The all-male village assembly, or sel’skii skhod, was connected with the commune rather than the village—institutions which, as will be pointed out below, were not identical. Composed of household elders, it met periodically to decide on matters of common concern and then dispersed: it had no other responsibilities and no standing organization. The absence in the village of institutional forms bears emphasis because it explains the extreme paucity of political experience in the life of Russian peasants. The Russian village could display great cohesion when threatened from the outside. But within its own confines, it never developed organs of self-government able to provide the peasants with political practice—that is, teach them to translate the habits of personal relations acquired within the walls of the household into more formal social relations.
The critical factor in the underdevelopment in Russia of a durable and functional village structure, the reason for the village’s fluidity, was, as in the case of the dvor, the absence of traditions of primogeniture. Compared with an English or Japanese village, the Russian village resembled a nomadic encampment: the peasant’s log cabin (izba), constructed in a few days and frequently destroyed by fire, was not much more durable than a tent.
The third peasant institution, the commune (obshchina), usually overlapped with the village but was not identical with it. Whereas the village was a physical entity—cottages in close proximity—the commune was a legal institution, a collective arrangement for the distribution among its members of land and taxes. Residence in a given village did not automatically confer membership: peasants without land allotments as well as non-peasants (e.g., the priest or schoolteacher) did not belong and could not take part in communal decisions. Furthermore, although the great majority of Russian communes were of the “single” type, which embraced one village, this was not universal practice. In the north, where villages were small, several of them sometimes combined to form one commune; in the central regions and even more often in the south, large villages would divide into two or more communes.
The commune was an association of peasants holding communal land allotments. This land, divided into strips, it periodically redistributed among members. Redistributions (peredely), which took place at regular intervals—ten, twelve, fifteen years or so, according to local custom—were carried out to allow for changes in the size of households brought about by deaths, births, and departures. They were a main function of the commune and its distinguishing characteristic. The commune divided its land into strips in order to assure each member of allotments of equal quality and distance from the village. By 1900, approximately one-third of the communes, mostly in the western and southern borderlands, had ceased the practice of repartitioning even though formally they were still treated as “repartitional communes.” In the Great Russian provinces, the practice of repartition was virtually universal.
Through the village assembly, the commune resolved issues of concern to its members, including the calendar of field work, the distribution of taxes and other fiscal obligations (for which its members were held collectively responsible), and disputes among households. It could expel troublesome members and have them exiled to Siberia; it had the power to authorize passports, without which peasants could not leave the village, and even to compel an entire community to change its religious allegiance from the official church to one of the sects. The assembly reached its decisions by acclamation: it did not tolerate dissent from the will of the majority, viewing it as antisocial behavior.*
The commune was largely confined to central Russia. On the periphery of the Empire—in what had been the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ukraine, and the Cossack regions—most of the peasants tilled individually, by households, under a system known as podvornoe zemlevladenie. Here, each household held, either in ownership or under lease, a parcel of land which it cultivated as it pleased. By contrast, in northern and central Russia, the peasants held the bulk of their land in strips and cultivated it under communal discipline. They did not own the land, the title to which was held by the commune. At the beginning of the twentieth century, 77.2 percent of the rural households in the fifty provinces of European Russia tilled the land communally; in the thirty or so Great Russian provinces, communal ownership was virtually universal (97–100 percent).8 Membership in a commune and access to a communal allotment did not preclude peasants from buying land for private use from landlords or other owners. In the more prosperous regions it was not uncommon for peasants to till both communal allotments and their private land. In 1910, the peasants of European Russia held communally 151 million hectares and 14 million hectares in outright ownership.†
The origins of the Russian commune are obscure and a subject of controversy. Some see in it the spontaneous expression of an alleged Russian sense of social justice, while others view it as the product of state pressures to ensure collective responsibility for the fulfillment of obligations to the Crown and landlord. Recent studies indicate that the repartitional commune first appeared toward the end of the fifteenth century, became common in the sixteenth, and prevalent in the seventeenth. It served a variety of functions, as useful to officials and landlords as to peasants. The former it guaranteed, through the institution of collective responsibility, the payment of taxes and delivery of recruits; the latter it enabled to present a united front in dealings with external authority.9 The principle of periodic redistribution of land ensured (at any rate, in theory) that every peasant had enough to provide for his family and, at the same time, to meet his obligations to the landlord and state. Such considerations moved the Imperial Government at the time of Emancipation to retain the commune and extend it to some areas where it had been unknown. It was expected that once the villages had redeemed their land by repaying the state the moneys it had advanced the landlords on their behalf, the communes would dissolve and the peasants assume title to their allotments. However, during the conservative reign of Alexander III legislation was passed which made it virtually impossible for peasants to withdraw. This policy was inspired by the belief that the commune was a stabilizing force which strengthened the authority of the bol’shak, curbed peasant anarchism, and inhibited the formation of a volatile landless proletariat.
17. Peasants in winter clothing.
By 1900, many Russians had grown disenchanted with the commune. Government officials and liberals noted that while the commune did not prevent the emergence of a landless proletariat it did keep down the enterprising peasant. Social-Democrats saw it as doomed to disintegrate under the pressure of intensifying “class differentiation” among poor, middle, and rich peasants. A conference on rural problems convened in 1902, in the wake of recent peasant disturbances, concluded that the commune was the main cause of the backwardness of Russian peasant farming.*
But the peasantry itself held fast to communal forms of agriculture because it promised access to a fair and adequate share of arable land and helped maintain the cohesion of the household. If land allotments had shrunk considerably by 1900, the peasant could console himself with the hope that sooner or later all privately held land in the country would be confiscated and transferred to the communes for repartitioning.
The three rural institutions—the household, the village, and the commune—provided the environment which shaped the muzhik’s social habits. They were well adapted to the harsh geographic and climatic conditions in which Russian agriculture had to be carried out. But nearly everything the peasant learned in his familiar environment proved to be useless and sometimes positively harmful when applied elsewhere. Living in a small community, the Russian peasant was unequipped for the transition to a complex society, composed of individuals rather than households and regulated by impersonal relations, into which he would be thrust by the upheavals of the twentieth century.