What do you think of this fact?
Imagine needing a permit for your face. In Russia under Peter the Great, that was real: men who wanted to keep their beards had to pay a tax and carry a token as proof.
A tsar back from his trip
In 1697 and 1698, Peter I toured Western Europe with the so-called Grand Embassy. According to Smithsonian Magazine, he travelled as “Sergeant Pyotr Mikhaylov”, spent four months at a Dutch East India Company shipyard and then worked at the Royal Navy’s dockyard in Deptford. He came home with big plans to modernise Russia. Beards, by then largely out of fashion elsewhere in Europe according to the British Museum, were high on his list.
At a reception after his return, Peter is said to have pulled out a barber’s razor and shaved his shocked guests himself. History Skills dates the announcement of the tax to September 1698. Many Russians wore beards partly for religious reasons, and the Orthodox Church considered going beardless blasphemous, Smithsonian writes.
Pay or shave
How much you paid depended on who you were. According to Smithsonian, nobles and merchants could pay up to 100 rubles a year, while commoners got off with as little as 1 kopek. Priests and deacons were exempt, the British Museum notes. Guards at the city gates checked bearded men, and anyone without proof of payment risked having his beard shaved off, History Skills reports.
The proof was a beard token. The British Museum holds a copper one from 1705, showing a moustache and beard, and the museum’s catalogue also lists a double-headed eagle. Its Cyrillic inscription translates as “Money Taken”. The museum explains that the tokens only appeared in 1705, when further laws were published, even though the idea went back to the first decree.
Bonus fact: A token in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg spells out the official view, History Skills writes: “The beard is a superfluous burden.”
Not everyone played along. Some men reportedly wore fake beards or shaved in town and grew them back outside the city. The tax faded after Peter’s death in 1725, and Catherine the Great formally repealed it in 1772. On paper, then, a Russian beard stayed taxable for more than 70 years.