Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Government

its alcohol monopoly has already been noted, but during the 1880s concerted

efforts were made to enhance income from other sources. The existing taxes

on tobacco and on sugar were increased, so that revenues from tobacco more

than doubled between 1880 and 1895, while the income from taxing sugar

showed a tenfold increase during this period. By 1895, taxes on sugar produced

more than 47 million roubles annually, some 80 per cent of the revenue that the

poll tax was producing in the last years before its abolition. The government

also moved to introduce indirect taxes in new areas: oil and matches were

both subject to new taxation from 1888, bringing in more than 27 million

roubles annually by 1895. Stamp duties were also increased, resulting in a

near-doubling of revenues from that source. The last area of indirect taxation

where the government was able to increase its revenues was through customs

duties. Tariffs produced close to 100 million roubles of revenue annually by

1880, but the government’s policy of moving to increase duties on imported

goods during the 1880s in order to stimulate domestic production resulted

in an additional 40 million roubles of revenue by 1890. Bunge’s successor as

ﬁnance minister, I. A. Vyshnegradskii, put in place a major tariff reform in 1891

and this accelerated the growth of revenue from this source so that in 1894

the government collected more than 183 million roubles from customs duties.

This development of indirect taxation made Russia much more dependent

on these sources of income than any of the other European powers. By 1911,

Russia gained 84 per cent of its revenues from indirect taxes, while indirect

taxation in France accounted for 70 per cent of its budget and Britain’s budget

gained 59 per cent of its total revenue from this source.

This dependence

on indirect taxation had serious consequences for Russia on the outbreak of

war in 1914. In a ﬁt of patriotic enthusiasm, the Russian government decided

to introduce prohibition during wartime, but this brought about a severe and

immediate reduction in the government’s income, as it lost its income from

liquor. Revenues in 1914 showed a reduction of more than 500 million roubles

on the previous year, at the same time as the government was having to cope

with severely increased expenditure to ﬁght the First World War.

∗∗∗

The impact of Russia’s budgetary policies on its population was considerable.

Since the overwhelming majority of Russia’s population were peasants, it was

inevitable that they would bear the greatest burden of taxation. Discussions

over the effect of government taxation policies on the peasantry have centred

40 I. A. Mikhailov, Gosudarstevennye dolgi i raskhody Rossii vo vremia voiny. Fakty i tsifry

(Petrograd: Pravda, 1917), p. 132.

482

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

State ﬁnances

on two periods: the early part of the eighteenth century, when Peter the

Great introduced the poll tax, and the post-emancipation period. While the

Russian government’s need for revenue was acute, and its apparent authority

over its population was very considerable, it had to act with considerable

caution when calculating the impact of its taxation policies. The threat of

peasant rebellion – whether real or merely perceived – was ever-present and

the government was well aware that its control of the empire could easily be

challenged by uprisings across its domains. The four great peasant revolts that

Russia experienced after 1606, culminating in the Pugachev revolt in the 1770s,

reinforced this belief and acted as a reminder of the power that the Russian

peasant could exert. While the state had been able to deal with these rebellions

and to reassert its own authority on each occasion, the government became

wary of implementing policies that could provoke the peasants into further

revolts. This was especially true in the mid- and late nineteenth century, when

the interests of noble landowners had to be balanced against the needs of

the peasantry in the construction of the 1861 emancipation settlement. An

increase in the number of peasant revolts in the 1850s caused genuine alarm

inside the government, and a nervousness about the potential power of the

rural population played a signiﬁcant part in the taxation reforms of the 1880s.

The impact of Peter the Great’s introduction of the poll tax on the peasant

has been widely debated. The emperor wanted to introduce a new and reliable

source of revenue, but at the same time he was very conscious of the need

not to antagonise the peasantry by making severe ﬁnancial demands on them.

Despite this, it has been argued, most notably by P. N. Miliukov in his writings

before 1917, that the burden of taxation increased very substantially during

Peter’s reign and that, in particular, the poll tax generated 260 per cent more

in revenue than the taxes that it replaced.

This argument is based on analysis

of the total tax yield, rather than looking at the burden faced by each Russian

household and does not take into account the increase in population over the

period and has thus been challenged by more recent commentators. It has been

argued that the state’s tax revenues increased partly because there were more

tax-payers, but that this was also due to inﬂation and that the real tax burden on

individuals remained more or less steady. It has even been suggested that the

introduction of the poll tax representeda reduction in the level of taxation, after

the government’s need to increase taxes to pay for the Great Northern War.

As has been widely acknowledged, however, there is insufﬁcient evidence to

41 P. N. Miliukov, Gosudarstvennoe khoziaistvo Rossii v pervoi chetverti XVIII stoletiia i reforma

Petra Velikogo (St Petersburg: Tip. M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1905), esp. pp. 471–91.

42 Kahan, The Plow,p.332.

483

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Government

come to deﬁnitive judgements about the burdens of taxation in the early part

of the eighteenth century. The Russian state did not have the bureaucratic

capacity to maintain accurate records of its ﬁnances during this period and the

budget-making process was still rudimentary. While complete evidence for

the actual ﬁnancial burdens faced by the peasantry during and immediately

after Peter’s reign is lacking, the perception produced by the introduction of

the poll tax is much clearer. The population as a whole believed that the poll

tax had resulted in signiﬁcantly increased taxation. But this belief was related

to the circumstances of the tax’s introduction. The early 1720s were hard years

for Russian farmers. Poor harvests and resulting high prices for grain helped

to reduce the peasants’ standard of living: many peasants were compelled to

become purchasers of grain, rather than being able to sell their own produce.

At the same time, the government moved to requisition grain, paying only

very modest prices to the peasantry, to try to alleviate famine. The methods by

which the new poll tax was collected also served to generate antagonism: the

task of tax-collection was initially handed over to the army and the military

sought to collect the new tax in cash. Previously, the work of tax-collection

had been undertaken by landowners, and peasants had been able to negotiate

to pay their taxes in kind or by performing additional labour services. The

combination of the need for the peasants to produce cash to pay the new poll

tax, together with the unbending attitude of the army during the process of

collection, served to intensify the stress that the peasants were already feeling

as a result of poor agricultural conditions. Even though the burden that the

new tax represented may, overall, not have represented any substantial increase

in the overall level of taxation demanded from the Russian peasants, their clear

perception was that the poll tax did represent a considerable extra demand by

the government.

The position of the peasantry in the second half of the nineteenth century

was also complex. Emancipation had been introduced partly as a response to

the apparent growth in peasant discontent during the 1850s. The terms of the

settlement had been dictated as much by the Russian state’s ﬁnancial posi-

tion as by the needs of either peasants or landowners. The government was

extremely unsure of the likely peasant response to emancipation, both in the

short term and as the real effects of the reform became clear. It was, therefore,

very wary of making signiﬁcant changes to the tax system until emancipa-

tion had bedded down. The system of redemption payments introduced a

new ﬁnancial burden for former serfs and, even though the state’s need for

extra revenue was considerable during the 1860s and 1870s, it was reluctant

to embark on a radical restructuring of the tax system. The perception that

484

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

State ﬁnances

gripped the Russian establishment after emancipation was that the peasantry

were becoming more and more impoverished,

and that this was not unre-

lated to the growth in revolutionary activity in the 1870s, culminating in the

assassination of Alexander II in 1881. The government came to believe that

it needed to try to alleviate the ﬁnancial situation of the peasant if it was to

prevent widespread rebellion. Alongside this, in the last part of the nineteenth

century the state wanted to promote industrial growth in Russia. As minister

of ﬁnance, Bunge wanted to reduce the level of direct taxation on the peasantry,

but the increases in indirect taxes in the 1880s and 1890s clearly had a signiﬁcant

impact on the rural population. The argument turns on the extent to which

the reductions in direct taxation were balanced by increases in excise duties

and other indirect levies. It has been suggested that in the ﬁrst half of the 1880s

the overall tax burden on the peasantry was reduced: even though indirect

taxation increased by some 10 per cent, this was more than compensated for

by signiﬁcant reductions in direct taxes. Urban residents paid more in taxation

during this period, but the rural population saw its overall tax burden reduced

by some 8 per cent.

This analysis is short-sighted, since it considers only the

ﬁrst part of the 1880s and fails to take into account the new impositions that

were levied during the late 1880s and 1890s. There has also been considerable

debate over the overall standard of living that the Russian peasant enjoyed after

emancipation, with historians arguing that the supposed ‘crisis of Russian agri-

culture’ at the end of the nineteenth century was a chimera.

The role that

taxation played in the peasant economy has formed part of these discussions,

with the increases in indirect taxation being taken as evidence to support the

view that the peasant standard of living declined at the end of the nineteenth

century. While indirect taxes do bear more heavily on lower-income groups,

the peasantry could also purchase less of the taxed goods, should they ﬁnd

themselves in straitened circumstances. Even the excise duty on vodka could

be avoided by the age-old practice of the peasantry distilling their own illegal

spirits.

The increased revenues that the government received from indirect tax-

ation at the end of the nineteenth century suggests that the population was

sufﬁciently prosperous to continue to consume taxed goods, even as the tax on

43 See A. I. Engelgardt, Letters from the Country, 1872–1887, trans. C. A. Frierson (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1993), for one of the main examples of this ‘literature of social

lament’.

44 See S. Plaggenborg, ‘Tax Policy and the Question of Peasant Poverty in Tsarist Russia

1881–1905’, CMRS 36, 1–2 (1995): 58.

45 J. Y. Simms, ‘The Crisis of Russian Agriculture at the End of the Nineteenth Century’,

SR 36 (1977): 377–98 is the starting point for this discussion.

485

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Government

them rose. The preponderance of rural dwellers in the Russian Empire makes

it improbable that it was townspeople who were the main purchasers of these

goods and, in any case, signiﬁcant numbers of the peasantry augmented their

income from farming by wage labour in Russia’s growing factories. It does

appear as if the Russian peasant was, overall, well enough off to be able to

continue to consume manufactured goods, even as the government increased

the taxation on them. Witte’s 1898 plaintive report to the emperor about the

impoverishment of the peasantry and the effect this had on the state’s bud-

get is a reﬂection on the long-term relative poverty of the Russian peasant.

The poor yields that Russian agriculture produced meant that the per capita

income of Russia’s farmers continued to be much lower than incomes else-

where in Europe and thus, that the tax revenues that they could contribute

were signiﬁcantly lower than in Austria or France.

The challenge that the Russian state faced in framing its ﬁscal policies was

how to enhance the overall prosperity of its population and thus increase the

state’s revenues. Although it was able to stave off the most serious ﬁnancial

crises, tsarist Russia faced a series of nevertheless persistent and signiﬁcant

budget difﬁculties. These were the product of the imperial Russian regime

seeking to maintain a military proﬁle equivalent to that of its Western neigh-

bours and rivals from an economic base that was much less developed than its

Great Power rivals. The tsarist state’s expenditure was on the same level as that

of its more prosperous rivals to the west, but its revenue-raising potential was

much lower. The tsarist state had, therefore, to impose relatively high levels

of taxation on its population to enable it to continue as a Great Power and it

had to collect its revenues effectively and ruthlessly if it was to continue to be

a credible military power.

486

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

part vi

FOREIGN POLICY AND THE

ARMED FORCES

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Peter the Great and the Northern War

paul bushkovitch

From the end of the ﬁfteenth century to Peter’s time the main preoccupa-

tion of Russian foreign policy was the competition with Poland-Lithuania for

territory and power on the East European plain. Poland was the hegemonic

East European power for almost two centuries, and after initial success by

1514, Russia struggled in vain against its neighbour with few intervals of peace

or goodwill. The long series of wars that resulted culminated in the war of

1653–67, which brought the Ukrainian Hetmanate into the Russian state and

marked a decisive turn in Russia’s favour. Relations with the Tatar khanates

to the south and east were more complex. Russia had conquered Kazan and

Astrakhan in 1552–6 but was unwilling to confront Crimea, whose overlord

was the Ottoman Empire, western Eurasia’s greatest power until the very end

of the seventeenth century. The tsars preferred to build elaborate defences

in the south, a line of forts and obstructions that stretched hundreds of miles

from the Polish border to the Volga, and mobilise the army every spring rather

than risk war with the Ottomans by pressing too hard on Crimea. The only

area of relative security was the north-west, the Swedish border. The expan-

sion of Sweden into Estonia in the 1570s and the capture of Ingria, ratiﬁed at

Stolbovo in 1619, cut Russia off from the Baltic and placed an ever more pow-

erful neighbour on Russia’s frontier, but Sweden’s main preoccupations were

with Denmark, Germany and Poland, not Russia. In the seventeenth century

Russia’s relations with Sweden were good (apart from the war of 1656–8,a

result of the Polish tangle) and the King of Sweden was the only European

monarch to be allowed to send a resident emissary to Moscow, from 1630 until

the outbreak of the Northern War. Thus it was not without reason that Peter’s

declaration of war on Sweden in 1700, in concert with Denmark and King

Augustus II of Poland, came as a surprise in Stockholm.

1 For more detailed discussion and a full bibliography see Paul Bushkovitch, Peter the

Great: the Struggle for Power 1671–1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

and Reinhard Wittram, Peter der Grosse. Czar und Kaiser (G

ottingen: Vandenhoeck and

Ruprecht, 1964).

489

Foreign policy and the armed forces

Peter’s new war was also a surprise because Russian foreign policy after

1667 had been preoccupied with the Ottoman Empire and its Crimean vassal.

Russia’s strategic situation had been radically altered by the acquisition of the

Ukrainian Hetmanate, placing Russian troops in Kiev and other Ukrainian

towns on the northern edge of the steppe, that is, of Crimean territory. The

immediate result was the Chigirin War of 1677–81, the ﬁrst in which Russian

troops actually confronted Ottoman soldiers as well as the Crimeans. The

outcome was a minor military defeat for Russia but also recognition of Russia’s

new border along the Dnieper. With their northern frontier secure, the Turks

under Kara Mustafa pasha turned to Vienna but were defeated in 1683.The

failed Turkish siege of Vienna led to the Habsburg reconquest of Hungary and

the formation of the Holy League, consisting of the Empire, Poland, Venice

and the Papacy. The regent Sophia, Russia’s ruler in Peter’s youth (1682–9)

responded positively to an imperial invitation to join the Holy League, but

such a step required a full reconciliation with Poland (1686), something that

aroused doubts not only among Polish magnates but also in Moscow. The

Naryshkin faction was against it, but Soﬁa and her favourite Prince V. V.

Golitsyn persuaded the duma (council of Boyars) to go along and Russia

joined in. Her contribution was to be the two Crimean campaigns of 1687 and

1689, both attempts to strike Crimea across the steppe, moving south from

the Ukraine, and both ignominious failures. The failures led to the triumph of

Peter and the Naryshkins, but the new government was not decisive enough

either to break with the alliance or to continue the struggle. The war stagnated

until the death of Peter’s mother in 1694 put him wholly in charge for the ﬁrst

time. Late in that year, on his return from Archangel and his ﬁrst sea voyage,

Peter decided to move against the Turks and he did not consult the boyars

about it. He followed the enthusiastic advice of his two foreign favourites,

Franc¸ois Lefort of Geneva and the Scottish general Patrick Gordon, not that

of his Naryshkin relatives. In the war Peter moved not against Crimea but

against the Ottoman fort of Azak (Azov) at the mouth of the Don. The lack

of a Russian navy caused the failure of the ﬁrst siege, so over the following

winter Peter built one at Voronezh and in 1696 took the fort. It seems that

he intended to go on ﬁghting the Turks, opening his way into the Black

Sea, and talks with his allies were the diplomatic purpose of the famous trip

to Europe in 1697–8. There he discovered that the Habsburgs in particular

were weary of war and that Peter would himself have to make peace with

Istanbul.

On the way home he met with Augustus II in Poland, who had a new idea:

attack Sweden. If Peter went along it meant a break with the tsar’s previous

490

Peter the Great and the Northern War

favourites, Lefort and Gordon, who continued to favour an anti-Ottoman

policy, but both died early in 1699. He mourned their deaths, but for political

support found two new favourites, Fedor Golovin, the scion of an old boyar

family, and Aleksandr Menshikov, the son of one of the palace falconers. Peter

moved quickly to make a treaty with Denmark, completing the circle of allies

against Sweden. His method was characteristic, for he ordered the Danish

envoy to Voronezh where he was inspecting the shipyards. There he met the

Dane at night in a small house on the edge of town with only Fedor Golovin

and a translator present, and together theywrote the treaty. Peter told the Dane

to be sure to keep the matter secret from the Russian boyars. Complications

with the Turkish peace put off the Swedish war until the autumn of 1700,but

the new direction was now set.

The course of the war was full of surprises, for the political, military, eco-

nomic and even demographic position of the warring powers was not what it

seemed on the surface. Sweden had been the hegemonic power in northern

Europe since the great victories of Gustavus Adolphus, having reduced Den-

mark in size and power and established itself not only in the Baltic provinces

but in northern Germany. The performance of King Jan Sobieski’s army before

Vienna in 1683 seemed to suggest that Poland had recovered from its losses

in the Russian-Ukrainian war. Contemporaries attributed great signiﬁcance to

Augustus II’s success in Hungary as an imperial ally and commander, presum-

ing that he, like Sobieski, could overcome the contentions of Polish magnates

long enough to secure victory. Russia, in contrast, was still a marginal power,

ﬁghting with mixed success against the Turks and Tatars and apparently much

less important than Poland.

In reality, the situation was quite different. Poland’s problems extended

beyond magnate quarrels with the king and with one another. The Cossack

rebellion of 1648 and the subsequent wars had largely been fought on Polish

territory, leading to economic catastrophe and demographic collapse. It did

not regain its pre-1648 population (about 11 million) until the middle of the

eighteenth century. Further, its crucial grain exports met increasing compe-

tition from improved farming techniques in Holland and England, its main

markets. Polish cities stagnated after 1648, falling in population and prosperity.

The most ruthless government would have raised revenue with difﬁculty in

this situation, but revenue for the army was almost entirely at the will of the

diet (Polish parliament) and the szlachta (nobility) served in the army as volun-

teer cavalry or on the wages of great magnates. A modern infantry army was

an impossibility. The king also could not fully control Poland’s Baltic ports

(Danzig and Elbing) nor could he build a navy.

491