to-do merchants, and monasteries). Dyak (clerk) corruption and bribery were conspicuous in the 1630s and 1640s; Alexei Mikhailovich’s later reign and the 1649 Ulozhenie (Law Code) dampened these excesses.
Alexei’s adviser Boris Morozov created several military chancelleries. Fyodor Alexeyevich’s gifted courtiers Yuri Dolgoruky and Ilya Miloslavsky engendered financial and publication chancelleries and the May and November 1680 financial- and military-administrative reforms. They streamlined chancelleries by merging subordinate chancelleries into the Military (Razryad) and Foreign Affairs (posolsky prikaz) Chancelleries and the Chancellery of the Grand Treasury (prikaz bolshoi kazny)-the culmination of bureaucratic pyramiding from the 1590s. The 1682 Musketeers’ Revolt partially unraveled the 1680 measures. Before 1700, Peter I’s regime created six chancelleries; three of them inaugurated the Petrine navy. Peter then dismantled the chancelleries; other institutions, culminating in the colleges, replaced them.
The Kremlin enclosed most chancelleries. They housed tribunal hearings, clerks’ writing tables, and document storage. Bigger chancelleries (Military, Foreign Affairs, Service Land [pomestny prikaz]) had separate buildings.
Historians have exaggerated in criticizing the Muscovite bureaucracy for its numerous offices and interference in one another’s jurisdiction. Red-tape (volokita) aside, all knew where to go, though they might petition tribunals many times. Chancelleries of the realm possessed five hierarchies: The Military Chancellery, during interims of no major wars (when it manipulated all chancelleries), directed all military-related chancelleries; the Foreign Affairs Chancellery oversaw territorial chancelleries governing recently annexed non-Russian lands; the Chancellery of the Grand Revenue (prikaz bolshogo prikhoda), supervised Northern Russian tax collection chancelleries (cheti, chetverti); the Chancellery of the Grand Court (prikaz bolshogo dvortsa) controlled the ill-understood royal court chancelleries; and the Patriarch’s Service Chancellery (patriarshy razryad) oversaw five bureaus in the Patriarchate.
Nine chancelleries existed in the 1550s, 26 in the 1580s, 35 in the first decade of the 1600s, 57
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in the 1610s; and 68 in the 1620s. Sizes of chancelleries varied enormously. The pomestnyi prikaz multiplied its staff the most: by 12 in 60 years, from 36 clerks in 1626 to 446 clerks in 1686. The Razryad reached 125, and the posolskii prikaz 40 clerks; temporary chancelleries (sysknye prikazy) had as few as 1 or 2.
At least 24 chancelleries (15%) functioned over a century. Under Romanov rule, 102 bureaus (75%) existed either 20 years or less (at least 80 years), highlighting Muscovite leadership’s short-term versatility and perennial “matters of state” preoccupations. Mean chancellery longevity was 33 years, 84 years the median.
Chancellery jurisdiction was territorial or functional: one region, (e.g., Siberia) or one pan-territorial function (e.g., felony administration, collection of prisoner-of-war ransom monies). Larger chancelleries, for division of labor, had territorial or functional “desks” (stoly). The 1600s razryad had up to 12. Desks could be subdivided into povytia (sections).
Muscovy had no serious Roman law tradition. Chancellery officials’ scribal virtuosity and ability to plan macro-operations (e.g., fortified lines, fortress construction, land surveys, tax assessment) were impressive, though they lacked the education of European chambers’ lawyers and jurists, Ottoman kapi-kulu administrators, and Chinese dynastic bureaucrats. Monasteries mostly handled charity (alms and sick relief). Starting in the early 1700s, the state supported education and social welfare.
All chancellery officials from boyar to clerk took rigorous oaths (e.g., personal behavioral issues, secrecy). The chancellery work force was steeply hierarchical. Tribunals (sing. sudya or judge) of 2 to 6 men (usually 4) heard court trial cases and decided other business. Counselor state secretary (dumny dyak) was the highest, professional tribunal rank. Boyars and okolnichie, administrative nonprofessionals, infiltrated tribunals from 1600, subverting joint decision making. Solo decision making by the chief chancellery tribunal director became de jure in 1680.
Duma tribunal members by the 1690s garnered at the expense of the dyak and podyachy a greater share of cash salary entitlements (oklady) than in the 1620s. Those of boyars and okolnichie ranged between 265 and 1,200 rubles (617-ruble mean), and 300 and 760 rubles (385-ruble mean). Wardens, bailiffs, watchmen, guards, furnace-men, and janitors were chancellery staff.
Prerevolutionary historiography described the evolution and structure of the chancelleries, their employees, and social interaction. Soviet historiography until the 1950s and 1960s neglected Muscovite administrative history in favor of topics explicitly related to class conflict. See also: ALEXEI MIKHAILOVICH; DYAK; IVAN IV; KREMLIN; NOVGOROD THE GREAT; OKOLNICHY; OPRICH-NINA; PATRIARCHATE; PODYACHY; TIME OF TROUBLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Peter B. (1978). “Early Modern Russian Bureaucracy: The Evolution of the Chancellery System from Ivan III to Peter the Great, 1478-1717.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago. Plavsic, Borovoi. (1980). “Seventeenth- Century Chanceries and Their Staffs.” In Russian Officialdom: The Bu-reaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, eds. Walter McKenzie Pint-ner and Don Karl Rowney. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
(1887-1919), soldier and Russian civil war hero.
Were it not for the eponymous novel and movie, historians would not likely have remembered the name of Chapayev, the unlettered commander of the Red Army’s Twenty-Fifth Infantry Division during the Russian Civil War. He was instrumental in defeating Alexander Kolchak’s “White” forces in the summer of 1919, but was killed in the action.
Dmitry Furmanov, the Chapayev brigade’s political commissar, published a thinly-fictionalized memoir about Chapayev in 1923. A proto-Social-ist Realist novel, Chapayev was an immediate bestseller and turned Chapayev into an overnight hero. Furmanov’s book spawned a veritable “Chapayev industry” of songs, games, and jokes. Although Chapayev was still in print a decade after its publication and selling well, there can be little doubt that the immense popularity of the 1934 movie Cha-payev extended the legend’s life.
CHAPBOOK LITERATURE
Made by two unknown directors, Georgy Vasiliev and Sergei Vasiliev, Chapayev debuted on November 7, 1934, on the seventeenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Reputed to be Stalin’s favorite movie, Chapayev was also the biggest box-office hit of the 1930s, selling over 50 million tickets in a five-year period. Even foreign critics and ?migr? audiences loved the movie, which starred Boris Babochkin as the brash commander.
Regardless of what the historic Chapayev was “really” like as man and hero, on the printed page and on the screen, he was an antidote to the dreariness and conformity of Soviet life. Furmanov was not a particularly gifted writer. His novella is plainly written and disjointed. The “Vasilyev Brothers” were competent directors but no more than that. Their movie is a rather primitive example of the early sound film. As many critics have noted, Cha-payev is an archetypal “cowboy,” a free spirit who supports revolution, but in his own way. The paradox is that Chapayev is an unruly model for “homo Sovieticus,” especially with the emphasis on manas-machine in the 1930s. It is important to remember, however, that for Stalin, Chapayev was the perfect hero-a dead one. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; MOTION PICTURES; SOCIALIST REALISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kenez, Peter. (2001). Cinema and Soviet Society from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin. London: I. B. Tauris. Luker, Nicholas, ed. (1988). From Furmanov to Sholokhov: An Anthology of the Classics of Socialist Realism. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.
Chapbook literature (Lubochnaya literatura, narod-naya literatura) refers to inexpensive books produced for lower-class readers, which were often associated with Moscow’s Nikolsky Market, center of the chapbook industry in late imperial Russia.
The proliferation of chapbook literature in nineteenth-century Russia was linked to the steady rise of literacy after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the appearance of a mass market for affordable reading material. As
