Phd Defence by Arina Fedorova
This dissertation examines the Peasants Land Bank within the broader context of the postemancipation agrarian order in the late Russian Empire. Established in 1882 as a state-governed landcredit institution, the Bank was intended to address unresolved tensions following the emancipation of serfs by expanding peasant access to land through credit, while allowing the state to maintain control over the pace and direction of land redistribution. Over time, it developed into a far more complex institution combining financial, administrative, and political functions.
The study traces the Bank’s transformation from a mortgage intermediary into a major landholding and governing body: first after it was authorized to purchase and manage estates in 1895, and then from 1906 onward, when it played a central role in the Stolypin agrarian reforms. It argues that the Bank functioned as a key mechanism through which the imperial state regulated access to land, projected authority across the empire, and restructured rural society. In doing so, it mediated an uneven and exclusionary redistribution of land in pursuit of an imperial ideal of an all-Russian peasantry, while also seeking to produce a new type of rural subject: an individual landholder, a disciplined borrower, and an administratively legible participant in state-regulated credit. At the same time, the dissertation highlights the structural limits of the Bank’s functioning, as it operated within an administrative system marked by bureaucratic congestion and centralized decision-making, and its rapid territorial expansion produced procedural rigidity and tensions between local conditions and central directives.
Overall, this thesis contributes to the literature on financial and imperial history, as well as to peasant studies, by demonstrating that banking institutions could do more than mediate economic transactions: they could regulate access to property, shape peasant subjecthood, and translate imperial priorities into social and spatial hierarchies.
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