The Russian Revolution полностью

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.