ABSTRACT
Preparing for the outbreak of the Northern War, creating a new army, and building the navy—all this led to a sharp upswing in the activity of government offices and to an expansion of the scope of their work. The bureaus—the central institutions of administration that Peter had inherited from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—could not cope with the increasingly complicated administrative tasks. Construction of the navy had been initially supervised by the Moscow Court Bureau, which had no connection to naval affairs. Hence, with the expansion of the scope of naval construction new institutions arose: the Admiralty and War bureaus. For the more rational management of the army the Cavalry and Foreigner bureaus were fused into a single War Bureau. The strel’tsy Bureau was liquidated, whereas two new ones were founded—the Preobrazhensky and the Semenovsky bureaus.
