men into service, their numbers needing to be constantly replenished due toflight,
disease, starvation, and battlefield injury. The demand continued through the
century: 90 levies between 1705 and 1825 yielded an estimated 2 million men.
While one recruit was taken per 20 households in Peter’s time, the exaction lowered
with population growth: in the 1730s, the norm varied from one recruit per 98
male souls to one per 320, the average yield being one per 179. The gubernia
reform of 1775 set a standard of one recruit from each 500 souls and gave the
responsibility of recruitment to local boards overseen by the gubernia Treasury.
Extraordinary levies occurred in wartime; in the Turkish wars of 1787–92, for
example, there were three levies offive per every 500 male souls and one of four
men per 500.
Nevertheless, Walter Pintner calculated that in the eighteenth century“in a typical
five-year period a village with 100 male souls could expect to lose from one to three
young men,”and only twice in the century did the number reach four per hundred.
Thus, the impact was heavier on the individual than the village. Men could be
recruited from age 17 to 35, although even older recruits are also recorded. Levies for
sailors were less frequent, smaller in size, and tended to be limited to Baltic port areas.
There, men were recruited in their early teens and trained on the job.
Levies were traumatic: when military recruiters arrived in villages, they came as
armed expeditions to shackle unwilling youths; in 1711 Field Marshall Sheremetev
traveled with a mobile gallows to deter his men from deserting and after 1712
recruits were branded on the hand to identify them (such marking was changed in
1738 to a characteristic shaving of the front of the head). Recruitment required
coercion through the century; laws alternately threatened death for desertion and,
desperate for troops, offered amnesty.
The burden fell primarily on East Slavic, Orthodox taxpayers: peasants, towns-
men, non-ordained sons of priests; coachmen and artisans, factory workers, and
some Middle Volga Tatars and other natives. Belarus’an-speaking peasants were
brought into the poll tax and recruit status of Russian peasants as their lands were
acquired in the late seventeenth century. In the 1780s peasants in the Hetmanate
and East Slavic lands acquired in thefirst partition of Poland (1772) were made
subject to recruitment (for a shorter period offifteen years). Russian townsmen
could buy out their levy with substitutes, and Jews paid double taxation in lieu of
recruitment until 1827. Very few non-Russians were required to serve: some
Middle Volga populations who were being assimilated into state peasant status
were exceptions. Late in the century Bashkirs and Kalmyks faced conscription as
irregular troops, but avoided it by forming their own regiments. Many other
populations (iasak payers, Baltic peasants, Don Cossacks, southern garrisons,
foreign colonists) were exempted.
Recruitment had myriad social impacts. Billeting became a huge burden on
communities, since soldiers served year-round, housed in communities. Although
in principle paid in salary and goods, their demands and disruptions on host
households were a scourge. Recruitment also created a whole new social category
of soldier’s families. Since service was for life (changed to twenty-five years in 1793,
perhaps emulating a recent Prussian reduction), a young man taken for the army
Army and Administration 299