Obshchina

Obshchina (Russian: ; IPA: [pin], literally:

"commune") or Mir (Russian: , literally: society
(one of the meanings)) or Selskoye obshestvo (Russian:
C (Rural community, ocial term
in the 19th and 20th century) were peasant village communities, as opposed to individual farmsteads, or khutors,
in Imperial Russia. The term derives from the word
, obshchiy (common).

western (i.e. Ukrainian) peasants, two thirds of steppe

peasants and 96.9% elsewhere.[1]
The institution was eectively destroyed by the Stolypin
agrarian reforms (19061914), the Russian Revolution
and subsequent collectivization of the USSR.

2 Structure

The vast majority of Russian peasants held their land

in communal ownership within a mir community, which
acted as a village government and a cooperative. Arable Further information: Russian Empire Local elected adland was divided in sections based on soil quality and dis- ministrative bodies
tance from the village. Each household had the right to The organization of the peasant mode of production is
claim one or more strips from each section depending on
the number of adults in the household. The purpose of
this allocation was not so much social (to each according
to his needs) as it was practical (that each person pay his
taxes). Strips were periodically re-allocated on the basis
of a census, to ensure equitable share of the land. This
was enforced by the state, which had an interest in the
ability of households to pay their taxes.

History

A detailed statistical description of the Russian village commune was provided by Alexander Ivanovich
Chuprov. Communal land ownership of the Mir predated
serfdom, surviving emancipation and even the Russian
Revolution (1917). Until the abolition of serfdom in
1861, the mir could either contain serfs or free peasants.
In the rst case lands reserved for serf use were assigned
to the mir for allocation by the proprietor.
Obshchina Gathering, by Sergei Korovin

Even after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, a peasant in his everyday work normally had little independence
from obshchina, governed at the village level (mir) by
the full assembly of the community (skhod). Among
its duties were control and redistribution of the common land and forest (if such existed), levying recruits
for military service, and imposing punishments for minor crimes. Obshchina was also held responsible for taxes
underpaid by members. This type of shared responsibility was known as krugovaya poruka, although the exact
meaning of this expression has changed over time and
now in Russian it has a negative meaning of mutual coverup.

the primary cause for the type of social structure found in

the Obshchina. The relationship between the individual
peasant, the family, and the community leads to a specic social structure categorized by the creation of familial alliances to apportion risks between members of
the community. In the Obshchina alliances were formed
primarily through marriage and common descent of kin.
Usually the eldest members of the household made up
the Mir to govern the redistribution of land. The families came together to form a community that depended
on making taxes more equitable and the concept of mutual help. Jovan E. Howe writes, The economic relations
In 1905, repartitional tenure didn't exist in the Baltic so established are essentially distributive: through variprovinces but was used by a quarter of western and south- ous categories of exchanges of both products and labor,
1

temporary imbalances such as those occasioned by insucient labor power of a newly-established family unit
or a catastrophic loss, which places one unit at an unfair reproductive disadvantage in relation to its allies, are
evened out.[2] In addition the alliance system had residual
communal rights, sharing exchanges during shortages as
well as certain distributive exchanges. Furthermore the
structure dened by these alliances and risk-sharing measures were regulated by scheduling and the ritualization
of time. Howe writes, the traditional calendar of the
Russian peasants was a guide for day-to-day living. The
names attached to calendar dates, the calendrical periods into which they were grouped, the day on the week
on which each fell, and the sayings connected with them
encoded information about when to undertake tasks, but
also about when not to work, when it was necessary to
perform symblic actions, take part in rituals and compulsory celebrations.[3]
Peasants (i.e. three-quarters of the population of Russia)
formed a class apart,[4] largely excepted from the incidence of the ordinary law, and governed in accordance
with their local customs. The mir itself, with its customs, is of immemorial antiquity; it was not, however,
until the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 that the village community was withdrawn from the patrimonial jurisdiction of the landowning nobility and endowed with
self-government. The assembly of the mir consists of
all the peasant householders of the village.[5] These elect
a Village Elder (starosta) and a collector of taxes, who
was responsible, at least until the ukaz of October 1906,
which abolished communal responsibility for the payment
of taxes, for the repartition among individuals of the taxes
imposed on the commune. A number of mirs are united
into a volost, which has an assembly consisting of elected
delegates from the mirs.
The Mir 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.

View on Obshchinas

The Mir or Obshchina became a topic in political philosophy with the publication of August von Haxthausen's
book in 1847. It was in the mid-19th century that
Slavophiles discovered the mir. Romantic nationalists,
the Slavophiles hailed the mir as a purely Russian collective, both ancient and venerable; free from what they
considered the stain of the "bourgeois" mindset found in
western Europe. Not surprisingly, it was but a short step
from this to the mir being used as a basis for Slavophilic
idealist theories [6] concerning communism, communalism, communal lands, history, progress, and the nature of
mankind itself.

VIEW ON OBSHCHINAS

were challenged by the opposing Western faction. Boris

Chicherin, a leading spokesman for the Western school,
argued that the mir was neither ancient nor particular to
Russia. The mir, the Western school argued, had arisen in
the late 17th to early 18th century, and was not based on
some sort of social contract or communal instinct. Rather
it was a monarchical creation, created and enforced for
the purpose of tax collection. Whatever the merits of either case, both schools agreed that the landlord and the
state both played a vital role in the development (if not
the origin of) the mir.
Where (arable) land is scarce, the communal form of tenue tends to prevail, but where
ever it (arable land) is abundant it is replaced
by household or even family tenue.[7]
The nineteenth-century Russian philosophers attached
signal importance to obshchina as a unique feature distinguishing Russia from other countries. Alexander Herzen,
for example, hailed this pre-capitalist institution as a germ
of the future socialist society. His Slavophile opponent
Aleksey Khomyakov regarded obshchina as symbolic of
the spiritual unity and internal co-operation of Russian
society and worked out a sophisticated Philosophy of
Obshchina which he called sobornost.
The European socialist movement looked to this arrangement as evidence that Russian peasants had a history of
socialization of property and lacked bourgeois impulses
toward ownership.
Russia is the sole European country where
the agricultural commune has kept going on
a nationwide scale up to the present day. It is
not the prey of a foreign conqueror, as the East
Indies, and neither does it lead a life cut o
from the modern world. On the one hand, the
common ownership of land allows it to transform individualist farming in parcels directly
and gradually into collective farming, and the
Russian peasants are already practising it in the
undivided grasslands; the physical lie of the
land invites mechanical cultivation on a large
scale; the peasants familiarity with the contract of artel facilitates the transition from parcel labour to cooperative labour; and, nally,
Russian society, which has so long lived at
his expense, owes him the necessary advances
for such a transition. On the other hand, the
contemporaneity of western production, which
dominates the world market, allows Russia to
incorporate in the commune all the positive acquisitions devised by the capitalist system without passing through its Caudine Forks [i.e., undergo humiliation in defeat].

By the second half of the 19th century the Slavophiles Karl Marx, First Draft of Letter To Vera Zasulich (1881)

See also
Commons
Kolkhoz
Repartition (periodic strip redistribution)
Optina

Notes

[1] Geroid Robinson, Rural Russia under the old regime, page
120
[2] Howe, Jovan E. (1991). The Peasant Mode of Production.
University of Tampere. p. 25.
[3] Howe, Jovan E. (1991). The Peasant Mode of Production.
University of Tampere. p. 40.
[4] Until the ukaz of October 18, 1906, the peasant class was
stereotyped under the electoral law. No peasant, however rich, could qualify for a vote in any but the peasants electoral colleges. The ukaz allowed peasants with
the requisite qualications to vote as landowners. At the
same time the Senate interpreted the law so as to exclude
all but heads of families actually engaged in farming from
the vote for the Duma.
[5] None but peasantsnot even the noble-landownerhas
a voice in the assembly of the mir.
[6] Cited in N.L. Brodskii, ed. Rannie Slavianoly (Moscow,
1910) p. LIII
[7] Pipes, Richard, Russia Under the Old Regime p.18
(Charles Scribners Sons, NY 1974)

References
Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime
This article incorporates material from the public domain 1906 Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary.

External links
Mir - infoplease
"Mir". New International Encyclopedia. 1905.

8 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

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8.1

Text

Obshchina Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obshchina?oldid=685312288 Contributors: Edward, Pratyeka, Tobias Conradi, Andrevan, Goethean, Altenmann, Sam Spade, Ramir, Xyzzyva, Mzajac, KNewman, Ghirlandajo, Valip, Brandmeister (old), RussBot, Grafen,
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File:KorovinS_NaMiru.jpg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/KorovinS_NaMiru.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: http://john-petrov.livejournal.com/1360410.htm Original artist: Sergey Korovin
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