Having recently read a few Russian classics, I've remembered that this mastodon of paper pushing Chinovniks was something I've wanted to know more on for some time. There was even talk of medals being awarded to the bureaucrats, they even had tiers of sorts (13 or so if i recall correctly) according to one's station and level of performance.
So, are there any well written works on the subject?
One of the standard works on the tsarist bureaucracy is the anthology Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century edited by Walter Pintner and Don Rowney. The entries cover the period you want. If you have access to jstor, Alfred Rieber's "Bureaucratic Politics in Imperial Russia," in Social Science History is worth checking out. William Sunderland's The Baron's Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution examines the late tsarist bureaucracy through the lens of the biography of an individual.