What Was the Russian Peasant Commune?
In the autumn of 1906, the new prime minister Pyotr Stolypin told the Second State Duma that the obshchina — the village commune of the Russian peasant — was “the bulwark and the hotbed of the revolution.” He was proposing, in a sentence, to break up the basic unit of Russian rural life. The commune he was attacking was an institution of enormous antiquity: in 1917 it still held the great majority of the 81 million Great Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian peasants in formal subjection, and it had done so for the previous four centuries (see Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War, 2021).
The structure of the commune
The commune was the village assembly (skhod) of all the adult male household heads, meeting under an elected elder (starosta) and an unpaid desyatitskii and sotskii headman. The skhod allocated the village’s arable land among the households on a periodic basis, often every ten to fifteen years, in proportion to the number of working souls in each household. It collected the state tax and the vykupnye redemption payments after 1861, distributed the conscript quota among the households, policed the village forest and common pasture, organised the construction of roads, ponds, and dykes, and ran a rough system of social welfare for widows, orphans, and the elderly.
The commune was, in addition, a system of mutual liability: the krugovaya poruka of the village was responsible for the tax payments of its members, and the village was the first level of the zemstvo system created in 1864. The commune’s records — the okladnye knigi of tax assessment, the resheniya skhoda of village decisions, the prigovory of peasant courts — form the bulk of what is now preserved in the Russian regional archives.
The commune and serfdom
Under the pre-1861 system of serfdom, the commune had been weaker than it became after the Emancipation of 1861. Catherine the Great and the territorial commissions of the 1760s-1790s reorganised the commune, in her words, “for the better collection of state obligations” — the right to poll-tax and conscript. The commune was, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the principal Russian mechanism for dealing with the introduction of permanent serfdom: the commune of odnodvortsy, the pososhnye liudi, and the state peasants kept their self-government, and the private-serf communes of central Russia ran their own affairs under the landlord’s steward (Baron, Birth of the Russian Peasant Commune, 1987).
The commune was, therefore, a state-creating institution as well as a peasant institution. The commune was the most important Russian mechanism for the collection of the poll tax (introduced in 1724 and abolished only in 1887), the conscription quota, and the maintenance of order in the countryside. The commune was also the principal channel of communication from the imperial state to the rural population.
The commune in the Emancipation
The Emancipation of 1861 preserved and strengthened the commune. The freed serfs were given their household plots in communal tenure, the redemption payments were organised on the basis of the obshchina, and the mir became the official legal subject of the village land. Alexander II’s government and its successors saw the commune as a guarantee of the peasant’s dependence on the state: as long as the commune controlled the land, the peasant would not be able to emigrate, and as long as the peasant was not on the land, the state could not collect the tax or fill the conscript quota. The commune thus served the political interests of the imperial government (Stolypin and the World, 2014).
The debate: Slavophile, Westernizer, and the narodnik
The commune was at the heart of the nineteenth-century debate about Russia’s future. The Slavophiles — Aleksei Khomyakov, the Kireevskys, Konstantin Aksakov — saw the obshchina as a uniquely Russian form of social organisation, both more Christian and more ancient than the European alternatives, and as the foundation of a specifically Russian path of development. The Westernizers — Boris Chicherin, the early Sergei Witte, and the liberal economists — saw the periodic redistribution of land as a disincentive to long-term investment, a brake on productivity, and a barrier to the development of a market economy. The narodniki — Alexander Herzen, Pyotr Lavrov, the early Petr Tkachev — saw the commune as the basis of an alternative to capitalist development, in which the Russian peasant, with his instinct for collective ownership, would leap directly to a socialist order (Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism, 1969).
Stolypin’s assault
Pyotr Stolypin’s agrarian reforms of 1906-1911 were the most direct attack on the commune since the 1860s. Peasants were given the right to leave the commune without the consent of the village assembly, the peredely (periodic redistributions) were ended, and the consolidation of household plots into a single hereditary holding (otryad) was actively encouraged. By 1914 about 2.5 million households had taken their land into hereditary tenure, and a further 1.5 million households had left the commune altogether. The reform, however, was interrupted by Stolypin’s assassination in 1911 and the outbreak of war in 1914, and was effectively reversed by the revolution of 1917. The commune, in the meantime, was the central institution of the Russian village: a body that had outlasted the Tsars, the Provisional Government, and the early Bolsheviks (see Kotsonis, States of Obligation, 2010).