Peter the Great (143 page)

Upon his return from France, Peter decided to approach the problem differently, replacing the household tax with a version of the individual head tax he had observed in France. The tax-paying unit of this new poll tax was to be the "soul": that is, every male from infant to grandfather in every village, town or peasant commune. But before the new tax could be levied, a new census was required. On November 26, 1718, a decree ordered that every Russian male except noblemen, churchmen and certain privileged merchants (all of whom were taxed differently) be inscribed Again, opposition was intense but by 1722, a census had been compiled, listing 5,794,928 male "souls" and in 1724 the soul tax was collected for the first time. Peasants were assessed at 74 kopeks or 114 kopeks per year, depending on whether they worked on private or state land. In terms of revenue, the tax was an enormous success, producing half of the state income that year and continuing in use through most of the nineteenth century until 1887, when it was abolished, by Alexander III.

The soul tax solved Peter's problem of revenue, but at the cost of placing an even heavier burden on the peasants and strengthening the bonds of the serfdom that tethered them to the land. In earlier times, Russian peasants had been free to move where they wished, a right that made it difficult and sometimes impossible for landowners to meet their needs for labor. This crisis intensified in the middle of the sixteenth century when Ivan the Terrible conquered Kazan and Astrachan, opening to Russian colonization vast regions of virgin black earth previously inhabited by nomads. By the thousands and hundreds of thousands, Russian peasants abandoned the forest to the north and poured into this flat, rich country. Farms and villages in central Russia were left uninhabited; whole provinces were semi-deserted. Landowners, threatened with ruin, appealed to the state, and the state, unable to collect taxes from empty villages, reacted. Beginning in the 1550's, decrees forbidding peasants to leave the land were issued. Runaway peasants were pursued, and in 1649 it was declared that any person who harbored them was liable to their landlord for his losses. In Peter's time, over ninety-five percent of the people were serfs; some were state peasants and some belonged to private landlords, but all were bound for life to the land they worked.

Peter's new soul tax placed the peasants even more firmly in the hands of the landowners. Once the population of a district had been counted by the census, the landowners and local authorities were responsible to the state for producing the tax revenue based on that population; actual collection of the money was left up to them. To assist landowners in keeping track of their peasants and extracting these taxes, Peter decreed in 1722 that serfs could not leave a landowner's estate without his written permission. This was the origin of the internal-passport system which continues in use in the Soviet Union today. Eventually, the power placed in the hands of the landowners—to collect taxes, to control movement, to dictate work, to punish infractions—made each landowner a little government unto himself. Where his ability to enforce was threatened, he was supported by the intervention of army regiments permanently billeted throughout the countryside. In time, to increase the controls on peasant movement, any serf wanting to leave the land was required to get not only the landowner's written permission, but written permission from the army as well. The result was a hereditary, all-embracing system of permanent servitude.

Most Russian serfs were bonded to the land, but not all. One great obstacle to persuading Russian noblemen and merchants to open new factories had been the difficulty of finding labor. To overcome this, Peter decreed in January 1721 that factory and mine owners could have factory serfs—that is, laborers permanently attached to the factory or mine in which their labor took place. Underscoring the key importance of building new industry, the Tsar also waived the strict rules about returning runaway serfs. Those serfs, he declared, who had fled their landowners to find work in factories should not be returned, but should remain where they were as permanent industrial serfs.

In the end, Peter's tax policies were a success for the state and a massive burden for the people. When the Emperor died, the state did not owe a kopek. Peter had fought twenty-one years of war, constructed a fleet, a new capital, new harbors and canals without the aid of a single foreign loan or subsidy (indeed, it was he who paid subsidies to his allies, especially Augustus of Poland). Every kopek was raised by the toil and sacrifice of the Russian people within a single generation. He did not float internal loans so that future generations could help to pay for his projects, nor did he devalue the currency by issuing paper money as Goertz had done on behalf of Charles XII of Sweden. Instead, he laid the entire burden on his contemporary Russians. They strained, they struggled, they opposed, they cursed. But they obeyed.

60

SUPREME UNDER GOD

In
matters of religion, Peter was an eighteenth- rather than a seventeenth-century man, secular and rationalist rather than devout and mystical. He cared more about trade and national prosperity than about dogma or interpretations of Scripture; none of his wars was fought over religion. Yet, personally, Peter believed in God. He accepted God's omnipotence and saw His hand in everything: life and death, victory and defeat. His letters are studded with the phrase "Thanks be to God"; every victory was promptly celebrated with a Te Deum. He believed that tsars were more responsible to God than commoners were, as tsars were entrusted with the duty to rule, but he did not enshrine the role of monarchy in anything so theoretical or philosophical as the Divine Right of Kings. Peter simply approached religion as he approached everything else: What seemed reasonable? What was practical? What worked best? The best way to serve God, he believed, was to work for the strength and prosperity of Russia.

Peter enjoyed going to church. As a child, he was thoroughly drilled in the Bible and the liturgy, and as tsar he made an effort to spread accurately written Bibles throughout his realm. He loved choral singing, the only music of the Orthodox Church, and it was his lifelong habit to push his way forward through the standing crowd and take his place to sing .with the choir. Orthodox congregations are less disciplined than those of other faiths: People stand through the service and move about, coming and going, signaling, whispering and smiling among themselves. Peter accepted this, but he would not tolerate people talking openly during a service. When he heard such an offender, he immediately collected a fine of one rouble. Later, he erected a pillory in front of a church in St. Petersburg for those who spoke during the service.

Respect for the service was more important to Peter than the form of the service. To the despair of many of his countrymen— especially the leaders of the Russian church—Peter's tolerance of other Christian sects was greater than ever experienced before in Holy Orthodox Russia. Peter had early understood that if he was to recruit foreigners in sufficient numbers, he would have to permit them to worship according to their own traditions. This view was reinforced in 1697 by his first visit to Amsterdam, which allowed people of all nations to practice any form of religion as long as they did not disturb the established church or the churches of other foreigners. "It is our belief that the religious ceremonies of those who have come to reside among us are of little consequence to the state, providing that they contain nothing contrary to our law," Witsen had explained. This toleration, Peter noted later, "contributed greatly to the influx of foreigners and consequently increased public revenues," adding, "I intend to imitate Amsterdam in my city of St. Petersburg."

As much as possible, he did so. Foreigners in Russia were permitted to have their own councils to rule on marriages and other eccelesiastical matters without being subject to Russian laws or the control of the Russian church. Late in his reign, Peter issued decrees recognizing the validity of Protestant and Catholic baptisms and permitting marriages between Russian Orthodox believers and members of other faiths, providing the children were brought up as Orthodox. Both these laws eased the path of

Swedish prisoners now settled in Russia who desired to marry Russian women. Toleration was also state policy toward members of other religions, Christian or non-Christian, in other parts of the Russian empire. In the Baltic provinces conquered from Sweden, Peter agreed that the Lutheran religion should be preserved as the state church, and this guarantee became an article in the Treaty of Nystad. In the vast khanate of Kazan and other regions where the majority of the people were Moslem, Peter made no effort to convert them to Christianity; he knew that such an effort would probably fail and might provoke rebellion.

To a considerable degree, Peter was even tolerant of Old Believers, whom the church vociferously condemned and persecuted. For Peter, the crucial point was whether their religious beliefs helped or harmed the state; their desire to cross themselves with two fingers instead of three mattered little to him. Thousands of Old Believers, fleeing persecution, had formed new settlements in the forests of northern Russia. In 1702, when Peter was traveling south from Archangel with five battalions of the Guard, he was to pass through this region, and the Old Believers, assuming that they were to be attacked, gathered in their wooden churches, locked the doors and prepared to burn themselves to death rather than recant. But Peter had no such intention. "Let them live as they like," he said, and moved south to fight the Swedes. Subsequently, when iron ore was discovered nearby in the vicinity of Olonets, a number of Old Believers went to work in the mines and forges and proved to be a good workmen. This was even more to Peter's liking; it was a useful fruit of toleration. "Let them believe what they like, for if reason cannot turn them from their superstitions, neither fire nor sword can do it. It is foolish to make them martyrs. They are unworthy of the honor and would not in this way be of use to the state."

Granted this latitude, the Old Believers continued to live quietly in remote regions, refusing to submit to church authority, but paying taxes and living irreproachable lives. In time, however, as the war made huge demands on Russian labor, Peter began to see their withdrawal into the forests not just as religious conservatism but also as political opposition. In February 1716, he decreed that a census of Old Believers be taken, that they be subjected to a double tax and that, in order to encourage public derision and shame them back into the arms of the established church, they be required to wear a bit of yellow cloth on their backs. Inevitably, the result was that the Old Believers exhibited the badge proudly, their numbers increased and, to escape taxes, they fled even farther from the reach of government control. Toward the end of his life, Peter's tolerance of them had largely faded. In an exasperated effort to diminish their numbers, he began sending them to Siberia, then rescinded that order because "there are enough of them there already." In 1724, all Old Believers except peasants who wished to keep their beards were required to wear a copper medallion that depicted a beard—and for this medallion they paid handsomely.

Although Peter tolerated a wide variety of religious worship in Russia, there was one Christian order which he disliked: the Jesuits. (Other brotherhoods of Catholic priests and monks were welcome in Russia; the Franciscans and the Capuchins even possessed small monasteries.) Originally, the Jesuits also had been free to hold services in Moscow and to travel freely through Russia on their way to the court of the great Manchu Emperor of China, K'ang-hsi. In time, however, Peter began to suspect that their religious zeal was largely a facade behind which they were reaching for political power. Confirmation of Jesuit worldliness, in Peter's view, came from the close relationship between the order and the Imperial government in Vienna, and eventually he decreed that "all Jesuits are earnestly commanded by virtue of these Letters Patent to quit the Russian dominions within four days after notice having given them, the world being sufficiently apprised of their dangerous machinations, and how common it is for them to meddle with politic affairs." Yet, Peter did not demand the closing of the Catholic church in St. Petersburg. He per
m
itted the parish to send for replacement priests, insisting only that they not be Jesuits and that they not claim protection from the court of Austria.

In other countries, Peter's well-known tolerance inspired in the heads of other churches the hope that, through him, their own faith might gain a foothold or even predominance in Russia. There was no possibility of this. Peter's interest in other Christian faiths was a matter of curiosity about the service and the institutions of administration. He never considered any form of religious conversion. Nevertheless, in 1717, while Peter was in Paris, a group of divines at the Faculty of Divinity at the Sorbonne proposed uniting the churches of Rome and Moscow by "observing a certain moderation of doctrine on both sides." The project worried some of the Protestant envoys in St. Petersburg because of the political implications of any such unity. Thus, it was with satisfaction that Weber reported that the proposal stood little chance. "Neither is it probable that the Tsar, after having suppressed the Patriarchal Authority in Russia, will subject himself and his dominions to a far greater dependency on the Pope.
...
It is needless to mention that difficulty concerning the marriage of priests which is looked upon in Russia as sacred, and other controverted points, about which both churches are never likely to agree."

In preserving the predominance of Orthodoxy in Russia, Peter demanded of the church that it make itself useful to society. In his view, the most useful thing that Russian priests could do, besides saving souls, was to teach. There were no schools, and priests were the only channel by which enlightenment could come to the Russian peasantry scattered across the immense land. But, for this purpose, the clergy seemed a woefully inadequate instrument. Many priests were hopelessly ignorant and unshakably lazy. Some were as superstitious as their parishioners. Few had any knowledge of how to preach, and therefore such education and morality as they did possess could not be transmitted. Attempting to overcome this deficiency, Peter sent a number of country priests to Kiev and other theological schools to learn not just theology, but how to speak in public.