Experiments with cheap copper coinage in the 1660s provoked widespread riots and were short-lived.
If the seventeenth century marks what looks like "modernization" on the European model for Russia's economy, the concept of "centralization" is often applied to the sixteenth century. It was a time when Moscow's grand princes began to consolidate their authority in more systematic ways, including building a bureaucracy and expanding the land fund for the army, as we have seen. The economy was a principal focus of such centralization. Early in the sixteenth century myriad fifteenth-century direct taxes were consolidated and new ones introduced to pay for new military formations, an expanded coach network, and urban fortifications. The state (and landlords) commuted to cash as many taxes as possible; at mid-century the state standardized the unit of direct land taxation as the "Moscow sokha," a measure of acreage calculated differentially according to the quality of land. To support the army, rates for military servitors' land were set lower than those for monastic land. Indirect taxes were also introduced, including by mid- fifteenth century a state monopoly on distilling and selling honey, beer, and vodka.
Immunities from state taxes were a central, but conflicted, aspect offiscal policy in the sixteenth century. Efforts were made to limit them: in 1551 many fiscal immunities were cancelled to increase revenues, and in 1572 and 1580 the donation ofland to immune landlords such as monasteries was limited in order to maintain the fund of land from which military servitors served and their peasants paid state taxes. But the state's immunities policy was inconsistent. Periods of canceling fiscal immunities alternated with eras (1530s-40s, 1560s-70, 1590s) when they were generously granted to reward political favorites, to garner support in time of war, and to encourage trade and settlement (as in monopolies and immunities given to the Stroganovs in the Urals). Immunities and land grants given to favorites continued to undercut the state's income through the seventeenth century.
Perhaps the most contradictory, and certainly self-destructive, economic policy in the sixteenth century was the wanton raising of taxes to pay the costs of state building and war, without regard for the population's ability to pay. Russian rulers did not attempt to work out a state budget until the late seventeenth century, and did not come near to getting control of an empire-wide budgeting process until a century after that. In the sixteenth century, taxes simply reflected demand. The tax rate per unit of land (sokha) rose from five to eight rubles from 1500 to 1520 and stayed steady for a while, then climbed precipitously. Tax rates rose 55 percent from 1536 to 1545, an estimated 286 percent (with commutations to cash) from 1552 to 1556, another 60 percent in the 1560s, and another 41 percent in the 1570s, reaching 151 rubles. Meanwhile, landlords were squeezing their peasants in a time of the Oprichnina, Livonian war, and natural disasters such as plague, crop failure, and famine in these Little Ice Age decades. In the seventeenth century rates rose again to pay for war and rebuilding after it (the Time of Troubles)—in the 1610s-20s, they reached 1,200-600 rubles per sokha. Tax rates fell through the 1630s to about 500 to 560, but soared to 1,700 rubles by mid-century, with relatively little inflation in this century. Even accounting for the sixteenth-century commutation of in-kind services to cash, these are unbearable rates. The result was arrears, abandonment of settled lands, followed by enserfment, as discussed in Chapter 10.
In the seventeenth century the economy prospered with demographic growth, territorial expansion, wealth from Siberian furs, and steadily rising foreign demand for these and other Russian products. But war and military reform claimed all this income, and state fiscal policy turned towards control of productive resources, more indirect taxes, and greater protectionism. Significant government revenues came from indirect taxes, including customs, sales taxes, and the domestic alcohol monopoly (landed gentry could produce alcohol, but it could be sold only by state shops or by holders of this tax farm). These were collected with a mixture of state oversight (merchants acting as the state's factors were assigned to collect customs, for example) and tax farming. Tax farming was more common in the center and on the steppe borderland than in the north (where community self- government provided officials to collect taxes). The wealthiest merchants, recruited into the role of factor (the gosti), could afford to purchase the most lucrative tax farms (such as alcohol income in Moscow), while lesser farms (local taverns, tolls, and customs) were purchased by a range of people—merchants, townsmen, Cossacks, soldiers, and peasants. The state constantly battled the problem of graft in collecting its income.
The state also tried to standardize customs and taxes across the empire, with limited effect. It was customary, for example, that towns favored their own merchants in sales taxes and tolls; from the late sixteenth century the state tried to restrict such policies and decreed them abolished in 1653. It also combined some customs taxes to ease shipments through major ports and increase profit to the state. Still, Russia was riddled with different taxes and tolls at regional borders across the empire in these centuries.
In addition to direct taxes on land, throughout the seventeenth century Russia added others. In the aftermath of the Time of Troubles in the 1620s, the Romanovs declared extraordinary levies to pay for military reform and restoration; these became annual taxes (a "third" tax, a "fifth") to pay for the Smolensk (1632-4) and Thirteen Years wars (1654-67). Although extraordinary levies continued into the 1670s, by mid-century the state was trying to impose a more consistent fiscal policy. The Lawcode of 1649 decidedly improved direct tax collection by fixing rural and urban populations to their towns or villages, accomplishing enserfment. It also deprived landlords of the immune tax status that their properties in towns had enjoyed, a move that in principle awarded taxed townsmen a monopoly on urban trade. This ban on immune neighborhoods, however, proved difficult to enforce well into the eighteenth century. The state also tried to capture income from church peasants by establishing a state chancery for church property in 1649; under protest from the Church, it was abolished in 1677.
The late 1670s and 1680s witnessed energetic reforms; an effort to produce a unified state budget was made, and in 1679 the basis of direct taxation was shifted to the household on the basis of new land cadasters. The state also attempted to set rates that took into account the ability of townsmen and peasants to pay. Certainly Russia was not yet developing the sorts of sophisticated record keeping and consistent fiscal policy that smaller, more developed states like England were developing, what John Brewer called the "sinews of power" for eighteenth-century England and that Charles Tilly underscored as key to early modern state building. But the last decades ofthe seventeenth century did witness self-conscious economic reforms that tried to exert more control over the national economy.
PRODUCTIVE INDUSTRY
Russia's townsmen were not renowned for their fine work. Except in rare cases, such as the fine silk weavers ofAstrakhan, who were Armenian craftsmen, or those who wove tapestries, painted icons, and crafted jewelry in the Armory at the Kremlin, the quality of early modern Russian artisanal work was rudimentary, to judge by foreigners' comments. There were no guilds to ensure high standards and foreign goods were so expensive and so distinctive that the common artisan had no incentive to emulate them. Russia's early modern productive industries were in raw and semi-finished materials more than finished products, produced by semi-skilled peasants and townsmen.