Deployment books of letters in the early 18th century: informative scopeof the document and communication of the Military Service Chancellery
The article deals with some little known documents of Peter I’s epoch, which were prepared annually by the Military Service Chancellery’s public servants. The deployment books contained chronologically registered letters about different affairs from all the cities, which came to the Military Service Chancellery from uyezds. The letters “otpiski” were drafted by some representatives of the local secular authorities - they were governors, top officials, the Chancellery’s public servants, as well as the Chancellery’s minor officials on a mission from the capital and the Chancellery’s colonels. The registry of a deployment book included word-for-word copies of the Military Service Chancellery’s officials’ decisions on every letter. Unlike charters that came from other chancelleries, “otpiski” marked the completion of some political tasks like tax and debt collection, transportation of men to the military service, dispatch of youngsters to a military inspection, regimental and municipal affairs, forwarding “rospisi” and lists to Moscow, the state of cities, and general events in the Russian cities under the Military Service Chancellery’s control. On the basis of some fragments of 1703-1708 deployment books and a complete book of 1705 the article reconstructs the mechanism of the “otpiski” movement - from their arrival at the Chancellery to the fulfillment of their decisions. The Chancellery’s inside communication that was regulated by every official’s right to make decisions on typical cases after governors and uyezd executives’s messages has been restored. Instructions to high-rank people and orders to other chancelleries came from the Chancellery’s head. The essence of the rule of the registered “otpiski” distribution to departments (“stols” and “povytias”) has been identified. For the first time an attempt has been made to draft a register of authentic abbreviations of minor officials and chancelleries’ departments (“stols”) due to the distribution of “otpiski” to be fulfilled. The authors have calculated the statistics of all the letters and systematized the letters of the first three months of 1705 according to the Deployment Book of Letters of the same year. It is concluded that the systematization of Chancellery’s practices had deficiencies as far as the rational departmental approach is concerned. Typical subjects of the letters that arrived at the Military Service Chancellery in 1705-1707 have been analyzed. The authors have published a sample of the Chancellery’s calculations of letters, an authentic “otpiska” by a governor, and twenty-five examples of records from some letters of the early 18th century.