Russia under the Old regime

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recruit'. Peter firmly believed that military power was essential to every country's welfare. In letters to his very un-military*on he emphasized the dominant role which war had played in history.4 Little wonder that during the thirty-six years of Peter's reign, Russia knew only one solid year of peace.

It took Peter no time to discover that with the hodge-podge of old and new regiments which he had inherited from his predecessors he could realize none of his military ambitions. This became painfully clear in 1700 when 8,500 Swedes, commanded by Charles XII, routed 45,000 Russians besieging Narva and then (to use Charles's own words) gunned them down like 'wild geese'. Nine years later, at Poltava, Peter exacted his revenge. But his triumph was really less impressive than it is usually made to appear because the Swedes, led by their erratic king deep into enemy territory, found themselves exhausted, outnumbered and outgunned when the decisive battle took place. Two years after Poltava Peter suffered the ignominy of having the Turks surround his army on the Prut; a predicament from which only the diplomatic skill of P.P. Shafirov, the son of a converted Jew in his service, managed to extricate him.

The establishment of a large standing army which Peter initiated constitutes one of the critical events in the history of the Russian state. At Peter's death Russia had a powerful force of 210,000 regular and 110,000 supplementary troops (Cossacks, foreigners, etc.), as well as 24,000 sailors. Relative to the population of Russia at the time (12 or 13 million) a military establishment of this size exceeded almost three times the proportion regarded in eighteenth-century western Europe as the norm of what a country could support, namely one soldier for each one hundred inhabitants.6 For a country as poor as Russia, the maintenance of such an armed force represented an immense burden. To enable it to carry the load, Peter had to re-vamp the country's fiscal, administrative and social structures, and, to some extent, transform its economic and cultural life as well.

Peter's most pressing need was for money; his military expenditures regularly absorbed 80-85 Per cent f Russian revenues, and in one year (1705) as much as 96 per cent. After experimenting with various fiscal methods, in 1724 he decided to sweep away the whole complicated system of payments in money, goods and labour evolved over the centuries and substitute for it a single capitation or 'soul' tax imposed on adult males. Tiaglo was nominally abolished, although in fact it continued to be applied sporadically for the remainder of the century. Before Peter's reform, the taxable unit in the village had been either a defined area of sown land or (after 1678) the household. The older methods of taxation permitted the tax-payer to practise evasion: to reduce the tax on land he