Obshchina
[1] 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.Even after the 1861 emancipation of the serfs, 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.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 symbolic actions, take part in rituals and compulsory celebrations".[5] Peasants (i.e. three-quarters of the population of Russia) formed a class apart,[6] 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is of immemorial antiquity, but it was not until the 1861 emancipation of the serfs that the village community was withdrawn from the patrimonial jurisdiction of the landowning nobility and endowed with self-government.Romantic nationalists and the Slavophiles hailed the mir as a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.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 peasant’s familiarity with the contract of artel facilitates the transition from parcel labour to cooperative labour; and, finally, 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].
Chechen mafiacommunerural communityRussianUkrainiankhutorImperial Russiastate peasantscommunal ownershipsoil qualityAlexander Ivanovich ChuprovserfdomRussian Revolutionabolition of serfdom in 18611861 emancipation of the serfsStolypin agrarian reformsSergei Korovinmode of productionPeasantsstarostavolostAugust von HaxthausenSlavophilesRomantic nationalistsbourgeoisBoris ChicherinRussian philosophersAlexander HerzencapitalistsocialistAleksey KhomyakovsobornostEast Indiescollective farmingCaudine ForksCommonsHromadaKolkhozOpštinaRepartitionHarvard University Presselectoral lawelectoral collegeslandownersSenatePipes, RichardCharles Scribner's SonsMarx, KarlVera ZasulichUniversity of TampereCharles Scribner: New Yorkpublic domainBrockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic DictionaryWayback MachineNew International EncyclopediaSlavic-languageadministrative divisionsdzielnicakrajina / pokrajinaměstysmjesna zajednicaoblast / oblast' / oblasti / oblys / obwód / voblasts'okręgokruhaopština / općina / občina / obshtinaosiedlepowiatselsoviet / silradasołectwostarosta okruhvoivodeship / vojvodinažupanijadarughagromadaguberniya / guberniajurydykaokoliapogostprowincjastarostwo / starostvaziemiazemljauchastok