BUREAUCRACY

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The 19th century is characterized as the century of technical progress and the widespread development of the natural sciences. The same century gave new definitions to the forms of social life. Formed the management system in developed countries, France, Germany was called - bureaucracy … Combination of French and Greek words: (bureau) - bureau, desk, study and (cratia) - power, power - in Russian - the power of the table.

It was in the 19th century that the bureaucratic regime was most fully developed. This is a system of government inherent in exploiting states, characterized by complete isolation from the life of the people and the despotic imposition of government methods on the people that are alien to their interests. Bureaucracy consists in the fact that the ruling exploiting class exercises its power through its protégés - officials who form a bureaucracy - a special closed caste cut off from the masses, standing above the masses of privileged persons.

Bureaucracy is not directly related to this or that form of government. The liberal democratic system and the parliamentary republic, to the same extent, create and nourish the bureaucracy. The absolute monarchy protects her and relies on her. In general, bureaucracy in the political sense of the word should be distinguished from the bureaucratic system.

In this sense, bureaucracy refers to the domination of a class of professional officials. Bureaucracy is one of the types of oligarchy, according to Aristotle - perverted form of domination … Bureaucracy is the self-sufficient domination of officials in the interests not of the entire state, but of the ruling class alone. Therefore, the bureaucracy is divorced from the people and equally alien to all its classes: the nobility, whom it envies and does not defend its historical privileges, the industrial classes and business, because it does not know the needs of civil circulation, does not care about the interests of the development of progress, the common people, because she is hostile to social reform.

The negative properties of the bureaucracy are explained, precisely, by its self-sufficient character, by its class organization and purpose. Hence the caste isolation of the bureaucracy; her contempt for "Non-officials", hence - ignorance of real life, routine and formalism, petty regulations and police suspicion, a negative attitude towards public initiative and initiative.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx speaks of the bureaucratic and military organization created by the French bourgeoisie as this monstrous organism - a parasite, entwining, like a net, the entire body of the autocratic monarchy, an organization even more strengthened by Napoleon, he wrote: "All coups have improved this machine, instead of breaking it." (K. Marx and F. Engels, Izbr. Prod., Vol. 1, 1948, p. 292).

The bureaucratic system, in its modern form, was created by Napoleon. Demanding from the executors unconditional submission to their will, Napoleon at the head of each department put persons responsible to him for their part and therefore dominating in their part alone.

The bureaucratic system was the requirement of that military spirit, the discipline that Napoleon was able to introduce into his administration, his ministers and prefects had to command and obey, as a regimental commander obeys his superior and commands his subordinates.

Bureaucracy is a historical phenomenon. Its forms changed in connection with the change in exploitative socio-economic formations, but its essence has always remained oppressive, without taking into account the interests of both the state and the people. By a bureaucrat they mean an official who is too jealous of his power, because the bureaucracy itself consists, among other things, in raising the sole authority of the official. In his hierarchy, he is a king and a god.

The historical development of Russia, in the same period, the course of state administration, was "borrowed", with an eye to the West, reflected the same socio - economic changes as in the West, and therefore presents many even outwardly similar features with French history. for example, bureaucracy.

Our first officials clerks The 15th - 16th centuries, as the word itself shows, were taken from the lower clergy ("clergy", "clergy" - the lowest minister of the cult of the Orthodox Church), and in their social status they were close to slaves: in princely wills we meet clerks among those released at will.

As was the case in the West, the role of the bureaucracy grew with the growth of the money economy and the emergence of commercial capital. As there, the feudal nobility hated the bureaucracy, who already under Grozny told how the Moscow Grand Duke had new trusted people - clerks who "They feed him with half (of their income), and take half for themselves" … And already under the direct successors of Grozny, there were clerks (the Shchelkalov brothers) in Moscow, who were the largest shareholders of the English trading company and who seemed to foreigners, in terms of their influence, to be real "kings".

This kind of clerks were already members of the boyar duma and, although they formally occupied the last place in it, they did not even sit in it, but only stood at its meetings, in fact, they were the most influential members of it: with the help of the “duma clerk "Shchelkalova - Boris Godunov became tsar," Duma clerk "of the merchants Fyodor Andropov under Vladislav

ruled the Moscow state. At this time, “new” noblemen of good origin were already bothering about clerical places, not embarrassed by the fact that the clerk was a “bad rank,” unworthy of a well-born person.

Along with the clergy, the clerk of that time was the first Russian intelligentsia: we have the history of the Time of Troubles, written by clerk Ivan Timofeev. The style of this work suggested to V. O. Klyuchevsky that Timofeev was thinking in Latin; in any case, his contemporaries of the same circle knew not only Latin, but also Greek. Later, the clerk Kotoshikhin gives one of the most remarkable descriptions of the Moscow state.

The flourishing of Moscow merchant capitalism in the 17th century. the growth of the Moscow bureaucracy should have been strongly propelled forward. Complaints of the Zemsky Sobor in 1642 about the dominance of clerks who built themselves "Stone mansions such that it is inconvenient to say" (a sample of such a chorus, before the revolution, stood on the Bersenevskaya embankment of the Moscow River, it was occupied by the Institute of Ethnic Cultures of the Peoples of the East, and in the 17th century the house was built by clerk Merkulov and was a rather modest building in those terms).

So the appearance among the Moscow orders of one, purely bureaucratic, order of secret affairs, where everything was in the hands of clerks and where the boyars, who controlled other orders, "Did not go and did not know business there" (Kotoshikhin), this growth is outlined, especially if we take into account that in other orders the actual owners were often clerks. How much the social consciousness of this group has risen can be seen from the fact that at the beginning of the 17th century. in one local case - that is, in a case involving accounts between people "with the fatherland", people "noble" - a clerk who was among the judges beat off the guilty with a stick, and it is not clear that the boyar judges had the civil courage to stand up for its one - estates.

Nevertheless, one can speak of a real bureaucracy in Russia only from the era of Peter, who was also the first representative of absolutism in the Western European sense of the word, that is, a representative of personal power not bound by the traditions of feudal society. The first real bureaucratic institution in our country was the Senate of Peter (1711), which replaced the Boyar Duma.

That, was a collection of the largest vassals of the Moscow tsar - people whose ancestors themselves were once sovereigns, princes, and although by the end of the 17th century. many new people joined this aristocratic group, and the descendants of the former appanage princes were already in the minority in it, nevertheless, the Duma remained an assembly of large landowners who had social significance and regardless of their "rank". The Senate was a collection of officials appointed by the tsar without any attention to their origin and social status (the former serf Sheremetev, Kurbatov, was immediately appointed to the place of one of the princes; bureaucratic discipline.

The tsar, legally, could not order the Duma - the boyar's verdict, formally, and at the end of the 17th century. walked next to the sovereign's decree ("The sovereign pointed out and the boyars were sentenced …"). But this was only a form of what had real meaning in the 16th century, it was a fact, not a right. Peter, even before the establishment of the Senate, dispensed with any judgments. The decree on the establishment of provinces (December 1708) began with the words: "The great sovereign indicated … And according to his, the great sovereign, by a personal decree, those provinces and the cities belonging to them are painted in the Near Chancellery." …

The tsar spoke with the senate in the following style: "With great surprise I received a letter from St. Petersburg that 8,000 soldiers and recruits had not been brought there, which if the governors do not soon reform, do them for this, as they deserve, or you yourself will endure …" (decree July 28, 1711). Or: "To deliver troops to the Ukraine, so that of course, by July, they will be in time, this is all that is necessary for the war, how to rule the Senate as soon as possible, under severe torture for non-correction" (decree January 16, 1712).

The Senate did not accept Peter's idea of collegiality in decision-making and constantly overwhelmed by the thought that senators are lazy, loafing and stealing, Peter first introduces into the Senate, for oversight, guards officers, and then creates a special position "Tsarevo's Eye", represented by the Prosecutor General obliged to keep track of “So that the senate in its rank would act righteously and unfeignedly”, and so that there "Not only the affairs were done on the table, but by the most action they were executed according to the decrees", "truly, zealously and decently, without wasting time." And to oversee the entire administration, fiscal accounts were generally created to "To supervise secretly all matters."

The fiscal institution again brings us back to the social meaning of bureaucracy. The new Peter's institutions, not only did not reckon with any "fatherland", but were definitely bourgeois in nature. Ober-fiscal Nesterov, also a former serf, wrote to the tsar about his "Supervised": "their common noble company, and I, your servant, mixed between them alone with my son, whom I teach fiscal and have a clerk …"

In addition to fiscalism, he also came forward with a project to establish a merchant company that would protect the "domestic" merchants from the dominance of foreigners. Simple fiscal was chosen, among other things, and "from the merchant people", in the amount of 50%. To calm the nobility, the decree said that they would be watching "the merchants," but we saw how Nesterov looked at himself. Looking closely at the Senate program left to this institution by Peter when he went on the Prut campaign, we see that almost all of it consists of financial and economic items ("Look in the entire state of expenditures …", "collect as much money as possible …", "fix bills of exchange", "goods … inspect …"). This list drowns general issues, such as "unhypocritical court", or specially-military (the formation of a reserve officer).

Peter's Senate bears as clear a mark of merchant capitalism as one can demand. In the era of Peter the Great, the bureaucracy in Russia not only assumes a Western European form, but also rises to almost the same pathos that we find in this era in the West.

In the Police Regulation (1721) we read: “The police promotes morals and justice, gives rise to good order and morality, gives everyone safety from robbers, thieves, rapists and deceivers and the like, dishonest and indecent living drives away and forces everyone to work and honest providence, repairs good stewards, careful and good servants, the city and in them regularly composes streets, prevents high prices and brings contentment in everything necessary in human life, warns of all illnesses that happen, produces cleanliness in the streets and in houses, prohibits excess in house expenses and all obvious sins, despises the poor, the poor, sick and other poor, protects widows, orphans and foreigners, according to God's commandments, educates young people in chaste purity and honest sciences, in short, under all these, the police are the soul of citizenship and all good orders and a fundamental support of human security and convenience. "

This "poetry" of the bureaucracy hid the dirty and cruel prose of the "primitive accumulation" that the bureaucracy served. Peter's reform to create collegiality in management resulted in the creation of institutions under this name, where decisions were made by a team of managers. Since: - [Collegium (Latin Collegium - "community of rights", the same legal capacity) - in a broad sense, any set of persons having the same rights and obligations].

The collegiums, according to the plan of Peter I, were called in Russia the highest bodies of state administration (corresponding to the ministries), established by Emperor Peter I instead of the previous orders by a decree of December 12, 1718. The chairman of the collegiums could not do anything alone and only by agreement with other comrades.

The purpose of the collegiums was to protect the internal peace and external security of the state, preserve good morals and civil order, encourage public and popular activities, promote the economic well-being of the country and provide the government with ways to set in motion the entire state mechanism. Peter liked Leibniz's comparison of the state with a clockwork very much - and he sent special agents to find out how this or that branch of administration is organized in this or that country, in order, if necessary, to adopt it and start it in himself.

In view of this goal, individual branches of management were distributed among the following 12 colleges: 1) foreign affairs, 2) military, 3) admiralty, 4) spiritual (synod), 5) justice, from which they subsequently separated: 6) patrimonial college, 7) Manufacturing, 8) Commercial Board, 9) Berg - Collegium, 10) Cameras - Collegium, 11) State Office - Collegium, and 12) Revision - Collegium.

The organization, competence and course of study of each collegium were prescribed in the general regulations of February 20, 1720, and in the same year the collegiums began their activities according to the prescribed order. Cases resolved and not yet resolved by the Senate were transferred from his office to the office of the collegia. Governor's offices and orders were subordinated to the collegia.

The Collegium of Foreign Affairs replaced the previous ambassadorial order with the appointment to conduct all relations between Russia and other states, both political and commercial. The first chairman of the board was the chancellor gr. Golovkin, vice-chairman - vice-chancellor Baron Shafirov, advisers - Osterman and Stepanov. The advisers were responsible for drafting all papers of great importance or requiring secrecy, papers of lesser importance were drawn up by the staff of the secretaries and translators of the colleges. At the invitation of the Tsar, advisers sometimes took part in ministerial meetings. The affairs of the collegium were decided by the chairman in consultation with other members and, by virtue of the decree, sealed less important papers, presenting more important ones for the personal approval of the Sovereign himself. The Collegium of Foreign Affairs continued to exist after the renaming of other collegia in 1802 into ministries, and in 1832 became part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The chairmen of the collegia were also senators at the same time. The offices of the colleges were established in Moscow, in which their representatives (collegiate ranks) changed annually (!). Over the course of their almost 100-year existence, the collegiums have experienced many changes both in their competences and in the composition of their members. Under Empress Catherine, the 1st collegium staff was reduced by half, and only half of the remaining ranks were in active service, the rest could choose residence at will before being called up to replace the functioning half of the board. Further, all collegia, with the exception of the foreign, military and admiralty, which were under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Privy Council and the Sovereign himself, were subordinate to the Senate.

In addition to the 12 named collegia, Catherine II also established: a) Little Russian, b) medical, c) spiritual Roman Catholic and d) justice of Livonian, Estonian and Finnish affairs.

The veche government that existed in Russia since ancient times, on which the reforms of Peter and Catherine II were based, was broken by other monarchs, and the scope of Russian patrimonial capitalism was wider than what it could capture, and almost as little remained of the "clockwork" they had started. as from the Petrovsky factories. Often only names and external forms remained, or what actually hindered the development of the bureaucracy, what are the collegia that obscured personal responsibility. Practically, the Russian regime of the 18th century. was more patrimonial than the Prussian or Austrian of the same era.

An attempt to create a solid hierarchy of bureaucratic posts by means of a table of ranks was thwarted by patrimonial traditions without any difficulty. Further, the middle nobility easily skipped the lower steps of the "report card", enrolling children in the service from the cradle; ranks went to them regularly, and by the time they came of age they were often already "headquarters officers." And for the court nobility, the measure of all things was personal closeness to the emperor or to the empress. The cornet caught in the "accident" became higher than any secret and real secret advisers, who sometimes kissed the cornet's hand. The beloved valet of Paul I, Kutaisov, almost instantly became a real secret adviser and Andreev's gentleman, and to Suvorov's immodest question about what service he achieved this, he had to humbly answer that he "shaved his majesty."

The bureaucracy of the 18th century was thus more like its 17th-century predecessor than what was pictured to Peter. The halt in its development was an exact reflection of the halt in the development of Russian capitalism in the first decades after Peter the Great. As soon as the economy begins to move forward at a more accelerated pace, this immediately affects a new rise in the bureaucracy. The post-Petrine bureaucracy knows two such upsurges. The first - just in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. in the era of Paul - Alexander 1, marked by the new scope of Russian commercial capitalism (the formation of the world grain market and the transformation of Russia into the "granary of Europe") and second, the emergence of a large machine industry.

The most prominent figure of the Russian bureaucracy of this era, Speransky, who again put forward a number of projects to make Russia happy by altering the administrative mechanism, moved in the circle of the big St. the policy of a supporter of France and an enemy of England, the main competitor of the nascent Russian industrial capital,and very carefully raised the question of the elimination of serfdom, which was the main reason for Speransky's disgrace before the war of 1812.

The reign of Nicholas I was almost the same flourishing of the Russian bureaucracy as Peter's, which is closely connected with the flourishing of Russian industry, at that time, in part, already began to determine by its interests the foreign policy of tsarism. Nikolai's most trusted state secretary, Korf, was a student and admirer of Speransky; Nikolai's "chief of staff for the peasantry", Kiselev, is very reminiscent of the Prussian bureaucratic reformers of the previous period. Thus, through the Nikolaev bureaucracy, there is a continuous thread from the Speransky era to a new rise of the Russian bureaucracy - the famous "reforms of the 60s", when the abolition of serfdom, and zemstvo "self-government", and the new courts were carried out in a purely bureaucratic way, to extreme anger of the landlords, who found that "A bureaucrat-official and a member of society are two completely opposite beings." The revival of bureaucratic work, again, exactly corresponded to the new upsurge of capitalism created by the expansion of the domestic market, thanks to the partial emancipation of the peasants, and the construction of railways. nets, etc. It must be added that all the reforms remained incomplete and half-hearted, and all did not weaken, but intensified the oppression that gravitated over the masses of the people.

After the era of "reforms", the bureaucracy is gradually turning into the direct apparatus of capitalism. The ministers of Alexander II were undoubtedly "to the left" of their tsar, and at a meeting after March 1, 1881, a large majority voted in favor of a constitution. The feudal reaction won, temporarily, but in terms of economics and finance, it had to make major concessions. It is characteristic that all Russian finance ministers of the late 19th century. They were not people of a bureaucratic career: Bunge was a professor, Vyshnegradskiy was a big stock exchange businessman (which he also combined with a professorship), Witte, one of the most prominent railway workers, on the eve of his calling to the highest bureaucratic posts had the modest rank of titular adviser. The "Table of Ranks" passed, as in the 18th century, but this time not before the habits of the feudal lords, but before the demands of capital. It retained the most bureaucratic character police in all its forms, central and local (governors, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and, especially, the police department, which has become the real center of the omnipotent bureaucracy), thus emphasizing that in Russia “state power increasingly acquired the character of societies, a force serving enslavement of the working class”.

Thus, the proletarian revolution was to smash the bureaucratic machine in one of the first stages. Workers, - wrote Lenin in August - September 1917, - having won political power, they will smash the old bureaucratic apparatus, smash it to the ground, leave no stone unturned, replace it with a new one, consisting of the same workers and employees, against whose transformation into bureaucrats measures will be taken immediately, elaborated in detail by Marx and Engels: 1) not only electivity, but also changeability at any time; 2) the pay is not higher than the worker's pay; 3) an immediate transition to ensure that everyone fulfills the functions of control and supervision, so that everyone becomes “bureaucrats” for a while, and therefore no one can become a “bureaucrat”.

During World War I, England and America "Have completely slipped into the common European dirty, bloody swamp of bureaucratic - military institutions, subordinating everything to themselves, suppressing everything by themselves" (Lenin V. I., Soch., 4th ed., Vol. 25, p. 387).

During the economic crisis of the 1930s, the bureaucratic and military institutions of the United States and England reached an unprecedented scale in their history, throwing their weight on the working class and all working people, as well as on the advanced intelligentsia, and subjecting the communist parties, trade unions to defending the interests of the people, to special persecution.

Soviet democracy is carried out by attracting workers and peasants to the cause of administration, involving them in the executive bodies of power, organizing the masses in election campaigns with the aim of causing them to be more active. These manifestations of Soviet democracy have gained special scope since 1925. The peasantry especially revived politically when it emerged from the ruin and became firmly on the path of restoring its economy; its needs then began to grow, culture increased, and it began to become more and more interested in all state affairs.

The participation of the masses in Soviet construction is constantly growing: for example, in 1926 only one RSFSR in 51,500 village councils participated 830,000 members of village councils (in 1 year against 1925, an increase of 100 thousand members of village councils) and there were 250 thousand participants in volost congresses. In the 3.660 volispolkoms in 1926, 34 thousand people worked, instead of 24 thousand in 1925.

“The masses should have the right to choose responsible leaders for themselves. The masses must have the right … to know and check every smallest step of their work. The masses should have the right to nominate everyone, without removing the workers' members of the masses, for administrative functions. But this does not in the least mean that the process of collective labor can remain without a definite leadership, without a precise establishment of the responsibility of the leader, without the strictest order created by the unity of the will of the leader. (Lenin, Soch., Vol. XXII, p. 420).

"How collegiality - said Lenin at the 7th All-Russian Congress of Soviets, - is necessary for the discussion of the main issues, so it is necessary to have sole responsibility and sole management, so that there is no red tape, so that it is impossible to evade responsibility " (Lenin, Soch, vol. XXIV, p. 623).

This clear-cut Leninist attitude, defining the scope of collegiality and one-man command, became the basis of the Soviet management organization. At present, collegiality is the defining principle in organizing the activities of Soviet bodies, as well as in the judicial system. Accountability, accessibility for any member of society - this principle for a leader or any official distinguishes the government of the USSR from any other government of any state.

Bolshevik criticism and self-criticism, the growth of socialist culture, the rise of political activity of the Soviet people, control and verification of execution were a huge force in the struggle against bureaucratic and bureaucratic methods of leadership, against all remnants of bureaucracy.

"A well-organized performance check is the spotlight that helps illuminate the state of the apparatus at any time and brings bureaucrats and clerks to the light of day." … (I. Stalin, Problems of Leninism, 11th ed., P. 481).

Control over the activities of Soviet institutions is exercised through village meetings, as well as through volost, uyezd, provincial, all-Union congresses of Soviets, where millions of workers and peasants participate in the decisions of state affairs. The forms of practical control over the activities of Soviet institutions and the participation of the masses in state work in the Soviet system are very extensive and varied; the main ones are: sections of the Soviets, organized by various sectors of the economy and work (communal, cultural, cooperative-trade, etc.).

In these sections, the members of the Soviets and the workers and peasants involved, work out various questions of Soviet construction, carried out surveys, and prepared questions for the plenary sessions of the Soviets. In large industrial cities, hundreds of thousands of workers were involved in the work of the councils in 1926. More than 40 thousand people took part in the Moscow Council, in the sections and in the surveys that they conducted. (and there are 2 thousand deputies in the council); 16 thousand enthusiasts worked in the Leningrad Council only in sections. etc.

From what has been said it is clear that the Soviet government was aware of the danger the bureaucracy posed for the proletarian state, and waged a continuous struggle to purify its cadres.

(To be continued)