The Noble Servitor and the Perrine State 135
to interfere in relations between serfs and their masters, yet he had an obliga-
tion to stop peasants running away: 'and those who flee he shall chase and
catch, and having seized them order the landowners to punish them'. Disputes
between soldiers a!!d their J'lf";i<::rnt 'hosts' came before a mixed military-
civilian tribunal, but criminal offences were passed to the regular courts. Men
might marry local peasant girls, so long as their owners agreed, and the latter
were forbidden to keep them back for arbitrary reasons.^76
Some of these provisions were reasonable, but the situation portrayed in
these documents was not. Peter had created, not the 'well-ordered police state'
of early eighteenth-century cameralist philosophy, but a pettifogging and
brutal despotism which perpetuated old abuses under a veneer of European
terminology.The financial burden which the Petrine army imposed on the Russian people is
notoriously difficult to calculate. The chief problem arises from the lack of
price data against which to compare the nominal value of the currency. Nor is
it known for certain how many men were actually under arms, since as a rule
units were below strength, and these units may not have received the entire
sum allocated to them by the establishment tables.
Nevertheless these tables must serve as the starting point in any investigation.
The 1711 list (effective from 1712) was based on 33 cavalry and^42 infantry
regiments in the active (field) army and another 43 infantry regiments as gar-
rison troops; there were a mere 184 men in headquarters staff, including
administrative officials.^77 The strength of an infantry regiment in the field
army was set at 1,487 officers and men, that of a cavalry regiment at 1,328.^78
Total establishment strength-including the artillery, for whom regular provi-
sion was made the following year-and costs are given in Table l. These esti-
mates covered pay, mounts, and equipment only. Supplies of food and forage,
put at 1,260,000 roubles, bring total expenditure to about 4 million roubles^79 -
considerably more than the anticipated revenue (for 1711) of 3.2 million
roubles. Excluding supplies, the bill for the army and navy together would
account for over^90 per cent of total state expenditure, put at 3,008,000
roubles.^80 Some of the regiments provided for were not formed, so that these
estimates were not kept to in fact.
(^76) PSZ vii. 4535, §§ 2, 4, 7, 9, 12, 15. On the latter point, cf. Man'kov, 'Krepostnoye pravo',
p. 167.
(^77) PSZ iv. 2319 (19 Feb. 1711), xliii. 2319 (pp. 1-2); Stein, Geschichre, p. 65. Prior to this date
there had been only 87 regiments; some were dissolved at this time: Avtokratov, 'Pervye organy',
p. 171.
78 PSZ xliii. 2319 (p. 4).
(^79) Mikhnevich, in SVM iv. (I, i, i). 121 n.
80 Milyukov, Gos. khoz. Rossii, p. 234. This was more than during the hectic years 1701-8
(although Milyukov's figure for^1705 is clearly exaggerated); for annual figures see his appendix,
pp. 70-140.