The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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center where devastation had been great, and pinned people to their place of
registration for ease of taxation.
New systems of taxation generated new kinds of censuses. In 1646, some special
taxes shifted from land to household based, resulting in a household census; the
household replaced land as the basis of direct taxation in 1679, based on new
cadasters ordered in 1676; regular surveys of rural and urban taxpaying households
continued into the early eighteenth century. These are not surveys of the entire
population; not only were non-taxpaying individuals not included (military,
church), but also groups such asiasak-paying natives and other non-Russians
who were listed in taxation records specific to them. Land and population surveys
were done in this century for other purposes as well, such as the 1649–52 survey of
untaxed neighborhoods in towns, in order to eliminate their immunities according
to the 1649 Lawcode; in the 1680s an ambitious and contentious survey of gentry
land was launched, but never completed.
Military intelligence, particularly on the borders, was a particular concern.
A primary role of governors on border posts from the west to Siberia was to
monitor border crossings, capture and interrogate suspected spies; on the southern
border the Don Cossacks played this role of intelligence gatherers for Muscovy.
Peter Perdue notes that expansionist efforts of the great Eurasian empires in the
seventeenth century resulted in thefirst demarcations offixed territorial borders:
the Ottoman empire demarcated borders with the Safavids (1639) and Habsburgs
(1699), while Muscovy defined borders in its progression into the steppe with the
Kalmyks, Tatars, Don Cossacks, and Ottomans. By treaties of 1689 and 1727
Russia defined a territorial border with China centering on the Amur which
endured for more than a century.
Russia systematically gathered information on the Qing empire. Diplomats,
border governors, ambassadors, and merchants wrote reports and smuggled out
Chinese books and maps. Several wrote travelogues, often pastiches of their own
and previous diplomatic records. All this information found an eager audience in
Moscow and European capitals, audiences anxious to forge an overland route to
China and to learn more about the new Manchu empire (1644). Ambassadors
Nikolai Spafarii (1674) and Isbrandt Ides (1692–5), for example, penned reports
and created maps that were widely circulated in manuscript (Spafarii) and print
(Ides) across Europe. Nicholas Witsen epitomizes Moscow’s lively exchange of
knowledge with Europe: resident in Moscow 1664–5, for the rest of his career in
Amsterdam he compiled and published ethnographic accounts, illustrations, and
maps of the Russian empire and steppe borderlands in what he calledNorth and
East Tatary(1692).
For expanding empires, maps were crucial to the process of conquest and
control. As Valerie Kivelson reminds us, mapping of large political entities arose
“from England to Japan”in eras of political centralization, notably thefifteenth
century for the leading states of western Europe. But before the eighteenth century
Muscovy, in Willard Sunderland’s phrase,“did not have a coherent state ideology
that valued territory as an intrinsic good.”Rather, it focused most cartographic
energy on land as taxable resource: new possessions were mapped for taxation


178 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801

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