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with a corresponding increase of forced labour; and forthe first time lay education was directly undertaken bythe state. It was on a very small scale, severely utilitarian,and crudely carried out, but it was not originally on aclass basis and it was of great importance that lay education,hitherto scarcely at all developed and unrecognizedas a national task, substantially owed its origin to thesovereign. Similarly, in an allied sphere, the newspaperin Russia owed its origin to the direct action of Peter,and the development of the periodical to that of Catherine.The impress was never lost; thereafter education wasvery closely controlled by the state, usually acting in combinationwith the church (see pp. 336-339)If we compare the Russia of Alexander I with that ofPeter the Great there is no fundamental change in thefunctions of the state, but they are being carried out ona larger scale and by different means, and for instancein education in a quite different spirit. In one field,however, the state has virtually abdicated direct control :the landowners' serfs have been for most purposes handedover to the rule of their masters (see pp. 142-147, 153).In another field, that of the censorship, state control haschanged in kind.Printing had been introduced into Muscovy in themid-sixteenth century from eastern Poland, but it remainedlittle developed and almost completely a preserveof the church until Peter the Great. Even then only 918books, apart from church service books, were publishedin Russia in the first half of the eighteenth century. Inthe second half the number leapt up to 8595, and at thesame time the importation of foreign books enormouslyincreased. Previously, the question of censorship inany modern form did not arise; it had been a matter ofprohibitions and confiscations, usually enforced by theecclesiastical authorities. The outbreak of the FrenchRevolution, coupled with the new scale of book productionand import, brought an immediate change.Henceforward the state, in conjunction with the church,devoted itself to the control of all reading matter.After a dozen years of wholesale, erratic suppressionunder Catherine the Great and Paul, Alexander I117