296 while large amounts of money were transferred from Livonia to Sweden in order to cover the requirements of the Swedish personnel budget. In 1699, for example, 294,981 dsmt in Livonian funds were transferred to the Swedish treasury, of which sum 90,000 dsmt were allocated for the salaries of the royal councillors and 70,000 dsmt were allocated for the maintenance of Sweden’s diplomatic representatives abroad. Against this background, then, Bogoslovskii’s Livonian example seems to have been rather poorly chosen to support his thesis that the Swedish local administration was too costly for Russia. A different evaluation of the relationship between Russia’s and Sweden’s “national resources” was provided by Heinrich Pick, who felt that “Russia has, from the highest mercy in nature, greater resources for feeding officials than has Sweden. In connection with this evaluation, one might ask whether it was not in fact Sweden’s relative poverty—and especially her shortage of labor— that produced the elaborate and efficient Swedish fiscal apparatus with its careful administration of resources. The vast transfer of wealth, in the form of the donation of estates and rents to the nobility, which took place during the seventeenth century played an important role in this development, as well. As the crown’s share in the production of the peasantry declined, the resources which remained certainly had to be administrated more carefully. The economic structure of Sweden and Russia were identical in nature. The mode of production may be described as seigneurial; the peasant population answered for the major portion of the total production in both countries. The surplus created by the peasants (that which remained of the net product after deductions were made for the support of the peasant and his household, that is, that which was required for the peasant to reproduce his own labor) was taken over, in the form of labor, produce, and cash rents, directly by the crown and a landowning, or rent-owning, and in Russia even a serf-owning, class of noblemen. Tliat portion of the peasant’s production which the crown took in taxes and rents went to maintain the military forces and the civil administration, one of whose tasks was to see to it that agricultural production was maintained without serious interruption. A large part of the state budget was accounted for by the allocations for the salaries of a numerous service nobility of officers and civil servants. It is also possible to identify a growing bourgeois, or precapitalist, element in the economies of these two countries during this period. Cash and commodity transactions had become numerous, as was reflected in agriculture, where cash rents became an increasingly common form for Ibid., 26. TsGADA, f. 248 dclo 58 1. 33. 294 " 2m
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