To fully exploit the taxpaying population, the state transformed taxation. In addition to new dedicated taxes (to pay for new model troops and fortifications, to redeem captives), special levies (for military reforms and wars), and state monopolies (particularly on alcohol sale), the state changed the bases of direct taxes. Until the mid-seventeenth century they had been assessed on the amount and quality of the land a household farmed, which allowed some flexibility in assessing a given family's burden. In 1647 the state shifted to a flat rate per household for special levies, and in 1679 the household became the basis of direct taxes as well, supported by new cadasters. The more lucrative head tax on individual males was declared in 1718 and put into effect in 1724 after a nationwide census (the first reviziia). Thus, after 1649, East Slavic peasantry and townsmen were bound to their landlord's estates or state and crown peasant villages.
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE PEASANTRY
Peasants in Russia's forests and cultivated steppe lands organized their lives in a complex interaction of cultural, political, economic, and ecological factors. As noted, peasants were responsible for significant burdens to outside parties. Serfs paid quitrent—in kind, in cash, or in labor—to their landlords; they performed services for their landlords (cartage, construction, military service); some were delegated to household work or to skilled labor such as blacksmithing, tending to horses, and carpentry. In addition, all peasants paid dues to their community for common expenses; they paid to support their parish church and clergy; to the state they paid land tax, the iasak, or another form of direct tax for non-Russian taxpayers, and many (few non-Russians) were recruited into the army when this began in mid-seventeenth century. Peasants of all sorts were obliged to do public services such as road building and cartage for officials, for the coach service and for military provisions.
Despite the diversity of the empire's populations, East Slavs (Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarus'an speakers) were always a majority. The first direct population data emerged in the eighteenth century, and it showed that non-Slavs constituted less than 15 percent of Russia's population; so diverse was the empire that each of the almost twenty other ethnicities constituted no more than 2 percent of the total population. Thus, the lives of the Russian peasantry represent a great piece of the social experience of the empire, and will be our focus here. The lands into which Moscow expanded in the early modern centuries offered at least three zones of agricultural engagement. The coniferous forest north of Moscow and across all of Siberia made arable farming only a minor part of household economy, if at all, while the richer soil of the mixed-forest (a wide triangle from around Novgorod south to Kyiv on the west narrowing eastward to the Volga-Oka "Mesopotamia") supported production of hearty grains such as rye and barley, with oats for horses. Arable farming in the mixed forest produced historically a 3:1 or subsistence yield. Root vegetables and legumes supplemented the diet—cabbage, cucumber, carrots, turnips, beets, onions, peas, and beans (potatoes were not introduced until the nineteenth century). Since livestock had to be housed and fed over a long winter, peasants kept relatively few animals and their meat did not supplement the diet regularly. But meat from hunting (elk, reindeer, bear, boar), fish, eggs, and cheese provided protein; mushrooms, wild plants, honey, and berries were foraged; food was preserved by pickling for the long winter. It was a nutritious diet by contemporary European standards, as noted in Chapter 17.
How East Slavic villagers worked the land varied with geography and political pressures. Absent constraints imposed by the state or landlords, villagers made rational decisions in light of a dearth of labor and abundance of land. Thus, they adopted what David Moon calls "extensification" of agricultural production: communities regularly moved, breaking new land with slash/burn agriculture. They cleared a field, burned the tree stumps, and farmed for several years until the fertility of the earth had been exhausted (Figure 10.1). Then, they moved on. Bespeaking the limited fertility of the soil, villages were small. As long as peasants
Figure 10.1 Augustin von Meyerberg's Album (1663) of his embassy to Russia depicted the cultivated fields, homes, and churches through which they traveled from the Baltic coast to Moscow with impressive accuracy; here the large peasant villages of Spasskoe and Klin on the approach to Moscow. General Research Division, The New York Public Library.
were free to move and land was available, this political economy made sense. Even when Russian and Ukrainian peasants began to move into the more fertile steppe lands, they used a similar practice of "field-grass husbandry," clearing and farming patches of prairie, then moving on.
Peasants also relied on many communal labor practices. Communities joined together to clear a field, to sow and harvest grain, thresh and glean. Sources of water, meadows for hay, pasture for grazing, forest for timber, rivers and ponds for fishing were all managed by the collective. Families worked their own land but it was usually identified as narrow strips within a larger communal arable field.
In the sixteenth century, as more peasants fell under the control ofpomeste-based gentry and as the state was raising its demands for taxes and services, peasants in the center found their mobility constrained. They were forced by debt or "forbidden years" to stay put. In such situations, many adopted a two-field or three-field system, in which plantings rotated annually among fields and one field was left fallow to restore itself. In the three-field system, one field was planted in spring with fast growing grain (barley and oats in the north and mixed forest, wheat in the steppe lands) and harvested in August. In late summer another field was sown with winter rye, to be harvested a year later in July. In the following year, the fallow was used and plantings rotated among fields. Although as peasants moved south and southeast into the steppe, the growing season became longer and climate and soil more hospitable, it never extended long enough to provide two plantings in one season, as the more moderate European continent enjoyed. Steppe land was not without its agricultural risks, as drought was a regular threat. Thus East Slavic peasants in most settings supplemented their diets with forest products where available, as well as handicrafts, livestock, and trade.
The commune was the fundamental living situation for Muscovy's Russian taxpaying classes, whether rural peasants (serfs or crown and state peasants) or townsmen. While East Slavic farmers had always worked together for some needs, a more embracing collective management of village life emerged only from the mid-sixteenth century. Communalism was not an organic element of the Russian character, as some have idealistically argued, but a rational response to increasing demands for production and taxes. In the rural setting, male heads of households formed a council that ruled the commune. Villagers also met in assemblies to make decisions unanimously. The council of elders was the organizer of collective economic work, the expression and guarantor of the community's moral economy, the organ of self-discipline and self-policing, the provider of mutual aid, the liaison with landlords, Church, and state.
Russian communes were patriarchal; male heads of households represented family units. Peasant households waxed and waned in size as lifespans played out, but as a rule they were multi-generationaclass="underline" sons brought their wives home to raise their children until the elder yielded control or died. Then, one son would maintain the household, others would split off to form their own households, and the cycle would start again. Russian peasant households through the eighteenth century practiced what is called the East European marriage pattern, in contrast to the pattern that emerged around the sixteenth century in some of the economically advanced western and central European states. In the European marriage pattern, marriage was delayed to the late twenties while men and women built up nest eggs to start a household; a good percentage never married at all. Illegitimacy was common due to late marriage age, and families were nuclear and small because of later marriage and also the use of contraception. In the East European pattern, on the other hand, marriage was universal and early (for women between 16 and 18, men 18-20). Illegitimacy was relatively rare since women married young; fertility was high. Peasant women could in principle have been constantly pregnant throughout more than twenty years of fertility, but the general contraceptive effect ofbreast-feeding kept the average ofpeasant women's pregnancies to seven to nine, if they survived all those childbirths. Nuclear families were not necessarily large, because infant and child mortality was high, but households could be large at the point in the life cycle when several sons and their wives and children remained under the patriarch's roof.