Dyak

DYAK

State secretary, professional administrator.

The dyak (state secretary) spearheaded Muscovy's bureaucratic transformation from the late 1400s into the Petrine era. Moscow professional administrators, seventeenth-century dyaks guaranteed daily chancellery operation, served in the governing tribunals, and supervised the clerks. Dyaks authorized document compilation, verified and signed documents after clerks drafted them, and sometimes wrote up documents.

Technical expertise was the dyak's sine qua non. Talent and experience governed promotion and retention of dyaks. Of appanage slave origin, the dyaks were docile, functionally literate, efficient paperwork organizers, and artificers of chancellery document style and formulae. Less than eight hundred dyaks served in seventeenth-century chancelleries, annually between 1646 and 1686; forty-six (or 6%) of all dyaks achieved Boyar Duma rank. The decrees of 1640 and 1658 formally converted dyaks and clerks into an administrative caste by guaranteeing that only their scions could become professional administrators. Dyaks' sons began as clerks, but father-son dyak lineages were uncommon, as few clerks ever became dyaks.

Almost half of the chancellery dyaks (some Moscow dyaks received no administrative postings) worked in one chancellery. Dyaks worked on average 3.5 years per state chancellery, their average earnings decreasing from one hundred rubles in the 1620s to less than ninety rubles in the 1680s. They could also receive land allotments as pay. In contrast, counselor state secretaries could earn two hundred rubles in the 1620s, and their salaries nearly doubled in the 1680s.

Seventeenth-century dyaks' social position declined, although their technical skills did not. Dyaks served also in provincial administrative offices, and numbered between 33 to 45 percent of their chancellery brethren. Few ever entered capital service.

See also: boyar duma; chancellery system; podyachy

bibliography

Brown, Peter B. (1978). "Early Modern Russian Bureaucracy: The Evolution of the Chancellery System from Ivan III to Peter the Great, 1478–1717." Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago.

Plavsic, Borovoi. (1980). "Seventeenth-Century Chanceries and Their Staffs." In Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, eds. Walter McKenzie Pintner and Don Karl Rowney. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Peter B. Brown