ABSTRACT
Transformation of the central administration began to take a very different course. The old, customary directors of that administration, the boyars, had been destroyed. Their place was taken by a new official elite consisting of promoted administrators. Thus the central government under Catherine II remained as undefined and disorganized as it had been before. Provincial administration was suitable soil in which Catherine II might sow the political ideas she had borrowed from her favorite works. Special considerations, moreover, impelled her to turn her primary attention to reorganizing the provincial administration. But the central administration, which preserved its old bureaucratic character under Catherine, lacked even the ties with society that had existed in the seventeenth century. Thus the contradiction between the principles on which the administration rested at the center and in the provinces grew still more acute under Catherine II. Her provincial units were based exclusively on population size.
