Russia under the Old regime

16

incapacitated the joint family continued together under one of the brothers whom it elected to serve as bolshak. The bolshak, a kind of paterfamilias, had final say in all family matters; he also set the schedule for field work and performed the sowing. His authority, originally derived from customary law, was given legal status in the 1860s by the rural courts which recognized his verdict as binding in disputes occurring within the family. All the property was held in common. The joint family was economically very advantageous. It was widely acknowledged by persons with expertise in rural life that field work in Russia was best done by large family teams, and that the quality of the peasants' performance depended in large measure on the bolshak's intelligence and authority. Both the government and landlords did all in their power to preserve this institution, not only because of its demonstrable influence on productivity but also because of its political and social benefits to them. Officials and landlords alike preferred to deal with the head of the household rather than with its individual members. Furthermore, they liked the asssurance that a peasant who for some reason (illness or alcoholism, for example) could not work would be taken care of by his relatives. The peasants themselves had more ambivalent feelings. They undoubtedly recognized the economic advantages of the joint family since they had developed it spontaneously. But they disliked the tensions which were bound to arise where several married couples lived under the same roof; they also preferred to hold property individually. After gaining personal freedom in 1861, the one-time serfs began to break up the joint families into their constituent units, much to the detriment of Russian agriculture and their own well-being.

The basic social unit of the ancient Slavs was a tribal community, estimated to have consisted of some fifty or sixty people, all related by blood and working as a team. In time, the communities based on blood relationship dissolved, giving way to a type of communal organization based on joint ownership of arable and meadow, called in Russian mir or obshchina. The origin of this famous institution has been a subject of intense debate for more than a century. The debate began in the 1840s when a group of romantic nationalists known as Slavophiles became aware of the peasant commune as an institution confined to Russia, and extolled it as proof that the Russian people, allegedly lacking in the acquisitive 'bourgeois' impulses of western Europeans, were destined to solve mankind's social problems. Haxthausen popularized this view in his book, published in 1847. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Russian mir became in Western Europe the starting-point of several theories concerning communal land-tenure of primitive societies. In 1854, however, this whole interpretation was challenged by Boris Chicherin, a leading spokesman for the so-called Westerner camp, who