Top-ranking posts at the court of Peter the Great (1697-1701)

This study of the recruitment of top-ranking officers at the court of Peter the Great is achieved through analysis of rank assignment dynamics and the way in which the highest government bodies became institutionalized. The author takes into consideration the linguistic aspects and reliability of the court's records, which entails analysis of communications between the élite and the supreme power, and reconstruction of the mechanisms at play in individual appointments and daily control of service personnel. The article relies on two hitherto ignored or neglected representative source corpora. The first consists of late seventeenth-century boiarskie povestki, notifications to attend sessions of the tsar's council (boiarskaia duma) addressed to the hundred or so officials occupying the seven highest ranks; the second corpus consists of boiarskie spiski, annual boyar lists, dating from the years 1690-1714. These rolls constitute an extensive and detailed serial source allowing the historian to reconstruct individual careers and infer what the typical career path of the leading élite was. The combination of source study and prosopography allows the author to conclude that older control methods were in use until the promulgation of the Table of Ranks in 1722, that is, much later than generally thought by historians. Reprinted by permission of Éditions de l'École des hautes études en sciences sociales