<i>States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic</i> by Yanni Kotsonis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic, by Yanni Kotsonis. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2014. xiv, 483 pp. $80.00 (cloth). States of Obligation provides a detailed examination of the development, reform, and implementation of the taxation system in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia. Focusing primarily on the post-Great Reforms era, Yanni Kotsonis explores both the intellectual and ideological objectives of taxation policies and the results of their practical application. He illustrates the shift to personal tax assessments and highlights the difficulties of establishing a system of direct individual universal taxation in a state where such obligations had been communal and determined according to privilege. In doing so, Kotsonis argues that the development and evolution of taxation policy was part of a broader modernization project that sought to redefine the very understanding of citizenship and the relationship of individuals to the state. Kotsonis situates taxation within the larger modernization project of the Russian Empire and Western Europe as a whole; indeed, he suggests that fiscal policies lay at the heart of the modernizing state. He places Russia squarely within that broader context, comparing Russian developments to those in Western Europe at the time. In order to implement a universal tax regime, the Russian government found it increasingly important to obtain knowledge of the individual and of corporate financial transactions. Collecting this information necessitated greater surveillance of the population and essentially made individual or corporate transactions the concern of the state. This knowledge, Kotsonis argues, led to a shift in the relationship between the state and the individual as new tax policies attempted to make tax bills more proportionate to income, subjecting the individual to assessment. Through taxation, the government established a new model of citizenship that emphasized civic-mindedness and responsibility in place of rights. Ultimately, taxation became the marker of citizenship rather than estate status, minimizing collective relationships in favour of a direct bond between the individual and the state. Kotsonis provides a detailed and comprehensive account of the taxation system reforms in the late nineteenth century, describing the bureaucratization and professionalization of tax collection, as well as the changing definition of the person (corporate and individual). Corporations, encouraged to write off expenses that could be documented, reported the details of their business dealings, which allowed commercial transactions to be traced, recorded, and taxed to a greater extent. Urban areas saw the imposition of new taxes, for example, the apartment tax, which made use of both universalistic and individual principles by establishing an individual assessment that could potentially be applied to any taxpayer. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".