106 The Warrior Tsar, 1689-1725
However, the authorities' efforts to adjust obligations to resources did not
extend very far. Proprietors of all categories had to contribute one recruit on
horseback for every 80 households-this in addition to the regμlar levies.^46
Towards the end of the decade decree was following upon decree'ip a steady
stream. Recipients of the tsar's demands could not anticipate what they' would be
required to give, which encouraged them to evade his arbitrary and peremptory
requests wherever they could. The levy had a demoralizing effect upon everyone
involved in it, officials and peasants as well as landowners. The government's
goals.were unreasonably high-indeed unattainable, as it seemed implicitly to
recognize; passive resistance was the natural consequence. A levy at the standard
rate, carried out across the whole country, should have yielded about 24,000
men. Those of 1705 did indeed induct 44,500 recruits, but during the next four
years only between 11,000 and 15,000 men were taken.^47 In all about 138,000
men are now thought to have been enrolled during the years 1701-9. This figure
is a good deal lower than the estimate of 230,000 arrived at by the nineteenth-
century military historian Myshlayevsky, to say nothing ofKlyuchevsky's guess
of 300,000.^48
After Poltava the pressure eased somewhat and a start was made on the
devolution of responsibility for the levy, and for army supply in generaI, to the
new provincial (guberniya) administrations. However, early in 1711 the out-
break of another war with Turkey led to near-panic in Peter's entourage. One of
the first acts of the Ruling Senate, which in effect took over from the Office of
Military Affairs and the now defunct Razryad, was to order proprietors in
Moscow to provide one man in three from their household servants; if they had
only two such domestics, they were to part with one of them, and if none were fit
to be sent they had to pay 30 roubles in lieu-nearly three times the sum that had
been demanded in 1699, an increase greater than the rate of inflation.^49 This
requirement was additional to the regular levy, which in 1711 was set at one
recruit per 10 households. The total yielded was over 50,000.'°Tbegovernment
was anxious to build up a nationwide reserve of 25,000 recruitl,. -.Ch province
maintaining half as many reservists as it did soldiers in the field.·RHowever, this
measure could not be implemented systematically. From 1713 to the end of
Peter's reign there were ten further general levies, at rates ranging from one man
per 40 households in 1713 to one per 250 in 1724. These yielded an intake of
153,000 men.^52 In addition a number of partial levies were imposed on specific
(^46) PSZ iv. 2065 (14 July 1705).
(^47) Beskrovnyy. Russkaya armiya, p. 26; Avtokratov, 'Voyennyy prikaz', pp. 230-2.
(^48) Myshlayevsky, Petr Velikiy, p. liv (and Mikhnevich, in SVM iv (I, i, i). 119); Bobrovsky,
Voyennoye pravo, ii. t77: 175,000 in 1705-9, without indication of source, and the estimate of
30,000 p.a. which appears to have misled Klyuchevsky (Peter the Great, p. 81); he may have
included men mobilized for various construction tasks.
49 PSZ iv. 2326, 2355, 2384, 2390 (I Mar., 30 Apr., 20, 30 June 1711); DiP i. 2.
io Avtokratov, 'Voyennyy prikaz', p. 233; Beskrovnyy, Russkaya arm/ya, p. 27.
51 PSZ iv. 2338, 2341, 2520, 2533 (16, 22 Mar. 1711, 2, 26 May 1712).
l2 Beskrovnyy, Russkaya armiya, pp. 28-9.