In the 1840s, the Slavophiles grew beards, read Herder and Hegel, and explored the Orthodox Church. They condemned the foreign influences that they associated with the Petrine Empire, but found it difficult to articulate their own positive ideas. Rich serf- and landowners, they felt that the Empire did not provide them with existential comfort. In their quest for an organic community that would rely on Russianness and Orthodoxy, the Slavophiles struggled with the multi-ethnicity of the Empire. Their theocratic nationalism was adversely affected by the fact of the Russian religious schism, a seventeenth-century religious conflict that made a significant number of the bearded, pious Russians non-Orthodox (see Chapter 10). It was the Schism that made it impossible to imagine a Russian nation based on Orthodoxy. Repeatedly returning to this theme, Khomiakov developed an original strategy, which was different from that of his more fundamentalist friends. It was not so much theocratic but, rather, communitarian and racialized. He was one of the first to identify the colonial nature of Russia's clash with modernity (see Chapter 1). Like his French contemporaries such as Francois Guizot (Foucault 2003: 226), Khomiakov racialized the political problems of his time. The Russian aristocracy, the descendants of Viking warriors, presented themselves as racially different from other estates, the clergy and the peasantry, the descendants of the peaceful Slavs. While the monarchy strove to neutralize this racial discourse, Khomiakov re-enacted it. Perceiving the written law, governmental rationality, and, most of all, property rights as the legacy of the European colonization that started with Rurik, he elaborated the idea of the commune. According to this contrarian idea, the commune was the ancient custom of the Slavs that preceded the Norman conquest of Russia and survived it. This idea came as salvation and became the central tenet of Slavophilism.
Thus, from romantic nationalism the Slavophiles shifted to com- munitarianism, which valued custom over law, the oral over the written, and the community over the individual. Furthermore, they declared Russia's priority in these anti-modern values. Later, the commune had become equally important to those radicals who believed in socialism but who preached a particularly Russian path to it. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who would soon go into Siberian exile developed a theory that, because of communal land-holding, Russia would escape capitalism. Since the future socialism would be built on the same principle of collective property as the commune, Russia would be able to reach socialism directly from its current condition, bypassing the hateful capitalism (Chernyshevsky 1856; Bogucharsky 1912; Walicki 1969; Dimou 2009). Nationalist movements in the colonies often affirmed their differences from the west in a similar way, constructing the "west" as materialist and individualistic and their own cultures as spiritual and communitarian (Chatterjee 1993).
Blending socialism with nationalism and combining ethnography, history, economics, and politics, the commune was a truly big idea, the grand narrative of Russian intellectual history. Boris Chicherin, a legal scholar who would become the major proponent of Russian liberalism and an elected mayor of Moscow, attacked Haxthausen in a much-discussed essay, which today would be called revisionist. Chicherin denied that the commune was an "ancient" institution and claimed that it was created in the imperial period. "The commune is a modern institution," wrote Chicherin (1856); it had nothing to do with the ancient Slavs and was created by the state for fiscal purposes. Essentially, Chicherin understood the commune as an incomplete analogue of the German-style municipality and credited Catherine the Great with importing it to Russia. But while the intellectuals were debating the origins of the commune, its actual power in the countryside was only increasing. The commune repartitioned land among its members, collected annual and special taxes, mediated between the peasants and the manor or the state, and chose recruits among the available young men, so that it could get rid of the troublemakers (Mironov 1985; Moon 1999). In the 1840s, the government strengthened the commune's disciplinary power even more, giving it the right to subject its members to corporal punishment or to send them to Siberia. The legislation of 1861 codified the emancipation of serfs from their lords but strengthened their dependence on the commune, which became the primary institution to structure Russian peasantry. Closer to the twentieth century, the commune became the main target of the struggle between the government, which wanted to emancipate the peasants from the commune and bring the land to the market, and the populists, some of them terrorists, who saw in these attempts the betrayal of both Russian and socialist ideas (Bogucharsky 1912; Gleason 1980; Wcislo 1990).
The peasant agricultural commune shared important features with the military institution of the gauntlet. In both cases, the gauntlet and the commune, the Empire delegated the execution of disciplinary practice to the grassroots level. The function of both institutions was to discipline the collective, suppress the private interests of its members, and, finally, reveal, expose, and destroy dissent. But of course, the commune was perceived as having deep national roots, while the gauntlet was regarded as an imported Prussian tradition - even the Russian name for it, shpitsruteny, sounds German. Russia's illiberal empire (Engelstein 2009) was based on an alliance between monarchical power at the top and practical communitarianism from below: both prevented the growth of the individual and capitalist development. As Chicherin showed, the commune was founded on the remains of customary law from the mid-eighteenth century, which was about the time that the gauntlet replaced the knout. "Such a communism is very easy to arrange, it is only necessary that there are lords and slaves," wrote Russian liberals (Kavelin and Chicherin 1974: 33).
Nowadays, scholars largely agree that the peasant commune was contemporaneous with the Empire, though the formative role of the state is a different issue (Atkinson 1990; Moon 1999). In the late nineteenth century, agricultural experts noted that in Siberia and other areas of recent colonization, the resettled Russian peasants created land communes spontaneously and without encouragement from officials, sometimes even despite new regulations that insisted on private ownership. Summarizing this evidence, an influential economist and historian of the peasants' resettlements, Aleksandr Kaufman, disagreed with the Russian liberal historiography. He maintained that the commune in the central and southern provinces also developed in a "self-generating way" that was similar to its development in Siberia (Kaufman 1908: 440; Shannon 1990). But he recognized that in the areas with an ancient agricultural population, e.g. in northern Russia, peasants developed individual farming practices with well-established property rights.
Kaufman was close to the conclusion that I formulate in my own language, which is not very different from his. In Russia, the commune was an institution of colonial ownership of land, which the settlers did not own or feel was theirs; it was also an institution for managing the population of settlers who were not attached to their land. In this institution, the peasants' interest in survival met with the state's interest in taxation and discipline. There was also a long-term tendency toward privatizing communal land, which eventually destroyed communes by converting its property to individual ownership. But only in the areas of the most ancient colonization, in the north, did this cycle reach its later phase.
Russia's most peculiar institution, the commune was different from the Soviet collective farm that replaced it. In neither institution did members own the land that they cultivated. However, members of the commune worked land individually or with their families, while members of the kolkhoz worked land together, in a collective which was modeled on an assembly line. First attributed to the industrial workers, the Marxist idea of the proletarian collective was then applied to peasants, prisoners, children, and the intelligentsia (Kharkhordin 1999). If there was a communitarian sentiment in the Russian village, through the Soviet period the kolkhoz destroyed it. Historically, the Russian commune showed huge variability over periods, areas, and types of property, but its mythology was more uniform. It was all about building a contrast between the higher and lower classes in Russia, a contrast as great as could possibly be imagined. While the higher classes of the Empire developed sophisticated laws of private property and means of self-expression, among the lower classes, so the story goes, life and land did not belong to the individual but to the collective.