Like the landowning dvoriane, mid-eighteenth-century chinovniks began to press the state for concessions. They too wished to be rid of the most disagreeable features of the state service system, especially that provision of the Table of Ranks which had made promotion in rank dependent on the availability of a corresponding post. They much preferred the old Muscovite system - restricted as it had been to the small high echelon of die civil service - whereby possession of a chin entitled the holder to a corresponding post in state service. The force of this Muscovite tradition was so strong that even in Peter's lifetime the basic premises of the Table of Ranks had been grossly violated; this must have savings were effectuated by the wholesale dismissal. Nor is it apparent why bureaucratization required the emancipation of dvoriane, in so far as bureaucrats also belonged to this class. The trouble with this interpretation is that it ignores the entire process of society's 'manumission' of which the emancipation of dvoriane was only one chapter, and which cannot be explained satisfactorily by the desire to save money or by other, narrowly conceived considerations of raison i'itat.
THE PARTIAL DISMANTLING OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE
been true of the holders of the four uppermost ranks, the generalitet, who, as had been noted, in 1730 nearly to a man descended from titled Muscovite servitors. Under Peter's successors merit requirements were further lowered. For example, to encourage education, Elizabeth allowed graduates of institutions of higher learning to bypass the lowest ranks. Still, at any rate as far as the lower grades of the bureaucracy were concerned, the Petrine principle held, and the average official had to wait for a suitable vacancy before being promoted to the next higher rank.
This principle was abandoned in the early years of Catherine 11, at almost the same time that the monarchy surrendered the principle of compulsory state service and much for the same reason, namely to win support. On 19 April 1764, Catherine issued instructions that all high civil servants who had held rank uninterruptedly for seven or more years were to be promoted to the next higher rank.* Three years later, the Senate asked the Empress what she wished done about those officials who had fallen short of the seven-year requirement by a few months and remained frozen in their rank while their more fortunate colleagues had moved up a notch. Catherine gave a casual reply destined to have the most weighty consequences; she ordered the general and automatic promotion of all civil servants who had served for a minimum of seven years in a given rank. This decision, dated 13 September 1767, set a precedent which was faithfully followed; henceforth it became the rule in Russia to promote civil servants on the basis of seniority without much regard to personal qualifications, attainments, or vacancies. Later on, Catherine's son, Paul, lowered the waiting period for most ranks to three or four years; and since it had become customary to bypass Ranks 13 and 11 anyway, a civil servant now had reasonable assurance that once he had reached the lowest chin and stayed in the service without getting into trouble with his superiors, he would in good time reach the coveted eighth rank and gain for his descendants hereditary dvorianstvo. (It was partly this threat of being flooded with ennobled bureaucrats that influenced Nicholas 1 and Alexander 11 to limit hereditary dvorianstvo to the uppermost five or four ranks; see above, p. 125.) Catherine's policies put the Table of Ranks on its head; instead of rank coming with office, office now came with rank.
The Manifesto of 1762, reinforced by the Charter of 1785, deprived the monarchy of control over the landed estate; the Edict of 1767 deprived it of control of the bureaucracy. The crown henceforth no longer had any choice but to convey up the automatic escalator of promotion
* This order, of utmost importance for the history of imperial Russia, is reproduced neither in the Full Collection of Laws nor in the appropriate volume of the Senate Archive (Senatskii Arkhiv, XIV, St Petersburg, 191 o). No historian seems to have seen it, and it is known only from references.
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officials who had logged a prescribed number of years in one rank. In this manner, the bureaucracy secured a stranglehold on the apparatus of state, and through it, on the inhabitants of state and crown lands for whose administration it was responsible. Already at the time keen observers noted the disastrous effects of such a system. Among them was a political imigri from one of the most aristocratic houses, Prince Peter Dolgorukov. Writing on the eve of the Great Reforms of the 1860s, he urged the abolition of chin as a prerequisite to any meaningful improvement of conditions in Russia:
The Emperor of All the Russias, the would-be Autocrat, finds himself utterly deprived of the right, claimed not only by all constitutional monarchs but even by presidents of republics, the right to choose his functionaries. In Russia, to hold a position, it is necessary to hold a corresponding rank. If the sovereign finds an honest individual, capable of performing a certain function but lacking in the rank required for the position he cannot appoint him. This institution is the most powerful guarantee given to nullity, to servility, to corruption. Hence, of all reforms it is the one most antipathetic to the all-powerful bureaucracy. Of all the abuses, chin is the most difficult to uproot because it has so many and such influential defenders. In Russia, merit is a great obstacle to a man's advancement... In all civilized countries, a person who has devoted ten or fifteen years of his life to study, to travels, to agriculture, industry and commerce, a person who has gained specialized knowledge and is well acquainted with his country, such a person will come to occupy a public post where he is able to perform useful work. In Russia, it is quite different. A man who has left the service for several years cannot rejoin it except at a rank which he had held at the moment of his resignation. Someone who has never been in the service cannot enter it except at the lowest rank, regardless of his age and merit, while a scoundrel, a semi-moron, provided that he never leaves the service, will end up by attaining the highest ranks. From this derives the singular anomaly that in the midst of the Russian nation, so intelligent, endowed with such admirable qualities, where the spirit, so to speak, roams the villages, the administration is distinguished by an ineptitude, which, invariably increasing as one approaches the highest ranks, ends up in certain high administrative echelons by degenerating into veritable semi-idiodsm.*13 The judgement, for all its impassioned harshness, cannot be faulted in