Russia under the Old regime

THE PARTIAL DISMANTLING OF THE PATRIMONIAL STATE

curtailed the acreage, and to reduce the tax on households he crammed as many relatives under one roof as it would cover. The soul tax, being levied on every adult male subject to taxation, precluded such practices. This method had the added advantage of encouraging the peasant to increase his cultivated acreage since he was no longer penalized by higher taxes for doing so. Peter also increased the rolls of tax-payers by eliminating the various interstitial groups between the tax-paying and service-bearing estates which in the past had managed to escape all state obligations, such as slaves (kholopy), impoverished dvoriane who worked like ordinary peasants and yet were regarded as members of the service class, and clergymen without assigned parishes. All such groups were now integrated with the peasantry and reduced to thestatusof serfs. This reclassification alone increased the number of tax-payers by several hundred thousand. Characteristically, the amount of the soul tax was determined not by what the individual subjects could pay but by what the state needed to collect. The government estimated its military expenditures to be four million roubles, which sum it apportioned among the tax-paying groups. On this basis the soul tax was initially set at 74 kopeks a year for serfs of private owners, 114 kopeks for peasants on state and crown lands (who, unlike the former, owed no obligations to the landlord) and 120 kopeks for the posad people. The money was payable in three annual instalments and until its abolition in 1887 for most categories of peasants remained for the Russian monarchy a fundamental source of revenue.

The new taxes led to a threefold increase in state income. If after 1724 the government squeezed three times as much money out of peasants and traders as before, then obviously the financial burden of the tax-paying population tripled. The money cost of supporting the standing army which Peter had created was henceforth borne primarily by the tax-paying groups which, it must be kept in mind, contributed also indirectly to the military effort by supporting with their rents and labour the service class.

And they bore this cost not only in money and services. In 1699, Peter ordered the induction into the army of 32,000 commoners. This measure was not an innovation, since, as noted, the Muscovite government had claimed and exercised since the fifteenth century the right to call conscripts known as datochnye liudi (p. 99, above). But what previously had been a means of raising auxiliary manpower now became the principal method of complementing the armed forces. In 1705 Peter set a regular recruitment quota, requiring each twenty households, rural and urban, to furnish annually one soldier - a ratio of approximately three recruits for each thousand inhabitants. Henceforth, the bulk of Russia's armed forces consisted of recruits drawn from the tax-paying classes.