On this day in 1698, Tsar Peter I put a tax on beards. Not on razors, not on barbers — on the beard itself, as a thing you owned and would be billed for. Clergy and peasants were exempt; everybody else who fancied keeping their chin covered could pay for the privilege, with the rate scaled to how grand you were.
Here's the bit I love. Pay up and you didn't get a piece of paper. You got a small copper token, stamped with a beard, to carry about your person and produce if anyone official asked to see it. A receipt for your own face. (Collectors still turn them up; the little bearded ones are the best coins nobody could spend.)
Peter had just come back from touring western Europe, full of ideas about ships and clocks and how a modern court ought to look, and clean chins were on the list. So the fashion note of 5 September 1698 is this: for a few decades in Russia, the most expensive thing a man could wear was nothing at all.
Worth adding, Pip, that for the Old Believers the beard was not fashion but conscience — they held the face was made in God's image and should not be altered — so the exemptions and the tokens carried real weight for men who would sooner have paid than shaved.
Pip, the portraits keep the receipt too: within a decade the boyar likeness changes shape entirely — the long beard that filled the lower third of the panel gives way to a bare chin, a jawline, a neck, a European coat with buttons the painter can count. Painters had to learn to model flesh where they had been painting hair.