about half again as much as in the United States and among the top tax-collection rates on the European continent. Nevertheless, except in oil boom years, the budget usually concealed a 2 to 8 percent deficit, financed by monetary emissions and resulting in inflation during the 1980s especially.
Some of the revenues mentioned above are retained by local or republican governments for their own expenditures. This was particularly high in the less developed regions of Central Asia, as part of the regional subsidy characteristic of Soviet welfare colonialism, as it has been called. See also: ALCOHOL MONOPOLY; BEARD TAX; TAX, TURNOVER
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gregory, Paul, and Stuart, Robert. (1998). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 6th ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
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Holzman, Franklyn D. (1955). Soviet Ta.xa.tion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kahan, Arcadius. (1985). The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout. An Economic History of Eighteenth-Century Russia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Turnover tax (nalog s oborota) was a tax on enterprise gross output, the main source of government revenue during the first several decades of Soviet planned economy, officially considered part of the surplus product in Marxist terms. It was introduced in 1930 for the purpose of unifying previously diverse taxes.
The difference between the final retail price for consumer goods (and most fuels) and the industry’s wholesale price, as set by the Soviet pricing authorities, less any handling charges, is the turnover tax. (Before 1949 this tax was also applied to producer goods for reasons of fiscal control.) Sometimes this levy was imposed as a unit tax, as a percentage of the sale price, or in other ways. Regardless of the method of collection, the turnover tax rate is thus the difference divided by the wholesale (or retail) selling price. These rates differed widely. In the case of agricultural products, the turnover tax comes from the difference between the procurement price and that at which the produce is resold by state organs. On salt and vodka, the turnover tax resembled an excise tax. In 1975 about one-third of the entire revenue from turnover taxes came from wines and spirits, hence any effort to reduce drinking, to the extent they were successful, posed a fiscal dilemma, as the Mikhail Gorbachev campaign discovered.
The turnover tax was administratively simple. Collecting the tax was easier from the relatively small number of industrial enterprises and wholesale organizations, most of which had decent accounts. Income taxes would have had to be collected from millions of citizens, many of whom were still illiterate or at least innumerate. The variable markup allowed retail prices to be changed when inventories warranted, without altering the industry wholesale price on which planning indices depended. For example, turnover taxes on food were lowered several times during the 1950s to allow the state to pay higher procurement prices without affecting politically sensitive retail prices. A
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
similar situation applied to fuels for household consumption. From 1954 until the late 1960s, official retail prices were held approximately constant, quite probably to save administrative effort. It also permitted certain prices to be disproportionately low, such as those on children’s clothing and approved reading material.
As compared to other sources of revenue, the turnover tax was quite large in the 1930s, but fell in relation to taxes on profits and incomes during the 1950s. See also: TAXES
Bergson, Abram. (1964). The Economics of Soviet Planning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Holzman, Franklyn. (1974). “Financing Soviet Economic Development.” In William L. Blackwell, ed., Russian Economic Development from Peter the Great to Stalin. New York: New Viewpoints. Nove, Alec. (1986). The Soviet Economic System, 3rd ed. Boston: Allen amp; Unwin.
MARTIN C. SPECHLER TBILISI See TIFLIS.
(1840-1893), Russian composer.
Arguably the most famous Russian composer, Tchaikovsky was the first to achieve renown beyond Russia’s borders and establish a place for Russian music in the repertories of Western concert halls and musical theaters. The first professional Russian composer to receive a thorough musical education, the import of Tchaikovsky’s achievement owes much to his mastery of the dominant nineteenth-century musical genre: the symphony. Yet Tchaikovsky’s enormous range, versatility, and output-he composed in all the major genres, including symphonies, operas, ballets, chamber works, songs, as well as compositions for solo instruments-assure the composer’s place among the most popular and prolific European composers of his day.
Tchaikovsky’s virtual dominance of the Russian musical scene by the end of his life aroused
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the envy of the nationalist composers known as the Mighty Handful, yet Tchaikovsky’s ability to adapt native folk material to established Western compositional structures proved more successful than their more earnest attempts to craft from those materials a unique native musical language. Four Tchaikovsky masterworks, representing three genres in which Tchaikovsky particularly excelled, were the fruits of an unprecedented final creative flourish: the opera Queen of Spades (1891), the ballets Sleeping Beauty (1889), The Nutcracker (1892), and the Sixth Symphony (1893).
Although Tchaikovsky’s music was deemed bourgeois in the relatively radical period following the 1917 Revolution, these criticisms faded in the Josef Stalin era, when the monumental art of the previous century once again found favor, and Tchaikovsky was hailed as a symphonist par excellence-the composer’s homosexuality, the perceived melancholy of his music, and his conservative politics notwithstanding. Tchaikovsky died of cholera in St. Petersburg in 1893, though a very active party of mostly Russian researchers allege the composer’s death was the result of a suicide brought about by a crisis over his homosexuality. See also: MUSIC
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, David. (1978-1992). Tchaikovsky: A Biographical and Critical Study. London: Gollancz. Orlova, A., ed. (1990). Tchaikovsky: A Self-Portrait. New York: Oxford University Press. Poznansky, Alexander. (1991). Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man. New York: Simon and Schuster Macmillan. Poznansky, Alexander, and Brett Langston. (2002). The Tchaikovsky Handbook: A Guide to the Man and His Music, comp. Alexander Poznansky and Brett Langston. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Taruskin, Richard. (1997). Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
In the final stage of the annual central planning process, Soviet enterprises received each year a com1526 prehensive document, the techpromfinplan (technical-industrial-financial plan), which they were required by law to fulfill. Divided into quarterly and monthly subplans, the techpromfinplan governed the operation of the firm by specifying output targets and input allocations, as well as a large number of financial characteristics, delivery schedules, capacity utilization norms, labor staffing instructions, planned increases in labor productivity, and other targets. In total, as many as one hundred targets were specified in the techpromfinplan, the most important of which involved output targets. Fulfilling output targets, measured either in quantity or value, formed the basis for calculating bonus payments for managers and workers.
In a very broad sense, the techpromfinplan was the means by which Soviet planners’ preferences were implemented. Social and economic goals set at the highest level of the political bureaucracy and conveyed to Gosplan, the State Planning Committee, were disaggregated by sector, region, and industry, and sent to individual
