Higher Civil Servants in the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs: Some Demographic and Career Characteristics, 1905-1916

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Slavic Review.One of those organs of tsarist government that apparently broadened its responsibilities and competencies during the nineteenth century was the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD).1 At the turn of the century the Ministry's authority extended over political and civil police, local agrarian affairs, licensing of physicians and veterinarians, gathering of statistical data for the empire (including censuses), postal and telegraphic services, press licensing and censorship, civil engineering, as well as other, equally diverse, areas. The publicly announced rationale for this vast range of competencies was that these functions all were directly related to the public welfare. As a government document written for Western consumption in the 1890s put it, the Ministry was "allotted the very extensive task of caring for the universal welfare of the people, the peace, quiet, and good order of the whole Empire."') Given the apparent significanlce of this arm of tsarist domestic administration, it seems useful to ask whether its personnel had certain professional characteristics and educational qualifications in common and, if so, whether these characteristics were appropriate ones in light of the operational concerns of the organization. Looked at across a span of years, this information should be useful in identifying coherelnt patterns of chanlge or stability, and it slhould consequently be of use to those interested in studying the interaction between a large public bureaucracy and its social, economic, and political environments. 1. (Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del). Numerous works are available which deal with the structure and operation of the tsarist bureaucracy in the early twentieth century. Citations to most of these are found in Erik Amburger, Geschichte der Behirdenlorganisation Russlands von Peter dem Grossen bis 1917 (Leiden, 1966); N. P. Eroshkin, Istoriia gosudarstvetnnyklt uchre2hdenii dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii, 2nd rev. ed. (Moscow, 1968) ; and my "Study of the Inperial Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Light of Organization Thleory" in Roger E. Kanet, ed., The Behavioral Revolution antd Comminunist Studies (New York, 1971), pp. 209-31. Works that deal centrally with the MVD are somewhat rarer. Useful ones include Leonid Dashkevicli, Nashe Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del (Berlin, 1895); Ministerstvo Vnutrentnikh Del: Istoricheskii ocherk (St. Petersburg, 1901); the memoirs of the former Ihigh MVD official, V. I. Gurko, Featitres and Figutres of the Past: Governmwent and Opinion in the Reign of Nicholas II (Stanford, 1939); and the biblio...

An Honourable Profession: Public Employees and Identity Construction in Chile, 1880–1920

“…Clean hands and the white collar put him, however symbolically, on the side of the rich' (Hobsbawm, 1996: 193). Similarly, the sociological and historiographical literature has argued that, in several historical cases, the public employee is one of the subjects that make up the middle class, together with artisans, the self-employed, liberal professionals, employees, traders and intellectuals (Röhl, 1967;Bowney, 1972;Stearns, 1979;Blumin, 1985;Archer and Blau, 1993;Kocka, 1995;Hobsbawm, 1996;Porter, 2004).…”