Kotsonis Yanni. States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. — 504 p. — ISBN-10: 1487521650; ISBN-13: 978-1487521653Beginning 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 Obligation is 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 Obligation is at once a study in Russian economic history and a reflection on the modern state and the modern citizen.List of Russian TermsIntroduction. A Short History of Taxes: Russia and the World from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First CenturiesThe 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 TaxationPeople, Places, Things: The Old Regime, Economic Knowledge, and the Coming of the New OrderThe Fiscal Instruments of Regime Change from the Eighteenth to the Nineteenth CenturiesThe 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 AccountabilityThree Tax Reforms, Three Visions of the PolityIgnore the Person: The Logic of Property Taxes after 1855
The Making of an Urban-Rural Divide
Indirect Taxation, the Free Market, and Their Discontents
The Excise Inspectors
The Public View of the Private, and the Meanings of Laissez-FaireThe Politics of Visibility, the Technologies of Intimacy: Taxes and the Remaking of Urban and Commercial RussiaWealth in Motion: New Money, New Taxes, and a New BureaucracyCapitalism 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 TaxSystematic Intimacy: Business Taxes and the Disciplining of Commercial RussiaThe 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 AggregationMass Taxation in the Age of the Individual: The New Personal Taxation in Russia and the WorldBack 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 UniversalismThe Income Tax as Modern Government: Assessment, Self-Assessment, and Mutual SurveillanceThe 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 StateThe Politics of Obscurity: Peasant Taxes, Excises, and the Vodka Monopoly to 1917Everyone and No One: Indirect Taxes and the Vodka Monopoly to 1917Revenue, Per Capita Rates, and the Limits of Social Reform
From Laissez-Faire to Nationalization
Treasure, Public Order, and Public Health
Prohibition, the War Budget, and the Financial CatastropheThe Peasant and the Fisc: The State Budget and the Persistence of Collective Tax ApportionmentPeasant Direct Taxes and the State Revenue Budget to 1914
State Policy and the Practices of UncertaintyThe Local Practices of Peasant TaxationRepartition
Arrears and Forgiveness
Collection and Punishment
Taxes in Kind
Was a Peasant a Person? Rural Taxation and the War-Time CrisisThe State and Revolution, the State and Evolution: Fiscal Practices and a New Regime, 1917–30Soviet Russia and the Continuing History of the Russian State

The Meanings of Utopia: Taxes, Urban Unities, and the Several Assaults on Peasant Separateness, 1917–21Urban Taxes, Nationalization, and the Achievable Utopia
The Peasantry, Limited Government, and Unlimited ForceThe Economy of Licences: Taxes and the New Economic Policy
Afterword. Russia, Socialism, and the Modern State