A people's tragedy

Despite its talents, the bureaucracy never really became an effective tool in the hands of the autocracy. There were three main reasons for this. First, its dependence on the nobility became a source of weakness as the noble estate fell into decline during the later nineteenth century. There was an increasing shortfall in expertise (especially in the industrial field) to meet the demands of the modern state. The gap might have been bridged by recruiting Civil Servants from the new industrial middle classes. But the ruling élite was far too committed to its own archaic vision of the tsarist order, in which the gentry had pride of place, and feared the democratic threat posed by these new classes. Second, the apparatus was too poorly financed (it was very difficult to collect enough taxes in such a vast and poor peasant country) so that the ministries, and still more local government, never really had the resources they needed either to control or reform society. Finally, there were too many overlapping jurisdictions and divisions between the different ministries. This was a result of the way the state had developed, with each ministry growing as a separate, almost ad hoc, extension of the autocrat’s own powers. The agencies of government were never properly systematized, nor their work co-ordinated, arguably because it was in the Tsar’s best interests to keep them weak and dependent upon him. Each Tsar would patronize a different set of agencies in a given policy field, often simply bypassing those set up by his predecessors. The result was bureaucratic chaos and confusion. Each ministry was left to develop on its own without a cabinet-like body to co-ordinate the work between them. The two major ministries (Finance and Interior) recruited people through their own clientèles in the élite families and schools. They competed with each other for resources, for control of policy and for influence over lesser ministries and local government. There was no clear distinction between the functions of the different agencies, nor between the status of different laws — nakaz, ukaz, ustav, zakon, polozhenie, ulozhenie, gramota and manifest, to name just a few — so that the Tsar’s personal intervention was constantly required to unhook these knots of competing jurisdiction and legislation. From the perspective of the individual, the effect of this confusion was to make the regime appear arbitrary: it was never clear where the real power lay, whether one law would be overridden by special regulations from the Tsar, or whether the police would respect the law at all. Some complacent philosophers argued on this basis that there was in fact no real autocracy. ‘There is an autocracy of policeman and land captains, of governors, department heads, and ministers,’ wrote Prince Sergei Trubetskoi in 1900. ‘But a unitary tsarist autocracy, in the proper sense of the word, does not and cannot exist.’ To the less privileged it was this arbitrariness (what the Russians cursed as proizvol) that made the regime’s power feel so oppressive. There were no clear principles or regulations which enabled the individual to challenge authority or the state.5

This was, in effect, a bureaucracy that failed to develop into a coherent political force which, like the Prussian bureaucracy analysed by Max Weber, was capable of serving as a tool of reform and modernization. Rather than a ‘rational’ bureaucratic system as distilled in Weber’s ideal type — one based on fixed institutional relations, clear functional divisions, regular procedures, legal principles — Russia had a hybrid state which combined elements of the Prussian system with an older patrimonialism that left the Civil Service subject to the patronage and intervention of the court and thus prevented the complete emergence of a professional bureaucratic ethos.