mid-sixteenth century. Communalism was not an organic element of the Russian
character, as some have idealistically argued, but a rational response to increasing
demands for production and taxes. In the rural setting, male heads of households
formed a council that ruled the commune. Villagers also met in assemblies to make
decisions unanimously. The council of elders was the organizer of collective
economic work, the expression and guarantor of the community’s moral economy,
the organ of self-discipline and self-policing, the provider of mutual aid, the liaison
with landlords, Church, and state.
Russian communes were patriarchal; male heads of households represented
family units. Peasant households waxed and waned in size as lifespans played out,
but as a rule they were multi-generational: sons brought their wives home to raise
their children until the elder yielded control or died. Then, one son would maintain
the household, others would split off to form their own households, and the cycle
would start again. Russian peasant households through the eighteenth century
practiced what is called the East European marriage pattern, in contrast to the
pattern that emerged around the sixteenth century in some of the economically
advanced western and central European states. In the European marriage pattern,
marriage was delayed to the late twenties while men and women built up nest eggs
to start a household; a good percentage never married at all. Illegitimacy was
common due to late marriage age, and families were nuclear and small because of
later marriage and also the use of contraception. In the East European pattern, on
the other hand, marriage was universal and early (for women between 16 and 18,
men 18–20). Illegitimacy was relatively rare since women married young; fertility
was high. Peasant women could in principle have been constantly pregnant
throughout more than twenty years of fertility, but the general contraceptive effect
of breast-feeding kept the average of peasant women’s pregnancies to seven to nine,
if they survived all those childbirths. Nuclear families were not necessarily large,
because infant and child mortality was high, but households could be large at the
point in the life cycle when several sons and their wives and children remained
under the patriarch’s roof.
In the Russian peasant village, a married couple was considered a work unit, and
a household was not viable without a strong adult couple, and preferably several.
When a woman was widowed, the community quickly arranged her remarriage to
prevent her from slipping into poverty and becoming a public burden. Everyone,
including children, worked, in tasks determined by age and gender. Men plowed,
harrowed, and sowed thefields, women tended gardens and domestic livestock.
Women did the cooking and preserved food; they made clothing and oversaw the
domestic economy. Everyone harvested in the intense months from late June
through at least August, men reaping and women threshing. Within the family
the male elder had absolute authority, including corporal punishment, over the
younger men and all the women. Women were particularly vulnerable to the
vagaries of fate—the loss of a male head of household or absence of sons or children
at all could impoverish a female. Peasant women had some property rights over
dowry property and were eligible for widow’s support, often from land in equiva-
lent of the dowry gift. In a stable family, women could achieve a certain status. The
Rural Taxpayers 227