The Russian Revolution полностью

The Russian peasant household was organized on a simple authoritarian model, under which full authority over the members and their belongings was entrusted to one person, known as bol’shak or khoziain. This family patriarch was usually the father, but the post could also be assigned, by common consent, to another adult male. The elder’s functions were many: he assigned farm and household duties, he disposed of property, he adjudicated domestic disputes, and he represented the household in its dealings with the outside world. Customary peasant law endowed him with unquestioned authority over his dvor: in many ways, he was heir to the authority of the serf owner. Since the Emancipation Edict of 1861, the bol’shak was also authorized by the government to turn over members of his household to administrative organs for punishment. He was the paterfamilias in the most archaic sense of the word, a replica in miniature of the Tsar.

The political and economic attitudes of Russian peasants had been formed in the first five hundred years of the current millennium, when no government inhibited their movement across the Eurasian plain and land was available in unlimited quantities. The collective memory of this era lay at the root of the peasantry’s primitive anarchism. It also determined the practices of inheritance followed by Russian peasants into modern times. It has been observed that in regions of the world where land is in short supply, landowners, both nobles and peasants, are likely to practice primogeniture, under which the bulk of the property is left to the eldest son. Where it is available in abundance, the tendency is to adopt “partible” inheritance, dividing the land and other belongings equally among the male heirs.* Even after agricultural land had become scarce, Russians continued to adhere to the old practices. Until 1917–18, when inheritance was outlawed, Russian landlords and peasants divided their properties in equal shares among male descendants. So entrenched was the custom that the monarchy’s attempts, launched under Peter I, to have the upper class keep its estates intact by bequeathing them to a single heir proved unenforceable.

The muzhik held most of his land as a communal allotment (nadel) to which he held no title: when the household died out or moved away, it reverted to the commune. But any land held by the peasant in private property outside the commune, as well as all his movable wealth (money, implements, livestock, seed grain, etc.), customary law allowed his heirs to distribute among themselves.

The practice of partible inheritance had profound effects on Russian rural conditions and, indeed, on many other seemingly unrelated aspects of Russian life. For as has been pointed out, the

transmission mortis causa [by reason of death] is not only the means by which the reproduction of the social system is carried out … it is also the way in which interpersonal relationships are structured.⁴

After the passing of its head, the household’s belongings were divided, whereupon the household dissolved and the brothers parted to set up households of their own. As a result, the dvor did not outlast the life span of its head, which made this basic institution of the Russian countryside exceedingly transient. In every generation—that is, three or four times a century—households throughout Russia broke apart and subdivided, much as do amoebas or other rudimentary biological organisms. Russian rural life perpetuated itself by a ceaseless process of fission, which inhibited the development of higher, more complex forms of social and economic organization. One dvor begat other dvory, which, in turn, multiplied in the same manner, like producing like and nothing new and different being given an opportunity to emerge.

The consequences of this custom become apparent when examined in the light of societies where the peasantry practiced indivisibility of property. Primogeniture makes possible a high degree of rural stability and gives the state a firm base of support in rural institutions. A Japanese sociologist thus compares the situation in Chinese and Indian villages, where primogeniture was unknown, with that in his own country, where it was prevalent: