The Elusive zemskii sbor, or: Taxation without Representation in Russian Turkestan?

Abstract

Abstract Historiography on the sblizhenie effort is abundant, as is the scholarship on the variable geometries of citizenship (grazhdanstvennost’) in reference to Tsarist Turkestan and to other parts of the Russian empire. More generally, the existence of local self-government organs, or zemstva, gradually introduced across parts of the empire from the 1860s onwards, was indeed one of the proxies for the degree of integration of a certain province or gubernia within the imperial fabric. Crucially, the zemstva were responsible for raising and spending a specific local tax, the zemskii sbor, which could be used for various tasks often close to the heart of local communities and their elites, from infrastructure to schooling and public hygiene. In Turkestan, zemstva did not exist when Lykoshin or Pahlen were writing – and were not established even during the revolution. The zemskii sbor, however, was regularly collected. This essay explains how the zemskii sbor was calculated and paid in Turkestan – an aspect still murky in the extant historiography. This is done on the basis of published and archival documents which include quantitative data, especially templates of tax ledgers and budgetary compilations, as well as by commenting on several flashpoints in the history of this tax in the region. The relation between the zemskii sbor and other levies is also clarified. In addition, the last part of the essay identifies how the revenue from the zemskii sbor was spent in Turkestan, and how this changed over time in the last decades of colonial rule. Knowing how the money was spent is relevant for understanding the implications of the absence of local government organs to preside over such expenditure.