Nomads and Soviet Rule by Alun Thomas;

Author:Alun Thomas;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Debates relating to the taxation of nomads or the confiscation of their property in Central Asia reveal a nascent administration vacillating between a series of competing priorities. Should taxation be proportionate to the payer’s ability to pay or to the state’s need to extract? Should nomads be recognised as a discrete group for the purposes of varying tax rates, and at what rate may nomads be taxed? Should taxation recognise the legacies of imperialism, seek to compensate previously colonised national groups, and punish the old imperial culture? Was there a meaningful stratification of wealth in nomadic regions, and if so, could the richest be effectively taxed into extinction? Overall, was a revolutionary, transformative tax policy deliverable, and how radically could it effect change? During the NEP, these questions were negotiated at different, overlapping times. Of all the decisions made, the last ones were the most calamitous for nomadic peoples.

The first official tax policies, which followed a period of ruinous confiscation and straddled a time of chaos and extreme hardship, made considerable concessions to nomadic communities. In recognition of the nomads’ fragile position at a time of economic crisis, tax exemptions for nomads were conceived and defended as a matter of principle. These exemptions were quickly conflated, however, with a broader series of concessions granted to non-Russians in Central Asia and a series of punitive measures imposed on European settlers, especially in Turkestan. As nomads were never European, any concessions made to nomadism were considered a symptom of a dangerous nationalism, even separatism. Ironically, it was a comparable kind of nationalism that led Russian administrators at local level to undermine the concessions in their own isolated manner. Nomadism, as a discrete category, featured in the financial policies of Soviet Central Asia from the earliest days of the NEP, but it was tainted by the nationalist discourses of the time.

It was further undermined by widespread anxieties about how to administer variable rates. Once it was agreed that settlement was to be incentivised by reward and punishment in tax rates and privileges, the problem of identifying the ‘moment of settlement’ become more salient, as did the question of what form settlement might take.174 As in all policy areas, the Party lacked the infrastructure and information necessary to induce transformation among nomads in anything but the most blunt and disruptive way. Financial imperatives and the organisations that represented them further abraded the post-imperial consensus by stressing the productivity of European farmers and the nonexistent returns from investing in nomadism.

All the while, the principle that nomads should be taxed differently from sedentary communities was sabotaged by the insistence that rich nomads should be taxed differently from poor ones. Opposition to the idea of class stratification among nomads was thin, but there was some considerable resistance to the practical proposition that different nomadic classes could be identified and taxed differently. This would be suppressed, leaving individuals liable to the accusation of being a member of the nomads’ own bourgeoisie, an increasingly elastic category of class criminal which countermanded concerns of lifestyle or nationality.

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