A Bolshevik Financial Revolution: Russia’s Fiscal Capacity and the Meaning of October 1917

• In Event: Chemical Controversies, Rubber Quests, and Fiscal Dreams: Technologies of Power in Soviet Modernity

Abstract

Why the October Revolution happened and what its consequences were cannot be separated from earlier attempts to modernize the Tsarist tax state. The origin of the October Revolution lay in fiscal and economic reforms of the post-Crimean War, reforms that were not revolutionary but which raised the fiscal burden on the agrarian people. This paper argues that contrary to the utopian illusion that a life without fiscal burdens was imminent, the October Revolution essentially picked up the mantle of the earlier Tsarist fiscal reforms. It examines the system of public debt created by the Bolshevik regime which, hitherto, has been virtually unexamined and invisible. By creating this system of public debt, the Bolsheviks sought to increase the bureaucracy’s power to tax the population and the enterprise directly. The Soviet bureaucracy, relying on capitalist financial instruments and technologies, generated an immense tax debt which was passed on to the worker and peasant masses. Aside from tracking the economic continuity of Soviet modernization, this paper argues that the uneven development of the system of public debt contributed to a growing tax debt which the bureaucracy refused to pay. The growing bureaucratic tax debt was transferred onto the Soviet people, which created antagonisms between the state and society similar to those seen in earlier Tsarist periods between agrarian peasants and foreign capital.

Author

• Alex Royt, U of Delaware