Peter the Great’s Beard Tax
Tsar Peter the Great presided over an actual fashion police. His inspectors stalked the streets of St. Petersburg, shaving beards and snipping inches off coats.
If you were a bearded man in St. Petersburg, circa 1714, a token like the one above would be your only defense against the overweening power of the state. It served as proof that the bearer had paid his yearly beard tax—a few kopecks for peasants, a hundred rubles or more for nobles or military officials.
The beard tax was just one part of a larger project: Peter the Great’s aesthetic reinvention of Russian culture. The tsar ordered his subjects to replace their familiar long Russian overcoats with French or Hungarian jackets. Mannequins set outside the Moscow city gates illustrated the new fashions for all to see. Tailors who continued to sell Russian styles ran the risk of steep fines, and anyone walking the streets in an old-fashioned robe was liable to have it shorn short by the Tsar’s inspectors.
The project had its roots in Tsar Peter’s days travelling around Europe. In 1697, when he set out on a grand tour, Peter chose to travel incognito, adopting the name “Sergeant Pyotr Mikhaylov.” Nonetheless, excited rumors of his visit spread from town to town, heralding him as a giant: 7 feet tall, brilliant, and only half-civilized. The trip would consume the next two years. For a time, he worked at a Dutch shipyard to learn ship-building techniques. He visited heads of state, collections of natural curiosities, and anatomical theaters, and threw legendarily wild parties. One particularly raucous event left every one of his host’s chairs smashed into pieces, his paintings shredded into ribbons, and chunks of pavement torn out of the ground.
