Methodological aspects of the study of the development of history of Russian civil service

Abstract

The article ponders over the key aspects of research methodology on history of reforming and development of public service in Russia. The main issue is identified as the ambiguous understanding of the essence and the public nature of state service and lack of universal methodology of its historical studying among various researches. The above material presents the author’s concept of historical models of reforming state service and substantiates the approach to a periodization of history of development of civil service through the process of consecutive change of historical models. The carried-out review of various groups of sources of historical information and literature on issues of transformation of the Soviet public service into its modern system allowed to describe tendencies of this development process and to present applied practices on increasing the efficiency of civil service.