Abstract
Investments in the fiscal, legal, and infrastructural “capacity” of the state have come to be seen as key determinants of economic development. Central authorities may make these investments, but local public sector institutions also play a role in building state capacity. This chapter examines the interaction between central and local capacity in the context of Tsarist Russia after the end of serfdom. We describe the structure of local government and, drawing on a variety of new sources, provide preliminary evidence on the extent of capacity building by various public sector actors. Our findings are suggestive of a particularly rich interaction between central authorities and decentralized institutions at the local level when it comes to providing public goods and services. We argue that interpretations of early modern and modern state building are remiss if they focus exclusively on the central government without considering the importance of locally determined efforts.
This paper incorporates part of an earlier working paper, “Local Politics and Public Goods in Late-Tsarist Russia.” Phonkrit Tanavisarut, Gulya Radjapova, and Ivan Badiniski provided wonderful research assistance.
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Notes
- 1.
To some extent, this view is consistent with the framework developed by Acemoğlu et al. (2014) in considering the interaction between local and central state capacity building in modern Colombia.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
Gennaioli and Voth (2015) utilize total central government revenues as their main measure of state capacity.
- 5.
Gregory’s (1982) measures include not only the expenditures of the central government, but also those of municipal authorities, the zemstvo, and local institutions of peasant self-government. That Gregory works with net government spending (net of transfers and intermediate purchases) likely explains the difference between his numbers and ours, both for central government expenditures and those of local institutions. On the structures of government in the Imperial period, see Hartley (2006) and Shakibi (2006).
- 6.
These indirect taxes included excise (aktsiz) taxes on other goods (tobacco, sugar, etc.); patents granting the right to sell these same goods; direct state production and sales of alcohol (after 1895); various fines and fees; ticket sales and fees on state railways; and others.
- 7.
As the state treasury became increasingly reliant on indirect taxation over the period, it appears that the bulk of direct tax revenues were left in the hands of local offices of central authorities (Zakharov et al. 2006). The composition of direct taxes changes over time, with the cessation of the soul tax in 1886 and its replacement by a state land tax. Direct taxes included other forms of property taxes as well.
- 8.
For a summary, see Mironov (1985). Prior to 1861, peasant and urban leaders occasionally assessed community members to provide some services, such as paying a literate villager to teach in an informal school. However, historians of serfdom have found little evidence of significant welfare or public good provision by serf communes (Dennison 2011). The Ministry of State Domains, which administered (and collected revenues from) the state peasantry, did establish a grain storage network, founded primary and secondary schools, and organized rural health networks after 1830. These were rather limited efforts, but they did provide examples followed by other ministries and, later, by the zemstva. On public good provision among the state peasants, see Ivanov, (1945). For discussions of urban government and public service provision prior to 1861, see Brower (1990).
- 9.
By “representatives” in these peasant institutions, we are referring to household heads in the communal skhody, or assembly, and the community members and rural society elders sent to attend township-level skhody.
- 10.
Other paid employees of rural societies and townships included tax collectors, guardsmen (over grain stores and churches), and agricultural workers such as shepherds for community flocks.
- 11.
Documentation of the grain storage system is widely available among the archival holdings of zemstvo, peasant institutions, and local Offices of Peasant Affairs. Such records include account books – see GANO, 20.90.46.
- 12.
Township elders were paid roughly 200 rubles per year in both 1881 and 1893, while rural society elders received approximately 30–40 rubles (1893 data not reported here). Township clerks – much more likely to be literate – were generally paid more than the elders.
- 13.
This is evident in numerous archival records that provide rough financial accounts of specific rural societies and township. For examples, see TsIAM, 199.2.362; TsGIA SPb, 190.5.286; and GANO, 20.90.113b.
- 14.
This description of Ardatovskii district zemstvo activities for 1883 is taken from minutes published in Zhurnaly (1884, pp. 106–223).
- 15.
See PSZ (Series II, Vol. 39, 1864, No. 40457). In this way, the zemstva have been viewed as a response to the “problem of provincial under-institutionalization” in Tsarist Russia (Robbins 1987, p. 16).
- 16.
Discussions over the original zemstvo law and the 1890 reform cited population and the distribution of property as the key variables behind the setting of seat shares. The reformers explicitly acknowledged the intent to favor the local landed elite as the most educated and experienced people in the provinces. In addition, the Minister of the Interior, P. A. Valuev, in his proposal for the 1864 law, outlined district norms (tsenzi) of communal or private land that were meant to correspond to curia seats in the two curia (the urban curia seats were to be based primarily on population).
- 17.
These assemblymen (glasnye) elected the district executive boards and representatives to provincial assemblies (which then elected a provincial executive committee). Conservative reforms of the 1890s reduced the assembly shares of the peasant and urban curiae. However, the newly emancipated peasantry still retained seats in the zemstvo assemblies and the possibility of election to executive positions. For additional detail, see Nafziger (2011).
- 18.
PSZ, Series II, Vol. 39, 1864, No. 40457, Clause 1.
- 19.
As reported in Zhurnaly, the Ardatov budget for 1884 included 81,481.64 rubles in expenditures, with 31,756.96 for health care (including the salaries and expenses for four doctors and three small hospitals) and 12,139.30 for education (including 5160 rubles in salary for 35 teachers).
- 20.
As a point of comparison, by the early 1880s, the volosti and sel’skie obshchestva of Ardatov district were spending roughly 120,000 rubles in total (Russia, Tsentral’nyi 1886).
- 21.
For example, a substantial part of the 1890 business of the Semenov district zemstvo executive board (uprava) was taken up with efforts to deal with tax complaints and arrears (GANO, 51.251.292).
- 22.
For additional details, see Nafziger (2011) and Russia, Tsentral’nyi (1896). In 1896, Ardatov district zemstvo expected to collect 70,421 rubles from property taxes but only received 55,396. Such shortfalls resulted in total accumulated arrears on property taxes of 83,300 rubles by the end of 1897. To help finance this deficit, by January of 1898 the zemstvo had borrowed 42,469 rubles against its capital reserves and 15483 (at 4.5 % interest) from the provincial zemstvo. Despite this persistent gap, budgeted spending rose from 103,000 rubles in 1896 to 137,000 in 1903. See ibid.; and Russia, Statisticheskoe (1906 volume).
- 23.
The majority of these grants were matching funds tied to school building.
- 24.
- 25.
Nafziger (2011) goes on to investigate the relationship between peasant representation and expenditures in more depth by relying on a change in the composition of zemstvo assemblies after a reform of 1890. That paper finds evidence consistent with peasant influence in these institutions.
- 26.
On the breakdown between provincial and district zemstvo activities, see Veselovskii (1909, vol. 1).
- 27.
The supply of primary schooling grew faster in zemstvo provinces than non-zemstvo ones, even after controlling for a variety of other possible explanations. Zemstvo efforts in health care, in promoting rural industry and crafts, in providing veterinary and agronomic services, and in managing large-scale fire insurance systems were critical components of a developing rural service sector.
- 28.
The specific official in charge differed depending on the region (Lapteva 1998). For details on revenue sources and expenditures undertaken by these and other local officials in non-zemstvo areas, see various yearbooks of the Ministry of Finance.
- 29.
Thus, the underlying funding sources in these non-zemstvo provinces were not so different in practice from what the zemstvo had available. It is not clear precisely where these two million rubles show up in the central government budget – the expenditures of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1905 amounted to 114.4 million rubles, with roughly 76 million dedicated to “local administration” and approximately one million separately appropriated for zemstvo, municipal, and other local institutions (Russia, Ministerstvo finansov 1907).
- 30.
For example, land captains (see below) were formally drawn from the district assemblies of the nobility, and townsmen associations played a role in municipal electoral systems. These bodies assessed obligations on their members to fund various initiatives (Hamburg 1984; Rieber 1991; Wirtshafter 1997).
- 31.
- 32.
Urban spending rose from 38 million rubles in 1880 to 56 million in 1890, before increasing even more sharply over the next two decades. In 1912, revenues of approximately 13 rubles per capita – much higher than what other government institutions collected from their constituents – supported this spending. See Russia, Ministerstvo finansov (various).
- 33.
Robbins (1987) and others have documented the characteristics and impact of the largely noble-class governors, noting their particular careerist concerns.
- 34.
- 35.
- 36.
Amid perceptions of a growing rural economic crisis following the famine of 1891–1892, the central ministries viewed many zemstva as fiscally insolvent and began intervening more directly (Fallows 1982, pp. 216–217).
- 37.
See Eklof (1986). This measure required district zemstva to submit plans for achieving universal enrollment in their jurisdictions plans. In return, they received various subsidies and loans from the Ministry of Education. Growing state intervention in local educational matters also came in a succession of ministerial decrees and reforms from 1867, where the Ministry of Education took over supervision but not the funding of schools, to the 1908 law.
- 38.
- 39.
Between 1885 and 1913, central government spending on education and health care rose from 23 million to 154 million rubles, or 2.7 to 4.6 % of total spending. Military spending stayed relatively constant at 27–29 % of overall expenditures throughout the period (Gregory 1982, p. 256). According to Eklof’s tabulations (1986, p. 91), central government spending on primary education rose from only 0.3 % of the budget in 1862 to 2.225 % (or approximately 76 million rubles) in 1913. By 1913, zemstva spending on education – mostly primary – reached approximately 88 million rubles (Russia, Statisticheskoe 1913 vol.). Eklof (1986, p. 89) shows that central government contributions to rural primary schooling rose from 11.3 % of all funding in 1879 to 45 % in 1910, while zemstvo support fell from 43.4 % to 29.6 % over the same period. Some of these contributions took the form of subsidies and loans to zemstva to supplement existing or planned programs.
- 40.
Atkinson (1982), among others, notes the presence of fiscal and political conflict between the townships/communes and the zemstva.
- 41.
Other years and sources of similar data generate similar conclusions. Our focus in on peasant tax obligations related to land, as such detailed (district-level) data are unavailable for other classes and types of direct taxes.
- 42.
In Cardoso and Lains, eds. (2013), many of the chapters do acknowledge some complexity in the fiscal hierarchies of the nineteenth-century state, but they do not draw on the “capacity” framework. Economic history works that explicitly focus on one or two parts of local government include Chapman (2015), Legler et al. (1988), and Ziblatt (2008).
- 43.
- 44.
Although this presumes that local elites would not coopt these institutions more than national elite could capture more centralized revenue and spending policies, a point emphasized by Bardhan and Mookerjee (2006).
- 45.
Due to fears of coordinated opposition, the Tsarist state put explicit limitations on interactions between zemstvo; forbidding, for example, coordination in public health provision. Moreover, it was only with the onset of World War I that a serious discussion of an Empire-wide zemstvo system took place, with such a structure implemented in a limited way in 1917. Given this (and similar limits on other cross-border governance), the network model proposed by Acemoğlu et al. (2014), whereby local and central governments make their own capacity investments in a strategic way, is perhaps not entirely applicable in the Russian context.
Archival and Published Primary Sources
Central Historical Archive of Moscow – TsIAM
Central State Historical Archive of St. Petersburg – TsGIA SPb
State Archive of Nizhegorod Oblast’ – GANO
Russian State Historical Archive – RGIA
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Nafziger, S. (2016). Decentralization, Fiscal Structure, and Local State Capacity in Late-Imperial Russia. In: Eloranta, J., Golson, E., Markevich, A., Wolf, N. (eds) Economic History of Warfare and State Formation. Studies in Economic History. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1605-9_3
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