ll peasants without land was formally
recognised by various Imperial ukazes.*

* For instance, the ukazes of October 13th, 1675, and June
25th, 1682. See Belaef, pp. 203-209.

The old Communal organisation still existed on the estates of the
proprietors, and had never been legally deprived of its authority, but
it was now powerless to protect the members. The proprietor could easily
overcome any active resistance by selling or converting into domestic
servants the peasants who dared to oppose his will.

The peasantry had thus sunk to the condition of serfs, practically
deprived of legal protection and subject to the arbitrary will of the
proprietors; but they were still in some respects legally and actually
distinguished from the slaves on the one hand and the "free wandering
people" on the other. These distinctions were obliterated by Peter the
Great and his immediate successors.

To effect his great civil and military reforms, Peter required an
annual revenue such as his predecessors had never dreamed of, and he
was consequently always on the look-out for some new object of taxation.
When looking about for this purpose, his eye naturally fell on the
slaves, the domestic servants, and the free agricultural labourers.
None of these classes paid taxes--a fact which stood in flagrant
contradiction with his fundamental principle of polity, that every
subject should in some way serve the State. He caused, therefore, a
national census to be taken, in which all the various classes of the
rural population--slaves, domestic servants, agricultural labourers,
peasants--should be inscribed in one category; and he imposed equally
on all the members of this category a poll-tax, in lieu of the former
land-tax, which had lain exclusively on the peasants. To facilitate the
collection of this tax the proprietors were made responsible for their
serfs; and the "free wandering people" who did not wish to enter the
army were ordered, under pain of being sent to the galleys, to inscribe
themselves as members of a Commune or as serfs to some proprietor.

These measures had a considerable influence, if not on the actual
position of the peasantry, at least on the legal conceptions regarding
them. By making the proprietor pay the poll-tax for his serfs, as if
they were slaves or cattle, the law seemed to sanction the idea that
they were part of his goods and chattels. Besides this, it introduced
the entirely new principle that an