In the last ten years, the revival of interest in the study of the Russian Ancien Régime government has resulted in the publication of several important works based on thorough archival research. It seems, nevertheless, that this new and sometimes strikingly original empirical evidence has not yet profoundly influenced the standard historiography drawing a more or less clear evolutional line that starts from a medieval administration, continues trough a 'patrimonial bureaucracy' of an early modern Western European type, and finally arrives at a bureaucracy approaching, or at least aspiring to ideal Weberian criteria. This article deals with just one particular problem, namely the nature, the place, and the role of 'personal relations' within the so-called 'professionalized' administrative system of 18th-century Russia.