“I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.”Someone else that also had things to say about beards was Peter the Great, who ruled Russia between 1682 and 1725.
When he came to power, Russia's administrative system was antiquated compared to the Western European nations. The state was divided into uyezds, a secondary-level administrative division; it corresponds to county. Each uyezd described groups of several volosts, earlier a term for territory ruled by the knyaz, a principality, but during this time it described the unit of administrative division. Peter looked to the west and saw many great things (in his opinion) and replaced the subdivisions with eight governorates, guberniyas.
His reign wasn't all reform, though. The subjugation of serfs to the will of landowners deepened, and he enforced class divisions, believing that “just as the landowner was to be tied to service, the townsman to his trade or handicraft, so the peasant was tied to the land.” Peasants had to have their master's written permission to leave the estate, and a new tax code expanded the number of taxable workers. The gap between serf and slave was smaller when his reign ended than when it began.
In fact, let's make a small detour called the Great Northern War. The war started in the year 1700, and ended 1721. Peter wants to open Russian trade routes to the West, and combines his forces with Denmark, Saxony and Poland to attack the Swedish hegemony in the North. Charles XII, the Swedish king at the time, subdued the coalition for nearly a decade, but then did the Instant Classic of marching for Moscow (lol).
“This victory has laid the final stone in the foundations of St Petersburg!”The Battle of Poltava, 1709, marks the turning point of the war, marking the beginning of the Swedish Empire's collapse and the rise of Russia.
I'm not going to linger on the Great Northern War; other people are better at military history, but if you're interested I recommend Peter Englund's book The Battle that Shook Europe.
Alright, so Peter's involved in a lot of war, and we know since before that war is expensive. What's the first solution for everyone, when you have a lot of costs?
Tax everyone. Hard. Well, not everyone. Everyone that can't complain.
So Peter finds himself in a situation where he's running a country on an outdated administrative system and with an aging infrastructure. His first monopolizes some industries: salt (lol), vodka, oak, tar. Then he taxes customs. Partly because he wants Russia to be more Western, partly because money. Bathing, fishing, beekeeping is all taxed (there is one more, that I will touch on later), as well as tax stamps for paper goods.
But, nobody likes being taxed, so people start using loopholes to avoid some of the taxes. Earlier, peasants could skirt some taxes by combining several households into one estate. That won't do. So Peter implements a poll tax, replacing the household tax on cultivated land. Now each peasant pays 70 kopeks, in cash, individually. A much heavier burden than before. Russia's treasure expands sixfold between 1680 and 1724. Peter places heavy tariffs on imports and trade, to protect Russia's interest.
"But what about the beards? You start by talking about beards, and now you're talking about... Reformation in Russia?", I hear you say.
Peter the Great implemented a beard tax. In an utter display of power abuse, he decides that beards are not Western enough. NOBODY should have a beard. He empowers the police to forcibly and publicly shave anyone who doesn't pay the beard tax.
In a classic move I like to call let's play favorites, the tax depended on the status of the bearded person. Anyone in the Imperial Court, the military, or the government was charged 60 rubles annually. Wealthy merchants were charged 100 rubles per year, other merchants and townsfolk were charged 60 rubles. Muscovites were charged 30 rubles per year. Peasants were charged two half-kopeks every time they entered a city.
Those who paid the tax had to carry a "beard token", a copper or silver token with a Russian Eagle on the reverse and the lower part of a face with nose, mouth, whiskers, and beard on the front. (Front meaning "heads", here.)
Several different versions of the token were minted. The common round version was inscribed with the words "money taken" on the front, and the date on the reverse; there was a rhomboid version in 1725 that said "beard tax taken" and the phrase "the beard is a superfluous burden" on the edge.
The tax was lifted 1772. Everything that makes money, I guess.
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