Russia under the Old regime

97

manpower used by the state to perform any and all functions which it required: soldiering, administration, legislation, justice, diplomacy, commerce and manufacture. The fact that its living derived almost exclusively from the exploitation of land and (after the 1590s) bonded labour, was an accident of Russian history, namely the shortage of cash. Later on, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the civil branch of the service class was put on salary without its character or function being thereby significantly altered. The roots of this class were not in the land, as was the case with nobilities the world over, but in the royal service. In some respects, the Russian service class was a very modern institution, a kind of proto-meritocracy. Its members enjoyed superior status but by virtue of their usefulness to their employer. Whatever their advantages vis-a-vis the rest of the population, with regard to the crown their position was utterly precarious. So much for the service class. The 99-7 per cent of Russians who did not belong to it, unless they were men of the cloth, owed the state a variety of obligations in money and labour called collectively tiaglo. Like the French taille with which it has much in common, the term is of domainial origin. It derives from the verb tianut\ 'to pull'. In the appanage period villages were said to be 'pulled' towards the manor or town to which they owed taxes or rents. Later, the term acquired a generalized fiscal meaning. In Muscovite Russia, the non-service people were called tiagloe naselenie, 'the pulling population', and their burdens, tiaglo, 'the pull'. But as late as the nineteenth century, after it had ceased to be used by the state, tiaglo was still current on private domains to designate a unit of serf labour, normally consisting of a peasant and his wife and one horse. Taxes due under tiaglo were set in Moscow on the basis of registers {pistsovye knigi). In the rural areas, the taxable unit was sometimes an area of cultivated land, sometimes a household, sometimes a combination of the two. The trading and artisan population living in towns and settlements was taxed by households. The local authorities enjoyed the additional right of imposing various labour obligations as part of tiaglo. Responsibility for the distribution of moneys and services was placed on the tax-payers themselves. The bureaucracy in Moscow having determined the global sum required by the state, apportioned it among the various regions and tax-paying groups. It was then up to the provincial officials and landlords to see to it that the tiaglo-bearers distributed the burdens equitably among themselves. In the colourful phrase of Miliu-kov, the government 'largely left it up to the tax to locate the payer'.8 Implied in this system was collective responsibility. All tiaglo-bearers formed communities, whose members were jointly accountable for the moneys and services imposed on their group. The system inhibited the