Suchergebnisse

The appeal issued by the St Petersburg Soviet on December 1, 1905, and known as the Financial Manifesto, served as a pretext for the Witte Government to liquidate the Soviet and to start a counterattack which, in a short time, completed the defeat of the first Russian revolution. The Manifesto represents a unique attempt to further the objectives of revolutionaries by undermining the monetary system, but it did not inaugurate a new strategy for revolutionaries in Russia, nor has it influenced revolutionary movement elsewhere. The originality of the Manifesto lies in its advocacy of a set of actions designed to bring about the downfall of Tsarism by exerting pressure on the gold base of the monetary system and by undermining government credit, rather than through withholding of tax payments. Refusal to pay taxes has been a widely used political weapon, at least since the American Revolution. It found its place in the program of the British Chartist movement, one of the first political movements rooted essentially in the working class.

When examining the various aspects of Soviet society, and looking back at its antecedents in pre-revolutionary Russia, a certain continuity in institutions and economic policies emerges. This is in particular true in the area of banking and credit. The Soviet banking system, as it evolved after the October revolution, and, more specifically, after the credit reforms of 1930–1932, is unique in many respects. Surely, there are examples in non-socialist countries of banking institutions which combine central banking and commercial banking. In many cases, central banks of the less developed countries have assumed a leading role in implementing development programs and in creating the required financial institutions, instruments, and markets. In some leading industrial countries, such as France and Italy, as well as in a number of the newer countries, large commercial banks are owned by the government. The uniqueness of the Soviet banking system lies in the complete integration of monetary processes within the system of central planning, the credit monopoly of the State Bank of the Soviet Union (Gosbank) and its broad control powers over the performance of the entire state-owned segment of the economy.