and urban taxpaying households, omitting privileged elites (servitors, church) and
natives who paidiasakor enjoyed tax privileges. Recording the empire’s population
became more complete when Peter I’s government shifted to a head tax: while the
primary focus was male urban and rural taxpayers, privileged social groups (nobil-
ity, clergy, Cossacks) and non-Russians were included in poll tax censuses. After the
initial survey ordered up in 1719 and completed in 1724, censuses were supposed
to be carried out everyfifteen to twenty years. They date from 1744, 1763, 1782,
and 1795 in this century, providing benchmark dates for demographic change.
Since the 1775 administrative reform was predicated on gubernii and districts
being apportioned according to population, a key responsibility of the reform’s
most important and most professionally staffed new agency—the Treasury Boards
in each gubernia—was to carry out regular demographic surveys.
Peter I created institutions to train native experts in surveying, navigation, and
mapping. Mapping served purposes of economic exploitation, military planning,
and intelligence gathering. As in the seventeenth century, Russia gathered foreign
maps: from his Grand Embassy of 1697–8 he brought home a collection of Dutch
globes; in his campaign against Azov in 1696 he ordered nautical surveys and
maps that were later published in the memoir of the secretary to a Habsburg
embassy, Johann-Georg Korb (1700), and assembled in an atlas of the Don region
produced in Amsterdam in 1704. Throughout the century Russia cultivated
intelligence on the Qing border and obtained Chinese and Manchu maps. The
Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Beijing, for example, founded in 1715 to
minister to Russian Orthodox captured and taken into Chinese service, became
a reliable source of information. Russian students sent there to learn Chinese and
Manchu clandestinely collected maps and histories, transmitted correspondence
from Jesuits in Beijing, and collected botanical samples and other scientificobjects
to send to Russia.
Peter’s famous efforts to educate his nobility in schools of“mathematics”were
intended not only to give them navigational skills but also mapping and surveying
capability. Peter I in 1701 founded the Mathematical-Navigational School in
Moscow and invited European astronomers, mathematicians, navigators, and
engineers to train thefirst professional Russian topographers. A noted boost to
local mapping was created by the capture of thousands of Swedish officers at the
battle of Poltava in 1709; exiled around the realm, many contributed engineering
skills to mapping Siberia and other areas. Throughout his reign Peter sent exped-
itions to explore, map, and collect ethnographic information about Siberia and the
Far East, the fruits of which are evident in his collections in the Kuntskammer in
St. Petersburg; he ordered up systematic mapping of all of Russia’s provinces. He
worked closely with Ivan Kirillov, a Russian who had been trained in cartography
and surveying in both Russia and Europe, to collect and systematize cartographic
knowledge.
The Russian Academy of Sciences, founded in 1724, took the leading role in
Russian cartography and scientific exploration of the empire through the century.
Academicians compiled two immense collections of empire’s natural history in
the late eighteenth century: over several decades Peter Simon Pallas assembled
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