An obshchina (, lit. 'commune'; Russian: община, IPA: [ɐpˈɕːinə]) or mir (, lit. 'world'; Russian: мир, IPA: [mʲir]), also officially termed as a rural community (Russian: сельское общество; Ukrainian: сільське товариство) between the 19th and 20th centuries, was a peasant village community (as opposed to an individual farmstead), or a khutor, in Imperial Russia. The term derives from the word obshchiy (Russian: общий, literally "common"). The mir was a community consisting of serfs, later emancipated serfs, state peasants and their descendants, settled as a rule in a single village, although sometimes a village included more than one mir and, conversely, several villages were sometimes combined in a single mir. The title of the land was vested in the mir and not in the individual peasant. Members of the mir had the right to the allotment, on some uniform basis, of a holding that each member cultivated separately. A holding could not be sold or bequeathed without the consent of the mir. As a consequence of its collective tenure, the mir had the power to repartition the land from time to time among its constituent households. The mir dealt primarily with the household and not with the individual. The peasant had a right to a holding but not to a particular holding, and he could not dispose of it freely.
History The concept of Obshchina was an important part in Old Russia and had its roots in Slavic communities. A detailed statistical description of the Russian village commune was provided by Alexander Ivanovich Chuprov. Communal land ownership of the mir predated serfdom, surviving emancipation and the Russian Revolution. Until the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the mir could either contain serfs or free peasants. In the first case, lands reserved for serf use were assigned to the mir for allocation by the proprietor. Even after the 1861 emancipation of the serfs, a peasant in his everyday work normally had little independence from obshchina, governed at the village level (mir) by the full assembly of the community (skhod). Among its duties were control and redistribution of the common land and forest (if such existed), levying recruits for military service and imposing punishments for minor crimes. Obshchina was also held responsible for taxes underpaid by members. This type of shared responsibility was known as krugovaya poruka (mutual responsibility), although the exact meaning of this expression has changed over time and now in Russian it has a negative meaning of mutual cover-up. In 1905, repartitional tenure did not exist in the Baltic provinces, but it was used by a quarter of western and southwestern (i.e. Ukrainian) peasants, two thirds of steppe peasants and 96.9% elsewhere. The institution was undermined by the Stolypin agrarian reforms (1906–1914). The ambitious reforms however failed to make a significant dent in the structure of peasant life in Russia.
Structure
The organization of the peasant mode of production is the primary cause for the type of social structure found in the obshchina. The relationship between the individual peasant, the family and the community leads to a specific social structure categorized by the creation of familial alliances to apportion risks between members of the community. In the obshchina, alliances were formed primarily through marriage and common descent of kin. Usually, the eldest members of the household made up the mir to govern the redistribution of land. The families came together to form a community that depended on making taxes more equitable and the concept of mutual help. Jovan E. Howe writes: "The economic relations so established are essentially distributive: through various categories of exchanges of both products and labor, temporary imbalances such as those occasioned by insufficient labor power of a newly-established family unit or a catastrophic loss, which places one unit at an unfair reproductive disadvantage in relation to its allies, are evened out". In addition, the alliance system had residual communal rights, sharing exchanges during shortages as well as certain distributive exchanges. Furthermore, the structure defined by these alliances and risk-sharing measures were regulated by scheduling and the ritualization of time. Howe writes that "the traditional calendar of the Russian peasants was a guide for day-to-day living. The names attached to calendar dates, the calendrical periods into which they were grouped, the day on the week on which each fell, and the sayings connected with them encoded information about when to undertake tasks, but also about when not to work, when it was necessary to perform symbolic actions, take part in rituals and compulsory celebrations". Peasants (i.e. three-quarters of the population of Russia) formed a class apart, largely excepted from the incidence of the ordinary law and governed in accordance with their local customs. The mir itself, with its customs, is of immemorial antiquity, but it was not until the 1861 emancipation of the serfs that the village community was withdrawn from the patrimonial jurisdiction of the landowning nobility and endowed with self-government. The assembly of the mir consists of all the peasant householders of the village. These elect a Village Elder (starosta) and a collector of taxes who was responsible, at least until the ukaz of October 1906 which abolished communal responsibility for the payment of taxes, for the repartition among individuals of the taxes imposed on the commune. A number of mirs are united into a volost which has an assembly consisting of elected delegates from the mirs. The mir was protected from insolvency by the rule that the families cannot be deprived of their houses or implements necessary for agriculture; nor can the mir be deprived of its land.
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