Authors

Discussion

The Peasants’ Land Bank was established in 1882 as a governmental institution, subordinated to the Ministry of Finance. It was an ambitious financial initiative devised by the state with the objective of facilitating access of the peasantry to a mortgage, even for those who were illiterate. But the Bank was not a financial institution per se. It did not merely issue loans to the peasantry for the purchase of land under agreements already reached independently with landowners; it also collected its own land fund, from which it sold land directly to peasants. Thus, by 1908, the Bank had become the largest landowner in the empire after the tsarist family, receiving with this giant land fund a great power of its disposal.
The Bank's period of hugest influence commenced with the inception of the Stolypin reforms, during which the state elevated the Bank to a primary role in the implementation of the final significant land reform undertaken by the tsarist government. By the 1910s, the Bank had established over 60 branches throughout the country, operating from the western borders of the Empire to Siberia and extending to the territory of present-day Kazakhstan. In the most remote provinces of the empire, the Bank constructed its own edifices in a singular style, designated sometimes as "neo-Russian". This architectural approach combined the Bank's purely economic influence with an aspiration to extend its “mental” imperial reach. However, for each region under the Bank's purview, the institution devised distinct mechanisms for incorporating the local peasantry into its operational sphere. These mechanisms reflected the broader imperial policy of disparate attitudes towards diverse imperial borderlands.
The findings of this study can contribute to our understanding of the colonial policy of the Russian Empire by demonstrating how financial institutions, when subjected to state control, can be utilised as a potent instrument within the political sphere, capable of enforcing the including and excluding initiatives as desired by the state. The author's objective is not only to conduct a detailed analysis of the inclusions and exclusions within the rural sector of the imperial borderlands. Instead, the focus will be on examining the imperial governance structures and the spread of imperial political influence on the borderlands through the financial sphere. This will be achieved by analyzing the financial, economic and “mental” consolidation of the empire through the lens of a particular banking institution that was said to be established exclusively for the benefit of the rural population.