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RUSSIA |
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RUSSIA |
HISTORICAL FRAMEWORK
The first public administration programmes were established in the early part of the seventeenth century and were generally primitive, varying according to local conditions. After the Great October Revolution, these programmes were replaced by the extremely ideological programme of the communist party through a system of higher party schools and the universities of Marcsism-Leninism. After 1992, a network of academies of civil service, formerly personnel centres, began to develop true public administration programmes in the sense that the field is understood by international scientists, experts and specialists.
Problems associated with selecting qualified personnel and formulating job descriptions for civil servants were the centre of attention of the Russian Government, and the situation acquired special urgency with the formation of a new state management system. The government found itself in need of employees able to efficiently make decisions and perform functions of state management and set out to define criteria to guide the hiring of such personnel. Government decrees set requirements for public service officials, including training in jurisprudence, in order to fill administrative structures with capable people. Decrees also established the need to support current employees in mastering those sciences necessary for them to effectively manage the public service system.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, a network of universities and branch institutions had been created in Russia, operating under the leadership of five ministries. These thirty institutions were primarily engaged in preparing experts for state service. The most active period of this network was at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. From 1898 to 1916, the Russian authorities employed nearly ninety thousand graduates of these institutions in the civil service, of whom twenty-nine percent were lawyers.
Soviet authorities quickly recognised the need to reform the professional training of state management staff and sought to establish a normative, organisational and material base for the administrative staff education system. One key part of this system was and is the Academy of Public Sciences. The Academy of the Central Committee of the Communist Party was opened in 1946 according to a decree on "the preparation and retraining of the managing party and Soviet workers."
In 1970, the communist party central committee issued a special decision on "measures to improve the theoretical preparation of staff in the Academy of Public Sciences of the Communist Party Central Committee," providing a number of measures for increasing the academy’s academic work. By 1978, academies of public sciences had become educational and scientific-methodological centres of the party and Soviet training system. The Soviet administrative staff training system had a number of distinct features, but most importantly, the ideology-based system of personnel training did not prepare experts in state management, but rather people with ideological biases.
The social transformation in economic and political attitudes in the late 1980s and early 1990s led to the reorganisation of the administrative staff training system. Today it is clear that professionally educated people are needed to manage the system through its present crisis to successfully navigate through the difficult transformation process and to assist its future development. Staff who joined the state service at beginning of the transformation to a market economy require professional training and retraining in order to form a personnel reserve in the field of management, which the former system did not and could not provide.
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