The Russians found this arrangement useful, and employed designated members of these religious communities at a tiny salary (which could be augmented by bribes by the ambitious) to perform these official functions.
[1] Ukases by Tsar Alexander I (reigned 1801–1825) required the rabbis to maintain civil information in Russian as well as Hebrew.
For this reason, the Jewish communities chose an individual familiar with Russian and other required languages to perform this role, and put his name forward.
[4] The crown rabbinate evolved, and by mid-century the government opened its own seminaries for training rabbis (supported by taxes on Jewish communities) with a strong secular syllabus promoting the interests of the state.
Finally, the government closed the schools down in 1873, realizing that the Jewish community regarded them as unfit for the honored position of rabbi.
[2] The problem of the "dual rabbinate" continued until the 20th century and World War I, with debates raging within the community itself about how to view and react to the situation.
This caused a split among the delegates among those who saw nothing wrong with learning Russian and even thought it would avoid much of the misery the Jews had undergone, however this resulted in a stalemate and no new decisions were taken about it.