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peasants, were deprived of their de facto trading andhandicraft privileges and subjected to inscription in thetax rosters of the towns.None the less, on most questions the interests of thestate and the landowner were fundamentally similar inthat the one wanted settled taxpayers and settled providersof military and labour services, while the other wantedsettled labour. Just as the 'men of service,' with theiroriginally temporary land grants becoming more or lesspermanent estates, owed compulsory service to the state,so the peasants must owe compulsory service by assuringits economic foundation, agriculture; and the 'men ofservice' became not only the officer class in the army andthe bureaucracy, but also, as it were, the officer class inthe great agricultural army of peasants.The gradual transformation of the previously variegatedclasses of peasants into roughly two broad classes, the' bondsmen' serfs of the landowners and the state peasants,was advanced a long stage further by Peter the Great,especially by his imposition of a uniform poll tax on allmales, except the nobility and gentry and the clergy(1718). This edict, with which was coupled a verysearching new tax census, applied to the towns as well asto the country, but its effects were especially importantin the latter. Peter, pushing further what had beenbegun by his predecessors, abolished all distinctionsbetween slaves or various other categories who were stillnot taxpayers and the taxpaying peasantry, and mergedthem in the poll-tax payers either as bonded serfs, orstate peasants, or registered townsmen.As a consequence of the poll tax the whole relation ofdirect to indirect taxation was reversed. Ordinary directtaxation had formerly been based on a very complicatedassessment computed on ploughland and certain othersources of subsistence. Then in the course of theseventeenth century, when the state was making desperateefforts to raise more money, it gradually shifted over totaxation by households, which after 1681 became theordinary mode of assessing direct taxation. The exactdistribution of the assessment within each commune ordistrict was left, as previously, to the locality itself.153