The elders and officials of the commune had tremendous power. They appor-
tioned obligations and tasks collectively; they assigned and redistributed lands; they
apportioned the tax according to families’ability to pay; they regulated when
collective work would be done (harvest, sowing) and how muchfirewood, timber,
fish, and other resources each family could collect. Communes exerted judicial
authority over all sorts of disputes and problems, sending only the highest of felony
criminals to the state courts. They could and didflog,fine, exile, and punish their
members to keep people in line. They policed moral and sexual behavior. In all this,
factions and petty rivalries could shape elders’decisions.
Steven Hoch presents a picture of Russian commune life that amounted to the
tyranny of male over female and old over young. Men dominated their wives,
daughters, and daughters-in-law; older men kept young men in line, through
discipline within the family or meted out by communal assembly. Household
elders decided when to retire or clung to power in the family and in the village
while their sons waited impatiently. The scourge of recruitment was a constant
threat from the early eighteenth century, and elders could use it to rid the village of
disruptive young men, or for that matter, of their rivals’son. Otherwise, recruit-
ment usually fell on a family that had sons to spare. Such power was extended in a
1760 law that allowed landlords (through the agency of their serf peasant com-
munes), state peasants, and urban communes to send unruly serfs to Siberia or as
recruits as punishment.
In the nineteenth century Russian and European scholars and publicists idealized
the commune as spiritually superior to western individualism and competition (the
Slavophile point of view) or as providing an alternative to capitalism for those
seeking a more equitable modern society (a socialist tack). Certainly the commune
had its positive sides: communities provided social welfare to orphans, widows, and
the disabled; they stepped in when death,fire, or illness decimated a family; they
provided for physical sustenance and social stability in this economy of scarcity
and autocratic control. Communes provided the“face to face”nurture of small
communities.
But sometimes“face to face”communities can be“back to back”: claustro-
phobic and riven by infighting and inequities. Petty rivalries could turn into
power plays by corrupt peasant officials. The constant constraints of a living
situation in which everyone knows everyone else’sbusinesstookitstoll.
A commune’s interest in maintaining tradition and stability impinged on every-
one’s freedom, in moral life and love, in avocations and economic prospects.
Teodor Shanin argued that the risk-averseness of traditional Russian peasant life
led to a culture of leveling, where communal policies consciously prevented any
one household from becoming rich by demanding more of high achievers (office
holding, larger tax and recruitment quotas). The interests of the collective
trumped those of the individual or even the individual family. Such social and
economic patterns are discernible on the broad scale, but one should be chary of
extrapolating them as determinants of Russian peasant psychology; plenty of
Russian peasants had the individuality to strike out on their own, or with families
or whole villages, to change their lives for the better.
Rural Taxpayers 229