governmental departments. Overall, the attempt at building a modern-style European bureaucracy that had begun under Peter the Great was a partial success. Bureaucrats believed that service to the state and the tsar constituted the highest possible calling, the result being that the ranks of the bureaucracy continued to grow by leaps and bounds. Prestige was the main attraction of employment in the bureaucracy, as salaries were small, and advancement through the ranks deliberately kept limited to prevent too many people, especially those of humble birth, from rising too fast. Only the most educated, cultured, and informed men became part of the tsar's inner circle of advisers. The bureaucracy's numbers increased by threefold during the first half of the 19th century. Pay continued to be low due to the overall poverty of the Russian state. This was not only due to the country's backwards economy, but also because the nobility were tax-exempt and free from the expense of waging wars, not only the great ones, but the smaller campaigns in the Caucasus. Bureaucrats were for the most part uneducated, uninformed of their departments' respective tasks, and also phenomenally corrupt. Most hesitated to make decisions and preferred to push themselves up through the ranks, with the end result that the tsar himself was forced to micromanage thousands of trivial affairs. Russia also suffered from a multitude of antiquated, contradictory, and discriminatory laws against Jews and minority Christian sects. Since not all minorities were part of the lower classes and many officials could not afford to feed their families, bribery was extremely widespread, and yet was probably the only thing that kept the Russian state from being even slower, more corrupt, and oppressive than it was. The Decembrist uprising had increased Nicholas's distrust of the nobility and dislike of anything resembling political reform, even among the upper classes. Education gradually continued to improve after Alexander's creation of a universal educational system in 1804, although due to lack of funds the emphasis tended to be on the creation of universities rather than on primary and secondary schools. In the latter part of his reign, the Minister of Education, A.N. Golistyn, moved to censor and exclude the dangerous revolutionary and anti-clerical ideas coming from Western Europe. He encouraged college students to report their professors to the authorities if they expressed subversive views. Those professors so exposed were either fired or threatened with prosecution. In 1833,