Exclusion as Colonization: The Bashkir Case

Bashkirs certainly were not the only non-Russian rural population in the empire; however, they occupy a unique place in the Bank’s documentation, where they appear as a distinct, repeatedly problematized category of sellers explicitly associated with a state-led project of land buy-off and redistribution. Internal correspondence repeatedly described Bashkir land as an “extremely significant fund” to be concentrated in state hands as quickly as possible, designating it as an exceptional acquisition within the Peasants Bank’s regional priorities.

The Bashkir case illustrates how the Peasants Land Bank operated as a key instrument of settler colonization within the Russian Empire. As Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch have shown, late imperial migration and resettlement were shaped by state efforts to reorganize space, population, and sovereignty through managed settlement, alongside persistent land pressures in the central provinces.Footnote ²⁵ From this perspective, Bashkir lands emerged as a strategic frontier where land abundance, low population density, and legally precarious indigenous ownership made large-scale land transfers both feasible and desirable. The Bank’s sustained focus on Bashkir land reflected this broader imperial logic, supplying the financial infrastructure that enabled the transformation of these territories into zones of Russian peasant settlement, under the guise of agrarian developmentFootnote ²⁶ and land scarcity. The Peasants Land Bank thus functioned there in a comparable manner to colonial banks overseas, channeling land and credit in ways that entrenched settler dominance while marginalizing local populations. For the Bashkirs, this process resulted in the systematic transfer of hereditary lands to “all-Russian” peasants, making the Bank a central agent in the erosion of Bashkir landholding and an instrument of imperial subordination and recognition of the steppe.

From the outset, the Bank distinguished between two categories of Bashkirs: hereditary landowners (votchinniki), whose rights dated back to their incorporation into the Muscovite state in the sixteenth century, and landless Bashkirs (pripushenniki). In 1883, the Peasants Bank’s UfaFootnote ²⁷ branch sought official clarification as to which of these categories would be deemed eligible for access to the Bank’s credit.Footnote ²⁸ The Ministry of Finance, with the approval of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, instructed that only pripushenniki would be eligible for the Bank’s loans. They immediately provided this clarification to the Bank’s Ufa branch. By the early twentieth century, however, most votchinniki were smallholders under severe financial pressure and increasingly compelled to sell their land to the Bank. One example is the Bashkirs of Chibinny village in Belebeyevsky district, who in 1906 sold 3,000 dessyatinas Footnote ²⁹ of land to the Bank after a crop failure left them unable to repay a loan from wealthier individuals. To avoid legal action and ensure they could pay off their debt on time, they had no choice but to sell the land to the Bank.Footnote ³⁰ Thus, while both categories experienced acute land and credit shortages, the Bank systematically excluded hereditary landowners from access to credit and instead deliberately turned itself into the principal purchaser of their land.

In 1895, new Regulations (Ustav) allowed the Bank to purchase land from votchinniki for resale to Russian settlers, primarily migrants from the “Great Russian”Footnote ³¹ provinces. The Bank believed that the main obstacles for those settlers were the high initial costs of finding suitable land and moving there, as well as loan payments.Footnote ³² To mitigate these challenges, as archival documents from the Ufa branch of the Bank in 1898 outlined, the Bank decided to start there “purchasing as much cheap land as possible and issuing loans to needy settlers on preferential terms.” The Bank quickly began implementing purchasing,Footnote ³³ but in 1898, it still carried out these purchases on a limited scale.

This policy expanded dramatically under Stolypin’s agrarian reform. A special decree drafted by Alexander Krivoshein (then the Bank’s Executive (1906–1908) and later Chief Director of Land Management and Agriculture) regulated these acquisitions. Krivoshein stressed the strategic importance of concentrating Bashkir land in government hands as quickly as possible, describing it as an “extremely significant fund.”Footnote ³⁴ The Bank acquired Bashkir lands at deeply undervalued prices: for instance, a Bashkir society offered land to the Bank for 40 rubles per dessyatina, a county official assessed the land at 62 rubles per dessyatina, yet the Bank ultimately bought it for only 24 rubles per dessyatina.Footnote ³⁵ Many sellers, facing economic hardship, were forced to undervalue their land, and the Bank took full advantage of this.Footnote ³⁶ At the same time, the Bank’s 1910 report noted that reaching an agreement with the Bashkirs was quite difficult, so some transactions were delayed for years.Footnote ³⁷ Moreover, officials sometimes abused their authority to push transactions,Footnote ³⁸ and evidence suggests the Bank restricted direct sales from Bashkirs to Russian peasants, forcing Bashkirs to deal with the Bank itself, which enabled the Bank to speculate on land prices and maximize its profits.Footnote ³⁹ Such a policy of centralizing peasant land transactions through the Peasants Land Bank was not limited to Bashkir lands but was pursued across the empire. Beginning in 1905, during the tenure of Nikolai Kutler as a Bank’s executive, “confidential circulars” were circulated to provincial branches, which, as contemporaries later recalled, instructed local officials to steer peasants toward purchasing land exclusively through the Bank’s mediation. Officially, this practice was presented as a means of facilitating more secure and advantageous land purchases for peasants.Footnote ⁴⁰ At the same time, it enabled the state to rapidly concentrate land in its own hands and to exercise comprehensive control over land transfers.Footnote ⁴¹

The scale of acquisitions from Bashkirs was usually obscured by the Bank’s statistics, which sometimes categorized Bashkir sellers as “peasants” in its reports. However, the Bank’s 1910 report indicated that from 1896 to 1905, the Bank acquired 122.2 thousand dessyatinas from Bashkirs, accounting for 12.7% of the total land purchased during this period.Footnote ⁴² Other Bank’s reports indicate that from 1896 to 1915, the Bank acquired 415,400 dessyatiny from Bashkir-votchinniki. Footnote ⁴³ In some years, these sales accounted for up to half of all the Bank’s purchases throughout the empire,Footnote ⁴⁴ making Bashkirs consistently the second-largest group of sellers after nobles.Footnote ⁴⁵ Remarkably, acquisitions continued even in wartime: during both the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905)Footnote ⁴⁶ and the First World War (1914–1917), when all other purchases for the Bank’s fund were suspended, Bashkir lands were still being bought.Footnote ⁴⁷ Moreover, from 1906 onward, when the Bank’s activities were formally redirected to liquidate its existing land portfolio following the mid-1900s capital crisis, these acquisitions also persisted. As David Darrow has shown,Footnote ⁴⁸ under this mandate, the government expected the Bank to prioritize the sale of already-acquired estates, particularly in provinces such as Saratov, where sales could yield immediate returns, rather than undertake new purchases. That the Bank nevertheless continued to acquire Bashkir land throughout these difficult years underscores the exceptional status of Bashkir lands in its land policy and suggests that the concentration of Bashkir land in the Peasants Bank’s hands followed priorities that went beyond financial solvency alone.

This terrifying buy-off coincided with other elements of Stolypin reforms. In the Bashkir steppe, the period also witnessed the withdrawal of households from the commune and the transfer of allotments into private ownership. Until then, mostly poorer Bashkirs had left the commune, usually to avoid tax burdens. But in 1910–1911, wealthier landowners also began to withdraw, explaining that if they stayed, the commune might sell their best plots to the Bank. By leaving, they sought to retain the most fertile land for themselves. As one of Ufa Bank’s branches’ officials observed, these wealthy Bashkirs occupied “all the best lands suitable for settlement,”Footnote ⁴⁹ which helps explain the urgency with which Bank employees pursued purchases. The Stolypin reform also allowed Russian peasants to register in Bashkir communes, a major change in imperial policy. Ufa Governor Aleksandr KlyucharevFootnote ⁵⁰ noted that this measure, combined with the famine that struck the region at the end of 1911, led many people, often with no ties to Bashkir villages or agriculture, to acquire in a hurry a large tract of Bashkir land “solely for the purpose of profit,” intending to sell it later.Footnote ⁵¹

Yet most of the Bashkir lands acquired by the Bank for its land fund remained unsold, becoming one of the Bank’s major failures and miscalculations. The data I collected from the Nizhnevolzhsky district (where the most active purchases occurred) shows that from 1906 to 1915, only 47.3 percent of the Bank’s land was sold there, one of the lowest rates among the Bank’s 17 districts.Footnote ⁵² Bureaucratic inefficiency, weak demand, and peasants’ reluctance (the opposite of what the Bank anticipated) to settle in Bashkir areas left much of the fund stagnant. However, despite the low percentage of overall sales in the Steppe, a considerable amount of land was still transferred from the Bashkirs to the all-Russian peasants, with unsold plots remaining in the Bank’s hands until 1917. During the Civil War, the leaders of the Bashkir national movement signaled that they were prepared to support the White government, which controlled the region, but only on the condition that it would return them the lands purchased by the Peasants’ Bank as their rightful property—a demand that the Whites, who wanted to revitalize the Bank, ultimately failed to meet.Footnote ⁵³

The Bashkir case shows how the Peasants Land Bank implemented colonization ideology as a financial practice. Manipulated prices and transactions reflected the state’s broader effort to control Bashkirs’ resources. Their dispossession parallels that of German colonists, whom the Bank targeted for different reasons, but both faced state-driven land acquisition leading to displacement and economic insecurity.

Excluding the “Enemies”Footnote ⁵⁴

The exclusion of foreigners from the Peasants Land Bank’s loans highlights another dimension of its discriminatory logic. While in the Bashkir case, the Bank facilitated settler colonization by acquiring vast tracts of cheap land, in the case of German and other so-called “foreign colonists,”Footnote ⁵⁵ the issue was political loyalty. The state and the Bank viewed them as a potential threat to both the prosperity of Russian peasants and imperial stability and consistently denied them access to land and credit on these grounds.

From the Bank’s foundation, it rejected petitions from foreigners of all origins. In 1883, Finance Minister Nikolai BungeFootnote ⁵⁶ declared that loans could not be granted to foreigners,Footnote ⁵⁷ particularly “German colonists,” stressing that the Bank’s mandate to serve “peasants of all categories” could not be stretched to include these “wealthy colonists,” who would otherwise become “dangerous competition for local peasantry.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Similar arguments were advanced regarding the Czechs,Footnote ⁵⁹ especially in the Volyn region,Footnote ⁶⁰ whose “prosperity” enabled them to compete with the Russian peasantry.

In 1905, following the Manifesto on the Improvement of the State Order,Footnote ⁶¹ which promised to expand civil rights in the Russian Empire, requests from foreigners increased, but the Ministry of Finance reiterated that assistance to foreigners fell outside the Bank’s remit.Footnote ⁶² The Bank observed a similar increase in requests after the Decree of November 9, 1906, when the government granted the Bank the right to issue loans secured by allotment landsFootnote ⁶³; at that time, Greek peasants, particularly in the Mariupol district,Footnote ⁶⁴ often approached the Bank to request such loans.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, the Bank consistently refused.Footnote ⁶⁶ The most notable case of shattered hopes for foreignersFootnote ⁶⁷ to issue loans secured by allotment lands occurred with the German peasants of the Kamyshinsky district,Footnote ⁶⁸ who applied to the Peasants Bank for a loan.Footnote ⁶⁹ Initially, both Pyotr Stolypin, the Russian Empire’s Prime Minister and Interior Minister, and Aleksandr Krivoshein, the influential head of the General Administration of Land Use and Agriculture, supported an exception, emphasizing that these peasants truly lacked access to land, which aligned with the Bank’s original goal of helping peasants in need to obtain land. This case sparked a public outcry, but the transaction ultimately failed. Initially, the process was delayed for legal reasons, and in 1909, the government imposed the final ban (zapret) on the sale of the Bank’s land to German settlers. Despite efforts by influential figures to prevent the deal’s cancellation, it could not be stopped, even though some Germans had already relocated to the newly acquired land.Footnote ⁷⁰

In 1913, the Ministries of Finance, Internal Affairs, and General Administration of Land Use and Agriculture reiterated that loans would only be issued to foreigners in exceptional circumstances; however, these occasional exceptions only reinforced the general tendency. At times, local branches mistakenly extended loans to foreigners who had long since obtained Russian citizenship or were not considered “colonists.” However, in all such cases, the Bank Council intervened, reversed the sales, and disciplined the officials involved. The principle was clear: land and credit were to be reserved for “all-Russian” peasants alone.Footnote ⁷¹

World War I marked another turning point, as on September 22, 1914, Nicholas II banned all “enemy subjects” from acquiring land in any way.Footnote ⁷² This was intended to prevent the purchase of lands belonging to Russian peasants who had been conscripted into the army. In 1915, the state went even further: a series of decrees stripped Austro-Hungarian, German, and Turkish subjects (including those who had already obtained Russian citizenshipFootnote ⁷³) of land rights, authorizing the Bank to buy their estates for redistribution. At that time, there was an opinion in social democratic circles that the imperial government was attempting to resolve the “agrarian question” at the expense of the Germans, without overshadowing the interests of all-Russian landlords.Footnote ⁷⁴ Among foreigners, this affected the German “colonists” from the VolgaFootnote ⁷⁵ and Southern regionsFootnote ⁷⁶ the most, as the Peasants Land Bank largely acquired their property as “enemy land.” In total, the Bank acquired 257,340 desyatinasFootnote ⁷⁷ from German owners for 44.2 million rubles.Footnote ⁷⁸ These were among the Bank’s last major acquisitions before it was shut down by the Bolsheviks in 1917.

Thus, what began as long-standing exclusion from loans ended in outright dispossession. Legal restrictions and fears merged into a wartime campaign against “enemy aliens,” which reflected broader pan-European trends, but in the Russian imperial context, it was closely intertwined with efforts to resolve the agrarian question through the redistribution of “enemy” land and with security concerns rooted in strengthening Russian influence in strategically sensitive regions.Footnote ⁷⁹ However, in peacetime, for the Bank (and for the state), ethnicity was secondary to confession: the principal boundary of inclusion ran between Orthodox and non-Orthodox subjects (or not recognizable as Orthodox by the state).

Confessional Exclusion

Orthodoxy was the Russian Empire’s dominant faith, but its population was strikingly multiconfessional. To manage this diversity, the state codified rules that defined confessional rights and the limits of religious freedom.Footnote ⁸⁰ By the mid-nineteenth century, the state no longer treated religion as a purely spiritual matter; it became a political category, with the state intervening directly in confessional affairs.Footnote ⁸¹ For most imperial subjects, faith remained a primary marker of identity, and for the state it functioned as an administrative tool. Footnote ⁸² Confessional affiliationFootnote ⁸³ thus operated as a politically meaningful distinction, an institutionalized boundary that structured rights and obligations,Footnote ⁸⁴ which was unevenly enforced and open to negotiation. The Peasants Land Bank offers a particularly clear lens through which to observe its practical application.

One of the most suppressed religious minorities of the Russian Empire was the Old Believers, who comprised approximately 2 percent of the population by the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸⁵ They faced multiple forms of legal discrimination, including restrictions on landholding, for practicing a version of Orthodoxy not recognized by the state. Classified as a “tolerable but unrecognized confession,” they were for centuries denied full rights; however, after the reforms of the 1860s, their discrimination started to be “harshly criticized by liberal lawyers.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Their situation thus formally improved only after Nicholas II’s April 17, 1905, decree on religious toleration, when the state intended to abolish the discrimination against them.Footnote ⁸⁷

What makes the case of the Old Believers and the Peasants Land Bank particularly curious is the fact that for them the Bank introduced a distinctive layer of exclusion, as many Old Believers registered as meschanes,Footnote ⁸⁸ thus the Bank discriminated against them on the basis of both religion and soslovie as non-peasants (while this soslovie classification as meschanes the state applied to Old Believers mechanically, only emphasizing the distinctions between Old Believers and Orthodox peasants and withholding rights). This dual status made them doubly disadvantaged: even when the Bank started to grant access to meschanes in general, it singled out Old Believers as a separate category and still excluded them, thereby promoting the importance of religious distinction above all others. At the same time, this classification was selectively demobilized to reinforce confessional hierarchies and effectively privileged even unrecognized Orthodoxy over other (non-Orthodox) forms of religious belonging. This dual logic was most clearly articulated in the empire’s western borderlands,Footnote ⁸⁹ a region long perceived by imperial authorities as politically and culturally fragile. Annexed during the partitions of Poland and characterized by dense multiconfessional populations, these territories made access to land and credit a sensitive political instrument, inseparable from broader projects of Russification and concerns over political loyalty.Footnote ⁹⁰

The issue of allowing Old Believers to obtain loans emerged in Bank documents as early as 1885, when branch officials reported to the Council in St. Petersburg numerous loan requests from them. The Governor-GeneralFootnote ⁹¹ of the so-called “Southwestern Krai,”Footnote ⁹² Alexander Drenteln,Footnote ⁹³ supported their inclusion, noting that many of them had owned land there before Russia annexed these territories and, even after being reclassified as meschanes, remained mainly landowners and farmers.Footnote ⁹⁴ He also stated that they were forced to rent land under increasingly hostile conditions: prejudice against them among Orthodox peasants was strong; Orthodox peasants often refused to lease land to Old Believers and demanded their eviction. In the 1860s, after the Emancipation reform, their position worsened as landlords curtailed leases,Footnote ⁹⁵ and state lands, where many Old Believers lived, were transferred to state peasants.Footnote ⁹⁶ Although the Ministry of State Property then encouraged Old Believers to re-register as peasants, most refused, because it meant losing tax exemptions and immunity from corporal punishment.Footnote ⁹⁷ As a result, choosing to remain meschanes, Old Believers lost their rights to the lands they occupied, while the opportunity for leasing became very limited, and buying remained impossible.

While actively lobbying for the inclusion of Old Believers, Alexander Drenteln particularly emphasized the importance of retaining them due to their well-developed agricultural practices.Footnote ⁹⁸ His efforts were not in vain, as in June 1885, the State Council authorized Bank loans for Old Believers in several Podolsk counties.Footnote ⁹⁹ In 1888, this right was extended to Vilna, Kovno, Grodno, and Minsk provinces; in 1894, it was extended to Vyatka, Mogilev, Kiev, Volyn, and all of Podolsk.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In 1895, the Bank’s new Charter confirmed these rights across all nine western provinces.Footnote ¹⁰¹ After this, their references in the Bank’s documents become scarce, although in 1902, a notable ruling granted Old Believers in Kovno preferential rights to purchase land, effectively equalizing them with the recognized Orthodox peasantry and placing them above local Catholic peasants, as culturally Russian and potentially loyal, thus explicitly reinforcing Russian Orthodox ownershipFootnote ¹⁰² with their assistance. By 1905, as the state moved toward recognizing Old Believers as a legitimate Christian confession, they finally obtained equal access to Bank loans alongside “traditional” Orthodox peasants.Footnote ¹⁰³

Thus, the case of the Old Believers illustrates the state’s ambivalent and situational approach to confession. While central authorities repeatedly sought to restrict their access to land and credit, local lobbying, economic considerations, and shifting political priorities enabled their very conditional inclusion.

The Bank’s documents also reveal particularly complex and often contradictory policies toward Catholic peasants. According to the 1896 report, the branch management in Lublin province complained that the exclusion of Catholics severely hindered the Bank’s operations.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In ten of the province’s nineteen districts, roughly half of the peasant population was effectively barred from purchasing land through the Bank, since certificates authorizing land acquisition could be issued only to Orthodox peasants, following the 1889 instructions of the Governor-General to the Commissars for Peasant Affairs.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Although exceptions existed, permission for Catholic purchases was rarely granted there, and it was difficult to obtain.

Bank officials generally viewed transfers of land to Catholics as even less desirable than sales to Old Believers, who were at least regarded as Russians and Orthodox. Exclusion was especially intensified in Kovno province,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ where the imperial administration explicitly sought to strengthen Russian Orthodox landholding. There, no statute directly prohibited Catholic purchases, and the state exercised control through the governor’s issuance of purchase certificates,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ a practice that, by the late nineteenth,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ had become relatively common among Catholics, many of whom were return migrants from America with significant capital.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

In response, the authorities sought to reassert confessional control over landownership.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Governor Troitsky of Vilna, Kovno, and Grodno reported that by the early 1900s, 354 plots had passed into Catholic hands. To counter this trend, he proposed creating a special fund within the Vilna–Kovno branch to support Orthodox settlers. Although initially rejected by the Ministry of Finance, the proposal was partially realized in 1902, when 10,000 rubles were earmarked exclusively for loans to “all-Russian” Orthodox peasants in the “Northwestern Territory,”Footnote ¹¹¹ with explicit instructions to promote compact Orthodox settlement.Footnote ¹¹² The underlying assumption was that living among non-Orthodox neighbors weakened peasants’ attachment to the land. Taken together, these measures demonstrate that the Peasants Bank was acting as an active agent in shaping the confessional geography of landholding in the Western periphery of the Empire.

The Peasants Land Bank’s documents show the systematic contributions to significant restrictions on Jews’ access to land. This exclusion was part of a broader imperial effort to regulate Jewish participation in land ownership, reflecting widespread ethnic and religious prejudice.Footnote ¹¹³ While the Bank’s reports frequently mentioned Jews as sellers of land, often selling their properties to peasants or the Bank itself, the situation was more complicated when it came to Jews purchasing land. Specifically, the Bank documents from 1903 reveal discussions regarding Jewish land purchases in the Polish provinces in relation to the State Council’s decree of June 11, 1891.Footnote ¹¹⁴ This decree prohibited Jews from acquiring land there or leasing peasant estates and managing them as attorneys or managers, separate from the right of ownership. By reinforcing these restrictions, the decree tightened the legal framework that excluded Jews from the land market.

In response to this law,Footnote ¹¹⁵ the heads of the Bank’s Warsaw, Lublin, and Petrokovsky branches drafted a proposal to incorporate this decree into the Bank’s Charter,Footnote ¹¹⁶ asking for clarification on its enforcement from the Legal Adviser of the Peasants Bank.Footnote ¹¹⁷ They asked the Legal Adviser how this addition to the Charter could be implemented if accepted.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The reason for its implementation, as a document stated, was that, despite all restrictions, Jews could sometimes purchase land from the Bank through front persons, albeit with significant risks, or were allowed to manage land leased by peasants in some cases. For example, the head of the Warsaw branch noted that the Bank had often allowed Jews to purchase land previously acquired with the Bank’s assistance from debtor peasants. Similarly, the head of the Lublin branch observed that Jews had, in some cases, used the harvest or buildings of debtor peasants, also with the Bank’s permission and in full accordance with the Bank’s Charter. The Legal Adviser acknowledged that it would be prudent to add a note of the Decree of June 11, 1891, to the Charter to prevent such cases in the future. He pointed out that, under the current circumstances, peasants’ leases could also be made privately (“at home”) and through such “home agreements,” the lease of land could potentially remain unknown to the Bank. The law of June 11 rejected this possibility completely: included in the Charter, this law would make any lease agreements with Jews invalid by virtue of the law itself.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Furthermore, the state required the Peasants Bank to prevent the land from passing into the hands of Jews, “who had nothing to do with agriculture,”Footnote ¹²⁰ through alternative means. In particular, if a nobleman, for financial reasons, put his estate up for auction through the Nobles Land Bank, the Peasants Bank also could participate in these auctions to assist the peasants who wished to buy the estate but lacked sufficient funds to do so.Footnote ¹²¹ The Bank adopted this measure in 1900Footnote ¹²² after an estate belonging to a ruined noblewoman was purchased by a Jew at a public auction held by the Nobles Bank in the Kursk province in 1899. Although such transactions were legal, since individuals of Jewish descent were allowed to purchase land in the internal provincesFootnote ¹²³ (within the Pale of SettlementFootnote ¹²⁴ or where they had permanent residence outside it),Footnote ¹²⁵ and could not be contested in any way,Footnote ¹²⁶ the Ministry of Finance intervened. As a result, on July 16, 1900, by Imperial decree,Footnote ¹²⁷ the Peasants Bank was granted an unprecedented right to participate in the Noble Bank’s land auctions, ensuring that land would not pass into the hands of Jews.

Other non-Orthodox religious groupsFootnote ¹²⁸ appeared in the Peasants Land Bank’s documentation only sporadically. Their marginal presence suggests that confessional categories became visible to the Peasants Bank primarily insofar as they intersected with land transactions involving “all-Russian” peasants rather than as objects of systematic regulation. A rare example concerns shtundists,Footnote ¹²⁹ described in an 1886 report by Fedor Fedorovich Voroponov, a member of the Bank’s Council, during his trip to the southern provinces. Voroponov noted a Bank-financed land purchase in the Elisavetgrad district that included former shtundist settlements (11 houses, where stundists had long rented land from the landowner). Although the shtundists appeared displaced as a result of the transaction, they vacated their homes “without resistance, peacefully” under newly established contracts and resettled nearby. Voroponov particularly emphasized the absence of conflict between shtundists and Orthodox peasants, highlighting their continued coexistence as orderly and non-confrontational.Footnote ¹³⁰

Taken together, these cases show that the Peasants Land Bank functioned as a rather flexible instrument of imperial governance. The Bank translated confessional hierarchies into concrete practices of land and credit allocation through differentiated regimes of exclusion and conditional inclusion. In the western borderlands in particular, these practices served broader political objectives, aligning property relations with imperial priorities of loyalty.

“Insiders’” Exclusion: Soslovie Footnote ¹³¹ and Gender Levels

This section serves a different analytical purpose from the preceding ones. Although it does not showcase non-financial exclusion, it reconstructs the baseline logic of the Peasants Land Bank as an institution designed to filter this time through soslovie and household structure. Against this background, I believe, the exclusionary practices examined in the other sections appear as politically charged departures from the Bank’s own creditworthiness rationale.

So far, the Bank’s discriminatory practices appear directed at clear outsiders: colonized groups like the Bashkirs, imperial subjects of foreign origin, or religious minorities. Yet exclusion also extended inward, affecting groups that formally belonged within the imperial order. One of these was the meschanes, who engaged in agriculture and were considered “insiders.” Their case shows how the Bank policed soslovie boundaries, denying access even to those who were Russian, Orthodox, and rural actors.

As its very name implied, the state designed the Peasants Land Bank to serve the soslovie of peasants, to whose hands the government wanted to pass the land. Yet another group also highly depended on land: the meschanes, often described in public discourse as the “forgotten soslovie.”Footnote ¹³² Though officially townsmen, many meschanes lived off farming and were economically indistinguishable from peasants. From 1885 onward, the Bank received repeated requests from local authorities and zemstvo institutions to extend loans to meschanes. The Kherson Zemstvo Footnote ¹³³ emphasized the plight of desyatinschiks,Footnote ¹³⁴ landless meschanes who “did not differ at all from peasants in their way of life or occupations.”Footnote ¹³⁵ In Kherson province alone, over 9,000 families rented more than 150,000 dessiatines of landFootnote ¹³⁶ but lacked access to Bank loans.Footnote ¹³⁷

These appeals partially succeeded: by late 1885, the Bank began issuing limited loans to meschanes who could prove full-time engagement in farming and the absence of private land.Footnote ¹³⁸ Their full inclusion came only with the 1895 Charter, which formally equalized meschanes with peasants. Yet a key restriction persisted: borrowers had to be “constantly engaged in agriculture.” The vagueness of “constantly” left decisions to bureaucratic discretion. Economist Druzhinin noted that “the meschanin may believe that farming for ten years is sufficient, while a Bank official may find that it should be eleven.”Footnote ¹³⁹

Urban meschanes remained excluded until 1908, when the Ministry of Internal Affairs issued a Circular “On the Right to Provide Loans to Urban Meschanes from the Peasants Land Bank.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Even this reform was narrow: only residents of “supernumerary towns,”Footnote ¹⁴¹ whose lifestyle “differed little from the agricultural peasantry,”Footnote ¹⁴² were eligible, and each case required local approval.Footnote ¹⁴³ The measure drew criticism: in Moskovsky Vedomosti,Footnote ¹⁴⁴ publicist Konstantin called the distinction between supernumerary and non-supernumerary towns obsolete and lamented that the Bank still denied loans to city dwellers who farmed. He argued that the Bank should serve all rural actors and evolve into a People Land Bank Footnote ¹⁴⁵ that met “national needs and benefits,” and not narrow soslovie interests.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Indeed, during the late period of its activity, beginning with the Stolypin reforms, the Bank planned to extend its services to “landowners of all sosloviia,” (and thus getting rid of all exclusionary grounds at this level) and to increase long-term agricultural loans.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ These plans, approved by the Council of Ministers in 1912, remained unrealized due to World War I and the 1917 Revolution.

As with the meschanes, the exclusion of peasant women operated through a different mechanism than the cases discussed above: it did not reflect a targeted political agenda. Instead, it is the Bank’s reliance on normative assumptions about creditworthy labor and household structure that rendered women structurally invisible as economic actors.

The Bank’s own reports acknowledged that female householders constituted the least protected and most disadvantaged group, deprived not only by the state’s legislation but also by customary norms that reinforced patriarchal dependence.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Specifically, the Bank acknowledged this as early as its 1883 report, emphasizing that “a considerable number of women” in the countryside carried the burden of taxation and householdFootnote ¹⁴⁹ management alone. Yet, in that same year, the Bank’s Council issued a ruling that permanently barred women from receiving its loans: a decision never revisited in the next thirty-five years.

However, women still appeared in the Bank’s documentation as members of partnerships,Footnote ¹⁵⁰ where their signatures were required but had no effect on loan amounts. The Bank justified this exclusion by reference to the need to “equalize” loan calculations between the communal system, where loan amounts were calculated based on the number of male household heads, and the household-based system of landholding,Footnote ¹⁵¹ which relied on counts of household heads regardless of gender. Importantly, regional distinctions underpinned the Bank’s logic. Bank’s officials distinguished between “Malorussian” localities (household-based) and Great Russian, Belorussian, and Novorossiya regions (communal-based). Yet rather than adjusting its credit norms to these differences, the Bank continued to apply a uniform calculation model derived from Great Russian, Belorussian, and Novorussian practice. As a result, women householders were formally acknowledged but excluded from loan shares, rendering their economic contribution financially inoperative.Footnote ¹⁵² Women’s participation in such partnerships remained purely nominal and never translated into financial rights. Unlike noblewomen,Footnote ¹⁵³ who could freelyFootnote ¹⁵⁴ sell their estates through the Bank, peasant women did not appear in the Bank’s records as autonomous financial actors, nor did the Bank provide a rationale for their exclusion as individual borrowers.

The cases of meschanes and peasant women reveal the Peasants Land Bank’s baseline logic of exclusion, rooted in overt administratively legible definitions of household and estate. Soslovie status and gender operated as default filters for the Bank, determining who could be recognized as its clients in the first place. Against this background, the exclusions examined elsewhere in this article appear as the politicization of an already exclusionary institutional design.