Range of Alternative Estimates of Intra-Village Income Inequality According to Western Siberian Data Tax Layouts of the Early 20th Century

Abstract

The article presents the results of the first attempt in domestic and foreign historiography to measure inequality among peasants on the eve of the Great Russian Revolution using indirect data on income from distribution sentences. At the beginning of the 20th century they were known as resolutions of village assemblies and they established the basis for the distribution of the total amount of taxes of a given village among peasants and fixed amount of payment of each individual peasant, taking into account his solvency. From a total of five thousand distribution sentences, sentences from three neighboring villages from the Tomsk district for three years from 1902 to 1908 were selected for microanalysis. The peculiarity of the distribution sentences is that they only approximately reflect the level of income of the peasant. In this regard, the authors proposed various ways to clarify the data of distributed sentences (recalculation of family data into personal data and exclusion from the calculation of the amount broken down without taking into account property criteria). The resulting figures for the Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, are compared with figures for other countries known from historiography. The authors conclude that the data support the average estimates of pre-revolutionary inequality, as opposed to the lowest and highest existing estimates, and this does not exclude the significant tension introduced into the lives of peasants by income inequality within each individual village.