Bourgeois self-representation and business tax reform in late imperial Russia

Russian Review

Volumn 68, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 583-606

  Bowman, Linda ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES   (Australia)

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EID: 74749098707     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: 14679434     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9434.2009.00540.x     Document Type: Article

References (124)

1. William G. Rosenberg defines "liberal" in the Russian context as the commitment to "the establishment of a rule of law, broadly based civil liberties, a representative and responsible government, and Russia's further development as a great European power on capitalist rather than socialist socioeconomic foundations." See his "Workers and the Liberal Narrative of Modernity," Slavic Review 55 (Summer, 1996): 246
2. Jo Ann Ruckman, The Moscow Business Elite: A Social and Cultural Portrait of Two Generations, 1840-1905 (DeKalb, 1984), 209
3. Margaret R. Somers, "Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation," Social Science History 16 (Winter 1992): 596
4. Jane Burbank, "Political Cultures of Advanced Autocracy: Can the Russian Historian Speak?" Russian History/Histoire Russe 31 (Winter 2004): 474
5. In the First Duma there were 3 commercial-industrial capitalists out of 474 members; 31 out of 520 in the Second Duma; and 7 out of 435 in the Third Duma. See Warren B. Walsh, "The Composition of the Dumas," Russian Review 8 (April 1949): 111-16
6. and C. Jay Smith, "The Russian Third State Duma: An Analytical Profile," Russian Review 17 (July 1958): 201-10
7. The Moscow Stock Exchange (1839), composed of the most influential members of the merchant estate (kupechestvo), established rates for bills of exchange, published commodity prices, regulated local trade practices, and oversaw brokers and goods inspectors. The Moscow Exchange Committee (1870) was an elite group elected by the one hundred (also elected) members of the Exchange Society. The MEC was permitted to represent merchant interests to the Ministry of Finance and in effect served as Russia's preeminent business lobby until the formation of the Association of Industry and Trade in 1906. See Thomas C. Owen, Capitalism and Politics in Russia: A Social History of the Moscow Merchants, 1855-1905 (New York, 1982), 8, 68. Berlin was a political ally of the MEC liberals, a member of the Progressist Party, and an early Soviet historian of Russia's commercial-industrial "bourgeoisie."
8. Pavel Afanas'evich Buryshkin (1887-1955) was the son of a peasant who made his fortune selling textile goods in Moscow. While his family did not belong to the business elite, Pavel was well-educated (Katkov Lyceum, Moscow University) and from 1912 started to play an active role in Moscow's civic and political life. He was elected to the MEC, where he was affiliated with the "young group," was a founding member of the Progressist Party, and became a member of the Municipal City Duma. During World War I he was active in, among others, the War Industries Committee. He wrote his famous memoir in emigration. See Ruckman, The Moscow Business Elite, 42, 221-22 n.10
9. and Iu. A. Petrov, Moskovskaia burzhuaziia v nachale XX veka: Predprinimatel'stvo i politika (Moscow, 2002), 391-93
10. Pavel A. Berlin, Russkaia burzhuaziia staroe i novoe vremia (Moscow, 1922), 251-52, 286
11. Pavel A. Buryshkin, Moskva kupecheskaia (Moscow, 1990), 235-36
12. Vivien Schmidt, "Institutionalism," in The State: Theories and Issues , ed. Colin Hay et al. (New York, 2006), 107
13. Riabushinskii (1871-1924) was a third-generation industrialist whose Old Believer family made its money from commerce in cotton, linens, and wool fabrics and later in mechanized weaving. He expanded the family interests to banking, publishing, the lumber trade, and automobile manufacturing. On the MEC he chaired tax committees and served as its president in 1915-16. Riabushinskii founded the newspaper Utro Rossii (published in 1907, 1909-17) with the aim of attracting business and intellectuals to a progressive movement distinct from the Octobrists and the Kadets. In 1912 he and Konovalov formed the Progressist Party and during World War I organized the War-Industries Committee. See Lewis H. Siegelbaum, The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914-17: A Study of the War-Industries Committees (London, 1983),13
14. Iurii A. Petrov, "Pavel Pavlovich Riabushinskii," in Istoricheskie siluety, ed. S. V. Tiutiukin (Moscow, 1991), 106-52
15. idem, Dinastiia Riabushinskikh (Moscow, 1997)
16. idem, Moskovskaia burzhuaziia v nachale XX veka
17. Iuri A. Petrov et al., Istoriia predprinimatel'stva v Rossii, bk. 2, Vtoraia polovina XIX-nachalo XX veka (Moscow, 2000)
18. James L. West, "The Riabushinsky Circle: Burzhuaziia and Obshchestvennost' in Late Imperial Russia," in Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Edith W. Clowes et al. (Princeton, 1991), 41-56
19. and West, "The Neo-Old Believers of Moscow: Religious Revival and Nationalist Myth in Late Imperial Russia," Canadian-American Slavic Studies 26, nos. 1-3 (1992): 5-28
20. Iuri A. Petrov, "Predprinimateli i vlast'," in Istoriia predprinimatel'stva, 246
21. Carole E. Harrison, "The Bourgeois after the Bourgeois Revolution: Recent Approaches to the Middle Class in European Cities," Journal of Urban History 31 (March 2005): 387
22. According to James Thompson, rhetoric reveals a "political arena in which authority is disputed, claims contested, and concepts authored." See his "After the Fall: Class and Political Language in Britain, 1780-1900," The Historical Journal 39 (September 1996): 795
23. Tim McDaniel, for instance, argues that "unlike early English entrepreneurs who could promote themselves as champions of modern technology and progress, the Russian industrialists had no positive unifying mission" (Autocracy, Modernization, and Revolution in Russia and Iran [Princeton, 1991], 121)
24. See also Valentin V. Shelokhaev, Ideologiia i politicheskaia organizatsiia Rossiiskoi liberal'noi burzhuazii 1907-1914 (Moscow, 1991), 196-97
25. Aleksandr N. Bokhanov, Krupnaia burzhuaziia Rossii konets XIX v.-1914 g. (Moscow, 1992), 260
26. Thomas C. Owen, Capitalism and Politics in Russia: A Social History of the Moscow Merchants, 1855-1905 (New York, 1982)
27. Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill, 1982)
28. A. Ia. Avrekh, "Russkii burzhuaznyi liberalizm: Osobennosti istoricheskogo razvitiia," Voprosy istorii, 1989, no. 2:17-31
29. and Harley D. Balzer, ed., Russia's Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History (Armonk, NY, 1996), 23-24
30. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs, 415
31. Harrison, "The Bourgeois after the Bourgeois Revolution," 382-83
32. Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie 1750-1850 (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 12
33. Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780-1840 (Cambridge, England, 1995) 2-3, 264
34. See also Thompson, "After the Fall," 785-806
35. See Petrov, Dinastiia Riabushinskikh
36. idem, Moskovskaia burzhuaziia
37. James L. West and Iurii A. Petrov, eds., Merchant Moscow: Images of Russia's Vanished Bourgeoisie (Princeton, 1998)
38. Irina V. Potkina and Tatiana P. Morozova, Savva Morozov (Moscow, 1998)
39. Irina V. Potkina, Na Olimpe delovogo uspekha: Nikolskaia manufaktura Morozovykh, 1797-1917 (Moscow, 2004)
40. Galina N. Ulianova, Blagotvoritel'nost' Moskovskikh predprinimatelei, 1860-1914 (Moscow, 1999)
41. I. S. Rozental', Moskva na pereput'e: Vlast' i obshchestvo v 1905-1914 gg. (Moscow, 2004)
42. Edward Vishnevski, Kapital i vlast' v Rossii: Politicheskaia deiatel'nost' progressivnykh predprinimatelei v nachale XX veka (Moscow, 2000)
43. and Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 1997)
44. The "young group" of the MEC included A. I. Konovalov, S. N. Tret'iakov, S. I. Chetverikov, P. A. Buryshkin, and P. P. Riabushinskii, among others. On the "young group" see West, "The Riabushinsky Circle"; Owen, Capitalism and Politics, chap. 7
45. Edith W. Clowes, "Merchants on Stage and in Life: Theatricality and Public Consciousness," in Merchant Moscow, 157-59
46. For the liberal agenda of the progressive industrialists see Rosenberg, "Representing Workers," 246
47. West,"The Riabushinsky Circle," 53
48. Wirtschafter, Social Identity, 85
49. Andrei Osipov notes that "today's millionaire ... leaps up early, hastily glances through the newspaper ... quickly swallows a cup of tea, and rushes into town. At the office, there are letters and telegrams, business visits requiring him ... to drop into the bank, shake hands with a necessary person - a member of the credit commission; then again to the office where ... the barrister is about to go to the factory. Come 11:00 A.M., one has to be at the stock exchange" (Serdtse Rossii: Ocherki kul'turnoi zhizni Moskvy [Moscow, 1902], 5)
50. This was Aleksandr I. Konovalov's rationale. See Stenogrammy zasedanii Soveshchaniia po peresmotru Polozheniia o gosudarstvennom promyslovom naloge (St. Petersburg, 1908), session 1, p. 2 (Stenogrammy 1:2)
51. Alexander Konovalov's Old Believer grandfather founded the family textile factory in Kostroma province. When Konovalov (1875-1948), aged twenty-two, became its director, he shortened the work day to nine hours and built an industrial settlement with "free hospital, school, library, crèche, barracks for single men, and a complex of cottages for workers' families." A leader of the Progressist Party (1912), he was elected to the Fourth Duma and was known as one of its "most authoritative orators." In the Provisional Government he was Minister of Trade and Industry. After emigrating to France in 1918 he worked as a journalist and performed as a concert pianist. See Petrov, Dinastiia Riabushinskikh, 93
52. Leonid E. Shepelev, Tsarizm i burzhuaziia v 1904-1914 gg.: Problemy torgovo-promyshlennoi politiki (Leningrad, 1987), 100
53. Mikhail Smetanin, "Aleksandr Konovalov," Byloe, no. 9-10 (1996): 21
54. and Iuri A. Petrov and M. K. Shatsillo, eds., Rossiiskie predprinimateli v nachale XX veka: Po materialam torgovo-promyshlennogo i finansovogo soiuza v parizhe. Publikatsiia dokumentov (Moscow, 2004), 263
55. Stenogrammy 1:42
56. Stenogrammy 3:1-7, 5:1-2
57. Roberta Thompson Manning, "The Zemstvo and Politics, 1864-1914," in The Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-government, ed. Terence Emmons and Wayne S. Vucinich (Cambridge, England, 1982), 133-76
58. On their contributions to cultural modernism see, for example, William Craft Brumfield, A History of Russian Architecture (Cambridge, England, 1993)
59. Robert H. Gorlin, "Problems of Tax Reform in Imperial Russia," Journal of Modern History 49 (June 1977): 246-65
60. Stenogrammy 5:20
61. The term corporation includes "joint-stock companies" (aktsionernoe obshchestvo), whose shareholders held cheaply priced aktsiia, and smaller, usually family-run "share partnerships" (tovarishchestvo na paiakh) (Thomas C Owen, The Corporation under Russian Law, 1800-1917: A Study in Tsarist Economic Policy [New York, 1991], 12-13, 51)
62. and Linda Bowman, "Russia's First Income Taxes: The Effects of Modernized Taxes on Commerce and Industry, 1885-1914," Slavic Review 52 (Summer 1993): 256-82
63. For a discussion of apportioned (raskladnyi) and individually assessed (okladnyi) taxes see Yanni Kotsonis, "Subject and Citizen: Taxation and its Meaning in Imperial and Soviet Russia," NCEEER Working Paper (Washington, March 18, 2001), 3ff
64. and idem, "'Face-to-Face': The State, the Individual, and the Citizen in Russian Taxation, 1863-1917," Slavic Review 63 (Summer 2004): 221-46
65. P. A. Khromov, Ekonomicheskoe razvitie Rossii v XIX-XX vekakh, 1800-1917 (Moscow, 1950), 444-511
66. Ministerstvo finansov, 1802-1902, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1904), 1:615-35, 2:640-47
67. Shepelev, Tsarizm i burzhuaziia v 1904-1914 gg., 41-43
68. Ministerstvo finansov, 1802-1902 1:615-35, 2:640-47
69. N. Pokrovskii, O podokhodnom naloge (Petrograd, 1915), 147
70. See also Andrew Babkov, "National Finances and the Economic Evolution of Russia," Russian Review 1 (July 1912): 180
71. and Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 1850-1917 (New York, 1986), 218-24
72. Bokhanov, Krupnaia burzhuaziia, 74
73. Ruth Amende Roosa, "Russian Industrialists and 'State Socialism,' 1906-17," Soviet Studies 23 (January 1972): 412-13
74. "O finansovykh rezultatakh podokhodnogo naloga," Vestnik finansov, promyshlennosti i torgovli, no. 46 (November 14/27, 1910): 278
75. Sven Steinmo, Taxation and Democracy: Swedish, British and American Approaches to Financing the Modern State (New Haven, 1993), 51-52, 55-57
76. Maurice H Robinson, "The Federal Corporation Tax," American Economic Review 1 (December 1911): 691-723
77. Gorlin, "Problems of Tax Reform," 252-53
78. PSZ 18 (June 8, 1898), no. 15,601
79. M. K. Shatsillo, "Evoliutsiia sotsial'nogo oblika rossiiskogo predprinimatel'stva," in Istoriia predprinimatel'stva, 221-23
80. Bowman, "Russia's First Income Taxes," 256, 261-63
81. See, for example, Istoriia predprinimatel'stva, 308
82. cited in Eric Lohr, "The Ideal Citizen and Real Subject in Late Imperial Russia," Kritika 7 (Spring 2006): 173
83. Lohr "The Ideal Citizen," 192
84. Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, "In Search of the People, In Search of Russia," Russian Review 60 (October, 2001): 500
85. Lohr "The Ideal Citizen," 192-94
86. Somers asserts that "rights are free-floating cultural and institutional resources that must be appropriated and in turn given meaning only in the practical context of power and social relations. ... A citizenship right, like all rights, is not a "thing"; it is a social practice." See Margaret R. Somers, "Rights, Rationality, and Membership: Rethinking the Making and Meaning of Citizenship," Law & Social Inquiry 19 (Winter 1994): 65, 79
87. See also Lohr, "The Ideal Citizen," 176
88. Yanni Kotsonis, "'Face-to-Face': The State, the Individual, and the Citizen in Russian Taxation, 1863-1917," Slavic Review 63 (Summer 2004): 222
89. PSZ 18 (June 8, 1898), no. 15,601; Bowman, "Russia's First Income Taxes," 256
90. Kotsonis, "Face-to-Face," 224
91. N. F. von Ditmar telegrammed the MEC on April 21, 1908, to advise that the Southern Association had requested the minister of trade and industry to summon a conference concerning business representation on zemstvo assemblies and forwarded petitions. See TsIAM, f. 143, op. 1, d. 284, ll. 163 (telegram), and 164-73 (petitions). See also Susan P. McCaffray, "The Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers and the Problems of Industrial Progress in Tsarist Russia," Slavic Review 47 (Fall 1988): 476-77
92. Zapiska Moskovskogo Birzhevogo Obshchestva, 20
93. Vtoroi Ocherednoi S"ezd predstavitelei promyshlennosti i torgovli, Po povodu vnesennogo v Zakonodatel'nye Uchrezhdeniia proekta podokhodnogo naloga: Doklad Soveta S"ezdov (St. Petersburg, 1907), 5, 14-15
94. Gorlin, "Problems of Tax Reform," 255
95. Zapiska Moskovskogo Birzhevogo Obshchestva, 7
96. Carl A. Goldberg, "The Association of Industry and Trade 1906-1917: The Successes and Failures of Russia's Organized Businessmen," (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1974), 256-59
97. Association of Industry and Trade, Materialy po promyslovomu oblozheniiu: Glavnye osnovaniia proekta izmenenii Polozheniia o gosudarstvennom promyslovom naloge, sostavlennye Ministerstvom Finansov k soveshchaniiu 24 Marta 1908 g. (St. Petersburg, 1908), 31
98. See Robert Edelman, "The Russian Nationalist Party and the Political Crisis of 1909," Russian Review 34 (January 1975): 32-35
99. Francis W. Wcislo, "Soslovie or Class? Bureaucratic Reformers and Provincial Gentry in Conflict, 1906-1908," Russian Review 47 (January 1988): 17-18
100. and Don C. Rawson, "Rightist Politics in the Revolution of 1905: The Case of Tula Province," Slavic Review 51 (Spring 1992): 99-116
101. See Robert W. Thurston, Liberal City, Conservative State. Moscow and Russia's Urban Crisis, 1906-1914 (New York, 1987)
102. McCaffray, "The Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers," 476-77
103. Wcislo, "Soslovie or Class?" 18
104. K voprosu o peresmotre promyslovogo naloga: Zapiska Nizhegorodskogo Birzhevogo Komiteta, rassylaemaia chlenam Nizhegorodskogo Birzhevogo Obshchestva (Nizhnii-Novgorod, 1908), 6
105. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs, 282-83
106. Berlin, Russkaia burzhuaziia, 301-2
107. See Bowman, "Russia's First Income Taxes," 268-71
108. Buryshkin, Moskva kupecheskaia, 113
109. (quoted in Boris Mironov, A Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917 [Boulder, 2000], 498)
110. Smetanin, "Aleksandr Konovalov," 21; Petrov, Moskovskaia burzhuaziia, 298
111. see also note 4. Roosa also notes the struggle between the government and industrialists over the future management of illness insurance funds in her "Workers' Insurance Legislation and the Role of the Industrialists in the Period of the Third State Duma, Russian Review 34 (October 1975): 419
112. See Mikhail I. Tugan-Baranovsky, The Russian Factory in the 19th Century, trans. Arthur Levin and Claora S. Levin (Homewood, IL, 1970), 316
113. and Bowman, "Seeking Salvation," 322-45
114. Stenogrammy, 4; 5:6-7, 16
115. Mikhail N. Baryshnikov, Delovoi mir Rossii: Istoriko-biographicheskii spravochnik (St. Petersburg, 1998), 167-68
116. Jennifer I Considine and William A Kerr, The Russian Oil Economy (Cheltenham, England, 2002), 16-19
117. Varentsov, Slyshannoe, 692
118. Daniel T. Orlovsky, "Professionalism in the Ministerial Bureaucracy on the Eve of the February Revolution of 1917," in Russia's Missing Middle Class, 281
119. Stenogrammy 9:39, 10:28
120. Varentsov, Slyshannoe, 327, 742
121. James L. West, "Visions of Russia's Entrepreneurial Future: Pavel Riabushinsky's Utopian Capitalism," in Merchant Moscow, 166
122. idem, "The Riabushinsky Circle," 46
123. A. Belyi, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii (Leningrad, 1934), 244
124. cited in John E. Bowlt, "The Moscow Art Market in Late Imperial Russia," in Between Tsar and People, 113-14