The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 17

by Unknown

But with what treasures did Peter undertake the moral and physical transformation of such an extensive empire? We behold an entire land metamorphosed, cities containing a hundred thousand souls, ports, canals, and establishments of all kinds, created; thousands of skilful Europeans attracted, maintained and rewarded; several fleets built, and others purchased; a permanent army of a hundred and twenty thousand men, trained, equipped, provided with every species of arms and ammunition, and several times renewed; subsidies of men and money given to Poland; and four wars undertaken. One of these wars spread over half of Europe and when it lasted twenty-one years the treasury from which it was fed still remained full. And Peter, whose revenues on his accession did not exceed a few hundred thousand pounds, declared to Munich that he could have carried on the war for twenty-one years longer without contracting any debt.

Will order and economy be sufficient to account for these phenomena? We must, doubtless, admire them in the czar, who refused himself every superfluity at the same time that he spared nothing for the improvement of his empire. Much must have been gained when, after having wrested the indirect taxes from the boyars, who were at once civil, military, and financial managers, and from those to whom the boyars sold in portions the collecting of them, Peter, in imitation of Holland, entrusted the finances to committees composed of select merchants. We may also feel less surprised at the increase of his revenue, after we have seen him subjecting to taxation the clergy as well as the laity; suppressing a number of monasteries, by forbidding monastic vows to be taken before the age of fifty; and uniting their estates to the domains of the crown, which were swelled by confiscations, by the reversion of his brother Ivan’s appanage, and by his conquests from the Swedes.

We must remark, at the same time, that he had opened his states to foreign commerce and to the treasures of Europe, which were carried thither to be exchanged for the many raw materials which had hitherto remained valueless; we must consider the augmentation of revenue which necessarily ensued, and the possibility of requiring to be paid in money a multitude of taxes which had previously been paid in kind. Thus, in place of quotas of provisions, which were brought from great distances and were highly oppressive to the people, he substituted a tax; and the sum raised was applied to the payment of contractors. It is true that even under this new system the state was shamefully robbed; for the nobles contrived in secret to get the contracts into their own hands, in order to fatten upon the blood of the people; but Peter at length perceived them; the evil betrayed itself by its own enormity. The czar then created commissions of inquiry, passed whole days in them, and, during several years, keeping these great peculators always in sight, made them disgorge by fines and confiscations, and punished them by the knout, the halter, and the axe.

To this superintendence by the head of the state, which, subsequently to 1715, the contraction of the war within a narrower circle allowed him to exert, let us add the increase of salary to the collectors, which deprived them of all pretext for misconduct. Nor must it be forgotten that most of the stipends were paid in kind; and that, for several years, the war, being carried on out of the empire, supplied its own wants. It must be observed, too, that the cities and provinces in which the troops were afterwards quartered furnished their pay on the spot, by which the charge of discount was saved; and that the measures which they adopted for their subsistence appear to have been municipal, and consequently as little oppressive as possible. Finally, we must remark, in 1721, the substitution, in place of the Tatar house-tax, of a poll-tax, which was a real impost on land, assessed according to a census repeated every twenty years, the payment of which the agriculturists regulated among themselves, in proportion to the value of their produce.

At the same time, the reformer refused to foreigners the privilege of trading with each other in Russia; he even gave to his subjects exclusively the right of conveying to the frontiers of the empire the merchandise which foreigners had bought from them in the interior. Thus he ensured to his own people the profit of carriage. In 1716 he chose rather to give up an advantageous alliance with the English than to relinquish this right in their favour.

But all the causes we have enumerated will not yet account for the possibility of so many gigantic undertakings and such immense results, with a fixed revenue in specie which, in 1715, was estimated by an attentive observer at only some millions of roubles. But in the fiscal expedients of a despotic empire it is to fluctuating revenue, illegal resources, and arbitrary measures that we must direct our attention; astonishment then ceases, and then begins pity for one party, indignation against another, and surprise excited by the ignorance with respect to commercial affairs which is displayed by the high and mighty geniuses of despotism, in comparison with the unerring instinct which is manifested by the humblest community of men who are free.

It is the genius of Russian despotism, therefore, that we must question as to the means by which it produced such gigantic results; but however far it may be disposed to push its frightful candour, will it point out to us its army recruited by men whom the villages sent tied together in pairs, and at their own expense—soldiers at a penny a day, payable every four months, and often marching without pay; slaves whom it was thought quite enough to feed, and who were contented with some handfuls of rye or of oats made into gruel or into ill-baked bread; unfortunate wretches who, in spite of the blunders of their generals, were compelled to be victorious, under pain of being decimated! Or will this despotism confess that, while it gave nothing to these serfs, who were enlisted for life, it required everything from them; that, after twenty-one years of war, it compelled them to dig canals, like miserable bond-slaves? “For they ought to serve their country,” said Peter, “either by defending or enriching it; that is what they are made for.”

Could this autocrat pride himself on the perennial fulness of an exchequer which violated its engagements in such a manner that most of the foreigners who were in his service were anxious to quit it? What answer could he make to that hollow and lengthened groan which, even yet, seems to rise from every house in Taganrog, and in St. Petersburg, and from his forts, built by the most deadly kind of statute-labour, and peopled by requisitions? One half of the inhabitants of the villages were sent to construct them, and were relieved by the other half every six months; and the weakest and the most industrious of them never more saw their homes!

These unfortunate beings, whatever might be their calling, from the common delver to the watchmaker and jeweller, were torn without mercy from their families, their ploughs, their workshops, and their counting-houses. They travelled to their protracted torture at their own expense; they worked without any pay. Some were compelled to fill up swamps, and build houses on them; others, to remove thither suddenly, and establish their trade there; and all these hapless men, one part of whom were bent to the earth with toil, and the other part in a manner lost in a new world, were so badly fed and sheltered, or breathed such a pestilential air, that the Russians of that period used to say that St. Petersburg was built upon a bed of human skeletons.

Listen to the complaints of the nobles and the richest merchants: after the gift of a hundred vessels had been required from them, they were forced to unite in this slough to build stone houses, and were also constrained to live there at a much greater expense than they would have incurred in their own homes. And when even the clergy remonstrated against the excessive taxes laid upon the priests (who were able to indemnify themselves out of their flocks) who can be astonished at the possibility of so many creations, and at the plenitude of a treasury which opened so widely to receive and so scantily to disburse?