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 any member of the rural population not legally attached to the land or to a proprietor should be regarded as a vagrant, and treated accordingly.  Thus the principle that every subject should in some way serve the State had found its complete realisation.  There was no longer any room in Russia for free men.

The change in the position of the peasantry, together with the hardships and oppression by which it was accompanied, naturally increased fugitivism and vagrancy.  Thousands of serfs ran away from their masters and fled to the steppe or sought enrolment in the army.  To prevent this the Government considered it necessary to take severe and energetic measures.  The serfs were forbidden to enlist without the permission of their masters, and those who persisted in presenting themselves for enrolment were to be beaten “cruelly” (zhestoko) with the knout, and sent to the mines.* The proprietors, on the other hand, received the right to transport without trial their unruly serfs to Siberia, and even to send them to the mines for life.**