Tatishchev's program for educating the state elite

The article deals with the management thought of Russia in the 18th century and the training of management personnel. V. N. Tatishchev was a prominent administrator, politician and diplomat of the second quarter of the 18th century. In his conceptual work “A Conversation between Two Friends about the Benefits of Science and Schools,” he formulated a program for the formation of a system for training the management elite in the country. The objective of this article is to identify conceptual elements in V. N. Tatishchev’s ideas about the goals, principles and mechanisms of the state’s educational activities. The basic method of the work performed is a structural analysis of V. N. Tatishchev’s text and the identification of its structural elements. The result of the analysis was the identification of three structures that allow Tatishchev to present his views on the training of the country’s management elite in a single system and to propose a program for the creation of educational institutions. The first structure is value-based. It includes the goal and principles that should underlie the work on creating an education system. The second structure is resource-based. In it, the author outlined the opportunities that need to be used to create such a system. The transition from the first to the second structure was a historical review of the measures taken by Emperor Peter I, as well as an analysis of the state of affairs in this area contemporary to Tatishchev. The third structure is instrumental. This is a set of specific actions that must be taken to solve the problem. The novelty of the study consists in identifying the conceptual elements of V.N. Tatishchev's views in the field of training management personnel. His findings can be used in studying management thought and public administration activities in Russia.