288 males (13.6Vo). Of these, sixty-nine percent had died, and the main reason for the increase in mortality had been the series of crop failures between 1721 and 1724. According to the same calculations, the peasants who had fled accounted for seventeen percent of the total decline.-®^ The government’s concern was expressed clearly in a memorandum on the condition of the country written by Chief Procurator P. I, laguzhinskii in 1725. He wrote that: it is a domestic danger that the growth of bread grains has been meager for several years and that the soul tax is becoming a heavy burden, since 1) runaways, the dead, and those who have been taken as soldiers have not been excluded, 2) the very old, invalids, and children who cannot work have been included in the same tax, and the soul tax has been collected in cash, for which reason the peasants in such a time of crop failures are not only forced to sell horses and livestock, but even their seed grain, and they themselves must suffer hunger, and the greater part of them are such as have no hope of being able to feed themselves in the future, and a great number of these have already died of nothing else but hunger . . . and a large number flee to the Polish border and to Bashkiria, against which not even the border outposts help. This sudden concern for the welfare of the peasants is understandable, for the labor of the peasants was a necessary prerequisite for the existence of the absolutist regime. The state apparatus was to be supported and maintained by the surplus production of the peasants, and the mission of the state apparatus, in its turn, was to maintain the existing social and political order. This was especially true when it came to the army, a fact illustrated in a revealing manner by a memorandum on the condition of the Russian army written in 1725 by Lieut. Gen. (later Field Marshal) Burkhart Christoph von Munnich, which stated, for example, that “the security of the crown and of the autocracy in the realm consists in the maintenance of the army. The tax reduction after Peter’s death proved to be an insufficient measure, and, during 1725, the Senate discussed other possibilities for coping with the strained state finances. In a report to Catherine I in October 1725, the Senate proposed a number of measures. According to this body, a further reduction of the soul tax fromseventy to sixty kopecks would be necessary during 1726. In addition, the Senate proposed a revision of the census lists in order to strike off the names of persons who, for one reason or another, no longer lived in the collection districts, so that the soul tax could be imposed on the remaining male population alone. It also felt that military expenditures had to be reduced and that this should ” 260 2G4 Anisimov (1973), 343—345. ChOIDR (1860), IV smes’, 269—270. ChOIDR (1897), II sines’, 41. 265 266
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