A researcher at the Centre for Russian, Caucasian and Central European Studies (CERCEC) in Paris, Anna Joukovskaia has produced a thoughtful and fascinating account of how the Russian administrative apparatus developed from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. She argues for the importance of “the everyday experience of banal contacts” between the population and administrative officials because it resembled “gymnastic exercises” that determined the state’s “physical and moral” health (12–13).

Joukovskaia suggests that “ecclesiastical practices” influenced the emergence of Muscovite state offices (prikazy) since the Metropolitan (and then Patriarch) had his own “boyars, his own diaks and podiatchie, and his own prikazy,” while monasteries had extensive experience administering lands with serfs (16–17). The novelty of Joukovskaia’s book is that it is a “prosopography” of the individuals and families involved in the “quotidian action” of administering the state (22). Joukovskaia focuses on Aleksei Kourbatov and the Chagarov clan, which produced several generations of servitors who never rose beyond local prominence, but built a fortune and reached hereditary noble status. One of the most important insights comes in the middle of the book when Joukovskaia explains that instead of exploring Muscovy’s administrative history “in terms of its long-term functions” and “retrospective to its effects,” she “privileges the point of view of the historical actor for whom our past is his troubled present and uncertain future” (111). This is very well put and deserves to be in the introduction.

Joukovskaia identifies the first bureaucrats under Peter the Great as “administrative entrepreneurs” who turned the personal commissions they received from the Tsar into institutions (31). She makes an important distinction between the term rab (slave) and kholop (servitor) (34), which implied a relationship “of patronage and clientelism” (66) that would later evolve into a “citizen of the fatherland” under Peter the Great (40). The central role in this evolution from the personal mission (poruchenie) to the institution (uchrezhdenie) lay through the “entrepreneurial administrator” (112).

Joukovskaia really hits her stride working through the regional archive of Sevsk, a town 500 kilometers southwest of Moscow where the Kourbatov clan was based. She worked through the perfectly preserved registration books from 1701 to 1730, which constitute a “unique image of local life” where the “podiachis and public scribes” appeared not simply as “representatives of the state” but also locals contributing to the “socio-economic environment next to the other inhabitants” (121). Joukovskaia concludes that the “professional podiachis” who were limited to office duty were poor and few (139). Instead, the families that produced the most bureaucrats and guided the evolution of Russia’s professional bureaucracy were already “at the head of complex financial resource networks” (139). Ironically, a bureaucrat had to do well for himself to become a “servitor (kholop)” of the tsar (140). The entrepreneurial bureaucrats were therefore also members of the “local elite” who developed “a hybrid social identity” (141). For example, Lazar Chagarov’s sons occupied the “polyvalent” but beneficial position of “local government officials, landed proprietors without a noble title, and entrepreneurs without merchant status” (184). Interestingly, in the seventeenth century the terms sluzhba (service) and sluzhitʹ (to serve) only applied to the boiars, whereas the diaki’s and podiachie’s responsibility was to “sit (sidetʹ)” or “work (rabotatʹ)” in the prikaz or bytʹ u gosudarstvennykh del, delatʹ prikaznye dela, or rabotatʹ prikaznuiu rabotu, since writing was considered “manual labor” beneath a member of the nobility (222–23). The 1690s witnessed “the notions of service and work at a bureau” approach each other in meaning (225) until Tsar Peter’s General Regulation of 1720 equated them as serving the “common good” (229).