Census Books of the Petrine Era

This article examines two household censuses conducted in Russia in 1710 and in 1715–1719. In 1719, the government abandoned the established practice of household descriptions and adopted a new principle of taxation, i. e. the poll tax. The 1719 census returns were subjected to revision in 1720–1723 (the First Revision). The new census made it possible to substantially increase the number of taxpayers by expanding the composition of taxable groups and strengthening controls during enumeration. In the scholarly community, a tendency has developed to base demographic studies on the results of the First Revision, while the Petrine household censuses have fallen outside researchers’ scope of interest. This article summarizes research on the information potential of those earlier sources. The author focuses on materials relating to the Black Earth uyezds, Belgorod, Voronezh, and Yelets, owing to both the accumulated research base and the degree of preservation and variety of documents for this region. Based on a comparative analysis of the data, the author reaches two main conclusions. First, the reliability of the Landrat books can be estimated at 65 % relative to the counts of the First Revision. Second, even allowing for the relative imprecision of the numerical estimates in the censuses of Peter the Great’s era, their information potential remains considerable: they reflect general socio-demographic processes and phenomena in the region. Additionally, it is demonstrated that those who evaded registration were mainly males of young age. Specific empirical material also corroborates the position held by a number of historians that the population increase recorded in the censuses resulted from the identification of those who had been hiding and from the expansion of the taxable population.