h, Charitable and educational Institutions, the fifth, dedicated to State Peasants and the sixth to Caucausion Affairs.Russia's bureaucracy flourished under Nicholas, who continued a bureaucracy based on the table of ranks which was developed by Peter the great. He did, however, make it more easy for a non-noble man to climb the table of ranks and achieve the status of hereditary nobility. Nicholas' laws about who could enter the civil service placed emphasis on receiving degrees from institutions of higher learning, many of which were open to all sections of the community. Without a good amount of public education, a nobleman could no longer scale the civil service ladder, and with education, even a non-nobleman could do so.This promotability was important because the incentive of hereditary noble status would in theory increase the supply of public-spirited civil servants would change the character of the Russian nobility. Nicholas was uncomfortable with the noble estate, understandable after the Decembrist revolt. He would have liked to have dissipated its power by creating a middle class or at least weakening its power. He seemse to have made steps towards that goal: between 1836 and 1843, 7200 men reached rank eight, and 4700 of them were from non-noble estates However, Nicholas also feared the nobility, and gave them some accessions to their demands: in 1845, Nik changed the rules so that a guy would have to reach level 9 to achieve personal nobility and level 5 to receive hereditary nobility. Yet, promotion simply accelereated, thereby maintaining the flow of new people into the nobility.Nicholas was a terrible micro-manager. He insisted that the power, and therefore the authority to make decisions, should remain in his hands. This setup has problems because decisions in any bureaucracy must be made at the locus of power. The more extreme the centralization, the higher the point in the bureaucratic structure where the decis...
