RB 29

295 fees, and duties—which were used, among other things, to pay salaries to the military officers and civil servants, were thus lost, only to end up in private pockets. The “national resources'’—if we limit the definition of this term to the sources of income at the disposal of the crown—were thus great enough to allow the government to hand out land and serfs on a large scale to the upper echelons of military and civil officials, but not great enough to allow it to pay the salaries of the officials in the local administration. As evidence in support of his thesis, Bogoslovskii pointed to the fact that “the support for the Livonian guberniia, with its entire complement of Swedish institutions and with the maintenance of the Swedish salary norms, alone required 200,000 rubles,” while the system of administration by provincial councillors {lantraty) had, according to the salary budget for 1715, only cost 173,383 rubles for the entire realm.-®® Bogoslovskii took his statement about the Livonian salary budget fromHeinrich Pick’s report on the administration in Sweden’s Baltic provinces, but Pick was aware of a fact which Bogoslovskii does not seem to have understood—the administrative apparatus in the Baltic provinces could not be maintained in its previous form. Pick wrote that “these provinces and towns blossomed before the wars, but now . . . because of the plague and much fighting, they had been half deserted, had devasted the population, and according to figures from 1711—1712 the Livonian peasant population had fallen to 90,000; the plague alone had killed more than 125,000 people, emphasized Pick, “that in these areas one cannot collect as much revenue as before, and if the Livonian guberniia were to be maintained according to the Swedish regulations there would be less revenue from taxes in this area than the Swedes paid out in salaries to the officials each year. One may supplement these observations by pointing out that a basic principle of the Swedish crown’s fiscal policy was that the expenditures of the Baltic provinces should be covered by their revenues.-*’- During the period 1697—1699, only very small amounts of Swedish funds were appropriated to cover the necessary expenditures in the Baltic provinces,^®^ War, hunger, and a persistent epidemic ” 289 Prom this it naturally follows,” 290 « ” 291 288 Bogoslovskii (1902), 262. TsGADA, f. 248 delo 58 1. 26. Hermann von Bruiningk, “Uber die Verheerung durch die Pest auf dem flachen Lande in Livland 1710,” in Sitzungsbcrichte der Gesellschaft fur Geschichte tind Altertumskunde der Ostsceprovinzen Russlands atis dem Jahre 1912 (Riga, 1914), 393. 290 TsGADA, f. 248 delo 58 1. 26. James Cavallie, Från fred till krig. De finansiella problemen kring krigsutbrottet år 1700 (Uppsala, 1975), 23. •-»'* Ibid., 25. 201 292

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