Experiments with cheap copper coinage in the 1660s provoked widespread riots
and were short-lived.
If the seventeenth century marks what looks like“modernization” on the
European model for Russia’s economy, the concept of“centralization”is often
applied to the sixteenth century. It was a time when Moscow’s grand princes began
to consolidate their authority in more systematic ways, including building a
bureaucracy and expanding the land fund for the army, as we have seen. The
economy was a principal focus of such centralization. Early in the sixteenth century
myriadfifteenth-century direct taxes were consolidated and new ones introduced to
pay for new military formations, an expanded coach network, and urban fortifica-
tions. The state (and landlords) commuted to cash as many taxes as possible; at
mid-century the state standardized the unit of direct land taxation as the“Moscow
sokha,”a measure of acreage calculated differentially according to the quality of
land. To support the army, rates for military servitors’land were set lower than
those for monastic land. Indirect taxes were also introduced, including by mid-
fifteenth century a state monopoly on distilling and selling honey, beer, and vodka.
Immunities from state taxes were a central, but conflicted, aspect offiscal policy in
the sixteenth century. Efforts were made to limit them: in 1551 many fiscal
immunities were cancelled to increase revenues, and in 1572 and 1580 the donation
of land to immune landlords such as monasteries was limited in order to maintain the
fund of land from which military servitors served and their peasants paid state taxes.
But the state’s immunities policy was inconsistent. Periods of cancelingfiscal im-
munities alternated with eras (1530s–40s, 1560s–70, 1590s) when they were gener-
ously granted to reward political favorites, to garner support in time of war, and to
encourage trade and settlement (as in monopolies and immunities given to the
Stroganovs in the Urals). Immunities and land grants given to favorites continued
to undercut the state’s income through the seventeenth century.
Perhaps the most contradictory, and certainly self-destructive, economic policy
in the sixteenth century was the wanton raising of taxes to pay the costs of state
building and war, without regard for the population’s ability to pay. Russian rulers
did not attempt to work out a state budget until the late seventeenth century, and
did not come near to getting control of an empire-wide budgeting process until a
century after that. In the sixteenth century, taxes simply reflected demand. The tax
rate per unit of land (sokha) rose fromfive to eight rubles from 1500 to 1520 and
stayed steady for a while, then climbed precipitously. Tax rates rose 55 percent
from 1536 to 1545, an estimated 286 percent (with commutations to cash) from
1552 to 1556, another 60 percent in the 1560s, and another 41 percent in the
1570s, reaching 151 rubles. Meanwhile, landlords were squeezing their peasants in
a time of the Oprichnina, Livonian war, and natural disasters such as plague, crop
failure, and famine in these Little Ice Age decades. In the seventeenth century rates
rose again to pay for war and rebuilding after it (the Time of Troubles)—in the
1610s–20s, they reached 1,200–600 rubles persokha. Tax rates fell through the
1630s to about 500 to 560, but soared to 1,700 rubles by mid-century, with
relatively little inflation in this century. Even accounting for the sixteenth-century
commutation of in-kind services to cash, these are unbearable rates. The result was
200 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801