HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

MOSCOW-UKRAINE ECONOMIC RELATIONS 481Finland) increased from 7.1 to 18.4 percent, and from 9.4 to 22.0percent in the output of the empire's European part alone (withoutPoland-Lithuania and Finland). This increase was from 11.9 to 19.3percent for the same period within the interwar borders of the USSR(Spechler, 1980, pp. 410-11, Table 1, citing Soviet sources). Thisrecord would suggest that market forces proved to be quite strong incomparison with any obstacles Moscow may have put in the way of theUkraine's economic development.Regardless of the development rate of the Ukraine's economy, thetsarist government, as we saw, taxed the Ukraine more than it spentthere through the state budget. Since this difference can be relativelyeasily quantified, it has often been cited as proof of Moscow's discriminatorypolicy against the Ukraine. The question that needs to be askedis whether this policy benefited ethnic Russians. The answer, at leastfor the last third of the nineteenth century, is suggested by Iasnopol'-skii's study (1897, pp. 439 ff.) on the regional distribution of budgetreceipts and expenditures. This study analyzes in detail which provinceswere beneficiaries and which bore the burden of the tax policy. Itconcludes that the principal beneficiary was St. Petersburg province,where the state capital was located at that time. The bulk of budgetexpenditures there went for activities associated with the administrationof the entire empire (e.g., the tsar's court, the ministries, themilitary, etc.), as well as for interest payments on the state's domesticand foreign loans, incurred in part for the construction of the railroadnetwork throughout the country. Thus all of the provinces were theindirect beneficiaries of the state expenditures in St. Petersburg.Direct beneficiaries were the border provinces, primarily those situatedin the northwest of the country, which were inhabited by Finns,Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Poles. Non-Russians also inhabitedother border provinces; for example, various Caucasiannationalities lived in the Transcaucasus and various Moslem nationalitieslived in Central Asia. The direct losers were for the most part theinterior provinces of the country, inhabited predominantly by ethnicRussians as well as by Ukrainians and numerous smaller nationalities.That the ethnic Russians were not favored by the budgetary policycan also be seen from the following evidence. According to an accountby then finance minister Sergei Witte (1903, p. 218), the tax burdenwas most severe in the fifteen Central Black Soil and Central Industrialprovinces of the empire's European part: for example, in 1896 budgetreceipts exceeded expenditures there by 3.50 rubles per capita. These