty at every level of government, but he was determined to suppress all forms of corruption which drained the national Treasury. In 1713, a decree called on all citizens to report to the Tsar himself any case of government corruption. The reward of the informer was to be the property of the accused, providing the informer's charge turned out to be accurate. This seemed too dangerous for most people, and what resulted was a torrent of anonymous letters, many of them maliciously inspired by a wish to pay off personal scores. Peter promulgated another decree, condemning anonymous letters by those who "beneath a show of virtue put out their venom." He promised his protection to accurate informers, saying, "Any subject who is a true Christian and an honorable servant of his sovereign and his fatherland may without any misgiving report orally or by letter to the Tsar himself." Eventually, an anonymous letter arrived which accused some of the highest officials of government of corruption on a grand scale. The writer was persuaded to stand up, and a dramatic trial ensued.
Over the years, the system by which villages were required to raise provisions for the army and deliver them to St. Petersburg and other towns through the newly conquered territories created a heavy burden because of transportation difficulties. To deal with these problems, middlemen stepped forward who agreed to make the required deliveries in return for the right to charge a higher price. This practice became a source of innumerable frauds. A number of key figures in the government were involved, conspiring with the deliverers and sometimes taking delivery of the provisions themselves under borrowed names. Although the scandal was widely known, nobody dared to challenge the noblemen and high officials involved by breaking the matter to Peter. Finally, so great was the misery of the people who were being taxed twice to pay for the stolen provisions that one man decided he must inform the Tsar. At the same time, he attempted to save his own neck by remaining anonymous and leaving unsigned letters of accusation in places where Peter went. Peter read one and offered the author not only his protection but a large reward if he would make himself known and could prove what he had charged. The informer appeared and provided the Tsar with unimpeachable evidence that his chief lieutenants were engaged in fraud.