90 Muscovite Roots, 1462-1689
and material resources, and slowed its economic development. Hellie offers
the intriguing comment that 'the Russian military establishment was much
larger relative to the size of the population than in any twentieth-century
[developing) country. Modern nations in the 9-10 mill inn population category
support armies of from 1,000 to 65,000 men' .57
Of the many taxes levied directly and indirectly on the\ populace in the
Muscovite period, only one was specifically geared to military needs. This was
the so-called 'musketeers' money' (streletskiye den 'g1), first 'levied in cash
form in 1615. It was designed to help maintain the Moscow strtrtsy, for the
provincial units as we know were in principle self-supporting. Payments in
kind (cereals) continued alongside this monetary tax during the .seventeenth
century, and in 1661 /2, during the fiscal crisis, an attempt was made to
substitute them for the tax. On the other hand, in some provincial areas the
streletskiy khleb (as these natural dues were known) was commuted into cash
payments.^58 Payment, in whatever form, was generally made in three instal-
ments each year; the taxpayers had to take it to the collection point, and
sometimes all the way to Moscow, which added to their burden. For this tax,
as for others that were levied directly, the unit of assessment was initially the
sokha, that is the unit of land or other property registered in the cadastre. The
size of this varied according to the social status of the owner or holder: ecclesi-
astical land was taxed at the highest rate, then that of 'black' peasant or urban
communities, of service gentry, and of the court (in that order).^59 In the 1630s
the 'inhabited area' (zhivushchaya chetvert.') and in the 1670s the homestead
(dvor) were substituted as the basis of calculation. These changes increased the
tax yield, but at a heavy social cost. The musketeers' money became, in one
historian's words, 'a real scourge for the population' and arrears quickly
mounted: in the area administered by the Ustyug office (diet' ) they were
nearly double receipts by 1671.^60 Grain payments rose about fourteenfold bet-
ween the 1620s and the 1670s;^61 the monetary dues amounted to 0.42 roubles
per 'inhabited area' in mid-century and to 2 roubles in the 16705.^62 In 1681 the
assessments were reduced by a third and the administrative arrangements
simplified.
One year prior to this modest reform, when an attempt was made to draw up
a state budget, anticipated receipts of musketeers' money amounted to 146,951
roubles, or 12 per cent of total anticipated revenue (1,220,367 roubles); actual
receipts, however, were over 40 per cent short of what they should have been.
More important were the extraordinary levies (zaprosnye den'gi), which in
1679/80 amounted to 235,338 roubles (19 per cent of total anticipated
s1 Hellie, Enserfment, p. 370 n. 4.
sw AAE iv. 189; Lappo-Danilevsky, Organizaniya, p. 26; Milyukov, Gos. khoi. Rossii, pp. 41,
59.
J9 Lappo-Danilevsky, p. 403.
60 Milyukov, Gos. khoz. Rossii, pp. 59-60, 63-5.
61 Hellie, Enserfmenl, p. 126; cf. Lappo-Danilevsky, Organizatsiya, pp. 28, 404.
62 AAE iv. 243, 250-1; Al v. 48; Chi~tyakova, 'Volneniya', p. 258.
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(Wang)
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