Taxes and Citizenship, 1850s–1920s

Iosif Stalin does not enter the story until the very end of Yanni Kotsonis’s fiscal history of imperial and early Soviet Russia, but the shadow of Stalinist collectivization hangs over nearly every page of this monumental work. From Emancipation to the 1920s, the Russian and then Soviet state had tried and failed to extract revenue from, and in the process make citizens out of, the Russian peasantry. This repeated and systematic failure was all the more frustrating for occurring alongside a process by which urban residents were increasingly treated as individuals rather than as members of social estates, were taxed as such, and were made participants in the emerging state. Collectivization was a solution—a violent, immoral solution—to a seemingly intractable problem that had bedeviled generations of Russian policymakers.