Dynamics of administration sphere in eighteenth-century Russia: issues of social contradictions

The article provides a historical and sociological analysis of the results of Peter the Great's and Catherine the Great's administrative reforms in order to reveal the nature of social contradictions as a flip side of these reforms. It is established that the state component of the Russian Empire evolved in the direction of forming large-scale and internally more differentiated administrative systems aimed at maximum immersion in the environment of social processes. This reflected the general specifics of domestic statogenesis. The flip side of Peter the Great's reforms turned out to be structural and functional failures, as the scale of the reforms exceeded the society's resource capabilities. At the same time, their course revealed the contradictions between Western experience and the domestic administrative “ground”. Nevertheless, the principle of servitude rigidly enforced by Peter I leveled and muffled class antagonisms. The reform efforts of Catherine II proved to be more successful in structural and functional terms, but implicitly carried a greater potential for internal conflict. The domestic policy, while striving to reconcile the state interests and the needs of the nobility, often prioritized the latter primarily due to further infringement of the rights of the peasantry. The contradictions between the peasantry and the nobility parasitizing on it could only accumulate under the existing state of affairs, and sooner or later they were bound to break out in the form of a large-scale social cataclysm. The central government, as the main sovereign, was aware of this danger, but its actions could only slightly weaken the symptoms of such antagonisms, but not completely eliminate them, since the latter would have meant a break with the backbone of monarchical power - the nobility.