148 Ratusha, therefore, the prikazy and voevodas were deprived of their roles in the fiscal administration of the towns in which commerce and merchant activities were predominant. On the other hand, the voevoda administration remained unchanged in those towns where the nobility owned resources in the form of serfs and land.^'*^ The ukaz of January 30, 1699 announcing the new administrative organization indicated the motive for the reform in the following revealing manner: it has come to the attention of the high monarch, that [the merchants] have suffered great losses in their commerce and trade and have been ruined by the procrastination {volokita) of the prikazy, so that some of them have abandoned their commerce and trade and become poor, and from this the state and ordinary incomes have suffered a loss, and the extraordinary imposts [have suffered] great shortages. And so that they, the town people {posadskie liudi) shall not suffer procrastination and losses in the various prikazy and be ruined, and so that the high monarch’s treasury—the direct taxes—shall not suffer shortages, and the indirect imposts shall not only not come in undiminished, but shall also increase, therefore the high monarch has shown them his benevolence and decreed; in future the urban population of Muscovy, when it comes to their judicial cases and their taxes, shall no longer lie under the jurisdiction of the prikazy, where they formerly lay, but rather the hurmistry (the members of the Ratusha, author’s note) shall administer the town people throughout the Muscovite realm. The Ratusha developed into a central treasury, receiving approximately half of the total revenues of the Russian state up until 1708.^' The organ’s influence was expanded further in 1703 when it was given the right to control the use of the revenues it collected."’® The reformof 1699 did not, however, produce a complete centralization of the Russian fiscal administration. Although some prikazy did in fact become defunct, others, including the Bol’shaia kazna, or grand treasury, continued to collect taxes alongside of the Ratusha.'^^ In 1708, in connectlon with the guberniia reform dealt with earlier in this study, the Ratusha lost its position as a central organ of fiscal administration. The revenue administered by the Ratusha was distributed among eight guberniia bursaries or treasuries, while most of the prikazy involved in fiscal administration were dismantled at the same time. The fiscal administration was decentralized; instead of being sent to a central treasury in Moscow first, the revenues collected were now sent directly to their destinations within Bogoslovskii, IV, 276. PSZ, III, no. 1,674. Baburin, 295. M. N. PoKROVSKii, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, edited by N. M. T Tikhomirov et al. (4 V., Moscow, 1965—1966), I, 567—572. •** Baburin, 295.
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