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.*
