As a result the state budget lost enormous funds which were misappropriated by landlords and spent on their personal whims (see Table 8).

Table 8. Losses to the State Treasury from the Gap between the Increase in the Poll Tax and Grain Prices, 1725-1800

* The direct taxes received by the state treasury are depreciated in proportion to the rise in prices.

Let us summarise

The eighteenth century is noted for the fall in the biological level of living of 98 per cent of the Russian population since the share of the nobles whose stature was likely to increase comprised 2 per cent of the population. Possibly the conditions of the clergy (1.5 per cent of the entire population) were better than our information about those drafted into the Army shows since, as a rule, they recruited people from among the pauperised part of the clergy, people who lost their job and had no prospects to get it. Finally, it is unlikely that the biological status of the small section of entrepreneurs (their share in the country’s population was less than 0.1 per cent) decreased. All privileged layers totalled not more than 3.5 per cent of the population. Consequently the biological status of the remaining 96.5 per cent of inhabitants decreased. The biological status took a turn for the worse twice: in 1700-1724 when the stature of recruits decreased by 2.1 cm and in 1745-1799 when it decreased by 5.1 cm. These periods were separated by two relatively favourable decades when the biological level of living reverted to the initial level of 1700-1704. From 1700-1704 to 1795-1799 the average stature of recruits decreased from 164.7 to 159.5 cm or by 5.2 cm. However paradoxical it is the decrease in the biological status occurred against the background of a considerable economic growth and was caused not by economic depression but by the rise in taxes and obligations which deteriorated the material conditions of common people and made them work longer and more intensively. Increase in payments to the state was linked with the wars Russia waged for the outlet to the Baltic and Black seas, for the status of a great power and with reforms carried out by the supreme power to do away with the lagging behind the West-European countries. The increase in obligations in favour of landlords was caused by their desire to have means for a comfortable and wasteful life. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century the surplus value created by landlord peasants, and they comprised more than half of the total country’s population, was equally divided between the state and landlords. But gradually it became almost an exclusive property of landlords who at the end of the eighteenth century usurped 88 per cent of its volume. It can be said that after the death of Peter I the nobles, and to be exact 70 thousand landlords, privatised 57 per cent of the country’s population. If two empresses, Elizaveta Petrovna and Catherine II could have resisted this and had preserved the state’s 50 per cent share of the surplus value created by the labour of landlord peasants these means would have been sufficient both for all the measures taken to modernise the country and for the pursuit of an active foreign policy without serious detriment to the well-being of the people. Under Peter I the burden of war and modernisation was distributed evenly among all social classes, national income met the requirements of the whole society and owing to this the decline in the well-being was minimised. Under Elizaveta and Catherine II all expenses were shifted on to the people’s shoulders, the people’s interests were sacrificed to the nobility elite which appropriated the results of the economic growth and modernisation. In consequences of this the well-being of the population also suffered a great damage – under the rule of the two empresses the biological level of living of broad masses fell 2.6 times greater than under Peter I.