Note 7 — Chapter I · GENERAL SKETCH OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANDHOLDING IN RUSSIA.

Prof. W. J. Ashley, in the introductory chapter of his translation of The Origin of Property in Land by Fustel de Coulanges, represents the Russian village community as “only a joint cultivation and not a joint ownership.” The Russian mir, he thinks, has always in historical times been a “village group in serfdom under a lord” (p. xx.). This opinion stands in direct contradiction to the results of Russian historical investigation, which are here presented in a condensed summary. The development of landlord property in Russia, on the contrary, is but a fact of modern centuries; there are vast provinces in Russia where there never was anything like a nobility and landlord property (e. g., the gubernias of Olonetz, Vyatka, Vologda, Archangelsk), save in a few exceptional cases. Serfdom was altogether unknown in these districts, and in all the rest of Russia a considerable part of the peasantry, though dependent upon the State, knew no landlord above them. Toward 1861 the total number of State peasants amounted to 29⅓ millions, while the former serfs numbered 22⅔ millions. (Prof. Janson, Essay of a Statistical Investigation on the Peasants’ Landed Property and Taxation, 2d ed., p. 1.) Thus, in so far at least as one-half of the Russian peasantry is concerned, the village community must be construed, in direct opposition to Prof. Ashley, as “joint ownership and not joint cultivation.”