Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 257

‘The rural commune presents itself’, according to Aleksandr Herzen,

as a social unit, a moral being: the state has never been able to infringe upon it; the commune is the possessor of a taxable entity and is thus responsible for everyone and for each individually, and for this reason it has autonomy in everything concerning its internal affairs.

This view of the Russian rural commune has proved remarkably durable. Since the mid-nineteenth century the commune has been seen as something impenetrable, mysterious, ‘differently rational’. This peasant institution is thought to have operated according to its own logic, impervious to outside intervention, including attempts by the state in the early twentieth century to undermine the practice of communal land tenure and land repartition (the periodic redistribution of communal arable among member households).

In this important new book, Corinne Gaudin challenges this traditional conception. Her study makes two major contributions to the history of rural Russia in the post-emancipation period. First, it highlights the importance of institutions for our understanding of the way rural communities functioned. Drawing on archival documents for districts in several provinces of European Russia, Gaudin demonstrates that, contrary to Herzen’s assertion, the mir was not an island unto itself; it was part of a larger institutional framework. Members of rural communes used local courts, engaged with local (state) officials, and responded to changes in state policy. Evidence from peasant petitions and communal resolutions indicates that peasant behaviour – from the frequency of land repartitions to changes in household size and structure – was often a response to changes in state policy. Gaudin argues convincingly that resistance to land reform in the early twentieth century was not rooted in defence of communal tradition, but in concerns about the laws governing poor relief and taxation, and the absence of a reliable system of property rights enforcement. The peasants in this study, like those studied by Jane Burbank, did not hesitate to involve courts and local officials in their internal disputes, often employing the official rhetoric of the state in their arguments. Defendants were denounced as miroedy and kulaki in attempts to discredit them with state officials, while plaintiffs, knowing that officials were charged with upholding ‘communal custom’, were quick to argue that custom supported their claims. The picture of the commune painted here is not one of an organic ‘social unit’ or ‘moral being’, speaking with one voice, but rather one of conflicting interests and internal discord. In this way, Gaudin’s study is part of a growing body of revisionist work which emphasizes communal conflict over cohesion.

Second, this study casts much-needed light on the Russian state’s failed attempts at rural reform in the period after 1861. Gaudin persuasively argues that major reforms, such as the Land Captain Statute (1889) and the Stolypin Land Reform (1905–17), failed because they were ill-conceived and poorly implemented, not because the communal culture of the peasantry was impervious to change. Land captains, for instance, were charged with both integrating peasants into the state legal framework and upholding ‘communal custom’. Or, in other words, they were responsible for ‘the practical impossibility of simultaneously promoting and preventing change’ (p.32). This task was made even more impossible by the lack of training for the job; most land captains had little or no knowledge of the local institutions they were sent in to uphold, and they received little guidance from the state.

Land reform in the early twentieth century was carried out in a similarly inconsistent way. The reform project encouraged peasants to privatize their communal allotments without creating the institutions necessary to enforce property rights. It encouraged the abandonment of communal land tenure without changing laws that linked communal tenure to taxation and welfare provision. As a result, many peasants were reluctant to seek title, given the lack of enforcement, and many communes were reluctant to grant it, out of fear they might be left with a larger tax burden or, should those granted title choose to sell their land, a larger landless population to support.

The only thing missing from this path-breaking study is a more comprehensive discussion of the sources. Gaudin’s research is meticulously documented and a detailed bibliography is provided, but given the strikingly revisionist nature of the work, it would have been useful to have a fuller discussion of the sources in the main body of the text. What is the range of information provided in the various reports and court records? What are the advantages of these sources and what are their limitations? How have they been used in the past, if at all? And are the records better for some provinces than others? Such information would be especially valuable to those who might, as Gaudin suggests, pursue a similar line of inquiry in the context of a local study.

But this does not detract from a major achievement. Gaudin convincingly challenges longstanding orthodoxy with an ambitious and exciting new study, which promises to guide research on rural Russia for many years to come.