Beginning in the 1860s, the Russian Empire replaced a poll tax system that originated with Peter the Great with a modern system of income and excise taxes. Russia began a transformation of state fiscal power that was also underway across Western Europe and North America.States of Obligationis the first sustained study of the Russian taxation system, the first to study its European and transatlantic context, and the first to expose the essential continuities between the fiscal practices of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
Using a wealth of materials from provincial and local archives across Russia, Yanni Kotsonis examines how taxation was simultaneously a revenue-raising and a state-building tool, a claim on the person and a way to produce a new kind of citizenship. During successive political, wartime, and revolutionary crises between 1855 and 1928, state fiscal power was used to forge social and financial unity and fairness and a direct relationship with individual Russians. State power eventually overwhelmed both the private sector economy and the fragile realm of personal privacy.States of Obligationis at once a study in Russian economic history and a reflection on the modern state and the modern citizen.
Author(s): Yanni Kotsonis
Edition: Paperback
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Year: 2016
Language: English
Pages: 504
Title Page......Page 4
Contents......Page 8
List of Tables and Figures......Page 12
Preface......Page 13
List of Russian Terms......Page 18
Introduction: A Short History of Taxes: Russia and the World from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries......Page 23
The Analytic Categories: The State, the Economy, and the Person......Page 24
Taxes and Regimes: Russia in International Context......Page 30
And Russia in Its Own Context......Page 43
Historians on Russian Taxation......Page 46
Part 1. People, Places, Things: The Old Regime, Economic Knowledge, and the Coming of the New Order......Page 51
The Fiscal Idiom of Civic Reform......Page 53
The Novelty of the State Budget and the New Space of Economics......Page 59
The Fiscal Reformers......Page 68
Poll Taxes, State Knowledge, and the Problem of Equivalencies......Page 71
“And Yet the Arrears Were Never Collected”: The Problem of Accountability......Page 80
Ignore the Person: The Logic of Property Taxes after 1855......Page 87
The Making of an Urban-Rural Divide......Page 90
Indirect Taxation, the Free Market, and Their Discontents......Page 100
The Excise Inspectors......Page 113
The Public View of the Private, and the Meanings of Laissez-Faire......Page 115
Part 2. The Politics of Visibility, the Technologies of Intimacy: Taxes and the Remaking of Urban and Commercial Russia......Page 123
3 Wealth in Motion: New Money, New Taxes, and a New Bureaucracy......Page 125
Capitalism and Privacy in Russia and the North Atlantic......Page 126
The Tax Inspectorate, Nikolai Bunge, and Popular Welfare......Page 141
Dead Souls: The Inheritance Tax and the Economic Personality......Page 152
Corporations, Personhood, and the Case for Transparency......Page 161
Enter the Citizen: The Apartment Tax......Page 164
The Laws of 1885 and the Map of Commercial Russia......Page 175
Disclosure, Exposure, and the Uses of the Norm......Page 180
Capital Gains, Contracts, Deeds, and Urban Real Estate......Page 192
Economic Individuation and State Aggregation......Page 201
Back to the Person: Russia and the International Debate over the Income Tax......Page 206
The Russian Income Tax and the Political Crisis of 1905......Page 214
The Inexorable Logic of Universalism......Page 220
The Mechanisms of Participation......Page 234
The Individual and the Personality in Fiscal Practice......Page 240
Evasion and Transparency......Page 249
The Income Tax and the Great War......Page 255
Russia and the Modern State......Page 264
Part 3. The Politics of Obscurity: Peasant Taxes, Excises, and the Vodka Monopoly to 1917......Page 271
Revenue, Per Capita Rates, and the Limits of Social Reform......Page 273
From Laissez-Faire to Nationalization......Page 282
Treasure, Public Order, and Public Health......Page 291
Prohibition, the War Budget, and the Financial Catastrophe......Page 307
8 The Peasant and the Fisc: The State Budget and the Persistence of Collective Tax Apportionment......Page 312
Peasant Direct Taxes and the State Revenue Budget to 1914......Page 313
State Policy and the Practices of Uncertainty......Page 323
9 The Local Practices of Peasant Taxation......Page 338
Repartition......Page 339
Arrears and Forgiveness......Page 344
Collection and Punishment......Page 356
Taxes in Kind......Page 373
Was a Peasant a Person? Rural Taxation and the War-Time Crisis......Page 376
Part 4. The State and Revolution, the State and Evolution: Fiscal Practices and a New Regime, 1917–30......Page 383
10 Soviet Russia and the Continuing History of the Russian State......Page 385
Urban Taxes, Nationalization, and the Achievable Utopia......Page 399
The Peasantry, Limited Government, and Unlimited Force......Page 411
12 The Economy of Licences: Taxes and the New Economic Policy......Page 432
Afterword. Russia, Socialism, and the Modern State......Page 449
Notes......Page 452
Bibliography......Page 578
Index......Page 615
