Russia under the Old regime

THE ANATOMY OF THE PATRIMONIAL REGIME

development in Russia of individual farming and large-scale private business.

The quantity of moneys and services due under tiaglo was not fixed. The government adjusted taxes in accord with its needs and its estimate of what the population could pay. After foreign invasions or severe droughts, they were lowered; in times of prosperity, they were raised. The system was unpredictable in the extreme. Whenever the state required additional revenue, it devised a new tax to pile on top of the existing ones. Special taxes were imposed to redeem Russian prisoners from Tatar captivity, to equip newly-formed musketeer units (strel'tsji), to maintain the courier service. Moscow's tax practices give the impression that by skimming it at once with new imposts the government wanted to prevent any surplus from accumulating in the hands of the population.

A particularly arbitrary feature of tiaglo was the requisition of labour services on behalf of the state. Voevody could demand from the population help in construction of fortifications, on road and bridge repairs, and in the billeting and feeding of troops. Since it was not compensated, work performed in fulfilment of tiaglo represented a form of forced labour. When at the end of the seventeenth century the government needed workers for the manufactures and mines which it had licensed foreign entrepreneurs to open, it had little difficulty finding them; it simply impressed muzhiki unattached to any tiaglo community, or exempted a certain number of households in neighbouring villages from monetary payments and put their able-bodied men on full-time labour tiaglo. As will be seen (Chapter 8), the working class employed in the manufacturing and mining establishments founded by Peter 1 was assembled in the same manner. When early in the seventeenth century Moscow decided to form infantry regiments under western officers to supplement the regular army composed of cavalry of dvoriane, it had no need for novel recruiting measures. Already at the end of the fifteenth century thousands of conscripts served in the armed forces. In 1631 a decree was issued that lands which did not furnish servitors - i.e. possessions of the church, widows, minors, retired servitors and the 'black lands' of independent peasants - were to furnish regularly one foot soldier for each five hundred acres of arable. These datochnye liudi were the earliest regular recruits in Europe. Sometimes tiaglo-bearers living on state lands were transferred en masse to distant parts of the country; for example, in the seventeenth century entire villages of black peasants were shipped to Siberia to help feed garrisons staffed by dvoriane. In the institution of tiaglo the Muscovite government disposed of an infinitely flexible device for harnessing ordinary manpower, much as in compulsory state service it had a ready mechanism for recruiting higher skills.