Serving the Tsar: Life Courses and Career Patterns of the Administrative Elite in Late Imperial Russia (1855-1914)

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The research project addresses imperial life courses of higher state officials working in the tsarist provincial administration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Two core areas will be investigated, based on exemplary imperial biographies. Firstly, the project deals with patterns of professional and spatial mobility among the administrative elite of the empire. To do this, the project elaborates the criteria of promotion and relocation within the tsarist administration, and reconstructs its system of job rotation. This system was characteristic for the late tsarist provincial administration and led to frequent changes of location, short tenure of service in one position and empire-wide assignments in the careers of state officials. The project explores the consequences of these administrative practices on state-building-processes, on officials’ opportunities to exert influence locally and on trans-local integration of different regions – made possible by the officials’ mobility.Secondly, the research project connects these structural patterns to the self-perception of tsarist officials, investigating how their conceptions of the empire, their patterns of loyalty and features of identity developed. It is especially this focus on individual life courses and corresponding personal accounts that allows a thorough comprehension of the officials’ intellectual horizons. Their individual self-conceptions do not merely reflect how officials view themselves in an imperial context, but they also show how the protagonists of the tsarist administration tried to broaden their scope of action, to claim expertize based on their professional background and mobility, and to take part in contemporary debates on reforming the empire. Thus, the careers of mobile elites provide an insight into the structural context of state bureaucracy, which is also enabling us to elaborate the self-conceptions of these homines imperii.Inspired by the new imperial history and the biographical turn, the project investigates the interplay of the imperial and professional frameworks, of individual scopes of influence and of guiding self-conceptions of those protagonists working in the provincial administration of the late Tsarist Empire. This view allows taking a new perspective on the tsarist state apparatus, its line of action and institutional change. Furthermore, the project fundamentally broadens our understanding of the late Russian Empire because it offers a thick description of the interdependency of state building, patterns of mobility, empire-wide exchanges and individual perspectives.