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Full-Text Articles in History
Review : 'Rural Unrest During The First Russian Revolution: Kursk Province', David W. Darrow
Review : 'Rural Unrest During The First Russian Revolution: Kursk Province', David W. Darrow
David Darrow
The provincial, particularly the rural and agrarian, aspects of Russian history have received renewed attention of late. In many ways, the book under review fits well with two other recent publications by Catherine Evtuhov and Tracy Dennison (Tracy Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom [Cambridge, 2011]; Catherine Evtuhov, Portrait of a Province: Economy, Society and Civilization in Nizhnii Novgorod [Pittsburgh, 2011]), contributing greatly to our understanding of provincial life and peasant economy in imperial Russia. Miller’s thorough study puts Kursk province under a microscope in search of an explanation of the socio-economic causal factors that contributed to violent peasant …
Review: 'States Of Obligation: Taxes And Citizenship In The Russian Empire And Early Soviet Republic', David W. Darrow
Review: 'States Of Obligation: Taxes And Citizenship In The Russian Empire And Early Soviet Republic', David W. Darrow
David Darrow
Many have portrayed death and taxes as life’s only certainties. Yanni Kotsonis’ book masterfully disrupts many of our certainties about Russian history by examining taxation as a nexus of key categories (state, economy, and people), and the role taxation played in the mutually constitutive processes whereby the modern state, the modern economy, and the modern population came into existence. In Russia, perhaps even more than in other states, ‘new kinds of taxes helped define [create] these categories, introduced a fundamental duality to each of them, and put each in tension with the others’ (8). The modern imperial state thrived on …