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However, in their glorification
of the commune Herzen and his followers often lost sight of the
reality which was somewhat less exciting. As later studies of
the commune were to show, its origins did not go back into the
hoary mists of antiquity but dated back to approximately the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the obshchina
began to evolve as an institution that formed part and parcel of
the Russian service state. Far from being an example of
spontaneous socialism of the Russian peasants, its was created
with the active encouragement of the state, if not on its direct
initiative. The state charged the commune with the collective
responsibility for the orderly payment of taxes by peasants. To
cope with this task, the commune gradually gained wide-ranging
powers: it distributed the tax obligation among its members,
enforced payment, administered punishments to recalcitrant
peasants, prevented members from escaping. Most important, it
provided the means to pay tax by assigning each male member a
plot of land roughly commensurate with the size of his family.
As the size of peasant households, constituting the commune,
changed with time, the land was periodically re-apportioned
among its members in order to spread the tax burden fairly. |
The
state-sponsored nature of the village community has been best
summed up by Tibor Szamuely who points out that in reality the
obshchina ‘represented the basic administrative unit of the
country, the vital cog on which, in the final analysis, the Russian
economic and financial system turned. The village community could
lead an existence and play a part independent of the landowner, even
though it was composed entirely of his bond slaves, because its
principal function was service to the State, the common master of
lord and serf alike...The obshchina was the agency through
which the State could mobilize the energies and resources of the
peasant serfs towards the solution of its tasks’. The commune thus
existed with the full blessing of the state and acted as a
collective guarantor for the payment of taxes.
The communal
ownership of the land and the repartitioning of the land among
members of the community - the features which particularly fired the
imagination of Russian peasant socialists - were the properties of
the obshchina that stood in the way of agricultural progress
and perpetuated poverty of its members. One of the leading Russian
historians of the twentieth century V. Diakin explains why:
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... it was the commune, and not the individual peasant or
peasant family, that had control of the arable lands. The
lands under the plough were divided up periodically according to
the number of “souls”, working males. The striving
after a just distribution degenerated into petty leveling. A
peasant household would be given a whole number of strips in
different places, low-lying and on the hill, on sandy soil and
on clay, close to the village and further away. This number
sometimes amounted to dozens, while the widths of the strips was
measured with a yardstick or even the traditional peasant’s bast
shoe. On such strips only a common rotation of crops was possible:
sow the same as everyone else, and at the same time as everyone
else. Otherwise the animals let onto the field will trample your
strip. It makes no sense to fertilize or improve the soil - at
redistribution somebody else might be given it. The commune stands
in the way of agricultural progress. It prevents people dying from
hunger, but it leaves no room for the more enterprising and
resourceful to get ahead.
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The equality
of members of the commune was the equality in poverty. The primitive
egalitarianism of the obshchina cultivated the type of
collectivism that suppressed the individual, fostered a formal
equality that enforced equal misery and slavery of its members. This
aspect of the commune was not lost on Nicholas Ogarev, Herzen’s
closest friend and lifelong ideological companion. He had spent
several years on his estate and had acquired a genuine love and
compassion for his peasants whose life he could observe on a daily
basis. He, however, did not idealize their way of life:
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Our obshchina
represents the equality of servitude... the commune is an
expression of the envy of all against one, of the community against
the individual. In the West the idea of equality presumes the
equal well-being of all, but the equality of the commune
requires that all be equally miserable. As a result...the peasant
(or rather, the Russian in general), is unable to comprehend the
possibility of a man not belonging to something, of a man simply
existing by himself.
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Thus the
actual workings of the communal system bore little resemblance to
the idyllic image of harmonious co-operation and dignified
egalitarianism conjured up by Herzen and his followers. The commune
perpetuated equality in poverty, deprived the peasants of incentives
to improve their farming methods, hindered technical progress. The
great distance between the ideals of the Narodniks and the reality
would have dramatic and even tragic consequences for the nineteenth
century revolutionary movement.
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