States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic 9781442696327

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STATES OF OBLIGATION

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YANNI KOTSONIS

States of Obligation Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2014 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. isbn 978-1-4426-4354-3

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Kotsonis, Yanni, 1962–, author States of obligation: taxes and citizenship in the Russian Empire and early Soviet ­Republic / Yanni Kotsonis. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-4426-4354-3 (bound) 1. Taxation – Russia – History. 2. Taxation – Soviet Union – History.  3. Russia – ­ Politics and government – 1801–1917.  4. Soviet Union – Politics and government – 1917–1936.  I. Title. hj2801.k68 2014   336.200947   c2014-902567-x This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

For Kate

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Contents

List of Tables and Figures xi Preface xiii List of Russian Terms xvii Introduction. A Short History of Taxes: Russia and the World from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries  3 The Analytic Categories: The State, the Economy, and the Person Taxes and Regimes: Russia in International Context And Russia in Its Own Context Historians on Russian Taxation Part 1. People, Places, Things: The Old Regime, Economic Knowledge, and the Coming of the New Order 1 The Fiscal Instruments of Regime Change from the Eighteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries  27 The Fiscal Idiom of Civic Reform The Novelty of the State Budget and the New Space of Economics The Fiscal Reformers Poll Taxes, State Knowledge, and the Problem of Equivalencies “And Yet the Arrears Were Never Collected”: The Problem of Accountability 2 Three Tax Reforms, Three Visions of the Polity  55 Ignore the Person: The Logic of Property Taxes after 1855 The Making of an Urban-Rural Divide Indirect Taxation, the Free Market, and Their Discontents

viii Contents

The Excise Inspectors The Public View of the Private, and the Meanings of Laissez-Faire Part 2. The Politics of Visibility, the Technologies of Intimacy: Taxes and the Remaking of Urban and Commercial Russia 3 Wealth in Motion: New Money, New Taxes, and a New Bureaucracy  87 Capitalism and Privacy in Russia and the North Atlantic The Tax Inspectorate, Nikolai Bunge, and Popular Welfare Dead Souls: The Inheritance Tax and the Economic Personality Corporations, Personhood, and the Case for Transparency Enter the Citizen: The Apartment Tax 4 Systematic Intimacy: Business Taxes and the Disciplining of Commercial Russia 126 The Laws of 1885 and the Map of Commercial Russia Disclosure, Exposure, and the Uses of the Norm Capital Gains, Contracts, Deeds, and Urban Real Estate Economic Individuation and State Aggregation 5 Mass Taxation in the Age of the Individual: The New Personal Taxation in Russia and the World  151 Back to the Person: Russia and the International Debate over the Income Tax The Russian Income Tax and the Political Crisis of 1905 The Inexorable Logic of Universalism 6 The Income Tax as Modern Government: Assessment, Self-Assessment, and Mutual Surveillance  174 The Mechanisms of Participation The Individual and the Personality in Fiscal Practice Evasion and Transparency The Income Tax and the Great War Russia and the Modern State Part 3. The Politics of Obscurity: Peasant Taxes, Excises, and the Vodka Monopoly to 1917 7 Everyone and No One: Indirect Taxes and the Vodka Monopoly to 1917  207 Revenue, Per Capita Rates, and the Limits of Social Reform

Contents ix

From Laissez-Faire to Nationalization Treasure, Public Order, and Public Health Prohibition, the War Budget, and the Financial Catastrophe 8 The Peasant and the Fisc: The State Budget and the Persistence of Collective Tax Apportionment  237 Peasant Direct Taxes and the State Revenue Budget to 1914 State Policy and the Practices of Uncertainty 9 The Local Practices of Peasant Taxation  257 Repartition Arrears and Forgiveness Collection and Punishment Taxes in Kind Was a Peasant a Person? Rural Taxation and the War-Time Crisis Part 4. The State and Revolution, the State and Evolution: Fiscal Practices and a New Regime, 1917–30 10 Soviet Russia and the Continuing History of the Russian State  295 11 The Meanings of Utopia: Taxes, Urban Unities, and the Several Assaults on Peasant Separateness, 1917–21  306 Urban Taxes, Nationalization, and the Achievable Utopia The Peasantry, Limited Government, and Unlimited Force 12 The Economy of Licences: Taxes and the New Economic Policy  333 Afterword. Russia, Socialism, and the Modern State  347 Notes 351 Bibliography 439 Index 471

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Tables and Figures

Tables 3.1 Direct Tax Receipts in 1913  97 3.2 Receipts from Direct Taxes, Fees, and Levies in 1913  98 7.1 Indirect Revenues by Category and Share in All State Revenues in 1913  209 8.1 Peasant Direct Tax Payments and Their Share in All Direct Tax Receipts in 1913  239 8.2 Peasant Direct Tax Payments and Their Share in All Direct Taxes, Fees, and Levies in 1913  240 8.3 Peasant Direct Tax Payments and Their Share in Total State Revenue Budget in 1913  241 Figures 3.1 3.2 6.1 9.1 11.1 12.1

Nikolai Khrist’ianovich Bunge  99 Sergei Iul’evich Witte  119 Vladimir Nikolaevich Kokovtsov  197 Sergei Korovin, “Before the Flogging at the County Board” (1884)  281 Typical Income Tax Form, 1920s  321 Nikolai Nikolaevich Kutler, ca 1900  339

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Preface

Almost thirty years ago I chose to study Russian history because I was interested in socialism, as was my whole family when we gathered around the dinner table in Athens, and as was a whole generation of Greeks who lived through an absurd dictatorship and its aftermath of enthusiasm, open debate, and legal demonstrations. But the conversation was worldwide. The Soviet Union was always part of the conversation in curious ways because we assumed that the world was bipolar, divided into the camp of existing socialism and the camp of capitalism. It gave us some awful choices. Would we question the USSR and thus socialism, since both sides told us that Soviet and socialist were a package deal? Or would we accept the USSR and with it a socialism that, for all its success in feeding and sheltering people, offered some particularly ugly moments of repression? Over time, serious discussion became less appropriate, and we turned to satire and irony to express the absurdity that was becoming the Soviet system. Was this, after all, socialism? We began to pose the question differently. Is the USSR socialist at all, to which my parents offered different answers. “Yes,” hastened my mother, Helen, a believer of sorts who was recovering from the shocks of 1956 and 1968. My father, Dionyssios, took the Socratic route: “What is socialism and why are you asking?” As a young, historically minded boy I asked a follow-up question: How did socialism come into existence in this way and not another? I needed to know Russia as much as I needed to know G.D.H. Cole, Oskar Lange, Karl Kautsky, and Ernst Mandel – and Leonid Brezhnev as much as Enrico Berlinguer and Willy Brandt. I took the plunge as an undergraduate in Montreal where George Rudé taught me France as class struggle, and Ronald Charbonneau taught me Russia as empire. So good were my teachers in the next few years that they pulled me back to imperial history: Geoffrey Hosking, Olga Crisp, Leopold

xiv  Preface

Haimson, Marc Raeff, and Richard Wortman. In Russia meanwhile I met a remarkable group of imperial historians who taught me about the long history of the Russian state idea and about the state school of Russian history: Anan’ich (husband and wife), Diakin, and Ganelin. In print I admired Chernukha and their intellectual godfather Zaionchkovskii. I soon found that a larger world of historians of Russia were asking similar questions as I, though with their own inflections: How does one narrate the history of Russia where 1917 is not a terminus and not Year One but a moment in a longer story? The Soviet period needs its prehistory, and the imperial period needs to know where it is headed. In this, George Yaney influenced me in ways he probably never intended, and Lars Lih offered me a model of cross-1917 narration. Martin Malia added his insistent voice when I had the pleasure of meeting him. All the while I matured with a remarkable group of graduate students in Morningside Heights, and we taught each other to read better and ask better questions. We still do, though we are much busier. These questions, of ideology and history, of Russia and the world, are still with me. Socialism and Marxism had myriad potentials and myriad faces, and one can explain historically why it took this form in Russia and not another, and why it took different forms in countries to Russia’s west and east. The answer that satisfies me just now is the historical character of the Russian state, and the contingencies that produced in Russia a particular brand of statism and a related brand of socialism. And what better way to explain that state than to study what states do always and everywhere: they tax, and in the process they define themselves and their populations. It allows me to compare the old empire with the new republic, and Russia with the countries with which it is regularly compared and contrasted, all in the wider context of modern statehood and citizenship. Taxation is by no means a small topic, but it opens the mind to even larger subjects. In recent centuries the populations of the world have been making a transition to citizenship, and this has been a mixed blessing. This book is an exploration of some enduring ambiguities, of modern satisfactions and disquiets.

••• The translations from other languages are my own, unless otherwise indicated. I refer to historical actors as “he,” “she,” or both depending on the context. Ministers and tax inspectors were all men, peasant payers tended to be men for historical reasons, and urban payers were, significantly, men as well as women. Numbers in the millions that are part of the text are represented as whole numbers in the millions followed by decimals rounded to the tenth. Terms for

Preface xv

weights, volume, and distance are anglicized and can be looked up in the list of Russian terms. Russian dates before 1918 are in the Old Style, that is the Julian calendar, which is thirteen days later than a date on the Gregorian calendar.

••• I am beyond grateful to Kate Warren, whom I met when she was five and I was ten, and whom I appreciated in a different way when we met again as adults. Ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμϐαίνουσιν, ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ. I dedicate the book to her. My eldest child, Dionyssios Maximillian, was born in the year in which I began my research, and he has grown into a young man of good sense, keen perception, humour, and, most important, a capacity to tell the difference between right and wrong. Not many people can say that for themselves. Mathilda Persephone followed with a breath-taking determination and an admirable disregard for the laws of physics and the conventions of gender, and at age nine she continues to be a marvel of the strong girl, the determined mind, and the irrepressible personality. James Galen – sword-fighter, all-round bruiser, and easy learner – followed and grew fast with wonderful role models, native intelligence, a terrific imagination, and the driest humour I  have ever seen in a six-year-old. They are all wise. Good editors are hard to come by, and I found one in Richard Ratzlaff of the University of Toronto Press. He has been a constant support and encouragement, keen to make books better, and a source of good advice and good cheer. He is graceful when he delivers good news (the book is good) and bad (the book is too long). He is the proof that a good academic press can also be a civil one. I owe to him the choice of two excellent outside reviewers who provided scores of large and small recommendations, almost all of which found their way into this book. Angela Wingfield, my copy editor, has been respectful of the text and has helped to make it better. Kenneth Pinnow read chapters and sections and opened to me vistas of analysis and historical literature. Peter Holquist has been a support since graduate school, the model of the clear and professional scholar and the indefatigable worker and critic. David Hoffmann is a critical and careful reader. Charles Steinwedel sharply criticized passages that needed criticism. Frederick Corney has always offered moral support. Vasilii Sablin nourished me with archival advice, hospitality, and friendship in Vologda, as he had in the harsh year of 1991. Matthew Turner brought to my thinking the encouragement of a sound mind and the parsing of an economist. Stephen Hoch gave me pointed queries and suggestions based on vast knowledge and an intolerance of nonsense. Jane Burbank has been usefully dubious of some of my premises and approaches and

xvi  Preface

always a fine and encouraging colleague. Thomas Owen and Donald Raleigh shared with me invaluable insights. My brother Charles was ready with expert research and a very good mind. At several venues a wider community of colleagues listened to my overviews and read some of the chapters, and their collective wisdom has helped make this a better book. They include Allegheny College, Binghamton University, Columbia University, the European University in St Petersburg, Harvard University, Georgetown University, the Ohio State University, New York University, Princeton University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Georgia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Vologda State Pedagogical University. Many archives offered professional support. They include the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA), the Vologda Regional State Archive (GAVO), the Russian State Archive of the Economy (RGAE), the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), the Central Party Archive (now the Russian State Archive of Socio-political History, RGASPI), and the Bakhmeteff at Columbia University. Libraries include the Russian National Library in St Petersburg, the State Library in Moscow, and the Regional Library in Vologda; the libraries at Columbia University, Stanford University, and the Hoover Institution; and the public libraries in Jeffersonville and Narrowsburg, New York State. At New York University (NYU), Diana Greene has been a solid bibliographer. Fiona Neale-May of the Jordan Center managed masterfully my institutional commitments and schedule in the final stages, allowing me time to write and revise. My students have been smart interlocutors: Elizabeth (Betty) Banks, Thomas Fleischman, Ivan Kostin, Cheng Hui Lim, Jamie Phillips, Anna Powers, David Rainbow, James Robertson, and Matthew Watkins. Brigid O’Keeffe, always the independent thinker, has graduated into a supportive colleague and careful reader, as has Chia Yin Hsu. Watkins produced an index that is as thoughtful as it is expert. I benefited from support that made travel and leave from teaching possible: the Hoover Institution where I was a National Fellow, the Remarque Institute at NYU under the auspices of the late Tony Judt, the Social Sciences Research Council, and the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research. The result, shortcomings and all, is my responsibility. Greenwich Village, New York July 2014

Russian Terms

Weights, Measures, and Currency Desiatina, unit of area. 1.09 hectares or 2.69 acres. Funt, unit of mass. 0.409 kilograms, and a rough equivalent to the British pound. Pud, unit of mass. 16.38 kilograms, 36.121 pounds, or 40 funt. Rubl’, unit of currency. Putatively silver based at moments before the 1890s; in practice often paper money (assignats) that fluctuated in value with emissions until stabilized in the gold standard of 1897. Russia left the gold standard in 1914 to pay for the war. The ruble was used during the Civil War alongside the sovznak (Soviet token) and was replaced by the chervonets and finally the Soviet ruble. Vedro, unit of liquid volume. 12.299 litres or 3.249 U.S. gallons. Versta, unit of distance. 1.0668 kilometres or 3,500 feet. Imperial Administrative Units and Offices Duma (Gorodskaia), Municipal Council. Municipal government elected from the 1870s with a narrow franchise of those who paid urban taxes, and from the 1890s with a more narrowed franchise that favoured wealthy owners of real estate. Gosudarstvennyi Sovet, State Council. Created in the early nineteenth century and appointed by the autocrat to vet and recommend new laws. From 1906 it operated as the upper chamber, and like the State Duma it approved the budget and new taxes before forwarding to the tsar for signature. Guberniia and Oblast’, province and region, respectively. The basic territorial division of the empire and the early USSR, and the basic administrative unit

xviii  Russian Terms

when viewed from the capitals. It was followed at the lower level by the district (uezd), the county (volost’), the town (gorod), and rural society (sel’skoe obshchestvo). Still used in the 1920s. Gusudarstvennaia Duma, State Duma. The legislature created in 1905 and elected by a broad male franchise until Stolypin narrowed the franchise in 1907 (the coup of 3 June). Four dumas were elected before 1917. Among its responsibilities was approval of the budget and of new taxes. Above it was the Gosudarstvennyi Sovet (State Council). Kazennaia palata, Treasury Office. Created in the 1770s and extended to all provinces and regions. Among its responsibilities were the administration of direct taxes and the employment of the Tax Inspectorate when this was created in 1885. Obshchina, the commune. Administered land use and land distribution among peasant households in some regions of Russia. Sometimes equated with the village and used in taxation because of its control of land allotments, but not formally a unit of tax administration. Prisutstvie. In tax practice, a commission that administered taxes and reviewed and set assessments. The commissions existed for most direct urban taxes and drew members from the employees of the central government (the inspector and other chinovniki of the Treasury Office), professional organizations related to that tax (for example, merchant guilds for the business taxes), local elected government (zemstvos and municipalities), and increasingly delegates elected by the pool of payers or appointed from the pool by the Treasury Office. Selo, the village. Usually a single settlement recognized in some tax and ­administrative matters, especially after the break-up of larger rural societies in 1899. Sel’skoe obshchestvo, the rural society. The lowest administrative unit in rural Russia and the institution responsible for the delivery of direct taxes from peasants. Sometimes equated with the village but often comprising several villages. Above it was the county (volost’), followed by the district (uezd) and the province (guberniia). Uchastok. A circuit, usually smaller than a town or county, used for one or another specific administrative function, for example, taxation, agronomic supervision, and public medicine. Uezd, district. The lowest level of state administration with hired full-time state employees and a separate self-government in the zemstvo. Above it was the province, below it the county (volost’). Both the state employees and the zemstvos were largely non-peasant in composition.

Russian Terms  xix

Volost’, county. The administrative level below the district (uezd) but comprising only peasants. It was the highest level of peasant self-government. It usually comprised more than one rural society. Zemstvo. Elected local self-administration, created in 1864. Responsible for infrastructure and public services. The property qualification for the vote and the elections through curia ensured that they were largely non-peasant in composition, and the employees too were largely non-peasant and ­non-noble by birth and outlook. Operated at the provincial and district levels, and very briefly in 1917 at the county level. Abolished by the Soviet government. Administrative Offices from 1917 Finotdel. The financial section of a sovet (council) at the provincial and district levels, the responsibilities of which included administering direct taxes and local budgets. Operated at the provincial (gubfinotdel) and district (ufinotdel) levels. Narkom, Narodnyi Komissariat, People’s Commissariat. The functional equivalent of a ministry from 1917. Sovnarkom, Sovet Narodnykh Komissarov, Council of People’s Commissars. Roughly a cabinet of the heads of the People’s Commissariats from 1917. Vesenkha, VSNKh, Supreme Council of the National Economy. Economic directorate responsible for nationalized industries and some planning and allocation. VTsIK, All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the apex of the system of soviets as this emerged in 1917 and 1918. It vetted and issued decrees.

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STATES OF OBLIGATION

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Introduction A Short History of Taxes: Russia and the World from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries

To say that taxes reflect forms of rule and government is to miss an opportunity; taxes are forms of rule and government. By studying them we can see the workings and evolutions of an entire regime. Taxation is one thing that a state does and always does. It does this with all people, be it by taxing them or by deciding not to tax them. By exploring taxes the historian or any critical observer can explore the evolution of the key categories we often take for granted – a state, an economy, and a person – and come a long way towards characterizing and comparing regimes.1 The Analytic Categories: The State, the Economy, and the Person There are different ways to study taxes historically, some more obvious than others. At first glance we measure their weight and incidence and largely confirm what we already thought – that an old regime in particular exempted those who were best able to pay and taxed those who were least able to pay. It is an easy case to make because the old regimes tended not to be structured to achieve social fairness and instead used taxes to reinforce legal distinctions through different obligations and privileges. From that starting point we measure progress towards a new regime by the extent to which taxes were extended to all persons regardless of their status, and payments became more commensurate with capacities.2 Historians of Russia have used much the same standards of equality and fairness in studies of rural taxation.3 Studies of urban taxation in Russia are fewer, but they likewise measure success in terms of equitability and social justice.4 On occasion we are pleasantly surprised to learn that fairness was achievable.5 More often, we lament that modern polities fail to live up to their own standards, or perhaps we conclude that taxes are a mere palliative that cannot redress the social imbalances of liberalism or capitalism or, for that matter, realize the promises of socialism.6

4  States of Obligation

This is a story worth telling, but there is more to be said. Making a fiscal system fair meant introducing changes not just to the tax bill but to the person who paid taxes, to the state that demanded them, and to the economy in which the wealth was produced. All three – state, economy, and person – are fundamental categories of analysis, and all three invite more rigorous exploration. Taxes offer a good occasion to do so. These entities were not autonomous but were mutually constitutive; they were not fixed in meaning but evolving.7 The terms need to be historicized and denaturalized (“de-familiarized” as Viktor Shklovskii put it), as a reminder that they were produced in particular ways in particular contexts; nothing was predetermined, what was written could have been written differently, and what was written could be unwritten. One may also pause at the tax practices that we take for granted but that emerged for specific historical reasons: declaration, income (and the national income), reporting, and even assessment (rather than dues and imposts). Each of these has a history. Fiscal theorists at the time expressed the broadest change as a movement away from systems of apportionment to systems of assessment. Into the nineteenth century, in Russia as much as in France, state needs were defined in advance and apportioned to the population (rasklad) with little regard for the capacity of the payer to bear the burden; the sums were then repartitioned among smaller territories and collectives (razverstka). How the localities decided on these divisions within a community was not the concern of the central government until very late, about the 1860s in urban Russia and the 1890s in rural Russia. The payer and the economy were separate from the state and largely unknown to it, and the system neither required much knowledge nor generated it. It was, briefly stated, a matter of rule, an unexplicated and unelaborated demand by a separate and sovereign power. Reformers pursued instead a regime of assessment (oblozhenie), whereby the capacities of the economy and the payer were calculated before the tax rate was set. Taxes moved towards a system of government rather than mere rule, and the culmination was the personal income tax that was based on the known paying power of persons and enterprises. The system required better knowledge and also produced knowledge in the process of assessing and collecting. Those who introduced the fiscal innovations were rethinking the state as a function of the national economy, the national income, and the sum total of individual paying capacities. The state could no longer be seen as free standing, at least not entirely. Nor could the national economy be free standing, because it was being given coherence and statistical expression by the state that depended on it. The economy was regularized and practices institutionalized in order to give it a form that was visible, countable, and accessible to the treasury,

Introduction 5

even as many held that the economy functioned best when the state left it alone. (National income, by way of example, was not a dispassionate view of the economy but a term developed for the purposes of income taxation.)8 Nor, finally, could the person be seen as entirely autonomous, because the person was forced to reconsider himself or herself as an integrated citizen whose economic activities had state significance and who should be viewed primarily in economic terms, with a sworn declaration as the annual reminder. In this light, taxation is not so much a weight or a burden, imposed by one discrete entity on another; it is equally a nexus where basic categories meet and reshape each other, and a way to express and negotiate the tensions of a modern regime.

••• Russians like other Europeans in the nineteenth century practised a philosophical duality based on two notions of personhood and two notions of what the modern state should look like. Political economists expressed the duality in the fiscal codes they devised. The person would enjoy immunities from state power, as revolutionaries and liberals from the late eighteenth century proclaimed, but at the same time the person was implicated in a new kind of state, as the new statesmen of the later nineteenth century insisted.9 Modern government is all about individuation and a new focus on the person rather than the territory or the collective, but this did not necessarily mean pure liberty from outside force, or a march of history that is measured teleologically by its capacity to afford immunities to the person. That is only one version of liberalism and a small part of modernity. It produced the equally modern objection that rampant individualism was producing a deracinated citizenry lacking in solidarities. It was immediately met with a countervailing movement to establish a national or social whole that would end the perceived anomie that liberalism had produced – an anomie detected in Tocqueville’s early disquiets and by the Utopian socialists, in Durkheim’s sociology, and in Mann’s philosophical rejection of “the liberal individualism of the West.”10 The greater and shared concern with the person meant more intense intervention in order to create a more malleable and improved human being, more in harmony with or integrated into one or another whole.11 These wholes tended to be aggregates of the whole population, not the segmented and particular communities of a legal estate or town. In the one scenario the state was separate from the person and stood above the person, with greater or lesser degrees of autonomous power from one regime to the next.12 This state claimed taxes from some distance and without

6  States of Obligation

detailed information about personal wealth. The state may have been more or less demanding but explicitly or tacitly, willingly or out of necessity, by design or by neglect, recognized the existence of the person in a separate realm. By the same token, the person could cultivate that separateness and affirm autonomies, and find refuge in the economy, society, civil society, local territory, or family, any of which could be defined in terms of its separateness from the state and as the state’s contradistinction. The autonomous state is indeed the setting for all sorts of historical narratives, fiscal ones included. It was this separateness that allowed the state to venture into the economic realm as a more or less alien force, and exercise what Theda Skocpol terms “autonomous power.” This state was always “predatory,” Margaret Levi tells us; “I hypothesize that rulers are predatory in that they try to extract as much as possible from the population.” That drive defies changes in parties and regimes and instead constitutes a continuous state act that is “stripped of all misleading ideologies.”13 Separateness makes for the very notion of “intervention” in the society, the economy, and the person. It was this separateness that allowed the person and society to resist, as James Scott would have it; persons, classes, and societies encountered the state but were not of the state, and they stubbornly maintained identities of their own.14 In the other scenario the state is a membership organization that presumes and achieves fuller knowledge of the economy and the person; it comprises the people it governs.15 In this rendering, the state “cannot stand as a transcendent power over and against society,” Gianfranco Poggi writes, “but it must thoroughly ‘innervate’ it, interpenetrate itself with it.”16 As Bob Jessop puts it, the state in its inclusive sense cannot be treated as an originating subject; it is “a set of institutions that cannot, qua structural ensemble, exercise power.”17 It is instead a locus of power in which the economy and the population can be viewed and acted upon. Gramsci’s stato integrale casts a long shadow over both of them. In fiscal terms, the one state generates steady and modest revenue based on guesses about what the payer can afford, and it was well understood that the wealthy paid less than they could and the poor more than they should. The other state produces the massive revenue on which modern polities depend, and proceeds with greater confidence that the tax is commensurate with capacities because those capacities are better known than ever. The one allows for greater privacies and greater unfairness; the other achieves a new fairness with less room for privacy. The newer fiscal order reshaped the objects it taxed and invited payers to join in the process with declarations and reports on other payers. It required a new kind of payer and a new kind of citizen, and the system could work to the extent that it asked people to participate and change, not simply obey. In the emphatic

Introduction 7

words of Poulantzas, “The law is never identical with pure negativity.” The law “lays down things to be done, dictates positive obligation.” It “does not merely impose silence and/or allow people to speak, it often compels them to speak (to bear witness, denounce others, and so on).”18 Ultimately, to follow Orwell and go even further, we are concerned with the distinction between an old notion of rule by command – “thou shalt,” which required obeisance before a separate and superordinate power – and a newer notion of using the tax system to tell people who they are – “thou art,” which required the payer to become a new person and participate in power.19 The “economy” is likewise a term that generates slippage and confusion relating to its intrinsic duality. It had been and continued to be a function of the state, but political economists began to use it in the early nineteenth century as one more way to express a universal whole, alongside the society, the nation, and the state itself. In the 1820s and 1830s, Friedrich List, in the absence of a German state, used the economy as a way of aggregating the entire population and termed it the Nationalökonomie, though he, his contemporaries, and their heirs never gave up on the Cameralist notion that the economy was also a realm of state management. For Karl-Heinrich Rau it was the Volkswirthschaft (or Volkswirtschaft), for French economists the économie nationale as well as the économie populaire, and so on.20 The Russian narodnoe khoziaistvo (literally the popular economy, translated in this book as the national economy) was a neologism in the 1890s and still new in the 1920s. I.M. Kulisher wondered in 1925 whether it was too soon to write its history. In great detail he showed that previous histories were in fact accounts of individual sectors or of state finances, and an early attempt to write the history of “the Russian national economy” in 1911 by Professor M.V. Dovnar-Zapol’skii left out agriculture; the rural statistics were too poor, and it was hard to picture peasants as part of something national (narodnoe).21 This economy was a work in progress, but its novelty lay in its potential to aggregate all people. In every case the economy conveyed the new notion that the economy comprised people even as it encountered them. The Russian “khoziaistvo,” after all – like the word “economy,” it was derived from the word “household” – implied management even if it travelled in the direction of an organic unity. The economist and political philosopher Petr Struve insisted that this economy was a space, not a tool, and that it “lacks a subject” because it is itself a subject. His contemporary Sergei Iu Witte, Minister of Finances, read some of the same German sources and called the economy the state’s instrument in national consolidation – also a space but one that was shaped by the state and used to create better people.22 According to Witte, the modern state on that German model entails “the complete subordination of the personhood of the citizen to the

8  States of Obligation

well-being of the state.” This was done in the school and the army but also in economic policy where Witte would make his name.23 Taxes in Witte’s view were the universal and ever-present tool that might realize the economic whole, and the modern economy was state-centred from the outset. The economy may act on us or it is the place where our actions take place. Our key categories, then, are the state, the economy, and the person. This book argues that new kinds of taxes helped define these categories, introduced a fundamental duality to each of them, and put each in tension with the others. It is a further argument that the tensions have been ongoing: modern government produced its own dualities, sometimes combatted them, and usually thrived on them. It is a final argument that when the Bolshevik Party did try to end these tensions once and for all after 1917, it was doing something new. This indeed is why Soviet Russia was a new regime. Taxes and Regimes: Russia in International Context To say that taxes are always collected, then, is not to say that taxes always mean the same thing over time and space. There were many ways to be obligated, many kinds of states making distinct demands, and different regimes that gave different meaning to the same fiscal practices. The topic invites comparison. Geographically we mean the comparison of one country with another. Russia is at the centre of this study, but the comparative measure is borne in mind and explicated regularly in an effort to avoid parochialism. Any country looked ­at very closely will seem unique; the trick is to find the right way to abstract from the one case in order to compare with the other. We will discover the great extent to which tax practices and laws were shared over the European borders, across the continent, across the Atlantic in Canada and the United States, and across the Pacific in Australia. This comparative awareness is vital because the study of any national history implies it, as in the simple statement that Russia was “behind” or its tax system “unfair.” Somewhere a more advanced and fair system was imaginable, and we should identify the comparative yardstick in use.24 Temporally we are concerned with the ways in which Russian practices changed or did not change from the eighteenth century through the era of the Great Reforms, through three revolutions, and through a civil war. This comparison too is implied in a study that stops or starts in 1917, and we can make more thoughtful distinctions by researching on both sides of that marker. To be sure, we have some good studies of tax burdens before and after 1917, mainly focused on the peasantry,25 but we are equally interested in taxes as a form of government. In that connection, and while appreciating the striking similarities

Introduction 9

of ideas, laws, and practice in Imperial and Soviet Russia, we also ask how identical provisions were adopted in regimes that were distinct. Our story necessarily begins in the eighteenth century. From that time political economists and philosophers across Europe who could not speak directly and openly about the shortcomings of absolute monarchial rule (because the absolute monarchs objected) could engage in technical debates about the better way to raise revenue. Obliquely they proposed a better way to govern. If the French Revolution stood for equality, then it had been on the state agenda for decades before 1789 when ministers sought ways to raise more revenue from all the population, including the privileged.26 In Britain, meanwhile, tax reform was paying for a larger state and also a new kind of state that did its best to ignore who the payers were by birth and status and instead followed exchanges and transactions. All people consumed, bought, and sold, and in the process of taxing these activities, the conversation turned to all people, not just taxable classes.27 The people demanded and abetted the change in Boston and Paris in the 1770s and 1780s when they challenged the tax demands of their absolute rulers and insisted that they be part of the process, and in London in 1799 when Parliament adopted a first experiment in income taxation that fell on the privileged. These were larger reconsiderations that fed directly into two famous political revolutions, and in Britain they reflected a steady commercial one.28 The conversation extended to St Petersburg in the year before 1812 when Mikhail Speransky, so admired by Napoleon, proposed new ways to tax exempted wealth, and the exempted persons made it a point to have him removed from office. The conversation was sustained from the 1850s as enlightened bureaucrats, confronted with a seemingly immovable system of legal estate discrimination, considered how tax systems might introduce equality without quite saying so. They presaged not an overt revolution, at least not yet, but they did challenge the old order of privilege and exemption; they did this through periods of reaction in the 1880s and 1890s (“the Counter-Reforms”) and under an autocracy that showed few signs of yielding its absolute powers. By the 1880s, the excises and other indirect taxes paid by everyone were becoming the mainstays of the budget. As for direct taxes, the nobleman and the privileged merchant were both paying for the first time, and the debate had changed from whether they should pay taxes to a question of how much and in what manner. By then the aristocrat had accepted the new standard of measurement – wealth and income rather than birth – and was forced to argue his or her case in the new idiom of universal obligation. In the process, almost unwittingly, the aristocrat had lost the larger argument; it was mattering just a little bit less that this person was a nobleman, and the new regulations called this person – blandly and significantly – a payer.

10  States of Obligation

European fiscal reformers taught a lesson that Russians learned quickly and well: the best way to avoid legal distinctions was to ignore people altogether and instead look at the things they owned. The eighteenth century was the age of the cadastre, which the Physiocrats had valued as an objective and legally neutral way to raise revenue.29 Russians had a similar conversation all the way to 1917, though the cadastre was never completed.30 A townhouse, viewed dispassionately from a distance and measured for its size, windows, and carriage-houses, and expressed in the universalizing idiom of money, would not tell whether the owner was a count or a peasant, gentry or burgher, Orthodox, Muslim, Catholic, Jew, or Lutheran. Expressed as cash, all persons were comparable and belonged on the same scale. With the numbers aggregated as imperial revenue, territorial differences might appear less important; the numbers would not reveal that one payer was in Tashkent, another in Riga, and another in Gomel’. For some of the same reasons of equality and equivalence, the tax collector would not even enter the property or interrogate the owner; the payer’s anonymity was to be guarded in an effort to avoid noting his or her legal status. Anonymity may or may not have implied privacy as well, though in places like France it did.31 The new tax system was a form of economic liberalism, and it could converge with political liberalism in the nineteenth century, most explicitly in France and the United States where taxes and constitutions were often debated in the same breath, and customarily in Britain where one could claim the right to be ignored. It meant guarding the rights and immunities of the person against the encroachments of the state, very often at the price of great fiscal unfairness. This legacy never went away. To this day, taxes on property from New York to Yorkshire tend to be absurdly removed from one’s income or the value of the property. When more revenue is needed, increased rates are lumped on territories and properties with little regard for the relative burden it represents for the payer. In Britain the pattern continued into the 1980s and took the form of the Council Tax which opponents quickly dubbed the Poll Tax in honour of its regressiveness. It is still not clear if the purpose of the tax was to make all arithmetically equal in their obligations or to relieve the better off. Such taxes do both, and they skirt the issue of paying power and income.32 In California the backlash led to the crude ceilings of Proposition 13 and a deeper kind of injustice.33 The flat rates that we decry and perpetuate relate to the fact that the tax assessor cannot know what the property is worth unless he or she violates the owner’s privacy. Homeowners everywhere are told never to let assessors in, and even the ardent advocate of fairness will make fairness impossible by stopping them at the property line. The objections and evasions are chalked up to one or another local idiosyncrasy: Russian history under the Mongols, autocracy, or

Introduction 11

Communism; Southern Californian libertarianism and fantasies of rugged individualism; Ottoman rule in Greece some two centuries ago, or even the legacy of classical demagogy and Alcibiades;34 and the freeborn Englishman’s right ­to be left alone. However, in so doing we obscure the internationalized pattern of public-private contestations that animate the national debates. Governments in turn can be sensitive to popular suspicions and share in the unease. Pitt, who introduced the income tax of 1799, was worried about the possibility of state intrusion and a coercive encounter with payers, and inserted provisions to avert it; nevertheless, the law was repealed in 1816. (Russia tried it in 1812 on Speransky’s advice and abandoned it as impracticable.) Into the nineteenth century the British government ceremonially burned tax records in the furnaces of Westminster; it was one such ceremony that got out of hand and burned down the complex, in 1833. Not to worry: duplicate tax records were secretly kept elsewhere.35 British Liberals lamented at the turn of the century that they had created a system of thoroughgoing inquisition despite themselves. Greek inspectors confronting a breathtakingly evasive population felt powerless to confront evaders directly and have taken to aerial and satellite surveillance of properties in search of unregistered buildings and swimming pools:36 the skies and space are not yet private.37 Another Greek peculiarity? American tax assessors are using aerial surveillance as well.38 By the same token, excise and tariff systems, flat rates that fall mainly on consumption and turnover, are preferred by governments because they are strictly impersonal and are felt less keenly by the payers than is a tax on income, even if they are deeply unfair. These flat rates promise regular and mass revenue, the political satisfaction that we are strictly equal, and social unease over our different burdens.39 But that is to get ahead of ourselves. At the time, or into the mid-nineteenth century, this practice of strict privacy was radical, and not only because it was blind to legal status and gave potentially everyone a tax bill. It delineated the boundaries between payer and collector, established and reinforced a regime of civil rights (understood as immunities, to be sure), and helped create the larger division of a polity into state and society, government and economy, person and power. Emerging from regimes of arbitrariness and absolutism, this was progress. Laissez-faire was one version of this because it respected the separateness of the person’s economic life from the power of the state, and Russia had its free-trade moment in the 1850s and 1860s. More generally, it was part of the birth of the new regime in Europe and North America. Everyone would pay something, everyone was obligated, and the state would measure obligations from a politically safe distance from the payer and the private sector. The tax farmer and the soldier would no longer break down the door of the Moscow shoemaker, the Provençal vintner, or the Massachusetts merchant. A new kind

12  States of Obligation

of inspector would make educated guesses about the bounties concealed inside. The assessments would be “external” (vneshnie) by observing the outside of a property, using “indicators” (priznaki) of wealth, because the inspector would not or could not enter the property in question. Only from the mid-century across Europe did the arithmetic equality of the new regimes begin to seem unfair. Lacking a direct assessment of a property, the fiscal system could scarcely distinguish between the stock brokerage and the blacksmith, so long as the buildings were the same size, had the same number of windows and chimneys, had a comparable number of people entering and leaving on a given day, and were on the same street. Originally this was the point in that it ignored the fact that the broker was a merchant by legal estate and the smithy a burgher. But wealth was being generated not by the value of the building but by the commercial, banking, or manufacturing enterprise that it housed; the building was at best an indirect and poor indicator of well-being. What mattered more was the new wealth being generated. Money was the new standard for measuring status, and money would be the new universalistic standard for placing the payer in one or another category of liability. As Edwin Seligman put it in his disarming way a century ago, the assessment of things meant losing track of the total wealth of each person and precluded the taxation of aggregate wealth. Wealth should be assessed through each person: “For, after all, taxes are paid by human beings and not by inanimate things.”40 The unfairness was redressed, only in part, in Britain with its Income Tax Act of 1842. Here the government began to examine not just wealth and property but also the movement of payments from one person or institution to another. No privacy was compromised once the money had left one person’s hands and before it reached the next. It was a measure more in keeping with the new kind of wealth that was being generated by British capitalism, and it allowed the state to participate in the enormous movement of capital that marked the new age. Now at least the earner would pay a percentage of the “income” – the new concept of moving capital, refined for the purposes of taxation. It was flat but at least it was proportional. Quickly this too was outmoded by the belief that the wealthier person should pay not only more as a proportion of income but also a larger share of the income, and “progression” – steeper marginal percentages, the more one surpassed subsistence – became the word of the day. The new system depended on direct knowledge, not guesses, of what a person earned and spent in a given year, and it depended on and generated new forms of information. Like so many aspects of modern government, taxes were being determined by information and knowledge, not by force alone.41 State revenue, historically the function of state need that was then imposed on a population, would now

Introduction 13

become a function of exchange in the economy. The “national income” – literally the sum total of all individual incomes calculated for tax purposes – was the basis for state income. This would generate the huge revenues that paid for the larger state in the decades preceding 1914, from costly armaments to nascent welfare institutions.42 Although in each country the occasion for debating comprehensive income assessment was different – French defeat in 1871, the costs of welfare provisions in Germany, the Russo-Japanese War and the Russian Revolution of 1905, the Dreadnought arms race and the build-up for war on both sides of the Atlantic – they all arrived at the comparable set of provisions that we call the income tax. In fact, we mean the personal income tax. Prussia, where both guns and butter were large items of expenditure and concern, led the way in 1892 when it introduced not just a tax on certain payments but a tax on the aggregate of a person’s net income.43 It ignited a debate that would rage for the next few decades in almost all the national capitals of Europe and North America. The person was no longer just a payer but a “subject” of taxation – the aggregate of all salaries and expenditures, wages and deductions, that produced net income. Russia was already in step with Europe and North America when it formally introduced an income tax bill in 1907 and adopted it in 1916. Since the 1880s a series of measures had made urban and commercial taxes calibrated, from the business taxes of 1885 to the apartment tax of 1893. State property taxes in towns became calculated rather than merely imposed. Indirect taxes meanwhile piggybacked on a new and dynamic exchange economy and by definition were in tune with economic activity. Together the new kinds of direct and indirect taxes supported a state machinery that cost around 200 million rubles in the budget of 1855 and 3.4 billion rubles in 1913. The larger budgets called for new revenue to finance a new state, and the new state of surveillance and information gathering made possible the new revenues. It was clear from the outset that this movement to intensive assessment was creating a new tension. Laissez-faire had not blinded the state to the economy and the economic actor; it brought them into focus, it set the conditions for a new relationship that was more intimate, and produced statistical categories, tools, and data that were more penetrating and encompassing. The separateness of state and economy – and with it the idea that the person could retreat into the economy and avoid the state – was subverted as soon as it was articulated.44 Civil rights and privacy were rethought as states learned more about their citizens’ economic lives; and states could do good things for the citizenry if that citizenry told the treasury more about its wealth and poverty, its capacities and needs.45

14  States of Obligation

It was a paradox of citizenship: the self-reliant person was made so by the activist state. The more the person could be self-reliant as an economic actor and imagine oneself to be independent of the state, the more the state should tend to one’s basic needs and make that person economically independent.46 The regimes of privacy – private sectors and private persons – were similarly in question: the private could only be protected when it was expressed and debated in public, protected and nurtured by the state.47 The state could only tax and assist if it knew what the population could spare and what the population needed. In Russia too a new rhetoric of popular welfare – narodnoe blagosostoianie – took firm hold in the 1880s, and demands that this state do more were as frequent as calls that it leave its population alone. Citizenship did not simply have the two normative sides of liberty and obligation, or the simplistic balance between rights and duties,48 but the dynamic tension of individual autonomy and personal commitment to the national whole. The citizen might exist in relation to the state and stand outside it to consent, meet obligations, or resist, or the citizen might be a participating member of the state who expressed his or her interests, demands, and needs in the state itself.49 Russia was hardly the first European state to insist on full civic commitment without affirming immunities and rights of consent; France had done precisely this with its tax policies before 1789, and, in general, modern citizenship began in the fiscal realm of obligation rather than in electoral politics and government by consent.50 The person’s relationship with the state was an ongoing conversation in Russia, as it was elsewhere, expressed as civic attitudes and rituals (grazhdanstvennost’) sooner than legal status (grazhdanstvo). It matters that these practices were being integrated into an autocracy and that the legal term for a Russian was “subject,” not “citizen.”51 It made for a free-wheeling discussion where the limits and boundaries between state and person were less clear. The problem was precisely that Russia was de jure an autocracy, while the discussion of the person’s relationship with the state was not so much a legal and statutory one, with clear markers and delimitations, as it was a matter of bureaucratic practices and philosophical reflection.52 In Soviet times the term “citizen” was more appropriate, and the premise was unambiguous: the person was not outside the state but comprised it and also had no choice. The state would not negotiate with the population, since negotiation required a degree of separateness between the two parties; instead the state would mobilize the population. Citizenship was the goal (a more perfected person) and the means to achieve it (a visible and malleable population). Across Europe and North America the obscurity of the person that made for coercion and neglect yielded to the more modern complaint: anxiety that the

Introduction 15

state knew too much and had too many capacities. “Surveillance,” lest we forget, began as a term for monitoring and gathering information, and it was entirely necessary to good government, including fair and reasonable taxation; it later added the dimensions of ubiquitous spying and prying, with sometimes vague and amorphous protests against an intrusion on a purportedly private life. However, the private, as we will have many occasions to repeat, was always to some extent created in public acts, and personhood itself was an evolving concept that can be studied because it was shaped by public and official categories, in public and official conversations. In many ways the person was a product of state laws and categories; and that person might be produced as decidedly autonomous or decidedly permeable. New fiscal terms expressed the transparency of the payer. The “person” and the “payer” were joined by the “economic personality.” The latter term was developed in Prussia in the 1890s and adopted worldwide as the fiscal counterpart to the malleable and fungible subject of psychoanalysis.53 It was the partitive and transparent contrast to the unexamined or fortified individual of the earlier systems, or the neglected one of the even earlier systems. Much of the argument against progressive taxation on both sides of the Atlantic concerned civil rights, state inquisition, and the loss of individual autonomy. The rates themselves were not beside the point, but the enduring debate lay elsewhere. A few benefited from the ongoing efforts to shield the person’s incomes from the state, but many more joined in the generalized protest against government intrusion whether it benefited them materially or not. It was a rhetoric and debate conditioned by the assumption that any person who was outside the state necessarily shared an identity and an interest with any other, even if their wealth and income were deeply unequal and their economic interests diverging. It was expressed in the trope of the American voter who supported candidates who would reduce the taxes on the very rich, but not on himself, convinced that this was a way to affirm the political liberty of all. In the confusion of libertarianism and entitlement, an American protester in 2009 demanded that politicians “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” (Medicare is a government program.) It was too easy to ridicule the man and miss the wider paradox he was expressing: the simultaneous desire to be left alone and to be enabled by that same government.54 The framework and the debate, then, persist. A specifically American rhetoric that casts taxes as socialistic and Marxist has provided the world with much entertainment,55 but it is just one idiom for expressing a contest between the state and the economy or the state and the individual that is neither American nor new. French cabinets fell when they tried to pass an income tax bill in the 1890s, and a proper law was delayed until 1917.56 Or witness the

16  States of Obligation

French millionaire actor Gérard Depardieu, who, fleeing to Russia for its flat tax in 2012, scoffed back at his compatriots, “You believe that success, creativity, talent – difference in fact – must be punished.”57 Europeans have been at it since the nineteenth century in their national idioms – the French who decried being rendered “completely naked” before the state, the Englishmen offended that they were forced to swear to their declarations and commit perjury before their God, the Russians suspicious of (and captivated by) the “fiscal anthropometrics” that dissected them as economic actors, and the Germans lamenting that they were reduced to a “nation of spies” and mutual denunciation. The modern state practised steady surveillance rather than merely command, it required updated information on changes in income rather than on the existence of properties, and it needed to trace the motion of wealth rather than its location. This was no small task for any bureaucracy, and the solution provided in Prussia and adopted worldwide was to make the payers and the citizenry do the work of assessment when they completed their tax forms and swore to them. The state intervened not to confront a payer but to induce the payer to do the work of the state; and once the payer had sworn before one or another God that the declaration was true, the burden of proof was shifted from the treasury to the payer. This produced the notion that the citizen, not the state, was doing the taxing or that the state was taxing only to the extent that it comprised the citizenry. The mode of thinking was expressed in taxation as “self-assessment,” which it is still called in Britain today. Modern taxation also entails mutual surveillance in the form of reports on payments; one person’s deduction is another person’s tax bill. Moreover, a century ago the process was managed by elected assessment commissions comprising the payers themselves in places like England, Prussia, and some American states. In Russia these were called prisutstviia, and they were used in all direct urban and commercial taxes. The commissions legitimized a practice by making it participatory, even if the practice was introduced in a constitutional monarchy, a republic, or an unapologetic autocracy.58 By enlisting to the needs of the state the tools of civil society in the form of monitored bank transactions, legal contracts, credit reports, insurance and mortgage policies, and all manner of economic exchanges, the state could plausibly claim that it was doing nothing new or pernicious; civil society was already a space of visibility and disclosure, made possible by the protections and infrastructures of the state. If we felt exposed, then we as economic actors had done it to ourselves when we applied for a loan or took out an insurance policy, when we contracted to buy or sell properties and merchandise – the information gleaned by a newly inquisitive tax inspector. The state had been “mining data” long before the term was in vogue.

Introduction 17

The treasury would gather more revenue and the tax would be fairer if the inspector knew just what a person earned in that year and what he or she could reasonably spare for the treasury. The claim would be more confident, evasion less possible. Given that there were few options other than to pay – it was based on concrete knowledge and it was confirmed by one’s fellow citizens – it was a fine time to become a virtuous citizen and pay up.59 All told, then, the dual understanding of citizenship animated a dual understanding of the state. The burdens that had been imposed and resisted by private citizens were being assimilated by participating citizens who expressed their selves in declarations and in tax brackets and exemption levels. The person could be the antipode of the state and the victim of power, or the person could be realized in state practices and act as the conduit of power.60 The idea of the citizen could imply the rightful person who was immune and autonomous, able when necessary to say no to the state, and advised to do so by the likes of Tom Payne and J.S. Mill;61 or the committed and integrated actor who was a member of the polity, less able to say no because he was himself the state, and advised to reveal all by the likes of Hegel. On a more basic level, the person may have no choice, as the Bentham brothers proposed in their Panopticon – first developed as a manufactory during Samuel’s stay in Russia, no less62 – since their acts and transactions were open to public view. Consciousness and citizenship, coercion and compulsion – these might be less relevant than was the regime of discipline that emerged in the nineteenth century. Subject and object were being blurred.63 The new logic eroded the most basic proposition that a tax was a burden imposed by an outside force that could therefore be resisted.64 It was disrupted by a universalism that held that taxation and coercion were reflexive actions, acted by and on oneself; and that any claim on one person benefited the whole to which the person belonged, so that ultimately surrendering tax was to the benefit of the payer. The problem faced by the protesting payer was not simply the avarice that animated his or her refusals (which all suspected), but the fact that one was saying no to his or her own state and therefore resisting oneself. In an extension of that same modern logic, not only would Soviet Russia reject the idea of resistance on grounds that it was a rejection of oneself – that argument was already quite common65 – but universalism could make the punishment self-inflicted, requiring signed confessions and the denunciation of citizen by citizen. If the state was everyone, then whatever the state did was in the name of everyone and to the benefit of everyone, including the victim. Punishment was a way to honour the condemned as a rightful citizen, Hegel had written in an argument in favour of capital punishment.66 Even executions, Bukharin wrote in 1920, were not imposed by an

18  States of Obligation

outside force but by the population on itself as “self-discipline”; the survivors would make up a better citizenry.67 The distinctiveness of the modern state lay in its deliberate and careful establishment of an economy and a citizenry that were separate from itself; and as it peered more carefully across the divide in order to calculate and assess needs and capacities, it began to erase that distinction altogether.68

••• The comparative awareness is a good antidote to parochialism. There was little in the Russian fiscal debates that was not also discussed in London, Paris, Berlin, Melbourne, Ottawa, and Washington. The debate was truly international as chancelleries in one capital looked to the records of chancelleries in another for both the techniques of government and the larger meaning of what they did – which is to say, in a nutshell, to obscure the difference between government and governed, to make the business of government participatory, and to synchronize state revenue with the national economy. The Russian expert Ivan Kh. Ozerov spent years in Britain, Germany, France, and Switzerland to research his doctorate on direct taxation and, immediately on his return, ­became an adviser to Russian cabinets and legislatures. His colleague Pavel Genzel’ was a specialist in British inheritance and income taxation and also advised officials in St Petersburg. (Both stayed to advise the Soviet government in the 1920s.) Journalists in St Petersburg writing for the Russian Economist read the French Economist, the Belgian Economist, and the London Economist and mobilized opinion for or against a given measure. By the time Nicholas II had signed the income tax law in 1916, he was extending a model that had passed three years earlier in Washington and Berlin (for the whole German empire), and he anticipated the French measure by a year. This is not to say that Russia was simply borrowing from the West; everyone was borrowing from everyone. The foremost American expert on direct taxation at the start of the century, Edwin Seligman, was trained in Germany and wrote primarily about European practices as they might be applied in the United States. French experts wrote with an eye on Germany, and the income tax was proposed in Paris (and Washington and St Petersburg) soon after the Prussian measure was passed in 1891. All studied the new British procedures in 1906 that seemed to require universal declaration, and these became part of the French and Russian deliberations of that same year. All waited to see whether the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would pass, as it did in 1913, removing the final obstacle to federal personal taxation. Russians functioned in an international scholarly, expert, journalistic, and juridical

Introduction 19

community. Modern government techniques and principles were animating formally unlimited autocracies alongside formally limited and elected governments. Both were ways of nurturing citizens, and whether the citizens also consented to their governments was a different matter.69 And Russia in Its Own Context Comparable is not to say identical, and there are two main areas in which one can begin to locate Russia’s distinctiveness on a terrain that it occupied with other Great Powers. The first area concerns the contrast between the very large ambitions for good government and integration, which Russia shared with other countries, and the limited capacities of the Russian state, which were specific to this empire and later this republic. At least, nowhere else was the gap so yawning, because so much of the population was peasant and legally, traditionally, and customarily exempt from the practices of modern government. At issue was an absolute and glaring scarcity of the information that would have made good government possible, and the weakness of the mechanisms that would have generated information. The Russian state, which has been derided as “strong” and “muscular” because it practised greater coercion,70 should be rethought as a weak one because its contacts with its population were so poorly developed, at least when the peasantry is taken into account; and peasants living in villages comprised four-fifths of the population. Huge changes were contemplated before the logistical and administrative groundwork could be put in place. Confident claims about plans and achievements turned out to be vacuous when examined carefully by historians. Yaney addresses the gap with a contempt for the exaggerated claims of historical actors and the historians who believe them. Hoch observes the problem with regard to the serf Emancipation of 1861, which was based on very little concrete data. Khristoforov mixes irony with careful investigation of the Emancipation’s aftermath to develop a fine appreciation of the absurd. The ignorance that Lih observes in the period of the Great War and the Civil War was conditioned by an existing structural weakness.71 Moishe Lewin surveyed the aftermath of the Civil War with his characteristic attention to the peasantry and called it a generalized “archaization,”72 but the administration was archaic to begin with. The rural Russian case lends itself readily to comparison with certain overseas colonial orders.73 Violence there was, but it was necessarily arbitrary because it was backed by so little real knowledge of the population and was therefore applied blindly and indiscriminately. Britain, by contrast, with tools and techniques of government that were unparalleled and applied in a sustained fashion, was truly a strong state that could generate unprecedented revenues and had been doing so for

20  States of Obligation

some centuries – more per capita and in absolute currency than could the notorious French monarchs in their day.74 France’s weakness was fiscal in the sense that it could gather less revenue; it was a weakness of government because the state could reach less deeply into the economy to measure and claim resources; this distance produced notoriety in arbitrary and unequal taxes but not steady and abundant revenue.75 All of this should lead us to couple our questions about the weight and amount of taxes with more probing questions about their manner and method of collection and assessment. Margaret Levi argues that government in Britain was less limited the more it became broadly representative and centred on Parliament, and the more it developed its machinery of surveillance; it could intervene in the economy and society much more readily and effectively,76 a capacity that is at once logistical and ideological. It was also deeply conformist to Russian eyes, with a large class of middling employees and petty proprietors scarcely questioning what they were practising. The dystopian writer Zamiatin began his satires in England, not Russia.77 The second, specifically Russian, dimension concerns the centrality of the state and its exclusiveness as a locus of mass integration. It seems to me that our singular concern on the social or the ideological, our privileging of the state-society dichotomy as the basis for what we write, and our focus on the Communist Party in the Soviet period have been pursued at the expense of a serious analysis of the state itself.78 The issue here is not its sheer power to coerce but its emergence as the universal locus, and the new practices that made it a membership organization by the late nineteenth century. The Russian tendency to valorize the state was pronounced and tended over time to encompass other possible planes of universal belonging – society, nation, and economy in particular. In this it is tempting and easy to cite historic precedents masquerading as causes that extended back to the patrimonial state of Ivan III, the excesses of Ivan the Terrible, and the reforms of Peter the Great or Catherine the Great; these matter to the later period because Russians themselves thought historically and invoked them all. However, statism as opposed to autocracy emerged more directly from the circumstances of the turn of the century, a crisis of cohesion that gripped the empire and threatened in 1905 to tear it apart geographically into smaller nations, socially into separate estates and classes, and politically into warring parties and an increasingly isolated autocracy. Other forms of solidarity, especially ethnic nationhood, were dangerous to an autocracy and an empire; the state developed in the Russian imaginary as a locus of integration in its own right, with specific institutions and practices to give it grounding. This is the thread, not incidentally, that also links the imperial period with the Soviet. The Bolsheviks were different, of course, and one should consider

Introduction 21

the ways they understood class struggle and class analysis; no other modern state was so given to class as an optic for viewing the population and a device for changing it. But it is equally remarkable that their thinking brought them, quite quickly in the course of 1917–20, to the state idea (gosudarstvennost’), where they joined the many pre-revolutionary officials and economists who were already there. Only the state could compensate for the utter collapse of the Russian polity. It was not just that the state would coerce people into submission and compliance, though it did this too; the state was also the destination, the locus of a new unity. To the degree that the Bolsheviks privileged the state over other forms of solidarity –people, class, society, economy, and nationality – they were the more extreme version of what preceded them; just about any large party in 1918 was turning to the state for salvation.79 The distinctiveness of the Bolsheviks was more than just one of degree; it entailed a denial of the dualities and tensions of the modern polity. Others had been suspicious of the autonomies of the economy and the person and strived to limit them; the Bolsheviks actually brought full and tangible unity into practice. Citizenship still meant commitment, but it lost its other possible meaning, separateness and immunity. Taxation, which had been construed in part as the encounter of the state with the citizen and the economy, was now seen as the state’s absorption of both. Even class struggle would be a state project. Change and conflict would be situated in the state, and ultimately there would be no interplay of personal and official, public and private, economy and state, people and power but an assimilation of the population and all its pursuits into an allencompassing state. European socialism had many forms, all of them imagined until 1917 for lack of experience in government, but Soviet socialism was the first to be practiced, and it would thenceforth be a state undertaking. Historians on Russian Taxation The literature on taxation in Russia in the nineteenth century is focused almost exclusively on peasants, and it includes some classic studies and lively debates.80 The subfield has moved from a picture of unrelenting taxation to the point of impoverishment to an appreciation that peasant tax bills declined in the aggregate and when they were divided into per capita averages. I estimate in chapter 8 that the direct taxes that were levied on peasants alone – the taxes, that is, that are at the centre of the quantitative debates over peasant living standards – accounted for about 1 per cent of total state revenue in 1913. In aggregate terms they were about a tenth of what they had been in 1895, and even less per capita. The quantitative debate will no doubt continue, but the field could stand a discussion of the ways in which the system was administered and what this tells

22  States of Obligation

us about the rule and government of peasants. Whatever the aggregate amounts, it was well nigh impossible to measure tax burdens against peasant capacities because the systems of direct and indirect taxation that affected peasants were never designed to do so. We can estimate total tax bills and derive per capita rates, but peasants did not pay their bills per capita. How aggregate bills fell on individual payers was unknown to those who studied it, and it still is unknown to us today; the law until 1903 and the practice thereafter did not in fact recognize individual payers and did not account for them. The Russian state administered territorial collectives that were left to sort out matters themselves. No one could say what a given territory, let alone household, could reasonably spare in taxes. This was a problem of rubles because the government found it difficult to fairly assess some four-fifths of its population and tended as result to lower its demands and allow regular non-payment. Also it made the system of rural revenue rigid because no one could quite say what a peasant could afford to pay and what would send them back across the threshold of subsistence. This mattered less at the turn of the century because most of the state’s revenue came from other sources – the documented transactions and incomes of the commercial economy. This mattered more from 1914 when state spending rose and revenue fell, because the treasury turned to the peasantry for additional receipts. The issue all along was not how much the peasant tax bill rose or fell (it fell from the turn of the century, by any measure) but that new standards of assessment and accountability were being developed in the cities; these made peasant taxation seem positively retrograde. To put it another way, it is difficult to appreciate what was at issue rurally without understanding what was happening in the urban and commercial fiscal system. The success of taxation in the urban sector raised expectations for the rural sector as well, and these expectations were unwarranted. Urban taxation is the very large neglected area of the historiography81 and takes up most of the monograph that follows. The need to address urban and commercial taxation is pressing because the overwhelming share of state revenue by century’s end was coming from the cities, industry, and commerce and from the newly dynamic economy of monetary exchange on which indirect revenue depended. Most of the indirect revenue came from the cities – probably in absolute terms, certainly on a per capita basis. There is a strong case to be made that urban and commercial Russia had developed an advanced system of information, surveillance, and discipline that made modern taxation possible and effective. Land-based taxes continued to be deeply unfair and arbitrary and the source of public scandal, be it in central Russia as we have long known or in places like Poland, the Transcaucasus, and Turkestan as Pravilova shows.82 In  practice, however, the treasury could afford to reduce land taxes to near

Introduction 23

insignificance and permit arrears because real revenue was coming from the new taxes on inheritance, business, commerce, capital, deeds, contracts, and urban properties that were truly assessed and applied to all regions of the empire. These in turn were overshadowed by the indirect taxes that generated most state revenue, with vodka leading the way in most of the periods under consideration. As an empire, Russia continued to have its regional imbalances; the purpose of the reformed fiscal system was to transcend the differences in a coherent and uniform order that expressed all people and all territories as money, aggregated in a single state budget. Taken together, the reformed taxes were an integral view of the polity and a manifestation of its potential unity, both in law and in practice. The hallmarks of the new system were its transparency, the confidence that the treasury had in its claims, and the calculation of the liabilities, and thence the relative inescapability of the tax. These taxes also embodied a different kind of government, and the urban fiscal system fed into Lenin’s belief in late 1917 that a sector that was so open to public scrutiny and state manipulation was ready for greater integration into a new kind of state. It was already a space of transparency and left the citizen “no place to go,” as Lenin put it in 1917.83 When these two systems met from 1914 in an attempt to mobilize the whole population for war – the urban system of discipline, individuation, and inescapability, and the rural system of collectivism, apportioned bills, and evasion – the encounter placed a high political and civic expectation on a peasant population that had never been prepared for anything other than obscurity and shirking. Urban-rural exchange collapsed, taking with it the indirect revenue streams that it generated, and the end of vodka sales in 1914 was perhaps the largest fiscal wound ever inflicted by a modern state on itself. This meant from 1914 that the supply of the cities with food and the securing of revenue for the state would be pursued through the mechanisms of direct taxes (as taxes and requisitions), using a fiscal apparatus and system that had never been intended for these purposes. Very large needs – in effect, the entire imperial market in grain – were shoved down the narrow neck of direct peasant taxation. Peasants evaded and avoided as they always had, but they were confronted with a new government struggling to survive a civil war and with much higher expectations of its citizens. The retribution of 1919 and 1920 was both massive and collective before Lenin and the Communists reconsidered and introduced the relatively relaxed approach of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921. The state’s ignorance of its peasant population underpinned both periods, the imperial and Soviet. The new state’s insistence that all were part of a new kind of power animated the ferocity of War Communism and the frustrations of the NEP. Paul Werth’s distinction between the old regime’s ability to reach its

24  States of Obligation

population and its ability to embrace and change it84 is useful when studying the new regime as well. Soviet power offered new possibilities for directly encountering peasant populations but few of the tools that it would have needed to truly administer it. It allowed for great coercion but little government. The carnage of War Communism could and did happen again. Even when the Communist Party retreated from the mass violence in 1921, it never did retreat from “Soviet power,” or the idea that the economy, the society, and the citizenry were to be viewed through the state as such and that this at least made the population reachable. It was, after all, a new regime, and this book contributes to the story of how it came to pass.

PART 1 People, Places, Things: The Old Regime, Economic Knowledge, and the Coming of the New Order

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1 The Fiscal Instruments of Regime Change from the Eighteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries

Finance ministers and many fiscal experts were traditionally outsiders to the Russian landed nobility, and they were well poised in the 1860s to cultivate a discrete state interest that stood above particular interests. They confronted a legacy of inequality and exemption from liabilities that they redressed in the language of taxation and political economy: a polity of separate and unequal estates should be rearranged as a single population of taxpayers, liable according to their means and regardless of their birth. In the first instance, fiscal reformers sought ways to shift burdens from the peasants who paid most of the direct taxes to the wealthier strata who paid almost none. This meant gathering a new kind of information on wealth and incomes. Ultimately the entire state economy, and soon the national economy on which it was based, would be expressed in a unified budget and a new corpus of state-generated statistics. The Fiscal Idiom of Civic Reform The prudent thing to say about the Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s is that they were aimed at strengthening autocracy. How exactly autocracy would be strengthened was a matter of debate, as some enlightened bureaucrats held that the spreading of obligations to all the tsar’s subjects regardless of birth – a form of legal equality – was the rational path.1 They won momentary though momentous victories over those who insisted on maintaining a stricter hierarchy of estate privileges. The government pushed through the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 over the objections of many, if not most, noble serf-owners and, in overriding their objections, reaffirmed the supreme authority of the autocrat and removed the serf-owning intermediaries who had ruled in the tsar’s place. Only the bureaucracy would do that. Equality was also implied in the reform of 1864 that created elected institutions of local government (the zemstvos), in the

28  People, Places, Things

juridical reform of 1864 that produced a new system of adversarial courts and jury deliberation that might pit a nobleman against a commoner or even a peasant, and in the military reform of 1874 that introduced near-universal male conscription. The autocracy overruled the host of particular interests and made the reforms possible; the result would still be an autocracy – on that there was little disagreement – but one that would mobilize people and resources more effectively and rationally on the basis of universal obligation.2 These were partial successes. All the way to 1917, to be born a peasant, nobleman, burgher (meshchanin), or merchant, or to be born into the clergy, still mattered very much. The serfs who were emancipated in 1861 (about half of all peasants) joined peasants on crown and state lands in a coherent legal estate. In their separate estate, peasants practised exclusive forms of government in their land communes, village societies, and counties; they used their own courts and customary law; and they underwent their own forms of punishment. Mobility was limited by the requirement that peasants accept an allotment of land from the lord, the crown, or the state and then pay for it over several decades. By 1886 all major categories of peasants had begun the process of redeeming the land. Before the last payment, peasants could not leave their villages without special permission from their elders, and even then they were registered in the village rather than their place of work and residence and they paid their taxes to their rural societies. If all went well with the payments, the last groups would redeem their land around 1950, but in fact little went well with the payments, and the redemption process was prolonged almost everywhere.3 Whatever the logic of the arrangements, the fact remained that these rules applied only to peasants. Military service, in some ways the purest of the Great Reforms in that it claimed all adult males, was implemented in such a way as to exclude some people, such as certain Muslims in the Transcaucasus and Central Asia; low rates of call-up and the common use of clout ensured that the well off and well connected served in disproportionately low numbers, making service a bastion of the low-born. How one owned land and other property was also an estate-related issue. Noblemen and the urban estates owned their land more or less as private property, and it could be sold and mortgaged, but peasants possessed and used land collectively through the commune or as individual or household property, not as private property. Peasant land was inalienable; it could not be sold or mortgaged except under highly unusual circumstances, and land taken away from a peasant household re-entered the peasant land fund. Distinct property laws exposed peasants to different credit systems and usually to no formal credit system at all. The weight of one’s vote in public affairs in the zemstvos and the urban governments was also estate and property based. The vote of

The Fiscal Instruments of Regime Change  29

the propertied merchant or nobleman was cast in a separate process, was more direct, and counted for much more than the vote of a peasant or burgher. There was no one institutional process in which all Russian subjects, male or female, participated; their estate and legal distinctions precluded it.4 Likewise, there was no one moment on the calendar when all Russian subjects participated in the same tax process, and no one direct tax for which all subjects were liable. Peasants and many of the non-Russian minorities were collectively accountable for lump sums to the state, while others paid individually and were individually accountable. Well into the 1880s the gentry, the clergy, most Cossacks, and a host of special-status populations were exempt from personal taxes, and peasants alone were liable for the poll tax. When the land tax replaced the poll tax, it applied differently to peasants and nobility; urban real estate underwent an entirely different system of assessment. Contemporaries found this remarkable because taxation was one of the ways in which the state defined its population. The perpetuation of collective taxation for some, exemption for others, and deep inequalities in general was to perpetuate a fundamental feature of the old regime. Change did happen, but it took some time for most people to appreciate it. Taxation was one of the more obscure areas of state and public discussion, with matters of potential significance buried in the numbing language of administration and fiscal expertise. The literate layman who was interested in, say, forms of direct taxation in Russia in the 1860s could go to a state library in the provincial capital and find a multivolume set that was published by one or another commission or department of the central government – for example, the twenty-two-volume Works of the Supremely Instituted Commission for the Improvement of the System of Dues and Levies.5 The reader could enjoy an extended discussion of the Mongol iarlyk (the power to collect tribute) under the Muscovite Grand Princes, the accounting methods of medieval French kings, Ottoman tax farming, British tax codes during the wars with Napoleon, and the tax systems of several German states, Sardinia, and Luxemburg into the nineteenth century. A riveting volume on inheritance taxes considered the Enlightenment treatises on whether a dead person was, legally and philosophically, dead. The excitement would grow in hundreds of pages of data and regulation that governed the way in which poll taxes applied to different legal groups and territories in the Russian Empire, why Old Believers paid twice but some Muslims and Jews not at all, and how a decade-long attempt at a cadastral survey in one province was planned, set into motion, and – thirty footnoted pages later – abandoned. In a sea of chinovnik idiom made notorious by Gogol – the arcane references to forms of command and instruction like ukaz, nakaz, zakaz, polozhenie, ulozhenie, manifest, and instruktsiia, not to mention Senate

30  People, Places, Things

opinions and State Council minority views – generalization seemed a remote possibility. Bafflement yielded to boredom and annoyance, with the larger point hardly in view. Yet it was in this dreary realm of state economy (gosudarstvennoe khoziaistvo) that legal equalization came closest to being achieved, though not in word. It was achieved, rather, in the realm of state tax practices and involved a circumscribed cohort of state servitors who were in a position to make their ideas matter to most Russian subjects. Perusing an extended discussion of the ways to assess property values, a few readers would have appreciated that the discussion of property taxes was a way not to talk about legal status and estate-based poll taxes. Buried in a footnote to a discussion of land taxes in Europe was a direct call to end legal distinctions in Russia by taxing land rather than persons. The protracted discussions of Belgian taxes on income from capital were a way to propose that anyone with capital and income should be taxed, noblemen and clergymen included.6 Hidden in a statistical memorandum on the artisans of the city of Saratov was an extended discussion not of burghers but of peasants and gentry, a direct indictment of gentry rule over their serfs, and a call to use the tax system to tax all noblemen.7 The writers were listed as “compilers” of precedent and data, but in fact they had authored extended treatises on the theory and practice of legal equality. The obscurity of the discussions certainly helped these writers in their delicate task of reforming the old regime. They could argue that taxes were a matter of “fiscal science” but not politics,8 even though the conversation was political from start to finish. It was political to the extent that the mass of regulation was analysed in order to show that the system as it existed was deeply inegalitarian and unequal in its application. The premise, sometimes stated but usually assumed, was that tax systems should apply to all Russian subjects, and proportionally to the wealth of the payer. An efficient and maximal use of the empire’s resources demanded universalism, ideally universality. The experts also proposed quite explicitly that state exigency trumped all claims to privilege and exemption. It was the special status and idiom of fiscal expertise that explains why reform proposals tended to prevail; even the opponents of civic reform acknowledged that state revenue was a matter of urgency, its ways best left to financial and fiscal experts. Theirs was a new way to look at revenue that brought legal equality into the old regime through the back door of finances. Russian financial experts were conforming to a pattern that had been observed throughout Europe since the eighteenth century, and Russians emulated the European example deliberately and consciously. Entrenched legal differences were transcended by changing the conversation from status to wealth. If noblemen as persons were exempted from taxation in seventeenth-century

The Fiscal Instruments of Regime Change  31

France, their properties were taxed along with the property of the free peasant, merchant, or artisan; they were all simply property.9 In spite of all the privileges of the British aristocracy that would persist into the twentieth century and confound Lloyd George’s New Liberals as late as 1914, aristocrats had paid the income tax on capital since 1842.10 As the Prussian inheritance tax assessed the property of dead persons, it could ignore the fact that the deceased had been a Junker, and claim a share in the interregnum between death and succession.11 In most of these cases, legal status was not so much rescinded as it was circumvented in order to give space to a new social reality. Here, the treasury looked dispassionately at properties and counted them as potential sources of state wealth. Here, what once looked like burghers and priests would now look like payers (platel’shchiki), and what once looked like a gentry landed estate would now look like “land,” comparable to peasant land only much larger. To distinguish between noble and peasant status, declared one fiscal expert in 1863, would be “anti-economical” (anti-ekonomicheskoe) – meaning a violation of the principles of political economy that looked at wealth objectively, as wealth. As the system began to move to proportionality as well, the wealthy titled magnate who was once paid nothing in tax because he was titled would now pay more because he was wealthy.12 The principle of equality, the politics of equalization, and understandings of fiscal and administrative efficiency were, in their minds, inseparable. Economic liberalism had some purchase among educated Russians in the 1850s and 1860s,13 fiscal reformers included. John Stuart Mill might be cited as a preface to the triennial assessment of glass producers in Tver’ district, and Adam Smith was enlisted to an argument for new fees on retail stalls.14 From the point of view of these officials, laissez-faire was the better way to serve the interests of the state, and for this reason alone it was useful. As the government focused on developing the “well-being of the country,” it sought forms of revenue that would interfere neither with individual labour nor with capital investments.15 The treasury paid less attention to the person as such and instead turned its attention to registering the existence of a firm and keeping track of key (taxable) indicators. The new or reformed taxes on businesses, urban real estate, and agricultural land that were adopted before 1881 were products of this pattern. Indirect taxes aimed to allow private production and trade to occur with fewer impediments and fewer regulations. The treasury assumed that production and trade would expand as a result, so that a modest tax rate would amount to larger state revenues. The treasury could monitor key indicators, which in effect meant measuring the symptoms of economic activity, revenue, and profit, rather than assessing the enterprise itself. Inspectors at first were interested in how much production left the plant, not what happened within it.

32  People, Places, Things

The repeal of the salt monopoly was important in this regard, and the move from the farming out of vodka taxes to an excise on a free (meaning non-state) trade provided a model for a new system of indirect revenues. The Novelty of the State Budget and the New Space of Economics For the first time the state was creating a neat separation between itself and a private sector and in the process outlined the features of both the state sector and the private economy.16 The movement away from poll taxes to “real taxes” (real’nye or veshchevye) – assessments of things rather than impositions on people – similarly established a distance between the state and the population as such. Enterprises were registered as private, and the point often missed is that they were registered for the first time; their existence and their activities became more public and more a matter of record and documentation than they had in the past. Uniform tax codes were applied to whole sectors of trade and production in order to view them as a single and coherent market. The multiplicity of local agricultural practices and rural pursuits was rendered uniform in a system that measured only land; diverse businesses looked comparable when expressed in money. In this new gap between state and private, the state was gathering a type of information that it had never gathered before, and indeed in quantities that were unimaginable in the 1850s.17 As the state set about distancing itself from private property and trade, it introduced a new intimacy and interdependence with the economy. This was the paradox of liberal economics and of laissez-faire in particular. Specifically, the new tax mechanisms allowed the state to reconsider its wealth in relation to the empire’s wealth. It was in this period – from the late 1850s to the early 1880s – that the Russian state developed its first comprehensive budgets, developed the principles of balancing them, and began the process of making its budget dependent on the wealth of the empire – or such wealth that could be readily identified and quantified. Visible (vidnyi) and tangible (osiazatel’nyi), such wealth could be taxed as well. This was the only economy that the statistician could quantify and characterize as he developed a comprehensive picture of production and trade. This economy was, from its inception, state related, and the newly discrete sphere of the economy was entwined with the state’s estimation of its own potential.18 “Laissez faire was planned,” Karl Polanyi famously phrased it, and it was accompanied by a host of legislation, qualification, instruction, and regulation that seemed to defeat the original purpose. The less the state intervened in the economy, and the more it separated itself from the direct management of economic relations, production, and exchange, the more it could know about the

The Fiscal Instruments of Regime Change  33

private economy – the private economy being the product, to a large extent, of the law, state practices, protection, regulation, statistics, and subsidies.19 The principle that trade and industry should be left alone by the state reached its apogee in Europe only in the 1830s and was quickly overwhelmed by a host of interventionist practices. Laissez-faire had a later and equally short lifespan in Russia, not much longer than the Great Reforms themselves. But laissez-faire was survived by the realization that production and trade could be better viewed and measured as an economy, transcending regional and legal differences and tracing its growth over time. On that basis the economy could be better acted upon sooner than left alone. Russia had no budget in the modern sense of the word – the aggregate of state revenues and expenditures – before the 1860s. On the one hand this is disappointing to the historian seeking exactitude, but on the other hand there is no good reason the figures should have existed. Looking back from the 1880s, the Ministry of Finances estimated that in 1855 total state revenue stood at 206,860,000 rubles. This was hindsight and guesswork because in fact there had been no comprehensive budget, and therefore no comprehensive data, of the state’s revenues and expenditures in 1855. The state budget as a coherent view of its finances, by which all state activity was represented in the same rubles, was first introduced in 1863. An incalculable share of taxation was not even expressed in rubles and did not enter the budget, since it entailed obligatory services rendered for roadwork, bridge maintenance, billeting, hauling, and security.20 Instead revenue was understood as part of the rule and management of a series of territories or productive undertakings that satisfied the needs of one or another government department.21 In Muscovite times, this was called feeding (kormlenie) – a term for the territory that sustained a given official, office, or chancellery. Territories were incorporated into early modern Muscovy, along with their systems of tribute and collection; this occurred as late as the 1860s with the incorporation of Turkestan, along with the collections and dues of the old khanates.22 These practices were incorporated into the chancelleries in Moscow that collected their own revenue from a given village, forest, guild, mine, plant, or waterway. Satisfied with the revenue received, the collector would ignore the surrounding territories, trades, and production as irrelevant to its revenue and to its brief. Similarly, whole swathes of gentry estates and the peasants who lived on them were of no direct interest to the state until the 1850s; the annual delivery of the poll tax for the serfs was the full extent of the concern. No one institution could provide a comprehensive view of any one sector or territory, let alone the economy of the empire, and indeed the term “economy” as it would be understood by century’s end was not yet in use. Taken together,

34  People, Places, Things

these items of revenue might be termed the “state economy” (gosudarstvennoe khoziaistvo), but even that term implied a level of aggregation and comprehensiveness that was beyond the capacity or interest of any one institution in 1855. The Ministry of Finances might concern itself with emissions and loans, but it had little idea of the revenue generated by crown serfs on crown lands, the output of bonded workers in state iron works, and the road-maintenance work of the gentry’s serfs. Even if it did, it could not express it all as money; too much of the labour was unpaid service to the gentry, and labour owed to the state and the local administrators. Barter and autarky thrived when monetization was too low in too many places, and monetization developed slowly in conditions of barter and services in kind.23 To be sure, Peter the Great had developed an empire-wide soul tax (podushnaia podat’, the poll tax), which was superimposed upon, or ran parallel to, the myriad categories of dues on bonded and obligated peasants, burghers, and tribes. The poll tax, the only uniformly assessed and administered tax in the empire, made possible the general distinction between taxable and non-taxable estates. This inequality applied uniformly throughout the empire and offered coherence to an otherwise fragmented polity. Catherine created the Treasury Offices (Kazennye palaty) in 1775 to monitor certain aspects of revenue and expenditure in a given province, which in practice meant that one clerk oversaw the dues of all peasants in the province.24 Alexander I created a Ministry of Finances in 1802 to stabilize the currency and borrow money in Russia and abroad. The Ministry of State Domains was created in 1837 to manage the lands and enterprises owned by the state, the peasants who worked them, and the revenues they all provided. But no one institution had full control or even an aggregate view of the money that entered the state treasury; there was, after all, no one state treasury. This was literally true since each local institution and each ministry kept its revenues in its own safe.25 Actual collection and enforcement were likewise fractured. Taxes in kind were collected by the institution benefiting, such as the soldiers who were billeted in the towns and villages or the postal offices that needed fodder or horses. Other taxes in kind were enforced by the police or the elders of the local collective institution. Depending on the locality, one or another crown agent or elder would mobilize the nearest residents to maintain a road or repair a bridge.26 State peasants were taxed by the Ministry of State Domains, crown peasants by the Court Institution, serfs by the gentry, and burghers through their own collective institutions, with the army and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (the police) providing the coercion where necessary.27 Once the relevant office had imposed its levy on the locality, further state intervention was supposed to be rare. Instead, tax farmers were assigned to the task of collecting

The Fiscal Instruments of Regime Change  35

direct taxes on persons, like the poll tax, or they paid for the privilege of monopolizing a given trade in a given territory, like alcohol and salt. In both cases they lived off the proceeds. All taxes before the 1860s were indirect, if by direct we mean the encounter of the payer with the state and a true assessment of a property or person, and this remained true so long as intermediaries like the gentry, tax farmers, and peasant elders were responsible for delivering lump sums to the government with little or no account of how they gathered it. Scant and indirect administration meant that the state could not know what it owned and what was owed to it. Aleksandr Herzen wrote of the choice files that he surveyed when he was in government service in Viatka province, with such titles as “The case of the disappearance without a trace of the building of the county administration and of the eating up of its papers by mice”; “The disappearance of twenty-two rent producing assets of the state” (amounting to 15 square versts); and “The case of the re-registration of the peasant boy Vasilii in the female sex,”28 which meant the loss of a male taxpayer. Herzen wrote in that characteristic tone of condescending satire towards Russia and the shame he felt as a Russian, but this state, premodern in so many ways, had no need of the sort of accuracy that he expected of a Great Power. The central government lacked and also did not need a direct relationship with its population, either as a matter of regular personal contact or as data and information that would have made direct administration possible.29 Lacking a dynamic sense of wealth generation in Russia or even a cadastre of land or a registry of businesses, the state’s income was rigid. “Strong states” like Russia, we are told, were the first and enthusiastic cadastral mappers, given the lack of resistance from civil society,30 but in fact Russia did not have a cadastre and never would. Revenue comprised dues (podati), a word that shared its roots with the words for tribute and subjecthood and implied a relationship of separateness and subordination. Others were levies and collections (sbory). Taxes (nalogi) were rarer and were considered more advanced in so far as they were assessed and they required both knowledge of, and contact with, the object of taxation – the person, the land, or the enterprise. The distinction was often notional, and the terms used interchangeably, but the careful writers treated “podati” and “sbory” as archaic, crude, and inexact. A given department estimated its expenses; demanded sums of money, labour, or resources from a given territory, category of population, or type of production; and expected that some of that amount would arrive in its coffers in a given year, some of the labour would be performed, and some of the goods delivered. For lack of knowledge of the local population, production, and exchange, the agency benefiting had no way to estimate what a given population could reasonably pay, so the levies were a combination of guesswork and adjustments

36  People, Places, Things

made by trial and error, ultimately enforced by sheer coercion. In times of crisis – natural disaster and war – government agencies encountered sharp shortfalls, either because the population could not pay or because the agency lacked the confidence to demand payment. Collectors had no way of knowing what was too much. Similarly, no government department was equipped to cover sudden increases in expenditure, and war in particular threw the imperial finances into disarray. Borrowing on the international bond markets was one option (the domestic one was too poor and undeveloped before the 1880s), but the instability of the ruble made for high rates of interest and onerous conditions. Few lenders trusted in a borrower that could not estimate its revenue and expenditures or provide a budget, let alone balance it. The most useful and also destructive form of revenue was emissions, whereby the Ministry of Finances printed new notes that were not backed by gold or silver. Devaluation was the inevitable consequence. Catherine began the practice with assignats in 1769, which for all the underlying theory of value was a cheap and quick way to make money. By 1815, many wars later, the assignats had shrunk in value by four-fifths.31 An effort to restore silver convertibility in 1810 as Mikhail Speransky proposed had come to nought as Russia geared up for a new war with Napoleon. A similar effort from the 1830s under Kankrin was ruined by the cost of the Crimean War. Mikhail Reutern’s efforts of the 1860s and 1870s were wiped out in one more war with the Ottoman Empire; in 1877–8 the notes in circulation almost doubled to 958 million rubles, and the exchange value of the ruble plummeted to 63 per cent of its face value. So inflexible was the revenue system that the emissions covered almost all the cost of that war. Falls in the value of the ruble ultimately harmed the state, which collected much of its revenue in those same paper notes at their face value but paid its loan obligations in gold or silver.32 The system allowed the state to get by from one “normal” year to the next, but no year was really normal. Some region would suffer a harvest failure, armed conflicts had to be paid for, Bashkir rebellions were followed by Chechen and Central Asian resistance, and these events regularly sent the revenue and currency systems into a downward spiral. The rigidity of the system also made it difficult to pay for the more ambitious state undertakings when they were put on the state’s agenda from 1855 by a new autocrat served by enlightened bureaucrats. The Great Reforms involved considerable direct outlays: paying the gentry for the Emancipation of the serfs (which was a bond operation unprecedented in scope), outfitting a new conscript army, manning a new legal system, hiring new and professionalized personnel in almost every branch of local and central government, and paying for their education. The sheer ambition of the Great Reforms demanded not only more revenue but also a different kind; not only did the finances entail a means

The Fiscal Instruments of Regime Change  37

of paying for reform, but they themselves were a subject of reform. The reconsideration required a new appreciation of coherence, unity, and rationality as ends in themselves, expressed in the new language of “the budget for the whole Empire.” It also involved a recognition that the treasury could act more effectively if all matters of money were brought under the supervision of a single institution, which would be the Ministry of Finances. A comprehensive and balanced budget would make a series of functions predictable and cheaper: borrowing on the European markets, collecting tariffs and taxes, spreading expenditures evenly over time and space, anticipating spending, and meeting new spending with calibrated tax increases and advantageous borrowing. Tax reform would help cover new costs, but tax reform itself was a costly venture. It entailed cadastral commissions, statistical bureaus, new kinds of inspection and therefore inspectors and their education, and new forms of collection. By 1885, looking at direct and indirect revenues combined, the reformed tax system had called into existence a good ten thousand new paid positions in the bureaucracy, paid for by the new kind of tax revenue collected by the new personnel. Their job was to become more familiar with the population’s activities in order to monitor them and tax them appropriately. If one could safely estimate the annual income of a person, enterprise, or property, one could confidently set lower or higher rates as needed in any given fiscal year. Taxation, then, was more than just a means to pay for the reforms; taxation was emblematic of a new approach to government, one in which the state and its population were mutually constitutive – the wealth of the state depended on the wealth of the population, and statistics were the realm in which the two coincided. All were expressed in the imperial budget, drafted with greater familiarity with the tax base. Some of the problems of predictability would be redressed by the introduction of the gold standard in 1897 – useful on the international bond markets, but even more useful to ensure that the nominal value of revenue was also its real value.33 However, a stable currency was only a precondition to solving the revenue problem, not a solution in itself. The ongoing issue was the rigidity of the revenue base, since the state required direct knowledge of what was being produced in the economy and had never concerned itself with the economy as mass exchange and production. The ongoing Russian project then was to create a greater intimacy between government and governed, state and economy, and allow the state to identify and tap into sources of wealth. In the meantime, the government settled for a coherent budget. In 1863 all revenue and expenditure was brought under the Ministry of Finances, which meant that the ministry would set out annual targets for each state institution and apportion funds accordingly. Ministerial treasuries were abolished, and all

38  People, Places, Things

revenue would flow to the same state coffers (kaznacheistva) at the provincial and central levels. All state institutions were required to follow the same nomenclature in itemizing their expenditures.34 All taxation would henceforth be  divided between two departments: the Department of Assessed Levies (Departament Okladnykh Sborov), meaning direct taxes on people, properties, capital, and enterprises; and the Department of Non-assessed Levies (Departament Neokladnykh Sborov), which levied excises on production and exchange. In 1866 the process of drafting the budget was consolidated under the Ministry of Finances and supervised by the State Council.35 In keeping with the spirit of openness – termed at the time “glasnost’” – Alexander II decreed that the drafting of the budget should be public and frank (otkrovennyi), and reported in government publications and to the non-­ governmental press. The measure would invite scrutiny among the educated public and inspire confidence among would-be lenders on the international bond markets; hence so much data was published in French.36 In 1869 the annual budget, which had been an official secret, was published in the new Annual of the Ministry of Finances. Editor A.B. Bushev stated the purpose of the periodical in circular terms: it reflected the belief that finances affected all persons in the empire, but it also made the case that finances should be a matter of concern for the public (publika). The annual would expose the public to “those aspects of economic life [khoziaistvennago byta] which are in direct connection with it,”37 which was another way of suggesting that the public should be concerned with finances and economic life as the ministry understood them. Its contents included state finances in the narrow sense but also facts and data about the private economy that were gathered through the new fiscal apparatus. Meanwhile in 1865 the government had inaugurated the weekly Herald of Finances, Industry, and Trade to publicize government measures and also act as a forum for a wider discussion of economic developments in Russia and abroad. All told, the budget aimed to implicate the reading public in the business of state revenue and spending, to make the economy at large relevant to the state economy. The assumption that this “economic life” was centred on the state was evident, and it would never go away. Contemporaries were only then beginning to think in aggregate terms, and they rarely used the term “economy” to express it; they usually referred to “trade and industry,” “agriculture” (zemledelie), and “finances” as separate undertakings surrounded by their own practical problems.38 The lament that Russian economics had yet to develop into a coherent and autonomous discipline would carry into the twentieth century.39 Leading economists like Struve, Tugan-Baranovskii, and Bulgakov were equally or better known as political philosophers, political activists, and political leaders.40

The Fiscal Instruments of Regime Change  39

Bunge was a leading university economist who became minister. Yet this made for a different kind of discipline that can be assessed in its own terms. With political questions of integration in view, economics was very much an explicit discussion of political coherence, imperial unity, and the state. It allowed for a broader perspective on economics – political economy, really41 – as a moral and ethical study and an activism, a wider view of finances, trade, and production that was linked to the larger development of the polity and often centred on the state’s real or potential role. In broad strokes, it was a field best compared with the historicist (“German”) schools, with an emphasis on historically embedded economic activity that in turn produced certain historical outcomes; the economist A.I. Churpov thought that Germany and Russia were similar and directly comparable. Less prominent in Russia was a rationalist (“French”) tradition that began with the universal laws of economics (not states and peoples) and studied them empirically in different places.42 Russian economics had less to do with fixing an existing system – “plumbing” as it would later be derided – and more to do with defining the system itself in relation to larger political questions. For our purposes, economic thinking and the development of new budgetary practices (the two went hand in hand) contained within them a duality. The economy may be an aggregate that comprises the state, but it is also a function of the state. Among other things this meant that economic knowledge was generated to a large extent by practical fiscal concerns, and often with a long-term view of the political meaning of tax collections. In 1883 the supervisors of the provincial tax apparatus met to discuss tax procedure, and they admitted to no distinction between what they registered for tax purposes and the aggregate of industrial and commercial activity. Both in and out of government, the tax figures were used to extrapolate data on “trade and production.”43 Well into the twentieth century the Annual’s comprehensive statistics on “industry and trade” were recordings of those properties and transactions that generated tax revenue, not the actual state of trade and industry. The same would apply to the national economy at the turn of the century, which was meant to express something more encompassing than the state’s revenue and expenditure but relied on the data related to revenue and expenditure to describe the national economy. In 1907 the Ministry of Finances began publishing its annual National Economy (Narodnoe Khoziaistvo) as a way to address relations that were larger than the state budget, but it too was a compilation of data generated for revenue purposes. It used sections and sectors drawn directly from the tax codes. The economy would comprise those “visible” indicators that were registered regularly over time and consistently over space, and this, in turn, concerned those items that were taxed because they were visible

40  People, Places, Things

and quantifiable. Since the only bureaucratic mechanism for registering those indicators was, again, the tax apparatus, one could be sure that the economy looked very much like the state itself. The Fiscal Reformers The new thinking about the state and the discrete interests that were not coterminous with those of the landed nobility emerged from specific strata of the Russian imperial administration. Many of the officials involved were the product of a reformed system of higher education under Alexander I, who graduated in the reign of Nicholas I and took on serious reforms under Alexander II.44 Fiscal reformers with training in law, political economy, and later statistics came together in the Ministry of Finances and its associated institutions, and they joined in the general reconsideration of the regime. In 1859 Alexander appointed the Supremely Instituted Commission for the Improvement of the System of Taxes and Dues (henceforth the Tax Commis­ sion). This became the main forum for the consideration and reform of the fiscal system into the 1880s, and it operated with considerable overlap with the Ministry of Finances. Finance officials retired into it, and commission members were promoted into the ministry. Its brief to create legal equality in taxation encountered opposition in a variety of government quarters where the nobility and clergy predominated, so the Tax Commission (like other commissions that were “Supremely Instituted”) was permitted to skip consultation with the other ministries and submit legislative proposals directly to the State Council and then to the tsar.45 Since the discussions of taxes were meant to be didactic of a new approach to government, its proceedings and reports were published.46 A small public of state administrators, academics, and jurists would be able to grasp their significance, and they were well positioned to carry the measures through the legislative process. Quietly and steadily, the commission was able to effect the repeal of most of the taxes that discriminated by legal status. It also prepared for the abolition of the poll tax, which occurred in 1886. In the course of the 1860s and 1870s the Tax Commission produced the reformed licence tax on businesses, the new urban properties tax, the inheritance tax, the new land tax, and the expanded system of excise taxes. The ethnic and social composition of the Tax Commission, and indeed of the Ministry of Finances, was relevant to its supra-estate brief. German names from the Baltic provinces abounded, as did naturalized foreigners and ennobled commoners who shared a dependence on the autocrat and an identity with the Russian state sooner than a legal estate. With training at Russian and foreign schools in jurisprudence, administration, and finances, the members were

The Fiscal Instruments of Regime Change  41

expected to view the fiscal system as a discrete state undertaking that stood apart from the interests of any one segment of the population. Selecting outsiders for high service was not a new device; it was practised in the ministries of External Affairs, the Army, and the Navy, and in His Majesty’s Own Chanceries, with their succession of German, Greek, and other non-Russian names. Nearly all of the finance ministers appointed by the tsars in the nineteenth century were Protestants, proceeding from the prejudice that Lutherans were frugal and honest with the tsar’s moneys. Among them were Egor Frantsevich Kankrin (minister from 1823 to 1844), born in Hessen-Darmstadt; Petr (Felix) Brok (1852–8), a Prussian Junker; Mikhail Khristoforovich Reutern (1862–78), from Riga; Nikolai Khrist’ianovich Bunge (1882–6), the Lutheran son of a Lutheran pastor; and Eduard Pleske (1904–5), Russianized but still Lutheran. Sergei Witte’s ancestors had converted from Lutheranism, and he trumpeted his Dutch ancestry as one of his qualifications for the post. The very last imperial minister, Petr L’vovich Bark (1914–17), was from a Baltic German family, married into another, and went to German schools. As a war-time minister and later an emigré in England (Sir Peter Bark) he rarely publicized his German pedigree. Other ministers were, if not Germans and Lutherans, then outsiders to the Russian Orthodox landed gentry: the Serbian Aleksandr Kniazhevich (1858–62), the Moldovan Aleksandr Abaza (1880–1), and the Scot Samuil Alekseevich Greig (1878–80). Vyshnegradskii (1888–93) was born into the clergy. Speransky, who was never minister but penned plans for an overhaul of the financial system in 1809 and in some ways inaugurated the whole era, was also born into the clergy. Vladimir Kokovtsov (1906–14) did come from the hereditary nobility, but a family of professionals (his father was an engineer), and he worked in the prison system before joining the ministry in 1896. All told, their dedication to (and dependence on) the autocrat was beyond doubt, and they often abandoned lucrative positions in the private sector to receive a fraction of the pay in the Cabinet. The last minister, Bark, gave up a salary of 120,000 rubles with the Volga-Kama Bank to receive 13,000 as minister. Witte and Vyshnegradskii had done much the same. By the 1860s, removed from the population, they nevertheless worked to implicate the population in the state’s finances and also to implicate the state in the economy as a whole. They were unlikely to defend an autonomous private economy on principle and tended in general to see the economy as a function or a component of the larger state interest. When private enterprise taxed by the state seemed to produce good results, as it seemed to do in the 1860s, the state deliberately stimulated and protected it; when the economic and social results of free trade became a matter of political and social concern, as happened from the 1870s, these same officials regulated and intervened in the market quite readily.

42  People, Places, Things

Bruce Lincoln chose his terms carefully when he termed the generation of the Great Reforms “enlightened bureaucrats” rather than necessarily liberals,47 and the term applies to fiscal reformers as well. They and their reforms sought ways to strengthen stability, imperial coherence, and revenue, and for a moment free trade and laissez-faire were the rage. However, they and their successors were perfectly willing to try state centrism if that better served the state interest. Poll Taxes, State Knowledge, and the Problem of Equivalencies The fundamental problems of the direct tax system by the mid-nineteenth century traced to a single source: the absence of a regular and accurate flow of data on who owned and earned what, who should pay what tax rate, and to what extent the tax collector should insist on payment from a delinquent. Extending tax burdens to more swathes of the population and especially the wealthier ones was only a first step, that of equality; deciding how much anyone should pay was the more profound and enduring problem, that of fairness and equivalencies. Alexander II’s fiscal advisers focused on the fact that the obligation to pay taxes fell on only certain strata of the population and exempted those who could afford to pay the most. Inequality (neravnomernost’) referred, in the first instance, to the fact that some of the tsar’s subjects were not taxable. Increasing the number of tax-paying people was a financial proposition, to be sure, but recasting the entire population into a single category of taxpayers was in keeping with the universalizing thrust of the era. A second area of concern was the fact that Russian taxes were assessed per head but not proportionally to one’s wealth or income, a phenomenon that was likewise referred to as inequality but more accurately as a lack of correspondence (nesorazmernost’) to capacities. Proportional or progressive taxation would have required a close relationship between the assessment and the value of the item being produced or the income it yielded. In 1855 no tax in Russia was crafted to measure the capacity of the payer to pay. Instead, the system proceeded from estimates of the financial needs of the state, which were apportioned to the empire, and these, in turn, were repartitioned to the collectives of peasants and burghers who were liable in each territory. The practice of apportionment (rasklad) and repartition (razverstka) was not unique to Russia. Similar systems were to be found elsewhere into the twentieth century, including the French impôts de répartition. The aim of reform, in Russia as elsewhere, was to create some correlation between the tax bill and the wealth of the payer; at the very least an apportioned tax might be distributed with some notion of relative values and incomes, with the data fed back to the central government to make for a better total bill redistributed to the provinces in better ways.

The Fiscal Instruments of Regime Change  43

With its concern with universal duty to the tsar and the state, it was fitting that the Tax Commission’s report on the poll tax was the first to be published, in 1862.48 The poll tax was, after all, the largest single source of direct tax revenue; at 46.7 million rubles in 1855, it accounted for 89.8 per cent of all direct taxes and 22.5 per cent of total state revenue, counting only the money taxes of the central government.49 But its political significance was the overriding concern of the members. This tax, in its conception and its implementation, was the most egregious to the Tax Commission because it was applied only to peasants, burghers, and certain non-Russian legal categories of the population. The poll tax was also the principal marker of social status in the empire. “Taxable” and “non-taxable” estate referred to one’s liability to the poll tax. It had been conceived in the reign of Peter the Great as a mechanism that would levy a sum from a given region commensurate to the cost of maintaining a regiment. Peter tried and failed to conduct a census (reviziia) of the population in order to spread the burden equally, but he went ahead anyway in 1724 by dividing periodic sums that were needed for the army among what were estimated to be five million males, all peasants and burghers (posadskie, later meshchane).50 The government did not concern itself with the method of collection, as this was left to the army, the special commissioners, and the tax farmers, who in turn dealt with the local elders of villages, urban neighbourhoods, and craft guilds. The elders, in turn, were responsible for the members of their collective. The army was an intermittent presence in the process of collection, either to help the collectors or to punish them. The army was periodically withdrawn in the eighteenth century because, according to a contemporary report, it caused “arguments and brawls” (ssory i draki), only to be brought back when arrears mounted, as they inevitably did.51 The censuses – really a simple headcount – would become more regular, Catherine’s Treasury Offices would be extended to almost all provinces, and the poll tax receipts would be delivered to the local state coffers (kaznacheistvo) rather than as cash and grain to feed the troops directly, but the basic principles of the system as it existed in 1860 were as old as Peter the Great. The tax measured the needs of the state, without regard to the paying power of the population; these sums were distributed by a process of territorial repartition according to the number of males in a province; and collections were left to designated collectors and the elders of a given local estate institution, backed or cajoled when necessary by the army and police. The gentry were responsible for the poll taxes of their serfs. These same practices applied to the host of other taxes that were introduced in newly conquered territories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with some sense of local practice overlaid with the Russian standard.

44  People, Places, Things

Greeks in Ekaterinoslav province paid a flat household tax, their Armenian neighbours a flat head tax, and Greeks in Taganrog a flat land tax. The Orthodox of Kiev province paid the poll tax, but anyone who was Catholic and Polish speaking was classified as shliachta and exempted. Cossacks around Kiev paid the poll tax, but Cossacks in other regions did not. Peasants on state lands paid an additional obrok, or quit-rent, distributed more or less per head, but serfs owned by the gentry paid the poll tax through their masters. Old Believers paid a double head tax as “a fine for the schism” (shtraf za raskol) alongside certain Jews, but Old Believers in Alaska were exempted. The Kirghiz in Siberia came close to a proportional tax, the iasak that claimed one head per one hundred in their herd, with reductions applied to the direct heirs of Genghis Khan; orchards in Georgia came even closer, with a tax assessed on land and the number of trees. But for lack of real accounting, these too were apportioned in practice, and responsibility shifted to the local collectives. Whatever the nominal principle of the taxes (per head, per household, on land, on herds, on crops), they were rendered uniform from the government’s perspective because they involved apportioning a fixed sum to a given territory; because the census data was almost always used in setting the amount, making it easy for any tax to slip into a tax per head; and because collective responsibility (de facto or de jure) allowed the local community to apportion the bill among the members according to its own politics and practices.52 As the Ministry of Finances would later comment, the very collection of the tax was part of the tax burden (tiaglo), devolved onto local communities as part of their obligation.53 All told, the 1859 census counted 53,945,497 persons – males and their families – who owed the poll tax or the equivalent taxes in kind.54 The issue was discrimination in the obligations, but any discussion of taxing the landed nobility was complicated by the expected opposition of the nobility and by the ambiguity of the nobility’s status. Even the legal codes and charters were not uniform in declaring whether the nobility was exempt because it already shared its exactions from the serfs with the state by delivering the poll tax; because it already served the state as administrators, officers, and jurists, forcibly until 1762 and as a corporate ethos and noblesse oblige thereafter; or because taxation was a mark of low status that was incompatible with nobility. All or some of these reasons were cited in official documents. Emperor Paul did attempt to impose a very modest poll tax on noblemen in 1797, reasoning that they received many privileges but carried no inescapable obligation. Paul’s tax was symbolic, as low as one kopeck, but it was objectionable enough to cause uproar in the provincial capitals and was ended soon after Paul was deposed.55

The Fiscal Instruments of Regime Change  45

The approach of the Tax Commission was to uncouple status and exemption. Paying taxes was the normal condition of the tsar’s subjects, while exemption could apply to anyone the tsar chose. To wit, drawing on the census of 1859, the commission estimated that 326,092 hereditary male nobles (plus their families) were exempt from taxation, but the total number of exempted males was almost ten times that number, 3,072,328. With their families, 10.5 per cent of the inhabitants of the Russian Empire were exempt from the poll tax. The commission noted, pointedly, that noblemen enjoyed exemptions alongside 27,676 Siberian exiles; 12,487 sailors in the merchant marine; 232,836 retired soldiers; 435,764 Bashkirs, Tatars, and Meshcheriaki; 239,883 merchants, and 9,630 honoured citizens; 141 Jewish and Muslim converts to Orthodoxy, and another 494,043 Muslims and Jews who had migrated recently to Russian territory; 4,775 household tutors; 24 gardeners in Tauride province; 98 descendants of Ivan Susanin, the hero of Glinka’s “Life for the Tsar”; workers in protected industries, such as 21 Armenian sheep herders; and almost 300,000 clergy and 500,648 Cossacks. It could also apply to anyone not already exempted who acquired higher education (1,816).56 This hardly put noblemen in exalted company, and this was the point: exemption expressed the tsar’s will, not a hereditary corporate privilege and certainly not a right. Exemption could be rescinded to restore the regime of universal obligation, which was disrupted by the repeal of obligatory gentry service to the state in 1762. Bunge, a pivotal finance minister in the 1880s and already an influential government adviser in the 1850s, wrote in 1859 that extending taxation to noblemen would be for their own good; exemptions “inevitably give rise to popular hatred toward those who enjoy the privileges.”57 If universality was one of the thrusts of tax reform, the proportionality of the tax to the income of the payer was the other. Proportionality could be construed as a commonsensical matter of fairness, which was how it was presented in the fiscal literature of the period. But one’s ability to pay meant assessing items of wealth, thereby circumventing status. The earliest record of this principle in Russian rule is from 1810, in the midst of the European wars, when Alexander I (influenced by the statesman Mikhail Speransky) announced in a manifesto of 2 February that equalization (uravnenie) – understood as proportionality – should be one of the goals of taxation. For the nobility this meant a war-time income tax, modelled on the British tax of 1799, which for lack of data and enforcement was voluntary and was rescinded after the war.58 Real proportionality would have required knowledge of what a person earned, and in Russian conditions this meant, for a start, a cadastre of lands and related pursuits. Gentry lands were de facto off limits, which left state lands and

46  People, Places, Things

the one-half of the peasantry that lived on them. In 1837, when Nicholas I created the Ministry of State Domains, he decreed that “the dues collected from state peasants should be brought into correspondence with the benefits received from land and crafts.” This meant, in substance, translating the poll tax on state peasants into a tax on production, and the task was undertaken by the new minister, P.D. Kiselev.59 This led to the attempt at a cadastre (of state lands) that began in 1842 in nineteen provinces from different regions of European Russia. Olga Crisp points out that the cadastre was part of the reform of the management of state domains and a paternal desire to guarantee the subsistence of state peasants. This, in turn, meant a better distribution of resources among state peasants and a proportional distribution of the tax burden. Finances were part of a larger approach termed “guardianship” (popechitel’stvo), a largely Cameralist effort to better manage state resources and care for the people who inhabited state lands. Fiscal considerations, social order, and popular welfare were wrapped into a single package.60 Unlike the laissez-faire economics that ensued in later decades, the Kiselev reforms entailed direct state management of its resources, meaning state lands and state peasants; as Bruce Lincoln tells us, it was part and parcel of an enlightened bureaucratic thinking that sought ways to reshape the economy and society in order to serve state interests better.61 The cadastral surveys lasted into 1858, when the initial effort to compare the provinces was abandoned, and the initial intention of mapping all state lands had been compromised. One of Kiselev’s underlings observed that the minister had “no clear understanding of what a cadastre was, and of what vast monetary and technical resources its introduction would have demanded.”62 Personnel was the predictable problem, not only their quantity but also their quality. They were “in all ways unfamiliar with this task and the peasant way of life; most of them had never seen a field.” Setting out to survey parcels of land, they found open village fields with no obvious markers. When they attempted to set markers, they found that strips of one household were scattered and intermingled with those of another household, and these were intermingled with the holdings of another village; the lands worked by serfs were mingled with the lands worked by state peasants. Unable to count all village lands, they counted a few and then multiplied them by the number of villages in the province, which allowed the commission to make the incredible claim that it had surveyed 53 million desiatinas by 1856. Moreover, it took the provincial commissions years to overcome their assumption that all peasants farmed. Whole villages and districts used the land to support their crafts and husbandry.63 The fundamental impediment to the process was one of equivalencies: the cadastral commissions lacked any one standard that would allow the same measure to be applied to different kinds of wealth, and then applied to different

The Fiscal Instruments of Regime Change  47

localities. Few peasants conducted their transactions in money alone, and when they did, it was in specific production conditions. The cadastral commissions found it impossible to compare, say, the value of a birch-bark shoe produced in Tambov province with a load of hay in Penza. The commissions could conclude that 59.65 per cent of a peasant’s survival depended on farming the land in Tver’ province, and 99.6 per cent in Ekaterinoslav, but they could not express either of those values in money.64 It also emerged that the cadastral commissions had used different methods of evaluation in each province, so the figures from different provinces could not be compared. A detailed local case study estimated that, if the cadastral data were used in setting new tax rates within each province, then those rates would vary wildly and irregularly as a proportion of household income: 31 per cent of peasant household income in Kursk province and 11 per cent in Pskov.65 “The truer means to judge the well-being of peasants,” reflected a member of the Tax Commission, “would have been an exact definition of their income from all sources, as well as their expenditures on all their needs.” However, this was a description of a personal income tax, which existed in no country, and “it would be to demand the impossible, since no one [in Russia] is capable of offering useful data in this matter.” Britain’s income tax, the most advanced and intrusive when it was introduced in 1842, levied flat rates on certain visible capital transactions and incomes, but it did not investigate other incomes and did not in the first instance ask about expenses.66 As was the case with so many other intractable problems in Russia, the cadastral commissions concluded that Russia was “too big” to be surveyed. Cadastres that examined the income from land could only be conducted in small states, like Saxony, Westphalia, and Milan. By contrast, it took Austria almost sixty years to survey half of its provinces, and the effort was ongoing in 1860.67 Abandoning the general cadastre as “completely impossible,” the last reviziia, that of 1859, was again a counting of heads and an apportionment of the bill among the provinces. Within each of the nineteen surveyed provinces, however, the government used the cadastral data to set differential rates. The example was set in St Petersburg province, which was the first province to undergo a cadastral survey in the 1840s because of the proximity of the imperial personnel and the university, and its relatively high rates of money exchange. Here, the cadastral commission sought one stable standard for all districts and chose land; a peasant household might not farm the family allotment, but it did produce, say, wooden spoons for the St Petersburg market. The task of the commission was to posit that a given unit of land was associated with a certain level of income, no matter what the nature of that income, and establish coefficients. In predominantly agricultural areas the commission estimated average harvest

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yields; in non-agricultural areas it set (rather arbitrary) equivalencies of crafts produced per area of land possessed. It also recorded rates for the land rented out by the gentry to state peasants as a way of estimating what the land was worth to the tiller. On that basis the commission set variable rates among districts (on average, 5.5 rubles per head in one district, and 70 kopecks in another) and within them (31 rubles per head in one village, and 2.40 rubles in another). These were not quite assessments in the sense that they proceeded from knowledge of what a given household earned in a given year. Instead these were relative rates and norms. Having decided how much money it would demand from a province in a normal year, the commission could reasonably expect more from one district than from another.68 The cadastral commission was forthright about the arbitrariness of its methods. Land was chosen because it was consistent, but a measurement of the extent of land was a poor indicator of the income of the person who possessed it. By making land its tax unit, it did not measure income but only an expectation of what a given type of land produced on average, it guessed even more about those incomes that were not agricultural, and it completely ignored other sources of income, like wages and trade. The guesswork continued as the estimates of income were divided among the inhabitants and translated into a per head levy, re-aggregated into a lump sum, and delivered as a bill to the territorial collective. How a village might then distribute that burden among its members was anybody’s guess and not at all the concern of the government.69 Back in St Petersburg, the Tax Commission declared disarmingly that “we cannot even ask that the incomes calculated in a cadastre reflect the level of well-being of peasants.” Its purpose was more modest: “The cadastre distributes dues evenly among those things that the government has recognized as liable to assessment.” What seemed like circular reasoning (the government would tax what it decided to tax) or capriciousness (the government would evenly tax what it arbitrarily chose to tax) was in fact a simple statement that the government would tax what it could see and measure over space. It would be a starting point for gathering information and promised some consistency, as Speransky had proposed as early as 1810.70 Politically, it was a linear argument that led to the landed nobility. The equivalencies meant that the same standards of measurement could be applied to any owner or user of property and that money and land would transcend legal differences. The taxes would be objective in multiple senses: they would be levied on things rather than people, they would ignore legal differences in their exclusive focus on things, and they would make comparisons across estates and territories and also over time by a single focus on things.

The Fiscal Instruments of Regime Change  49

For the same reasons – equality and proportionality – a suggestion to use labour days as a basis for taxing persons, as was practised in France in the impôt personnel et mobilier, was dismissed because the wealthiest potential payers, the gentry, would pay the same as the peasant; if only manual labour were counted, the gentry would again be tax exempt.71 However, the Tax Commission recognized that a truly assessed tax, graduated and proportional to income, was logistically impossible. It studied and then rejected the Prussian “class and classification” system of 1851, which imposed a flat tax on incomes under 1,000 talents and ascending scales for incomes above it. Russia had few incomes so large and no information on who earned them. “There is absolutely no data for distributing inhabitants into classes.”72 Gathering that information would be politically unpopular and potentially intrusive. It would require “an extreme constraint on each person’s freedom … It would be necessary to investigate each taxable person, and this would strengthen the police or fiscal surveillance of individual persons.”73 Instead the Tax Commission concluded that only universality was an attainable goal. Poll and obrok (quit-rent) dues would be transferred to the land and away from the person. Land would be the standard of assessment; money would be the ultimate expression of wealth and the solvent that dissolved the members of estates into the same pool of payers. It would be applied to the landed nobility in the state land tax that was initiated in 1870, modestly and haltingly given the gentry’s uneasy adjustment to the Emancipation.74 It also entailed an effort, from 1860, to convert services owed in kind into an annual monetary payment.75 Moreover, the underlying pragmatism, of taxing things because they could be found, quantified, and compared, was a precedent that would be generalized in the decades to come; the government would focus on those things that are “easily brought to light” (udobno privedeny v izvestnost’) and subject to “objective” evaluation.76 “And Yet the Arrears Were Never Collected”: The Problem of Accountability By correlating the poll tax with the paying power of the household, however indirectly and arbitrarily, the government hoped to reduce the tax arrears that were a regular feature of the tax system. Arrears were registered with the very first poll taxes in the 1720s. In the 1730s every assessment of 70 kopecks per person yielded 3 kopecks in practice.77 The government explained the arrears in a manner that would remain remarkably stable over the next century and a half: poverty and the role of the intermediaries. The latter – the collectors – were the

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only people with whom the government interacted directly. It was easy to not only focus on them but also assume that they were causal factors in the arrears; any other causes were invisible. The collectors in each region and estate were regularly accused of corruption and then arrested, flogged, and exiled. This could apply as much to the tax farmers (the komissary and voevody of the eighteenth century, noblemen and military men responsible to the governors and the Senate) as to the peasant and burgher elders who were responsible for their peers.78 Empress Anna was especially fond of blaming the collectors, and large punitive detachments rounded up the tax farmers, the bailiffs on state lands, the gentry’s managers, and the peasant elders and beat them with whips and birch rods. Some were executed. Even noblemen who withheld their serfs’ taxes were arrested, but the practice was discontinued because noblemen tended to die in prison at a high rate. In villages where arrears surpassed 500 rubles, the government automatically sent a detachment (ekzekutsiia) of nine soldiers, who would be paid by the villagers at a daily rate of 15 kopecks for the officer, 5 kopecks for the non-commissioned officer, and 3 kopecks for the private, plus 3 funty each of bread and one of meat. Horses would get hay. The longer it took the village to deliver the arrears, the longer the army would stay. The collectors could also sell off the properties of individual delinquents, send them or their children to the army, or, if they were too deviant even for the army, to Siberia. Among burghers and state peasants, the arrears could be forcibly redivided among the other members of the community – a mechanism of collective responsibility that would be generalized to all peasants after 1861, though the term was not used in the eighteenth century.79 Why villagers who were unable or unwilling to pay their bill were more likely to pay a new and larger one was unclear, but the entire system, if viewed as a mechanism of collection, was counterintuitive. Under Empress Anna, in villages where the tax bill was determined to have been divided unfairly or corruptly, the army was instructed to “carry out stern tortures and destruction.”80 “The strong measures,” the Tax Commission would summarize, “taken under the Empress Anna Ivanovna for the collection of arrears filled all Russia with terror. And yet the arrears were never collected.”81 Indeed, tax arrears had been written off in the late 1720s, and in 1730 Anna found that they had grown again; all Russian towns without exception were in arrears, serfs owed 1.6 million rubles, and state peasants owed another 800,000 rubles. By the end of her reign, arrears had risen to a cumulative 5 million rubles. If Peter the Great collected 3 kopecks per head on a 70-kopeck assessment, Anna increased it to 8 kopecks. The arrears were written off in 1752, only to climb steadily over the next decades.82

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In hindsight, it is clear that arrests, exiles, tortures, beatings, and wholesale reprisals avoided the point, if the point was the collection of the taxes. Either these measures were unrelated to increasing revenue or they removed the delinquents from production and ensured that the tax would not be paid at all, or they punished the wrong people. But taxes were as much a matter of rule and spectacle. They were meant to instil in the population a fear and respect of power, and they inscribed legal distinctions in status by dividing the population into taxable and non-taxable estates.83 The benevolent forgiving of tax debts was part and parcel of the same approach to rule. The ruler was distant, fierce, and benevolent but not at all familiar with the local conditions; the punishments were as arbitrary as was the forgiveness. Blanket write-offs of debts followed Anna’s reign with increased regularity. One or another imperial milestone provided the occasion for benevolence, and the arrears provided the mechanism for its expression: 1787 (Catherine’s jubilee), 1797 (Paul’s accession), 1814 (victory over Napoleon), 1826 (Nicholas I’s accession), and 1855 (Alexander II’s accession).84 In the last case, 1855, a sum of 54.2 million rubles was forgiven, against a total annual assessment of 45.4 million rubles in soul taxes and quit-rent.85 The wise peasant would wait for the death of the tsar before paying too much of the tax bill or pray for the tsar’s long life and another jubilee. Since the taxes were never meant to represent a realistic appraisal of the paying power of a peasant or burgher, taxation was instead a satisfactory mechanism of levying gross sums on a territory, and an occasion to express and reaffirm a style of rule. By the 1860s, however, the scale of government programs and a new awareness of the population as a dynamic source of wealth meant that the Tax Commission was genuinely interested in investigating the reason that peasants would not or could not pay taxes. The members never seemed sure which it was. The very character of the data, which was province wide, offered them few clues. The increase in population between the censuses should have meant that the burden was being spread among more people and was, per capita, smaller, but still the arrears went up. Arrears increased during destructive wars and harvest failures but also in times of good harvests and domestic peace. Arrears rose when the tax bill was increased, and also when the bill was reduced. Arrears could be found on gentry estates among serfs, but also among peasants on crown and state lands. They might be found in one village but not the neighbouring one.86 In Saratov province the relationship between the tax bills and the arrears was inverse: peasants who owed 5.79 rubles per capita in tax had negligible arrears in the late 1850s, while neighbouring villages that owed 1.86 rubles per capita had accumulated arrears of 7.3 per cent of the annual assessment – even though all arrears had been written off in

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1855.87 There was no discernible connection between government practices and policies, on the one hand, and the arrears, on the other. In addition, in ways that would become more pronounced at the end of the century, the lack of knowledge and the disconnect between government action and peasant reaction would ensure that the government would not act with confidence; it could never be sure if peasants were not paying because they could not or because they were tacitly refusing. By the late 1850s there was something of a consensus in the government that the lack of correspondence between wealth and taxation was at the root of the debacle, but there was little agreement on how to redress it. As one member of the Tax Commission concluded in 1860, the “equality” of the poll tax was “arithmetical, but not qualitative or proportional” to the payer’s income or wealth. It would remain so as long as Russia lacked the professional administrative apparatus to investigate local conditions regularly and systematically.88 The use of the cadastral data in the 1859 census was supposed to make each tax bill relative to the wealth of the payer, at least for the nineteen provinces concerned. Yet the arrears began a new climb in these provinces too, despite the cadastres, despite the blanket write-offs of 1855, and despite the larger “gift” of personal freedom from the gentry in the Emancipation of 1861.89 Arrears approached 38 million rubles in 1880, when the government again wrote off a sizeable potion; even so, the arrears on the poll tax reached 19 per cent of the annual assessment by 1881, with highs of 114 per cent in some provinces and lows of 10 per cent in others. All provinces without exception had arrears.90 It was as if, the Tax Commission observed, the Great Reforms had never occurred. In some ways this was true. Collective responsibility (krugovaia poruka or krugovoe ruchatel’stvo), which made collections and accountability a purely peasant affair, remained unreformed and indeed was generalized to all categories of peasants. Imperial apportionment and local repartition, which treated taxes as a state need but not a matter of paying power, remained the standard practice. This meant that the government agencies neither had nor sought information about the internal condition of any county or rural society and did not participate in the collection of the tax. According to the practice outlined at Emancipation, the Ministry of State Domains (and later also of Finances) compiled its annual tax assessments and distributed them to the provinces. The cadastral data notwithstanding, these sums were often calculated as fractions or multiples of the old soul tax.91 The governors distributed them to the district coffers (uezdnoe kaznacheistvo), which then divided them among the county boards of elected peasant elders. The county boards sent the final assessment document (okladnoi list) to the village elders.92 The whole process was observed, but not managed, by a single clerk of the provincial Treasury Office. Elders were

The Fiscal Instruments of Regime Change  53

given very detailed instructions about the types of compulsion they could use and the methods of assessment at their disposal, but the representatives of the central government were specifically banned from interfering with the way in which the local collective gathered its taxes, so long as the bill was paid.93 Non-interference had been one of the founding aspects of the poll tax in the 1720s, an expedient that released the government from a costly direct involvement in collections. The expedient was turned into the principle of communal self-rule in the 1840s, when the peasant land commune was “discovered” as the pillar of Russian peasant society – by a German traveller, no less.94 At Emancipation, communal property was officialized for much of central Russia, while in all regions state non-interference in peasant government was universalized and valorized as “the principle of peasant self-administration” (nachalo krest’ianskago samoupravleniia). Even in villages where property and inheritance were individualized by household (podvornoe vladenie), tax collection still operated by the collective responsibility of the rural society (sel’skoe obshchestvo).95 From the imperial or provincial capital there was little operative difference between types of ownership because collective responsibility rendered them uniform. The way in which the local collectives of villagers apportioned the tax among their members was well beyond the concern or competence of government agencies.96 Only in the 1890s would the government undertake a systematic investigation of the way peasants taxed themselves. With collective responsibility came the entire ethos of the autocratic rule of collectives. As often as the intermediaries were punished for arrears, peasants were forgiven for their native poverty – native because the poverty seemed obvious but was not demonstrable or quantifiable. Or, more accurately, it was impossible to relate the arrears in any given county or village with the economic conditions that obtained, because those conditions were unknown to the officials who compiled the tax bills. Some generalization had always been possible, but it tended to be global information that did not relate to the arrears of a given territory. Periodic investigations found that rebellion, famine, and epidemic might reduce the paying power along the central Volga (the Bashkir Wars of the mid-eighteenth century), that the movement of the front in one or another Turkish or Napoleonic war might sharply reduce the number of payers and replace them with refugees, and that a harvest failure produced famine in large areas of Belorussia. However, it should be clear by now that government agencies could not move beyond global generalization, lacking as they did the more detailed knowledge of localities, villages, and households, the more penetrating mechanisms of assessment and investigation, the dynamic sense of change in any one place, and the tactile administration that could manage the entire affair. An increase in the tax yield might indicate that peasants were

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being squeezed and better coerced or it might indicate that peasants were better off. Both claims were made regularly because both were plausible but neither was verifiable.97 More important than the fact of poverty, then, was the entire ethos of paternal Christian rule that animated autocracy, by which peasants were held to be globally defenceless, poor, dependent, and (as individuals, households, or even villages) invisible. This ethos made possible the global forgiving of tax debt by “The Most Kind of Manifestos” (Vsemilostiveishii manifest) and for the collective punishments of a delinquent territory. This attitude would remain remarkably stable into the twentieth century, partly because of the depth of the ideological conviction about autocracy and about peasants and partly because of the material limits on Russian rule that made the ideology reasonable. For all the writings on universalism and equalization, even the tax reformers were prepared to treat peasants differently.

2 Three Tax Reforms, Three Visions of the Polity

In the 1860s and 1870s the central government concluded that reform would have to be different for different populations and economic functions. In urban and commercial Russia the government laid the groundwork for a modern system of revenue that was based on wealth and possibly income. That method was not applied to rural Russia where a system of collective responsibility and sparse government administration allowed for the perpetuation of much older practices disguised as new measures like the land tax. There would be no encounter of the peasant person with the state, and peasants across the board would administer their taxes collectively. The new order of direct taxation did reduce the patchwork of regional arrangements, but it replaced it with a new and more profound urban-rural divide. Indirect taxes were a third route that ignored the person altogether and observed the realm through the act of consumption. Tax farming was replaced by a full-blown excise system with its own new excise inspectorate. It did offer a rare view of the economy that ignored one’s status altogether; paradoxically, the free trade on which it was based offered a better way to regulate the production. Yet the market and the excise system offered little in the way of social and individual regulation and improvement at a time when these goals were on the state and public agendas. The excise system was a hugely successful fiscal operation, but it was the occasion to express a larger discontent with the free market itself. Free trade was subverted almost as soon as it was proclaimed. Ignore the Person: The Logic of Property Taxes after 1855 There was to be no immediate and direct assault on gentry privilege, at least not in name. Rather, the Russian fiscal system adopted a different approach, borrowing heavily from the French example of the eighteenth and nineteenth

56  People, Places, Things

centuries, which circumvented the question of legal status by shifting focus away from the person to the person’s property. In France under the old regime, this process was connected with the fiscal effort to collect revenue from the otherwise exempt gentry. In order to avoid a direct encounter with individual payers, the practice of apportionment in France – the impôts de répartition rather than impôts de quotité – distributed lump sums among the départements, and these were redistributed among property owners according to local values and local cadastres. Apportionment in France developed as a philosophy as well as an expedient. It was a recognition of the political and administrative difficulty of peering regularly into the minutiae of everyday life – flat rates were much simpler to collect and less open to negotiation – and also an affirmation of the immunity of the person from investigation.1 From these twin principles of simplicity and privacy emerged the very complicated and well-developed systems of French external assessment. A body of inspectors and assessors produced not only numbers and invoices but also voluminous writings that carefully considered the philosophical implications of any new tax and any new form of assessment. These assessments could rely on the observation of a business or a home from the street and could draw on indirect indicators of wealth, but they almost never entailed a direct confrontation with the payer, rarely required tax declarations, and rarely involved a visit to the home or business in question. Some of these taxes levied flat sums on persons that were scarcely different from a poll tax, except they were universal; others were taxes on windows and doors that were associated with income or wealth; and others were based on the rental values of apartments, gleaned from local data. They were acceptable to taxpayers because the final sums were modest, if inflexible, and also guarded the payer’s privacy. The same considerations – privacy and expedience – ensured that France would not implement the income tax in the nineteenth century, and only a feeble one in the early twentieth.2 The French example was very much on the minds of Russian fiscal experts, in a way that it had not been under the previous reign. In the 1820s the State Council dismissed recommendations for a reform of direct taxation because it was beneath the dignity of the empire to ape western, Asian, or ancient states. “What existed in primitive and unenlightened times, and what the Turks are doing to collect the people’s money, cannot be an example … Russia does not slavishly imitate any other people, but instead we can say that Russia herself reigns over all others.” The prodigious reference in these proposals to French political economy in the eighteenth century was hardly comforting, considering its outcome in 1789.3 By the 1860s it was precisely eighteenth-century France that offered fiscal experts the best precedent because it cast equality as

Three Tax Reforms, Three Visions of the Polity  57

a universal liability before an absolute ruler. An added liberal sensibility that granted the person some immunity was discussed explicitly, as a matter of economic theory and fiscal expedience. From a distance the treasury could claim moderate and predictable amounts of visible wealth and income, and even the moderate sums would amount to much more if private trade and production were allowed to develop with less government interference but with better registration. Many doubted the French principle of individual immunity (chapters 3 and 6), but virtually all experts could agree that a detailed assessment of businesses and households was practically impossible. The solution to the problem of personal taxation was to avoid taxing persons. A member of the Tax Commission told the State Council in 1861, “Of course, the division of inhabitants into taxable and non-taxable estates should have been repealed as incompatible with the creation of a rational tax system, but this goal can be reached much more conveniently and comfortably by repealing all personal taxes.”4 Quietly and almost imperceptibly, the assessment moved from a flat rate on the person to a rate (also flat) on the property. The treasury became more concerned with items of wealth than with the person as such. In fiscal parlance, the “object of assessment” would no longer be the person but the things the person owned or possessed; the owner would be “the payer,” a commonsensical term that was in fact a neologism that skirted the person’s legal status. Instead of the person, who was liable for an absolute sum, the fiscal apparatus was redirected to the things that generated income. While in theory both urban and rural Russia were reformed in this manner – shifting burdens from persons to properties – in practice the Russian state lacked the capacity and the will to implement these changes in the villages. Urban Russia embarked on a full-scale revision of the methods of assessment and collection because a slightly expanded bureaucracy could easily map properties and observe an existing and growing exchange economy. In rural Russia the state lacked the full-scale monetization by which to trace economic activities, the personnel to realize it, and the political will to enact it. The Making of an Urban-Rural Divide As early as 1855 Alexander II ordered the Ministry of Finances to develop alternatives to the poll tax on burghers, and the legislation was proposed to the State Council in the years 1862–3.5 The poll tax of 4 million rubles was repealed for 1864 and replaced by a revamped licence tax on businesses for 1865 and an entirely new urban properties tax.6 Each tax was to yield about 2 million rubles, and together they came suspiciously close to the sum of the old poll tax on burghers, around 4.1 million rubles.7 What seemed like a mere change in name,

58  People, Places, Things

however, had been developed by the Tax Commission to promote a series of new principles in the system of direct taxation: universalism, wealth, and increasingly income assessment in place of apportionment. The tax on businesses was a licence fee (patent) on any business in a town and potentially anywhere. This had been in existence since 1824, when Kankrin introduced it as a simple if regressive way to tax non-agricultural wealth. At that time the tax was intimately tied with one’s estate status. The licence allowed one to trade, and a separate fee (svidetel’stvo) allowed one to enter the merchant guilds and participate in production and trade. Non-merchants had difficulty gaining admission to the merchantry or to the guilds, and non-merchants did not necessarily pay the licence tax. The revised law for 1863 was the Statute on Tariffs for the Right to Trade and Other Industries (Polozhenie o poshlinakh na pravo torgovli i drugikkh promyslov). It maintained the licence – it was simple and allowed the government to register all businesses – but changed the relationship between trade and status. Anyone with sufficient capital could enter the merchantry and the guilds, and the fees for entering the guild were cut in half. Anyone who liked could buy a licence, regardless of legal status.8 Trade and manufacture from the government’s point of view would be an occupation rather than a title, and status would be money based rather than a birthright. The system would deliberately erode the estate element in the economy, and more fluid classes would take its place. The licence fee began with rough scales of the expected revenue of certain types of businesses in certain regions, so it was higher on, say, a tannery in Moscow than on a tannery in Pskov, and higher for a jeweller than for a cobbler anywhere. Highly regressive though it was – it could barely distinguish between a Moscow tinker and a Moscow iron works – it was useful to the treasury for its capacity to simply register businesses that had hitherto not been registered with the treasury at all, and to guarantee a steady flow of revenue.9 That the new tax was based on “tangible external indicators” (osiazatel’nye vneshnie priznaki)10 would seem retrograde in later decades. It involved no component of reporting or declaration and no provisions for the disclosure of the actual income of a firm.11 The treasury could only consider the symptoms of income rather than the income itself: buildings, doors, loading gates, and the comings and goings of workers and carts. One should recall, however, that this tax was modified in order to replace a poll tax that required no information whatsoever, save a counting of heads. Even the external indicators would provide the treasury with troves of information that had never been the treasury’s concern: the very existence of a firm, its location, and some sense of its size and activity. For this reason the Tax Commission insisted that this tax, unlike all other direct taxes, not be apportioned; when registering activities and paying

Three Tax Reforms, Three Visions of the Polity  59

the fee, the payer entered into a direct and individual relationship with the state. The modesty of the licence tax was also deliberate. As the Ministry of Finances explained in 1863, the state could approach trade and production less coercively but more effectively, registering more firms, taxing them at a nominal rate, and extracting more income for the treasury “thanks to … the natural, free development of trade and industrial enterprises.”12 Alongside the revised licence fee came a new urban properties tax (Nalog s nedvizhimykh imushchestv v gorodakh, posadakh i mestechkakh) on land and buildings that produced or could produce some kind of revenue. The contrast to the poll tax that it replaced was remarkable. The pool of potential payers expanded when the subject of taxation was a property rather than a person, and it now included honoured citizens, merchants, and noblemen who had been exempt from the poll tax. In theory, it assessed all properties at 0.2 per cent of their value. Billeting taxes in kind were converted in 1875 to a lump sum of 2.0 million rubles and added to the property tax of 2.1 million rubles. It remained at 4.1–4.2 million rubles into the 1880s.13 The tax removed from the tax rolls the burghers who did not own property, thereby introducing wealth as a new criterion to replace legal status. The old poll tax rolls for burghers, it will be recalled, included not only traders and craftsmen but also wealthy plant owners and wholesalers who obviously paid too little. Others paid too much, including church psalters, ballet dancers, orchestral musicians, clerks, scribes, dockworkers, footmen, dishwashers, and cooks. The new focus on property removed most of these groups from the tax rolls. It replaced them with a new category altogether, that of “the possessing” or “the propertied” (imushchestvennye or sobstvenniki) – a term that would become commonplace as a socio-political designation of status.14 The Department of Assessed Levies would later mark the urban properties tax as “the first attempt in our tax system to transfer direct taxes from personal labour” – meaning the estates most associated with manual labour – “and spread direct assessment on all estates without exception, not only on taxable classes.”15 Fundamentally it eroded the very idea of a taxable estate. It also offered a single standard that could be applied to all regions of Russia – the monetary value of real estate – and this was applied to all parts of the empire over the next few decades, from Poland to the Far East and Turkestan. To be sure, the ambition to assess the properties left unaddressed the problem of personnel and data. There was no body of state employees to calculate direct taxes, so in practice the aggregate sum of the urban properties tax was derived from the sum of the old poll tax and apportioned to the provinces. Now, however, the distribution from the provinces to the towns was conducted with the help of the new zemstvo institutions, and within the towns by the reformed municipal administrations (dumas and ratushas). These formed local

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commissions (prisutstviia) that were supplemented by invited property owners (eksperty) who could comment on incomes and property values in a given neighbourhood or occupational group. Taxpayers would assess other taxpayers in order to derive averages for a given industry and region, and the averages would then apply to everyone as normy (norms). At the same time, the franchise for the election of town government was changed in 1870 to include all owners of properties rather than merchants and burghers by estate, so that the franchise began to square with the tax liability. The payment of any tax, duty, or licence fee made one eligible to vote, though the highest tax bracket (meaning the largest property owners) dominated the town administration.16 There was, potentially, a political tension in the system because it linked taxation with representation in the context of an autocracy. Izbiratel’nyi tsenz (electoral census) referred to the amount of tax paid that made one eligible to vote and stand for office; tsenzovoe obshchesvtvo (census society) soon entered the vernacular to designate that group of the population that was propertied and qualified to vote. Bunge, as adviser to the government and tutor to the tsarevich, was aware of the tension, and he qualified the relationship between taxation and the franchise. True, he wrote, the advanced forms of taxation that included taxpayer participation in the assessment process – England was the prime example – tended to emerge in countries with representative government. Russia, however, was an “unlimited monarchy,” which meant that property could not be a basis for rights or consent; rather, property selected a small stratum for “participation” and “consultation” but not “representation.”17 Like­ wise, the commission that was charged with drafting the municipal reforms linked taxation with participation (uchastie); taxation suggested the degree of one’s commitment to local affairs and could serve the tsar locally. Small property owners were marginalized, and the propertyless were excluded.18 Munici­ pal reform never implied popular consent but the local administration of the central state’s laws and policies. Tension was also evident in the fact that the representative tax commissions were modelled in part on the English system of local tax commissions, which functioned autonomously and constituted an explicit devolution of authority to local society and a check on the central government. The Russian government presented the participation of taxpayers in their own assessment as an enrichment of the state itself. Rather than devolving authority to a separate social group, the Russian lawmakers declared that the state’s right to tax was not in need of justification; the state would enhance its effectiveness by drawing the local population into the process.19 Despite the inclusion of taxpayers in the assessment commissions through the zemstvos and municipalities, this was still administrative justice, a system contained within the state bureaucracy rather than outside it, even as it co-opted some of the local population.20

Three Tax Reforms, Three Visions of the Polity  61

Rural taxation remained largely unreformed, and the poll tax was maintained into the 1880s. At 55 million rubles in 1881, the poll tax remained the largest single direct tax, and by now it fell exclusively on peasants. The obrok – the quit-rents of peasants who lived on state lands, which varied by region according to rudimentary regional observation – was assessed at another 31 million rubles, more if one counts the surcharges for the use of state forests. Together, peasants as an estate provided 70 per cent of all direct tax revenue in the early 1880s.21 The system as it had evolved in the 1860s allowed for some differentiation between provinces, since the provinces were broken down into eight regions: the highest rates were in provinces with large cities and ports, and therefore markets for rural production and high rates of money exchange; the lowest rates were in the far north of European Russia and Siberia. For some groups, like Siberian herders, there was no pretence of differentiation, only a flat rate based on historical precedent. The smallest unit of state apportionment would be the district (uezd). This meant that, if a peasant lived at the southern tip of Archangel district, his rate would be high because the district also contained the port of Archangel, but a few feet across the border in Kholmogorsk district the rate would be a small fraction. Real income and well-being never entered the picture.22 The main change in rural taxation was the introduction of the modest state land tax (Gosudarstvennyi pozemel’nyi nalog), adopted in 1870 and implemented piecemeal from 1875 until it was universalized in 1886. It was set periodically by the State Council and then apportioned to the provinces. Some cadastral and general economic information was brought to bear, and land values or incomes from land were supposed to be the one constant in the whole system. The system was crude because the government had not developed a consistent way to compare values and well-being between the provinces, and the relative rates between the provinces were supposed to be the main mechanism of fairness in any system of apportioned taxation. Instead, fifty-two provinces in European Russia were grouped into eleven regions, and the aggregate figures were apportioned accordingly. In 1884 when the tax was to be generalized, the government used three main regions and employed some simple division that saved it from the need for actual evaluation: 36.6 per cent to central black earth region, 36.6 per cent to the other black earth regions, and 27.5 per cent to the non-black earth.23 The provincial Treasury Offices were responsible for distributing the bill among districts, using whatever information was available to them. Scratching the surface of a new so-called land assessment, one inevitably found the 1859 census for the poll tax, and often the land values that were developed for the Emancipation. Statistics on land values and incomes could be used where they existed, and the Ministry of Finances invited the zemstvos to gather and share their data in 1867. Their mandate to assess their own taxes on real estate,

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especially agricultural land, made them the obvious institution to conduct local cadastres; and the state land tax was meant to fall on the same lands that the zemstvos were taxing. But this cadastral work had barely begun, and the localism of the zemstvos made the data scant and idiosyncratic, unsuited to regional comparison even within a province. Zemstvo cadastral and assessment methods ranged from the rare full-scale evaluations of the quality and revenue of land to the more common flat rates on a desiatina of any land to the use of indirect indicators like rental rates, and, ironically for a land tax, the number of inhabitants in a region.24 So poor was the state of statistical work that there was no regular counting of the local statisticians themselves. One was known to have been hired in 1870, and only in 1882 did the Ministry of Internal Affairs request that the governors count the statisticians as part of a crack-down on subversives. The total of 227 statisticians in that year included casual correspondents of the zemstvos rather than actual statisticians, and they were concentrated in a few wealthy regions: 153 of the 227 worked in just five provinces.25 In the same year that the government requested the data from the zemstvos, it decided not to use them because of their poor quality, and by 1870 no such data had been used by the Ministry of Finances in apportioning the land tax.26 In 1878 the Tax Commission concluded that the cadastral work had gone nowhere, and not one zemstvo could provide data useful in the process of tax assessment. Witte repeated the lament in 1892.27 The state had had statistical bureaus under the Ministry of Internal Affairs since the 1830s, but these were poorly staffed and, from the fiscal perspective, counted the wrong things. Surveys were designed not to seek economic information so as not to frighten the respondents. Other surveys of conscription-age men and horses were again not useful in tax assessment. As Hoch summarized, “the Russian autocracy lacked the means to administer the society effectively, best evinced by its inability to gather the most basic economic data.”28 Apportionment and repartition were therefore unavoidable, but the real departure was that the land tax fell on all land without exception; the immediate target was gentry land. This was the first tax that would apply to the agricultural land of the gentry, offsetting the fact that “the weight of direct taxation falls as always on peasants, thereby retarding the correct development of their wellbeing.”29 The initial sum for the tax was set at 4.5 million rubles, of which 3.0  million rubles was imposed on non-peasants, mainly the gentry.30 In the early 1880s, as the government began to phase out the poll tax and replace it with the land tax, gentry lands comprised 42.5 per cent of the lands assessed, peasant communal land made up 53.0 per cent, and crown lands 4.0 per cent. However, as a share of the overall direct tax bill, the gentry still paid very little:

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in 1881 the gentry land tax comprised 4.0 per cent of direct taxes, while peasant taxation (redemptions, land taxes, and the poll taxes) comprised 89.0 per cent.31 The system remained deeply arbitrary. Despite the letter of the law, local practice might assess the tax on land values, on expected incomes from lands, or (inasmuch as the poll tax data was still in wide use) on male labourers or all persons. Once again a full cadastre was considered and dismissed because “Russia is too big,” so local practice would determine how the bill was repartitioned inside a province. The provincial political realities made for some remarkable inequalities. Gentry land should have been taxed at a higher rate. It was more valuable because it was sellable, mortgageable, extensive, and consolidated and was more likely to produce marketable surpluses. But given the gentry’s predominance in the zemstvo institutions, their lands were assessed slightly lower (3.23 rubles per desiatina) than were peasant lands (3.84 rubles per desiatina). In some cases, the tax was set at a purely nominal 50 kopecks per desiatina.32 Even the overarching goal of transcending estate was realized imperfectly. Peasant lands and gentry lands were both assessed as “land,” but there was no operative principle in the tax regulations of an individual peasant payer, an individual peasant household, or even an individual plot of peasant land. That is to say, the tax code treated every rural society as a tax unit (podatnaia edinitsa), alongside every gentry landed estate. The peasant county, meaning its elders, was responsible for repartitioning the bill among households. This was the uniform administrative practice for peasants regardless of the way in which peasants owned their land. Even in those regions where peasant land was possessed individually, by household (podvorno), and where there was no redistributive land commune, the tax unit was still the rural society, and the rural society was responsible for the taxes. In substance this meant that gentry landowners interacted with the state directly, while peasant householders had no direct relationship with the state as such, only the peasant intermediaries. As late as 1917, the official statistics entered gentry land assessments and peasant land assessments under separate columns, reflecting the different ways that the law and the practice construed the subjects. The land tax was overwhelmed by the size, controversy, and symbolism of the redemption payments (vykupnye platezhi). In the wake of the Emancipation of 1861 a series of regulations determined that almost all serfs would receive land when they were freed from the gentry. The state would compensate the gentry for the lost land, and the peasantry would pay back the state in the form of annual redemption payments. These were to last for about fifty years. Different groups of peasants entered the redemption process until 1886, when state peasants had their quit-rents to the state converted into redemption

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payments (in this case, a quit-rent liability that was capitalized and paid down over forty-nine years).33 Indeed 1886 marks the year that the Russian peasantry was first treated as a coherent group in that its members all owed the same taxes (land tax) and quasi-taxes (redemptions) regardless of region and legal status at Emancipation (serf, crown, and state peasants). From this revenue status flowed the basic outline of rural government that was again consistent over space: self-government in the county, the rural society, and the village. Far though this was from an ambition of integral government – the system of peasant government was marked by separateness, first and foremost, from any other state or zemstvo institution – it was nevertheless the first step towards conceiving of a uniform peasantry that could be counted and acted upon globally. For our purposes, it is important that the redemption payments were treated as taxes. Theoretically they were a banking operation, but the drafters of the emancipation settlement considered that they had no way to make peasants accountable through conventional mortgage mechanisms; inalienable and communal land could not be used as security. Bunge (one of the drafters) recommended that the redemption payments be added to the list of taxes that were collected by the state, and this became the practice.34 They resembled taxes in another way, too; in the absence of a cadastre the redemption amounts did not reflect the value or the income of the land and were calculated on the basis of aggregate acreage figures for a region or population or as functions of quitrents – none of them income based.35 Part of the problem was that there was no market in inalienable peasant communal land and therefore no ready standard for determining its value. Instead, broad regional averages were derived from the open market in gentry land. At the same time, the government asked the gentry to offer estimates of the value of the land they would give to their former serfs, but the gentry returned with estimates of the labour days that would be lost by freeing them. On these bases the state allowed the peasants to negotiate with the lords in order to reach a price. The prices of the land, the compensation of the lord, and redemption payments to the state were the product of unequal negotiation by peasants with their lords in each village.36 Once these rates had been set, redemptions were billed globally for the village in question, sometimes whole regions, and collected by the collective responsibility of the peasants before the state. In conception and implementation, then, the redemption payments were treated as one more tax, and an archaic one at that, which was added to the assessment for the poll tax and land tax of a given rural society each year, along with land taxes payable to the zemstvos and to the peasant administration itself. Rural societies returned sums that only sometimes covered the full amount,

Three Tax Reforms, Three Visions of the Polity  65

and these sums were applied to cover the different taxes. That the payments rarely covered the bills was hardly new, but by the 1880s this became the source of scandal as officials began to ask that a tax assessment actually be paid, in the process assuming that it was a fair claim on capacities; the assumption was entirely unreasonable. Critics began to equate the arrears with poverty, thereby assuming that taxes that were affordable would otherwise have been paid; this assumption too was unreasonable. Both ignored the fact that the taxes were never meant to reflect capacities, and both assumed alien standards of accountability. If one were to add the taxes in kind (zemskiia povinnosti or natural’nyia zemskiia povinnosti) that only peasants owed, then one can better appreciate the discriminatory and archaic character of the peasant tax system as a whole. Finance officials readily admitted that it constituted “an enormous injustice.”37 Only peasants were called upon, through their rural societies, to provide road, bridge, and waterway maintenance, fire-fighting, postal delivery and support, and security along the main roads. Arbitrariness abounded as the labour taxes fell on those who lived closest to the job in question. One step removed from forced labour, the value of these services was, literally, incalculable. Labour markets were too poorly developed so soon after the end of serfdom. Anyway the central and local governments were in no position to pay for the labour; they would have needed proper monetary taxes to do so. Efforts to convert these dues into monetary taxes would have paved the way for claiming a commensurate monetary share from other estates; once it was monetary, it was universally applicable. To that end, the Tax Commission attempted to arrive at an aggregate monetary figure for all taxes in kind and concluded that each peasant in 1863 owed 87.5 kopecks, a sum that it hoped to one day redistribute among all Russian subjects as a money tax. This was achieved in the towns, when the billeting obligations of the burghers were added to the urban properties tax.38 Labour taxes would apply only to peasants into the twentieth century.39 One may remark on the inequality that was built into the tax system as a whole, not so much in the sense that peasants paid too much; some doubtless paid too little. The larger point is that no one could say what was affordable, and the system of peasant taxation was necessarily arbitrary. It stood in ever starker contrast to the emerging system of universalistic assessment that was taking shape in the cities. Indirect Taxation, the Free Market, and Their Discontents From the 1860s to the 1880s Russia made a transition from tax farming to a full-blown system of excise taxation. It offered the first general statistical views

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of the population as economies of production and exchange, and indirectly as consumers. The excise system was predicated on a well-established exchange economy and on the then-current prejudice that this economy functioned best when it was privately owned. The state would skim a portion of the exchange in the form of tax. Yet this system also made for much more effective regulation because it allowed the state a fuller view of production and exchange and a better way to intervene in the economy. Tax farming by contrast had blinded the state to the local workings of the exchange economy. Free trade was tempered from its very inception as officials sought more revenue and better production and market practices, and they used their new tools to address a wider unease over the disorder and unpredictability of the unbridled market. The trade in vodka epitomized the trajectory from free trade to regulation – or, better yet, the use of private trade to regulate the economy – and it captured the many economic and social anxieties that were at play in the fiscal debates. Indirect taxes on trade were the most equal of all taxes, if by “equal” one means universal liability and non-discrimination. Excise taxes were charged at the point of production or wholesale distribution, and they were paid by anyone who bought the goods in question: alcohol, tobacco, sugar, and, until 1880, salt. They offered no exemptions at a time when direct taxes still divided the population into taxable and non-taxable estates. Taxpayer and consumer became synonymous, and birth became irrelevant. These taxes involved no direct encounter with the payers, only the producers or the wholesalers, which was both politically expedient and a cheap form of administration. As the Tax Commission reported to the State Council, indirect taxes “weigh on the people much less, they spread themselves more evenly, and generally they are paid as if imperceptibly by taxable persons at the very moment of demand and thus seem less burdensome.”40 Excise taxes also achieved with great simplicity what required great labour when the taxes were direct: they monitored production and exchange in the economy, they suggested patterns, and they connected state revenue with economic activity. Their great disadvantage was that they were regressive, since they took no direct account of the person’s paying power. The idea that the wealthy would buy more was silly because the demand for these goods was inelastic, which is what also made them a steady and predictable source of revenue. Their relationship to a person’s income was inverse; that is, they weighed more heavily on a person with a low income. Mass taxes depended on mass consumption, and the masses in this case were the aggregate of lower-income populations who, individually, would consume as much alcohol, tobacco, or salt as the wealthy and pay just as much in tax. Cumulatively – as estates or as labouring classes – these consumers would account for the overwhelming share of the revenue. It

Three Tax Reforms, Three Visions of the Polity  67

was common practice even in the government to treat excise taxes as one more burden on the lower classes of the population and to add them to the total tax liability of peasants.41 It took a good deal of dissembling on the part of financial experts to argue that an excise system was anything but unfair; it still does. One might argue, for example, that one would pay only to the extent that one chose to consume the article in question; with the exception of salt, which was taxed until 1880, these items were not necessities. The more serious argument was neither economic nor fiscal but political. Some finance officials took issue with the social categories that were in use and questioned the juxtaposition of the people, the peasantry, and the labouring classes with the “possessing” classes, the nobility, and the well-off. They could look at the matter as individual accountability and ignore the collective sums, and in the process propose a sociological and political rethinking of the population: individuals seen as individuals dissolved the collectives to which they otherwise belonged. Whereas the gross amounts contributed through peasant and working-class consumption looked enormous, the impact on any one person seemed minimal. If the standards for measuring success were individual contributions to a larger state economy, individual accountability, and near-universal payment to the treasury, then excise taxes did achieve their objectives. Obsessed as they were with the legacies of exemption and apportionment, fiscal experts were satisfied that non-peasants would pay as well. As was the case with direct taxes, the Tax Commission concluded early in its deliberations that equality rather than proportionality was the goal that was immediately achievable. The disproportion of that contribution to the incomes of the wealthy and the poor was a price to be paid for equality and simplicity, and also for the privilege of being left alone by the state.42 To be sure, it was widely recognized that direct taxes would have been the optimal form of revenue. As the Tax Commission reported to the State Council in 1863, the issue of direct taxes was cultural: “The ideal [form] of a normal tax system is … a uniform income tax. In practice, the question can be viewed as follows: the more developed a certain country is in the economic sense, the more a system of direct taxes acquires a dominant significance over indirect taxes.” Here England was the prime example, but its ratio of direct to indirect taxes, 2:3, was unique (according to this estimate, but no two estimates are the same). Russia, with a ratio of 3:7 in 1880, was the extreme case but also closer to the pattern of continental Europe. For lack of a business culture of openness, for lack of a tradition of disclosure to the treasury, and for lack of a dense network of tax inspection, the revenue system would continue to rely heavily on indirect taxation, and the ratio would increase steadily to 1:5 in 1901.43

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Modern taxation is “indissolubly linked to an exchange economy,” Gabriel Ardant writes, and excise taxation could not exist without it.44 The trade in vodka was the first to be reformed in this period because it was already monetized to an unusual extent; in many localities vodka was used as currency because it retained its value better than did the ruble.45 The system of vodka revenue had been established in 1827 as a mixture of tax farming (otkup) in Great Russia, a monopoly of the (Polish) nobility in Ukraine, a purely Cossack matter in the Don Region, and a private industry with excise taxation in the Baltic provinces. The existence of fundamentally different systems was itself an object of official criticism; it disrupted the “unity of the market” and of the “state economy” at a time when uniformity, legibility, and standards of comparison were ends in themselves. That one of those systems, the gentry’s monopoly in Ukraine, reinforced estate privilege and rewarded the Polish gentry (then engaged in another rebellion) was itself damning. It was the tax farming in Great Russia, however, that captured the imagination of tax reformers because it allowed for the greatest abuses, ran so contrary to the principles of free trade, and shielded the population of consumers so completely from the state. As the system existed until 1863, Great Russia was divided onto “drinking regions” (piteinye okruga), within which an entrepreneur acquired the right to sell alcohol and collect an excise tax on the state’s behalf. The distillate was produced in 723 state plants and many more private ones. Nominally an excise system, it was in fact simple tax farming: the commissioner (the tax farmer) was expected to pay a fixed annual sum to the state, while the commissioner’s practices within a district were beyond the state’s concern. The tax farmers established their own regulations for the distribution of alcohol, they used legal and illegal methods to enforce their local monopoly, and they often banned the distribution of the state-produced alcohols that yielded lower profit margins.46 Riots erupted in Archangel and Penza provinces in 1850 when tax farmers withheld the cheaper alcohols at Shrove Tide. Crowds broke into the warehouses to take it, and stores went up in flames. If more reason was needed to repeal tax farming, the spectre of drunken public disorder that could be blamed on the tax farmers was a highly effective one.47 In reforming the vodka trade, fiscal experts concentrated on both finances and popular welfare. Vodka revenues accounted for up to half of all state revenue, but it was common knowledge that the tax farmers used bribery and false reporting to keep the lion’s share of the profits – estimated at 781 million rubles, rather than the 128 million rubles that the system actually delivered to the state. In 1859 tax farming was dominated by 149 persons, the wealthiest being Greeks who did indeed deliver the promised revenue. D.E. Benardaki delivered 19 million rubles annually and punctually, and he was the model for the tax farmer

Three Tax Reforms, Three Visions of the Polity  69

Murazov in Gogol’s Dead Souls. His ostentatious lifestyle, his large art collection, and his work for the Greek parish in St Petersburg (Grecheskii pereulok, where the October Theatre now stands) and higher education in Athens spoke of the many millions he kept for himself. That 149 individuals controlled nearly half of imperial revenue and interacted on the state’s behalf with the population of alcohol consumers was, as the Ministry of Finances reported to the State Council, “beneath the dignity” of the state and “humiliating.” The state did not really govern its population at all; government – from revenue to public wellbeing and order – was contracted to the highest bidder. The tax farmers were aware of their own importance and acted with impunity. As the government moved towards abolishing the farming system, the tax farmers offered to guarantee the state’s revenue over eleven years, to build a railroad of 225 versts (with revenue generated by a monopoly of alcohol sales in its zone), and to provide a bribe of 1 million rubles to K.K. Grot, the person charged by the tsar with the reform. Grot turned it down, and Alexander II, impressed with the honesty of yet another of his Lutheran finance officials, awarded him a prize in the same amount, which he also turned down.48 The system was also inefficient. The tax farmers employed some 280,000 persons throughout the empire in a cumbersome network of transportation, retailing, credit, shop keeping, and enforcement. State production was so inefficient that most of the distilled alcohol sold in the Great Russian provinces was supplied by private plants in the Baltic provinces, which had an excise system, while state distilleries in Russia produced at one-sixth of their capacity.49 Aside from finances and efficiency, the government focused on “the economic condition of the lower classes of the population,” since overindulgence was generally associated with the poor. Adulteration made for uncounted deaths (literally uncounted since there was no one to record the aggregate deaths or list their causes as alcohol related), and taverns became local centres of prostitution, crime, and mass drunkenness. Elaborate systems of semi-bonded labour and extortionate credit arose around the trade, as addicts mortgaged their harvests and household goods, their labour, and their family’s labour. Even the occasional wedding feast required borrowing from the tax farmers. The government’s objection was paternal, a concern for a largely defenceless peasantry that the tsar was sworn to defend. Creeping into the conversation about vodka was a correlation between state revenue and the health and welfare of the population. Labour power was reduced by drinking and onerous terms of credit, and the health of the state’s finances was harmed in so far as it depended on the health of the population as a whole. Capital that might be employed productively in new industries (which in turn would represent tax revenue) was squandered on the quick profits of the

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farming system. Railway construction, for example, should have been thriving as a sector in its own right rather than as a by-product of vodka sales.50 A state monopoly on production and trade was discussed but rejected. The Tax Commission was aware that the autocrat had retained the right to a monopoly since the seventeenth century, and Ivan the Terrible had practised a version of it in the crown’s network of kabaki (from the Tatar word for a drinking den, in old Russian a korchma). However, in keeping with the free-trade ethos of the time, a state committee concluded that “there is not even one example in Russia where state management [khoziaistvo] was more advantageous than the comparable private enterprises.”51 The State Council dismissed a series of other proposed regulations on the trade on similar grounds: limits on the number of drinking establishments, creating de facto local monopolies that would be “dens of degeneration” and allow price fixing; price limits, since “the price of alcohol, under conditions of free competition, will set itself, and the government has no ability to set [prices] properly”; and limits on the strength of the alcohol, since consumers would make their preferences known – which on second thought was not necessarily good news. In the final report approved by Alexander II, the State Council concluded: “The excise system will eliminate all encumbering measures and all useless formalities, and will require no limits on the rights of the owners of the properties for the maintenance of plants and pubs [shinki], and it will not interfere with popular [that is, non-state] production.” According to the new law, distilleries and points of sale would pay the flat licence fee (patent), as did all businesses, and the treasury would claim a flat 4 rubles on a bucket (vedro) of pure alcohol at the distillery.52 Alcohol was to be a free trade, both its production and its sale. Or so it seemed at first, but not all state institutions were as taken with free-market thinking as was the Ministry of Finances. The push-back came from the ministries of Internal Affairs and of State Domains that had traditional briefs to protect populations and maintain public order, and from a variety of paternally minded members of the Court and the State Council. As these institutions worked with the Ministry of Finances to determine the details of the tax, the initial legislation was drafted and over the next decades amended to include a host of regulations and caveats. In the first instance, vodka offered an opportunity to intervene in matters of production, so that large tax discounts were offered to plants that distilled potatoes rather than grain. This was a way to diversify the crop cycle and use the pulp from the distilling process to produce fertilizer. In the great rush to receive the tax reduction, the amount of potatoes purchased for distillation rose from under 0.5 million puds in 1870 to 28.8 million puds at the end of the 1890s. Plants that adopted advanced technology

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were rewarded by the removal of all taxes above a certain level of output, while antiquated plants paid the full tax. The measure worked too well and inspired a new wave of regulations. The concentration of production in fewer capital-rich plants that could produce more tax-exempt alcohol had the effect of marginalizing smaller rural plants; the total number of distilleries in the empire fell from 4,624 in 1863 to 4,019 a year later, and the average production per plant rose from 42,700 to 60,500 buckets. By the early 1890s the number of distilleries had been cut in half, while bottling plants became heavily concentrated in St Petersburg – some 80 per cent. To compensate for its success, and since the failing plants tended to be rural distilleries, the government reverted to a different regulation: banning new distilleries in the cities.53 Monitoring became more intense than under the farming system, or, to put it more succinctly, the farming system was designed to avoid any need for ­monitoring while the excise system required it. The excise tax required the Department of Non-assessed Levies to measure the output and production methods of the distilleries. A new group of inspectors monitored plants to ensure that their technologies were updated and efficient. The excise office installed in every plant metres and gauges to measure the output that was taxed. Some of the inspectors lived near the premises to provide round-the-clock surveillance and prevent secret production. All cartloads were counted, and their loads recorded. Inspectors had to watch for the secret loading docks from which the producers carried out untaxed output and the secret pipes that filled hidden barrels with distillate. They also had to verify the excise documents of every load and keep an eye out for forgeries.54 Alcohol was also an opportunity for a larger debate about popular welfare and an occasion to act on it, though in no consistent way. Questions of welfare crept into the initial legislation of 1863, and this legislation was revisited within a year of its promulgation and regularly thereafter. By the 1880s, as Daniel Beer shows, fears of degeneration and physical debilitation made for the mutual shaping of science and political discourse – it was not clear which was the metaphor55 – and science and politics met in the realm of state tax policy. Mead and beers would be taxed at a lower rate in order to encourage moderate habits (steadier drinking of a lower alcohol content). Villages were given the right to approve or close shops in their territory, and towns could ban sales in certain (working-class) neighbourhoods. Sales were banned near churches, barracks, monasteries, and railway lines or during the meetings of the village assemblies and on Sundays. Fears that alcohol was too readily available on the streets or near places of work led to a ban on sales from produce stands. When all these measures seemed to encourage more hidden consumption at small kabaki and

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taverns (traktiry), the fees on open-air stalls were removed and the fees on taverns were raised, while kabaki (where one could drink but not eat) were banned. Drinking, it was hoped, would lose some of its stigma if it were made more public and woven into other everyday practices. When this seemed to work too well, manifest in openly drunk factory workers who wove drinking into their workdays, the government sought to encourage drinking at home; stalls were reintroduced with a ban on seating, eating, and prostitution so as to encourage carry-out and home consumption by drinkers “with their families.” When it was reported that this too worked too well, and whole families were found drunk, the alarm was sounded over the apparent poisoning of the family unit and the possible effects on child-bearing women. When taverns were banned, they became kabaki; when the kabaki were banned, they became brothels. The list of regulations and counter-measures went on. The owners of taverns were made responsible for any deaths from overdrinking or for allowing their customers to “drink themselves to amnesia” (napivat’sia do bezpamiatstva). Minimum distances were set between places of sale. When these limits again had the effect of sending the sales and consumption underground, the bans were relaxed and the power to regulate the retail trade was handed to new local committees of gentry and bureaucratic overseers, the Commissions on Drinking Matters (Prisutstviia po piteinym delam) in 1885. The policies fluctuated wildly and were regularly reversed to encourage one or another outcome – so much so that the effects of any one policy were impossible to measure.56 “However, these measures did not lead to a sobering up,” lamented the perplexed economist M.I. Fridman.57 “Free” though the trade was, it provided the government with the irresistible opportunity to act on large segments of the population and, directly or indirectly, on whole sectors of the economy. From the outset the government “freed” the trade in order to better tax it, introduce better production, and encourage different patterns of consumption, investment, and labour. For physicians, economists, and journalists, too, the tax system was an occasion to gather a plethora of data on the inputs, outputs, and efficiencies of production and the health of the population, and it produced the only large body of data on alcohol consumption in Russia over time. After all, the figures from before 1863 had been provided mainly by the tax farmers, who were prone to vast underreporting in their areas of operation; by those statistics, the Great Russian provinces consumed less than half per capita than the Ukrainian provinces where the nobility did the reporting but did not pay tax (0.23 versus 0.60 buckets per person). By the new system, the government could offer a coherent picture of the official sales of alcohol, and these figures, in turn, fuelled the public debate over alcoholism and state revenues.58

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The only safe conclusion to be drawn from those figures was that state revenue was vastly improved under the excise system. State vodka income jumped from 121 million rubles in 1862 (the last year of tax farming) to 139 million rubles in 1863 (the first year of the excise tax and licence fees) and 222.3 million rubles in 1880. The revenue reached almost 300 million rubles in 1894. In any given year, vodka revenue accounted for some 30 per cent of all state revenue.59 Otherwise the data, which was produced with revenue in mind, allowed for a wide variety of contradictory conclusions and fuelled a seemingly endless debate about the economy and popular welfare. Consumption per capita, according to some adjusted calculations, fell from 1.23 buckets per person in Great Russia at the start of the excise system to an annualized 0.90 buckets for the rest of the 1860s, and 0.62 buckets in 1886–7. However, if one accepted the figures from before 1863, then per capita consumption (meaning sales) in Great Russia tripled with the excise system and then gradually declined. It even seemed as if Russians consumed less alcohol per capita than did the population of any other Great Power: the French drank almost ten times as much, the British and Germans three or four times as much, and the Americans two or three times as much. It quickly emerged that in Russia almost all the consumption was of distilled alcohol (93.2 per cent), while other countries consumed mainly wine and beer (80–85 per cent in Britain and France).60 Nor did the figures address the issue of binge drinking. Russians (it was thought) tended to drink highergrade alcohol in short spurts, such as weddings, funerals, holidays, and Sundays, and a binge (zapoi) easily spilled into the work-week. The perennial question was how to generalize and therefore act more effectively on popular habits. Class – a generalized notion of toiling and propertyless people – was the starting point of the analyses, as Fridman would later put it: “Which classes of the population drink, and how do they drink?” It was a question that invited greater scrutiny and more focused studies, and the answers would require more calibrated policies.61 In fact the figures reflected the officially registered sales at the point of production, and the more the sales were registered (“brought to light”), the higher consumption seemed to be. “Bringing to light” was a guiding metaphor in taxation in general as the state sought to expose more private activity in order to tax and regulate better. The image of the dark den with hidden excesses of over-consumption, exploitation, self-destruction, and sex for money was a fitting metaphor in a narrative that emphasized economic transparency and better control. It is for this reason that these figures should be understood for what they are – the products of official registration, a rule that applied to all the new activity that was being registered for whatever tax purposes – rather than a true snapshot of the trade or the consumption at any given moment.

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They tell us what the state sought to know and therefore saw, not what Russians were experiencing. This could mean that the figures suggesting declining consumption were in fact a fall in registered sales owing to boot-legging and moonshining, and that much more had yet to be registered. There is no doubt that illegal production and sales, mainly in rural areas, would have made the figures on consumption much higher; in some provinces, the number of illegal drinking establishments was triple the number of registered ones. The actual rates of consumption were anyone’s guess. The certainty that the official figures were too low allowed critics to claim that the excise system made alcohol too readily available and too cheap. A.E. Reinbot would point out that the falling prices of alcohol led directly to a sharp increase in consumption in other cases in Europe and that Russia probably conformed to the same pattern. Lacking good data, he gauged the pattern from the rise in the death rate from alcohol poisoning – in St Petersburg province, an increase of 656 per cent in the years 1858–74, and across the empire an increase from an annual average of 1,614 deaths in 1858– 62 to 4,506 in 1870–4.62 Yet it was no accident that the sharp increases were registered by the new zemstvo institutions, which gathered data on death rates in the provinces and also listed the causes of death. There was no real way to compare the pre- and post-1864 death rates (the year zemstvos were introduced), just as there was no real way to compare the pre- and post-1863 sales (the year the excise was introduced). Yet the standardization of the trade and the revenue was a moment to realize a coherent vision – at least, one particular view – of the economy and the population. It also allowed for a debate over the best ways to act on the population and the economy, both viewed as a consistent whole through a newly uniform system of production, trade, and taxation. This is not to say that the debate was particularly accurate on any side, and it is better to appreciate the issue of vodka as a tableau on which any number of anxieties, concerns, and ambitions could be painted. The quality of the data (again, it was gathered only with revenue in mind) made it possible to claim any number of mutually exclusive certainties: that Russians drank more or less under the excise system; that they drank more or less than their European counterparts, and did so with more or less enthusiasm; that they drank a better or worse quality of alcohol; and, generally, that the excise system and free trade were good for “the people” or harmed them.63 In this contestable body of evidence, the Herald of Europe began a sustained criticism of the free trade in alcohol, one of the early voices in a campaign against free-trade economics in general. The problem, the journal opined in 1862 as the excise system was being introduced, was Russia’s “simple people” (prostoliud’e), its “undevelopment, absence of mental life and absolute lack of a

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feeling of personal adequacy,” all of which required more rather than less government involvement.64 By the 1880s even the government was convinced by its own poor statistics that consumption was rising, at least in Great Russia, and the Ministry of Finances increased restrictions on retail sales and raised the excise tax from 4 to 11 rubles per bucket.65 It helped that the science concerning alcohol and alcoholism was inconclusive, with guesswork and stereotype standing in for fact and method. “The consumption of alcohol in the existing conditions of life and nourishment of the Russian people represents a requirement of the peasant’s organism,” wrote the Herald in one of its more reaching (but in the scheme of things, hardly exceptional) opinions. Alcohol was a source of nutrients and body heat, and a biological necessity for the overworked peasant. As a necessity, it could not be left to the market but required a state monopoly.66 The salt industry followed a similar process of privatization, and revenue was again wrapped in questions of economic philosophy and popular welfare. That the salt trade was largely monetized made it an easy object of reform, and its symbolic power was increased by its association with old regime France and the gabelle. Speransky had targeted it as early as 1810.67 When Bunge was asked by the Tax Commission to report on it, he noted that salt was a human necessity closely linked with larger questions of “popular prosperity.” It was used in food processing, the fishing industry, and animal husbandry. Prices were inflated by a complicated system of state monopolies on production and retail through state stores, tax farming, and excise taxation. Its supply and price in any region was uncertain. The government should stimulate a private sector in salt, and this in turn would stimulate other private industries – a private sector being “one of the conditions for the well-being of any country.”68 As was the case with alcohol, the myriad local arrangements were abolished in 1861. Salt mining and trade were privatized, and the state imposed a single excise tax of 30 kopecks per pud. With the tax farmers gone, the state acquired its first overall view of the trade, including retail prices (which fell steadily) and sales (which increased). Revenue from the excise tax stood at 10 million to 12 million rubles annually. At Bunge’s urging, the excise tax was repealed as well in 1880 as a calculated measure to stimulate the private economy, fol­ lowing explicitly the model of other European countries. Thereafter extraction went from 48 million to 85 million puds in 1893, exports from 27,000 to 482,000  puds, per capita consumption from 24 to 30 funts, and prices fell 3–5 times, depending on the region.69 The salt trade was exceptional because the state removed itself as a tax collector. The petroleum industry represented the rule: deregulation made for better regulation; tax relief made for better taxation. In the fields around Baku a new

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demand for kerosene in the 1860s transformed the ancient use of petroleum for local heating and lighting into an imperial boom industry concentrated in Cherny Gorodok (Black Town). Hundreds of small firms bought plots from the state and paid the state per day of extraction in something of a tax-farming system. Prices were inflated by high production costs, easily followed by over-production and price collapses. It was well-nigh impossible to regulate and tax so many small firms, and evasion abounded. Here the state removed itself completely from the sector and left it to the market to sort itself; in 1877 it abolished all taxes. Tax farming was replaced with auctions of plots by the state and one-off payments. The effect was to concentrate more plots in fewer hands. These, the treasury reasoned, would be easier to register, regulate, and tax, and in 1888 the treasury returned to the industry with new excise taxes on mazut (cheap heating oil) and kerosene. In a pattern that was to be repeated in a variety of sectors, state taxes began with a small excise that had little effect on the budget but did have the effect of registering production. As more production was registered, the tax revenue rose from 6.6 million in 1888 to 41.6 million by 1908.70 By that time, as Nicholas Lund writes in his splendidly researched study, the officials saw the state as integral to stabilizing production and transportation in a chaotic market, not as an outside actor, and ministries regularly reminded producers that they were serving state interests on state lands. The oil barons were, according to the Minister of Trade and Industry in 1909, “sub-contractors” of the state itself.71 The Excise Inspectors Again, the paradox of free trade – what Polanyi calls the “dual movement” – was suggestive of a larger pattern of modern economies; deregulation and the abolition of taxes were but a first step in better regulating and taxing, and the two movements happened in rapid succession or even simultaneously. Hence the explosion in the number of state tax employees, and their professionalization, at the very moment of free-trade ascendancy. Across Europe “the introduction of free markets, far from doing away with the need for control, regulation, and intervention, enormously increased their range,”72 and in Russia the oversight was carried out by a revamped fiscal administration. It began with the Excise Oversight (Aktsiznyi nadzor). Before the creation of the Department of Non-assessed Levies in 1863, the state’s tax employees were financial observers at the provincial level, renowned as “blind executors of the law” or “worshippers of bureaucratic and often self-interested arbitrariness.” All of them were corruptible. “Sellability [prodazhnost’] was a normal phenomenon in the old chinovnik midst,” observed Grot when he became the first director of the Department of Non-assessed Levies, and certain chinovniki “were distinguished, in this regard, by an especial shamelessness.” Minister of Finances

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Kniazhevich despaired that he “found it impossible to locate honest people in Russia” and doubted that he would ever be able to reform the system as a whole. The State Council pushed ahead, reasoning that the personnel would be corrupt no matter what the measure; at least the measures should be well conceived.73 Grot inherited 4,109 inspectors who oversaw the systems of tax farming and excise through the old Department of Various Levies, and even de jure it was not clear whether they worked for the government or for the tax farmers; in practice they were paid by both. Grot promptly fired most of them and then created positions for 5,359 overseers (nadzirateli) and observers (nadsmortshchiki). They would oversee the indirect taxes on vodka, petroleum, tobacco, and matches. A few worked at the provincial level, but 94 per cent worked in smaller tax districts (okruga), sometimes living at the plants in question. To avoid the culture of corruption, Grot went directly to the secondary and tertiary schools to recruit them, interviewed them personally, and hired them regardless of estate or rank. Good remuneration would bolster their professional esteem and make bribes less tempting. Their average pay of 1,400 rubles per year was unusually high, and as an added incentive they were allowed to keep a percentage of the excise taxes they collected; bribes would be less attractive to them and less affordable to the plant owners. As new excise taxes and new forms of assessment were added over the next three decades, their numbers increased by 40 per cent, reaching 7,529 in 1893.74 Bribery was not unknown among the new employees, but the unchecked corruption of earlier years seems to have been overwhelmed by a more solid corporate ethic.75 The character and ethos of the inspectorate paralleled the general direction of fiscal policy and of the upper reaches of the fiscal bureaucracy. Separate from the culture and the practices of Russian business, and steadfastly immune to the corrupting influences of Russian culture in general, they were suggestive of the separateness and new-found autonomy of both the state and the private economy. Paid by the state exclusively, responsible only to the Ministry of Finances, and well educated and well trained, they were to arrive in the localities as the representatives of a discrete state interest. Separate though they were, the information they gathered on production, trade, and consumption in the private sector was meant to make the state more synchronized with the economy, more intimate with the private sector, and possessed of a budget more dependent on “popular wealth” and “popular production.” Taxation bridged the gap between the state and the private sector at the very moment the gap was being created. The Public View of the Private, and the Meanings of Laissez-Faire In the 1880s Russia joined almost all European states in a retreat from freemarket economics and from a strict respect of the autonomous rights of private

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enterprise. Later Russian economists would look back on the 1860s and 1870s as an “epizod” of free-market dogma.76 The change was not entirely abrupt or unexpected. Economic liberalism, never a uniform creed, had allowed for state involvement in moderating the excesses of the market. John Stuart Mill, who began his career championing the autonomy of the economic and the social from the state, ended it with calls for social policies and a greater public role. As John Maynard Keynes would later point out with regard to Britain and France, laissez-faire was at first a matter of journalistic promotion and political philosophy, not economics; political economists wrote more subtly of the “harmony” of the public and the private.77 In Russia, debates between Westernizers espousing universal laws were pitted against Slavophiles citing historical specificity, but even the would-be free-traders contained the tension in their thoughts, as Zweinert shows so well. At Moscow University the political economist Ivan K. Babst promoted freedom of commercial action but tended to correct himself with references to historical specificities that required different thinking and policies for Russia; he was by training a historian. Ivan Ia. Gorlov championed the “great” laissez-faire but allowed for the protection of small peasant production and communal land funds.78 In Kiev, Bunge had argued in the late 1850s that the state might stand above private interests but that it nevertheless regulated the economy in order to tame the otherwise “unlimited freedom of interests.” He cited as his authority J.S. Mill.79 The exceptions to laissez-faire became the new norm and were systematized as the workings of the modern state that was enmeshed with the economy. Russia was not the exception to any of this. To be sure, the reaction took specific historical form in Russia. Laissez-faire would be added to the list of currents that had, it seemed, unhinged the person from the collective (be it the state or the legal estate) and alienated the person from hierarchical authority. This was a more general diagnosis that followed the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 and was labelled retrospectively the Counter-Reforms. A new tsar would arrest and reverse aspects of the Great Reforms by retrenching unlimited autocratic authority and reinforcing estate differences.80 In peasant agriculture the state had established some distance, as with the emancipated state peasants in particular who would no longer be state wards with their economies managed directly à la Kiselev but would become selfgoverning with their own land funds, customary practices, specific tax collections, and communal self-administration. They encountered little systematic interference and little help from the state, not least because there was no state bureaucracy to interfere or help. From the 1880s the government contemplated new ways to enter peasant society to address peasant poverty and perceived chaos, be it the Peasant Land Bank of the Ministry of Finances, the same

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ministry’s abortive attempt to introduce tax inspectors to the village, or the land captains (zemskie nachal’niki) created by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (chapter 3). New limits were placed on peasant participation in the market, from constraints on peasant borrowing to limits on peasant mobility (chapter 8). The failure of certain sectors to sustain themselves added a layer of economic necessity to the ideological mood. The government at first encouraged private capital to invest in railways, assisting with targeted subsidies and with floating bonds, but the risks were so great and the entrepreneurs so cautious that the government guaranteed the bonds and sometimes the shares; by the 1880s the government was floating the bonds itself, building its own railways, and buying out the private firms.81 Private banks proliferated from the 1860s but entered into filial relations with the State Bank From its creation in 1860 the State Bank had never ceased to be an extension of government policy. Reduced import tariffs in the 1860s stimulated foreign trade, but imports overwhelmed domestic industries; more targeted and punitive protective tariffs were introduced in the 1880s and 1890s. The unregulated grain trade was subjected to new regulations by a state that was newly concerned with the welfare of producers and consumers. By the 1890s even Bunge was disturbed, and he warned that the reaction stood to create in Russia an impracticable utopia of full state management and predictability.82 This pattern of free-market economics followed by state intervention would become familiar and regular over the next century of European history. On the eve of yet another free-market catastrophe Keynes would make the case for a permanent state role, and in the catastrophe’s wake Polanyi would reinforce this argument. Too many areas of legitimate social concern were neglected in pure competition, too many vast inequalities were countenanced, and a sense of collective good could not be pursued in a thinking that privileged individual interest. At the very least, laissez-faire was an action that brought on an opposite reaction: more complicated and encompassing layers of intervention stimulated by society’s self-defence. Since Keynes it has been easy, and sometimes useful, to narrate modern economies as a pendular movement between extreme deregulation and extreme state intervention, with the immoderation of the one inviting the return of the other.83 The relationship between private and state was not merely the interplay ­of opposites, however; it was a dynamic one that produced new realities. Liberal­ ism in the nineteenth century served to bring into being a conception of the economy that was discrete and observable; the state was active in creating that economic space. To a certain extent, this meant extracting the state from the direct management and supervision of production and trade in order to visualize it better; the emancipation of peasants with little state presence to oversee

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them in new conditions was the case in point, and it invited new interventions to compensate (chapters 3 and 8). As David Christian argues with regard to the vodka trade in Russia, this entailed a movement from a premodern understanding of revenue (as monarchial right, as estate privilege) to a neat, modern separation of the private and state sectors. The state assumed exclusive control over revenue, and it made production and trade the exclusive concern of the private sector.84 But this led quite rapidly to new kinds of regulation, much more ambitious ones that were bolstered by better numbers and better knowledge, and in Russia it led to the vodka monopoly of 1894 (chapter 7). Private property and industry were the “cornerstone of a civic order and civilization,”85 Bunge wrote in the 1850s, so much so that they needed the state to be delineated. The state would recognize and help create a private sector, it would give it statistical representation and legal coherence, and it would point the way towards better practices. From the statistics on output and exchange, the cadastre of all enterprises, the figures on consumption, and the surveys of land, all the way to the direct requirements of certain kinds of production and trade that were meant to encourage certain types of consumption and discourage others, the state was ubiquitous in the private sector that it claimed to be leaving alone. Paradoxical though it now seems, the private sphere of production, trade, and wealth was a state undertaking from the outset, a public view of the private.86 The paradox did not escape Bunge, who argued that the state should fortify and nurture the private economy and, if need be, force the private sector to remain private over its own objections; buy-outs and subsidies were too lucrative to resist.87 The state claimed to be examining and taxing what already existed, but this was accompanied by an unselfconscious recognition that the state was bringing new realities into being. There was an easy movement between the “is” and the “ought to,” between existing reality and the reality that was being willed and practised into being.88 The very concept of state intervention, then, assumes the interaction of two distinct realms, the one intruding on the other, the one guarding its autonomies against the other, but in fact the two were mutually constitutive on the larger plain of the emerging national economy. The private sector was defined against the state, often by the state, while the state’s wealth became a function of the wealth generated in the economy. The private-public separation was ambiguous in another way: it created a field for a new kind of action, arguably one more thoroughgoing than was the Cameralism it replaced – a Cameralism that precluded a coherent vision of trade, industry, and agriculture because it was organized around certain state functions. Its instrumentalism left most trade and production invisible.

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In this regard the image of a pendulum moving from free trade to state control and then back is misleading; economics in Russia had changed for good, as it had across Europe in the nineteenth century. The establishment of an area between the state and the economy has been termed aptly a “space of calculability” – the creation of a distance necessary for objective observation and intervention.89 The delimitation created a coherent field of conversation – as was intended, which is why so much of this material was published for the benefit of a reading public.90 In the great debates that ensued during the next decades over tax policy, and through the tax data a larger debate over social welfare, poverty, and inequality, all sides were in fact looking at the same economy expressed in the same state-generated data and state-created categories. Each new tax offered a lateral view of the empire, understood as a particular sector of the economy (agriculture, trade, and industry) or as universal practices (drinking vodka, eating salt, and smoking cigarettes). The Ministry of Finances cast each of them as an empire-wide activity, and it deliberately rejected policies that might apply to only one place for fear of disrupting the unity of the market. Hence the merger of peasant legal categories (state, court, or former serf) into a single peasant tax system in the 1880s, and that peasantry could be visualized and acted upon globally. Hence the insistence that the regional exceptions that had applied to vodka and salt revenues be reduced to uniform systems of excise on a uniformly private production and trade, also to be located across the empire; each new tax measure was meant to affect growers, producers, consumers, and labour throughout the realm. A modification of the tax on businesses opened the merchantry to almost anyone who wanted to join and could put up the capital, and began to reconfigure the estate as an occupation, potentially even a class. The separateness of estates was undermined by an urban property tax that counted all urban owners in a tsenz (census) of urban real estate, and that same census shaped the municipal electoral law; by the turn of the century, “census society” (tsenzovoe obshchestvo) designated a privileged and propertied elite that defied estate categorization. Hence, more generally, the tendency to ignore the legal estates in tax policy and look instead at property and income, abstracted and expressed in the same terms: money.91 Equality here was understood as equivalences and comparability, not sameness.92 Having broken down the estates into properties and occupations, taxes served to re-aggregate them in a coherent economy, a comprehensive view of the whole people. Across Europe from mid-century, and in Russia since the 1890s, this would become the “popular” or “national” economy that we now take for granted as the Volkswirthschaft, économie nationale,93 and the narodnoe khoziaistvo. The state was intrinsic to that aggregate, not outside of it.94

82  People, Places, Things

The liberal legacy was unmistakable, even as laissez-faire receded into the past, because liberalism could mean a concern with the individual and the population but not necessarily their autonomies. As Daniel Beer argues, liberalism in Russia took the form of a new and intensified concern with the population and its welfare and health, coupled with new social techniques that were meant to effect specific outcomes.95 For the purposes at hand, this was a liberalism that aggregated the population in a coherent economy and allowed for new kinds of generalization and global action. Just as the economy occupied that liminal space between achieved reality and a work in progress, so taxation functioned as both a means (taxation as a mechanism to realize a coherent economy and people) and an end in itself (the economy and the people as a better way to raise revenue). Popular welfare was being considered in a host of direct regulations that governed how people consumed, laboured, and sustained themselves, be it the more careful attention to paying power in the tax system or the belief that a better shepherded economy might produce better revenue. Liberalism would also survive in an incipient concern with the individual as such. This too may seem paradoxical, for in the 1860s and 1870s the fiscal apparatus was directed away from the person and towards wealth (land, industry, and trade), and from the 1880s the government seemed to be retrenching the faceless collectives of the estate system. Witness the fact that an ever-growing share of the state budget was made up of indirect taxes. State revenue of all kinds tripled between 1855 and 1878, growing from 206.9 million rubles in 1855 to 457.5 million rubles in 1869 to 629.0 million rubles in 1878. All categories of revenue grew, but direct taxation grew more slowly; as a share of total state revenue it fell from 22.5 per cent in 1855 to 18.0 per cent in 1869 to 15.7 per cent in 1878.96 Even direct taxes were becoming levies on things but not people; with the repeal of the poll tax in 1886, Russia had no taxes that were formally levied directly on persons. However, individuals received ample recognition in the negative; they were defined by the extent to which the state left them alone, which was a matter of administrative expedience, a momentary respect for individual autonomy, and a short-lived belief that the economy would thrive without state patronage. But the more systematic registration of properties, production, and exchange had the potential to do the opposite: to locate the person through the wealth that was being documented so prodigiously. This was not as sharp a break from the past as it may seem. The problem with personal direct taxes like the poll tax had not been that they were personal but that they were estate based, they discriminated by legal status, and they were flat (arithmetically equal but not proportional to one’s wealth).97 The new kinds of assessments would be personal but also universal and proportional, and they depended for their effectiveness

Three Tax Reforms, Three Visions of the Polity  83

on a much more detailed body of data about personal economic output and exchange. That data was being produced by the reformed system of the 1860s and 1870s. In ways that were only then becoming apparent in other parts of Europe, measures aimed at equalization – the avoidance of the individual in order to avoid his or her status – had the effect of better exposing the population as individuals. The end of tax farming, the removal of collective buffers in the cities, the transcending of estate status, and the focus on the properties as individual units – all of these established a terrain in which the individual economic actor was more easily located. The spectre of old regime France’s (legally) equalizing absolutism and Tocqueville’s diagnosis of atomization are appropriate comparisons, not least because Russian experts deliberately looked to the example of the French ancien régime.98 To put it another way, in the new space that was being opened between the private sector and the state stood the people who owned the property, received and spent the wealth, and paid the taxes. The imperial regime was in the process of counting populations as individuals, arguably for the first time.99 These individuals were more exposed and legible than ever in the past, and the next stage in fiscal reform would be, precisely, a drive towards the personal income tax that would tax persons unequally but more fairly.

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PART 2 The Politics of Visibility, the Technologies of Intimacy: Taxes and the Remaking of Urban and Commercial Russia

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3 Wealth in Motion: New Money, New Taxes, and a New Bureaucracy

Once again shielded by the arcane language of fiscal science, experts from the 1880s took aim at the new and enormous wealth that the capitalist economy was generating, as yet with little tax to burden it. The new wealth took the form of money sooner than land, and it was in motion as it passed from one enterprise or person to another. The new money lent itself to accurate assessment and progressive rates, and the gold standard of the new fiscal system was the personal, progressive income tax. The personal income tax was postponed across Europe and the United States, and treasuries like Russia’s proceeded cautiously to avoid a direct plunge into the private economy. Instead, a new professionalized bureaucracy (in Russia the Tax Inspectorate) began to map the new economy, locate the movement of wealth (“income”), and tax it in transit; the state was only tapping into the regular transactions of civil society without touching wealth as such. Yet the very notion that the state and the private economy were distinct was destabilized by the fact that this economy was made possible by state laws, enforcement, and infrastructure and given definition in state statistics, and by the fact that the state depended on the economy for its revenue. Personhood too was in flux. Treasuries avoided a direct encounter with the person, but fiscal practices and fiscal theory eroded the idea of the autonomous person. Treasuries began with symbolic precedents where personhood and individual autonomy were already in doubt: dead people and their estates, and juridical persons (corporations). These were selected because they were not living, physical persons, but their attributes were then transferred back to living, physical persons in preparation for personal income taxation. How all persons came to resemble corporations and how the living came to resemble the dead is a story worth telling. It concerns the emergence of a veritable industry of information gathering and a host of small techniques that lie at the base of modern fiscal systems and modern government. It concerns the

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malleability of a fundamental historical category, the person, which is taken for granted but is in fact historical and contingent.1 The apartment tax of 1893 showed the potential outcome in the cities, where the payer would become the fully committed, participating, and transparent citizen. Underlying the whole evolution was a larger epistemological blur, of private and state, private and public. Any firm and any fortune might be privately owned but owed their existence to the state, its laws, and its protections; the autonomous person was made so in state laws; any private act that was registered was necessarily also a public act. The tacit right to be left alone was joined by the positive right to be recognized in state law; the neglect that was made possible by state ignorance was joined by the deliberative attention of a new bureaucracy. The urban-rural divide deepened as urban Russia vaulted into a new era of assessed and calculated taxes. Rural Russia was exempted from these practices and its potential outcomes. The new Tax Inspectorate was not allowed to deal with peasant payers directly, and the new forms of assessment, calculation, and participation in state functions were explicitly banned from villages. Capitalism and Privacy in Russia and the North Atlantic The story of Russian taxes from the 1880s is part of the North Atlantic story of capitalism itself. European and North American states began to propose new income-based taxes on businesses, estates, and finally persons in the nineteenth century because they seemed necessary, fair, and feasible. They seemed necessary because national budgets were growing geometrically to pay for new militaries, new infrastructure, and nascent welfare states. Russian budgetary spending grew from 115 million rubles in 1867 to 1 billion rubles in 1897 to over 3 billion rubles in 1913.2 Commerce and industry were obvious sources of new revenue because they were hardly taxed and generated enormous wealth. The new fortunes could be shockingly large, and the ostentatious wealth of the American barons had its counterpart in Russia with its own railway barons, textile tycoons, and oil kings.3 Large fortunes were not necessarily new, but in Russia in particular wealth had been landed and associated with the management of agricultural estates and an accompanying paternalism.4 Commercial capital was termed mobile capital (dvizhimyi kapital) in order to emphasize its divorce from the land, its fluidity, and its elusiveness. That so much of the new wealth was the outcome of paper transactions that produced nothing obviously useful or tangible added a moral imperative to the fiscal proposition. The new money remained largely untaxed because the antiquated systems of revenue focused on land and real

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estate regardless of their potential to generate income, and on consumption regardless of one’s means. An enterprise might pay a flat licence fee or a tax on its urban properties but almost nothing on the millions of rubles in revenue that it generated for the owners. The tools of taxation had left commercial and industrial wealth “privileged,” reasoned a member of the Russian State Council in 1898 during one more drive to tax it. “It is hardly possible to find another class of the population that can more easily bear a tax increase than the class of traders and industrialists.”5 Russia was hardly unique. Foreign statisticians estimated at the turn of the century that direct taxes on industrial incomes contributed a mere 3–4 per cent of state revenue budgets in Europe, comparable to Russia’s figure of 3.2 per cent, but the commercial and industrial sectors produced at least half the wealth in any of the Great Powers. It violated – to quote the French experts who were then quoted by their Russian colleagues – a “natural” tendency towards “human fairness.”6 It was equally important that this kind of taxation was now feasible in new conditions of monetization, at least in principle. To express landed wealth as money was logistically difficult because so much of it was based on non-­ monetary transactions and because it was unseemly to the noblemen who saw their landed property as historical, moral, and exceptional. The commercial and industrial sector was easily or only expressed as money. As such it could be located and compared over time and space. In other words, it was fungible, and it was or could be made legible. It flowed in patterns and in ways that were observable by an inquisitive state that was willing to peer into the transactions of civil society on a regular basis. Bank accounts and interest, bonds and shares with premiums, mortgages, insurance operations, real estate markets, and wage and salaried labour – all the everyday practices of a commercial and industrial economy – represented forms of transaction that were regularly documented in the legal framework of capitalism. Any of these transactions represented a contract that was registered with the state in order to be enforceable, and states could insist on registration in order to make it legal. From the perspective of the fisc, the registered transaction was also evidence that one person or enterprise had transferred money to another. National treasuries began to locate the wealth in transit, not in situ, appreciating the new economy in all its dynamism and movement.7 The all-encompassing term for that wealth in transit was “income” (dokhod) – money received by any entity from any other entity. “Income” was a historical term that was connected intimately with tax reform.8 Cadastres of lands and enterprises were necessary but insufficient because they identified what entities might generate income but not what they in fact gave and received; the rigidity of the cadastral map was inappropriate to the fluidity and flux of the

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commercial economy.9 By the end of the century the statistical machinery of the modern state added, to its cadastral surveyors, new bureaucracies to trace actual incomes, meaning the payments that could be intercepted, documented, and taxed. By the turn of the century virtually all European and North American states were developing estimates of national income (in Russia, narodnyi dokhod), or the sum of incomes that were being documented preparatory to income taxation.10 In fact, the data were generated by the early operation of incomebased taxes, making the system self-feeding. Sergei Prokopovich hazarded the first serious estimate for Russia in 1906, as did the Department of Assessed Levies in 1906 and 1909 on instruction from the Cabinet; all were anticipating the personal income tax. The department estimated that all personal incomes above 1,000 rubles (that is, the incomes that would be taxed) totalled 1.70 billion rubles in 1906, revised to 2.64 billion rubles in 1909.11 Adam Tooze shows that there was a wider European project “to make the national economy into a calculable and governable object.”12 Russia is a case in point. The introduction of income taxes was delayed across Europe and across North America because of the political opposition mounted by the financial, commercial, and industrial entrepreneurs who were to be its first targets. No doubt the opposition was motivated by the unstated desire to avoid new burdens, and the advocates of income taxation assumed that avarice was at its base. Historians since that time have similarly narrated the debate over income taxation as a contest between public good and individual greed, with the wealthy finally consenting to income taxation as the moderate alternative to social revolution.13 No industrialist or financier, however, claimed rapacity as a justification, at least not in the nineteenth century. The public argument against income taxation concerned the proper relationship between the state and the individual, and this debate acquired autonomy from the basic fiscal proposals that prompted it. It involved a public beyond the very wealthy, including economists, journalists, publicists, and politicians who wrote for the proliferating business bulletins and liberal broadsheets consumed by a readership that was comfortable but not necessarily prosperous. Narrow commercial information blended with liberal doctrine in publications that were business oriented, be they Le Figaro, Le Temps, or L’Économiste français (modelled on L’Économiste belge), the London Economist or the Financial Times, or, finally, The Russian Economist (Russkii economist), The Economist of Russia (Ekonomist Rossii), or the semiofficial Russian Economic Review (Russkoe ekonomicheskoe obozrenie). The debate and the rhetoric were conditioned by the very idea that state and society, state and economy, and state and individual were antipodes; anyone who could locate herself or himself outside the state could share in a civic

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identity and a common defensiveness against the treasury, notwithstanding their deep economic disparities. It became difficult (as was no doubt intended) to correlate support or opposition to the tax with any one class perspective. People who might never pay the tax joined in the chorus of protest against big states and big government, seemingly counter to their own economic interests.14 By the same token, socially and nationally minded tycoons came out in favour of higher taxes on themselves. The arguments for and against income-based taxes crossed imperial and national borders. As government after government drafted bills on income taxes, usually beginning with enterprises and then turning to persons, they used their embassies and expert consultants to examine, select, refine, and promote foreign models. Their opponents drew on the foreign press and foreign parliamentary proceedings to craft the counter-argument for the necessary separation of the person and private enterprise from the state. In the United States, Seligman was an academic economist at Columbia University who was trained in Germany and advised American governments in the early twentieth century, and he mustered a mass of foreign precedent and argument to the cause of income taxation. In Russia, Bunge, the finance minister in the 1880s, later complained that his proposals for full-blown income taxation in industry were defeated in Paris, where Paul Leroy-Beaulieu convinced a suspicious French bourgeoisie and his many Russian admirers that the tax would strip the person of protections and dignity.15 As Leroy wrote in Économiste français, income taxation was a new instrument of oppression of the person and “a true fiscal Terror.”16 It is true that the personal income tax required practices of exposure and divulgence that at the time seemed intrusive and unprecedented in their inquisition. These took the form of now mundane but then novel conventions of annual sworn income-tax declarations, which gave a regular profile of incomes and expenditures of enterprises and then persons; automatic and mandatory reports of any payments made by one person or entity to another, which seemed like mass, mutual, and systematic espionage; and audits, which could amount to an inspector’s seemingly unlimited right of investigation and verification when he or she had doubts about a declaration or a report, and which put the burden on the payer to document what he or she had sworn in the declaration. Early income tax laws recognized the anxiety and proceeded indirectly. “Withholdings” and “stoppage at source,” as they emerged in Britain in midcentury, did not directly confront the payers but claimed a share of money as it moved from one person or institution to another. The treasury might ask about the interest earned from a bank account but not what was in the account, thereby taxing a payment rather than the wealth as such. Even these approaches were controversial. Britain had introduced a mild version of the income tax in 1799

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to pay for the Napoleonic Wars and repealed it soon after. The British model of 1842 was an income tax but not a personal one; that is, it did not assess the aggregate of a person’s incomes except in certain cases where incomes were undocumented – the notorious “Schedule D.” Otherwise it was indirect of the person (payments but not people were assessed), partial (only certain incomes were liable), and flat (progressive rates were not possible for lack of full disclosure of all the incomes of a firm or person). In other words, this was not a personal income tax, and it was not a progressive one. It was a compromise between fiscal need and limited government.17 French liberals cited it as the better alternative in the early twentieth century: any income could be taxed already, and it was simply a matter of locating it and taxing it at a flat rate; persons were not and should not be assessed.18 The fierce constitutional debates over the personal income tax are discussed elsewhere (chapter 5). Suffice it to say here that the proponents of income taxation were forced to proceed cautiously, and they rarely began with full-blown personal income taxation. Instead, national treasuries adopted partial and indirect measures that taxed narrow categories of income, including inheritances, businesses, urban dwellings, and capital. Often the amounts in question were very small, and in all cases the treasuries could argue that the tax was on the transaction – an income received – not on the wealth of the person and not on the person as such. An enterprise may have been privately owned and its disposition left to the owner, but one’s transactions with other persons and enterprises were necessarily public, in the visible realm of civil society rather than the personal realm of privacy. The issue was “income,” not “wealth.”19 By that reasoning, the state did not invade enterprises and households, roll back immunities, and violate confidentialities; nor did it impose itself on individuals. The state exposed and registered the transactions of civil society, inserted itself in the nexus of economic transactions, and then joined in the general movement of capital that was so characteristic of the new economy.20 In Russia the signal measure was the industrial tax (promyslovyi nalog), which was in fact a collection of measures inaugurated in 1885. “Industrial” in this case meant non-agricultural, and the measures might better be understood as business taxes. These taxed the incomes of enterprises in the empire and they immediately raised the question of personal and entrepreneurial confidentiality. To be sure, Russia had no legal affirmation of a right to privacy as such; the word “privacy” had no direct translation, and the expanding claims of the state were not counterweighed by a right to immunities, only a tradition of obscurity.21 Russian subjects enjoyed a space of official neglect interrupted by occasional intervention, the by-product of an autocracy that was concerned with formal order but was also distant and lacking in inquisitiveness and curiosity about the welfare of its population. The critic of autocracy was likely to protest

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the arbitrariness of the state but equally likely to protest its pernicious disregard of the well-being of its people.22 Both criticisms bespoke a lack of consistent administration rather than too much government as such, and interventions in trade and industry were necessarily arbitrary and fuelled by very little concrete knowledge of who owned and earned what. “Privacy” was not the central term of the Russian debate, but this was not a uniquely Russian problem at the time. Rights to privacy in any country were often extrapolated from other legal concepts and evolved historically. In Britain and the United States some notion of privacy was derived from the laws guarding the secrets of trade and banking.23 Famously the American right to privacy has been distilled from customs and statutes that do not mention it, such as the immunity from illegal search and seizure. The U.S. debate continues to evolve around a similar axis. Advocates extrapolate the term “privacy” from constitutional clauses that do not use it, leading some jurists to conclude that there is no constitutional right to privacy. Advocates of transparency make the case that “privacy has a cultural weakness as a NIMBY-like, me-first sort of value” that should be overwhelmed by considerations of public safety, drug control, financial accountability, and fraud. Privacy was the excuse for malfeasance, the argument runs.24 Russians did not encounter a ready-made model in the West but rather a concept that was in motion and open to contestation; Russians had their version of that debate. In Russia something resembling privacy emerged – or might have emerged – from the administrative practice of commercial secrecy (kommercheskaia taina) and credit secrecy (kreditnaia taina). These traced to the Credit Statute, which required employees of the State Bank to “keep secret all that relates to the operations of the bank and its accounts,” that is, the depositors. The same provisions applied to private banks, part of a general campaign to induce Russians to deposit money in accounts rather than under the proverbial mattress. In the criminal code of 1845, secrecy was extended to the trade methods of any enterprise and the production processes of manufactories (fabrichnaia taina) in order to protect them from their competitors. In these regards, Russian law was as coherent as were the laws in any other country, perhaps more so given the reliance on case law in Britain and the United States, as opposed to statute in Russia.25 Cumulatively the Russian laws implied that the central government could not force a firm to open its trade books (kupecheskie or torgovye knigi), and the effect was an edifice of secrecy that made tax evasion easy and commonplace.26 The proposal to tax the income of businesses put these protections in doubt in Russia, as it did in all countries, but in Russia there was no confident, articulate, and hegemonic bourgeoisie to make the counter-argument. Russian merchants, not known for their erudition, protested that commercial secrecy was

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an estate privilege and an “illustrious tradition,” if not a right. The principled case was made for them by academic economists and parts of the ­government itself. The Trade and Manufacturing Department of the Ministry of Finances (later the separate Ministry of Trade and Industry), which oversaw the interests of entrepreneurial Russia, sometimes with the support of the Ministry of Justice, treated secrecy as a sign of a healthy liberty from bureaucratic arbitrariness and a space for entrepreneurial initiative.27 Penalties for tax administrators who violated secrecy were severe.28 The terms of the debate – secrecy – encouraged certain lines of argument over others. If privacy might be understood as a positive right that needed good reason to be uprooted, secrecy implied active concealment that needed to be justified. In England the protection of trade secrets was treated as an exceptional constraint on free trade rather than a right; more effective were privacy laws and practices,29 which transformed a plainly fiscal debate about evasion into an argument about civil liberties. In the United States the distinction between privacy (strong right) and secrecy (weak right) is well developed in legal and business theory and practice.30 Secrecy is not privacy.31 It was the added dimension of privacy that was absent from the Russian debate, and the case for the autonomy and privacy of business transactions was weak from the outset. The absence allowed for the development of a more thorough understanding of personal commitment and a notion of citizenship that was relatively unchecked. The revenue departments of the same Ministry of Finances, often with the support of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and parts of the State Council, regularly construed secrecy as a manifestation of the retrograde practices of Russian businesses that had every reason to hide illegal conduct and financial malfeasance. A broader culture of obscurity and suspicion made merchants seem antique, illustrated in the perhaps apocryphal case of a Moscow merchant who was forced by the tax office to hire a book-keeper to make his business legible. Asked by the book-keeper for the amount of basic capital he should record, the merchant replied, “I wouldn’t even tell my own brother about my capital, and you expect me to tell you, a hireling [naemysh]?”32 To these officials, commercial secrecy was symbolic of the historically inward-looking and unintelligible practices of the Russian merchantry, manifest in a narrow pursuit of “personal enrichment and success” but “completely uncultured and lacking a firmly elaborated public opinion.”33 A “private affair” (chastnoe delo) might also denote a particularistic and selfish one. It invited a different line of questioning: other than trade secrets, why would a legally correct enterprise need to hide its practices from the public and from the state?34 Indeed, proposed Minister of Finances Greig in 1880, why not publish all information pertaining to income and tax liability, making them a matter of

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“universal knowledge” (vseobshchee svedenie)?35 In his ancestral Scotland this would have seemed radical. In Russia, though, the debate presumed transparency rather than privacy and shifted the onus to the taxpayer, who did not have recourse to formal rights. There was little promise that Russia’s commercial strata could mount the fierce opposition of a French banker or a British industrialist, less still that they could mobilize opinion outside their narrow occupational institutions. Wealth did not make for hegemony, and generally in Russia great wealth did not translate directly into political power; the merchantry’s reputation for insularity (zamknutost’) was taken for granted, and their dependence on the state for contracts, protection, and bailouts was a matter of record.36 By 1905 their claims to privacy were being swept away as part of the proposal for a personal income tax (chapter 5). In the meantime the practical limits of Russian administration blended with wider assumptions about Russian culture to defeat proposals for full-scale disclosure and truly assessed taxation. Locating incomes would present an administrative challenge under any circumstances, and Russia in the early 1880s had absolutely no personnel to assess direct taxes below the provincial level; the Tax Inspectorate was only created in 1885. The Tax Commission had recognized in 1867 that income taxes depended on “the closest familiarity with all economic conditions” surrounding a payer, but Russia lacked not only the information but also the mechanisms that would generate that information.37 On the cultural level, income taxation might also create a spiral of mass evasion and coercion. An income tax on entrepreneurs would depend on the doubtlessly false declarations of individual payers that could not be verified against outside data. Archaic notions of the antagonism and separateness of ruler and ruled created a gap that could not yet be traversed administratively and instead produced and legitimized a culture of concealment and deceit. In these conditions the tax would have to be accompanied by a regime of inquisition that would be disruptive to the economy, would be politically unpleasant to the bureaucracy, and would further alienate the population from its rulers.38 Even the government of Alexander III, with its enhanced reliance on police measures and an unlimited autocratic authority, would not travel that distance. Or, equally arguably, this government in particular, with its vision of state power that was superordinate, distant, and sacred, would not yet presume the level of intimacy that income taxation implied. Autocracy was both domineering and distant. For its own historical reasons, then, Russia converged with a model of business taxation that was less intrusive and more indirect of the person and the enterprise, at least initially. In 1882 the State Council’s Economic Department concluded that France rather than Britain offered the better example: “France, a state that is much more densely populated, richer, and less extensive than Russia, recognized after the War of 1870–71 that it was more convenient not to

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introduce an income tax.”39 On the surface the Russian taxes on business that were introduced in the 1880s were, like the French model, nominal, flat, and often apportioned. They allayed the basic objections to a direct confrontation between the treasury and the payer, and they were feasible because they required initially only rudimentary and readily available information about the enterprises. Unable and unwilling to enter properties and enterprises and peer into their books, the Ministry of Finances designed taxes that fell on “presumed income” (predpolagaemyi dokhod), potential or expected income (dokhodnost’ or ozhidaemyi dokhod), or income extrapolated from a norm and based on a few or many known cases (normal’nyi dokhod).40 They did not apply to the person but to the property of the person, that is, the firm. The Ministry of Finances regularly affirmed, however, that these measures were preparatory to a new regime of progressive income taxation, first of enterprises and later of persons.41 Here the model was indeed Britain, where the 1842 income tax on transactions evolved de facto over the next six decades into a comprehensive system of declaration and verification, in which three-quarters of all payers submitted sworn declarations even though the law did not require it of most of them. Likewise Russian business taxes had the potential to become personalized over time because the steady accumulation of data allowed the treasury to estimate more finely the revenues of a given firm and ultimately its owners. Incrementally the mechanisms of assessment became so refined and successful that by the turn of the century these taxes had become progressive income taxes on businesses in all but name, based on declaration, verification, and investigation. The way in which this came to pass in the short span of twenty years relates to the production of information by a new kind of state that recognized few legal limits on its powers of investigation. To appreciate this evolution one needs to return to the proposition that taxes were in part a matter of revenue and in part an engine for gathering information, and these two sides operated in tandem, each making the other possible to ever greater extents. In this regard the process was dynamic: taxes required information but were the main engine for generating it.42 This helps explain how the industrial tax, which was a collection of small direct taxes when it was introduced in 1885 and yielded 23 million rubles, ballooned in the twentieth century into the largest single source of direct tax revenue for the imperial state, or 150 million rubles in 1913. That was 54 per cent of taxes formally termed direct, as table 3.1 indicates. Closely related to the business taxes were other fees and levies that depended on calculations of income and transfers, including deeds, contracts, and inheritance. When these are added to the formally direct taxes, as they are in table 3.2, then the share of these new or modernized taxes among all direct

Wealth in Motion  97 Table 3.1 Direct Tax Receipts in 1913, Whole Empire (nearest thousand rubles) Industrial tax

Tax on interest from capital

Urban properties tax

Apartment tax

Taxes on gentry and peasant lands

Total direct taxes

150,118,000

35,104,000

36,611,000

8,986,000

46,635,000

277,454,000

54.1%

12.7%

13.2%

3.2%

16.8%

Source: Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, vyp. 1915g., 33–5, 98–101.

receipts was about 92 per cent. The rest (35 million rubles) comprised the land taxes paid by peasants, which were hardly calculated at all (see chapter 8). The new taxes had implications for imperial coherence as well, since taxes on businesses, capital, contracts, deeds, urban properties, and inheritance were applied in stages across the Russian Empire. Centralization was on all agendas, and for the Ministry of Internal Affairs in particular this meant more powerful governors and local agents who were not quite administrators but rulers.43 By contrast, the Ministry of Finances applied tax law, fiscal practices, and a new bureaucracy to all regions, with a system of equivalencies that defied the local and the particular. In the end all populations and territories were expressed in rubles. To be sure, representatives of different regions could make the case that unreformed and arbitrary land taxes continued to discriminate, against the Polish provinces in particular, while land taxes in Turkestan were a chaos of levies inherited from the khanates mixed with new land taxes that worked as poorly here as they did in central Russia. But many of the complaints about land taxes in any region related to the nature of the land tax itself, not the ethnic composition of the region in question; apportionment, arbitrariness, and unaccountability abounded everywhere.44 Reformed urban and commercial taxes also carried a different significance. It mattered just a bit less that the payer of the industrial tax in Lodz was Polish or German or Jewish and that the owner of a trading firm in Orenburg was a Muslim; it mattered more that they owned a business, observable and calculable in the same manner as was the mill in Moscow. Data and information alongside money itself were solvents that could dissolve the otherwise pronounced borders of region, ethnicity, religion, and language into an imperial whole. The techniques of information gathering also help explain how a small number of inspectors were able to oversee the taxation of businesses across a vast territory without the need to actually visit the 1.8 million establishments that they monitored by 1912. State Councillors wondered in 1884 how a few hundred inspectors could oversee such a vast empire,45 and the answer by century’s end was that the inspectors would use norms, self-assessment by the payer, and

98  The Politics of Visibility, the Technologies of Intimacy Table 3.2 Receipts from Direct Taxes, Fees, and Levies in 1913, Whole Empire (nearest thousand rubles) Direct taxes (from table 3.1)

Stamp duties

Fees on property transfers (including inheritance)

Total direct taxes, fees, and levies

277,454,000

111,844,000

48,360,000

437,658,000

63.4%

25.6%

11.0%

Source: Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, vyp. 1915 g., 33, 98–101.

mutual reporting in order to avert the need for direct management or even rule. It had more to do with government and discipline, the intervention in economic relations and exchange, and the management of information in a new system of surveillance. By then the state knew much more about the movement of capital – its patterns and predictabilities – and was able to locate and tax it with greater confidence and from a distance, and the state knew much more because of the very operation of the tax. The business tax shows information and revenue, and state and society, in all their enmeshment and mutuality. In this movement to personal and assessed taxation, the inheritance and corporate taxes of the 1880s were a first and significant experience, followed in 1893 by the apartment tax. These were in fact income taxes – personal ones, technically speaking – and as such they were models for a system of universal personal income taxation “that achieve that same aim … with less disruption of existing economic relations.”46 Corporations (as opposed to enterprises owned by individuals) were chosen for income taxation in 1885 because they were highly exceptional. They existed thanks to the law, and they had no formal claims to autonomy or privacy from state scrutiny. They were termed juridical persons in contrast to physical (fizicheskie) ones. In a similar vein, an inheritance tax treated the person – this time the dead one – as an aggregate of properties and incomes that was open to investigation; the deceased, like the corporations, would find it difficult to defend their immunities. These taxes were less objectionable because they were exceptional and often nominal in amount, but they invited a reconsideration of the nature of personhood and of the individual’s relationship with the state, and they opened the way to full-blown personal taxation.47 This was first achieved with a small sample of urban dwellers in the apartment tax of 1893. The Tax Inspectorate, Nikolai Bunge, and Popular Welfare The architect of these reforms from 1881 to 1886 was Nikolai Kh. Bunge, another Protestant (the son of a Lutheran pastor, no less) appointed to manage the empire’s finances. He is one of the more under-estimated statesmen of the late

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Figure 3.1 Nikolai Khrist’ianovich Bunge. Departament okladnykh sborov, 1863–1913. St Petersburg, 1913. Photo by Anthony Accardi/Blue Rhino, Inc.

empire48 and was overshadowed by the flamboyant Witte who followed in the 1890s. However, Bunge was easily more thoughtful and less pragmatic, more consistent in his reasoning, and more aware of the historical moment and its possible legacies and consequences. He was an academic and the rector of Kiev University, called into government service from the 1850s to advise on banking reform, the peasant emancipation, and commercial law. Bunge’s record as finance minister49 is remarkable: in five years he introduced the foundations for a system of urban and commercial taxation, and a new inspectorate to manage it; he expanded the system of indirect taxation, albeit reluctantly but with great fiscal success; he completed the transition from poll taxes on peasants to a

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unified land tax on all estates; and he replaced the quit-rent on state peasants with redemption payments. Beyond taxes he established the Peasant Land Bank, the Factory Inspectorate, and new sobriety committees to accompany the excise system, each of which spoke to the new and different ways in which the state could penetrate and act on the polity as a whole. These were large undertakings that together speak to an emerging welfare-state mentality:50 better contact with the population made for better revenue; better revenue let the state do more things for the population. He prevailed in these undertakings for reasons both circumstantial and fundamental. The State Council that vetted his proposals was stacked with the retired reformers of the 1860s and 1870s whose enlightened statism had animated the earlier period.51 Few other state bodies would agree as readily on the need to “quickly erase such a glaring occasion to discriminate among the estates” as the system of direct taxation. More important, his argument for legal equalization was couched in the language of fiscal science; his colleagues demurred when the reasoning was applied to peasants, and many landed noblemen in and out of government protested when it was applied to themselves, but they had few objections to the notion that modernized taxes suited the cities, industry, and commerce. It was indeed in commercial and industrial Russia that his legacy was most lasting, while in rural taxation his legacy was at best mixed. Bunge achieved these reforms in the wake of a period termed retrospectively the Counter-Reforms. Following the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, the new emperor was retrenching and rolling back many of the reforms of his predecessor. It was painted in broad strokes as a period of unremitting darkness and oppression,52 but an equalizing agenda was alive and well in the realm of taxation; the economic historian Michelson would date the end of the old fiscal regime to the 1880s.53 In fact, there was little contradiction between Alexander III’s political retrenchment and Bunge’s fiscal reforms; both were meant to shore up and strengthen autocracy. Bunge’s idiom appealed to Alexander III; obligations (he told the tsarevich whom he tutored) were “universal” and “flowed from the principles of equality of all before the law” – meaning the sovereign.54 The logic of universal obligation was irresistible when the autocrat sanctioned the policies, and universal obligation was a way to understand the nature of an autocracy. What else might an autocracy be? Still, there were limits, and Bunge faced the sustained criticism of his colleagues, especially in the Ministry of Internal Affairs under Count Tolstoy, who held that the order and hierarchy of estates had been subverted too much already and who championed an inward-looking Russia and a renewal of estate particularisms. The universalism championed by the Ministry of Finances did meet its push-back in and out of government. At issue was the “resilient and firm” principle of legal estate that Bunge challenged, his “bookish foreign

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theories” that were “cosmopolitan” and ignored “Russian idiosyncrasy.” His critics nicknamed him “Monsieur Benge.”55 The idea of a land tax that would apply to noble estates was, to many aristocrats, undignified and insulting to their historic exceptionalism. They objected most strenuously, and gained the most traction, when Bunge turned his attention to peasant Russia, and aristocratic landowners claimed to be speaking for a constituency larger than themselves. They rejected the notion that peasants were prepared for modern forms of assessment and indeed government. They limited the effectiveness of new rural taxes (chapter 8), banned the new tax inspectors from entering the village, and engineered Bunge’s dismissal in 1886. The creation of the Tax Inspectorate in 1885 was one of Bunge’s great achievements, but the ban on inspectors from entering villages was a failure with enduring consequences. That Russia lacked the dense administration that would make government or even rule effective was a point of consensus for Russian statesmen of all political stripes. This was the problem of “undergovernment,” as Starr terms it, a shared perception that Russia’s state required a civil service that was in direct and sustained contact with the population it ruled.56 All agreed, in other words, that the deliberate non-interference in society of the 1860s had been misplaced; Emancipation seemed to have produced in peasant Russia corruption, poor self-government, and poverty, and in industry unchecked profiteering, bankruptcies, and a culture of entitlement while feeding at the government trough. The exact way in which the problem was to be redressed was a point of debate, and it revealed fundamental differences in conceptions of state power that were pursued simultaneously. The most notorious initiative created the land captain (zemskii nachal’nik) under the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1889. He was meant to address the apparent chaos of peasant self-government at the communal and county levels. The land captains would be free of the bureaucratic routine and rigidity that characterized ministerial government, and opponents and advocates alike considered the land captains to be little, local autocrats. They were empowered to rule over peasants in the spirit of paternal oversight, meaning that legality may not have been their primary concern. Critics objected that the land captains would be intermittent rather than systematic administrators, and their champions tended to agree: they brought personal, arbitrary rule to the local level, making autocracy real and present to more people.57 “Arbitrary” was a pejorative to some and an aspiration for others, but it was to be the reality of peasant rule over the next three decades. It is arguable that more individual agents with more powers extended notions of rule but not government; certainly it was “not an institution of administration,” as Pravilova puts it in a related vein.58 The alternative approach did attempt to create a regular and tactile administration, and it was put into place with less public storm during decades of persistent work that introduced new bureaucracies carrying new and uniform

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practices. The approach owed largely to the efforts of Bunge and his successors, was centred on the Ministry of Finances, and entailed the introduction of many more local agents with a different brief and ethos. We know less about them because they were less controversial and notorious, and they conformed to notions of a professional bureaucracy that we may take for granted but were a departure in that time and place. These persons and institutions represented a certain level of institutionalized and regularized intervention in one or another aspect of local society and, specifically, interventions in socio-economic relations. They depended on and generated statistics and observation sooner than decrees, and they anticipated government that was information driven and prescriptive rather than superordinate and proscriptive. Generally, these personnel tied the interests of the state to the welfare of the population. The Factory Inspectorate was created in the same year as was the Tax Inspec­ torate, 1885, also under the Ministry of Finances; it addressed the wide belief that the factory order was producing the conditions for social instability in the cities.59 The inspectors were not many – about two hundred – but their powers were suggestive. They could visit the larger plants and regulate the treatment of workers through a broad spectrum of entry points, from the length of shifts to the age and sex of workers, and from safety and public health to living conditions in the factory-provided barracks.60 They regularly reported on production processes and technology, which they considered to be relevant to working conditions. They opened an otherwise bilateral relationship between employer and wage earner to state scrutiny by inserting the civil servant between them. In so far as the reports of the inspectors were published, they opened the world of the factory to a reading public at large, not to mention the generations of historians who have relied on the data they produced.61 On similar models, the Ministry of Finances created in 1894 the Inspectorate of Small Credit with a staff of five hundred inspectors under the State Bank, whose brief was to oversee the correctness of the emerging network of statesponsored credit co-operatives. They were encouraged to disrupt and destroy the private credit networks of moneylenders in the villages that the government considered to be exploitive.62 In taxation, as we have seen (chapter 2), the Department of Non-assessed Levies created an Excise Inspectorate that was highly educated and professionalized, reached 7,529 employees in 1893, and provided a view of the production and movement of consumer goods and the first glimpses of the operation of an imperial market. The Tax Inspectorate was created in 1885 to oversee direct taxation, and Bunge’s initial proposal was that it should function in village and town alike. It had foundations similar to those of the factory and small credit inspectorates: knowledge of local conditions and tactile interactions with the population in

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question. When Bunge proposed it to his ministerial colleagues in 1882–3, he held that the steady and predictable flow of taxes required a level of assessment that was commensurate with one’s material well-being; this in turn was predicated on the regular flow of information about the paying power of the payers. The inspectors would guard the fiscal interests of the state, Bunge proposed, but “the proposed administration should stand close to the payer, know his needs and paying powers, know the actual objects of taxation, and follow the proper flow of the levies due to the Treasury and conduct collections of arrears.”63 Paying power was a matter of welfare, and the government would not only be aware of popular welfare but also promote it. Bunge cited J.S. Mill to explain how liberalism allowed for public intervention to soften the excesses of “the unlimited freedom of interests,” and Friedrich List to argue that the state could guard and actively nurture a national economy if only to tax it better. Tax receipts would depend on the development of “popular well-being” (narodnoe blagosostoianie), not only effective collections.64 In the extreme the government paid out large sums to make peasants more self-reliant farmers and better taxpayers; one sees in this period not only a welfare-state mentality but also considerable spending, both on the new bureaucracies and on costly programs. Soon the state would establish programs of food loans (prodovol’stvennye ssudy) to help peasants in crisis years. More impressively in 1883 Bunge gained approval for a new Peasant Land Bank, arguing that helping peasants buy more land was a way to increase their tax-paying power. In a memorandum to Alexander III, Bunge cited the Peasant Land Bank as an example of an integral state approach to the population and the treasury: taxes would be calibrated to reflect the economic condition of the payer, and this meant that the state would need much more knowledge of the population’s economic condition; using that knowledge, the state could raise the living standards of the population and make them better able to sustain the state; and the state would have more revenue to care for the population.65 In some ways the state and the economy were inseparable, and the observer could use the one to see the other. “The State economy,” he wrote later, “is not only its finances but also the whole aggregate [sovokupnost’] of the public economy.” Taxes would be used to address the needs of “the aggregate of the whole population.”66 Witte continued this reasoning: “fiscal policy,” he wrote in a memorandum to Alexander III in 1893, “cannot be contained in the strictly limited framework of the financial needs of the government as they are traditionally understood … [It] is within the power of the government authority to be concerned with everything touching the welfare and the needs of the people.”67 Yet when Bunge became minister, he had absolutely no paid personnel below the provincial level to administer direct taxes.68 For all the study of other

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European models, the contrast in terms of personnel was startling: Russia’s ratio of administrators to population was about four times lower than in other Great Powers.69 The same held true in the fiscal administration. France in the 1860s had 1,200 inspectors working at the local level. Prussia spent 11 million marks to hire 700 people to collect 140 million marks in direct taxes. The Austrian Empire’s 1,236 bezirker employed 1,236 professional tax collectors, 1,236 controllers, 671 tax assessors, 1,311 assistants to the assessors, and 1,202 other employees.70 Against these numbers, Russia had 75 people to administer its direct taxes, one for each of the provincial and regional Treasury Offices of the empire. This was the Head of the Second Desk, who was responsible for overseeing the poll taxes, the redemption payments, the new land taxes, the urban properties tax, the licence fee on businesses, and the stamp and deeds duties. He was helped by two record-keepers and an accountant. Direct assessment was beyond their capacities because these employees did not leave their offices and because they were narrowly trained in accounting and state regulation. Bunge termed them “modest people who are distinguished only by their extreme precision in fulfilling their responsibilities and by an exactitude to the point of pettiness.” Their work was limited to compiling the reports of the local institutions that actually collected the taxes. Who exactly did the collecting in the district, county, town, or rural society was usually up to those collectives, and the principles by which they apportioned the tax bills was unknown to the ministry, which also did not ask.71 Only in the early 1890s would the government examine the question systematically in response to the great famine of 1891.72 Bunge’s proposal for a new inspectorate was made to an interministerial conference in 1882–3. He asked that the inspectors be the local level in an integrated fiscal administration that reported directly to the central government and penetrated the local communities and even households. They would have broad powers of assessment, information gathering, inspection, and audit. He had in mind commercial enterprises, urban neighbourhoods, and villages alike. The ensuing debate with Minister of Internal Affairs Tolstoy concerned the role of the inspectors rurally and the matter of peasant taxation (chapter 8). At issue was the ideological opposition of most of Bunge’s colleagues who not only would not fund such an undertaking but explicitly banned the inspectorate from the villages indefinitely in light of the “idiosyncrasy” of peasant society. Inspectors could only monitor the formal work of the county’s peasant elders. Collections and the distribution of state tax bills would be left to the peasant collectives in question, with the inspectors verifying formal accounting practices at the county level. It meant that the change from poll taxes to land taxes in 1886 was largely formal, since these would be administered in ways that scarcely changed at all. It was perhaps the great missed opportunity for introducing the principles of assessment to some 80 per cent of the population, and

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a missed opportunity for drawing peasants into a form of modern, individualized government. Bunge’s plan for a more penetrating inspectorate in the cities – where the population was prepared for “advanced forms of assessment” – invoked no objections. To be sure, inspectors would wield no coercive powers of their own – they would call in the police when needed, and the land captains in later years – but this meant that the inspectors would become more practised in techniques of administration and information gathering, surrounding the payer with documentation rather than wresting arbitrary sums. Their work was to be “intellectual” but not “punitive” (karatel’nyi), wrote Bunge. The inspectors “presume a quite high mental and moral level,” and they are required to have a familiarity with the law as well as a facility with numbers and the principles of accounting and economics.73 Of the first crop of 222 inspectors who were hired by July, 45 per cent had higher education, 34 per cent secondary, and 21 per cent primary. By 1899, fully 72 per cent had higher education, and in that year a degree from a university or a polytechnic became a requirement for employment. (The educational requirement was extended to the Factory Inspectorate and later the Inspectorate of Small Credit.)74 The inspectors’ personnel files show that degrees in agronomy, economics, and law abounded.75 High birth was not rare since higher officials used their family and personal networks to select the early cohorts carefully. Pavel Nikolaevich Kutler was a case in point. Born into the landed nobility in Orlov, he attended the Petrovskaia Agricultural Academy in Moscow on the invitation of his uncle, the renowned naturalist professor K.A. Timiriazev, and studied economics and statistics. He became a tax inspector in 1892 on the recommendation of his brother Nikolai Nikolaevich, who was by then vice-director of the Department of Assessed Levies. Good connections and pedigree helped Pavel Nikolaevich as he became treasury director in Tambov and then Moscow provinces, and finally state treasurer in 1914.76 Others like Ervand Davidovich Sargsiants were low born but had degrees, from the Petrovskaia Agricultural Academy in his case, from the juridical faculties of the universities in many others.77 Ivan Dimov was a Bulgarian educated at St Petersburg University in law, and naturalized.78 Peasants like one Garasov in the Transbaikal were fewer, but he did have a higher a degree, he worked in an undesirable region, and was hired in early 1917 when young men were in shortage and the income tax was being implemented for the first time.79 As compensation for their educational levels and to insulate them from corrupting influences, the inspectors would be exceptionally well paid. The base salary of 1,500 rubles easily and often rose to 2,500 rubles with living expenses and bonuses for hardship postings – and to the graduates hardship could mean anywhere outside Moscow or St Petersburg. (Sargsiants asked to be transferred

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from Krasnodar to “one of the more or less cultured cities of European Russia, excepting the Far North.”) Salaries in Turkestan reached 3,500 rubles to allow them to hire a translator. These were extraordinary rates for civil servants at the lower ranks, which, the Minister of Internal Affairs protested, would inspire discontent for the vast majority of squalid civil servants.80 He was right; in later years land captains regularly applied for employment as tax inspectors, and they were routinely turned down because of their “thorny character” (tiazhelyi kharakter). The ministry’s personnel office sought “scholars, not policemen.”81 The inspectors would be familiar with local society but not at all rooted in it; they could not be enforcers of the law, but they were certainly meant to be the carriers of a higher commercial and civic culture. From 1885 Russia had places for 500 inspectors at an annual cost of 900,000 rubles, initially working in the provinces of European Russia where industry and large-scale trade was concentrated and relatively well documented. Their number increased with every new direct tax and as each tax was extended to Siberia, the Transcaucasus, and Russian Central Asia. By 1910 Russia had 1,017 inspectors and 266 assistants, and in 1911 their combined numbers reached 1,551.82 These numbers were set to grow again in anticipation of the income tax. Everywhere the ministry sought a ratio of one inspector for every 200,000 population or in active commercial centres as few as 90,000; areas like Kamchatka that had no inspector were to receive one in 1916.83 The territories they would cover were extremely diverse, but the role of the inspectors was precisely to render them all legible and in this way consistent and comparable, measured uniformly as tax units (podatnye edinisty) and expressed in the common idiom of revenue, profit, and cash. As an inspector put it, they would lend consistency to “almost all Russia with its unmasterable territory, a dispersed, tribally diverse and culturally weak population.”84 As Bunge explained, this was part of a transformation in the state that marginalized the local collective and corporate institutions that had once done the state’s work. “The old order, by which the relationship between the payer and the collector was viewed as their private affair, should retreat before a new order by which these obligations take on a state character.” The state would engage individuals, not faceless collectives. Household budgets would become extensions of the state budget and vice versa, and the state budget would offer a comprehensive view of the population. Ideally and over time even the village collector would become a state employee, if only the inspector were allowed to meet him, so that the collector’s view of the individual payer would also become the state’s view of the individual subject.85 The work of the inspectors in Turkestan was the extreme case of what was occurring subtly elsewhere. Here the ministry carried out a campaign to not

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simply dominate the new territory but merge it into the imperial economic and administrative fabric; Russia was not a conventional overseas empire but a contiguous one with more possibilities for integration. The army was followed in short order by surveying expeditions that created plots and titles, which were called “private property.” Whatever that may have meant in practice,86 the key point was individuation. Tax bills were attached to individual holdings for which an individual payer was accountable, a process facilitated by the likes of Nikolai N. Kutler who was sent here by the Ministry of Finances to make sense of the new subjects. To be sure, the land tax, here or in central Russia, was in practice the least calculated tax of all, with regional rates set by the central government, based on cursory land evaluations verging on guesswork, and with obscure methods of distributing the tax bills among individual payers that amounted to collective responsibility. A mix of local land usages was overlaid and reshaped with a mix of Russian terms to describe them.87 More penetrating, coherent, and fiscally important – and the least studied with regard to Turkestan – were the taxes on businesses, capital, deeds, and contracts, which generated revenue and much less controversy. Unlike land taxes, these taxes could transcend or ignore local custom and law altogether and recast the territory and the population in the imperial likeness. Whatever the region, they proceeded from the same assumptions about the equivalency of the units of taxation using value and income, and produced comparable ruble assessments from Khar’kov to Khiva. The change was educational, the inspectors claimed, because the registration of businesses and properties for tax purposes would reinforce local rights to private property (or create the institution of private property as they understood it) and would force payers to adopt advanced practices of record-keeping, legality, and transparency.88 Many colonial projects were dead letters, and the imaginings of governors were just that,89 but the fiscal apparatus was a way to put ideas into practice and place Turkestan administratively on a spectrum with the rest of the Empire. It was imperial state building as much as conquest. It was a strategy used in the Ottoman Empire and is a useful parallel to Russia.90 Turkestan was not the exception, and the inventiveness of the fiscal process was applied to European Russia as well. The inspectors created new views and new objects everywhere they went, and their brief concerned cities and commerce wherever they found them. Dead Souls: The Inheritance Tax and the Economic Personality Nikolai Gogol’s moral objection to the modern economy concerned its capacity to abstract the person as wealth and money. “Dead souls” referred to the crime

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of mortgaging serfs who were dead, but the larger critique did not concern serfdom, which Gogol did not condemn outright. His satire concerned a moral crime, the abstracting of human beings, and the critique concerned the commercial practices that were divorced from real value and labour, and ownership devoid of paternal management. “Soul” was a pun on the term for a serf, since the point was that the spiritual soul had been lost altogether. After all, the system had created moneyed wealth out of non-existent (or no-longerexistent) persons, with chits standing in for the souls (in both senses) of the deceased. Modern business practices opened the way for a satire on the nature of personhood. The comparison with the later debate on estate and inheritance taxes is not superficial, because in this realm the government introduced the idea of a juridical personality that was given all the attributes of a person except life. Indeed, this person was defined by the fact that she or he was dead but still somehow maintained a legal personhood. This person ultimately existed only thanks to the law, but it would become a precedent to be applied to living persons as well. To put it another way, the estate tax was introduced because the people in question were dead, but the ensuing debate hinged on whether a dead person was still legally a person, and thus whether the living could be treated in the same manner as the dead. Gogol’s objection to an absurd syllogism, penned at the dawn of Russian capitalism, is relevant. When Russia introduced a revamped estate tax in 1883 (The Duty on Properties Transferred by Non-monetary Means), it was following the lead of Britain, France, and the German states; they were followed by the Canadian provinces and Australia in the 1890s and the United States in 1916.91 The attraction of the tax in all these countries was only sometimes fiscal. In countries without comprehensive personal income taxation, which is to say almost all countries before the 1890s, the estate tax was a surrogate that claimed a share of one’s gains at life’s end rather than annually, and in Britain it was termed a  deferred income tax.92 Even when the revenue was negligible, as it was in Russia, the estate tax was an occasion to introduce more exacting methods of personal assessment. Specialists in inheritance taxation moved easily between industrial, income, and inheritance taxation because they were part of the same mix of techniques that would generate information. Genzel’ started as a specialist in industrial taxation around 1900, defended a doctoral dissertation on inheritance at Moscow University in 1907, and continued as an adviser to the government on income taxes. He advised the Soviet government in all these areas in the 1920s. The choice of the estate tax as the place to begin personal assessment was astute because the persons in question were dead; their rights and those of their

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heirs were open to question, and it was absurd to claim that a dead person owned anything. Anyway, the dead could not argue their cases, and their successors had a weak claim to what was not yet theirs. To be sure, as English and French thinkers had argued in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the individual’s right to property was absolute and survived her or him in the form of testament, and the state might only claim some flat rates in return for the state’s protection of that property and for its guarantee of the right of transfer. The estate tax weakened this assumption by claiming or implying that a person’s rights died with the person. As Jefferson famously wrote to Madison in 1789, “‘The earth belongs in usufruct to the living’; … the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. The portion occupied by any individual ceases to be his when he himself ceases to be, and reverts to society.”93 The milder version of the same argument, developed in France and Germany in the sixteenth century, was that at the moment of death the property did not belong to anyone, and in this brief moment the state could intervene to claim a share and confirm the balance as the property of the heirs.94 Such an arrangement, said one Russian Treasury Office director in 1882, could be achieved “without any infringement on the public [dlia publiki]” because the most interested party was dead.95 Even if property might be defended as a natural right, the movement of property from one person to another could be cast as public and open to scrutiny. Inheritance was an artificial creation of the law that depended entirely on the state to be enforced. In Jeremy Bentham’s words, “all rules of succession to estates are creatures of the civil polity, and juris positivi merely.”96 Count Gur’ev, the Russian minister of finances in the 1820s, made this case before the State Council during an early attempt to reform the law: “the heir uses the protection of the laws in order to become the owner of the properties, the acquisition of which did not cost him any labour whatsoever.” The heir paid the state for the laws that allowed him to become heir, “under the protection of which he makes use of such a valuable right” – meaning that it was not a right at all.97 If one were to extend this logic, one could also avoid the question of private property without quite challenging it. The tax was not quite on the person or even on the property, the rights of which were set aside for the purposes of the inheritance tax; it was a tax on the transfer of property, just as an income tax was on the movement of wealth rather than its existence. The English inheritance taxes of the eighteenth century were transfer taxes, and only in the Finance Act of 1904 were various duties consolidated into a comprehensive, progressive tax on the estate of the deceased. The U.S. federal estate tax, embedded in the Revenue Act of 1916, explicitly disavowed any claim to the person’s wealth: “The tax is not laid upon the property, but upon its transfer from the decedent to others.”98

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In Russia the argument for the inviolability of the person as property was sometimes expressed, particularly with regard to noble properties, but the decisive argument that defeated Gur’ev’s proposal of 1821 was different: that inheritance was part of the natural perpetuation of the blood line. State Councillors who were asked to consider the measure cited the sanctity of the lineage, by which they meant noble lineage, rather than the absolute rights of the individual owner. As a State Councillor told Gur’ev, “it insults the law inspired by nature that exists among blood.”99 When Bunge introduced a new proposal in 1881, this time successfully, he faced a similar objection from Minister of Justice Palen: “the heir is the continuation of the personality [lichnost’] of the predecessor, and inheritance includes the aggregate of all possessions, rights, and obligations of the owner who has died.”100 To touch the property would be to infringe on the person, he suggested, but the continuity of the family was decisive. His heir was his successor and his continuity, not his beneficiary, implying that there was no transfer of property. A State Councillor added: “Inheritance – in every and all cases – is an indefinable quantity, an ideal, or better yet, … it is the aggregate of property rights and obligations, by which is effected a continuity from the deceased votchinik [the owner of a patrimony] to his heir.” This wealth could not be quantified, because it was above all the manifestation of the family as a unit and over time, and the family in turn was a social and philosophical principle.101 Bunge disrupted the continuity between the deceased and the heir, implying that the state dealt with individuals strictly: “the heir acquires possessions only because the law has established certain conditions for the right of transferring possessions by testament, and [the law] gives the testament its force.” Only the state allowed a dead person to express his will after he had died. The issue was not the intrusion on the established rights of private property but the competition of that principle with an equally compelling one: the state’s ultimate right to all property. When a line died out, the property was escheated and confirmed the principle of eminent domain; the new law would establish a balance “between the right of relatives to inheritance and the escheat rights of the state.”102 Bunge was inserting the state in the relations of the family by questioning its continuity over time and by questioning the autonomy of the relations between parents and children. Bonds of kinship (the sacred rod championed by the Ministry of Justice into the 1890s) were broken down by the strict principle of personal accountability. The state would approach each person as an individual rather than as part of a family, much in keeping with the development of Russian law and legal thought since the 1850s.103 Only the state itself represented continuity over time while people tended to die, and only the state united those individuals. The substance of the polity was random individuals given collective and social form by the state. Here the state

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grew into something larger than the occasional guarantor of a transfer and instead became the perpetual membership organization that had once been the role of the family. Bunge drew on a long line of German legal theorists who claimed since the eighteenth century that the state was a part of every wealth, since that wealth only existed and only grew under the benevolent tutelage and protection of the state. In this capacity, the state was the “universal co-heir” of any estate.104 The principle of staatlicher Erbrecht allowed the state to claim a share of any property; in countries that required an equal share for each survivor, the state would be added as an equal co-heir alongside the survivors – a fifth member of any family of four. Critics in England and the United States would ridicule the notion as “too Continental” since it ascribed to the state personhood and then invited this monster to sit at the dinner table, almost literally. “It rests upon the concept of a personalized state that few political theorists of to-day would approve,” objected one American scholar in the 1920s.105 But the English version of a similar principle carried similar implications: “The state … is represented as a silent partner in the business of each citizen, without whose aid and protection” the wealth would not have been accumulated. The significance in all these cases went beyond finances. It implied that the state was not extraneous to the family or the enterprise but integral to them; declarations and audits were the natural outcrops of this reality.106 Bunge’s other significant argument, however, went beyond the relations among persons; it concerned the person himself. The idea that the person and the property were inseparable and inviolable was a creation of the law, he posited, and a tenuous one at that; he also implied that the person was a creation of the law, much like a joint-stock company, an enterprise, or a bank.107 If the person was for tax purposes a legal creation, then the state could also manipulate the person to its own ends, be it by making that person transparent or by claiming a share of the person-as-property. Here were the first glimmers of a concept that would take hold across Europe and North America, the economic personality (ekonomicheskaia lichnost’) that was a novelty at the time and a commonplace in fiscal economics by the early twentieth century.”108 Far from having a pre-existing right to autonomy and immunity, the person was a public concept at its inception and therefore disposed to outside scrutiny. The person was not pre-existing but constituted in a web of legislation and official practice. Its rights were afforded not by nature or by God directly but by the people who approved laws – in Russia this meant the autocrat – and people could change the laws and the nature of personhood. To insist that a person was immune, private, or autonomous was as much the product of human creativity as the opposite contention that the person was transparent and permeable. Societies had choices.

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In this sense, personhood was really a privilege and rights contingent. Any enterprise could be subject to detailed inventories (opisi), Bunge and his advisers argued, be it for a mortgage application, an insurance policy, or a criminal investigation; that inventory was expressed in money. The same must apply to taxation. The deceased would undergo that process at the moment of death in the tables of legal evaluation (tabeli zakonnoi otsenki) that the treasury would supply. Likewise the physical, living person could be broken down into its component parts, re-aggregated, and expressed as a sum of money, with a portion claimed by the state. Or, to put it another way, if one agreed that economic personality was artificial, then that artificiality might be transferred back to the physical, living person in order to make the two equivalent. If one was transparent, then so was the other. Ultimately neither the physical person nor the juridical one was artificial or natural; both were the products of human society. This was also a universalism that claimed that all people, when expressed as property, could also be expressed as money. Bunge put this reasoning to good use when he debated the landed nobility in the State Council in 1882 (and did little to enhance his low popularity in those circles). His critics’ reference to the inviolable patrimony (votchina) as an almost mystical category suggested a claim to historic rights and exceptions. Land, a critic told him, was a special kind of wealth, at least when it was part of a nobiliary patrimony, for it sustained the first service estate and allowed it to perform its historic duties of serving the autocrat and of ruling locally. Merchants and industrialists aimed to make money, and it was right that their persons should be measured and taxed in money, but how could history, lineage, and blue-bloodedness be measured in numbers and crass money?109 Bunge’s argument that everything could be measured in cash was another way of attacking estate particularism and of insisting that all persons and properties were subject to the same standards of measurement and liable to the same levies. One could scarcely imagine a more deep insult to the old aristocracy, and one can well appreciate the vitriol they threw at the minister. Even for Bunge, however, univeralism stopped at the peasantry and ensured (to express it oxymoronically) that universal principles would only apply to some people. By setting a relatively high exemption rate of 1,000 rubles, Bunge could argue that any person would be measured in money so long as they were worth 1,000 rubles or more. If peasants were to be excluded, it would be because of their small income, not their birth. But when the State Council settled the issue in Bunge’s favour, the exemption was applied not only to small estates but also to “all persons of the working estate [rabochego sosloviia],” later clarified to mean any peasant who possessed land. Particularistic though it was, the argument made practical sense. Peasant lands were inalienable by law, be they communal

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or household owned; in land communes theoretically the land reverted to the collective upon the user’s death, and all peasant lands were treated as parts of a single land fund that could only belong to the peasantry. Any tax that claimed a portion of peasant land was at odds with the fundamentals of peasant property law.110 By this logic the universal standards of human measurement and indeed the concept of personhood could not apply to the peasant estate. How small the population of taxpayers would be was suggested by the first years of operation of the estate tax. It was limited to estates valued above 1,000 rubles, and it taxed them before distribution to the heirs at a marginal rate of 1–8 per cent.111 In 1884 the tax brought in 4.6 million rubles; 1.9 million rubles came from the estate of one person, Baron Stieglitz, a Baltic German aristocrat whose heirs actually declared the full value of the estate.112 In later years the death of one or two magnates would increase the revenue by a wide margin, only to fall in the next year when too many magnates survived past December. Hence the yield was 6.3 million rubles in 1895, but 4.9 million rubles a year later; 7.1 million rubles in 1899, and 5.6 million rubles a year later. Part of the problem was that the treasury lacked dynamic data on the ownership and movement of property and capital. These numbers would grow as more properties were registered and more deaths were reported to the tax office, but even in 1913, with a new ceiling of 12 per cent, the revenue was 13.3 million rubles.113 In fact the fiscal importance of the estate tax in Russia was always expected to be small – around 7.8 million rubles according to early projections – owing to the small number of large estates. The suggestion that the estate tax was a surrogate for the income tax, or what in Britain was termed a “lump-sum” income tax on capitalized property at the moment of death,114 was close to the point. Even so the issue was not the revenue so much as the precedent: the estate tax introduced to Russia the principles and practices of income taxation and established them firmly in the legal code. These practices included declaration, documentation, inventory, verification, and, if need be, investigation and audit. The law of 1883 called for a court agent to gather documents and visit properties in order to compile a detailed list of a deceased person’s possessions. The heirs would submit written declarations of the estate to be divided. Rather than demand a flat fee on a transfer, the treasury would be armed with enough data to graduate the tax. The inventories would be verified against existing records at local and central government offices, insurance companies, and mortgage banks and against data on local rental and sale prices. Evasion would become more difficult as the treasury tested each declaration against a growing corpus of documentation.115 The inheritance tax was also an aggregate measurement of a person’s wealth at his or her death. The tax combined landed wealth with liquid capital, such as

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securities, savings, and cash, and indeed the latter made up about half of the state’s revenue from this tax and testified to the state’s new capacity to trace non-landed wealth and monetary transactions.116 In the absence of an income tax, the inheritance tax would provide that information, on average, once every thirty-three years. In so far as it was practised once in a generation and the owner was dead, it avoided “interference in a person’s home life,” Bunge pointed out. Its effects would be felt in the long term, as the inspectorate (created two years later) developed a dynamic picture of ownership and transfers, allowing the treasury to “permanently follow” (postoianno sledit’) the wealth and its owners across time and across provincial boundaries. Ultimately it would help match all these items of wealth to a person, and all persons to items of wealth.117 Here, then, was the mutual relationship between taxation and information, each justifying the other in a circular manner. In the first instance, the inheritance tax was one of the two main justifications for creating the Tax Inspectorate in 1885, the other being the industrial tax of the same year. If the tax required an inspectorate, the inspectorate would create the conditions for the tax’s ­operation. How, asked a member of the State Council in 1882, would the government create a registry of deaths, transfers, sales, and properties? And ­who would verify all the declarations, almost all of which would be falsified? “Where will one find [state agents] in Solikamsk, Belebei, Ishima, Kola, Berezov, Blagoveshchensk, and Vladivostok?” In these cases, answered Bunge, the tax would simply register the transaction, and in that manner create a “cadastre” of businesses, properties, and capital and lay the groundwork for a thoroughgoing tax in the future, the income tax.118 In the meantime, information would be its own reward. When asked by a meeting of the directors of Treasury Offices why they would expend so much effort on so little revenue – with suggestions that the cost of collection would exceed the return – Bunge patiently explained. He instructed them that in the process of implementation, the tax would create information, making visible to the treasury what had previously been invisible – undocumented properties, unregistered heirs, even unregistered persons who should have been taxpayers. This would increase the yield from this tax and then make other taxes possible. If other European states set higher rates of inheritance taxation in order to supplement the treasury, and based it on well-developed systems of registration and documentation, Russia would use the tax to generate the information and anticipate a different tax regime.119 Corporations, Personhood, and the Case for Transparency The legacy of commercial secrecy slowed the development of assessed taxes, but the one business that could not cite its autonomy from the state and the

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public was a corporation; it was a state creation, and its balances were published annually. The corporation became the model for the assessment of all businesses, because corporations too were businesses, and of all persons, because legally corporations were persons. Corporations included joint-stock companies (aktsionernye obshchestva) and smaller share partnerships (tovarishchestva na paiakh). They were easy to assess; they were called accountable (otchetnye) because they were required to publish their accounts on an annual basis and they had done so since 1871 in the appendices to the official Herald of Finances.120 Bunge held that the issue in corporate taxation was not only feasibility but also culture. Corporations were more advanced, he wrote in 1858, because they were both privately owned and transparent in their operations, making them “the most happy union of private activity and societal [obshchestvennyi] activity.” Stocks and shares were an abstracted form of wealth that was quantifiable and visible, and securities were “the most highly developed form of private property.”121 Already in 1869 the Ministry of Finances was proposing to begin the income tax here,122 and by the 1880s Bunge as minister would argue that a higher form of commercial culture called for a higher form of taxation that was based on transparency and disclosure. Others would argue that corporations anticipated the idealized citizen: accountable, transparent, rational, and fully integrated into a larger national whole. Citing Prussian economists, Russians in the 1890s held that taxation based on disclosure and visibility was “the only form of assessment worthy of a free citizen.”123 The other peculiarity of corporations was that they were “juridical persons” (iuridicheskie litsa), artificial people that (or who) were given the right to act as a single unit even if they did not have one owner. Their great advantage to the shareholders was that they limited personal risk; responsibility was shifted to the corporation as a separate and coherent entity – which often meant and still means that no one is accountable. Be that as it may, the point is that the liability of the shareholder was limited to the value of the share. The corporation became the abstract personification of the wealth of the enterprise and somewhat removed from the fact of ownership.124 If the shareholder was therefore made less accessible to the treasury, the corporation itself was entirely transparent. Taxing corporations was not a direct claim on the person of the owner, that is, the shareholder, but on an artificial entity that stood between the state and the person. Since corporations were creatures of the law that existed thanks to a large corpus of regulation, it was difficult for corporations to then claim immunity from the state. Russian jurists and fiscal experts drew these conclusions from abroad, including the United States where a protracted debate culminated in the corporate income tax of 1909 and anticipated the personal income tax of 1913.125 There it was widely recognized that a corporation acted as a person, but legislators

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posited that it should pay for the privilege.126 Asked why corporations but not all businesses would be liable for an income tax, advocates replied that it was feasible because corporations were already visible, but also legally permissible because of the ambiguities over the legal status of the corporate “person” or “entity.” Corporations could be taxed as persons because they were given the legal attributes of persons, but as non-persons they enjoyed no immunities.127 In Russia the dependence of corporations on the state was more pronounced, as Thomas Owen writes. The law on corporations of 1836 treated them as concessions and special privileges, which is why each one had its charter approved by the emperor personally. Other systems had been moving to a process of simple registration (France in 1867, Prussia in 1870), which had the effect of naturalizing corporations as one of the many ways in which the population might open a business. Russia, however, maintained the concession system for fear that vast fortunes would exist beyond state scrutiny and beyond the control and accountability of any one person.128 It was difficult to argue that an entity that could not exist without the emperor’s signature was somehow independent of the state and immune to further investigation when it came to taxation. A physical person may be subject to the tsar, but a juridical one existed only by his grace. Corporations created a space of ambiguity over the nature of personhood, and the ambiguity made for some real confusion. In some countries legislators proposed that taxable corporations be granted the personal exemption that was afforded in personal income taxation where it existed. The exemption (or “standard deduction”) was understood as the amount of income that a family needed to feed, clothe, and house itself, the minimum needed for subsistence; hence the German term Existenzminimum and the Russian equivalent, prozhitochnyi minimum. The U.S. Congress granted corporations a personal exemption of $5,000, apparently without irony.129 The same reasoning extended to a corporation’s personal constitutional protections. The 1909 law avoided the constitutional ban on direct personal taxation by calling the corporate income tax an “excise” that happened to claim a percentage of corporate profits.130 The device cut many ways. A century later, in 2010, the Supreme Court granted corporations the rights of free speech expressed as unlimited contributions to political campaigns. In her dissenting comments, Justice Sotomayor observed that the problem traced to the nineteenth century. Judges “created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons … There could be an argument made that that was the court’s error to start with ..., [imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics.”131 The law did have the capacity to reshape something as basic as personhood and bring new realities into being, with greater or lesser degrees of absurdity.

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The Russian story is familiar. States endowed corporations with the qualities of a person – as the economist Pavel Genzel’ mused, “to place them on a level with all other mortals”132 – but in later years they would return to the physical person the qualities of a corporation: transparent, given definition in the law, and thus open to official scrutiny. Having begun income taxation with corporations because they were exceptional,133 governments simultaneously argued that the qualities of transparency and openness should be the attributes of any enterprise and of any person, and indeed of the model citizen. It was from this starting point that the Russian government, alongside many European governments, would begin the long process of unravelling the principle of secrecy – or privacy, as the case may be – and generalize the idea of transparency to other enterprises and ultimately to all persons.134 On this model, the Russian government proposed after 1905 that all businesses be subjected to a full system of income taxation; in 1907 it proposed that an income tax be applied to all persons.135 Enter the Citizen: The Apartment Tax The reform of municipal government in 1892 was one of the hallmarks of the reaction that followed the Great Reforms; the passage of the apartment tax in 1893 and its implementation in 1894 caution us to avoid absolutes. Autocracy continued to reform itself. The contrast invites an uncoupling of two facets that are generally associated with liberal reform but are distinct variations on a larger modern change: rights of political participation and consent, and participation in the state. It is arguable that the latter is the more common, in democracies and autocracies alike, and takes the form of jury duty, military service, and tax declarations. It will be recalled (chapter 2) that the reform of municipal government in 1870 had created a franchise that was based entirely on the tax system, so that taxation became the prerequisite for representation, not vice versa. If an urban dweller regardless of legal estate paid any one of the urban taxes (urban properties was the most common) or any taxes or fees to the municipality, that person was given a vote in one of the three curia that selected the municipal duma. In practice, the franchise was kept small because the tax system was based on the wealth that Russian subjects worked hard to conceal; few people showed enough capital to qualify for the upper curiae in particular. In 1881 in the city of Moscow 2.6 per cent of the population voted all told. A mere 222 delegates in the first curia elected one-third of the municipal duma members; the second curia had 1,360 delegates, and the third 18,310. The law of 1892 limited the franchise to those whose properties were assessed at 3,000 rubles or more.

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Since very few had such property, and even fewer declared it, the electorate was in practice cut back by 75 per cent. The status of the mayor and the municipal council had been vague because they were at once representatives of the voters and servitors of the state; the law of 1892 clarified that they were all state servitors.136 If the breadth of the franchise and the autonomy of local society were tests of progress, then this was a reaction par excellence. Whether it was deliberate that the Ministry of Finances introduced a contrasting bill for an apartment tax (Kvartirnyi nalog) in that same year is not clear from the evidence, but soon-to-be minister of finances Witte, who presented the proposal to the State Council in 1892, treated the apartment tax as a model of a broader civic participation.137 Superficially, Witte and his young protégé in the Department of Assessed Levies, Nikolai N. Kutler, cited as justification the famine of 1891 and the fall in state revenues, and they put forward two measures that would raise new urban taxes and share the fiscal burdens with populations that were undertaxed or untaxed. The income tax was one of them, and Kutler explained in his memorandum to the emperor in July 1892 that it aimed to make comprehensive the existing taxes that assessed monetary wealth and capital (estate, capital, and business taxes). The income tax would aim more directly at bank accounts and force a partial repeal of credit secrecy; as we have seen, it was rejected for that reason in particular.138 Witte, for his part, was uneasy about a real income tax and tended to favour excise taxes that generated greater revenue from more people and went unnoticed by the payers; they were likewise universalistic but avoided contact with persons. The business taxes were more realistic and would be expanded, but outside of business too many incomes were invisible to the state, and the latter would compensate with arbitrary investigations of too many persons who would in turn practice more refined concealment.139 The income tax was dropped, but the apartment tax was adopted and functioned as its surrogate, targeting urban professionals who tended not to own property or to pay taxes. The apartment tax was not really a fiscal proposition. In practice, it raised 2.7 million rubles in its first year, 6.5 million rubles fifteen years later, and almost 9 million rubles in 1913.140 It was instead a way to estimate the incomes of the urban well-off. It treated rent as an indicator of one’s aggregate income, and tables were provided to the inspectors to estimate what share of one’s income would likely go to rent. By multiplying the rent by one or another factor, the inspector determined a “norm” for one’s income.141 It assessed any person who occupied an urban dwelling, with the potential rent in an owner-occupied apartment inferred from neighbourhood data, that is, another norm.

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Figure 3.2 Sergei Iul’evich Witte. Departament okladnykh sborov, 1863– 1913. St Petersburg, 1913. Photo by Anthony Accardi/Blue Rhino, Inc.

A good deal of the information came from the payers. Declarations by renters and landlords accustomed people to provide information to the state under oath, stating the rents they paid and the number of people with whom they lived. The declarations were verified by the inspectors and new city commissions (prisutstviia) against existing data (insurance and mortgage information, rental advertisements in the press, and other state taxes) and regional and neighbourhood norms.142 All employers in the cities were required to declare whether their salaried employees rented or owned their dwellings; employers who provided a housing allowance had the information handy.143 Any payer was allowed to appeal a tax, but in that instance the payer was required to

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compile a profile of incomes and properties (imushchestvennoe polozhenie) and document it.144 As was the case with the business tax, an appeal had the effect of reversing the burden of proof. The new commissions verified the declarations. The membership of six (plus the inspector who chaired) included three landlords and three renters. The representatives of the owners were determined by the municipal franchise because the municipal dumas amply represented landlords and other building owners. The representatives of the renters were elected in a separate assembly convened by the inspector. Where there were no elected municipal institutions, all the commissioners would be elected.145 If the property qualification limited the pool of people active in municipal government, the apartment tax added to them the less wealthy but well educated to form what Kutler termed “society.” In this regard the tax was singularly universalistic and personal; it offered one scale on which any person could be assessed, and it treated the payers as “subjects of assessment” who declared their economic standing, rather than as “payers” who paid for a property, income, or enterprise. In its brochure explaining the new tax to the public the Department of Assessed Levies insisted that existing taxes looked at properties but were not quite taxes on persons. “By contrast, the apartment tax will be paid by the householder as a person [kak litso].”146 This, above all, was the importance that Kutler and Witte ascribed to the apartment tax. Kutler, fresh from his service for the Ministry of Finances in colonial Turkestan, had considered carefully the problem of equivalencies – how could the pasture of the herder be compared with the homestead of a European settler – and income-based taxes seemed to him an obvious way to transcend regional, legal, and ethnic particularisms. Such taxes could do for Russia in Europe what they did for Russia in Asia, and indeed they would bridge the two in a unified system of assessment; from the start it was understood that the tax would be implemented in towns everywhere. In European Russia, property regimes may have varied no less than in Asia – consider the difference between a noble estate and peasant communal land, and between peasant communal land and peasant household ownership – but when a property was expressed in money, and specifically the money it generated, any property was comparable with any other. As Witte told his colleagues in the interministerial conference of October 1893, the apartment tax was a model for a formally individualized assessment that could apply to Russia universally. It would soon be spread to Central Asia and the Transcaucasus (1898) and ultimately, he hoped, to Russia’s villages as a wider domicile tax. Witte and Kutler understood that the apartment tax was preparatory to the income tax and therefore applied it to all urban populations of the empire.147

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Witte accepted that the apartment tax would affect very few people (ultimately around 800,000 affluent heads of household), and the money received was truly negligible if one considers the labour that it took on the part of the inspectors. Another sixty inspectors were hired just to administer it. Despite its low return the ministry painstakingly reported the names of the towns in which the tax operated (in its first year, 722), divided the towns into five classes based on income levels and costs of living (the two capitals in category one, and small district capitals in the last and numbering 522), and published the number of individuals who paid in each town. The inspector verified these declarations and chaired the commissions that met over several days or weeks, all in order to collect from many payers about one ruble.148 In one district town the commission read 333 declarations in order to conclude that 253 owed no tax; the remaining 80 paid 231 rubles, and of these, 41 persons paid a single ruble.149 In the process the Treasury Office was able to register all living quarters in a given town, using its own street numbering system; indeed the tax required in some towns the introduction of house and street numbers since many had no system for locating a building below the city block.150 Money was not the issue, and nor would it be: “It represents for the Ministry of Finances,” wrote Witte in 1893, “a significance that is not so much the sum of the expected revenue, as much as a first experience in the assessment, as much as possible, in accordance with the means of the payer.”151 It was used quite soon in the reform of the urban properties tax. That tax reform was proposed in 1907, adopted in 1910, and practised fully from 1911; the data on urban rents was used to assess the income potential of all urban properties.152 The public reception of the apartment tax among some of its payers – mainly professionals – was surprisingly positive, perhaps because the small burden it represented for each payer allowed her or him to appreciate its civic significance. The tax brought into public affairs “the most thoughtful and educated persons” and “the most mentally developed,” reported a satisfied economist in The Russian Economic Overview. The participants had both “an educational qualification” and “specialized knowledge” and represented the “highest class of intelligentsia.” In the midst of reaction, the commissions were one of the very few arenas of public activism permitted for educated Russians who were excluded from local self-government.153 A gathering of academics would later recall that they received the news of the tax happily because of its “moral importance,” whereby Witte took the abstract principles of individuality and put them into legal and fiscal practice. Professor Iarovskii of Kiev agreed that the money was not important: “Who cared about a few million more rubles? Here the value was in the progressive-income principle and its pedagogical

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significance.” When the tax inspector convened the assembly to elect the members of the commission, “it was a great holiday on our street,” a celebration of fairness and individuality.154 Elected commissioners began displaying their membership in their titles and visiting cards. Not everyone was as gleeful; it was, after all, one more tax and one more obligation to serve in a state agency. When an interministerial commission revisited the law ten years later, the Ministry of Finances complained that too many eligible voters for the commissions had refused to appear at the electoral meetings, so that the remaining voters and members were of a poor quality. The Ministry of Internal Affairs, which monitored the commissions through the governors, added that too many of the members arrived at the meetings drunk, too many were illiterate, and too many were guided by their personal considerations of avarice and revenge on their neighbours. The governors tended to respond with crack-downs. Rather than curtail the commissions, however, the government decided to force payers to perform their public roles better. Both ministries agreed that henceforth all eligible voters would be forced, on pain of fine, to appear at the meetings and to serve when elected, and the illiterate and semi-literate would learn the principles and practices of assessment on the job. They were also required to be sober. The assemblies of electors would be held always, regardless of turnout.155 The initial requirement that all payers submit declarations was modified because so many payers were illiterate; by the new rules they would still be forced to sign a declaration that was completed on their behalf by the inspectors and their peers on the commissions.156 “Of course,” one expert wrote with regard to practice of declarations in general, “a declaration assumes a certain public development, but at the very same time it will itself serve as a powerful educational tool.”157 Russians may not have been civically prepared for modern taxation, but modern taxation would prepare them for civic life – or taxation was their civic life. Kutler held that the government should force the payers to act as a check on the government. In 1903 he and deputy minister Vladimir Kokovtsov insisted that the larger principle of participatory taxation was to remain as a necessary counterweight to the potential for official arbitrariness, whether or not the payers liked it. A tax that was administered by the payers alongside officialdom would inspire confidence and also train subjects in affairs of state, and thus had “a deep moral meaning.” Kutler affirmed that “the public element” (obshchestvennyi element) was more important than any revenue. “The representatives of the payers should serve as a guarantee for society against the arbitrariness, errors, and carelessness of the fiscal organs.” If need be, as the initial legislation stated, the payers could dissent from the inspector and submit a conflicting assessment. This was modelled on the English tax commissions for income tax,

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which reaffirmed the distinction between the treasury and the payers even as the two were implicated in the same process; set aside for the moment was the Prussian model of majority voting and unitary commissions that suggested a communion of state and society.158 Yet the relative position of payer and collector was blurry. Although styled as a counterweight to officialdom, the elected members swore an oath on the Bible and the Cross to “defend the interests of the Emperor … to the last drop of blood.”159 Participation would be a right but also an obligation, and the representatives of society were also representatives of the state; the inspectors who served the state were also taxpayers. One inspector submitted an analysis of his circuit commission and concluded that its purpose, for all its shortcomings, or indeed because of them, was a form of compulsory education for the population. Neither Prussian nor English commissions on income taxes involved the same punishments and compulsions to force the taxpayers to participate, perhaps because the formula of requiring one to participate in his or her own assessment still seemed perverse. But Russia was different. The punishment in the form of fines “will accustom the population to fulfill its obligations, connected with the conscientious attitude in general to its obligations before the state.” Russia’s cultural level was low, the inspector explained, which was precisely why compulsion was used to force people to vote, serve, and become “rational.”160 Clearly this beckoned towards a larger model of citizenship that the government would promote more explicitly in the years following 1905: a spirit of civic belonging and responsibility (grazhdanstvennost’) rather than the legal category of a citizen with defined rights (grazhdanin). “Citizen” as a legal category would be awkward and incompatible with an autocracy, and fiscal writers before 1905 were careful in print. In 1900 Genzel’ intimated that taxation was a matter of a citizen’s education, but he would not say it; he would only quote Prussian economists who held that the income tax with full declaration was “the only form of assessment that is worthy of the free citizen.”161 Setting aside the question of government by formal consent, however, citizenship would enjoy a long future as an ethos that demanded a new attitude to power, a complicity in state functions, and one or another degree of union with the state.162 Hence perhaps the great time, effort, resources, and printed space that the ministry afforded to this fiscally marginal tax: the numbers and character of the payers were indicative of a type of society that the state was sponsoring. The ministry admitted that, while the revenue was negligible, the tax was a mechanism to gather information about a group of the population that was uncounted (the free professions) and could be melded with other groups (the propertied) as “society.” These were groups that would not otherwise have been considered together but would have fallen into separate categories of

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estate or property.163 In Mstislav, Mogilev province, the membership included the inspector, one baron, one nobleman, one merchant, one burgher, and one peasant; by occupation and education they were likely to be even more diverse.164 They constituted a society (obshchestvo), but one that was implicated in the state rather than its antipode. Workers were nowhere to be seen (the consequence of being untaxed directly), but society had come a long way from a narrow circle of noblemen. Political undertone became overtone in 1899 when Witte and Kutler used the commissions as a model for the reform of the franchise in municipal government. They offered to hand over the revenue from the tax to the municipalities if the towns agreed to use the liable persons of the apartment tax as the franchise in the elections to municipal government. The franchise for municipal government was based on property alone, and it allowed the very wealthy merchants and traders to dominate even if they were illiterate and culturally vulgar. Income as expressed in the apartment tax encompassed a different “society” and could be expanded to include those who may have been without property but were “the most cultivated and thoughtful [intelligentnye] people.” The new qualifications for participation in urban government would be the same as the tax liability: property, but also “an educational qualification” and a qualification based on profession and salaried employment (sluzhebnyi tsenz). A commission under Prince Obolenskii began deliberations in July 1899. The Ministry of Internal Affairs continued to resist the proposal, against the urging of the ministries of Finances and Justice; ultimately it seems to have gone nowhere. However, the response of the municipalities was symptomatic of the new character of local society. Within a year about half of Russia’s municipalities had agreed to the proposal; the revenue was real, and the new system offered the possibility that many more qualified urbanites would be brought into urban government.165 Local government was too complex to be limited to the wealthy few. With this larger question of municipal government in mind, Obolenskii asked the inspectors to begin combing the mass of individual declarations in their circuits. They were to compile new lists of payers classified according to their educational levels and occupations.166 The ideal they sought, in the administration of the tax and in the politics of the towns, was a comfortable and well-educated burgher with a sense of self-worth. What anywhere else would be considered a person with a bourgeois sensibility – the outgrowth of an interaction of state and articulate public in a public sphere, the two proceeding from their autonomies even as they obscured their mutual boundaries – was not quite what Obolenskii had in mind. Habermas’s notion of a public sphere has limited use here. Neither side had a well-developed sense of its autonomies,

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and many were working to overcome their boundaries. “Society” was in this context a carefully cultivated official category, one’s conduct was choreographed, and the would-be autonomy of society was created deliberately by the state itself. Society was a space that straddled state and population, compulsion and voluntarism, and obligation and consciousness.167 Witte had long held that the state would have to foster a new culture where its population was not up to the task.168 Whether the person completing an annual declaration and sitting on the assessment commission truly believed that the act was civic and emblematic of a mature citizen is open to debate. The point of the urban taxes, and indeed of citizenship itself, was that they created spaces of inescapability that forced the payer to practise civic belonging. Some may have believed it, and the new practice gave them a space of self-realization. For others the requirements of the taxes produced a pantomime of civic virtue and empty affirmation, but belief was also beside the point because none of them had a choice.

4 Systematic Intimacy: Business Taxes and the Disciplining of Commercial Russia

Tax law from the 1880s established the conditions for locating and registering the existence of industrial and commercial enterprises, especially in the cities but potentially anywhere. It provided Russia with its first full-scale cadastre of businesses that gradually began to map the movement of money and goods as they passed from one entity to another. Profounder than the letter of the laws was the practice of the laws over the next thirty years. The business taxes, mixed with information from other taxes and from the expanding financial and insurance sector, spawned a veritable web of information and documentation. The data being revealed was more intimate, and it was gathered systematically. Incomes were no longer guessed but calculated, documented, and, from the perspective of the payer, undeniable. Coercion gave way to discipline, and the ancient complaint that the state was overtaxing was supplanted by something new: anxiety that the state knew quite a lot and its claims were unavoidable. For the same reasons, the business taxes mushroomed into the largest single source of direct tax revenue on the eve of the war, which was much greater if one were to consider the related taxes on capital, deeds, and contracts. The Laws of 1885 and the Map of Commercial Russia What was loosely referred to as the industrial tax (promyslovyi nalog) was in fact three different taxes: a licence, a repartitional levy on profits, and an income tax on corporations. They are better termed taxes on business because they applied to any trading, retail, manufacturing, or financial enterprise, but not farming. When business taxes were revised in 1885, it was generally assumed that different forms of taxation suited different levels of cultural advancement. For this reason the system maintained the basic licence fee (patent) that had existed

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in various forms since the 1820s, henceforward known as the “basic tax” in a three-tier system. This was the one tax that would apply to all Russian businesses without exception, from street vendors to conglomerates. It was a low fee set according to broad external indicators, and its primitiveness was its great virtue. Most potential payers were illiterate and innumerate. Even among large enterprises the inspectors would note in the 1890s “a complete absence of book-keeping or even literacy.” Traders could not estimate their incomes and instead lived day to day by inputs and outputs. Ongoing campaigns to teach book-keeping were meant to educate entrepreneurs in modern business practices and also make them legible and accountable – a dual function that was repeated in other countries1 but had only some success in Russia.2 The fiscal expert Genzel’ chalked it up to “almost always low mental level and development” of the vast majority of Russia’s entrepreneurs, which required a primitive tax system to suit them.3 Politically, a generalized suspicion of government required caution, and the licence tax “does not demand too much interference of the tax apparatus in the commercial affairs of the payers.”4 All in all, the Ministry of Finances reported to the State Council that this tax was needed “under our ethnographic, way-of-life (bytovye), and economic conditions.” Fiscally the main function of this tax was to generate a moderate but steady revenue, register the existence of all businesses, and create a business cadastre (promyslovyi kadastr). This was no small ambition. Other taxes on businesses and their properties were not possible unless all businesses had been registered, and the Ministry of Finances estimated that at any given time a good ten thousand enterprises were not recorded in any government office – from pie sellers on the main streets to mining and timber operations that were either formally exempt or kept secret in vast woodlands and scarcely administered expanses.5 The government held that larger enterprises were ready for more complicated forms of assessment, so in 1885 in addition to the licence it introduced two  new taxes, “The Assessment of Trade and Industrial Enterprises of a Supplementary Levy (Percentile and Repartitional).” The first of these, the percentile tax on corporations (Dopol’nitel’nyi protsentnyi sbor s otchetnykh predpriiatii), was in effect a personal income tax, as Bowman has shown so well, in so far as corporations were juridical persons. It was a subjective assessment in that it proceeded from full disclosure of a firm’s incomes and profits and taxed them on the aggregate at a progressive rate. It reversed the equation that existed for almost all other direct taxes. Rather than gather external indicators in order to estimate revenues and profits, it proceeded from full knowledge of the corporation’s balance sheets and profits. Moreover, rather than begin with an assessment of state need, which was then divided among territories and enterprises (the repartitional system), it began from the individual enterprise in

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order to assess its capacity to pay and calibrate what the state could reasonably claim. The rates could be adjusted, and they tended to increase, but the rates had to be set in relation to the proven revenues of a given firm. State revenue would become a function of economic activity, and the two would ultimately become inseparable.6 The other part of the new tax of 1885 was the Supplemental Repartitional Levy (Dopol’nitel’nyi raskladochnyi sbor), which initially applied to guild enterprises alone because of their size and better record-keeping but was expanded in 1889 to all large enterprises except corporations. In 1898 the distinction between a guild enterprise and all others (except again corporations) was removed completely – a Russian version of an earlier Prussian move to free economic pursuits from legal status.7 Before 1898 the law had maintained a mutually reinforcing connection between the merchant estate and the state treasury so that the state located and governed firms through the guilds, and the guilds received state sanction to speak for their members. From 1898 that relationship was ended as estimated revenue and profit became the sole criterion for a firm’s tax liability. Soon after 1898 new registrations of firms through the merchant estate fell precipitously.8 Estimating the presumed income of a given firm for the repartitional tax was complicated, and in fact the law did not spell out how it was to be accomplished. A full system of assessment, declaration, and verification was deemed premature for lack of a network of inspectors to gather information and for fear that most declarations would be false but unverifiable. Instead the repartitional tax, as the name implied, relied on the redistribution of a lump sum set in St Petersburg, as was done with the poll taxes and later the land tax on peasants. A flat imperial bill was set every three years, and this was distributed among the provinces, the districts, the cities, and finally individual enterprises. Local institutions would work with the inspectors to divide the sums among the firms. Officials at the time claimed that this form of taxation was unobjectionable because it was less intrusive and would not “shock public opinion” (shokirovat’ obshchestvennoe mnenie). Experts held that repartition was familiar to Russians because it extended back to the Mongols, but it was also used across Europe when the state could not or would not encounter payers individually.9 The fiscal expert Blagoveshchenskii thought this was not much of an improvement on peasant collective responsibility, because it involved no direct assessment by the state.10 In fact, it was much more complicated than peasant taxation because it relied on the steady accumulation and revision of written records at the local level; it also involved the direct participation of state officials and their encounter with payers, in fundamental contrast to peasant practice. The system for distributing the burden within a province – deciding what

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share of the total bill fell to each enterprise – would be decided by formal declarations, checked against a growing body of evidence on each enterprise, and administered by the new inspector who would work with commissions of the taxpayers themselves. This information, in turn, would produce more accurate estimates of the economic output of a given province, which would be returned to the central government to adjust the provincial distributions every three years. In other words, peasant taxation depended on static estimates of peasant allotment lands and was left to the peasants to sort out (chapter 8), whereas business taxes were meant to be dynamic and evolving according to the changing data on individual firms. The cumulative revenue from the new supplementary taxes in their first years of operation was nominal. The repartitional tax was set at an empire-wide 2.6 million rubles for the first three-year period, and it was distributed among 123,203 enterprises; the percentile tax on corporations applied to 802 firms in 1885, which paid some 2.1 million rubles. In 1889 the repartitional tax was extended to large non-guild enterprises as well. In that year about 420,000 firms were assessed for the supplementary taxes, of which 1,184 were corporations paying the income tax. The treasury received a total of 7.8 million rubles in 1889, or about 5.0 million rubles for the repartitional tax and 2.8 million rubles for the corporate tax.11 For the Ministry of Finances commenting on the new tax in 1889, the significant figure was not the rubles; these were too few. It was the figure of 420,000 firms that underwent some sort of assessment and yielded a trove of information. The task of publishing the results did not even fall to the Depart­ ment of Assessed Levies, which was responsible for administering the tax. Instead the publications were issued by the Statistical Section of the Department of Trade and Manufacture in a series titled, awkwardly, “Materials for a TradeIndustrial Statistics.” With great solemnity the Statistical Section announced the dawn of a new era in state information gathering, and in these publications the relationship between revenue and information was reversed: rather than rely on statistics to collect the tax, the tax was allowing the government to “implement [sic, osushchestvit’] and bring into being a statistics of trade and industrial enterprises.” The emphasis is in the original and reveals an awareness that data gathering was a creative process rather than a representation of a pre-­ existing reality. The tax made for “a section [of knowledge] which has as its target the unit, i.e., the single enterprise that is active in trade and industry.”12 The material became the basis for the comprehensive registries of businesses that began to appear as soon as the new taxes were introduced, beginning with the Statistical Results of the Percentile and Repartitional Levies, which focused on the location,

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function, and size of firms rather than on the taxes they paid. In the 1890s the registries were published by other parts of the Ministry of Finances and by nonstate organizations, as part of an effort to facilitate communications among firms, allow buyers and sellers to contact each other, and allow all government agencies to easily locate them for whatever reasons they may have had. All of these registries were based on the tax rolls for the two supplementary taxes, with additional material provided by the Factory Inspectorate.13 By 1912, when the government issued its last comprehensive data on the business taxes, both the volume of data and the monetary revenue had increased dramatically. The government had a registry of 1,799,103 trading and industrial firms ranging from the very large conglomerates to the individual artisans, peasant craftspeople and traders, stall owners, and part-time traders and producers, all spread over nineteen sectoral categories (razriady) plus their subdivisions by size and region. The licence fee generated nearly 40 million rubles in revenue annually by 1912, which was no longer a negligible sum; it had more than doubled since 1884, when it had yielded 18.4 million rubles. The supplementary taxes generated another 110 million rubles in the same year, up from about 5 million in 1885. By now 600,000 firms were subject to the supplementary repartitional tax, up from the original 123,200 of 1885, and most of these submitted detailed declarations annually. All told, the business taxes accounted for over half of all revenue from direct taxes in 1913 (table 3.1).14 This was an increase that suggests a dramatic transformation in the nature of government, meaning the capacity of the government to locate, quantify, and tax its population. Most interesting in this regard was the supplementary repartitional tax, which evolved from a more or less flat fee to a complex system of assessment and declaration. The other taxes rested on either complete knowledge (the corporate income tax) or almost no knowledge (the licence fee), whereas this tax was structured to provide greater and finer detail over time and was most revealing of the techniques of transparency that were at work – or, as they were termed at the time, the techniques of “making visible” (privodit’ v izvestnost’) or “manifesting” (vyiavlenie) what was otherwise obscure or unrecorded. It was, briefly stated, a story of modern transparencies. Disclosure, Exposure, and the Uses of the Norm The key to making firms visible was a novel merger of state and entrepreneurs in the assessment process. The repartitional tax was administered locally by the new repartitional commissions (Raskladochnye prisutstviia). These existed at the provincial and district levels, and large cities and other areas with high volumes of activity were given city and circuit (uchastkovye) commissions. They

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were chaired by the director of the Treasury Office at the provincial level and by the tax inspector at the district, city, and circuit levels. The other members of the commissions were representatives of local businesses, sent by the local trade associations, the merchantry, the zemstvos, and the municipalities or drafted from the pool of payers by the inspector. They included at least one “trading peasant” (torguiushchii krest’ianin) who traded or produced crafts but was not registered with the urban estate institutions or the large trade associations and did not participate in zemstvo or municipal government.15 By 1909 the merchantry as such was being removed from the commissions and replaced by representatives of all entrepreneurs, while zemstvos were also removed because they had little to do with non-agricultural enterprises.16 The creation of the commissions in 1885 was surrounded by controversy, and it was opposed by most of the directors of Treasury Offices who were summoned to St Petersburg in 1882 and 1883 to lend their advice. Their superficial objection related to the cumbersome nature of collegial decision making and also to the experience with the municipal repartitional commissions for the urban properties tax that were corrupt and chaotic. Members tended to lower their own estimates and inflate those of their neighbours, and they looked out for their personal interests but not the treasury’s interests. Bringing peasants onto the new commissions was all the more reason to worry. But the objection reflected a larger vision of power as separate from the population. “The financial administration has to be established firmly and in its activities it should depend only on itself,” demurred one director. Power was a state monopoly, said another, but the new arrangements would “give a part of that power to these [municipal] commissions.” Bunge who had summoned them persisted. Practically, the state would not have a dense system of inspection for some years, and it should make intelligent use of “public representatives.” In terms of fairness, “the matter of taxes affects directly all strata of the society; to eliminate public representatives from this matter completely would be an extreme injustice.” In terms of the nature of power, the commissions did not devolve functions to non-state institutions; rather the population would be enlisted to a state institution and implicated in a state practice.17 Clearly Bunge had in mind a different kind of power, not a partitive one, and his proposal for participatory commissions bore comparison to the system of jury trials introduced in the 1860s; both implicated the public in state functions, both blurred the distinction between state and society, and both were promoted as a means to educate the population in state affairs.18 Neither was premised on consent but on the execution of laws passed by the autocratic government. The commissions in particular created a new kind of participatory institution that was not entirely bureaucratic and not entirely public. The members of

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the commissions began their work by taking an oath to guard the interests of the tsar and at that moment were acting on behalf of the state; however, they took a separate oath to guard the confidentiality of all taxpayers assessed by the commissions on pain of heavy fine and imprisonment.19 The commissions made it difficult for payers to claim they were victims of the state as such. The periodical literature of large trade and manufacturing associations would excoriate the “tax organs” that administered the industrial tax, but they were silent about the fact that their tormentors were their fellow taxpayers.20 It was well understood that the members would be corrupt or at least venal; this Bunge did not deny. The Ministry of Finances admitted publicly that it expected the members to attempt to influence their own share of the bill.21 They could suggest that a competing firm had received a large order, had purchased new steam engines, or had hired more workers, each of which was an indication of revenue and profits. It was in the nature of a repartitional tax that a higher rate on a competitor produced a lower rate on oneself. But there were two mechanisms that redressed the imbalance over time. Membership lasted three years, so the next commission was likely to raise the rates on former members who had treated themselves to a tax reduction. More inescapably, all the information gathered about any firm was fed into a calculated “norm” for any sector and territory. These were assumptions about what certain firms of certain sizes and in certain territories were likely to generate in revenue and profits. Local fiscal agents spent much time devising the norms in elaborate statistical studies.22 A higher rate for any one firm was added to the aggregate data for the sector and territory to produce a new and higher figure for “normal profit,” and this would be applied in the next year to all enterprises. Derided as “taxation by analogy” (what applied to one firm should apply to another),23 this was a deliberate mechanism for raising and equalizing the rates on all firms within a territory over time. This made the process of information gathering dynamic: any declaration or body of data on one enterprise ultimately affected the assessment of all comparable firms, and an attempt to shift the burden to another firm had the long-term effect of raising one’s own tax bill. The one case determined the norm, and the norm then determined every other case.24 The same principle operated from district to district. It was in the logic of a repartitional tax that each district commission would under-report its activities so that a neighbouring district would bear a greater share of the fixed burden. The articulate and savvy commissioners in the cities generally passed more of the tax to the rural areas. “We guard our circuit” (My uchastok oberegaem), a member volunteered. In the short term the inspectors were willing to go along since they were (according to one journalist) “institutionally inclined to lower the district’s assessment”; a lower tax was less likely to be contested and more

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likely to be collected.25 This could explain why the inspectors and the members of the commissions got along so very well; in 1912 the inspectors disagreed with the recommendations of the commissions in only 0.1 per cent of all cases.26 The imbalances created by shifting assessments to other districts would be redressed over time, again by way of escalating norms. The overestimates imposed on a neighbouring district were tallied by the provincial Treasury Offices to arrive at new and necessarily higher estimates of the expected revenue of all districts in the province. Any district that deviated widely from the norm for the province stood out, and the inspectors would raise the assessments on those territories during the next cycle. In Minsk province this amounted to a blanket increase in the assessments of between 35 and 200 per cent in particular towns.27 Ultimately the information was fed back to St Petersburg, making for a higher bill for the province, and since every province would have a higher bill, the government could raise the total bill for the empire steadily at three-year intervals. This partly explains how the revenue from the repartitional tax rose by a factor of twenty-three in the years 1885–1912; the number of firms assessed went up, but so did the rate of tax on profit. The particular piece of information reshaped the picture of the provincial and indeed imperial economy, and the larger abstraction of the economy reshaped the picture of the individual firm. Aside from the anecdotal reports of commission members, in the early years real documentation was scarce. The commissions usually began with the licence fees, which stated the existence of a firm and provided some details on its size. This was a sensible starting point because the Ministry of Finances arrived at its initial (1885) estimates of the liability of each province for the repartitional tax by counting the licence fees paid in that province, expressing it as a share of the total for the empire, and then applying the same proportion for the repartitional levy. The initial task of the inspector, aided by the information of the commission members, was simply to locate unregistered firms in a given district, adjust the licence fees of individual firms, and identify those that were liable for the repartitional tax. To that end, and throughout the existence of the inspectorate to 1917, well over half of an inspector’s workday was spent on the road visiting and observing firms and identifying unregistered ones. Pavel Kutler recalled spending much of his time as a tax inspector on this tax in particular.28 In his very first year of employment, 1885, a Kursk inspector “manifested” (vyiavil) 250 firms that had never been registered, while the Moscow inspector identified enterprises that had paid for licences that were obviously too small given their external indicators.29 The tax inspectors were required to create a filing system to enter data on individual firms, but in the first few cycles the commissions used simple lists with entries for the amount of tax owed by each enterprise, with little or no explanation at all.30

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This would have been a self-perpetuating process whereby the crude licence tax only produced multiples or factors of itself, adjusted with the episodic reports of the members of the commissions and the spot checks of the inspectors. What made the process dynamic was the introduction of new sources of information. Much of the new information came from the firms themselves in the form of a signed declaration (zaiavlenie).31 The introduction of declarations was the occasion for some discomfort in the government and in the press at large because of the ways it distorted the nature of political power; in many European languages including English the practice was termed “self-assessment” (in Russian, samooblozhenie), which seemed like a subversion of the proper separation of the payer from the collector, even a form of self-torment and persecution. Taxes were burdens, after all, and to call them anything else was a linguistic trick. From the perspective of payers, concealing and even lying to the government was hardly remarkable, but forcing one to incriminate oneself in writing seemed perverse. Generally, it further blurred the boundaries between ruler and ruled because it implicated the payer in what had once been a clear state function.32 Advocates of the practice explained that the state in a modern economy could not gather all the information it needed, because relations were too numerous and complex, “forcing the state to resort to the co-operation of the payers.” However, in this necessity there was a virtue; “the development of public selfreliance, the development of personality” called for popular participation in the form of self-evaluation.33 In the early years the point was moot because so few people bothered to complete their forms. Galakhov’s study of the commissions of the 1880s and early 1890s in Moscow province finds that the forms were submitted in only 20 per cent of all cases. In the other four-fifths, the commission simply entered a figure based on external indicators or the class of enterprise, that is, a multiple of the licence fee. In some rural regions there is no evidence that declarations were submitted at all.34 But again the “norm” came into operation. Even if only one in five firms submitted declarations, the information submitted by that minority would become part of a new norm used to assess all comparable firms in the district. It was common practice for the commissions to increase all assessments in a district on the basis of a few declarations and a higher norm. In the city of Moscow the commission raised the assessment of firms anywhere from two to six times the previous assessment.35 A firm was allowed to appeal any of the taxes, from the licence fee to the repartitional and percentile levies, but the rate of appeals on assessments in Russia was exceptionally low. The reason was that, by appealing, the enterprise would be required to open its trade books to the inspector and the commission, which meant in effect a reversal of the burden of proof and the suspension of

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the provisions of commercial secrecy. This logic was deliberate, dated to 1885, and was regularly reaffirmed by a variety of treasury officials and ministers. As the State Council concluded in 1898, appeals should be made easy because “it is desirable to make it easy in all ways [for the payer] to elucidate his true profits, and in this connection to give payers all means to expose [raskrytiia] the true condition of their affairs before the Repartitional Commissions.”36 Even a successful appeal that led to a lower tax bill was considered a success for the government because it circumvented the provisions of commercial secrecy.37 The government also made it very easy to submit documentary evidence to the commissions with the declarations, that is, before the assessment was made. By the law of 1898 such information would trump the information gathered by the commissions and the norms they established. However, in 1912 only 4.5 per cent asked to do so, and only 2.9 per cent actually followed through; the ministry guessed that the firms were discouraged when they realized they would have to open their books.38 Appeals were also rare because it was well understood that the tax assessments were far below what they would have been in conditions of full disclosure. In Moscow province, where the highest rates for the repartitional levy obtained, the average annual payment of a large guild enterprise in 1889 was 63.80 rubles, while the great majority of firms paid around 5–6 rubles. In Voronezh province, which was more typical of the empire outside the capitals, a large guild enterprise paid 20.80 rubles on average, and a non-guild enterprise paid 2.71 rubles.39 As Galakhov concluded, firms generally chose not to appeal and not to submit additional documentation because the likely outcome was a higher tax.40 As late as 1908, when better information and higher rates obtained, the Ministry of Trade and Industry was certain that business taxes were generally low as a percentage of profit, lower than they would have been in conditions of full disclosure.41 In later years a new factor kept down the proportion of appeals: assessments were based increasingly on specific knowledge of what a firm received in revenue. Here then was the modern solution to the ancient problem of uncertainty, when the treasury could not say whether a tax was sustainable to the payer. To be sure, the tax inspector did not have a comprehensive picture of what a firm earned in revenue, and one should be dubious of the commonplace claim that the treasury knew industry and trade as such. Instead the inspector created a new object of study, “visible income,” that is, what was documented and undeniable, and then acted on the new creation. That income, at least, could be taxed with confidence. To put it another way, the treasury would lament less over what it did not yet know; it would act with confidence on what it did know.

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Taxation in these conditions was a process, not the guesswork that had made it easy for a firm to negotiate with the treasury. Protests and appeals tended to focus on matters of interpretation (what was or was not deductible, how to measure basic capital and profit rates) rather than on the fact of the tax and its rates. The thrust of the objections of the entrepreneurs was that taxation, with its increasing disclosure and exposure of incomes, was “a humiliation.”42 Claims that the tax was simply too high – that refrain that was so common in the past and now seemed premodern in its assumptions about political power and commercial wealth – were exceptional because tax fell on provable incomes. And it was difficult, try as the payers may, to point fingers at a discrete state power against which they were resisting; the bulk of the work of assessment was done by their peers who sat on the commissions. For all these reasons the rate of appeal was very low. In 1889–91 an annual average of 11,000 firms contested their assessment for the repartitional tax, or 3 per cent of the taxed enterprises. (In Prussia the rate of appeal approached 13 per cent in 1892–7.) In 1912 the rate of appeal was still low at 5 per cent.43 Declarations were not only reports on the firms submitting them but also reports on the firms with which they did business. A firm was allowed to deduct payments to suppliers, the purchase of new equipment, or the construction of new plant, dormitories, schools, and clinics for the workers and their families. In the early years most firms did not claim deductions, and few even bothered with the declarations; the rates were nominal. But as the tax offices gathered more and more documentary evidence of the revenues of firms – which made a higher rate of assessment unavoidable – and the norms and tax bills continued rise, the firms had incentive to complete their declarations in order to claim deductions. By the post-1905 period, most firms were completing their declarations and in considerable detail. In 1912 a total of 416,696 firms submitted declarations, which was 69 per cent of all firms liable to the repartitional tax; the others were exempted because of their small size or bankruptcy, and only 11.9 per cent of firms failed to declare when required.44 This was quite an improvement on the estimated 80 per cent that failed to submit declarations in the 1880s and 1890s in Moscow province or the 100 per cent that failed to in a place like Vologda in 1885. The explanation does not seem to have been the penalties for failing to declare, which were rarely imposed, could not exceed 100 rubles by law, and in practice averaged 3 rubles in fines per firm or 23 rubles for corporations.45 Rather, the firms had every incentive to claim deductions.46 British practices in the income tax had produced a similar result: declarations were voluntary in 1842 for most payers, a clause reaffirmed in 1863; the promise of deductions, however, meant that by 1906 three-quarters of payers submitted declarations. French legislators would adopt

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a similar strategy when they contemplated an income tax: the law of 1909 did not require declarations, but a law of 1914 stated that the assessments of the inspectors could not be challenged without full disclosure and a declaration. In 1917 declarations were made mandatory.47 That the declarations may have been false was well understood and hardly unique to Russia; Prussians would show rates of false declaration of up to 80 per cent.48 Corporations, which had been required to submit declarations all along, showed the way with creative accounting that often freed them of any tax whatsoever. All firms learned to keep separate books for the tax offices alone – a year of entries written in the same fresh ink and probably on the eve of an audit. Still other books were kept for the shareholders. The inspectors were more concerned with the principle of declaration and were also satisfied that the information might be useful in the future.49 Declarations and deductions had a further importance. Every deduction claimed by one firm was evidence that another firm had generated the same amount in revenue.50 The state, in other words, was tapping into the transactions of civil society and putting society to work on its behalf. This mechanism was especially useful to the inspectors in locating certain types of enterprises that were not registered with any government office because of the nature or location of their businesses. Peasant producers of industrial raw materials like flax, hemp, and wool were too many and widely dispersed, and in any event the inspectors were not allowed to enter villages to locate them; however, their buyers could report them in their declarations. Intermediaries (skupshchiki) bought up quantities of agricultural goods but did not have storefronts and registered warehouses, but wholesalers would list them on their deductions. Noble landowners who operated businesses on their estates, such as sugar beet refining, could not be visited without invitation or without cause, but wholesalers, processors of food, and retailers would list them as suppliers. Timber firms operated in remote regions by definition, and gold- and platinum-extracting enterprises were only made taxable (and necessarily registered) in 1901; their buyers would sooner or later list them. As the tax was extended to more and newly conquered territories in Turkestan and the Far East, inspectors were sent out to a virtual terra incognita, lacking maps, let alone registries of businesses. Each of these would be traced through their sales, listed as deductions on other people’s declarations.51 Thanks to the business tax, reported the Ministry of Industry and Trade, almost all regions of the empire are “of a character more open to accounting and registration.” By 1910 only some regions of “natives” in Sakhalin, Kamchatka, the Amur basin, and Iakutsk were still invisible.52 Consider the single case of the Vologda tax inspector who wrote to a peasant county board in his district in 1910. He had the name of a peasant who sold

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semi-processed linen that was used to make lace, but the peasant had not purchased a licence to practise his trade. How the inspector knew of the peasant without ever seeing him or visiting the region is a story that began in Moscow. A large textile mill in that city declared in its tax declaration for 1910 that it bought its materials from merchants in various provinces, and the firm entered these supplies as deductible expenses on its declaration. Its tax assessment was lowered accordingly. The Ministry of Finances had always insisted that any payment claimed as a deduction had to be accompanied by the name and location of the recipient.53 The Moscow mill supplied this information on its declaration. The Treasury Office in Moscow located the tax districts of those suppliers by consulting the published registers of business in the Russian Empire (the product of the tax rolls, no less) and sent brief notes to the inspectors in charge of each district in those provinces. One note went to the inspector in charge of Vologda district, informing him that the merchant David Moiseevich Kats in the city of Vologda had sold semi-processed linen to the Moscow firm. Kats, it transpired, had not declared the revenue. Confronted by the inspector with a higher tax bill, he lowered his new assessment by listing his peasant suppliers as expenses and, as required, he named them. The inspector checked those names in the card catalogue for the business tax, noted that one of the peasants did not appear as a payer of the licence fee, and wrote to the county board.54 It will be significant to the discussion of peasant taxation (chapter 8) that the letters were not sent directly to the peasants in question but to the county boards and that none of these inquiries received an answer. It is relevant to this discussion that one declaration generated another, that one deduction generated two new assessments, and that each firm escaped tax by naming another. This was “the tax net” that “caught” (ulovil) more payers, according to satisfied fiscal experts; it was every man for himself (sauve qui peut) to outraged payers in France where similar mechanisms were being proposed; and it was organized denunciation according to payers in Prussia where the technique was well developed. New information was also used against the firm making the declaration. Corporations were allowed to deduct the salaries of the employees and board members. They could receive hundreds of thousands of rubles in untaxed stipends that would be claimed as corporate deductions for the tax year. Corporations thus boosted these payments dramatically (the payments were often going to the managers’ spouses, siblings, and children) and listed them in great detail as deductions. One firm that paid its director (that is, the founder) 3,000 rubles in 1885 increased it to 60,000 rubles five years later to avoid the new tax, and paid 10,000 rubles to his wife. The firm would show a loss (as a juridical person), but each shareholder-relative would become very wealthy.55 So in 1898 the government confirmed that these deductions were allowable

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within certain limits (up to 10,000 rubles per person, with the total payments not exceeding 3 per cent of all expenditure) and thus encouraged the practice; however, it imposed a flat tax of 2 per cent on the board members, members of oversight committees, councils, auditing commissions, and managers – the very people who had been registered so carefully in order to claim them as deductions. The corporation would have to report on its board members and employees – a particularly uncomfortable prospect since it often meant that managers would be reporting on their family members. Board members, in turn, were required to report the aggregate of all income they received from all the boards on which they served. By requiring aggregate declarations, the government was laying the groundwork for progressive personal taxation. During the fiscal crisis of 1906 the government imposed a progressive income tax of 1–7 per cent on all managers and board members, and a flat 1.7 per cent fell on all salaried employees, notaries, expeditors (transport agents), and brokers. Kutler (by now a Duma deputy) placed the revenue from this tax at 4 million rubles in 1909. Even corporations that were protected and non-taxable, such as railways and shipbuilders, were required from 1900 to report the stipends paid to their board members.56 By 1912, 330,639 people were being taxed directly by this mechanism.57 It is remarkable how little compulsion was used or even mentioned in these practices. To be sure, the threat of arrest and confiscation supplied the coercive boundaries to the whole system, even if they were rarely practised.58 Within this boundary the inspectors and the commissions operated exclusively by information. The system functioned more or less automatically: each step by the payer supplied the treasury with more information about this enterprise and its business partners, and each new item of information produced a new or higher tax on this payer or someone else. The system worked from the group to the individual by way of norms, and from the individual to the group by way of declarations and reporting that helped set the norm and identify hidden incomes.59 The earlier system of estate-based collective responsibility and solidarity had been truly abandoned; the new system ensured that payers would act as individuals separate from the collectives to which they belonged, and that individuals would act in competition with each other. It was, indeed, its own form of atomization, an erosion of social and corporate solidarities in favour of an imperial solidarity. Capital Gains, Contracts, Deeds, and Urban Real Estate The system of urban and commercial taxation was completed as the business tax drew on the data yielded by other taxes on capital, deeds, apartments, and

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urban properties. All of these taxes drew on data provided by banks, insurance brokers, and mortgage lenders, and the data yielded by one tax was used in the others. Tax inspectors had to administer them all together.60 The inspectors were permitted unfettered access to any assessment or evaluation conducted for any tax at any level of government (state, zemstvo, and municipal). The inspectors maintained a correspondence with the statistical bureaus of all these institutions, many of which were created to register and evaluate properties for their own tax purposes.61 The inheritance tax was an obvious example, valuable because of its level of disclosure on the heirs, and its data was integrated into the operation of the business tax.62 However, this data was gathered rarely, upon the death of the owner. A new Tax on Interest from Capital was more lucrative. It was introduced a few months after the supplementary taxes on businesses, and the timing was not coincidental. It was in the first instance a way to tax the new kinds of monetary wealth that otherwise escaped all taxes, mainly bonds. Credit and commercial secrecy was circumvented because the treasury did not directly investigate the owners of capital but was concerned solely with the interest that was paid out to them – the “wealth in motion” that was at the base of all income taxation. In order to avoid a direct confrontation with the payers, the Russian law followed the British model of “stoppage at source”: tax would be withheld by the financial institution and delivered to the treasury so that there was no contact between the taxpayer and the inspectorate, and also no way to avoid paying. The rate was set at 5 per cent, which in the first year of operation made the revenue nominal at 3.8 million rubles. It escalated to 30.4 million rubles in 1913 (table 3.1), a reflection of the growth in monetary and paper transactions in the economy and of the capacity of the state to locate them. From its inception the tax provided the tax inspectors with information in the administration of the business taxes: which owners received interest and, by inference, which of them had large amounts in the banks or invested in securities and thus also had large commercial incomes.63 Other ways to verify business activities were the revamped stamp duty on contracts (gerbovyi sbor) and the fees for registering deeds (krepostnye poshliny). The deeds gave to the new owner the state’s sanction of ownership, and it made the contract enforceable, but the taxes also made the transactions registered and public. These were initially required of corporations alone since they had more than one owner and they required a specific act to formalize a sale or purchase. In 1882 Bunge proposed that the stamp duty and the fee on deeds be required of all enterprises and persons. The more the transactions were registered, the more the government accumulated data about transactions in the private economy. The law did allow for “domestic agreements” (domashnyia

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soglasheniia), meaning oral or written agreements that were not registered with the state and which constituted the overwhelming share of business agreements in the empire. By the new regulations, domestic agreements would be unenforceable or less easily enforced because they did not have official recognition. Traders would be told outright that all their informal agreements were contestable without a stamp duty, and their ownership in doubt without a deed.64 The system also encouraged full disclosure: if two parties agreed privately to under-report the value of the transaction, then in the event of disagreement a plaintiff would only be able to claim the (lower) declared amount. Bunge consulted with his Treasury Office directors whom he had called to St Petersburg, and they saw the proposal as a great opportunity. Evidence garnered from the stamp duty or registered deed could be used to adjust any other tax, because both documents included detailed inventories of what was being bought and sold. They would provide grounds for detailed investigation in the event that a transaction was revealed through the stamp duty but had not been declared for another tax (mainly the projected business tax). The excitement grew as the directors realized that they could use the stamp duty as a pretext to launch searches of homes (domashnye obyski). In their view, no confidence had been violated by a search; in return for state enforcement it was the buyer and the seller who had invited the state into the process and tacitly allowed it to monitor and verify the activities in question. Some officials at the meeting did protest: “It would be to create a special institution of spying, hardly desirable in any civilized state.” Never mind that the practice was borrowed from “civilized” western Europe and that by other definitions it enhanced a healthy transparency; the point was that it offered the government access to otherwise invisible transactions. In practice, a revised law of 1900 more or less made the stamp duty mandatory and informal agreements unenforceable. Taken together, the two duties grew to represent a sizeable source of revenue, or 160 million rubles in 1913 (table 3.2), which was growth by a factor of three since 1884. By their very operation they provided the treasury with a dynamic register of property ownership and economic transactions in general.65 The enforcement of the stamp duty became the occasion for a new practice of stamp audits (gerbovye revizii) by the inspectors, each an occasion to peer into the workings of an enterprise or household. The inspectors conducted 2,865 audits in 1902 and 28,208 in 1908.66 Here was a good example of how the personification of corporations could feed back into new understandings of physical persons. Into the 1880s only corporations were required to register their sales and purchases through the stamp duty or register their deeds because corporations had no one responsible owner. A treasury director told the gathering of his colleagues that these

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registrations should be required of all enterprises because it was unfair to discriminate between different kinds of persons: “to make any distinction between private persons and joint-stock companies would be groundless. These companies are by law juridical persons, which enjoy the same rights as individual persons with regard to all possible consensual transactions.” In fact the government was universalizing obligations, not rights, and some of the directors did point out that the transactions of a corporation were uniquely public because a corporation was uniquely transparent and uniquely owned and thus was not comparable to a physical person. When pressed to identify the legal difference between a physical and a juridical person, however, they could only insist that one was living and the other not. Legally, they admitted, there was no difference at all.67 The private sector was also enlisted to fiscal ends.68 In the 1880s, tax offices began using mortgage data at the level of a neighbourhood to gauge the value of real estate and its capacity to generate revenue. Owners might under-­ estimate the value of a property in their tax declarations, but mortgage lenders were more likely to arrive at a market-based appraisal. This information could be used in the operation of any number of taxes, beginning with the tax on urban properties (Nalog s nedvizhimykh umushchestv v gorodakh, posadakh i mestechkakh). This tax rose steadily thanks to periodic re-evaluations – its sum rose by 12 per cent from 1884 to 1892, and another 12 per cent from 1892 to 1893, for a total of 6.8 million rubles in revenue. In 1904 mortgage data was mobilized by the inspectors in order to conduct a general re-evaluation of urban properties, while annual assessments gathered ever more information about each property – for example, which ones were electrified.69 In 1910 a new law reformed this erstwhile apportioned tax into a fully assessed one, with the tax depending on the revenue potential of a property (5 per cent of the market value), which was taxed at 6 per cent. In 1913 it yielded 36.6 million rubles in revenue, a six-fold increase over 1893 (table 3.1).70 Residents of different regions protested that rates were rising and that the tax was discriminatory, but tax receipts were rising everywhere as new methods of assessment were applied uniformly.71 In Moscow in October 1911 the director of the Treasury Office boasted, and the payers complained, that the yield went up by 83 per cent in one year for the city of Moscow, and new assessments were being extended to the suburbs.72 By 1911 the commissions for this tax were operating entirely on the principle of income, gauged by compiling rental rates in each neighbourhood and setting norms, with no trace of apportionment to be found.73 The commissions would include representatives of the payers (via the municipal dumas or elected directly by property owners) as well as architects who were paid to carry out

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full evaluations of the properties in question.74 Since the first category of properties that were taxed was commercial space, the findings were immediately integrated into the operation of the industrial tax; the data was added to the pool of indicators for neighbourhoods and individual firms in order to raise the norms.75 It was also common, since the 1880s, for the inspectors to investigate insurance rates for properties by sending short formal inquiries (spravki) to the local brokers. If an owner was likely to under-estimate a property’s value for tax purposes, she or he was likely to over-estimate it for the purposes of fire insurance.76 But the government added another device to ensure that Treasury Offices had the figures handy: it imposed a separate tax on fire insurance policies. Arguably the only purpose of this tax was to force owners to declare the amount they paid in insurance and by inference the value and revenue potential of the insured properties. The value of the tax was extremely low: 50 kopecks for every 1,000 rubles in insured value and only on the first 20 per cent of the premium. The tax generated a mere 6.6 million rubles in revenue by 1913,77 but it also generated a full record of property values, the incomes they generated, and the goods stored on the insured premises.78 Finally, and in addition to the mandatory reporting of certain transactions by financial institutions and employers, any item of information in a tax declaration or in the file cabinets of the Treasury Offices could be verified by writing a query (spravka) to almost any private or government institution, a practice that was extended in 1898.79 These went out to the taxed firms, their bankers, insurance agents, mortgage holders, suppliers, clients, and the statistical bureaus of any other government department (local or central) directly or indirectly involved in tax assessment.80 All this information had the cumulative effect of mapping businesses and offering a dynamic picture of each firm, its transactions, and its changing fortunes. Each item of information was added to a file card for each firm, which was held in an enormous card catalogue for the industrial tax in the local tax offices. This catalogue was cross-referenced with catalogues for the urban properties tax, the land tax, the apartment tax, and a host of duties and fees (deeds, stamp, inheritance, and capital gains), so that each tax reinforced and was reinforced by every other tax. The evolution was, indeed, dramatic. When the new business taxes were introduced in 1885, the commissions scarcely had any documentation at all, they left few written records, and they distributed the sums to the districts and firms based on factors of the licence tax. The card catalogues required by the law were not in place for some years. The commissions were charged with estimating the “presumed income” of all liable firms, but the law and regulations did not set

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out the means of making the presumption.81 In Vologda province the tax assessment for each firm tended to be a round figure determined by simple division (the number of firms divided into the total bill).82 Ten years later, in 1895, more firms were submitting their declarations, more data was being added to the catalogues, and tax bills were being individualized according to the finer data available. The province received its bill of 22,500 rubles for its non-guild enterprises, still a crude repartitioned sum reflected in the rounded figure. However, the provincial Treasury Office had much more information on each firm and its relative size, so that the district of the provincial capital was apportioned 9,422 rubles, and the most rural one, Iarenskii, was apportioned 118 rubles.83 In the same province fifteen years later, in 1910, the vast majority of firms that were required to send declarations did so. The information had grown to such a degree that the number of tax brackets multiplied, making the brackets sensitive to gradations and fine distinctions. In Vologda province a firm would be placed in one of 152 categories to determine its liability. A store selling hats, for example, was categorized by its external indicators (employees, entrances, warehouses, and so on), further classed according to new or used hats, luxury hats and “simple-people” (prostoliudnye) hats, and fur hats or cloth hats, and finally classed according to the affluence of the region or neighbourhood. Each firm was placed at the appropriate intersection of normative criteria, and each category was associated with a “normal income” and “normal profit” and a consequent tax.84 (If this seemed like a lot, consider that France used 1,500 classifications in assessing its licence fee alone.)85 It would be an exaggeration to say that the treasury had a record of all commercial activity. With the exception of corporations, all assessments were based ultimately on indicators and norms, corrected by the incomes that had been made “visible” when they were intercepted by the state or reported by another business. Declarations were assumed to be incomplete and inaccurate, and aside from corporations no firm was required to expose its trade books unless it chose to do so. Few in fact did. It was also well understood that a good deal of income and economic activity was concealed by way of accounting practices and cash transactions that never entered a firm’s books – if, that is, the firms even kept books. Briefly stated, the system was based on visibility rather than actuality, and on objective indicators rather than subjective assessment. The fact that the norms themselves became based on verifiable data indicates that the whole system was becoming income based rather than repartitional. The state’s information was partial and incomplete, but that very uncertainty could work in both directions. From the perspective of the taxable enterprise, it was never clear if, how, or when a new item of revenue would be exposed and subjected to new and

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large assessments. Around 1,000 inspectors across the empire, even when aided by commissions, could not be expected to read and cross-check around 500,000 declarations carefully and within the prescribed period of assessment and collection. The disciplining effect came from uncertainty; it was always possible that one’s declaration would be selected for more careful scrutiny, that one firm would be listed as someone else’s deduction that would set in motion an audit, that a member of the commission would add specific information on the firm in question, or that the ongoing correspondences of the inspectors with private and government offices would shift an assessment upward. Any one of these, wrote an incensed entrepreneur, hung over one’s head as a “sword of Damocles” that might descend on the payer “out of nowhere” to raise a tax bill by “hundreds of thousands or even millions of rubles.”86 The treasury could be sure of the accuracy of the information it did have and then tax that income confidently and at a higher rate. The system was able to draw more businesses into the pool of liable firms (1.8 million liable for the licence tax by 1912), while the number of firms liable to the supplementary tax had grown from 123,203 in 1885 to 598,110 in 1912. Of these, about half (301,000) were thought to have rates of profit that exceeded 10 per cent on capital, and they were subjected to an additional tax (one for profit rates above 10 per cent of capital, another for profits exceeding 20 per cent of capital). Estimates of capital, return on capital, and net profit rose as absolutes and as per-firm figures. With the confidence that these figures were probably underestimates sooner than over-estimates, the rate of taxation rose. The rate of the assessment on profits in the repartitional tax was estimated to be 6.9 per cent in 1912, which was a sizeable increase over the rates that obtained in 1885 (1.4 per cent). Even stalls and stands that supplied little or no information other than location and owner were placed in categories of income based on neighbourhood and type of trade.87 As for corporations, 5,331 were liable for the percentile tax, up from 882 in 1885, and their taxes were now progressive on a scale of 1–14 per cent.88 In these regards the Russian system of revenue shared much with its European counterparts and indeed with modern government. It entailed discipline sooner than compulsion, a system that induced the payers to conform and comply as if on their own accord. Bentham’s panoptic effect – never knowing if one was being watched, and never knowing what information was in the possession of the authorities – was enhanced by the knowledge that the surveillance was conducted not only by a state inspector but also by the other taxpayers who sat on the commissions. This was the point that critics could never quite square when they protested the abuses of the state administration; the surveillance was mutual, and the alleged abuses were perpetrated by one’s

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peers. As the director of the Warsaw Treasury Office put it in 1892, this was “the powerful control of public opinion, which is the indispensable assistant to taxation.”89 One suspects, indeed, that the outrage of the entrepreneurs was rooted in their inability to avoid, evade, or negotiate, in the inescapability of the taxes imposed rather than in the absolute unfairness or incorrectness of the rates. To wit, as was predicted in the 1880s, arrears in the payment of the business tax became rare, in sharp contrast to virtually any other direct tax in the empire.90 As Bowman has shown, business taxation in Russia was a model of European success in that it generated considerable income and was based on highly advanced techniques of monitoring;91 it was also a source of anxiety over the person’s exposure to the state and one’s peers. This made all enterprises seem – as the government pointed out and had long hoped – more like corporations in their transparency and methods of assessment.92 From 1898 the Ministry used its new data to impose a surplusincome tax of 3.3 per cent on non-corporations, which presumed good knowledge of their income, and by 1909 it was preparing to abolish repartitional taxes altogether in favour of income taxes for all but the smallest firms; this was achieved by the Provisional Government as one of its last acts, in October 1917.93 Making more firms go public had been the intent of the central government since the late nineteenth century, when the State Council had agreed with the Ministry of Finances that it wished to induce as many companies as possible to become corporations and produce the “inescapable lifting, to fiscal ends, of the commercial secrecy of the payers.”94 This was already being accomplished indirectly, since even small firms had come to realize that their assessments would be higher if they did not declare their deductions, meaning that the penalty for commercial secrecy was a higher tax; and directly, by forcing more and more firms to declare, which in turn opened the way for a demand to see the books. Smaller firms in particular came to realize that the repartitional system in which the larger firms kept books and claimed deductions while the smaller ones did not had the effect of shifting more and more of the burden to the latter.95 No law required the smaller firms to adopt these practices; they were induced by a combination of incentive and penalty, which gave them a false choice. In these conditions, as the ministry told the new legislative State Duma in 1908, the government would limit the choices of all enterprises to two: become a corporation where secrecy did not apply or be required to keep books and then open them to the tax inspectorate and end commercial secrecy. The result from a revenue perspective would be the same.96 In that year the Ministry of Finances concluded that the repartitional and licence taxes had already

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performed the “important service role of perfecting the industrial cadastre.” It proposed that all business taxes be folded into a single income-based tax on enterprises. By then it was being argued that the privacies and immunities that had made the income tax impracticable in the 1880s had been overcome by the reality of near-full assessment through taxes on businesses, capital, deeds and transactions, and real estate.97 The Ministry of Trade and Industry objected that such a change would be intrusive, but the Ministry of Finances pointed out that Russia’s business taxes already depended on so much transparency that even the licence fee had become income based, comprising a host of indicators and small assessments.98 As the economist Genzel’ observed, this outcome was not quite the result of legal reform but of regulations and administrative practices, much in the manner of British reform: “Such an evolution is being achieved already, life itself is leading to it.”99 Ultimately the changed landscape allowed the government to take the next and final step in reforming the fiscal order: the personal income tax, where the practices of divulgence and transparency would be applied to all persons.100 Economic Individuation and State Aggregation Bunge, the author of so many of the measures aimed at transcending estate and forging individuality, was a student of Tocqueville, and he was aware that reform and liberalism had unintended consequences. The French eighteenth century loomed large in Russian minds at the end of the nineteenth. The erosion of local and corporate self-administration, in part thanks to new fiscal practices, threatened to isolate the person; for lack of social networks to replace the old ones, the person faced “social suicide.”101 The comparison with France under the old regime was apt, and others – again tax experts – would pursue it. The deputy director of direct taxes, Nikolai Brzheskii, penned a treatise on French fiscal theory in the eighteenth century and explained that the state had used its absolute powers to reform the old regime, against the objections of some of its leading subjects. Arguably, only an absolutist state could do this.102 The Revolution of 1905, which began as a rebellion of the privileged against the very privileged, would be evocative of Tocqueville’s other warning: the most dangerous moment for a bad regime was when it attempted to reform itself, as Russia had been doing for over four decades. The comparison with Tocqueville’s France has its limits. Tocqueville warned of atomization, meaning that the erosion of corporate and territorial autonomies left the person alone to face a separate and overbearing state, vastly unequal in its powers over individuals who had lost their solidarities. Bunge had in mind a different outcome that would avert a collapse like that of 1789. Far

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from “shielding the state from the encroachments of society,” as Richard Pipes characterizes the period, Bunge’s approach was to implicate the one in the other. Far from the state being reduced to “the tsar and his officialdom,”103 it was now extended to include potentially the whole population. The person’s separateness from the state (and isolation from the collective) was to be overcome by a series of direct contacts and formal practices that implicated the person in the work of the state. It was indeed “the people” as an integral whole that was emerging from these approaches, not simply as a negative – anything outside the state – but as a positive construction situated in the state itself. Bunge’s tools were fiscal, to be sure, but taxing and spending were not a narrow state or personal concern; they were among the very few instruments of direct government available to the Russian state, and they were creative of a new and large abstraction, “the aggregate of the whole population.”104 An abstraction it was, but one that was quantifiable and increasingly grounded in real practices thanks to the operation of new mechanisms of calculation and individuation and the operation of new forums for participation. One would be hard put to show that the state was merely formalizing what was already occurring, for, in formalizing the daily transactions and encouraging certain types of conduct, the state was bringing a certain kind of economy into statistical being. This economy was populated by real people, albeit ones who had been shaped and construed in specific ways in order to make them legible and equivalent. Even in the early 1880s, discussions of the new inspectorate and the new taxes assumed that the inspectorate and the taxes they administered were a way to look at the people of the empire; the tax units of the empire were a cumulative representation of the people, and fiscal experts regularly claimed that their (tax) responsibilities amounted to a stewardship of trade and industry.105 The Minister of Finances (as Witte’s employees told him at a gathering in 1902) was “the executive director of the great economic corporation of the Russian people.” Lest the points be lost, they were now considering Russia as a nation (narod), the economy as its locus of realization, and the state as its director.106 Witte drew on Bunge to argue that autocracy would use its tools to reshape and then rest on “the whole people.”107 When he tutored the Grand Prince Michael Aleksandrovich in 1900–2, Witte explained that a national economy was newly understood as an integral whole, but only the state gave it unity: “The whole aggregate of economies in the country is united in one national, organically self-contained whole, fastened together [skrepliaemoe] by the unity of state undertakings.”108 Not quite organic à la Parsons, not quite self-­contained. Politically, by the same token he objected to local self-government in the zemstvos because it interfered with the direct relationship of the state with the population and he was party to the “counter-reform” of the zemstvos that made its

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elected deputies “state servitors.” The alternative that he offered in Autocracy and the Zemstvo was an integral administration that reached down to the village and allowed for the concentration of the population’s energies in the state structure. It is again no accident that taxation would be the nexus of the revamped administration because it had been cast for some decades as a way to reconsider the relationship between the state and the population. Fittingly, one of Witte’s ghost writers (Witte was not known for his smooth prose) was Nikolai Kutler,109 colonial fiscal administrator, director of the Department of Assessed Levies, author of the apartment tax law of 1893, and one of the authors of the income tax bill of 1907. With the income tax in mind, the Cabinet directed the Department of Assessed Levies in 1906 and again in 1909 to calculate national income, and it turned to its tax rolls. In no time at all the figures were being used as measures of income disparity and class stratification or, in more inaccurate terms, as a measure of wealth, quickly ignoring the fact that the category of income was a way to avoid a direct discussion of wealth, not to gauge it.110 The treasury overcame its ancient uncertainties about who made what and who could afford what tax rate by creating something new and then acting on it: income, specifically visible income, and finally national income (narodnyi dokhod). National income looked very much like taxable income, and taxable income very much like visible income. All looked like state projects. As Mitchell tells us, “expert knowledge works to format social relations, never simply to report or picture them.”111 Representative government was not the issue, and there was no quid pro quo of representation before taxation. Lecturing the tsarevich in 1863–4, Bunge had accepted that the estate principle was being eroded and that this allowed in the West for the rise of national representative government. In Russia the erosion of estate was effected by an “unlimited monarchy” that meant to strengthen itself.112 It also allowed for something new to autocratic government, participation in state functions, and intimated a new kind of community: a person, an economy, and a state that were mutually constitutive. At the same time the centrality of the state was clear. It was hard to ignore how much the state gave definition to the person and the economy – beginning with statistics, continuing with state-provided criteria of status and wealth, and culminating in the juridical and administrative practices that understood even the person as a product of legal theory and official practices. If Tocqueville warned of a person cut loose from a community, Bunge already had in mind a new community: the state itself.113 Witte’s stated ambition to “subordinate ever broader spheres of private economic activity to the state”114 might easily obscure the originality of the project: making the state not simply dominant but a membership organization. With the state locating and shaping

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persons into a coherent whole by way of its fiscal instruments, the formula of taxation and representation did not make sense; the more apt formulation was government by taxation. Nor was the individual of Tocqueville’s writings fitting to the historical setting of Russia in the late nineteenth century. Tocqueville’s atoms were isolated, to be sure, but also rightful and in some regards impenetrable. Individual rights were weak in Russia, and the state deliberately weakened them further because its first serious consideration of personhood assumed permeability rather than autonomy. When the income tax was proposed in Russia in 1907, and when it was passed in 1916, there was little in the legal arsenal that could be mobilized to oppose it. As the experience with the business tax suggested, one’s activities were already quite open to scrutiny; it simply required the political will and the bureaucratic capacity to look. Russia remained an autocracy with the techniques of a reforming government, modern and potentially unlimited.

5 Mass Taxation in the Age of the Individual: The New Personal Taxation in Russia and the World

The personal income tax in Europe and the United States brought the person back into focus after decades of taxes on lands, properties, and incomes, which had been designed to be impersonal. Objective taxes on things were joined by subjective taxes on persons and the aggregate of their incomes. This was part of a new concern with the person, though not so much with the person’s immunities; it had more to do with the person’s visibility, integration, and capacities. The approach required an erosion of personal autonomies in order to make assessment possible, and in Russia in particular the erosion was thoroughgoing as fiscal experts, officials, and legislators saw in taxation a way to create a unified, universalistic, and integrated realm. Theirs was a more pronounced response to the crisis of unity, exposed in Russia during the Revolution of 1905. Back to the Person: Russia and the International Debate over the Income Tax The personal income tax was debated in all European and North American countries towards the end of the nineteenth century and adopted everywhere in the twentieth. It was one of the emblematic paradoxes of the modern era because it was personal and direct – precisely what the fiscal orders had avoided since the time of the American and French revolutions. The change captures the dual movement of modern government, a tension between individual immunity and personal commitment. European reformers since 1789 had created a system of depersonalized taxes that served three political and fiscal purposes: legal equality, immunity from state investigation, and fairness. All three goals were achieved by taxing properties and items of income and deliberately avoiding an assessment of the person. Equality was implied because all properties registered as money looked alike, as

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did all monies registered as incomes, and the taxes did not discriminate between the different kinds of owners and the legal statuses of income earners. Cash offered the equivalency that the new regimes had been seeking.1 The measures were the fiscal extension to the universalism of the nation state. Immunity was enshrined as treasuries deliberately distanced themselves from the person of the payer as a way to disown their reputations for inquisition and repression. The poll taxes that fell on persons were replaced by taxes on objects (hence, “objective taxes,” in Russian veshchevye nalogi).2 The avoidance of the person was in keeping with a broadly liberal impulse of the nineteenth century, the recognition of the autonomy of the individual, which in tax practice barred the treasury from investigating the economic life of the payer. The procedural model was the British income tax of 1842, which significantly was not a personal income tax; it was a rate on payments as they moved from one entity to the next, situating the treasury between payer and payee, but not in the first instance assessing the person in the aggregate. Only the professionals who received large undocumented incomes were required to declare all their incomes under oath, and Schedule D became a byword for state inquisition and personal anxiety in debates across Europe.3 However, if the person requested no deductions and did not contest the tax bill, there was no occasion to even meet a tax assessor. The person did have the right to be left alone, though at the price of a higher assessment.4 What the British developed as expedience and precedent the French elevated to political principle. The School of French Finance Inspectors trained personnel in “liberty” as well as in balanced books, combing the finest details of administrative practice to avert an intrusion of the state on the person and to guard against their direct encounter. The system made educated guesses about what an enterprise or property might tell about incomes without entering the property or confronting the payer with anything but a final bill; instead the system relied on “external indicators” (in Russia, vneshnie priznaki).5 External indicators had the obvious meaning of looking at the outside of a building and estimating what a window or loading bay suggested about income; it had the added meaning of being external to the person.6 Briefly stated, the fiscal regimes of the post-1789 period recognized the individual but then avoided him. Persons were defined negatively, by what the state could not do to them. Fairness, understood as proportionality and a relative capacity to pay, meant achieving some correspondence between the value or income of a property and the taxes to which it was subject. The notorious poll taxes, so symbolic of the old regimes, were not simply personal and discriminatory but also arbitrary, making little distinction between the large and the small property owner. Such taxes were unelaborated, justified by monarchial sovereignty and state might.

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They could be moderated by the poverty and evasiveness of the subjects, the incompetence and corruption of the collectors, or the capricious mercy of the monarch. Newer taxes estimated the income that the property might yield to the owner and in this manner became matters of calculation, proof, and elaboration. The new regimes achieved proportionality, which at the time was a huge step forward from the flat and arbitrary imposts of the past; the regressiveness of the new taxes was at first less important than their capacity to distinguish between one or another property or income. New state levies were functions of the economy, and the state budget was no longer a free-standing, autonomous variable that was imposed on the economy. It depended on familiarity with the properties that were associated with wealth. In Russia the reform of the urban taxes in the 1860s had begun to move taxes from persons to items of wealth, usually real estate, and at least intended to tax the income they might yield to the owner; in the 1880s commercial taxes began to measure the income derived from an enterprise and in this manner moved towards proportionality. The movement in modern statecraft was dual, however, and the new regimes of taxation paradoxical. The more the state distanced itself from the person, the more information it gathered about economic activity and the more it concerned itself with the person of the owner.7 A new concern with social fairness – the capacity of a person to bear not just the same proportion of tax to income but a higher rate – introduced a more complicated correlation between taxes and the paying power of the person: progression. Progressive taxation was now also feasible because states had been registering economic activity for decades, and the information on an isolated item of income provided the path to the person who received it, to be added to the other incomes received by the same person. Tax would fall on the aggregate income of the person at progressive rates, not on isolated properties at flat rates. By the 1890s, economic transactions, scrupulously recorded in depersonalized procedures as separate incomes, were being aggregated in specific persons who were able to pay more or less tax at higher or lower marginal rates.8 Few governments began with a personal income tax, but all states arrived at it; the notable exception was Italy, whose income tax of 1864 was introduced so early because hardly anyone noticed or paid it.9 The United States abandoned an income tax after the Civil War and would abandon another in 1895 after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. Jurists questioned the right of the federal government to lay a direct, personal, and assessed tax on its citizens, rather than the apportioned taxes allowed in the Constitution. Legislators and journalists denounced it as “communistic, socialistic.” Plus ça change. The American case, with its special attention to privacy and individual autonomy in the face of an expanding federal government, was of notable interest to Russians

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who found the discussion baffling and quaint; they nevertheless recognized it as part and parcel of a larger conversation about national coherence and individual refusal.10 Some governments effected the change despite themselves. British Liberals in the 1890s lamented that in pursuit of social fairness they were creating something they had not intended, a system based on direct assessments of the payers, discriminating rates, and progressive levies. Only under Lloyd George would the New Liberals embrace the change as part of a comprehensive approach to social reform.11 In Russia the change was deliberate; here experts could see that impersonal taxes elsewhere had paved the way for a new kind of personal taxation, so that tax reform since the 1880s had been widely understood as steps in the direction of full-blown personal and progressive taxation.12 The business taxes of the 1880s evolved, by the 1900s, into systems of fullblown declaration and income assessment, though initially only on businesses and through the symbolic apartment tax; persons were on the state agenda from around 1905. The change from property to income to personal assessment was simple in technical terms. It literally meant reorganizing card catalogues by name rather than by property or transaction type and consolidating disparate incomes into a single person. But it was monumental in that it privileged the person and made her or him the subject of government. The payer was no longer just the payer or, for that matter, an individual with the trappings of impenetrability and autonomy, the indivisible entity of the Latin and the Greek atom, which linger in our understandings of personhood. The payer was the subject (sub”ekt), the economic personality (ekonomicheskaia lichnost’), and the possessing personality (imushchestvennaia lichnost’). Incomes, properties, expenditures, debts, and subsistence needs comprised this personality, which was necessarily scrutable and partitive.13 The negative person defined in the practices of the early nineteenth century was being joined by a positive one, visible to the state and also created in formal administrative categories and practices. Taxes were becoming, once again, personal. The Prussian personal income tax of 1891 was the great innovation in this regard, dismissed in some quarters because it seemed so uniquely Prussian in its demand for personal information and accountability. Its provisions are today commonplace, but to a European or North American at the turn of the century the measure could seem radical and perverse. The mandatory reporting of salaries and capital payments by employers and brokers suggested automated denunciation. Itemized deductions were one person’s write-off for expenses but a report to the tax office on someone else’s income, a system of paid informing. Prussian Junkers were outraged as their servants were interviewed about their masters’ lifestyles, which seemed

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to encourage a culture of espionage, subvert the social hierarchy, and bring the state into the household.14 Even worse, the requirement of signed tax ­declarations by every person seemed a form of self-incrimination and self-­ victimization, asking the subject to perform the state’s predatory duties. British critics viewed the system with “repugnance” as it devalued the religious ritual of swearing an oath. French publicists considered it an affront to the individual, and Minister of Finances (later President) Raymond Poincaré admitted that one public reading of the truly comprehensive Prussian law would lead to its defeat in the French chamber. When the Russian State Duma considered the bill in 1915, the controversy was not over its rates on payers but its “inquisitional character.”15 Despite this – or because of the system’s effectiveness in tracing the movements of capital and generating new revenue – the personal income tax of Prussia was immediately taken seriously in chancelleries from St Petersburg to Washington, where seemingly incompatible regimes assimilated the same practices of investigation and divulgence and proposed them to their respective legislatures.16 The debate was internationalized. Russia’s proposal for a personal income tax in 1892 was occasioned by the great Volga famine, but its substance was derived from the Prussian legislative discussion of the preceding year, as were the U.S. proposal of 1894 and the French of 1895.17 French publicists wrote odes to the Prussian income tax, warned of falling behind Germany in the fiscal race, and recommended it as the solidifier of the nation; others warned of a creeping Prussian militarism and effected the fall of at least one cabinet.18 After 1905, Minister of Finances Vladimir N. Kokovtsov was speaking the language of Lloyd George, quite literally since the former received regular reports on tax debates in Britain (and France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Australia, Canada, and the United States) and selected from them practices and arguments that could work in Russia. His opponents were well rehearsed in the counter-­arguments of parliamentarians, journalists, and publicists on both sides of the Atlantic.19 The furious debate that followed across Europe and over the Atlantic accounts for the long delays in passage: some nineteen years in France (1895– 1914, and even then it was watered down and postponed), nineteen in the United States (1894–1913, not counting the Civil War measure), and nine in Russia (1907–1916, or twenty-four years if one counts the half-hearted proposal of 1892). It was over sixty years before Britain’s parliament decided (1906) to make the income tax of 1842 personal and progressive for all payers. Nevertheless, passed it was in all these countries, and in the process the tired claim that the passage of an income tax in one country would lead to capital flight to another lost its urgency. “Where are they going to take it to?” mused an

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Australian expert testifying to the British parliament in 1906, as national treasuries geared up for one or another version of the tax.20 “To Turkey,” quipped a Russian legislator in 1915 in answer to the same question posed in the State Duma, the only European county without any income taxation, and in this regard (in his view) less than European.21 With social reform and military budgets at the centre of all national agendas, one could scarcely refuse to pay tax on offensively large and now visible incomes. In Russia in 1915, for example, a nobleman showing 10,000 rubles in income would have been objecting to 282 rubles in tax, an objection that could not survive the public debate.22 “Such a person could scarcely be called a citizen” was the pre-emptive rebuke of the Duma’s sponsor in 1915.23 Instead critics objected to the fuller disclosure and state inquiry that progressive rates presumed, and the debate evolved around the correct relationship between government and governed, the nature of political power, and the nature of citizenship. It made for a classic contest between individual privacies (which protected the person from the state’s claims but made progressive reform difficult) and disclosure and transparency (which allowed for a more dynamic budget and an activist social policy but stripped the person of immunities). Basically, privacy, construed as the refusal to disclose financial information, would mean that no declaration could be verified, making for a regime of wholesale evasion.24 Progressive taxation implied visibility and calculability and rolled back the protection that, materially speaking, only mattered to the privileged few who benefited from their championship of universal civil rights. So argued Russia’s Social Democrats, among them Lenin in 1913, but so too argued Russia’s liberal, conservative, statist, and expert writers as they dismissed the civil rights argument as subterfuge.25 The arguments should be taken seriously because they revealed distinct approaches to the nature of the citizen: the one autonomous, defined largely by his or her immunities, deliberately obscure, and rightfully or customarily private; the other transparent and malleable, implicated in the socio-political order, and mobilized into the state. Landed aristocrats, in Britain in 1910 and Russia in 1915, made their last stand on this issue in particular, proposing that landed wealth be excluded altogether lest lowly inspectors trample through their estates. In a related vein they made a case for historical exemption, translated into modern terms as an argument that agriculture in general was too difficult to measure by the standards of a commercial economy.26 The case for aristocratic exceptionalism died with the old regimes themselves, overwhelmed by powerful arguments for universalism. The case for privacy was more lasting and revealed contrasting and enduring understandings of the citizen.

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The character of the state was at issue as well, though not in the obvious or traditional ways. One might too easily conclude that the income tax was pursued by a state that was more powerful and more autonomous, as Theda Skocpol argues so coherently, an image that James Scott updates with his picture of the “strong state,” “muscle-bound” as it imposes itself on a weakened society. For them this was the same state in more pronounced form, and for both writers Russia is a case in point. There is historical evidence to support them, to be sure. At the time the standard and superficial argument against the income tax was that it was a reversion to the bad practices of the old regimes. The state returned to the person after an absence of several decades, and it carried with it a renewed intrusion on the person, though with fewer limits and much greater knowledge and surveillance.27 The Russian embassy in Paris, asked to report on a French income tax proposal of 1909, opined that a “fiscal Terror” was dragging the country back to the arbitrariness of Louis XV and the murderous populism of Robespierre.28 Le Figaro, quoted by The Russian Economist, warned that the income tax would be perceived as no better than the taille.29 Russian experts quoted L’Économiste français at length and summarized: “The consciousness of the payer will return to its old condition; he will consider himself to be in a position of legitimate self-defence; he will arm himself against the fisc.” The income tax was not a reversion to the personal taxes of eighteenth century, however, because this was not the same state or the same person. In the first instance the tax did not capriciously ignore the person or exempt whole categories of subjects but made every person the subject of intense scrutiny and concern. By the same token the tax did not recognize the separateness of the state and the person but instead filled the state with the persons it governed. The two were mutually constitutive, and the state was a universal membership organization – not just a territory and not just a bureaucracy.30 Philosophical individualism could still mean separateness and autonomy from the state, but administrative individualization came to mean realization within it.31 The nature of political power was also in motion. An older debate addressed the nature of the power that passed between the person and the state, with an image of the citizen cowering under the blows of a separate and autonomous state or valiantly resisting it; politics was a matter of balancing two separate spheres. Power was a tangible instrument or tool in a traditional relationship between a subject (the state) and an object (the taxpayer). The personal income tax changed this relationship because the payer was now also a subject, in the sense of a self; because the state reshaped itself in accordance with the capacities of its citizens; and because power itself was becoming a shared terrain in which state and person were hard to distinguish.

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The Russian Income Tax and the Political Crisis of 1905 Russia had been part of the European debate from the outset. Its first experiment in income taxation was Speransky’s levy of 1810,32 based on the model of Britain’s levy of 1799, but it was quickly abandoned because it was unenforceable. The Tax Commission of the 1860s and 1870s discussed the income tax largely as an academic exercise with little intention of actually implementing it.33 The Ministry of Finances tested the idea before other ministries and the State Council in 1878–9 and 1891–2. Both proposals for personal income taxation were occasioned by fiscal crisis related to the Russo-Turkish War and the Volga famine, respectively, and both were rejected in the course of government-wide deliberations. The paucity of large fortunes was one issue. The British income tax depended on many large incomes, and critics in France had argued that a country of small proprietors had too poor a tax base; Russians adopted the argument from France wholesale. In Russia the new capitalist entrepreneurs were notorious but few in number, while the managerial, salaried, and professional strata were poorly remunerated and often worked with untraceable cash. Locating such incomes would be intrusive. An income tax would instil defensiveness and evasion in those who were unaccustomed to the ethos of civic responsibility, while the state would respond with added intrusion and coercion.34 The Russian Cabinet35 committed itself to the personal income tax in 1905 when Prime Minister Ivan Goremykin declared it “a state necessity of the highest order,” part of a larger effort to reduce the budget’s dependence on regressive taxes and introduce personal assessment at the base of the fiscal system. The bill was approved by the emperor in February 1907 and sent to the new State Duma for deliberation. The timing makes sense on multiple levels. In the international context Russia was joining a movement that already included Prussia as a practitioner and the United States, the German Empire, France, and Britain as likely emulators. The treasury would benefit from the influx of additional revenue from the commercial sector, to pay for a nascent but already costly welfare state and a shockingly expensive military of which the Dreadnought was the most impressive example.36 That commerce and industry paid scandalously low taxes was one issue, that of social fairness, which implied that the very wealthy should pay more tax at a progressively higher rate; the other issue was universal civic enlistment, which required all citizens to pay some tax. Universal military service would have its fiscal counterpart, and the “conscription of income” would become the catch phrase of European treasuries and publicists in the years leading up to 1914 and all the more so after the outbreak of the Great War.37 By then income taxation was not an alien concept in urban and commercial Russia. The practice of the inheritance tax since the 1880s and the apartment

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tax since 1894 had acquainted a small but significant segment of the urban population with the techniques of aggregate assessment, if only to claim symbolic sums. The business taxes of 1885, as they evolved into the new century, entrenched practices of divulgence and transparency and generated impressive revenue without debilitating the commercial-industrial sector in any demonstrable way. The issue to entrepreneurs was the emotional affront that the business taxes inflicted on payers who found them so difficult to avoid as they nibbled away at precedents of secrecy and confidentiality and subverted the traditional order of distance between ruler and ruled. Once the victim of neglect and the beneficiary of disregard, the payer was now the object of intense state concern. In Russia, as elsewhere, premodern protests over fiscal oppression (overtaxation) yielded to eminently modern anxieties: the capacity of the state to reach, penetrate, and reshape the person in a web of information, converting the private individual into a public subject. Either way, the fiscal expert Ivan Kh. Ozerov told the Cabinet commission in 1906, this was progress in that it departed from the unidirectional exercise of power by the state, and he expressed the movement in familiar geographic metaphors: “Here in Russia a Europeanization is taking place … and forms of collection are losing their Asiatic character.”38 Ozerov was a Moscow University economist who held that tax systems reflected and accelerated historical progress. In Russia, as elsewhere, taxes were moving away from a purely fiscal concern with revenue; they became instruments of economic and political action, and manifestations of a complex and integrated economy.39 But the year 1905 was not just any year in Russia, and Russia was not just another state. Measures that in their detail were replicated in a variety of countries and spoke to a shared Atlantic and ultimately global experience carried different significance when they were considered in their constitutional contexts. For Russia this was the last year of a losing war against Japan – “Asia” defeated “Europe,” and with a vengeance – and the first year of a revolution that would last into 1907. The tax proposal was itself a part of that revolution; it reflected a perception of a new civic maturity, and it would redirect civic and political energy into the state. A movement that began as a largely civil rights campaign orchestrated at the turn of the century by radical liberals in exile did manage to bring together for one brief moment some liberal gentry who claimed they were speaking for “the land” through the roughly eponymous zemstvos; some professionals who had expertise and little voice in government at all, even though the government (central and local) usually employed them; some industrialists who felt they produced much but received little systemic prominence in a regime that was still in its fundamentals an old and agrarian one; and more or less professional

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subversives, from agrarian Socialist Revolutionaries to Social Democrats, who could agree for the moment that the revolution would be a political one, a bourgeois foundation on which to pursue one or another vision of social change.40 How much any of them also represented the workers who took to the streets after January 1905 was and is open to debate, but certainly for some months the image of a united people was difficult to resist for a shaken autocrat who made concession upon concession. In October an Imperial Manifesto granted the political institutions, however conditional and vague, for the practice of legal politics for another decade.41 The fact that many leaders of the centrist and liberal parties accepted the offer was related to the moderation of their agendas but also to the turn of the movement among workers to an immediate social revolution. Trotsky’s Petersburg Soviet spoke for workers and now also claimed power, and the December Uprising in Moscow solidified the impression that the worker’s movement was no longer conterminous with the liberal movement that had flowered in that remarkable year.42 With the harvest in, peasants took stock of the collapse of government authority and moved against the nobiliary estates that held land and rental records in order to seize the one and destroy the other.43 Generally, the workers’ and peasants’ movements exposed the vacuity of political power, a perception that worried oppositionists as well as officialdom. How could an autocracy and a government devoid of authority not only reform the polity but immediately stop a descent into the apparent lawlessness and anarchy of late 1905? The post-1905 period was in some measure an effort on the part of the state and the educated public to give new content to political power and reinvent the authority of the state, one person at a time. The Stolypin reforms that aimed to make integrated and invested individuals out of peasant collectives were the most famous aspect of that drive;44 fiscal reforms were another. The income tax bill was drafted and presented to the Duma in the midst of the revolution, and it was one of its products. The ensuing debate articulated opposite conclusions about the significance of the revolution and the nature of citizenship in Russia, argued by some of the same people with equal conviction. The first view held that the revolution had shown that Russians were prepared for modern citizenship and that the new income tax would be the consequence and manifestation of that maturity, something of a reward or come-uppance for the bold demands of 1905. The other held that Russians had shown they were unprepared for civic participation, with reckless would-be leaders unleashing a popular movement they could not control.45 In this connection the income tax was a form of forced civic education, discipline, and enlistment. The income tax might reflect a mature citizenry or it might usher the population into a new

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citizenship whether or not it was prepared, with the state’s coercive organs standing in for the person’s civic consciousness. Either way, the income tax was necessary, as Ozerov told a Cabinet commission while the revolution raged outside its windows: it was “insurance for a future tranquility” (strakhovanie budushchego spokoistva).46 The ambiguity was to be found in the government and also in the new Duma and a relatively free press, and the rhetoric of the two realms was often indistinguishable. Both cited the transcendent needs of the Russian state, notwithstanding the ongoing antagonisms between government and public. Among legislators and in much of the liberal and moderate socialist press the distinction between the government in power (pravitel’stvo) and the Russian state (gosudarstvo) was meaningful; one might oppose the former while valorizing the latter. A continental étatisme was perhaps more pronounced in Russia where gosudarstvennost’ implied a foundation of state-centred continuity, stability, and unity that was otherwise elusive.47 Critics of the government had allowed for some future accommodation on the shared terrain of statism, more so as they stared at the “pitiless bunt” that ended the year 1905. It had always been unclear whether oppositionists had been demanding a less intrusive and arbitrary state that should respect the separateness of society, captured in the liberal and populist slogan “Leave us in peace!” (Ostav’te nas v pokoe!) that was still to be heard after 1905; or a state that was more systematically active in the economy, more caring for its population, and that enlisted the population to the state itself, a demand that seemed more emblematic of the new times.48 The liberal physicians who boldly stood up to power before 1905 in Nancy Frieden’s narrative had successors after 1905 who demanded a part in power in John Hutchinson’s narrative, culminating in 1918 in the creation of the Commissariat of Public Health that made physical well-being a state undertaking.49 The erstwhile liberal revolutionaries – many now parliamentarians – were willing to agree that they were more implicated in the future of the state and dependent on it for their existence than previously, and their criticism of a newly oppressive government could amount to pleas to allow society into the state and in the process to reform it before it was too late; fiscal reformers in the government were proposing just that. Social Democrats found common ground and demanded more; the income tax was their only concrete fiscal proposal all the way to 1917, a way to redistribute income if not yet wealth. The government may not have been elected, the role of the legislature uncertain and the franchise narrowed after Stolypin’s coup of 3 June 1907, and the prerogatives of the emperor or autocrat contested and unsettled, but the state would nevertheless be participatory and inclusive and, in these senses, reformed and legitimate.50

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It was in this context of crisis that an international debate became Russian; the balance between state claim and individual refusal was tipped towards a vision of the state as the ultimate and perhaps exclusive locus of integration. The debates assumed the historic weakness of civil society, the functions of which would be performed by and within the state itself. In the process the debates advanced a thoroughgoing critique of individual autonomy before the latter was legally established or culturally entrenched, a point that Engelstein makes so well.51 In Russia, as elsewhere, the person had become the sine qua non of reformist government, but there were different ways to understand the person. If all this exceeded some of the most state-centred visions to be found to Russia’s west, Ozerov told a Cabinet commission in 1906, then so be it. “The question is asked: Do we really need to permanently and in all regards blindly follow other states? It seems to me that if we are to implement a new reform, it is best to learn the latest models and then go even further.”52 Russia’s tax would be “more perfected,” Nikolai Kutler told the same gathering, perhaps capitalizing on Russia’s historical evolution or perhaps accelerating it. Russia would avoid the pesky institutions of individual immunity (selfish exemption) and social autonomy (anarchy) that had hindered the full development of citizenship in other countries.53 This citizenship would circumvent individual rights and pursue, simply, unlimited inclusion in the state. The Inexorable Logic of Universalism In Russia the rise of electoral and legislative politics did not necessarily accelerate or slow the march of the income tax bill, but it did foster an imperial conversation on universal liability. With individuals travelling easily between the government, the legislatures, journalism, and the academy, there was considerable overlap between the spheres and considerable continuity as the bill left the Cabinet in 1907 and entered the State Duma, the State Council, and the reading public at large. It truly was an imperial debate. The government formed three commissions to draft a bill on the personal income tax in the years 1905–6, right in the midst of the Revolution. One commission was appointed by the Cabinet and headed by Nikolai Kutler in May 1905; it revisited the legal history of income taxation in Russia and established its feasibility and desirability.54 The second followed in March–April 1906 under the chairmanship of Deputy Finance Minister Ivan Shipov and began to address the particulars.55 A third was formed in May 1906 under the Ministry of Finances to discuss commercial secrecy and, more broadly, the relative rights of the state and the person to demand and refuse disclosure; an income tax would depend on individual and institutional reporting of payments and

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incomes.56 Ultimately the Cabinet would send the measure to the emperor and then the State Duma that met in April 1906 as a lower house of a bicameral legislature. The Cabinet was appointed by the emperor and had many ways to avoid the Duma when it came to the budget, of which about half was immune to legislative scrutiny, but new, increased, or reformed taxes were one area in which the Duma’s approval was clearly required.57 With this in mind the Cabinet decided to justify the income tax in public and to the Duma on the grounds of extreme financial need, citing a budget gap of 93 million rubles (soon restated as 35 million rubles) caused by the war with Japan and revolution. Crisis would be used to push through a reform that had long been on some agendas.58 In fact the fiscal crisis would be handled through borrowing and increased indirect taxes.59 In its closed sessions the Cabinet estimated that the short-term revenue of a new income tax would be perhaps 25 million rubles, not enough to cover the deficit, and anyway the law would not come into effect quickly enough to offset the shortfall. Much of the new revenue would be consumed by the added costs of individual assessment and collection.60 Over time the rates would be increased, and the pool of payers expanded, but in the meantime the revenue of the tax would be “purely symbolic.”61 The argument for a fiscal emergency was tactical, aimed to galvanize the public and avoid the political controversy that had surrounded the tax in other countries. The Cabinet estimated that legislative proposals for the income tax had been rejected eight times before being passed in Britain in 1842, and it had yet to become progressive (it would in 1906); bills were still regularly rejected in France and the United States on grounds that were political and constitutional, notwithstanding the irrefutable fairness of the measure.62 After the preamble about state necessity and fiscal rectitude, the Cabinet discussions turned to the “deep moral meaning” of personal income taxation.63 It carried a “broad state significance and not just a narrow fiscal one.”64 The argument that prevailed in the Cabinet in 1905 and 1906 was the political need to mobilize the population and “enlist” (privlekat’) it to the state’s agenda. The crisis that the officials were addressing was not a budget gap but a political gap between the Russian state and its population, as Kutler told the Cabinet commission of 1905; they could see it on display outside their office windows as demonstrations were followed by armed combat. However, the strikes and demonstrations were also proof of something hopeful, he explained delicately to a room of chinovniki. “The cultural level of our population is rising in stages, and during the years that preceded the terrible shock that has overtaken our fatherland … one could even observe an improvement in its socio-economic condition.” It was a Tocquevillian trope: revolutions happen in conditions of rising expectations, not abject poverty. But this revolution was degenerating

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into a “smuta,” a general collapse of the empire into antagonistic rulers, classes, estates, ethnicities, and religions. An “advanced” form of taxation would “enlist” that energy to a restructured state. Interests would be expressed through the state rather than against it, and “citizenship” would be nurtured and instilled as the new common bond.65 The tax would recast the population of collectives into individuals and reintegrate them as persons: today’s revolutionary marching with the working class would be tomorrow’s citizen working with the state, more worried about filling out a tax form correctly and advantageously; and today’s merchant expressing a traditional resistance to taxes would be tomorrow’s conscientious payer who had no choice but to pay and may even decide that this was virtuous. In both cases the person was removed from the collective and inserted in the state. Minister of Finances Kokovtsov told his colleagues in 1906 that this “personal element” would break down the collectives that had torn the polity asunder, and he resisted more cautious alternatives that would not give the individual pride of place. A Cabinet colleague reasonably asked why the budget gap could not be closed with a slight increase in one or another excise tax, as was in fact done in subsequent months. This increase could be collected by the state at the point of production, leaving the payer alone. It, too, defied ascribed and collectivist distinctions and dealt in the neutral terms of producers and consumers. Kokovtsov retorted that indirect taxes were regressive and did not account for one’s capacity to pay, and they were impersonal in a negative way: they showed no direct concern for the payer and did not force the payer to consider his or her relationship with the state. The personal income tax by contrast would create a deliberative moment that allowed the payer to pause and consider “consciously” (soznatel’no) what he or she owed the state and why.66 Another colleague pointed to the British model of withholdings at source from items of income. That system generated great revenue, but it also avoided comprehensive personal assessment. It may have been less fair because it was flat, but it was less objectionable politically and more acceptable culturally because it was indirect of the person as it taxed visible transactions. Kutler responded that there was a difference between a system that “captures” (zakhvatyvaet) incomes and one that “captures” the person. The Russian system would do both; it identified items of income that “slip out from under current levies,” and it “enlisted [persons] to participate in taxes.” It accounted for the payer’s “personal self-reliance” (lichnaia samostoiatel’nost’) in the sense that it assessed the person comprehensively.67 Kokovtsov added that the British system of assessment was deliberately “external” to the person; like the French system, it avoided any peering into “internal incomes.” In Russia the direct relationship was precisely what the government sought, “accounting for the personal, subjective

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element, the personality of the payer.” The state would gain a better picture of a person’s capacities, and the payer would become a part of a state undertaking. As another minister explained, the tax “is in no way meant as a means to top-up the treasury,” because the revenue was too small. Rather, “it is essential to implicate society itself in this reform, elicit its sympathy, secure for the fisc the co-operation of public forces in the difficult task of calculating incomes and determining rates.”68 The single-minded pursuit of the person also ran against the corpus of law that treated the family as the smallest unit of rule, and the patriarch as the point of contact with the world outside the household; individual assessment would circumvent the patriarch to reveal women and offspring.69 In 1905 the Ministry of Finances proposed that any adult with an income, male or female, should file a declaration. For women this would be an “honourable” recognition; they might not vote, but they would support the state. Exceptions were made for regions with strong traditions of patriarchy and specific legal codes, such as Poland, the Baltic, and the Chernigov and Poltava provinces. Conservatives in the Fourth Duma seized on the inconsistency to make the case for patriarchy everywhere: the law was meant to be uniform across the empire, so in every case a woman should file under her husband’s or father’s name. Women, after all, were less prepared for civic life and would be made vulnerable to exacting state practices. Anyway it was cheaper to administer: Prussia used family declarations, so returns were filed by only 10–11 per cent of the population; Saxony, which followed strict individualism, required returns of 40 per cent of the population. Kutler disagreed: it was true that the costs of collection would be higher and that the state would tax more incomes at a lower progressive rate (large family incomes would be broken down into small individual ones and taxed at the lower marginal rate), but “to me it’s all the same” if the point was “the equality of persons.” The State Council sided with Kutler, reversed the recommendation of the Duma, and returned to strict individual filings.70 Similar issues arose over reproduction. In 1892 the Ministry of Finances had proposed deductions for payers with children or higher taxes for bachelors and spinsters, all ways to reward childbirth and rearing. Ozerov quipped in 1900 that Russia had no need to stimulate a rise in the birth-rate “since in Russia God has blessed us and the rate of childbirth refuses to decline at all.” Kutler mused that the state may not have the right to influence reproduction: “what people do with their income should not concern the state.” Later versions of the bill would ask about family condition, and the Third Duma proposed to tax childless adults extra; the Fourth Duma reversed the provision because the tax was crafted to highlight the person at the expense of its collective belongings, family included.71

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Personal and individualized though the income tax was, it was at the same time universalistic. Its ultimate objective was to integrate the newly recognized person into the state. Like the existing objective taxes, it approached the person through monetary income rather than legal status; unlike existing taxes, it made the person, not the property or income, the subject of assessment, the locus where all incomes and all expenses met and formed the personality. It could do this to any person; where the treasury found a barter economy or income in kind, it would be the inspector’s task to translate it into money. Even peasants might be assessed one day, once their output had been located, quantified, and recalculated as cash.72 True, as some ministers demurred, the tax would introduce a new distinction between those who were below or above the level of the basic exemption and divide them into taxed and non-taxed populations. In this sense it would resemble the poll tax, which had evolved into a primary marker of legal and social status, whereby exemption was a mark of privilege. Reformed property taxes since the 1860s had done the same but in the reverse, making taxation the mark of privilege and higher status: the vote in municipal and zemstvo elections was a reward for paying higher taxes on real estate, determined by the property census; it quickly produced the idea of “census society” that was taxed and privileged.73 The income tax was performing that symbolic, status-related function in France even before it was adopted; the parliamentary debate of the 1890s produced “the 10,000” highest-income families as a new popular marker of class, and critics feared it would subvert the strict individual equality of the republic.74 Prussian practice had produced the new divide of 900 marks. American opponents of the 1894 measure held that its exemptions were by definition discriminatory and violated the legal equality of all citizens; any progressive tax would be unconstitutional.75 There is a difference between caste and class, however. It was important that any person could move in or out of the taxable category as incomes rose and fell, and if Americans soon described themselves as “tax brackets,” their status could change from one year to the next. The fluidity spoke to the alterability and mobility of the person. In this sense the tax was not normative but exploratory and fluid, not quite universal but certainly universalistic; some may not be taxed, but all were taxable. The very term for the basic exemption, prozhitochnyi minimum (from the German Existenzminimum, the minimum needed to subsist), reflected the basic needs of any human being regardless of his or her legal status. Shared biology trumped ascription. The tax might even beckon towards universality; any person could be liable to assessment and could be required to file a tax declaration, if only to determine that she owed no tax. In this sense it was a universal civic ritual. It may

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one day be extended to peasants, while at the other end of the wealth and status spectrum the members of the imperial family (save the emperor and his heir) would be forced to file declarations as well.76 The exemption might also be lowered so as to claim small sums from more people; as it was, fiscal experts estimated that with an exemption of 1,000 rubles, three-quarters of the revenue from the income tax would come from six large cities.77 Hence the State Controller proposed to the Cabinet in 1906 to set the exemption at a low 600 rubles; it would increase the pool of payers threefold and “capture” clerks, some skilled workers, and well-off peasants.78 By taxing at even symbolic rates, the law would avoid the sense that the tax was a penalty on the wealthy and would reinforce its civic meaning; American legislators had proposed this since the 1890s.79 Ivan Filosofov of the Ministry of Trade and Industry agreed that a lower rate would make the tax inclusive rather than exclusive; “progressive forces” and “cultured and educated elements” like professionals must be “made committed and mobilized.”80 Counter-proposals of 1,500 rubles – meant to avoid the lowly employee, clerk, and wage-earner and spare them the “advanced” practices of the well-off and cultured – were rejected as too exclusive. The tax can only be effective “if it captures a broad circle of payers, and in general this kind of assessment becomes more meaningful, the more deeply it sinks itself [opuskaetsia] into the lower strata of the population.” As the Cabinet expressed it in 1906, “carrying a tax obligation in favour of the state should be recognized as an honourable, not a humiliating, duty.” It carried a political meaning even when the burden was nominal and the revenue negligible.81 The compromise, agreed in 1906 and the fixed point for the next ten years, was 1,000 rubles. Even state employees would pay the tax, and very many of them would surpass the exemption level – including for example all tax inspectors. To some officials the provision created an illogical situation in which the state paid for its bureaucracy by taxing its bureaucrats, and the state that claimed the tax would tax itself.82 Easier and cheaper to pay the state employees less and keep the balance in the treasury; or better to not tax them in any way, as a mark of their distinctive status as custodians of a society to which they did not themselves belong.83 The counter-argument of the Ministry of Finances was twofold and not at all financial in its logic. The first was that state servitors in particular should be liable because of their special role in the polity; exalted status was no longer a cause for exemption but an occasion for liability. The second argument was that personal income taxation was a practice and a ritual that eroded distinctions and created new identities; by taxing chinovniki alongside professionals and entrepreneurs, the law would blur distinctions between state and society. Priests offered the opportunity to make a similar point because the state

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paid their salaries and they performed some state functions, but with an added dimension: exceptionally spiritual in their calling or exceptionally obscure and insular, in the opinion of their critics, they would be demystified and normalized by casting them as one more recipient of income, “like any other man.”84 Noble landowners requested their own privileges when they were invited to represent their interests to the Cabinet commissions of 1905–6. The gentry were almost synonymous with the Russian state, given their historic role as servitors, which gave rise to demands for outright exemption. The tax would add a new personal “tyranny” that destroyed the vestiges of their corporate distinctiveness because it expressed the nobleman in money alongside any other Russian subject. Ministerial officials responded that this was the point of the tax. There was also an immediate economic argument for exemption. The gentry’s gradual abandonment of the countryside and the selling-off of gentry lands that began soon after Emancipation reflected an inability to cope with paid labour and market conditions; this became a flight in 1905 as estate owners faced an immediate and direct threat to their lives and properties.85 The ministry pointed out that estate belonging could not determine wealth, and a noble landowner showing an income of 1,000 rubles was not poor. The larger argument was directly universalistic: the entire country had suffered through the revolution as “the state,” and an economic loss to the gentry was only one of many losses suffered by the Russian state. The obverse also held true: if the state was gaining by taxing one group of the population, then no one group could be losing by paying tax to the state to which it belonged; a gain for the state was a gain for all its members, the taxpaying nobleman included.86 Banking and industrial representatives were also invited to the Cabinet commissions, where they expressed concern that the income tax, added to the existing taxes on businesses, would greatly overtax non-agricultural enterprises. Unusually visible and monetized in their transactions, they would be persecuted as a class. They retreated before a barrage of criticism from ministers and expert consultants to the effect that “the representatives of mobile capital are defending their personal interests.” Ozerov pointed out that any class will ask for its own exclusions and exemptions, but the point of the tax was to recast them as citizens. Lacking support from the traditionally sympathetic ministries of Finances and Trade and Industry, S.S. Khrulev, chairman of the board of the St Petersburg International Bank, rose to declare that “we, the representatives of the banks, are not defending any class interests. We are prepared to go along with the introduction of the income tax and will be, of course, among its most active payers.” After all, the measure represented “an all-state importance.”87 All in all, the tax was presented as an honour rather than a burden. Exemption from the honour of taxation meant, in effect, civic exclusion, as the Duma

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reported to the State Council in August 1916: “To protest against this measure would be to cast doubt on the voting rights of populations of different kinds, and it would be to doubt the expedience of allowing the more cultured strata to fulfill these most important public duties.”88 High income suggested “high citizenship” (vysokaia grazhdanstvennost’), and the higher the tax the greater the civic status.89 The tension between ascribed status and universalism did persist, reflecting an estate mentality that never quite went away.90 Even when insisting on a monetary standard for liability, the Cabinet tacitly reverted to legal status as the measure of income. The Ministry of Agriculture, for example, proposed that peasants were poor by their very status, and by status were culturally unprepared for sworn declarations, deductions, and appeals. (That this was the same institution that was managing an effort to differentiate between “strong” and “drunk” peasants might give us pause.) The minister was finally persuaded by the reasonable argument that no peasant was likely to show more than 1,000 rubles in income, and if he or she did, he or she was unlikely to be ignorant of the world in which such a tidy sum could be earned. Proposals that “Yakuts on the Asiatic steppes” be exempted or that different rules of assessment be applied to Turkestan were debated and ultimately rejected because it was well understood that they, and virtually all rural payers east and west of the Urals, would fall below the exemption.91 Still, in the Cabinet discussions low income translated into a tacit and sometimes explicit blanket exemption for peasants, workers, or “people of the working classes.” Kokovtsov explained in 1906 that the state lacked the systems of data collection that would have been necessary to tax anyone but the well-off; Russia’s “statistical science” was still too poor to estimate “popular income.”92 The tendency made income a shorthand for legal estate, at best occupational group; in that spirit the State Controller proposed that the tax be applied to select occupations and estates, all defined a priori; it would avoid a “frontal attack on incomes.”93 Ambiguity persisted at the other end of the status spectrum as well. The Cabinet always assumed that the emperor (and his spouse and heir) would be exempted. This particular exemption flew in the face of the arguments that were being made in every other connection, to the effect that high income would make the person liable and that high culture was suited to complex assessment; by that measure, state employees, priests, the members of the Duma and the State Council, and all other members of the imperial family were being made liable.94 The issue here was the nature of sovereign power, which the government insisted was still embodied in the autocrat. In the Fundamental Laws of 1906 that gave detail to the October Manifesto, the government declared in article 5 that “the person of the Sovereign Emperor is sacred and inviolable”;

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this was incompatible with any claim on his property and income (taxes) and any intrusion on his person (assessment). Article 20 was explicit on the question of taxes; it cited the unity and indivisibility of sovereign power, manifest in the unity of the autocrat’s political power with the autocrat’s property and, historically, his territorial realm. Here the autocrat was exempted because to tax him would be to make him, his property, and his power separable, and sovereignty divisible. For all the economic universalism of the contemporary rhetoric, and for all the new talk of civic maturity, the Cabinet could only state that the autocrat was politically unique. Otherwise the Cabinet debates did reveal a new logic of universalism that was to be repeated in broad terms as the Duma took up the measure in 1907 and as the issues spilled into the expert journals, popular newspapers, and voluntary associations. Many of the people who advised the Cabinet, like Ozerov and Genzel’, also advised the Duma, taught at the universities, and contributed to the economic press. Chairmen of the Duma Finance Commission like German Lerkhe were former government servitors, and indeed much of the government’s opposition in the Duma comprised former colleagues. Nikolai Kutler was fired from the government by Tsar Nicholas for proposing the redistribution of gentry land; he joined the liberal Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party and was elected to the Second and Third Dumas; as the chairman of the Finance Commission he advocated for the bill he had co-written.95 His brother Pavel, meanwhile, helped prepare implementation as treasury director for Moscow province and later as the state treasurer. All these people came together regularly in the Society of Financial Reforms, a club of legislators, former government officials, academics, and journalists who used the budget and taxation as a platform for wider liberal reform. When the bill reached the State Council in 1915, it was shepherded by the academic economists and retired finance officials who had helped draft it, by now including Kokovtsov. The multitude of meetings and debates in the Duma opened with the statement that the tax would generate political cohesion and foster “a strong link between the person and the territory of the Empire.” Only Polish deputies regularly objected as a statement of independence from Russia,96 but even the Polish nationalist Władysław Grabski found its logic difficult to resist: the income tax brought modern states into being as coherent and integrated entities, over-­ riding particularisms and localisms, as it would soon do for France and Russia and one day might do for an independent Poland (where Grabski would serve as the first finance minister).97 Amendments in the Duma that would have varied the income tax by region and accounted for the cost of living in the capitals were rejected in favour of a single system that used the same measurements of income in Vladivostok and St Petersburg. Uniform practices would overcome

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vast distances. Its very uniformity would be the mark of the state’s cohesion; any variation would disrupt its “universality” (vseobshchnost’).98 To be sure, in a pattern made familiar in the Cabinet debates, a series of Duma members rose to request exemptions for the particular interests they represented and cited their exceptional conditions or circumstances; each request was defeated in a vote of all against one when it was brought before the full meeting of the committee or Duma. It was in the logic of a politics of universalism that was being played out for the first time in the legislature, and it implied in its unrelentingness the emergence of a tangible, integral whole. Demands for exceptions for a few – peasants, noblemen, workers, clergy, industrialists, ethnic minorities, Cossacks – were rejected by majorities representing everyone else. These were “particularistic” (chastnyia) positions, whereas the law was recognizing a state in which all interests were refracted.99 Exemption would be the product of low income, not low, high, or exceptional birth. What to do with industrial workers was a special problem for the liberal and socialist deputies and economists who claimed to speak for them; it echoed a larger European debate over how to include the poor, the workers, and the agrarian majorities, especially when such groups did not have the vote.100 In the Duma in 1910 Nikolai Shchepkin asked for a blanket exemption from the income tax for workers regardless of income; just to be sure, he proposed an exemption level of 1,200 or 1,500 rubles, which would exclude all workers and most salaried employees. He was supported by Social Democratic deputies who worried that an exemption of 1,000 rubles would include some skilled workers and protested that workers were too poor to pay. It was hard to get around the notion that status was an indicator of income. Their critics, led by Kutler, jumped at the absurdity: a worker making 1,000 rubles was not poor, and his opponents were placing status, occupation, and class before the attributes of the person in question. Ultimately this was a misguided paternalism that would deny workers “personality.” The liberal deputies continued the debate in the Society of Financial Reforms, where some insisted that the role of the state was to “protect and guard the weakest”; workers should be exempted alongside the “elderly, peasant agriculturists, artisans, and the infirm.” Ozerov pointed out that this was demeaning to workers who were being equated with the disabled. Honouring workers meant assessing them alongside all others, not exempting them.101 An exclusive tax reflected an exclusive citizenship; a more expansive citizenship implied an inclusive tax. There was also a persistent argument in the legislature to the effect that the great divide between agriculture and industry could not be bridged, so that noblemen and peasants should be exempted. An assessment of income alone “ignores the great differences between the lifestyle and income condition of

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urbanites and agricultural householders.”102 P.P. Migulin, the economist who advised the Ministry of Agriculture, made the case on the pages of The Russian Economist. Any household consumed much of what it produced, and the bill raised the possibility of investigating how many eggs the members ate in a year, and of making them pay a part to the state. Legislators led by Kutler repeated that the purpose of the tax was to make these categories equivalent and comparable – the egg had a market value, no matter who ate it – and anyway the idea that the gentry ate what they grew was sophistry, the product of “the large appetite of certain landowners.”103 However, the same logic might apply to peasants. Ozerov had long argued that the gradual repeal of collective responsibility (chapter 8) was removing “that barrier,” the peasant commune, “beyond which it was difficult to look and consider individual paying power.” As early as 1900 he proposed that the state should begin to “enter into direct contact with payers” among the peasantry by use of a new income tax.104 The position of some industrialists was counter-intuitive, but it fuelled the universalistic logic that was at play. The more articulate entrepreneurial groups of Moscow, those gathered around Pavel Riabushinskii, never rejected the tax, even though entrepreneurs operating in a money economy were to be its principal payers.105 Instead, using a Prussian argument of the 1890s that had since been expressed almost everywhere, they insisted that it be applied to more people, thereby avoiding the impression that it was a punishment for the wealthy. Rather than try to reduce their own liability, they proposed to increase the bill for everyone else. A special commission established by the Moscow Exchange under Riabushinskii reported that taxation was not a burden but the mark of the citizen or the tool to create one. On these grounds the commission recommended that the standard exemption be cut in half to 500 rubles: “One of the chief demands of the income tax is the universality of the assessment … To sacrifice for all-state needs is the obligation of every citizen, and the bigger the circle of citizens, the wider will develop in the population a sense of civic selfconsciousness and the feeling of civic duty.”106 Not only would the estate be transcended, but estate institutions would be penalized as a way to remove them from the state structure. At first the Ministry of Finances proposed to exempt the “county, village, [Cossack] stanitsa, and homesteader institutions and the corresponding non-Russian ones” because they were used by the state to rule locally. The Third Duma agreed reluctantly: despite their particularistic character, “under the current structure of our state, these institutions must be viewed as a part of the state’s administration.” Anyway, the ministry decided, these were not “physical persons.” This was the opening for the opposition led by Kutler and Lerkhe in the Duma in 1910: if they were not physical persons, then they were “juridical persons”; as such they

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should be subject to the same exemptions and the same liabilities as any enterprise and any physical person. To exempt them would be to entrench in the new law “the mark of estate [priznak soslovnosti].” The Fourth Duma removed the exemption altogether, concluding that estate institutions were “chastnyia” (private, meaning non-state). The same exemption of 1,000 rubles would apply, apparently on incomes not related to their state functions.107 The State Council agreed and made an example of the Don Cossacks: “Cossack institutions are in effect estate institutions and serve only the interests of their own members, not the whole local population.”108 Circumventing estate, the state dealt with the individual and nurtured the citizen. Citizenship in these formulations implied individual membership in the state as such. As A.N. fon-Ruttsen told the Society of Financial Reforms, the very wealthy protested the state’s intrusion on their lives, but they were its members. One may have considered the implications of belonging to the nation or the society, but fon-Ruttsen offered a different principle: “Landowners and industrialists are not only members of a given local union, but citizens of the state.”109

6 The Income Tax as Modern Government: Assessment, Self-Assessment, and Mutual Surveillance

The Russian income tax law of 1916 drew on a variety of national models and capitalized on decades of debate and theory that had destabilized the idea of the economy to make it more state centred and destabilized the idea of the person in order to make persons penetrable and partitive. These impulses were more pronounced in Russia than they were elsewhere because they were shaped by the successive crises of 1905–7 and 1914–17. The tax was viewed widely among officials, experts, journalists, and legislators as a locus in which a new kind of participatory state would be nurtured into existence and where a true citizenship of personal integration and accountability would make the economic act a state act. The state that had done so much to lend coherence and legibility to economic practices now mobilized those practices into a thoroughgoing identification of the person and the economy with the state. The Mechanisms of Participation The bill on the income tax contained specific provisions that were meant to train people in the state’s functions. The main provision in this regard was the provincial, district, and neighbourhood assessment commissions (prisutstviia). Commissions had been introduced in the administration of other Russian direct taxes since the 1860s on models borrowed from Germany and Britain (chapters 2 and 4). Inspectors joined with representatives from the group that were liable for the tax in a given territory. The commissions reviewed the declarations of taxpayers, tallied them with data gathered from other sources, considered appeals, and if necessary conducted audits. In the early years the members of the commissions had been selected by one or another corporate or professional organization. The urban properties tax of the 1860s had allowed the zemstvos and municipalities to choose the representatives; merchant and

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entrepreneurial bodies and municipalities had sent their delegates for the business taxes of the 1880s. By contrast, the apartment tax from the 1890s had used combinations of direct election by the payers and delegation from the municipalities. The meaning of the commissions had always been ambiguous: it was unclear whether the members were meant to be representatives of the public or of the state, and the laws and instructions suggested both. Nikolai Kutler offered some clarity when he drafted the legislation on the apartment tax of 1893. The commissions were meant to introduce “a certain public supervision” over the state and thus act as a check on the fiscal organs. The state and the society (obshchestvo) were necessarily distinct.1 Kutler’s provisions for the income tax in 1905 were subtly different, perhaps reflecting the sense of crisis and urgency and perhaps reflecting a philosophical change on his part that privileged the state. The members would be elected directly by assemblies of taxpayers, unmediated by local and corporate bodies that were tainted by privilege. The commissions would recognize public forces (obshchestvennye sily) but organize them in the state.2 Deputy Minister Shipov elaborated: the zemstvos and municipalities that might otherwise send their delegates to the tax commissions had a narrow franchise and used curia to favour certain legal estates; as bastions of privilege they “do not stand close enough to the population.” In principle the state should afford no recognition to “particularistic” estate institutions, which would be “in sharp contradiction to the very character of the law.” Tax commissions would have a wider and direct franchise, and every vote would count the same. These provisions made for the “enlistment of public [obshchestvennyia] elements, the participation of which is insistently necessary.”3 Coming from an autocratic servitor the statement was peculiar; the Cabinet was appointed by the tsar, and the estate institutions he criticized were autocratic creations. It makes some sense, however, when one considers that the purpose of the commissions was not consent and certainly not representative democracy but the actual incorporation of would-be citizens into the state machinery. The Cabinet repeated the reasoning in 1910. When the Novgorod zemstvo asked to share in the receipts from the projected income tax, the Cabinet turned it down. True, sharing the income tax with local government would have been an opportunity to redress the great imbalance between state and local tax receipts, which in Russia were at a ratio of 7:1, in France 3:1, and in England and Belgium 1:1.4 The issue instead was the franchise: “Far from all of the liable recipients of income can participate in local self-government according to current laws. It would hardly be just to force them to make payments to the zemstvos and municipalities without giving them corresponding rights” of electing them and serving.5 Similar mechanisms of direct election

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were introduced for the business tax in 1909 and the revised urban properties tax in 1910. In the admiring assessment of The Russian Economist, the practice linked the state with the individual taxpayer and submerged the two into the same practices.6 In general, service on the commissions blurred the distinction between a right and an obligation and emphasized a new kind of civic belonging. Service on the commissions would be mandatory, on pain of fine or imprisonment, but this was also termed a right. Where too few eligible voters showed up to elect the commissions, the governor would appoint the members from the pool of payers; they too could not refuse to serve. Women deprived of the vote in politics would still elect and join the tax commissions. The Fourth Duma held that women should vote for and serve on the commissions even though they had no right to vote in local and State Duma elections. The Duma majority declared that it was “guided by general considerations of the desirability of enlisting these persons to public activism.” The vote that they were denied in the formal political process would be replaced with “the right to participate in taxation.”7 The word “participation” (uchastie) was chosen carefully and used consistently in place of its obvious alternative, “consent.” To be sure, for a brief moment – from the announcement of the broad male franchise for the Duma elections of 1905 to its drastic curtailment in June 1907 – the Cabinet seemed to suggest that the justification for the income tax would be the near-universal male suffrage by which the First and Second Dumas were elected, making for the familiar correlation of taxation and representation. When ministers drafted their memoranda in favour of the income tax in October 1906, some of them argued that universal (male) representation allowed for universal taxation. The ministers then reconsidered: the memoranda would be sent as part of a package to Nicholas II, who held that the monarch was an autocrat who in principle could operate without the approval of the legislature. To a man the ministers revised their drafts and struck any connection between taxation and representation, and the bill that reached Nicholas in early 1907 made the case for “participation.”8 Participation implied inclusion, and this could be achieved with or without consent. The compelling parallel to paying taxes was not voting but serving in the armed forces. It had long been argued in Europe that income taxation was the equivalent of military service, which the well-to-do and well-educated had managed to avoid in disproportionate numbers. German G. Lerkhe, a former official of the Ministry of Finances and chairman of the Duma Finance Commission, reasoned in 1910 that the privileged might object that the tax was an “an intrusion on private interests,” but adult males were already subject to military conscription, which fell mostly on the lower classes (as an absolute

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number and as a proportion of the population). Conscription was a tax in kind that claimed the whole person, body and soul, and “taxes in kind intrude no less on the private interests of the citizens” than income taxes.9 The Russian Economist elaborated that the majority of Russian males failed to serve. Figures from 1907 showed that 67 per cent of eligible males were not called up, because the state could not afford to train and equip them.10 The income tax would make de facto what was stated de jure in article 1 of the statute on military service, which claimed “all the male population, regardless of their legal standing.” Moreover, those who were exempted for whatever reason – in particular Muslims in some regions – should pay a special progressive surtax. Already Muslims in the Transcaucasus paid a special tax in lieu of service (as did non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire11 and certain categories of men in France and Greece). In the Russian Empire the liquidation of autonomous armies in Poland and Finland had replaced service with a new tax.12 Since the 1880s there had been discussions of such a tax in Turkestan, and in 1916 the Cabinet proposed that Muslims there pay a surcharge on the income tax. Already residents of Turkestan paid low taxes on land compared with those paid by residents of European Russia (5 rubles versus 14 rubles per head, according to this calculation), so the income tax would equalize them in status and obligation; and they would pay for their exemption with a progressive surtax of between 6 rubles and 200 rubles.13 “From that point of view,” concluded the State Council in 1916, “the income tax can be compared with universal military service.”14 (The provision for payment in lieu of service was repealed by the Soviet government in May 1918: money should not buy out one’s civic obligations.15) Citizenship was being construed as the mark of inclusion in a manner that obscured the difference between rights and obligations, and also between state and society. By the same logic, it was unclear whether there was to be a formal difference between payer and collector. The commissions would function by majority voting in a single, unified body, reflecting the unity of state and public power that they embodied. Officials guarded this unity deliberately as the measure moved through the Cabinet and the legislatures. One official objected that the inspectors would be outnumbered by a majority of elected taxpayers; others feared that ignorant taxpayers would be bullied by the expert inspectors. Lerkhe of the Duma Finance Commission pointed out that the neat distinction between payer and collector was being replaced by a different notion of power: the elected representatives would embody “the sovereignty of public opinion” but “within the organs of power.”16 Thus constituted, the assessment commissions would have greater legitimacy and enhanced powers. Under the provisions of the apartment and business

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taxes, payers could choose not to allow the inspectors or the members of the commissions into their premises. This immunity was immediately subverted by the provision that an assessment could not be challenged unless the payer provided documentation and invited the commissions for a physical inspection of the apartment or enterprise. It was a tacit reversal of the burden of proof. When this provision was introduced to the urban properties tax in 1910, it produced an immediate jump in audits and visits to individual properties, along with a doubling in the yield of the tax.17 Under the income tax even the formal immunity from investigation was removed; the commissions could demand financial disclosure and also inspect the interior of buildings. This raised the alarm over a new intrusion by the state on society, and the Cabinet responded with an argument that would be repeated in the Duma and by the inspectors themselves. Pavel Kutler, director of the Moscow Treasury Office, formulated it as follows: since the commissions were elected from among the taxpayers, the intrusion could only be by society on itself, and therefore it was not an intrusion at all. Thanks to the commissions, explained the Ministry of Finances in 1907, there was no discrete state from which to hide because the payer was at that moment a part of the state, and no discrete society encountered the state because society’s functions were being practised within the state. The ministry insisted that commissions be used for more and more taxes: “everything will be legible to everyone,” and “everything will be visible”; “everything will be understandable,” and “there will be no cause for fear.”18 By 1916 the commissions were styled in the State Council as “state organs of participation” and organs of “mutual public supervision” (vzaimnyi obshchestvennyi kontrol’) by which payers held each other in check.19 Ultimately two sets of relations were cast into doubt by the commissions, revisiting some large political questions that had been addressed by European fiscal experts since the eighteenth century. The commissions clouded the statesociety dichotomy, and they also invited citizens to investigate each other and in effect disrupt their solidarities in a system of “mutual public supervision.” The commissions addressed the problem that Turgot had expressed in France in the eighteenth century: the great conflict between the fisc and the population was conditioned by their very separateness, by the absence of a sense of a larger society to which both ruler and ruled belonged. For Nicolas de Condorcet, as Keith Baker summarizes, the solution was not popular will and representative government but a new understanding of a public or social interest in which “the administrative state and the political nation are coterminous.”20 It was precisely this blurring of the boundary between the state and the society, and the merger of the prerogatives of government and governed, that made later liberals uneasy and provided the grounds on which French legislators rejected commissions

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altogether in 1909.21 In the French rendering of the problem, state would be state, making its necessary claims on citizens; and society would be society, where citizens encountered power, distinguished themselves from the state, and if necessary resisted it. A “citizen of the state,” however, had no other place to go. The Individual and the Personality in Fiscal Practice The core of the personal income tax was the person, and it was its personalizing dimensions that made for the greatest political controversy as the tax was proposed in a variety of national contexts. At the very least it gave rise to the classical liberal protest that the atomized person was subjected to the unequal weight of the state. “Our forefathers of 1789 sought to get rid of personal taxes because people do not want to present themselves completely naked before a completely fiscal and authoritarian state,” intoned a French deputy in 1896.22 But such objections were being outmoded because the tax was not simply personal but personalized, not simply imposed on citizens but practised by them. The tax suggested not the shock of oppression and outright coercion but the duller anxiety of penetration and discipline. In the terms of the Russian economist Aleksei Rafalovich, the system took the otherwise autonomous or neglected person and broke him down into state-provided categories of incomes and expenditures, family status and dependents, and rental payments and incomes. The economic personality, according to critics, was a grotesque remoulding of the subject in a “specific form of fiscal anthropometrics.”23 At play here, as they were in a variety of national contexts, were conflicting understandings of the person, and it is useful to consider the meaningful difference between the individual on the one hand and the personality on the other. “Individual” after all implied indivisibility, perhaps privacy, and some sense of immunity that arose from some combination of benign neglect and positive rights. “Economic personality” was introduced in Europe and North America in the 1890s to suggest something different: divisibility, transparency, and complexity. By definition, the personality, formed in state categories and filled with public knowledge, was transparent and open to investigation. As these notions competed in the fiscal codes and in national politics, virtually all countries ended up with parallel systems of taxation. Objective taxes on properties (very often levied by local government) still allowed the payer to refuse the inspector entry to one’s home, making for relatively flat and regressive taxes that were based on crude external indicators and repartitioned levies; excise and sales taxes never asked who the payer was. These taxes suggested political equality but not social fairness. Subjective taxes on persons, understood as incomes, proceeded from and made possible near-full disclosure of the person’s economic

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life. These taxes suggested assimilation into a larger integral society. The two versions of personhood provided critics and advocates of the income tax in most countries with two competing principles for arguing their cases. The tension was ongoing and unresolved and arguably was never meant to be resolved.24 In the Russian debate the distinction was less obvious. To be sure, the sense of the person (litso) as distinct from other persons was commonplace in Russian literature and political thought.25 It implied individuality qua distinctiveness from other persons. But the idea of the individual as absolutely autonomous was different and in some ways incompatible with distinctiveness; autonomy implied ignorance of the person, be it by design or by neglect, while distinctiveness required the deliberate study of each person. Indeed, contemporaries found autonomy awkward to express. In one confused discussion in 1905, officials and government advisers spoke at cross-purposes when they used “the person” (litso) to imply either her immunity from investigation or transparency. One economist sought precision in the term “personal self-reliance” (lichnaia samostoiatel’nost’), but rather than imply a dignified immunity, he meant to argue that each person was distinct and had to be understood as a distinct subject of taxation, that is, fully exposed and individually assessed. Another economist seeking a word to express the individual as autonomous resorted to the Latin “individuum” and then renounced the concept as selfish. He meant instead to emphasize the complexities that made each person unique, requiring comprehensive and personalized assessment.26 Recognizing and valorizing one’s personhood – and this Russians did as much as anyone else – did not necessarily separate the person from the state; it could invite greater state concern and investigation, valorizing one as a member of the state rather than as a distinct and potentially resisting entity. Hence the weakness of an argument that had served British and French critics of the income tax so well in modifying its provisions, the right to privacy. It was the affluent and wealthy who made this argument most eloquently, mindful no doubt of the ways the argument made them immune to investigation and assessment. British bankers refused to provide lists of depositors when asked in 1843 because it intruded on both a private enterprise and a private individual who deposited money in a bank, and Inland Revenue was forced to acquiesce. French bankers were even more successful in their refusals well into the twentieth century.27 The closest concept to privacy in Russian practice was commercial secrecy, which applied to businesses, though not necessarily to persons. Russian bankers and entrepreneurs had argued with some success since the 1880s that commercial secrecy was their customary privilege that protected them from their competitors and arbitrary bureaucrats. As they were unable to express it as a principle, their sponsors in the ministries did it for them: secrecy

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limited state interference in the healthy development of private initiative and created a space of entrepreneurial innovation (chapter 3). By 1905 this reasoning was under assault, and in 1906 two commissions considered the partial or full repeal of commercial secrecy: the Shipov Commission of March and April, and the May conference on secrecy as such. Their membership overlapped, bankers were invited to both, and debates from the one were picked up in the next. Whatever immunities secrecy may have offered were put into question; progressive taxation was impossible without full disclosure of incomes, and privacy elsewhere had been the dressing for a more basic avarice and simple evasion. The issue was the confidentiality of bank accounts in particular – the idea that a bank should report on the holdings of their depositors – and private bankers were invited to comment. In the past they had been accustomed to the sympathy of some parts of the ministries of Finances and of Trade and Industry. Now they were confronted by the unified contempt of the experts and officials who dismissed their protests as greed and selfishness; Genzel’ had called them the plain “egoistical strivings of the trade-industrial class.”28 After all, this was a moment of revolutionary crisis that required greater contributions and participation in the state. On the streets outside workers had been clashing with Cossacks and army units, and the state’s coercive organs were all that stood between the workers’ movement and the propertied few. At that very moment, bankers were refusing to divulge to the state that preserved them and their wealth from extinction. Taxation and the requisite disclosure, they were told in scolding tones, was an “important civic duty” but also a state necessity, requiring sacrifice on the part of the well-off. “Why does England enjoy such tranquility and is at the same time perhaps the most conservative of all countries? Because there the possessing classes met the needs of the working masses in time and voluntarily accepted a certain tax burden.” If Russia’s wealthy refused, then the state would force them into compliance in the interests of “stability.”29 Bankers retorted that they did not object to paying more tax, only the provision that they reveal their depositors and accounts – a sophistry since the one depended on the other. At Shipov’s commission, State Controller Sergei I. Ivanov told the bankers that they were demanding an exemption that no one else in Russia enjoyed; the repeal of secrecy would simply equalize obligations. “Really!” (Na samom dele!), he exclaimed. Wage-earners, clerks, and the salaried employees of a corporation, a private firm, the state, or local government – all were already fully visible to their employers and were guarded by no particular rules on confidentiality. And they had no savings to hide. Their dignity was not an issue, and under the income tax all employers “will be obliged to inform the fiscal organs with lists of names of all persons who receive salaries,

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wages, and so on, with an itemization of their incomes. In this manner the income of the labourer or small salaried employee will be accounted for to the last kopeck.” This was their civic duty, but larger incomes from capital “in the hands of rich people” would be concealed.30 Secrecy would be an excuse for evasion. Transparency, in the view of Ivanov, was a normal and healthy state of being that allowed for integration and commercial progress. Ozerov argued that “openness” (glasnost’) was not an affront but a common practice in the most “advanced business countries,” the United States and Germany. It had emerged spontaneously in “credit rating agencies,” which generated intimate knowledge of a person’s economic life (“the credit report”). In Berlin the firm Schimmelpfennig “gathers data on the economic condition of millions of businesspersons in all countries of the world, and for a small payment it is conveyed as a report to anyone who wants to receive it.” (The minutes spelled it out in English: “the credit report.”) In the United States the Mercantile Agency did the same, and Americans seeking loans consented to release their personal information. Some denounced it as the “new inquisition,” but no one would do business with a person who concealed her business profile. Secrecy was “abnormal.”31 According to Lerkhe in 1910, visibility and honesty were imperative because “the preservation of absolute secrecy is in substance as dangerous as its so-called violation,” an excuse for deception towards other citizens and towards the state.32 Russian entrepreneurs had yet to develop the practice of openness, Kokovtsov said, to see the disclosure as a natural transparency, so the state would do it for them; it would introduce “the new principle of making known the entire economic personality of the payer.” The income tax would be “accompanied by the elucidation (vyiasnenie) of all property relations, including those that are otherwise protected by commercial secrecy.”33 (That Kokovtsov spent most of his career studying prison systems abroad and administering prisons in Russia seems here relevant; modern penal systems were about discipline, visibility, and – literally – inescapability.) A colleague added that the precondition of the income tax was the visibility of all economic transactions, drawing on the practices of civil society; but in Russia the income tax would be the instrument of transparency, not its consequence.34 The bankers meeting in May 1906 objected that the full disclosure of bank accounts to the treasury was allowed in “no other country.” Ozerov agreed: “In fact this is completely true,” but Russia was seeking a better system in which a citizen had nothing to hide from his or her own state. In other ways Russian proposals were more moderate, Ozerov suggested. Württemberg had a special tax gendarmerie, and in the United States some states did something more insidious by employing private collection agencies to recover tax debts, and

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reported delinquents to the credit-rating agencies to lower their credit standing. In Russia by contrast the process would be conducted safely within the state.35 The bankers were forced to abandon the argument for precedent, which was clearly going to be overturned; they appealed instead to principle, perhaps for the first time. The repeal of secrecy would be an intrusion on a private (chastnoe) affair, and generally the income tax is associated with “widely instituted penetration by the fiscal organs into private proprietary affairs.” Officials at the meeting immediately construed the word “private” in its negative sense – “particularistic” and, in this sense, self-seeking. One banker then resorted to a different term: “The credit institution is my very self [eto moe ia].” To investigate it would be to subject a dignified being to the indignities of prying and investigation. This was simple selfishness, Ozerov replied, a defence of “personal interests.” Divulging information is not “a police function, but on the contrary a highly important citizens’ duty.” Government representatives agreed that the self was composed of properties and incomes, but properties and incomes were a matter of public record, formed in statesanctioned practices and protected by the state. Ultimately the properties and therefore the persons were open to claim because they were state creations.36 Indeed, an official philosophized, Russian law had brought the “person” into being in the first place, as laws had done everywhere, making the separation of the state from the person an artificial one. Even the proposition that the person was immune from the state was a creation of the state’s laws, as it had been everywhere, and could be revised like any other law.37 Specifically, added another, the category of the “person” was, for fiscal purposes, gifted by the state; the state first thought through what a person might be when it recognized corporations as “juridical persons” (iuridicheskiya litsa). These were entirely creations of the law, and fittingly Russia’s first “personal” income tax was levied in 1885 on these persons. Likewise, inheritance law had recognized the estate of the deceased as a “person” that existed after death in the form of properties and incomes. These persons could be taxed freely because the state enforced the practice of testament. Immediately this had given rise to the legal argument for the equality of all persons – dead or living, artificial or “physical” – and their equal liability to tax and assessment (chapter 3). By 1905, the spillover to living persons was more or less complete, and Shipov used these precedents to argue that all persons were equal before the law and open to the same practices of investigation.38 In the end the bankers lost the argument completely. The Fourth Duma repealed secrecy – not by law but by the practice of divulgence in the course of income assessment – so as to produce “a greater element of openness,” preemptive to the mass evasion that was expected to accompany the new law.39

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The debate over annual sworn declarations addressed directly the relationship between the state and the person, indeed the increased difficulty of locating their mutual boundary. Declaration (zaiavlenie) was termed generically self-assessment in European languages. In Russia this was samooblozhenie or self-evaluation (samootsenka), with an implication of introspection, self-­ awareness, and free divulgence. It suggested that the person was performing functions that had otherwise been visited on the person by an external power. Despite the claims that declarations were a peculiarly Prussian institution, they had been a British practice since 1799, and in 1842 they were required (as Schedule D) of certain categories of professionals whose incomes were not documented. For other payers in Britain, declarations were technically voluntary for those seeking deductions, but the incentive produced the desired result: three-quarters of all payers provided declarations by 1906. In that year Parliament decided in principle to make declarations compulsory.40 Russians used declarations sparingly after 1885 for the business tax and much more widely in the 1890s for the apartment tax; from 1906 they were required of individual board members of corporations as part of the business tax, and from 1910 they were used for the urban properties tax as well. The superficial justification for declarations was simple to the point of naive, as stated by the Russian cabinet: “The most accurate determination of income can be conducted only by the very recipient of that income.”41 The practice did however have a practical logic, stated in the Cabinet discussion of 1906: without declarations, inspectors would be staring into a void. Treasuries lacked as yet the capacity to associate all incomes with persons, so the function of declarations was to give the inspectors a starting-point, a statement that could be checked against the available outside data. It put the onus on the payer; having ventured a positive statement about his or her income, the payer could be presented with an “opros” (a query or an interrogation), which was a requirement to prove that the information that was sworn was true, against the conflicting information that was available to the commission. Failure to answer the query led automatically to the confiscation of the income and movable property in question “without contest” (bezspornym poriadkom).42 To put it paradoxically, “self-assessment,” which invited the payer to candidly reveal himself or herself, created the conditions for more complete compulsion.43 The device of declarations was practical, but it was also an “advanced civic practice.” Americans had practised it in some forms of taxation long before they had an income tax, and it was accustoming them to modern practices of divulgence.44 It presumed that the payer had emerged from barter and subsistence into a money economy, it assumed a minimum level of literacy and numeracy, and it implied a wider savvy about the implications of the numbers

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in terms of taxable income and deductions. Broadly, it assumed that the individual would co-operate, consciously and with an internalized sense of duty, with the state. It assumed “a much stronger development of the citizens’ duty,” Ozerov rhapsodized before a Cabinet commission in 1905. “Every citizen, in submitting a declaration, will be penetrated by a consciousness of a debt fulfilled to the state.”45 Self-assessment was roundly criticized as a dissembling absurdity wherever it was introduced. In any country, taxes were popularly construed as burdens and imposts that a reasonable person would avoid. Incomes after all were personal matters that no one should have been compelled to divulge in the first place. More profoundly, declarations subverted the proper relationship between ruler and ruled by sharing their respective functions. French liberals objected to sworn declaration because it implied complicity in taxation, forcing the payer to be a party to his or her own victimization. Serious arguments were heard in France and the United States to the effect that it violated constitutional protections against self-incrimination; denying their small concealments as they traditionally had, they would be forced to commit perjury. Americans who had to file declarations in states like Illinois objected that they were learning the ways of deceit and that taxation was “a school of perjury” producing “a nation of liars”; the income tax offered “a reward for dishonesty and encouragement to perjury. The income tax will corrupt the people.”46 Alternatively, the payer would have to confess the transgression to the state, like a parishioner to a priest. “Take what you will,” declared a writer in Le Temps, “but do not make me swear to it” – a stark reaffirmation of a concept of an authority external to the individual. Léon Say recommended that the “sensible man” refrain from forthrightness before an “impudent” state; the state had created the conditions for evasion by making immoral demands.47 French legislators approached the matter cautiously. They agreed in 1896 to “shun all systems based on the declaration of total income,” which would lead to “vexatious investigations.” The Chamber left it out of the mild income tax of 1909, which depended instead on withholdings at source in the older British manner. A new law of 1914 did the same but stated (also in the British manner) that no deduction could be claimed and no tax assessment could be contested by the payer without an itemized declaration. It took the separate war-time law of July 1917 to require annual declarations.48 In Britain opponents were concerned with the oath in particular, which would be secularized everywhere as the signed declaration but which at the time meant swearing on a holy book that the declaration was true. It was “blasphemous” because it confused two kinds of authority, the one religious and internal to the person, the other secular and a matter of outward compliance. It

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meant “seizing a man morally by the throat” and tempted him to violate his oath before God. Generally, it made one’s relations with the state a matter of conscience rather than compliance.49 Similar arguments were used in Russia, where payers would be required to swear on a Bible, a Qur’an, or a Torah. Opponents were specifically concerned with the ritual of an oath, “demeaning such an important religious act” by introducing it to a realm where people were expected to be less than forthcoming. Avoidance and even evasion were well understood to be customary practices: “In the consciousness of many it is not shameful to cheat the treasury.” By introducing the alien issue of honesty into taxation, the laws would create dishonesty.50 Assessments and disclosures had been occasions for a longer negotiation with the tax authorities that arrived at a midpoint between the payer’s under-reporting and the inspector’s overestimates. The new procedures elevated the small evasions to the level of sin. “Evaluate as you see fit,” as the ministry described the objection, “but don’t make us go to confession about our economic condition, at that under threat of severe punishments for incorrect declarations.”51 Critics were right in the sense that the practice of oaths was meant to elevate one’s responsibility to the state. As Kokovtsov explained in 1905, the provision was meant to end the assumption that taxes were external to the person.52 Inspectors in Suvalki (Suwałki) quickly grasped the significance: faced with a solid collective of “them,” in this case Shtetl Jews, individual oaths would break them down into persons directly responsible to the state.53 Evasion and Transparency The greatest objection to the use of declarations in Russia – and indeed to the personal income tax – was cultural backwardness, and this was also the larger argument in its favour.54 From the first academic discussions of income taxation in the 1860s to adoption in 1916, the most common protest was that it required a level of “culture” and “civic-mindedness” that most of the Russian population lacked.55 Ministers objected to the 1892 proposal on the grounds that other countries had prepared for it incrementally for over a century, while Russia aimed to introduce it without “a high culture and development of the population, an established and active public opinion and a certain space of civic existence.” Russia’s 1812 income tax, which was applied as an emergency measure to the nobility – “the most developed, cultured, and patriotic” group of the population – had been a fiasco of cheating and evasion.56 The State Controller warned in 1906 that these practices were ominous even in “civilized” Prussia and Britain. “It’s another matter in Russia, where even if we allow for the good conscience of the payers, only in the capitals will we find people who

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are mentally prepared to consciously approach the task laid before them.” He continued, “On 95 per cent of our territory we are dealing with benightedness and unculturedness.” It “does not take into account our customary, psychological, and cultural unpreparedness for income assessment.”57 Witte, whose attitude to the personal income tax was ambiguous, agreed in 1892 that the invisibility of incomes would produce arbitrary searches and investigations, mass evasion, and a heightened suspicion of the state; in 1912 he warned from retirement that the income tax might “contradict the established conditions of existence of the population.”58 For lack of civic maturity, critics warned, the Russian state would have to compensate with greater coercion.59 As far back as 1867 the Tax Commission had warned that Russia’s “moral customs and other specificities of popular life” would make for mass evasion; the state would respond with “strict fiscal oversight” and outright force.60 Stanislav M. Rotvand told the Society of Financial Reforms that the population was not “economically and morally mature for this perfected form of assessment”; Russia’s state was “Eastern” and would become even more so as it strengthened itself at the expense of its individual subjects.61 The cultural argument was double edged, and advocates agreed on most counts, from the civic inadequacies of the population to the need for greater compulsion. Declarations were not enough, stated O.O. Geiman to the Society of Financial Reforms in 1911; they must be backed by coercion. “One must arm the agents of the fisc with all means necessary to elucidate the actuality [vyiasnenie istiny]” of a given sworn declaration. Even “advanced” Europeans had a record of mass evasion: in Prussia 25 per cent of all declarations were audited, and of these, 80 per cent were false. In Britain compulsory declarations were recommended in 1906 because it was assumed that most payers concealed their incomes, and indeed audits of those who declared revealed that around 44–55 per cent had lied. In Russia the “weakly developed civic feeling” required even greater enforcement and stiffer penalties.62 Prime Minister Goremykin, who put the income tax on the Cabinet’s agenda in 1905, accepted that in Russia more than elsewhere “low culture would be the occasion for a universal effort to hide incomes,” and the state would have to redouble its investigative practices. Low consciousness, added a colleague, required “extreme criminal sentences.”63 The future was folded into the present. Russia was unprepared for modern government and required instead coercion, but the tax could only exist because Russians were prepared for modern government. The tax assumed voluntary civic commitment but then required it on pain of heavy imprisonment and fine. It invited public and individual participation and initiative but also offered the script that payers would act out in the form of state-supplied forms and oaths. It assumed candid disclosure but then created a space of inescapability

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– the “greater information of the fisc” (ból’shaia osvedomlennost’ fiska), with the candour reduced to ritual.64 Duma deputies insisted that the image of Russians as “unconscionable wild people” was unsustainable when liberals were demanding universal male suffrage, and the tax would be an introduction to civic life; but, for good measure, the punishment for evasion should be unusually harsh by European standards.65 To bring it to its absurd conclusions, Russians would willingly divulge because of their greater tendency to conceal; they would freely declare because they had no choice. Ozerov explained the tension temporally. True, countries with a higher level of “civic consciousness” also had the more severe laws because they assumed a higher level of human development and a higher degree of responsibility; the law was more disciplinary than punitive. In Russia the laws would be especially punitive for the opposite reason – to offset the “weakly developed civic feeling” and create something that did not yet exist, “citizenship.”66 Less absurdly it was argued that taxation would create the citizens it depended on to be effective. Nikolai Kutler captured the duality – the “is” and the “ought to be” – in his introductory remarks to the Cabinet commission of 1905. After a long explanation of the “rising cultural level of our population” that made the tax possible, he then allowed for doubt. “Independent of this,” he continued, “the introduction of the income tax, as the most fair and just, will be in and of itself a huge cultural factor, capable of nurturing in the population consciousness of its tax duties.”67 Having argued that the tax was already appropriate to Russia, advocates also argued that the tax would make citizens out of passive subjects; this was its “political and, so to speak, public-educational meaning.” As Ozerov put it to the Society of Financial Reforms in 1911, even the poor who were otherwise unprepared for this form of taxation should be taxed nominally “in order to craft [dlia vyrabotki] a healthy payer psychology.”68 A century earlier England was no better off culturally than Russia was in 1906, stated a minister, but England adopted the income tax nevertheless. (In fact, the tax of 1799 was repealed.)69 Treasury Offices in some non-Russian regions would complain that their populations were unprepared for such measures, be it the Don with its extreme insularity and caste-like resistance to central power, or Turkestan with a majority that was “illiterate in Russian and completely undeveloped,” with “too few intelligentsia forces.” In these cases the ministry instructed the provinces that the practice of the tax would provide them with all the data and experience they needed.70 Or, as Ozerov had put it in his influential article in 1900, “Can the Income Tax Be Introduced to Russia?,” Russia, which seemed so much like a primitive colonial territory, was changing, and the change would be accelerated by the

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income tax. The income tax that had been introduced in the Raj by James Mill was a failure, but that was because “in India we are dealing with different political conditions: the population is divided in two camps, the conquerors and the conquered, with opposing interests, and such a situation cannot be an auspicious basis for the new form of assessment.” In Russia the income tax would create new relations in which the “fisc enters into unmediated [neposredstvennyia] interactions with the payers.” If Russia lacked a real civil society (obshchestvennost’) and lacked “the supervision of public opinion,” Russia would have something different: complete “openness” situated within the state itself.71 Paradoxically, backward Russia would arrive at a point ahead of its western European counterparts, dispensing with a period of civil-society formation or a stage of individual fortification. The profounder concern was that the new system would make resistance impossible because the person would be situated in the state that oppressed him, fully exposed to its coercive organs. As if to confirm these fears, Ozerov proposed to the conference on commercial secrecy in 1906 that the best antidote to state coercion was complete transparency and inescapability. All payers and the amount of their assessments should be published in newspapers and posted on public buildings so that other payers could scrutinize them; something similar had been practised in the business tax since 1908.72 Already the system of declaration had built-in devices of mutual reporting, since a deduction listed by one payer would become the visible income and liability of another; already automatic and mandatory reporting of payments and bank accounts meant that any such income was registered with the state; and already one’s fellow payers on the tax commissions were invited to scrutinize every other payer.73 Ozerov proposed that these practices be made completely public and that denunciation be formalized and regularized: “It is completely expedient to invite the payers themselves to participate in the verification of the truth of the income declarations by posting [on public buildings] the lists of payers and their tax assessments.” It would give each citizen the confidence that all who should pay were indeed paying and that an item of income was being duly declared; if not, then the citizen would act as a check on the next citizen by reporting an evader to the fiscal authorities. With citizens stripped of the possibility to conceal, the state would have no reason to coerce. In a similar vein, Kutler explained that the tax would not depend alone on powerful inspectors but on the inexorability of the tax and the visibility of all payers in a system of elected commissions, deductions, and mandatory reporting – what he termed “public forces.”74 The director of the Stavropol’ Treasury Office concluded that the solution to the expected evasion was not to moderate the tax but to make it “inescapable.”75

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The objections to Ozerov’s proposal were multiple, and most concerned the “nation of spies” of which Prussians had warned since the 1890s. S.S. Khrulev, chairman of the board of the St Petersburg International Bank, expressed it in typical terms: “Unfortunately in Russia, consciousness of civic duty is still very weakly developed”; information would be used to get even with a class antagonist or an unpleasant neighbour. Such had been the complaints in places where assessments had been made public, including Prussia, Switzerland, Australia, certain provinces in Canada, and certain states in the United States. One could request the tax declaration of Abraham Lincoln and any other payer of the 1864 tax because the public exposure was thought to be central to its effectiveness.76 (When Israel developed its system of income taxation in the 1950s, it began with published registers of payers and counted on “public indignation” and denunciation.)77 Critics added that “Russia will not be transformed from an uncultured to a cultured country simply thanks to the introduction” of the income tax. Neither the population nor the state servitors themselves will “turn out to be at the requisite height from the point of view of culture.”78 In the end the Cabinet and the Duma proposed to list likely payers in advance of the tax deadline “in the most widely distributed local periodicals,” inviting the public to add names of persons they knew should be liable. The State Council removed the provision for fear of mass denunciations and blackmail.79 It was restored by the Soviet government in 1918, citing the pre-revolutionary precedents. The objection raised by P.P. Tsitovich, an academic consultant to the conference on commercial secrecy, was more penetrating. Under any circumstances “the income tax is an importunate and intrusive [nazoilivyi] tax” with “a widely implemented penetration by the representatives of the fisc in private proprietary relations.” Implicating the population in this investigation, with an image of state-society harmony in which “the population itself will help identify hidden incomes,” was “naive.” Full publicity and popular participation would not limit coercion; nor would the full merger of state and public functions do so; exposure would remove the limits on coercion and pit payer against payer. Transparency had been a pipe dream of the French fiscal reformers of the eighteenth century who had recommended a union of the person and the state in conditions of pure “light” and “truth,” where (as Baker puts it) societies would have “less need to be ruled.”80 In fact, countered Tsitovich, it would be the occasion for greater coercion because the person inhabiting the state had no protection from the state. It would invite the population to practice coercion through the state and on the state’s behalf, wielding the state’s powers of investigation in an all-out pitting of citizen against citizen and a culture of “denunciation, blackmail, and chicanery of all kinds.” Lacking boundaries and delimitations, the theoretical reconciliation of the person with the state would be a nightmare of atomization and lawlessness.81

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Tsitovich’s formulation put the matter starkly: resisting the state was an i­mpossibility if all persons and functions were conducted within the state in ­conditions of complete transparency. Resisting the state was the simpler proposition, however. The vexing questions were different: Could the citizen resist other citizens? Could the citizen resist the state that he comprised, which was to say, could the citizen resist himself? The Income Tax and the Great War The income tax had always been argued as a mix of political imperative, civic mobilization, individualization, and transparency – and, lest we forget, revenue. It is fair to say that when the tax was finally passed in April 1916, its political implications had overwhelmed its fiscal origins. To be sure, the war-time crisis was in large measure a fiscal one because the state had renounced its single largest source of revenue, the vodka monopoly (chapter 7), leaving a gap of almost one billion rubles, or 30 per cent, in its regular budget. By 1915 the war was costing 8 billion or so rubles in additional military spending. In the end, both would be covered by borrowing and by leaving the gold standard in order to print unbacked notes, contributing to an inflationary spiral that halved the value of the ruble by late 1916. The inflation had everything to do with the break-down of urban and rural exchange and the urban shortages in particular that would contribute to the revolutions of February and October 1917.82 In this context the revenue from the income tax was paltry. The projected annual revenue of 25–40 million rubles in 1906, adjusted to 64 million in 1909, and raised to 75 million rubles by the new proposals of 1914, or even the estimate of 130 million in 1915, which accounted for a wider pool of payers and inflation – these were capable of financing Russia’s military campaign for perhaps a week or compensating for less than a tenth of the gap in the regular budget; it was a drop in the ocean if military spending was included.83 The best one could say in fiscal terms was that the tax would be maintained after the war as something “organic and permanent” and might be expanded over time into a major source of state revenue; at worst it would be an annoyance that cost more to collect than it promised in revenue.84 In the meantime, contemporaries appreciated it almost entirely as a form of mobilization and integration – “to show the enemy our strength”85 – and specifically as a way to implicate more people in the affairs of the Russian state, to include those who had shirked, and to make more of the population accessible to the state and visible to the treasury. As the right-wing Duma deputy Snezhkov put it in 1915, “the introduction of the income tax is not so much a fiscal as a political and social measure.”86 Very often the rhetoric and the law took on a punitive aspect, directed in the first instance at the very wealthy, who in turn

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understood it as an attack on themselves, and rightly so. In previous years Russian experts had been anxious to make the tax universalistic and universal, affecting more people and avoiding the class tinge. Now contempt was directed at industrialists and merchants, those who paid few taxes in the past or were making large profits by supplying the army.87 The highest marginal rate had been set at 5.0 per cent of income in the bill of 1907 but was raised in the final law to 12.5 per cent. Alongside the business taxes and the war-profits tax of 13 May 1916 that applied to businesses, the combined marginal rate would be up to 90.0 per cent on the profits of enterprises.88 For some deputies this had a useful socio-political effect of levelling the large fortunes. It would help avert the American reality in which several “billionaires” controlled most of the economy and controlled the politicians, a decidedly un-Russian translation of economic into political power.89 At the very least, this was the imposition of basic fairness, a sharing in the state’s expenses in accordance with one’s capacities. No doubt entrepreneurs would lower that rate by the usual practices of deductions and false accounting, but this was not the political climate for overt resistance. Faced with renewed and more open hostility from all state institutions and all sides of the political spectrum – the State Council, the Duma, the ministries, and the liberal and nationalist parties, not to mention socialists – the industrialists could only beg for a combined ceiling of 50 per cent tax on profits.90 In a related attack on privilege, the income tax would also be the occasion to finally tax directly the noble landowners who had used their privileges to pay less land tax per acre than their peasant neighbours had paid. Now the tax would be assessed and administered by the state alone, without the help of the local institutions dominated by that same landowning gentry. There would be elaborate provisions for translating the incomes in kind of the agriculturalist into money equivalents.91 In a last gasp of the old regime, landowners continued to argue for exemption into 1916 in both houses of the legislature, by which time they were over-ruled by the majority who pointed out that landowners earning tens of thousands of rubles per year still only paid nominal taxes on land. Deputies like Bublikov warned that the Duma was yielding not to liberalism but to socialism and ochlocracy, which to him were the same thing. Snezhkov and Prince Sviatopolk-Mirskii complained to the last that the landowning class was being exterminated by progressive rates on “low incomes” of 10,000–20,000 rubles.92 By defending landowners, they insisted, they were protecting peasants as well. The peasant deputies in the chamber were unimpressed: “God save us from our friends, but we will deal with our enemies ourselves.”93 And so they did, sooner than anyone could have guessed.

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The landed aristocrats were right in spite of their motivations: the target of the measure was more than extreme wealth. It applied to anyone who was thought to be paying too little tax, including the free professions and ultimately the wage-earners and peasants. This was accomplished by manipulating the exemption level in conditions of inflation. The 1,000 ruble exemption to which the Cabinet had agreed in 1907 was a technique to exclude many of the free professions, many salary-earners, and virtually all wage earners and peasants. In 1914 Bark proposed an exemption of 700 rubles, which would have doubled the estimated pool of payers from 700,000 to 1,400,000 but increased revenue by 5–10 million rubles – a negligible sum that would surely be erased by the added cost of assessing and collecting tax from so many small payers.94 In 1915 the State Council went further with a proposal for 500 inflationary rubles, which meant perhaps 300 rubles in constant 1913 rubles – sure to affect factory workers, peasant households, day-workers, traders, and even peddlers and stall owners. Now even Bark objected that it was well-nigh impossible to assess such payers. The State Duma demurred that the military and political moment was too delicate to initiate such an intrusive measure with such unstable populations. The majority rested on 1,000 rubles, or about 600 pre-war rubles at the moment of the vote in August 1915. The compromise reached in 1916 was 850 rubles, which by then meant about 425 pre-war rubles and was still likely to encompass much of the adult population, at least in principle.95 A Labour deputy rose in the Duma in 1915 to demand an even lower exemption: the tax would become “an indicator of civic and political rightfulness,” and the working classes should rush to pay it rather than avoid it. Taxing the poor would bring them that much closer to the equal vote.96 More people would pay, wrote Deputy Minister Pokrovskii, less to satisfy the need for revenue and more as come-uppance for the past shirking that was now unacceptable. “It strikes at the pocket of the well-off classes, no matter what the political party to which they belong. This tax affects the interests of landowners and factory owners, capitalists and the representatives of the free professions who so far pay no direct taxes save the negligible apartment tax.”97 In the process the state was creating a new kind of relationship with its subjects based on direct encounter and transparency: “the state stands, finally, face to face [litso k litsu] with the payer.”98 The economist M. Bogolepov anticipated “a direct recourse to the units of the national economy.” With secrecy lifted and information gathering perfected, with collectives and estate institutions circumvented, “the state is shortening the path from the treasury to the pocket of the payer.” More than that: “At a time when the state opens not only the pocket of the payer but the heart of the citizen, it is appropriate to proceed by the most straight and open path.”99

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Inspectors well appreciated the implications. Once hampered by traditional privileges of secrecy and obscurity, for the first time they were allowed by the new tax to have direct and unfettered access to individual payers. True, admitted the Kiev provincial congress of inspectors in early February 1917, the tax had to begin with concrete information about a person’s incomes, and in this sense “the burden of proof ” (tiazhest’ dokazatel’stva) rested with the organs of the fisc. But this meant very little because the payer was already visible to the inspectors and the commissions: “to that end the law gives to the tax institutions extremely abundant material, and it does not stop before the lifting of credit secrecy.”100 These practices were already in place for other taxes, Petrograd inspectors noted at their meeting, and would now be consolidated into a single personal assessment and expanded to many more people.101 Quickly the local Treasury Offices began to report how many “persons” they had discovered by the new methods, the swathes of population they had “mastered” (osvoili). In Vologda province, the inspectors reported in 1915 that the population had increased by 57.9 per cent since 1909; they meant that the units of taxation had increased, as new instructions required the inspectors to count not only properties and territorial collectives but also tens of thousands of persons.102 Asked to estimate “popular income” in 1909, the Don Region Treasury Office had reported bluntly that the Don existed as a territory but not a coherent population, fractured as it was by estates and estate-like ethnicities and religions. There was no one popular income to report because there was no one people. Cossacks in particular cited their corporate autonomy and refused to divulge information or pay taxes directly to state representatives. How, asked the treasury director, was one to force information out of such “insular” groups as Cossacks? The issue was not an entrepreneurial class but some rarefied bodies such as the Novocherkassk Society of Don Cossack Traders. The Ministry of Finances wrote back that it was now the task of the Treasury Office to overcome the insularity (zamknutost’) of the population by “revealing” its income. In 1915 the same Don Region reported the “discovery” through assessment of 17,579 “new persons.”103 The treasury officials in Baku reported the large numbers of people who had once been concealed but whom the inspectors had “made known” (privodili v izvestnost’).104 With great ceremony did the inspectors of Petrograd and Khar’kov report that they were carrying all the data to a new section of the Treasury Office, collapsing myriad reports on incomes from a variety of institutions and assessments into a single catalogue organized by name. The personal file cards (lichnye kartochki) were more than a new filing system; they were a new form of government.105 Properties that were dispersed over different provinces and tax circuits and had been liable to separate taxes would now be assessed in the

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aggregate under the name of a single owner and taxed progressively; this embodied the membership of the owner in the largest whole, the state, and there was no internal border over which he or she could escape.106 In their excitement, inspectors entered prisoner of war camps to ask captured German and Austro-Hungarian officers to complete their forms; their stipends with room and board exceeded the exemption level. The Department of Assessed Levies concluded that they should be exempt because they were not Russian, as this tax sought out citizens, not prisoners.107 Russians living abroad, however, should be claimed, so that Russian subjects in Harbin would fill out their forms along with the employees of Russian shipping agencies in Piraeus; to do otherwise would be to renounce them.108 Down the avenue at the Royal Palace in Athens, Queen Olga of the Hellenes was asked as a Russian subject to complete her forms (her income was 97,404 rubles), as was all the extended imperial family with properties and incomes in Russia who listed the upkeep of their palaces as deductions. What to do with Nicholas II, meanwhile, was problematic: exempted before February 1917 because he was Russia’s one and only true citizen, he was exempted in March because he was the only Russian who was not a citizen.109 The February Revolution gave new meaning to the work of the inspectors; payers and inspectors alike referred to their new tax as the small price to pay for the new freedoms – an altruism made easier by the inflation that reduced their real tax bills by the day. New commissions convened in February 1917, and the surviving files show a good deal of co-operation between the inspectors and the elected commission members. Together they painstakingly reviewed declarations and verified them against pools of information from the state and private sectors. Paid informers were brought in as eksperty to comment on declarations from other persons in their professions, including lawyers and personal physicians who worked with untraceable cash, and priests who lived in part on alms. Priests informed on priests, lawyers on lawyers, and whether this was citizenship or spying can only be a matter of opinion. The commissions held separate meetings for each profession, and the one for the restaurant and hotel employees was not rare in its detail: “Gruzdev indicated that the monthly pay in tips in 1916 for employees of the cafeteria at the train station reached 200–300 rubles, for waiters at Golden Anchor up to 200 rubles, for doormen up to 200 rubles, for employees at the hotels and the canteens and coffee shops 150–200 rubles.”110 Based on these norms, assessments would be raised for those who had declared, and imposed on those who had not declared at all. For inspectors in particular this was a moment of professional realization, the chance to apply to all individuals the principles they had evolved since the 1880s. Like almost any occupation group in 1917, the inspectors formed their

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own union, with the paradoxical mission to seize on universal citizenship to represent themselves as distinct and self-governing. Like all occupational groups, they held an all-Russia congress, theirs in August 1917, to formulate a common mission and claim their own rights and autonomies. With tributes to Bunge (the founder of their “corporation” in 1885) and affirmations of their autonomy from both the government and the people, they promised to guard the interests of both with scientific objectivity and civic commitment. Citizenship had made every person a component part of the state. Philo­ sophically, announced the chair of the congress, the revolution “changed the old forms of state existence” from one of collective obligation to one of individual responsibility. This was the culmination of that general merger of personal and state functions, whereby government was taken over by every citizen, and the state entered into every citizen. The fall of autocracy “decentralized authority” to each person, so that “the work of each citizen now acquires a different meaning and character.” Individual considerations became state matter; payers would be forced to “re-examine themselves” and their “personal budgets” as “citizens” who together comprised the state budget.111 They would do what they could to compensate for the state disintegration occurring around them. In vain did the minister of finances tell the congress that the inspectors themselves embodied that disintegration. For all their complaints about the refusals of individual payers and about the collective evasion of the peasantry, the inspectors were withdrawing into a separate “medieval guild” and demanding autonomy from the state that paid them and gave them their laws and instructions. The minister had no more power over the inspectors than the inspectors had over taxpayers, manifest in the plummeting tax returns for 1917. Direct tax receipts fell by 33 per cent for the land tax, 41 per cent for urban properties, and 19 per cent for the industrial tax – the last being always the most difficult to avoid.112 The new income tax came in on target, more or less, but it should have been much higher owing to inflation and the new categories of payers who were liable. The Provisional Government by summer was considering greater coercive measures to force the population to pay.113 “Only the tax vise and a strengthened tax pressure” could force them, declared Finance Minister Nekrasov. Labour Minister Skobelev borrowed Kokovtsov’s phrase, “merciless taxation,” and elaborated that the income tax should claim all income from interest and all profits of enterprises. His other demand was open ended: the financial emergency required “the interference in all regions of economic life” in search of revenue.114 Related efforts to “register” the rural population for the purposes of grain collection and added taxation, directed at peasants as “the obligatory duty of every citizen,” degenerated into frustrated comments on the withdrawal of

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Figure 6.1 Vladimir Nikolaevich Kokovtsov. Departament okladnykh sborov, 1863–1913. St Petersburg, 1913. Photo by Anthony ­Accardi / Blue Rhino, Inc.

the peasantry from the “national economy.” It culminated in the decision of the Provisional Government to seize grain.115 New taxes were added on rural buildings, but these too could not be collected.116 By now it was widely held that peasants paid the fewest taxes in the aggregate or per capita, and now they were withdrawing into their local economies by refusing to market their grain, harming the national economy in its moment of existential crisis, and by refusing to pay even the modest taxes they owed. Already in 1915 imperial officials, frustrated by the early signs of peasant

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exemption and refusal, had decided to apply the income tax to peasants as a form of forcible inclusion. As V.I. Gurko declared before the State Council, the purpose of the income tax was to “capture in the tax net the popular masses.”117 Kokovtsov, retired into the State Council, called it a policy of “merciless taxation” (nalogovaia besposhchadnost’). They knew at the same time that the proposition was filled with political meaning but was logistically unachievable. For it was Kokovtsov who had insisted in 1906 that the exemption level be kept at 1,000 rubles or raised to 1,500 rubles because peasants and workers could not be located and lacked the civic preparation; however, in 1916 that very same Kokovtsov argued the opposite case as a member of the State Council – an exemption of 700 rubles (350 in 1913 rubles) in the interests of mobilization, not revenue.118 Bark also stated that the purpose was not financial and that the tax and the war were occasions and instruments to introduce equality, universality, and fairness.119 At best the tax would serve as a device for locating and registering wealth that may be claimed in some other measure – food supply, for example – part of the larger “registration” of the national economy that was becoming a byword in technocratic parlance.120 It would reach its apogee in Soviet power. Russia and the Modern State Critics warned in shrill tones of the dangers of extreme personalization and inexorable integration, but their point was expressed in less alarmist, sometimes gleeful, terms as the Hegelian dialectic. The interplay of the universal with the particular and their unification in a new kind of state had animated much of the fiscal debate since the 1880s, and no doubt most of the actors involved had had their exposures to Hegel as university students. In early 1914 the economist I.I. Levin elaborated before a well-educated audience at the Society of Financial Reforms. European tax law was crafted to reveal the distinctiveness of the person and recognize the differences among people as economic actors, thereby facilitating calibrated assessments and progressive taxation. In this sense the tax was a celebration of the person in all his or her distinctiveness. But the new focus on the person was only part of a process that was meant to produce equivalency and aggregation. At the very same time, these persons lost their distinctiveness, and all were made legible and equivalent, and in this sense uniform and malleable, by shared standards of measurement. “The masses are depersonalized” (massy obezlicheny), be it as “a mass of soldiers” or “the armed people” or the “national economy” (narodnoe khoziaistvo, emphasis in the original), which allowed for the community of the state and the people. The looming European war would be a “mass moment” requiring extraordinary

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measures, but those measures would become permanent; they reflected a permanent “mass state.”121 The proposition that Russia was sharing in a larger state transformation should be taken seriously. Russian experts and officials held that Russia was participating in a European search for cohesion and mobilization and using the fisc to achieve it; that the specific practices of the Russian bureaucracy were to be observed across the continent and across the Atlantic; that these practices gave rise to similar debates over the state’s incursions into the realms of the individual and the economy; and finally that the proper boundary between government and governed was being dissolved by a notion of participatory power.122 Indeed, despite the tendency to contrast parliamentary Britain with autocratic Russia, the economist F.A. Men’kov likened them. Located on the geographic and political extremes of Europe, their similarities suggested the emergence in Europe of universalistic categories that encompassed and transcended particular interests. Quoting Lloyd George, Men’kov wrote in 1913 of a “tax revolution” sweeping across Europe, most controversially in the Liberal attack on landed interests in 1909–10 that had culminated in the defeat and reform of the House of Lords, “that club of huge pomeshchiki.” The feat was achieved not only by rallying one interest against another but also by appealing to a sense of nation and society to which all classes belonged. Each new demand for universal education in Britain and each new war scare in Germany produced an escalation of fiscal demands that overrode the Lords along with the Junkers. The same applied to the economy that was being recast as an aggregate of all economic relations rather than the sum of its antagonistic classes and corporate autonomies. Surveying the European landscape, Men’kov concluded that all national cases carried the same implication of “reforming the old regime” by fostering legal equality and recasting collectives as individuals, and re-aggregating them as members of one state.123 There was much to recommend the argument, for the income tax was part of the rise of the state, the economy, and the people as universal categories. While the French assembly was taking up the income tax from 1895 as a way to consolidate and mobilize the French populations, Durkheim was publishing his foundational works on sociology – Rules of Sociological Method (1895), The Normality of Crime (1895), and Suicide (1897). Durkheim’s quest for stability in a society of equivalent and measurable individuals had its counterpart in a fiscal proposal that treated all persons as interchangeable and fully integrated into society. “The categories of the mind are rooted in the arrangements of the society of which they are a part,” he proclaimed, a statement that was equally political, philosophical, and for our purposes fiscal.124 In Britain, George Harwood told outraged Conservatives in 1909 on the eve of their historic defeat in the

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House of Lords: “The whole country must be regarded as one. The capital fund of the country, whether it goes to capital, or to pay wages or to food, is all one common fund, and we do not diminish it in the least by passing a portion of it to one class of the population rather than to another class.” This was new, rejoined an astute listener, in that “the social value” was now determining the justice of any individual or private claim.125 What was good for the whole was good for the part; a tax paid by the one was good for the other in so far as she or he was an integral part of the nation. This relationship was ongoing: taxes ceased to be an annual state foray into society in search of revenue to cover annual expenditure; state and society were enmeshed in a permanent relationship of interdependence. Asquith told Parliament in 1907 that taxes were an obligation that outlived the majorities of a given parliamentary session, a given majority party, or a given budget vote; they reflected the permanence of the state and the society as well as their ongoing mutuality. Everywhere, individual rights were being complicated by a new appreciation of the person; if this was the era of sociology that spoke of a coherent whole, the turn of the century was also the era of psychoanalysis with its proposition that persons were personalities, composed of compartments that rendered them legible, partitive, and malleable. This made all persons not equal but equivalent. Ultimately this notion of personhood broke down the barriers of the individual, making every personality a manifestation of the larger whole, as both Durkheim and Freud argued from their different perspectives.126 In this, however, there was a tension that never entirely disappeared, because there were different ways to imagine and live universalism. The proposition that the needs of the state required the new measures was regularly countered with a reference to the distinct and competing needs of the economy, the society, and the person, an ongoing push-back to re-establish the autonomy of society and the person against the demands of the state.127 The state was not always the embodiment of the population. In England payers cited the universal right to private property against the growing demands of the treasury.128 In France the “dignity of the nation” was under attack by a state that was not its synonym, and indeed citizenship and nationality were not always the same thing.129 Privacy and personal dignity moderated the German imperial tax of 1913, even as the likes of Adam Müller insisted that “one cannot be imagined outside the state,” “the totality of all human concerns.”130 In other words, Europe had a plurality of universalistic categories that could supersede particular interests, making it possible to argue for or against a given proposition on the grounds of state, national, social, economic, and personal interest.131 As Brubaker and Cooper observe, the state “does not monopolize

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the production and diffusion of identifications and categories; and those that it does produce may be contested.” Modern history produced “the hard work and long struggles over identification” situated in “families, firms, schools, social movements, and bureaucracies of all kinds.”132 It mattered that the Russian debate reinforced the state’s primacy in conceptions of unity and integration. The alternatives to the state regularly became its subsets. The idea of the state as the “aggregate of popular interests” (sovokupnost’ narodnykh interesov) was suggestive in this connection. The phrase originated with Bunge and was publicized in 1906 by the Ministry of Finances as it sought to describe the budget as a totality.133 There had always been a tendency, both in Russia and abroad, to equate what the state registered (and taxed) with the economy as such, making the economy a creation of its own statistics; the economy became the state’s mirror rather than a view of something separate. There was a new tendency, most noticeably in Russia, to assume that the state budget was potentially a view of all economic activity, estimates of national income snapshots of all persons added together for one or another state undertaking. “National accounting” could mean a measure of all income and property or it could mean that all incomes and properties existed in relation to the state. “National income” was primarily the instrumental creation of states everywhere as they prepared for income taxes. By the same token, social and public needs were viewed through the prism of the state. When the Russian government made its public case for new revenue to pay for expanded compulsory education and new welfare provisions, these were presented as “state needs.”134 Those Russians who might have been motivated to offer an alternative vision – bankers, merchants, and industrialists, those who may even have believed in the principles of privacy and separateness that would also guard their personal fortunes – were historically inarticulate and from 1905 poorly positioned to do so; only the state had saved them from extinction. With impressive uniformity they too affirmed the primacy of “state interests.” For the same reasons of political crisis, many would-be oppositionists had positive reasons to agree with state officials; 1905 was fresh. Mikhail Alekseenko of the moderate liberal Octobrists, a finance professor at Khar’kov University, and chair of the Duma Budget Commission, gave the keynote speech to the Society of Financial Reforms in 1910 on the need for new kinds of taxes. There were “public needs,” to be sure, though as Russians competed for resources and passed burdens on to others, the free play of social and individual antagonisms spelled “anarchy.” Alekseenko thus began and ended his speech by calling them all “demands of state” (potrebnosti gosudarstvennye), and a social good was pursued by and through the state itself as a matter of stability and order. The income tax would be “a school from which state activists will emerge.”135 Russia’s civil society (obshchestvennost’)

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was weak or non-existent, Ozerov agreed, but this was not a deterrent to the adoption of European practices; the attributes of civil society, including openness, personalization, and personal accountability, could all be introduced by the state and practised within it.136 The state might substitute itself for society and incorporate society into itself, as historians have astutely observed, but society went along.137 That there was not a regime of individual rights to accompany a regime of personal taxation was one of the specificities that gave liberty to a more ambitious vision of the state. Autocrat and liberal critic could agree that the demands of the treasury and the state superseded any individual refusal. The franchise was narrowed, conflicts over constitutional prerogatives erupted with regularity, and the autocrat declined ultimately to change his title even as others refrained from using it; they preferred “Emperor.” But the idea of the state, both as the instrument and the locus of integration, as a force that persons encountered, and the space where persons existed, allowed these actors to envision a unity that was otherwise elusive. Finally, Russia was not unique in its use of the war to introduce full-fledged personal income taxation. All belligerent powers extended it as part of the conscription of wealth that accompanied military call-up. The model again was Britain, where rates were increased and exemptions lowered. The tax yielded £584.7 million in 1918; that was a seventeen-fold increase over the £34.2 million that was collected in 1906, the year that Parliament decided in principle to make it personal and progressive.138 Indeed the specific idea that the poor should also be taxed even at nominal rates was common in Russia and other countries before 1914 and was put into practice during total mobilization. Initially Lloyd George’s tactic of 1909–10 had been to increase direct taxation on the wealthy and in proportion to their wealth, pitting small landed minorities against majorities that were scandalized by the exemption of aristocratic wealth.139 The universalistic reasoning could work in the opposite direction as well. To exempt lower-income groups, Liberals had long complained, was “demoralizing” in that it excluded them from an important part of civic life. As Asquith told Parliament in 1907, “if we are to have social reform we must be ready to pay for it, and by we, I mean the whole nation.” To Lloyd George, speaking in 1911, even this was inadequate: “I have never had any sympathy with the idea that that someone has got to be exempt because he is earning a small amount.” Even small payments would serve the political purpose. Herbert Smith of the Miners’ Federation agreed: “If we had more direct taxation we would have more active workers than we have.”140 The Labour Party had been silent on the matter because their demand for lower taxes on workers tallied poorly with their simultaneous demand for equal political participation. Drawn

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into power in the war-time coalition and implicated in the state’s agenda, the Labour Party accepted an income tax on the higher wages in 1915. The amounts were symbolic, but symbolism was the point: the small rates “raise political responsibility and interest” among workers.141 Here was a strong state if ever there was one, with unmatched capacities to locate incomes and earners and tax them at calibrated, personalized rates. Russia was different not in its intentions but in its sheer capacities, as well as the absence of possible bulwarks that would have limited the reach of the state machinery. The extension of the income tax to peasants in 1916 (chapter 9) was one example. By now the state was mobilizing to locate more wealth, especially land and the grain that grew on it, in a campaign of “registration” that would for the first time give the state a view of its rural populations, their production and surpluses, and a way to seize it if needed. But the war would not be an occasion to capitalize on past familiarity with the national economy, certainly not its agrarian majority; the state would somehow achieve familiarity for the first time.

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PART 3 The Politics of Obscurity: Peasant Taxes, Excises, and the Vodka Monopoly to 1917

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7 Everyone and No One: Indirect Taxes and the Vodka Monopoly to 1917

Indirect taxes were the largest source of imperial tax revenue, and when they were combined with the receipts from the state vodka monopoly of 1894, the reliance was overwhelming. The large revenue speaks to the development of a true money and exchange economy and of sophisticated methods of surveillance on the part of the state. The movement from excises on vodka to an outright monopoly suggests that the new proximity of state and economy could lead to a more encompassing state claim on whole sectors and the people who inhabited them. The temptation to use the fiscal tools to change mass and personal habits of consumption was irresistible from the outset. The results were mixed or unmeasurable, but the anxieties over class, personal self-control, public order, and gender that drove the effort revealed the new ambition to achieve greater social control. The anxiety and ambition were not unique to Russia, but the use of the state to express them was. The result in 1914 was the end of vodka sales and a fiscal disaster. Revenue, Per Capita Rates, and the Limits of Social Reform Indirect taxes offered the state a measure of the modern exchange economy and a space in which to reform it. They also offered a view of the population and a space in which to reform people. The idea that the state might re-engineer its population through the economy was increasingly common in the late empire, as it was across Europe; consider the Stolypin property reforms as an attempt to change peasant relations and mentality; factory regulation as a way to protect and pacify workers and alter their relations with their employers; and the regulation of the grain and dairy trades as a means to eliminate petty middlemen from the countryside.1

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The excise system can be appreciated on that same spectrum, and it was a more intensive enmeshment of state power, production, trade, and consumption. It suggested that socio-economic goals might be pursued on a mass scale and comprehensively, touching any person who produced, sold, bought, or consumed a given commodity – in short, potentially everyone. Measures ranged from the monitoring and regulation of the taxed production at breweries and distilleries from the 1860s to the cartelization of the sugar industry in the 1890s, and from the nationalization of the vodka trade in 1894 to alcohol prohibition in 1914. Production and exchange were the areas affected most directly and demonstrably. Officials, professionals, and public activists also mounted sustained campaigns to alter whole cultures of commerce, custom, and personal habit as well. The vodka monopoly of 1894 shows how far this reasoning could go; the ban on alcohol sales that the state monopoly made possible in 1914 took the reasoning even further. Contemporaries sometimes ignored the truism that indirect taxes were in the first instance a way to raise money and that in Russia most of the state budget came from these sources. They included excises on sugar, tobacco, cigarette paper and tubing for papyrosy,2 kerosene, and matches. Vodka revenues had included excises since the 1860s, and the state monopoly on the trade in distilled alcohol since 1894. Calculations of the share that these revenues occupied in the budget depend on how one counts the state-owned railways, tariffs (on imported tea in particular), and stamp and contract duties; these were not called taxes but often had tax-like properties and generated net revenue for the state. Any estimate will show the ratio of direct to indirect taxes in Russia to be extraordinarily low compared with that of other Great Powers, with Russia occupying the one extreme of a continental gradient and Britain the other. The usual estimates limit their scope to formal taxes and vodka revenue and exclude the state railways, and place the ratio of direct to indirect taxes at 1:4 or 1:5; in Britain by that measure it was about 1:1.3 The reader can judge by the official figures for 1913, presented in table 7.1. Counting the railways, they show total revenue of 3.4 billion rubles, with a breakdown of 15 per cent direct taxes to 81 per cent indirect taxes, plus 4 per cent in extraordinary revenues. Sidorov offers a lower ratio. He reasons that fees on transactions and deeds (poshliny and sbory) were as indirect as excises, railway revenues, and vodka sales and concludes that in 1913 92 per cent of all state revenue was indirect in the sense of being non-assessed (neokladnye).4 One may quibble given that fees and levies were somewhat graduated and calculated and may be considered direct taxes; they were after all assessed on transactions. However, his categorization is defensible given the relatively new insistence that the modern

Everyone and No One  209 Table 7.1 Indirect Revenues by Category and Share in All State Revenues in 1913, Whole Empire (nearest thousand rubles) Type of tax DIRECT REVENUE: Taxes, fees, and levies on persons, properties, and transactions* INDIRECT REVENUE

Rubles

Per cent of total revenue

503,747,000

14.7%

2,776,723,000

80.9%

Of which: Excises (including vodka excise) and customs

708,101,000

20.6%

State regalia Of which state vodka sales, except excise

1,024,882,000 899,299,000

29.9% 26.2%

State properties Of which state-owned railways

1,043,740,000 813,604,000

30.4% 23.7%

136,888,000

4%

VARIOUS AND EXTRAORDINARY REVENUES Total

3,417,358,000

Source: Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, vyp. 1915 g., 33–5. * The total for direct revenues is higher than the figures in tables 3.1, 3.2, 8.1, and 8.2 because the higher figures include sundry revenues. They are used here because they cannot be disaggregated from the total for direct revenues and should be treated as notional.

tax should be individualized, personalized, calibrated, and progressive. Cer­ tainly this was the view of the Cabinet from 1905 when it offered Britain as the model of an advanced fiscal system on the grounds that more taxes were direct there, and offered Russia itself as the antithesis (chapters 5–6). Duma members after 1905 likewise considered Russia’s use of indirect taxes a shameful symptom of poor government that produced impersonality and regressiveness.5 Some parties demanded the full repeal of all indirect taxes and their replacement with a comprehensive and universal income tax, with an exemption of only 400 rubles.6 While other Great Powers had greater recourse to direct taxes, Russia’s reliance on indirect taxes had been growing. In the 1850s, so far as it is possible to estimate, the ratio of indirect to direct taxes was about 1:1, and revenues from vodka (as tax farming) approached half of the budget; the movement by 1913 to a ratio 9:1 (all revenue) or 4:1 (all taxes and the vodka monopoly but not the railways) was dramatic. Given Russia’s unique reliance on vodka revenues that alone made up about a third of the state budget, sarcasm about dependency and addiction abounded: “the budget is an alcoholic.”

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More than any other commodity, vodka brought public health and social policy to the centre of the fiscal system – or the fiscal system to the centre of public health policy – because vodka raised questions of state complicity in perceived popular excess, mass alcoholism, and degeneration. Some outstanding studies have delved into the policy, public health, and sociological dimensions of the alcohol question;7 this chapter focuses on the enmeshment of state fiscal power and social policy and on the uses of fiscal tools to act on the population. Via the vodka monopoly, the entire matter was placed in state hands, and state control produced the possibility and the hope for an easy solution to the “drinking question.” It was here that the state, with much public participation, pushed the boundaries of state involvement in the economy the furthest and indeed offered a model of state-managed trade and production. The state monopoly also opened up for the likes of Leo Tolstoy the possibility, for the first time, of outright prohibition.8 Indirect taxation was at once a fiscal and a social proposition; it was precisely its ubiquity and reach that made its use in social policy irresistible. In any number of countries it was appreciated or derided as the main point of contact between the treasury and the lower economic classes who paid excises on alcohol, at a time when the affluent paid more of their taxes directly and according to their means.9 In Russia the vodka stall was probably the single largest point of contact between the state and the population, touching more people than army recruitment, tax collection, or law enforcement, and it entailed more sustained interaction than did the school. What better place to collect the population’s money, what better way to teach one or another virtue, from abstinence and religion to self-control and industrial work ethics? Different visions of economic system had attended the excise system from its inception. These included (more or less successively) laissez-faire economics in the 1860s, when the state sought to foster a self-reliant private sector whether or not the private sector wanted it; a liking for state-sponsored oligopoly and big business in petroleum and sugar-beet refining from the 1870s, promoted as a way to temper the chaos of competition and the inefficiencies of the petty producer and trader; statization in the 1890s in the vodka monopoly (and the railways, if one were to treat them as revenue), which removed the market from sectors where the market did harm to imperial interests; and public health and spiritual regeneration – a heightened sense of the social good – that animated alcohol prohibition in 1914. The monopoly on grain that was introduced incrementally after 1914, and formally in 1917, followed on this logic. Broadly, it was the emergence of the idea of a national economy in the 1890s – an economy that is integral and acted as a surrogate of an ethno-national conception of the

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empire – that made such thinking possible. The economy was one of the very few ways in which the state might speak of and touch everyone.10 The movement towards greater state management at the expense of the private sector was unmistakable, part of a vision of managed development that had been propagated by the Ministry of Finances since the 1890s. The movement implied that certain social and strategic interests should be guarded from private greed and marshalled by the state, which was alone capable of standing above the fray, mediating among competing interests, and indeed encompassing within itself the population and its pursuits.11 It met with little public resistance. Conservatives appreciated state guidance and power that would limit personal greed, while liberals and socialists saw in the vodka monopoly a model of economic rationality and social welfare that might be extended to other sectors. They acted on this when they formed the Provisional Government in 1917 and promptly nationalized the grain trade, in part using the model of the vodka monopoly. The public debate before 1914 concerned not the existence of the vodka monopoly nor the enhanced role of the state in the economy as a whole; it concerned the proper deployment of state power, as critics proposed that the fisc should do much more to alter popular habit and achieve social transformation. Russians since the 1880s had been asking of taxes what they had rarely asked before: whether they could be levied in accordance with one’s means and whether they offered the tools for affecting individuals rather than faceless aggregates. Direct taxes lent themselves to this conversation well, and they were the occasion to consider birth-rates and classes, poverty and housing, earned and inherited wealth, income from rent, capital, salaries, or wages, and the difference between conscious participation and mere obeisance. Indirect taxes had a more limited reach and were hardly deliberative at all, and this accounts for the great frustration that accompanied the public debates over vodka and revenue. Not that indirect taxes were antiquated or outmoded. Quite the contrary, excise taxation and the state vodka monopoly were hallmarks of the advanced money economy and could scarcely be compared with the tax-farming systems for alcohol and salt, which were abolished during the Great Reforms. Excises depended on monetization, and they presumed specialization so that the consumer bought rather than produced vodka, fuel, or lighting. Excises required state surveillance of who produced what, and they provided a statistical view of production and trade. The revenue was entirely the product of economic exchange rather than an arbitrary impost on a separate and economically unknown sector. State revenue operated in tandem with economic activity and accompanied daily commercial exchanges rather than hindered them. Indirect

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taxes made the ancient conversation about “tax burden” (podatnoe bremia) less appropriate or urgent; it was argued that they could not by their nature be a burden at all but were part of a consumer’s choice.12 The very idea of an “impost” was brought into question because of its voluntary nature and because no one stood before the payer to demand a share of household wealth or income. The payer paid when she or he chose to buy a given product. The immediate objection to indirect taxation was that it was regressive and clumsy when it came to individualized obligations and socially calibrated policies. An excise tax was levied on the monetized part of exchange, not on incomes as such.13 In the last analysis, an excise tax spoke to the capacities of the payer only by inference, implying that a wealthier person bought more consumer goods than a poorer one. In fact, there were only so many consumer goods any one person could buy, so the idea that the excise was proportionate to income was tenuous. An excise was arithmetically equal for all consumers and accorded with a vision of political equality – since the eighteenth century French fiscal experts had thought that flat and equal taxes reflected an exactly equal civic status – but it violated the new principles of proportionality or progression. The chairman of a corporate board who was paid 20,000 rubles per year paid the same fraction of a kopeck on a box of matches as did the worker who earned 200 rubles. That neither really noticed the tax was consolation to some but smacked of concealed unfairness to others. The British move towards direct and increasingly progressive taxes was the counter-model. At the other extreme stood the United States and the Russian Empire itself. Russians analysing the U.S. income tax of 1913 measured it against the treasury’s reliance on tariffs and measured both against incomes and concluded that in the larger fiscal scheme the system was still entirely unfair, more so than in Russia.14 The unfairness of regressive taxation was part of a wider objection: the impersonality of a system that was being judged by the new standards of personalization. Excise taxes were a poor way to gain knowledge of individual subjects and influence individual behaviour; they neither required nor produced that level of familiarity. After all, the point of indirect taxes was that they were indirect of the person; they offered data on aggregate sales but very little on personal or even group habit. Fiscally the system of indirect taxation was hugely successful, and it did offer a view of broad patterns of production and exchange, but it fell on no particular individuals, only all of them, and it produced global data that could not be broken down into individual parts and were never meant to be. It offered an aggregate picture of the people, but it offered avenues to no particular person. Those looking for the engaged and visible subject, for the malleable and changing person, or for “the soul of the citizen,” were necessarily disappointed.

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The tools were crude but were used nevertheless as part of a larger impulse to improve and change people rather than to only rule them.15 Nowhere had excise regimes been used that extensively to alter social behaviour, but Russian officials and their critics genuinely believed that it was time to try. As was the case with peasant taxation (chapters 8–9), ambitions far outstripped capacities, though in this connection the incapacity had to do with the nature of this revenue, not Russian administration as such. Global social measures that had been applied to a whole polity since the 1860s were mistaken for comprehensive ones and tended for this reason to fail – at the very least their impact could not be measured – but the tendency persisted and culminated in the banning of the sale of vodka in 1914; in 1918 excises were repealed altogether. In fiscal terms the decision was catastrophic. The social policy implications were much wider, implying that the person might not be approached directly but that the world in which he or she lived might be remodelled with a view to producing a new person.16 Contemporaries spoke of a regeneration in terms that may now seem zealous or fanatical, but they should be taken seriously as a measure of contemporary ambitions. Contemporaries were only dimly aware that the global and the comprehensive were not the same thing. The confusion of the particular with the whole – the assumption that the actual person was the same as the per capita rate, that the one person could still be found in the collective aggregates, or that the aggregates represented the sum of all persons and behaviours and could be calculated as an average person who actually existed – was part and parcel of the rise of statistics that became essential in any public discussion. In these debates one could find much about the people but little about persons, and it matters that few pointed out the difference. The glaring case in point is the official and expert discussion of alcoholism, fed by the data and powers of the vodka monopoly, where a disease that all understood to be individual was addressed as a mass phenomenon affecting the people. It was part of a slippage that characterized the old regime and would also characterize the new. In the last analysis, state action was directed at class stereotypes, national types, social and cultural symbols, apocrypha, and anecdotes that lent meaning to otherwise blurry numbers. The thinking and the puzzle were intrinsic to the mass society. From Laissez-Faire to Nationalization In the 1860s indirect taxes had been the product of a laissez-faire moment in Russian history, when the state divested itself of production and minimized its regulation and instead skimmed small sums from a private sector that was encouraged to grow relatively unhindered (chapter 2). The taxes were paid by

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consumers who might not notice the kopecks that were added to the rubles they spent. Bunge in the 1880s was a partisan of perfected direct taxes, but he permitted an increase in excises in order to pay for the lowering of peasant poll, quit-rent, and land taxes.17 Witte was a champion of excises and wary of direct taxes. His support for the income tax proposal of 1892, the work of his predecessor, was faint at best when he presented it to the State Council, and he probably ensured its defeat. He contented himself with the symbolic apartment tax that introduced the principles of declaration and progression but not the mass inquisition of a universal income tax, or its mass revenue. The big revenue would come from new and higher taxes on consumption.18 Witte expanded the weight of excises and tariffs in the budget because they were easy and cheap to administer and politically safe; they entailed the surveillance of hundreds of producers and importers rather than millions of retailers or tens of millions of consumers. In fiscal terms, excises offered that daily, massive, and predictable flow of revenue on which any modern treasury depended – “the colossal sums that today’s budgets demand.” Witte also took the increase in excise revenue to mean that the Russian standard of living was improving. Tax fell on items that were not biological necessities, which meant to him that peasants in particular were choosing to buy them and were newly able to do so.19 At the very least, the increase reflected specialization and monetization; Transchel, who concentrates on the social dimensions, is aware more than most that the modern debate over alcohol was made possible by a monetized economy.20 Looking at the whole period of 1880–1901, one can see that indirect taxes more than doubled while direct taxes grew by less than a third.21 The full-time employees of the Excise Oversight (Aktsiznyi nadzor) rose from 2,520 in 1887 to 8,805 in 1897, while the inspectorate of direct taxes still numbered under a thousand.22 Had the issue been purely revenue, then the system of indirect taxation would have been the great proof of the soundness of Russian fiscal policies and of the great advances in monetization, specialization, market exchange, and statistics on which excise taxation depended. Certainly Witte believed so,23 and economic historians have confirmed a picture of growing exchange and monetization in urban and rural regions.24 Instead the heavy reliance on indirect taxes was taken as a symptom of a state that could not measure the paying capacities of its population and indeed had few direct contacts with most of its subjects.25 Regressiveness was of concern to certain but not all writers, many of whom were satisfied with the political fairness implied in arithmetically equal taxes and the belief that an indirect tax on non-necessities could not be a burden in the traditional sense.26 After 1905, Duma deputies set aside their misgivings and tended to approve increases in excises more readily because the excises

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were felt less personally than direct taxes and were less politically fraught. A half-kopeck increase on the rate for several pounds of tobacco seemed negligible, but it translated into several million rubles in added revenue.27 Nevertheless, even Duma deputies shared in a larger diagnosis, which they repeated like a mantra: an unfair regressiveness reflected the distance between government and person and precluded a more direct correlation between socioeconomic standing and state need. Hence the government’s renewed attention to direct taxes – the urban properties tax as reformed in 1910 and the personal income tax that was proposed in 1907. State policy from 1905 never renounced excise taxes, and the treasury could scarcely afford to, but it might compensate with a more calibrated and progressive system of direct assessment.28 Times had certainly changed, and the very nature of excise taxation was inimical to the new times. Indirect taxation in the 1860s and 1870s had been lauded as a guardian of political equality and liberty; it cast all as consumers rather than as members of a status group, forced exactly equal contributions, and ignored the person of the payer. By the turn of the century this was its great weakness: it avoided the person of the payer and was arithmetically equal but not proportional or progressive.29 In that same vein, the tariffs on consumer goods that functioned as quasi-indirect taxes by levying rates on imports were fiscally satisfying with total revenues of 353 million rubles in 1913, of which tea was the largest item,30 but tariffs offered the least opportunity for influencing consumption patterns since state regulation ended at the empire’s borders. Not that indirect taxation was without its potential for economic or social intervention. Excise taxation implied a different way to regulate the economy, not a way to dispense with regulation, and controls and limits appeared as soon as the new excises were in place in the 1860s. The trade in vodka offered the most comprehensive view of the possibilities and limits. Despite the freeing of the vodka trade in the 1860s in an excise system, there were myriad attempts to control consumption, beginning with the initial legislation of 1863 that limited the hours and locations of points of sale. These either had no provable effect or produced unintended consequences. Limiting sales from stalls in order to reduce public drunkenness sent the trade to the kabak (drinking dens) where workers and peasants could drink for days on end. Bans on the kabak in 1885 sent vodka to the brothels. Limits on the brothels sent vodka to the taverns, which were meant to make drinking part of a civilized meal but which looked more and more like kabaki and brothels where men could eat, drink, and buy sex for days on end. Re-allowing stalls to encourage take-out and home drinking with one’s family seemed to produce entire families of drunks and more public drunkenness, which brought the regulations full circle to new limits on the stalls.31

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Some public activists and journalists had agitated since the 1880s for an end to the private trade in alcohol altogether, reasoning that the excesses were the product of an amoral pursuit of profit. Witte agreed as he leaped on the enormous potential for revenue. In his public arguments the two issues, public health and fiscal policy, were entwined: heavy drinking “is a danger to the country’s economic well-being and thus weakens the steadiness of the state budget.”32 The positive statement was that “the healthy financial economy depends closely on the economic well-being of the population,” which was harmed by excessive drinking.33 Economics, finances, and public health were different ways of looking at the same population, a reasoning that produced the state monopoly on the sale of vodka. It was approved in 1894 by Alexander III (a suspected alcoholic, no less), introduced in four provinces in the Urals and Volga regions, and extended to most of the empire by 1904. Central Asia, the Transcaucasus, Kamchatka, the Amur, and the Pacific coast were excluded because of local custom and fears of stimulating cross-border boot-legging. In all other regions of the empire the state maintained its excise taxes at the point of production in private distilleries, heavily regulated those distilleries, and also operated its own distilleries. All other aspects of the industry became state monopolies, including the wholesale and retail trades, the purification and mixing of the raw distillate, the manufacture of corks, and the bottling. State stores replaced private stalls and most private drinking establishments, and only taverns and upscale establishments that served food and met the ministry’s moral and hygienic standards received a licence to sell state-provided vodka. In most cases, though, sales would be limited to state-owned stalls and take-out.34 Trade in the lesser alcohols like wine, beer, and mead was left in private hands and subjected to excises and licence fees; in Russia they were not popular (“too weak to be called alcohol”) and did not represent the same health danger or revenue potential. At first the wholesalers of these alcohols, along with the wine cellars and the beer halls, were allowed to operate relatively freely because they were thought to be the better alternative to distilled spirits, in accord with the vision of steady and moderate imbibing that the Ministry of Finances propagated.35 By 1900 these were subjected to greater regulation in proportion to their growing reputation for seediness.36 The revenue was impressive. State receipts from alcohol included the licence fees on private distilleries, beer halls, wine cellars, and taverns (and as such did not usually show up in the budget as alcohol revenues but as licence fees on businesses); excises on all forms of alcohol; and profits from the bottling and sale of vodka. Of all gross receipts from indirect sources except railways in 1912 (1.1 billion rubles), 71 per cent (819.8 million rubles) came one way or the

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other from alcohol. Alcohol alone accounted for about 28 per cent of all revenue in the ordinary budget, including railways.37 As a proportion of the budget this was not far from what the state had received from the excise system before 1894 or even the farming system before 1863 – always around a third to a half, depending on how one counted – though as an absolute the receipts from vodka more than doubled under the monopoly, compared with the earlier excise system. If one were to exclude the state railways because they were not a source of revenue but a way to keep trains running, then the share of vodka in the state revenue budget neared 40 per cent. For 1911 we have a more careful breakdown: gross revenue from vodka in that year was 782 million rubles; net revenue (after paying suppliers and state employees and maintaining state properties) was 501 million rubles; and, excluding the excises that pre-dated the monopoly, profits were 191 million rubles.38 In substance the monopoly as such netted the treasury 191 million rubles – neither negligible nor spectacular – so it was plausible when the Ministry of Finances claimed that it valued the monopoly not only for its revenue but also as a means to safeguard public health. The vodka monopoly was proof, if any more were needed, that the state was not standing aloof from the economy or even guiding it by indirect means like loan guarantees and contracts; it could take over a whole sector by removing the private entrepreneur. The nationalization of railways had offered some precedent, but that was also occasioned by the bankruptcy of many private railway lines and their strategic importance to the economy and the military; and the state did step in to maintain certain industrial plants that were on the verge of bankruptcy.39 But the trade in alcohol was a highly profitable private enterprise, and its take-over suggested the state’s right, in place of the private sector, to manage economic activity. True, vodka had a peculiar cultural resonance and was tied to economic and physical well-being, so its nationalization might be seen as exceptional sooner than emblematic. But in Witte’s view, any economic undertaking was at once social and fiscal given the inseparability of welfare, revenue, and production, all encompassed in the neologism that Witte did so much to popularize, the “national economy.” In this sense the monopoly reflected a new kind of thinking of the economy as organic, a way to speak of the whole polity in all its interconnectedness. “The Minister makes bold to say,” Witte told Alexander III in 1893 on the eve of the monopoly, “that fiscal policy in our fatherland cannot be contained in the strictly limited framework of the financial needs of the government as they are traditionally understood. In the understanding of the Russian people there is a sincere conviction that it is within the power of the

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government authority to be concerned with everything touching the welfare and the needs of the people.”40 Meanwhile the Ministries of Finances and of Agriculture were using the law and state investments to remove private traders from the grain trade and private producers from the dairy industry, all as an expression of hostility to the chaos and exploitation of private enterprise.41 The nationalization of vodka was not that exceptional after all. Bunge protested from retirement that his successor had gone too far. “Of course we cannot go any further, unless we allow, as did Bellamy in Looking Backward, that the state should plough, sow, and harvest and then publish all the newspapers and journals, write the stories and the novels, and achieve the great feats of the fine arts and sciences.”42 Bunge was being dramatic, but it was conceivable enough to make a joke of it, and from 1918 he would be proven more right than he could have imagined, down to the Soviet decree on state sowing committees of 1920. Meanwhile the socialist economist Peshekhonov grudgingly admired the future that the monopoly implied: Witte had propagated a new model of economic management, and he envisioned an economy that was guided by and in some ways operated by the state for the social good.43 Peshekhonov had a chance to realize what he had dreamed, when he joined the Provisional Government in 1917 and oversaw the new state monopoly on grain. The state vodka monopoly entailed a network of 26,000 vodka-selling stalls in 1913, a factory in St Petersburg for the production of one billion corks per year (as yet the only sure way to plug a bottle), 44 distilleries, 353 storage facilities, and a total of 40,000 salaried employees plus uncounted wage-workers, carters, and day-labourers.44 Looked at another way, the monopoly put some 140,000 families out of business, for the government estimated that this was the number of people who in 1894 had depended on the private trade as owners of 129,000 drinking establishments and as small and large traders. Uncounted were the carters, petty middlemen, owners of small dens, the credit-cum-­ alcohol operators in villages (alcohol sold against the next crop) and workingclass neighbourhoods (alcohol fronted against the next pay day).45 In the group of provinces where the monopoly applied in 1894–8, 71,773 private drinking establishments were reduced to about 23,000. Of these, most were also slated for closure, and a few would survive as taverns vetted by the Department of Non-assessed Levies. They were joined by 17,000 state-owned stores selling vodka.46 Few lamented the passing of the private sellers given their unsavoury reputations for usury, price gouging, and product adulteration.47 Anyway there was a real case to be made that the trade was not free. The government had already attempted before 1894 to reduce and regulate the drinking establishments by selling fewer licences more dearly and in the process had created an oli­gopoly of private sellers – or, depending on one’s perspective, a monopoly

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of the private sector that excluded the state. Viewed this way, the question was not the freedom of the trade but who would dominate it.48 State regulation became a system of vertical integration that affected pricing. Forty-four large state distilleries coexisted with the private ones to produce the raw distillate, and they were only allowed to sell to the state. Originally the prices were set by auctioning the state orders to the lowest bidder in each “drinking region” in order to gauge a local rate, but this quasi market mechanism allowed for fixing and manipulation and benefited the larger plants that had favourable economies of scale. In 1903 this was replaced by a system of repartition (razverstka) of state orders, which looked very much like state planning; rather than estimate a market price, the system calculated state demand and the costs of production. The employees of the Department of Non-assessed Levies researched local labour costs, grain prices, and fuel prices, and they visited the plants to observe production processes and interview the plant employees. If the plant met the Ministry of Finances’ standards for efficiency, mechanization, and cleanliness, then the plant owners and the representatives of the Ministry of Finances joined with the agents of the Ministry of Agriculture to arrive at a regional price that included a pre-determined profit margin for the distillers. The final rates for each region of the empire were confirmed in St Petersburg by a committee of the Ministries of Agriculture, Internal Affairs, State Control, and Finances. As that composition implies, the state was concerned with much more than just revenue; it was concerned with public order, agriculture, and public health. Orders were then apportioned to each plant at the fixed prices.49 This was a monopsony that gave the state direct power over production. The Department of Non-assessed Levies instructed the plants on the processes and the machinery they were required to use, and it decreed changes that would enhance sanitation or the purity and efficiency of the production process. It kept tabs on the quality and age of the equipment and ordered the plants to set aside capital for reinvestment, it set rates on capital equipment amortization, and it informed the plants when it was time to replace the machinery. Commercial secrecy – a way to guard production and business processes from competitors – was irrelevant because the state determined the process used by all plants. The confidentiality of the firm’s finances was suspended as soon as the plant accepted state orders, because the books were necessarily open to the ministry so that production costs could be calculated. For the state it meant receiving exactly the product it needed, with the moderation of the prices more or less guaranteed. The system was also attractive to the plant owners because it assured them a steady income, though not windfalls. And it was especially attractive to the gentry and peasant farmers who supplied grain and potatoes

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because it guaranteed them a buyer and a price well in advance of the planting season. As the Department of Non-assessed Levies summarized in its jubilee publication, “in guaranteeing the distilleries that they will supply their output to the state at prices that were decided in advance and with no chance of a loss, the state sale of alcohol gave the distilling industry and the agriculture with which it is connected much more resilience, one that eliminates almost any need for guesswork.”50 If ever there was a case for the superiority of targeted state ownership over private enterprise, and for limited planning over the market, this was it. Something similar was achieved in a different way in the sugar beet industry, also in 1894, where the government heavily constricted the market while still allowing private ownership. As was the case with alcohol, the government reasoned with some cause that a free market in sugar was patently harmful to consumers and producers alike. The world oversupply of sugar had threatened the Russian sugar beet industry since the 1870s. Massive price swings accompanied the secular downward price trend, and any imported cane sugar that had been produced with near-slave labour on colonial plantations and mills was cheaper than any domestically refined beet sugar.51 Export subsidies were tried but could only be effective if the state covered almost the whole cost of production. The entire industry of growers and refiners – magnates like the Tereshchenkos – was threatened with extinction, and they responded with oversupply in some years and undersupply in others. Consumers faced unpredictable household budgets. The ministry was concerned with predictability and stability at all levels, from planting to household consumption. In 1894 the state intervened by way of tariffs, excises, and direct controls over output. Internationally these measures were reinforced by the Brussels Convention of 1902, which coordinated the various national and imperial market regulations in a series of regional output quotas.52 Domestically the Ministry of Finances examined harvests and changes in demand and accordingly set empire-wide targets for sugar beet refining in each year. The imperial number was then broken down into output quotas for every plant in the empire. Output above the quota was taxed at double the rate – 3.50 rubles per pud rather than 1.75 rubles – which made it unsellable. By 1910 price swings had been contained within a band of 30 kopecks per pud (16.58–46.80 kopecks, depending on time and place), rather than the previous band of 2.5 rubles. Consumption (or registered sales) went up in the same period, from 27 million puds in 1894 to 61 million puds in 1909.53 The revenue of the treasury in 1912 was 128 million rubles, the second-largest item of excise revenue after vodka.54

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The officials who created these systems were pleased, of course, with the revenue but also with the stability that it offered to the treasury, the producers, and the consumers. In both cases, the sugar and vodka trades, the achievement was as much aesthetic as it was fiscal because the sectors were subordinated to a vision of stable, predictable, and rational production and trade. Consumption was another matter. Treasure, Public Order, and Public Health In monopolizing the trade in vodka, the state took ownership of the issues of public health and public order that attended drinking, and state ownership offered seemingly unprecedented possibilities for reforming not only the trade but the population, the person, and the culture. Very quickly the initial matter of revenue spawned a larger public quest to explain and address problems of mass and individual consumption, drunkenness, and alcoholism; the quest was fed by the data generated by the monopoly and the excise system. More than any other sector, the vodka trade demonstrated the ways in which an increasingly intimate relationship between state, economy, and population could lead to the removal of the boundaries between the three, dissolved as they were in the total solutions that were put forward by professionals, public activists, and finally the state. Alcoholism and drinking might be ended altogether. At least contemporaries could try. Grappling with the broad patterns of consumption implied by the indirect taxes, state officials and critics alike debated the meaning of the global data that allowed for broad comments on imperial patterns of supply and demand but little on how individuals or even groups behaved. There had been some successes, to be sure. A transition to safety matches was partly accomplished between 1892 and 1911 by punitive taxes on the cheaper and seriously hazardous phosphoric matches. Russians bought 1.08 billion phosphoric matches in 1890 and 598 million in 1911, while purchases of safety matches went up from 34.5 million to 305 million.55 But this too was a matter of production rather than consumption, more to do with making something unaffordable rather than with how the matches were used. One could still be an arsonist when using safety matches, just as one could still be an alcoholic when buying state-bottled liquor. Cigarette use was similarly immune to tactile control. The Ministry of Finances held (for no known reason other than a liking of steady moderation) that the measured intake of tobacco smoke was good for the body. Calibrated taxes were meant to encourage steady use, but there was no way to calculate the results. Global statistics on sales that were translated into per capita consumption could not distinguish between the

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chain-smoker and the non-smoker. Vodka, however, was such a cultural and political lighting rod, and state involvement so advanced, that contemporaries invested unprecedented study into the question of consumption and ways to bring about real change. In the run-up to the vodka monopoly the State Council had insisted and Witte had agreed that the state would “eliminate the private interest from the drinking trade,” face the consumers, and address “the moral interests of the population.”56 How and whether this could be done was not at all certain even to Witte. On the one hand, he had allowed that the state might not have much control since vodka was a matter of deep-seated culture, perhaps even climate (which stimulated an interest in Norwegian drinking patterns) and a distinct Russian or peasant biology. Anyway there was no precedent for state regulation of behaviour at the individual level. On the other hand, Witte held that the state should change popular habits and also that the state had that role and that capacity. Whether this was the price of the State Council’s agreement or Witte’s sincere belief is an open question.57 Witte often believed what he was forced to argue.58 Witte held that moderate drinking was good for the economy and the budget and that persons, budgets, and the economy all lent themselves to an aesthetic prejudice for steadiness and predictability. There was a strong impulse across Europe and North America to apply the aesthetic to consumption and the human body, with the person understood as the regularized and steady engine of labour alongside the machine or the dynamo – the human motor, as Rabinbach puts it so usefully.59 Man’s hours should pass as regularly as those of the twentyfour-hour clock. The productive worker should imbibe small quantities of alcohol every day rather than abstain for a week and then drink for a few days uninterruptedly – the infamous zapoi (binge) that seemed so emblematic of a Russian penchant for extremes.60 Study after study concluded that Russia’s per capita rate of consumption of distilled alcohols was not unusually high on the European spectrum; in the period of 1901–5 Russians consumed 4.9 litres per year, next to 7.38 litres in Belgium, 4.6 litres in Britain, and 13.9 litres in Denmark. Russians consumed another 4.4 litres per capita of beer, as opposed to 218.0 litres in Belgium and 119.7 litres in Germany.61 Like so many others, however, Witte was influenced by anecdote and sheer observation that convinced him that Russians drank their annual quantities in a few sittings; by the fact that one was very likely to stumble on unconscious revellers, brawlers, and small riots during certain times of the year, like Shrove Tuesday or Easter Sunday, or for that matter any given Sunday in the village and the workers’ quarters; and by the reports of factory managers who complained that their workers were operating machines in a barely conscious state.

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His models were Germans and Englishmen nursing beers before or after their shifts, and Frenchmen sipping wine after a day in the fields. The ideal modern worker laboured as steadily as he drank, his self-control manifest in his controlled use of alcohol. What was good for the people was good for the treasury: “Proper consumption results in greater per capita consumption and greater per capita income for the treasury,” and higher consumption spread out evenly over the year “is not only safe but might even be beneficial to the person’s hygiene.”62 Deputy Minister Novitskii told the Duma in 1911 that any substance consumed in excess was a poison, which strictly speaking was true, and then likened alcoholism to an overconsumption of fish or meat, any of which could cause sclerosis and premature death. The point was to induce Russians to drink vodka as they ate food – steadily, daily, and in measure.63 There was little science to back these arguments since no one knew the mental and physiological consequences of steady drinking as opposed to steady eating or, for that matter, the long-term effects of binge drinking; and there was no one standard for deciding how much was too much or at what point the drinker passed from the acceptable realm of serious socializing to alcoholic psychosis.64 As K.K. Tolstoy observed in a trenchant analysis of the literature, there was not a consistent or provable explanation to be found for why people drank to excess, how much was excessive, and what to do about it in individuals and whole classes and societies.65 Osipov, for his part, insisted that the ignorance about the effects of alcohol was too great for serious discussion and recommended more intensive investigations of the effects of “large, medium, and small doses” on the human organism. Without irony he continued, “But no one knows what a large, medium, and small dose is.”66 One might know the alcoholic when one saw him, just as decades later a certain American judge knew pornography when he saw it,67 but this was not a basis for policy. Witte promised that the state monopoly would produce moderation, but he never explained how, and his critics could not demonstrate that the state monopoly made matters worse. To be sure, critics would spend the next two decades laying the blame for the endurance of alcoholism at the state’s feet. The ministry “under no circumstances intended to turn down a growth in this income,”68 which was true until 1914 but far from a causal explanation. A person could feed an addiction or have a drunken brawl with or without the monopoly, so at best critics were making the moral argument that the state should not be a party to it. It was more plausible to argue that the monopoly at worst made alcohol cheaper and readily available and in this manner made excess easier. At best the monopoly limited poisoning, adulteration, gouging, and usury.

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The critics, however, did confirm what Witte had already assumed: the centrality of the state in the public debate about public health, reinforcing a state-centred view of the Russian polity. The fiscal infrastructure of the excise and the monopoly in many ways made this debate possible. The Ministry of Finances would protest that the openness and transparency of the new system fed data to its critics, and all sides depended on the industry of state statistics that went back to the 1860s and blossomed in the 1890s. In this very real sense the debate was the product of the system of state revenue and its related surveillance. More to the point, it raised the possibility that the marriage of morality, economics, public health, and state power could lead to fundamental reforms or even abolition. The space of the debate was especially wide because the numbers were so inconclusive. The data concerned registered sales, which did rise moderately under the monopoly69 but indicated better registration. But the figures were not gathered in order to measure what contemporaries wanted to find out most – consumption rates on an individual or a group basis, and individual or group habits of steadiness or excess. They masked the industry of home distilling and unregistered sales.70 The per capita rates were the product of simple division that could not distinguish between the hard-core alcoholic and the teetotaller.71 Others found more pronounced increases in per capita consumption, but this could well have meant that the newer figures were better figures thanks to the tighter controls of the monopoly. In addition, it was not possible to demonstrate that per capita figures for sales under the monopoly correlated with alcoholism and immoderation because no one could say how much was too much for any one person.72 Alcohol consumption could be extrapolated from sales figures, and these were necessarily mass figures because they counted mass sales; alcoholism was an individual disease, and this suggested the need for individual or small-group cures. The costs, though, would have been prohibitive. The Department of Non-assessed Levies filled the empirical haze with inspiring prose in 1896, some of it quite fanciful: Cases of death by drinking have been reduced significantly, there are fewer murders and disorder during holidays and at the markets, there are fewer arrests of drunks by the police; the clergy reports that the number of visitors to God’s temples has grown; according to the mining and factory employers there are fewer missed days at plants, factories, and estates … [The monopoly] has inspired in peasants a feeling of irreducible happiness … The people has become more sober, and cases of drunken riot that usually accompanied any village celebration are receding into the past, and at the same time there is greater tranquility and harmony in the families.73

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Given all this uncertainty – about the origins of alcoholism and its very definition, about the usefulness of the data in measuring habit and consumption, and about the relationship between health and the monopoly – contemporaries “paraded their prejudices in an unusually open fashion,” John Hutchinson observes.74 As Herlihy shows, there was scarcely an aspect of Russian life that was not somehow connected to alcohol in the contemporary literature. As so little was understood about the causes of alcoholism while at the same time it was such a deep seated cultural practice and scandal, it was used as a vehicle to highlight and promote any number of ideologies and social issues that may have been only vaguely related to dipsomania as such. Vodka was the hook that offered them an audience and enhanced their authority in promoting one or another view. Sociology, class, religion, gender, and medicine were the most common, and the state as the sole purveyor became part of these conversations. By far the largest literature concerned the social conditions that made excess possible, and in turn assumed that social conditions were the best way to explain and remedy the problem.75 The problem, in other words, was to identify a social pattern, which the state could attack using its monopoly powers. The psychiatrist S.A. Pervushin’s quantitative studies of the official sales of vodka found a direct correlation between good harvests and economic boom, on the one hand, and rises in the per capita consumption (actually, official sales) of vodka, on the other. He implied that the poorer classes were necessarily more prone to alcoholism. The problem as the author recognized was threefold: it was not clear whether increased drinking was a sign of opulence and contentedness, or the economic boom made affordable an existing tendency towards excess; the figures did not account for illegal and home distilling, which would be on the rise in bad economic times and at the expense of official sales; and, most important, Pervushin only studied peasants and workers and thus concluded that peasants and workers drank more.76 V.K. Dmitriev, a student of the marginal revolution in economics, examined the central Russian provinces and found declines in consumption (sales) in times of poor harvests. Clearly this implied that peasants had less money to spend, but Dmitriev was anxious for a wider social explanation: impoverishment leads to lower consumption because a poor and “degenerating” person required less alcohol to become drunk, making this the sociological rendering of drinking on an empty stomach.77 Fridman agreed: “Apparently there was a neuro-physical [nervo-fizicheskoe] degeneration of the population, on the basis of which the drinker requires a smaller quantity of alcohol to achieve a corresponding effect.”78 Yet when V. Norov examined the official statistics, he found that the secular trend was either stable or slightly on the rise; it took an exceptionally good harvest to move the rates of

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consumption upward and then only a little, and a catastrophic crop failure to produce a decline.79 Anecdote, too, seemed to inform the general assumption that poorer workers and peasants drank more than others, but again the numbers were not helpful in correlating chronic poverty with inebriation (which was the hypothesis). Focused studies found that poorer factory workers drank more as a percentage of their weekly pay, which was a truism. Wealthier, skilled workers drank less as a share of their wages (also a truism) but more in volume per capita, which indicated that they could afford to buy more vodka. Shcherbina found that in 1900 in rural areas consumption was highest among the poorest and the wealthiest peasants, indicating to him dejectedness in the first case and good times in the latter; Prokopovich’s study of household budgets among St Petersburg workers found much the same. If there was a link between higher rates among the poor and the well-off, it was that both had higher levels of monetization and a greater tendency to buy rather than produce alcohol; others had closer ties to the villages and access to moonshine.80 However, Fridman insisted that the poor drank because of their poverty, and all drank out of feelings of sadness or hopelessness. Popular psychology bordering on platitude was his final resort: “People do not get drunk out of happiness, they only have a few shots or in the extreme several shots; after all, happiness is not a chronic or prolonged occurrence.”81 The numbers made sense if one agreed that Russians were generally sad and more given to melancholy (toska) than were other national types. Attempts to be more specific about when people drank produced no useful recommendations. Statisticians and sociologists found that factory workers drank (a) on their way to work, (b) at work, (c) after work, (d) on their days off, (e) on holidays, and (d) every Sunday. Peasants at least refrained from drinking when they worked in the fields, but they did drink quite a lot to mark the dawn, the dusk, holidays, baptisms, weddings, funerals, births, and Sundays. Again the conclusion was too broad – people drank very much and much of the time – to be useful in recommending policies, and instead it reinforced the global observations with which the researchers began. “Everyone drinks so much,” observed a correspondent in Vladimir province, “that I couldn’t tell you who drinks more.” Anecdotally (or apocryphally) the conclusion was typified by an investigator who approached a group of four village drunks and asked them why they were drinking. Out of sadness because his horse had died, said the first; out of happiness because his wife had given birth to a son, said the second; because he was well paid, responded the third; because he was poor, added the last.82 When a Duma deputy in 1911 lamented that people drank out of

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“depression,” a colleague called out from the benches, “Out of happiness!”83 Both sounded plausible, and neither was provable. Comparing urban sales with rural sales was likewise fraught. Overall the vodka monopoly yielded 953 million rubles in 1912 according to one set of figures, but only 256 million rubles (27 per cent) came from sales in rural Russia where four-fifths of the population lived. The stalls were heavily concentrated in the cities, where there was a higher concentration of consumers; rural stalls were less profitable, and villages had the right to ban them.84 Dmitriev, in a 1911 monograph, found that per capita annual urban alcohol consumption (sales) was three times greater than rural consumption (1.52 versus 0.47 buckets), again using the sales from the stalls as his guide. In Semipalatinsk the cities bought 41 times more alcohol than did the surrounding countryside, in Iakutsk province 27 times, and in the Urals region 15 times, and of course Dmitriev equated sales with consumption. He speculated that the issue was class, urbanization, and wages and held that market forces were counter-productive when left unchecked.85 Dmitriev could have speculated in all sorts of other ways: that urban money purchases were registered while home distillation was not; that the rural areas were a paradise of moonshine; that the urban distilleries where the production was measured and the urban stalls that reported sales catered to unusually large regions, while rural stalls were fewer; that the government avoided establishing stalls in rural areas with non-Russian populations (especially “tribal peoples” and Muslims), while the cities were dominated by ethnic Russians and Ukrainians; that rural people bought their alcohol in the cities (up to half of all clientele in Penza, where the matter was investigated), having sold their harvests and crafts at market; and that the working-class neighbourhoods had dramatically higher concentrations of population than the affluent ones and the villages. Still, Pervushin concluded in his “attempt at a theory of mass alcoholism” that industrial workers were the key to understanding Russia’s drinking problem: cities consumed (bought) at 4.0 or 4.5 times the rate of the rural regions, working-class neighbourhoods consumed (bought) 3.0–4.0 times per capita than the leafy neighbourhoods, and “therefore urban workers’ neighborhoods are the hotbeds of our drunkenness.”86 The caveats and qualifications were stated and then ignored as the numbers, however flawed and inappropriate to the question, became the only objective data at a time when objective data was the currency of public debate. The numbers on consumption by economic class, for example, may have offered anything from inference to pure guesswork, but only the subjective assumption that excess was a lower-class phenomenon could make sense of them. Fridman

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enumerated the shortcomings of the data but still concluded, “The regular demand for vodka among workers is in substance the same as regular drunkenness.”87 The Ministry of Finances responded to the perception with new limits on the hours of operation of state stalls in working-class neighbourhoods and villages; there is no evidence that this led to less drinking, less drunkenness, or less alcoholism.88 The class bias was reinforced by the ministry itself. Part of its concern was the policing aspect, meaning the effort to limit the spectacle of public drinking and public drunkenness that was always a part of the public debate. The ministry did try to calm these fears when the monopoly was introduced, and newspapers reported increases in drinking in the streets. It pointed out that the closing of the taverns and their replacement with stalls left workers with few options for drinking save in the open air, and public drinking was confused with more drinking.89 Drunk women were especially scandalous to contemporaries.90 The stalls that seemed to encourage street drinking were meant to have a salutary effect by allowing men to bring their bottles home (rather than drink on the spot) and imbibe in the presence of their wives and daughters. Since it was thought that women drank less or not at all and also controlled the household budgets and morality, they were “the biggest enemy of the drunkenness of their husbands.” Hence the banning of the kabak in 1885 where a man could indulge in all sorts of excesses away from the public eye and the ire of his wife, mother, or daughter, and hence the limits on the numbers of taverns and beer halls.91 However, it turned out that women also drank, sometimes quite a lot. Figures were released by the hospitals and rehabilitation clinics to show that women accounted for about a quarter of all alcoholic psychoses, on a level with those of France and England. The psychiatrist I.A. Sikorskii concluded, “The threat has penetrated the deepest, so to speak uninfringeable [neposiagatel’noe] place – the womb of the mother, and in the alcoholism of the Russian woman a diseased heredity can forge a direct path to the degeneration of the Russian people.”92 In one more about-face, in 1902 the ministry relaxed controls on taverns in an effort to get alcohol out of the home and into the masculine company of the tavern.93 Degeneration was very much on the expert mind, Daniel Beer tells us, and it was understood largely as a lower-class phenomenon.94 When it came to alcohol, it was an assumption rooted in class bias and slippage: there were more poor people than wealthy ones, regardless of the apparently class-neutral nature of alcoholism; mass consumption and “mass alcoholism” could only be about “the popular masses” of peasants and workers.95 Hence Fridman’s statement of the problem in his study of 1916, “Which classes of the population

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drink predominantly [preimushchestvenno]?,” a phrasing that could only lead to peasants and workers as the predominant classes of the population.96 Degeneration also related to a new concern across Europe with the health of recruits and the health of the nations they comprised. Russia, like so many other countries, began the century with a concern for the health of its young men who would join the army and the women who would bear them, and it mattered that most recruits came from the working class and the peasantry. In Britain this was occasioned by the poor physical appearance of soldiers in the Boer War in 1899, and in Russia five years later by the performance of recruits in the Russo-Japanese War. Russia’s loss to Japan was attributed in some quarters to mass drunkenness during call-up and at the front lines.97 Even here, however, the discussion spilled into questions of public order and class anxiety because – the argument ran – the same recruits who had rioted in 1904 and stumbled into battle in Manchuria joined a revolution (or a drunken riot, as some would have it) in 1905, which in their minds made vodka a causal factor in the smuta that followed.98 By contrast, “among the classes standing above the mass of simple people it is considered impolite” to consume in public. That the affluent also drank quite a lot was less important than the fact that they were too few to make a riot, and their violence was domestic rather than public. As to whether the well-off and educated could be alcoholics to greater or lesser extents than could the workers, no one could say with conviction or plausibility, though physicians and psychologists reported that their patients came from all walks of life.99 The data did not tell, and experts speculated that the upper-class drunk was more likely to consume cognac, brandy, and wine that did not make it into the sales figures for the monopoly.100 Mussorgskii succumbed to heavy drinking; Alexander III, who decreed the monopoly, carried a hip-flask wherever he went. Hutchinson found that there was no evidence at all to support the upper-class claim that lower-class excess was higher per capita, a claim that defies credulity. “When one recalls that all these people were living and working in the same Russia which has produced a memoir literature overflowing with examples of upperclass indulgence – not to say debauchery – one is tempted to say that they suffered from a truly wonderful myopia.”101 More irony: rumour had it that it was Rasputin who, between drunken orgies with Russian aristocrats, put the prohibition bug in the ear of Nicholas II.102 The myopia was significant, however, because it allowed some contemporaries to relate drinking to their own cultural and class anxieties. Alcoholism may have defied the sociological categories, but it was precisely the social framing of drunkenness that gave the debate its urgency. It fed on the fear of uncontrolled masses and mass psychosis that threatened public order and high culture

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itself, part of a wider anxiety about street crime and random violence that Joan Neuberger recounts, which was most pronounced in Russia after the events of 1905 and that Stephen Frank studies in relation to rural criminality.103 Hence the common tendency was to conflate lower-class drinking habits and clinical addiction, or the sociocultural and the medical, as captured in the psychiatrist Pervushin’s phrase “mass alcoholism” – a collective and social definition of an individual affliction. The mass diagnosis would have an individual prescription; having conducted exhaustive studies to correlate alcoholism with class and income, Pervushin recommended two years of hypnosis and re-education for each alcoholic as the only effective cure.104 (Here at least there was some science to support him: individual approaches tended to work well, if only some institution would foot the bill.) All this made temperance movements microcosms of social estrangement.105 The aim of the Duma Commission for Struggle with Drunkenness was to educate the “intelligentsia strata” about the excesses of the lower classes.106 Temperance institutions were dominated from the outset in the 1880s by the propertied and educated few, by the officials, health professionals, clergy, and philanthropists who made alcohol into the question it became.107 The old Commissions on Drinking Affairs that had accompanied the excise system from 1885 had been a regulating agency of ex-officio and volunteer members from the state, clergy, and gentry who grappled poorly with the ever-changing regulations. When Witte requested the monopoly, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the State Council insisted that temperance be attached, and Witte offered the Guardianships of Popular Sobriety – “popular” implying lower class. These were established and subsidized by the Department of Nonassessed Levies in all regions of the monopoly, at the provincial, district, and urban neighbourhood levels. There were 790 Guardianships, and their formal membership in 1903–4 stood at almost 29,000, joined by uncounted volunteers. The excise system and the monopoly paid for the sobriety campaigns. The Guardianships were a concession to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and typified that ministry’s vision of top-down oversight and paternalism. Almost all the members were non-workers and non-peasants, as was the intention. They included a goodly representation of priests (18.0 per cent), land captains (14.0 per cent), teachers (9.7 per cent), and gentry landowners (11.0 per cent), and a very low representation of peasants (5.6 per cent).108 In their regular reports the Guardianships explained their mission as helping “the simple folk,” “working people,” “the children of the simple class,” and “children of the street.”109 In 1904 their annual subsidy from the state was 4.8 million rubles, and they raised 4.0 million rubles of their own. They used the funds to open alcohol-free canteens and tea rooms, museums, libraries, and clinics and to sponsor lectures and public entertainment.110

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Not just any entertainment. Patriotic song recitals competed with riveting productions of “Outside the Monastery Walls,” “In the Old Days,” and “Bride for the Tsar.”111 Small wonder that the audiences tended to be the propertied and educated elites who sponsored them and appreciated them as a cheap way to hear opera and classical music. The report of the St Petersburg Guardianship was almost plaintive: “no doubt the intelligentsia visitors act in a salutary manner on the conduct of the popular masses simply by their very presence and example” – if only the popular masses would come. Similarly there were over 4,000 libraries empire-wide sponsored by the Guardianships, but in St Petersburg the 2,814 subscribers were mainly the members of the Guardianship and students at nearby schools.112 After 1905 even the elite stopped joining the Guardianships, when formal mass politics, political parties, and voluntary societies were a much more compelling outlet for their activism.113 The local committees that depended more on volunteers than on ex-officio members had a membership of 12,500 in 1903 and 7,200 in 1910; all volunteers in the system fell from 42,100 to 17,000. The Ministry of Finances cut their subsidies in half to 2.5 million rubles, while their independent receipts also fell by half to 2.0 million rubles. It was easy to conclude, as so many did, that the ministry cared very little about the disease of alcoholism and much more about the revenue. The economist Migulin was categorical in this belief and, through his patrons in the Ministry of Agriculture, agitated for a greater effort to curtail drinking by decree. Word reached the tsar.114 If the monopoly and its temperance aspects had any effect on consumption patterns, there was no way to prove it. There was no way to show that the 60,000  pamphlets distributed in 1910 were read, understood, or persuasive, that the 70,000 public lectures induced any one to skip a drink, or that the total of 4.6 million rubles that were spent on official temperance in 1910 had any effect on the rates of alcoholism. The Guardianships paid for 28,646 patients in twelve hospitals and two mobile clinics, using hypnosis and claiming a success rate of 40 per cent, and the individual approach seemed most suited to an addiction that appeared in different people in different ways, but this amounted to a mere 75,000 rubles or about 0.1–2.0 per cent of the budgets of the Guardian­ ships, depending on the region. More was spent on canteens, more was spent on entertainment, and more was spent on opera alone.115 In St Petersburg in 1911, 710,000 rubles were spent on entertainment and 23,000 rubles on treatment.116 The reason is both financial (individual measures were more expensive) and class related. Many or most of the experts and activists were singly concerned with the collective, especially the collective of rioting workers that inhabited their cultural nightmares, and sought collective measures to reach them. To K.K. Tolstoy the entire industry of statistics and government countermeasures was simply a moment in a larger tendency to give rational explanation

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to all aspects of the human condition, replacing the “instinctive order” with a “rationalization of life” and the “laws of nourishment.” And it was an opportunity to fill the empirical void with one or another agenda, if need be regardless of the data. Ultimately even Tolstoy could not resist; alcoholism was “just one of the symptoms of the decline of morality.” With the details of the phenomenon and the trade so confusing, writers resorted to the largest and least helpful explanations and recommendations: that the widest political and social conditions were the cause of mass drinking and that alcoholism could only be cured by a fundamental political and social overhaul. This medical approach to political questions (or political approach to medical questions) was pervasive after 1905, with hostility to the government and disappointment in the masses offered in equal measure. Pervushin concluded that alcoholism was “conditioned by all our dismal atmosphere, especially in recent years, chronic dissatisfaction and lack of fulfillment, the most complete arbitrariness, uncertainty about what tomorrow will bring, an impenetrable darkness.”117 The masses were unmanageable, but at least it was not their fault. The medical testimony that suggested that alcoholism affected persons across the class spectrum with no obvious pattern – in effect, implying an unpredictable social incidence and inviting a huge investment in individual treatments – was overwhelmed by a more powerful and compelling narrative that implicated economic disparity and despair, the neglectfulness of the state, and the oppressiveness of autocracy itself. The solutions recommended by professionals, Duma deputies, and publicists included a minimum wage and universal unemployment insurance; state-sponsored housing for factory workers; improvements in nutrition; women’s suffrage; a ban on prostitution; a revision of the laws on public assembly, voluntary associations, and military training; an extension of civil rights; changes in the legal status and pay of teachers and an overhaul of the educational system; changes in the legal status of non-Russian tribes (inorodtsy); greater support for co-operative institutions; reform of local government; university and scientific autonomy; a ban on the system of apprenticeship in small-scale industries; and more tea.118 Pervushin’s conclusion ultimately had little to do with alcohol as such but used alcohol as the springboard for a different discussion of politics, regime, and degeneration; deep reform “will lead us inevitably to general revival of the state organism.”119 One suspects indeed that social reform was promoted by those who wanted social reform. Police measures were promoted by those who liked police measures. The prescriptions that came from the camp of law and order were equally unhelpful: surveillance of heavy drinkers and boot-leggers, greater police presence to maintain public order, more religion, more individual responsibility, and stronger family units. Baron Meiendorf of the Duma Commission for Struggle with Drunkenness was frustrated that these official temperance measures

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amounted to “wishes” with no consequential measures, only self-control, individual responsibility, God, and stricter laws.120 This situation suited the fiscally minded officials of the Ministry of Finances fine because it produced platitude; parading the contradictory and inconclusive scientific data, they could return to the beginning of the debate and recommend moderation and self-control at no cost to the treasury. If alcoholism was about everything, one could safely do nothing.121 Alternatively, if alcohol was about everything, one could fix everything by banning alcohol. This was a remarkably simple prescription for the global observation that Russians drank too much and that drink was the source of too many evils to make the revenue worthwhile, that the causes and the consequences were too great to lend themselves to partial and calibrated measures that seemed not to work. Paradoxically, Russia’s experts and public activists, trained to narrow the question and link causes with effects, had contributed to the movement by associating drinking with virtually any aspect of Russian society, implying that a total problem required a total solution. Piecemeal measures like a law that reduced the alcohol content of vodka from 40 to 37 per cent were mere “palliative,” scientists agreed at the First All-Russia Congress for the Struggle against Drinking in 1909. Russia needed either social overhaul or one or another version of prohibition.122 Meanwhile the Duma was debating whether to make vodka bottles smaller.123 Other countries were considering limits and prohibitions, and in nearby Sweden the government rationed alcohol and likewise entwined it with political and social agendas – denying alcohol to married women and the unemployed, for example. But Russia had been brought to a point of enviable simplicity: only the state could sell distilled alcohol, and Russia was still de jure an autocracy where one man could make the decision.124 Nicholas could treat alcohol as a Gordian knot, and himself as Alexander. It helped that Nicholas had never been one for nuance, and by January 1914 he was convinced that some reform of the vodka monopoly would be needed to address the millions of “lives ruined by alcohol.” He fired Finance Minister Kokovtsov, who had demurred – how could a financial adviser willingly surrender a third of the revenue budget as war approached?125 – and appointed Petr Bark, one more Baltic German who agreed to alcohol reform as a condition of his appointment. Bark recommended a gradual transition to income taxation to compensate for the phasing out of vodka revenues. He had in mind decades, but Nicholas banned sales in August as part of the mobilization and then extended the ban and made it permanent. He had no argument from Bark.126 Overnight, Russia lost about one-third of its total budget revenue. The issue had come a long way from revenue, but then again taxes were never just about revenue. Sometimes taxes had nothing to do with revenue. This

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debate was about how political, medical, and public activists could reach and reform the population, and in the debates over the excise system and the vodka monopoly they found the limits of their reach. The ban on sales was partly the result of frustration and partly the product of an autocrat who thought his power had mystical qualities. Among some contemporaries, however, the ban was the start of a new and complete overhaul of the society that had produced degeneracy and addiction, since a better society would nurture a better person. There was no shortage of priests, mystics, and philosophers who had been making this case for some decades – and Marxists and materially grounded activists who transitioned easily to Bolshevism after 1917, as Herlihy suggests, and held, like the Bolsheviks, that a new society would produce a better person, and the better person the new society.127 It was part and parcel of the final struggle on which the Bolsheviks embarked in 1918 – final, that is, until the Bolsheviks abandoned prohibition in 1925 in favour of revenue and moderation. Prohibition, the War Budget, and the Financial Catastrophe The capacity of the state to effect changes in habit and custom was in doubt, as was the larger impulse to render the population responsive to state design. The goal was pursued nevertheless and much more actively with the outbreak of war, which made the gap between ambition and capacities starkly important.128 Nicholas II banned sales in 1914 and thereby banned the formal trade in vodka, at great cost to the treasury and to the ruble itself, but he was addressing in crude fashion what had been written by so many contemporaries who understood revenue not as a fiscal mining operation but as a view of the population and a tool to reshape it. In Nicholas’s vision, workers would work harder, peasants would farm better, and soldiers would fight more fiercely if they did not have the temptation and debilitation of distilled alcohol. It was that simple, and Nicholas would achieve it with a stroke of the pen. How the measure affected consumption could not be said since the government and the public had lost their one, albeit imperfect, view of the problem. Suffice it to say that the initial glee over the seemingly overnight conversion of Russians to abstinence faded as consumers turned to cologne, pharmaceutical alcohol, shoe polish, varnish, and, of course, home distilling. Sales of denatured alcohol were registered, and they rose by a factor of ten.129 The Provisional and Soviet governments would preserve some or all of its outlines until 1925 – the Communists motivated by dreams of proletarian austerity, mass self-discipline, and more surplus grain.130 At first Nicholas was implementing the existing regulations on mobilization, which provided for the suspension of sales in the regions of a call-up, except in

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the “first-class taverns, assemblies, and clubs.” The issue had never been the well-off. On 22 August 1914 he extended the ban for the duration of the war, and a collection of smaller measures made the ban comprehensive in 1916.131 He was loudly supported in the Duma. Zealots like M.D. Chelyshov of Samara had long promoted the virtues of a simple and total ban that few of his colleagues thought practicable. Many considered him mad or at least a bore. In January 1911 on the floor of the Duma he was able to recite Nekrasov, Aleksei Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, the medieval chronicles, and Chinese diplomatic correspondence from the thirteenth century before the chair cut him off, but he took the floor again to enumerate the plight of American drunks state by state.132 By 1914 most deputies had been swept by the patriotic wave, impressed by the near-miraculous power of the single act of determination and blinded to its unintended consequences. Shingarev of the Kadets observed that this was the first time in history that a state had renounced its principal source of income in a time of war, but he fell short of suggesting it was wrong.133 He was likely awed by the mixed feelings of financial doom and moral renewal. In a moment when symbol easily overtook substance, few uttered what they had long held to be obvious: any peasant hut, any out-of-the-way factory workshop, any student dorm room, and any bathtub could become a distillery, this one entirely unregulated and yielding nothing to the treasury. Boot-legging became a boom industry.134 Taken alone, the war-time drive to regulate alcohol even at some cost to the treasury was not unusual. In England and Wales it was embedded in the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914, which watered down drinks and limited pub hours as part of the war effort. Canada enacted prohibition in 1917 and in the War Measures Act of 1918, and the United States followed in 1919, showing that similar folly could be achieved in different constitutional contexts.135 But Russia’s budgetary dependence on alcohol was unique. In 1915 (the first full year of prohibition) it disrupted the budget to the tune of over 1 billion rubles (the gross revenues) and created a net hole of about 626 million rubles (excises and the profits of the monopoly). The financial situation soon got worse because every new loss of territory was a further loss of revenues from taxable properties, businesses, and transactions. Revenue projections of one year were reduced in the next by inflation.136 Across-the-board increases in existing taxes still left a projected deficit of about 300 million rubles for 1915.137 Russia, along with other belligerent countries, left the gold standard in order to allow for greater spending, but the Russian government was reckless and had fewer choices and placed no legal limits on new emissions.138 In Britain, for example, the War Cabinet upped the margins and lowered the floor on the income tax to approach a balanced budget and avoid inflation. Russia, by

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contrast, had an inelastic system of revenue; taxes on properties and businesses were still a small portion of the budget, and their doubling would still not generate sufficient revenue. Excises and tariffs were also doubled in many cases, but they produced less (legal) consumption and little additional revenue. The extension of the excise system to more products like bread was considered but never implemented for fear of the consequences in the factory neighbourhoods. New monopolies were considered but could never approach the yield from vodka. Sobolev estimated at the time that the combined revenue of new monopolies on tea, sugar, tobacco, matches, and insurance would only reach 250 million rubles.139 For new revenue the Cabinet turned to the only documented sector, commerce and manufacturing, and quickly exhausted the possibilities. Between the old business taxes, the new war profits tax, and the new income tax, enterprises would be taxed at a rate of up to 90 per cent on profits. No doubt entrepreneurs would use healthy deductions and creative accounting to ensure this never came to pass, but it was thought in the government that little more could be expected from businesses short of nationalization – more imminent than anyone at the time imagined.140 As the deficit in the normal budget soared to 1.4 billion rubles at the end of 1916, and faced with an additional 10 billion rubles in extraordinary military spending, the government resorted to the printing press141 and foreign borrowing.142 Meanwhile the Cabinet was reduced to a shambles of incompetence, rotation, and sycophancy, and the ruble reached half its pre-war value in late 1916.143 Bark assured Nicholas in early 1917 that the deficit was easily fixed and that the decision to end alcohol sales was the right one. Prime Minister Goremykin was quoted as follows: “So what if we do lose eight hundred million rubles in revenue? We shall print that much more paper money; it’s all the same to the people.” And so they did, and so did the Provisional and Soviet governments, to the cumulative total of 22 billion unbacked rubles as 1917 drew to a close – about seven times the last pre-war budget.144 There was only one large group that was taxed at low rates, and it was the largest demographic in Russia: peasants. New revenue would have to come from peasants, one way or the other, but no one could say how much tax was too much for a peasant to bear. Certainly the taxes that affected them most, on consumption and land, had never returned data on what peasants produced, earned, or could pay, because capacities had never been calculated with any degree of certainty. Those taxes had never been designed to do so. New claims would have to be hoisted on the peasantry blindly because no one could say what peasants could afford to pay. To put it simply, at no point had the central government assessed peasant incomes, and from 1914 this mattered as never before.

8 The Peasant and the Fisc: The State Budget and the Persistence of Collective Tax Apportionment

The Russian state budget on the eve of the Great War was remarkable for its size after having grown by a factor of sixteen since the 1850s. It was also remarkably new in character. Most revenue came from indirect sources and did not distinguish among legal statuses; most direct revenue was likewise derived from incomes and types of transactions that ignored legal status. In their ways these were all calculated taxes that depended on a documented commercial economy. By contrast, peasant direct taxation operated by separate rules, and the central government neither had nor sought control over how the tax bills compiled in St Petersburg were allocated among peasant collectives and gathered from households. The system as it operated from St Petersburg to the district capital was one of territorial apportionment and repartition, not assessment, and the Tax Inspectorate was not permitted to investigate village practices in a sustained manner, if at all. This was not new, but an old practice was being subjected to the new standards of assessment, calculation, and accountability that had been developed in the cities since the 1880s. A tax payment should reflect a capacity to pay, and non-payment an inability to pay or evasion. Yet there was no good reason that this relationship between capacities, assessments, and payments should have existed in peasant Russia. All aspects of peasant taxation were matters of guesswork, trial and error, and arbitrariness. The aggregate tax bill on peasants declined after the turn of the century – another dramatic change – but the fundamental problem of government and state ignorance remained. This was a matter of poor government that would matter more as Russia entered its period of fiscal crisis in 1914 and turned to the peasantry to pay for old and new needs. Peasant Direct Taxes and the State Revenue Budget to 1914 The assumption that peasants bore the brunt of state tax claims is widespread, and it is worthwhile to test that assumption against the quantitative evidence.

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This exercise makes it possible to identify more succinctly what was and was not at stake in the last decade of the old regime. Briefly stated, the issue after 1905 was not the burden as such but the manner in which peasant taxes were fixed. State revenue grew from 206.9 million rubles in 1855 to 3.4 billion rubles in 1913, the last pre-war budget. This was achieved by a wholesale rethinking of the nature of wealth and the sources of state economic power. When the treasury looked at its subjects as money rather than as status groups, it transcended legal differences and proposed an equivalency of all Russians regardless of birth. Some may have been wealthier and others poorer, but all lent themselves to that same standard of measurement. The old regime reformed itself, and the fisc was a tool of the change; by the same token, the fisc gathered more and different revenue because of the larger changes it had initiated. Locating wealth and persons required a new kind of state observation and calculation and a new familiarity between payer and collector. In the nexus of information the distinction between ruler and ruled could be blurred, yielding to a new sense of government rather than mere rule. State revenue and economic activity lost their fundamentally predatory relationship and became mutually dependent. Peasant direct taxes never underwent that transformation.1 Instead peasant taxes were reduced to near insignificance in the overall state budget, which was to make the problem smaller rather than to resolve it. The commonplace of the nineteenth century, still repeated in some of the historical literature, was that peasants in imperial Russia paid most of the taxes or at least more than they should.2 In fact peasant taxes fell as a share of the imperial budget from the 1880s until they became nominal after 1906, and they fell dramatically per capita as well. From that time the issue was starkly one of government, much less of revenue.3 In 1855, according to the imperfect official figures, peasants paid 82 per cent of all direct taxes (42.7 million of 52.2 million rubles) and a fifth of the entire imperial budget of 207.0 million rubles.4 The aggregate direct taxes on peasants escalated into the 1890s because peasants were required to pay for the land they received at Emancipation, and these redemption payments were treated by all concerned as taxes. Total payments reached 111.7 million rubles in 1895. From then on the total tax bill declined as the state reduced the land taxes and then abolished the redemption payments on 3 November 1905. In 1913 peasants paid around a tenth of what they had paid a decade earlier, or 13.0 million rubles in the state land tax.5 A disproportionate share of these were apportioned in a punitive manner to the Polish provinces – it was a grand abuse made possible by the nature of apportionment – which was bad news for Poland and good news for all other regions.6

The Peasant and the Fisc  239 Table 8.1 Peasant Direct Tax Payments and Their Share in All Direct Tax Receipts in 1913, Whole Empire (nearest thousand rubles) Industrial tax

Tax on capital gains

Urban properties tax

Apartment tax

Land taxes on rural private property (mainly gentry)

Direct taxes on rural estates (peasants and equivalents)

Total direct taxes

150,118,000 54.1%

35,104,000 12.7%

36,611,000 13.2%

8,986,000 3.2%

11,082,000 4.0%

35,553,000 12.8%

277,454,000

Source: Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, vyp. 1915g., 33–5, 98–101.

But payments of the land tax were small and declining, even if one were to add together the taxes paid by peasants and by other peasant-like populations. Empire-wide, if one adds the land tax on peasants to all the taxes that could conceivably be construed as state levies on peasants and peasant-like populations and nomads, from the chimney taxes on Polish peasants to the tax on Kirghiz and Kalmyk herds to the levies on Armenian homesteaders, then the figure is 35.6 million rubles, give or take.7 In absolute terms, peasants in 1913 were paying less than in 1855 and certainly less than in 1895. The declining contributions of peasants were equally impressive when viewed as a share of direct taxes, presented in table 8.1. In 1913 direct tax receipts (priamye nalogi, on persons, businesses, and properties) reached 277.5 million rubles, of which 35.6 million rubles or 13 per cent came from peasants and rural populations, other than noblemen. To put these numbers in perspective, the treasury secured over four times more revenue from the industrial tax than it did from direct taxes on peasants. The treasury secured the same revenue from the tax on interest from capital as it did from direct taxes on peasants, and roughly the same from the urban properties tax as it did from direct taxes on peasants. Overall, non-peasants paid some 87 per cent of direct taxes, or, to put it more accurately, that share was paid by a population that did not conform to the ascribed estate categories of the old regime. It was paid by a mixed population of traders, manufacturers, bankers, shopkeepers, urban dwellers and property owners, and owners of rural private property (mainly noblemen). The payers were sometimes peasants by legal estate, but they were selected for what they did economically rather than how they were born, and occupation superseded legal ascription. Estate categories no longer corresponded to the categories of payers, and the term “taxable estate” had by then lost its meaning. The old regime continued to reform itself.

240  The Politics of Obscurity Table 8.2 Peasant Direct Tax Payments and Their Share in All Direct Taxes, Fees, and Levies in 1913, Whole Empire (nearest thousand rubles) Direct taxes (from table 8.1) except on rural estates

Direct taxes on rural estates (peasants and equivalents)

Stamp duties

Fees on property transfers (including inheritance)

Total direct taxes, fees, and levies

241,901,000

35,553,000

111,844,000

48,360,000

437,658,000

55.3%

8.1%

25.6%

11.0%

Source: Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, vyp. 1915 g., 33, 98–101.

Even this estimate – that 13 per cent of direct tax payments were from taxes on peasants – is an overestimate of the share paid by peasants qua peasants because many Russian direct taxes came under different headings, like fees (poshliny) and levies (sbory) that fell on property sales, commercial transactions, transportation, and inheritance, most of which were tax-like and proportional to the value of the transaction (chapter 3). The overwhelming share of these were paid by non-peasants because of their greater visibility in a commercial economy, the separate laws pertaining to peasant properties and contracts, and the graduated rates that depended on the size of a transaction or contract and meant that peasants paid less or not at all. These, added to the titular direct taxes in table 8.1, amounted to 437.7 million rubles, of which peasants qua peasants paid 35.6 million rubles or 8.1 per cent (table 8.2). Roughly speaking, nine-tenths of direct tax revenue came from populations other than peasants. Or, to put it succinctly, 92 per cent of direct tax receipts did not relate to the payer’s legal status. True, from the perspective of peasant payers, the total direct tax bill fell less sharply because they were also liable for local taxes paid to the zemstvos and communal self-government (mirskie sbory), as well as for mandatory fire insurance payments. These rose as state taxes fell8 and should be studied more carefully. Taking these into account, Wheatcroft still finds (using a different statistical series and an unspecified territory) a decline from 189.1 million rubles in 1895 to 157.5 million rubles in 1912.9 Anfimov uses a different calculation and shows a decline from 182.9 million rubles in 1901 to 152.7 million rubles in 1912.10 The per capita rate fell more sharply because the population grew as the aggregate tax bill fell. Russia’s rural population in the fifty provinces increased from 87.6 million in 1901 to 108.8 million in 1912; in all the empire, except Finland, the population rose from 135 million to 168 million. Lower aggregate taxes were owed by many more people; by Anfimov’s calculation the peasant

The Peasant and the Fisc  241 Table 8.3 Peasant Direct Tax Payments and Their Share in Total State Revenue Budget in 1913, Whole Empire (nearest thousand rubles) Type of tax

Rubles

Per cent of total revenue

Direct taxes: Income and property Of which peasant direct taxes

272,517,000 35,553,000

7.9% 1.0%

Fees and levies on transactions, titles, and transportation

231,230,000

6.7%

TOTAL DIRECT REVENUE*

503,747,000

14.7%

Indirect taxes: Excises (including the excise on vodka) and customs

708,101,000

20.6%

State regalia (including the vodka monopoly)

1,024,882,000

29.9%

State properties (including state railways)

1,043,740,000

30.4%

TOTAL INDIRECT REVENUE

2,776,723,000

80.9%

136,888,000

4%

VARIOUS AND EXTRAORDINARY REVENUES TOTAL

3,417,358,000

Source: Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, vyp. 1915 g., 33–5, 98–101. *The total for these receipts is higher than the totals in tables 8.1 and 8.2 because they include sundry receipts that do not fall under the larger categories. Because of the way they are entered by the Ministry of Finances, they cannot be disaggregated.

per capita rate for all direct taxes at all levels of government declined by about 25 per cent from 1904 to 1912.11 The transformation is expressed more vividly if one considers that overall revenue in 1913 stood at 3.4 billion rubles (table 8.3), of which peasant direct taxes accounted for about 1 per cent. Excepting the revenues of the vodka monopoly and the revenues of the railways (both categories in table 7.1) on the grounds that they were businesses sooner than taxes, the state revenue budget stood at 1.7 billion rubles; peasant direct taxes accounted for 2 per cent. Excises and receipts from state vodka sales and the state railways, as table 8.3 shows, made up around 85 per cent of state revenue. Peasants paid these rates, along with all other Russian consumers (chapter 7). How much they paid is impossible to say because the figures on purchases did not record estate

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belonging. Even if those figures were available, it would be hard to gauge their significance, for lack of data on peasant incomes. One can instead suggest that an excise tax was not a direct burden but the accompaniment to consumer purchases of non-essentials. They were regressive and unfair but not a burden in the usual sense. However, we do know from the data on points of sale that most of this revenue came from the cities that were more monetized, had more an exchange economy, and were more affluent. Exact numbers are hard to defend, but Plaggenborg’s estimates are the most defensible; he concludes for 1901 that urbanites paid about 65 per cent of the excise taxes while accounting for 20 per cent of the population, and that of all taxes, direct and indirect, urbanites and peasants paid at a ratio of 7:3.12 There are two broad meanings to draw from these figures. The one concerns the total taxes paid by peasants as such, by which measure the Russian state had succeeded marvellously in its effort to shift taxes away from rural and peasant Russia to urban and commercial Russia. The system of peasant taxation maintained its deep injustices, from arbitrary and near-blind apportionments of tax burdens to the localities, to deliberately punitive apportionments to Poland. But the scandal almost always concerned the land taxes, which had become paltry; the overwhelming weight of direct tax revenue came from assessed and calculated taxes on industry, commerce, transactions, and urban properties, and these were applied to all regions in the same manner.13 Regardless of the region, by 1913 peasants were paying fewer direct taxes than in 1855, not to mention 1895, be it in the aggregate or per capita. Mironov speculates that in general the standard of living was on the rise, something that invites further investigation. If confirmed, it would make every ruble paid in tax less onerous. Plaggenborg asks whether the direct taxes on peasants were not too low given their paying powers.14 The second meaning concerns the ways in which the Russian state was moving towards taxes on incomes and exchange that reflected a commercialized economy rather than a status-based society. It was this movement that makes measurement of the total peasant tax bill so difficult; aside from the direct taxes on peasant lands, the state did not record which social and legal groups paid what taxes, and the assessment process was never structured to offer such data. Statisticians struggled to extrapolate an estimate of the peasant burden as such, and historians have followed suit, but one should not rush past the historical point: the Russian budget, and to that extent the Russian polity, was making a distinct move to universalism. The decline in peasant taxes quickly ended the debate on peasant over­ taxation; instead it put issues of poor government into sharper relief, and this

The Peasant and the Fisc  243

disquiet lasted to the end of the old regime in 1917 and indeed into the 1920s. At issue all along, and singly so after 1905, was the manner in which peasants were assessed and what this said about the place of peasants in the Russian system of rule and government. The problem was not that the system of peasant taxation had changed to the worse. Those with a historical memory knew that the symptoms of a bad administration that were routinely listed – large arrears, crude methods of collection and punishment, arbitrariness, the fact that peasants managed their taxes in relative obscurity – were not new. Rather, the problem was that not much had changed at all, and the tax system was “completely out of correspondence with the demands of the new times.”15 As urban and commercial taxation vaulted ahead into a new era of individual assessment, peasant taxes remained positively antique. They were collectivist in an era of individuation, apportioned in an era of calculation, coercive in an era of discipline. Most impressive was the higher standard by which success was being measured: the capacity of the state to know its individual subjects and, in the words of Nikolai Brzheskii, the vice-director of Direct Taxation in the 1890s, to create a direct relationship with “a single payer, not a tax unit.” Having “surrendered” power over peasants to the nobility under serfdom, and to “incompetent” peasant authorities at Emancipation, the state should now “reveal” payers obscured by intervening authorities and “particularistic” institutions. F.G. Terner, a former acting minister of finances and a surviving member of the old Tax Commission, wrote in 1896 that the symptoms of the anachronism were to be found in “corporal punishment, forced wage-work, the selling off of peasant inventories – in short, those leftovers of serfdom, the existence of which is completely incompatible with the financial administration of a cultured country.”16 The clash of epochs may be expressed in the following contrast. As Terner was writing in the mid-1890s, urban residents were gathering for the first time to administer the apartment tax in co-operation with the inspectors, and the process was understood by officials and some tax payers as a moment of civic maturity and personal self-realization. Men in frock coats and neckties met in their elected tax commissions and pored over written self-assessments, their own included; they extended or limited the state’s claims, allowed or curtailed the avoidances of their peers, and in sum participated in a new kind of state. Some payers may have seen the dawn of a new citizenship; none had a choice but to play the citizen. In that same year countless peasants who had not paid their taxes were being stripped, bound to benches, and beaten with birch rods. No one even knew how many because the practice was internal to peasant selfgovernment, as indeed were most aspects of peasant taxation and government.

244  The Politics of Obscurity

The abolition of corporal punishment at the turn of the century did not remove the conditions of state ignorance that produced it. Labour dues (“taxes in kind”) were levied on peasants every year and continued unabated to 1917. Like a beating, they were an unelaborated claim on the body of the peasant, unmediated by calculation and money. Viewed this way, there were two Russias: the one urban and individualized, the other rural and collective. The one measured individuals and created individual accountability, the other measured aggregates and taxed collectives; the one concocted “personalities” expressed in money, the other claimed and punished the body of the peasant; the one invited the payer to join in power, the other subjected the person to the power of the sovereign. The one was unavoidable, bounded by the threat of coercion, the other easily avoided (hence the arrears) and coercive to the core. The beating stood in for familiarity. Russian officials could rightly use the budget to paint a picture of a modern, diversified, and dynamic fiscal system that represented a modern and diversified economy; the overwhelming share of state revenue came from one or another commercial or industrial transaction and economic exchange generally. But that small, premodern pocket of revenue, so insignificant in the overall budget that it would scarcely be missed if abolished altogether, embodied the state’s relationship with the 80 per cent of the population that was peasant. And yet to abolish it would be to cut peasants loose from any direct obligations to the treasury and a primary connection to the Russian state. Russia would have been in good company if matters had been left at that; many industrial and industrializing societies ignored or exempted agricultural incomes, found it difficult to locate them, and sometimes protected them. Anyway the incomes in question were small, and agrarian populations tended to shrink. In Russia in 1914, however, the fiscal crisis was enormous (and in part self-inflicted; see chapter 7), new revenues were desperately needed, and peasants comprised four out of every five inhabitants. Peasants were the obvious new source of receipts, but, fiscally speaking, not one peasant could be found as an individual, only all of them as a collective. In the crisis that ensued an intense modern claim was hoisted on a population that was entirely unprepared for it, using a system never intended for these purposes. State Policy and the Practices of Uncertainty For all the studies that have attempted to show that the taxes that fell on peasants were high or low, the one argument that is not to be found is that the direct taxes on peasants were fair, rational, or equitable. On the contrary, their

The Peasant and the Fisc  245

unfairness and inequitability (neravnomernost’) were points of departure for contemporaries of all stripes, in or out of government.17 The main dispute about the pre-1905 period was and is whether the aggregate of peasant taxes was overburdening peasants in the aggregate and whether the per capita rate was sustainable for the average peasant. We do know that the aggregate taxes and per capita rates declined, and dramatically so after the turn of the century. But peasants did not pay their taxes per capita; they followed local practice, which was legally and customarily idiosyncratic. How much and in what manner a peasant household was given a tax bill was necessarily a matter of uncertainty to any outside observer. The uncertainty was conditioned by the nature of the peasant tax system, which distributed bills to peasant communities and left collections to those communities. Peasant direct taxes since the eighteenth century had been repartitional (raskladnye) as opposed to assessed (okladnye). This meant that fundamentally the imperial bill for a given tax was an assessment of state need that was then distributed among the regions, not an assessment of payer capacity that might determine the size of the state’s claim. They remained repartitional until 1917 and indeed into the 1920s, with only a brief interruption in 1918 when the new Soviet government experimented with assessment (chapter 11). In some ways the state’s claim was moderated by notions of peasant capacities but only in the crudest ways. Account was taken of the presumed value of the land that peasants received after Emancipation as an aggregate, also the product of guesswork, and the tax bill was then redistributed among the regions, then the provinces (gubernii), then the districts (uezdy), then the counties (volosti), and finally the rural societies (selskie obshchestva). At any or all stages state employees, from the Ministry of Finances in St Petersburg to the provincial Treasury Office to the inspector in the district capital, could modify the distributions, sometimes by use of harvest estimates and grain prices but usually based on anecdote and the personal observation of the inspector. This happened regularly, but it took years to gain the necessary approvals because the overall bill was fixed by the central government; any local adjustment required a reconsideration of all bills. The start and the end of the process was the state’s total demand; if a Treasury Office could make the case for lowering the bill for a district or rural society, that same amount had to be reapportioned to some other district or rural society as compensation. An amount reduced in one province was supposed to be levied in another.18 Ultimately the central government could reduce the total bill, a cumbersome process that did occur with some regularity, but this was more a matter of forgiveness than a calculation of income. Peasant taxes

246  The Politics of Obscurity

were never meant to be a function of incomes; at best the state and its agents struggled to account for “sufficiencies” (dostatki) in a system designed to ignore them.19 Post facto studies of the matter can guess whether there was a happy accident – that peasant tax bills happened to be reasonable in relation to peasant paying power, something that was very rarely measured at the time. This was the nature of the poll tax and the quit-rent on state lands that existed to 1886, and of the state land tax that replaced them in that year.20 Added to that same bill were the taxes imposed by the zemstvos, also on land and also repartitional, which comprised the single largest source of zemstvo revenue and were collected, along with state taxes, by the Treasury Offices.21 More taxes were levied by the peasant county and the rural society. In addition to formal taxes, peasants owed the redemption payments for the land they had received at Emancipation, which were phased in after 1861 and universalized in European Russia from 1886. These payments were theoretically part of a bond operation that would amortize over the next half century; by the 1890s, however, they had been redefined as taxes and they were collected in the same manner as was any other tax, and added to the total tax bill received by a local community. While the rates for redemption payments were set in a variety of manners – by the patently unequal negotiations between landowner and serf on private lands, by translating the quit-rent into a redemption for state lands, by regional averages, or by undisguised guesses22 – they shared with other taxes a lack of correspondence with local paying capacities, as officials at the time freely admitted.23 All of these taxes were presented to the rural society along with obligatory insurance premiums and repayments of food loans as a lump sum or in stages, and they were to be paid according to the local economic calendar. There was a fundamental disjuncture between what the central government apportioned to the rural society and the manner in which a rural society repartitioned and collected it; for this reason it is difficult to trace the impact of a given tax on a county, rural society, village, or household. For the state, apportionment was based on land values at least theoretically, while the rural society repartitioned the bill among households as it saw fit, using any number of methods that were allowed by the law. Peasant tax practices within the rural society were no one’s formal concern until the 1890s,24 but the matter of apportionment within the rural society remained an autonomous peasant affair to 1917. Alarms were raised in state offices when the tax delivered by the rural society was chronically and egregiously low, and the arrears were the formal trigger for greater state intervention.25 But this too was less an occasion for better calculations, and more the pretext for greater coercion to force local officials to collect more from the villagers. As late as 1892 the Ministry of

The Peasant and the Fisc  247

Finances proclaimed explicitly that it did not intend to alter the principles of peasant taxation, only improve the system as it existed,26 and this remained mostly true through the famine of that year, the revolution of 1905, and into the Great War. Apportionment and repartition was hardly unique on the European fiscal spectrum, but elsewhere this had evolved into forms of detailed calculation. The French impôts de répartition apportioned bills to the départements, and they to the payers by use of well-developed provincial cadastres that indicated who owned what properties and what incomes the properties implied for the owners. The individual was then accountable with his or her property, and property was the common thread in all regions and all levels of the fiscal hierarchy. The process was dynamic: local information was sent up the hierarchy to inform the total national assessment and the provincial shares.27 In Russia into the 1880s some commercial and real estate taxes were apportioned, including the redistributive tax on enterprises and the urban properties tax. Over the decades they were fine-tuned and correlated with local values and incomes by way of dynamic cadastres; local information was fed into norms in the process of collecting taxes, and the norms were used to recalculate what the state could reasonably expect and to distribute the bill more fairly among the regions and tax units. Payers were responsible with their properties (chapters 3–4). There was nothing comparable in rural Russia for four principal reasons. In the first place, there was no uniform or even complete cadastre or a mechanism for feeding local economic data back into the process of assessment. Second, the self-government of peasant communities shielded the individual household from the state, making calibrated and individualized assessments impossible and precluding the locality from sending information back to the centre in order to modify the distributions. Third, and in a related vein, the state’s fiscal administration was too sparse to administer the taxes in any direct way, and the inspectorate had been banned from entering villages since its creation in 1885. Fourth, there were limits on what peasant possessions might serve as security, to be seized in the case of delinquency, and therefore uneven enforcement and poor accountability. The scarcity of personnel was in the first instance the product of administrative expedient, a way to release the central government from hiring anyone below the district level. Collection was devolved onto peasant collectives, and the act of collecting taxes was itself “one of the burdens of the local population.”28 The state did not pay salaries to the rural elders, and this tended to limit the influence of the one on the other; if they were paid, it was part of a local arrangement.29 This meant that a single inspector, when the position was

248  The Politics of Obscurity

created in 1885, aided by land captains, when those positions were created in 1889, oversaw a district, and they interacted with the elders of the county. The circuits (uchastki) that broke down a city into smaller tax neighbourhoods were not introduced in rural Russia; the state’s employees were appointed at the district level. These same inspectors spent most of their time with urban and commercial taxes, where they had greater powers of inspection and where they secured most the state’s direct revenue. On average in European Russia this gave the inspector oversight of twenty or so counties, each county with ten or so rural societies (sel’skie obshchestva), each rural society with three or more villages (sela, seleniia), and each village with ten or so households on average. The sheer expanse was one issue; the sheer number of households another.30 The Vologda Treasury Office reported that in Nikol’skii district one inspector oversaw 160 rural societies, some with 285 villages each. Tot’ma district had rural societies with 45 villages each, and Kandikov had on average 17. In Olonets province a single rural society might have 28 to 63 villages. The expansive north was not unique if one considers how many households might be involved. In Kherson in the south the average inspector oversaw fewer rural societies but an aggregate of 25,000 households, as did his colleague in the north.31 When the government tried to rectify the situation in 1899 by reducing the size of the rural societies and shifting accountability to some of the villages, it did little to help the inspectors; they now oversaw four times the number of tax units (rural societies and villages) and the same number of households.32 For the most part, their work involved scrutiny of the rural society accounts, on the lookout for gross formal irregularities. Even if they had wanted to, inspectors were not permitted to visit the individual peasant households or even the assemblies (skhody) of the county, the rural society, and the village. That task was left to the police.33 There were ideological reasons for this, as we shall see, but expedience was still an issue into the next century. Witte oversaw the reform of 1899 that made some tax territories smaller, but he insisted that inspectors only interact with elders, never households; the personnel were better employed to manage the taxes on businesses and urban real estate.34 The problem of personnel did not go away after 1905, and the Duma Finance Commission in 1912 pleaded with the government to hire fewer constables and more inspectors and to make peasant taxation a matter of calculation rather than guesses.35 Closely related to the scarcity of personnel was the scarcity of numbers and information, for these existed in a mutual, dynamic relationship; the one could not function without the other. For lack of sufficient personnel to gather the local economic data, the existing personnel lacked the data to administer the local taxes. This deprived the system of that hallmark of modern fiscal systems,

The Peasant and the Fisc  249

whereby the process of collecting a tax furnished ever-better information on the object being taxed, making for more current assessments and more calibrated taxes over time. The tax inspector’s data pertained to the whole district or the rural society and focused on aggregate land holdings rather than on what was redistributed down to the household, and harvest estimates concerned the whole district and what it exported out of the district.36 Any of his figures were aggregates for the district, perpetuating a system of aggregate collective taxation. Even the aggregate figures were poor because there was no cadastre of taxable land. Cadastres may have been crude, but at least they were localized and were the starting point of any assessed tax; having located plots of land and connected them with their owners, one might over time add details about other economic activities and income potential in order to bring tax bills into correspondence with paying capacities – perhaps of the household, but as a start even the rural society or county. In the 1860s and 1870s the Ministry of Finances invited the new zemstvos to create provincial cadastres that would be used in apportioning any tax. For lack of zemstvo statisticians (the first was hired in 1870, in Viatka),37 the government gave up and returned to its own global statistics. It tried again in 1893, and in 1899 it added a subsidy of 1 million rubles. By 1916 the work was half complete, and the local procedures varied wildly, but the government decided to use what it had anyway in tax collection and food supply.38 Hoch’s observation on the 1850s still applied in the twentieth century: grand schemes – in his case the redemption process, in this case reformed land taxes – were enacted on the basis of numbers that were inappropriate to the task at hand, with aggregates, averages, surmises, and guesses standing in for real knowledge.39 Part of the problem with both state and zemstvo statistics was one of geographic equivalence, since each province or district was measuring something else – usually land in combination with animals, labour, crafts, or wages, but in no uniform or consistent way. This was especially problematic in apportioned taxation, where the relative rates were decisive in deciding what ter­ritory received what share of a fixed bill. But there was another kind of equivalence that mattered even more as the century drew to a close: the capacity to measure all tax units in terms of their monetary surpluses (money spent outside the tax unit on things other than necessities), the only sure way to compare any one household with any other, and the only way to decide whether a given tax was appropriate to that household. This was a matter of income (dokhod), which had a specific meaning that made it useful in modern taxation and indeed originated with income taxation (chapter 3). This concept was well developed in urban and commercial taxation, but Russian statisticians rarely measured

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income in rural Russia at all. When the government undertook its first studies of national income in 1906 and again in 1909, it excluded peasants altogether.40 As David Darrow writes, statisticians were interested in subsistence and in surpluses above a biological necessity, not income as such.41 There was good reason for this since much of a peasant economy was not monetary but in kind, the labour provided by the family rather than the market, but this was a problem for fiscal policy; the practice proceeded from and reinforced the notion that peasants were not subject to the same measurement as any other sector of the economy. It was this exceptionalism that spawned the labour-production school associated with Aleksandr Chaianov, which not only held that peasants were outside the usual boundaries of economics but also created an entire subdiscipline that valorized peasant exceptionalism.42 Sergei Prokopovich, on whom historians still rely for estimates of national income, decided that the problem of peasant incomes was intractable and offered some extremely conditional numbers. He assigned a monetary value to goods that were not exchanged, meaning the monetary value of the production and labour that were not monetized.43 To attempt to apply these findings to fiscal policy requires caution, for the studies of national income of the early twentieth century were conducted with the proposed income tax in mind; they were interested in the incomes of the affluent, the urban, and the commercialized, not the peasants. Estimates of peasant incomes and the share taken by taxes tend to go back to either Prokopovich or the ministry’s efforts of 1906 and 1909,44 or use one or two village case studies from which historians have extrapolated notions of an imperial pattern.45 A particular case study of one village in 1906 has a fascinating genealogy in the historiography: it held that peasants paid 6 per cent of their income on taxes, but over time the fact that it was a single case study of one village in one year has been lost in a string of increasingly global, unqualified, and confident citations.46 The specific issue here is how to measure the share of taxation in peasant incomes, at a time when no measurement of peasant income beyond some cases studies existed and when the proposition was methodologically curious. Applying these standards of income measurement to peasants would have meant measuring tax as a proportion of an egg that was eaten in the household, a domicile that was never rented out, and a cow that was never slaughtered or sold. One could draw any number of contradictory conclusions from these estimates, often to serve an immediate political purpose. Witte had argued in the 1890s that peasant taxes were low and had per capita rates to make his case, but when he disagreed with a new tax proposal in the State Council in 1902, he

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declared that taxation had reached “its extreme limit of intensity” (whereas in fact peasant tax rates had gone down). For the latter claim he offered no numbers, and nor could he, since at that time there were no figures for national income and there never would be figures for peasant incomes as such.47 In 1905 Nikolai Kutler, anxious to show that personal incomes in the cities and commerce were taxed too little and should be subjected to the new income tax, argued that peasants paid 35 per cent of their income on taxes, as against 8–10 per cent paid by manufacturers. The figures on commerce were defensible since these taxes proceeded from provable and calculated income; there is no telling how he arrived at his figures on peasant incomes.48 The problem of method directly affected the reality of tax assessment on the ground. For lack of data and personnel and for lack of agreement about how to measure peasant incomes, the taxes that were meant to be levied on paying power or property values became quasi poll taxes or flat rates on land regardless of economic meaning. This was indeed the greatest criticism of peasant taxation all the way to 1917 and even the 1920s. The state land tax, phased in from 1874 and universalized in European Russia in 1886 as the replacement for the poll tax, was meant to be guided by the value of the land (at a rate of 0.18 per cent) or its implied income (3.5 per cent). To keep the tax simple and consistent, the tax on peasant land was levied on allotment land exclusively. Lacking useful figures on either values or incomes, the repartition of the tax among the regions by the law of 1884 followed the crude precedent that had been used to set redemption rates at Emancipation, including regional and provincial averages, existing rates for the quit-rent, existing rates for the poll tax, and sheer guessing. Far from being an assessment, the rates reflected simple division: 36.6 per cent was repartitioned to the central black earth region, 36.6 per cent to the other black earth regions, and 26.8 per cent to the non-black earth.49 These same evaluations were in use in 1915, though the regional distributions were recalculated in 1906.50 The problem continued as the imperial and regional bill was repartitioned locally. The job of apportioning the land tax to the rural societies in 1886 fell to the newly hired and the yet-to-be hired inspectors (the position was only created in 1885), who were given six months. In that year around two hundred inspectors were hired, and only five hundred positions were to be filled in total. For lack of time, experience, or data, the inspectors used as their guide the existing rates for the poll tax and the quit-rent, the values used in the redemption process, seriously outdated population figures (usually the census of 1859), and even the land evaluations of the 1840s. Assessing land values was fundamentally problematic because the land in question did not have a market value;

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it was inalienable peasant allotment land, so the inspectors used the data on the sale of gentry land, which had a market value. In many regards, Nina Anan’ich muses, the poll tax survived as the land tax, and the quit-rent as the redemption payments.51 Ultimately the imperial aggregates derived from precedent, or the amount that had been levied in previous taxes and were thought to be reasonable, and these in turn had been estimates of state need rather than agrarian capacities. Peasant autonomy was also a problem, and peasant self-government had strong advocates in the government until the turn of the century, as Simonova shows.52 It made the state claims and the peasant collections two separate undertakings. Bunge was alone among ministers in 1882 to argue that the proposed tax inspectors be allowed to enter villages and deal directly with individual peasant households and circumvent the peasant elders. It would reflect the unity of the state and peasant realms and embody a new integration as the county and communal budgets became the smallest elements in a larger state budget, the household the smallest unit of government.53 This would have been a start, but he was blocked by Minister of Internal Affairs Tolstoy who defended the “principle of peasant self-administration.” Peasants required paternalism and protection from the money economy and from any force that could put subsistence and rural stability at risk. The goal of the rural system was order and subsistence, not an education in accounting and civics. Even many of Bunge’s subordinates, the directors of Treasury Offices who were summoned to St Petersburg for consultations in 1882–3, balked at the suggestion that the new inspector might actually enter villages. Power was separate, distant, and awe inspiring, standing above as the “warden of the people” (opekun naroda). Inspectors should be like the police, and one inspector should be appointed for every district policeman and take on the police’s fiscal responsibilities. “Isn’t that just the same old constable,” demurred one of Bunge’s supporters, “now transferring his service from the Interior Ministry to the Finance Ministry?”54 The State Council sided with Tolstoy and stripped the inspectors of any powers of household assessment whatsoever and banned them from entering villages or visiting the peasant assemblies. They could look over the county tax books, and where they found massive irregularities, they might initiate a cumbersome process of reporting them to the Treasury Office, the Treasury Office reporting to the district agencies on peasant affairs,55 the district agencies to the governor, and the governor to the police.56 Tolstoy for his part proposed an expansion of the all-purpose plenipotentiary personnel (chinovniki osobykh poruchenii) who could travel the districts freely and intervene when necessary to cut through bureaucratic red tape and local custom.57 In this he anticipated the land captains, non-peasants who were introduced to oversee peasants in

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1889, powerful but not systematic. Land captains did have the right to intervene in rural societies if the flow of justice and taxes was interrupted, and they usually co-operated with the inspectors but in no sustained or systematic way.58 Formally and deliberately the ideal peasant community was supposed to function on its own. As Corinne Gaudin writes, the rural society was the “primary mediating institution” between the state and the peasant household,59 and for fiscal purposes it was the primary “tax unit” (podatnaia edinitsa) beyond which the treasury did not regularly peer.60 Until 1903 this principle of peasant self-government was enshrined in the collective responsibility that made every household of a rural society responsible for every other household; the shortfalls of the one could be claimed from all others, a collective delinquency claimed from a single neighbour. Collective responsibility in taxation obtained in all regions regardless of forms of land ownership.61 It was a laudable spirit of “all for one and one for all” (vse za odnogo, odin za vsekh) according to some, a “complete depersonalization of the peasant” in the view of others.62 Collective responsibility and “the commune” were used loosely to imply things that lasted well past 1903 when collective responsibility was abolished, and well past 1906 when the commune was challenged by the Stolypin reforms. Legally, and all the way to 1917, it was the rural society that apportioned the tax bill to the households, and in practice it was the rural society that delivered the lump sums to the treasury. The terminology allowed for confusion. Perusing the inspectors’ reports, it is clear that they used the term “collective responsibility” to imply the local process of apportionment and collection in which the inspector had no part, and was a synonym for obscurity. “The commune” (obshchina or mir, by which they may have meant the rural society, the village, or the land commune proper) was shorthand for administrative separateness, the levels of government in which the inspector did not take part. The term referred less to specific legal practices (they often spoke of the mir, which was not a legal institution at all but a tradition, or the obshchina, which was the land commune and not related to taxation directly) and more to the fact that the inspectors had little idea what the villagers were doing because sums were apportioned within rural societies and villages according to local politics, precedents, and calculations. The inspector’s ignorance was ensured by the legal provision, which lasted to 1917, that he not visit peasant gatherings and households; he dealt instead with the elders of the county and the rural society.63 All of this rendered local particularities, customs, and traditions less relevant to the work of the state’s agents because in a real sense the inspector was not permitted to care what happened inside the rural society; he cared more about the disposition and demeanour of the elders and the final delivery of a

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collective tax assessment. To be sure, rural societies operated in a variety of economic and legal contexts that affected how exactly they carried out their duties, and the system was structured to respect and preserve those differences by ignoring them. They ranged from communal landownership in much of central Russia that faded to individual hereditary ownership as one moved south, west, and east, each of which produced modified rules for the administration of taxes. The elders might act with one or another degree of formal involvement by the local community of villages or households, and they may or may not have convened gatherings of representatives from all the villages they comprised, as the law required. These mattered less because the details were left to the communities to sort out and because the functions of the group were regularly performed by the elders acting alone.64 In the 1890s the inspectors reported from across the European empire that there was no discernible distinction between one or another kind of ownership and that from Poltava to Archangel and from Pskov to Tauride the Treasury Offices gave lump sums to the rural societies to sort out and also left collections to the elders.65 They surmised that the villages that were supposed to practise collective responsibility did not, and those that were exempt from collective responsibility practised it anyway.66 In substance, regional variation was rendered meaningless by the legal provision that the rural society was responsible for the group, in most places until 1903, and by the fact that the apportionment of the tax bill remained the sole responsibility of the peasant institutions all the way to 1917. All in all, the process of peasant taxation, from the fixing of the imperial bill in St Petersburg to the repartition to the individual household, was governed by uncertainty, since no one could say for certain whether a tax was too high or too low for a village or household. The uncertainty was reflected in the responses of the central government, which alternated between brief bouts of harshness and brutality and longer-term policies of reduction, forgiveness, and laxity. Neither extreme could be justified by the numbers, such as they were, and any thesis about the burden of taxation on peasants was conditional. Critics of the government who tended to cite anecdote and round numbers to argue that peasant taxes were too high were confronted by the fact that the per capita rates were very small.67 But to claim that peasant taxes were therefore low or reasonable, as Witte did towards the end of the 1890s, was equally incautious because no one could say how the per capita rate actually fell on households, which depended on how a bill was repartitioned by the district and the rural society, how arrears were registered, and how taxes and arrears were collected.68 The safer observation was made by Minister of Finances Reutern when he formed

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a commission to study the problem of arrears in 1876: taxes bore no obvious relationship to the value or income of the land being taxed, making it impossible to correlate wealth or poverty with the household liabilities or arrears.69 Or, as a typical inspector put it in 1893, the main reason for shortfalls and arrears was not necessarily high taxes; this could not be known. It was “the lack of correspondence with income,” making any assessment arbitrary and idiosyncratic.70 It was a certainty that some peasants who could carry a tax burden were de facto tax exempt, and equally certain that others were assessed beyond their capacities. None of this was new, and the system in its basic outlines was as old as Peter the Great (chapter 2). What had changed by the 1890s were the standards for measuring success, which had everything to do with the remarkable transformation in the system of urban and commercial taxation. There the treasury practised all the things that peasant taxation did not: assessment that was consistent from region to region and household to household because it was based on income and expressible as money; tax bills that corresponded with proven paying power; assessments that were individualized, meaning specific to the person, household, enterprise, or property; and taxes that tended to be actually collected because they were assessed on provable and visible income and backed by the threat of confiscation. By then only peasants were not individually accountable for their obligations, and the personalized and knowledgedriven practices of the cities had completely passed them by. Witte lamented that a peasant was a “half-person” (poluperson) rather than a “person” (person),71 and personhood by then had a long and complicated fiscal history in urban Russia. But the land tax, “by its very nature” as an apportioned tax, Kokovtsov stated in 1906, “cannot be an equitable tax” – a fair statement that had been beside the point a few decades before.72 Witte’s comment to Nicholas in 1898 – that peasant taxes were not necessarily too high but were certainly the wrong kind – was self-serving for a minister under political siege, but it was also accurate if one was concerned with good government.73 The inspectors who were relative newcomers to the scene expressed this heightened expectation in their frustrated comments on the unresponsiveness of peasant communities to outside stimulation and exhortation; their much deeper experience with urban taxation had prepared them for something else altogether. Formal collective responsibility bore the brunt of the public and official criticism as “a union that stands between the fisc and the individual payer, past which it is impossible to look into individual tax-paying power.” Its abolition in 1903 was championed by many of the same people who had promoted personal income taxation in the cities, and in so doing they declared an ambition sooner

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than an outcome. For Ozerov it was a huge symbolic moment: “the barrier falls away, and more and more the fisc will be able to enter into direct relations with payers, and this will give the inspectors ever more data in order to become familiar with the tax capacities of separate payers.”74 Nikolai Kutler argued the repeal before the State Council in 1902 with language lifted directly from the language of the apartment tax, ascribing to peasants characteristics that he had used to describe well-off urbanites. “Now the fact of the distinct personality is noticeable in the structure of our village, along with the development of personal initiative and entrepreneurship and the striving of the more developed and energetic peasants to improve their situation.”75 Such was the view from St Petersburg, the provincial capital, and the district centre. It remains to consider how the tax system operated as peasant practice in the county and the rural society.

9  The Local Practices of Peasant Taxation

Collective responsibility was abolished in most of European Russia in 1903, and most of the empire followed suit,1 but territorial apportionment remained in place. This made for local practices that changed very little. The repartition of the tax bill to the rural society and household remained a local peasant matter with little sustained involvement by the agents of the state. The latter complained that peasants were unable to grapple with finances and were unfamiliar with the law, but the evidence should direct our attention elsewhere. Peasants tended to grapple as well or as poorly as anyone else when it came to the law,2 but the laws themselves were terrible. The laws afforded the elders and the communities extraordinary latitude so that the many absurd practices that were observed locally were in fact legal. Officials prayed that the local practices would also be sensible and fair, but there were few provisions to ensure it. The law permitted assessments and collections that might have little to do with capacities, they tended to punish the wrong people, and they punished delinquents in ways that had little to do with collecting taxes and arrears. The system reinforced notions of rule and sovereign power but made little fiscal sense. The large arrears that characterized the eighteenth century also characterized the early twentieth. The 1903 declaration of individual household responsibility was as true as it had ever been, in the sense that the same elders did what they could to distribute the same bills to individual households, did what they could to induce their fellow peasants to pay, and then delivered the lump sum to the treasury. The government was at a loss about how to make household accountability a reality and did not issue new instructions until 1910; these stated blandly that the household was responsible for taxes, but with no elaboration.3 The inspectors were still consumed by their work in the taxes on commerce and city real estate; each inspector was responsible in addition for some 25,000 peasant

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households. Rarely could they focus their attentions on peasant taxation at its lowest levels. What did begin to change, gradually but discernibly, was that the inspectors could intervene after the fact of apportionment when high arrears triggered their involvement, and peasants were permitted to petition the inspectors directly for a lowering of their taxes or a forgiving of their arrears. The agents of the state could be seen considering individual peasant households for the first time, albeit by appealing to the elders for information and action.4 This was a modest change that carried some significance for how the peasantry was to be governed; given time it could have been a realistic start. It remains to examine local peasant practices as they evolved before and after 1903, considering the three stages of local taxation: apportionment or repartition by the rural society to the household, the registration and forgiving of arrears, and the actual collections of taxes and arrears. Labour levies, scarcely removed from a corvée and with many of its abuses, persisted to 1917 and beyond. Repartition The bill for the state land tax was received by the peasant elders of each county and combined with the redemption dues and the local taxes on a date that accorded with the local economic cycle (for example, after the harvest, after the timber season, after the fishing season).5 These bills were redistributed among the rural societies. The act of apportioning among households (raskladochnyi prigovor or razverstka) was supposed to be done by a meeting of the peasant assembly, be it of a rural society or of representatives of the villages that comprised the rural society. Very often the elder did it on his own, or he renewed repartitions from past years. From the perspective of the inspector and the land captain, this was perhaps the simplest part of the tax process because the aggregate could be divided among the households as that rural society saw fit. So long as the report of the elders was coherent and consistent in the sense that the same principles applied to all payers, there was no further reason for the inspector to be involved.6 How precisely the rural societies apportioned the bills was no one’s formal concern until 1893 in the aftermath of the Volga famine and epidemic, when the Ministry of Finances asked the inspectors to report on local tax practices. The ministry wanted to know whether peasant households were being taxed consistently and in some reasonable proportion to their capacities, and ultimately whether peasants were being overburdened. The inspectors responded by studying the formal reports of the rural societies7 and reported in substance

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that there was no way to predict how state taxes affected individual households because rural societies were given a wide variety of ways to repartition the bills. But it was clear that proportionality to one’s overall means entered local calculations only occasionally. Justice was very much a part of the process but not in the sense of proportionality and progression as fiscal experts understood it. For the most part, rural societies sought simplicity and consistency, and they aimed for the arithmetic equality of all the households but not a measure of paying power. They tended to apply a single and inflexible standard – often but not always the size of a household’s land allotments – across the board so as to avoid a sense of arbitrariness and favouritism.8 This was most often achieved by dividing the total taxes by the number of allotments in a given rural society. These shares (zemel’nye dushi, pai) were then apportioned to the households in accordance with the number of allotments they held.9 However, there was great local variation that went well beyond the allotment land. Shares might be apportioned by the number of persons of all ages (“by eaters,” po edokam) or the number of adult workers, or adult male workers, or male heads of household, making them all variations on a poll tax. Husbandry, crafts, and land bought or rented outside the commune were not taken into account in many cases. At least one community did take all of this into account and used complex calculations of what each indicator meant for the paying power of the household, leading one inspector to call it a proto-income tax.10 Elsewhere shares were apportioned on the basis of holdings of pasture and woodlands, more valuable in some regions than was arable; in coastal Archangel province, by access to fishing waters, divided evenly among all males over the age of ten; in Olonets, by the number of ovens, each representing a unified household; in parts of Samara, by chimneys, meaning again the hearth as household. Any of these patterns might be found in a single county or even a single rural society that comprised several villages, each following its own customs or the will of its village gathering or the decisions of its elder.11 Regardless of the method, the requirement was that the total of all household assessments add up to the total assessment for the rural society, the total for all rural societies to the total bill for the county. The process could be extremely perfunctory, with elders renewing the practices of previous years or decades, and very often referring to the population census of 1859. Dead people were regularly taxed (this was permitted in the law), and those still alive were required to pay their shares – in one village the taxable dead reaching a quarter of all households, and in another the dead accounting for most of the arrears that the living refused to pay.12 Inspectors could lament that the assessments were flat, arbitrary, unfair, or entirely absurd, but they were not illegal. So long as the

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rural society applied its method consistently, the inspector had no reason to intervene. The role of the inspector was to verify that the decision of the rural society about the method of distributing the bill was being practised, whatever that decision might be, but not to challenge the decision itself.13 The process of apportionment was the one stage of peasant taxation that was not reformed by the law of 1903. After the repeal of collective responsibility, inspectors were enjoined to consider local practices more carefully, but the requirements were largely the same as before: check the account books for extreme formal irregularities and verify that the same standards were used with all households. Rural societies were also supposed to explain the methods they used for apportioning, but these were rarely challenged because the law allowed them to practise almost any method so long as it reflected “local custom” or bore some relationship with “capacities.” According to the instructions sent to the elders, capacities could be measured by a wide range of methods, from the size of land holdings to the number of workers, of human beings, or of draught animals, “and so on” – an ellipsis that could and did allow almost anything.14 Verification of the methods used in a rural society was difficult because the inspectors had the same aggregate numbers as before – usually land and districtwide harvest figures that were updated every one to six years or perhaps not at all, and very often surmised on the basis of anecdotal reports. If there was something formally wrong with the repartitional act or if one was not adopted for that year, the inspector could only impose the repartition from the previous year, not devise a new one.15 There were still traces of collective responsibility, abolished for collections but maintained at the stage of apportionment; any decision to release households from taxes for reasons of hardship did not release the village from the total assessment. The shares of the exempted had to be assigned to other households, which explains the rarity of exemptions.16 Consider the cases to be found in 1910 in Kandikov district, a largely fertile and agricultural region of Vologda province also known for its cattle raising and milk production. One rural society simply reported how much it had charged each household by simple division (the total bill divided by the number of households), making it entirely flat and undiscriminating: every adult male owed 2.62 rubles for the state land tax. No household was named, and no cows entered a calculation. The neighbouring rural society divided the taxes among parcels of allotment land so that each household (here they were named) would pay a multiple of that rate according to the number of allotments it possessed, with no mention of varying land qualities or household sizes, or livestock, which were so important to the local economy. This was a flat tax on land rather than on households. The space on the form for explaining the method of repartition was always left blank by the elders, and probably seemed redundant; it was obvious that their method was simple arithmetic.17

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Some officials did exhort their inspectors to individualize their work in the spirit of the Stolypin land reforms, which put a premium on individualized government and accountability. The director of the Simbirsk Treasury Office, A.A. Bulgakov, explained the new political climate to the periodic congress of the province’s tax inspectors in 1908. “The impersonal, unitary, collectively paying commune is changing before our very eyes into an assembly of many payers responsible for themselves personally … The repeal of collective responsibility should have placed the taxation and administrative organs [of the state] closer to the payer, to more exactly and better calculate his assessment and his arrears.” Yet clearly taxes were assessed indiscriminately, and this was “abnormal and impermissible, and it demands on the basis of the law the most active interference in order to eliminate it.” Bulgakov was careless with his words (the commune played no part in taxation), and he proposed despite the law that the inspectors conduct an “exhaustive investigation of all householders” and replace village assessments with household assessments. This was fanciful even if it had been legal. In this province ten inspectors with rural oversight were assigned over 234,000 households, or on average 23,000 households each, and their main work was in commercial and urban taxation. The Simbirsk inspectors pondered the problem. Full-scale household assessment was out of the question, but they might instead identify simple and consistent indicators; the raw data on land per household could be modified when placed alongside some other measure of well-being such as wage-work, the harvest for that year, or husbandry. Inspector A.P. Briukhatov proposed to divide all households into “rich” and “poor” using one or another indicator, and others proposed a graduated scale using a variety of indicators, but the meeting degenerated when it was asked to decide which indicators to use. Any one item of wealth meant something different in each village, and any one item was meaningless when unaccompanied by other indicators. Concluded the stenographer: “The members of the congress recognized the desirability of setting scales [of paying power], but the members of the congress had difficulty showing what the indicators of each gradation would be.”18 What the inspectors needed but lacked was a monetary representation of peasant incomes that would override local specificities so that tax could be assessed in all places by the same methods. In the meantime the inspectors depended for information on the records and accounts of the rural society and county, and these had worsened since 1903. With the repeal of collective responsibility the rural society had been told to list each household with some indication of its tax burden and its capacities; since this meant thousands of households, the elders stopped collecting data altogether. Hence the brief, laconic lists of tax liabilities with no indication of method other than long division.19

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Even Stolypin’s homesteaders and the many more who had left the repartitional land commune and held their land as “individual property” saw little change in the way they were assessed.20 In practice they received a share of the repartitioned bill.21 The instructions of 1910 called for separate household assessment and billing, only as exceptions, for households that had physically and legally left the village and shared in none of the common resources whatsoever. Such households were extremely few, while all others were to receive their share of the bill for the village or rural society.22 Even this modest provision was overridden by the Ministry of Justice, which insisted that all peasant land (including homesteads) be registered together so as not to confuse it with gentry land, which was truly “private.”23 Arrears and Forgiveness The involvement of the central state in peasant taxation escalated at the next stage of the process, the reporting and forgiving of arrears.24 When a rural society did not pay its full tax bill by the end of the cycle (usually in January or February, but this varied over time and space), the deficit was automatically registered as an arrear (nedoimka). With each passing year these arrears accumulated. In the 1890s peasant tax arrears reached unprecedented amounts, though not unprecedented proportions to the annual bill. The arrears became the undeniable proof that something was wrong with peasant taxation. The problem was to decide what exactly was wrong, an issue that was addressed in two ways: in the investigations that the arrears triggered at the local level, since shortfalls gave the inspectors a little more power to examine local practices and economic conditions; and in the protracted public debate over peasant poverty, in which the arrears were the central point of reference. First to the public debate, which was the most familiar to contemporaries and historians alike. By the 1890s it was widely assumed that the arrears were a reflection of peasant poverty and part of a larger crisis of peasant agriculture; Hoch writes that tax arrears were “certainly the most widely cited surrogate measure of rural living standards,”25 precisely because there was no direct measure of peasant living standards. The fact that the arrears made a leap during and after the famine years 1891–2 seemed to support a correspondence between arrears and poverty and reinforced the assumption that peasants were not paying their taxes because they could not afford them. If peasants did not pay taxes in 1892 because of the famine, the reasoning went, then they did not pay taxes in other years because they were poor. If this were true, then an effort to collect taxes and arrears would plunge households into destitution, rendering the relationship causal as well. Vyshnegradskii’s policy of stepped-up

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collections in the years and even weeks preceding the crop failure – one of the circulars dated to 25 July 1891 – seemed to offer a scandalous illustration.26 The assumption that peasant arrears reflected poverty was understandable because arrears offered some consistent quantitative backbone to one or another narrative of rural Russia at a time when data was extremely hard to come by. Bunge himself cited the arrears in 1880 to argue for the repeal of the salt tax since arrears “are a sign of the ruin of peasant households, the impoverishment of the source from which the state receives its revenues.” He used the arrears again in 1882 to argue for forgiving them and for a reduction in the redemption payments. “Naturally,” he told the State Council, “taxes that are burdensome to the payers become delinquent, and huge arrears are accumulating in entire rural societies.”27 Outside of government the argument ballooned. Ianson’s comprehensive study of 1878–9 was a sincere if flawed argument that an unfair Emancipation settlement left peasants with too few resources to pay tax bills that were too high.28 The narrative resonated with the gentry who could now speak for “agriculture,” identifying their own decline with the perceived immiseration of peasants and ignoring the larger origins of the gentry’s condition – cheap wheat from Australia and Canada that depressed world prices. Russians saw the crisis in Russian terms, but, lest we forget, the agricultural depression was Europe-wide. On this basis the Russian gentry could ask for lower taxes and favourable tariffs on tools and machinery.29 Outright oppositionists and subversives used the aggregates to speak for “the people” that was defined in large measure by their victimhood and misery: searching for the people, they found it expressed in aggregate tax numbers; and searching for an impoverished people, they found it expressed in the aggregate arrears.30 The rest was simple division: each Russian peasant owed a given tax, and each peasant was too poor to pay to the extent of the per capita arrear. All these groups contributed in their ways to the “agrarian question” (agrarnyi vorpos) that took shape definitively in the wake of the Volga famine of 1891 and the ensuing epidemic, when so many newly minted professionals hired by local and central governments were joined by correspondents and journalists who witnessed the human catastrophe – some 600,000 dead – and reported it to the reading public.31 What they witnessed and read about for the Volga region in two years was generalized as a picture of the peasantry everywhere and always. Many at the time were aware of the regional and local variations, but people disposed to think of aggregates – the peasantry and the people – were likely to return to them even after enumerating the caveats.32 Witte was one of the few to suggest otherwise, though he chose his terms carefully: “there is absolutely no wholesale impoverishment of the peasantry,” which was a way of saying that not every peasant everywhere was always poor, but this still left plenty of room for poverty.33

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Soviet-era historians refined the global argument, though some like Anfimov and Koval’chenko knew the reality to be more complicated and hinted as much in the numbers they reproduced without comment. They could plainly see that regional variations were too sharp to allow for a pure class analysis for the whole European empire or a general statement of the peasantry’s condition, but they generally refrained from the direct statement.34 They had little choice: steady peasant immiseration was by then twinned with peasant class stratification (uncomfortably to be sure) as a causal explanation for the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. To question the immiseration thesis was to question the legitimacy of the October Revolution. Those with a choice found the same argument compelling, and it became elaborate in the hands of American historians. Robinson and Gershenkron offered the most coherent versions over the next several decades, and generations of historians were trained in their narratives of an unrelenting poverty that fed directly into the fall of autocracy.35 Historians have enumerated the flaws in the immiseration thesis in recent years, especially the use of global figures.36 Briefly stated, the tendency to cite cumulative arrears and compare them with that year’s tax bill was dramatic in narrative terms, but it compared two different things. Total cumulative arrears were published annually by the Ministry of Finances in a column next to that year’s assessment. It was an accounting device that showed what revenues the treasury might still expect. (In a balance book it was a credit, not a liability, which helps explain why it persisted in official usage even though it was a political liability.) It was this comparison – annual tax bill and cumulative arrears – that was available in published form to any interested person, and it was more dramatic than the annual shortfall. Looking at redemption payments in European Russia for 1897, for example, peasants owed 97.4 million rubles on the yearly bill but paid 87.5 million rubles – a shortfall for that year of 9.9 million rubles or 10 per cent. This was suggestive if not necessarily shocking, and it was certainly not new. But according to the cumulative figures, peasants were in arrears for 103.9 million rubles against a bill of 97.4 million rubles, making (total) arrears 107 per cent of the (annual) assessment.37 Calculating the arrears for the redemption payments alone was also problematic. The overwhelming weight of all arrears in direct taxes in the European empire comprised arrears in redemption payments, or 103.9 million rubles out of 104.2 million rubles in 1897. Fixing their sights on redemptions offered greater impact and also moral outrage because under this category peasants were paying for land that they and others thought should have belonged to the peasantry in the first place, as the people who actually worked it. It was possible to propose that peasants were consciously expressing a world view and a moral economy – refusing to pay redemptions they thought unjust, but accepting

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taxes as fair. In fact the evidence shows overwhelmingly that peasants did not know which taxes were being paid with every delivery to the treasury, because the law predetermined which dues were being satisfied and in what order. Having retained its share for communal and county taxes (which meant these were satisfied first), the rural society sent the remainder as a lump sum to the district treasurer (uezdyi kaznachei). The rest was accounting procedure: the treasurer applied the sums first to the zemstvo land taxes and then to the state land taxes; in later years priority was given to the obligatory insurance payments and the repayment of food loans. The redemption payments were satisfied last. Arrears were calculated in the reverse order so that any arrear would be recorded automatically and necessarily as an arrear in redemption payments.38 It was this practice that explained the very high arrears for the redemption payments and also the very low arrears for any other tax. Hence in 1897 peasants in European Russia were in arrears for the redemption payments for 103.9 million cumulatively, but 10.0 per cent for the land tax cumulatively and 3.1 per cent for the land tax on that year’s bill. To put it another way, 96.9 per cent of the land tax for that year had been paid.39 The fundamental flaw to the argument that correlated arrears with deepening poverty was that arrears were nothing new or unusual; they had been endemic to the system of repartitioned taxes since the introduction of the poll tax under Peter the Great (chapter 2). Arrears had existed before, during, and after economic catastrophes, and geographically they were to be found in stricken and unaffected regions alike. The recent history was no different. In 1854 the arrears in the poll tax were a cumulative 54.2 million rubles against annual receipts of 45.4 million rubles. These were forgiven to clear the decks for Emancipation, only to climb to 15 million rubles by 1871, 23 million rubles by 1875, and 31 million rubles in 1881; another 7 million of that was written off.40 Arrears in the redemption payments appeared as soon as the process started, reaching 8 million rubles in 1866 or just five years after their introduction for some categories of peasants; many of these were forgiven, but they climbed again to 20.5 million rubles in 1880 and 23.4 million rubles in 1881. Many of these too were forgiven – 9 million rubles in annual dues and 14 million rubles in arrears – followed by more reductions and write-offs in 1883. More arrears and write-offs ensued.41 Consider, more broadly, what happened after 1905, by which time the redemption payments had been abolished and the arrears mostly forgiven. Now the tax bill for peasants was at its lowest point since the eighteenth century and 10 per cent of what it had been in 1895, and the aggregate of taxes owed to all levels of government was smaller than the aggregate in the 1890s. At that point the arrears began to accumulate anew, but for the state land tax which was now

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the last item to be satisfied by peasant payments.42 In 1913 alone, peasants in European Russia failed to pay 1.2 million rubles in land taxes against a bill (including arrears) of 7.3 million rubles, for a shortfall of 16.2 per cent. Empirewide it was 16.4 per cent.43 The distribution of arrears over space defied neat generalization. Arrears jumped in regions with famine but also in regions with no famine at all – indeed, in regions with good harvests that could sell dear owing to the harvest failure elsewhere.44 Industrial regions had arrears as high as those of agricultural regions. Some rural societies in a county had no arrears, while neighbouring ones had arrears of 260 per cent; some rural societies overpaid their taxes, while neighbouring ones owed up to six times their annual assessments.45 The reasons that a given rural society paid its taxes were often idiosyncratic. A rural society with a timber mill to pay the whole bill had no arrears, while the neighbouring village had high ones; the owner of a fishing trawler who hired crews from a given village might pay all the direct taxes for the village, while the neighbouring village had massive arrears. Or a rural society might borrow from itself or from the county, in effect using communal taxes to pay state taxes and cover the whole assessment.46 (It meant that peasant tax payments in these cases were counted twice – once as communal, once as state taxes – and, if widespread, would modify our calculations of actual peasant payments.) Economic explanations do have their place, to be sure, and there was always some good reason that peasants could not pay their taxes in one or another locality, be it regional harvest failures, falls in the prices of cash crops, or local events like the closing of a mill.47 The problem of arrears was chronic and may be located properly in the nature of the taxes in question. An economic down-turn affected different tax systems in different ways. Income-based taxes would simply produce less revenue, reflecting lower economic activity, falling sales, lower profits, and lower provable income. Apportioned taxes were different; an economic down-turn produced formal arrears, not simply reduced revenue. This was especially true of the crude apportionment that was practised in peasant Russia. Since assessments were not based on income or economic activity, they stayed the same regardless of economic conditions. This was true at the ministerial level where the aggregate imperial assessments were fixed. It was also true on the microlevel when the rural society received a bill; the amount could not be changed, so the elder and the assembly were loathe to grant anyone a reduction or an exemption, even in cases of catastrophe or demonstrable poverty, because that same amount would have to be collected from someone else.48 For peasants or communities in distress the ready alternative was always non-payment. The same alternative was available to any household that simply did not want to pay

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tax. Either way, the shortfall was necessarily registered as an arrear. It might be addressed after the fact with reapportionments and write-offs from St Petersburg or new repartitions within the provinces and rural societies, but not during the tax cycle. At every level of the system, assessments were driven by historical precedent; it took quite a shock and quite a mobilization of will to alter the amounts that had been apportioned in previous years. This in a nutshell is what fiscal experts meant by the system’s “immovability” (nepodvizhnost’)49 – its insensitivity to economic change, and the paucity of dynamic and current information that made other taxes reflections of economic activity. To wit, even after the reform of the system in 1903 and the adoption of new instructions in 1910, the repartition of the tax by a village could not be changed for six years, regardless of intervening events, and if a new repartition was not adopted, the old one retained its force. The same distributions to households could be used indefinitely in defiance of economic and demographic change.50 Urban taxes were completing a move to assessment because they produced specific data on the properties in question; they were “flexible” (gibkie) and they could be adjusted at the imperial level quite easily because they were based on real knowledge of what a property could sustain in terms of tax;51 peasant taxation lacked that capacity to produce information. Try as one might, attempts to correlate arrears with one or another indicator of wealth or poverty were unsuccessful. Small land holdings that could not sustain high taxes had arrears, but large land holdings that could not sustain an even higher tax also had arrears. Villages that were formerly owned by noblemen had arrears, as did those that had been on crown or state lands – the former allegedly because they had too little land after Emancipation, the latter too much – so they all had arrears.52 Villages with household ownership lacked the enforcement of the community, while those with communal ownership lacked individual accountability, so they all had arrears.53 Those with formal collective responsibility had arrears because they tended to be large, and those without collective responsibility had arrears because they lacked collective responsibility, so they all had arrears.54 Observers might make equally convincing but opposite claims based on very little data, but the point was that they all had arrears.55 “It would be futile to attempt to explain the phenomenon on the basis of economic conditions,” Brzheskii concluded; the patchwork of low and high arrears reflected poor administration and the relative strictness and effectiveness of local peasant authorities and the police – a conclusion shared by the overwhelming opinion of inspectors who may or may not have referred to economic factors but always referred to poor enforcement.56 Arrears were endemic to peasant direct taxation, as they had been since the 1720s when the government assessed taxes in the expectation that only some

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would be paid. Arrears, in other words, were built into a system of uncertainty and were a way to moderate the claims of a state, which could never say if it was asking too much. This perspective should alter how we understand arrears towards the end of the nineteenth century. What was novel about the 1890s was not the presence of arrears, or even the proportion of the arrears to the annual bill, but the absolute ruble amount: in any year some tax would remain unpaid, and in the 1890s tax bills were higher; there was that much more tax not to pay. Over time the inspectors learned that peasant apportioned taxes were unlike the calibrated taxes of the cities and commerce, and they contented themselves with some revenue but not all of it. The trick was to decide how much less to expect in any given year, weighing the inclination of any tax payer to evade against the possibility that the tax might be too much for a given locality.57 Arrears did matter. They may or may not have been symptoms of poverty and economic down-turn in any given year, but one could never say for certain, because the tax system was never structured to correlate paying power with the tax; and in this sense arrears were always symptoms of poor government and inappropriate data. This had always been the case, and the government’s wellestablished response to its own uncertainty and its low confidence in its fiscal demands was to forgive the arrears altogether – with notorious bouts of harshness that were more memorable but far less frequent than the forgiveness. The forgiveness was as arbitrary as the initial imposts; for lack of the right kind of data, the write-offs and reductions were apportioned rather than calculated. In 1880, for example, the deliberations on the forgiving of arrears began among the ministries in St Petersburg by setting round numbers that would be written off from the total imperial bill, ranging from a flat 9 million rubles to a more generous but equally flat 12 million rubles. The State Council then decided to give the reduction to every peasant household so that all peasants could feel “the concern of the supreme power.” The reduction that was announced in December 1881 was calculated per head and then repartitioned within the provinces in the same manner as the initial assessment.58 In 1896 a reduction was decreed for the land tax of a total of 7.5 million rubles, which translated to under one ruble per desiatina in the south and over one ruble in the north, this one apportioned locally by the tax inspectors.59 As for the forgiving of arrears as such, the starting point of that process was, of course, the presence of arrears, for lack of any other consistent data: the higher the arrears, the larger the write-offs, so that a failure or refusal to pay tax was rewarded with a smaller bill.60 The surest way for a rural society to be refused the forgiveness was to pay its taxes in full. The urban payer seeking a lower tax bill documented his or her losses and expenses and received a calculated deduction; the peasant taxpayer was seeking

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mercy. The peasant reductions were announced as an autocratic gift rather than a fiscal calculation, using as the occasion one or another imperial milestone: coronations in 1882 and 1896 and the birth and christening of an heir in 1904. They reinforced the sense that taxation was a matter of autocratic arbitrariness – paternal and benevolent in this case, fierce and exacting in others. The matter was at once a reaffirmation of sovereign right and a clearing of the balance books, but it was not a calculation of need or fairness.61 Witte in 1900 hoped that the blanket write-offs would be replaced with localized and calibrated ones, but he offered no new method.62 Just a few years later, peasants were awarded the biggest write-off in Russian history with all the hallmarks of past ones – the forgiving of the arrears in the redemption payments followed by the abolition of redemptions altogether, to mark the birth and christening of the tsarevich. This one required no calculation at all because it was universal. Peasants in the late nineteenth century acted as they always had: they paid less tax and waited for the tsar to die or an heir to be born. Those peasant elders who thought it through or who were guided by their predecessors over the generations would have realized that the only way to receive a write-off of arrears was to have them, and the better way to receive forgiveness was a failure to pay taxes; prompt and full payment was one way not to receive autocratic favour. Officials had noticed this pattern as early as 1881, as the work of the government commissions planning to reduce peasant arrears was leaked and then publicized in the local press and announced outright in the villages, as proof of the autocrat’s benevolence. Peasants concluded that it would be folly to pay taxes that would soon be written-off or postponed – the emperor had just died, after all – and arrears escalated in villages that were deemed well off and poor.63 Sure enough, arrears were written off in anticipation of the coronation of 1882, and the redemption payments were reduced.64 When the government decreed reductions in the redemption payments in 1899, it kept the clause secret; a further 3.2 million rubles were forgiven without announcing it as policy, so as not to raise “exaggerated hopes” among peasants.65 But any such hopes were rewarded six years later when the peasant bill for taxes and redemptions was reduced by some 90 per cent. By the same token, natural calamities, which did raise the level of arrears, also became opportunities for peasant communities to not pay taxes whether or not they were afflicted; and this was no doubt a response to government policy, which suspended collections for entire regions, not just the stricken households or villages. The famine years 1891–2 are a case in point. A Perm’ inspector reported that a district with 48 per cent arrears in 1890 had doubled them to 100 per cent in 1893; the harvest failure of 1891 was a cause in some places in that year, but non-enforcement was the cause everywhere. In Orenburg the arrears

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were already 255 per cent of the annual bill in 1890, before rising to 428 per cent in 1893.66 In Kazan’ the provincial arrears grew steadily from 102 per cent of the bill in 1884 to 210 per cent in 1890 to 366 per cent in 1893. Noted the inspector, “Though the main reason for growth in the arrears must be attributed to the harvest failures of 1891 and 1892, nevertheless in many localities of the province poor harvests were not so much the cause of the shortfall but an excuse to allow it.”67 The repeal of collective responsibility in 1903 changed some of the local practices for dealing with arrears. Individual peasant households with high arrears were now given the right to circumvent the rural society and petition the inspector directly for redress. The inspector in turn could ask the county elders for information on the petitioner. This still meant that the inspector was brought in episodically, after the fact of apportioning a bill and only after a petition; and his recommendations were sent to a variety of state agents for a final decision. If the results were mixed, it owed to the short period between the reform and the outbreak of war, the ongoing problems of data and workloads, and the fact that the inspector still depended on the county authorities for information.68 But a motivated inspector could act in new ways. In one district in Vologda province the inspector responded to dozens of petitions from local peasants who requested a lower bill and a write-off of arrears. Kiprian Agafonov Maskalev (the names recorded in the local style) had been assessed in a per-head distribution of the local tax bill but paid none of it, on the grounds of poverty. As a retired soldier he had very little to spare. The inspector wrote to the peasant county board and received information on his individual land holdings (he had none) and livestock (also none), at which point the inspector wrote to the director of the Treasury Office, and he to the governor, and all agreed to write off Maskalev’s back taxes and exempt him from future land taxes. Obviously this was cumbersome, but it did work if the inspector made a point of it and if the county board responded.69 A petition from Zosim Andrianov Travinov produced a similar correspondence but a different result. Travinov had cheek: the inspector wrote to the county board and learned that Travinov, despite modest land holdings, earned a good salary at the state liquor store, which made him uniquely accessible and his income uniquely demonstrable. His wages were then docked at source to cover his back taxes. This involved the inspector, the county board, the land captain, the Treasury Office, the liquor store, and the governor, and it could not be a frequent occurrence, but it was now conceivable.70 In Valtanovskii county the inspector worked with the county board to compile impressively detailed lists of households, itemizing their individual allotments, horses, cows, other livestock, buildings, household members including male and female workers

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and minors, and any income from wage-work and non-farming occupations. He could refer to these lists when needed to address individual petitions.71 These were exceptions. Those who received individual tax relief tended to be landless retired soldiers, while those whose wages were docked were paid formally and in the public sector; not many were so demonstrably poor and not many earned money so transparently. Most inspectors did not have the time to spare, and they did not always have a co-operative elder at the county level. In any ten correspondences with the county boards about single peasants, for the land tax or for any other tax (such as the patent for enterprises that fell on peasant craftsmen), the inspector was likely to get a response on only one and gave up on the other nine. The elder’s silence was often motivated; if the inspector arranged to exempt one villager, the others would have to pay the difference. Usually the county board did not respond, and sometimes it responded that it had no record of the person’s economic standing or of the person’s existence.72 Even persistence did not always pay off. A file on Nefedovskii county in Vologda district stretched over two years, with the inspector asking for the names of the persons who owed back taxes and for an explanation of the arrears on an individual basis. The county board ignored the requests completely, and there was nothing the inspector could do except threaten it with the land captain. There is no record of what happened next, if anything.73 Lacking individual information, the inspectors acted on the only data they had, usually the regional harvest and the movement of grain between districts. They pressured the peasant elders in good years and relaxed collections in bad years. But the inspectors knew full well that the harvest was a poor indicator of paying power and concluded, again, that the key to good collections was the competence of the elders – which in turn explained the continuing patchwork of arrears, with one village paying in full and the neighbouring one not at all.74 Delinquency was still rewarded, inadvertently, because the inspectors still relied on precedent, or the aggregate payments that had been received from a rural society in previous years, as the benchmark for what to expect in the next year, and this also informed their decision to increase or decrease the pressure on the elders. The rural society had every reason to keep payments low in every single year lest the norm be increased. Woe to the rural society that paid all its taxes, for the same would be expected in the future.75 Collection and Punishment The county and the rural society used a combination of measures to ensure payment or to punish delinquents; the two recourses were not the same. Rural

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societies and counties could be engaged in one or another punitive measure at any moment of the year. They could apply them before the end of the tax cycle in order to collect a shortfall in current taxes (nedobor) or at any time to collect arrears registered with the Treasury Office (nedoimki). The elders were to identify individuals or villages with low rates of payment, take action independently, and perhaps invite the inspector, land captain, or police to assist. Measures included the redistribution of back taxes among all or some households under the provisions of collective responsibility, permitted until 1903; property confiscations in a whole village, again until 1903; individual confiscations, which were the main tool in all periods; arrests and fines of delinquents and peasant officials; compulsory wage-work or bans on travel (until 1906) and the docking of wages; and corporal punishment until its abolition in 1904.76 By the principles of collective responsibility these measures were supposed to be the affair of the local community; more often in practice it was the state’s agents who initiated the punishments in the face of passive or uncooperative elders, and the state’s agents did what they could to stimulate the elders into action. The dilemma that state officials faced had its roots in the structure of uncertainty. For the system to work well in gathering revenue it required stepped up coercion and force, applied in the first instance against the elders of the county and the rural society in the expectation that they in turn would gather more tax from the households. But since there was no way to tell what the peasant authorities would do to gather the tax, and indeed since neither the apportionments nor the arrears could be correlated with paying power, tax might be demanded arbitrarily by frantic elders trying to escape state intervention and personal punishment. It would be demanded “of the first passing fellow villager,” Bunge warned in 1882.77 Inspector Nardov in Nizhegorod province was reluctant to pass matters to the police because the policeman would take the tax as he saw fit, “and he does not distinguish the rich or well-off householder from the poor one.”78 Vyshnegradskii’s demand for more stern collections in 1891 translated in some localities into mass beatings, and for all his failings this was not what Vyshnegradskii had in mind. The results could be truly catastrophic for certain households and villages, including the “complete bankruptcy of the peasants” in question.79 It was this arbitrariness that incensed Nikolai Brzheskii, the ministry’s expert on peasant taxation and one of the main propagandists for the repeal of collective responsibility.80 Its repeal in 1903, however, did not alter the fundamental truth that punishment, like the assessment, was only sometimes related to capacities. Fiscal officials from St Petersburg to the district capitals lacked confidence in their demands, and this made inaction and a relaxation of pressure the safest course of action; ultimately, the only way to be sure that a household was not

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being overtaxed was not to tax it at all. Excepting the coordinated bouts of harsh collection that preceded and followed Bunge’s tenure, the trend in state policy was unmistakable: a reduction in the levels of coercion that were needed to make the system fiscally effective, largely because the measures were economically irrational and morally objectionable. This caution had been built into the system of peasant self-government since the 1860s, when the State Council and the Senate had adopted measures that were meant to protect peasants from destitution. Fundamentally this was the provision that as a rule peasant allotment land should not be taken away, on moral and political grounds (the household’s subsistence) and legal ones (the land was under state mortgage and could not be alienated until the debt was fully paid); anyway the land was needed to pay the taxes. Paradoxically, the taxability of the land was the measure of its immunity from seizure, though seizures did occur. But the same paradox applied to other possessions: the more meaningful they were to the household, the greater their immunity from seizure. Over time the Ministry of Finances added to these immunities, for example when Bunge ordered a halt to wholesale confiscations of village farm animals. Provincial Treasury Offices added their own exemptions.81 In the wake of the Volga famine a succession of exclusions were consolidated and elaborated in the law of December 1893 on the Inalienability of Peasant Possessions, which applied to redemption payments (the bulk of the arrears) and was extended in 1899 to all taxes and credit operations. In substance, the law held that a peasant household could not be deprived of any item that was necessary for its subsistence, including all real estate (be it allotments or land acquired individually since Emancipation), agricultural equipment and tools, seed for planting, grain for consumption, livestock, and draft animals. Seizing and actually selling any of these items was governed by cumbersome rules and procedures that were meant to make state and peasant authorities think carefully before attempting it.82 As the provincial Treasury Offices added their own exclusions, as the law required, the lists of items immune from seizure went well beyond the already long list of the Ministry of Finances.83 The result was that the land tax, theoretically assessed on the land’s value, could not automatically use that land as security and tended over time to treat it as immune from confiscation; and generally economic capacity played a decreasing role in the matter of enforcement. Consider, to begin with, the incidence of inventory (opis’) of peasant possessions other than land, the first step towards actually confiscating the possessions of delinquents. In forty-nine provinces of European Russia in the period 1891–4 inventory was taken in 97,480 villages. Such was the procedure that an inventory was a discrete act that did not necessarily mean that the goods would

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be sold; that happened in 12,951 cases, or 13 per cent of the villages in which inventory was taken. Nor were the returns impressive in fiscal terms; the arrears in these 12,951 villages were over 10 million rubles, but the receipts from the public auctions were 1.6 million rubles. In other words, inventories and the much rarer auctions were a way to warn peasants or show state agents that something was being done. The local reports bear this out.84 In the next statistical period, 1895–9, there was a sudden drop in this form of punishment. Now the data was gathered from thirty-six rather than forty-nine provinces, it covered five rather than four years, and it counted the number of households affected (213,138 inventories, 11,802 actual sales, with 352,174 rubles recouped) rather than the number of villages. Direct comparison between the two periods is not possible, but the ruble yield from the process can be compared as yearly provincial averages. In the first period the sales extracted 8,124 rubles per province per year, and in the second period 1,957 rubles per province per year, for a decline of 75 per cent. The annual decline within the period 1895–9 is also impressive. Inventory was taken in 62,057 households in 1895, but in 40,326 households in 1899; actual sales were held in 4,519 households in 1895, but in 1,821 households in 1899. And 97,137 rubles were yielded in 1895, against 44,429 rubles in 1899. Generally, one should consider the drop in the ocean that these efforts represented. In 1899 the arrears amounted to well over 100 million rubles, while sales were conducted against households with total arrears of 132,605 rubles and actually yielded the treasury 44,429 rubles.85 To put it another way, the confiscations, notorious as they were, yielded the treasury 0.04 per cent of what it was owed. The items that were seized in these operations did not pertain at all to the land that was assessed, and most items had no immediate economic significance; they tended to be items of household or personal use. Tax inspectors noticed that many samovars were being confiscated (“arrested,” as the term had it, meaning that they might be returned if tax were paid), one of the few manufactured goods that could be sold readily and was not a subsistence item; fur coats, considered a luxury since overcoats were thought to be adequate attire for peasants; and scarves and patterned blouses and extra pairs of boots. The items could take on local colour, as in multi-ethnic Perm’ province where the inspectors listed “fur coats, caftans, samovars, patterned dresses, coin necklaces (from Tatars), pillows, decorated harnesses, decorated yokes, and other things.”86 In some provinces the list of goods that could not be seized was much longer, so that in Nizhegorod in 1913 even the samovar was immune.87 The village society was also permitted to seize the allotment land of a chronic defaulter and redistribute it through the communal fund – a measure that at least bore some relationship to the subject of taxation. The process was

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cumbersome, but a determined elder might carry it through. To be sure, not all of the reported cases were for tax arrears as such. Rural societies used the tax system as the pretext for taking back land that was not being used by absentee peasants, not as a tool of accountability.88 The statistics did not record the cases in which the delinquents were not deprived of land but were given more to help them pay their bills.89 Nor was seizing allotment land always a punishment; for some households it was a blessing since much of it was wasteland for which they had to pay tax, while some peasants no longer lived in the villages and no longer used the land. Peasants in Viatka province begged to have their allotments taken away because it was wasteland, but the rural society refused; the system of repartition meant that someone in the rural society had to pay the assessment and the arrears, and no one else would have it.90 This is, incidentally, one good reason that allotment land was not seized more often.91 Be that as it may, allotments were seized in 87,599 cases in forty-nine provinces in the whole period of 1891–4. (The number is impressive at first glance, but recall that allotments numbered in the millions, and since each household might have several allotments, not all the allotments of a household were necessarily seized.) This was on average 447 per province per year. In the second period, 1895–9, 1,705 lost their land temporarily and 169 permanently in thirtysix provinces, for a combined average of 10 per province per year. That was a decline of 98 per cent. Again there was a decline within the period 1895–9, from 810 total cases in the first year to 132 cases in the last. In 1899, cases of the permanent seizure of an allotment amounted to two.92 Property seizures carried a certain logic: property was the route to the payer, and the person was being taxed in so far as, and to the extent that, he or she had the property to sustain that level of taxation. Accountability was also enforced through one’s property, lending the entire operation coherence and predictability. Bunge universalized the land tax in 1886 as a way to create a connection between capacities (income from land), taxes (on that land), and accountability (land as security). The person would be treated as an economic actor and reached through her or his property, making a tax calculated rather than a mark of personal subordination and burden. The law of 1893 overturned the nascent logic; it left collectors with less to confiscate, reinforcing the notion that the land tax, for all its objective dressing, was still an old-style tax on the person of the peasant rather than a function of economic activity. Theoretically tax fell on the allotment land of peasants, but that land was the least likely item of wealth to be seized in the event of non-payment, certainly by the end of the century. And the circle of items that could be confiscated other than land was so circumscribed as to make a connection between tax and general paying capacities nearly impossible; at the very least, it could not be routine.93

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The loss of individual accountability also made collective measures meaningless; tax and arrears would be the responsibility of all in theory but no one in practice.94 Collective responsibility was invoked when a rural society failed in its efforts to collect its current taxes and lower its arrears. In this process the role of the inspector and the land captain was more direct, be it by approving the act of collective responsibility, by forcing the rural society to invoke it, or by implementing it without the approval of the rural society.95 Collective responsibility was most often associated with the reapportionment of the arrears among all members of the rural society, but it was also rarely practised – 2,971 times in the period 1891–4, on average 742 times per year, with a high of 988 times in 1893 and a low of 415 times in 1894. In 1900, 112 rural societies applied it, of which 27 actually carried it out. Another 142 rural societies were forced against their will to invoke collective responsibility by the tax inspector and the land captain. Again the numbers were paltry, given that 62,084 rural societies had the right to carry it out, and most of them had arrears. The provincial break-downs for 1900 show no regional pattern and suggest instead that the attitudes of the governors, land captains, and tax inspectors were more decisive than local socio-economic conditions. Of the 27  cases in which the rural society implemented collective responsibility, 17 were in Moscow province, followed by two each in Samara, Kostroma, Perm’, and Voronezh. In other words, in most provinces collective responsibility was never practised at all, and collective responsibility was not practised in the overwhelming majority of rural societies. A single insistent tax inspector or land captain made the difference, so that of the 142 cases in which the inspector forced the issue and circumvented the peasant elders, 25 were in Moscow province and 17 in Samara.96 Redistributing arrears was a formal and discrete act that was separate from an effort to collect the arrears. In most cases the debt was being reapportioned to the same households that had not paid their taxes in the first place, and in other cases the entire village was in default, so any redistribution would fall on households that were already delinquent. If households had refused to pay because they were destitute, the mechanism made no sense because an additional tax would not make them well off. If they simply refused for lack of enforcement, nothing compelled them to change their ways. Either way, the problem came back to the lack of individual enforcement; however the debt was redistributed, it was hard to hold anyone accountable. Confronted with a new bill for their own arrears and the arrears of others, the households simply refused to pay it; the same sums, though redistributed, remained unpaid. Hence a Viatka inspector concluded, “Greater or lesser collections by villages is in no way related to the application of collective responsibility.”97

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Alternatively collective responsibility could take the form of wholesale inventories of all households in a village or rural society with a view towards mass auctions. Again it depended on the disposition of the state’s agents and the elders. Some provinces reported that it was practised in every district in at least one village, especially in the years before 1893; most reported that it was never practised at all. But these figures counted the inventories, not actual confiscations, and in only a handful of cases did the process result in an auction – about one in ten, according to the local reports. When the auctions were actually held, they were generally failures. There was a social stigma attached to auctions, since householders did not want a part in the punishment of their neighbours and did not show up.98 Moreover the wholesale auctions promised to sell confiscated goods to the same people who lost them. According to the rules, peasant possessions had to be sold in that same community.99 But since the buyers (that is, the debtors) did not appear for the event, the goods were returned to the owners. Only in the extreme and after holding the auction in that village more than once could the land captain hold the auction outside the village and allow outsiders to bid. Another way to view the auctions was as a form of ransom: villagers could come to buy back their own confiscated goods and indirectly pay down their tax arrears. The elder could seize goods from all or some villagers and keep them in his home until some of the back tax had been paid – as always hoping for some payment of back or current taxes but never all.100 Wholesale confiscations were fiscally ineffective. Evidence from the early 1890s suggests they might net 1–7 per cent of the arrears in question,101 but the ineffectiveness persisted. Wheatcroft, understandably baffled by the persistence of arrears in times of good harvests at the turn of the century, speculates that the repeal of collective responsibility deprived communities of enforcement and that this made for persistence of high arrears. But there is little evidence to support the assumption that collective measures had ever been used widely or had ever been effective. The more common individual measures were still in place, and these, too, had always been ineffective. Since most rural societies refused to enact collective responsibility (or any other punishment), the police sometimes took matters into their own hands. They made their rounds of the villages, took the property of peasants whether or not they were in arrears, and sold their goods in the street or at the regional bazaar. In a case from Viatka province the police were able to recover between 50 and 80 per cent of the arrears. These were good fiscal results, but there was no way to tell whether the measure collected the money from actual delinquents – formally the collection of arrears from a community was separate from the assessment of the original tax on its individuals and could instead be claimed from anyone – or it squeezed money from the truly destitute.102

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The lack of enforcement and accountability – the disconnect, that is, between the state’s agents and the rural societies, and between assessments on lands and collections from persons – also meant that even the most careful and incomebased assessments of a locality would not yield higher taxes. Malmyzheskii district of Viatka province was a well-publicized exception that proved the rule. In 1888 the district officials overseeing peasant affairs took an interest in the high arrears and worked with the inspector to arrive at a fair redistribution of the accumulated back taxes. It gave new instructions to the rural societies to account for land, buildings, livestock, horses, equipment, wages, crafts, and trade, and thereby divide the households into four groups: rich, well off, middle, and poor. In Smailskoe rural society this translated into a bill for 50 rubles per “land-soul” for three rich households (multiplied by the number of allotments per household), 30 rubles for 38 households that were well off, and 17.5 rubles for 88 households that were middling. Sixty-two households were deemed poor and exempted. This was a form of graduated taxation, one of the more careful examples to be found anywhere in rural Russia. The case is unique, and the outcome instructive: the peasant authorities did nothing to collect, and in that year not one household paid its taxes, presumably out of resentment of the interference and the violation of local notions of equality and justice. Collective responsibility became the collective refusal to pay.103 All this serves as a reminder that the role of the peasant elders was dual and contradictory, as Gaudin writes. They were not only the agents of the state; they were also and simultaneously the defenders of their communities and were loathe to act against their neighbours.104 While their fear of personal punishment might motivate them to collect more tax, the fact that they were members of the community could inspire them to resist outside pressure and remain passive in the face of arrears. Indeed, more impressive than the cases of punishment were the many more cases in which a local community did absolutely nothing to address the massive arrears. After all, the numbers show that confiscations of any kind – collective or individual – were highly exceptional, and the yields insignificant to the treasury given the size of the arrears. Other forms of punishment were easier to apply and indeed were more common because they were unrelated to the property of the taxpayer, but they were almost entirely lacking in fiscal sense. Chief among them were arrests (up to two days) and fines of delinquents and “responsible” individuals. The tax system was such that “responsible” before 1903 referred to the peasant administrators of the county and the rural society rather than the individual peasant households, which made legal sense because households were not individually responsible to the state. This made the elders accountable if not responsible. In the period of 1891–5, the period for which comprehensive numbers were kept

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for European Russia, 36,322 rural society elders were arrested along with 2,279 village collectors and 2,963 county elders.105 The majority of the arrests did not affect delinquents at all. Almost 42,000 peasant elders and collectors were arrested for arrears, compared with 38,225 individual defaulters. The practice, in other words, was designed to spur elders into action but not necessarily to force payment from the actual delinquents. On the contrary, arrest might be the preferred form of punishment for the delinquents because it did not actually force them to pay tax.106 Similarly, of the 21,404 fines that were levied, 14,873 fell on elders rather than on individual delinquents. Anyway, the practice of fining delinquents was absurd because the peasant who did not pay taxes was not likely to pay a fine; his likely punishment was another fine that would not be paid, or perhaps a beating. It is arguable indeed that the linch-pin of the system, and the main reason any taxes were collected at all, was that the elders stood to lose too much from shortfalls by way of arrests, fines, and state interference in local affairs and had everything to gain from large revenues that kept the state away, paid their salaries, and were easy to embezzle.107 The arrests were significant because the point was the personal punishment rather than the payment, and it reflected a sovereign right of the autocrat over the subject’s person rather than an economic claim as such; non-payment was an affront to state authority sooner than a cause for fiscal concern. Bunge was aware of this implication in the 1850s when he was invited to consider the abolition of serfdom and its fiscal ramifications. A poll tax on souls rather than on property could be assessed with no measure of paying capacities, and punishment could be meted out, but there would be no assurance that the tax would be paid. The poll tax was a sovereign imposition on a subject, unmediated by economic calculations of properties and paying powers, so that the person of the peasant was the state’s security in collections. And “the census soul on which the … tax is based cannot serve as sound security.” Deputy Minister Terner elaborated in 1896: in almost any other European country (and in Russia’s commercial-industrial sectors) payers were responsible in so far as they owned a taxable property. In Russian villages by contrast the tax fell on the person regardless of property and wealth, and the result of failure to pay was, among other things, arrest and corporal punishment – the only recourses left to the authorities who might punish disobedience and still not collect the tax.108 Corporal punishment offered the most retrograde but perversely consistent response to economic unaccountability. It was an extension to the notion of taxation as a sovereign claim on the person, and to punishment as a retribution for violating the sovereign’s law or will. “By breaking the law,” someone once wrote in a different context, “the offender has touched the very person of the

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prince.”109 There are no comprehensive figures on its use, partly because it was a practice internal to the county and applied by the peasant county courts, and partly because it was an awkward thing to publicize in Russia’s bilingual financial publications. A bond broker in Paris or London would be treated to data on bond yields, amortizations, railway operational costs, and the beatings of naked peasants. We do know that it was a sentence handed down most often for tax arrears. As with all matters of peasant taxation, its use depended on the disposition of the state’s local agents, the peasant elders, and, in this case, county courts. Anecdotal evidence suggests that around 1870 the practice was common, and floggings comprised the majority of sentences handed out by certain county courts. In particular districts in the 1880s, up to half of all male heads of household might be subjected to beatings for tax arrears, and in others none at all.110 In Tambov tax delinquency was wrapped in a larger temperance campaign. Delinquents who were chronically drunk or deemed lazy were arrested repeatedly; if the tax was still not paid and the delinquents returned to drinking, they were beaten regularly. Pressure from state agents also played a role in its incidence. In Viatka province the police seized the county judges, took them on the road to pass sentences of flogging, and administered them on the spot. Consider the shocking case of Constable Mitiashin in Kazan’ province, who was asked by the governor to act on the very high arrears of Kaisk county. He beat 700 persons in the first year and 214 in the second; in the third the villagers cornered and beat him. It was shocking for its sheer brutality but also because it did not induce the delinquents to pay.111 According to some reports the practice declined in the 1890s because peasant judges refused to use it or renounced it outright. Its final abolition in 1904 would have been the product of a movement from below, which would make it a rare case of autocratic sensitivity to peasant opinion. Certainly the moral outrage among the educated public was demonstrable. But some of the change was initiated by officials at all levels. State law steadily reduced the categories of peasants who could be flogged because officials thought it was retrograde and embarrassing, incompatible with the elevated status of more and more peasants. Aside from all women – exempted for the sexualized undertones of a stripped and beaten woman, which was taken to be different from the sexualized undertones of a stripped and beaten man – exclusions were extended to those with more than primary education, those in military service, those over sixty, and village and county elders.112 Land captains, who were given the right to change the sentences of county courts in 1889, often commuted floggings to fines and arrest, presumably because of their ethical qualms. Physicians who were required to oversee a flogging to ensure the victim was not crippled or killed began to object quite loudly.113

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Figure 9.1 Sergei Korovin, “Before the Flogging at the County Board” (1884). Oil on canvas. State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia. Used with permission.

Looked at in the context of tax arrears – which was the occasion for most sentences of corporal punishment – the decline in beatings conformed to a general decline in all forms of punishment for delinquency from the mid1890s. Rather than understand floggings in terms of the moral outrage that surrounded them, one might view them as part of the general relaxation of all forms of punishment – fines, arrests, and confiscations of any kind. The disturbing fact is that among all these forms of punishment beatings were still the most common in some districts.114 Informally after its repeal it was still practised by overzealous police who “literally beat the tax out of peasants” (bukval’noe vykolachivanie podatei).115 It persisted because flogging retained its premodern logic in a premodern system of taxation. It was the counterpart to

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forgiving arrears by “supreme manifesto” – also unrelated to economic capacities and also arbitrary. As Abby Schrader has shown for an earlier period, a beating reinforced conditions of unequal status and served as a reminder of the awesome power of the autocratic state over a single and illegitimate peasant. Apologists stated forthrightly that the birch was a necessary way to reinforce one’s social status and place, especially given doubts that peasants were mature enough to understand and internalize legality and assimilate the nature of the laws. Beautiful talk about citizenship seemed entirely out of place when the topic was the peasantry. At best, peasants would be taught obeisance and station. While the occasion was tax arrears, beatings reinforced “the finest but still perceptible boundaries or signifiers,” as one land captain put it.116 Floggings captured the peasant tax system in all its contradictions as the wider political and fiscal context vaulted ahead of an outmoded system of rule over peasants. If a flogging was considered in 1863 an effective means of overwhelming the defaulter and his neighbours with the spectacle of state power, by the 1890s the emerging standards of success were whether the tax was reasonable and whether treasury could actually secure the revenue; and there was little about a beating that ensured the payment of taxes. Policemen went into villages to administer beatings, levy fines, and arrest elders, and in some of the extreme cases of mass terror the peasants actually paid more tax; usually the arrears went down because they were forgiven, not because they were paid; and the arrears rose again when the bouts of terror were ended.117 On the contrary, the argument ran, beatings were a punishment preferable to paying taxes or to the other punishments that were available to the county court, such as arrest (and loss of labour days) or confiscations (and loss of property).118 The argument that peasants preferred the lash to the alternatives is based on hearsay, as Burbank has shown.119 There is, however, evidence that floggings were more likely to be administered if there was less property to confiscate.120 The significance of beatings lay not in the purported self-dehumanization of peasants but in the fact that it was the most economically meaningless recourse in a system that was animated by a good deal of economic meaninglessness. Such were the tensions of the system of rural revenue and administration that physical beatings were a real option in the course of collecting taxes, and they still made some sense at the turn of the century. At the very least, beatings demonstrated to state agents that something was being done about the huge arrears even if there was little hope that the tax arrears would be paid. Their incidence seems to have increased when outside authorities were present,121 making it a spectacle in a number of ways – a display of state power for other

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peasants to see, the humiliation of the delinquent by official power for what amounted to disobedience, and a performance for the state’s agents. All in all, the system of collections depended on the capacity of the state’s agents to apply pressure on the elders, and the elders on the members of the rural society. The measures ranged from the annoying (redistributing back taxes and imposing fines that would not be paid) to the punitive (seizing goods and arresting elders and delinquents) to the nonsensically brutal (beatings). Together these measures seem to have been adequate, as they always had been, to secure some revenue in any given year. It follows then, as the inspectors reported almost uniformly, that collections worked best when a rural society was faced with more interference and force, and worked poorly when the pressure was relaxed.122 It was the passivity that was much more common and less reported; it was less dramatic to narrate how something did not occur, though a report from Tikhvinskii district concluded that, with the passivity at all levels of the administration and huge local arrears (a cumulative 2 million rubles for the district), “peasants are paying mostly out of honour.”123 Asked to explain high arrears, most often the inspectors reported that little effort was spent on collections and punishment and that the elders contented themselves with collecting some portion of an annual tax bill. The official history of the inspectorate in 1910 summarized, “Stern measures of collection were taken only rarely, and at that only in cases of the persistent [arrears] of the payer.”124 “Insufficient attention” from the peasant authorities, land captain, and police was the recurring refrain. (One might add the neglect of the inspectors who were focused on urban and commercial taxes, but the inspectors penned the reports.) In Novgorod province the inspectors reported that only one county could be found where any enforcement measures were undertaken whatsoever, though all counties had arrears. In Pskov province, when an inspector asked the elders why peasants failed to pay taxes and arrears, the answer was disarming: “no one demanded it.” The rural society, noted an inspector in Kazan’, “undertakes compulsion only under pressure from the police.”125 Even then the state’s agents found it difficult to stimulate the elders into action. In July 1891 the inspector and land captain working in Ardatovsk district in Kazan’ province, facing pressure from the ministry, did the work of the rural societies by identifying 2,000 well-off households that had arrears of 80,000 rubles and no reason not to pay; the elders still ignored them.126 Very often, it turned out, rural societies elected elders and collectors with the expectation that they would not collect the taxes, while others made sure to get elected because they were the biggest delinquents or expected to keep part of the revenue, officially or not.127

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Extreme coercion could be more effective, but the social consequences could not be measured, as the state’s agents knew well. In one district in Viatka the enforcement measures undertaken by the police were massive and extremely punitive. Collective beatings and confiscations – basically a terror that went well beyond individual demonstrations – reduced the arrears from 40 per cent of the tax bill to 11 per cent; however, when the measures were stopped during the famine of 1891, in areas unaffected by the harvest failure as well as the stricken ones, the arrears climbed back up and reached 82 per cent of the bill. In one case the police undertook the process of inventory and confiscation without the participation of the local peasant authorities, seizing possessions as they found them and without reference to the lists of defaulters, and recovered up to 80 per cent of the arrears. Fiscally speaking this was a great success, but there was no telling whether destitute households had been forced to pay; no doubt some were. Racked by this uncertainty and under pressure from above, the police backed away, and the arrears began to climb anew. Now it was likely that those who could pay their taxes were refusing.128 Asked for the reason that a district in Chernigov province had exceptionally low arrears at 1 per cent of the annual bill, the inspector responded confidently: “the unrelenting compulsion and threats on the part of the village and county responsible persons,” backed by a group of “chasers” (goniteli) who “whisk away the delinquents to the common hut (the county court) to make them pay.” In another district “there takes place what is called a robbery [grabezh], in other words the seizure in the presence of several households by the village authorities of warm clothing from the delinquents during the winter months.” They would get their coats back only if they paid some of the tax. “In Konotopskii district the elder and a whole mob [arava] goes to the unhappy payer and shames him, and stay until he pays.”129 Or consider the action of the Krestinskii district zemstvo in Novgorod province in 1909 when it faced massive revenue shortfalls. Only the state’s agents were supposed to collect taxes on behalf of the zemstvo, so in effect the zemstvo offered bribes to the local police in the form of “travel expenses”: 200 rubles for the police commander, 125 rubles each to the constables, and between 15 and 30 rubles to the police auxiliaries. The taxes now flowed, but what the police did and to whom was not reported, nor was it asked.130 The main change that followed in the years after 1903 was that arrears could not be redistributed and whole villages could not be inventoried, but this had been rare even when it was allowed. Now collections had to be connected with the shortfalls and back taxes of that particular household. Some inspectors did gather the lists of names of delinquent peasants and sent them to the land captain for further action, but this depended on the willingness of the elders to

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provide the names; for the most part the counties and rural societies did not keep records of individual liabilities, arrears, or capacities – this in 1913, ten years after the repeal of collective responsibility. What data they did possess they did not always share with the state’s agents. As a result the inspectors returned to their aggregate figures, and the decision to intensify or relax collections was made for whole districts based on the harvest and the tax yield for past years. The inspectors agreed that these were poor indicators of capacities and poor predictors of whether payment would be made; in the year 1913, for example, when the harvest was exceptionally good in Nizhegorod province, the arrears grew.131 The rate of collection still depended on the efforts of the elders, so that of two counties with identical harvest patterns, one collected almost all taxes owed and the other almost none.132 Even when the inspectors did try to insist on enforcement in the form of property seizures for the most impressive arrears, they were often overruled by layers of officials citing layers of regulation – ultimately the law of 1893 – who feared a scandal and wondered whether peasants could afford their bills; there was still no way to tell. Inventories were taken in Nizhegorod province, as they always had been, but none of them resulted in an auction. Even homesteaders – the one type of household that the inspector could deal with directly by invoking a new law of 1906 – were protected from seizures. The governor of Nizhegorod province decided that confiscations of land were too harsh, especially with regard to homesteaders who were to be treated gently and preferentially in order to encourage self-reliance and personal responsibility. The irony escaped him.133 Taxes in Kind The system of peasant taxation did not calculate properties, incomes, and capacities as a way of making a claim on the payer; it resorted directly to the person because the economic calculation was lacking. Certainly corporal punishment and arrests could be understood this way, but the matter went much further. Passport laws as they existed to 1906 could be used by local peasant authorities to keep a delinquent peasant from leaving the rural society, or the passport might be foisted upon the delinquent to force him into wage-work to pay his taxes.134 These practices were abolished at the start of the century for good and obvious reasons, and the abolition implied a movement towards economic assessment and accountability, and a movement away from bodily constraint and compulsion. But the logic that made for such punishments – in substance, the absence of data appropriate to economic assessment, making for an unmediated claim on

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the physical person – survived in taxation in kind (natural’nye povinnosti) that usually took the form of labour service and existed to 1917. The Soviet government maintained it into the 1920s under different names (Trudguzhnalog, trudguzhpovinnosti). Peasants alone owed labour for road and bridge repairs, waterway maintenance, guard duty, punitive detachments and posses, billeting, postal carting, fighting forest fires, and church maintenance. The burden ranged from the onerous to the annoying. Work as auxiliaries for the police (sotskie and desiatskie) involved 400,000 peasants in Russia’s fifty European provinces at any time; the vast majority were unpaid, at least formally.135 In Vologda province peasants in 1899 provided 189,046 labour days and 50,815 horse days (carting).136 In 1902 in Gaisinskii district of Podoliia province peasants provided 75,932 labour days. In Kiev district the norm was about one labour day per household per year. In 1907 in Elizavetgradskii district, billeting amounted to 424 days of civilian officials, and 6,700 days of military ranks.137 Tens of thousands served as elders, judges, and collectors of the counties and rural societies, none paid by the central government, some paid by their peasant institutions, and some keeping a share of the tax revenue.138 Labour obligations were a form of apportioned taxation. The bills were mandated by the central state and delivered to the peasant authorities directly or through the zemstvos. They had all the problems of other apportioned taxes. They allowed local authorities to decide how to implement them, so long as the service was performed, or allowed outside authorities to force the local peasant authorities into action with little regard for the local consequences. Road repair involved a division of territories into smaller road units, and villages on that road were held responsible; a street-front household provided labour, while households on side streets did not. Or a village might apportion the labour levy the same way it apportioned land taxes, by land allotment. When the local levy did not satisfy the need for labour, the police descended on villages and recruited the first men they could find or cordoned off a row of houses and enlisted whomever was at home.139 Unfortunate households that were located within 15 versts of a forest fire could be press-ganged into fighting it; others that were near post offices or on postal routes were required to provide carting; those near a bridge were forced to maintain it. Very often the assigned workers were the unemployed, the drunk, the crippled, and the elderly, any of whom could be exploited easily and might appreciate the very modest stipends, tax relief, perks, and bribes that came with the job. Police auxiliaries who were entirely unsuited to police work were put to use as the domestics of the higher ranks. Tax delinquents volunteered as tax collectors and police auxiliaries to lower their rates, conceal their arrears, and pocket some of what they collected.140

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These were the excesses that an unregulated claim on labour allowed, enumerated by the Duma commission that aimed to abolish taxes in kind and convert them into money taxes.141 But the related problem was one of equivalencies; there was no one measurement that applied to all Russian subjects, so taxes in kind spoke to the absence of entrenched and universalized variables that allowed any two persons to be compared. The urban tax payer was measured in rubles, the peasant in days of labour. Gentry landowners paid taxes for fighting forest fires; peasants put out the fires. Gentry supplied lumber, while peasants felled it and carted it to the river to build the bridge. Burghers since the 1870s had paid a tax for maintaining local garrisons, and peasants had to bring police and soldiers into their homes to billet them. Urbanites paid postal rates, and peasants carried the mail and fed the horses. In 1861, when the peasantry was emancipated but forced labour was maintained, the system made some sense. Low levels of monetization made for more arrangements in kind, and the recent preponderance of unfree labour limited the flow of wage workers. It was not even clear what a day’s labour was worth. The constraints of the commune made labour recruitment on a market an uncertain and unpredictable undertaking. Claims on a population already immobilized through the commune were more practicable. By the 1890s, as Burds has shown, the regional markets in peasant wage-labour were much more evolved and established. By then the system of labour dues clashed with the objective of the government that had been stated over the preceding four decades, which was to move away from taxes that were applied on the basis of status.142 The usual way to ignore status was to translate assessments and payments into cash and thereby make them universalistic, and the entrenchment of a labour market should have made this possible. It was, of course, possible to translate labour into money, as was done for burghers in the era of Great Reforms. With that in mind, Brzheskii tried in 1906 to estimate the monetary equivalent of maintaining roads by a labour levy in a given locale, ranging from 24 rubles per versta in Kiev province to 107 rubles in Archangel, but this was based on the daily cost of a worker on a labour market; the point of the labour levy was that it avoided the market and no money officially changed hands. At all levels of state administration it meant lower (monetary) costs and balanced budgets. Converting peasant labour into a comparable tax was delayed because the state needed the labour as such, and claiming the person of the peasant was more effective, in some places more reliable, and everywhere cheaper than hiring workers.143 Anyway a new money tax would have been recorded and published as one more quantifiable burden on the population that would be added to the existing numbers, and the central government was loathe to expose itself to more

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criticism. For all these reasons labour levies were hard to resist even after the government committed itself to phasing them out. New ones were added, such as the billeting of additional police and army detachments, which was introduced in April 1905 as part of the pacification that lasted into 1907. Some reforms were purely formal. When the law of 5 May 1903 transferred the police auxiliaries from the district to the county and the rural society, apparently for accounting purposes because it absolved state institutions of responsibility and made it the affair of peasant institutions, the auxiliaries provided the same service.144 Was a Peasant a Person? Rural Taxation and the War-Time Crisis When the income tax was rewritten during the Great War to apply to peasants, the fiscal imperative was obvious, but the mechanics were virtually non-­ existent. Peasants had been shielded by self-government that produced myriad local practices but never a predictable system, and taxing peasants on income had not been seriously considered before 1914. The war would be the moment to apply income assessment to peasants, not to capitalize on it. As Bogolepov wrote, taxes would for the first time penetrate “the whole population, all individual households,” so that “not only the pocket of the payer but the soul of the citizen open before the state.”145 The sentiment was lofty, but this system could not locate an individual peasant, let alone his soul; a peasant was still lost in aggregates of land holdings and rural societies. As Prince Sviatopolk-Mirskii told the Duma in 1915, Russia still lacked a most basic cadastre that might guide income assessment, of peasants or any other agricultural groups. He meant by this to warn against taxing the landed aristocracy, but his argument about peasants had the added virtue of being true.146 A cadastre was necessary to locate sources of income and the owners of the properties that generated incomes. Mirskii’s opponents in the Duma were not at all deterred as they moved into hyper-reality: Russia did not need a cadastre since it could skip directly to a fully personalized system that was better than a cadastre.147 The decision to tax peasants personally produced an immediate logistical problem because fiscally speaking a peasant was not a person. Witte was called out of retirement in late 1914 to lead a commission to seek out new revenues, and he agreed that peasants should be taxed more thoroughly. He also knew, however, that a real assessment was unachievable, and he proposed a flat 50 kopecks on every desiatina of peasant land, to be delivered to the treasury by the old collective methods. Workers would pay a flat 5 rubles per head.148 Bogolepov offered an oxymoron: a “personal” and assessed income tax should

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be repartitioned among peasant communities on the basis of population and collected by collective responsibility – in effect, an old-style poll tax.149 By now no one considered the French solution: lacking in precedent and uncertain of the financial returns, French law excluded peasants from income taxation, and indeed the whole income tax was put off when war broke out in 1914.150 Instead Finance Minister Bark echoed the emerging consensus that peasants, who no longer paid tax on their vodka and had been released from their redemptions a decade earlier, were paying too little.151 Local fiscal agents tended to share the sentiment but were confronted with the reality of implementation for which they received little guidance. Faced with a gap between political ambition and administrative possibility, between the reality of a collectivist administration and the goal of personal accountability, they used an entirely contradictory vocabulary. Days before the February Revolution of 1917 the Kiev treasury director exhorted “citizens of all estates” to co-operate, and “all persons as well as peasants” to make their declarations. He spoke excitedly in the language of colonial conquest, likening the encounter with individual peasants to the European encounter with a new colony. The “universality of assessment” would allow inspectors to “master” (osvoit’) the population; it would be a “first contact [pervoe prikosnovenie] with the whole mass of taxpayers.”152 Later that year inspectors at their all-Russia congress promised to carry out their mission with “respect for the person of the payer and protection of the interests of the peasantry,” intimating that the two were not the same.153 The Treasury Offices were left to adopt their own procedures. The law, by setting lower exemption levels, allowed for the taxation of peasants, but then again there was no explicit requirement that peasants had to be taxed on income. Some provincial meetings of inspectors that convened in late 1916 and early 1917 decided to exclude peasants from the income tax because they were presumed poor and, more to the point, could not be assessed as “persons”; Khar’kov province was a case in point.154 Other meetings decided to assess all peasants by estimating income from land holdings even though peasant land holdings were not registered with the tax office on an individual basis. This meant that any tax would have to be levied on aggregate land holdings and could not be a personal income tax. In January 1917 the Petrograd provincial meeting decided to attempt it.155 In Kiev, inspectors would investigate rental rates to calculate who earned income from rent and who farmed 20 desiatinas or more, but these numbers would have to be compiled by methods that were not at all clear. The brochure that was circulated in the villages (“To the Village Population”) implied that peasants would volunteer to fill out their forms and seek out teachers, priests, and zemstvo employees to help them.156

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At the other extreme of the empire, in Khabarovsk in the Far East, inspectors decided to assess all rural populations, even though a year earlier the Treasury Office had reported that it had assessed not one person beyond the regional capital.157 The inspectors decided to use the data in the agricultural census of 1916 (the cadastre commissioned in the 1890s and never completed), notwithstanding the fact that it was legally confidential; the inspectors surmised that the repeal of commercial secrecy applied to censuses as well. Russian, Chinese, and Korean gold miners and day labourers in the Amur Basin represented a special problem. They had never been registered as “persons,” but to exclude them altogether would be to miss out on the revenue and be philosophically demeaning to them. So the inspectors would make personal cards for workers earning over 500 rubles, and simple lists of those making less. The latter would be half-persons taxed at half the rate.158 The problem of fiscal obscurity was a larger problem of a disaggregated economy, and this became clear when peasants in 1915 and 1916 withheld their taxes from the treasury and their grain from the cities. Peasants had good reason to withhold grain since there were fewer manufactures to buy, no legal vodka on which to spend their receipts, and artificially low prices for grain. Distilling the harvest was an immediate solution to both problems: distillate gave them vodka, and vodka kept its value longer than either grain or money (devalued by the day) and did not spoil. Feeding grain to the livestock produced more meat, the price of which was unregulated. But grain was needed by everyone else; fixed prices were followed in short order by requisitions of surplus grain in 1916. The problem was to find out who produced what and in what surpluses, and for this the imperial government in 1916 was no better equipped than in 1914. To make matters worse, the task was assigned to two institutions with no experience in procurements, the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Agriculture, with advice from economists and statisticians like V.G.  Groman who were increasingly given to seizing surpluses even as they struggled to calculate them.159 Any ministry would have confronted the core problem – that it did not know who had the surpluses – but the state employees who were now given the task were singularly unfamiliar with the practice of local calculation and collection and showed little of the caution and humility that had been built into the system of peasant taxation in previous decades. Moreover, their brief was to represent the cities, not the peasantry, and they expected of the countryside the same transparency that they had come to expect of the commercial and industrial sectors. Groman could dream of perfect numbers that allowed him to calculate peasant production costs and subsistence needs down to the individual household, and for the state to pay fixed

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prices for the grain along models used in the vodka monopoly – also based, it will be recalled, on fixed prices and production costs. But to apply this on the imperial scale and on all peasant output was fantastical, and in practice it entailed developing regional and imperial averages and arriving at per capita rates, little better than a poll tax. “It really was a beautiful plan,” observed a wry visitor who was told how the statistics were reaching down to every village and co-opting every household into a national machine of provisioning and national accounting.160 Local agents knew well that the numbers were aggregate or came from the village elders who did “as they wish” to concoct them. Only statisticians like Groman took the numbers literally, fancying that the global land and harvest figures were also comprehensive views of the peasantry. They showed a profound faith in economic management, and they presumed knowledge that they did not have.161 In the absence of the right numbers the government quickly found itself on familiar ground: a repartitional levy (razverstka) for grain, imposed by Minister of Agriculture Aleksandr Rittikh in December 1916. The system that worked poorly in collecting relatively small taxes would be used to collect very large amounts of grain, with little knowledge of who had what grain to spare. Force was not spelled out, but it was the logical outcome. Someone would ultimately have to visit the grain storage sheds and entrepôts of the small wholesalers. Raids on grain exchanges and the floggings of small traders in 1916 compensated for the lack of knowledge, as violence always had.162 The same applied to the peasant householders. The prelude to the first forced requisitions of grains from peasants was an incident in Viatka province, in the village of Aleksandrovskaia in December 1916, when a land captain and ten policemen broke down a shed door to seize grain that existed in no one’s statistics.163 On the surface, matters in 1916 did look very much like they did in the 1850s, when grand schemes were enacted on the basis of precious little information. But officials in the 1850s or even 1913 were well aware of their limits and erred on the side of caution, setting low taxes and forgiving shortfalls, tacitly protecting peasants from the ignorance of the treasury. Real revenue came from industry and commerce. From 1914 the fiscal crisis was real, and the expectations of full civic participation to meet the challenge heightened. The safety mechanisms were falling away as officials sought to meet peasant payers “face to face.” They left less room for the forgivable arrears of the subject and gave more latitude for acting on the unforgivable evasion of the citizen. Officials counted not on evolved practices or on local data, those practical preconditions that make a civic claim practicable and civic virtue unavoidable. Instead, when they announced the requisitions, they counted on “a surge of patriotic feeling,” a miraculous and universal recognition of the “obligatory duty of every Russian

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citizen.” Printed invoices sent to households termed the levy “your contribution to national defense.”164 A few months later, in March 1917, the Provisional Government opted for its own total solution, the grain monopoly. One of the new officials responsible for food supply was Peshekhonov, the socialist who had admired the vodka monopoly as a model of state management and economic rationality. But the limited vertical integration that had made the state orders of distillate manageable was lost as the premise was applied everywhere without the basic knowledge of who produced what. The Provisional Government did not quite bother with calculations and could not. It simply nationalized all surpluses above a subsistence norm, set subsistence norms as per capita rates, and in effect announced a direct route to the output and saved itself from the need to estimate. On the imperial plane, economists like S.G. Strumilin scrambled to decide what constituted biological need and therefore what could be considered a surplus. In effect, an intractable problem was passed to the localities where local authorities were to ponder its intractability: procurement agents were to measure surpluses through detailed inventories that were to be carried out in all villages but never were.165 The only option in the absence of knowledge was to search the peasant household and literally kick down the door of the grain shed, as was threatened and practised intermittently by the Provisional Government. It was carried out full scale by the Soviet state, and by 1919 the Bolsheviks did not bother to conceal that the practice was a repartition, not a calculation, taken from the tax practices of imperial Russia. It was a razverstka, this one an apportionment to the provinces of state requirements for food (prodrazverstka). It was the sure sign that the collector did not know what the payer could spare. The war-time mobilization was not the outcome of decades of administrative and civic integration but the occasion to pursue it, in Russia more than elsewhere. Violence would compensate for the absence of real knowledge and of the implied intimacy between state and citizen. And in Russia, as Holquist writes, the war-time measures outlasted the war.166 Citizenship was a militant pursuit from its formal proclamation in 1917. Although armed with fewer administrative capacities than any other Great Power, Russian political leaders and specialists after 1914 were armed with an ambition of including, integrating, mobilizing, and transforming people they scarcely knew. The Bolsheviks knew even less, but they placed heightened demands and expected full compliance of a population that had been taught exceptionalism and anonymity.

PART 4 The State and Revolution, the State and Evolution: Fiscal Practices and a New Regime, 1917–30

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10 Soviet Russia and the Continuing History of the Russian State

Narrating the movement from one regime to another is fraught because the small practice that is familiar from an older time acquires a different meaning in the new. It will not do to focus on the details without explicating the larger framework of meaning and significance in which the details were produced. Many excellent studies of the way in which planning and allocation in the “unitary economy” fared in these years – foundational studies, really, that should be read – are less adept at examining the intellectual world in which the planning and allocation seemed reasonable, in which a “unitary economy” was a goal worth pursuing.1 It might reduce the historian to a chronicler who conveys the larger premises of historical actors uncritically, which is a disservice to the intelligent reader, or who accepts those premises unwittingly, which is a disservice to the intelligent writer. At the other extreme, to over-emphasize ideology and call the Soviet period entirely new and deserving of a narrative that begins in 1917 risks lending too much historical substance to a narrative convenience, too much credence to the claims of Soviet Communists who insisted on their own “world-historical” originality,2 or too much authority to their ideological enemies who were adamant about the unprecedented monstrousness of Communism and termed it an ideocracy.3 One may well ask why only this regime should be understood as an ideological drive and examined through the lens of ideas, as if western European liberalism and market fundamentalism were the products of nature.4 Ideology is constitutive of reality everywhere, not its opposite anywhere. The historical question is more basic: where, after all, did the Bolsheviks come from if not from imperial Russia? In an immediate sense, they drew on decades of economic thought, much of it socialist and Marxist, that privileged unity and the integration of all sectors and people as a moral principle that would be pursued by economic means. Broadly, they drew on a tradition of

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political economy (socialist and other) that was at once economic, sociological, and philosophical, in Russia more so than elsewhere.5 Any person active in 1918 was the product of the old regime, and the Bolsheviks who set out to destroy the old regime were its most lasting legacy. Somehow we need to account for the novelty of a new regime on a timeline longer than itself.6 Having formed the new government, the Bolsheviks found in the fiscal system some of the tools that might effect unity in practice. This chapter follows the trajectories that were identified in the preceding chapters and considers the meaning that they acquired after 1917. Disciplinary purists will forgive me. This interlude appeals to philosophy, critical theory, and fictional writing, and I return to them in the chapters that follow. I find the lenses useful as I make sense of the facts I narrate. In any case, contemporaries used these genres to describe themselves and critique their times, even as they addressed questions that they considered to be firmly economic.7 Economics, even fiscal economics, was in those days an intellectual field and an intellectual engagement with the polity at large, not just quantifiable efficiency and utility; economists wrote in prose. Using, engaging, and interrogating their optics is not beside the historical point; they are a different way to make a historical point.8

••• Our task is to bring into sharper relief two types of comparison that are or should be central to the study of modern Russia. The first comparison is temporal. It concerns the extent to which the Soviet state perpetuated the practices of the imperial state and the extent to which it also maintained its structures. Ultimately it is a way to ask what made Soviet Russia a new regime rather than merely a new government.9 The second comparison is spatial and concerns the ways in which Soviet Russia might be placed on a spectrum of modern states and regimes.10 Taxes are a good way to pursue these questions because they embodied so explicitly the changing notions of the economy, the state, and citizenship, and together these categories amount to views of regimes and form a basis for their comparison. The argument for continuity is strong. This was still a system of exaction in which the state secured from the population what it needed to sustain itself and pursue its strategic goals, usually industrialization and military power.11 It was also a system of coercion, from the repression of the small political oppositions after 1917 to the nationalization of urban production and trade, and continuing with the full-scale assault on the peasantry in 1919 and 1920.12 It is arguable that the new state was doing what all states do – the related businesses of gathering resources and practising violence – only with greater autonomous

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powers, less regard for the autonomies of society, and more wilful disregard of the human costs.13 To make it all happen, the Bolsheviks relied very heavily on an army of imperial specialists who served loyally and carried on the work of the Russian state.14 In the fiscal and financial apparatus, rates of retention were high. Around 90 per cent of all personnel in the Commissariat of Finances in 1919 were kept from the imperial Ministry of Finances, as were two-thirds of all tax inspectors into the early 1920s.15 At the higher levels, Genzel’, Ozerov, the brothers Kutler, and F.A. Men’kov occupied economic and fiscal policy positions through the 1920s and helped write the new tax laws. In the 1930s the Kutler offspring became high-level planning and finance apparatchiki.16 Certainly these experts thought they were living the next stage in the history of Russian statehood, as the socialist Peshekhonov explained in his 1923 pamphlet, “Why Did I Not Emigrate?” He was the grudging admirer of “the centralization of economic power” at the turn of the century who then oversaw the grain monopoly of the Provisional Government in May 1917.17 In his apologia he proposed that the Bolsheviks were the carriers of the Russian state idea (gosudarstvennost’) and that by serving the Soviet government one served Russia.18 The Bolsheviks exiled him anyway and refused his pleas to return.19 All in all, the cynic may be satisfied that the Bolsheviks, for all their romantic class analysis and beautiful utopian visions, were only interested in power, much like their predecessors though more single mindedly.20 The jaded may offer a wistful plus ça change,21 echoing the likes of Rudolph Goldscheid who held that revenue and the budget were “the state stripped of all misleading ideologies.”22 The positivist may ignore the moral and ideological haze in order to study how the Bolsheviks did what they did, measured by the same quantitative standards as might be used in the study of any other state.23 There is something to commend in each of these conclusions, but it would be a pity to stop the analysis there. There is a real difference between a state that makes claims on a population that is separate from itself and visits violence upon that population, and a state that encompasses the population in order to reorganize it, improve it, and practise unmediated violence. The fundamental problem we confront in studying the Soviet period is that the familiar dichotomies of state and society, state and economy, and state and individual were in doubt because the Bolsheviks did not accept them. Rather than impose a dichotomy that was not in operation at that time, manifest in the historian’s casual reference to the binary “state and society,” one may consider what its disappearance implied in practice. Art historians and literary critics have offered useful perspectives. Boris Groys in his study of “total art” in the avantgarde points out that Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks shared aesthetic premises

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and goals about the total society. Katerina Clark proposes that we consider the polity an “ecosystem” that defied the neat partisan distinctions and made antagonists seem a little more alike despite themselves.24 Art became politics, but politics and economics became aesthetics: a redesigning of society to conform to a vision of completeness and movement. State ownership is one key to understanding the new regime; in terms of economics and fiscal theory, it is the fundamental departure. After October 1917 state ownership was not just one possible expression of the economy among others, nor the last resort of eminent domain; it was the sine qua non of “Soviet power,” a term that is oft repeated but rarely engaged. All real estate had been nationalized, which meant that the state took ownership of everything on behalf of everyone,25 but no one in particular. All persons and their activities took place in that shared space; all social and economic life took place on state land and property. Statization was chosen over the redistribution of property into private hands or the socialization of property at the local level, and it embodied the exclusive centrality of the state as such. The Decree on Land of 1917, to cite a famous example, allowed peasants to redistribute and use the land, as a concession, but it did not allow them to own the land. It was a vision that potentially allowed for no intermediaries between the person and the power because the power had become a shared locus, not a discrete instrument, and it allowed in principle for no separation between the state and the economy, because the one had subsumed the other.26 The government did not act on that potential from the outset in 1917 or at all times thereafter, but it could if and when the Communist Party decided, as it did in 1919 and again in 1929. There were debates, to be sure. One erupted in the wake of the Civil War, over the recent experience of War Communism or the desirability of submerging all economic activity into the state and managing all economic life as a bureaucracy. Another followed over the allowance of non-state trade and enterprise during the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921. However, both debates concerned how and to what extent the state would deploy powers that were theoretically unlimited, not whether the Soviet state had that right.27 For all the fluctuations in Soviet policy that raise questions about the nature of Soviet socialism – state capitalism in 1918, War Communism in 1919, New Economic Policy in 1921, the Great Turn of 192928 – the system’s underlying stability and safeguard was state ownership and party control, and these were not reversed until 1991. Concessions to individual enterprise in 1921 were conditional, and a reversion to full state control was always an option; it was exercised in 1929. Peasants may be given more autonomy in farming and selling, as they were in 1921, or they may be given less, as they were in 1919 and 1928.

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Non-state enterprises might be encouraged, as they were from 1921, or they might taxed heavily and starved of state credits and raw materials, as they were from 1926; they might be allowed high profits or they might be closed down and their operators arrested, as they were intermittently through the 1920s.29 One could speak of advances and retreats, of forward and backward movements, of state management and liberalization, of radicalism and moderation, but they were all played out in the field of Soviet power. Taxes gave expression to this range of possibility. They might compensate for the separateness of the person and economy from the state, as taxes had done everywhere, or they might put an end to the difference between the state and the economy and create a single whole that was realized by and in the state. They might moderate socio-economic inequality by progressive rates or they might end these differences by confiscating all private wealth. Even the Bolsheviks were not sure which it would be, and they disagreed among themselves, but the state’s ultimate ownership and the party’s latitude were the new republic’s constitutional reality. Soviet power changed the character of violence because of its borderless nature.30 As Lenin put it in The State and Revolution in the fall of 1917, the population “will have no place to go” to evade its obligations and responsibilities, because the new state would comprise the population rather than only act on it. This new state would cause “the transformation of all citizens into workers and employees of one huge ‘syndicate,’ which is the whole state.”31 After 1917 the party’s economic theorists Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhenskii surveyed the militarized landscape of civil war and expressed pride over the decisiveness of the Communist Party, violence included; they took exception to the notion that this was just one more state practising more coercion. This was a new kind of state that had transformed power rather than merely seized it, and they ridiculed the notion that power was an object to be moved about or seized “as if it meant moving a marble from one pocket to the other.” In case the reader did not understand the first time, they stated it thrice more: “The revolution therefore destroys the old power and creates a new one, a different one, one that did not exist before.”32 The logic of merging the person with power was not new; it had ample precedent in the fiscal codes and practices. It was a mode of thinking that was designed to obscure the distinctions between government and governed, payment and collection, state and economy. Power became participatory but not necessarily consensual. This conception made all claims and actions self-inflicted and inflicted by one citizen on another, manifest in the new terms that we now take for granted in a modern system of taxation: self-assessment, self-taxation, and mutual reporting. These techniques had been used to obviate the need for

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violence, since transparency made for inescapability. In Soviet times the logic was applied full blown in order to practise violence in different ways, because the very subject-object relationship of the person and power, and the state and the population, had been rejected. As Bukharin wrote in The Economics of the Transition Period, compulsion “is conducted not by a separate force but reflects the collective will of all, obligatory for every one.” He used a distinct grammar of the passive voice and the reflexive verb, and the symbolic language of the universal, where actions were hard to ascribe to a particular person or group since everyone was acting on everyone and every action was of and in the universal whole. The population had fewer options for resisting the state because it was the state, not its antithesis; resisting the state would be for the state to resist itself, for the person to resist himself or herself. And the population could be better reached for whatever purposes, be it improvement, mobilization, or violence. Unity was both the goal in the sense of a destination – for our purposes, it was “the unitary economy” and “the unitary budget” – and the method in the sense of an unlimited field of action to achieve it. “Proletarian compulsion in all its forms, beginning with shootings and ending with labour obligations, is – paradoxical as it sounds – a method of creating a communist humanity from the human material of the capitalist epoch.”33 Thus conceived, the state was both a stability and a weapon. Soviet power made for visions of perfect unity and unlimited compulsion, for stable harmony in the banal practices of a bureaucracy34 and the fierce, final struggle of an all-out war.35 The state was both an actor and the place in which the action took place. The modern state is Janus faced, Poulantzas tells us, able to exist with the stability of a universal membership organization and also able to narrow itself into a discrete entity of executive power and force. The state might maintain its epistemological opposition to “everything else” or it might itself become “everything.”36 In Soviet Russia the duality was expressed in specific ways. It involved a state that encompassed all, and even the enemies of Soviet power were necessarily a part of it,37 their antagonisms played out inside the state, though “in a different manner,”38 more easily coerced and reformed precisely because they were in the state and had “no place to go.” Universal though the state was as a membership organization, it was also a partocracy with a discrete membership that maintained a monopoly of policy and command. Everyone was a citizen, but only some were comrades, Berdiaev noted early on;39 notions of unity could always be disrupted by class violence and the use of sheer force, and a unitary power produced segmented views that were internal to itself. The greatest violence was reserved for the peasantry when the state undertook to tax it and seize from it, and War Communism is associated first and foremost with an all-out assault on peasants in an effort to take their grain. One

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may remark that rural violence compensated for the great distance that separated the peasantry from the modern, integrated economy and that an old-style state responded with old-style compulsion on a massive scale. One may equally remark that the violence was more ferocious because of the underlying assumption that the population no longer had the right to be left alone because it should comprise a new kind of state. “The people will figure out how to protect its own interests,” intoned a commissar to a gathering of tax inspectors in May 1918, as he promised the inspectors armed detachments and the backing of the army for the first time.40 Citizenship had its consequences.41 Of course, the common understanding of citizenship is that it is necessarily a balance of rights and duties,42 but we should consider that citizenship had come to mean inclusion without the mediation of formal rights and obligations at all; it had more to do with human transformation. Looked at this way, peasants were punished for failing to live up to the demands of inclusion, and it is the new and unforgiving standard of full participation that should equally occupy our attentions. By this logic, Soviet Russian citizenship was not the shifting of the balance from rights to obligations, but a regime of inclusion and mobilization in which the distinction between rights and obligations had disappeared. The actions and inactions of the population now had state significance in a way that they did not have before. Poggi identifies this mode of thinking finely when he observes that the modern (nation) state is “an inclusive entity, embracing vast numbers of people and where in principle some measure of intrinsic significance attaches to every individual.” In a corresponding manner, he considers citizenship “as [a] generalized bond attributing some political standing and significance to all individuals normally operating within the state’s territory.”43 He had in mind western Europe, but the insight applies to Soviet Russia. This is not to say that the dull thud of totalitarianism landed on a helpless population and extinguished its liberty and creativity.44 In the first place, the state was itself a productive space, not simply a sanction.45 Not all endeavour needs to be outside the state in order to be creative; not all creativity requires the purity of a non-state existence in order to be legitimate. We may regret the loss of the tension of the state-society binary, but it should encourage us to rethink how a new state was experienced.46 In the second place, the population was not helpless, and the advantage of a large space is that it allows for sectors of neglect, for pockets of unexpected and informal solidarity, and for social networks that are neither permitted nor repressed.47 Russia had a long and rich history of intimacy and informal association, and these never went away. Privacy, however, by which we mean a formally autonomous sphere that was potentially closed to the state, was a different proposition with a difficult past

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(chapters 5–6) and not much of a future. Hoffmann reminds us that the state could intervene in any area of life when the party so chose,48 in part because any area of life took place in the space of Soviet power – from reproduction to sexual habit, and from drinking and nutrition to labour and production. Left at that, this is a description of the welfare state tout court.49 It is arguable that Soviet socialism, when placed on the larger canvas of European modernity, was a Russian path to the universal society, anxiety and all. The Great War is being recognized among historians, rightly, as the great catalyst that made for state interventionism everywhere, 50 though the pattern of intervention was already well established before 1914.51 Epistemologically the ideas of an autonomous and private self and a private economy (chapter 2) were subverted as soon as they were proposed because they were framed as state and public acts. And Russia was hardly alone. Students of taxation in other countries have intimated that the loss of a space between the economy and the state, and the tendency of the state to take over the role of the society and civil society, were at the root of a modern malaise. Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and neoliberalism are the reaction.52 Certain criticisms of the Soviet Union are framed by an anti-Marxist tendentiousness,53 but the totalitarian school with which they are associated catalogues symptoms that are cited by a separate western literature about western societies themselves. Both literatures worry about the disappearing space between the state and the society, the state and the economy, and the state and the person; both are concerned with the fading distinction between government and governed; and both problematize the individual, be it as an atomized victim or an all too malleable self.54 It is parochial to suppose that western capitalism, commercialism, commodification, and consumerism alone were able to extinguish individuality,55 and a conceit to maintain that Soviet Communism alone was able to stamp out the creativity of the individual. Antonio Gramsci, interpreted by Perry Anderson, proposed some decades ago that we tend to follow different paths to the universal, but in both East and West we have arrived at an all-encompassing whole and have called the one “civil society,” which overwhelmed the state, and the other “the state,” which overwhelmed civil society. They are different ways of describing everything.56 Gramsci’s was perhaps the more thoughtful version of convergence. Modern we all are, but there are different ways to be modern. The term is both useful in outlining a set of problems and too broad on its own to allow specificity.57 It still requires historical narration and due consideration of the contingencies and differences. For the purposes at hand, it was the fiscal experts whom the Soviet government inherited who proved especially adept at locating Russia on a shared European spectrum and also at identifying its specific

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qualities. They drew on a history of Russian economic thought in which an ultimate goal was a unity and full integration of all sectors and the people who comprised them.58 They had contributed to a new kind of Russian statism in careers spanning three decades and traversing the boundary of 1917. Well before the Bolsheviks seized state buildings, it was a commonplace to them that the state might become a locus of integration rather than an organ separate from the person, society, and economy. Imperial officials had pursued that vision in symbolic measures like the apartment tax, in important revenue measures like the industrial tax and the vodka monopoly, and in ambitious measures like the income tax. With increased ardency they held that each of these acts of payment and the economic activities on which they were based had state significance, and indeed were only given meaning as state acts. As this state entered its decade of crisis in 1905, the insistence on the primacy of the state became more pronounced, and the contempt for the private economy and the immune person more explicit. The Great War created a crisis of exchange and at the same time offered unlimited mobilization through the state as the remedy. The war also raised the stakes. From 1914 the refusal of the industrialist to pay higher taxes and of the peasant to surrender grain was an affront to the state and required more state to compensate. A corresponding suspicion of the market and of the private economy also had a long history.59 Surely the historian should weigh contingencies in narrating the movement towards the fully statized economy of 1919–20.60 Planning was not planned, as Polanyi put it; it was a form of reflexive self-defence by society when it was confronted with unbridled and dehumanizing markets and a sometimes shameless pursuit of private gain.61 The war-time crisis made the critique all the more trenchant. But the striking pattern that sets Russia apart is that the state was the ready solution, offered up reflexively by actors across the political spectrum, in and out of government, and in a variety of circumstances of war as well as peace.62 It bears repeating that this mentality predated the war and predated 1905, and the state was offered up at the expense of other possible loci of human integration, such as the society, economy, and nation (or people). These became subsets of the state as such. For our purposes, this meant that the general response to a weakening market was to weaken it further, and the response to a break-down of exchange was state allocation and planning. We should be impressed not by the dogmatism and the binary thinking as such – “market fundamentalism” uses the same binary and is no less dogmatic63 – but by the particular direction that they took in that time and place. Russia’s response to crisis was different because the state was both the method for redressing the crisis, and the solution to the crisis. Be they imperial officials frustrated with a market that did not obey autocratic command,

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technocratic socialists and liberals who dreamed of perfect statistics in order to move goods between town, country, and front, or Communists who saw before them a unity of all social and economic activity, they tended to treat the state as the alternative to the market and the private economy, and they did so in zerosum terms.64 The Bolsheviks, more than others, also had a ready alternative, which was not simply to deny the market,65 nor simply to use the state to limit it, but to reconfigure human existence as a state project. As Rosenberg argues, limiting the market was not new and not limited to the Bolsheviks, but antimarket sentiment before 1917 did not necessarily mean ending private property.66 Imperial Russian models of statism such as the vodka monopoly involved planning around the institution of private property (chapter 7), as did a wider European drive during the Great War to allocate sooner than rely on market exchange.67 The Bolsheviks, in ending private property, made for a different kind of state and a new regime. The experts recognized that they had helped bring this new regime into being by claiming more and more for the universal state so that it could do good things for its population, but in 1919 and 1920 they recoiled in horror at its capacity to do harm. In their dialectical way they had seen an interplay of state universalism and individual particularism and tended increasingly to prefer the former over the latter. What was different about the Bolsheviks, they intimated, was that they denied the dialectic altogether by claiming it was over. The experts spent much of the 1920s in an effort to persuade the Communists to restore the separateness of state and people, state and economy, and state and person, and thereby restore a necessary tension to the polity. The fiscal apparatus might do this, as it had done in earlier periods of Russian and European history. In the 1920s they were given wide latitude to do so, conditional on good economic and fiscal results. The Bolsheviks also had a belief that a polity was best understood and acted upon in terms of the classes that comprised it, and no doubt this was in tension with a concomitant belief in the state’s universalism. But we might consider how class and state were related and how the one led into the other. Class to the Bolsheviks was both a social and a temporal concept, a way to portray and explain a polity at any given moment and a way to anticipate its movement. To some extent this meant a normative categorization of society into classes,68 but class was also a dynamic that propelled history forward to a final end. Class conflict would lead to only one class, and therefore one state to embody it; by 1920 some Communists held that this end was at hand thanks to nationalization. What was a bourgeoisie without property, and what was a proletariat without a bourgeoisie to exploit it? It was then that they began to use “the proletariat,” “the state,” “the citizens,” and “the population” interchangeably.

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Echoing a much older literature in which the young Marx critiqued Hegel, the Bolsheviks held that unity would not be philosophical and belonging would not be expressed ritualistically; nor would belonging be partial and ambiguous; it would be complete, tangible, and lived as every person became the bureaucracy.69 And not just Marx: Baker reminds us that not long before Marx began writing, Condorcet had made the case that the “administrative state and the political nation” should be made conterminous.70 Taxes might recognize class differences and address them; at certain times of eschatological thinking, taxes might be used to end the differences and create only one class embodied in one state. Often in the years 1919–20 Communists spoke in both tenses at the same time, insisting that conflict and unity were simultaneous rather than successive historical stages. The mode of thinking has been variously termed “combined development” by Trotsky, and “telescoping” by others; “compressed assimilation” by John Mersereau;71 sophistry by Rosa Luxemburg since it allowed the Bolsheviks to proclaim victory for socialism and still shoot people;72 and simple contradiction by the jurists working for the Soviet government in 1918 who could not make logical sense of the new Soviet constitution, which recognized class struggle but also declared that unity had been achieved.73 To try to impose sequential reasoning or normative categories on their thinking would be to miss the dualism and ambiguity on which they thrived. Again students of the avant-garde remind us that the collapsing of time was an active and deliberate endeavour, expressed in the logically awkward notion that “the future was in their hands.”74 In practice it allowed Communists to declare unity and still capitalize on division, to declare stability and still practise violence, all at the same time. Soviet socialism was an amalgam of a new Marxism and an old statism, of a new class thinking and a notion of universal citizenship. It was consequently dual: it was the government of all people without exception who would be treated as citizens, and it was the orchestrated struggle of its constituent parts.

11 The Meanings of Utopia: Taxes, Urban Unities, and the Several Assaults on Peasant Separateness, 1917–21

Soviet Russia was founded on an existing urban-rural divide, and this made for two kinds of state. In the cities, in industry, and in commerce the Bolsheviks used the tools of the modern state and the transparencies of the modern economy to locate and nationalize wealth and create a system of state ownership, allocation, and unity – the miseries of the civil war economy notwithstanding. Their inexperience in rural government and economics was glaring, and they tried in 1918 to apply to agriculture the visions of unity and assimilation that had worked so quickly, if not particularly well, in industry. Their policies of individual peasant assessment and the registration of the rural economy were novel and unprecedented, and were also categorical failures by the end of 1918. The Communists gave up the idea of peasant assessment, returned in 1919 to apportioned levies, and enforced them with unprecedented violence. The violence was motivated by peasant separateness as well as the new demands of citizenship; the violence had few limits because of the borderless space of Soviet power. Urban Taxes, Nationalization, and the Achievable Utopia Although the Bolsheviks nationalized all land and real estate and opened the possibility of a thoroughgoing statism, they also thought that most production would remain a private undertaking for the time being, regulated and taxed but not owned and managed directly by the state. In late 1917 their program was still a limited one of bank nationalizations, state monitoring, and progressive taxation. The three policies worked in tandem. Taxes recognized the continuing separateness of the state from the economy; the gap would be bridged by greater information gathering achieved through bank ownership and economic surveillance. As the economic crisis deepened in 1918, though, the Bolsheviks

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turned to the alternative of complete state ownership. It is true that they were at first reluctant to pursue all-out statization, but the reluctance lasted a few months and did not survive the year 1918. As we narrate the circumstances that produced this outcome, we should be impressed that the fully statized economy was a reasonable option to the Bolsheviks. Banks were nationalized, and this would give the state a view over investments, capital, and personal incomes.1 It would make progressive taxation effective: “Only control over banking operations,” Lenin wrote in September 1917 in “The Impending Catastrophe,” would allow the state “to organize the effective collection of the income tax so as to really prevent the concealment of properties and incomes.”2 Soon the government confronted a more fundamental problem, which was not one of locating incomes but of their disappearance owing to inflation,3 the closing of factories, and rising unemployment. The new priority was to keep production and employment going. Workers responded by nationalizing the factories in 1918; the Bolsheviks demurred that it was premature and bad for production, but they soon went along by formally extending nationalization to all large-scale manufacturing. In 1919 and 1920 more waves of nationalization, these ones deliberate, brought smaller scale manufacturing into the state, and urban workshops and windmills became state property as well. Policy was now geared towards allocation among state enterprises and the supply to the citizens using consumption norms, and the Bolsheviks undertook their first experiments in economic planning. Economists like Strumilin and Kritsman made the case that the entire country could and should be understood in terms of per capita norms of biological food need – rations – which would save the state from the need for direct familiarity with each citizen. “Planning” entered the new economic vocabulary.4 Economic transparency and state monitoring were achieved in the decree on workers’ control of November 1917, which repealed credit and commercial secrecy. This opened the books of all private firms to their workers, and hence the state, in order to make income inequalities fully visible and income taxation effective.5 Commercial and credit secrecy was one of Lenin’s pet peeves, and among the Bolsheviks who were trained in frontal assaults on capitalism – his comrades were robbing banks – the focus on commercial law seemed an eccentricity. However, Lenin was in tune with a host of imperial officials and academics who had been hostile to secrecy since the 1880s (chapters 3 and 6). For them it embodied archaic and artificial obscurity in an economy that was otherwise measurable and visible. In 1905 when bankers fell back on secrecy to argue against a progressive income tax, this in the midst of political collapse, the imperial officials were scandalized. So too was Lenin in 1912, once the fortunes had been saved; the absence of an income tax was primarily the absence

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of the information and data that the tax would have generated in the course of its operation. In contrast to Germany, “in Russia there is no income tax, there are no data on the growth of the wealth of the propertied classes.” German figures on income showed a shocking income disparity, but “our even more striking reality is closed behind a curtain, a curtain of darkness, of opaqueness.”6 Imperial officials and legislators rolled back secrecy after 1905, and it was repealed in 1916. It is not clear how much the Bolsheviks understood this as they marvelled at their own originality, as revolutionaries will do. The Bolsheviks went slightly further in demanding disclosure, but what they implemented was on a spectrum with treasuries worldwide and drew on imperial debates and international precedents. In September 1918 they required that lists of tax payers be published and posted on public walls. An institution was required to reveal any information on its wage and salary payments to the tax inspector.7 The ministries and the Duma had discussed this option, and Ozerov in particular promoted it in a vision of “the greater information of the fisc” and mutual surveillance. As the Soviet reports made clear, officials knew that it was already practice in countries like Australia, Switzerland, and Canada, in the United States during the Civil War, and in some U.S. states thereafter. What was novel in 1918 was not so much the rules of disclosure but the effects of full nationalization, which rendered disclosure superfluous. Management became a matter of internal state accounting and resource allocation, and all the revenues of companies became entries on the state budget. Incomes were wages paid by the state that were fully disclosed and often took the form of rations. There was no secrecy to repeal, only a black market to suppress.8 The progressive income tax was the only directly fiscal measure on the Bolshevik platform up to October 1917, alongside the abolition of excise taxes, and the former would compensate for loss of the latter.9 The initial purpose of the income tax, according to Lenin in May 1917, was simple income redistribution and civic accountability – the assessment of large shareholders progressively and substantively, and smaller incomes “very little” and symbolically. Even the taxation of the wealthy would not go much beyond what the imperial and provisional governments had been implementing; nor could it. The Bolsheviks inherited a rate that, when combined with the war profits and the business taxes, claimed 90 per cent of the profits of enterprises.10 In September 1917 Lenin still thought that the income tax was better than nationalization because of its capacity to generate information and capitalize on the methods of the capitalist economy. The role of the state was to harness the dynamisms of capitalism, not yet to end capitalism. “Confiscation itself leads nowhere, as it does not contain elements of organization and accounting for proper distribution. Instead of confiscation we can easily impose a fair tax, taking care of

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course to preclude the possibility of anyone evading assessment, concealing the truth, evading the law.” Cartels and monopolies, as they had existed until 1917, already provided data, predictability, fixed prices, and resource allocation, and these were a step towards planning; income taxation would allow the state to extend its reach into all pockets of economic activity and expose it.11 The old rate was re-adopted without change in November 1917, citing the imperial law of 1 May 1916, and again in July 1918.12 If this seemed radical, it was not a Bolshevik idea but part of the radicalization of the imperial polity. The Bolsheviks would enforce it better and allow fewer loopholes, avoidances, and evasions because of their fuller control of information. On 24 November 1917, therefore, the new government renewed with modifications the personal income tax of the Provisional Government of June 1917, which in turn was a renewal with modifications of the imperial tax of April 1916.13 Sovnarkom (the Council of People’s Commissars) was explicit: the new government would maintain the old regime’s structure of direct taxes (as it applied to the cities) because it was well suited to the new. The Bolsheviks went further by explicitly applying the tax to all wage and salary groups.14 Enterprises were also subjected to “contributions,” which were demanded by workers and Red Guards in support of local institutions. The party leadership discouraged this as crude and anarchic and insisted that the existing rate of 90 per cent on profits from 1916 was adequate. Class struggle should not be spontaneous or punitive. It should be a systematic process that was orchestrated by the state, one of directives and daily administration that ranged from progressive taxation and monitoring to limited state ownership. The income tax was central because it would provide both steady revenue and steady surveillance of the economy – that interdependence of taxation and information that modern taxes always produced. Information rather than mere force would be the foundation for a new kind of government.15 The government resisted calls for outright expropriation by taxation as late as June 1918.16 Some Communists thought that taxes might lead the way to nationalization and levelling but that it would be part of “a deeply thought-out plan” that used the existing tax apparatus in a systematic way.17 By 1919, however, the Soviet state had moved very quickly to full nationalization, not by taxation but by workers’ action and state decree, and one may well ask why the fully statized urban economy needed any taxes at all. It was to ask the state to tax itself, as Commissar of Finances Gukovskii wrote to Sovnarkom in summer 1918: statization was so successful that it was “destroying the very objects of assessment.” Anyway the imperial state, like the Soviet Republic in the first half of 1918, had depended on indirect taxes for about 85 per cent of its revenue. That proportion remained remarkably stable, even if the aggregates

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had fallen catastrophically since October 1917.18 The tension went beyond industry; the urban properties taxes of the imperial government were maintained by the Soviet, even though urban property had been nationalized (“in principle”) since 23 November 1917.19 Why would the state tax what it already owned? There was to be sure a financial use to taxation that never entirely disappeared. Malle finds that money was used in some transactions among enterprises, in the procurement of resources for factories and workshops, in the supply of the army by artisans and craftsmen, and in quasi-tolerated, semi-official food purchases from the villages. Someone was accumulating money, and some market exchange was still semi-legal. Taxes might level out high incomes and also soak up excess currency and slow the devaluation of the old rubles and the new sovnzaki (Soviet tokens) that were both in use. Local Soviet institutions still seized cash when they found it and called it a tax retrospectively, as did detachments of foraging workers, food supply employees, and the so-called village poor.20 It was a chaos of overlapping jurisdictions and vague laws, but money still played a part in this.21 Fiscal measures were a drop in the ocean given the larger economic catastrophe that unfolded in 1919. Output was declining, official food supply was reduced to starvation rations that were always supplemented by the black market, and tax revenue was plummeting even when measured in devalued currency. The economy was being measured in volumes, weights, and hours of labour, not money. By 1920 almost 90 per cent of the state budget comprised entries in the ledgers of the state offices in which money did not change hands.22 With regard to tax revenue, no two estimates were the same, but any measure suggested a fiscal deluge. The income tax was supposed to have been the new engine of state revenue, but in July 1918 the Commissariat of Finances thought that the income tax was yielding only 54 per cent of what was expected, or 257 million inflationary rubles against targets of 474 million rubles.23 The local figures could be worse.24 Malle estimates that all taxes in 1918 amounted to a mere 7.3 per cent of cash revenues and a much smaller fraction of all revenue. The Commissariat of Finances put the percentage of taxes to all revenue at 5.7 for 1919. D”iachenko, who may have folded estimates into actual receipts, puts all tax revenue at 1.8 billion rubles in 1918, 6.5 billion rubles in 1919 (counting one extraordinary tax of late 1918), and 0.5 billion rubles in 1920, but even his higher estimates represent respectively 12.0, 13.0, and 0.3 per cent of overall state revenue.25 The Commissariat of Finances did report collections of 851 million rubles in July–December 1919, but the deficit for that period stood at 136 billion rubles.26 Anyway the inflationary spiral was unstoppable so long as expenditure far outstripped revenue, making every tax receipt less meaningful. All revenue combined, in cash or in ledgers, could only cover 23 per cent of

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state expenditure in 1919 and 13 per cent in 1920. The rest was covered by the printing press.27 Emissions stood at a monthly 217.6 million rubles in 1915, and 78.6 billion rubles in 1920. Soviet economists like Preobrazhenskii cared less about the money, and a few began to speak of a moneyless economy of allocation, a happy coincidence of virtue and necessity.28 In these conditions, taxes were assessed for political reasons first and foremost, and more so as the months went by; they were a regular affirmation of universal belonging and civic obligation. Taxes were not abolished,29 new income tax laws were passed and deliberated through 1920, and the local assessment commissions continued to meet to review appeals and arrears.30 The income tax in particular would apply to factory workers, thereby bringing the logic of citizenship to its conclusion: full and rightful citizens were to be taxed, not exempted. In November 1917 the initial decree of Sovnarkom stated explicitly that workers and salaried employees would be taxed along with all others.31 In May 1918 Lenin told the financial directors of provincial soviets that the income tax would be “raised from all incomes and wages without exception,”32 which was a financial imperative when applied to the wealthy, but a civic one when applied to the mass of low earners. He may have been impressed by his correspondence with an elderly Bolshevik a few days previous, who called for taxes that were truly universal as a way to restore hope in a crumbling economy: “it will solidify in each citizen an honourable, direct, citizen’s conscience.”33 In July, Sovnarkom confirmed that all workers and employees would be taxed on income and that the collections would be made monthly rather than yearly to keep up with inflation.34 In November, new rates were set, which had the deliberate effect of lowering the exemption level to 988 rubles, which in conditions of inflation meant that any income was now to be taxed, the lower ones at a symbolic 12 rubles per year.35 In the course of 1918 the income tax was extended to all private enterprises of all sizes and in all localities, meaning by year’s end the taxation of the small artisans and peasant craftsmen who worked in a room or a shack with no hired labour.36 N.N. Evreinov of the All-Russian Soviet Executive Committee (VTsIK) told the congress of financial directors in May 1919 that taxes were still a tactile and regular way to remind the person that he or she was a citizen, to “implicate” the citizen in the state’s expenses even if the sums were negligible.37 The Commissariat of Finances acknowledged in the autumn of 1918 that the cost of collecting the taxes was more than their yield. It cited directly the imperial officials who had pondered the same paradox – that some of their taxes represented a net loss to the treasury. The commissariat explained that taxes placed a claim on all citizens and as such were “an act, the political importance of which is not only equal to, but surpasses, its fiscal importance.” The Soviet

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government acknowledged that this was a continuation of the “state principle” that the imperial government had propagated; it was on a spectrum with the universal taxes of any modern state, and “it links Soviet Russia with the past.” Everywhere and always, taxes “reflect the political and social physiognomy of the state,” and this still needed to be done in Soviet Russia indefinitely as an education. Taxes may or may not have had a class element, but they always had a civic one; modern states claim taxes because the state is the “representative of the people as a whole.”38 Local records indicate that workers and employees were indeed taxed through 1919 and into 1920. In September 1918 the Union of Metal­workers of Tula asked why they were being taxed on income. They recognized that taxes were “in principle necessary” but requested that the assessment be passed on to the bourgeoisie.39 The Commissariat of Communications complained that railway workers were being taxed on income in 1918, whereas taxes should apply only to the “propertied and trade-industrial class.” Deputy Finance Commissar Bogolepov replied that this was a civic tax that allowed for no normative exemptions.40 Workers and salaried state employees were taxed in 1920 at apparently nominal rates, though much of what they received was in rations.41 The tax assessment commissions continued to meet into 1920, sometimes to consider appeals and non-payments from 1917 and 1918, for nominal sums of 5–10 rubles that were literally worth less than the paper on which they were printed and less than the paper used to keep the minutes of the meetings. Yet the commissions met, they poured in the man-hours, they filled out forms, they kept minutes, and required full documentation, all as a way to remind all payers that they were obligated.42 The subtle change in the work of the commissions was that they were no longer elected. In March 1918 Sovnarkom agreed to expand their franchise to include representatives from all ages and both genders, but in August it decreed that the commissions for direct taxes be composed of the employees of the Soviet institutions. The Soviet hierarchy already comprised the population so there was no need for intermediary bodies and additional elections.43 Around the same time, Sovnarkom decreed that the number of tax circuits be increased to make local assessment more penetrating.44 All of this speaks to a considerable degree of continuity with the way in which imperial officials had thought of taxation: the obligation of all citizens. For all their revolutionary rhetoric that cast 1917 as Year One, the Bolsheviks also let on that they were extending processes of inclusion that predated their government. The obvious and clear change concerned class, which the Bolsheviks used as an optic and a device in their policies. The problem from late 1918 was that classes as traditionally understood, as unequal incomes and

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property relations, were fast disappearing. Inflation was reducing fortunes to pocket change, and Preobrazhenskii thought that inflation was doing the hard work of levelling better than was any confiscatory tax; nominal taxes served at best to remove whatever excess rubles could be located.45 Nationalization meanwhile took away enterprises and real estate from their owners and made them items in the state budget. In this context, taxation could only wrap up what was being achieved through nationalization and inflation, and was part of the process that put an end to class differences. By 1920 some were already looking forward to “Communism.”46 Curiously, then, the profounder change that Soviet socialism represented was not so much its recognition of classes but the thought that this and other divisions of humanity might end. This thinking took hold quickly and competed with the notion that classes still existed and needed taxes to moderate their differences. The tension was expressed in contradictory versions of the income tax. A new version dated 27 March 1919 claimed 25 per cent of any income up to 72,000 rubles in Moscow and Petrograd, or what was thought to be 3,500 pre-1914 gold rubles, and 100 per cent of incomes over that limit. In other words, a citizen living in the capitals was not permitted to have an annual income over 2,600 pre-war rubles.47 However, the comfortable sum of 2,600  rubles – about what a tax inspector might have earned before 1914 – could be kept. Within a week a new exemption level of 6,000 rubles was introduced in the provinces, which without doubt meant outright expropriation. This was the more radical version of state unity that posited that any labour or earnings outside of state employment was impermissible, and any earnings above subsistence were to be confiscated. Locally the assessment commissions taxed any income over 3,000 rubles into the end of 1919.48 Class then had travelled from a conflict played out in the socio-economic field to a relationship with the state; the bourgeois was anyone who worked outside the state (whom Lenin promised not to feed at all),49 the proletarian, anyone who worked in the state sector. The collegium of the Commissariat of Finances held that the very existence of economic activity and property outside the state “contradicts the foundations of Soviet power.”50 All obligations were fulfilled by working within the “truly national economy,” all incomes were entries in the “unified state budget,” and taxes were the vestiges of a bygone era when the state had claimed what had been produced in a private economy. While one part of the Commissariat of Finances issued a new income tax law in June 1920 and was busily working on another that fall,51 other parts prepared for the abolition of all taxes.52 Anyway, one might well ask what the bourgeoisie was by 1920. It was for the most part a bagman who carried a few sacks of grain from the village and came

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back with simple manufactures like good blades and lighters; squalid and barely able to feed himself, he was pitied by the villagers when the Cheka came to shoot him. “Rentiers” might be workers letting out a room in an apartment. Others might be village priests (who would never be integrated into the state), with assessments based on the number of parishioners (each worth one ruble in income) and the church treated as a private enterprise.53 The positive outcome was embodied in Nikolai Kutler – nobleman, former colonial administrator, former imperial minister, former liberal deputy in the State Duma, former bank chairman, and former chairman of the supremely capitalist Congress of Industry and Trade in 1917. In 1920 he was an employee of the Commissariat of Finances, the Supreme Council of the National Economy, and the Central Statistical Administration. The reformed currency of 1922, the chervonets, was printed with his signature. He was paid in money and rations like any other state employee and as such proletarianized.54 For some, this was socialism, the assimilation of all the economy and all persons into the state, where the tension and contradiction of government and governed, of exploited and exploiter, had disappeared into a borderless whole. The new objective was “statization,” and Trotsky held that “the road to socialism lies through a period of the highest intensification of the principle of the state.”55 By then, though, his logic was circular because socialism was, simply, the state.

••• If the state was the final end, at least for the cities and industry, then economics was a matter of better statistics and allocation, of accounting and shipment schedules, and of performing daily and routine work in the state. Transparency, nationalization, and revenue came together in a state-centred vision of – to use the lingo of the time – the science of administration, accounting, monitoring, discipline, and socialist consciousness.56 Bolshevism could be bold and aggressive, but it also prized bureaucratic predictability and it could be deeply banal. The new state in these duller renderings was the routinized government of all its citizens, and Lenin had promised in The State and Revolution that the citizen would be doing things no more dramatic than keeping count of goods and issuing receipts.57 In May 1918 he called a new emissions policy “the final decisive battle with the bourgeoisie,”58 and storming was a matter of accurate bookkeeping. A year later Communist officials were considering how they might manage the “unified economy” and the “unitary state” where a legal private sector no longer existed. It may have been a disaster of hunger, disease, and industrial contraction, but it was an administrative utopia in the making and it was “socialism.”

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The Soviet system may or may not have provided economic security in these early years, but “it was also and in perhaps even greater measure meant to be beautiful,” expressed in harmonies, unities, stabilities, and regularities, and encompassing the world down to its most minute details.59 With little of the drama of class struggle remaining, and with the heroism of the attack consigned to the front, Communists could look like accountants with guns. The state idea had subsumed class, society, and economy, not to mention the people, lending Soviet socialism its distinctive state centredness and state fetishization. It was easy to conclude, as early theorists of planning concluded, that the state administration, the economy, and the population were views of the same thing. By 1920 the state bureaucracy was the method that would achieve unity and the manifestation of that unity:60 everyone was a state employee. The satires began immediately. In the novel We, written during the Civil War, Evgenii Zamiatin described what he saw around him, and he proposed that the new polity was a dystopia – or would have been had it not been a regime of war, shortage, want, and rationing (on which see Orwell). Zamiatin’s critique centred not on the material reality of Soviet socialism but on the aesthetics of unity (the One State), predictability (mathematics), and transparency (glass buildings). In this sense his critique was of the modern polity in general, and he began it in England where he worked as a naval engineer in 1916 and watched conformist employees walk from their identical houses to their identical workplaces, oblivious to the possibility that this might seem odd. He mocked the belief that statistics were beautiful and numbers expressive of the self, a characterization that applied to the Menshevik Groman as much as the Communist Preobrazhenskii; to conformist England where Zamiatin once worked, as much as to revolutionary Russia where he now lived; to the American Taylor as much as the Russian Lenin who so admired him. Zamiatin doubted that the distinction between the person and the collective could ever be eradicated, and he playfully began We with the pronoun “I.” More profoundly, Zamiatin asked where one could go once all life had become a state project and all existence expressed in mathematical formulae. Lenin’s answer in 1917 had been “nowhere” (nekuda), a statement wrapped in the glow and menace of unity and finality. Zamiatin’s answer was outer space, which in 1920 was meant to sound both awesome and ridiculous and made the point that human society can never reach an end. What is the final number? his protagonist was asked in a step towards the unravelling of the whole project.61 Historians have been focused on what Communists destroyed, with the legal market extinguished and the black market regularly suppressed, making the early Soviet system a culmination of the many measures dating to 1914 that had fought market weakness by further weakening the market. This is a fair

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assessment, as far as it goes. Zamiatin observed what was being built, took it at face value, and called it an absurdity. He did not invent the One State (edinoe gosudarstvo) of his novel but was mocking Communists who wrote regularly of one or another “unitary” thing. Zamiatin premised his nightmare on the possibility that many of its participants believed in it;62 others quietly doubted but had no choice but to act it out, making sincerity and inner consciousness irrelevant to the performance,63 and cynicism a looming possibility.64 What the Bolsheviks achieved in the years 1918–20 was not the destruction of the state but its apotheosis. No one had predicted this outcome just yet, but Lenin had allowed for it when he blended utopian philosophy and practical politics, aesthetics and economics, and the present and the future, in The State and Revolution. While he wrote here of a fierce attack on the bourgeois state, he also wrote about a time when complete unity would be achieved and the new state would represent an end to difference. The state, “in the proper sense of the word,” would wither because it would lose its subject-object relationship with the population. But there was another sense of the word, and as the old state disappeared, a new one proclaimed itself to be everything. The Peasantry, Limited Government, and Unlimited Force “Utopian” can imply fantastical but achievable, and this is a way to look at the urban and industrial sector in 1920: anything but a world of opulence, but a real administrative unity nonetheless. “Utopian” can also imply fantastical and unachievable, and this well describes Soviet power in the villages in the years 1918–20. The carnage that unfolded rurally made satire misplaced and dystopian thinking premature. As Zamiatin was writing We, the agrarian economist Aleksandr V. Chaianov was writing his own work of fiction, Journey of My Brother Aleksei to the Land of Peasant Utopia. It was a credulous and formulaic addition to the genre, about how peasants might one day achieve unity and stability, not the jaded critique of the consequences of unity and stability. The Bolsheviks had great ideas for the countryside, whereby peasants would be integrated and accountable in a unified economic system. The Soviet government tried these ideas in 1918, but peasants remained almost entirely unregistered and unaccountable, their surpluses and needs unknown to the state. Class differences and stratification were invoked intermittently to explain rural dynamics and give the new state its grasp of the village, but this too would have required some familiarity with individual householders before class status could be determined. In the absence of the tactile, individualized knowledge that breeds intimacy and modern government, it was the peasantry’s wholesale relationship with the state that provided the constant thread. By 1919 and into

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1921 the state encountered the peasantry in acts of sheer violence and command, not in the techniques of government and discipline. Again it is the urban-rural contrast that interests us, and the manners in which peasants did and did not participate in state revenue, the national economy, and in the polity as a whole before 1914. What the imperial government had claimed from the peasantry in direct taxes was hardly based on direct knowledge at all, only guesses imposed on an unknown economy. Peasant direct taxes had always been apportioned rather than assessed (chapters 2 and 8), for lack of any method of accounting, and peasants gathered taxes from their communities (chapter 9) because no one else had the manpower and the knowledge to do it. The urban payer paid taxes to the state because the income in question was documented and undeniable, and what was not documented was not taxed; peasant income was invisible to the state, and the assessment for a territory was a guess. What was assessed was deniable, and what was not documented was still taxed. In practice, the state demanded a sum that it thought might be payable based on trial and error. The householder paid what he thought would keep the elder away. The elder gathered enough tax from his charges to keep away the police, the land captain, and the tax inspector (chapter 9). Until the war, this all mattered for reasons of civic accountability and government, not for fiscal reasons of tax revenue; peasant direct taxation comprised about 1 per cent of the state revenue budget and perhaps 2 per cent of all tax revenue. The state’s real revenue came from the cities and commerce and by regulating and piggybacking on mass consumption. Peasants participated in the polity and paid their taxes in ways that depended on a national market, rather than by deliberative acts of payment. The market siphoned off their surpluses and gave them cash, it brought them the processed and manufactured goods that they bought with the cash, and it provided the mass exchange of consumer goods on which they paid most of their taxes in the form of excises; the payments into the treasury through monopolized state vodka were similarly an act of consumption. This did not make for better government, though it was the hallmark of a modern exchange economy. The state had known by region, production point, or point of sale that an aggregate number of matches and kerosene had been bought and a gross volume of alcohol had been purchased by someone. The system of indirect revenue worked even though no one could quite say how it affected individuals or even social groups, and one need not ask as long as the annual aggregate results on sales and tax revenue were good. And good they were, to the tune of at least fourfifths of the state budget. The breakdown of market exchange after 1914 changed this situation; the state needed tax revenue, and the cities and army needed food. The first blow to

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the national economy was self-inflicted – the end of vodka sales in 1914 and the loss of 30 per cent of the regular budget and a goodly share of peasant money exchange. With the ruble devalued, manufactures scarce or redirected to the front, the railways commandeered by the army, and vodka out of the equation, peasants paid less tax in real terms and had less to buy; the less they bought, the less they paid in taxes and the less they needed to sell their grain to meet their tax obligations and consumption needs.65 The state required a direct recourse to peasants, the largest group of the population and arguably the least taxed. It meant that the food supply demands of the empire would be funnelled down the narrow neck of direct taxation, using a system of direct levies that had never been designed for those purposes. The remedies made matters worse because they took aim at that same market. Fixed prices, the repartitioned levy (razverstka) in late 1916, the grain monopoly of the Provisional Government, and the more militarized food dictatorship of May 1918 – these were all versions of a thinking that faulted the market for the break-down in supply and proceeded to further suppress it. To the extent that the policies were successful, they gave peasants ever fewer reasons to sell their grain.66 The emergency was the occasion to express a hostility to markets and traders that had long been harboured and articulated, among officials and experts alike.67 More fundamental was the disjuncture between what officials in the years 1914–18 were proposing for peasants and what they could realistically achieve, lending the entire period and the entire matter a surrealistic aspect. The peasant household, its needs and surpluses, was still nowhere to be seen despite formal declarations in 1916, 1917, and 1918 that the state would somehow – magically, really – conduct inventories of all peasant households and claim something fair. The problem faced by the Bolsheviks, then, was not the break-down in the flow of information needed to tax or to requisition; the information had never flowed in the first place. In the course of 1918 they tried two policies at once – levelling through confiscatory taxes and income equalization through progressive rates – but neither policy was realistic.68 Whatever the Bolsheviks did, whether they looked at peasants as a mass of individual citizens or as a cluster of classes, and whether they meant to tax or to seize, they needed data on the single peasant household. Initially the Bolsheviks thought it was a matter of using the numbers that already existed or could be easily produced, and they believed the likes of Groman when he claimed that the better numbers on the doings of every household were only a few calculations away – and over ten million questionnaires. (Groman and the Mensheviks meanwhile were having second thoughts.)69 They expected of rural Russia the visibility and responsiveness that they were achieving in the cities in that same year. The Bolsheviks

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waited in vain in 1918 for the numbers on surpluses to materialize, while provincial authorities waited in vain for the village elders to report them.70 There was no way to argue with the elders when they denied there were surpluses because there was no specific data that might prove them wrong, unless someone by-passed the elders and kicked down the door of the shed. This route was implied in the decrees of the imperial and provisional governments and was practised intermittently from 1916. It was generalized in Trotsky’s food dictatorship of May 1918, which gave the state the right to seize any surpluses by whatever means necessary, and in that month tax inspectors were given armed detachments to make peasants fill out their forms and deliver taxes in kind or in cash. The data would be by household, not by village. A commissar told a gathering of tax inspectors in May, “One can’t count on the population’s consciousness in the matter of paying taxes, so measures of compulsion are necessary.”71 This was not a solution, however, and for the same reason of ignorance: there was no telling if the grain they found was for sale (which the owner would deny) or for feeding the household and for sowing (which the owner would always claim). In fiscal terms, the searches furnished no information about what the producer would have in the next year, which meant that the shed door had to be kicked in again after the next harvest. Land taxes – the main direct tax for which peasants were responsible – would not serve the purpose at hand. They were abolished because the state should not tax its own land, as fiscal experts concluded in 1918, and they did not get to the core question of surpluses and incomes.72 The Bolsheviks sought something advanced and perfected, a claim on the aggregate of the household’s pursuits, and assumed that the income tax could be readily applied given the political will. Indeed the income tax was the great hope of the Bolsheviks in 1918, as it had been for the imperial government in 1916 and the Provisional Government in 1917. All of them had decided to tax peasants on income, in part as a way of raising money and forcing grain sales, and in part as a way of calculating peasant capacities. Each completed form would be a profile of that household, and the information could be used for the purposes of food supply as well. In early 1918, instructions were sent to the provinces. The financial sections of the soviets were to use the existing assessment commissions (prisutstviia, later komissii) to manage the affair in the districts. Counties and villages in turn would form new assessment commissions, in place of the semi-formal peasant assemblies and boards that had apportioned the land taxes. The elders (“the executive committees of the county and village soviets”) would convene them, and the commissions would compile information on each household’s land, animals, income, and membership, and supply that information to the inspectors who would set the final bill for the single household.73 It was that simple.

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A year later – January 1919 – a new decree again ordered that the income tax be extended to “persons of the rural population,” as if this had not been decided already in 1916, 1917, and 1918.74 In March 1919 the provincial finance commissars were reporting that no local assessments had begun, let alone the taxes collected. The commissars promised that household inventory, assessment, and registration would be the goal for 1919, as it had been in 1916, 1917, and 1918, and as it would be in each succeeding year for the next decade.75 In May, Chutskaev told the second All-Russia Finance Congress that assessments of persons and households was still the goal, though there were regrets all around that “it was necessary to carry out a collective assessment.”76 From Simbirsk came a report on how the income tax would now be applied to peasants – this in April 1920, or two years after the Council of People’s Commissars had first ordered it, and four years after it had been allowed by the imperial government.77 Matters were not proceeding to plan, and the record in Tot’ma district, Vologda province, was probably typical of the practice in many places. In June 1919, following one more flood of commands from Moscow, Finance Director Ul’ianovskii summoned the peasant county elders of the district. Twenty-four came. Everyone had to pay some tax, Ul’ianovskii declared, and the inspectors at the meeting made it clear that the tax was no longer aimed just at traders and trading peasants but anyone with an income over 3,000 rubles, which in 1919 meant “the entire population of the district.” Each county was supposed to have “Commissions on the Income Tax” with participation by the tax payers and the “executive committees” of the county soviet. No peasant in the district had declared his income, and the state lacked specific information to break the silence, so this time the commissar was serious: “it is essential to register the incomes of every payer in that village.” The commissions were instructed to by-pass the elders and gather the village assembly, and on the spot the householders were to complete the income tax forms. There was a certain absurdity to the instructions because the elders at the meeting were the same ones who were to be by-passed by changing their names to commissions and committees. Be that as it may, the elders (commission and committee members) made no comment for the record, save a request for higher pay, and they left with bundles of short-form income tax declarations to distribute among the citizens. Over the summer the reports came in from across the province that not one form had been filled out and that the “executive committees” (meaning the elders) had not actually visited any households and had rarely called meetings of the villagers. There were no assessment commissions. When the elders did call assemblies, “the payers hid themselves”; other householders were invited, but they refused to come; and meetings of the village assembly refused to discuss taxes at all, let alone pay

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Figure 11.1 Typical income tax form, 1920s. The form did not request a statement of class identity. Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov. Rukovodstvo dlia platel’shchikov podokhodno-poimushchestvennogo naloga, s prilozheniem blanka deklaratsii. ­Moscow, 1923.

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them.78 Interestingly, the householders freely declared their land holdings, as they always had for imperial taxes, but refused steadfastly to divulge any other information.79 The county soviets that were universalized in 1918 were scarcely distinguishable from the old combinations of elders and village gatherings, said an inspector in Kazan’: “all matters of village life are debated as before in disorderly, loud congresses.”80 The problem was that the commissars had no knowledge of individual payers, and an income tax could only work if that information were available. This is illustrated by the case of Mikhail Dmitrievich Romanov of Nikol’skii district, who in 1918 was somehow located by the income tax commission and given a bill on his income. Romanov quickly understood that an income tax required knowledge of his income and that neither he nor the tax office knew how to measure it. In fact the tax had been levied on his land, all 45 desiatinas, which was an impressive holding, but this was a measure of wealth rather than income, and the tax office could not distinguish between arable and swamp land. The district appeals commission agreed that there was no way to know what a desiatina yielded in income, that the year’s harvest had been poor, and that there was no specific knowledge on his income per se. Romanov was freed of all tax.81 If urban standards of documentation were to be applied to peasants, then scarcely any peasant would owe tax. The job of the inspector, lacking specific knowledge as he always had, was to guess, and the guesses of 1918 were no more reliable than the guesses of 1914. Some inspectors in Kazan’ in May 1918 surmised that peasants must have been doing well enough because they were buying more crop and building insurance than they had in the past, and insurance had been used for some decades in the cities as an indicator of paying power. Their colleagues surmised the opposite, that peasants bought insurance because they were experiencing desperately hard times and expected worse. Everyone acknowledged that peasants had paid almost no tax since 1917, but this could mean poverty or shirking.82 The Commissariat of Finances meanwhile was gathering the same information in 1918 as the ministry had been in earlier years: climate and harvest data for whole districts across the republic.83 The Bolsheviks needed a constituency that might break the collective silence of the village and furnish them with concrete knowledge of who had what. Workers had played that role in the cities, and this indeed helps to explain why the urban economy was statized so quickly: the workers of a factory walked into the management offices, and this government did not stop them. So in May 1918 the government introduced the Committees of Rural Poor, alongside the Decree on the Food Dictatorship, and they were meant to be its enforcers. The committees were inspired by class thinking and the less orthodox notion that

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the peasantry, while a class in Marxist terms, was divided between rich and poor and middling. The poor could act as a rural proletariat and the state’s organ in the village. It was one of many surrogates that the Bolsheviks created in the absence of an actual industrial proletariat – women in Kazakhstan and Central Asia, or the Red Army and the young.84 The social dynamic was quickly forgotten, and the committees acted as men with guns, looking for food. According to one Communist the committees “set one part of the village against the other part which will eat the requisitioned grain.”85 But the committees had their uses. They could be the wedge in the village that gave the state its first eyes and ears and in situ reports of the people who had grain and who could afford taxes, and they were treated as the executive organ of the Commissariat of Finances for the purposes of tax collection, and of the Commissariat of Food Supply for the purposes of grain requisitions. They might help the arriving commissars by fingering the hidden cash, the sheds, the surpluses, and the owners who concealed them. Carr thought they were little more than informers.86 The problem was that they gave the new state little of what it really needed, which is to say steady surveillance and regular information on what a given household could afford in that year and the years to follow. In December the committees were abolished.87 Denunciation stood in for calculation, seizure for revenue. In a last attempt to find out who had what on a sustained basis, the Soviet government introduced the Tax in Kind (Nalog naturoi) of 30 October 1918.88 This was to be a classic income tax (“the income tax in kind”), modified for peasants who would pay in food in conditions of high inflation. The early deliberations of the Commissariat of Finances show that it was based on the laws of April 1916 and June 1917. Its scales were set on the basis of these earlier laws, and finance experts sought the grain equivalent to the Existenzminimum of 1,000 pre-war rubles. Anything above would be taxed progressively.89 There was a lively back-and-forth between members of the Council of People’s Commissars, who thought that the law should be aimed at the rural rich and should claim all surpluses, and members of the Commissariat of Finances, who saw it as a graduated tax on all citizens that only moderated inequalities.90 Finance Commissar N.N. Krestinskii (Gukovskii’s replacement) allowed that the Decree on Land permitted the state to claim any and all surpluses, but he had in mind something more modest – to induce peasants to pay any tax at all – and he called for a progressive claim on surpluses on “the rural population – peasants.” Class barely entered the picture. Krestinskii called it a civic tax on “all agriculturists” and “all citizens” – including the poor. If this seemed odd for a socialist state, then it was to be remembered that the revolution had confirmed that all were “rightful citizens.”91 Meanwhile militarized

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institutions like the Commissariat of Food Supply held to a class line and insisted that taxes were or should be an attack on the “rural bourgeoisie,” in opposition to Krestinskii and his “all-democratic” approach – that is, taxes levied on all citizens.92 The exchanges had a surreal quality, however: any tax, a confiscatory class tax or a progressive personal one, would have required assessment of the individual payers before determining personal or class liability. Such information did not exist, but the authors of the Tax in Kind, Krestinskii and his deputy, Chutskaev, thought that the process of assessment would furnish it. They well understood that modern taxes produced the information needed to make those taxes effective. Chutskaev’s instructions of 12 November 1918 ordered the county soviets to form assessment commissions of its own members, tax payers, village poor, tax inspectors, and any Communists who could be found, and finally called for the creation of “village tax commissions,” which would fill out the forms.93 Krestinskii worked hard to get the forms right and expected ten million householders to complete them, asking each to report land, livestock (pigs, sheep, cattle), draught animals (horses and oxen), storage sheds, grain surpluses, and gross and net income stated in rubles.94 Provincial tax offices would no longer keep lists of villages and aggregates of arable land in the county but would keep a new system of index cards (kartochnaia sistema), one for each peasant household.95 This was to be the individualization of the Russian peasantry, something that no statistician or tax office had accomplished in the past. The forms – bundles of them – are still in the archives, some that were never sent out, some sent to individual householders and never returned, and others returned blank by the postal workers. The forms were addressed “to the householder,” and any reasonable peasant could claim that he was not that householder but another one. Months later provincial finance commissars could not locate one form that had been completed. The tax was still levied in 1919 but not as an assessment; it was converted back into money and distributed to the localities based on their populations, that is, a poll tax, and a symbolic one at that.96 A simultaneous, ten-billion-ruble Extraordinary Revolutionary Tax was meant to claim surplus cash from town and country alike but not wage-earners; about 1.6 billion rubles was collected over the next year in inflationary rubles.97 The problem was to discover what a surplus might be. Forms sent out from Petrograd to surrounding villages in 1918 arrived back in 1919 marked “undeliverable.” Henceforth the commissariat decided that the forms would be sent to the village elders “for wide familiarization with the citizens,”98 which in effect meant a return to collective self-rule, with the elders acting once again as the nexus between state and village. Throughout the Soviet

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Republic, provincial finance directors reported that bills and collections were being left entirely to the county elders. The elders were “the most authoritative,” said the Ekaterinburg report, because only they had any idea of what was happening at the village level. After pondering the matter, the commissariat decided not to hire tax collectors at the county and village levels and to use local collective institutions instead; like the imperial state, the Soviet administration stopped at the district level.99 By 1919 the rural tax system had returned tacitly to apportionment and collective responsibility, with the elders acting as intermediaries. This had been latent in the original Soviet pronouncements on the revolutionary tax in October 1918, when the expected yield was treated as a target (tsel’) rather than an estimate of revenue; the sums were not in fact assessed from the ground up but were set in Moscow and devolved onto the provinces as a repartition. In the classic manner of an apportioned tax, a flat 2.6 billion rubles was apportioned to Moscow province, a flat 1.0 billion rubles to Petrograd, and so on.100 This and all other taxes, reported the Kaluga provincial financial section in late 1919, were apportioned and repartitioned (100.0 million rubles to this province), per head as a poll tax, and with understandings of paying powers that were “superficial.”101 Evreinov of the All-Russian Soviet Executive Committee had objected at the time that this was inconsistent with assessed taxation and class policies because the tax was treated by all as a per-head tax (12 rubles on each adult), made no distinction between rich and poor, and was apportioned in the manner of a classic poll tax.102 In this sense, the tax was already the opposite of an assessed tax on income, and its subsequent arbitrariness owed not to poor implementation but to the original design. It was based on what the treasury wanted rather than on an assessment of what payers could pay. Locally a finance commissar reported that the whole province had given up on class discrimination or, for that matter, any discrimination in tax collection because there were no data to measure class status. This allowed for a reaffirmation in the official rhetoric of the civic principle of equal and symbolic levies, “of a highly modest assessment that is fair and comprises all people.” This was not a class tax or “some odious contribution, but the general tax obligation of all citizens before their state.”103 Higher officials at the Commissariat of Finances knew that their goals and their practices were at odds. In November 1919 the collegium of the commissariat that set broad policy recognized that repartition (rasklad) and the flat rates of a poll tax were the only option in rural Russia but were politically untenable, while assessment (oklad) and graduated rates were politically advanced but logistically impossible.104 But the Soviet state could not be seen as premodern, and there followed a familiar, awkward search for the right terminology.

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In March 1920 the Commissariat of Finances decided on an oxymoron: the ­“assessed” personal income tax would be repartitioned among collectives. It was an oxymoron that was almost identical to the one proposed in 1914 by imperial finance officials and for identical reasons: no one could say what a villager could pay. Instead, using a procedure that had been outlined by Bogolepov in 1914, the Commissariat of Finances would gather what information it could on local paying capacities (which is to say very little), aggregate the numbers in Moscow, and redistribute those sums down to the county or village based on population; the villagers would sort it out among themselves.105 Suspending their disbelief, finance officials in Moscow waxed enthusiastic about the novelty of the Soviet project. This state would not tax things but people and dispense with assessment altogether. It did this because an advanced state only governs and claims its citizens and assesses the person. Part of the genius of Soviet Russia was that it did not permit itself to tax objects; full nationalization was a reality in the cities and a principle in the countryside, and there was no property to tax since it belonged to the state as the “universal heir.” There were no objects left to tax, and the old “objective taxes” on things had gone. This left only “the subject, meaning the person,” and any existing tax was now “unified in the person.”106 This would have been progress by any measure, and Soviet economic historians advertised it as such: this was the direct encounter of the state with its citizens, and the full integration of the person into a state where “the understanding of ‘the subject of a tax’ and the ‘bearer of a tax’ are one and the same.”107 In fact there was no calculation involved at all, and in their haste to proclaim the achievement of “the whole people,” Soviet officials had rushed past the persons who comprised it. The idea of the single person as the subject of policy and study was not contrary to socialist collectivism but should have been its precondition,108 lest the entire project become one of a priori, ascribed identity.109 But the potential route to the payer had been lost as soon as the formal market had disappeared (and with it the mechanism for measuring exchange and income), and property nationalized (and with it the way to identify the starting point and destination of incomes).110 Tools that had once been used to locate and assess payers, like insurance policies, bills of sale, and loan agreements, had all ceased to exist in the course of 1918. Economically speaking, the Soviet state had no measure of the “personality,” that category that was under development for decades in the late empire, and the promise that socialism would more fully develop the person in the countryside faded into collective and territorial tax bills.111 Yet the Soviet state was ambitious in its structure because it claimed to encompass all people and could act on them at will, albeit as poorly understood

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collectives. It made for potentially unlimited coercion but not government. The reform of the fiscal administration from 1918 is one way to appreciate this new reality. The old system had entailed a tripartite division into the central government, the inspectors who made sense of the law in local conditions, and the local collectives that gathered and paid the taxes. In 1918 the distinction was removed, and Communist leaders began talk of a new “unitary power” (unitarnaia vlast’) expressed in “the unity of fiscal policy.” The “archaic” Treasury Offices were abolished, and the inspectors were folded into the district soviets.112 Officials at the all-Russia meeting of the financial sections in May 1918 insisted and repeated that the inspectors were to be merged into the local soviet institutions and should lose their autonomous roles; they would operate “in close connection with and under the control of the unitary power in the localities.”113 The population was also part of that power, and indeed it comprised a local soviet, so the mediating and buffering role of the expert was ended. Bemused inspectors in Kazan’ in May 1918 asked what had become of their “honourable role” as “intermediary between the population and power.” Ignorant peasants needed protection from arbitrary authorities, and that role was “autonomous.” The commissar who convened the meeting responded sharply that the autonomy of a soviet employee is “abnormal,” and inspectors will “merge with the local soviet.” The people were themselves the soviet, and as such they would learn to represent their own interests. All in all, an inspector summarized, the state’s claims would entail greater coercion, and armed detachments would now enter the villages regularly as part of the collections campaigns. However, it was the context of Soviet power that would make coercion effective: “the success of receipts depends on the organization of power,”114 not simply its application. That the local soviet institutions ceased to be elected and grass roots is true,115 but this made for something new; they were obligatory universal membership organizations that did not represent the population as much as they comprised it. From Moscow the Communist Party sent its personnel to direct the financial sections at the provincial and district levels and command the managers, bookkeepers, and inspectors. The majority of the local personnel were hold-overs from the Treasury Offices, but either the director or his deputy would be a Communist, and his was the final word.116 Assessment commissions that had been elected into 1918 were appointed from 1919; the soviets were the same as the people, so why vote twice or why vote at all?117 The era of assessed peasant taxation lasted in practice for one year, or all of 1918, and could easily be forgotten were it not for its instructiveness on large ambitions and limited capacities. It was accompanied by a hardening attitude towards peasants that spilled easily into revanche. Peasants by 1914 had been

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the least taxed segment of the population. Since then the Soviet state had given peasants the gentry’s land to use as they saw fit. It had repealed all land taxes but imposed no fees or taxes for its use. It had repealed the excise taxes and hardly bothered with a new sales tax.118 In fact, in the first half of 1918, Russian peasants owed very little to the state, and they hardly paid what they owed: a nominal income tax, disclosure, and the surrender of surplus grain.119 Peasants had never been good at paying taxes and arrears, a Kazan’ inspector told his colleagues in May 1918, “and yet millions were spent on vodka each year in every district, in years of good harvests and bad harvests.” Now they were paying nothing because they were not being forced.120 When the state repealed the land taxes, villagers used the occasion to cease all tax payments whatsoever, and in provinces like Tver’, Smolensk, and Kursk the whole collection apparatus collapsed.121 Inspector Novozhilov of Tot’ma district summoned the county elders to reprimand them in June 1919: industrial workers and employees had been paying income tax since late 1917, while peasants, who arguably gained the most from the revolution, paid nothing.122 As a tax inspector in Kazan’ summarized to his colleagues in May 1918, peasant Russia had become a mass of evasion and shirking. “The population does not pay taxes right now because no one has the power to force them.” Inspector F.P. Rudko lamented, “That nice mood which we had at our first congress [in 1917] has gone and cannot exist. Then there was faith that Russia was in a new epoch, an epoch of wide creativity in all domains of state and social life, but now there is no such faith.” Now the Soviet state was offering the inspectors “their own punitive apparatus,” and the inspectors seemed glad to have it; “measures of compulsion are needed,” they agreed, “force is indispensable.”123 L.L. Obolenskii of the Commissariat of Finances drew the contrast between the two forms of economy and government that had developed in Soviet Russia, between what cities were providing as component parts of the national economy (“the organized, socialized city economy”) and what peasants were failing to provide as its exceptions (“the peasant economy – independent, individual households of petty village producers”). He mixed entreaty with contempt and threat: “Only completely blind people, or the elements that are hostile to Soviet power, could fail to appreciate the great efforts that are being expended [on them] … Only someone out of his mind could try to chop the log on which he is sitting” and fail to “support the state.”124 Chutskaev wrote to the Council of People’s Commissars in fall 1918 that over the preceding year “the overwhelming part of the Republic’s population almost completely failed to participate in carrying financial burdens: all direct taxes that still exist have been paid by the city, but the village has been almost completely freed from paying them.” The main task of Soviet power should be to “enlist the village population to the

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carrying of state dues.” On this count all the left agreed, “from socialists to democrats.”125 The commissariat never gave up on the ideal of assessment by household and in March 1920 announced a new campaign of individualized taxation on income. But the circular then explained that this would be a “system of apportionment,” with gross sums distributed to villages to manage as the collective saw fit. It would be a poll tax in all but word.126 In January 1919 the Soviet state announced that it was shifting its energies to seizing grain outright using the Commissariat of Food Supply, through a policy known as razverstka (repartition) or prodrazverstka (repartition in kind).127 It was officially styled “in continuation of the tax in kind” of October 1918. The extent to which the razverstka replicated the old imperial tax, proceeded from a similar problem, and offered a similar solution is fuller than has been appreciated. In part this is because razverstka has been mistranslated as “requisition,” which was the outcome of the process but not the process itself. Its proper translation is “repartition” or “apportionment” (of a levy), and it was the term used for centuries in rural taxation. Thus translated, the term captures better the very candid and deliberate way in which the Communists were drawing on the imperial precedent. The similarity was conditioned by the absence of the tools, administration, and information that would have made real assessment possible. Once again the state would assess its own needs and admit that it had little knowledge of local surpluses, and for these purposes it would stop trying to find out; capacities be damned. Once again these bills would be divided up among the regions, provinces, districts, counties, and villages according to precedents and guesses and revised by a process of trial and error. The decree of 15 January advised villagers to practise class discrimination, but this was rendered meaningless by the provision that the whole village was accountable; whatever means it chose to use, it had to deliver the lump sum at the appointed time. Once again the state would expect some of that bill to be delivered but not necessarily all of it; in the first year it yielded 38.4 per cent of its target.128 The armies intervened when the payments were egregiously low or the state needs were exceptionally high. Once again the village elders were the linch-pin that was responsible for the group. They landed in jail often, as they had in imperial times, and were released when the group coughed up some of what was demanded. Again the elders became enforcers in order to keep the state’s agents away, the community protected, and themselves out of the stockade. The razverstka was a “declaration of non-interference in the village,” Patenaude writes, so long as the grain was delivered.129 In the treatment of the collective as a single unit, class was not meaningless, but its meaning had evolved. The anti-kulak stance of 1918 was tempered and largely replaced by reference to the “middle peasantry,” and this in turn

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became a euphemism for the peasantry as a whole. Kulaks there were, but they were located once the grain payments fell too short, meaning that a kulak was anyone who withheld grain.130 The action defined the class status, not least because there was no way to measure class status. The state only had aggregates on territories.131 Osinskii in 1920 wrote that the requisitions with any class distinctions or individual discernment could only be a general statement of intent because in practice class distinction was only the policy up to the county level, “maximum up to the village,” which is to say that class disappeared as the bill was delivered to the elders. Thereafter peasants practised what they had always practised, a combination of “apportionment by head” and “apportionment by acre.”132 There was no way to assess peasants, but they could still be punished with fewer institutional limits. As Bunge had written sixty years previous, the lack of individual or private property rights to the land made the person and his body the only recourse of the state; and as Terner had written in the 1890s, punishment was bodily because there was little property to be found or subjected to seizure. The difference was that the imperial order had been tempered by the separateness of the peasant population from the state, and the tax offices were moderated by an appreciation of their own ignorance. From 1918, as peasant elders received their bills and prepared for negotiation with the state’s agents, the Bolsheviks reached for their guns. In these connections, the comparisons between the old tsarist and the new Soviet coercion are misplaced.133 From 1919 the horror stories of individualized execution, on the one hand, and of mass killings of whole groups, and frontal assaults on villages, on the other, reached incredulous urbanites and foreigners.134

••• By now it should be clear that “getting the grain” is not really an explanation of what occurred in 1918–21, nor even an explication; no one ever “just” does anything. War Communism was the encounter of a poorly integrated countryside with the modern and exacting standards of citizenship, of modern ambitions with premodern capacities. This had little to do with Marxism and class per se, certainly not by 1919, but it did have a long, non-Marxist prehistory of universalistic thinking. Mikhail Kalinin thought it was all turning out well despite the fact that so many peasants were dying of execution and famine. As peasants started to see themselves as part of “one social whole,” they were “beginning to prepare themselves for participation in running the government.” They now had an understanding of the state principle (gosudarstvennost’). I.A. Torovich thought that a peasant was seeing himself as “a state worker on state land,” he declared with

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due emphasis, and must “work according to the tasks of the state under one leadership and one plan.” Osinskii was similarly sanguine: most peasants “recognized in principle obligations in areas of food supply, labor, and even taxation.” Peasants were being inducted into the “unified economic plan” and enjoying the “compulsory state regulation of agricultural production as a whole, a regulation that will penetrate more and more deeply.” Violence was not a by-product of the new polity but was productive of the new polity. Even the executions were an education, an enlightenment, a “revolution in peasant consciousness,” and an “induction into the national economy.”135 At play in this conception of violence was an unforgiving understanding of citizenship that explained the violence and allowed for it. Peasants were citizens in the sense of included and accountable, not necessarily rightful, and if they acted otherwise, then violence was justified because the expectations were higher. Anything less than punishment, even capital punishment, was to call a peasant something less than a citizen, something less than responsible and mature, and something less than a full human being. This was not a new or even a Marxist formulation, but it was certainly a modern one. Hegel wrote that the state could claim the person because the person was in the state, and the state was the highest form of human belonging. The highest expression of citizenship came, according to Hegel, when the person paid taxes and served in the military, 136 and at such moments the subject-object relationship of the person to power was dissolved into the state.137 “The objective and the subjective will are then reconciled, as one and the same serene whole.”138 Execution in turn was the highest moment of human responsibility. The state in these connections was not in a contract with its population, and therefore the state was not in negotiation with something separate or visiting punishment on a separate person. “On the contrary, it is that higher entity which even lays claim to this very life and property and demands its sacrifice … [Capital] punishment is regarded as containing the criminal’s right and hence by being punished he is being honored as a rational being.”139 Communists were different in two ways in particular. Hegelians relished the ongoing dialectic of the family, the civil society, and the state and were content with the capacity of man to exist in different places simultaneously – as a citizen but also a merchant or a father. Bolsheviks by 1919 had an understanding of the state as the exclusive and inescapable realm of belonging. In this formulation the state was both a place in which the person achieved unity and the instrument that would achieve it, finally. In a related manner, there was little sign of the personality in the rhetoric of 1919–20 that leaped past the person directly to the collective in the hope that the collective would produce the better person. The state was a violent means and the peaceful end, both at the same time.

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Things got worse before they got better. Some party leaders thought that they saw the last glimmer of a functioning national market reaction when peasants refused to sow their fields to meet anything but their subsistence needs. Faced once more with urban hunger, the party mounted a final assault on individual production and resolved in December 1920 that sowings too would become a state operation and managed by committees.140 By the end of the year, peasant rebellions were widespread, and the malnutrition of the cities was coupled with a harvest failure and outright starvation in rural regions.141 Illusions that something better was just around the corner could no longer be sustained when children with bloated stomachs were begging at the train stations. Some market would have to be countenanced to restore the movement of goods between town and country because allocation and seizure were not working. Few Bolsheviks liked the market and fewer understood it, but they knew that it worked. State ownership – which is to say socialism – was here to stay, but it need not always mean an all-encompassing, top-to-bottom control of all production and exchange.

12 The Economy of Licences: Taxes and the New Economic Policy

The Soviet tax system of the 1920s was a deliberate effort to recreate what had existed to 1914, crafted by many of the same specialists who had built the prerevolutionary fiscal system. It aimed at urban incomes, using income assessment; it imposed apportioned levies on the countryside; and it relied most heavily on indirect revenue to an extent that was strikingly similar to the 1913 state budget. All of this was to recognize what the Soviet state could and could not accomplish, which was similar to what the imperial state could and could not accomplish. For all the similarities, this was a new regime, and the Communist Party could alter its course at will. Such was the conditional nature of the New Economic Policy (NEP) that was proclaimed in 1921 and abandoned in 1929.

••• The NEP may be understood as an experiment conducted in the controlled environment of Soviet power and state ownership. Its end in 1929 was not preordained, and some Communists thought that it was a sustainable model of development and an alternative way to imagine existing socialism. But its end was always a possibility because the party that directed the state never relinquished the state’s ownership of all property and its command of largescale industry, raw materials, transportation, and investments. Whatever the concessions to market relations, “all wealth on the territory of the RSFSR belongs to the government.”1 The ruling party could end the policy as soon as it decided to do so. Within the realm of Soviet power, pockets of production and exchange would be permitted in an economy of licences – for the artisan and craftsman and the odd large-scale entrepreneur to use state property to manufacture, for

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the farmer to use state land to sow and harvest, and for the middleman to buy and sell at a profit. Concessions to foreign companies gained much attention and little traction, but the entire system of private enterprise was one of concessions. The licence (patent) that was given to non-state enterprises from 1921 was not new at all; it had been used since the 1820s to locate and tax economic activities (chapters 2 and 4). In the 1920s the licence reflected the reverse reasoning; it gave the firm the right to exist in the first place and was used to supervise non-state enterprises that existed conditionally. Private trade at its height in the fiscal year 1925–6 (or what was visible) remained below half the total trade, and privately earned (visible) income never surpassed 55 per cent of total national income. From 1926 these were reduced when the party decided that non-state enterprises were commanding too many resources.2 No one was quite sure how this market functioned and with what social consequences; the market revealed aggregates and involved a good deal of faith. Economists knew that this economy worked on a global level by producing and moving goods and generating revenue, but they could not, any more than their imperial predecessors could, explain and master its dynamics and trace them to the individual consumer and producer. Economists were pleased that production and exchange were restored by 1925, but Communists in particular were disappointed with the rates of growth, which were slow compared with their sense of urgency to build an industry that could in turn build socialism (the state sector, that is) and equip an army to defend it. Trotsky’s scissors crisis expressed both the insight into economic dynamics and the concern with their potential autonomy.3 Direct state intervention was regular, be it in the renewed assault on private middlemen in 1925 or the manipulation of industrial and agricultural prices to effect one or another outcome – better terms of trade for peasants in 1923, worse from 1927. The state’s concern with the social as it was affected by the economic, already manifest before 1917 as an interest in the politics of populations and statistics and in the operation of the entire fiscal apparatus, intensified in the 1920s and made the gaze of the social scientist part and parcel of policy as it never had been before. Pinnow terms this “the social science state.”4 Communists and non-Communists alike were alarmed when they thought that the social consequences of the unbridled market were more pronounced than in the past, or at least those consequences were better documented. They recorded and studied the wealth of the new traders (Nepmen), the unemployment of the workers or their low wages, the loss of the safety net to austerity and fiscal orthodoxy, parenting practices, heredity, orphans, homelessness, alcoholism, prostitution, sexual deviance, and suicide.5

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Taxes reflected these anxieties, and discriminatory rates were applied to workers, traders, widows, and Red Army men. Interestingly and tellingly, though, no class was exempted a priori; taxes were still the mark of the citizen.6 For the industrial taxes of July and November 1921, all enterprises paid a licence and a rate on turnover, much in the manner of the industrial tax of 1885.7 The personal income tax was revived in 1921 as the Universal Citizens’ Tax, with rates ranging from 50 kopecks to one ruble for workers and employees, and a flat 1.50 rubles for all others. It was hardly progressive at all, but then again it was likely to be paid, and it was a start that secured some revenue and that registered incomes for better taxation in the future.8 A new income tax in 1922 was much the same, basically a poll tax, in order to force payers to register themselves.9 In 1923 the income tax was revised with different schedules for different occupations, on the Prussian class model, though in this case “class” (klassnaia sistema) meant “income categories,” not “socio-economic identity” (klassovaia). There were flat and nominal rates for industrial workers and white-­ collar employees making over 75 rubles a month; higher, though flat, rates for professionals; and progressive scales for those working as tradesmen and entrepreneurs and for joint-stock companies. The architect was Pavel Kutler – former imperial treasury director and the state controller – whom Communists called the “creator” of the whole system of direct taxes in the 1920s,10 with advice from his brother Nikolai (until his death in 1924). The latter, it will be recalled, had been an imperial minister and the author of Russia’s income tax bill of 1907.11 Genzel’ and Ozerov were also on hand when the measures were drafted and revised in 1922 and 1923. Surveillance again became the word of the day. The ongoing census of urban dwellers yielded only names (7.627 million “self-reliant citizens” for 1923, meaning people who fell into the occupational categories and excepting peasants) and little about the incomes themselves.12 Employers reported on their employees, unions on their members, market committees (bazarkomy) on the movement of goods and their prices,13 and housing committees (domupravleniia) on their residents. Housing committees in Irkutsk were told to inform on the residents’ lifestyles regularly and fully.14 (One of the antagonists in Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog is the housing committee chairman, Shvonder, part stool pigeon, part bureaucrat who subverts the proper hierarchy of talent and culture as Bulgakov understands it.) Assessment commissions were formed out of payers, party members, local soviet executives, and trade unions. In the cities at least the assessment and verification process could be quite thorough.15 Enthusiastic party and union activists descended on factories and workers’ neighbourhoods in Voronezh in festivals of form filling and tax glee.16 Pavel Kutler reported that

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the tax generated information even as it used it; the USSR gained its first picture of income differentiation thanks to the income tax.17 The inheritance tax was revived, more as a way to locate the movement of wealth, which is the role it played historically; it yielded a grand total of 120,000 rubles in 1924–5. Genzel’, the pre-revolutionary specialist on inheritance taxes, was again on hand to share the history, help write the law, and explain why the money itself was of secondary importance.18 That the Soviet income tax looked like the imperial one stands to reason; it was drafted by many of the same people, who ascribed to it a familiar significance. The income tax was “nurturing” and taught the citizen to “calculate his budget himself ” and determine what he owed to the state “for the income he received under its protection.”19 The tax was often nominal, and the revenue from some categories of payers was less than the cost of collection, but so be it; the Commissariat of Finances had decided, like the imperial ministry in 1905– 7, that the purpose was to “expose and register all payers,” to “bring them to light” (privodit’ v izvetsnost’).20 The income tax, stated Professor I.F. Tsyzyrev in January 1924, was an encounter of the state with the citizen that “bonded the two sides,” “the most authoritative way in which the state manifests its will.”21 The tax should apply to anyone potentially, and there would be no class exemptions, only different scales for different occupations.22 Some Communists were baffled that the socialist state would tax its workers at all. As was the case before 1917, policy stated that workers would be taxed if they surpassed the exemption level, but it was tacitly understood that most would not, and some estimates of the yield removed them from the calculation altogether. Some instructions for the 1922 version insisted that workers would not pay tax on wages, only on non-wage incomes, even though the law stated that they would pay on all income but at nominal rates.23 Finance Commissar G.Ia. Sokol’nikov insisted that workers would pay, citing the same law.24 Who was “the subject” of the income tax, queried a published guide for payers? “All citizens” living in a city, it replied, and the forms did not ask for class belonging.25 Income assessment should become a “mass personal tax” on “all citizens” including workers, declared the commissariat in 1925.26 Were workers in fact taxable, and should they be? This debate had taken place before, in 1910 when Social Democrats and liberals had had it out in the Duma, the press, and the liberal Society of Financial Reforms (chapter 5). Nikolai Kutler, who had provided an answer in 1910,27 provided the same answer in 1924: being recognized by the state was an honour. He and his brother Pavel expressed satisfaction with the new income taxes because “universalism” (vseobshchnost’) had been reaffirmed.28 Arguably, it had never gone away because the Soviet state – workers’ state or not – had been taxing workers since

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1917. And arguably, workers, now the first citizens of the state, had more reason to pay than anyone else. Also restored was the basic structure of pre-revolutionary revenue, with direct taxes given greater political significance while indirect taxes actually secured the money. Indirect taxation was politically important now more than ever because it would leave the person alone and avoid a repeat of the mass violence of War Communism.29 The income tax (excepting the agricultural tax) would only ever account for 2.5 per cent of the state revenue budget in the 1920s, and in 1923 was meant to apply to about 2.1 million payers.30 In the fiscal year 1925–6 all direct taxes, on incomes, industry, and agriculture, amounted to 15.0 per cent of the state budget, pretty much the proportion of 1913; the rest was one or another form of indirect revenue. Re-legalized alcohol (wine, then beer) was introduced from 1921, and in 1925 vodka was again for sale through a state liquor monopoly; once again this became the largest single source of state revenue. Again the state would capitalize on exchange, and the doubts about its social usefulness and costs would be suspended, for the time being, as officials focused on the good fiscal results.31 By the same token, the fundamental divide between rural and urban taxation was replicated in a system that replicated the principles and approaches of 1914. It was brought back by many of the same people who now advised the Soviet government, and the Kutler brothers in particular seem to have been behind the draft legislation. They had a hand in the Tax in Kind of 1921 and in the Unified Agricultural Tax that replaced it. Rurally the Commissariat of Finances promised that peasants would be assessed as thoroughly as “the whole mass of the population” and “all citizens.”32 In Saratov the inspectors were mandated to “awaken [the peasant’s] consciousness” so that he paid taxes not as an onerous burden but “in so far as he is a citizen.”33 Taxes would induct peasants into the “national economy” by “inculcating” new principles in “the very depths of the peasant mass.”34 The Commissariat of Finances told the Council of People’s Commissars in 1922 that class was beside the point; the agricultural tax was, like its urban counterpart, “a nurturing tax” that taught all peasants to carefully consider their place in the state.35 There was a huge though entirely familiar gap between the theory that peasant taxes were assessed, individualized, and calibrated and the practice of repartition and collective responsibility. In theory, peasants were subject to graduated scales and household assessment, in kind in 1921 in the prodnalog and in cash in 1924 in the Unified Agricultural Tax. Both induced peasants to give up their surpluses, and those results measured in grain marketings were better than at any time since 1917. The aggregate estimates of the yield of the tax were supposed to be the sum of all local and individual assessments, and

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each household was meant to pay according to its capacities. But because the local assessments did not take place and never had, the aggregate tax for the Russian Republic was once again an estimate of the state’s demands, distributed according to rough estimates of land holdings, harvests, and past tax receipts. Kamenev’s draft of the Tax in Kind of 1921 set a target of 350 million puds based on the harvest of 1913 and the amounts collected from peasants under the requisitions of 1919–20.36 The “estimates” were in fact targets, providing a way for the localities to reach the state’s demands rather than register and assess local capacities. For all the talk of scales and progression, the government had left the matter of collection to the counties and villages since 1921 (actually, since 1919) – as had the imperial government since the eighteenth century. “Citizens” and “local peasants” would form “organizations” to manage taxes, which is to say some combination of the village gathering and the elders.37 The process of apportionment that Tracy McDonald describes so well was identical to a pre-revolutionary rasklad by a ministry.38 The early targets were based on tax data for 1914, and the system was devised by pre-revolutionary specialists who deliberately made taxes indirect of the single household and relied on collective self-government.39 The direct approaches since 1916 had produced massive violence, Men’kov warned in 1922.40 Nikolai Kutler was categorical when he was consulted in 1920 in anticipation of the prodnalog: the tax in kind had to be repartitional, and direct assessment was out of the question for lack of an assessment machinery, now or at any point in Russian history.41 Indeed the old specialists took the opportunity to advise against that direct confrontation between the state and the person that had been War Communism. The memories of militarized collections, executions, and famine were fresh. No one doubted that the party could set policy and had few limits on what it decided; the Communists had won the Civil War. The party had statized all land, Pavel Kutler admitted, not socialized it, and this remained true after 1921. “I don’t know how these arguments ended in [Communist] Party circles,” but the fact was “that the land belongs to no one” and is subject to “a right to property in land that belongs to the state.” The state could “declare a monopoly of the air” and tax it, if it so chose.42 But they did advise – plead, really – that the state re-establish and respect buffers and intermediary institutions between the state and the population. Unmediated relations had produced violence. This was especially necessary in the villages where the administrative system was primitive and unequal to the task of direct assessment and government; an archaic village required an archaic tax system. Nikolai Kutler revived quasi-feudal precedents. Villages should be given a bill for the state land on which they lived and worked, and left to sort out their production and tax obligations among themselves. Soviet taxes

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Figure 12.1 Nikolai Nikolaevich Kutler, ca 1900. Departament okladnykh sborov, 1863–1913. St Petersburg, 1913. Photo by ­Anthony Accardi / Blue Rhino, Inc.

should really only be the obrok, he said, the quit-rents that state peasants had paid for the use of state lands until the 1880s. Kutler put it in the delicate language of the imperial chinovnik: “The term ‘obrok dues’ may, of course, be recognized as uncomfortable, since it is associated with the idea of a return to the methods of a past that has died out.” No matter, the name “can be changed as one wishes – an ‘agricultural tax’ or ‘payment for the use of state land.” Either way it would be an old-fashioned apportionment (raskladochnaia sistema).43 The economist A.A. Sokolov asked for something similar in 1923 when he proposed that the state stay away from the person and charge only for land use, not

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labour and output. After all, labour and its products belonged to the labourer, and “the state has no place here.” It should be called a rent tax.44 Genzel’ proposed a different feudal arrangement. “We need to approach this rent assessment in the manner of the Duke of Westminster,” since the duke who owned the land in the City of Westminster collected thousands of small rents from leaseholds but did not interfere with what happened above ground. “Our state is a Duchy of Westminster.”45 It was worldly musings such as these that led Communists to conclude that an old specialist may have been “loyal to Soviet power” but “not always sensitive [chutok] to the current situation of Soviet reality.”46 The agrarian economist Chaianov was brought in to the Commissariat of Finances, and he observed that while theoretically the state should tax households, the state had no way of doing so. The tax in kind was a lump sum, calculated by acre according to whatever data could be found, aggregated in Moscow, and devolved onto the localities as an old-fashioned repartition, a rasklad.47 In 1922 Groman and Strumilin were at work in the state planning agency, Gosplan, to estimate subsistence and surpluses and therefore tax rates, and their bench-marks were the average annual tax assessment for 1900–14, measured in pre-revolutionary gold rubles and then expressed in kind. They calculated the global calorie needs of the population (what consumers should eat and what peasant producers needed to keep for themselves) and then measured the needs against pre-revolutionary tax rates and gross receipts. They arrived at an aggregate tax bill of 240 million puds of rye for 1922–3, and then repartitioned the sums among the provinces based on population, acreage, and pre1914 rates of marketings and taxation. No one on the commission bothered to call this anything other than a repartition (razverstka).48 Local officials and inspectors agreed: only simple and flat taxes had any hope of being collected, largely as the local community saw fit.49 Equivalent rates were developed in weights of meat (horse, cow, camel, mule, sheep, goat, and pig) for the Kirghiz, Kalmyks, Bashkirs, and for all of Turkestan, the Caucasus, and Siberia. There would be no class exemptions, only allowances for the families of servicemen.50 In the words of an informational brochure to inspectors in 1923 in Saratov, this was not a class tax at all: the payer “will fulfill his duty before the Republic in so far as he is a citizen.”51 Locally this meant that the sums given to the counties and villages as a lump bill were the product of guesswork and the precedent of yields in years past, but not real current knowledge. Little new data was being gathered because the system still lacked that dynamic aspect of regular reporting and sustained monitoring. When county elders were asked to provide their harvest estimates in Tot’ma district, Vologda province, preparatory to the tax in kind, the elders

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complied because they were happy to be rid of the requisitions. What they offered (as they always had) was the start of a negotiation, not a demonstrable number, and the district financial sections raised the estimates for every county by factors of two, three, or even five. Everyone assumed the elders were underestimating, and no one had data to disprove them, so the increases were more or less automatic and uncalculated. The district finance officials did provide some explanations for the numbers, but these were a general sense that the weather had been good and the harvest should be, too.52 Again there was a good deal of pragmatism at work because there were too few local agents to actually assess. By September 1922 the Commissariat of Finances had returned to a complement of over 2,400 agents (including 748 inspectors and 1,596 finagenty, meaning helpers),53 a number sufficient for overseeing commerce and exchange but not rural territories and agriculture. Bills would be apportioned, and the agents of the Commissariat of Finances would limit themselves to oversight of the counties, as they had before 1914. Non-interference in the collection process was again made formal, even as the party literature insisted that the new taxes on peasants were to be individualized and calibrated down to the individual householder.54 The replication of pre-revolutionary provisions was at points so specific that one suspects again the hand of the pre-revolutionary specialists. In 1923 the inspectors were told to oversee the village and the county (sel’sovet and volsovet), while “direct management” would rest with the county peasant officials alone (volispolkom).55 Tver’ inspectors were told to visit village gatherings and even payers in principle, but the instructions only spoke in practice of oversight of the peasant county officials.56 The law on the Unified Agricultural Tax of 1924–5 stated explicitly that the repartition of the bill was left entirely to the county and the village, and responsibility for delivering the lump sum was left to them as well. Inspectors were again not allowed into the villages in a regular and sustained way; they would verify the lists of “objects of taxation” (the aggregate lists of land holdings provided by the county) but not the households themselves.57 The household entered the calculations of the inspector when the bill was appealed, which had been the innovation of 1903, and at that point the inspector depended on the county and village elders to provide information. That failing, as it generally did, the inspector had to use what data he had to place the household in one or another normative category of poor, middling, and well-off and then use the ascribed status to decide whether and how much to tax it.58 As we have seen (chapter 9), this had been attempted in a limited way before 1914, but it scarcely went beyond the limited indicators with which the process began. As for the village itself, it too was supposed to employ methods of detailed assessment, of households individually. “Collective responsibility is repealed,”

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the decree of 21 March 1921 boldly declared, as had the imperial government in 1903 and with a similar effect: some but not much. In practice, the responsibility for household assessment, progressive rates, and class discrimination was passed to the village collective with the lump-sum bill, with little followup from the district soviet. Only the collective of the villagers could sort out the bills among themselves, unmolested by outside agents, and the collectives were responsible for the delivery of the grain and the cash. The army was brought in when the returns were too obviously low, but the punitive measures were again collective: roadblocks and arrests of key local figures that would force the group to pay.59 Collection was also weak in familiar ways. In May 1922 the Council of People’s Commissars reintroduced the law on the inalienability of peasant possessions, modelled on the law of 1893: no land and no item needed for the household’s survival could be confiscated for delinquency and evasion. This again meant that tax liability could not be connected directly with household capacities, at least not by the state’s agents; the collective would use its own methods.60 In June the government further explained that the seizure of land and crops was too severe because too many peasants did not understand the law, and the distinction between evasion and avoidance, between deliberate and unintended non-payment, was reintroduced. Specifically, local organs began to employ the distinction between “conscious evasion” and “low culture” – a new category that applied only to peasants.61 All in all, local officials complained that it was “impossible to catch” (ulovit’) the individual peasant household.62 The Soviet state was not the first to call its taxes assessed and individualized and then repartition them to a collective; the imperial state had done it for decades, or since it had introduced the “assessed” land tax in the 1870s and 1880s and repartitioned its amounts to the localities. As one reads the reports from around the middle of the 1920s, one should be impressed not only by the changelessness of a practice that stretched back to the eighteenth century but also by the new intolerance of these practices. Demands escalated not in quantitative terms as much as in their uncompromising and unforgiving expectation of accountability and belonging. Again the Communists drew a contrast between the cities where incomes were documented and the population “individualized,” and the rural areas where the state could only impose aggregate rates on faceless collectives.63 A.A. Ostrovskii, a non-Communist and also not an admirer of peasant exceptionalism, read the decree of 1921 and its instructions and focused on what it did not do, which is to say offer anything new when compared with Russia in 1914. “By its silence it affirms the implementation of the new tax in kind by the efforts, methods, and customs of the old estate–communal peasant organization.” The

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village would exist “outside the influence of the law and of state power.” This was a repartition, plain and simple, starting in Moscow and repartitioned by the old sequence of “province-district-county-village.” “Will the village authorities follow the letter of the decree? No one outside the county will care, but at the very same time from outside the county there will be a burning demand by the state to receive the grain, and this one-sided pressure will force the local authorities and the local population, in the interests of self-preservation, to transfer to a simple repartition by household according to local conditions and local understandings. Obviously this will mean that they will implement the principle of collective responsibility.” It meant a retreat into self-rule: “The village will learn no new understandings, no new organization, so long as [state] power does not demand it.”64 In the case of the Labour and Carting Tax (Trudguzhnalog) of November 1921 and its precursors from 1918 (trudguzhpovinnosti), collectivism and peasant particularism were scarcely even concealed.65 Lenin in 1918, to be sure, held that these taxes were more rational because they calculated the person’s labour and were an extension and perfection of the income tax in conditions of inflation,66 but there is little evidence of calculation at all. They were simply mobilizations of available labour power, as in the mass mobilization to clear snow in November 1918 and sundry ad hoc mobilizations to and for the front.67 It was hard to ignore that these had existed before 1917 as dues in kind (natural’nye povinosti, chapter 9) and were derided as archaic and crude. The labour and carting taxes that began in 1921 were more regularized but no more evolved. In the first six months of 1921 the Commissariat of Labour announced that it had mobilized 1,583,311 persons and 1,898,718 draught animals. As always, one should query the statisticians’ confidence, but also the statisticians’ categories, since peasants and animals were appearing in the same table; and one should be thankful that peasants and draught animals were not merged into the same column.68 From 1923 the local authorities, in demanding labour, were supposed to be guided by seven categories of class belonging in the countryside, but there were no provisions for that calculation; the tax was apportioned, and it was set at the same rate for all people – one day of labour. The state’s labour needs for public works like carting grain and lumber and repairing bridges would be apportioned to the districts, and from the districts to the counties where the peasant collective would somehow, by whatever means it chose, get a given assignment done. Some cities might convert the tax into money (as was done by the imperial government in 1863), but in the countryside the state needed the labour sooner than the money.69 The one real effort to apply individualized taxation rurally was the extension of the income tax to peasant populations from 1922 onward. Peasants may have

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owed the agricultural tax, but many peasants were craftsmen, traders, and suppliers of unusually large surpluses of grain, meat, or dairy products. They would be taxed on income, and the village would be introduced to the principles of personal assessment that already applied to the cities. It was by no means universal but it was universalistic and it was a start.70 In practice, only the elders could identify the persons and incomes in question, if anyone could, but the “county executive committees do not respond to the inspectors,” and they refused to provide information on the local population for fear that it would be used against them in the future (which of course was true, as it was true of any modern tax).71 Instead the income tax was assessed on peasants when snippets of information were gathered about occupations – that someone from a given village traded in butter, for example, or that a given peasant was doing well selling wooden spoons in a town market. But since no one could say whether this was a business on the side or a large operation, these persons were taxed “by the nomenklatura of their profession.” Wealthy or not, the “trading peasant” would pay, often a flat rate since a progressive one could not be calculated. Many were taxed by word association: since they were listed as political enemies (former priests, noblemen, and White Army veterans), they were placed in a higher category for taxation as well. The result was that the poor were taxed regularly. There could be “no individual approach,” only a “normative method” that depended on “external social indicators.”72 Such were the conclusions in Moscow, and reports from the provinces show that this was indeed the practice.73 The Communists were hardly the first to lament that “the village represents itself,” as Finance Commissar Sokol’nikov told the second All-Union Financial Conference, in 1925. The statement was not a paean to peasant liberty but an old lamentation that peasants could not be integrated. He continued that “Face to the Village,”74 the policy proclaimed in 1925 to afford more concern to the villages, was double edged because concern could mean different things. It was partly a promise to devote more resources to rural development, and that happened until Communist officials concluded that more money was flowing into the countryside than what was being extracted.75 At the very least, Communists could fairly claim that their taxes were no more onerous per capita than the taxes of the tsars in the final years of the empire.76 Face to the Village, though, was also part of a growing concern that peasants were poorly integrated and contributing too little to the new regime. The 1920s produced a remarkable industry of agitation and policy aimed at bridging the gap between town and country,77 and we should appreciate it as the constant reminder of how wide the gap was and how pressing the problem seemed to Communists. Why else would the Soviet system need an “alliance”

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(smychka) of peasant and worker? What should have been a “unified system,” Gosplan’s V.A. Golgovskii declared in a damning report on taxation in June 1925, was in practice separate forms of government, with the urban sector assessed and manipulated and the rural sector the subject of guesses and command. The USSR did not have a national economy in the sense of a “union” (spaika) but had “principles that have been mechanically chained together.” P.T. Smigla reported these findings to the Council of People’s Commissars and warned that all planning and economic forecasting was held back because the peasantry remained “isolated” from the systems of modern assessment. The aim was “unification” (unifikatsiia). The implication was that the Soviet state should engage more directly and forcefully with the countryside, the warnings of the old experts notwithstanding. Pavel Kutler was consulted in the deliberations, and he offered caution disguised as agreement: income taxes were good for the whole economy without exception, he concurred, except for those who lived outside of a city.78 Face to the Village was also and more profoundly a determination to study the peasantry and understand better how to bring it into the national economy and make it responsive to national policy. The agricultural tax was flat and apportioned; this was a sign of poor government, and it limited the state’s policy options. Like any repartitioned tax, it was rigid. Taxes could be increased to pay for industrialization, but no one knew how much was too much, and no one knew how peasants would react.79 Somehow the country needed to industrialize and to maintain an army; the new five-year plan of 1928 needed funds. In this context, official agricultural prices were adjusted downward relative to industrial goods, private traders were snuffed out, and tax rates were upped on the well-off peasants. The last was meant to be a targeted measure that, in conditions of de facto collective responsibility, was devolved onto territories and translated into a rising bill for everyone. With taxes higher and prices lower, grain marketings fell across the board. It was back to feeding the farm animals for the meat and eggs that were unregulated, and turning rye into moonshine. The kulak was blamed again in 1928, but it was the same one who was blamed in 1919: the one who did not sell grain to the state, if only one knew who he was. There was still no way to tell, and only the visiting army and detachments of shock workers could find out when they once again kicked down the door to the storage shed. This was Stalin’s “Urals–Siberian method” of searches, seizures, and shootings, modelled on his warm memories of 1919–20, and it degenerated into an assault on any village that did not deliver grain, and spilled into forced collectivization. Collectivization was a global response to the problem of peasant unresponsiveness, and it did bring the Soviet state to the village in the shape of the

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army, the agronomists, shock workers, the tractor mechanics, and the party activists.80 There would be a plan for agriculture, for the peasants who survived famine and deportation or who remained after the flood of migration to the new industrial centres. In fact not many would be left, which placed Russia on a spectrum with other industrial economies. But the price in violence was uniquely high. This was “socialism,” Communists proclaimed, a unity of state, economy, and society, a singular “people” that was worth the cost to the persons who survived and comprised it.

Afterword Russia, Socialism, and the Modern State

In 1930 private property had not been in existence for some thirteen years, and the Soviet system realized one of its potentials by becoming fully statized. The private sector of leased production and semi-tolerated trade had come to an end, and the (visible) economy had become fully planned and allocated. This was to be socialism, as it had been in 1919 and 1920, favoured over the many models of development and management that socialists and Marxists had put forward in Russia and abroad. Such were the circumstances of interwar Europe that this, and only this, was to be “existing socialism” that assimilated historical Russian attitudes and traditions into a universal model. It is better called Stalinism. The model of a fully unified economy and budget had been created out of ideology and circumstance in 1919 and 1920, and it was re-adopted by 1930, again through a combination of ideology and circumstance. An unresponsive market was weakened, and its weaknesses were once again dealt with by measures that weakened it further, until the measures were designed to end it. Any person working – legally, that meant everyone – would be a state employee, save the collective farmers who alone functioned as quasi-autonomous collectives. Communists had always been of two minds about collective farming: it was good that it was not individual and small scale, but collective farms still implied the obscurity of the person in the collective.1 The ambiguity would persist, and collective farmers in later years owed their produce collectively (as a tax, in fact), and they would still be taxed on income to make up for their continued separateness in their distinct collectives. That tax was on acreage, not income, and the collective as a whole had to somehow make sense of the bill.2 Russia really was different, and it should caution us against using overly sweeping generalizations about the totalizing world of modernity. More commonly in Europe a state’s claims depended on the separation of the state from

348  States of Obligation

the economy, but modern taxes also obscured the boundary on which they depended. The tensions that gave state and society their meanings, and the shifting distinction between the two, were ongoing processes. They were expressed most clearly in Hegelian terms that allowed for full commitment to the state in certain actions – like paying taxes – but existence in other spaces as well, like the economy and the family. One could be state and society, both at the same time. One could be a committed citizen and also a private person. Modern Europeans had often acted on the primacy of the state – elsewhere it took the form of a welfare state – but Russians also insisted on its exclusiveness, the only and higher way to understand humanity. The distinctions between the state, the economy, and the citizen did matter, and Russia offered the historical case study in their disappearance, at once precluding certain avenues and opening others. Russians before 1917 had been suspicious of the world of private economies and wealth, and officials and academics thought of ways in which the person could be integrated into state practices and give meaning to themselves as state activists rather than as private persons. This was related to the circumstances of 1905 onward, when the entire regime seemed to be disintegrating and the state was conceived as the new and possibly only bond for a fractured and antagonistic population, reconciling them to the state by active participation and to each other by submerging their differences in the state. The more the population identified with the state, the more that state was legitimate and stable. To be sure, the dualities persisted, in Russia as elsewhere. The modern state has always been a nexus and a locus, both at the same time, encountering the population because it was separate and assimilating it because there was less distance between them. Consent may or may not have mattered, but participation and inclusion always did. Fiscal systems could reflect either or both visions of statehood and citizenship. For those who preferred their polity as one of non-interference, privacy, and autonomy, then excises, sales taxes, and flat taxes on income served fiscal purposes well despite their deep unfairness. For those who preferred their state to be knowledge based, personalized, and fair, the progressive income tax would continue to serve as a counter-model of statesociety intimacy despite the intrusion it required. Both in fact would persist as models of modern revenue, and even the Soviet state concluded that if the currency was ever to have value, the budget would need mass revenue; various forms of flat and indirect taxes would continue to exist. One wonders why the total state would tax its own citizens, which is to say tax itself. It is understandable that the collective farmer would be taxed since he or she functioned with relative autonomy from the state. Would taxes be levied on the workers and engineers and bureaucrats in the expanding

Afterword 349

industrial sector, on those who laboured in and inhabited the state and indeed comprised it? Foreign observers would be perplexed, and a baffled American expert, Franklyn Holzman, repeated to his readers what he had heard, not quite understanding it and not recognizing the genealogy: a tax on a worker was nominal, it was not progressive, but “it is important from the standpoint of good citizenship for all citizens to participate directly in financing social and state activity.”3 Even if the USSR had classes, and some would be favoured over others (they just did not struggle from 1936), it was also a state that included citizens understood as everyone. Taxes were the regular reminder that one was a citizen, but citizenship was not always good news. It was the term used as the sentences were being read to the victims of Stalinist terror, as they were being marched off to their executions in the next few years. They were termed not “class enemies” but “enemies of the people” because they had no place in perfect unity. They disrupted a union of comrades that was just around the corner, but to the very end they were citizens.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Good models that use taxes to trace deeper changes over time are Martin J. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–1914, with perhaps a clearer argument in “Payment and Participation: Welfare and StateFormation in Britain, 1900–1951,” Past and Present, 150:1 (February 1996), 169–216; Gabriel Ardant, Histoire de l’impôt, book 2, Du Xllle au XXe siècle; and over time among different regimes, D.E. Schremmer, “Taxation and Public Finance: Britain, France, and Germany,” in Sidney Pollard and Peter Mathias, eds, Cambridge Economic History of Europe, 315–494; Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue. 2 A very good example being Edwin R.A. Seligman, Essays in Taxation, and The Income Tax: A Study in the History, Theory, and Practice of Income Taxation at Home and Abroad. 3 Geroid Tanquary Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime, as well as Alexander Gerschenkron, “Agrarian Policies and Industrialization, Russia 1861–1917,” in M. Postan and J. Habakkuk, eds, Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 6, pt. 2, 706–99; A.M. Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie i klassovaia bor’ba krest’ian Evropeiskoi Rossii: 1881–1904 gg.; A.M. Anfimov, “Nalogi i zemel’nye platezhi krest’ian Evropeiskoi Rossii v nachale XX v. (1901–1912gg.),” in Ezhegodnik po agrarnoi istorii vostochnoi evropy, 1962 g., 489–505; James Y. Simms, Jr, “The Crisis of Russian Agriculture at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A Different View,” Slavic Review 36:3 (September 1978), 377–98; Stephen G. Wheatcroft, “Crises and Conditions of the Peasantry in Late Imperial Russia,” in Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921, ed. Esther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter, 128–72; Valentina Grigor’evna Chernukha, Krest’ianskii vopros v pravitel’stvennoi politike Rossii (60–70 gody XIXv.), ch.2; Stefan Plaggenborg, “Tax Policy and the Question of Peasant Poverty in Tsarist Russia,

352  Notes to pages 3–5 1881–1905,” Cahiers du Monde Russe, 36:1/2 (1995); Stefan Plaggenborg, “Who Paid for the Industrialization of Russia?” Revolutionary Russia 3:2 (December 1990), 183–210. 4 Still useful is Alexander Michelson, “Revenue and Expenditure,” in Russian Public Finance during the War, ed. by Alexander Michelson, Paul N. Apostol, and Michael W. Bernatzky. Good focused studies include Robert Henry Gorlin, “State Politics and the Imperial Russian Budget, 1905–1912,” and “Problems of Tax Reform in Imperial Russia,” Journal of Modern History 49:2 (1977), 246–65; A.N. Bokhanov, “Vopros o podokhodnom naloge v Rossii i krupnaia burzhuaziia (konets XIX– nachalo XX veka), Istoricheskie zapiski 114 (1986), 276–302; A.P.Pogrebinskii, Gosudarstvennye finansy Tsarskoi Rossii v epokhu imperializma; V.V. Galakhov, “Nekotorye voprosy izucheniia statisticheskikh materialov promyslovogo oblozheniia, 1885–1898 gg.,” Istoricheskie zapiski, 109 (1983), 238–61; Linda Bowman, “Russia’s First Income Taxes: The Effects of Modernized Taxes on Commerce and Industry, 1885–1914,” Slavic Review 52:2 (1993), 256–82, and “Bourgeois SelfRepresentation and Business Tax Reform in Late Imperial Russia,” Russian Review 68:4 (2009), 583–606. 5 Or began to be an issue: Michael Kwass, “A Kingdom of Taxpayers: State Formation, Privilege, and Political Culture in Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of Modern History, 70:2 (1998): 295–339. Seligman was more sanguine than most and held that a properly administered and well-thought-out fiscal system could bring about real social justice. 6 Robert Elliot Kaplan, Forgotten Crisis: The Fin-de-Siècle Crisis of Democracy in France, 68; Robert Stanley, Dimensions of the Law in the Service of Order: Origins of the Federal Income Tax, 1861–1913; N.G. Sokolov, “Nalogovaia politika v derevne v pervye gody sovetskoi vlasti (1917–1920 gg.),” Istoricheskie zapiski, 113 (1986), 76–111. 7 A good re-examination of the idea of the individual as self is well underway, and I contribute to it below in chapter 6 in particular; much more is needed with regard to the state and the economy. 8 For the case of Prussia, see Schremmer, “Taxation and Public Finance,” 446–7. 9 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, 185; Gianfranco Poggi, “Citizens and the State: Retrospect and Prospect,” in Quentin Skinner and Bo Stråth, eds, States and Citizens: History, Theory, Prospects (Cambridge, 2003), 42; and narrated historically from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries in Quentin Skinner, “States and the Freedom of Citizens,” in Skinner and Stråth, States and Citizens, 11–27. 10 Stephen Lukes, Individualism (London, 1973), esp. 12–15 (France), 20–2 (Germany); and the broader point on the historical need to reunite the “atoms” of the new regimes in Taylor, Sources of the Self, 193.

Notes to pages 5–7  353 11 This point is made well for the Soviet period in Kenneth M. Pinnow, Lost to the Collective: Suicide and the Promise of Soviet Socialism, 1921–1929. The more general point is made in Nicos Poulanztas, State, Power, Socialism, transl. by Patrick Camiller, 65–6. 12 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed; Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China, with reference to Russian taxation on 132–3. Skocpol reaffirmed the separateness of the state in her introduction to Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueshchemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds, Bringing the State Back In), 1–23, qualified by a recognition that the state can inform social and cultural attitudes. See also Dietrich Rueshchemeyer and Theda Skocpol, eds., States, Social Knowledge, and the Origins of Modern Social Policies. 13 Hence Levi’s “theory of the predatory state”: Of Rule and Revenue, 3, 6. The latter quote is from Goldschein writing before 1918. And yet other aspects of the work show a fuller awareness that the state never acts independently: see Levi’s appendix, “Bringing People Back into the State: Bibliographic Essay.” 14 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. In a related vein, Scott also argued that states are “younger” than the societies they rule (Seeing Like a State, 183), whereas it seems to me that these are mutually constitutive. 15 Few in this literature will insist that the state is ever total, but instead they follow Gramsci to describe its duality and its capacity to be both discrete and all-­ encompassing. Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, esp. 12, 15, 20; Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in Its Place, chs.1, 10, and esp. pp. 6–9; Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” American Political Science Quarterly 85:1 (March 1991): 77–96; and Mitchell, “State, Economy, and the State Effect,” in George Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn, 76–97. For a different rendering of the state’s duality (“the two arms of the state”), see Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time, ch.1. 16 Gianfranco Poggi, “The Modern State and the Idea of Progress,” in Progress and Its Discontents, ed. Gabriel A. Almond, Marvin Chodorow, and Roy Harvey Pearce, 351–2. 17 Bob Jessop, “Corporatism, Parliamentarism, and Social Democracy,” in Trends toward Corporatist Intermediation, ed. P.C. Scmitter and G. Lehmbruch, 185–212; and Jessop, State Theory, 6–9. 18 Poulantzas (State, Power, Socialism) makes several related points about institutions that are seen as proscriptive but should also be seen as prescriptive and productive of new selves: ideology (23–5), the state (29–30), and the law (82–3). 19 George Orwell, 1984, with an afterword by Erich Fromm, 227–8.

354  Notes to pages 7–10 20 On the German history of the term to 1900 see Johannes Burckhardt, “Wirtschaft,” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, band 7 (Stuttgart, 1992), 581–7. 21 I.M. Kulisher, Istoriia russkogo narodnogo khoziaistva, vol.1 (Moscow, 1925), 1. 22 On these two views see Yanni Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861–1914, 37–9. 23 S.Iu. Witte, Po povodu natsionalizma: Natsional’naia ekonomiia i Fridrikh List, 2nd ed., 124; on Witte, the economy, and the state see Francis Wcislo, Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849–1915 (New York, 2011), 157–65. 24 Peter Holquist has mobilized exhaustive research to identify similarities over time and space in “‘Information Is the Alpha and the Omega of Our Work’: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context,” The Journal of Modern History 69:3 (1997), 415–50. 25 With good syntheses in Paul R. Gregory, Before Command: An Economic History of Russia from Emancipation to the First Five-Year Plan, and R.W. Davies, ed., From Tsarism to the New Economic Policy: Continuity and Change in the Economy of the USSR. In addition see Eberhard Müller, “Der Beitrag der Bauern zur Industrialisierung Russlands, 1885–1930, Bemerkungen zur Korrektur eines Interpretations Modells,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 27:2 (1979). 26 Kwass, “A Kingdom of Taxpayers”; Keith Baker, Condorcet, from Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics, esp. 206–13. 27 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783; with a debate outlined eloquently in Christopher Storrs, introduction to The FiscalMilitary State in Eighteenth Century Europe: Essays in Honor of P.G.M. Dickson, ed. Christopher Storrs. 28 Approached in an earlier literature less through the large legislative measures and more through the small precedents and changing regulations: B.E.V. Sabine, A History of Income Tax; F. Shehab, Progressive Taxation: A Study in the Development of the Progressive Principle in the British Income Tax; H.V. Emy, “The Impact of Financial Policy on English Party Politics before 1914,” Historical Journal 15:1 (1972), 103–32; R.C. Whiting, “Taxation and the Working Class, 1915–24,” Historical Journal 33:4 (1990), 895–916. 29 Roger J.P. Kain and Elizabeth Baigent, The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State: A History of Property Mapping, esp. ch. 9. 30 E.N. Kolotinskaia, Pravovye osnovy zemel’nogo kadastra v Rossii; discussed in larger ways in Igor Khristoforov, Sud’ba reformy: Russkoe krest’ianstvo v pravitel’stvennoi politike do i posle otmeny krepostnogo prava (1830–1890 gg), 58–70. 31 Schremmer, “Taxation and Public Finance,” 378–80. 32 To the accompaniment of riots and massive arrears. Chris Wheal, “Poll Tax Is History,” The Guardian, 13 April 1999.

Notes to pages 10–14  355 33 Ranging from a deterioration in infrastructure and services to the use of “voter initiatives” funded by billionaires. “War by Initiative: A Case Study in Unintended Consequences,” The Economist, 20 April 2011. 34 The tired idea that Greeks were trained to suspect government by Ottoman rule is a quaint and parochial way to state a larger argument about privacy and transparency. Suzanne Daley, “Greek Wealth Is Everywhere but Tax Forms,” New York Times, 1 May 2010. 35 Levi, Of Rule and Revenue, 137–43. 36 “Sten Ekale Enas stous Treis Delose ten pisina tou,” Ta Nea, 22 April 2010; James Surowecki, “Dodger Mania,” The New Yorker, 11 July 2011; “Oi foroi kai oi doryforoi,” Eleutherotypia, 22 April 2010. 37 Or so it now seems: Stuart Banner, Who Owns the Sky? The Struggle to Control Airspace from the Wright Brothers On (Cambridge, MA, 2008). 38 Diane Valden, “What’s Next, Assessor Drones?” Columbia Paper (Ghent, NY), 18 July 2013. 39 Nicolas Delalande, Les Batailles de l’impôt. Consentement et resistances de 1789 à nos jours (Paris, 2011). 40 Seligman, The Income Tax, 14. 41 Mary O. Furner and Barry E. Supple, eds, The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experiences, 7–10, 31; and Mary O. Furner and Michael J. Lacey eds, The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States (New York, 1993), 4–9. For the fiscal argument, see Seligman, The Income Tax, 16–17. 42 Jose Luis Cardoso and Pedro Lains, eds, Paying for the Liberal State: The Rise of Public Finance in Nineteenth Century Europe; George Steinmetz, Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany. 43 Similar measures, however, already existed in Hesse and Saxony after 1874: Mark Hellerberg, “Tax Competition in Willhelmine Germany and Its Implications for the European Union,” World Politics 48 (April 1996), 324–57. By 1914 such taxes existed in all German states and for the empire as a whole. 44 What Karl Polanyi terms the “dual swing” in The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time; what John Maynard Keynes calls the illusion of laissez-faire because it never really did or could exist in practice, in The End of Laissez Faire: The Economic Consequences of the Peace; and what Timothy Mitchell calls a “space of calculation” that was created as soon as the state took stock of the purportedly separate economy, in The Rule of Experts: Egypt, TechoPolitics, Modernity, chs. 2–3. 45 The opposition of civil rights and collective good is common, as in the eradication of epidemics that required compulsory vaccination and police measures to be effective: Michael Willrich, Pox: An American History. 46 Or to employ the logic of a patent: the more the inventor discloses secrets, the more the state can protect the patent, and the less it is a secret. Mario Biagioli,

356  Notes to pages 14–16 “Patent Republic: Specifying Inventions, Constructing Authors and Rights,” Social Research 73:4 (Winter 2006), 1129–72. 47 Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis expressed this as the difference between common law privacy (the decision to publish or not to publish a manuscript) and statutory privacy (only possible once a work has been published). “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review 4:5 (15 December 1895), 200. 48 A surprisingly resilient binary framework, as in Theory and Society 26:4 (August 1997), Special Issue on Recasting Citizenship, ed. by Michael Hanagan and Charles Tilly, for example. See Hanagan’s formulation on page 397 where the concept is not recast at all. 49 Good discussions of citizenship and the relevant Russian literature are Alexander Morrison, “Metropole, Colony, and Imperial Citizenship in the Russian Empire,” Kritika 13:2 (Spring 2012), 327–64; Dov Yaroshevski, “Empire and Citizen,” in Daniel Brower and Edward Lazzerini, eds, Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and People, 1800–1917, 58–79. 50 Daniel Gordon, “Citizenship,” in Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (New York, 2002). 51 Eric Lohr provides a good narrative of imperial and Soviet laws, understood as the right to live in the territory and carry a state-issued passport: Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union. 52 Which indeed brought Lohr to a study of philosophy and practice in “The Ideal Citizen and the Real Subject in Late Imperial Russia,” Kritika 7:2 (Spring 2006), 173–94. 53 Or so I suspect, extrapolating from Jan Goldstein’s distinction between interiority and self-talk, a priori self and partitive. The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–1850, introduction and ch. 4. 54 Highlighted in Suzanne Mettler’s opinion piece, “Our Hidden Government Benefits, The New York Times, 19 September 2011. 55 Molly Michelmore, Tax and Spend: The Welfare State, Tax Politics, and the Limits of American Liberalism; Jill Lepore, “Tax Time: Why We Pay,” The New Yorker, 26 November 2012, 24–9. 56 Schremmer, “Taxation and Public Finance,” 391–7. 57 Russia’s flat tax was the product of a state collapse that lost track of its economy and payers, but it became a neoconservative model in countries that could easily practise progressive rates. Andrew Higgins, “Coming Soon to Belgian Village, a French Film Idol Fleeing Taxes,” The New York Times, 30 December 2012; at the time of this writing, he was accepting Russian citizenship, New York Times, 4 January 2013. 58 On autocracy and participation, David Rainbow, “Siberian Patriots: Participatory Autocracy and the Cohesion of the Russian State, 1858–1919,” PhD diss., New York University, 2013, chs. 2–3.

Notes to pages 17–18  357 59 A mode of participation that has been explored in Joshua Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925, 15, with an interesting use of Slavoj Zizek and the choix forcé in the Yugoslav army; and Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, 224–5. On the blurry line between voluntarism and compulsion in taxation in Britain (“quasivoluntary compliance”), see Levi, Of Rule and Revenue, 123. 60 For the individual as a constructed public view of the person, and as much the product of state policies, see John W. Meyer, “Myths of Socialization and of Personality,” in Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery, eds, Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford, 1986), 208–9; Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, 73. For a discussion of Foucault in relation to the self (“the individual is not the vis à vis of power, but one of its prime effects”), see Jerrold Seigel, “Problematizing the Self,” in Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds, Beyond the Cultural Turn (Berkeley, CA, 1999), esp. 283. For a suggestion that the person can be realized within the state, as well as the society or the economy, see Jessop, State Theory, 5. 61 Skinner, “States and the Freedom of Citizens,” 11–27. 62 Simon Werret, “The Panopticon in the Garden: Samuel Bentham’s Inspection House and Noble Theatricality in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” Ab Imperio 3 (2008); Alessandro Stanziani, “The Traveling Panopticon: Labor Institutions and Labor Practices in Russia and Britain in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (2009), 715–41. 63 As Hegel promised and hoped: Georg Hegel, Introduction to “The Philosophy of History”: With Selections from the “Philosophy of Right,” trans. Leo Rauch, 42; Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox, art.152, p. 109. 64 On some of the problems of the idea of resistance in Soviet history, see Michael David-Fox, “Masquerade: Sources, Resistance, and Early Soviet Political Culture,” Trondheim Studies in East European Politics and Societies, 1 (1999), 1–38; Anna Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies,” Kritika 1:1 (Winter 2000), Special Issue on Resistance to Authority, 119–46; in German history see Michael Geyer, “Resistance as Ongoing Project: Visions of Order, Obligations to Strangers, and Struggles for Civil Society,” in Geyer and John W. Boyer, eds, Resistance against the Third Reich, 1933–1990 (Chicago, 1994), 325–50; and on the theoretical level in Timothy Mitchell, “Everyday Metaphors of Power,” Theory and Society 19:5 (October 990), 545–77. 65 Though Marx stated it as well: Sokolov, “Nalogovaia politika v derevne,” 76. 66 Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, art.100, pp. 70–1. 67 Nikolai Bukharin, Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda. Chast’ I: Obshchaia teoriia transformatsionnogo protsessa, 140–44, 146. 68 The fiscal argument for England in Emy, “The Impact of Financial Policy,” 104, 127–8; and for Germany in P.-C. Witt, “Tax Policies, Tax Assessment and Inflation:

358  Notes to pages 18–20 Towards a Sociology of Public Finances in the German Inflation, 1914–23’, in Wealth and Taxation in Central Europe, 137–8. A point made in the terms of private-public, and state-family, in Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, 71–2. Steinmetz recognizes that a new separateness of state, economy, and society was at play in the nineteenth century and that this was complicated by a nascent welfare state (Regulating the Social, esp. 1–11 and ch. 3); and he develops the point more fully in his edited collection (State/Culture), especially through the contributions of Jessop and Mitchell. Charles Maier accepts that the state-society, public-private, boundaries are in question but does not go so far as to consider that the boundary might be impossible to locate: Charles Maier, ed., Changing Boundaries of the Political: Essays on the Evolving Balance between State and Society, Public and Private (Cambridge, 1987), 1–24. 69 On the idea that citizenship is about inclusion and participation rather than consent, see Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, 258–61; Margaret Somers, “Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere: Law, Community, and Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy,” American Sociological Review 58 (October 1993), 587–620; Holquist, “‘Information Is the Alpha and Omega’”; James R. Lehning, To Be a Citizen: The Political Culture of the Early French Republic, introduction. 70 Gauging the strength of a state by its capacity to coerce is extremely widespread, and Scott synthesized this approach very eloquently and intelligently in Seeing Like a State. 71 On the gap between ambition and capacities, see George Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861–1930, introduction; Khristoforov, Sud’ba reform; Stephen Hoch, “The Great Reformers and the World They Did Not Know: Drafting the Emancipation Legislation in Russia, 1858–61,” in Gary Marker et al., eds, Everyday Life in Russian History: Quotidian Studies in Honor of Daniel Kaiser, 250; Lars Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921. 72 Moishe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York, 1985), 311–12. 73 As in Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996), chs. 1 and 7, and esp. pp. 334–5, which discusses an “inversion” of the surveillance state in African societies that lacked logistical capacities. 74 Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien, “Taxation in Britain and France, 1715–1810,” Journal of European Economic History, 5 (1976), 601–50. John Brewer is impressed not only by the sheer growth in British tax revenue in the eighteenth century but by the remarkable growth in the fiscal machinery that made it stable, systematic, and administrative rather than merely coercive: Sinews of Power, ch. 6 and summarized on pp. 189–90. Gail Bossenga makes a related point from the French

Notes to pages 20–7  359 perspective: “Taxes,” in Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds, Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1980), trans. by Arthur Goldhammer, 584–6. For a similar discussion of Germany and the United Kingdom in a later period, see Daunton, “Payment and Participation,” 169–72. 75 Gail Bossenga, “”Financial Origins of the French Revolution,” in Thomas E. Kaiser and Dale van Kley, eds, From Deficit to Deluge: The Origins of the French Revolution, esp. 59. 76 Levi, Of Rule and Revenue, 124–32, with the direct comparison to absolutist France; Poggi makes the broader point in his “Citizens and the State,” 40. 77 Evgenii Zamiatin, Ostrovitiane (The Islanders), based on his residence in England in 1916 and published in 1917. For an English edition see Yevgeny Zamyatin, Islanders, and the Fisher of Men (Edinburgh, 1984). 78 For the theoretical argument that a privileging of society is sometimes unwarranted, see Jessop, State Theory, 5. 79 As studies of other political parties have shown: N.G. Dumova, Kadetskaia Partiia v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny i Fevral’skoi Revoliutsii (Moscow, 1988) and Kadetskaia Kotrrevoliutsiia i ee razgrom, Oktiabr’ 1917–1920gg. (Moscow, 1982); see also a more explicit analysis of statism in William G. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921 (Princeton, NJ, 1974), ch.1; and Oliver H. Radkey, The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February to October 1917 (New York, 1958), who was understandably perplexed by the rise of authoritarian statism in a populist party. 80 See works cited in note 3, above. 81 See works cited in note 4, above. 82 Ekaterina Pravilova, Finansy imperii. Den’gi i vlast’ v politike Rossii na natsional’nykh okrainakh, 1801–1917 (Moscow, 2006). 83 On these grounds James Scott makes the compelling and rare case that Lenin should be understood as a modernist thinker, not only a socialist, and not a retrograde dictator. Scott, Seeing Like a State, ch. 5. 84 Paul Werth, “In the State’s Embrace? Civil Acts in an Imperial Order,” Kritika 7:3 (Summer 2006), 433–58. 1. The Fiscal Instruments of Regime Change from the Eighteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries 1 Articulated clearly and consistently by N.Kh. Bunge, one of the authors of the Emancipation settlement and its fiscal implications, and later the minister of finances. On his statements from the 1860s, see Nina Anan’ich, “Materialy lektsionnykh kursov N.Kh. Bunge 60–80-kh godov XIX veka,” Arkheograficheskii

360  Notes to pages 27–31 ezhegodnik, 39 (1977), 306–7, and from 1882, see his speech before the State Council on the repeal of the poll tax: RGIA, f.1152, op.9 (1882), ll.173. 2 The argument that the Great Reforms were principally aimed at a more effective autocracy is made most clearly in Alfred Rieber, “The Politics of Emancipation,” in The Politics of Autocracy: Letters of Alexander II to Prince A.I. Bariatinskii, 1857–1864, ed. Rieber, 15–58. That the autocracy was the instrument that made change possible has been made with regard to the Emancipation in particular: Terrence Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861; and Daniel Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855–1861. 3 Gerschenkron, “Agrarian Policies and Industrialization.” 4 For an overview of the reforms see W. Bruce Lincoln, The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia. On local government, see Francis W. Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia: State, Local Society, and National Politics, 1855–1914, chs. 1–2. On property forms, see Mikhail Dolbilov, “Zemel’naia sobstvennost’ i osvobozhdenie krest’ian,” in D.F. Aiatskov, ed., Sobstvennost’ na zemliu v Rossii: Istoriia i sovremennost’, 45–151. On credit, see Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward, ch.1. On peasant court practices, see Jane Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905–1917. 5 Or at different times “for the Reexamination of the system of Dues and Levies.” Trudy Komissii, Vysochaishe utverzhdennoi, dlia peresmotra sistemy podatei i sborov, 22 vols. (St Petersburg, 1861–81). 6 F.G. Terner, comp., “Materialy-svedeniia o pozemel’nom naloge v inostrannykh gosudarstvakh,” in Svedeniia o priamykh nalogakh v inostrannykh gosudarstvakh, vol. 2 of Trudy Komissii, Vysochashe uchrezhdennoi (1863), pt.1, pp. 8–9, n.1. Terner would serve in the Finance Ministry into the 1890s and was acting minister. 7 I.A. Gan, “Materialy o nastoiashchem byte meshchan Saratovskoi gubernii. Zapiska,” in Trudy Komissii, Vysochaishe uchrezhdennoi, vol. 1, 7–14. 8 Aside from France and the prototypical example of Turgot (Baker, Condorcet), see claims that taxation is somehow apolitical in Levi, Of Rule and Revenue, 6. 9 Kwass, “A Kingdom of Taxpayers.” 10 Daunton, “Payment and Participation.” 11 Terner, Materialy-svedeniia o pozemel’nom naloge, 9. 12 Ibid., 7. 13 Vincent Barnett, A History of Russian Economic Thought, 20, 24, 31–2. 14 “Po motivam na proekty 1. Polozhenie o patente, 2. Pravo na torgovliu,” in Trudy Komissii, Vysochaishe uchrezhdennoi, vol. 5, O poshlinakh za pravo torgovli i drugikh promyslov (St Petersburg, 186?), separate pagination, 38. 15 “Ob ustroistve pozemel’nago i podvornago nalogov s sel’skikh obivatelei,” in Trudy Komissii, Vysochaishe uchrezhdenoi, vol. 3, Doklady, Zhurnaly i zapiski v Gosudarstvennyi Sovet (St Petersburg, 1863), 1.

Notes to pages 32–7  361 16 Bunge, acting as a financial adviser to the government, was explicit on the matter in the late 1850s. Valerii L. Stepanov, N. Kh. Bunge: Sud’ba reformatora, pt. 1, ch. 2. 17 The process was hardly limited to Russia; see Mitchell, Rule of Experts, chs. 2–3. 18 There is a large literature on the ways in which the state brought non-state categories, including economic ones, into existence by counting them. The broadest statements are to be found in Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900; Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance. 19 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 147. Matthew Watkins contributed to this argument in a stimulating conversation. 20 “Kratkii obzor deiatel’nosti Ministerstva Finansov za dvadtsatipiatiletie s 1855 po 1880g.,” in Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, vyp. XI (1881), 2–3. 21 Part of a larger tension between the territorial and functional principles outlined in Alfred Rieber, “Patronage and Professionalism: The Witte System,” in Problemy vsemirnoi istorii. Sbornik statei v chest’ Aleksandra Aleksandrovicha Fursenko, ed. V.B. Anan’ich, 287. 22 Pravilova, Finansy imperii, 279–80. 23 D.P. Gavrilov, comp., Svedeniia o sushchestvuiushchem poriadke i sposobakh otpravleniia natural’nykh povinnostei v tsentral’nykh guberniiakh Imperii. Sobrany v 1860 godu [1862], in Trudy Komissii, Vysochaishe uchrezhdennoi, vol. 4, pt. 1, 99–103; Ministerstvo Finansov, 1802–1902, pt. 1, ch. 1. 24 Olga Crisp, “The State Peasants under Nicholas I,” in Studies in the Russian Economy before 1914, 83. 25 A.P. Pogrebinskii, Ocherki istorii finansov dorevolustionnoi Rossii, XIX–XXvv., 58–63. 26 Gavrilov, comp., Svedeniia o sushchestvuiushchem poriadke, 99–103. 27 Pogrebinskii, Ocherki istorii, 58–63. 28 Aleksandr I. Gertsen [Herzen], Byloe i dumy, in Sochineniia v deviati tomakh, vol. 4, 268. 29 Ministerstvo Finansov, 1802–1902, pt. 1, 1–3, 11–13, 411. 30 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 49. 31 Khromov, Ekonomicheskoe razvitie Rossii (Moscow, 1950), 440–7. 32 Olga Crisp, “Russian Financial Policy and the Gold Standard at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” in Studies in the Russian Economy before 1914, 96–100; Alla Sheptun, “Russian Monetary Reformers: Speransky, Mordvinov, and Bunge,” in Vincent Barnett and Joachim Zweynert, eds, Economics in Russia: Studies in Intellectual History, 41–56; Michael W. Bernatzky, “Monetary Policy,” in Russian Public Finance during the War, ed. Alexander Michelson, Paul N. Apostol, and Michael W. Bernatzky, 337–9; Walter McKenzie Pintner, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I, ch. 5. 33 Crisp, “Russian Financial Policy and the Gold Standard”; Paul Gregory and Joel W. Sailors, “Russian Monetary Policy and Industrialization, 1861–1913,” Journal of Economic History 36:4 (December 1976), 836–51.

362  Notes to pages 38–46 34 Pogrebinskii, Ocherki istorii, 58–63. 35 Stepanov, Bunge, 70. 36 Ministerstvo Finansov, 1802–1902, pt.1, 404–7. 37 Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov. Vypusk I na 1869 god, i–iii. 38 Implicit in recent overviews of Russian economic thought, where issues were mobilized to address one or another partial approach to production and exchange, like revenue and trade: Sheptun, “Russian Monetary Reformers.” 39 Barnett, A History of Russian Economic Thought, 2–3, 9–11. 40 Natalia Makasheva, “Searching for an Ethical Basis of Political Economy: Bulgakov and Tugan-Baranovsky,” in Barnett and Zweynert, eds, Economics in Russia, 75–89; all three economists in Barnett, A History of Russian Economic Thought, 48–58. 41 Barnett, A History of Russian Economic Thought, 3. 42 Joachim Zweynert, “Between Reason and Historicity: Russian Academic Economics, 1800–1861,” in Barnett and Zweynert, eds, Economics in Russia, 58–9; Churpov and Germany in Barnett, A History of Russian Economic Thought, 34–5. 43 See the journal of the 1883 meetings of treasury directors in RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394, l.88ob. 44 Explained in broader terms and with less regard to finances as such in W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825–1861; Richard Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, esp. ch. 2. 45 Ministerstvo Finansov 1802–1902, pt.1, 408–9. 46 Trudy Kommissii, Vysochaishe uchrezhdennoi, 22 vols. 47 Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform. 48 I.P. Rukovskii, comp., Istoriko-statisticheskiia svedeniia o podushnykh podatiakh, in Trudy Komissii, Vysochaishe uchrezhdennoi, vol. 1, Priamye nalogi. Istorikostatisticheskiia svedeniia o priamykh nalogakh v Rossii (St Petersburg, 1862). 49 “Kratkii obzor deiatel’nosti Ministerstva Finansov” (1881), 6. 50 Rukovskii, Istoriko-statisticheskiia svedeniia, 1–3. 51 Ibid., 165–6. 52 Ibid., 15–18, 48–53, 61–2, 69, 71–3. 53 Ministerstvo Finansov, 1802–1902, pt. 1, 2–3. 54 They owed, on average, 1.85 rubles per male soul, 2.13 rubles per male head of household, or 3.23 rubles per household. Rukovskii, Istoriko-statisticheskiia svedeniia, 106–8. 55 Ibid., 12–14. 56 Ibid., 84–92, 105. 57 Bunge, “O podushnoi podati,” cited in Stepanov, Bunge, 75. 58 Rukovskii, Istoriko-statisticheskiia svedeniia, 15. 59 “Poiasnitel’naia zapiska o rabotakh po soglasheniiu otsenok gosudarstvennykh imushchestv mezhdu guberniiami” (1860) in Trudy Komissii, Vysochaishe

Notes to pages 46–50  363 uchrezhdennoi, vol. 1, 1; Kolotinskaia, Pravovye osnovy zemel’nogo kadastra, 84–5; Khristoforov, Sud’ba reform. 60 Crisp, “The State Peasants under Nicholas I,” 88–9; Pintner, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I, 170; N.M. Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest’iane i reforma P.D. Kiseleva, with attention to the cadastres on 25–33; and Kolotinskaia, Pravovye osnovy zemel’nogo kadastra, 86–93. 61 Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, in which Kiselev is the precursor to the Great Reformers of the 1860s. 62 My thanks to Igor Khristoforov for the reference: K.S. Veselovskii, “Vospominaniia,” Russkaia starina 116:10 (1903), 20. 63 “Poiasnitel’naia zapiska o rabotakh po soglasheniiu,” 7–9, 11–14; Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest’iane, vol. 2, 171–2; Pintner, Russian Economic Policy under Nicholas I, 164–5. 64 Rukovskii, Istoriko-statisticheskiia svedeniia, 146. 65 “Poiasnitel’naia zapiska o rabotakh po soglasheniiu,” 2–3, 16–17. 66 Ibid., 13–15 and n.1, 88. 67 Ibid., 5–7. 68 Rukovskii, Istoriko-statisticheskiia svedeniia, 143, 147–49; “Poiasnitel’naia zapiska o rabotakh po soglasheniiu,” 17–18. 69 “Poiasnitel’naia zapiska o rabotakh po soglasheniiu,” 7; “Ob ustroistve pozemel’nago i podvornago nalogov,” 12–14; Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest’iane, 31. 70 Marc Raeff, Michael Speransky, Statesman of Imperial Russia (The Hague, 1957), 91–2. 71 Domovaia i kvartirnaia podat’ vo Frantsii i v Avstrii (1862), in Trudy Komissii, Vysochaishe uchrezhdennoi, vol. 2, 1–3. 72 S.I. L’vovskii, comp., Klassnaia i klassifitsionnaia podat’ v Prussii (1861), in Trudy Komissii, Vysochaishe uchrezhdennoi, vol. 2, 3–4, 29–30; “Ob ustroistve pozemel’nago i podvornago nalogov,” 7. 73 “Ob ustroistve pozemel’nago i podvornago nalogov,” 7. 74 A concern expressed by Reitern in 1866, and a reason for the delay in implementing the land tax. I.F. Gindin, Gosudarstvennyi bank i ekonomicheskaia politika tsarskogo pravitel’stva, 1861–1892 gody, 33–5. 75 Rukovskii, Istoriko-statisticheskiia svedeniia, 109. 76 “Poiasnitel’naia zapiska o rabotakh po soglasheniiu, 88, 91–2. 77 Rukovskii, Istoriko-statisticheskiia svedeniia, 6. 78 Ibid., 162–4. 79 A point made in the Ministry of Finances around 1900 in order to show that it was a recent creation that could be safely repealed: Brzheskii’s memorandum in “Materialy peresmotra uzakonenii o vzimanii okladnykh sborov. Krugovaia

364  Notes to pages 50–6 poruka v suzhdeniiakh redaktionnykh komissii i Glavnago komiteta. Zapiska vitse-direktora DOS N.K. Brzheskago” [1903], reprographic copy in the library of RGIA. 80 Rukovskii, Istoriko-statisticheskiia svedeniia, 162–85, 190–2, 206. 81 Ibid., 192. 82 Ibid., 6, 187–90, 210–13. 83 Abby Schrader’s study of corporal punishment captures these dimensions of rule: Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia. 84 Rukovskii, Istoriko-statisticheskiia svedeniia, 198–200. 85 Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, XI, appendix, 86–8. For the local case study of Saratov, see Gan, “Materialy o nastoiashchem byte,” 3. 86 Rukovskii, Istoriko-statisticheskiia svedeniia, 193–5, 198–200. 87 Gan, “Materialy o nastoiashchem byte,” 3–5; Bruce Adams, “The Reforms of P.D. Kiselev and the History of N.M. Druzhinin,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 19:1 (Spring 1985), 38–9. 88 Gan, “Materialy o nastoiashchem byte,” 5–6. 89 Ezhegodnik XI, appendix, 86–8, and vol. 1, 210–16; “Poiasnitel’naia zapiska o rabotakh po soglasheniiu,” 107. 90 N.I. Anan’ich, “K istorii otmeny podushnoi podati v Rossii,” Istoricheskie zapiski 94 (1974), 190. 91 Anan’ich, “K istorii otmeny,” 185. 92 Rukovskii, Istoriko-statisticheskiia svedeniia, 172–5. 93 Ibid., 132, 203–95. 94 Haxthausen’s observations on the innate collectivism of Russian peasants are of course questionable, and they are also open to empirical scrutiny: T.K. Dennison and A.W. Carus, “The Invention of the Russian Rural Commune: Haxthausen and the Evidence,” The Historical Journal 46 (2003), 561–82. 95 Ministerstvo Finansov, 1802–1902, pt. 1, 423–4. For more on the collections process see Rukovskii, Istoriko-statisticheskiia svedeniia, 161, 178. 96 Rukovskii, Istoriko-statisticheskiia svedeniia, 132–9. 97 Hence the ability of historians to make opposite guesses based on the same evidence. Adams, “The Reforms of P.D. Kiselev,” 39, takes issue with Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest’iane. 2. Three Tax Reforms, Three Visions of the Polity 1 For a recent review of the French case, with great attention to the lack of proportionality and less to the radicalism of proportional taxation in its day, see Delalande, Les Batailles de l’impôt. 2 Contemporary Russian overviews are Terner, “Materialy-svedeniia o pozemel’nom naloge,” 160–61, and “Domovaia i kvartirnaia podat’ vo Frantsii i v Avstrii,” 1–8. A

Notes to pages 56–60  365 French historical overview is Ardant, Histoire de l’impôt. Similar points are given in Schremmer’s overview, “Taxation and Public Finance.” 3 A debate revisited and cited by Finance Minister Bunge in the 1880s speaking before the State Council: RGIA, f.1149, op.9 (1882), d.64, ll.5ob-6. 4 “Ob ustroistve pozemel’nago i podvornago nalogov.” 5 Trudy Komissii, Vysochaishe uchrezhdenoi, vol. 3, Doklady, Zhurnaly i zapiski v Gosudarstvennyi Sovet (St Petersburg, 1863). 6 Recounted in a cabinet history of direct taxes in RGIA, f.573, op.18, l.27333, l.574ob and footnote 1. 7 Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, Vyp. IX, 7. 8 The Department of Assessed Levies to the State Duma, 1909, on the history of industrial taxes and their further reform. RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, l.3. 9 Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, Vyp. XI (1881), appendix, “Kratkii obzor deiatel’nosti Ministerstva Finansov” 7; Anan’ich, “K istorii podatnykh reform,” 160. 10 RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, report of the Department of Assessed Levies, 1909. 11 As the Ministry of Finances candidly admitted at the time, and as recounted in 1909 in a report to the State Duma: RGIA, f.23, op.9, l.366, l.3. 12 Report from the Ministry to the State Duma in 1909 in RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, l.3; discussed at the time in A. Leongardt, “Zapiska o gil’deiskom voprose,” (1861); “Po motyvam na proekty 1. Polozhenii o patente, 2. Pravo na torgovliu” (1861), both in Trudy Komissii, Vysochaishe uchrezhdenoi vol. 5, O poshlinakh na pravo torgovli i drugikh promyslov (St Petersburg, 1861). 13 Stepanov, Bunge, 137. 14 “O podatnom ustroistve meshchanskikh obshchestv,” 9–10. 15 Departament okladnykh sborov, 30–1. 16 Pravila o vzimanii v 1863 godu naloga s nedvizhimykh imushchestv v gorodakh, posadakh i mestechkakh (St Petersburg, 1863), 3–9; Instruktsiia raskladochnym komissiiam i Gorodskim Dumam, ili zameniaiushchim ikh uchrezhdeniiam, o raskladke naloga s nedvizhimykh imushchestv v gorodakh, posadakh i mestechkakh, na vtoruiu polovinu 1863 goda (s.l., n.d.), 5; Robert Thurston, Liberal City, Conservative State: Moscow and Russia’s Urban Crisis, 1906–1914, 35–6; Ministerstvo Finansov, 1802–1902, pt. 1, 414, 424–5. 17 Stepanov, Bunge, 74. 18 V.A. Nardova, Gorodskoe samoupravlenie v Rossii v 60-kh – nachale 90-kh godov XIX v., 36–44. 19 Ministerstvo Finansov, 1802–1902, pt. 1, 414, 424–5; A. Kulomzin, Pozemel’naia podat’ v Anglii [1861], in Trudy Komissii, Vysochaishe uchrezhdennoi, vol. 2, Priamye nalogi v inostrannykh gosudarstvakh (St Petersburg, 1863). 20 Ekaterina Pravilova, Zakonnost’ i prava lichnosti: Administrativnaia iustitsiia v Rossii (vtoraia polovina XIX v. – oktiabr’ 1917 g.), 107–8.

366  Notes to pages 61–7 21 Anan’ich, “K istorii otmeny,” 184; with comparable calculations in Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 65–6 and by the Department of Assessed Levies in RGIA, f.1152, op.10, d.235, ll. 25–30. 22 Zapiska o raskladke dopol’nitel’nago podushnago naloga, s sel’skikh obivatelei po stepeni blagosostoianii gubernii i uezdov (s.l., n.d [no later than 1863]). 23 As recounted in a history of land taxes in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, II sozyv, vol.2, col.1048. 24 Kolotinskaia, Pravovye osnovy zemel’nogo kadastra, 99–102, 108–9. 25 Moscow, St Petersburg, Kursk, Chernigov, and Perm’. My thanks to David Darrow for sharing with me his archival data from GARF, f.102 3-oe dp, op. 78 (1882), d. 625, ll. 183–89. See also V.F. Abramov, Rossiiskoe zemstvo: Ekonomika, finansy i kultury, 18–19. 26 Doklad osoboi komissii ob izmenenii podushnoi sistemy sborov, 17; and letter of 9 July 1869, Minister of Internal Affairs to Minister of Finances, in Trudy Komissii, Vysochaishe uchrezhdennoi, vol. 3, pt. 2, no pagination. 27 As the Department of Assessed Levies explained in connection with income taxation after 1905, since a proper cadastre would have been a necessary precondition to rural income taxation. RGIA, f.573, 18, op.27333, ll.572–72ob; Witte’s remarks on ll.589ob-90. 28 Hoch, “The Great Reformers,” 250. 29 “Kratkii obzor deiatel’nosti Ministerstva Finansov,” 9; Doklad osoboi komissii ob izmenenii podushnoi sistemy, 32–3. 30 “Kratkii obzor deiatel’nosti Ministerstva Finansov,” 8. 31 Gindin, Gosudarstvennyi bank, 34–5. 32 Stepanov, Bunge, 136. 33 Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 65–6, discusses the transformation of obrok payments into redemption payments. 34 Stepanov, Bunge, 65 35 Hoch, “Great Reformers,” 258. 36 Gerschenkron, “Agrarian Policies,” 727–43. 37 F.G. Terner, “Ob obshchikh osnovaniiakh preobrazovaniia nashei podatnoi sistemy,” in Trudy Komissii, Vysochaishe uchrezhdennoi, vol. 3, Doklady, Zhurnaly i zapiski v Gosudarstvennyi sovet (St Petersburg, 1863), 8. 38 Gavrilov, Svedeniia o sushchestvuiushchem poriadke, 7, 13, 17–18, 34–5. 39 Nikolai Brzheskii, Natural’nyia povinnosti krest’ian i mirskie sbory. 40 Terner, “Ob obshchikh osnovaniiakh preobrazovaniia,” 5–6, 31–3. 41 For example, one high-level government official added the entire vodka revenue for 1859 to the poll tax: Terner, “Ob obshchikh osnovaniiakh preobrazovaniia,” 7–8. 42 Terner, “Ob obshchikh osnovaniiakh preobrazovaniia,” 1, 3–4.

Notes to pages 67–73  367 43 The figures are relative and notional, because certain taxes could be classified as either direct or indirect, and the figures did not always account for local taxes. Terner, “Ob obshchikh osnovaniiakh preobrazovaniia,” 5; P.Kh. Shvanebakh, Nashe podatnoe delo, 32. 44 Gabriel Ardant, “Financial Policy and the Economic Infrastructure of Modern States and Nations,” in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe, 166. John Brewer makes a similar argument for Britain: The Sinews of Power, esp. 189–90. 45 On tax and vodka in an earlier period see John LeDonne, “Indirect Taxes in Catherine’s Russia II. The Liquor Monopoly,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 24:2 (1976). 46 Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia aktsiznoi sistemy vzimaniia naloga s krepkikh napitkov i 50-letiia deiatel’nosti uchrezhdenii, zavedyvaiushchikh neokladnymi sborami (St. Petersburg, 1913), 4–5. 47 Mikhail Isodorovich Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia v Rossii, vol. 2, 20–1. On tax farming and vodka revenue before 1863 see David Christian, Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation, chs. 6–7. 48 Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 20. 49 Ibid., 4–5, 7, 9–13. 50 M.I. Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol. 2, ch.1, pts. 1–2; Christian, Living Water, chs. 6–7. 51 N.O. Osipov, “Istoricheskii ocherk vliianiia piteinykh sborov v Rossii,” appendix 1 to Kazennaia prodazha vina. Izdanie Glavnago Upravleniia Neokladnykh Sborov i kazennoi prodazhi pitei, 45–9; M.I. Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol. 2, ch.1, pt.1, and 47, 54; Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 2–5. 52 M.I. Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol. 2, 62–3; Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 15–17, 30. 53 As discussed at a meeting of tax and excise directors in 1882–3, in RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394, l.35ob; Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 23–4, 31–4, 48; M.I. Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol. 2, ch. 2, pt. 5, esp. 54–76. 54 M.I. Fridman, Vinnaia monopiliia, vol. 2, 64–5. 55 Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–1930, 15 on metaphor in science; 35–6, 40, 73–4 on alcohol per se. 56 M.I. Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol. 2, 39–40, 47–76; Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 15, 34–8. 57 M.I. Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol. 2, 85. 58 Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, appendix IX. 59 Ibid., 40, and appendix XII; Osipov, “Istoricheskii ocherk vliianiia,” 74–7. 60 Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 8–9, 42–3, and appendix IX. 61 M.I. Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol. 2, 444–6 and ch. 2, pts. 3–4.

368  Notes to pages 74–80 62 A.E.Reinbot, “Alkogolizm za granitsei i u nas,” Russkoe bogatstvo, 11 (1884), and 3–4 (1885). 63 M.I. Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol. 2, 77–84. 64 Vestnik Evropy, November 1862, 450. 65 Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 34–8. 66 Vestnik Evropy, July 1876, 68. 67 Raeff, Michael Speransky, 93–4. 68 Ministerstvo Finansov, 1802–1902, pt. 1, 520–1. 69 Bunge in Severnyi vestnik, 7 (1893), 54; Shvanebakh, Nashe podatnoe delo, 2–3; Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 241–3. 70 Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 225–32. 71 Nicholas Alexander Lund, “At the Center of the Periphery: Oil, Land, and Power in Baku, 1905–1917,” PhD diss., Stanford University, 2013, quote on p. 24, broader context for the period in ch.1. 72 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 140. 73 Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 11–14. 74 Ibid., 21–3, 253–68. 75 M.I. Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol. 2, 65–76. 76 P. Migulin, Nasha bankovaia politika, 1729–1903; Crisp, “The Pattern of Industrialization in Russia,” in Studies in the Russian Economy before 1914, ed. Crisp. 77 Keynes, The End of Laissez Faire, 22–8. 78 Zweynert, “Between Reason and Historicity,” 64–7; Barnett, A History of Russian Economic Thought, 33–4. 79 Stepanov, Bunge, pt. 1, ch. 1; and on Bunge’s tendency to privilege regulation despite his liking for private enterprise, Zweynert, “Between Reason and Historicity,” 67–8. 80 Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia, ch. 3, is the most sophisticated exploration of the ethos of the period. For a wider overview, see P.A. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia na rubezhe 1870–1880-ikh godov. 81 Aida Solov’eva, “Iz istorii vykupa chastnykh zheleznykh dorog v Rossii v kontse XIX veka,” Istoricheskie zapiski, 82 (1968), 89–119; J.N. Westwood, A History of Russian Railways, 64–70, 142–5. 82 Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 33–4, citing Bunge in the 1890s. 83 Keynes, The End of Laissez Faire, 36–42. 84 Christian, Living Water, 371–2, 374. 85 Stepanov, Bunge, 84. 86 Mitchell, in Rule of Experts, makes this case for Egypt, as surveyors delineated and thus created a particular kind of property, one that was especially visible and calculable. The idea that the private is necessarily a public undertaking is explored

Notes to pages 80–8  369 by cultural historians in particular. See Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987); Lauren Berlant, ed., Intimacy; John Brewer, “This, That and the Other: Public, Social, and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Dario Castiglione and Leslie Sharpe, eds, Shifting The Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century. 87 Stepanov, Bunge, pt. 1, ch. 1. 88 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, ch. 12. 89 Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 80–122, esp. 101. 90 Ibid., 102–3. 91 Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 5–6, 11–14. 92 On equivalences, or their absence under old regimes in Europe, see Holquist, “‘Information Is the Alpha and the Omega,’” 419–21; Bruce Curtis, “Foucault on Governmentality and Population: The Impossible Discovery,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 27:4 (Autumn 2002), 507–11; Pinnow, Lost to the Collective, ch. 1. 93 Johannes Burkhardt, “Wirtschaft,” in Otto Bruner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur PolitischSozialen Sprache in Deutschland. 94 As it had been in England for some time: Brewer, Sinews of Power, ch.6. 95 Beer, Renovating Russia, introduction and ch. 1. 96 Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, Vyp. XI (1881), 5–7, 37–8, 94, and appendix; “Kratkii obzor deiatel’nosti Ministerstva Finansov,” 3, 6–8. 97 Terner, Materialy-Svedeniia o pozemel’nom naloge, 8–9. 98 Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution; as recounted with a Russian inflection in Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991, 30–3. 99 Charles Steinwedel, “Making Social Groups, One Person at a Time: The Identification of Individuals by Estate, Religious Confession, and Ethnicity in Late Imperial Russia,” in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices since the French Revolution, ed. Jane Caplan and John Torpey, 67–82. 3. Wealth in Motion: New Money, New Taxes, and a New Bureaucracy 1 Historians and literary critics of imperial Russia have made this quite plain: Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Standler, eds., Self and Story in Russian History. This contingency is also implied by Jarrold E. Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventh Century. 2 Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 41. 3 P.A. Berlin, Russkaia burzhuaziia v staroe i novoe vremia; Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and

370  Notes to pages 88–90 the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, pts. 3 and 7; Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia, pt. 2. 4 This paternalism was more imagined than real: Stephen Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov; Michael Confino, Domaines et seigneurs en Russie vers la fin du XVIIIe siècle: Étude de structures agraires et de mentalités économiques. 5 K.I. Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia v Rossii, 1885–1910 gg.: Ocherk deiatel’nosti podatnoi inspektsii za 25 let ee sushchestvovaniia v sviazi s razvitiem priamogo oblozheniia, 115–16. Noted by Bunge in his report to Alexander III on 20 September 1880: “O finansovom polozhenii Rossii,” Istoricheskii arkhiv 2 (March–April 1960), 132–43. See also P. Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie o promyslovom oblozhenii v Rossii,” Russkoe ekonomiheskoe obozrenie, 1 (1900), pt. 1, 59, who cites the State Council in 1884. 6 For a good summary and example of the indignation see Seligman, The Income Tax. The figures are very notional estimates from Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 1, 55, which in turn relies on Michael Mulhall, The Dictionary of Statistics, 747. Mulhall’s compendium did not explain what was meant by “industrial taxes” and did not cite its sources. The French and Russian quotes are in Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 1, 73. 7 Viewed in literature: Anne Lounsbery, “The Worlds on the Back of a Fish: Mobility, Immobility, and Economics in Oblomov,” The Russian Review, 70 (January 2011), esp. 44. 8 Assaf Likhovski. “A Map of Society: Defining Income in British, British-Colonial, and American Tax Legislation,” British Tax Review (2005), 158–79. 9 Cf. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 38–45. In Scott the cadastre is treated as a hallmark of a pernicious modernity but was treated by contemporaries as a crude device in conditions of capitalism and monetization; see for example Bunge to the State Council in 1884 in RGIA, f.1149, op.10, d.22, ll.2–3ob, and by the conference of Treasury Directors in 1882 in RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394, ll.16–23ob. 10 Each state counted income in different ways, but the numbers did produce international norms and comparisons that framed policy. See the compendium of European national incomes and income tax rates in Mulhall, The Dictionary of Statistics, which was part of the basis for Russian estimates of how much income industry produced (estimated in Russia at 45 per cent) compared with what it contributed to national budgets (under 4 per cent). Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” 55. 11 Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” 55; S.N. Prokopovich, “Opyt ischisleniia narodnago dokhoda Rossii,” in Trudy volnogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva; RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.461ob-62, 602–06ob (minutes of the conference on gathering data on incomes). Paul Gregory’s studies are an admirable effort to arrive at more comprehensive estimates: Russian National Income, 1885–1913. On

Notes to pages 90–3  371 contemporaneous American studies of national income (often termed “national wealth”) see Richard J. Joseph, The Origins of the American Income Tax: The Revenue Act of 1894 and Its Aftermath, 33–42. 12 Adam Tooze, “Imagining National Economies: National and International Economic Statistics, 1900–1950,” in Imagining Nations, ed. Geoffrey Cubbit, 223. 13 Seligman, Income Tax, set the tone for a good century and is still echoed in Joseph, Origins of the American Income Tax, and Stanley, Dimensions of the Law, 3–4. In the Russian historiography see Bokhanov, “Vopros o podokhodnom naloge,” 276–302, and Galakhov, “Nekotorye voprosy izucheniia statisticheskikh materialov promyslovogo oblozheniia,” 238–61. Linda Bowman’s view is less certain about the extent of evasion and less conventional in its conclusions: “Russia’s First Income Taxes,” and “Bourgeois Self-Representation.” On France, see Kaplan, Forgotten Crisis; and Stephen Walker Owen, Jr, “The Politics of Tax Reform in France, 1906–1926,” PhD diss., University of California–Berkeley, 1982. 14 Stanley, Dimensions of the Law, 12–13. 15 N.Kh. Bunge, “Zagrobnye zametki,” Reka vremen: Kniga istorii i kul’tury, 1 (1995), 245–6. Ozerov’s review of the French parliamentary and economic debate is a good example of the movement of arguments across borders: Ivan Kh. Ozerov, “Epizod iz istorii bor’by v sfere oblozheniia,” Russkoe ekonomicheskoe obozrenie, 1 (1900), 44–52. 16 Économiste français, 28 March 1896, p. 285, and 8 February 1897, p. 162. 17 Daunton, Trusting Leviathan; Levi, Of Rule and Revenue. 18 Owen, “Politics of Tax Reform,” 58, 61, and esp. 138ff. Russians cited this French debate repeatedly because of its civil rights implications, as in this correspondence about the income tax between the Ministry of Finances and the Treasury Offices in 1910: RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2354, l.323. 19 See the Russian debate from 1892 that drew heavily on foreign parliamentary and journalistic debates: RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.845, which was part of an abortive attempt to introduce income taxes. Followed closely by the imperial court: RGIA, f.468 (His Majesty’s Own Cabinet, economic section), op.13, d.390 (on the proposal for an income tax, 1892), ll.3–8ob; and from 1898, debate on the revised industrial tax in RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, ll. 19–19ob. 20 Described as a modern form of information management in Marilyn Strathern, “Cutting the Network,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2:3 (1996). 21 For a general statement on the way in which individual rights in Russia were ambiguous, see Linda Harriet Edmondson and Olga Crisp, eds., Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, and Clowes, Kassow, and West, eds., Between Tsar and People. 22 Many students of Russian liberalism assume that autonomy from the state was the main issue, but Daniel Beer has shown that welfare and the demand for

372  Notes to pages 93–5 state activism were at least as much a part of the Russian liberal project. See Beer, Renovating Russia, and John Hutchinson, Politics and Public Health in Revolutionary Russia, 1890–1918. 23 Allison Coleman, The Legal Protection of Trade Secrets, 1–3. On the contested notion of privacy in American law see Colin Bennett, “In Defence of Privacy: The Concept and the Regime,” and John Gilliom, “In Response to Bennett’s ‘In Defence of Privacy,’” both in Surveillance and Society, 8:4 (2011). Many thanks to Rudy Garcia of New York University for directing me to this literature. 24 Gilliom, “A Response to Bennett’s ‘In Defense of Privacy,’” 501. 25 Amédée E. Turner, The Law of Trade Secrets, 3. Robert Dean, The Law of Trade Secrets, notes only modest statutory change in the United States. 26 I.N. Dodichev, “Pravovoi rezhim kommercheskoi tainy,” diploma thesis; Bokhanov, “Vopros o podokhodnom naloge,” 284. 27 The patron relations with the Ministry of Finances cast doubt on the potential for self-reliant private sectors and class confidence: Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs, ch. 1, and Ruth Amende Roosa, “Russian Industrialists and ‘State Socialism,’ 1906–17,” Soviet Studies, 23:3 (1972), 395–417. On the debate over commercial secrecy and the character of merchants’ and ministerial arguments, see Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 1, esp. 58–75. 28 As reaffirmed in 1892 during discussion of the income tax, with fines of 1,000 rubles and prison terms of three months: RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.580–582ob. 29 The overlap of secrecy, confidentiality, and privacy is developed in John Hull, Commercial Secrecy: Law and Practice, 6–8. Hull treats them as conterminous. See also Simon Mehigan and David Griffiths, Restraint of Trade and Business Secrets: Law and Practice, 1–2. 30 Jack Hirshleifer, “Privacy: Its Origin, Function, and Future,” The Journal of Legal Studies 9:4 (December 1980), 649–50. 31 Consider the difference between keeping a manuscript secret (common-law privacy) and the act of protecting the rights to it as private property once it has been published (statutory). Warren and Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” 200. 32 Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt 3, 101. 33 From the Cabinet’s debate over the income tax in 1892: RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.583ob. 34 As Deputy Minister Witte and the director of assessed levies wrote to Alexander III in 1892, with a special concern for the immunity of bank accounts. RGIA, f.468, op.13, d.390, ll.3–8ob. 35 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.577–579. 36 Summarized in Tim McDaniel, Autocracy, Capitalism, and Revolution in Russia, pt 1; Wcilso, Tales of Imperial Russia, 156–65. 37 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.571ob.

Notes to pages 95–100  373 38 Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov (1883), 72; Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 1, 58; Bowman, “Russia’s First Income Taxes,” 260–1 and note 18; Nina I. Anan’ich, “K istorii podatnykh reform 1880-kh godov,” Istoriia SSSR, 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1979), 161–4, 166, 169; RGIA, 573:18:27333, ll.579ob (Historical study of income taxation in Russia, 1905); Stepanov, Bunge, 138–9; Ministerstvo Finansov, 1802–1902, pt. 2, 141–3. 39 Conclusion of the Department of the Economy, State Council: RGIA, f.1152, op.9 (1882), d.173, l.14ob. 40 These terms were commonplace in the literature and tax records of the time, and are explained by Bunge in a memorandum on his tenure as minister: Bunge, “Zagrobnye zametki,” 225–6. 41 Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 3, 99. 42 On the circular character of the process – knowledge begetting reform, and reform begetting knowledge – see the ministerial discussion in RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.616–617; Ivan Kh. Ozerov, “Vozmozhno-li vvesti podokhodnyi nalog v Rossii?” Russkoe ekonomicheskoe obozrenie 5 (May 1900), 30, 33–4; and the observation of Bark, the minister of finances in 1916, in Gosudarstvennyi Sovet. Stenograficheskii otchet. 1916, col. 92. For further general background to this process see Furner and Lacey, The State and Social Investigation, part 1. 43 A point made in Pravilova, Finansy imperii, pt. 1, with a clear formulation on 124–5. 44 See the marvellous discussion of the land and urban properties taxes as they applied to Poland in Pravilova, Finansy imperii, 186–96, which tended to have punitive aspects to them. The tax on urban real estate applied to Poland in 1910 in the same manner as it did to other regions but with higher rates, the product of a procedural scandal in the Duma. On the land taxes in Turkestan see Pravilova’s ch. 12. 45 During the debate over the law on the new inspectorate: RGIA, f.1149, op.10, d.22, l.49. 46 Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov (1883), 72, with reference to inheritance. 47 Bunge, “O finansovom polozhenii Rossii,” 139–40, traced such a trajectory quite openly. 48 An imbalance made right in Stepanov, Bunge. 49 He was appointed deputy minister in 1880 and minister in 1882. 50 A point worth repeating: Gaston Rimlinger, Welfare Policy in Europe, America, and Russia, has useful chapters on Russia and offers a valuable comparative context. 51 These were Miliutin, Valuev, Greig, Loris-Melikov, Reutern, and Abaza. Stepanov, Bunge, 122–3. On the role of the State Council in protecting and extending the legacy of the Great Reforms, see Heidi W. Whelan, Alexander III and the State Council: Bureaucracy and Counter-Reform in Late Imperial Russia.

374  Notes to pages 100–2 52 Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, ch. 11; P.A. Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie v kontse XIX stoletiia; L.G. Zakharova, Zemskaia kontrreforma 1890g.; Thurston, Liberal City, 36–42; Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, 70–5; Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia, ch. 3. 53 Michelson, “Revenue and Expenditure,” 10–11. This sentiment was echoed in Stepanov, Bunge. 54 Stepanov, Bunge, 73. 55 See the scathing pamphlet by N. Smirnov, Sovremennoe polozhenie nashikh finansov, prichiny upadki ikh i sredstva k uluchsheniiu nashego gosudarstvennago khoziaistva, esp.6–7, 10–13, 31–4. It is a defence of the autocratic and estate principles against an encroaching plutocratic capitalism. Bunge’s response appeared as “Zamechaniia Ministra Finansov na zapisku tainago sovetnika Smirnova” (St Petersburg, 1886). 56 S. Frederick Starr, Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia, 1830–1870, 46– 8; and George Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government: Social Evolution in the Domestic Administration of Imperial Russia, 1711–1905. 57 Raymond Pearson, Russian Officialdom in Crisis: Autocracy and Local SelfGovernment, 1861–1900, cites the perception of local corruption and mismanagement and takes it seriously; Wcilso, Reforming Rural Russia, ch. 3, and Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, 70–5, explore the underlying ideology. 58 Pravilova, Finansy imperii, 125: with regard to the governors (namestniki) in the Transcaucasus in this passage, to the non-Russian regions generally in part 1 of her book, and a fine description of an approach to rule generally. 59 Factory-centred Bismarckian welfare and the British system of direct state inspection were the explicit models. Stepanov, Bunge, 105–7. 60 A.Iu. Volodin, Istoriia fabrichnoi inspektsii v Rossii, 1882–1914 gg.; Gaston Rimlinger, “Autocracy and the Factory Order in Early Russian Industrialization,” Journal of Economic History 20 (March 1960); Theodore von Laue, “Factory Inspection under the Witte System, 1892–1903,” American Slavic and East European Review 19.3 (1960), 352–5. 61 Quite soon the materials became the basis for sociological studies and political tracts. See the famous examples of Mikhail Ivanovich Tugan-Baranovskii, Russkaia fabrika v proshlom i nastoiashchem, istoriko-ekonomicheskoe izsledovanie; Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Ob’iasnenie zakona o shtrafakh, vzimaemykh s rabochikh na fabrikakh i zavodakh,” “Novyi fabrichnyi zakon,” PSS, vol. 2, 15–60, and 263–314. Historians still find these materials invaluable. For examples of works that rely heavily on them see Diane P. Koenker and William G. Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917; Leopold Haimson and Charles Tilly eds., Strikes, War, and Revolutions in an International Perspective: Strike Waves in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.

Notes to pages 102–6  375 62 Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward, ch. 4. 63 From Bunge’s presentation to ministerial employees: RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394, l.6; Departament okladnykh sborov, 1863–1913, 100. 64 Bunge, “O finansovom polozhenii Rossii,” 135; Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 6–8; Stepanov, Bunge, ch. 2. 65 Bunge, “O finansovom polozhenii Rossii.” 66 Bunge, “Zagrobnye zametki,” 225–6. 67 Vsepodaneishii doklad, printed in Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, 1893; and in Russkiia vedomosti, 2 (1893). 68 Explained in the conference of treasury directors in 1882: RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394, l.5ob. 69 Starr, Decentralization, 48. 70 Terner, Materialy-svedeniia o pozemel’nom naloge, 129–30; in the State Council debate in RGIA, f.1149, op.10, d.22, ll.56–56ob; Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 11–12. 71 Reports of the Ministry of Finances to the interministerial conference on a tax inspectorate: RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394, l.42ob, and the State Council debate in f.1149, op.10, d.22, l.3ob-4. 72 Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok vzimaniia okladnykh sborov s krest’ian: Po svedeniiam, dostavlennym podatnymi inspektorami za 1887–1893 gody, 2 parts. 73 Bunge to the State Council: RGIA, f.1149, op.10, d.22, ll.5ob-7ob. 74 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 34–5, 97–8, 202–7; von Laue, “Factory Inspection,” 352–5. 75 Personnel files of 1907–17: RGIA, f.573, op.20. 76 RGAE, f.7733 (Commissariat of Finances), op.18, d.4746: personnel record of Pavel N. Kutler. 77 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.492. 78 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.502. 79 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.542. 80 Tolstoy to Bunge in RGIA, f.1149, op.4, d.22, ll.5ob-7ob, 21; pay rates in RGIA, f.573, op.20. 81 RGIA, f.573, op.34, d.536. 82 On the expansion of the inspectorate to administer new taxes and in new regions: Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 52–3, 60–1, 71, 83–6, appendix; Department okladnykh sborov, 189–93. 83 Waves of new hires anticipated in RGIA f.573, op.20, d.374 (on the strengthening of the tax inspectorate, 1916), ll.21–23ob, 80–93ob, 311ob-312. 84 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 27. 85 Bunge, “Zagrobnye zametki,” 247–8; and during the State Council debate in RGIA, f.1149, op.10, d.22, ll.35ob-37.

376  Notes to pages 107–10 86 The sources and the historians who use them move easily between different terms for describing the legal property regime after 1886, including “private property,” “individual property,” “land fund,” and “collective.” None explains what any of these terms could have meant in practice. Daniel Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire, 61–2; D.S.M. Williams, “Land Reform in Turkestan,” Slavonic and East European Review 51, 124 (July 1973): 428–38; Pravilova, Finansy imperii, ch. 12. 87 D.S.M. Williams, “Fiscal Reform in Turkestan,” Slavonic and East European Review 52, 128 (July 1974): 382–92; Pravilova, Finansy imperii, 283–4. 88 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 60, 165–8. 89 The analytic frame of Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire. 90 Huri Islamoglu, “Property as a Contested Domain: A Reevaluation of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858,” in Roger Owen, ed., New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle East, 25. 91 William Schultz, The Taxation of Inheritance. The Russian project was one of the final products of the old Tax Commission, sent to the State Council where Bunge oversaw its passage. RGIA, f.1149, op.9 (1882), d.64: report no. 167 of the Commission: “O krepostnykh poshlinakh s imushchestv, perekhodiashchikh po pravu zakonnago nasledovaniia ...” 92 P. Genzel’, “Nalog s nasledstva. Rech’ na dispute,” Russkaia mysl’, 28:9 (1907), 107–10. 93 Jefferson to Madison, 6 September 1789, quoted in Schultz, Taxation of Inheritance, 173. 94 In the Ministry of Finances report to the State Council: RGIA, f.1149, op.9 (1882), d.64, l.38ob; Genzel’, “Nalog s nasledstva,” 107–115. On the writings of Johannes Sturm and Jean Bodin in the sixteenth century, see Schultz, Taxation of Inheritance, 167. 95 RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394, a meeting of treasury officials convened by Bunge to discuss the inspectorate, l.23ob. 96 Quoted in Schultz, Taxation of Inheritance, 170–1. 97 RGIA, f.1149, op.9 (1882), d.64, ll.4ob-5. 98 Schultz, Taxation of Inheritance, 157, 177 and n.34; Max West, The Inheritance Tax, 60–1. 99 RGIA, f.1149, op.9 (1882), d.64, l.5ob. There were ample parallels abroad: Arnold Mascarel, La famille et la fiscalité: Rapport presenté au XLIe Congrés de la Société d’économie sociale le 31 Mai 1922, 7. 100 RGIA, f.1149, op.9 (1882), d.64, l.8. 101 RGIA, f.1149, op.9 (1882), d.64, ll.165–170. 102 RGIA, f.1149, op.9 (1882), d.64, ll.39. 103 As Wagner has shown with regard to property law: William G. Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia, introduction. See also the continuing

Notes to pages 110–16  377

104 1 05 106 107 1 08 109

1 10 111

1 12 113

114 1 15 116 117 118 119

120 1 21 122 1 23 124 125

debate on inheritance law in Ekonomist Rossii, 11 (20 March 1910), especially the article by A.V. Eropkin. A Russian rendering is given by A.V. Eropkin in Ekonomist Rossii, 11 (20 March 1910). Schultz, Taxation of Inheritance, 174. Schultz, Taxation of Inheritance, 173–5. For example, in his speech to the State Council: RGIA, f.1149, op.9 (1882), d.64, l.174. As in Seligman, The Income Tax, where the term is taken for granted. The mystical case for gentry exceptionalism was elaborated by R.V. Fadeev in Russkoe obshchestvo v nastoiashchem i budushchem (St Peterburg, 1889–90), vol. 3. RGIA, f.1149, op.9 (1882), d.64, ll. 40–40ob, 99ff. P. Genzel’, introduction to Nalog s nasledstv i darenii v SSSR: spravochnik po perekhodu imushchestv v poriadke nasledovanii dareniia i po ikh nalogovomu oblozheniiu, ed. A. Tugengol’d, 7–8. Even the American scholar Schultz was surprised: Taxation of Inheritance, 68. Figures are from the State Controller, in Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 200. On the law and its evolution see B.S. Vraskii, O poshlinakh s imushchestv, perekhodiashchikh bezmezdnymi sposobami. Eugenio Rignanio, William. J. Shultz and Edwin R.A. Seligman, Social Significance of the Income Tax, pt. 1; Schultz, Taxation of Inheritance, 179, 184. Genzel’, “Nalog s nasledstva.” Tugengol’d, Nalog s nasledstv i darenii v SSSR, 8. In the conference on a new tax inspectorate, 1882: RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394, l.23ob. RGIA, f.1149, op.9 (1882), d.64, l.173. Bunge in 1882 to a conference of Treasury Office directors, on the proposed inheritance tax and its relation to the proposed tax inspectorate: RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394, ll.25–44. L.E. Shepelev, “Aktsionernoe uchredistel’stvo v Rossii (istoriko-statisticheskii ocherk),” in Iz istorii imperializma v Rossii, vol. 1, 34–5. Stepanov, Bunge, 84, citing Bunge from Zhurnal dlia aktsionerov, in 1858. This was abandoned only because it discriminated among kinds of “persons”: RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.572–572ob. Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 3, 99–100. Thomas Owen, The Corporation under Russian Law, 1800–1917: A Study in Tsarist Economic Policy, chs. 1–2. Such experts reported regularly to the Ministry of Finances from the Russian embassy in Washington, DC. See Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 3, 90–6, which shows a certain fascination with American practices.

378  Notes to pages 116–20 1 26 Joseph, Origins of the American Income Tax, 79–81. 127 On the ways in which corporate law created new arguments for openness and disclosure, see Steven A. Bank, “Entity Theory as Myth in the Origins of the U.S. Corporate Excise Tax of 1909,” William and Mary Law Review, Vol. 43 (2001).p.542. 128 Owen, Corporation under Russian Law, 15–24 and ch.3. 129 Joseph, Origins of the American Income Tax, 79–81. 130 Steven A. Bank, “Entity Theory as Myth,” 453n17. 131 Jess Bravin, “Sotomayor Issues Challenge to a Century of Corporate Law,” Wall Street Journal, 17 September 2009, 19. 132 Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 3, 85. 133 This was similar to the Prussian law of 1867 that Russia emulated, which placed corporations in a separate and special category: Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 3, 85–6. 134 An argument and a genealogy used explicitly in a Cabinet commission on secrecy in 1906, convened to make the personal income tax possible. RGIA, f.573, op.34, d.300, ll.3–27. 135 In Russia it was widely assumed that the corporate income tax was the prelude to a personal income tax: State Council to Bunge, 30 April 1884, cited in a history of income taxes in Russia, 1906 (“Istoricheskaia spravka po voprosu o vvedenii podokhodnago naloga v Rossii”), RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.579ob; Bunge, “Zagrobnye zametki,” 244–5. The same was true in the United States: Joseph, Origins of the American Income Tax, 86. 136 Thurston, Liberal City, 36, 39. 137 Stepanov, Bunge, 148. 138 RGIA, f.468, op.13, d.390, ll.3–8ob. 139 Witte to State Council in RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.589ob-590. His unease over direct taxes in M.S. Simonova, “Otmena krugovoi poruki,” Istoricheskie zapiski, 83 (1969), 163–4, 168. 140 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 131–2; Department okladnykh sborov, appendix. 141 Gosudarstvennyi kvartirnyi nalog (St Petersburg, 1893), 34–40. 142 Ibid., 8. 143 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.845: correspondence on the development of the apartment tax. 144 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 67. 145 See the composition of the commission of Kandikov in Vologda province in 1909: GAVO, f.393, op.1, d.474, l.2. In some cases the dumas also chose the renters, but it is not clear how they were located given the exclusion of the non-propertied from municipal government. Interministerial conference of 1893: RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.845. 146 Gosudarstvennyi kvartirnyi nalog, 2–3, 34–40.

Notes to pages 120–7  379 147 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.845. On the expansion to other regions see Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 131. 148 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 66–7, 131–2, and 66n. 149 Kandikov in Vologda province: GAVO, f.393, op.1, d.53, l.59. 150 My thanks to Dmitrii Chuginskii of Tula for this document. GATO (State Archive of Tula Region), f.118, op.2, d.1559 (general list of payers of the apartment tax for 1900). 151 Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, 1893, 40. 152 The history of the urban properties tax reform to 1910 in RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.216; as practised in Vologda from 1911 in GAVO, f.389, op.1, d.5. 153 Ivan O. Fesenko, “Uchastie kvartirokhoziaev v gorodskom upravlenii,” Russkoe ekonomicheskoe obozrenie, 3 (March 1900), 15. 154 V.S. Iarovskii, recorded in Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 2 (1911), 380. 155 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.3, ll.229–33 and f.1158, op.1, d.3, ll.374ob-374. 156 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.845, ll.128–128ob. On the other hand, in the town of Kandikov in 1894 all taxpayers completed their declarations. GAVO, f.393, op.1, d.53, l.66ob. 157 Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 3, 100. 158 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.845, and f.573, op.20, d.3, ll.229–233. The English system of general commissioners and the Prussian model described in Seligman, The Income Tax, 58–9, 81–2. 159 As they did in Vologda: GAVO, f.393, op.1, d.53 (1894), l.7. 160 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2354, ll.68–73ob (1909). 161 Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 3, 99–100. 162 Cf. Laura Engelstein, “Culture, Culture Everywhere: Interpretations of Modern Russia, across the 1991 Divide,” Kritika, 2:2 (2001), 380. 163 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 131n. 164 Pamiatnaia kniga Mogilevskoi gubernii za 1906 g. (Mogilev), 201. 165 Fesenko, “Uchastie kvartirokhoziaev,” 17, 22–4, 27, 32. 166 Podatnaia inspektsiia, 131–2; Fesenko, “Uchastie kvartirokhoziaev,” 15, 17. 167 On the larger reform of local government at that time see Krizis samoderzhaviia, 111. 168 Wcislo, Tales of Imperial Russia, 156–65. 4. Systematic Intimacy: Business Taxes and the Disciplining of Commercial Russia 1 Israel in the 1950s, for example: Assaf Likhovski. “‘Training in Citizenship’: Tax Compliance and Modernity,” Law & Social Inquiry 32 (2007) 675–6. 2 Typical laments over the absence of account books came from the Cabinet in 1892: RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.583ob; and on the idea of income, ll.586–7; in an

380  Notes to pages 127–31 expert discussion of the business taxes in RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, ll.29–30; and in a meeting of inspectors in Zhurnal zasedanii s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Kazanskoi gubernii za 1896 g., 19. Publicity for book-keeping in Posobie dlia osmotra torgovykh knig i opredeleniia oborotov i podatnoi pribili raskladochnymi prisutstviiami. This was directed to payers as much as collectors. 3 Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 1, 74–5. 4 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, 579ob, where the business tax was discussed as a prelude to the personal income tax. 5 This in 1898. RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, l.270ob. 6 As the government anticipated: RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, l.9. 7 Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, 61–2, 64. 8 The tax statistics did not even record the estate affiliations of the firms. They did record, however, the revenue received by the state for registering a business through the guilds; of the 40.0 million rubles received for the licence tax in 1912, only 1.1 million rubles came through guild registrations. Statistika priamykh nalogov i poshlin. Gosudarstvennyi promyslovyi nalog. Osnovnoi nalog s otchetnykh i neotchetnykh predpriiatii i dopol’nitel’nyi nalog s neotchetnykh predpriiatii za 1912 god (St Petersburg, 1915), vi. 9 Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 1, 61, and pt. 3, 96–7. 10 N. Blagoveshchenskii, “O dopol’nitel’nom raskladochnom sbore s gil’deiskikh predpriiatii,” Ekonomicheskii zhurnal, 3 (March 1888), 3. 11 Statisticheskie rezul’taty protsentnago i raskladochnago sborov po ischisleniiu, klassifikatsii i opredeleniiu oborotov i pribylei torgovykh i promyshlennykh predpriiatii za 1889 g., viii; additional figures in RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, in a report from 1909: ll.7–8; Bowman, “Russia’s First Income Taxes,” 262. 12 Statisticheskie rezul’taty protsentnago i raskladochnago sborov, ii. 13 These included the serial Svod dannykh o fabrichno-zavodskoi promyshlennosti v Rossii, issued after 1889, the Ukazatel’ fabrik i zavodov Evropeiskoi Rossii: materialy dlia fabrichno-zavodskoi statistiki (1894) and the Fabrichno-zavodskaia promyshlennost’ Rossii: perechen’ fabrik i zavodov (1897). 14 Meaning the taxes that were officially classified as “assessed.” 15 See the proceedings in GAVO, f.357, op.1, d.1: Nikolskii district, 1885. 16 As recounted by Nikolai Kutler in a discussion of the bill on the income tax in 1905: RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.571–571ob. Previous proposals for income taxes had been rejected, in part because the government would have to rely on estate institutions to administer them: l.569ob. The 1909 changes in RGIA f.23, op.9, d.366, ll.46–46ob. 17 Debates among treasury directors in their conference of 1882: RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394, ll.46ob–49, 92, 102–102ob, 103, 111ob–12, 116. 18 Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, 260–1.

Notes to pages 132–6  381 19 As commissioners did in Vologda: GAVO, f.393, op.1, d.527, l.108. 20 “Nalogovyia izdevatel’stva,” Promyshlennost’ i torgovlia, 20 (15 October 1910), 406–8. 21 Statisticheskie rezul’taty, iii. 22 A feat for which Pavel Kutler expressed pride in his autobiographical statement of 1927 to the Soviet Finance Commissariat: RGAE, f.7733, op.18, d.4746 (unclear pagination: ll.8–9?). 23 Bowman, “Russia’s First Income Taxes,” 276. 24 This has fascinating parallels with norms in the insurance industry: François Ewald, “Norms, Discipline, and the Law,” Representations, 30, Special Issue on Law and the Order of Culture (Spring 1990), 138–61. 25 Bowman, “Russia’s First Income Taxes,” 274–5; on the last point, Blagoveshchenskii, “O dopol’nitel’nom raskladochnom sbore,” 5–6. 26 Statistika priamykh nalogov … 1912. On the corporate tax see Bokhanov, “Vopros o podokhodnom naloge,” 278, and Michelson, “Revenue and Expenditure,” 17–18. 27 Bowman, “Russia’s First Income Taxes,” 275. 28 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 49–50. RGAE, f.7733, op.18. d.4746 (unclear pagination: l.8?): autobiographical statement of P.N. Kutler. 29 Galakhov, “Nekotorye voprosy,” 243. 30 Ibid., 244. 31 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 119. 32 Blagoveshchenskii, “O dopol’nitel’nom raskladochnom sbore,” 4. 33 Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 3, 99–100. 34 Galakhov, “Nekotorye voprosy,” 243, 246. In the archives of Vologda province the declarations only begin to appear in the 1890s. 35 Ibid., 244. 36 RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, ll.11, 13; Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 120. 37 About one-third of all appeals were successful. Statistika priamykh nalogov … 1912, xxix. 38 On the process of appeal, Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 3, 98–9; Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 120; on the numbers and results, Statistika priamykh nalogov … 1912, xxviii; on the reasons for low levels of appeal, as well as cumulative figures for 1898–1908, RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, ll.29–30. 39 Statisticheskie rezul’taty protsentnago i raskladochnago sborov… za 1889 g., iv, xiii–xiv. 40 Galakhov, “Nekotorye vorposy,” 244; and the tacit agreement of a critic of the government in “Nalogovyia izdevatel’stva,” 407. 41 This is in 1908: RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, ll.29–30. 42 One of the rare writers to go public with his or her objections, albeit anonymously, was clearly enraged but would not go as far as to claim that the tax rate was too high. It was instead “a humiliation.” “Nalogovyia izdevatel’stva,” 407–8.

382  Notes to pages 136–40 43 RGIA f.23, op.9, d.366, ll.29–30; Statistika priamykh nalogov … 1912, xxix; Bowman, “Russia’s First Income Taxes,” 273–4; “Nalogovyia izdevatel’stva,” 407. 44 Statistika priamykh nalogov… 1912, xxviii. 45 Ibid., xxviii, xxix. 46 “Nalogovyia izdevatel’stva,” 408; “Voprosy promyshlennago oblozheniia,” Promyshlennost’ i torgovlia, 9 (1 May 1910), 635. 47 Schremmer, “Taxation and Public Finance,” 391–7; Shehab, Progressive Taxation, 225–6, 247–8. 48 Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 2 (1911). 49 Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 3, 90–1, 93, 102, n4. 50 Ibid., pt. 3, 102. 51 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 120, 154–5. 52 RGIA, 23:9:366, ll.40–1. 53 A test case was carried to the Senate and won by the ministry. “Voprosy promyshlennago oblozheniia,” 635. 54 GAVO, f.393, op.1, d.519: “Raskladochnye prigovory raznykh selenii,” 1910. Such coordination among inspectors was facilitated by law in 1899: Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 109. 55 Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 2, 126–7, and pt. 3, 90. 56 “Izmenenie nekotorykh postanovlenii o gosudarstvennom promyslovom naloge,” Vestnik finansov, 5 (1906), 170; reviewed in 1909 by the ministry in RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, l.35ob; Bokhanov, “Vopros o podokhodnom naloge,” 278; Bowman, “Russia’s First Income Taxes,” 270; Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 117, 120–1; Kutler’s estimate in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia III, meeting 31, 16.XII.1909, col.3666. 57 The tax category was “personal industrial occupations” (lichnyia promysloviya zaniatiia), which may have extended beyond board members and salaried employees. Statistika priamykh nalogov… za 1912, 2. 58 On penalties and the role of the police see Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, ch. 2. 59 A form of power by norms, complicity, technique, and discipline familiar to the reader of Foucault. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 87–9. Laura Engelstein questions the applicability of the model to Russia: “Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia,” The American Historical Review 98:2 (April 1993), 338–53. 60 As recalled by Pavel Kutler in his autobiographical statement to the Commissariat of Finances, about his work in the 1890s: RGAE, f.7733, op.18, d.4746, l.58. 61 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 35–6; RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394, ll.16–23ob. 62 As the ministry anticipated in 1882: RGIA, f.1149, op.10, d.22, ll.2–3, and f.20, op.4, d.3394, l.23ob; Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 46–7. 63 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.579.

Notes to pages 141–4  383 64 Done routinely: Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 45. 65 RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3393, ll.27ob–29; Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 35–6, 101, 140–1; Michelson, “Revenue and Expenditure,” 28–9. 66 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 135–8. 67 RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3393, ll.30ob, 117–19; Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 137. 68 RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394, ll.16–23ob; Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 108. 69 GAVO, f.389, op.1, d.5, on the assessment of the urban properties tax in Vologda, 1911, l.300. 70 With a lucid Duma debate summarized by Motovilov from the Finance Commission in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, ­sessiia III, meeting 20, 20.XI.1909, cols. 2250–7; with more debate in meeting 21, 23.XI.1909 and 29, 11.XII.1909. 71 Following a procedural scandal in the Duma, the rate was set at 10 per cent for Poland, though the methods of assessment were made uniform. Pravilova, Finansy imperii, 186–96. 72 The director was Pavel Kutler, Nikolai’s brother. Zhurnal oktiabrskoi 1911 goda sessii s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Moskovskoi gubernii (Moscow, 1912), 4. 73 GAVO, f.389, op.1, d.5 (1911): Minutes of the Sessions of the Vologda Commission for the State Tax on Urban Properties, l.46. 74 RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.216, Council of Ministers debate: “On the collection of taxes on immovable property in cities, 1906–1913,” ll.71–71ob; f.560, op.26, d.634 (1906) l.66. 75 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 35, 42–3, 59–60, 162–4, 176–7; Departament okladnykh sborov, 91–4, and appendix, diagram 6; Stepanov, Bunge, 137. 76 RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394, ll.16–23ob; Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 108. 77 Michelson, “Revenue and Expenditure,” 28. 78 “Russkoe strakhovanie ot ognia za poslednie gody,” Promyshlennost’ i torgovlia, 20 (October 1910), 408–10. Of course, this ran contrary to government programs to encourage insurance, described in Cathy Frierson, All Russia Is Burning! A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia, ch. 6. 79 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 108; Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 1, 69. 80 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 45–6 on the early disappointments, 108–9 and 162–4 on later successes. On the working of the system, see the correspondence of the Vologda Treasury Office in GAVO, f.393, op.1, d.527, ll.26–81: Meetings of the repartitional commission on additional trade taxes, 1911. 81 Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 1, 61. 82 GAVO, f.357, op.1, d.1. Galakhov, “Nekotorye voprosy,” finds something similar in Moscow province. 83 GAVO, f.357, op.1, d.32: On tax collections and surpluses in Vologda province, 1895.

384  Notes to pages 144–8 84 GAVO, f.393, op.1, d.517, ll.14–18. On the multiple categories that were used to place a firm in a “class” (region), “group” (type of firm), and razriad (mainly size by external indicators), see Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 116–17. 85 Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 2, 118. 86 “Nalogovyia izdevatel’stva,” 407. 87 This in Vologda, where the commissions filled in the forms for the stalls that ­provided too little information: GAVO, f.393, op.1, d.527, ll.26ff. 88 Statistika priamykh nalogov … 1912, xxii–xiii, xxix; Statisticheskiia dannyia … na 1896, 1897 i 1898 gody (St Petersburg, 1900), vi. 89 As he reported to the Ministry of Finances when the latter considered an income tax: RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.586–7. 90 The prediction that arrears would disappear was widely held when the inspectorate and the business taxes were introduced: RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394, l.145ob. 91 Bowman, “Bourgeois Self-Representation.” 92 As Genzel’ observed in 1900: “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 3, 104–5. 93 A.K. Kirillov, “Reforma promyslovogo naloga v Rossii v 1917 g.,” Voprosy istorii, 12 (December 2011), 87–95, with the 1898 reform on p. 88. 94 RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, ll. 19–19ob. 95 Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 3, 103–4. 96 RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, l.27ob. On the encouragement of incorporation, see Bowman, “Russia’s First Income Taxes,” 263 and n29; Fred Carstensen, “Foreign Participation in Russian Economic Life,” in Entrepreneurship in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Gregory Guroff and Fred Carstensen, 144. 97 All in RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, ll.11, 13; Gorlin, “State Politics,” 115–17. Bunge had hoped for this outcome: “Zagrobnye zametki,” 245–6. 98 RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, ll.25ob–26. 99 Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 3, 89, 105. 100 Bowman, “Bourgeois Self-Representation”; Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 7–8. 101 N.Kh. Bunge, Garmoniia khoziaistvennykh otnoshenii, 11; Stepanov, Bunge, 29–30; and on Bunge’s emphasis on state regulation of the private, Zweynert, “Between Reason and Historicity,” 67–8. On the use of fiscal practices in destroying collectives and individualizing the population, see Tocqueville, The Old Regime, bk. 2, chs. 3, 6, 9, 12. 102 Nikolai K. Brzheskii, Podatnaia reforma: Frantsuzskiia teorii XVIII stoletiia. 103 In fact, Pipes makes no mention of Bunge at all. Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, 305. 104 Bunge, “Zagrobnye zametki,” 225–6. 105 This as early as 1882: RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394, l.116. 106 Quoted in von Laue, Witte, 35. On the unique professionalization of the ministry see Rieber, “Patronage and Professionalism,” 287, 290.

Notes to pages 148–52  385 107 M.S. Simonova, “Bor’ba techenii v pravitel’stvennom lagere po voprosam agrarnoi politiki v kontse XIX v.,” Istoriia SSSR, 1 (1963), 78–9. 108 Witte, Konspekt lekstii o gosudarstvennom khoziaistve, chitannykh Ego imperatorskomu vysochestvu Velikomu Kniaziu Mikhailu Aleksandrovichu v 1900–1902 gg. The state-centredness traced in part to List: Witte, Po povodu natsionalizma. 109 Ganelin in Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 111. 110 This was done everywhere, including in current U.S. literature, which still conflates income with wealth, and in earlier German writings where the assessments of the income tax were taken to mean wealth. See Lenin’s criticism of the practice in his review of Kautsky from 1899: “Retsenziia: Karl Kautsky, Bernstein und das sozialdemokratische Programm: Eine Antikritik,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, 206–7. 111 Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 118. 112 Stepanov, Bunge, 74. 113 Kotkin suggests that Tocqueville’s model of the state molding society was in operation in Russia: “1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytic Frameworks,” Journal of Modern History, 70 (June 1998), 397–8. Russian officials seemed to propose that the state take the place of society. 114 P.A. Zaionchkovskii, Pravitel’stvennyi apprat samoderzhavnoi Rossii v XIX v (Moscow, 1978), 103–4; and as he similarly put it to Nicholas II in 1895 in Krizis samoderzhaviia, 34. 5. Mass Taxation in the Age of the Individual: The New Personal Taxation in Russia and the World 1 See explicit statements in RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.569–79 (review authored by the Department of Assessed Levies, 1906); f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.64ob–67ob, l.165 (Cabinet debate). 2 Ardant, Histoire de l’împot; Owen, “Politics of Tax Reform,” 58, 61, 138–43; Schremmer, “Taxation,” 378–80, 391–7; Seligman, Income Tax, 13–17 and ch. 5; on Britain see Levi, Of Rule and Revenue, 137–8, and Sabine, History of Income Tax, 30–1, 62, 73. 3 Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 8, 13.VIII.1915, cols. 663–4. 4 Levi, Of Rule and Revenue, 137–8; Seligman, Essays in Taxation, 322, 473–80, 485–7; Daunton, “Payment and Participation,” 174, 176–7. Recounted by Russian officials and expert advisers in 1910 in RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2354, l.323, and by the Department of Assessed Levies to the Duma in 1907 in RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.332, 334. 5 Owen, “Politics of Tax Reform,” 58, 61, 138ff.

386  Notes to pages 152–7 6 Schremmer, “Taxation and Public Finance,” 378–80, 391–7. 7 Seligman, Income Tax, 13–17. 8 As reported in the Cabinet: RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.14–15ob. 9 Seligman, Income Tax, 340ff. 10 Ivan Kh. Ozerov, “Sovremennyia techeniia v sfere priamogo oblozheniia v Soedinennykh Shtatakh,” Russkoe ekonomicheskoe obozrenie, 5 (1897). 11 Emy, “The Impact of Financial Policy,” 113. 12 Ozerov, “Vozmozhno-li vvesti podokhodnyi nalog,” 30, 33–4. 13 On economic personality and visible personality, see Seligman, Income Tax, 495, and for the case of France between 1789 and 1914, see his ch. 5. This was described succinctly by Kokovtsov to the Cabinet in 1906 in RGIA f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.7–8. 14 This is explained further by Kutler in Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 2 (February 1911), 6. European criticisms are catalogued in Seligman, Essays in Taxation, 322, 473–87. 15 Krinskii in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 7, 1915, cols. 576–8. 16 Seligman, Income Tax, 262–6. 17 The early Russian discussion in RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.580–582ob; the European debate in Seligman, Income Tax, ch. 2. 18 Jacques Godefroy Cavaignac, La Formation de la Prussie contemporaine; Jacques Godefroy Cavaignac, Pour l’impôt Progressif , 1–11. 19 For example, RGIA f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.458–9. 20 T.A. Coghlan in Shehab, Progressive Taxation, 233–4. 21 Posnikov in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 8, 13.VIII.1915, col. 665. 22 The question dominated the final debate of the Duma in its fourth session, summarized by Posnikov in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 8, 13.VIII.1915, cols. 661–6; his calculation on 665. 23 Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 8, 13.VIII.1915, col. 665. 24 Benjamin Baez, “Confidentiality in Qualitative Research: Reflections on Secrets, Power, and Agency,” Qualitative Research 2, 35 (2002):43 (verification and accuracy) and 47–9 (privacy). 25 Vladimir Il’ich Lenin in Pravda, 7 June 1913. 26 A standard problem in societies with large populations of small farmers, handled in France by de facto exemption or in Israel by exemption followed by guides of expected and normal incomes: Likhovski, “’Training in Citizenship,’” 676. 27 Kaplan, Forgotten Crisis, 68. 28 Report from the Russian embassy in 1910: RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2354, ll.362ff. 29 Russkoe ekonomicheskoe obozrenie, 1 (January 1900), 48–9.

Notes to pages 157–60  387 30 Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 22, 42–3. Brubaker makes the useful distinction between the archaic sense of citizen as exclusive and local (a burgher) and modern notions of universal citizenship. Absolutist France levelled the population, as Tocqueville put it, but republican France absorbed them as citizens. 31 On individualism as realization rather than separateness, see Lukes, Individualism, ch. 1 and esp. 12–13; on “German” individualism from Fichte to Hegel, see 20–2. 32 Raeff, Michael Speransky, 104. 33 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.571–571ob; this was the Ministry of Finances’ assessment of the short-lived income tax of 1812–20, which was administered by the local nobility: ll.369–369ob. 34 All summarized in Bunge, “Zagrobnye Zametki,” 245–6, and by a Cabinet commission of 1905 in RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.574ob–575ob; in the 1892 debate: ll.582ob–583. 35 It is not clear that the Council of Ministers functioned as a cabinet in the British style, though many ministers thought that it did. I use the term, guardedly, because the Council did deliberate these issues collectively and delivered a consensus to the emperor. But this was not always the case. It is a problem with its own literature: David M. McDonald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia, 1900–1914. 36 Peter Gatrell, Government, Industry, and Rearmament in Russia, 1900–1914: The Last Argument of Tsarism, chs. 3–4. 37 As described for Germany in Witt, “Tax Policies, Tax Assessment, and Inflation”; for Britain in Whiting, “Taxation and the Working Class,” 915; for France in Owen, “Politics of Tax Reform”; for the United States in W. Brownlee, Federal Taxation in America: A Short History, 45–6, and Jerold L. Waltman, Political Origins of the US Income Tax, 43. 38 Ozerov, “Vozmozhno-li vvesti podokhodnyi nalog,” 27–33. 39 Barnett, A History of Russian Economic Thought, 75–7. 40 Shmuel Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia, 1900–1905; Sidney Harcave, First Blood: The Russian Revolution of 1905. 41 Geoffrey Hosking, The Constitutional Experiment in Russia: Government and Duma, 1907–1914. 42 Laura Engelstein, Moscow 1905: Working Class Organization and Political Conflict, ch. 11. 43 Maureen Perrie, “The Russian Peasant Movement of 1905–1907: Its Social Composition and Revolutionary Significance,” Past and Present, 57:1 (1972). 44 There is a huge and good historiography of the reforms, but I am concerned here with its ideological intent: Yanni Kotsonis, “The Problem of the Individual in the Stolypin Reforms,” Kritika 12:1 (January, 2011), 25–52.

388  Notes to pages 160–3 45 This is captured in the collection of critical essays on the Russian intelligentsia of 1909: Nikolai Berdiaev et al., Vekhi/Landmarks, ed. and trans. Marshall Shatz and Judith Zimmerman. The post-1905 dynamic is told most compellingly in Leopold Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905–1917,” Slavic Review 23, 4 (December 1964): 619–42. See also Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905–1944. 46 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.617. 47 This makes their later turn to authoritarian statism less surprising: Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution, ch.1; Radkey, The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism; Manfred Hildermeier, The Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party before the First World War, chs. 5, 12. 48 These views were represented in the debate between two populists, Vakhln Totomiants and A.A. Nikolaev, in 1908. Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward, 126. 49 Nancy Mandelker Frieden, Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform and Revolution, 1856–1905; Hutchinson, Politics and Public Health; Beer, Renovating Russia. 50 On participation as distinct from support or consent see Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, 258–61; Somers, “Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere”; Holquist, “Information Is the Alpha and Omega”; Lehning, To Be a Citizen, introduction. 51 Engelstein, “Combined Underdevelopment.” 52 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.617–19. 53 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.580–582ob. 54 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.438–62: Minutes of the Commission on the question of introducing income taxation, 12–17 May 1905. 55 RGIA, op.34, d.300: Minutes of the interministerial commission on the introduction of income taxation. 56 Protocols of the conference under the Ministry of Finances on commercial secrecy during income taxation, RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.607–31. 57 V.A.Demin, Gosudarstvennaia Duma Rossii, 1906–1917: Mekhanizm funktsonirovaniia, 56, 60; Ben-Cion Pinchuk, The Octobrists in the Third Duma, 1907–1912, 153. 58 A phenomenon observed in Carol Leonard, Agrarian Reform in Russia: The Road from Serfdom, 1–2. 59 On the budget see Gorlin, “State Politics and the Imperial Russian Budget,” ch. 2, especially 121–3. 60 Pokrovskii in the 1906 Cabinet debate in RGIA, f.560, op.26, d.634, ll.108–11; and in Kutler’s commission in f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.441. Kokovtsov made the fiscal case to the Cabinet in May 1906 and then disavowed it. RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.3–4. 61 In the Cabinet deliberations of 1906: RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.109–12. 62 Goremykin in Council of Ministers, August 1906: RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, l.165.

Notes to pages 163–7  389 63 RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.3–5, 109–12; RGIA, f.560, op.26, d.634, ll.62ff; RGIA, f.573, d.18, op.27333, ll. 438ob-439, 441. 64 RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, l.112. 65 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.327, 440–1. 66 RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.1–8l, and f.560, op.26, d.634. 67 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.327ob, 332, 334. 68 RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.7–8, 105–20ob; RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.439– 39ob and 456ob–57, as well as the Cabinet report to the Duma on ll.334–5. On the French system see Schemmer, “Taxation and Public Finance,” 378–80, 391–7. 69 Hence the regular insistence that income-based taxes fall on individuals as such: As declared as early as 1867 in the Tax Commission, which rejected proposals for household taxes because they would not fall on single persons. RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.571–571ob; in 1892 by the Ministry of Justice, which criticized proposals that might tax the household rather than the person: ll.587ob–588. It was one of Stolypin’s insistent demands when he negotiated for a new law on individual peasant property and rejected formal recognition of household property. Petr Stolypin, Nam nuzhna velikaia Rossiia: Polnoe sobranie rechei v Gosudarstvennoi Dume i Gosudrstvennom Sovete, 1906–1911, 176–80, 253–8. 70 For Kutler’s original proposals see RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.453ob. Overviews are available in RGIA, f.1158, op.1, d.3, ll.339ob (Cabinet and Duma), and ll.565– 70 (State Council debate). See also Kutler in Izvestiia Obshchestva finansovykh reform, 2 (February 1911), 20–2. 71 For a review of the issues see Ozerov, “Vozmozhno-li vvesti podokhodnyi nalog,” 43–4; the Third Duma debate in RGIA, f.1278, op.6, d.15, ll.803–5, which spilled over into the pages of Izvestiia Obshchestva finansovykh reform, 2 (February 1911), 31–2; and an overview of the Cabinet and Duma debates to 1915 in RGIA, f.1158, op.1, d.3, ll.366ob–368. 72 As the Department of Assessed Levies put it: RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.449ob. The Cabinet agreed in 1906: RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.18–18ob. 73 The poll tax and status is discussed in chapter 2; census society in chapters 2 and 3. 74 Le Temps, 1 February 1896; Schremmer, “Taxation and Public Finance,” 391–2. 75 Stanley, Dimensions of the Law, ch. 5. 76 RGIA, f.1158, op.1, d.3, ll.68, 326–329ob; f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.18–18ob. The tsar’s family would file directly with the minister of finances: f.573, op.34, d.300, ll.37ob–38; this was in fact carried out in 1917, extending to immediate relatives living abroad such as Queen Olga of Greece: f.573, op.34, d.309. 77 Izvestiia Obshchestva finansovykh reform, 4 (July 1911), 50–1. 78 RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.21–22. 79 Seligman, Income Tax, 499–532. 80 RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, l.35ob.

390  Notes to pages 167–71 81 RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.20–21, 69–69ob. 82 As pointed out by the war minister in 1892: RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.588. 83 As stated by M.I. Veselovskii in 1869: RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.572–572ob, 587. 84 For the Cabinet debate on priests see RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.2, 20–1, and the Duma’s final decision on l.174; discussed later by Kutler in Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 2 (February 1911), 4–5; and the Duma and State Council debates in RGIA f.1278, op.6, d.16, l.191ob; f.1158, op.1, d.3, ll.331ob, 712ob, 714ob. 85 Avenir Pavlovich Korelin, Dvorianstvo v poreformennoi Rossii, 1861–1904 gg.: Sostav, chislennost, korporativnaia organizatsiia; Leopold Haimson, introduction to The Politics of Rural Russia, 1905–1914, ed. Haimson. 86 RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.18–18ob. Also debated in the Shipov commission of 1906 in f.573, op.34, d.300, ll.40–2. 87 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333: Cabinet conference on commercial secrecy, May 1906, ll.616–17, 618ob–619; Ozerov’s remarks on 626ob–627. 88 RGIA, f.1158, op.1, d.3, l.39ob. 89 Quote from the economist Ivan Andreevich Isaev in Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 2 (February 1911), 23–4. 90 Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia, ch. 5; Leopold Haimson, “The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia,” Slavic Review, 47:1 (Spring 1988). 91 On peasants see RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.18–18ob; on Yakuts, ll.56, 69–69ob. On Turkestan see the published “Zapiska Ministerstva Finansov: K preobrazovaniiu deistvuiushei nalogovoi sistemy,” 6 December 1915, 48–9. Reprographic copy in RGIA Library. 92 Kokovtsov to Council of Ministers, May 1906: RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.4–5. 93 RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.59–60; rejected by the Cabinet on ll.69–69ob. 94 RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.15–17; in the Duma in RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.339. The imperial family would have to file declarations but directly to the minister of finances. 95 Demin, Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 108–9. 96 Moskovskii ezhenedel’nik, 40 (1909), 21. 97 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2354, ll.73–73ob. In order to lower Polish rates on the urban properties tax of 1910, Grabski argued for full uniformity across the empire – a paradoxical position for a Polish separatist. Pravilova, Finansy imperii, 193. 98 On territorial uniformity see Grabskii again in RGIA, f.1278, op.2, d.3213 (Finance Commission), l.165; and RGIA, f.1278, op.6, d.16 (on the income tax, 1906–16); the State Council’s conclusion in RGIA, f.1158, op.1, d.3, l.339ob; Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 2 (1911), 9, and 4 (June 1914), 10, 50–1; and a similar exchange from 1892 in RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.589ob. 99 Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 2 (February 1911), 4–5, 8–12; Ekonomist Rossii, 47 (27 November 1910) and 1 (8 January 1911). Legislative and Cabinet

Notes to pages 171–5  391 debates in RGIA, f.573, op.34, d.300, ll.40–2; f.573, op.20, d.2354; f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.616–19, 626ob–627; f.1278, op.6, d.16, ll.24–5, 187ob–189, 191ob; f.1158, op.1, d.3, ll.330–332ob, 337ob, 571, 715ob–716. 100 Ira Katznelson, “Knowledge About What? Policy Intellectuals and the New Liberalism,” in Dietrich Rueshchemeyer and Theda Skocpol, eds, States, Social Knowledge, and the Origins of Modern Social Policies, 23–4. 101 RGIA, f.1158, op.1, d.3; f.1278, op.6, d.16, ll.159–60; and the debates among liberal legislators in Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 1 (December 1910), 4, and 2 (February 1911), 5, 19. 102 This from the representative of the Ministry of Agriculture to the Shipov Commission: RGIA, f.573, op.34, d.300, l.40. 103 RGIA, f.1278, op.6, d.16, Duma Finance Commission debate of 1910: l.272. Kutler in Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 2 (February 1911), 8–12; P.P. Migulin in Ekonomist Rossii, 47 (27 November 1910), and 1 (January 1911); and the final Duma debate (regarding all incomes in kind) in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 8, cols 759–62. 104 Ozerov, “Vozmozhno-li vvesti podokhodnyi nalog,” 33–4. 105 Vtoroi ochrednoi s”ezd predstavitelei promyshlennosti i torgovli. Po povodu vnesennago v zakonodatel’nyia uchrezhdeniia proekta podokhodnago naloga. Doklad Soveta s”ezdov. Bokhanov shows this in his evidence in “Vopros o podokhodnom naloge,” esp. 284–5, despite a tendency to assume that the “bourgeoisie” as a whole opposed it (282). 106 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2337, l.413; Bokhanov, “Vopros o podokhodnom naloge,” 286–9. The Prussian argument in Seligman, The Income Tax, 27. 107 The Third Duma debate in RGIA, f.1278, op.6, d.16, ll.187ob–191ob; full summary by the State Council in 1915 in RGIA, f.1158, op.1, d.3, ll.330–332ob. 108 RGIA, f.1158, op.1, d.3, l.337ob. 109 Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 4 (June 1911), 56–7. 6. The Income Tax as Modern Government: Assessment, Self-Assessment, and Mutual Surveillance 1 As explained in Gosudarstvennyi kvartirnyi nalog, 55–6; in the discussions of 1893, in RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.845. 2 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.327, 440–1. 3 RGIA, f.573, op.34, d.300, ll.31–3. The decision not to recognize the standing of estate-based institutions comes from the Duma–State Council reconciliation commission in 1915: RGIA, f.1158, op.1, d.3, ll.715ob–716. 4 Ekonomist Rossii, 3 (23 January 1910), 3–4; Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 4 (June 1911), 10, 56–7. The numbers are notional since other writers came up with different estimates: RGIA, f.560, op.26, d.634, l.220.

392  Notes to pages 175–9 5 Council of Ministers to Novgorod zemstvo, 1 July 1910: RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2354, ll.252–3. The Cabinet had considered sharing the revenue in 1906 as a way to “implicate” local society in its implementation: RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.442ob, reversed on ll.453ob–454ob. 6 RGIA, f.573, op.26, d.3 (Kokovtsov to the Duma on the urban properties tax), ll.348ff; f.23, op.9, d.366, ll.46–46ob on the business tax; Ekonomist Rossii, 3 (23 January 1910), 3–4; Thurston, Liberal City, 44–6. 7 RGIA, f.1158, op.1, d.3, ll.370–3. 8 RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.69–69ob, 83, 126–7, 133, 156. 9 Lerkhe in RGIA, f.1278, op.6, d.16, ll.14–16ob. British politicians made a similar argument, that increased income taxation on the well-off compensated for the disproportionately high conscription of workers after 1914: Whiting, “Taxation and the Working Class,” 915. 10 In 1907, 1,204,000 males were eligible by age, but only 403,060 were called up. B.A. Nikol’skii, “Voennyi nalog,” Russkii ekonomist, 10 (18 April 1909), 112–13. 11 Pravilova, Finansy imperii, 277–9. 12 Pravilova, Finansy imperii. 13 This was first proposed by Kokovtsov in 1906: RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, l.9; and by Petr Bark in 1916: “K voprosu o preobrazovanii nalogovoi sistemy,” 8–12, reprographic copy in RGIA Library. 14 RGIA, f.1158, op.1, d.3, l.577ob. 15 Decree of the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), GARF, f.130, op.2, d.947, l.15. 16 The objection in the Cabinet commission in RGIA, f.573, op.34, d.300, ll.43–43ob; and from the Suvalki Treasury Office in 1909 in RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2354, ll.68– 73ob; Lerkhe in 1910 in RGIA, f.1278, op.6, d.16, l.16ob. 17 Zhurnal oktiabrskoi 1911 g. sessii s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Moskovskoi gubernii (Moscow, 1912), 19–20. 18 The early versions in Gosudarstvennyi kvartirnyi nalog, 7, 55–6; RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.845; Pavel Kutler in Zhurnal oktiabrskoi 1911 g. sessii s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Moskovskoi gubernii, 19–20. The quote is Ministry of Finances to State Duma, on urban properties tax, 1907: “O peresmotre polozheniia o naloge s nedvizhimykh imushchestv” [1907], reprographic copy in Lenin Library. For observations that such arrangements situated the individual in the state, in contrast to the British institution of independent commissioners, see Schremmer, “Taxation and Public Finance,” 443–5; Daunton, “Payment and Participation,” 177; RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.216. 19 RGIA, f.1158, op.1, d.3, l.577. 20 Baker, Condorcet, 214. 21 Owen, “The Politics of Tax Reform,” 138–43.

Notes to pages 179–84  393 22 Kaplan, Forgotten Crisis, 68; for more on France see Ardant, Histoire de l’împot, bk. 2, 407–8. The French, Austrian, and Italian cases, but not the Russian, are narrated in Seligman, The Income Tax. Specific national cases are given in Stanley, Dimensions of the Law; Sabine, History of Income Tax, 154–5; and Shehab, Progressive Taxation. 23 Aleksei Rafalovich, Zhelatelen li podokhodnyi nalog, 6. 24 Hence the paradox of modern understandings of selfhood and citizenship, which insisted on both independence and total commitment to the community. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 185. 25 Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia. A Study of Practices, esp. 182, 189–90. 26 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.332. 27 For ideological dimensions see Emy, “Impact of Financial Policy,” 103–5, 107, 112. For details see Sabine, History of Income Tax, 30–1, 62–73; Owen, “Politics of Tax Reform,” 138–41. 28 Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 2, 101. 29 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.617. 30 RGIA, f.573, op.34, op.300, ll.35–36ob; in the conference on secrecy in f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.618ff; and in the State Council in f.1158, op.1, d.3, ll.383ff. 31 In the Cabinet in RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.24ob ff; f.1158, op.1, d.3, ll.68, 326–329ob; in the Shipov commission in f.573, op.34, d.300, ll.35ob–36ob, 38ob– 39ob, 76–76ob. 32 RGIA, f.1278, op.6, d.16, l.16ob; f.1158, op.1, d.3, ll.383–386. 33 RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.24ob-225; expressed by local inspectors in f.573, op.34, d.310 (Petrograd conference of tax inspectors). See also Izvestiia Obshchestva finansovykh reform, 2 (February 1911), 6. 34 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.458–458ob. 35 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.617–18. 36 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.616ob–617. 37 In a review of the French debate in RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2354, ll.362ff. 38 RGIA, f.573, op.34, d.300, ll.3–27, 35ob–36ob; f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.458–458ob. 39 RGIA, f.1278, op.6, d.16, l.16ob; f.1158, op.1, d.3, ll.383–6, 714ob. 40 Emy, “Impact of Financial Policy,” 119, 131. 41 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.456ob–457; and A.A. Geiman in Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 2 (February 1911); and elaborated as a description of German practices in Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 3, 99–100. 42 RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.24ob–25. 43 See in particular the comments of Geiman and Ivan Andreevich Isaev in Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 2 (February 1911). 44 Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 2, 101.

394  Notes to pages 185–7 45 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.607–31; quote on 617ob. 46 As reported from Illinois and related in Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” pt. 3, 95–6. See Stanley, Dimensions of the Law, 20–1, and Seligman, Income Tax, 500–5. 47 Léon Say and Joseph Chailley-Bert, eds., Nouvelle dictionnaire d’économie politique, 736; Le Temps, 24 and 30 January and 1 February 1896; and Paul Leroy-Beaulieu in Économiste français, 28 March 1896, 285, and 8 February 1896, 162. 48 Le Temps, 8 March 1896; Schremmer, “Taxation and Public Finance,” 391–7; Seligman, Income Tax, ch. 2; Ozerov, “Epizod iz istorii bor’by,” 52. 49 Sabine, History of Income Tax, 31, 63, 154–5, 181; Shehab, Progressive Taxation, 225–6, 237–8. 50 As debated in the Cabinet commissions of 1905 and 1906, in RGIA, f.573, op.34, d.300, ll.37–37ob, and f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.617ob (including quotes). 51 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.335: in a description of the international debate over income taxation. This was paraphrased by an inspector in 1916 in Zhurnal s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Vladimirskoi gubernii 4 i 6 dekabria 1916 goda, 22–3. 52 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.456ob–457. 53 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2354, ll.68–72ob. 54 As it was elsewhere. See Likhovski, “‘Training in Citizenship’,” 685–7, where the backwardness and primitiveness (“levantinism”) of the population of immigrants was seen as the main obstacle to income taxes, and the tax itself as a remedy that would teach citizenship. 55 A point of consensus among the advisers and officials of the Ministry of Finances, recounted historically to the Cabinet in RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll. 64ob–67ob; reviewed in an official history of income tax proposals in RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.569ff; in Ozerov, “Vozmozhno-li vvesti podokhodnyi nalog”; in Pokrovskii, “O podokhodnom naloge,” Vestnik finansov, 28 (12 July 1915), 47–8; and in Chernukha, Krest’ianskii vopros v pravitel’stvennoi politike Rossii, 83–4. 56 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.583ob. 57 RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.54–56, 64. 58 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.589ob–590; Simonova, “Otmena krugovoi poruki,” 471. 59 Shvabenakh, the State Controller, to Council of Ministers, October 1906 in RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, l.56; Rech’, 317 (23 November 1914); Michelson, “Revenue and Expenditure,” 168–9; and Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, VI sozyv (August 1915), 556–638. 60 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.571. 61 Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 2 (February 1911), 40–1. 62 The Prussian figures are in Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 2 (February 1911), as is the debate. On evasion in Britain, see Sabine, History of Income Tax, 181–3; and RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.440–1.

Notes to pages 187–91  395 63 Goremykin in August 1906 to Council of Ministers: RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, l.165; and l.460ob. 64 As stated in Kutler’s commission 1905: RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, l.442. 65 Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 7, 11.VIII.1915, cols. 622–6. 66 Ozerov in RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.460ob, 617ob. See also Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 2 (February 1911), remarks by I.A. Isaev and O.O. Geiman. 67 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.327, 440–1. 68 Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 2 (February 1911), 19. 69 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.440–441ob. 70 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2354 (1909), ll.56–8 (Don) and ll.88–90ob (Turkestan). 71 Ozerov, “Vozmozhno-li vvesti podokhodnyi nalog,” 33–4. 72 On the business tax: RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, l.39. 73 Outlined systematically in the Cabinet in RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.24ob–25; and by Kutler in Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 2 (February 1911), 6. 74 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.327–327ob. 75 RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.580–582ob. 76 Steven A. Bank, Kirk J. Stark, Joseph J. Thorndike, War and Taxes. 77 Likhovski, “‘Training in Citizenship,’” 674–5. 78 Sergei Bakhteev of the Ministry of Agriculture in response to Shipov: RGIA, f.573, op.34, d.300, 42ob; the debate on ll.38ob–39. 79 RGIA f.1158, op.1, d.3, ll.373ob–374, 714ob–715. 80 On this see Baker, Condorcet, 79, 206–8, 213. 81 RGIA, f.573, op.34, ll.38ob–39ob, 76–76ob, and Bakhteev on 42ob; and as considered in the Cabinet in RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.459–459ob, 618ob–619, 629ob–630ob. 82 Michelson, “Revenue and Expenditure,” 128–9. 83 These were crude estimates, to be sure, since they combined tax revenue with borrowing, and “ordinary” with “extraordinary” budgets. Even though all factors in the estimates were in motion owing to inflation and lost revenue, these were the terms in which the discussions were conducted. M. Fridman, “Finansovaia reforma v Rossii,” Vestnik finansov, 8–10 (1916). For dismissals of the fiscal argument for the income tax by the prime minister, the minister of finances, and most supporters and opponents in the State Duma and Council, see Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 7, 11.VIII.1915, col. 645; Stenograficheskii otchet. Gosudarstvennyi sovet (1916), cols. 83–180, 184–202. 84 All of these dimensions are summarized by Posnikov in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 7, 11.VIII.1915, cols. 560–76, and meeting 8, col. 667; accusations of government fiscal inaction by Skobelev on col. 652.

396  Notes to pages 191–4 85 Motovilov in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 7, 11.VIII.1915, col. 632. 86 Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 7, 11.VIII.1915g., col. 607. 87 RGIA, f.1158, op.1, d.3, ll.575–575ob. 88 Michelson, “Revenue and Expenditure,” 202–3; Vestnik finansov, 21 (1916), 292. 89 Markov in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 7, 11.VIII.1915, cols. 642–3. 90 Rech’, 23 November 1914. 91 Vestnik finansov, 29 (19 July 1915), 93ff. Incomes in kind were addressed in articles 87–8 of Vestnik finansov, and described in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 8, 14.VIII.1915, cols. 760–2. 92 In extended speeches before the Duma: Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 7, 11.VIII.1915. 93 Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 8, 13.VIII.1915, cols. 673–4. 94 Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 7, 11.VIII.1915, col. 585; and meeting 8, cols. 680–1; Stenograficheskii otchet. Gosudarstvennyi sovet (1916), cols. 83 ff. All estimates are notional, since the numbers would only become clear in the process of assessment. 95 See Bark’s proposal in RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, l.170. Shchepkin objected in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 7, 11.VIII.1915, col. 636, as did Posnikov on col. 667. For calculations see Michelson, “Revenue and Expenditure,” 172–3; and Duma and State Council exchanges in RGIA, f.1158, op.1, d.3, ll.326–9, 710–19. 96 Markov 1 in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 7, 11.VIII.1915, col. 643. 97 Pokrovskii, “O podokhodnom naloge,” 47–8; repeated verbatim to a meeting of tax inspectors in Vladimir in December 1916: RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.4487, l.15. See Bark’s similar statements in Stenograficheskii otchet. Gosudarstvennyi sovet, cols. 83–8. 98 Pokrovskii, “O podokhdnom naloge,” 46. 99 M. Bogolepov, “Voina, finansy i narodnoe khoziaistvo,” Vestnik finansov, 36 (7 September 1914), 300–3. 100 Zhurnal zasedanii s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Kievskoi gubernii 3–10 fevralia 1917, 4. 101 RGIA, f.573, op.34, d.310. 102 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.374, ll.57–58ob. 103 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2354, ll.56–8 (1909). On the “discovery” of 1915, f.573, op.20, d.374, l.73. 104 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.373, ll.49–52ob.

Notes to pages 194–9  397 105 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2354, l.46 (Khar’kov); f.571, d.34, l.310 (Petrograd). The earlier by-property and by-income forms are described in Zhurnal noiabr’skoi 1910 goda sessii s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Moskovskoi gubernii (Moscow, 1911), 21–8, 83–6. 106 RGIA, f.1158, op.1, d.3, ll.380–1. 107 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2938 (on the income taxation of war prisoners), 1916–17. 108 The Chinese railways in RGIA, f.573, op.34, d.308 (1917); report from the Russian embassy in Athens in 1910, in RGIA f.573, op.20, d.2354, l.320. 109 RGIA, f.573, op.34, d.309 (on the income assessment of the imperial family), l.15 on Olga. 110 GAVO, f.389, op.1, d.53 (minutes of the meetings of the First Circuit of the Vologda town commission on the assessment of the income tax, 1917–18), l.43; GAVO, f.690, op.1, individual case files in dd. 3, 5, 9. 111 Pervyi Vserossiiskii s”ezd podatnykh inspektorov i ikh pomoshnikov. Moskva, 7–17 avgusta 1917g. Zhurnaly plenarnykh zasedanii s”ezda, 12, 17–24. 112 For year-end results see GARF, f.130, op.2, d.381, ll.24ff. Mid-year results in A.L. Sidorov and A.M. Anfimov, comp., Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii nakanune velikoi oktiabrskoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii. Dokumenty i materialy mart-­oktiabr 1917 g., doc. 556, 416. Overviews in Pogrebinskii, Gosudarstvennye finansy Tsarskoi Rossii; B.B. Rivkin, Finansovaia politika v period velikoi oktiabrskoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii. 113 RGIA, f.560, op.28, d.1223. The provincial yields for August 1917–August 1918 are in RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2925, the all-Russian total on 97–97ob. 114 Speech to the State conference in August 1917, in Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii, docs. 556, 416; Skobelev quoted in V.I. Lenin, “Neminuemaia katastrofa ­i bezmernye obeshchaniia,” PSS, vol. 32, 105–6. 115 Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 50, 59, 71–3, 85. 116 Abramov, Rossiiskoe zemstvo, 21–2. 117 Gurko in Stenograficheskii otchet. Gosudarstvennyi Sovet (1916), col. 236; the Duma’s report in RGIA, f.1158, op.1, d.3, l.38ob. 118 See Kokovtsov’s statements of 1906 in RGIA, f.1276 op.2, d.213, ll.2, 4–5, 21–2. 119 Bark’s memorandum: “K voprosu o prebrazovanii nalogovoi sistemy,” February 1916, 1–7. Reprographic copy in library of RGIA. 120 Bogolepov, “Voina, finansy i narodnoe khoziaistvo,” 300–3. 121 Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 9 (18 February 1914), 6–7. 122 A comparison made by officials of the Department of Assessed Levies in RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.845, and surveyed in 1913 in Departament okladnykh sborov, 1863–1913, 60–100. 123 F.A. Men’kov, “Obzor fiskal’nago zakonodatel’stva glavneishikh Evropeiskikh stran s nachala XX stoletiia,” Novyi ekonomist, 20/30 (27 July 1913) and on Germany in 37/38 (21 September 1913), 7–8.

398  Notes to pages 199–202 124 Lewis Coser, “Primitive Classification Revisited,” Sociological Theory, 6 (1988), 85–­ 90. For more general information see Robert Nisbet, The Sociology of Emile Durkheim. 125 Emy, “The Impact of Financial Policy,” 125. 126 John Towes, “Historicizing Psychoanalysis: Freud in His Time and for Our Time,” Journal of Modern History, 63 (September 1991), 504–45. 127 Emy, “The Impact of Financial Policy,” 119, 123. 128 Ibid., 103–5. 129 On social interests see in particular Emy, “The Impact of Financial Policy,” 113, 117. On the rhetoric of nation that was employed by both advocates and opponents of the French bill, see Say and Chailley-Bert, Nouvelle dictionnaire d’économie politique, 736; Le Temps, 24 and 30 January, and 1 February 1896; Paul Leroy-Beaulieu in Économiste français, 28 March 1896, 285, and 8 February 1896, 162; Owen, “Politics of Tax Reform,” 138ff. On the distinction between nationality and citizenship see Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood. 130 Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 9, dismisses Müller too quickly. 131 For a suggestive discussion of “nation,” state, and society as a plurality of universalisms that characterize western European political thought, see Poggi, “The Modern State,” 349–51. See also Jessop’s discussion of the state, including the suggestion that human relations can be analysed in a variety of universal categories. Jessop, State Theory, 5. 132 Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity,’” Theory and Society, 29 (2000), 16. 133 This phrase is used repeatedly. RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, l.24ob; f.1158, op.1, d.3, ll.68, 326–329ob; f.573, op.34, d.300, ll.35ob–36ob, 38ob–39ob, 76–76ob. 134 Kokovtsov in RGIA, f.1276, op.2, d.213, ll.2–4. 135 Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 1 (December 1910), 13–15. 136 Ozerov, “Vozmozhno-li vvesti podokhodnyi nalog,” 33–4. 137 Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, ch.1; Peter Holquist, “La société contre l’État, la société conduisant l’État: La société cultivée et le pouvoir d’État en Russie, 1914–1921,” Le mouvement social, 196 (July–September 2001), 21–40. 138 Sabine, History of Income Tax, 154–5. 139 Bruce K. Murray, The People’s Budget, 1909–10: Lloyd George and Liberal Politics. Similar issues were implicit in the German case. Witt, “Tax Policies, Tax Assessment, and Inflation”; Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich, “The Modernization of the Tax System in the First World War and the Great Inflation, 1914–1923,” in Wealth and Taxation in Central Europe: The History and Sociology of Public Finances, ed. Peter-Christian Witt. On the dissolution of particular interests into the national economy, see Charles Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy; and Brownlee, Federal Taxation.

Notes to pages 202–10  399 140 Quotes from Asquith and Lloyd George in Sabine, History of Income Tax, 146–7, 154–5; quote from Smith in Whiting, “Taxation and the Working Class,” 896, and Shehab, Progressive Taxation, 258–9. Echoes were heard in Russia, RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2354, ll.362ff. 141 Emy, “The Impact of Financial Policy,” 126. 7. Everyone and No One: Indirect Taxes and the Vodka Monopoly to 1917 1 On the Stolypin reforms as social reform see Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906–1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation; Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize; Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward, ch. 3. On economic reform as social reform, see T.M. Kitanina, Khlebnaia torgovlia Rossii v 1875–1914; Volodin, Istoriia fabrichnoi inspektsii; Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward, chs. 2 and 4; Peter Holquist, “‘In Accord with State Interests and the People’s Wishes’: The Technocratic Ideology of Imperial Russia’s Resettlement Administration,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (Spring 2010), 151–79. 2 A kind of cigarette that is half cardboard tubing and half paper tubing filled with tobacco. 3 E. Kun, “Opyt sravnitel’nago izsledovaniia nalogovogo bremeni v Rossii i drugikh glavneishikh gosudarstv Evropy,” Vestnik finansov, 3–4 (1913); see the Cabinet’s 1907 report to the Duma in RGIA, f560, op.26, d.634, l.220, which arrives at a ratio of 5:1, versus 2:1 in Britain; Michelson, “Revenue and Expenditure,” 148; Bowman, “Russia’s First Income Taxes,” 257–8, n8; Anfimov, “Nalogi i zemel’nye platezhi krest’ian Evropeiskoi Rossii,” 504. 4 Sidorov and Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii, 41. 5 See Sinadino’s eloquent comments in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia iii, meeting 20, 20.XI.1909, cols. 2258–66; and Baron Cherkasov’s in meeting 21, 23.XI.1909, cols. 2283–6. 6 V.I. Lenin, “K derevenskoi bednote,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol.7, 171–2. 7 Patricia Herlihy, The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia; Christian, Living Water; John Hutchinson, “Science, Politics, and the Alcohol Problem in Post-1905 Russia,” Slavonic and East European Review, 58, no. 2 (April 1980), 232; Kate Transchel, Under the Influence: Working-Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia 1895–1932; Laura Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle: Drink and Worker Culture in St Petersburg, 1900–1929. 8 Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 15. 9 Asquith and Lloyd George in Sabine, History of Income Taxes, 146–7, 154–5; Smith in Whiting, “Taxation and the Working Class,” 896; Shehab, Progressive Taxation, 258–9. These sentiments were echoed in Russia, RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2354, ll.362ff.

400  Notes to pages 211–15 10 An intellectual history of the national economy has yet to be written. Aspects of its emergence are noted in chapter 4 of the present book and in Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward, 36–8. 11 Wcislo, Tales of Imperial Russia, 157–65. 12 A healthy debate has flourished between Plaggenborg, who holds that excises cannot by definition be a form of over-taxation, and Hoch, who cites rational choice and the possibility that consumer choices may have been seen as necessities by the buyers. Plaggenborg, “Who Paid for the Industrialization of Russia?”; Stephen Hoch, “On Good Numbers and Bad: Malthus, Population Trends and Peasant Standard of Living in Late Imperial Russia,” Slavic Review 53, no. 1 (Spring 1994), 41–75. 13 With an interesting review of the issue in V.I. Lenin, “Nekriticheskaia kritika. Po povodu stat’i g-na Skvortsova ‘Tovarnyi fetishizm’ v No.12 Nauchnago obozreniia za 1899g.,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3, 611–36. 14 Novyi ekonomist, 21 (1913); Pravda, 7 June 1913. 15 For this I rely on Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia, and borrow his expansive understanding of liberalism in a wider vision of degeneration and perfectibility. 16 One side of a nature-nurture divide that Herlihy identifies in Alcoholic Empire, 38ff. 17 Stepanov, Bunge, 245. 18 He laid out this policy in 1892 and followed it faithfully: in RGIA, f.560, op.26, d.66: “Konspekt programy i obzora deiatel’nosti Ministerstva Finansov v 1892 g. i v posleduiushchikh godakh,” ll.25ob–26; Wcislo, Tales of Imperial Russia, 154–5, 167. 19 Simonova, “Otmena krugovoi poruki,” 163, 168; Plaggenborg, “Who Paid for the Industrialization of Russia?” 197–8. 20 Transchel, Under the Influence. 21 Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 41. 22 Otchet Glavnago upravleniia neokladnykh sborov i kazennoi prodazhi pitei za 1897 g., 66–9. 23 As he stated repeatedly: Simonova, “Otmena krugovoi poruki,” 163–4, 168. 24 Jacob Metzer, “Railroad Development and Market Integration: The Case of Tsarist Russia,” Journal of Economic History 34, no. 3 (September 1974), 529–50. 25 This was summarized with reference to the government and legislative attitudes since 1905 by Posnikov in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 7, 7.XI.1915, cols. 560–70. 26 Witte assumed that equal taxes were fair taxes: RGIA, f.560, op.26, d.66, l.26. 27 Shchepkin in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia iii, meeting 20, 20.XI.1909, col. 2267. 28 RGIA, f.560, op.26, d.634: Guiding principles of the reform of state revenue, ll.62–4.

Notes to pages 215–20  401 29 Discussed at a conference of treasury directors in 1882: RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394, l.18ob. 30 Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov 1915, 33. 31 M.I. Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol.2, 84–8. 32 Kazennaia prodazha vina, 13, 15. 33 Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 108–9; Kazennaia prodazha vina, 6–8. 34 Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 145. 35 On beer, porter, and mead see N.G. Pozdniakov, P. Komov, V. Likin, and P. Mavrikev, Pivovarenie i pivotorgovlia v Rossii s drevneishikh vremen do nastoishikh dnei: Materialy po istorii pivovareniia i pivotorgovli, 1, 5–7, 9–10; on fruit and grape wines and distillates see N.G. Pozdniakov, P. Komov, V. Likin, and P. Mavrikev, Pravila i instruktsiia o fruktovo- i vinogradonochnom i kon’iachnom proizvodstve, 7–15. 36 Otchet glavnago upravleniia neokladnykh sborov … za 1897 g., 100–2; Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 107ff; M.I. Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol.2, 177–85. 37 David Christian, “Prohibition in Russia, 1914–1925,” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 9 (1995), 97, table 1; Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, appendix 12. 38 Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 154–5. 39 Jonathan Grant, Big Business in Russia: The Putilov Company in Late Imperial Russia, 1868–1917. 40 Theodore von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia, 34. 41 Kitanina, Khlebnaia torgovlia Rossii; Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward, ch. 2. 42 Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 33–4. At issue was the grain trade. Witte, who had announced in the early 1890s that the state would stay out of the grain trade, introduced a massive campaign of state prices and purchases, beginning with supplies to the army. Kitanina, Khlebnaia torgovlia Rossii, pt. 2, ch. 2. 43 A.V. Peshekhonov, Ekonomicheskaia politika samoderzhaviia: Tsentralizatsiia ekonomicheskoi vlasti. 44 Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 111–12. 45 Kazennaia prodazha vina, 17. 46 Ibid., 179; Kartkii ocherk, 111–12. 47 Kazennaia prodazha vina, 17 and 179n; Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol. 2, 186. 48 Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol. 2, 76. 49 Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 131–4. Since there was no health ministry, this aspect came under Internal Affairs. 50 Ibid., and 136–7. 51 Roland T. Ely, “Cuba and Sugar: Four Centuries of Evolution,” Caribbean Studies 3, no. 7 (October 1967), 65–76. Ely gives useful attention to other colonies and the world market. 52 Benjamin Taylor, “The Brussels Sugar Convention,” The North American Review 190, no. 646 (September 1909), 347–58.

402  Notes to pages 220–4 53 Ocherk zakonodatel’stva po aktsizu s sakhara v Rossii, 1–9, 11–12. 54 Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, appendix 12. 55 Policy outlined in Otchet Glavnago upravleniia neokladnykh sborov … za 1897 g., 46–7; results in Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 235. 56 Kratkii ocherk, 108–9, 111–12; Kazennaia prodazha vina, 6–8. 57 Few seemed to have believed that Witte really cared about sobriety. Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol. 2, 491–3. 58 Wcislo, Tales of Imperial Russia. 59 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity, chs. 3–5. 60 Transchel frames this attitude as the “tippling theory,” which was common earlier in the nineteenth century. It was associated with free trade, since it was believed greater availability would lead to steadiness. Under the Influence, ch. 3. 61 S.A. Pervushin, Vliianie urozhaev v sviazi s drugimi ekonomicheskimi faktorami na petreblenie spirtnykh napitkov v Rossii, 181. 62 Witte to the State Council, 1893, in Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol. 2, 150–3. 63 Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia iv, meeting 45, 26.I.1911, col. 682; Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 16. 64 On the medical disagreements see Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, ch. 3. 65 K.K. Tolstoy, “Potreblenie alkogolia kak predmet nauchnykh issledovanii,” appendix 3 to Kazennaia prodazha vina. 66 N.O. Osipov, “Opyt issledovaniia vliianiia alkogolia na cheloveka,” Appendix 2 to Kazannaia prodazha vina, separate pagination: 79–80. 67 “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” Justice Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964). The issue was obscenity in Les Amants. 68 Deputy Bulat in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia iv, meeting 48, 21.I.1911, col. 919; Kazennaia prodazha vina, 196–7. 69 Mark Schrad compares per capita figures from a wide variety of sources, all of which find an increase after 1900. Mark Schrad, “The Prohibition Option: Transnational Temperance and National Policymaking in Russia, Sweden, and the United States,” 294, fig. 6.1. See also Hutchinson, “Science, Politics, and the Alcohol Problem,” 232; Anfimov, “Nalogi i zemel’nye platezhi,” 494; N.O. Osipov, “Istoricheskii ocherk vliianiia piteinykh sborov v Rossii,” appendix 1 to Kazennaia prodazha vina. 70 Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 6–7. Cf. Christian, “Prohibition in Russia,” 98–9. 71 Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol. 2, 86; Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 6–7.

Notes to pages 224–8  403 72 John Hutchinson, “Medicine, Morality, and Social Policy in Imperial Russia: The Early Years of the Alcoholism Commission,” Histoire Sociale / Social History 7 (1974): 219; Hutchinson, “Science, Politics, and the Alcohol Problem,” 235. 73 Otchet glavnago upravleniia neokladnykh sborov … za 1896, pt. 2, 50–1. 74 Hutchinson, “Medicine, Morality, and Social Policy,” 216. 75 The historical literature is split on the issue, understandably given the sources. Laura Phillips gives a thoughtful critique of the link between alcoholism and urbanization, while Transchel offers an impressive narrative of drinking as a movement from tradition to modernization. Herlihy emphasizes that the medical – hence individual – explanations were becoming more common by century’s end. Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle; Transchel, Under the Influence; Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire. 76 Pervushin, Vliianie urozhaev, 137–49. 77 V.K. Dmitriev, Kriticheskie issledovaniia o potreblenii alkogolia v Rossii. 78 Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol. 2, 79–80. 79 Analyzed in Pervushin, Vliianie urozhaev, 150–2. 80 Pervushin, Vliianie Urozhaev, 137–49; Pervushin cites Shcherbina on 170 and Osipov on 152–3. F.A. Shcherbina, Krest’ianskie biudzhety; S.N. Prokopovich, “Biudzhety peterburgskikh rabochikh,” Poznanie Rossii, 2 (1909). 81 Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol.2, 446–8. 82 Ibid., figures on 450–7, anecdotes on 457–9. Transchel’s effort to systematize peasant and worker habit (Under the Influence, 14–21, 26–8) leads in the same direction – a lot of drinking, any time. The stereotype remained in force long after the empire: John Bushnell, “Urban Leisure Culture in Post-Stalin Russia: Stability as a Social Problem?” in Terry L. Thompson and Richard Sheldon, eds, Soviet Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Vera S. Dunham, 58–86. 83 Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia iv, meeting 48, 29.I.1911, col. 944. 84 B.N.Mironov, Blagosostoianie naseleniia i revoliutsii v imperskoi Rossii, 324; Anfimov, “Nalogi i zemel’nye platezhi,” 502; Statisticheskii ezhegodnik Rossii. 1914., pt 12, 15. 85 Dmitriev, Kriticheskie issledovaniia, 446–8. On his thinking more generally, see Barnett, A History of Russian Economic Thought, 68–70. 86 S.A. Pervushin, Opyt teorii massovago alkogolizma v sviazi s teoriei potrebnosti. K voprosu o postroenii teorii alkogolizma, kak massovago iavleniia, 87–91. 87 Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol. 2, 449–53. The contradicting studies are cited on 453–6. 88 Otchet glavnago upravleniia neokladnykh sborov … za 1897 g., 102–3. 89 Kazennaia prodazha, 22, 187–96. 90 Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, ch. 6; Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle, and Transchel, Under the Influence, have a keen eye for gender, be it the presence of women in a ritual or their absence from a tavern.

404  Notes to pages 228–231 91 Kazennaia prodazha vina, 9–10. 92 Pervushin, Vliianie urozhaev, 180–3. 93 The urban tavern is the subject of Laura Phillips, “Everyday Life in Revolutionary Russia: Working-Class Drinking in Taverns in St Petersburg, 1900–1929,” the laws on 140ff. 94 Beer, Renovating Russia. 95 Pervushin, Vliianie urozhaev, 153n1. 96 Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol. 2, 446. 97 Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, ch. 4; Schrad, “The Prohibition Option,” 293–6; Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation. 98 Baron Cherkasov in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia iv, meeting 45, 28.I.1911, col. 648; Transchel, Under the Influence, 35–6. 99 As Herlihy amply demonstrates in Alcoholic Empire, 38–9. 100 Pervushin, Vliianie urozhaev, 152–3, n.1; Kazennaia prodazha, 199. 101 Hutchinson, “Science, Medicine, and the Alcohol Problem,” 252. 102 Christian, “Prohibition in Russia,” 90. The rumour seems to have originated with Kokovtsov: Out of My Past: The Memoirs of Count Kokovtsov, chs. 33–4. 103 Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St Petersburg, 1900–1913; Stephen P. Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856–1914, 21; and specifically with regard to alcohol and 1905 in W. Arthur McKee, “Taming the Green Serpent: Alcoholism, Autocracy, and Russian Society, 1881–1914,” ch. 11; and Schrad, “The Prohibition Option,” 296. 104 On hypnosis see Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 44–7. 105 I focus here on movements that were financed by the state’s vodka monopoly, but there were others. Patricia Herlihy examines church, lay, and women’s movements in “Strategies of Sobriety: Temperance Movements in Russia, 1880–1914,” Kennan Institute Occasional Papers, 1990, and Alcoholic Empire, chs. 2, 4–6. See also W. Arthur McKee, “Sobering Up the Soul of the People: The Politics of Popular Temperance in Late Imperial Russia,” Russian Review 58, no. 2 (April 1999), 212–33. 106 Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia iv, meeting 42, 21.I.1911, col. 279. 107 Hutchinson, “Medicine, Morality, and Social Policy,” 210. 108 Popechitel’stva o narodnoi trezvosti v 1910 g., 7–8. Herlihy’s figures are different but comparable, Alcoholic Empire, 16–17. 109 Popechitel’stva o narodnoi trezvosti v 1908 g. 110 Popechitel’stva o narodnoi trezvosti v 1910 g., 11–12. 111 Popechitel’stva o narodnoi trezvosti v 1908 g., part 1: St Petersburg. 112 Ibid., 2, 6–7. On elite attendance at the productions see Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 19.

Notes to pages 231–5  405 113 Joseph Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia: Science, Patriotism, and Civil Society. 114 Fridman, Vinnaia monopoliia, vol. 2, 491–3. 115 Kratkii ocherk 50-letiia, 148–52. 116 Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 18, 22. 117 Pervushin, Opyt teorii massovago alkogolizma. 118 Much of this is outlined in Hutchinson, “Medicine, Morality, and Social Policy,” and “Science, Medicine, and the Alcohol Problem,” as well as Pervushin, Opyt teorii massogago alkogolizma, 90–1. All of these points came up in the deliberations of the Third Duma and its commissions. See the culminating debate in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia iv, meeting 42, 21.I.1911. 119 Pervushin, Opyt teorii massovago alkogolizma, 91. 120 Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia iv, meeting 42, 21.I.1911, cols. 279ff. 121 Indeed, save a curtailment of hours and a change in the capacity of vodka bottles, doing nothing was precisely what the government recommended and the Duma produced in 1911, after three years of debate. The ministry, for its part, simply published the inconclusive and contradictory studies. 122 Hutchinson, “Science, Medicine, and the Alcohol Problem,” 248. 123 Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia iv, meeting 42, 21.I.1911, cols. 279–354. Bottle sizes were to be reduced to under one-twentieth of a bucket. 124 Schrad, “The Prohibition Option,” 315–17. 125 Kokovtsov believed that the vodka monopoly was the main factor in his dismissal and thought that Rasputin was one of the people behind it. However, he tended to think that almost everyone was his enemy. Kokovtsov, Out of My Past, chs. 33–4. 126 Peter L. Bark, “Memoirs,” Bakhmeteff Manuscript Collection, Columbia University, chapters paginated separately: ch. 4, pp. 20–2, 26–8; ch. 5, pp. 8–9, 11–16. 127 Herlihy, Alcoholic Empire, 51. 128 For a recent summary of war-time finances see Peter Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History, ch. 6. 129 Christian, “Prohibition in Russia,” 113–15; Transchel, Under the Influence, 70–1. 130 Christian, “Prohibition in Russia,” 95–7; Transchel, Under the Influence, 70ff. 131 Christian, “Prohibition in Russia,” 91–2. 132 Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia iv, meeting 42, 21.I.1911, cols. 303–54, and 43, 2.I.1911, cols. 363–444. 133 Hutchinson, “Science, Medicine, and the Alcohol Problem,” 234–6.

406  Notes to pages 235–8 134 This was already happening before the war, and in some areas plants worked day and night to supply the boot-leggers. Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia iv, meeting 43, 22.I.1911, cols. 456–9. 135 Those contrasting constitutional contexts are discussed in Schrad, “The Prohibition Option,” 8 136 Michelson, “Revenue and Expenditure,” 187. 137 Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 7, 11.VIII.1915, col. 557. 138 Barnett, A History of Russian Economic Thought, 80–4. 139 M.N. Sobolev, “Perestroika finansovoi sistemy Rossii v sviazi s vvedeniem podokhodnago i poimushchestvennago nalogov,” in V.Ia. Zheleznov, ed., Voprosy finansovoi reformy v Rossii, 2–5. 140 Michelson, “Revenue and Expenditure,” 190, 212. 141 Z.S. Katsenelenbaum, Obestsenenie rublia i perspektivy denezhnago obrashcheniia. Katsenelenbaum’s calculations extend into 1918. Michael W. Bernatzky, “Monetary Policy.” 142 Paul N. Apostol, “Credit Operations,” in Russian Public Finance during the War, ed. Alexander Michelson, Paul N. Apostol, and Michael W. Bernatzky, 288–320. 143 Bark, “Memoirs,” ch. 5, pp. 11–16; ch. 10, pp. 8–14; Schrad, “The Prohibition Option,” 321n161. 144 Kokovtsov, Out of My Past: The Memoirs of Count Kokovtsev, ed. H.H. Fisher, 473. 8. The Peasant and the Fisc: The State Budget and the Persistence of Collective Tax Apportionment 1 And there were no plans for it to do so: Witte to Alexander III in 1892: RGIA, f.560, op.26, d.66, ll.27ob–28. 2 For example, Carol Leonard, Agrarian Reform in Russia: The Road from Serfdom, 50. 3 A brilliant dissection of the historiography of the peasantry is Andrey Karagodin, “Velikorusskii Pakhar’ at the Global Village: Comparing Methods and Approaches in Western and Russian Historiographies of the Post-Emancipation Russian Peasantry,” Revolutionary Russia 15, no. 2 (December 2002), 136–62. A good summary and refutation of the impoverishment thesis is Paul R. Gregory, Before Command: An Economic History of Russia from Emancipation to the First FiveYear Plan (Princeton, 1994), ch. 3. 4 D.A. Timiriazev, “Kratkii obzor deiatel’nosti Ministerstva Finansov za dvadtsatipiatiletie s 1855 po 1880g,” Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, vyp. XI, appendix, 3, 6–8; and comparable figures for 1864 in Simonova, “Otmena krugovoi poruki,” 184. The numbers include poll taxes and quit-rent (obrok).

Notes to pages 238–42  407 5 Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, vyp. 1900 g., 58–9, 122–3; Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, vyp. 1915 g., 94–5, 101. Anfimov’s figures for 1912 are close at 11 million rubles for the land tax on peasants: “Nalogi i zemel’nye platezhi krest’ian,” 492. According to separate figures, given by Anfimov on page 493, another 2.3 million rubles might be the peasant share of the land tax on private arable bought outside the allotment system; they cannot be used here because they are from a different statistical series – see page 502. 6 Pravilova, Finansy imperii, 196. These numbers are tentative since many Polish provinces were taxed by different systems, but the disproportion seems quite clear. 7 Predominantly rural taxes are identified in Departament okladnykh sborov, 67, with the numbers for 1913 in Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, vyp 1915 g., 95–7. If one were to follow Wheatcroft’s different calculation, apparently of the fifty provinces of European Russia for which he uses a different series, the trend would be comparable; peasant direct tax payments to the state fell to 23.4 million rubles in 1909 from around 111.0 million rubles in 1895. Wheatcroft, “Crises and Conditions,” 160, table 4-12. 8 Abramov, Rossiiskoe zemstvo, 22. 9 Wheatcroft, “Crises and Conditions,” 157–8, n18, and tables 4-11 and 4-15. 10 Anfimov, “Nalogi i zemel’nye platezhi krest’ian,” 502. 11 Ibid., 491. 12 Plaggenborg, “Tax Policy and the Question of Peasant Poverty,” 65. His numbers for all tax payments do not include the redemption payments, which were soon abolished. Hoch’s estimates of indirect taxes are quite different but aim to make the same point that peasant payments were low relative to their share of the population: Hoch, “On Good Numbers and Bad,” n.21. Wheatcroft does not try to differentiate between urban and rural consumption and instead uses regional data on indirect tax receipts – a questionable approach since taxes were usually collected from the plants, not the stores, and any region with many of the plants would seem to be consuming more; vodka outlets served whole regions and likewise did not differentiate between rural and urban consumption. Wheatcroft, “Crises and Conditions,” 159–61. Mironov offers similar estimates for the period of 1901–12: Blagosostoianie naseleniia, 324. Anfimov uses simple per capita rates and assumes that urban and rural populations consumed exactly the same amounts per capita: “Nalogi i zemel’nye platezhi krest’ian,” 493–7. 13 The outcry surrounding the unfair taxation of Poland almost always concerned land taxes. The urban properties tax was applied to Poland in 1910 by the same methods as to the rest of the empire but (following a procedural scandal in the Duma) was assessed at a higher rate, 10 per cent instead of 6 per cent of net income. Pravilova, Finansy imperii, 186–96. The much larger taxes on businesses and capital were assessed in the same manner and at the same rates across the territories.

408  Notes to pages 243–8 14 Plaggenborg, “Who Paid for the Industrialization of Russia?” 205. 15 Brzheskii, Natural’nye povinnosti, 18–19. 16 N. Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka sel’skikh obshchestv: Istorikokriticheskii obzor deistvuiushchago zakonodatel’stva, v sviazi s praktikoiu krest’ianskago podatnogo dela, 10–11, 13; F.G. Terner, Gosudartsvo i zemlevladenie, pt. 1. 17 This was well summarized in the Duma debate of 1908, where all sides agreed that the state land tax should at least be equal per acre to what the gentry paid. Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia ii, meeting 16, 17.XI.1908, cols. 1296–8. 18 Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 63. 19 Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 213–16; report of Viatka Treasury Office, September 1882, in RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394; on the redemptions, Hoch, “The Great Reformers,” 274. 20 The poll tax was abolished in Siberia for all populations in 1907. 21 According to 1913 figures this tax contributed to 44 per cent of zemstvo revenue. On their size, methods of evaluation, and repartition see Abramov, Rossiiskoe zemstvo, 15, 18, 21–3. 22 Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 63–7, and my chapter 2 herein. 23 The subject of Hoch, “The Great Reformers,” 247–75. See also Stepanov, Bunge, 128; Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 68; Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 189; Departament okladnykh sborov, 40–61. 24 This produced a large published work in two volumes that were and are widely cited: Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok; and using those materials, Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka. 25 Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 163. 26 Wcilso, Tales of Imperial Russia, 167–8. 27 Terner, Svedeniia o pozemel’nom naloge, 174–5. 28 Ministerstvo finansov 1802–1902, pt. 1, 1–3. 29 Brzheskii, Natural’nyia pivinnosti, 23, 68; Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 185–8. 30 Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 327. 31 Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 24–35 (Vologda), 17 (Olonets), 120 (Kherson); on the wild fluctuations in sizes see Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 219–24. 32 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 129. 33 On the law and its practice before and after 1899 see B. Assonov, comp., Rukovodstvo dlia krest’ianskikh obshchestv, volostnykh starshin i sel’skikh starost po vzimaniiu okladnykh sborov; Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 38–9, 69–71, 121–30, 158–9; Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 327. Meetings of the Nizhnyi Novgorod inspectors in 1897 and 1913 made the identical observation: that they

Notes to pages 248–50  409 could not visit peasant tax payers. Zhurnaly zasedniia s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Nizhegorodskoi gubernii v 1897 g., 19–23, and Zhurnaly I. Soedinennago s”ezda po krest’ianskomu podatnomu delu II. S”ezd podatnykh inspektorov Nizhegorodskoi gubernii 9–18 dekabria 1913 goda, 54–6. For similar observations expressed at other congresses of tax inspectors see Zhurnal noiabr’skoi 1910 goda sessii s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Moskovskoi gubernii; Zhurnaly zasedanii I: soedinennago s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov i zemskikh nachal’nikov Simbirskoi gubernii 17–19 noiabria 1908 g. II: S”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Simbirskoi gubernii 20–23 noiabria 1908 g.; Zhurnal s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Vladimirskoi gubernii 4 i 6 dekabria 1916 goda; and Zhurnal zasedanii s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Priamurskago kraia 17go dekabria 1916 goda. 34 S. Iu. Witte, Zapiska po krestianskomu delu predsedatelia vysochaishe utverzhdennago Osobago Soveshchaniia o nuzhdakh selskokhoziaistvennoi promyshlennosti, 69–70. 35 Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia iv, meeting 141, 28.V.1912, cols. 2693–4. 36 Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 356. 37 Abramov, Rossiiskoe zemstvo, 18–19. 38 Kolotinskaia, Pravovye osnovy zemel’nogo kadastra, 108–12, 115; K. Lovatskii, “Pokrytie raskhodov Evropeiskoi voiny i finansovyia problemy blizhaishago dnia,” Ekonomicheskoe obozrenie 1 (Sept–Oct 1916), 41–2; Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 65–6 and note. 39 Hoch, “The Great Reformers,” 250. 40 Deliberated in RGIA, f.573, op.18, d.27333, ll.461ob–462, 602–606ob. Genzel’ made a similar effort in 1900. Genzel’, “Kratkoe issledovanie,” 55. On the problem of peasant incomes see, Stepanov, Bunge, 136; Plaggenborg, “Tax Policy and the Question of Peasant Poverty,” 68n17. 41 David R. Darrow, “Statistics and ‘Sufficiency’: Toward an Intellectual History of Russia’s Rural Crisis,” Continuity and Change 17, no. 1, (2002), 63–96. Subsistence had framed state policy since Emancipation: Hoch, “The Great Reformers,” esp. 247. 42 Revived and extended by Todor Shanin in a series of works, most notably The Awkward Class. 43 Prokopovich, “Opyt ischisleniia narodnago dokhoda Rossii”; S.N. Prokopoovich, Opyt ischisleniia narodnago dokhoda 50 gubernii Evropeiskoi Rossii v 1900–1913. 44 Gregory used the 1906 estimate of the Ministry of Finances. Before Command, 34–5. 45 Anfimov is therefore careful and conditional about his conclusions in “Nalogi i zemel’nye platezhi krest’ian,” 503, and Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 110ff; Mironov is less so in Blagosostoianie naseleniia, 326–7. 46 For a genealogy of a fact – that peasants paid 6 per cent of their income on taxes – start with Leonard, Agrarian Reform, 50, who cites Gregory, Before Command, 53,

410  Notes to pages 250–5 who cites Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 110, who cites Prokopovich’s 1918 study. Anfimov candidly states (109–11) that he was using Prokopovich highly conditionally and for lack of any reliable data whatsoever. 47 Witte’s comments to the State Council of 30 December 1902: Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 44. 48 Bokhanov, “Vopros o podokhodnom naloge,” 282. 49 Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv II, vol.2, col. 1048. On the Emancipation see Hoch, “The Great Reformers,” 260. 50 Duma materials in RGIA, f.1278, op.2, d.3213; Vestnik finansov 16 (19 April 1915): 99–101. 51 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 50–1; as reported by the Treasury Offices in 1882 in RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394; Anan’ich, “K istorii otmeny,” 184–5; Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 66–7, 85. 52 Simonova, “Otmena krugovoi poruki.” 53 Ibid., 162. 54 RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394, ll.106, 111ob–112, 116. 55 The District Congress of Peasant Affairs was an ex-officio body of non-peasants who oversaw all aspects of peasant government. They usually did very little and left fiscal matters to the inspectors and land captains. 56 The Department of Assessed Levies’ proposal for an inspectorate, 1884: RGIA, f.1149, op.10, d.22, ll.35ob–37; Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 225–6. 57 Tolstoy to Bunge, RGIA, f.1149, op.10, d.22, ll.11–23. 58 Wcislo, Reforming Rural Russia, ch. 3, on their inception; Gaudin, Ruling Peasants, ch. 2, on their practices. 59 Gaudin, Ruling Peasants, 16–17. 60 Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 219–21. 61 On the uniformity of collective responsibility see Assonov, Rukovodstvo dlia krest’ianskikh obshchestv, 32–3. 62 Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 219. 63 Ibid., 194–7 and ch. 5; Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 2, 6–8, 20. 64 As in Chernigov where the elders did it all: Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 2, 20ff. 65 Ibid., pt. 1, 3, 12, 24, 42–5, 79–82, 119–31; pt. 2, 3–8, 10–12, 79–82. 66 Ibid., pt. 1, 13–14, 20, 22–3; pt. 2, 96–7, 101–3. 67 Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, 1899, 80. 68 As the Ministry of Finances established in the 1880s: Anan’ich, “K istorii otmeny,” 184–5. 69 Stepanov, Bunge, 127–8. 70 Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 4; Ministerstvo Finansov 1802–1902, pt. 2, 122–3. 71 Simonova, “Bor’ba techenii,” 77.

Notes to pages 255–60  411 72 In the Cabinet: RGIA, f.573, op.2, d.213, l.5. 73 RGIA, f.560, op.22 (1898), d.215: materials drafted in response to Nicolas’s query about peasant taxation. 74 Ozerov, “Vozmozhno-li vvesti,” 33–4, 47. 75 Simonova, “Otmena krugovoi poruki,” 184–5. 9. The Local Practices of Peasant Taxation 1 In Siberia, Archangel province, the Don, and the steppe provinces the repeal was completed in October 1906. Turkestan and the Transcaucasus were to follow. 2 A point made definitively in Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court. 3 V.O. Palechek, comp., Instruktsiia o primenenii Polozheniia 23 iiunia 1899g. o poriadke vzimaniia okladnykh sborov s nadenl’ykh zemel’ sel’skikh obshchestv i vysochaishe utverzhdennago 12 marta 1903 goda mneniia Gosudarstvennago Soveta ob otmene krugovoi poruki krest’ian po uplate okladnykh sborov. A year later the Duma Finance Commission agreed with the Ministry of Finances, reluctantly, that the hands-on administration had to remain with the peasant elders while inspectors would only supervise. Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv II, sessiia v, meeting 141, 28.V.1912, cols. 2688–90 4 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 158–9. 5 This flexibility was introduced gradually after the 1860s: Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 174–84. It was generalized after 1903: Palechek, comp., Instruktsiia o primenenii Polozheniia 23 iiunia 1899 g. On its practice in Nizhnyi Novgorod in 1913 see Zhurnaly I. Soedinennago s”ezda. 6 Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 238. 7 GAVO, f.393, op.1, 40 (unnamed file on the gathering of information on peasant tax-collection practices by the inspector, 1893). 8 Two works rely on these reports and summarize the practices: Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, ch. 5; and Simonova, “Otmena krugovoi poruki,” 170–1. 9 Zhurnaly zasedniia s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Nizhegorodskoi gubernii (1897), 80–4; Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, vol. 1, 1–4 (St Petersburg), 42–5 (Samara). 10 Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 165; Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 2, 48, 62. 11 Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, vol. 1, 1–2, 4–6, 8–9, 17, 22, 42–5, 62, 71, 101, 119–31; vol. 2, 6–8. 12 Ibid.,vol. 1, 4–5, and 101; Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 173, 213–17. 13 Zhurnaly zesedaniia s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Nizhegorodskoi gubernii (1897), 19–23, 80–4.

412  Notes to pages 260–3 14 Palechek, comp. Instruktsiia o primenenii polozheniia 23 iiunia 1899 g (1910), art. 8, 3. 15 Zhurnaly I. Soedinennago s”ezda po krest’ianskomu podatnomu delu (Nizhnyi Novgorod, 1913), 7–14, 29. 16 Palechek, comp., Instruktsiia o primenenii polozheniia 23 iiunia 1899 g (1910), art. 27, 8, and art. 34, 9. 17 GAVO, f.393, op.1, d.519 (repartitional acts of Kandikov district), ll.129–42, 147–51. 18 Zhurnaly I. Soedinennago s”ezda po krest’ianskomu podatnomu delu (1908), 4–6, 9, 12–17. 19 Ibid., 28–9. 20 The Stolypin reforms allowed peasants to separate their land into consolidated homesteads (khutora) or at least consolidated farmland without a house on it (otruba), but the most common practice was to take out title of the land (ukreplenie) without consolidating it. 21 Zhurnaly I. Soedinennago s”ezda po krest’ianskomu podatnomu delu (1913), 37–40. 22 Ibid., 39. 23 “Neotchuzhdaemost’ krest’ianskikh nadelov,” 287. The distinction between individual and private was meaningful: Kotsonis, “The Problem of the Individual in the Stolypin Reforms.” 24 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 127, Ministerstvo finansov, 1802–1902, pt. 2, 468–9. 25 Stephen Hoch, “On Good Numbers and Bad,” 41–2; and on taxes themselves being ruinous see Gregory, Before Command, 52–4. 26 Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia, 40, and a local example in Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 68–73. 27 Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 57; Ministerstvo Finansov, 1802–1902, pt. 2, 122–3. 28 The flaws are identified in Stephen Hoch, “Did Russia’s Emancipated Serfs Really Pay Too Much for Too Little Land? Statistical Anomalies and Long-Tailed Distributions,” Slavic Review 63, no. 2 (Summer 2004), 247–74; and Darrow, “Statistics and ‘Sufficiency.’” 29 Korelin, Dvorianstvo v poreformennoi Rossii, 254–84; Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order, pt. 1. 30 Summarized in Esther Kingston-Mann, Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution. 31 Richard G. Robbins, Famine in Russia, 1891–1892: The Imperial Government Responds to a Crisis. 32 Plaggenborg, “Who Paid for the Industrialization of Russia?” 96–7; Plaggenborg, “Tax Policy and the Question of Peasant Poverty,” 59–61. 33 Witte said this in his debates with Minister of Internal Affairs Pleve. Simonova, “Bor’ba techenii,” 77.

Notes to pages 264–7  413 34 Though I.D. Koval’chenko and L.V. Milov did comment on the difficulty of describing global patterns for any purposes: Vserossiiskii agrarnyi rynok XVII–nachalo XX veka, 257–82. 35 Gerschenkron, “Russia: Agrarian Policies and Industrialization, 1861–1917”; Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime. 36 The most systematic is Hoch, “On Good Numbers and Bad,” 44–8. 37 Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, 1899, 96–7. 38 On the practices and role of the kaznacheistva see RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394, 69–73ob. On the order of tax payment in the accounting practices see Brzheskii, Natural’nye povinnosti, 18; and as it evolved after 1903, see Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia i, col. 1217–18. 39 Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov (1899), 96–7; Hoch, “On Good Numbers and Bad,” 44. 40 Ibid., vyp. XI, appendix, 86–8; Anan’ich, “K istorii otmeny,” 190; Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 58. 41 Stepanov, Bunge, 127–8; Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 85. 42 This was still practised in 1913: Zhurnaly I. Soedinennago s”ezda po krest’ianskomu podatnomu delu, 42. 43 Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov, vyp 1914 g., 94–5; Finansovyi otdel Kansteliarii Gosudartvennoi Dumy, Svod dannykh o postepennom postuplenii obyknovennykh gosudarstvennykh dokhodov s 1900g. po 1914g. i 8 mesiatsev 1915 g., 211. 44 Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 68–73. 45 Ibid., pt. 1, 4, 22–3; Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 219 and ch. 6. 46 Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 2, 10–11, 14, 22–3; Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 96–100. 47 This was the case in Novgorod: Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 14. Wheatcroft finds a correlation between downturns and harvest failures, which Hoch challenges (“On Good Numbers and Bad,” 48–53), but Wheatcroft also accepts that arrears went up in good years (“Crises and Conditions,” 167). Plaggenborg finds that arrears persisted even as the tax bills went down. Plaggenborg, “Who Paid for the Industrialization of Russia?” 199, and “Tax Policy and the Question of Peasant Poverty,” 62. 48 This was reported almost across the board by inspectors in 1893, as can be seen throughout Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok. 49 As the treasury directors in 1882, reporting to Bunge: RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3393. 50 Palechek, Instruktsiia o primenenii polozheniia 23 iiunia 1899 g., art. 15, 5. 51 This was stated well by Baron Cherkasov in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia iii, meeting 21, 23.XI.1909, col. 2284. 52 Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 2, 6. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., pt. 1, 50, and materials on Voronezh and Saratov.

414  Notes to pages 267–73 55 Ibid., pt. 1, 29 (Vologda), 120 (Kherson); vol. 2, 20 (Chernigov). 56 Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 162ff; with a typical comment in Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 131. 57 Zhurnaly I. Soedinennago s”ezda po krest’ianskomu podatnomu delu, 24–5. 58 Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 61–2. 59 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 75–7, 127–30, 159; Simonova, “Otmena krugovoi poruki,” 167–8. 60 Anan’ich, “K istorii otmeny,” 192–6; Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 4. 61 Stepanov, Bunge, 129; Anan’ich, “K istorii otmeny,” 184–5. 62 Simonova, “Otmena krugovoi poruki,” who cites Pravitel’stvennyi vestnik, 1 (1900). 63 Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 55–6; Ezhegodnik Ministerstva Finansov vyp XI (1881), 9; Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 75–7. 64 Mironov, Blagosostoianie naseleniia, 328. 65 Simonova, “Otmena krugovoi poruki,” 167–8, 177. 66 Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 48, 50. 67 Ibid., pt. 1, 68. 68 Zhurnaly I. Soedinennago s”ezda po krest’ianskomu podatnomu delu, 12, 59–80, gives a discussion of village and county accounting methods. 69 GAVO, f.390, op.1, d.67: requests of peasants of Sychevskaia county on eliminating their arrears (1908), ll.38–43. 70 Ibid., ll.44–49. 71 Ibid., d.64: on tax arrears in Valtanovskaia county, 1907–8. 72 GAVO, f.393, op.1, d.519, 1910, l.17. 73 Ibid., d.65, l.28; there is similar correspondence in d.64. 74 Zhurnaly I. Soedinennago s”ezda po krest’ianskomu podatnomu delu, 23–7, 56, 58. 75 Ibid., 7–14, 17, 19, 29. 76 The ways a county or rural society could punish are summarized in Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 189–93. On the punishments initiated by the police see ibid., ch. 7. See a summary of the laws in Simonova, “Otmena krugovoi poruki,” 172–5. 77 Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 94. 78 Zhurnaly zasedniia s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Nizhegorodskoi gubernii v 1897 g., 80–4. 79 Ministerstvo Finansov, 1802–1902, pt. 2, 122–3; Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 128. 80 This was the main point of Brzheskii’s classic Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka. His writings were excerpted and cited widely within the government. See for example “Materialy peresmotra uzakonenii o vzimanii okladnykh sborov: Krugovaia poruka v suzhdeniiakh redaktionnykh komissii i Glavnago komiteta. Zapiska vitsedirektora DOS N.K. Brzheskago” [1903], in the library of RGIA. 81 Ministerstvo Finansov, 1802–1902, pt. 2, 122–3.

Notes to pages 273–9  415 82 Vestnik finansov, 21 (1902), 324–7; and “Neotchuzhdaemost’ krest’ianskikh ­nadelov,” Pravo 3 (1908), 154–62, and 5 (1908), 280–7. 83 For the regulation see Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, xi, n.1; for the local practice see Zhurnaly I. Soedinennago s”ezda po krest’ianskomu podatnomu delu (1913), 46–9. 84 Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 6–7, 21, 48, 52, 119; pt. 2, 8. 85 Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 93. Wheatcroft cites these same figures to show that coercive measures were consistently harsh in the 1890s, but the figures show a sharp decline: “Crises and Condition,” 169. 86 Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 2, 12, 48. 87 Zhurnaly I. Soedinennago s”ezda po krest’ianskomu podatnomu delu, 48. 88 Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 6. 89 Ibid., pt. 1, 2–3. 90 Ibid., pt. 1, 41. This was an outcome of the crude system of allotments from the 1860s: Hoch, “The Great Reformers,” 262. 91 Palechek, Instruktsiia o primenenii polozheniia 23 iiunia 1899 g, art.144, 36. 92 Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 92–3. 93 “Neotchuzhdaemost’,” Pravo 3 (1908), 158. 94 This is described graphically for Viatka and Perm’ in Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 35–48. 95 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 127; Rukovodstvo dlia krest’ianskikh obshchestv, 27. 96 Anfimov’, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 92–3, table 12 for the period 1891–4, and 102–3, table 14, for the year 1900. On the methods of reapportionment see Terner, Vospominaniia, 320; Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 97; Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 2. 97 Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 2, 10–11, 41; Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 97. 98 Ibid., pt. 1, 48. 99 Palechek, Instruktsiia o primenenii polozheniia 23 iiunia 1899 g., art. 122, 31. The overall process is described in arts. 112–31. 100 Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 44, 48, 66, 119. 101 Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 98–9. 102 Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 39–40. 103 Ibid., pt. 1, 38–40. 104 Corinne Gaudin, Ruling Peasants: Village and State in Late Imperial Russia. 105 Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 90. 106 Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 2, 6. 107 Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 68; Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 113–15.

416  Notes to pages 279–85 108 Bunge, “Ob izmenenii iuridicheskikh otnoshenii,” 64–5; Terner, Gosudarstvo i zemlevladenie, pt. 1, 288; also Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 192; Hoch, “The Great Reformers,” 249. 109 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 49. 110 Stephen P. Frank, “Emancipation and the Birch: The Perpetuation of Corporal Punishment in Rural Russia, 1861–1907,” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 45 (1997), 410–16, and Jeffrey Burds, Peasant Dreams and Market Politics: Labor Migration and the Russian Village, 1861–1905, 77–80. 111 Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 3, 38; Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 193; RGIA, f20, op.4, d.3394, ll.116ob–117. 112 Frank, “Emancipation and the Birch,” 403–4. 113 Frieden, Russian Physicians. 114 The contrasting views in Burds, Peasant Dreams, 79; Frank, “Emancipation and the Birch,” 412; Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court, 15–16. 115 Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia v, meeting 141, 28.V.1912, col. 2689. 116 Schrader, Languages of the Lash, 151–4. Burds makes a similar point: Peasant Dreams, 77. 117 As treasury directors observed in the 1880s: RGIA, f.20, op.4, d.3394. 118 Frank, “Emancipation and the Birch,” 405. 119 Burbank found no original source for the claim: Russian Peasants Go to Court, 15–16. 120 Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 39. 121 Burds, Peasant Dreams, 77. 122 As Brzheskii concluded in his summary of these reports: Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 195; and Witte’s agreement cited in Simonova, “Otmena krugovoi poruki,” 173–4. 123 RGIA. f.573, op.20, d.2354, l.175. 124 Rovinskii, Podatnaia inspektsiia, 68. 125 This and other examples in Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 8, 11, 68, 131. 126 Ibid., pt. 1, 68–73. 127 Ibid., pt. 1, 4, 8, 21, 24; Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 256. 128 Sushchestvuiushchii poriadok, pt. 1, 38–40. 129 Ibid., pt. 2, 19–20. 130 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2354, ll.158–161ob. 131 Zhurnaly I. Soedinennago s”ezda po krest’ianskomu podatnomu delu (1913), 29. 132 Ibid., 24 and 27 on the nature of the data; 58–9 on the high arrears in the face of a good harvest. 133 Ibid., 30–3, 34–6, 46–9.

Notes to pages 285–90  417 134 V.G. Chernukha, “Pasport v Rossiiskoi Imperii: Nabliudeniia nad zakonodatel’stvom,” Istoricheskie Zapiski, 4, no. 122 (2001), 91–131; Krizis samoderzhaviia, 67–8; Sushchestvuiushchi poriadok, pt. 1, 2–3. 135 Brzheskii, Natural’nye povinnosti krest’ian, 83–4. 136 Ibid., 91. 137 Anfimov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, 132. 138 Brzheskii, Natural’nye povinnosti krest’ian, 23; Brzheskii, Nedoimochnost’ i krugovaia poruka, 185–8. 139 Brzheskii, Natural’nye povinnosti krest’ian, 36–7, 46, 51–2. 140 Ibid., 36, 78n1. 141 Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv III, sessiia ii, meeting 16, 17.XI.1908, cols. 1297–306. 142 Brzheskii, Natural’nye povinnosti krest’ian, 22. 143 Ibid., 37–8. 144 Ibid., 85–7. 145 Bogolepov, “Voina, finansy i narodnoe khoziaistvo,” 302–3. 146 Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 7, 11.VIII.1915, cols. 591–4. 147 Ibid., meeting 8, 13.VII.1915, col. 663. 148 Rech’, 23 November 1914. 149 Bogolepov, “Voina, finansy i narodnoe khoziaistvo,” 303–4. 150 Schremmer, “Taxation and Public Finance,” 394–5. In the 1950s Israel exempted farmers from some of the provisions of income taxation and then resorted to tables, that is, broad norms for defining an income that could not actually be assessed. Likhovski, “‘Training in Citizenship,’” 675–6. 151 Bark in Stenograficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy, sozyv IV, sessiia iv, meeting 7, 7.VIII.1915, cols. 585–6. 152 Zhurnal zasedanii s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Kievskoi gubernii 3–10 fevralia 1917 g., 4–5; and from Petrograd in January 1917: RGIA, f.573, op.34, d.310, ll.13–14ob. 153 Pervyi Vserossiiskii s”ezd podatnykh inspektorov, 10. 154 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2354, ll.43–46ob (minutes of Khar’kov congress of inspectors). 155 RGIA, f.573, op.34, d.310, ll.13–14ob. 156 Zhurnal zasedanii s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Kievskoi gubernii, 55–8. 157 RGIA, f.23, op.9, d.366, ll.40–1. 158 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.34, ll.21–23ob; Zhurnal zasedanii s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Priamurskago kraia, 62–7. 159 Alessandro Stanziani, L’économie en révolution: Le cas russe, 1870–1930, 155–8 and ch. 7 passim.

418  Notes to pages 291–6 1 60 Lih, Bread and Authority, 86. 161 Ibid., 7, 16, 27–8. On the faith in economic management as it evolved during and after the war, see Peter Holquist, “What’s So Revolutionary about the Russian Revolution?” in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed. David L. Hoffman and Yanni Kotsonis, 87–111. 162 Lih, Bread and Authority, 36. 163 Ibid., 49–51; Taisia Mikhailovna Kitanina, Voina, khleb i revoliutsiia: Prodovol’stvennyi vopros v Rossii 1914–Oktiabr’ 1917g., 254–64. 164 Lih, Bread and Authority, 30, 50–1. 165 Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921, 96; Kitanina, Voina, khleb i revoliutsiia, 310; Stanziani, L’économie en revolution, 198–204. 166 Holquist, “‘Information Is the Alpha and the Omega’”; and with regard to food supply, Holquist, “What’s So Revolutionary about the Russian Revolution?,” 101. 10. Soviet Russia and the Continuing History of the Russian State 1 The clearest case in point is the work of E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution: 1917–1923, or William Chamberlin’s The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921, where one is in awe of the research and the narrative sweep and left wanting more engagement of the Bolsheviks’ larger ambitions and assumptions. 2 A contest to make 1917 entirely new is narrated in Frederick Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution; and stated broadly in Stephen Kotkin, “1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytic Frameworks,” Journal of Modern History 70 (June 1998), 397. 3 For an emphasis on ideas as the distinctiveness of the Soviet Union, as distinct from reality, and at that an eloquent and intelligent one, see Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy, which casts the USSR as an ideocracy. The term and the effort to lay the blame for Stalinism at Marx’s door traces to Karl Popper in particular. See Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, 23. 4 I register my admiration and disagreement with one such approach in “The Ideology of Martin Malia,” and direct the reader to Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 45. 5 A history outlined well in Barnett, A History of Russian Economic Thought, esp. the introduction and chs. 3–4; discussed in this book in chapter 1. 6 With lessons to be learned from the historiography of the French Revolution that extends before 1789 and past it: Isser Woloch, The New Regime, which draws attention to the exaggerated claims of revolutionaries, and Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution.

Notes to page 296  419 7 Aleksandr Chaianov, for one, took time off from agrarian economics during war communism to pen his utopian fiction, Journey of My Brother Aleksei to the Land of Peasant Utopia. An English-language edition can be found in The Russian Peasant, 1920 and 1984, ed. R.E.F. Smith. Then again it is arguable that a lot of economics were and are utopian and fictional. 8 As demonstrated in Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Britain. Poovey asks, among other things, how and when economic thought that was once a form of philosophy, prose, and fiction became a matter of numbers and fact, certainly in the nineteenth century. Her own mixed genre is felicitous. Keynes had made a similar observation but the opposite point in his dismissal of the laissez-faire economists of France and Britain as mere philosophers and publicists. Keynes, The End of Laissez Faire. 9 Compare the approach of Richard Pipes, in Russia under the Old Regime, The Russian Revolution, and Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, where he sees regime change as a seizure of power; and that of Baker, Condorcet, which studies the problem of its transformation. 10 Three works stand out for their effort to locate common characteristics across the chronological and spatial boundaries: Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, which is often provocative in useful ways; Lih, Bread and Authority, though the focus is decidedly Soviet and Russian; and Holquist, “‘Information Is the Alpha and Omega,’” in which a body of research backs serious interpretation on both comparative planes. 11 This continuity is explicit in such classic works as Von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? A Reappraisal of the Russian Revolution, 1900–1930. It is most often implicit, as in R.W. Davies, ed., From Tsarism to the New Economic Policy. The book contains some of the best works of economic history on that period and question, and it conveys very well the assumption that the economy is a stable category over time, with a state that pursued some of the same goals under two regimes, for example taxation, industrialization, and higher agricultural output. Two works on war communism in the countryside make the case that the system was geared towards seizing resources first and foremost. V.V. Kabanov, Krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo v usloviiakh “Voennogo Kommunizma”; Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921. 12 The argument is often explicit, most notably in the works of Richard Pipes who holds that coercion and police measures were endemic to Russian rule whatever the nature of the regime. Russia under the Old Regime, esp. 57, 316–18. E.P. Gimpel’son concludes that there was little difference between imperial and Soviet approaches to government, including revenue, since they were both based on coercion: Formirovanie sovetskoi politicheskoi systemy, 1917–1923 gg., 39. See also the nuanced but similar argument of S.V. Leonov, Rozhdenie sovetskoi imperii:

420  Notes to pages 296–7 Gosudarstvo i ideologiia, 1917–1922. Political arguments for continuity are more often implicit, embedded in the very choice of political repression as a subject of inquiry. Good examples among too many are George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police; and Orlando Figes, The People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924, which is also an argument for continuity over the boundary of 1917 by positing a constant people subject to the power of a constant state. The same is true of Jonathan Daly’s review article, “The Security Services in Imperial and Soviet Russia,” Kritika 4, no. 4 (2003), esp. 973. A different rendering holds that one or another social category, usually the peasantry, was more or less unchanging and faced greater or lesser degrees of violence from governments that were fundamentally predatory. Kabanov, Krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo. 13 Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, which is an argument for the relative autonomy of the revolutionary state, and uses Russia as one of its case studies; and Scott, Seeing Like a State, which makes the case that alien visions of change were superimposed by modern “muscle-bound” states on their populations, and also uses Russia as one of its case studies. 14 A case made best in James Heinzen’s study of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture of the RSFSR: Inventing a Soviet Countryside: State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917–1929, chs. 1–2; and George Yaney in The Urge to Mobilize. For another example of the Soviet continuity of imperial experts see Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. 15 In 1922, 65 per cent of the inspectors were imperial hold-overs. The Council of People’s Commissars declared tax inspectors to be “shock workers” in 1921, meaning that they had priority for rations. Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, Nalogi. Sbornik dekretov, instruktsii i tsirkuliarov za 1921–1922 gg., 23–7. In places all the inspectors were retained from before 1917: RGAE, f.7733, op.40, d.200, esp. ll.128–42, 313–14; and d.715, ll.70–1, 72–4, which shows that this had been the case before 1921 as well. On the 1921 drafting and rations see f.7733, op.1, d.6983, l.203. On the retention of personnel in general, and the unusually high rate at the Commissariat of Finances, see M.P. Iroshnikov, Predsedatel’ Soveta Narodnykh Komissarov Vl. Ulianov (Lenin): Ocherki gos. deiatel’nosti v 1917–1918gg., pt. 2, ch. 1. 16 See for example Nikolai Nikolaevich Kutler’s employment record: RGAE, f.7733, op.18, d.4745; and Pavel Nikolaevich in d.4747; Pavel Pavlovich in d.4746; Konstantin Nikolaevich in d.4744. See also one of many gatherings in the 1920s where the older specialists were brought together to devise new policies: RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6821, “On Rent Assessment, 1923–24.” 17 And demanded the greater use of coercion to extract resources: Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution, 102–4. 18 A.V. Peshekhonov, Pochemu ia ne emigriroval?

Notes to pages 297–8  421 19 Stuart Finkel, On The Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere, 219–20 and note 317n27. 20 Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union; Pipes, The Russian Revolution and Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919–1924. 21 A tradition inaugurated by the duo of American anarcho-socialists who were exiled by the U.S. government to Soviet Russia: Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further Disillusionment in Russia; and Alexander Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth. 22 In Levi, Of Rule and Revenue, 6. 23 Wheatcroft’s many and excellent quantitative studies are cases in point, though there is no book to point to. 24 Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism; Katerina Clark, St Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution. 25 Ekaterina Pravilova, in the epilogue to A Public Empire: Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia, notes that there is surprisingly little published of an interpretative nature that concerns nationalization and its constitutional implications. Any good study of the economy after 1917 will speak of industrial nationalization and the nationalization of agricultural land, though little on urban real estate; less explicit is the larger political and legal context that this created. See Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918– 1921. On the nationalization of urban real estate see Hubertus Jahn, “Housing Revolution in Petrograd, 1917–1920,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 38, no. 2 (1990), 212–27. See also Kotkin, “1991 and the Russian Revolution,” 424, who shares Malia’s point that the destruction of the market and private property was the prerequisite of the Soviet system and perhaps its main attribute. 26 Part of this story is treated historically by Kharkhordin who considers the state as actor in place of, or in the name of, its citizens and draws on Bourdieu’s notion of the state as metonymy. “What Is the State? The Russian Concept of Gosudarstvo in the European Context,” History and Theory 40, no. 2 (May 2001), 206–40, esp. 239. 27 The overviews of the debates in Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, chs. 3 and 5, are still excellent. The same is true of Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers and Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study in Collectivization. Stephen Cohen casts a long shadow over anything concerning the 1920s, and rightly so. He looks to the NEP as a model of mixed economies and moderate socialism, and rightly and polemically proposes that socialism could have taken a form different from Stalinism: Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938. But the mixed economy was a matter of debate rather than a constitutional foundation, and we may consider why this period of relative tolerance was always under threat and ended quite easily in 1929.

422  Notes to pages 298–300 28 Narrated in a historiography that holds out many suggestions that a version different from Stalinism might or should have prevailed. For the political argument, besides Cohen, see Samuel Farber, Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy; for the cultural argument see Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution; and for the economic argument see Holland Hunter and Janusz M. Szyrmer, “Testing Early Soviet Economic Alternatives,” Slavic Review 50, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 253–67. An excellent unpacking of some of the economic and political issues is Mark Harrison, “Why Did NEP Fail?” Economics of Planning 16, no. 2 (1980): 57–67. 29 Alan M. Ball, Russia’s Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921–1929; Nove, An Economic History, ch. 6. Both make the point that private enterprise was a tenuous proposition throughout the 1920s and was subject to periodic squeezes and repression, up to and including arrests. For an overview of the fluctuations and reversals in Soviet economic policy, see R.W. Davies, Mark Harrison, and S.G. Wheatcroft, ed., The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945. 30 For violence as a constant that defied ideological differences see Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. 31 Lenin, Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia, vol. 33 of Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., ch. 5, 97, 101. 32 Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenyi Preobrazhenskii, Azbuka kommunizma. Populiarnoe ob”iasnenie programmy Rossiiskoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii Bol’shevikov, ch. 3, art. 24, 61–3. 33 Bukharin, Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda, 140–4, 146. 34 For Lenin, government “is reduced to the extraordinarily simple operations which any literate person can perform, of supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and issuing the appropriate receipts.” Gosudarsvto i revoliutsiia, ch. 5, 97. As Rigby points out, creating a bureaucracy was a main preoccupation of the Bolsheviks: T.H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom, 1917–1922, 14. 35 Lenin again, about a year later, calling for “merciless repressions” in Penza province: “Hang (I mean hang publicly so that the people see it) no fewer than 100 kulaks, rich people, and bloodsuckers … Do this so that for a hundred miles around the people will see it, understand it, tremble, and cry out: we are killing and we will kill the bloodthirsty kulaks … Yours, Lenin. P.S. Find tougher people.” From “Hanging Order, 1 and 2,” Library of Congress facsimile of handwritten draft of telegram, August 1918, www.webcitation.org/688s4tzaw. 36 Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, 12, 15, 20. See also Pierre Bourdieu’s rendering of the state’s duality in Acts of Resistance, ch. 1. All these authors draw usefully on Gramsci’s distinction between the “integral state” and the “state in the narrow sense.”

Notes to pages 300–2  423 37 In this light, the exile of specialists in the early 1920s should be seen as exceptions, a mopping-up following the Civil War and a clean slate for the upcoming mixed economy of NEP. Finkel, On the Ideological Front. In later years one could be deprived of some civic rights but not of citizenship: Golfo Alexopoulos, “Soviet Citizenship, More or Less: Rights, Emotions, and States of Civic Belonging,” Kritika 7, no. 3 (2006): 487–528. Eric Lohr points out that denaturalization gave way to a policy of keeping citizens in the country: Russian Citizenship, ch. 6. 38 Bukharin and Preobrazhenskii, Azbukha kommunizma, ch. 6: compare 133 with 142–3. 39 Nikolai Berdiaev, “Chelovek i klass,” Narodopravstvo 20, no. 8 (January 1918), 2–4. 40 Zhurnal s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Kazanskoi gubernii, sostoiavshegosia 7–14 marta 1918 goda (novyi stil’) (Kazan’, 1918), 11–13, 24, 54–7, 62–3. 41 On some of these nuances of citizenship in Russia, which fingers the problem of coerced consent, see Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925, 15–17. 42 By way of example see “Special Issue on Recasting Citizenship,” ed. Hanagan and Tilly, which does not in fact recast citizenship. 43 Poggi, “The Modern State and the Idea of Progress,” 349, 354. 44 A view expressed in still relevant works: Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy; Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union; Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled. 45 As Poulantzas notes in his disagreement with Althusser, the state was not simply repression, since “the state also functions in a positive fashion, creating, transforming and making reality.” State, Power, Socialism, 30. 46 A method applied in Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. 47 Extrapolated from Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. For different but compatible views of state belonging in Soviet times see Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on the Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin, which emphasizes the personal and all-consuming drive to self-fashion within official criteria, mainly Marxism-Leninism as such; and Robert Edelman, Spartak Moscow: A History of the People’s Team in the Workers’ State, which emphasizes the many spaces for self-representation and social solidarity that were possible in the very same period. 48 David Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939. 49 Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain; and generally, Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance. 50 Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution; David Hoffmann, “European Modernity and Soviet Socialism,” in Russian Modernity, ed. Hoffmann and Kotsonis. 51 Steinmetz, Regulating the Social; Somers, “Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere”; Beer, Renovating Russia.

424  Notes to pages 302–3 52 Daunton, “Payment and Participation.” 53 This view is still with us in Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class Consciousness and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia, with an unproductive hostility to Marxism in any shape or form: see my review in Revolutionary Russia 15, no. 1 (2002), 116–19. 54 A comparative point made in connection with Italian fascism in Mabel Berezin, “Political Belonging: Emotion, Nation, and Identity in Fascist Italy,” in State/ Culture, ed. Steinmetz, 361–2. A western (non-fascist, non-Communist) perspective in Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, introduction. On modern “top-to-bottom” visions of the state that perhaps inadvertently use the words of Lenin (Respublika sovetov snizu doverkhu) see Poggi, “The Modern State and the Idea of Progress,” 347. 55 A genre too large to cite at length. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, is easily the more anxiety ridden, as are Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, and Judith Williamson’s “the illusion of choice” in Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising; and a more policy-driven and hopeful John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State. A somewhat sanguine version – call it “fun with capitalism” – is Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, with a pithy definition on 345–6; and a more dead-pan David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, where postmodernity is on a spectrum with modernity; a quizzical Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, where modern oppression and social oppositions give way to rootlessness in an unbounded space; and the more playful Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality. 56 Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review I/100 (1976), 5–78. 57 For an intelligent dismantling of the term that finds it more or less useless see Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, ch. 5. One might return to the distinction between modernity as an analytic tool and modernization as a teleological model. 58 A refrain in Barnett, A History of Russian Economic Thought; see for example on Struve, 54–5. 59 Kitanina, Khlebnaia torgovlia, pt. 2, ch. 2. 60 As the field was invited to do by Lars Lih in Bread and Authority. 61 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 147. 62 All belligerents during the First World War turned to state management of the economy, but only the USSR maintained it as a peacetime form of government as well: Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution. In Britain, Labour would try to do so for a brief period after the Second World War. 63 Margaret Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights.

Notes to pages 304–8  425 64 The refrain of Pravilova, A Public Empire. 65 Cf. Malia, The Soviet Tragedy, which holds that socialism anywhere was a denial of a market and of capitalism rather than the affirmation of something new. 66 William Rosenberg, “The Problem of Market Relations and the State in Revolutionary Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36, no. 2 (April 1994), 356–96. 67 Pravilova, epilogue to A Public Empire. 68 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia,” Journal of Modern History 65, no. 4 (1993), 745–70. 69 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right.” Marx’s point was that the bureaucracy should not be separate from the population but, in effect, be its synonym. 70 Baker, Condorcet, 214. 71 Cited in Alessandra Tosi, Waiting for Pushkin: Fiction in the Reign of Alexander I (1801–1825), 13. 72 Rosa Luxemburg read the first Soviet constitution in 1918 and thought it confusing because the Bolsheviks called their new regime the rule of one class over others and also a government of and by all citizens. “The Question of Suffrage,” in Russian Revolution and Marxism or Leninism?, 63–6. 73 The jurists at the Commissariat of Justice in 1918 were baffled by the new constitution: “On the one hand there is declared a dictatorship with the end of implementing socialism, and on the other that order is recognized as fully implemented.” Cited in Leonov, Rozhdenie sovetskoi imperii, 197–208. 74 Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, 21–2, referring to the avant-garde in 1919. 11. The Meanings of Utopia: Taxes, Urban Unities, and the Several Assaults on Peasant Separateness, 1917–21 1 Malle, Economic Organization, 155. 2 V.I. Lenin, “Groziashchaia katastrofa i kak s nei borot’sia,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., vol. 34, 163. 3 In 1918, inflation measured about 10 per cent in a good month and over 30 per cent in a bad one. Malle, Economic Organization, 61. 4 Malle, Economic Organization, 50–62 and ch. 5, esp. 275ff; Stanziani, L’économie en révolution, 272–6; with a few early (1920) books on the subject discussed in Barnett, A History of Russian Economic Thought, 96. 5 Rivkin, Finansovaia politika, ch. 5. Recounted in late October 1918 in RGIA, f.130, op.2, d.40, l.113, and discussed historically by Sovnarkom on 21 September 1918 in d.1007, ll.15ob–17. 6 Pravda, 30 November 1912. Well treated in G.L. Mar’iakhin, Ocherki istorii nalogov s naseleniia v SSSRe, 23.

426  Notes to pages 308–10 7 On disclosure to the inspectors, Krestinskii to Sovnarkom, in GARF, f.130, op.2, d.11, ll.137–137ob, and Bogolepov’s report to Sovnarkom on secrecy and the powers of inspectors in d.1007, ll.15ob–17. The public posting of tax payers in Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, Trudy Vserossiskogo s”ezda zeveduiushchikh finotdelami. Raboty sektsii i doklady (Moscow, 1919), 134, 137–8; Rivkin, Finansovaia politika, 167. 8 An evolution described well in V.P. D”iachenko, Istoriia finansov SSSR, 1917– 1950gg., 59–64; with new budget practices described throughout R.W. Davies, The Development of the Soviet Budgetary System. 9 Davies, The Development of the Soviet Budgetary System, 11–13. 10 Lenin, “Neminuemaia katastrofa i bezmernye obeshchaniia,” 105–6. 11 V.I. Lenin, “Uderzhat li Bolsheviki gosudarsvtennuiu vlast’?,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., vol. 34, 287–339. This quote is well treated in Malle, The Economic Organization, 35–6. Barnett has a good discussion of the way in which capitalism would be the foundation for state socialism: A History of Russian Economic Thought, ch. 7. 12 Although the Soviet officials thought that the imperial rate was 95 per cent, not 90. GARF, f.130, op.23, d.1, ll.144–145ob: Sovnarkom decree of 24 November 1917; the decree of 17 July in d.947, l.18. 13 Texts and materials in RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.4485: on assessed taxes and the income tax, April 1918–February 1919. 14 GARF, op.130, d.1: protocol of the meeting of Sovnarkom, 24 November 1917, and the adoption of the report of Bogolepov, ll.145–145ob, 147, and punitive measures on ll.142–3, signed by Lenin, Stalin, Shliapnikov, and Bonch-Bruevich. 15 The complaints about confiscations in GARF, f.393 (Commissariat of Internal Affairs), op.5, d.17, ll.1–396; and f.130, op.2, d.70. The larger debate in Davies, Development of the Soviet Budgetary System, 17–18. 16 GARF, f.130, op.2, d.40 (Decrees of Sovnarkom on financial affairs, January– December 1918), l.57: inter-institutional commission of 20 June 1918. The Commissariat of Internal Affairs asked for rates of taxation of 100 per cent, which was rejected by the Commissariats of Finances and State Control. 17 As in the anonymous report in the files of the Commissariat of State Control, apparently in March 1918: GARF, f.4390, op.1, d.3, ll.139–47: “On the radical restructuring of the tax system in connection with the nationalization of production,” with the quote on l.142. 18 GARF, f.130, op.2, d.381, ll.24–36: Report of Gukovskii on state revenues and expenditures of the republic, January–June 1918. 19 GARF, f.130, op.23, d.1, ll.130–4, 137. 20 E.N. Sokolov, “Chrezvychainyi revoliutsionnyi nalog 1918 goda. Ideia i praktika,” Voprosy istorii, 7 (July 2011), 79–85.

Notes to pages 310–12  427 21 A chaos described in Finansy i narodnoe khoziaistvo. Ezhednevnaia gazeta Komisarriata finansov i SNKh Severnoi obasti, 51 (24 November 1918), 2. 22 D”iachenko, Istoriia finansov, 156–7; Malle, Economic Organization, 168–9; Davies, Development of the Soviet Budgetary System, 14–25. 23 RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2925, ll.97–97ob. 24 GAVO, f.388, op.4, d.4264, ll.78–9: in Vologda province projections of 2.6 million rubles contrasted with a yield of 561,000 rubles in the year ending in June 1919, a shortfall of three-quarters. 25 Narodnyi Kommissariat Finansov, 1917–1921, 43–4; Malle, Economic Organization, 160; D”iachenko, Istoriia finansov, 65–7; Davies, Development of the Soviet Budgetary System, 42–3. 26 Izvestiia Narodnogo Komissariata Finansov, 2 (16 February 1920), 1–4. 27 Malle, Economic Organization, 168–90; D”iachenko, Istoriia finansov, 156–7. Different figures are given in Davies, Development of the Soviet Budgetary System, 31 and table 8. 28 E.A. Preobrazhenskii, Finansy v epokhu diktatury proletariata, 18. 29 Though some were suspended: Izvestiia Narodnogo Komissariata Finansov, December 1919, 15–16. 30 As in VTsIK’s decree of 26 June 1920. 31 GARF, f.130, op.23, d.1, ll.144–7. 32 Lenin, “Doklad na Pervom Vserossiiskom s”ezde predstavitelei finansovykh otdelov sovetov, 18 Maia 1918g,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., vol. 36, 352. 33 From 30 April: GARF, f.130, op.2, d.221, ll.4–4ob. 34 GARF, f.130, op.2, d.9, ll.353–62, Commissariat of Finances to Sovnarkom, 7 July 1918; Sovnarkom’s decree in d.947, ll.1, 18, 19ob, 20–21ob. 35 GARF, f.130, op.2, d.1013, ll.32–40 (Materials submitted to Sovnarkom by the Commissariat of Finances, November 1918). 36 Ongoing concern with the income tax in GARF, f.130, op.2, d.221: Report on the income tax, 30 April–17 December 1918; D”iachenko, Istoriia finansov, 154, citing the Sovnarkom decree of 23 September 1918 on tax declarations; and on small enterprises, 58. 37 Trudy Vserossiiskogo s”ezda zaveduiushchikh finotdelami, 126, 154. 38 Article by S.I. in Izvestiia Narodnogo Komissariata Finansov, 5/6 (3 October 1919), 3. 39 GARF, f.1235, op.93, d.233(b): correspondence of VTsIK with local workers’ organization: ll.179–92. 40 GARF, f.130, op.2, d.222, Correspondence of Finance Commissariat on taxes: l.1; Bogolepov’s response to the railway workers is in d.224, ll.7–7ob. 41 GAVO, f.5, op.1, d.155, on the income tax in Vologda province, January 1919– January 1920, esp. ll.93–6; also d.43.

428  Notes to pages 312–14 42 GAVO, f.388, op.4, d.4267: On appeals for the incorrect collection of the income tax, Vologda province, vol. 2; and f.5, op.1, d.34, protocols of the meetings of the income tax commissions, on appeals of the payers, which lasts into 1920. 43 GARF, f.130, op.2, d.9, ll.348–9: Decree of Sovnarkom on changes to the composition of assessment commissions, 3 August 1918; the logic reported by Bogolepov in d.947, ll.23–8, with an earlier proposal of June to keep one representative from the tax payers on the commissions, later reversed: d.223, ll.1–6, and a March proposal that the commissions be entirely elected, in f.4390, op.1, d.3, ll.137–9, also reversed. 44 GARF, f.130, op.2, d.947, ll.18–21. 45 Preobrazhenskii, Finansy v epokhu diktatury proletariata, esp. 18. 46 Bertrand M. Patenaude, “Peasants into Russians: The Utopian Essence of War Communism,” Russian Review 54, no. 4 (1995), 568–9. 47 Izvestiia Narodnogo Komissariata Finansov, 5/6 (3 October 1919), 3; its implementation discussed at the financial congress in May: Trudy Vtorogo Vserossiiskogo Finansovogo S”ezda, 45; D”iachenko, Istoriia finansov, 56, 58. 48 Trudy Vserossiiskogo s”ezda zaveduiushchikh finotdelami, 134–5, decree of 3 April 1919. The practice in GAVO, f.483, op.1, d.11, report from inspector Novozhilov in Tot’ma district, November 1919: ll.95–6. 49 Nove, An Economic History, 70. 50 V.R., “Reforma priamogo oblozheniia,”Izvestiia Narodnogo komissariata finansov, 3/4 (15 September 1919), 3–4. 51 The law of 26 June 1920 in K.K. Zagorskii, “Nalogovaia politika,” in Ocherednye voprosy finansovoi politiki. Sbornik statei, vol. 2, 57–8; and Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, Sbornik dekretov i rasporiazhenii po finansam, vol.3, 62; circular to provincial financial sections, Izvestiia Narodnogo komissariata finansov, 6/7 (April 1920), 16–17; RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6977, Report by Nikolai Kutler of 10 November 1920, “On the question of the importance of taxes and their organization under current conditions,” ll.26–8. 52 In a project dated 26 February 1921: Zagorskii, “Nalogovaia politika,” 57–8. It is possible the measure was passed: Michael A. Newcity, Taxation in the Soviet Union, 9; Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, Sbornik dekretov i rasporiazhenii po finansam, vol. 3, 62–3. 53 GAVO, f.483, op.1, d.11, On the Assessment of the Income Tax in Vologda province, 1918–1919, ll.10–11, 13–15. 54 Detailed in Kutler’s employment record at the Commissariat of Finances: RGAE, f.7733, op.18, d.4745, ll.1–3. 55 Malle, Economic Organization, 32, 137–9, 142. 56 See Lenin in April 1918: “Ocherednye zadachi sovetskoi vlasti,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., vol. 36, 181–5.

Notes to pages 314–20  429 57 Lenin, Gosudarsvto i revoliutsiia, 97. 58 Lenin, “Doklad na Pervom Vserossiiskom s”ezde predstavitelei finansovykh otdelov sovetov, 18 Maia 1918g.,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., vol. 36, 354. 59 Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, 3. 60 Stanziani, L’économie en révolution, 272–6, referring to the writings of Kritsman, Miliutin, and Larin. 61 Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, trans. Clarence Brown, 168. 62 The working argument of Hellbeck, Revolution on the Mind. 63 Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 220: “it was not necessary to believe. It was necessary, however, to participate as if one believed.” 64 Oleg Kharkhordin, “Reveal and Dissimulate: A Genealogy of Private Life in Soviet Russia,” in Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar, eds, Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy, 333–63. 65 Gatrell, Russia’s First World War. 66 Cited in Nove, An Economic History, 49. 67 Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward, chs. 3–4; Kitanina, Khlebnaia torgovlia; Holquist, Making War, ch. 1. 68 GARF, f.130, op.2, d.255: correspondence of Sovnarkom and the Commissariat of Agriculture on local tax policies, ll.25–25ob. 69 Stanziani, L’économie en révolution, 212–13; Lih, Bread and Authority, 162, 165. Lih notes that the Bolsheviks took over the Menshevik plan of full registration of 1916 and 1917, even as the Mensheviks were disavowing it as impracticable in 1918. 70 Kaganovich in Prodovol’stvennaia politika v svete obshchego khoziaistvennogo stroitel’stva Sovetskoi vlasti. Sbornik materialov. Posobie dlia prodovol’stvennykhagitatsionnykh kursov, organizuemykh Narobrazami soglasno tsirkuliara TsK RKP ot 26/VIII 1920 g., 181–5. On the enduring problem of numbers and statistics into 1920, Stanziani, L’économie en révolution, 212–23. 71 Zhurnal s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Kazanskoi gubernii, 11–13. 72 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.4771 (on land assessments), d. 4773 (on the land tax), ll.37–38ob, 42, 71–71ob, and d.4768; reviewed in Izvestiia Narodnogo Komissariata Finansov, 10 (7 November 1919), 1–2, and 2 (1920), 7. 73 Local deliberations in GAVO, f.5, op.1, d.155, l.4: On the assessment of peasants in 1918 for the income tax; and in f.483, op.1, d.11, ll.9–11. Other reports can be found in Trudy Vserossiiskogo s”ezda zaveduiushchikh finotdelami, 130–9. 74 See the decree of Sovnarkom of 21 January 1919 in GAVO, f.5, op.1, d.155 (On the reorganization of income taxation), l.4; anticipated in Izvestiia Narodnogo Komissariata Finansov, 11 (November 1919). 75 Ekonomicheskaia zhizn’, 45 (29 December 1918). 76 Chutskaev’s report in Trudy Vtorogo Vserossiiskogo Finansovogo S”ezda. Mai, 1919 (iz stenograficheskikh otchetov s”ezda), 28–34.

430  Notes to pages 320–4 77 Izvestiia Narodnogo Komissariata Finansov, 5 (3 April 1920). 78 GAVO, f.5, op.1, d.155, esp. ll.93–96ob. The aftermath can be seen on ll.118–20, 125, 153, and throughout the file for other districts as well. 79 GAVO, f.5, op.1, d.155, l.118. 80 Zhurnal s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Kazanskoi gubernii, 13. 81 GAVO, f.483, op.1, d.11 (December 1918), ll.9–10. 82 Debate in Zhurnal s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Kazanskoi gubernii, 4–10. 83 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.4770, data and reports from the tax inspectors on the harvest and climate by district, 1918. 84 A.P. Kuchkin, Sovetizatsiia kazakhskogo aula; Gregory Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Socialist Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919– 1929; Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia; Mark von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930. 85 Quoted in A.P. Markov, Razverstka i natural’nyi nalog, 17–19, 41; Lih, Bread and Authority, 148. 86 Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 2, 161–3. 87 Lih, Bread and Authority, 178–9, 181. 88 Dekret VTsIK ot 30 oktiabria 1918 g. ob oblozhenii sel’skikh khoziaev natural’nymi nalogami v vide otchisleniia chasti sel’sko-khoziaistvennykh produktov, s prilozheniem instruktsii NKF ot 12 noiabria 1918 g. po primenenii etogo dekreta. 89 Deliberations in RGASPI, f.19, op.1, d.191, ll.30–31ob; RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.4768, ll.1–2, the final draft in d.214, l.54. Rates in Dekret VTsIK ot 30 oktiabria 1918 g., 3, 23–4. 90 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.4768, ll. 8, 26ob–28ob, 43, 51–3. 91 RGASPI, f.19, op.1, d.191, ll.30–31ob (Commissar Krestinskii’s report to Sovnarkom, September 1918); d.211 (minutes of Sovnarkom), ll.1–2; d.214 (minutes of Sovnarkom); RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.4768 (Department of Direct Taxation, correspondence with Sovnarkom), ll.1–3, 8, 26ob–28ob, 43, 51–3; Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, Sbornik dekretov i rasporiazhenii po finansam, 1917–1919, 169; Dekret VTsIK ot 30 oktiabria 1918 g., 3, 23–4. 92 For example, Izvestiia Narodnogo Komissariata po Prodovol’stviiu, 1 (May 1918), 2/3 (May 1918), and 4/5 (May-June 1918) where the lead article rejects the “alldemocratic position.” 93 Dekret VTsIK ot 30 oktiabria 1918 g., 23–6. 94 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.4775: On the tax in kind, ll.3–4; and d.4774, Papers on the tax in kind, ll.3, 184–185ob. Sample form in GAVO, f.5, op.1, d.155, l.39. 95 GAVO, f.5, op.1, d.155, ll.39–39ob, 42. 96 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.4774, ll.3–4, 255–258ob. Russia-wide reports found a flat rate to be widespread and the commissions never formed. L.L. Obolenskii,

Notes to pages 324–7  431

97

98 99

1 00 101 102 1 03 104 105

106 1 07 108 109 110 111

112

113

114 115

“Natural’nyi nalog,” Izvestiia Narodnogo Komissariata Finansov, 7 (18 October 1919), 2; and 9 (31 October 1919). Early drafts by the Commissariat of State Control in August 1918 in GARF, f.130, op.2, d.40, l.98; final draft on ll.137–8; and in f.1235, op.20, d.10, ll.53–6. Overview in Sokolov, “Chrezvychainyi revoliutsionnyi nalog 1918 goda”; yield estimates on p. 86. Izvestiia Narodnogo Komissariata Finansov, 5/6 (3 October 1919), 21. RGAE, f.7733, op.40, d.715: Correspondence with provincial finance sections on the question of instituting the position of tax collectors, June–December 1920, quote on l.22, rejection of hiring collectors on ll.68–68ob. RGIA, f.130, op.2, d.40, l.138. Izvestiia Narodnogo Komissariata Finansov, 2 (16 February 1918), 5–7. Evreinov’s minority opinion of 17 October 1918 in GARF, f.4390 (State Control), op.2, d.27, ll.266–74; Sokolov, “Chrezvychainyi revoliutsionnyi nalog,” 78. Izvestiia Narodnogo Komissariata Finansov, 3 (23 February 1920). Ibid., 11 (November 1919), 6–7. Ibid., 6/7 (April 1920), circular to the provincial finance sections, 20–25 March, 16–17. The 1914 proposal in Vestnik finansov: Bogolepov, “Voina, finansy i narodnoe khoziaistvo,” 303–4. Izvestiia Narodnogo Komissariata Finansov, 3/4 (15 September 1919); 1 (6 January 1920); 2 (1920), 7. Mar’iakhin, Ocherki, 21. As Lunacharskii held: Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual, 190–2. Which in some ways it did: Fitzpatrick, “Ascribing Class.” A point made by V.V. Lozovskii in December 1923 in the Finance Commissariat’s commission on peasant taxes: RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6821, ll.184–5. The loss of the person in Leonov, Rozhdenie sovetskoi imperii, 11; S.N. Bulgakov, “Karl Marks kak religioznyi tip,” in Filosofiia khoziaistva, 315; A.N. Iakovlev, Predislovie. Obval. Posleslovie, 78. The administrative change in RGIA, f.130, op.2, d.40, ll.144–52 (decree of 31 October 1918); Ezhenedel’nik NKF Severnoi oblasti, 7 (24 November 1918), 1–2; Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, 19–22, 75. On the institutional reforms, see Davies, Development of the Soviet Budgetary System, 19ff. Trudy Vserossiskogo s”ezda zaveduiushchikh finotdelami, 15–19, 23–4, 52–3; Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, 1917–1921, 4; Davies, Development of the Soviet Budgetary System, 19. Zhurnal s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Kazanskoi gubernii, 2ff on the debate on paying power, and 11–13, 24, 54–7, 62–3 on the nature of power. A process narrated in Robert Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: A Study in Organisational Change, 1917–1923.

432  Notes to pages 327–30 116 On the hold-over of personnel, see the Finance Commissariat’s report from 1919: RGAE, f.7733, op.40, d.715, ll.70–4; L.L. Obolenskii, “Nashi zadachi,” Izvestiia Narodnogo Komissariata Finansov, 1–2 (September 1919). On the appointments of directors see the Decree of VTsIK of 5 November 1918, in Ezhenedel’nik NKF Severnoi oblasti, no. 7 (24 November 1918), 1–2. In 1919 when the heads of the financial sections and their deputies met for their congress, 183 of 272 delegates were party members who ran the sections or were the deputies. Davies, Development of the Soviet Budgetary System, 19–20. 117 Trudy s”ezda zaveduiushchikh, 134–5, 155–6. Measure decreed in RGAE, f.7733, op.40, d.715, ll.72–4; Davies, Development of the Soviet Budgetary System, 17. 118 This would have required that buying and selling be formal and massive, and it was neither. D”iachenko, Istoriia finansov, 59. 119 See the figures for Vologda province where new waves of peasants were added to the income tax rolls in 1918, but only a quarter of the assessments were actually paid: GAVO, f.388, op.4, d.4264, ll.78–9 and elsewhere. Russia-wide the tax yielded about half of what was expected in the year ending July 1919: RGIA, f.573, op.20, d.2925, ll.97–97ob. 120 Zhurnal s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Kazanskoi gubernii, 50–3. 121 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.4771, ll.1–31, and d.4768. 122 GAVO, f.5, op.1, d.155, ll.95–6, with more reprimands from the finance director. 123 Zhurnal s”ezda podatnykh inspektorov Kazanskoi gubernii, 3, 12–13, 50–3, 62. 124 Izvestiia Narodnogo Komissariata Finansov, 7 (18 October 1919), 1–3. 125 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.4768, ll.26–7. 126 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.4769, l.17–10ob, where the Kaluga tax office is ordered to maintain collections of taxes into December 1919. The central tax office in Moscow had twenty to twenty-five employees left by early 1921. Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, 1917–1921, 78–9. The circular calling for new income tax collections in March 1920 in Izvestiia Narodnogo Komissariata Finansov, 6/7 (April 1920), 16–17. 127 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.4769: On the repartitions of the levies. 128 Malle, Economic Organization, 401. 129 Patenaude, “Peasants into Russians,” 554–7; and Lih, Bread and Authority, 179–80. 130 Lih, Bread and Authority, 202–10. 131 Kaganovich in Prodovol’stvennaia politika, 181–5. 132 N. Osinskii, “Gavnyi nedostatok nashei razverstki,” in Prodovol’stvennaia politika, 189–92. 133 Cf. Gimpel’son, Formirovanie sovetskoi politicheskoi systemy, 39, Leonov, Rozhdenie sovetskoi imperii, 213. 134 With graphic detail supplied in Arthur Delano DuGarm, “Grain and Revolution: Food Supply and Local Government in Tambov, Russia, 1917–1921,” 215–29. And a more moderated narrative of the Antonov uprising in Eric C. Landis, Bandits

Notes to pages 330–5  433

1 35 136 137 138 139 140 141

and Partisans: The Antonov Movement in the Russian Civil War, with a discussion of poison gas attacks on pp. 265–8. All in Patenaude, “Peasants into Russians,” 560–5. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, arts. 323–5, 209–10. Ibid., art. 152, 109. Hegel, Introduction to “The Philosophy of History,” 42. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, art.100, 70–1. Patenaude, “Peasants into Russians,” 562ff. With graphic detail provided in a variety of works: DuGarm, “Grain and Revolution”; Kabanov, Krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo. Documents in Viktor Danilov and L.G. Protasov, eds, Antonovshchina: Krest’ianskoe vosstanie v Tambovskoi gubernii v 1920–1921 gg. Dokumenty, materialy, vospominaniia.

12. The Economy of Licences: Taxes and the New Economic Policy 1 Zagorskii, “Nalogovaia politika,” 57–8. 2 Nove, An Economic History, 133–4. 3 Naum Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties: Names to Be Remembered; Lewin, Political Undercurrents; Alexander Erlich, The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924–1928; Stanziani, L’économie en révolution. 4 Pinnow, Lost to the Collective. 5 Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses, brings together a literature too large to cite here. 6 The fact and its logic were well developed in the meeting on tax reform in 1923, involving among others Ozerov, Genzel’, Pavel Kutler, and Lozovskii: RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6821, ll.182–5. See also Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, Nalogi, 197–8. 7 D”iachenko, Istoriia finansov, 117–18. 8 It did exempt soldiers in service, war invalids, single women with children, and students. RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6980 (Tax policies), ll.50–88; Narodnyi komissariat finansov, Sbornik dekretov i rasporiazhenii po finansam, vol. 5; Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, Nalogi, 197–8. 9 Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov,Vtoraia konferentsiia finotdelov, 1921 g. (28–29 dekabria), 57–8; Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, Soveshchanie finansovykh rabotnikov tsentral’nogo raiona. 9–11 iiunia 1922g. Stenograficheskii otchet, 27 and passim. 10 Employment evaluation of P. Kutler signed by Krzhyzhanovskii in 1927: RGAE, f.7733, op.18, d.4746, l.15. 11 N. Kutler’s description in RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6820, ll.1–3, and his draft proposal that was passed by VTsIK in 1923: RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6818, ll.14–25. The tax described in Obzor raboty Narodnogo Komissariat Finansov za period s 1 oktiabria po 1 aprelia 1925 g., 57–8; D”iachenko, Istoriia finansov, 119–20; and

434  Notes to pages 335–6 good descriptions in English by Franklyn D. Holzman, Soviet Taxation: The Fiscal and Monetary Problems of a Planned Economy, 78–9, and “Income Taxation in the Soviet Union: A Comparative View,” National Tax Journal 11, no. 2 (June 1958), 101–6; Davies, Development of the Soviet Budgetary System, 67–8. The laws and instructions in Narodnyi komissariat iustitsii, Gosudarstvennyi poimushchestvennopodokhodnyi nalog, and Narodnyi komissariat finansov, Gosudarstvennyi podokhodnyi nalog. 12 Pavel Kutler to VTsIK in late 1923 in RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6816, l.20. 13 Instruktsiia o rabote finansovykh inspektorov po nalogam i sboram na 1924/25 god. 14 Obiazannosti domupravlenii po povedeniiu nalogov. Instruktsiia o postanovlenii VTsIK i SNK ot 28 iiulia 1924 g. 15 Details on the local operation of the revised tax in RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6819, ll.224–32, from 1923 and 1924; for 1925, see the report by E.E. in RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6980, ll.40–9. 16 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6818, Summary reports for the RSFSR, as well as provincial reports from Orlov, Leningrad, Voronezh, and Donetsk: ll.10–16. 17 Kutler in RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6820, ll.1–3. 18 A. Tugengol’d, comp., Nalog s nasledsvt i darenii v SSSR. Spravochnik po perekhodu umushchestv v poriadke nasledovaniia i dareniia i po ikh nalogovomu oblozheniiu. Foreword by Genzel’, 2–4. His doctoral dissertation at Moscow University was on this tax: Genzel’, “Nalog s nasledstva. Rech’ na dispute,” 107–12. 19 RGAE, f.3429, op.2, d.779, ll.377–83, People’s Commissariat of Finances to Sovnarkom, 1923. 20 Raboche-krest’ianskaia inspektsiia, Podokhodnyi nalog, s predisloviem i pod obshchei redaktsiei V.V. Kuibysheva, 23–4, 51–3, 55–60, 84. 21 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6819: A.I. Tsyzyrev, “The legal position of the tax payer and administrative court,” ll.149–50. 22 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6818 and d.6819. 23 One local guide excluded income from wages, but it may have meant that wages were taxed at source, not cumulatively at the end of the year. Chto nuzhno znat’ platel’shchikam podokhodno-poimushchestvenogo naloga, 3. The same distinction may have been meant in Narodnyi komissariat finansov, Rukovodstvo dlia pletel’shchikov podokhodno-poimushchestvennogo naloga, s prilozheniem blanka deklaratsii, referring to the 1922 law. 24 December 1922: Narodnyi Komissariat finansov, Instruktsiia o poriadke vzimaniia podokhodno-poimushchestvenogo naloga, 4. 25 Chto nuzhno znat’ platel’shchikam podokhodno-poimushchestvenogo naloga, 1. 26 Obzor raboty Narodnogo Komissariata Finansov, 57. 27 Izvestiia obshchestva finansovykh reform, 1 (December 1910), 4, and 2 (February 1911), 5, 19.

Notes to pages 336–40  435 28 N. Kutler in 1923, “On the reform of the income-property tax,” in RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6816, ll.14–25; Nikolai Kutler in 1921 in RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6978, ll.74–5. 29 F.A. Men’kov, “Raboty v oblasti priamogo i kosvennogo oblozheniia,” in Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, Ocherednye voprosy finansovoi politiki. Sbornik statei, vol. 2, 40–7. 30 Pavel Kutler’s report to VTsIK in November 1923 in RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6816 (on the reform of the income-property tax), ll.14–21. 31 Holzman, Soviet Taxation, 176–8; Davies, Development of the Soviet Budgetary System, 82–3, table 14. Some of the cultural and economic issues are addressed in Neil Weissman, “Prohibition and Alcohol Control in the USSR: The 1920s Campaign against Illegal Spirits,” Soviet Studies 38, no. 3 (July 1986), 349–68. 32 Obzor raboty Narodnogo Komissariat Finansov, 57, 62. A good summary of the rural tax system in the 1920s with attention to its contradictions is Sergei Esikov, Rossiiskaia derevnia v gody NEPa: K voprosu ob al’ternativakh stalinskoi kollektivizatsii (po materialam tsentral’nogo chernozem’ia), 86–107. 33 Saratov gubprodkom, Edinyi sel’skokhoziaistvennyi nalog, 1923–1924 gg., 3–5. 34 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6980, ll.89–90. 35 RGAE, f.3429, op.2, d.779, ll.377–83. 36 RGASPI, f.323, op.2, d.43 (Kamenev’s file), ll.2–3. Similar observations in D”iachenko, Istoriia finansov, 74, 121–2; Davies, Development of the Soviet Budgetary System, 67–8; Holzman, “Income Taxation,” 105–6; Lih, Bread and Authority, 214–15. 37 Which Tracy McDonald finds to be the practice: Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside under Soviet Rule, 1921–1930, ch. 5; as does Esikov, Rossiiskaia derevnia, 86–7; with the procedures described in Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, Sbornik dekretov i rasporiazhenii po finansam, vol. 4, 70–3. 38 McDonald, Face to the Village, 132–3. 39 Lozovskii in December 1923 in RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6821, ll.184–5; Markov, Razverstka, 277–9. 40 Men’kov, “Raboty v oblasti priamogo i kosvennogo oblozheniia.” 41 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6977, ll.26–8. 42 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6821, l.182ob. 43 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6977: N. Kutler, “On the question of the meaning of taxes and their organization in current conditions, 1920,” ll.26–8. 44 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6821, l.182. 45 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6821, l.201. 46 In the confidential evaluation of Pavel Kutler: RGAE, f.7733, op.18, d.4746, l.15. 47 Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, Trudy sel’skokhoziaistvennoi sektsii, ed. N.N. Derevenko and V.I. Rudkovskii, 65–80.

436  Notes to pages 340–3 48 RGAE, f.4372, op.13, d.55: Minutes of meeting of the commission for calculating the tax in kind for 1922–3, held in February 1922, ll.1–3ob; more per-head rates are given in RGAE, f.4372, op.13, d.56: Minutes of the meeting of the Gosplan commission for taxation of agriculture, October–November 1922, esp. l.17. 49 Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, Soveshchanie finansovykh rabotnikov tsentral’nogo raiona, 22. 50 RGAE, f.3429, op.2, d.779, ll.24: Sovnarkom on the tax in kind in the regions of animal husbandry. 51 Saratov gubprodkom, Edinyi sel’skokhoziaistvennyi nalog, 5. 52 GAVO, f.5, op.1, d.155, ll.156ff. 53 Narodnyi Komissariat Finnasov, 1917–1922, 77–8. 54 As in the party publication, Edinyi sel’skokhoziaistvennyi nalog 1924–25g. (material dlia agitatorov). 55 Narodnyi komissariat finansov, Stenograficheskii otchet soveshchaniia Upolnarkomfinov. Aprel’ 1923 g., 151–2. 56 Instruktsiia o rabote finansovykh inspektorov, 25ff. 57 Narodnyi Komissariat Prodovol’stviia and Narodnyi komissariat finansov, Edinyi sel’skokhoziaistvennyi nalog, 1923–1924 gg. Sbornik nalogovogo zakonodatel’stva, 12–18, articles 24–25; instructions to the inspectors on pp. 40–1. Repeated for 1924–5 in Narodnyi komissariat finansov SSSR, Edinyi sel’skokhoziaistvennyi nalog, 1924–1925gg. Sbornik nalogovogo zakonodatel’stva, 17ff; the sample forms showed that the county sent cumulative figures, not household break-downs. 58 GAVO, f.5, op.1, d.1790, Minutes of a meeting of the gubernatorial commission on a single agricultural tax; and GAVO, f.5, op.1, d.1802, Commission investigating complaints in Nikol’skii district. 59 This continued into 1922: see Markov, Razverstka, 265–7; Esikov, Rossiiskaia derevnia, 86, 89. 60 Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, Sbornik dekretov i rasporiazhenii po finansam, vol. 5, 195–8: decree of Sovnarkom of 6 May 1922; report by E.E. Pontovich in 1925 in RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6980, ll.40–9. 61 RGAE, f.3429, op.2, d.779, VSNKh to Bogdanov, 8 June 1922; and RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6819, ll.170–5, and d.6818, ll.10–16. 62 This is in 1923: RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6821, ll.184–5. 63 RGASPI, f.323, op.2, d.42; RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6818, ll.32, 126–7, 170–5, 178–81, 267–9. 64 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6978: A.A. Ostrovskii, “Legal foundations of the tax in kind,” ll.24–18 (reverse pagination). 65 Introduced on paper in 1918 as an outgrowth of the constitution’s universal labour obligation. RGAE, f.3429, op.2, d.779 (memorandum on the labour tax, 1918); GARF, f.382 (Commissariat of Labour), op.8, dd.1–2.

Notes to pages 343–9  437 66 The civic and universalistic dimensions in RGAE, f.3429, op.2, d.23, and Lenin’s statements in Izvestiia Narodnogo Komissariata po Prodovol’stviiu, 4/5 (May/June 1918); and Trudy Vserossiiskogo s”ezda zaveduiushchikh finotdelami, 128, 133ff. 67 Early discussions of the tax, in June 1918, in RGAE, f.3429, op.2, d.23: proposal from A.E. Makovetskii on universal labour dues. See also Narodnyi Komissariat Truda, Materialy o rabote NKT i ego mestnykh organov za 1921 g. (Moscow, 1923), 72. 68 A. Anikst, Obzor deiatel’nosti Narkomtruda za 1921 goda (k IV sessii VTsIK) (Moscow, 1921), 12–20. 69 The decrees in GARF, f.382, op.8 (on the labour and carting tax, 1920–1), d.7 (on the early drafts and discussions). That the tax was inefficient but necessary was stated in late 1922 in RGAE, f.4372, op.13, d.56. From 1923 the province could decide to translate the levy into cash. GARF, f.382, op.8, d.69; RGAE, f.3429, op.2, d.779, ll.23–23ob. See also Trudguzhnalog (Moscow, 1922), with detailed instructions; D”iachenko, Istoriia finansov, 73; RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6980, ll.50–88. 70 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6980, ll.50–88. This is possibly Genzel’ in 1923. 71 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6818, from 1923. 72 RGAE, f.7733, op.1, d.6819, ll.170–5; and d.6818, ll.10–16; Raboche-krest’ianskaia inspektsiia, Podokhodnyi nalog, 17–18, 47–9, 86–7, 156–66; Newcity, Taxation in the Soviet Union, 12. 73 GAVO, f.5, op.1, d.1790 (1925–6), where class ascription is used to decide on ­appeals. Same in d.1802. 74 A term used expansively and effectively by Tracy McDonald, who identifies well the tensions of Soviet policy in the 1920s. Her discussion of tax practice is instructive. Face to the Village. 75 D”iachenko, Istoriia finansov, 122–3. In 1925–6, revenue from the agricultural tax stood at 252 million rubles, and rural expenditure at 450 million rubles. The estimates did not include the indirect taxes paid by peasants or the other direct taxes on income. 76 Gregory, Before Command, 87–8. 77 McDonald, Face to the Village, and Heinzen, Inventing a Soviet Countryside. 78 RGAE, f.4372, op.14, d.234, ll.73–72, 70–59, 50–49, 42–38 (reverse pagination). 79 G.Ia. Sokol’nikov in Vtoroe Vsesoiuznoe finasovoe soveshchanie. Stenograficheskii otchet, rabota sektsii i rezoliutsii, 23–6, 52. 80 R.W. Davies, The Soviet Collective Farm, 1929–1930. Afterword 1 Patenaude, “Peasants into Russians,” 565, referring to 1921. 2 Newcity, Taxation in the Soviet Union, 18. 3 Holzman, Soviet Taxation, 305.

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Index

alcohol: alcoholism, understanding of, 225–30, 232–3; alcoholism and class anxieties, 228–30, 232, 234–5; banning of in Russia, 233–5; banning of in other countries, 235; Bolsheviks and, 234, 337; consumption (see alcohol consumption); degeneration fears and, 210, 225, 228–9, 234; popular welfare and, 71–5; state revenue from, 216–7, 235; temperance movements and, 230–1, 232–3, 280; women and, 72, 228. See also vodka alcohol consumption, 225–7; debate statistically enabled, 224, 227, 231–2; Russian vs. European rates, 222; Witte on, 222–3, 230; World War I and, 234–5 Alexander I, 34, 45 Alexander II, 38, 40, 42, 57, 78 Alexander III, 95, 100, 229 Anderson, Perry, 302 Anfimov, A.M., 240, 264 Anna, Empress, 50 apartment tax, 175, 177–8, 303; as civic pedagogy, 88, 117–25, 158–9, 243, 303 Ardant, Gabriel, 68

arrears, 49–50, 51, 52, 54, 146, 264–5. See also peasants, taxation of, imperial Russia: arrears Asia, Russian ideas of, as vs. Europe, 56, 159 Asquith, H.H., 200, 202 assessment vs. apportionment and repartition, tax practices of: measurement of individual capacity to pay and, 42, 52, 245; as payer inside or outside of state, 4–5, 56–7, 179–80; in Russia, 58, 96, 142, 144, 146; and Russian peasantry, 52, 243, 258, 266, 268, 325–6, 337–8; United States and, 153. See also repartition and apportionment of taxes; taxation as modern form of government; urban-rural divide, tax practices Australia, 18, 108, 155, 190, 308 Austria and Austria-Hungary, 47, 104, 155 autocracy (Russia), 20, 27, 78, 100, 117, 360n2; characteristics of tax regime under, 54, 60, 92–3, 95, 150, 176, 233– 4, 269, 282; tax exemption and, 169– 70, 195 Baker, Keith M., 178, 190, 305

472 Index banks, Russia, 93; nationalizations under Bolsheviks and, 306–7; secrecy and income tax, 168, 181–3; State Bank, 79, 102 Bark, Petr L’vovich (Sir Peter), 41, 193, 198, 233, 236, 289 Beer, Daniel, 82, 228, 371n22 Belgium, 18, 30, 175 Bellamy, Edward, Looking Backward, Bunge on, 218 Benardaki, D.E., 68–9 Bentham, Jeremy, on inheritance tax, 109. See also Panopticon principle and taxation Berdiaev, Nikolai, 300 Bogolepov, M., 193, 288–9, 312, 326 book-keeping, 94, 107, 127, 128, 137, 144, 146 bourgeoisie, Soviet Russia, 313–4 Britain, 20, 73, 229, 235, 315; income tax in, 9, 12, 31, 91–2, 123, 136, 140, 151– 2, 163, 188; income tax, personal, in, 154, 155, 156, 187, 235; influence on Russian taxation and, 18, 45, 47, 60, 67, 96, 122, 158, 164, 174, 181, 185, 199, 202, 209, 212; inheritance tax in, 108, 109, 113; Labour Party of, 202–3; privacy debate in, 11, 16, 93, 94, 180, 185–6, 200; role of state in, 78, 111; tax practices in, 9, 10, 16, 19–20, 175, 184, 199–200, 208, 358n74, 392n9 Brubaker, Rogers, 200–1, 387n30 Brzheskii, Nikolai, 147, 243, 267, 272 budgets, Russian state, 13, 27, 237; household and personal budgets, in relation to, 109, 196; novelty of, 32–3, 37–9; and revenue in 1918–20, 310– 11; in Soviet Russia, 313, 337. See also taxation, state budget revenue from Bukharin, Nikolai, 17, 299–300

Bulgakov, Mikhail, 335 Bunge, Nikolai Kh., 91, 100–1, 102, 218; attack on estate particularism, 112, 149; biography, character, effectiveness of, 41, 98–101; on estate tax, 110–12, 114; on peasantry, 101, 112– 13, 214, 252, 263, 272, 273, 275, 279, 330; as proponent of modern tax regime, 75, 100, 103–6, 114, 115, 131, 140–1; on relationship of state and society, 78–80, 147–9, 201, 218 Burbank, Jane, 282 bureaucracy, as product of taxation, 37, 76 business taxes (promyslovyi nalog) and related taxes: commercial secrecy and, 146–7, 159, 180–3, 189–90; commercial secrecy, Lenin on, 307; as comprehensive view of firms and transactions, 137–8, 143–4; licence fees and, 130, 133–4, 146; performance and purpose of, 31, 57–9, 81, 92–8, 126–30, 146, 177–8; repartitional, 127–39, 145, 146. See also capital, tax on interest from; corporate tax; deeds and titles; stamp duty cadastre, for taxation purposes, 10, 35, 45–7, 52, 62–3, 126–7, 247, 249, 370n9; commissions, Russia, 47–8; inadequate for modern taxation purposes, 89, 288 Cameralism, 7, 46; as outmoded form of intervention, 80 Canada, 8, 18, 155, 190, 235, 308 capital, tax on interest from, 97, 140. See also business taxes Carr, E.H., 323, 418n1 Catherine the Great, 34, 36, 43 census (Russia, 1859), 44–5, 61

Index 473 census society, 60, 81, 166. See also franchise and taxation Chaianov, Aleksandr V., 250, 316, 340, 419n7 Cheka, 314 Christian, David, 80 Chutskaev, S.E., 320, 324, 328 citizenship: as inescapable, 17, 123–5; as product of modern taxation, 5, 6, 13, 14, 16, 19; in Soviet Russia, 21, 292, 300, 301, 331, 423n37. See also participation; person, concept of; universalism Civil War (Soviet Russia), 298, 338 Clark, Katerina, 298 coercion: as necessitated by civic immaturity, 187–90, 330; as sign of weak state, 19, 24, 273, 419n12. See also corporal punishment; peasants, taxation of, imperial Russia; peasants, taxation of, Soviet Russia; state, in Soviet Russia Cohen, Stephen, 421n27 collective responsibility, for taxation: before 1903, 44, 50, 52–5, 64, 107, 172, 276–8; formal repeal of (1903), 257, 260, 261, 270, 272, 285; perpetuation of (1903–17), 253–6, 257, 289; in Soviet Russia, 54, 325, 337–8, 341–3, 345 Commissariat of Finances, 310, 313, 322, 336 Commissariat of Food Supply, 323, 324, 329 Committees of Rural Poor, 322–3 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 178, 305 conscription and military service, in relation to taxation, 158, 176–7 contracts, taxation of, 96. See also business taxes

Cooper, Frederick, 200–1 corporal punishment, 243–4, 279–84, 285–6. See also coercion corporate tax, 98, 115–6, 126, 129–130; of state-created artificial persons, 114–17, 141–2 (see also person, concept of). See also business taxes; France; Prussia; United States Cossacks, exceptionalism of, 29, 44; ­income tax and, 173, 194 Counter-Reforms, 78, 100, 117, 149. See also Great Reforms Crimean War, 36 Crisp, Olga, 46 currency: emissions of, 36, 191, 236, 314; in Soviet Russia, 311, 314 dairy trade, 207, 218 Darrow, David, 250 declarations of income, 5, 18, 91, 134–5, 165; as lens on broader economic ­activity, 136–9, 189; opposition to, Europe and Russia, 184–6 deeds and titles, taxation of, 96, 140. See also business taxes Delalande, Nicolas, 364n1 Depardieu, Gérard, 16 Department of Assessed Levies, 38, 59, 120, 129, 149, 195 Department of Non-assessed Levies, 38, 76; vodka monopoly and, 218–20, 224, 230 discipline, taxation as form of, 17–18, 98; as substitute for incomplete state knowledge, 144–6; successor to coercion, 126. See also taxation as modern form of government Dmitriev, V.K., 225, 227 Don region, 188, 194 Dovnar-Zapol’skii, M.V., 7

474 Index Duma (State), on the income tax, 162, 170, 171, 193 Durkheim, Émile, 5, 199 “economic personality,” 15, 111–12, 154, 171, 182, 244; income tax and, 179, 290; Soviet Russia, statistical neglect of, 326. See also person, concept of; transparency and visibility economics, discipline of in Russia, 38–9 economy, category of — national or popular, 4, 7, 39, 80, 81, 90, 103, 198, 210, 217; and Soviet Russia, 313, 331 — as neologism, 7, 33–4, 38, 81, 217 — social engineering, new space for, 207 — state constitutive of, 4–6, 13, 39, 78– 81, 103, 149, 302; in Soviet Russia, 295, 298, 299 — as statistically delineated, 32–3, 80, 148, 201, 361n18, 419n8 Emancipation Manifesto. See peasants, imperial Russia equality, legal and as principle of taxation, 3, 6, 9, 30; and inequality, explained, 42; vs. proportionality, 67; in Russia, 27, 31, 48–9, 52, 81, 238 equivalencies, in taxation, 42, 46, 97, 249, 287, 340 estate, legal (soslovie), in taxation, 28–9, 44–5, 78, 169; eclipse of, 31, 49, 58– 60, 63, 66, 81–3, 112, 139, 168, 172, 239, 242, 287; income tax and, 175, 193. See also taxable and non-taxable populations; universalism estate tax. See inheritance and estate tax Europe, Russian idea of. See Asia, ­Russian ideas of Excise Oversight, 76, 214

excise taxes: as bridge from state to private sector, 66, 75–7; purpose and performance of, 55, 65–8, 70–3, 81, 212; revenue from, 9, 215. See also taxation, Soviet Russia exemptions, 3, 9, 27, 45; from income tax, 166–73, 177, 193, 198, 289 external indicators, external assessment — in France, 56–7, 144, 152, 164 — political significance of, 4, 10–14, 39– 40, 53–4, 152, 164–5, 171, 178–80, 186 — in Russia: business tax and, 31, 127, 133, 134, 143, 144; peasant taxation and, 259, 261, 267, 271, 322, 344; as symptom of weak administration, 12, 48, 58, 62 Extraordinary Revolutionary Tax, 324 Face to the Village, 344, 345 Factory Inspectorate, 102, 207 fairness. See equality family tax policy, 165–6 February Revolution (1917), 191, 195, 196 Food Dictatorship, Decree on, 322 Foucault, Michel, 357n60, 382n59 France: alcohol consumption and, 73, 228; corporate tax in, 116; discreteness of state and society in taxation, 10, 14, 78, 138, 178–9, 185, 200, 387n30; income tax in, 13, 15–16, 91, 92, 136–7, 152, 155, 157, 163, 166, 180, 199, 289; influence on Russian taxation and, 18, 49, 91, 55–7, 83, 89, 95–6, 147, 157, 158; inheritance tax in, 108, 109; tax practices in, 9, 13, 20, 30–1, 104, 175, 190, 212; tax practices, assessments; 144, 152, 164; tax

Index 475 practices, repartition and apportionment, 4, 42, 56, 247 franchise and taxation, 60, 117, 124, 166, 175–6. See also census society free-market economics. See laissez-faire free trade, 55, 74, 78; as form of improved regulation and taxation, 76–7 Fridman, M.I., 72, 73, 225, 226, 227, 228–9 Galakhov, V.V., 134, 135 Gaudin, Corinne, 253, 278 gentry: decline of, 263; land tax and, 62– 3, 192, 262 Genzel’, Pavel, 18, 108, 117, 127, 147, 181; in Soviet Russia, 297, 335, 336, 340, 433n6 Germany: influence on Russian taxation and, 18, 29, 39, 41, 155, 174, 182, 308; inheritance tax in, 108, 109, 111; personal income tax in, 13; state and economy in, 7–8, 200. See also Prussia Gogol’, Nikolai, 29, 69, 107–8 gold standard in Russia (1897), 37, 191, 235 Goremykin, Ivan, 158, 187, 236 Gosplan, 340, 345. See also Soviet regime Grabski, Władysław, 170 grain: seizures of, 197, 290–1 (see also peasants, Soviet Russia); trade and regulation of, 79, 207, 210, 218, 292, 318 Gramsci, Antonio, 6, 302 Great Reforms, 27–8, 36–7, 42, 52, 360n2. See also Counter-Reforms; juridical reform; peasants, imperial Russia; zemstvos Greece: taxation of Russians and Queen Olga in, 195; tax evasion and surveillance in, 11, 355n34

Greeks, in Russia, 44, 68–9 Greig, Samuil Alekseevich, 41, 95 Groman, V.G., 290–1, 315, 318, 340 Grot, K.K., 69, 76–7 Groys, Boris, 297 guild enterprises, 128, 135 Gur’ev, Count, 109–10 Habermas, Jurgen, 124 Harbin, taxation of Russians in, 195 Harwood, George, 199–200 Hegel, Georg Friedrich, 17, 198, 305, 331 Herald of Europe, 74–5 Herald of Finances, Industry, and Trade, 38, 115 Herlihy, Patricia, 225, 234 Herzen, Aleksandr, 35 historiography of Russian taxation, 21–2, 263–4 Hoch, Stephen, 249, 262 Hoffmann, David L., 302 Holquist, Peter, 292 Hutchinson, John, 161, 225, 229 income: assessments of, 4, 12, 16, 48–9, 96, 108, 134–5 (see also assessment vs. apportionment and repartition; selfassessment); definition of, 12, 89, 109, 385n110; national, 4, 13, 90, 149, 201, 250, 370n10. See also declarations of income income tax, generic: in Britain, 12, 47, 91–2, 96, 151–2, 188; in Europe and United States, 49, 56, 88, 90; in India, colonial, 189; in Russia, 67; in Russia, emergence of, 90–2, 95, 117, 118, 147, 158, 186 income tax, personal: international emergence of, 13, 47, 151–8, 187, 335;

476 Index intimacy between state and individuals and, 4, 91, 95, 151–7. See also Britain; France; Germany; person, concept of; Prussia; taxation, Soviet Russia; United States income tax, personal, in imperial Russia: cultural backwardness and, 186–90; emergence and surrogate taxes of, 13, 18, 83, 87–8, 98, 117–25, 147, 150, 156; evasion of, 183, 186, 189; exemption levels from, 166–73, 177, 193, 198, 289; income tax bill (1907), 162–5; income tax bill (1907), assessment commissions of, 174–8; peasants and (see peasants, taxation of, imperial Russia); as response to Revolution of 1905, 151, 159–64; revenue from, 191, 196; as universal civic enlistment, 158, 163–7, 175–6, 191; World War I and, 202–3. See also person, concept of income tax, personal, in Soviet Russia. See taxation, Soviet Russia India, colonial, 189 individuals: as atoms vs. subjects, 154; in France vs. Russia, 147–50; as indivisible, 179; isolation of for tax purposes, 139, 243; liberalism and, 5, 82–3; weakness of rights in Russia, 150, 202. See also person, concept of industrial tax. See business taxes information, for purposes of taxation. See surveillance inheritance and estate tax, 31, 97, 98, 140; in Britain, 108, 109, 113; in France, 109; in Germany, 108, 109, 111; meaning of personhood and, 108–14, 183; in Prussia, 31; surrogate to income tax, 113–14, 158–9; in United States, 108, 109, 111. See also taxation of the dead

insurance rates, state’s use of data from, 143, 322 Israel, 190, 417n150 Jefferson, Thomas, on inheritance, 109 Jessop, Bob, 6 Jews, taxation of, 29, 44, 186 juridical reform (1864), 28, 36 Kamenev, Lev, 338 Kankrin, Egor Frantsevich, 41, 58 Keynes, John Maynard, 78, 79, 419n8 Khristoforov, Igor, 19 Kiselev reforms, 46, 78 Kniazhevich, Aleksandr, 41, 77 Kokovtsov, Vladimir N. (sometimes Kokovtsev), 122, 155, 233, 405n125; on income tax, 164–5, 169, 170, 186, 198; and prisons, 41; and prisons, as related to taxation, 182 Kotkin, Stephen, 385n113, 421n25, 429n63 Krestinskii, N.N., 323–4 kulaks. See peasants, Soviet Russia Kulisher, I.M., 7 Kutler, Nikolai N., 107, 189, 256; on apartment tax, 118, 120, 122, 124; on income tax, 149, 162–5, 170, 171, 172, 251; in Soviet Russia, 297, 314, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339 Kutler, Pavel N., 105, 133; on income tax, 170, 178; in Soviet Russia, 297, 335, 336, 337, 338, 345, 433n6 Labour and Carting Tax (1921), 343. See also taxes in kind laissez-faire, 11, 31, 32–3, 210, 213; Keynes, John Maynard on, 78, 79, 355n44, 419n8; Russian and European retreat from, 77–82. See also Polanyi, Karl

Index 477 land captains, role in peasant taxation, 79, 101, 248, 252–3, 258, 272, 276, 280 land tax (agricultural): implementation and performance of, 61–4, 97, 107, 196, 238–9, 265; relationship to individual payer, 30–1, 49, 251, 255, 275; repeal of in Soviet Russia, 319; as replacement of poll tax, 29, 99, 246, 252. See also peasants, taxation of, Soviet Russia Lenin, V.I., 23, 315, 422n34–5; State and Revolution, 314, 316; taxation and, 307–9, 311, 343 Lerkhe, German G., 170, 172, 177, 182 Levi, Margaret, 6, 20 Lewin, Moshe, 19, 358n72 liberalism, economic, 78; in Russia, 82, 103, 371n22; taxation as form of, 10 Lincoln, Bruce, 42, 46 List, Friedrich, 7, 103 Lloyd George, David, 31, 202 Luxemburg, Rosa, 305, 425n72 Malia, Martin, 418n3–4 Malle, Silvana, 310 Mann, Thomas, 5 Marx, Karl, 305 Marxism, anti-, 302 McDonald, David M., 387n35 McDonald, Tracy, 338 Men’kov, F.A., 199, 297, 338 Michael Aleksandrovich, Grand Prince, 148 Migulin, P.P., 172, 231 Mill, James, 189 Mill, John Stuart, 17, 31, 78, 103 Ministry of Finances, Russia, 33–4, 37– 42, 44, 59, 70, 76–7, 80, 165, 201, 210 Ministry of State Domains, Russia, 34, 46, 52, 70

Mitchell, Timothy, 149, 355n44 modernity, use of term, 302, 347, 424n57 money as universal metric, 12, 32, 49, 58, 65, 81, 89, 106, 166, 238 Mongols, tax legacy of, 128 mortgages, state’s use of data from, 142 Muslims, 29, 177 national income. See income nationalization, 236, 296, 298, 304, 307– 8, 309, 314, 332, 333, 347, 421n25. See also vodka; Soviet regime; taxation, Soviet Russia NEP (New Economic Policy): conditional nature of, 23–4, 298, 332–4, 421n27; at urgings of imperial fiscal personnel, 338 Nicholas II, 18, 46, 195, 233, 236 norms, of taxation, 60, 97, 118–19, 247; of repartition payments, 132, 134–5 Old Believers, 29, 44 Olga, Queen of the Hellenes, taxation of by Russia, 195 Orwell, George, 7, 315 Osinskii, N., 330, 331 Ozerov, Ivan Kh.: on income tax, 161, 162, 171, 172, 182–3, 185; Russian backwardness and, 18, 159, 188–90, 201–2, 256; in Soviet Russia, 297, 308, 335, 433n6 Panopticon principle and taxation, 17, 145 participation: in place of consent, 176–8, 348; in place of consent in Soviet Russia, 299, 301; in state vs. in politics, 117–18, 388n50; taxation as form of, 6, 9, 60, 134 passport laws, 285

478 Index Paul, Emperor, 44 Peasant Land Bank, 78, 103 peasants, imperial Russia: Emancipation process and settlement, 19, 27–8, 36, 53, 246, 265, 360n2; immiseration thesis and, 264; institutions of, 28, 53, 64, 81, 101, 252–4, 273. See also peasants, taxation of, imperial Russia; Stolypin peasants, Soviet Russia: attempts to penetrate (see Committees of Rural Poor); Bolsheviks’ ignorance of, 316, 318–19, 322–3, 337, 344; class understanding imposed on, 322–3, 325, 329–30; collectivization, roots of, 345–6; control and resistance of, 298, 332; grain seizures and, 300, 318, 319, 323, 329, 330, 345; kulaks, 330, 345; land use (Decree on Land, 1917), 298; urbanrural divide and, 306, 316–17, 322, 325, 328–9, 330, 337, 342–5; violence as forced integration of, 300–1, 306, 316–17, 330–1. See also peasants, taxation of, Soviet Russia; Tax Inspector­ ate: Soviet era peasants, taxation of, imperial Russia, 8, 21–4, 27, 33, 54 — arbitrariness of, 65, 245–6, 254, 257– 60, 272 — arrears, 246, 255, 257, 265–7, 413n47; famine and, 269–70, 284; forgiveness of, 254, 258, 265, 268–71; as intrinsic to system, 267–8; perceived as reflection of peasant poverty, 65, 262–5, 267; post-1905 and, 265–6 (see also collective responsibility) — collections, system of, 258, 283–5 — collective apportionment of (see repartition and apportionment of taxes)

— collective responsibility and (see collective responsibility) — debate over contribution to tax revenue and, 237–42, 254, 289 — elders, role of, 247–8, 253–4, 258, 261, 278–9, 283, 285, 291 — income, inapplicability of, 104–5, 249–51 — income tax and, 169, 172, 203, 288–90 — invisibility to state and, 23, 55, 137–8, 203, 236–7, 247, 288 — lack of data and personnel and, 248– 9, 251–2, 257–8, 261, 267, 271, 285 — as premodern, 243–4, 278, 285 — punishments and, 257, 271–2, 278–9; confiscations as form of, 273–5, 277– 8, 282, 284, 285; corporal and the premodern state, 279–84, 285–6; immunities from, 273, 280 — quit-rent (obrok) and, 44, 49, 61, 64, 99, 246 — redemption payments (as taxes) and, 63–5, 100, 238, 246; arrears of, 264–5, 269 — separateness of, 7, 19, 64, 78, 104–5, 128–9, 196–8, 250, 252–3, 282, 330 (see also person, concept of) — war crisis and, 236–7, 288, 291–2, 317–18 See also Bunge, Nikolai Kh.; land captains; land tax; peasants, imperial Russia; poll tax; taxes in kind; Tax Inspectorate; Witte peasants, taxation of, Soviet Russia: attempts to individualize and, 324–6, 341, 342, 343–4; central administration, weakness of, 325, 338, 341; coercion and, 34, 43, 243–4, 246, 327, 328, 329, 338, 342, 345; collective

Index 479 apportionment of (see repartition and apportionment of taxes); collective responsibility and (see collective responsibility); continuity with imperial regime, 327, 329, 338, 341, 342, 343; elders, role of, 319, 320, 324–5, 329, 344; extraction strategies, 296, 318, 327; income tax and, 319–22, 326, 343–4; land taxes and, 319, 328; quitrent (obrok) and, 339. See also peasants, Soviet Russia; taxes in kind person, concept of: corporate personhood, influence of, 116–17, 141–2, 183; as creation of modern state, 5–7, 9, 13–15, 17, 87–8, 94, 108, 111, 148– 50, 182–3, 302; deceased, as model of income assessment, 31, 107–14, 140, 183, 336; immune from taxation, 56– 7, 90–2; income tax, reshaped by, 164, 174, 179–80, 184, 188, 198, 200, 288; peasant as half- or not a person, 255, 288–90; Soviet Russia, relationship to state, and, 297, 423n47; Zamiatin on, 315. See also citizenship; “economic personality”; income tax, personal; individuals; inheritance tax; Soviet ­regime: human malleability Pervushin, S.A., 225, 227, 230, 232 Peshekhonov, A.V., 218, 292, 297 Peter the Great, 34, 43, 50, 265 petroleum, taxation of, 75–6 Pipes, Richard, 147–8, 419n12 Plaggenborg, Stefan, 242, 400n12, 407n12 planning, economic, in imperial Russia, 219–20. See also Soviet regime Poggi, Gianfranco, 6, 301 Poincaré, Raymond, 155 Poland, 97, 170, 238, 373n44, 407n13 Polanyi, Karl, 32–3, 76, 79, 303

poll tax (or head or soul), 40, 43, 49, 52– 3, 58, 265; of burgers, 57, 59; of peasants, 29, 33–4, 46, 99, 246, 251, 279; in Soviet Russia, euphemized, 324, 325, 329 Poovey, Mary, 419n8 Poulantzas, Nicos, 7, 300, 353n18, 423n45 Pravilova, Ekaterina, 22, 101, 373n44, 374n58, 376n86, 421n25 Preobrazhenskii, Evgenii, 299, 311, 313, 315 privacy: as barrier to fair assessments, 10; as imperilled by modern taxation regimes, 6, 13, 14, 92–5, 117, 179–82; in relation to commercial secrecy, 92– 4; in Soviet Russia, 301–2. See also ­secrecy; transparency and visibility; United States: privacy debate in progressive taxation, 15, 42, 307, 348; emergence of, 12, 96, 139, 153, 181 Prokopovich, S.N., 226, 250 property, private, creation of, 107, 111 property tax, 30; as opposed to persons, 55–7; urban, 29, 31, 59–60, 65, 81, 142, 178, 247; urban revenue from, 142. See also land tax Provisional Government (1917), 146, 196–7, 211, 218, 236, 292, 318 Prussia: corporate tax in, 116, 378n133; influence on Russian taxation and, 49, 115, 123, 128, 172, 186, 190, 335; inheritance tax in, 31; personal income tax in, 13, 18, 154–5; pioneering modern tax regime of, 15, 16; tax practices in, 104, 136, 137, 138, 165, 166, 184, 187 psychoanalysis, 15, 200 public health, fiscal policy entwined with, 210, 213, 216, 222, 224. See also alcohol; vodka; welfare public opinion, 102, 121, 128

480 Index queries (spravki), used for taxation, 143 quit-rent. See peasants, taxation of, imperial Russia Rabinbach, Anson, 222 Rafalovich, Aleksei, 179 railways, 70, 79; nationalization of, 217, 241 Rau, Karl-Heinrich, 7 redemption payments. See peasants, taxation of, imperial Russia repartition and apportionment of taxes — France, 4, 42, 56, 247 — Russian cities and businesses, 127–39, 144, 145, 146 (see also business taxes) — Russian gentry, 62–3 — Russian peasants, imperial, 4, 42, 43, 237, 245–7, 251; operation of, 52–3, 63, 257–60, 262, 265, 266–7, 275 — Russian peasants, Soviet, 306, 325, 329–30, 338–43, 345; Prodrazverstka (1919–21), 292, 329 Russian Economist, 172, 176, 177 Russo-Japanese War, 159, 163, 229 Russo-Turkish War, 158 salt, 32, 35, 67; excise tax on, 75 Say, Léon, 185 scissors crisis, 334 Scott, James, 6, 157, 353n14, 370n9, 420n13 secrecy (commercial, credit, and trade): Bolsheviks and, 307–8; business taxes and, 140, 146–7, 159, 180–3, 189–90; income tax and, 118, 162; Lenin and, 307–8; privacy and, 92–5, 117; state actions, obstacle to, 114, 193–4; state efforts to circumvent, 135, 219, 290, 372n27. See also privacy; transparency and visibility; United States: privacy debate in

self-assessment: political significance and contestation of, 16, 134, 184–6, 299–300; in Russia, 97, 243. See also income: assessments of; participation; taxation as modern form of government; transparency and visibility Seligman, Edwin, 12, 18, 91, 352n5 Shchepkin, Nikolai, 171 Shipov, Ivan, 162, 175, 183; Shipov Commission, 181 Siberia, 44, 50, 61 Sikorsky, I.A., 228 Skocpol, Theda, 6, 157, 353n12 Smith, Adam, 31 socialism, Soviet, defined, 304–5, 314, 346, 347 “society,” emergence of, 120, 123–5, 131. See also state, the Society of Financial Reforms, 170, 171, 173, 187, 198, 201 Sotomayor, Sonia, 116 Soviet constitution (1918), 425n72–3 Soviet regime: continuities and, 23, 295– 6, 308, 420n12; economic planning and, 307, 340, 345; economic transparency and, 307–8, 314; endpoint of perfect unity and, 295, 296, 300, 304– 5, 313, 330, 349; human malleability and, 234, 297, 300, 301, 304, 327; intellectual inheritance of, 295–6; nationalizations and, 296, 298, 304, 314, 332, 333, 347, 421n25; nationalizations, circumstances of, 307–8, 309; nature of power in, 296–302, 306, 313–4, 327, 333; novelty of, alleged and real, and, 295–6, 304, 418n2; principle of party control in, 298, 300. See also state, in Soviet Russia; taxation, Soviet Russia Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars), xix, 309, 311, 312

Index 481 Speransky, Mikhail, 9, 36, 41, 45, 48, 75; income taxation and, 158 Stalin, Joseph, 345, 347 stamp duty, 140–1. See also business taxes state, the: capacities measured by economic activity, 127–8, 211, 238; the economy and (see economy, category of); European and Russian transformation of, 4–5, 198–203; in imperial Russia, understanding of, 5, 19–21; as participatory locus of integration, 157, 162, 173, 174, 202, 303; relationship to personhood (see person, concept of); resistance, impossibility of, 189–90, 201; and society, blurred with, 175–8, 193, 198, 200, 202, 211, 302, 331 (see also state, in Soviet Russia); and society, discrete from, 11, 29, 148, 161, 175, 301 state, in Soviet Russia, 20, 23, 24, 301, 303–4, 334; as all-encompassing, 21, 297–302, 313, 314–16, 326–7, 331; coercion as positive force in, 296, 299, 422n35; end of, 305; Lenin on end of, 299; on modern European spectrum, 296, 302. See also person, concept of State Council, 56, 57, 70, 77; composition of, 100; income tax and, 173, 193 statistics: as creator of new categories, 37, 129; as product of new kind of state, 27, 83, 90, 96, 102, 194–5, 315; statisticians and, 62; as universalizing, 97; weakness of, 95, 169, 249. See also economy; surveillance Stolypin, Petr, 389n69; Stolypin reforms, 160, 161, 207, 253, 261–2, 412n20 Strumilin, S.G., 292, 307, 340 Struve, Petr, 7, 38 sugar beet industry, regulation of, 220–1 Supremely Instituted Commission for

the Improvement of System of Taxes and Dues. See Tax Commission surveillance, as product of taxation, 11, 13, 15, 20, 98, 114, 121, 123, 126; imperial Russia, weakness of, 19, 22, 32, 35–6, 42, 49, 52–4; the NEP and, 335; superior to coercion, 12, 16; by taxpayers of taxpayers, 145–6, 178, 195, 335 (see also self-assessment). See also statistics Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Prince, 192, 288 Switzerland, 18, 190, 308 tariffs, import, 79, 215 taxable and non-taxable populations, 9, 34, 42, 43, 57, 66, 166, 239, 336 taxation, Soviet Russia, 8, 21, 23, 190, 335; class difference and, 305, 312–13; continuities with imperial Russia, 296, 303, 309, 311–12, 329; continuities with imperial Russia, of personnel, 296–7, 302–3, 327, 333, 336; contributions (kontributsii, 1918), 309, 325; excise taxes, 308, 328; exemptions, 311, 312, 313, 320; income tax, 307–9, 310, 311, 313, 335, 336, 337, 345; nationalizations and effect on, 309, 313, 326; revenue provided by, 310; state, of itself, 309–10, 348–9; as tool of integration, 299, 311; of workers, 312, 336. See also state, in Soviet Russia taxation, state budget revenue from: direct taxes, 89, 96–8, 130, 140–2, 191, 196, 239–40; indirect taxes and vs. direct, 9, 23, 82, 207–9, 213–14; peasantry and contribution to, 237–42, 254, 289; Soviet era, 309–11, 337 taxation as modern form of government, 3–6, 12, 40, 81, 87, 130–1, 145–6, 149–50, 159, 238; income tax as hallmark of, 187

482 Index taxation as social control: via direct taxes, 211; via indirect taxes, 207–8, 210, 212–13 taxation of the dead, 259. See also Gogol’, Nikolai; inheritance tax Tax Commission (Russia, 1859–81), 40– 52, 57, 58, 62, 65, 67, 95; on Russian backwardness, 187 taxes, direct (see separately: apartment taxes; business taxes; contracts; deeds and titles; inheritance and estate taxes; land tax; poll tax; property tax; taxes in kind): evolution of, 58, 82, 215; fiscal data and, 42, 97–8; implementation and assessment of, 23, 35; in Soviet Russia, 337; use as metric of modern government, 9, 67, 97. See also taxation, state budget revenue from; taxes, indirect taxes, indirect (see separately: excise taxes; tariffs): data generated by, 31, 96, 221; regressiveness of, 66–7; reliance on as symptom of premodern state, 99, 209, 214–15; in Soviet Russia, reliance on, 309–10, 333, 337; as uninterested in individual payers, 31, 35. See also taxation, state budget, revenue from; taxes, direct taxes in kind — before 1917 (natural’nye or zemskie povinnosti), 34, 44, 49, 65, 177, 244, 250, 285–8 — in cities, 34, 59, 65, 287 — as food: Food Dictatorship (May 1918), 319; Nalog naturoi (Oct. 1918), 323–4; prodrazverstka (1919–21), 292, 329; prodnalog (1921), 337–8, 340–1, 342–3 — as labour and carting, after 1917, 286, 343 — as requisitions and grain monopoly (1916 and 1917), 291–2

tax evasion, 93, 95, 183, 186, 189 tax farming, Russia, 34–5, 50, 65–6, 68– 73, 75–7, 83. See also Benardaki Tax Inspectorate, 12, 76–7, 114, 140, 148, 253; history and composition of, 102– 7; income tax and, 194–6; peasantry and, 88, 237, 247–8, 253, 258–61, 267, 270–1, 272, 276, 283; Soviet era and, 301, 319, 322, 325, 327, 337, 341, 420n15 Terner, F.G., 243, 279, 330 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 83, 163, 385n113; on atomization, 5, 147, 149–50 Tolstoy, Count, 100, 104 Tolstoy, K.K., 223, 231–2 Tolstoy, Leo, 210 Tooze, Adam, 90 transparency and visibility: delineation of the economy and, 32, 39–40; “economic personality” and, 15, 111; government as inescapable and, 23, 88, 93, 111, 117, 130, 147, 178, 182, 189– 91, 299; visible income, concept of, 135, 149, 307–8 Treasury Office (Kazennaia palata), xviii, 34, 43, 52, 61, 104, 121, 131, 133, 138, 141, 143, 144, 188, 194, 245, 246, 252, 254, 270, 272, 289, 290, 327 Trotsky, Leon, 305, 314, 319, 334 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 178, 360n8 Turkestan, 33, 97, 169, 177, 188; bureaucratic conquest of, 106–7, 137 Unified Agricultural Tax, 337, 341 United States, 73, 235; corporate income tax and law in, 94, 115–16; income tax in, 18, 87, 91, 151, 153–4, 155, 158, 163, 166, 167, 185, 190, 212; influence on Russian taxation and, 182,

Index 483 192, 212, 308; inheritance tax in, 108, 109, 111; privacy debate in, 11, 15, 93, 94, 182, 184; tax practices in, 8, 10, 16, 116, 308 Universal Citizens’ Tax, 335 universalism, taxation as form of, 9, 17, 30, 42, 82, 120, 142, 200; in cities, 65; income tax and, 170–1; as reform focus, 45, 49. See also income tax, personal; participation; person, concept of; Soviet regime urban-rural divide, tax practices, 55, 65, 88, 171–2, 238–44, 247–8, 255, 267, 268, 287. See also peasants, Soviet Russia: urban-rural divide; peasants, taxation of, imperial Russia: separateness of urban taxation, 3, 22–3, 97, 99, 153, 268 utopia, 79; Soviet Russia and, 314, 316, 349. See also Bellamy; Chaianov; Zamiatin vodka, 23; attempts to limit consumption, 215–16, 221–3, 228; banning of (1914), 23, 207, 233–4; excises on, 32, 68–70, 73; monopoly (see vodka monopoly); as proof against devaluation, 290. See also alcohol; Department of Non-assessed Levies; public health vodka monopoly: emergence and operation of, 216–21; as confluence of state, economy, population, 80, 207, 292, 303; revenue from, 191, 217, 227, 233, 241; state’s new interest in public health and, 210, 234; under the Bolsheviks, 337 Volga famine, 155, 158, 258, 263, 273

Vyshnegradskii, Ivan, 41, 262, 272 War Communism, 23–4, 298, 300, 330, 337, 338 Watkins, Matthew, 361n19 wealth, as opposed to income, 149 welfare, popular, 13; state’s interest in, 82, 100, 103, 217–18. See also alcohol; vodka Werth, Paul, 23–4 Wheatcroft, Stephen G., 240, 277 Witte, Sergei Iu, 41, 62, 99; on apartment tax as civic participation, 118–25; economy as master-category, 103, 148–9, 217–18; income tax and, 187, 214; peasant taxation and, 248, 250–1, 254, 255, 263, 269, 288; public health and fiscal policy, 216, 222; taxation as tool of modern government, 7–8, 149–50. See also alcohol; zemstvos women: alcohol regulation and, 72, 228– 9; taxation of, as form of equalization, 165, 176, 280 workers, industrial, and income tax, 171 World War I: inadequacy of tax revenue and, 191 (see also peasants, taxation of, imperial Russia); as spur to univeralizing taxation regimes, 23, 198, 202; state transformation and, 198–9, 292, 302–3; war-profits tax, 192, 236 Zamiatin, Evgenii, 20; We, 315–16 zemstvos, 28, 74; predominance of gentry in, 63, 159; reform of 1864, 27; role in taxation, 61–2, 131, 148–9, 174–5, 246, 249, 284, 286; Witte on, 148–9