Supervising the Supervisors: Bureaucracy, Personality and Rule of Law in Kazan Province at the Start of the 20th Century (original) (raw)
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Topychkanov, A. V. “Old Institutions against Old Institutionalism: Towards the New Institutional Approach to the Muscovite Chancellery System,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, Vol. 54, No. 1–3, 2020, pp. 281–290. , 2020
This review article examines the historiographic analysis of the circumstances under which appeared the reference guide by D. V. Liseitsev, N. M. Rogozhin, and Iu. M. Eskin, Prikazy Moskovskogo gosudarstva XVI-XVII vekov: Slovar’-spravochnik [Governmental Chancelleries of the Muscovite State in the 16th-17th Centuries] (Moscow, St Petersburg, 2015). This analysis has uncovered two tendencies in the study of Muscovite chancelleries: the formal-legalist, and the practical, which respectively can be attributed to old and new approaches to the study of institutions. The former tendency focuses study on formal institutions with precise legal foundations and a particular structure, range of functions, and jurisdictions. The latter treats the Muscovite chancelleries as a dynamic system formed and changed by practical interactions. The authors of the reference guide used the formal-legalist approach to the study of the chancelleries developed by the State School of Russian historiography and were faced with the inherent limitations of its methodology, which works better in the study of rational bureaucratic institutions than in the study of old institutions that arose before the Muscovite administrative apparatus was rationalized. This article argues that the study of old pre-rationalized institutions requires a New institutional approach focused on practice.
Klychkov i Pustota: Post-Soviet Bureaucrats and the Production of Institutional Facades
Second Annual Danyliw Research Seminar, Chair of …, 2006
O ver the past fifteen years, post-Soviet states have adopted a variety of policies intended to develop new property rights, democratic elections, and other liberal institutions. However, in each of these areas of governance, many new institutions are empty: they reflect the letter, but not the spirit, of the law. This paper examines a number of explanations for this development, tracing ways in which today's Potemkin institutions in Ukraine and Russia are linked both to Soviet bureaucratic legacies and policy choices of the post-Soviet period. The paper further suggests that the application of certain social scientific methods to the study of political and economic change contributes to the development of institutional facades.
As monarchs expanded their power they replaced venal office holders and local elites with salaried officials who administered directly on their behalf. Government bureaucracies then became "effective" to the degree that they could penetrate towns and villages, regulate relations and use resources in specific ways. This growth of an "infrastructural" ability to control or coordinate society via central institutions must not be confused with despotism or tyranny, nor did the increased ability of the state to centralize, nationalize, and standardize social life within its territories necessarily increase or reduce despotic or dictatorial power.1 The territory within which this development occurred is called a "national state" if the inhabitants of annexed regions, as citizens subject to a single centralized bureaucracy, eventually came to accept the power of distant rulers as legitimate authority. Some use the term "empire" to refer to polities in which local populations did not develop such a loyalty, while others note that countries are empires if they have no single bureaucracy and citizenship.2 Among important qualitative variables underlying this state and empire-building were levels of literacy, professional training and work habits. Among the quantifiable variables such as the methods and speed of information transmission and processing, was the size of central bureaucracy and the army. Opinions over when territorial expansion should be considered "state-building" and when it should be considered "colonialism" differ, as they do over whether or not peripheral regions were "colonies" and the degree to which "colonial modernization" promoted modernity. No less contentious are opinions concerning the expansion of government functions and increases in staffing levels that have been going on since the seventeenth century within national states. On one side, advocates and contemporary "Statebuilding" literature note that big governments are a necessary condition of modernity. In western Europe, against a backdrop of rising Per Capita income, independent courts and judiciaries, and administration based on legal expertise and procedural knowledge, bigger governments brought citizenship, social services, and enforcement of standards. Larger central bureaucracies, the argument continues, made implementation more likely, fostered impersonal-formal attitudes towards authority, and among the middle and upper classes, and later the lower classes, the notion that interests were to be pursued "bureaucratically"-institutionally via rule of law and due process.3 The 1 M.
Slavic Review, 2021
Can classical political theories of mixed constitution from Polybius to Cicero help us shed new light on Russian politics? In order to so, this article first considers political structures of such non-parliamentary republics as medieval Novgorod and Venice, while choosing Constantinople as a basis for their comparison. Second, using Anthony Kaldellis's recent book that has reinterpreted Byzantium in terms of the classical theory of res publica, it analyzes the question of auctoritas in ancient republican Rome and then imperial Constantinople. Third, the author employs Giorgio Agamben's book on the state of exception, in order to see how mechanisms of power and authority that the Roman emperors had employed might help us interpret anew the phenomenon of tsardom, given that Ivan the Terrible was the first in Russia to be crowned as tsar, that is, Ceasar. This might have a lasting significance even for present day politics.
I.T. Shatokhin, A.A. Titova THE NEW AND THE OLD IN THE LIFE OF PROVINCIAL OFFICIALDOM DURING BOURGEOIS MODERNIZATION OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE, 2018
DuringRussiàs capitalist modernization in the second half of the nineteenth century, guberniia and uezd officialdom acted as an intermediary between the top echelons of power and the people, bringing the legislature to the latter and adapting it to local conditions. At the same time, bourgeois reforms created a "modern" official who was to represent the looming rule of law state (pravomernoe gosudarstvo). A modernizing Russian society demanded an updated administration. The transformation of the corrupt, poorly-educated, and socially self-contained pre-reform Russian provincial officialdom into a modern Weberian rational bureaucracy was never completed in the imperial period. It naturally took time and effort for the bureaucracy to slowly divest itself of many of these earlier flaws. Still, a number of significant changes occurred, including an end to estate limitations, a growth in professionalization and specialization of provincial Crown officials, and shifts in the socio-cultural values and needs of the officialdom.