A sociologically significant historical reconstruction of one era in the history of the Russian civil service

The article is a review of the book Civil Service in Russia in the 19th — Early 20th Century. Documents and Research (compilers, scientific editors: A.A. Belykh, A.L. Dmitriev. Moscow: “Delo”, 2024. 680 p.) on the history of civil service in the Russian Empire from 1802, the introduction of the ministerial system, to the revolutionary events of 1917. The key trend of this period is modernization or rather its attempts to weaken/change the significance of ranks due to the educational factor under the increasingly complex tasks of social governance. Almost half of the book is made up of official documents which together with analytical “sketches” and testimonies of contemporaries show the main factors in the evolution of the civil service: training of civil servants, discussions of supporters and opponents of the abolition of ranks, the growing “social democratization” of the bureaucracy. The book is a sociologically useful historical reading for researchers of public administration, social differentiation and development of the education system in a specific historical period, since it combines primary documents with biographical method (presents a collective portrait of the highest level of public administration in pre-revolutionary Russia) and examples of the quantitative-qualitative approach to the description and typology of the Russian bureaucracy on various grounds. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.