Russia under the Old regime

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These measures represented an innovation of major historic significance. West European armies in the seventeenth century were manned almost exclusively by volunteers, i.e. mercenaries; and although here and there men were pressed into service in a manner which came close to forceful induction, no country before Russia practised systematic conscription. Spain introduced compulsory levies in 1637, and so did Sweden during the Thirty Years' War; but these were emergency measures, and the same held true of the conscription adopted by France during the War of the Spanish Succession. In western Europe, compulsory draft became the norm only after the French Revolution. Russia anticipated this modern development by nearly one century. The system of annual drafts of peasants and posad people introduced by Peter early in his reign, remained until the military reform of 1874 the normal way of providing manpower for Russia's armed forces. Russia therefore has every right to claim priority as the first country with compulsory military service. Although a recruit and his immediate family received automatic freedom from serfdom, the Russian peasant regarded induction as a virtual death sentence; required to shave his beard and to leave his family for the remainder of his life, the prospect he faced was either to be buried in some distant place or, at best, to return as an old, perhaps disabled man to a village where no one remembered him and where he had no claim to a share of the communal land. In Russian folklore there exists a whole category of'recruit laments' (rekrutskie plachi) resembling funeral dirges. The farewell given a recruit upon induction into service by the family also resembled funeral rituals.

As far as Russia's social structure was concerned, the main consequence of the introduction of the soul tax and recruitment obligation was to consolidate what had traditionally been a fairly loose and diversified body of commoners, ranging from destitute dvoriane to ordinary slaves, into a single homogeneous class of tax-payers. The payment of the soul tax and (after dvoriane had been freed from state service) compulsory military service became hallmarks of the lower class. The contrast between it and the elite became sharper than ever.

Peter's successors made the landlords responsible for the collection of the soul tax from their serfs and formally liable for arrears. It further charged them with the duty of supervising the delivery of recruits from their villages (the selection of the recruits was entrusted to the community, akhough this power, too, gradually passed into the hands of landlords). With these measures, the state transformed landlords into its fiscal and recruiting agents, a fact which could not help but enhance their authority over the population, more than half of which was then living on private, secular estates. The most onerous period of serfdom begins with Peter's reforms. The government now continues to abandon