Souls" Versus "Means": Implicit Meanings of the Peasants' Tax Distribution Acts at the Early XXth century Russia (on the Materials of the Bogorodslaya and Semiluzhnaya Counties, Tomsk District)

The aim of the article is to reveal the sense of terms used by peasants when distributing taxes. This aim is important because tax reform was a generally acknowledged point of the Russian agenda at the early 20th century. The fact that even poorest peasants had to pay taxes, ruinous for their weak husbandries, was the most annoying thing in the eyes of the public opinion. Even after the abolition of poll tax (1885) number of male peasants living in a village was one of the main factors for calculating sum of taxes due from that village. Distribution of that sum among peasants was exercised by peasant commune. Until now we have only vague idea of what indicators peasants used to allot a greater or smaller part of the collective burden to each taxpayer, and why they chose these particular indicators. When trying to reveal that we face not only the problem of obtaining information from primary sources, but of understanding the true sense of terms used by peasants. The sources of the research are primary sources from the archives. Interpreting the sense of a term requires studying primary sources that provide us with the context. Tax distribution acts adopted by village assemblies make the documentary basis for current research. The base used includes more than three hundred acts of two West Siberian counties (volost) of the Tomsk district. It contains a complete set of distribution acts for 1907 and 1908 and a sufficient number of acts to trace trends through one or two previous years. The two counties selected can be considered typical for the peasant Russia of the early 20th century. Still they are not quite similar. Bogorodskaya volost, 50 km far from Tomsk, specialized on agricultural production. Semiluzhnaya volost, situated close to Tomsk and partly settled with recent Stolypin migrants, depended mostly on the non-agricultural incomes. Synopsis of the article. Comparison of data for the two counties shows striking difference between the systems of tax distribution. Semiluzhnaya peasants put some 70% of taxes upon "souls", while Bogorodskaya inhabitants preferred "valid workers" (31-37%), ploughland (19-20%) and cattle (29-32%). Textual analysis of the particular clauses used by the peasants adds something essential to what can be seen from the figures only. It appears that most of the "per soul" distributions are in fact connected to the land allots or to the valid workers. Moreover: both souls, valid workers and land allots appear variations of the same distribution model tied to the working force of a peasant. This "personalized model" can be opposed to the "wealth model" tied to payer's prosperity formulated through cattle number, ploughland and hayfield area. Conclusions. We can see that the two contradicting models could as well be combined in one system of tax distribution (at Bogorodskaya volost). Besides, we understand that the "soul" of the early 20th century is a measure quite different from the time of poll tax when this term became famous. That is, even the pure "personalized model" should be considered not as rejecting the economic life but as reflecting it in a different way, a kind of the peasant "laissez-faire" concept application.

Keywords

Authors

References