Note 85 — THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE AND SOCIALISM A Letter to J. Michelet

A peasant commune belonging to Prince Kozlovsky bought their freedom. The land was divided amongst the peasants in proportion to the sum contributed by each to the purchase-money. This arrangement was apparently most natural and just. The peasants, however, thought it so inconvenient and inconsistent with their habits that they decided to regard the purchase-money as a debt incurred by the commune and to divide the lands according to their accepted custom. This fact is vouched for by Baron von Haxthausen. The author himself visited the village in question.

In a book recently published in Paris and dedicated to the Emperor Nicholas, the writer says that this system of the division of land seems to him unfavourable to the development of agriculture (as though the object of it were the success of agriculture!); he adds, however: ‘It is difficult to escape these disadvantages, because this system of land division is bound up with the organisation of our communes, which it would be dangerous to touch; it is established on the fundamental idea of the unity of the commune, and the right of every member of it to a share in the communal property in proportion to his strength, and so it supports the communal spirit, that trusty prop of the social order. At the same time it is the best defence against the increase of the proletariat and the diffusion of communistic ideas.’ (We may well believe that for a people in actual fact possessing their property in common, communistic ideas present no danger.) ‘The good sense with which the peasants avoid the inconveniences of their system where such are inevitable is extremely remarkable; so is the ease with which they agree over the compensation for inequalities arising from differences of soil, or the confidence with which every one accepts the decisions of the elders of the commune. It might be expected that the continual re-divisions would give rise to continual disputes, and yet the intervention of the higher authorities is only necessary in the very rarest cases. This fact, very strange in itself, can only be explained through the system, with all its disadvantages, having so grown into the morals and conceptions of the peasants that its drawbacks are accepted without a murmur.’

‘The idea of the commune is,’ says the same author, ‘as natural to the Russian peasant, and as fully embodied in all the aspects of his life, as the corporate municipal spirit that has taken shape in the bourgeoisie of Western Europe is distasteful to his character.’—(Author’s Note.)