States of Obligation

Yanni Kotsonis is an associate professor in the Departments of History and of Russian and Slavic Studies and founding Director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University.

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


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


2 Three Tax Reforms, Three Visions of the Polity


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


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


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


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


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


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


9. The Local Practices of Peasant Taxation


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


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


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


Afterword. Russia, Socialism, and the Modern State