arrears, abandonment of settled lands, followed by enserfment, as discussed in
Chapter 10.
In the seventeenth century the economy prospered with demographic growth,
territorial expansion, wealth from Siberian furs, and steadily rising foreign demand
for these and other Russian products. But war and military reform claimed all this
income, and statefiscal policy turned towards control of productive resources, more
indirect taxes, and greater protectionism. Significant government revenues came
from indirect taxes, including customs, sales taxes, and the domestic alcohol
monopoly (landed gentry could produce alcohol, but it could be sold only by
state shops or by holders of this tax farm). These were collected with a mixture of
state oversight (merchants acting as the state’s factors were assigned to collect
customs, for example) and tax farming. Tax farming was more common in the
center and on the steppe borderland than in the north (where community self-
government provided officials to collect taxes). The wealthiest merchants, recruited
into the role of factor (thegosti), could afford to purchase the most lucrative tax
farms (such as alcohol income in Moscow), while lesser farms (local taverns, tolls,
and customs) were purchased by a range of people—merchants, townsmen,
Cossacks, soldiers, and peasants. The state constantly battled the problem of graft
in collecting its income.
The state also tried to standardize customs and taxes across the empire, with
limited effect. It was customary, for example, that towns favored their own
merchants in sales taxes and tolls; from the late sixteenth century the state tried
to restrict such policies and decreed them abolished in 1653. It also combined some
customs taxes to ease shipments through major ports and increase profit to the
state. Still, Russia was riddled with different taxes and tolls at regional borders
across the empire in these centuries.
In addition to direct taxes on land, throughout the seventeenth century Russia
added others. In the aftermath of the Time of Troubles in the 1620s, the
Romanovs declared extraordinary levies to pay for military reform and restoration;
these became annual taxes (a“third” tax, a“fifth”) to pay for the Smolensk
(1632–4) and Thirteen Years wars (1654–67). Although extraordinary levies
continued into the 1670s, by mid-century the state was trying to impose a more
consistentfiscal policy. The Lawcode of 1649 decidedly improved direct tax
collection byfixing rural and urban populations to their towns or villages, accom-
plishing enserfment. It also deprived landlords of the immune tax status that their
properties in towns had enjoyed, a move that in principle awarded taxed townsmen
a monopoly on urban trade. This ban on immune neighborhoods, however, proved
difficult to enforce well into the eighteenth century. The state also tried to capture
income from church peasants by establishing a state chancery for church property
in 1649; under protest from the Church, it was abolished in 1677.
The late 1670s and 1680s witnessed energetic reforms; an effort to produce a
unified state budget was made, and in 1679 the basis of direct taxation was shifted
to the household on the basis of new land cadasters. The state also attempted to set
rates that took into account the ability of townsmen and peasants to pay. Certainly
Russia was not yet developing the sorts of sophisticated record keeping and
Trade, Tax, and Production 201