To the Editors

In her otherwise fine article, “Unsalaried and Unfed: Town Clerks’ Means of Survival in Southwest Russia under Peter I” (Kritika 14, 4 [Fall 2013]: 715–39), Anna Joukovskaia displays spotty knowledge of 17th-century Russian civil administration and American historiography on it and apparent unfamiliarity with literature on historical bureaucracy and complex organizational theory (716–17). It is gross error to suggest that Richard Hellie and I elevated Muscovy’s central and provincial administration to a 20th-century platform. Neither of us ever claimed the chancellery system fit an idealized Weberian template, but the chancellery system was not devoid of bureaucratic properties; denying their widespread existence is fruitless. Many more chancelleries than the Razriad and a few others partook of these properties.

The concept of historical bureaucratic societies, stretching back to antiquity, fits Muscovy.¹ Muscovy never possessed a late modern bureaucracy, and I never have advocated the contrary. Wielding the term “bureaucracy” is logical with the necessary qualifications. Hellie and I always noted the roles of personalism, favoritism, corruption, elite shenanigans, and other “anti-rationalistic” factors in late Muscovy’s administrative governance.²

Joukovskaia indiscriminately cites Walter Pintner’s two chapters from Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century as proof for her comments.³ But Pintner states “that the civil service was by no means a creation of Peter I” (191). She bypasses his characterizations on civil service (210) that aptly describe the Moscow professional administrators (dumnye d′iaki, d′iaki, and pod′iachie), and avoids Borivoj Plavsic’s earlier chapter in the same book on the 17th century, whose views (21–22) parallel mine. Though they lacked 19th-century formal education, these central ranks received informal education, specialized on-the-job training, and deep experiential knowledge. They proceeded through expertise and longevity pay-based career ladders; despite notorious lapses, meritocracy on the whole imbued these three Moscow ranks.

Critiquing historiography is a major professional function, but limited familiarity with others’ scholarship and cherry-picking of evidence is not the way to go about it. Having said this, I regard the rest of Joukovskaia’s article as a real contribution to our comprehension of Petrine provincial administration, and I find her interlocking concepts of status group and service management especially promising (736–37). I look forward to what I assume will be her major published monographic work in the future.

• Anna Joukovskaia responds:
• Anna Joukovskaia

I sincerely regret that the text of my article has left Professor Peter Brown with the impression that I am unfamiliar with some of his work, which every specialist knows to be an important contribution to the history of Moscow’s 17th-century chancellery system. I can assure Prof. Brown that I have carefully studied everything he has published on the subject. The fact that I disagree with his general vision of Russia’s ancien régime administration by no means diminishes my respect for his research.

Copyright © 2014 “Kritika” and Anna Joukovskaia