Russian economic historians have longed for a handbook on Imperial Russian taxation. Yanni Kotsonis's States of Obligation makes a substantial contribution by describing Russia's complex tax system from roughly 1860 to the 1920s. Kotsonis documents the Russian Empire's “progress towards a new regime by the extent to which taxes were extended to all persons regardless of their status, and payments became more commensurate with capacities” (p. 3).

Kotsonis shows how the Empire taxed the many segments of its population and how these mechanisms changed over time. This research required consulting archives in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vologda, and New York. An impressive stock of published primary sources, periodicals, and secondary literature enriches the narrative.

Kotsonis stresses how taxation brought citizens closer to their state: understanding the population's capacity to pay required assessing the population's wealth and income. On this point Kotsonis can be a bit abstract, for example, arguing that “taxation is…a nexus where basic categories meet and reshape each other, and a way to express and negotiate the tensions of a modern regime” (p. 5).

Part 1 sets the stage for the beginnings of Russian tax reform to 1880, beginning with the Empire's composition of its first real budgets. Before the 1860s, all of Russia's taxes were indirect and therefore not based on assessments of capacity to pay (p. 35): this serves as the starting point for Kotsonis's narrative. Reformers aimed to “make the budget dependent on the wealth of the empire” (p. 32). Rural cadastres proved impossible, but reformers introduced a reformed business license system, excises in place of tax farming, and rural collective responsibility for taxes. Russia's urban-rural divide, highlighted by the book's subsequent sections, already confronted these early reformers.

The book engages Imperial data reluctantly. Kotsonis compares aggregate taxation amounts but hesitates to make comparisons across regions, industries, or income groups. In the case of the countryside, for example, Kotsonis argues that it would be “well nigh impossible to measure tax burdens against peasant capacities because the system of direct and indirect taxation that affected peasants were never designed to do so” (p. 22). I imagine this book will stimulate future research examining these tax records more deeply, perhaps combining data sources to compare what we know about Russian rural and urban wealth to tax payments.

Kotsonis's reluctance to make quantitative comparisons is especially apparent as the book traces the evolution of capacity-based taxes on urban dwellers and commercial enterprises (Part 2). A debate in Russian economic history considers the influence of non-corporate vs. corporate taxation on industrial organization. Non-corporate enterprises faced taxes based on regional and industrial norms. Corporations (legal persons, Kotsonis reminds us) faced taxes based on balance sheet profits. Fred Carstensen, for example, claimed that the change in the tax code induced partnerships to incorporate to avoid unpredictable tax norms (“Foreign Participation in Russian Economic Life: Notes on British Enterprise, 1865–1914,” in Entrepreneurship in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, eds. Gregory Guroff and Fred Carstensen: 144). Kotsonis is skeptical that enterprises would prefer to be assessed (p. 135) but does not calculate tax burdens.

Kotsonis stressed that the Empire made the greatest progress in urban and commercial taxation. The Empire taxed corporations on their incomes and made progress towards a personal income tax with its apartment tax, which used rental expenses as a proxy for income. The 1905 Revolution brought calls for a universal income tax to express universal citizenship, which culminated in Russia's 1916 income tax. Such progress, however, was not the rule for most of the Empire's history nor for the Empire's largest economic sector.

Part 3, “The Politics of Obscurity,” outlines Russia's continuing challenges in measuring wealth in the countryside. Having given up on a comprehensive rural cadastre, the Russian state instead relied on indirect, excise taxes on sugar, salt, tobacco, matches, and, most infamously, vodka. Overall indirect revenue constituted 80.9 percent of total Imperial Russian government revenue in 1913 (p. 209). The book includes a thought-provoking account of the state vodka monopoly's conflicting revenue and public health goals. The countryside meanwhile continued to face collective responsibility for repartitional taxes, and the state struggled to reconcile rural tax arrears, often resorting to violence. The book's cover, Korovin's 1884 painting “Before the Flogging at the County Board,” ominously reminds readers that the Empire did not abolish corporal punishment until 1904.

Especially when describing older institutions in the countryside, States of Obligation can seem too Russia-focused. Many of the institutions Kotsonis describes, for example, tax farming and repartition, could be found throughout Europe and Asia. Kotsonis mentions the French influence on Russian repartition (pp. 4, 42) and references income taxes in the United Kingdom and United States. However, Kotsonis could have better placed Russia's taxation in world context. Perhaps the Russian Empire stood out from its European peers by relying on such institutions so late and at such an impressive scale.

In the book's final part, the Bolsheviks continued extended the Imperial income tax, with renewed political objectives. The Bolsheviks provide Kotsonis with further evidence of taxation's role in citizen-building: when the cost of collecting the income tax exceeded revenue, the commissariat emphasized the tax's universality, calling it “‘an act, the political importance of which is not only equal to, but surpasses, its fiscal importance’” (p. 311). The Soviet government introduced a failed rural survey (pp. 321–24) and continued to struggle to extract revenue and grain from the countryside. The book ends on a disturbing note: Stalin's efforts to address rural revenue “degenerated into an assault on any village that did not deliver grain, and spilled into forced collectivization” (p. 345).

States of Obligation will be essential reading for economic historians of Russia and will be of interest to scholars of public finance's evolution in practice. Kotsonis's description of Imperial Russian and early Soviet taxation is an important contribution in an ongoing effort to characterize Russia's complex economic institutions.