When foreign seamen became embroiled in disputes with Russians, Peter hurried to the defense. Once, a Dutch merchant vessel, maneuvering into the crowded harbor of Kronstadt, accidentally rammed a Russian frigate, breaking its accommodation ladder. The Russian captain was furious, although the apologetic Dutch captain offered to pay for the damage. Un-appeased, the Russian sent a guard of Russian soldiers and sailors on board the merchantman and demanded ten times the appropriate sum. Peter was at Kronstadt and, hearing of the commotion, rowed out to the frigate to inspect the damage. Seeing that no harm had been done except to the ladder, which could be repaired in a few hours, he became enraged at his frigate captain. 'In three hours,' he said, 'I will return and I expect to see the ladder of your ship repaired.' Three hours later, the Tsar returned to find the ladder repaired but unpainted. 'Paint the ladder red,' he commanded, 'and in the future, let foreigners receive nothing at your hands but marks of politeness and friendship.'
It was typical of Peter's character that in the middle of a war, with a new army, a new navy, a new capital and a new national economy all under construction, he should also begin to dig a new system of canals at different points in Russia. It was not that they were unneeded. The distances in Russia were so vast and the roads so poor that commercial goods as well as individual travelers faced almost insurmountable obstacles in moving from place to place. This problem had always bedeviled the effort to bring products from deep inside the giant nation to the seaports for export; now, it presented itself even more acutely in the form of transporting the quantities of grain and other foodstuffs which were needed to feed St. Petersburg. The solution had been provided in large part by nature, which had equipped Russia with a magnificent network of rivers—the Dnieper, the Don, the Volga and the Dvina. Although all these rivers except the Dvina flowed south, it still remained possible to haul goods northward, upstream, by the sheer brute force of human and animal labor. What remained was to connect this far-flung tracery of natural water routes with a system of canals which linked the rivers at vital points.
Peter's first herculean effort was to try to link the Volga with the Don and thus, by his possession of Azov at the mouth of the Don, give most of the Russian heartland access to the Black Sea. For more than ten years, thousands of men labored to dig a canal and build stone locks, but the project was abandoned when Peter was forced to return Azov to the Turks. The growth of St. Petersburg inspired a second vision: linking the whole of Russia to the Baltic by connecting the Volga to the Neva. By extensive surveying, Peter located in the region of Tver and Novgorod a tributary of the Volga which ran within less than a mile of another stream which flowed, through many lakes and rivers, into Lake Ladoga, which emptied into the Neva. The key was a small canal at Vyshny- Volochok. It took 20,000 men four years to dig the canal with the necessary locks, but when it was finished, the Caspian Sea was linked by water with St. Petersburg, the Baltic and the Atlantic Ocean. Thereafter, a stream of flat-bottomed barges loaded with grain, oak timbers and other products of southern and central Russia, along with the goods of Persia and the East, moved slowly but continuously across the face of Russia.
Naturally, there were difficulties and opposition. Prince Boris Golitsyn, assigned to oversee the first of these projects, grumbled that 'God made the rivers go one way and it was presumption in man to think to turn them another.' The flow of river traffic was sometimes impeded when the stone locks of Vyshny-Volochok canal silted up and had to be redredged. But this was a minor obstacle compared to the hazards faced on Lake Ladoga. The surface of this mighty inland lake, the largest in Europe, was sometimes whipped by wind into a violence worthy of an ocean, and often the waves overwhelmed the unwieldy, flat-bottomed river barges which had to have an exceptionally shallow draft to pass through the Vyshny-Volochok canal. When storm winds howling down from the north caught these clumsy river craft on the open lake, the boats either capsized or were driven onto the southern shore of the lake and broken in pieces. Every year, gale winds sank or drove ashore hundreds of barges, with the loss of their cargoes. Peter ordered the construction of a special fleet of lake boats with hulls and keels deeper than the shallow barges, to be used for the passage across Lake Ladoga. But this required unloading and reloading which were far too expensive and time-consuming with cargoes such as grain, hay and timber. His next move was to look for a way of avoiding the lake passage. In 1718, he decided to cut a canal through the swampy land along the southern shore of the lake from the River Volkhov to the mouth of the Neva at Schlusselburg. The total distance would be sixty-six miles.
The project was first entrusted to Menshikov, who knew nothing of engineering, but was anxious to accept any assignment which might win him favor with Peter. Menshikov spent more than two million roubles and squandered the lives of 7,000 workmen, who died of hunger and disease because of bad administration. A great deal of needless work was done even before the basic decision had been made whether it was better to dig the canal in the earth behind the shoreline or to try to wall off part of the lake with dikes. The Tsar was on the point of abandoning the work when he encountered a German engineer, Burkhard Christopher von Munnich, who had extensive experience building dikes and canals in North Germany and Denmark. Once Munnich took over, the work proceeded more efficiently, and in 1720 Weber wrote: 'I am credibly informed that this work is in such an advanced state as to be ready next summer and that consequently the trade between the Baltic and the Caspian Sea, or between all Russia and Persia will be upon a sure foot, though still with the inconvenience that ships coming from Kazan might be near two years on their way.' Weber was badly misinformed, and by 1725, when Peter died, the Emperor had seen only twenty miles of the great canal (it was seventy feet wide and sixteen feet deep) actually dug. After Peter's death, Menshikov frowned on the engineer, and it was not until 1732, in the reign of Empress Anne, that the canal was finished and Munnich triumphantly escorted the Empress in a procession of state barges along the entire length of the prodigious waterway.
Today, the great canal system of Russia initiated by Peter forms a giant artery of commerce for the Soviet Union. The canals permit large ships to pass to and fro, up and down the rivers of Russia from the Black Sea and the Caspian to the White Sea and the Baltic. During the White Nights in Leningrad, one can sit on the Neva embankment and, after midnight, when the city's bridges have gone up, watch a long procession of ocean-sized cargo ships pass like silent mammoths up the river, bound for the interior of Russia a thousand miles away.
Everything had to be paid for. Relentlessly and remorselessly, the war and the great construction projects sucked up the lifeblood and treasure of Russia. Although Peter repeatedly emphasized to his officials that taxes should be levied 'without unduly burdening the people,' his own constant demand for funds overruled this sentiment. Taxes crushed every article and activity of daily life, yet the state never collected enough money to pay its mounting expenses. In 1701, the army and navy swallowed up three quarters of the revenues; in 1710, four fifths; and in 1724, even though the war was over, two thirds. When money was short, Peter slashed the salaries of all officials, temporal and spiritual, excepting only those most necessary to the realm: 'foreign artisans, soldiers and sailors.' In 1723, there was so little cash that some government officials were paid in furs.
The only solution, until growing commercial and industrial activity could expand the tax base, was to lay still heavier taxes on the burdened nation. Hitherto, the basic tax had been the old household tax, determined by a census taken in 1678 during the reign of Tsar Fedor. This tax was laid on every village and landowner according to the number of houses and farms possessed (and made for crowded living because, to avoid taxation, as many families and people as possible crowded under one roof). In 1710, believing that the population must have increased, Peter ordered a new census. To his astonishment, the new census showed that in thirty years the number of households had decreased by from one fifth to one quarter. There was some real justification for this: Peter had drained off hundreds of thousands of men into the army, the shipyards at Voronezh, the work on the canals and the building of St. Petersburg, while thousands more had fled into the forest or to the frontier. But the new low figures also represented the helplessness of the government to overcome the stratagems of both nobility and peasants who were determined to evade taxes. Bribing the commissioners who counted the houses was a preliminary gambit. If this failed, the peasants simply removed their houses from the commissioners' sight. Russian peasant houses were largely made of logs or timbers notched at four corners. Thus, they could be un-notched in a few hours and either removed to the forest or scattered about. The census takers and tax collectors knew the trick, but there was little they could do about it.
Upon his return from France, Peter decided to approach the problem differently, replacing the household tax with a version of the individual head tax he had observed in France. The tax-paying unit of this new poll tax was to be the 'soul': that is, every male from infant to grandfather in every village, town or peasant commune. But before the new tax could be levied, a new census was required. On November 26, 1718, a decree ordered that every Russian male except noblemen, churchmen and certain privileged merchants (all of whom were taxed differently) be inscribed Again, opposition was intense but by 1722, a census had been compiled, listing 5,794,928 male 'souls' and in 1724 the soul tax was collected for the first time. Peasants were assessed at 74 kopeks or 114 kopeks per year, depending on whether they worked on private or state land. In terms of revenue, the tax was an enormous success, producing half of the state income that year and continuing in use through most of the nineteenth century
