277 The unstable situation among Russia’s enserfecl peasants became an increasingly dominant political problem for the Petrine regime. Both the tax base and the pool of recruits for the army were reduced when serfs took flight to Siberia or other inaccessible places where they could neither be found nor returned to their estates. Because of its fiscal concerns, the government blamed the estate owners for this development.--^ Thus, in article 31 of their instruktsiia, voevodas were charged with supervising the estate owners in their provinces: since there are some careless people who themselves, in a depraved manner, lay waste to their own villages, who either because of drunkenness or some other unstable habits not only fail to maintain their estates or protect them, but even ruin them by imposing upon the peasants all sorts of unbearable burdens, and in addition beat and torment them, and because of this the peasants leave their farms (taiglo) and flee, and from this comes deserted areas and shortages increase in the state revenues. The connection between the work of the peasants and the state finances, which was completely apparent to contemporaries, was given even more explicit expression in Peter’s ukaz “Concerning the protection of the agriculturalists” (“O berezhenii zemledel’tsev”), which stated that the peasants are: the arteries of the realm, and just as the whole human body receives its nourishment through the (great) artery, the realm receives it through the (peasants). Therefore, one must protect them and not burden them excessively, but rather they shall be kept from all sorts of attacks and devastation, and in particular (see to it) that the service nobility {sluzhilyc liudi) treats them properly. As is evident fromthis quotation, and as shall be illustrated further below, Peter’s intervention for the benefit of the peasants was not called forth by any humanitarian considerations, but was dictated entirely by the need for revenues with which to maintain the governmental apparatus. The fiscal policies that placed a ceiling on the landowner’s exploitation of his serfs, and especially the introduction of a poll tax, which will be dealt with below, did, of course, give rise to antagonisms between the absolutist regime and individual landowners.-^' N. 1. Pavlenko, “Petr I,” in N. I. Pavlenko ct aL, eds., Rossiia v period reform Petra I (Moscow, 1973), 66—69. B. I. Syromiatnikov, “Reguliarnoe" gosiidarstvo Petra Pervogo i ego ideologiia (Moscow & Leningrad, 1943), 145. lu. A. Tikhonov, “Feodal’naia renta v pomcshchichikh imeniiakh Tsentral’noi Rossii V kontsc XVII—pervoi chetverti XVIII v.,’’ in N. I. Pavlenko et al., eds., Rossiia v period reform Petra I (Moscow, 1973), 212. Conditions were somcwh.at better on the crown estates, but as the donation of crown estates increased the state peasants lived under the constant threat of being handed over as labor to some estate owner or manufacturer; see Golikova, 166. 22fi
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