152 The Imperial Century, 1725-1825rnubles.^39 In fact the purchase price had already been indirectly determined by
officialdom, since the cost of despatching a recruit had been regulated for the
benefit of skladchiki.
As for monetary commutation, exercise of this riglii Jepended on rank, as
did the fee payable. In Peter's day merchants had to pay 100 roubles.^40 By the
1730s ecclesiastical owners were required to give double as much, while secular
proprietors with 30- 70 souls paid only 20-30 roubles.^41 During the Seven
Years War, when the provision of recruits lagged behind demand, donors in
any category who were in arrears were permitted to make such payments.^42
The various regulations on substitution and commutation· were easily
bypassed. Landowners and merchants traded in recruits, passing them off as
domestic servants,^43 and built up reserves of them to be used when needed. The
main offenders were at first peasant elders or landlords' bailiffs, whose
employers were absent on service but had given them carte blanche to protect
their interests-which in this case coincided with those of their dependants.
The natural bonds in a close-knit rural society led people in all walks of life to
co-operate against the agents of the distant central vlas(. Only fear of delation
limited this far-reaching solidarity. Donors would, as noted, submit men who
were physically unfit or outside the prescribed age limits, despite the risk of
punishment. Another ruse was to inveigle strangers into volunteering in place
of one's dependants and to pass them off as such under a false name.^44 In 1774
a knowledgeable observer claimed that, when serving on a recruitment board,
he had once been presented with two men so deaf that they could not even hear
a cannon being fired.^45 A few years earlier a certain Lieutenant Ukhtomsky of
the 2nd Grenadiers was discovered to have bought up numerous runaway
peasants in the Vologda area, whom he then sold to donors as potential
recruits. In his defence Ukhtomsky asserted that the men had approached him
of their own accord and that he had not known their true status, but these
patently thin excuses did not save him from court-martial.^46
Undoubtedly the most frequent source of abuse was the receipt or voucher
issued to the donor on acceptance of a recruit. Contrary to the authorities'
initial intentions, this became a kind of security paper and might be sold to
39 PSZ xxi. 15721 (3 May 1783); reduced to 400 roubles for landed proprietors on 18 Sept. 1793
(xxiii. 17154)-according to Aleksandrov (p. 272) as a money-raising vemure by the Treasury;
cf. ibid., pp. 252, 261, 266-7, 283 n.; Scmevsky, Krest 'yane, i. 367-8; Arkhiv gr. Mordvinovykh,
iv (1902), 39; Martos, 'Zapiski', p. 528, for scattered data on free-market prices; the peak was
reached in the late 1810s, when a substitute fetched over 2,000 roubles.
40 PSZ vii. 4550 ( 17 Aug. 1724).
41 PSZ x. 7169, 7282 (6 Feb., 17 June 1737).
42 PSZ xiv. 10736 (6 June 1757), § 4. Such a law was actually superfluous since a decree of 1754
(xiv. 10326, 21 Nov.), § 10, extended the right to landowners in any category, but it was
presumably not widely known.
43 Aleksandrov, Se/. obshchina, pp. 264-5, 270.
44 PSZ xiv. 10326 (21 Nov. 1754), § 11, xix. 13483 (20 July 1770), §§ 7, 10.
4S Vyazemsky, 'Zapiska', p. 5.
46 Shchukin, Sbornik, ii. 27-30.