Ministry of the Imperial Court under Alexander III (with Reference to Prince V. S. Obolensky’s Diary)

Abstract

This article studies the specifics of court administration as a component of the extensive problem of the history of state institutions of pre-revolutionary Russia. Due to its proximity to the monarch, the Ministry of the Imperial Court occupied a special position in the bureaucratic system of the state. In its structure and organisation of work, the vestiges of the eighteenth century were strong. The purpose of the study is to reveal the nuances of the work of the court department in providing for the life of the royal family in the 1880s, when an attempt was made to reform the Ministry of the Court on a common basis for the bureaucratic system, to determine the reasons for the failure of this restructuring, and the origins of the transformations that did take place. The article is based on the diary of Prince V. S. Obolensky-Neledinsky-Meletsky, Marshal of the Imperial Court of Alexander III, which has not been introduced into scholarly circulation previously and is stored in the Department of Written Sources of the State Historical Museum. Unlike the well-known testimonies of the highest officials of the Ministry of the Court (V. S. Krivenko, A. A. Mosolov), which are of a memoir nature, Obolensky’s diary reveals the daily and multifaceted activities of employees at the court, restores the importance of individual senior and middle officials, and the relationships among them. The analysis makes it possible to conclude that the organisation of the household and ceremonial aspects of the life of the royal family was ensured by the coordinated work of a huge mechanism, whose precision of functioning largely depended on the orderliness and professionalism of the highest ranks of the court. Unlike other ministries, in the work of the court department, the system of relations that developed among representatives of the imperial family and court ranks was of great importance. This is what prevented the timely rotation of personnel and the implementation of much needed reforms. This situation was levelled by the dominant role of the personal factor, which determined the importance of employees to a greater extent than their official position.

Keywords

• министерство императорского двора
• гофмаршал
• александр iii
• в. с. оболенский
• придворно-хозяйственная деятельность
• реформа
• личные отношения