Note 10 — Chapter LI · LAKE KHANKA TO THE COAST.

I heard on the Kama in European Russia, from a Belgian, that whereas he, as a foreigner, was free from taxation, having to pay only 1s. 3d. a year for his passport, some of the peasants have to pay as much as 28s. Servants of the Crown, including priests, pay no taxes, though their children begin to do so at the age of 21. In Western Siberia no man (except convicts deprived of all their rights) is free from direct taxation, the manner of collecting the tax being similar to that followed in Russia. A census is taken every 20 years or oftener, and a number of villages are classed together into a mir (a world), from which a certain tax has to be raised. The mir settle among themselves in a kind of local parliament the proportion each family shall pay, and then, whether the members of a family increase or diminish, this fixed proportion goes on till the next census is taken. This causes great inequalities. Thus a father with a large family will be made liable for a large sum, which, so long as he has children at home to work, he can pay; but should his sons be drawn for soldiers, or be cut off by death, he is in a different position; though, on the other hand, a man with a family of small children at the time of taking the census is lightly taxed, whereas, when his children grow up and work, he could well afford to pay more. In European Russia the census is taken every seven or nine years, and the tax to be paid by each family is revised oftener.

Each village receives land according to the number of its inhabitants, but so that each “soul,” or able-bodied male or head of a family, gets about 15 acres, a space which, properly cultivated, should suffice for his support; but if not, land in the Primorsk government costs only 2s. an acre; in fact, at Nikolaefsk, the government gave land under certain restrictions for building, and up to 1875 charged no property-tax, nor even for licences during the first ten years of Russian occupation. When this land has been allotted to a man in Russia with its accompanying tax, he cannot get quit of the bargain so far as the tax is concerned. Should he find the land unprofitable he may give up its cultivation, but he must continue to pay the tax, and hence it often happens that a man leaves his commune and goes to a neighbouring town for employment, but still pays taxes for the land in some remote village he has left.