A long box.
From time to time, one or another ruler announced, as they would now say, for populist purposes, his desire to talk to the people directly, bypassing intermediaries. Such acts include the order of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich to put a special box on a pillar in Kolomenskoye near the royal palace, in which anyone who needed it could put a complaint or petition in the royal name. It was announced that these petitioners would fall directly into the tsar's own hands. There have always been many grievances in Russia, petitions were written without number, therefore they put a large and deep box — "long", as they called it then. In the "long box" of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, letters from those who did not have access to the tsar poured in, and these, of course, were ordinary people, the poor, offended by "strong people". It was a great bother for the tsar to sort out all these petitions, and not always his hands reached them. The tsar sent the petitions he read with his inscription "to disassemble and solve" to the orders. And there they decided slowly: sometimes they had to wait for years for a decision, while many petitioners did not receive an answer at all. Muscovites reviled and reviled their petitioners in a "long box", and when they were convinced that there was no sense from this, the clerks began to take out all sorts of abusive letters written in such obscene words that they could not show the tsar. After that, the box was completely removed. But the memory of him remained in the saying: to put a case on the back burner means to delay its decision indefinitely, and most likely, not to solve it at all.