Designing a System of Control in the Sphere of Public Finance: Regulation of State Purchases under Peter I

Abstract

Among the various innovations that appeared in Russia under Peter I, the widespread practice of public procurement for the needs of the armed forces turned out to be underestimated in historiography. Significant public funds used to finance the purchase of food, fodder, uniforms, and ammunition became available for looting by unscrupulous officials and contractors. As a result, the losses of the state budget turned out to be so great that the tsar began to consider the theft of money through state contracts one of the main threats to the state. However, the problem was not only financial damage. The criminalisation of public procurement created a corruption environment and stimulated the emergence of criminal communities in the state apparatus. This article continues the author’s research on this topic and presents preliminary observations on how Tsar Peter tried to build an organised system for combating economic crime in the field of public procurement. Particular attention is paid to the activities of the Moscow Contracting Office, a subsidiary body of the Office of Contracting Affairs. Since the head of the Department of Contractual Affairs, the captain of the Lifeguards of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, Colonel Gerasim Ivanovich Koshelev, simultaneously headed the office investigating high-profile cases of embezzlement and smuggling (the cases of the Solovyov brothers and Arkhangelsk vice-governor Alexei Alexandrovich Kurbatov), he combined the personnel potential of both subordinate departments. In part, this gave the work of the Office of Contracting Affairs and its Moscow branch the form of an investigative body. The reconstruction and study of control and supervisory bodies’ work in the field of public finance is complex, affecting unexplored issues of the economic, administrative and social history of Russia in the early modern period.