In the Russian peasant village, a married couple was considered a work unit, and a household was not viable without a strong adult couple, and preferably several. When a woman was widowed, the community quickly arranged her remarriage to prevent her from slipping into poverty and becoming a public burden. Everyone, including children, worked, in tasks determined by age and gender. Men plowed, harrowed, and sowed the fields, women tended gardens and domestic livestock. Women did the cooking and preserved food; they made clothing and oversaw the domestic economy. Everyone harvested in the intense months from late June through at least August, men reaping and women threshing. Within the family the male elder had absolute authority, including corporal punishment, over the younger men and all the women. Women were particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of fate—the loss of a male head of household or absence of sons or children at all could impoverish a female. Peasant women had some property rights over dowry property and were eligible for widow's support, often from land in equivalent ofthe dowry gift. In a stable family, women could achieve a certain status. The patriarch's wife lorded over younger women in the household; on rare occasions, widows (with capable sons) joined the council of elders as head of household. If they fulfilled their central roles in reproduction and in production in the household economy, women were valued and respected members of the group.
Power in the commune replicated patriarchal authority in a household. The council of elders oversaw all; they selected officials to manage tax collection, collective agricultural and construction work, law and order (Figure 10.2). Their goal was to keep the community running smoothly so that it produced enough food to live on and enough profit to pay their obligations to the state, the Church, and the landlord if they had one. Communal government also worked to keep a buffer between the community and state and/or landlord. Communal officers worked with state officials to collect taxes and recruits and to manage public services such as road and bridge upkeep. Landlords actually living on small estates might have exerted direct control and high exactions, but most villages did not have a resident owner. The more serfs an owner owned, the less burden he put on individual households. Landlords' bailiffs generally cooperated with communes, trusting in peasants' understanding of the agrarian cycle, deferring to peasants' risk-averseness (because of the precariousness of the climate and burden of taxes). Landlords also relied on the commune's self-policing; bailiffs stepped in to provide control, relief, or coercion in times of famine or crisis, and could be involved in discipline and coercive processes such as recruitment. But communes preferred to manage for themselves, including strict discipline.
Figure 10.2 This seventeenth-century chapel of St. Nicholas from the Novgorod area illustrates the straightforward log construction that East Slavic peasants, working communally, turned into an art of secular and church architecture. Photo: Jack Kollmann.
The elders and officials of the commune had tremendous power. They apportioned obligations and tasks collectively; they assigned and redistributed lands; they apportioned the tax according to families' ability to pay; they regulated when collective work would be done (harvest, sowing) and how much firewood, timber, fish, and other resources each family could collect. Communes exerted judicial authority over all sorts of disputes and problems, sending only the highest of felony criminals to the state courts. They could and did flog, fine, exile, and punish their members to keep people in line. They policed moral and sexual behavior. In all this, factions and petty rivalries could shape elders' decisions.
Steven Hoch presents a picture of Russian commune life that amounted to the tyranny of male over female and old over young. Men dominated their wives, daughters, and daughters-in-law; older men kept young men in line, through discipline within the family or meted out by communal assembly. Household elders decided when to retire or clung to power in the family and in the village while their sons waited impatiently. The scourge of recruitment was a constant threat from the early eighteenth century, and elders could use it to rid the village of disruptive young men, or for that matter, of their rivals' son. Otherwise, recruitment usually fell on a family that had sons to spare. Such power was extended in a 1760 law that allowed landlords (through the agency of their serf peasant communes), state peasants, and urban communes to send unruly serfs to Siberia or as recruits as punishment.
In the nineteenth century Russian and European scholars and publicists idealized the commune as spiritually superior to western individualism and competition (the Slavophile point of view) or as providing an alternative to capitalism for those seeking a more equitable modern society (a socialist tack). Certainly the commune had its positive sides: communities provided social welfare to orphans, widows, and the disabled; they stepped in when death, fire, or illness decimated a family; they provided for physical sustenance and social stability in this economy of scarcity and autocratic control. Communes provided the "face to face" nurture of small communities.
But sometimes "face to face" communities can be "back to back": claustrophobic and riven by infighting and inequities. Petty rivalries could turn into power plays by corrupt peasant officials. The constant constraints of a living situation in which everyone knows everyone else's business took its toll. A commune's interest in maintaining tradition and stability impinged on everyone's freedom, in moral life and love, in avocations and economic prospects. Teodor Shanin argued that the risk-averseness of traditional Russian peasant life led to a culture of leveling, where communal policies consciously prevented any one household from becoming rich by demanding more of high achievers (office holding, larger tax and recruitment quotas). The interests of the collective trumped those of the individual or even the individual family. Such social and economic patterns are discernible on the broad scale, but one should be chary of extrapolating them as determinants of Russian peasant psychology; plenty of Russian peasants had the individuality to strike out on their own, or with families or whole villages, to change their lives for the better.
AGENCY AND RESISTANCE
It was not in the self-interest of communes to resist the state or their landlords; peasants were tied to the annual cycle of crops for their very subsistence. But peasants exerted a lot of agency, resisting in everyday ways, as James Scott has chronicled. In Russia, for example, they insisted that their landlords observe prohibitions on work on Sundays and all state holidays and religious holydays. David Moon notes that by the mid-nineteenth century, Russian Orthodox peasants observed 95 Sundays and holydays off work, a greater number than other faiths in the empire (38-48 for Catholics and 13-23 for Protestants in the Baltics, 13-15 for Muslims). Such regular days offprovided peasants with an acceptable workload, and they complained to their landlords or to officials about overwork.