ABSTRACT
No institution in rural Russia has attracted so much attention, or been so widely misunderstood, as the village commune. Communes were the basic institutions of local government in Russian villages. Although run mostly by peasant elders, communes worked with the state and seigniorial authorities. They were guided by state decrees and landowners’ instructions, as well as the peasants’ unwritten customary law. Thus, communes linked the peasant households examined in the previous chapter with the ruling and landowning elites discussed in Chapter 3. Communal officials were responsible for a wide range of village affairs, including day-to-day administration, sharing out and collecting the obligations communities owed to their landowners and the state, and distributing the village’ arable land between households. Communes directed the village economy, especially the three-field system of crop rotation. In addition, they made provision for villagers’ welfare, and were responsible for law and order and for resolving disputes between their members.
