Income, Housing and Inequality in Barnaul and Tomsk in the early 1910s. Based on the Materials of the Presence on the Apartment Tax

Abstract

The subject of the study is the degree of severity of stratification of the urban population in pre–revolutionary Russia. The authors set the task to calculate the decile coefficient and identify other indicators useful for understanding the degree of inequality among the citizens of two large Western Siberian cities of the early XX century. For this purpose, rarely used sources are taken, some of which are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. The advantageous difference between apartment tax documents is that they allow you to estimate the income of citizens for the period when there was no income tax in Russia yet. The advantage of the "Statements of homeowners on apartment tax" in comparison with other sources on this tax is that they contain information not only about rich citizens (tax payers), but also about those who were exempt from tax due to poverty. The authors conclude that the decile coefficient indicators in two large Western Siberian cities work rather in favor of the pessimistic tradition that considers inequality in pre-revolutionary Russia to be high. The difference between Tomsk and Barnaul was revealed by the following characteristics: the gap in apartment prices between homeowners and tenants ("housing scissors"), the share of tenants among citizens, the share of householders living "on the settlement" with tenants. These differences are associated with a higher level of development of the rental housing market in Tomsk, which can be explained by its greater attractiveness as an economic, cultural and administrative center. The authors consider it useful to study living standards as one of the ways to study inequality.