left his family and home forever. His wife and children were typically left with few
resources, becoming a burden on relatives and community, often turning to
manufacturing or domestic work. Recruitment also strengthened the power of
elders within households and the council of village elders collectively, as they
determined which men would be sent away. Sometimes villages took men from
larger, more prosperous households, reasoning that they had sufficient labor to
survive. Sometimes they took from small households who were having trouble
carrying their collective tax burden, often dissolving the household and redistrib-
uting their lands to more able households. Petty rivalries among elders could be
played out in the selection process, as well as community self-interest: it helped
village and landlord for the community to send to the army men who were most
disruptive, lazy, drunken, or otherwise nonconformist.
Another social impact of recruitment came from the practice of purchasing substi-
tutes for recruits; on large landlord estates, or wealthier villages, the cost was spread
among the families, often (like the tax burden) disproportionately falling on wealthier
peasants. Robert Jones points out that in a typical village of 200 male state peasants in
the 1780s, the estimated head tax burden (140 rubles) paled in comparison to other
obligations: 250 rubles collectively to the commune for community needs, 512 for
quitrent to the state, and between 400 and 500 rubles collectively for purchasing
recruits. Such purchased men came from impoverished families and vagrants.
Scholars such as John Keep, Richard Hellie, and Walter Pintner have character-
ized eighteenth-century Russia as a militarized society or a“garrison state,”due to
its immense standing army and large military expenditures. But others disagree,
pointing out that military demands did not structure the economy, polity, or
society empire-wide; the impact of military mobilization fell unevenly across the
empire, negligibly in areas remote from strategic sites and heavily in borderlands
and in radiuses around fortified points where soldiers were billeted in peacetime
and provisions bought or confiscated. Society-wide, an ethos of military coercion
and discipline did not permeate society, at the peasant or noble level. As Janet
Hartley points out about peasants, soldiers’lifelong service meant that communi-
ties did not experience much effect of their young men’s military experience.
Soldiers did not return to their villages with new ideas, new attitudes, or a military
ethos. Traditional social institutions stayed intact. As for nobles, their education in
the eighteenth century was as influenced by Enlightenment values as military
discipline. Surprisingly, as Walter Pintner shows, in the eighteenth century a
much smaller percentage of male nobles actually served in the military than one
might assume (rising from about 17 percent of male nobles in 1755 to about
35 percent by 1795). Neither economically nor culturally did Russia’s immense
commitment to a landed army (and smaller navy) make it a militarized state.
ADMINISTRATION
To pay for army and warfare, several administrative reforms were tried over the
century. Peter I’s government transformed central and local government in three
300 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801