Abstract
Reviewed by: James M. White, Ural Federal University, Russia
With the financial crisis of 2007–2008, investigating debt has assumed crucial importance, both in academia and for the broader public. Historians, sociologists and political scientists are not simply concerned with the economic aspects of debt, but also with how debt is (and has been) evaluated in moral, legal and sociocultural terms. Certainly the most well-known work to emerge from this is David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, an expansive anthropological account that connects debt with a wide range of phenomena, spanning from philosophical and religious developments to political upheavals and social revolutions. Graeber stands only at the tip of the iceberg of a voluminous literature dedicated to showing that debt has a history: it is a history that can help us critique the normative claims often fielded by politicians, publicists and bankers today in their quest to politicize and moralize debt and indebtedness.
Therefore there is no doubt that Sergei Antonov’s examination of debt in the context of imperial Russia is timely. His very decision to investigate this subject in relation to the Russian Empire may indeed seem at first glance counter-intuitive: after all, the most common image of Russia in the nineteenth century is that of a predominately agrarian society where banking and credit networks were hampered both by economic backwardness and arbitrary autocratic governance. While a grain of truth lies at the foundation of this perception, it is of course reductionist, especially as Russia rapidly modernized and industrialized following ‘the Great Reforms’ of the 1860s: the rapid development of domestic and international business, new patterns of agrarian landownership, and the establishment of a new court system required sophisticated banking mechanisms and complex legal regulations. In cultural terms, one can scarcely pick up any of the nineteenth-century classics of Russian literature without encountering a scene involving creditors disputing the stipulations of a will or the image of the perennially indebted nobleman (although as Antonov demonstrates, the stereotype of the frivolous and economically irrational Russian aristocrat is in need of some revision, contradicted as it is by a copious amount of archival and statistical data). The moralization of debt and bankruptcy over the course of the late imperial period was both a result and a cause of such an intensive artistic spotlight.
At first, Antonov takes a ‘nuts-and-bolts’ approach to his subject, clearly explaining the legal codes governing credit, bankruptcy and property, and the various mechanisms in place which allowed for the flow of borrowed money. He spends some time looking at the regulatory bodies trying to police such practices and ensure the preservation of both the law and moral and social conventions. All of this is undergirded by considerable archival research in Moscow: the examination of these real cases (fascinating by virtue of their details alone), side-by-side with legal norms and sociocultural portrayals, allows him to offer numerous interesting insights into where reality parted ways with perception and the extent to which regulation was truly effective. Individual chapters also examine the effects of credit and debt on social structures, personal networks, and individual relationships with authority figures within the state apparatus, the police, and the legal system.
It of course comes as little surprise to discover that much lending and borrowing avoided both official channels and indeed any kind of documentation altogether: nor can one confess shock that the norms established in law were frequently violated by unscrupulous parties. However, one of the author’s central arguments is that neither the pre- nor post-reform legal system can be considered chronically deficient, a common assumption in the historiography. Instead, he argues for the gradual development of the legal mechanisms dealing with pecuniary disputes, a conception that largely allows him to sidestep the general argument that the reforms of the 1860s constituted a decisive break with previous traditions. Equally, his in-depth discussions of the social and cultural understanding of debt help to disperse the enduring stereotype that imperial Russians (and possibly all Russians) have a fundamentally incorrect or indeed alien conception of money, a claim which often lies at the root of allegations of irreversible economic retardation.
The fact that Antonov has written a book on this subject is in itself of great value: the subject has been almost completely ignored by both Western and Russian historians, a fact detrimental to our understanding of economic attitudes and social practices in the Russian Empire. That he has written his book with a great deal of aplomb, conceptual rigour, and analytical attention to detail makes this work far more than just the first milestone of an ongoing research project: it is an undeniably significant and impressive piece in its own right. While there are a few caesuras here and there (some provincial perspectives would add much; a discussion of the post-1905 situation would have been illuminating; a closer look at Orthodox preaching on the subjects of debt and bankruptcy would have been of considerable value), none of them detract from the value of an eloquent and sophisticated work suitable for not only academics, but the general public and undergraduate students.
The completion of this review was supported by the grant of the Russian Federation for attracting leading scholars to Russian educational establishments of higher professional education, scientific institutions of the state academies of science, and the state academic centres of the Russian Federation (Laboratory for the Study of Primary Sources, Ural Federal University). Agreement no. 14.A12.31.0004 from 26.06.2013.