Selling Vodka: The Tax Farm—Structure, Metabolism, and Ecology

Abstract

Abstract If the tavern was the cell of the liquor trade in Russia during the nineteenth century, the tax farm was the organism. And while in the history of tax farming, as in that of living creatures, there had been a time when the organism was the cell, by the nineteenth century this was no longer true. By the mid-nineteenth century, there were two distinct types of tax farm in the Russian Empire. First, there were retail farms, whose lessees were granted monopolies on the retail trade in vodka. Then there were the ‘excise tax farms’. Most tax farms were multi-celled commercial organisms, coordinating the activities of ten, twenty, thirty, or more taverns (or distilleries in the privileged provinces after 1851). This chapter examines the nature, the anatomy, and the commercial metabolism of the tax farm — how it functioned and nourished itself as a commercial enterprise. It also considers the tax farm's ‘ecology’, and in particular, the symbiotic relationship with the Russian government, without which tax farms could not possibly have survived so long.