147 The Assessment of the Duties and Taxes to be laid upon the People, the collecting of the Czar’s Revenue, and the sole Decision of all Causes, (excepting those within the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction) had formerly been wholly committed to such of the chief Lords who were Favourites, and commonly were of the greatest Families in Russia; who acted as sovereign Princes under the Czar, in the several Provinces into which the Empire was divided; who had the Liberty to make use of the Czar’s Name for their Authority in the Issuing forth their Orders, and might be said to have the sole Power of Mens Lives and Fortunes in their Hands. And for the Examination of Causes, and for the Executing of their Orders, each of these Lords, or Princes, held apart an Office or Court of Justice (i.e., prikaz, author’s note) in Mosco {sic), where these great Lords usually resided, and to whom there was an Appeal from the District of all the lesser Towns and Cities in each Province. Each of these Lords had the sole Power also lodged in them, to appoint and send Governors to the several Towns and Cities, to which each province was again subdivided into lesser Districts. — — — These Governors, in their respective Districts throughout all the Czar’s Dominions, had the Power of the Assessment of the Taxes, and of appointing Challavolnicks (or Collectors) under them to receive the Czar’s Revenues, and to return such Sums as they collected (which they used to send under a Guard of Soldiers) into the grand Precause (i.e., prikaz, author’s note), or proper Office of each Boyar, residing in Mosco, where the Account of the Collections made in each Province was made out, (such as was thought fit) with the Account also of what was expended on the several pretended Occasions, for the Service of each respective Province; and the rest sent into the Office of the great Treasury in Mosco, as aforesaid. Russia’s fiscal administration was altered in the direction of centralization in 1699. This reformmeant that much of the collection of revenues, hitherto charged to thirteen different prikazy, was transferred to a new administrative unit, the so-called Burmistrskaia palata (Burgomaster Chamber) or Ratitsha.^- Control of this new fiscal organ was given to commercial groups, which thereby assumed more importance for the state finances. The creation of the Ratusha should be viewed against the background of the increasing economic strength of the merchants. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, it was the towns that paid the most burdensome of the direct taxes, while collecting the most important of the indirect taxes at the same time.^'* Urban dwellers, however, found it difficult to defend themselves against the arbitrariness of the prikazy and the local voevoda administration. The voevodas, many of whom had purchased their position with large bribes in the prikazy and had subsequently governed their administrative districts for personal profit, constituted a particularly serious obstacle to the merchants in their commercial pursuits.*^ With the establishment of the D. S. Baburin, “Reforma vysshikh i tsentrarnykh organov gosudarstvennogo upravleniia,” Ocherki (1954), 295. M. M. Bogoslovskii, Petr I. Materialy dlia biografii (5 v., Leningrad, 1940—1948), III, 245. Ibid., 246, and A. G. Man’kov, Razvitie krepostnogo prava v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVll veka (Moscow & Leningrad, 1962), 312, 321. See below, p. 231.
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