Unsalaried and Unfed
Résumé
One of the current tasks for the historiography of administration in the early modern Russian empire is to reveal the sources of the economic survival of clerks in the 18th century. At the end of the 17th century, clerks (pod′iachie) made up more than 95 percent (about 4,500 people) of the men employed at Moscow chancelleries and their regional branches.10 They were responsible for carrying out a substantial portion of vital administrative tasks. For most of the 17th century, Moscow and town clerks usually received a sort of salary, or remuneration (zhalovanie), from the tsar. In addition, they were directly remunerated by the governed populations and individual clients, who provided clerks with “feed” (korm), various perquisites (dokhody ot del, poshliny, pochesti, pominki, vziatki), and “bribes” (posuly, vziatki). By contrast, in the reign of Peter I and up to the 1760s, the vast majority of clerks (not only in the provinces but also in the capitals) received state compensation either on an extremely irregular basis or not at all. How did three generations of clerks and their family members support themselves? The present article contributes to the resolution of this issue.
Domaines
Histoire
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