Peasants' Land Bank as a credit intermediary in 1906-1915: regional analysis

The present study is devoted to the analysis of the Peasant Land Bank’s intermediary operation (that is, an operation to issue loans for the independent purchase of land by peasants from landowners) in 1906-1915. The intermediary operation of the Bank developed throughout its entire activity, but after the start of the Stolypin agrarian reform, the indicators for it began to grow rapidly - in ten years the peasants received 125.7 thousand loans to buy 5.7 million “dessyatin” of land. This happened not only due to the increase in land supply on the market after the unrest of 1905, but also due to the stabilization of the banking activity itself, which was finally put on developed effective principles and for the most part was devoid of completely senseless bureaucratic delays. The author studies the intermediary activity of the Peasant Land Bank on the scale of each year and each province with the involvement of vast arrays of statistics. This combination of chronological (within each year and its specifics in the history of the Bank) and provincial analysis makes it possible to identify important aspects of the quantitative and spatial scale of the Bank's intermediary activities. And based on this, to analyze the Bank's contribution to the implementation of government initiatives in the course of the Stolypin agrarian reform.