The Death of a Government Clerk

During the 1800s, tsars’ political ambitions and a changing class structure shaped the development of Russian bureaucracy. From 1721 to 1917, a series of autocratic tsars ruled the Russian Empire. Russia had no constitution or assembly of elected representatives during this period, and the hereditary monarchs claimed that they ruled by divine right. Below the royal family, the upper class consisted of “landowning nobles, wealthy merchants and high ranking members of the Orthodox Church, civil service and military” (“Imperial Russia-Government and People.” BBC, 8 Feb. 2024). A minute but growing middle class made up of civil servants, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals were both better educated and more open to reform than most of their countrymen. The vast majority of Russia’s population lived in the countryside, and most of them were serfs during the first half of the 19th century. In the feudal system, the monarch granted land to nobles known as vassals, while serfs were bound to live and work on the vassals’ land. Feudalism flourished throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, but serfdom wasn’t abolished in Russia until the Emancipation Reform of 1861. By freeing millions of serfs from their obligation to remain on nobles’ lands, Alexander II hoped to increase the urban workforce and stimulate industrialization. However, although they sought economic development, the tsars attempted to resist the social changes that accompanied industrialization in other European countries, particularly an increase in citizens’ political power. 

Russia’s bureaucracy represented one of very few opportunities for social advancement in this period. Civil servants were responsible for the day-to-day work necessary to support the tsar’s reign, such as enforcing laws, collecting taxes, and keeping records. While the system’s reach seemed vast and intrusive to the nation’s citizens, Russia’s bureaucracy was understaffed compared to those of Great Britain, France, and Germany. In addition, the bureaucracy was notoriously plagued by corruption and inefficiency. Catherine the Great bribed civil servants to support her by decreeing that any bureaucrat who held the same rank for seven years would automatically receive a promotion regardless of merit. Later rulers revised the Tables of Rank in the mid-1800s, but bureaucrats who reached a sufficiently high status could still join the hereditary nobility. This engendered an obsession with rank among bureaucrats. A combination of meager pay and lack of ethical training led many to supplement their salaries by accepting bribes. Bureaucrats were notoriously inefficient and unwilling to make decisions. Their faults figured prominently in the literature of the period, including the work of Chekhov and Tolstoy: “The idea that Russian public life was distorted by a stifling lack of initiative and high levels of corruption amongst officials was a common theme in all forms of belles-lettres” (Hughes, Michael. “Samovars and Quills: The Representation of Bureaucracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature.” Archival Science, vol. 14, 2013, pp. 55-68). The Russian people reviled the bureaucracy, and it ended along with the tsar’s reign in the revolution of 1917.