275 “until they are able to earn their keep with good people.” Stuck on at the end of this article was the admonition to the landshövding to prohibit anyone from leaving the country without a valid passport. The comparable Russian article, also numbered 19, was given the following form: He shall also see to it that no vagrant persons {guliashchie liudi) are in his province, and those who are invalids (uvechnye) he shall send away to those towns and villages from whence they say they come, and those who are not invalids he shall send to (military) service, or to work where it is needed, nor shall he allow vagrant people to pass without passes {proezzhie pis’ma). In terms of its contents, this text presents no significant departure from its Swedish prototype. No persons capable of work were to be allowed to wander about in the province without jobs. Because of the lack of hospitals, sick cottages, and poor cottages, the poor were to be sent back where they had come from. The article’s mention of passes—the Swedish instruktion only mentions passports for foreign travel—indicates, however, that the Russian authors had a specific goal in mind, namely to use all available means to put a stop to the widespread flight of serfs which, because of forced conscription into the military, increased taxes, and, not least of all, crop failures, was especially intensive during the first quarter of the eighteenth century. A series of legislative acts were promulgated which set severe penalties for those who received and harbored runaways,^-^ and in this situation it was not surprising that the idea of introducing a domestic system of passes, by which it would be possible to achieve more effective control over the movements of the serfs, was put forth. Among other things, an anonymous author proposed that the government should issue an ordinance stating that, “in future, people should not be allowed to receive anyone from one guberniia into another without documents,” and that every estate owner should provide his serfs with “work passes” {pis'mo v otpusk dlia rabot).--- The first—and some have said the fundamental—ukaz in the history of the Russian domestic passport system was promulgated in October 1719. No one was to travel “from town to town or from village to village” without a pass (proezzhee Hi prokhozhee pis'mo) or passport.-"^ But, as was pointed out above, a regulation concerning domestic passes had already been included in the instruktsiia for voevodas. Somewhat more than a quarter of the articles (fifteen of fifty-four) in See below, p. 288. Shapiro (1954), 176. N. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii, Proekty reform v zapiskakh sovremennikov Petra Velikogo (St. Petersburg, 1897), 115, according to which the document may possibly be from 1713. Ibid., 116. 220 220 222 222
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