299 help was exempted from the obligation to pay the so-called mantalspenningen. The connection between the assessment of taxes and the activities of the local administration was discussed in the Russian reform legislation not only in the instructions for the officials of the local administration, but in the instruktsiia for the kamer-kollegiia. There it was stated that land registers (Russian zemskie Hi gruntovye knigi, Swedish jordeböcker) were to be set up for “each estate or homestead, thereafter district, and finally for the entire province.’* But a necessary prerequisite to this would have been to carry out a massive survey of all cultivated lands in Russia, and no attempt at such a survey had been made since the unsuccessful attempt in 1680. Indeed, it is to be doubted whether such a survey was possible in Russia at the time of these administrative reforms.*^”^ George Yaney has found an interesting connection between the “bogus” survey of 1680 and the difficulties of bringing about a systematization of the administrative structure. Yaney wrote, for example, that: elements of system such as a pretended registry of land boundaries doubtless made the hierarchy a bit more effective as an organization and as a means of communication between tsar and people, but by the same token they rendered it even more impervious to systematization than before. The better traditional society worked on the basis of bogus measures, the more capable it became of resisting the imposition of accurate measurement. Thus elements of legal-administrativc system became obstacles to systematization. It was especially from the landowning and serf-owning nobility that hard opposition to a tax assessment based on a general survey of the land could be expected. The nobility shared an interest in opposing the rise of a truly effective state apparatus for the collection of taxes. The Senate, however, was aware of the connection between the Swedish method of fiscal administration and the surveying system. In his report ;J0fi 30!) Lars Gustat Linde, Sveriges finansrätt (Stockholm, 1887), 249—250; as for the other groups who were excused from paying the rnantalspenningcn, or poll tax, see RA, Riksregistratur, Instruktion för mantalskommissarien, December 20, 1693, article 7. ZA (no. 416), 560—561. See B. B. Kafengauz in Pososhkov, 379—380; 1. E. German, Istoriia mezhevogo zakonodatel'stva ot Ulozheniia do general'nogo mezhevaniia {1649—1765) (Moscow, 1893), 100—103. This in spite of the fact that there was general interest among the nobility for a survey which would legalize and protect the possession of the estates which had been donated by the crown, and which would legalize the estate boundaries and eliminate the constant disagreements among landlords over various pieces of property. Sec below, p. 301 note 316. George L. Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government: Soeial Evolution in the Domestic Administration of Imperial Russia, 1711—1905 (Urbana, Chicago & London, 1973), 117. ao7 :]08 300
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=