The Russian Peasant Commune After the Reforms of the 1860s

Abstract

In the 1860s the Russian government carried out a series of major reforms that had important consequences for key dimensions of Russian society—its economy, judiciary, local administration, army, censorship, and education. Historians have generally agreed that these reforms exerted a profound influence upon Russian historical development, but they have not arrived at an analogous consensus on how the reforms of the 1860s affected the general development of the country as a whole or the peasantry in particular. In this article I seek to analyze the immediate effect of the reforms of the 1860s on the fundamental institution of the peasantry—the commune. I shall employ a sociological approach, a mode of analysis for which the specialized literature is both rich and diverse, in an attempt to determine the underlying structural principles of the commune and to construct an analytical model for the functions and the development of the repartitional land commune.