by James Millar
In addition to its public news distribution functions, TASS supplied “Not for Press” information
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
bulletins to Soviet leaders during the late 1920s and most likely for most of Soviet history. See also: JOURNALISM; SOVNARKOM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hopkins, Mark W. (1970). Mass Media in the Soviet Union. New York: Pegasus Publishing. Mueller, Julie Kay. (1992). “A New Kind of Newspaper: The Origins and Development of a Soviet Institution, 1921-1928.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California-Berkeley.
MATTHEW E. LENOE
TATARSTAN AND TATARS
Tatarstan is a constituent republic of the Russian Federation, located at the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers, with its capital at Kazan. Originally formed as the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1920, it was renamed the Republic of Tatarstan in 1990. Tatars, sometimes referred to as the Volga Tatars or Kazan Tatars, form the indigenous population of Tatarstan. They form the second largest nationality in Russia (5.5 million in 1989) and one of the largest in the former Soviet Union. As of 1989, about one quarter of Tatars lived in Tatarstan (1.8 million), with large communities in Bashkortostan (1.1 million) and other republics and provinces of the Volga-Ural region and Siberia. Additionally, about one million Tatars lived in other republics of the former Soviet Union, primarily in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere in Central Asia. The Tatar language belongs to the Kipchak branch of the Turkic language family and has several dialects. Most Tatars are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi legal school, with smaller numbers of Kriashen, or Christianized Tatars.
Finno-Ugric tribes, the earliest known inhabitants of Tatarstan, were joined by Turkic-speaking settlers after the third century C.E. Most important were the Volga Bulgars, who arrived in the seventh century and by the 900s had established a state that soon dominated the entire Middle Volga. Bulgar economic life combined agriculture, pas-toralism, and commerce, making the Bulgar state one of the most important trading partners of Kievan Rus. The Volga Bulgars officially adopted Islam in 922 during the visit of Ibn Fadlan, an emis1519
TATARSTAN AND TATARS
Tatars of Kazan. © JAMIE ABECASIS/SUPERSTOCK sary of the Caliph. In 1236 their capital at Great Bulgar was captured and destroyed during the Mongol invasion, and Bulgars subsequently became a subject people of the Mongol empire and the Golden Horde.
Russians and Europeans often referred to these invaders as Tatars, a term that originated with a Turkic tribe in the Mongol army but by the nineteenth and early twentieth century was applied by Russians to several different Turkic Muslim groups, including ancestors of today’s Kazan or Volga Tatars, Crimean Tatars, and Azerbaijans. The implication that these peoples are descended from the Mongol invaders was long commonplace. While scholars agree that Mongols and their allied tribes may have played some part in the formation of today’s Tatar people, most also assert that contemporary Tatars owe a much larger debt both genetically and culturally to the Volga Bulgars, with an admixture of local Finno-Ugric peoples and several Turkic tribes that migrated to the region over ensuing centuries.
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In the 1440s, as the Golden Horde disintegrated, a separate khanate emerged at Kazan, in what some scholars see as a restoration of Bulgar statehood. In 1552 the Kazan Khanate was conquered and destroyed by Muscovy, marking the first Russian incorporation of large Muslim populations into their expanding empire. Under Russian rule, intense Christianization campaigns alternated with periods of greater toleration. In the late eighteenth century, Catherine II granted the Tatars the right to trade with the Muslims of Central Asia and allowed them to form a spiritual board at Ufa to regulate the religious affairs of Muslims in European Russia. With their superior knowledge of Turkic language and customs, Tatar merchants quickly established a virtual monopoly over trade between Russia and Central Asia. This contributed to the formation of Tatar commercial and industrial classes, urbanization, formation of a small industrial working class, and emergence of a secular national intelligentsia. These factors made the Tatars, like the Azerbaijans in the Caucasus, one of the most economically integrated Muslim groups in the empire.
The nineteenth century saw important intellectual and cultural changes, most importantly the Jadid movement to reform Islamic education by introducing the secular subjects taught in Russian schools, and the emergence of Western forms of culture such as novels, plays, theater, and newspapers. The development of national identity and cultural nationalism proceeded as well with the creation of a standard Tatar literary language. However, the broader questions of national language and the parameters of the nation remained controversial. Intellectuals who imagined all or most Turkic-speakers as belonging to a single nation of Turks quarreled with those who defined a narrower Tatar nationality, while others emphasized the larger Islamic community. Nevertheless, as Russia drifted toward revolution in the early twentieth century, most members of the educated elite shared a belief that their community formed the natural leadership of Russia’s Muslim Turkic population.
Tatars were divided by the same social and political conflicts as Russians during the revolutionary period. The question of national autonomy was intertwined with these conflicts, with a serious division emerging in 1917 between supporters of extraterritorial cultural autonomy and those favoring the autonomy of a large territorial Idel-Ural (Volga-Ural) state within a Russian federation. Local Bolsheviks and Left SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries), both Russian and Tatar, secured Soviet power
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
TATARSTAN AND TATARS
Engraving of a Tatar family in their home. © JAIME ABECASIS/SUPERSTOCK through Moscow’s proclamation of a Tatar-Bashkir Soviet Republic in March 1918 and suppression of anti-Bolshevik Tatar factions. Throughout the civil war, Tatar leftists such as Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev supported Soviet power in part because of its positive attitude toward ethnic federalism, though many other prominent Tatar leaders, such as the writer Ayaz Iskhakov, sympathized with the Whites. Moscow’s decision to create a Bashkir republic in 1919 lead to abrogation of the Tatar-Bashkir republic and promulgation of a separate Tatar republic in 1920.
Tatarstan experienced all the economic trials of the Soviet period, including famine in 1921 and 1922 and the collectivization of agriculture, but also notable industrial development with the emergence of an oil industry since the 1940s, construction of the immense Kama automobile factory (KAMAZ) in Naberezhnye Chelny (1970s), and significant urban growth. Cultural policies were similarly inconsistent: The Tatar language was shifted from the Arabic alphabet to the Latin in the 1920s but then Cyrillicized in 1938; and elements of Tatar history and culture that were celebrated in the 1920s were vilified under Stalin’s rule, only to be carefully rehabilitated in Tatar journals in the 1960s and 1970s.
During the Gorbachev years, new Tatar political organizations raised concerns about the survival and perpetuation of Tatar national culture, both within Tatarstan and in the extensive Tatar diaspora, where assimilation was more common. The governing circles of Tatarstan responded by declaring the republic’s sovereignty and unilaterally raising its status to union republic (1990), writing a new authoritative constitution (1992), and signing a treaty (1994) and other agreements with the Russian federal government that delineated division of powers, responsibilities, and resources in a form widely studied as the Tatarstan model. There was relatively little interethnic violence in the republic, in part because Russian residents (43.3% of the population in 1989, compared to 48.5% Tatar) benefited from many of these steps as well.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
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TAXES
One continuing political problem in the 1990s was concern over the status of Tatars living in neighboring Bashkortostan. See also: CENTRAL ASIA; ISLAM; KAZAN; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bennigsen, Alexandre, and Lemercier-Quelquejay, Chan-tal. (1967). Islam in the Sov
iet Union. New York: Praeger. Broxup, Marie Bennigsen. (1996). “Tatarstan and the Tatars.” In The Nationalities Question in the Post-Soviet States, 2nd ed., ed. Graham Smith. London: Longman. Bukharaev, Ravil. (1999). The Model of Tatarstan: Under President Mintimer Shaimiev. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Bukharaev, Ravil. (2000). Islam in Russia: The Four Seasons. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Frank, Allen J. (1998). Islamic Historiography and “Bul-ghar” Identity Among the Tatars and Bashkirs of Russia. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Rorlich, Azade-Ayse. (1994). “One or More Tatar Nations?” In Muslim Communities Reemerge: Historical Perspectives on Nationality, Politics, and Opposition in the Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, ed. Edward Allworth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rorlich, Azade-Ayse. (1986). The Volga Tatars: A Profile in National Resilience. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. Zenkovsky, Serge A. (1960). Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
DANIEL E. SCHAFER
TAXES
Taxation of the population is the basic way governments raise the revenue necessary to carry out their functions, including administration of justice, defense, and construction of infrastructure, such as canals, roads, and public buildings. When taxes are inadequate, as they often were in Russia, they were supplemented by domestic and foreign borrowing (possible after the 1770s), confiscations, or disposal of state property. The various modes and objects of taxation also clearly demonstrate the level of economic development of Russia through the centuries, as well as the shifting class basis of state power.
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Prior to the establishment of the Russian Empire, most taxation came from the revenues of the tsar’s estates. As a major serf owner, he collected rent from them. Following the reduction of the independent boyar class, the Russian state demanded service from pomeschiki, nobles and gentry, in exchange for their property in land and serfs. The state also monopolized the export of certain commodities, such as grain, farmed out the sale of alcohol, and minted silver and copper coins. Where deficits persisted, the Muscovite princes simply defaulted on state obligation. Quantitative estimates are, however, nearly unavailable until the eighteenth century, when some quantitative studies of the state budgets were written, most notably those by Paul N. Milyukov and S. M. Troitsky.
The main taxes in the 1700s were the fixed poll (soul) tax, excise taxes on alcohol and salt, revenues from the export monopoly of certain commodities, tax on iron and copper, customs tariffs, and mint revenues. During emergencies these were supplemented by special taxes (such as on beards of religious dissenters), debasement of the coinage, or printing paper money (assignats). The last two, which caused an inflation tax on holders of cash, occurred mostly during the frequent wars of those times. All peasants paid the poll tax according to population estimates, except during periods of natural hardship or on the accession of a new ruler, when rates were temporarily reduced. Throughout the century the government increased the rate of indirect taxes on alcohol, as well as demanding customs duties in hard currency. On the other hand, burdens on miners and iron-masters appeared to slacken in the post-Petrine period.
To collect net fiscal revenue the Russian state employed either tax farmers, agents who paid for the privilege of collecting levies, or direct distribution of salt and alcohol. For these monopolized commodities the tax was simply the difference between the retail price and the cost of production. In 1754 the state granted gentry and members of the aristocracy its former monopoly in the sale of alcohol, from which incomes increased steadily, unlike those on salt, a prime necessity. The salt tax was actually abolished in 1881. Despite these measures, tax payments were frequently in arrears (nedoimki), particularly during wars or famine. Peasants would try to avoid taxes by emigrating to the frontier areas of Siberia and the southern steppes, but the system of joint responsibility meant that fellow villagers would try to prevent their leaving. Little seemed to change in the tsarist
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
TAXES
regime during the more than half a century from Catherine’s rule to the Crimean War and the subsequent Emancipation. Exemptions from taxation and a stagnant industrial economy meant that tax revenues did not increase much. Transcaucasia began to supply customs revenues from the 1830s, but the new areas of the southern fringe were expensive to conquer and hold. Fiscal inadequacy became painfully clear when Russia’s poorly supplied troops were defeated at Sevastopol by English, French, and Turkish forces. That the Russian roads and river routes were so obviously inadequate for mobilization led to great interest in expensive and extensive railroad projects, requiring both more money and new industries.
The late nineteenth century was a period of rapidly rising governmental outlays, doubling between 1861 and 1890, and again between 1901 and 1905. Railroad building in this vast country accelerated, primarily for military purposes; debt service, health, and education also increased their share in state expenses, though the latter two were still small by international standards. To meet these expenditures, the government was able to increase indirect tax revenues, chiefly on vodka, but also by its monopoly on the sale of sugar, tobacco, kerosene, and matches. As was understood, reduced peasant net incomes meant more grain for export. Royalties and transportation tariffs on coal and iron also increased. Customs duties rose significantly, both as a result of higher rates and larger import volumes. Tax policy protected industry at the expense of agriculture, as direct taxes on company profits and capital plus redemption payments hardly increased at all between 1890 and 1910.
Despite some discussion of this possibility before World War I, most individual incomes were not taxed, but apartment rents and salaries of civil servants and joint-stock company employees were. This pattern points to the strongly regressive nature of tsarist taxation. According to estimates by Albert L. Vainstein, the tax burden on peasants averaged 11 percent of their total income in 1913, but probably more than one-quarter of their cash receipts.
Following the October Revolution, the Bolshevik government depended on confiscations and fiat money, but this chaotic strategy of covering expenditures soon led to peasant uprisings, and the government had to switch to a tax in kind (prod-nalog)-replaced by cash in 1924-on the peasantry. After meeting their obligations, rural agriculturists could sell their surpluses on the local market. HowENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY Table 1.
1940
1965
1984
Total Revenue (billion rubles)
18.0
102.3
376.7
Turnover tax
59%
38%
27
Payments from profits
12
30
31
Cooperatives’ taxes
2
1
1
Mass bond sales
5
« 1
« 1
Direct taxes
5
8
8
Social insurance contributions
5
5
7
“Other”
12
17
27
SOURCE: Narodnoe Khoziaistvo (National Economy), 1973, 1978, and 1984. Courtesy of the author. ever, government efforts to keep the procurement price for grain low increased the actual surplus taken. Moreover, the nepmen had to pay a temporary tax on super-profits starting in 1926.
During the Stalinist period the government greatly increased the burden of taxation to an estimated 50 percent of household income. As shown, the principal mode of taxation was on the nationalized manufacturing and mining sectors, plus heavy exactions in kind from the collective and state farms. The Finance Ministry also conducted compulsory bond sales, but these were phased out during the 1950s.
In more recent Soviet times the regime imposed a mild income tax on employees, with a top rate of 13 percent above a certain exempt amount. But authors, physicians in private practice, tutors, landlor
ds, craftsmen and like independents would pay at treble these rates or up to a marginal rate of 81 percent. Bachelors (and small families until 1958) paid a 6 percent surtax, but military personnel, students, and dwarfs were exempt. There was also a fairly stiff tax (from 12 to 48% by 1951) on money and imputed incomes from private plots in addition to a small tax on kolkhoz net income. This was in addition to forced deliveries at lower than market prices.
Soviet authorities strongly preferred indirect taxes over those imposed directly on persons. Apparently they believed workers would be more sensitive to their wages and wage differentials than to the prices they paid-money illusion. However, after 1947 they also endeavored to reduce official prices on goods of mass consumption.
While the turnover tax remained the single largest source of revenue until the 1960s, the type
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TAXES
A female entrepreneur watches as a Moscow tax-police inspector confiscates goods from her unlicensed shop. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEXANDER SALYUKOV/ASSOCIATED PRESS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION. of tax which increased the most during later Soviet times was that on profits. In 1950 the turnover tax accounted for 56 percent of the total, while deductions from profits provided only about 10 percent. By 1970, however, turnover tax declined to 32 percent, while deductions from profits rose to 35 percent of the consolidated USSR budget. However, the distinction between these two taxes is not sharp: both are enterprise taxes unrelated to the ability of citizens to pay.
To these taxes on profits, which after all belong to the state as owner, might be added retained profits devoted to state-mandated investments. After 1965 the regime added a small charge on net capital and broader rental payments in addition to remittances of the free remainder of profits. The miscellaneous category included large and rising profits from foreign trade-for example, on imported grain or exported oil-a stamp duty on legal documents, an inheritance tax, a local property tax, and a tax on automobiles, boats, and horses. All this added up to a considerable burden of taxation-approximately 45 percent of Soviet national income in the postwar period, about half again as much as in the United States and among the top tax-collection rates on the European continent. Nevertheless, except in oil boom years, the budget usually concealed a 2 to 8 percent deficit, financed by monetary emissions and resulting in inflation during the 1980s especially.
