Income inequality of peasants of a suburban district according to tax assessments: Semiluzhnaya volost of Tomsk county at the beginning of the XX century.

The article is intended to provide historians with new data to discuss the problem of income inequality in pre-revolutionary Russia. Authors aim at obtaining figures that can be used to compare with the already available digital estimates of inequality in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as to include pre-revolutionary Russia on a par with other countries and eras. Since income data for the period studied is particularly scarce for rural areas, the authors focused on peasants. The task was to obtain data that would allow us to get a picture of inequality at the micro level – within individual villages. As a data source, layout sentences are used – resolutions of rural gatherings on the distribution of taxes between members of the community. The choice of Semiluzhnaya volost is due to the opportunity to obtain the greatest chronological diversity of data for the Tomsk collection of folding sentences. The work is based on the results of the archival search. Based on personal data extracted from the lists of peasant tax payers, a number of Gini indices were calculated for individual villages over individual years, with further assessment of their reliability. A number of Gini indices have been obtained, which make it possible to talk about a significant or even high level of inequality in the studied villages against the background of well-known world values and estimates for pre-revolutionary Russia. It is shown that the proximity of a large city (Tomsk) contributed to an increase in income inequality by creating the possibility of earning as a waste worker and by creating demand for non-agricultural goods created by peasants. It is shown that the primary values of the index should be considered underestimated due to their high dependence on the per capita distribution of taxes, and the values cleared from the per capita component should be considered overestimated due to the underestimation of personal non-agricultural earnings of peasants. The difference between the values of the purified indices for different villages is explained by the special economic appearance of the village of Semiluzhny as an important point on the Siberian route.

late imperial Russia, economic history, inequality, peasant studies, Siberian studies, tax history, Gini coefficient, tax distribution resolution, peasant commune, migratory labourer