increasingly inadequate. Since, unlike France and Britain in the late eighteenth
century, Russia did not choose to tax the nobility, the state turned to indirect taxes
and other sources.
The Church became one of those resources. Peter I abolished the patriarchate,
replacing it with a Synodal organization charged with improving the pastoral care of
parishioners. To that end, the state rescinded any remainingfiscal immunities on
church lands, raised their taxation rates and forced the Church and major monas-
teries to contribute to such projects as the building of triumphal arches for victory
celebrations and the construction of the Azovfleet in 1696–7. Peter also limited
monasteries’landholding and instituted a Monastic Chancery in 1701 to better
collect income from these lands. Peter identified a group of wealthy monasteries
and bishoprics who were expected to pay some of their income directly to the state.
Peter stopped short, however, of ending the right of the Church to own land and
did not dismantle existing monasteries.
The Church remained a potent economic force well into Catherine II’s time. It
repeatedly (unsuccessfully) lobbied to restore the patriarchate and boldly made the
argument that since Peter I had not made claims on most church lands, then the
Church’s right to own land was affirmed and its immunities should be restored.
With donations and economic growth, by 1762 church and monastic landholdings
constituted roughly two-thirds of all the plowed land and about one-seventh of all
the rural population in the empire, primarily in the north and center. To pay for
war, Peter III, following plans developed under Empress Elizabeth, proposed a
major confiscation of church land according to which church peasants would
become subject to a new College of Economy, to be supervised by retired noble-
men. The state, then, would support bishops and monks with state salary and leave
monasteries enough land to support their staff. In 1762 Peter III began implemen-
tation of this reform, and his successor, Catherine II, after some timely hesitation
(she did not want to alienate the Church soon after a turbulent accession), followed
through in 1764. She was also probably responding to peasant unrest that had
broken out when the reform (which peasants welcomed) appeared to be being
canceled. The majority of Russia’s convents and monasteries were closed: of 562
monasteries, only 161 survived, as did only 67 of 217 convents and by 1770
17,000 displaced monks had been recruited into the army. Former church peas-
ants, now called“Economic” peasants, enjoyed better terms than even state
peasants, since the reform redistributed land to increase the size of their plots.
Even though their quitrent rate was raised above what the Church had collected,
they prospered, and the state yielded a net gain of about a million rubles of new
annual income.
FISCAL POLICY AND EMPIRE
Many ethnic groups across the realm paid different taxes and different rates,
although an effort atfiscal homogeneity was made in the 1780s in the western
borderlands (it proved to be short-lived). In Siberia, for example, East Slavic
Fiscal Policy and Trade 329