taxpayers paid poll tax and quitrent at the empire-wide rates. Natives, on the other
hand, paidiasak. Throughout the eighteenth century the state preferred to collect
iasakin furs, rather than cash, but occasionally tried setting a cash value for it. This
foundered on the problem of properly evaluating the furs; natives would hold their
best back to sell surreptitiously to traders (even though they were forbidden in
principle to trade in furs). Catherine II tried to create in Siberia an administrative
andfiscal reform similar to elsewhere in the empire. Furs were to be collected from
native groups collectively; theiasakvalue wasfixed and each community should
select its own administrative elders to act as liaison with Russian collectors. With
fixediasakand rising market prices, state income did not rise, nor was a network of
elders successfully installed. But the native population continued to pay by a
different taxation system that they had more leeway to manipulate than did
Siberia’s Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking state peasants.
As for indirect taxes, in Siberia vodka was the state’s second largest source of
revenue, as in European Russia. It had been sold by communities through sworn
representatives (“na vere”) until 1767, when tax farming was in principle intro-
duced. But in western Siberia, nobles were lacking to take up the farms, so the state
and towns produced and sold vodka; in eastern Siberia, because natives enjoyed the
right to brew and sell their own fermented mare’s milk liquor, the vodka market
was limited and its sale confined to state stores.
Taxation was similarly diverse in Bashkiria. Here state peasants paid poll tax and
quitrent and provided recruits. As discussed in Chapter 4, by the 1740s Mordva and
Tatars here and in the Middle Volga, previouslyiasakpayers, were sinking into state
peasant status, as the poll tax was levied on them to pay for fortified lines in Bashkiria.
Landed Bashkirs and Meshcheriaks were, meanwhile, rising in status: after 1754 they
did not payiasakor other direct taxes, but rather provided military service on the
Orenburg Line, and in 1798 they were allowed to form a Cossack Host. Their
dependent people, theteptiars(non-Russians who tilled Bashkir lands on a contrac-
tual basis) and landless workers (bobyli) had a privileged position compared to state
peasants. As of 1747 they paid a quitrent of 80 kopecks (which did not rise in 1760
and 1783 as others did). This made them well off compared to the state peasants,
who after 1783 had to pay a 3-ruble quitrent and 70-kopeck poll tax and provide
recruits as well. The state tried to rectify this inequity in 1789, in a situation of
continuing Russian in-migration, by puttingteptiarsandbobylion the samefiscal
basis as state peasants, but this was rescinded in 1790, becauseteptiarsoffered to
become a Cossack regiment, serving in lieu of paying tax.
The Don Cossacks preserved the privileges they had negotiated over centuries.
The 1775 administrative reform was not imposed in Don Cossack lands; the Don
Cossacks paid neither poll tax nor quitrent. Their Russian or Ukrainian serfs,
however, paid poll tax and provided recruits. Don Cossacks also enjoyed a privil-
eged position in the vodka monopoly, being allowed to brew vodka and wine for
sale in their own lands, although in the 1770s they faced some competition from
state vodka sales.
In the northern Caucasus, Cossacks and nomads paid no personal direct taxes;
John Le Donne notes that as late as 1794, 61 percent of the sparsely populated
330 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801