History Faculty Publications
Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
2015
Publication Source
Revolutionary Russia
Abstract
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 these dualities (particularly those involving personhood) and the new Bolshevik regime attempted to eliminate them once and for all (thereby acting as a truly new regime built upon the foundation prepared by the fiscal practices of the old).
Inclusive pages
216-218
ISBN/ISSN
0954-6545
Document Version
Postprint
Copyright
Copyright © 2015, Taylor and Francis
Publisher
Taylor and Francis
Volume
28
Issue
2
Peer Reviewed
yes
eCommons Citation
Darrow, David W., "Review: 'States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in The Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic'" (2015). History Faculty Publications. 62.
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/hst_fac_pub/62
Comments
The document available for download is the author's accepted manuscript, provided in compliance with the publisher's policy on self-archiving. Differences may exist between this document and the published version, which is available using the link provided. Permission documentation is on file.
Book's citation information: Kotsonis, Yanni. States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in The Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2014.