The death and revival of the Russian commune 1850 – 1920

The Obshchina, village commune, or Mir, has historical origins which are not known but date back to even before the medieval period in early antiquity. The village commune was an association of peasants holding communal land allotments. This land, divided into strips, was redistributed every ten to fifteen years to allow for changes in the size of household due to deaths, births, and departures. Land was divided into strips depending on quality and distance from the village.

Through the village assembly, the commune resolved work allocation, the distribution of taxes, recruits for the military, and disputes. It could exile members to Siberia; it authorized passports, needed to leave the village; and could even compel an entire community to change its religious allegiance. The assembly reached its decisions by the acclamation of the majority.

With the Russian climate so harsh, it wasn’t uncommon for peasants to lose all of their crops or livestock. The villagers set up a system in which they would support one another in difficult times. Members of the commune who were prospering would usually be the ones looked upon to help others in their times of need, preventing any one family from falling under in the community. The Mir or commune was protected from insolvency by the rule that the families cannot be deprived of their houses or implements necessary for agriculture; nor can the Mir be deprived of its land. The commune represents the fundamental philosophy and origin of the name communism. It is therefore safe to say that Communism, at the local level, was present in most of Greater Russia in the East before the rise of serfdom in the 16^th century, which peaked at 80% of the population in the 17^th century, and its replacement, peasant debt and industrialization, in the 19^th century.

By the 19^th century 75% of Russians belonged to the peasantry, and serfs made up nearly half of the peasantry. Serfdom and gentry were heavily concentrated in the central and western provinces of Russia, at over 55% of the population. In Greater Russia, or the East, the Obshchina or Commune of peasants was almost universal with serfs representing about 20% of the population. Serfs were also part of the commune with lands reserved for serf use assigned by the landlord to the commune for allocation.

Less talked about, is the right of merchants in cities to own serfs. As Peter the Great saught to raise taxes and military industrial development, factory owners rights to own serfs were reinforced by legislation between 1721 and 1816. Half of all Russian factory workers were still serfs in the first half of the 19^th century. They received no land in the Emancipation Act of 1861. Landlords deliberately increased the number of domestic serfs when they anticipated serfdom’s demise.

It became convenient to use rural serfdom rather than the oppressive and bureaucratic regime of Nicholas I to explain all Russia’s weaknesses in the mid 19^th century. Two parties for reform took shape, on the one side the Slavophiles backing the communes and wishing to strip back centralized bureaucracy , and on the other western ‘liberals’ and industrialists bringing fashionable ideas of privatization and free markets. Serfdom was supposedly responsible for the country’s military incompetence, food shortages, civil disorder, and industrial backwardness, and was a good way to divert attention from the real issues. As often happens in history, war is cited as forcing through change. Defeat in the Crimean War in 1856 was the excuse, although in reality there had been 712 peasant uprisings in Russia between 1826 and 1854. By 1859, one-third of the estates and two-thirds of the serfs owned by the nobles had been mortgaged to the state and banks. Many of the smaller landowners could barely afford to feed their serfs and were shifting by necessity to the free labour system, by contracting other people’s serfs.

From 1861 serf emancipation went into law, after five years of drafting by committees answerable to the landlords. The compensation that the landowners received was far in advance of the market value of their property. They were also entitled to decide which part of their holdings they would give up. Unsurprisingly, they kept the best land for themselves. The data shows that the landlords retained two-thirds of the land while the peasants received one-third. So limited was the supply of affordable quality land to the peasants that they’re narrow strips proved difficult to maintain and yield sufficient food or profit to pay back their loans. While the landowners were granted financial compensation for what they gave up, the peasants had to pay for their new property. Since they had no savings, they were advanced 100 per cent mortgages, 20% of which would be paid by the peasants directly to the landowners. With the other 80%, the gentrys’ debts were effectively converted to the peasantry’s redemption payments. The peasants would be given a 49-year period within which to pay for the land at a cheap rate of interest. Landlords were also compensated by additional generous loans from the government.

Serfs now were liable for taxes. Freeing serfs from the land, once redemption payments were complete or where the land had been repossessed by the banks, drove many to the new factories in the cities.  This was particularly the case for the younger generation who, since the Emancipation Act, no longer needed permissions to marry, had greater freedom of movement, and could keep their salaries rather than passing them to the patriarch. The young flocked to the cities. Russia’s coal, iron, steel, and oil production tripled between 1890 and 1900. Her GNP grew more quickly than any other major European power. Railroad mileage almost doubled, giving Russia the most track of any nation other than the United States. The construction of the Trans Siberian Railway linking Moscow and Vladivostok was started in 1891 and completed in 1905 and ran for 5,785 miles. The urban labour force grew rapidly. For example the population of St Petersburg and Moscow doubled in the decade. Most workers were employed in huge factories where wages, hours of work, and housing conditions were usually very poor. Government attempts to improve conditions were resisted bitterly by employers there.

The working hour disputes which escalated between 1895 and 1905, culminating in Bloody Sunday, were the catalyst for the strengthening of the Slavophiles case, now known in their urban form as Communists, with the Slavophiles ideals updated and made relevant to the industrial power struggle by Marx and Bakunin. Alexander III’s effective abolition of representation of the poor in parliament with the 2^nd to 4^th Dumas, and Russification policies in Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and other periphery states further stoked the fires.

By 1900, approximately one-third of communes, mostly in the western and southern borderlands, had ceased the practice of repartitioning. Stolypin, appointed by the Tsar after the dissolution of parliament, imposed agrarian or freemarket reforms from 1906 to 1914, removing the rights of the commune to repartition land thus finally enforcing private ownership of land. The laws also past the tax burden directly from the state to the individual, removing the commune’s tax collecting obligations and with it their ability to allocate the tax within the community.

These changes were repealed in the communist agrarian reforms of the 1920s which reinstated the powers and rolls of the communes. But it is interesting that the communist agenda was seen and reported as radical and new by western historians rather than a return to systems of government that had existed for millennia.