All these attempts came to naught for a simple reason: there was in Russia no customary law, as there was in general no law for the peasants. Here it must be stated that … every volost’ and volost’ court had its own customary law.… As proprietor of an estate, I had … occasion to establish close contact with the rural population, which turned to me, as a specialist, with requests to resolve all kinds of disputes and misunderstandings in the realm of land ownership and property rights in general. I was commonly appealed to in matters involving divisions of family property. I had in my hands many decisions of volost’ courts, and notwithstanding the habit of making juridical generalizations, I was never able to detect the existence of some kind of general formula which even the given volost’ court would apply to concrete, frequently recurring questions. Everything was based on arbitrariness, and, moreover, not the arbitrariness of the court’s members, consisting of peasants, but that of the volost’ clerk, who awarded verdicts at his whim, even though the members of the court affixed their signatures to it. The people had no faith in the court. The verdict of a volost’ court was invariably seen as the result of pressures from one of the parties or of hospitality in the form of a bottle or two of vodka.… And when the case reached a higher instance, that is, the [volost’] assembly, and subsequently the guberniia office … then the scanty juridical knowledge which the members of the higher instances had at their command was powerless to cope with the arbitrariness, inasmuch as reference to customary law sanctified every lawless act. If this customary law could not be ascertained by specialists with professional training and determined to derive general norms from the practice of customary law—i.e., the decisions of the volost’ courts—then one can imagine what ignorance of laws and obligations prevailed among the population itself in all property matters and all those conflicts which had to and did arise every hour of the day.
Our one hundred million peasants lived, in their everyday life, without law.52
One of the consequences of a poorly developed legal sense was the absence of the concept of human rights. There is no indication that the peasant regarded serfdom, which so appalled intellectuals, as an intolerable injustice: indeed, his often quoted statement to the master—“We are yours but the land is ours”—suggests the opposite. The peasant held “freedom” of no account. Under serfdom, bonded peasants not only did not feel inferior to freemen but identified with and were proud of their masters. The Slavophile Iurii Samarin observed that serfs treated free peasants with contempt as footloose and unprotected creatures. Some of them even viewed the Emancipation as a rejection by their masters.53
Given a weakly developed sense of rights in general, the muzhik had no notion of property rights in the Roman sense of absolute dominion over things. According to one authority, Russian peasants did not even have a word for landed property (zemel’naia sobstvennosf): they only spoke of possession (vladenie), which in their mind was indissolubly bound up with physical labor. Indeed, the muzhik was not even able clearly to distinguish the land to which he held legal title by virtue of purchase from his communal allotment and from the land which he leased, all of which he called “our land”:
The expression “our land” in the mouth of the peasant includes indiscriminately the whole land he occupies for the time being, the land which is his private property …, the land held in common by the village (which is therefore only in temporary possession of each household), and also the land rented by the village from the neighboring landlords.54
