Tax legislation on dogs and registration and tax dog tokens in the USSR (1922-1937 years)

Abstract

The purpose. Coverage based on discovered sources of the tax policy of the USSR in the 20s and 30s of the
20th century regarding dog owners, terms and amounts of payment, public reaction to innovations. Samples of tax registration tokens of this period are randomly analyzed (form, content, language, etc.). On the basis of this, for example, the degree of observance of the law on the language of the “rooting” period (1923-1932) is clarified.
The scientific novelty lies in the fact that although a lot has been written and published about the tax policy of the USSR
in the 20s and 30s of the 20th century, this aspect of it has never been considered separately by anyone. Also, for the first time, the main types of tax-registration dog tokens of various cities of the USSR of the specified period are analyzed and introduced into scientific circulation.
Conclusions. In the 20s and 30s of the 20th century, the practice of taxing dogs on the population, which existed in
the “pre-revolutionary” period, was revived in the USSR. The reason for this, first of all, was the need for accounting and registration of animals due to a significant number of stray dogs and frequent outbreaks of plagues, in particular rabies. Dogs were included in the “small livestock” category. A whole layer of regulatory and binding resolutions of the authorities regarding this problem, which contained fiscal, registration, sanitary-veterinary, social-regulatory, penal and other components, was postponed. These resolutions were mostly published in the press of that time to familiarize the population with them.
The increase in the tax burden against the background of the famine years caused dissatisfaction among the population, especially the peasants, due to which the authorities were forced to react and began to deny the existence of a dog tax in some places.
Dog registration and tax tokens from Ukrainian cities of this period are witnesses of the era, historical sources and
artifacts at the same time. According to the surviving specimens, we know that the «Ukrainian-speaking» dog tokens (1926-1937) first appeared in the stream of «rooting» as a historical phenomenon. Their analysis proves, for example, the violation by the administrative and financial bodies of certain Ukrainian cities in certain years of the requirements of the «Ukrainian language» of such tokens. After the Holodomor (1932-1933) and repressions (1934-1937), this phenomenon practically disappeared, which was obviously directly related to the collapse of the «Ukrainization» process as a whole.