Abstract
The phenomenon of power, without a doubt, is one of the fundamental problems of the humanities and social sciences, the "eternal" topic that is always in the field of view of researchers, including historians. For the retrospective study of the evolution of power institutions in Russia is of fundamental importance during the second half of XVII - the first half of the eighteenth century, especially the period, which is associated with the administrative reforms of Peter the Great and because of historiographical inertia consider the time of a radical break with the traditional way of life, a "watershed" between "old" and "new" Russia. While I do not fully share these views, I cannot but admit that Peter's reign occupied an important place in the long transition of our country from the Middle Ages to the modern era and turned out to be an extremely remarkable stage in a series of fundamental transformations in the relationship between power and society, inherent in the very nature of the historical transition. In particular, these transformations are most noticeable in the complex process of interaction of management structures of different levels, different origins and functional purposes. No matter how the concept of power is interpreted, it will be obvious that it has its own physical expression, manifested not only and not so much through the state administration apparatus, through the systemic totalities of administrative structures, but through the people who serve in these structures and exercise their powers. Officialdom, the" anthropological "hypostasis of power, sets the historian-researcher the task of studying its "human" dimension. The latter, which is most clearly manifested at the local level (not at the level of the legislator, but at the level of the executive), has little in common with the usual dimensions of power of a formal legal nature. The current state of historical science creates favorable conditions for moving away from macrosociological and formal-legal constructions by including administrative history in the context of historical and anthropological research in the spirit of "new social history", encourages us to begin to understand the "anthropology of power", actualizing the long-standing call of M. V. Tolstoy. It is necessary to put administrative history in the context of social structures, to focus on the analysis of"people of power".
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