Muscovites elegantly spent eternity were taken over by the state and then sold at four times the original price. Of all the monopolies, however, the one most profitable to the government and most oppressive to the people was the monopoly on salt. Established by% decree in 1705, it fixed the price at twice the cost to the government. Peasants who could not afford the higher price often sickened and died.
To tighten administrative control and increase the efficiency of tax collectors across the sprawling mass of the empire, Peter in 1708 divided Russia into eight giant governorships, assigning these eight provinces to his closest friends. Thus, the Moscow governorship was assigned to Boyar Tikhon Streshnev, St Petersburg went to Menshikov, Kiev to Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, Archangel to Prince Peter Golitsyn, Kazan to Boyar Peter Apraxin, Azov to Admiral Fedor Apraxin, Smolensk to Boyar Peter Saltykov and Siberia to Prince Matthew Gagarin. Each governor was responsible for all military and civil affairs in the region, especially the production of revenue. Unfortunately, as some of the 'governors' resided in the capital far from their provinces, and others had conflicting duties (Menshikov was usually with the army), their authority left much to be desired.
Nevertheless, the effort continued. The governors commanded, the fiscals schemed, the tax collectors strained and the people labored, but only so much money could be squeezed from the Russian land. More could come only from the development of commerce and industry. Peter, observing the successful practices of English and Dutch trading companies in Russia, ordered Moscow merchants to form similar associations. At first, the Dutch were worried that their own efficient trade machinery would be jeopardized, but they soon realized that these fears were groundless. 'As concerns the trading business,' the Dutch minister wrote reassuringly to Holland, 'the matter has fallen through of itself. The Russians do not know how to set about and begin such a complex and difficult business.'
No matter how much the people struggled, Peter's taxes and monopolies still did not bring in enough. The first Treasury balance sheet, published in 1710, showed a revenue of 3,026,128 roubles and expenses of 3,834,418 roubles, leaving a deficit of over 808,000 roubles. This money went overwhelmingly for war. The army took 2,161,176 roubles; the fleet, 444,288 roubles; artillery and ammunition, 221,799 roubles; recruits, 30,000 roubles; armament, 84,104 roubles; embassies, 148,031 roubles, and the court, medical department, support of prisoners and miscellaneous, 745,020 roubles.
The extraordinary demand for taxes was matched by an extraordinary demand for men. In the nine years from Narva to Poltava, Peter drafted over 300,000 men into the army. Some were killed or wounded, others died of disease, but the overwhelming proportion of the losses came from desertion. Additional drafts of peasant labor were conscripted to work on Peter's ambitious construction projects. Thirty thousand laborers a year were needed for work on the fortifications at Azov and the building of the naval base at Tagonrog. The shipyards at Voronezh and work on a never completed Don-Volga canal required more thousands. And well before Poltava, the effort to build St. Petersburg was consuming more men than anything else. In the summer of 1707, Peter ordered Steshnev to send 30,000 laborers to St. Petersburg from the Moscow region alone.
These unprecedented demands for money and men drew groans from all classes. Discontent and complaint were not new in Russia, but always the people had blamed the boyars when things went wrong, not the tsar. It was Peter himself who had shattered this image. Now, the people understood that the Tsar
Talk of this kind did not go far. The new Secret Office of Preobrazhenskoe had agents everywhere, watching and listening for 'violent and unseemly speech.' These special police were successors to the Streltsy, who had acted as preservers of public order until their dissolution, and then to the soldiers of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, who had replaced the Streltsy as street-corner gendarmes. When the Guardsmen were called away to war, Peter created a new organization, the Secret Office. Formalized by ukase in 1702, it was given jurisdiction over all crimes and especially treason 'by word or deed.' Not surprisingly, the chief of this new office was Peter's comrade, the Mock-Tsar, Fedor Romodanovsky. A savage, brutal man, totally devoted to Peter, Romodanovsky dealt mercilessly with any suggestion of treason or rebellion. Through a network of pervasive eavesdropping and denunciation, followed by torture and execution, Romodanovsky and the Secret Office did their grim work well: Even under extreme oppression from tax collectors and labor conscriptors, cases of treason 'by word and deed' never threatened the throne.
But the record of these years is not all cruel. In various ways, Peter made serious efforts to improve the customs and conditions of Russian life. He acted to raise the status of women, declaring that they must not remain secluded in the terem, but should be present with men at dinners and on other social occasions. He banned the old Muscovite system of arranged marriages in which bride and groom had no choice in the matter and did not even meet each other until the marriage service was being performed. In April 1702, to, the immense joy of young people, Peter decreed that all marriage decisions should be voluntary, that the prospective partners should meet at least six weeks before their engagement, that each should be entirely free to reject the other, and that the bridgegroom's symbolic wielding of the whip at wedding ceremonies by replaced with a kiss.
Peter forbade the killing of newborn infants who were deformed—the custom in Moscow had been to quietly smother such children immediately after delivery—and ordered that all such births be recorded so that the authorities might oversee the continued existence of these children. He prohibited the unrestricted sale of herbs and drugs by street vendors, ordering that they be sold only at apothecary shops. In 1706, he established the first large public hospital in Moscow on the banks of the Yauza River. To make the streets safer, he forbade the wearing of daggers or pointed knives which turned drunken brawls into bloody 'massacres. Dueling, largely a foreign custom, was banned. To cope with the hordes of professional beggars who besieged travelers on every street, he required beggars to go to an almshouse to do their soliciting. Later, he attacked the problem from another side by declaring that anyone caught giving alms to a beggar in the streets should himself be fined.
To encourage foreigners to serve in Russia, Peter decreed that all previous laws which had restricted the rights of foreign citizens to come and go across the frontiers as they pleased were now repealed. All foreigners in Russian service were placed under the Tsar's protection, and any legal dispute affecting them was to be judged not by Russian law and Russian courts, but by a special tribunal composed of foreigners following the procedure of Roman civil law. Further, all foreigners were promised absolute religious freedom while in Russia. 'We shall exercise no compulsion over the consciences of men, and shall gladly allow every Christian to care for his own salvation at his own risk,' announced the Tsar.
Despite the distractions of war, Peter maintained his interest in broadening the educational horizons of his subjects. The School of Mathematics and Navigation established by Henry Farquharson and two other Scots in Moscow in 1701 flourished with 200 Russian students. These valuable investments in the future became the object of a tussle between the recruiting sergeants and Kurbatov, who stepped in to save them from conscription into the army, complaining that it was a waste of money to educate them if, after they j were trained, they were to be drafted as simple soldiers. A School of Ancient and Modern Languages had been founded by Pastor Gluck, Catherine's Lutheran guardian, who had arrived in Moscow with his family in 1703; Gluck was to train future Russian diplomats in Latin, Modern Languages, Geography, Politics, Riding and Dancing. The Tsar ordered that the ancient chronicles of Russian history, especially those in the monasteries of Kiev and Novgorod, be sent to Moscow for safekeeping. He directed that the foreign books being translated into Russian and printed in Russian by the Tessing brothers of Amsterdam be exact translations, even if portions of the texts were unfavorable to Russia. The purpose, he said, 'is not to flatter my subjects, but rather to educate them by showing them the opinion entertained of them by foreign nations.' In 1707, when a typefounder and two printers arrived in Moscow, Peter approved a newly revised Cyrillic type in which new books printed in Russia began to appear. The first was a manual of geometry, the second a handbook guide to the writing of letters, with instructions on how to offer compliments, issue invitations and make a proposal of marriage. Most of the volumes that followed were technical, but Peter also ordered 2,000 calendars, and histories of the Trojan War, the life of Alexander the Great and of Russia itself. The Tsar not only commissioned the books, but edited and annotated them. 'We have read the book on fortifications which you translated,' he wrote to one translator. 'The conversations are good and clearly rendered, but in the sections teaching how to carry out fortifications, it is darkly and unintelligibly translated.'
