Tax battles within the peasant community: Murinskoye repartitional resolutions 1904

Abstract

The article aims to change the attitude of researchers of the Late Imperial Russia to the resolutions (“prigovory”) of local peasant assemblies, which are considered an uninformative source. The author proves the possibility of using them as a source of rare information about the struggle of peasants at a village assembly. The particular type of resolutions used by the author originated from the repartition of taxes between individual peasants by the peasant commune (“raskladochnye prigovory” = repartitional resolutions). The work is based on the documents from the state archive of the Tomsk region – one of the largest Siberian centers for storing pre-revolutionary documents. Among the one and a half thousand repartitional resolutions discovered here, the author found four rare documents containing direct evidence of the open confrontation that took place at the assembly. Considering the proposals of the minority that lost the scramble, the author proves that the essence of these confrontations in all cases was the struggle between the rich and the poor for adapting the grounds of tax repartition most favorable for each of the parties. Particular attention is paid to the resolution of the village of Murinskoye: it is distinguished by bright rhetoric, that disguises the true result of the dispute that took place at the assembly. By placing this document in the context of other repartitional resolutions, the author reveals the meaning of those terms that the village clerk did not explain and reconstructs what was left unsaid. Finally, the author compares the shares of each of the repartition grounds (the one favorable to the poor and the one favorable to the rich) according to the scheme initially proposed and according to that fixed in the resolution. The conclusion says that the result of the struggle at the assembly was a concession by the poor in favor of the rich. Repartitional resolutions that allow such an analysis are rare, but the information contained in them rewards the efforts spent on finding them.