Russia under the Old regime

17

argued that the peasant commune as then known was neither ancient nor autochthonous in origin, but had been introduced by the Russian monarchy in the middle of the eighteenth century as a means of ensuring the collection of taxes. Until then, according to Chicherin, Russian peasants had held their land by individual households. Subsequent researches blurred the lines of the controversy. Contemporary opinion holds that the commune of the imperial period was indeed a modern institution, as Chicherin claimed, although older than he had believed. It is also widely agreed that pressure by the state and landlord played a major part in its formation. At the same time, economic factors seem also to have affected its evolution to the extent that there exists a demonstrable connection between the availability of land and communal tenure: where land is scarce, the communal form of tenure tends to prevail, but where it is abundant it is replaced by household or even family tenure.

Whatever the merits of the case, in the imperial period the vast majority of the Russian peasants held their land communally; in the central provinces the commune was virtually universal. The arable was divided into sections corresponding to the quality of the soil and distance from the village. Each household had the right to claim in every such section one or more strips corresponding to the number of its adult members; the latter were typically defined as all men between the ages of 15 or 17 and 60-65, and all married women under the age of 48. The strips were extremely narrow, measuring between nine and twelve feet in width and several hundred yards in length. A household might have had thirty to fifty or more such strips scattered in a dozen different locations around the village. The principal purpose of this arrangement was to enable every peasant to pay his share of rents and taxes. Since households grew or diminished over time, every so often (e.g. at nine-, twelve-, or fifteen-year intervals) the commune took its own census, on the basis of which it carried out a 'black repartition' (chernyi peredel), resulting in a re-allotment of the strips. The system was meant to guarantee every peasant an equitable share of the land, and every household enough land to support itself and to meet its responsibilities to the landlord and state. In reality, peasants were loath to part with the strips in which they had invested time and effort, especially if from an increase of the village population the repartition caused their allotments to be diminished. The authorities therefore had to step in repeatedly to enforce redistribution by decree.

One occasionally hears analogies drawn between the pre-revolutionary communes and the collective farms {kolkhozy) introduced in 1928-32 by the communist regime. The analogy has little to recommend it, except for a negative factor common to both institutions, i.e. the absence of private ownership in land. The differences are quite basic. The mir was not a collective; farming in it was carried out privately, by households. Even more significantly, the peasant living in the mir owned the product of his labour, whereas in the kolkhoz it belongs to the state which compensates the farmer for his work. The Soviet kolkhoz corresponds most closely to an institution encountered in Russia under serfdom under the name mesiachina. Under this system the landlord enclosed his land and placed the peasants on full-time labour on his own behalf, paying them a wage to support themselves.

Unlike the joint family, imposed on them by a combination of economic necessity and pressure from above, the commune enjoyed peasant loyalty. It provided a high degree of security without seriously inhibiting freedom of movement. It also allowed common access to meadow as well as co-ordination of field work which was highly desirable under the prevailing climatic conditions and the open field system. The latter was done by a council of the mir, composed of all the bolshaks. The peasants ignored the criticism levied at the commune by economists, who saw it as a millstone around the neck of the more enterprising among them, and tenaciously clung to it. In November 1906, the imperial government introduced easy procedures for the consolidation of strips into individual farmsteads. The legislation had a limited measure of success in the borderlands of the empire; in central Russia, the peasants simply ignored it.* In so far as the political system of Russia is the main theme of this book, at this point the influence of the natural environment upon Russia's constitution need only be delineated in the most general terms.

On the face of it, nature intended Russia to be a decentralized country formed of a multitude of self-contained and self-governing communities. Everything here militates against statehood: the poverty of the soil, remoteness from the main routes of international trade, the sparsity and mobility of the population. And Russia might well have remained a decentralized society, with many scattered centres of localized power, were it not for geopolitical factors which urgently demanded firm political authority. The extensive, highly wasteful nature of Russian rural economy and the need for ever fresh land to replace that exhausted by overcultivation and undermanuring compelled Russians at all times to push outward. As long as their colonization had been confined to the taiga, the process could unroll spontaneously and without military protection. But the rich and desirable soil lay in the steppe, under the

* By 1913, only 17-7 per cent of peasant households availed themselves of the right to consolidate their strips and leave the commune, and most of these were in the Ukraine and Belorussia: A.N.Chelintsev, Sel'sko-khoziaistvennaia geografiia Rossii (Berlin 1923), p. 117, and Lazar Volin, A century of Russian agriculture (Cambridge, Mass. 1970), p. 107.