ABSTRACT
The “state peasants” who lived in the vast expanse of the Russian North and Northeast made up about half of the peasant population. In the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, they were completely free to dispose of their plots of land by buying, selling, or willing them. The introduction of a head tax brought about great changes in the economic life of the peasants. The head tax introduced by Peter the Great in 1719 was fairly easy on the rich, but an intolerable burden for the poor, and the number of defaulters soon grew. In the second half of the eighteenth century the government began limiting the peasants’ right to dispose of their land; in the 1780s, it came up with the idea of “land equalization” similar to that which had taken place among the peasants under serfdom. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Russian peasants displayed active initiative in a wide variety of economic activities.
