Concesiunea pescuitului în apele de pe domeniul statului în Basarabia (1812-1869)
Fishing tax-farming in state owned waters of Bessarabia (1812-1869)

Summary/Abstract: In this study, based on previously unpublished archival sources, we analyze to what extent the fiscal policy of the Russian government in Bessarabia influenced the fishing of the inhabitants of the Russian bank of the Danube. The main focus is on the system of fishery tax farming, which was practiced by the imperial authorities to extract income from fish resources, as well as to tax fishermen. Having analyzed the provisions of the tax farming contracts, we found that initially the main problem for fisher- men was sanitary and epidemiological restrictions. Only by the beginning of the fourth decade did they recede into the background, giving way to those restrictions imposed by tax farmers. If previously they sought only to obtain from the state the right to collect a tithe from fishing, now they began to insist on the inclusion in the tax farming contracts of a condition on the exclusive right to the caught fish and the obligation of fishermen to hand it over to them at a fixed price. Thus, the easing of sanitary restrictions led to an intensification of the struggle for the right to free fishing with tax farmers who were seeking to increase their own income, and who, besides, came from other regions of the empire. The local fishing communities were in a constant search for solutions to survive, but the imperial authorities were looking for an increase in incomes, resulting in a constant confrontation in this regard. The end of this fiscal burden came only in the late 1860s. However, by that time, according to the provisions of the Paris Peace Treaty of 1856, the Russian Empire had already lost most of its fishing possessions in Bessarabia. Only then did the Russian imperial authorities show their concern for the Vylkove fishermen, ruined by the fiscal policy they had been pursuing for decades.

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