Kruzhok - Debt, War, and Peace
The Kruzhok-REEES Reading Group presents Kostas Zivas, Yale University
Title: "Debt, War, and Peace: Negotiating Bankruptcy in the Russian Partition after the Napoleonic Wars (1813-1830)"
Abstract: Why did technical debates about dividing up the property of heavily indebted Polish-Lithuanian nobles spark heated exchanges between some of the most prominent bureaucrats of the Russian Empire? After the Napoleonic Wars, the impoverished Russian Partition (the territories comprising today’s Belarus, Lithuania, large parts of Poland and Ukraine) experienced a profound debt crisis as nobles defaulted en masse. Tsar Alexander I responded to calls for an intervention by founding special debt commissions to help settle the multi-million debts of some of the wealthiest Polish-Lithuanian nobles. The chapter shows how debt commissions became fora where imperial officials, indebted nobles, hundreds of creditors, legal intermediaries, and members of the imperial family negotiated a legal regime for partitioning the property of debtors and settling financial obligations to the state and private creditors. In addition to high financial stakes, the parties understood that choosing between different legal instruments of debt collection (public auctions or less forceful means of dividing property) also meant choosing between competing visions of the Russian imperial order.
Bio: Kostas Zivas is a PhD candidate in History at Yale University. He holds a BA in International Relations from Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens, Greece, and an MPhil in History from the University of Cambridge. His dissertation, "Converting Empire: Imperial Russia and the Politics of Debt in the Territories of the Former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1793–1840s)," examines how the Russian Empire utilized the private debts of the Commonwealth’s nobility as a mechanism of governance in the annexed territories.
Date: Friday, September 25, 2026
Not Open to the Public; for more information on the kruzhok and to get involved, please visit it's webpage.