Ekaterina Pravilova's book is an impressive and illuminating guide to—as its title indicates—the “political history” of the ruble, or more precisely, the paper ruble. This history opens with the assignats issued by Catherine II. A paper money at first readily convertible to silver or copper, the assignat dipped in its exchange rate to metal by the second half of Catherine's reign and did so increasingly thereafter due to excessive emission. Under Alexander I, Mikhail Speranskii sought unsuccessfully to replace what Pravilova describes as “the whimsical ruble of despotic monarchism” by “a ‘rule-of-law’ ruble” (48). Repeated attempts at “taming” the over-issued assignats ended with Egor Kankrin's creation under Nicholas I of “state credit bills” (74, 78): a new paper money convertible to silver ruble coins at par, and exchangeable for assignats at the ratio of 1:3.5. The introduction of these “credit bills” at last permitted the withdrawal and “abolition of the old assignats” (78).
Whatever reform it undertook, however, as Pravilova tells it, the state retained monopoly control over money, permitting no checks on its authority. Kankrin's reform did not result in an independent central bank that could limit emission and ensure society's supervision of government finances. The 1897 gold standard reform—enacted to integrate Russia with the leading economies of the time—followed this overarching pattern. So did the rescue in the NEP era of the overprinted Soviet ruble by way of a new paper gold-ruble currency, the chervonets. Sergei Witte's gold standard was, according to Pravilova, an “ostensibly pro-bourgeois” policy that violated “the interest of the bourgeoisie” and reflected the minister's “distrust of private initiatives” (186–87). Dubbing his gold standard “the autocratic standard,” the author points to such “contradictions” in its implementation as subordinating the State Bank to the Finance Ministry and binding the Bank to emission rules rather than allowing it to make its own emission decisions (187, 197–98). Similarly disregarding the principle of the emission bank's autonomy, the chervonets reform subsumed the Soviet State Bank into the People's Commissariat of Finance.
In both cases, the state accumulated a gold reserve that Pravilova indicts as excessive and overly costly. Witte set the gold reserve to provide 50% coverage for a paper issue of 600 million rubles and 100% for any emission above the 600 million. It grew to a “mesmerizing” size by the start of the Russo-Japanese War, covering 150% of Russia's paper issue—compared to the 50% for paper yen guaranteed by the gold reserve of Japan, another recent member of the gold-standard club (245). The percentage of the chervonets's reserve backing relative to emission was much smaller, 25% (A. Z. Arnold, Banks, Credit, and Money in Soviet Russia [1937], 148). Given the material constraints of the time, Pravilova rightly considers this reserve to be enormous. Highlighting the imperial and Soviet “obsession with size,” the book argues that both governments, having rejected the “key elements” behind the gold standard, “constitutionalism, political representation, and transparency of financial policy,” focused in compensation on something of “secondary” importance, “the size of the gold reserve” (351).
By taking what might be called a “classical” liberal perspective in its critique of autocracy and a “hypertrophied” centralized Soviet state (351), this book presents a useful framework for tying together a multitude of views and practices (mostly in the form of state policies) about money. But the scheme of state-society opposition may also obscure monetary ideas and monetary interactions not assimilable to either side of the divide. For instance, suggesting a blurred private-public boundary, Ian M. Drummond notes that the solidity of the imperial gold reserve both drew foreign capital to Russia with high interest and enabled Russian private firms to borrow “more cheaply” at foreign markets, thereby undergirding the vast expansion of “bank money,” credit available to private commercial banks not visible as printed rubles (Ian M. Drummond, “The Russian Gold Standard, 1897–1924,” Journal of Economic History 36, no. 3 [September 1976]: 670, 682–84, 688). Another instance is the intriguing episode Pravilova mentions of the private money printed by Sergei Mal΄tsov at his factory estate, which hints at a conception of individual subjects’ right to mint money that divided, in the 1860s, not the state against society, but ministry against ministry (the Finance Ministry condemned it, while the Justice Ministry supported it).
This minor quibble aside, in all, Pravilova's book is an accomplished endeavor that recasts Russian history “in the language of money,” as she poetically explains (361).
