New peasant bodies were created to manage the peasants. public administration, which, however, retained a number of features of the feudal serfdom. All householders of a rural society, which usually consisted of peasants belonging to one landowner, constituted a village assembly, which elected a village headman, a tax collector and other officials. In the volost, which included a number of adjacent rural communities, a volost assembly was assembled, consisting of representatives of rural communities and electing a volost government with a volost foreman at the head, and a volost court, which had jurisdiction over minor civil and criminal cases of the peasants of a given volost (persons of other estates were tried by the volost court only if they agreed to do so).
The peasant administration was extremely limited in its competence: the issues to be handled by the gatherings concerned mainly the distribution and collection of taxes and the procedure for serving all kinds of duties; in those societies where communal land ownership existed, this was supplemented by issues related to land regulations.
Officials of the village and volost administration carried out a number of police duties: the village headman had to monitor the proper execution of taxes and duties by the peasants - state, zemstvo, lay and landowners, and had to oversee the compilation of “revision tales”, i.e., the presentation of information to determine taxes, he had to monitor the serviceability of roads and bridges, manage the supply of assistance in emergency cases, for example, in case of fires, floods, etc.; The volost foreman had to announce laws and orders of various authorities, protect “decency” in public places and the safety of persons and property, prevent and suppress crimes, detain vagrants, fugitives, deserters and criminals, prevent the spread of “harmful rumors” among peasants, etc.
The peasant administration was made directly dependent on the administration. All officials of rural and volost administration had to unquestioningly carry out the orders and demands of judicial investigators, zemstvo police and all generally established authorities. In addition, a special official was placed over the peasant administration - a peace intermediary, all of whose orders had to be unquestioningly carried out by officials of the peasant administration.
The main function of the peace intermediaries was to facilitate agreement between peasants and landowners and draw up so-called “statutory charters”, which precisely determined the size of the allotment received by the peasants, its location and peasant duties. The statutory charters were required to be put into effect no later than two years after the publication of the “Regulations”; Before this, peasants had to fulfill duties at the same rate, with the exception of small fees. In addition, the functions of the conciliators included the approval of elected officials of the peasant government; they could cancel decisions of peasant assemblies, consider complaints against peasant government bodies, and could impose penalties on peasant elected officials: subject them to arrest or fine.
Peace mediators were appointed by the governor on the recommendation of the leaders of the nobility from local nobles who had a certain land qualification, and were approved by the Minister of Internal Affairs. Thus, the world mediator, on the one hand, was an organ of the central government, and on the other, was closely connected with the local nobility. Above the peace mediator stood the district congress of peace mediators, chaired by the district leader of the nobility, and above the congress was the provincial presence for peasant affairs, chaired by the governor, consisting partly of officials, partly of local noble landowners.
Thus, the power of the individual noble landowner over the peasants was largely replaced by the power of representatives of the local noble society.
Rural society was bound by mutual responsibility; the entire society was responsible for the proper performance of government, zemstvo and worldly duties by each of its members, regardless of whether the society had communal or household land use. In those areas where there was communal use of land, mutual responsibility extended to duties in favor of the landowner. The community was of a compulsory nature, that is, the peasants did not have the right to leave it until they had finally bought out their allotment. Communal use of land was combined with periodic land redistributions.
Subordinate to the government authorities, the peasant administration was part of the system of the government apparatus, being its lowest cell, completely dependent on its higher levels. And the government itself viewed peasant “self-government” not as a right, but as a duty of the peasants; for example, peasants elected to any position did not have the right to refuse it without valid reasons, precisely specified in “ General situation February 19."
The history of the rural community as a class institution that guided the entire life of the village - economic, social, family and everyday life - can be traced through historical sources since the time of Russian Pravda, the original first written state code of the 12th century.
The territorial (neighborhood) community was a universal form of social and economic existence of the Russian peasantry; the ubiquity of its distribution only testified to its necessity and, as it were, “self-emergence” on the new lands newly populated by Russian peasants. Tracing the stages of the history of this most important institution, one should first of all keep in mind that over the centuries its functions have not remained unchanged. The fact is that with the strengthening of the state apparatus and the development of feudal land ownership, the functions of the rural community slowly but steadily narrowed. If, according to the Russian Truth, the community was involved in the judicial investigative process, and its representatives - in the princely court, and until the 15th century. She played a significant role in local government (allocation and collection of taxes, legal proceedings), but with the expansion of feudal land ownership, her role in local government became more and more diminished. Therefore, the history of the rural community should be considered from two perspectives - the state government itself and intra-village management.
The rural community has always remained the basis for the organization of agricultural production, and, naturally, land use and land ownership were the primary task for the communities; therefore, solving these problems played a very important role significant role in the life of communities, especially when it came to state judicial proceedings in the event of disputes and litigation. The consolidation and development of the system of feudalism in Rus' was characterized by the legal originality of different social views on land ownership. State power in the person of the Grand Dukes of Moscow unswervingly adhered to the conviction that all land was its property and only it had the right to unconditional land disposal. The manorial system was based on this legal principle, when a serving man received an estate on the basis of conditional ownership, as long as he (or his descendants) carried out his military obligations. Feudal estates - estates, with all the unconditionality of the right of inheritance along kinship lines, were nevertheless under the control of the princely (later - royal) authority, which could confiscate them, limit the rights of disposal, etc. Only in the 18th century. the ruling class - the nobility - obtained from the supreme power the right of ownership of their land holdings with unconditional disposal of them.
The communal peasantry, which considered its possessions as belonging to the entire community, developed its own rights on the basis of custom, which was based on the principle of hereditary ownership of the peasant household and part of the communal lands developed by it.
Preserved official material from the XFV-XV centuries. contains an interesting formula that seems to combine two principles - state and customary law. In various documents issued from the peasantry in connection with various land disputes, this formula sounded like this - the land of the Grand Duke, and our (peasant) possession. Communities, often representing entire volosts, fought fiercely for their possessions, and they often turned to the grand ducal court.
Turning to these documents of the 14th-15th centuries, one can see some features of the peasant worldview: the black-growing peasantry of that time recognized the ownership of the land by the grand ducal power and at the same time considered the land as their own, volost, which was in its collective possession with the right of disposal; it also believed that the grand ducal government was obliged to protect peasant communal black-plow land ownership, and thereby the community itself (Cherepnin, 1960, pp. 264, 266, 268, 274, 275). At least since the end of the 15th century. written state law took into account the norms that determined the position of secular communities and regulated, to one degree or another, their relations with the supreme power and its local representatives. Charters of the Grand Dukes and codes of law of 1497 and 1550. legislatively strengthened the position of secular peasant representatives in the system of local government. Peasant ownership of land within the boundaries of the community-volost was equally traceable everywhere, regardless of whether they were black-plowed lands, palace lands, or part of feudal estates. The community-volost had considerable rights, which largely stemmed from the structure of its existence. The community-volost was headed by a volost assembly, which elected officials of the volost (elders, centurions, or sotskys), laid out and approved the duties assigned to the volost. This democratically elected organization had considerable and versatile power; it retained the forensic investigative functions that had been preserved since the times of Russian Pravda, the organization of the fulfillment of state duties, the disposal of escheated and free land and the reception of new settlers, supervision of the condition of communal lands and their protection from external attacks. All these economic, administrative, fiscal and police functions of the volost community, by force of circumstances, forced both the central palace departments and the local feudal neighbors to take it into account. Through its elected representatives, the community-volost presented its complaints directly to the supreme authority. She also protected the established custom of celebrating temple holidays with their “feasts” and “fraternities”, at which local affairs could be discussed and decided (Pokrovsky N.N., 1973. Chapter 2). At the same time, the historical sources of the XTV-XV centuries. allow us to judge a certain stage in the history of the class peasant organization in the system of the feudal state, in which it was communal land use, paradoxically, that made it easier for the supreme authorities, who did not encounter resistance from private landowners, to declare themselves the supreme owner of the land, preserving the functions of local self-government and thereby incorporating them into the public administration system. It should be borne in mind that this stage laid a deep mark on peasant self-awareness - the dual basis of land law forever remained in the minds of communal peasants, and communal organization remained the basis of rural existence and management, despite the most serious changes in the future of peasant life.
The 16th century marked the beginning of the transformation of communal organization. It was from this time that the mass theft of volost lands began by more and more multiplying landowners. The creation of the local system led to the death of the community-volost in the central districts of Russia. The community from a volost organization actually turned into a rural one and was confined in its activities to the boundaries of private feudal estates, and the life of communal peasants was regulated by the “codes” of landowners and patrimonial owners, as can be judged from the surviving materials of a later time (XVII-XVIII centuries).
In areas where local landownership did not develop, the community-volost continued to exist, in some places until the second half of the 19th century c., in its history the main motive is the fight against the ever-increasing bureaucratization of local government. Communities-volosts have survived primarily in the northern, Trans-Volga part of Russia, in Pomerania - from Karelia to the Urals. Until the middle of the 16th century. Local government in this region was headed by feeders sent from Moscow, with whom the volost communities, defending their prerogatives, came into sharp conflict. IN mid-16th century V. The government of Ivan IV extended the zemstvo reform to the northern region, according to which all local government was transferred to the elected bodies of volost communities (assemblies of various ranks and officials elected to them) (Nosov; Kopanev, 1978). This system managed to survive the terror of the oprichnina and existed until the end of the 16th century, until the introduction of voivodeship administration began in Russia, with which the volost communities actually shared power. In the 17th century Zemstvo administration reached its peak, as evidenced by the classic study of M.M. Bogoslovsky, in which the author studied in detail land relations in the North, the structure of zemstvo worlds with their numerous functions as “an economic union, a church community and a legal entity.”
The norm of the Council Code of 1649, which attached peasants to the land, was actually not in effect in the North; with household-hereditary ownership of allotments and the right to use communal lands preserved by the right of custom, the Northern Russian peasant enjoyed freedom in economic activity. The government unsuccessfully sought to prevent the resettlement of black-growing peasants (especially in Siberia), but did not proceed from the norms of the Code, but from the fiscal interests of the treasury; in the end, it made no difference to him where the black-growing peasant paid state taxes. The volost communities themselves were not at all supporters of banning the movement of their members (Kopanev, 1984, pp. 56-66).
In the XVIII-XIX centuries. the northern Russian community retained its internal essence, although it was subjected to continuous pressure from the system of centralized government; The “trusteeship” of the provincial authorities led to their invasion into the internal life of the community, which turned into the lowest level of administrative and fiscal management.
The zemstvo worlds of the North played a huge role in preserving civic consciousness among the northern peasantry and townspeople, which manifested itself during the years of the Polish intervention at the beginning of the 17th century, in its active role in the work of zemstvo councils, during the years of the Legislative Commission of the 1760s and in everyday assertion of one's rights. Moreover, it was the Northern Russian peasantry, which played a primary role in the economic development of Siberia, that brought zemstvo traditions there.
The emergence of a rural community in the very first decades of the development of Siberia by the Northern Russian peasantry testified to its necessity for resettlement and thereby the naturalness of its regeneration in newly populated areas. Typologically, the Siberian community was close to the Northern Russian one, since it grew on the basis of the social ideas of the first settlers. In fact, it followed the same path of development as in the North, with the only difference being that Russian reality in the 17th-18th centuries. significantly accelerated the movement of this social organization on its path to the lower administrative authority. Already the first generations of Russian settlers proved to local and central authorities the futility of attempts to deprive them of the right to travel. It was quite obvious that the agricultural development of Siberian lands could only rely on the economic experience brought by the settlers. Documents of the 17th century indisputably indicate the use of this experience not only from a purely economic point of view, but also from a social one.
The emerging Siberian peasantry, in their appeals (petitions) to the authorities, often acted on behalf of not one village, but several, which allows us to think about the formation of volost communities. In the process of agricultural development of lands and the creation of arable land, “indiscriminate” associations were formed, clearly of communal origin. These associations, jointly carrying out the development of land, created the basis of customary legal family-inherited ownership of land. The role of the community in the social life of the Siberian peasantry is clearly evidenced by documents addressed to local and central authorities (Alexandrov V.A., Pokrovsky N.I. Chapter 1). In fact, these appeals concerned very different circumstances of local life - taxation and duties, land use procedures, police and administrative supervision, personal obligations of community members, abuses and abuses of power by clerks appointed by governors, elections by communities of elders and the issuance of secular “choices” to them, etc. .p. The diversity of all these everyday circumstances, not to mention the direct clashes between communities and the local administration, testified to the breadth of worldly thinking, which clearly reflected not only class interests, but also the peasants’ ideas about the significance and capabilities of their class body.
Officially, territorial communities-volosts were recognized by the provisions of 1797, according to which the population size was established in them, but in fact they were formed much earlier, and their elected bodies were approved by the district or factory administration until the 1780s.
In the process of bureaucratization of local government, according to the decree of 1805, on a national scale, only household owners were ordered to gather at volost gatherings; in 1822, the number of rural attorneys was determined who could represent their villages at volost gatherings. Nevertheless, the gatherings continued to express primarily the interests of the worlds. Very significant in this regard is the existence of elected lay attorneys, who were entrusted with the resolution of all rural matters with the local administration and who, according to the peasant conviction, had personal immunity. And in the 18th and 19th centuries. The volost community was not only involved in the distribution of taxes and duties, but also actively fought for the possibility of fulfilling them, based on its labor and material resources. Communities, regulating rural life, in Siberia even took on the functions of the Synod and themselves made decisions on the divorce of husbands and wives. Thus, the volost and the rural communities that comprised it, with all the administrative and managerial functions assigned to them, retained their authority as a social organization of Siberian peasants.
The rural community, which found itself in the central regions of the European part of the country in conditions of serfdom, personal dependence on feudal landowners, went its own way, and its social role acquired specific features that reflected the social inferiority of the local peasantry in comparison with the Northern Russian and Siberian ones. The death of black-mown communities-volosts in the center of the country became especially obvious in the second half of the 16th century. with the development of the local system. Villages were confined within rural communities; however, despite the fact that administrative, economic, fiscal, and police functions for managing estates and estates of palace and monastery estates were in the hands of their owners, the implementation of these functions could not be done without the participation of representatives of rural communities. Headmen and kissers, as elected representatives of the worlds, are constantly mentioned in a wide variety of documents of the 15th-16th centuries; it is to them that palace letters, replies from landowners and patrimonial owners are addressed.
One way or another, regulation in the performance of tax duties of peasants occurred through the interaction of the owner's management apparatus and community representatives. Of course, the degree of subordination of the communal administrative apparatus to the patrimonial apparatus depended on the general process of “development” of the community by the feudal lords, in which, under all circumstances, it found itself in an absolutely losing situation. Initially, even in the XV-XVI centuries. communal management invaded mainly the sphere of tax fulfillment, which one way or another entailed changes in the system of communal land use, when the feudal lord started his own arable farm. At the same time, the distribution of tax obligations between individual householders gave rise to the need for their corresponding equalization in land provision, and since, due to the natural demographic variability of the state of the working capabilities of each household, there was a need to constantly review the level of this land provision (all the more narrowed due to the development of the lord’s own arable land), the consequence All this was the replacement of the hereditary-household principle of village land ownership with the ultimate egalitarian principle. This change occurred spontaneously and was the result of community initiative.
At the same time, there was a strengthening of private-feudal supervision over public and family life villages. The feudal regulation of the local village was reflected in the surviving private ownership “codes”, in which the owners differently defined the role of the rural community and its functions. Basically, these “codes” were compiled during the 18th century, i.e. at the final stage of the “development” of the village by the feudal lords. These unique documents revealed a very different approach of private feudal legal thought to determining the functions of the rural community (Alexandrov V.A., 1976. Chapter 2). Only a minority of Russian landowners sought to regulate as much as possible all the circumstances of village life and place communities under conditions of purely police petty supervision. Such cases were observed only in corvee farms, where every step of the peasant fell under some paragraph of the lord's instructions. In such estates, the role of community representatives was relegated to the level of overseers and informers, and occasionally even the abolition of the community occurred. Prominent political figures of the first century leaned towards such a system. half of the XVIII V. - A.P. Volynsky, V.I. Tatishchev, a little later - Samarins, Shepelevs and others.
On quitrent estates, on the contrary, landowners either did not interfere at all in the internal life of the village and were only interested in fiscal revenues, or formally delegated all management functions under their general control to elected community representatives (burgomasters and elders). Such management has been known since the 18th century. in the estates of the prince. G.V. Gruzinsky, I.I. Shuvalov, book. S.G. Kurakina, V.G. Orlov and many others. Of course, in these cases, the rural community fully retained its functions of managing the village, and there was even a peculiar mutual influence of the functions of communal and patrimonial administrative “managers.” Thus, for the Orlovs, all the threads of managing their vast estates were concentrated in the main office, to which general supervision and decisions on controversial issues were left. Meanwhile, the mayors who ruled individual estates and other “ranks” were elected by the world; they also carried out all administrative and judicial functions within the estate.
Every year the world elected a commission of accountants to check worldly expenses, a commission to determine the quitrent obligations of each household, and hence its land provision. If necessary, decide on other most important issues Lay commissions were occasionally created, the decisions of which were approved by the assembly (recruitment sets, controversial family relationships, etc.). The Orlovs built their management of the estates primarily taking into account worldly traditions and peasant mutual assistance. There is evidence that this is why the "code". V.G. Orlova was popular among Russian landowners of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Finally, there was a third version of the relationship between landowners and serfs, when rural administration was based on a mixed patrimonial-communal principle, in which the community retained significant rights to control the patrimonial administration. According to the surviving systematic data on the activities of lay gatherings in the village. Pistsovo Ne-Rekhtsky district (for 1730-1790), which belonged to Prince. Dolgoruky, in the village. Nikolsky Rybinsk district (for 1770-1812), which belonged to the Orlovs, and in the village. Aksenovo Chukhloma district (for 1809-1820), which belonged to the Dmitriev-Mamonovs, their competence is clearly visible in those cases when community initiative was not suppressed by patrimonial stewards (Alexandrov V.A., 1976. P. 139). As a rule, primary attention at the meetings was paid to taxation, land and financial issues; Elections of community administration and lay commissions were systematically carried out at gatherings, as well as private complaints, lawsuits, requests for property, family and other matters were examined, decisions were made on minor court cases and secular assistance; From time to time, gatherings discussed the procedure for fulfilling conscription duties and other in-kind government duties (road, pavement, etc.), providing for the parish church and the local clergy.
After fierce controversy before the reform of 1861, dedicated to the fate of the rural community, it was preserved. The communal structure and its relationship with general public administration were legally stipulated. In general, the community remained a social organization of the peasantry. Moreover, the state government, when carrying out the judicial reform of the 1860s, aimed at creating a general inter-estate system of legal proceedings, was forced to establish special volost courts to resolve civil cases between peasants, where record keeping was carried out to a greater extent on the basis of customary, but not state law.
The establishment of volost courts was explained by the fact that the norms of village community life and family life, strictly observed among the peasantry, often contradicted state civil law. The communal peasant worldview, which persisted in the era of developing agrarian capitalism, complicated the position of the community as a social organization of small producers, where traditional secular management, land use and everyday life were preserved. The land redistribution community, liberated from the landowners' power, legally received the right of collective ownership of land and disposed of it at its traditional discretion. However, the administrative supervision of local authorities and the institution of land chiefs, established in the 1880s, narrowed the democracy of community gatherings; redistribution and exit from the community became more difficult. In regions with hereditary household communal land use, depending on local circumstances, old land use rules were preserved and new land use rules emerged. Thus, in Siberia, the general features of land use remained occupational rights to arable plots and common ownership of all other land (hayfields, forests, fishing grounds, etc.); The community strengthened regulation in the use of hereditary estates, hayfields and pastures, and lands under borrowings.
In the second half of the 19th century. The administrative role of the community in land use was strengthened everywhere. The rural community, which for centuries showed amazing adaptability to the changing conditions of the village, late XIX- early 20th century was in a difficult situation. It remained a class, peasant organization, but the indivisible communal ownership of land increasingly came into conflict with developing agrarian capitalism. In 1906, the tsarist government reformed P.A. Stolypin tried to resolve this contradiction by proposing that communal peasants be allocated together with an allotment (on the right of ownership) from the community “into farmsteads” and, in order to defuse land hunger and social tension in the central Russian village, especially to promote the resettlement movement to Siberia and Central Asia. However, wide sections of the peasantry, who saw social protection in the community, began to oppose the plundering of communal land, and the goal of the reform of P.A. Stolypin was not achieved.
The February and October revolutions also did not contribute further evolution community organization. The Soviet government, advocating the nationalization of land and the transformation of the community into a “democratic neighboring union” of land users, essentially returned to the typologically past stage of state land ownership. According to the Land Code adopted in 1922, the community was recognized as a self-governing organization primarily in land terms with equal land use of individual farms and joint use of land. But seven years later, complete collectivization destroyed the small rural producer, and with him his community, turning the Russian peasant into a hired worker with a piece of personal land. The death of the rural community, whose possibilities were not exhausted on the path of cooperation in agricultural production, had dire consequences for Russia.
The rural community, in addition to its social significance, supported the traditional ideas of the vast mass of the rural population about the preservation of land and the order of their use (often of an ecological nature), about the norms and forms of social and neighborly behavior in different age groups(Gromyko, 1986), about rituals and holidays associated with cycles of rural production. In other words, the community contained an educational function, which, with the nationalization of the village and the omnipotence of local authorities of various ranks, was eroded among rural residents; Along with it, entire layers of folk culture disappeared (holidays, entertainment, folklore, historical memory, etc.).
The bulk of the people of Russia, the Russian people themselves, who carried within themselves what is called spiritual strength, are peasants. Even by 1917, their number exceeded 85% of the country's population. As a “techie”, I will say that 85% is a fairly significant value: if there is an 85% probability of obtaining some result, then in a number of cases they cease to control it - such a probability is enough.
Anyone who wants to understand Russia must understand the way of thinking of the peasants, for they are the essence of Russia. We all came from peasant backgrounds, at most in the second or third generation. And within us lies the peasant spirit, the Russian spirit. And when the poet says: “Here is the Russian spirit, here it smells of Russia,” it means here it “smells” of a peasant, since we have nothing more Russian.
Russian peasants never settled separately from each other, or rather, for many hundreds of years they lived together in communities, and it was these communities that they called “the world.” Without knowing the rules of the world and its fundamental principles, it is pointless to talk about Russians. For we are all from there - from the community, from the world.
An ordinary Western person, when moving to another apartment, hires a car and movers to transport him for money. And 99% of Russians in a similar case invite friends, for whom they buy vodka and snacks for an amount exceeding what they would pay to the movers, and after the move they have a drinking party with their friends.
Everyone knows that the most stable currency in Russia remains a bottle, often drunk together. Why? After all, Russians don’t drink more than, say, the French.
Formally, the Russian world, the Russian community was destroyed in a hundred-year struggle against bureaucracy, but its spirit lives in us. It is still indestructible and cannot be ignored.
From the point of view of managing democracy, what are the main features of the Russian community? To understand this, you need to clearly imagine what is now and what was before.
Now legislators are regulating the smallest details of our inner life, and they do it equally (uniformly) for the entire population, and they are even proud of it. Chairman of the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR A.I. Lukyanov boasted that the congress adopted more than 200 legislative acts in two years of work, and the chairman of the Congress of People's Deputies R.I. Khazbulatov – because there are 700. And how many more will they accept?
These acts regulate everything that the bureaucracy can come up with: the size of the army, its expenses, the amount of taxes, teachers' salaries, the length of the working day, the number of doctors, sales rules, and so on, so on, so on. Everywhere you hear that we have people's power, but the people have nothing to do with it, since commands to the entire population are immediately given by a single bureaucracy from one center. The people are in laws and decrees, as if in a vice, but the bureaucracy is free.
The freedom-loving Russian people did not tolerate this and, united in communities, resisted the bureaucratic madness for a long time.
The governance scheme of Russia was initially built in this way. The Tsar, both legislator and executor, commanded seemingly unchallenged all of Russia. Outwardly this is so, but no one pays attention to the fact that from the point of view, from the position of the people, he commanded in narrow areas of public life. The peasants very rarely had to deal with his teams, the teams of the center. At first, the king was engaged only in external defense, for which he obliged the people to act in accordance with the royal will, and not as the people considered necessary, in three cases: when paying taxes, when working for a warrior, and later as a nobleman, and when supplying a recruit to the army . There was also criminal law: The tsar, with the help of his laws, persecuted criminals throughout Russia, but if the peasant was not a criminal, then this did not concern him. Subsequently, the tsar’s power extended to industry and science: they built and maintained universities, encouraged the arts, etc. But this also affected the peasant only indirectly, through a tax - a tribute.
How many times a year did the peasant have to remember that he has a king, and the king has laws? How often has he encountered these laws? Three times a week with the tsarist law on corvee. What about the others? Two or three times a year, no more!
And we, living today, how many times do we have to deal with laws and decrees sent down from the capital? From the region?
Here is an example from the recent past. We woke up in the morning in an apartment, the size of which and the rent for which were determined in the capital; they put on clothes, the price of which “came down” from Moscow; ate foods whose quality was determined by the center; transport fares, the driver's salary, the width of bus seats - all this was also decided in the capital. Collective farmers sowed, planted, and harvested crops only according to instructions from above. We were entangled in bureaucratic chains, with officials declaring that all this was for our good, and it was impossible otherwise. Today, these same bureaucrats are churning out more and more new laws and continue to convince everyone that it is impossible otherwise.
No, you can! And it was possible before, until the kings gave in to the bureaucrats and wise men. The Russian peasant community did not have any laws of higher power over itself, except for those given above, and in social and economic life it was governed independently. The people governed themselves. What else can you call this if not democracy? Yes, Russian peasants did not elect a deputy by universal and secret ballot so that he would supposedly broadcast something in parliament on their behalf, without even understanding what. But they did not need this, since they established their own laws, and each, let us emphasize, each had a direct influence on the formation of these laws.
The laws of self-government in communities were different. A Russian proverb of that time said: “As is the city, so is its temper; as is the village, so is its custom.” There were no written laws; laws were established in the form of customs that were remembered by the world. These customs were strictly followed by every member of the community. In this regard, each village, each community was a separate state - sovereign, as today's wise men would say.
However, there were several rules and customs common to all of Russia. For centuries, Russian people have noticed what it takes to live together in harmony, and in principle they are not far from orthodox Christianity or Islam. The main thing is universal justice, the Russians did not make any discovery here, but the ways in which they ensured this justice are interesting.
Of course, for Russia, which lived according to the family principle, the main law or custom was that the community was formed according to the family principle, but without its head (father). The “father” was the community meeting - a collective governing body, which was not a meeting of representatives, each member of the community was automatically a member of this meeting, and his voice had such weight that, for example, a deputy of the oldest parliament in the world - the English one - never dreamed of.
The following principle automatically followed from the principle of the Russian family: not a single member of the community could be excluded from it under any circumstances. If you were born in a community or were accepted into it – that’s it, there is no force capable of expelling you from there. True, in ordinary family the father could separate his son from himself by giving him part of the property. In a community, on the contrary, its member could leave the community only voluntarily, but he was not entitled to anything from the common property. Both principles remained valid, only under different conditions. Both in the family and in the community, the person was calm: no matter what decisions his father or the community made, no one would allow any injustice towards him personally.
The family principle determined another feature: the community had a very disdainful attitude towards the sacred right of personal property in general and an extremely negative attitude towards personal ownership of land. A family member should not have personal ownership of something with the help of which the entire family exists. Non-recognition of personal ownership of land is a sacred Russian idea that has been carried through a millennium. Property is only common; the land must be at the disposal of the one who cultivates it.
Another Russian principle, common to all communities: a decision at a community meeting could only be made unanimously. The community did not bother counting the votes. If at least someone was against it, no decision was made.
The parliamentary wise men do not even suspect the possibility of the existence of such a principle. Indeed, how to implement this principle? After all, this is a dead end. Parliament will not make a single decision. This is impossible in parliaments, although hundreds of thousands of Russian communities have existed according to this principle for a millennium.
You need to understand the following. The Russian peasant, like Russian people in general, is a true democrat, that is, he always believed that public interest is higher than personal interest, and not only thought so, but was also guided by this principle. And at secular gatherings, the peasants proceeded precisely from the interests of the community, therefore, there could be no disagreements. And parliament is an arena for the struggle of personal interests, even if these are the personal interests of groups, parties or segments of the population. These interests are different, so it is impossible to achieve unanimity.
For a peasant, a community is the house in which he lives and his children will live. The ruin of the community is the ruin of him personally. The peasant was responsible with his fate for the decision he made. And in parliaments, especially Soviet and post-Soviet ones, deputies are not personally responsible for their decisions, so they can afford to vote for anything.
Peasant gatherings, especially on complicated issues, could last many evenings in a row and sometimes took a very rude (on the verge of a fight) form. They didn’t hesitate to discuss any little things, even if they affected the delicate aspects of someone’s life, which usual time were not subject to discussion. The community problem was literally turned inside out, examined from absolutely all sides until each member of the community began to understand that the proposed solution was the only one, even if he personally was not satisfied with it. And the decision was made only when the last person arguing calmed down. (From these positions, today’s parliamentary vigils look extremely shameful. Deputies are going to discuss the most difficult state issues, but they begin by agreeing when to end their meeting. And who said that this time will be enough? After all, the issue has not yet begun to be discussed!)
Could it be that, despite the length of the discussion, some member of the community, pursuing personal interests, still did not agree? Yes, it could. In this case, tired of arguing, 200 or 300 people could give in to one and make a decision that benefits only that person. But the community is not an institution for noble maidens; its members are hard-working and quite determined people. No one forgave anything to the person who went against the world. He certainly paid for his insolence and was often forced to leave the community. He had troubles: a cow drowned in a swamp, hay burned, a cart wheel suddenly broke, and so on, until the person began to understand the meaning of the saying: “You can’t trample against the world.”
World-eating kulaks always built their houses in the center of the village, close to other houses, so that in the event of a fire, the flames from their burning house would spread to neighboring houses, knowing that only in this case they would not be set on fire.
What did unanimity give to an individual when making decisions? The guarantee that no one will neglect your voice and your personal interests. Because it is in the interests of society to take into account the interests of everyone. No one will stop arguing without hearing your opinion. You can talk a lot about respect for each individual person, or you can introduce respect for it into law. One can argue that since a state has freedom of speech, it means it is a civilized state, forgetting that freedom of speech without the obligation to listen is fun for wise men. What's the point of talking if no one is going to listen to you? The peasant community of Russia, unlike the overwhelming majority of the Russian intelligentsia, who prefer to “philosophize” in the Western manner, understood this.
Another rule common to all peasant communities is the observance of justice in the distribution of their means of subsistence - land. Communities had different methods of distribution.
And finally, common to all communities was collective responsibility for external obligations, for the obligation to pay taxes and supply recruits to the army. If, for example, there were 200 people in a community obligated to pay taxes to the tsar, then none of them directly brought their required 12 rubles to the tax department; the community paid all 2,400 rubles, and then distributed this money to the community members.
The same goes for recruiting. If, for example, it was supposed to send one person out of 100 into the army, then the military department did not look for these people in villages and villages. The communities themselves determined who to serve, and often sought to buy a recruit on the side, that is, to find a healthy single man, so that he would agree to become a soldier for the enormous money collected by the world at that time. If one could not be found, the world decided which family to take the soldier from. And the money was paid to him. The decision of the community, the “sentence of peace,” in this case was not subject to appeal; the selected recruit could be taken to the recruiting station without his consent, bound.
The community fulfilled its obligations in good faith and demanded the same attitude. If landowners or officials, violating laws and customs, inflicted insults on the community, and it was not possible to achieve justice through legal means, then the community decided to take extreme measures. One of these measures was riot. Meanwhile, the kings also understood that the causes of rebellion often lie in the actions of the authorities; they understood that shed blood could cause a huge amount of response. Therefore, when a rebellion broke out, the state always tried to extinguish it without bloodshed, while this was still possible. It is characteristic that the Order of St. Vladimir, the fourth degree of which gave the right to hereditary nobility, was awarded to those officers and officials who could stop peasant unrest without resorting to weapons. This required courage, since the indignant community ceased to regret both its own and other people’s blood.
Sometimes a community could do the following without resorting to rebellion.
Several men killed the hated landowner and his family, and set his house on fire. They then went and surrendered to the authorities. In Russia, the death penalty was imposed in exceptional cases. Therefore, the court sentenced the peasants to a period of hard labor and exile to Siberia. Marriage bonds were considered sacred; then they believed that marriages were made in heaven, and it was not for people to break them. Therefore, according to the existing law, the families of convicts, if desired, were sent at state expense to the place of hard labor and exile, and they were also provided with maintenance at the expense of the treasury. In addition, the peasants regularly collected money and sent it to the convicts, since in their eyes these were not criminals, but heroes who suffered for peace.
So, the Russian people were united into self-governing communities, although they had obligations to the state, but on a small list of issues. The community in a number of cases was able to effectively defend its sovereignty before anyone else, as only a family can do.
The priority of such spiritual values as devotion to society, readiness for self-sacrifice for its sake, a heightened sense of justice and disdain for the tenets of material values such as the inviolability of private property and personal ownership of land determined the differences in the behavior of Russian people and people of the Western worldview.
For many centuries in a row, Russians settled throughout the earth, exploring new uninhabited places. The British, French, and Germans did the same. They also moved to America, Africa, and Australia. But both did it differently. Let's say European settlers settled the North American prairies. On the plot of land allocated to them, they built a house and a farm, established friendly relations with neighbors for joint actions against common misfortunes. They paid taxes depending on the amount of land they owned; over time, some of them went bankrupt, their land was bought up by more successful neighbors, and the less fortunate became urban and rural proletarians. This was in accordance with the way of thinking of Western man; there was nothing in it that bothered his conscience.
The Russians acted differently. The peasant community, having received land allocated to it (for everyone), first of all chose convenient place for a village or village. Each family was allocated a plot for the estate. The plots were cut next to each other, forming a street or streets of the future village. At the same time, the community took into account that families would grow and divide, and therefore they left a reserve for future development. The remaining land was divided into three parts: meadows, pastures and arable land. There could be a fourth part – the forest. The community used all this land together.
On land allocated for estates, the whole world built houses for everyone. All the livestock of the village were released into pastures as a single herd. With arable land and meadows the situation was more complicated. Arable land, firstly, was divided according to quality: hillock or lowland, one has more clay, the other sand, etc. In different communities, the land was divided into different numbers of varieties, sometimes up to 15. Next, the land was divided into plots - allotments based on the following considerations. Among the peasants, taxes (taxes) were imposed only on males, but on everyone: both old and young. The population census was carried out every seven years. The number of males recorded in the census remained the same for taxes throughout this period. That is, in fact, it was not individual people who were subject to taxes, but the entire community. The number of men was simply a numerical estimate of the tax capacity of a given community.
If at the time of the census there were one hundred boys, men and old people in the community, and the tax per person was 12 rubles per year, then the total tax in the amount of 1,200 rubles had to be paid over seven years. The world itself had to sort out the collection of taxes within the community.
This happened differently in each community, but the principle was the same: the world did not require a person to pay a tax if it did not provide him with land in order to earn this tax. Most often, each type of arable land was divided according to the number of taxpayers. It was an allotment. Obviously, one plot could consist of up to 15 strips of land of different types. In addition, the strips were located on three fields: spring, winter and fallow. (The wise men made fun of this, first in St. Petersburg, and then in Moscow and Leningrad, but one must understand that, first of all, the peasants themselves understood the unreasonableness of such a division, but justice was higher for them than this inexpediency.)
Allotments were distributed among families, but not equally, but according to the “strength” of each family, that is, depending on how many workers it had to cultivate the land. Let's say there were four males in a family: a father and three young sons. Formally, she had the right to four plots or an plot of four times the size. But the community could only give them two, since in fact there was no one in this family to cultivate the land, and therefore there was little likelihood that the family would be able to contribute its share of taxes to the community treasury. And another family, in which there is only a father among men, but three adult unmarried daughters, could receive not one, but three plots.
In the intervals from census to census, the composition of families could change: boys grew up, daughters got married, old people died. The community responded quickly to these changes every year. Allotments were confiscated from weakened families and transferred to those families that were becoming stronger. There were no conditions imposed on those receiving the land, except to pay the previous owner for improvements, say, for a new fence. The principle was sacredly confessed: only those who cultivate it own the land.
In some provinces, a more accurate accounting of the strength of the family was kept: a boy at the age of 10 received the right to 0.25 plots, 12 years old - 0.5 plots, 14 years - 0.75 plots, a man from 20 to 55 years old could receive up to two plots , but from the age of 55 - only 0.5 allotments, and after 60 years the peasant was freed from both land and taxes. Very rarely, but it happened that communities divided the land according to the eaters, that is, in proportion to the composition of the family.
In other communities, in order to reduce the number of strips of land per plot, they carefully determined the profit that land of one quality or another could give one worker. In proportion to this profit, the length of the poles was measured, which were used to measure land of different types, that is, in one plot the land was worse, but there was more of it, and in another it was better, but less. To whom what allotment should be given was decided by lot; in general, in Russia it was used in almost any case when something had to be divided.
Many Russian researchers who lived in the countryside in the last century predicted the development of the community in the direction of collective farming, but, of course, not in such a bureaucratic form as collective farms in their final form. Indeed, in many communities special fields were allocated that were cultivated by the whole world. The harvest was sometimes divided, but more often it was used to pay taxes, to help the weak, and in general for social purposes. Sometimes, for this purpose, a field or the entire estate was rented from the landowner.
Of course, no one in the community could sell their plot, although they could rent it out. But the community could sell part of the land, or it could buy it, replenishing its land supply.
Mowing was also often carried out collectively, although in those years the meadows could be divided into strips so that everyone could mow for themselves. But some communities were divided into artels and divided the meadows according to the number of artels and people in them. Then the artel together mowed the entire meadow, set up and equalized the haystacks according to the number of people, and then divided the finished hay by lot.
The community provided each member with the right to work without any “ifs.” If a person wanted to work, the community provided him with equal conditions as everyone else. The community was also a social security agency. Usually, frail old people lived out their lives with children, and orphans grew up with close relatives. But it happened when both old people and children were left alone. Most often, in this case, they “went around the world,” that is, they lived in each family of the community in turn for a certain time, say, a week, and dressed themselves with community money. (By the way, although this sounds cynical, before the abolition of recruitment, orphan boys were of particular value to the community; their health, and the health of future soldiers, was especially monitored.)
But there were other ways. The old people could receive food and feed for livestock collected “from around the world,” or they could simply live in their hut, and community members regularly brought them ready-made food. And this was not alms: the community was obliged to support its weak members, and the one who accepted help did not humiliate himself to beg for it.
The community collected more money than the state required. This money was used for the same purposes that the state is now pursuing by increasing taxes. The community stored bread, built schools and hired teachers, and if it was strong, then doctors or paramedics. In fact, the peasant spent more on taxes than was provided for by the government, but he established this difference himself and spent it himself. The central government received money for what only it could do. The rest remained in the community and did not fall into the hands of the bureaucracy. This is important to note in order to understand the ultimate goals of the struggle between the bureaucracy and the community.
All Russian communities had a system of mutual aid. Its peculiarity was that everyone who was asked for help provided it, but not out of spiritual generosity, but because he was obliged to help. This help (in the old way to help) was divided into three categories.
In the first case, everyone who was invited to help helped without expecting any encouragement. As a rule, we are talking about difficult cases when a community member was in poverty due to force majeure circumstances, say, a house was demolished by a flood. Then those whom he asked, or the entire community, went to build a house, and no one had the right to demand anything for it.
In the second case, a community member called for help if he started a task that was beyond his strength: he decided to build a mill or plowed so much land that he was unable to harvest the crops, or the husband suddenly died, and the wife decided to harvest the crops from her plot herself and don't give up on it. In this case, everyone who was called was obliged to help, but the owner had to arrange a dinner with drinks (hence all our bottles in mutual settlements).
In the third case, it is more likely not about help, but about hiring in conditions where patriarchal relations did not allow giving and accepting money for work. For example, a kulak or landowner, when inviting someone to harvest the harvest, is obliged to stipulate what will happen at the end: dinner with drinks or even dancing. Anyone who didn't like this didn't have to go.
The peasants deceived God with the system of mutual aid. The fact is that during the harvest every day was precious, but on Sunday God forbade work; it was necessary to rest. But he forbade working, not helping! So they helped every Sunday from June to September, losing consciousness in the evening from fatigue.
Let us note the difference between the Russian peasant community and its parody copy - the collective farm.
First. Collective farms were built according to the Marxist dogma, according to which the peasant must become a proletarian - a hired worker: come to work at 7 o'clock in the morning, conscientiously do what his superiors ordered him to do, and, having received money for it, leave, and then the grass will not grow. This dogma turned the worker in industry and the peasant in agriculture into a beast. Marxism is based only on the laws of economics, without taking into account that people also need to be managed, that is, they must be asked to behave in a certain way.
The Russian peasant community, being more communist than Marx himself could have dreamed, took into account the laws of human behavior. A peasant, working in a community, on a plot of land belonging to the community, received for his labor not a salary from the boss, but the final result of his labor in in full and in its natural form.
Second. The community was sovereign and no one interfered in its affairs. A collective farm is an enterprise dominated by the bureaucracy; it is the penultimate victory of the bureaucracy in agriculture (the last victory will be the collapse of collective farms).
Otherwise, the ideas of the community and the collective farm coincide, and cannot but coincide, since the community moved towards collective work, and the collective farms were built on communal principles.
So, let’s summarize what has been said, allowing ourselves to repeat what has been said (repetition is the mother of learning).
The people are the population of the country and future generations. The state is the population, legislative and executive powers. The purpose of the state is to protect the people. The state protects itself with the hands and lives of the population. The legislative branch gives commands to the population to protect the people, and the executive branch organizes the population for this protection.
Initially, democracy in Russia was built according to the following scheme. The Tsar - the legislative power and the head of the executive power - took upon himself the responsibility to give the population commands to protect the people and organize the population to carry out these commands only in those cases where they could not give such commands to themselves: to protect the people from an external enemy, a criminal ( throughout Russia); to protect the intellect of the people - training scientific and engineering personnel, conducting scientific research; for economic protection - the creation of state industry; on the protection of Russian citizens abroad. In other cases, the population of Russia, united in communities, gave itself commands to protect itself.
One can dispute the appropriateness of certain elements of the structure of Russia (serfdom, monarchy, etc.). But there is no reason to assert that the Russian idea of government was flawed in relation to the implementation of democracy (power of the people). She was absolutely correct. It is not enough to proclaim the power of the people; it is necessary to give the people ways to govern.
The population (peasants) did not interfere in management issues if they could not understand them (army management, foreign policy etc.), and did not elect deputies from among themselves to resolve these issues. And the government did not interfere in those issues in which it was incompetent: the management of communities, their economic and social affairs. At the same time, the state apparatus was minimal, and therefore the costs for it, and tax burden on the people. The vast majority of military and civilian officials were indeed responsible for what the people need The case, and the tax expenses on them were justified.
But in Russia two forces were already maturing for which democracy was in principle unacceptable: the bourgeoisie and the apparatus bureaucracy.
Here the author is ruled by Marxism, and although he himself does not like anything complicated, he nevertheless believes that Marx greatly simplified the issue of struggle in society. It is not enough to consider that we have only two antagonistic classes: workers and capitalists. According to Marxist theory, bureaucracy is a product of bourgeois relations and along the path to communism it will disappear. But we have seen from the example of the history of the USSR that this is far from the case. The fact is that these two forces are based on different foundations: the actions of the bourgeoisie are subject to the laws of economics, and the actions of the bureaucracy are subject to the laws of management. They have one object of robbery - the people, but the methods are different: the bourgeoisie takes away part of the worker’s labor in the form of surplus value, and the bureaucracy - in the form of taxes and bribes. But they are skinning one sheep.
They are enemies of each other, competitors in the object of robbery, but they can become allies for a while in order to break the resistance of those who are going to be robbed. When the resistance is broken and the robbery itself begins, they again become enemies and, oddly enough, can become allies of the people (according to the principle, the enemy of my enemy is my friend), destroying a competitor with his help. In this “classical” triangle, the people - bourgeoisie - bureaucracy everyone hates each other, but everyone tries to use each other in the fight against their enemy.
Let's take modern history. Yeltsin is the leader of the bureaucracy, who, in the name of its goals, destroyed the Soviet Union. At the same time, he promised a well-fed life for the bourgeoisie, and it acted as his faithful ally, although at its core the bourgeoisie is international. The bourgeoisie supported Yeltsin with money and militants on the barricades of the White House and allowed his bureaucracy to take place in the chairs of officials of the former allied departments. But the bureaucrats very quickly realized that taxes from the people and the salaries paid from them provide a very modest life. Then they started extorting (bribes) from the bourgeoisie. It howled, bourgeois parties and associations even found themselves in opposition to Yeltsin. However, as soon as the Supreme Council of Russia began to prepare the issue of releasing Yeltsin from office, the bourgeoisie again, without hesitation, rushed to his aid, buying television, demonstrators, and then militants to shoot the Supreme Council. The bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy hate each other, but most of all they hate the power of the people - democracy, realizing that they and democracy are incompatible.
Let's return to the peasant community, to the world. The growing bourgeoisie and the apparatus bureaucracy emerging among officials, which is not directly responsible for protecting the people, began military operations against the Russian world, and this is natural.
Why did the community not suit the bourgeoisie? In order for the bourgeoisie to collect its share of surplus value from the people, it is necessary to obtain ownership of the means of production, and for the peasants this is land. Consequently, the bourgeoisie needed the land of the communities to go on sale, but to do this it was necessary to destroy the communities.
Why did the bourgeoisie not suit the peasants? After all, the tsar took away their surplus value in the form of taxes, and the landowner in the form of quitrents! Why can't the bourgeoisie? The tsar took money to protect the peasants, and the nobleman, according to the original idea, took it for the same reason. But the bourgeois, kulak or capitalist took the money for himself personally and did not intend to spend it on protecting the people. This is robbery in its purest form.
With bureaucracy the issue is more complicated. The fact is that it multiplies, grows fat, robbing the people, exploiting ideas about their supposedly even better protection. Technically it's done like this. Some officials, desperate to make a quick career and not too burdened with the responsibilities of truly protecting the people, bring up the idea of some kind of additional protection for them. For example, in Russia there are many fires, and the losses from them are enormous. The wise men actively prove that such an issue cannot be left without government intervention, organize a campaign and, pushing each other aside, rush to show their wisdom and knowledge of life. The king or the government, without delving into the essence of the issue, at the same time sincerely want to prevent people's losses. Therefore, with the money of the treasury, the money of the people, they hire officials and wise men to prepare the appropriate document, then they approve this document and again, with the money of the people, they hire a new bureaucracy to monitor the implementation of the rules laid down in the document. At the same time, no one thinks that losses from fires are borne not by the treasury, but by people; no one asks these people whether they need these rules, these officials and controllers. They take their money and pay a new detachment of apparatus bureaucracy, while claiming that everything is being done for their own good.
The king or another legislator needs to develop his own understanding of the issue so as not to fall for bureaucratic provocation. To do this, you need to understand what bureaucracy is. But who understood and understands this? True, not all kings trusted their bureaucracy, but they could not oppose anything to its perfidy.
Let's digress a little from issues related to the community and look at how the bureaucracy operated within the bowels of the state apparatus itself. The ease with which bureaucracy multiplies is especially characteristic of control organizations, which are able to veil the purpose of their activities even at the time of their creation. The paradox is that their meaninglessness for the Cause is clear, but a boss using a bureaucratic management mechanism cannot live without control.
Let's give an example. Nicholas I saw various shortcomings in the composition of officials and their promotion. In addition, various abuses associated with the appointments and transfers of officials in vast Russia, inherent in the bureaucratic mechanism itself, were obvious. Strictly speaking, the tsar should have demanded from the ministers the final results of their work, without interfering in matters of personnel selection. But he decided to improve matters in a different way: he ordered the development of rules for the selection of personnel and established control over the exact implementation of these rules. For this purpose, the Inspectorate Department was created in 1846, about which Nicholas I wrote: “The goal has been achieved: order and accountability have replaced carelessness and abuse of various kinds.” The department quickly grew and soon cheerfully reported to the tsar: “Four years of experience have proven that the highest idea of taking your thread of control into the sovereign hand... brought benefits in many respects: a) everything that did not have a commonality, that was executed separately, came to a possible unity; b) The Charter on Civil Service received due force...; c) entry into service, dismissal from it, transfer from one department to another, promotion to rank... are now carried out on the positive principles of the central management system in the same general order.”
The department kept silent about how “effective” the general procedure turned out to be: losses are not reported. For honest people the service became sharply more complicated, and the scoundrels, as before, had freedom. After all, the department was not responsible for their absence, but for the correctness of passing and filling out the papers. So, filling out the column about sources of income, the impudent people made fun of: “The estate was acquired by his wife with gifts received in her youth from Count Benckendorff.” And nothing happened.
It is no wonder that after the death of Nicholas I, complaints flowed to his son. In 1857, Alexander II “deigned to order that all ministers and chief managers be given the opportunity to figure out by what means it would be possible to reduce and limit the enormous correspondence that arose with the establishment of the said department.”
At that time, not all activities in Russia were centralized, and against the backdrop of the clerical departments of private enterprises, the Inspectorate Department looked especially wretched. Therefore, the king agreed that the department was not needed, and it was abolished. But... the bureaucratic mechanism remained. And the son of Alexander II decides to revive this department. The ministers were alarmed, Minister of Justice N.V. Muravyov wrote a note to the Tsar asking him to delay the publication of the decree, to which the Tsar replied:
“If I wanted to receive a negative answer, then, of course, I would turn to the ministers” (the tsar involuntarily showed that he did not consider his closest assistants to be decent people and faithful servants, and could not imagine their work without control on his part). So, in 1894, the department arose like a phoenix from the ashes, called the Inspection Department, starting all over again, but in a worse form. Even people close to the tsar wrote: “With us, everything is done somehow by chance, without considering anything... In general, the arbitrariness of the ministers was not connected with anything, but now they have gone to the other extreme... It turns out that now for all the appointments of fools or swindlers, for which the minister or governor was previously responsible for, the king will be responsible!”
The groans of the ministers reached the ears of the son Alexandra III. Let us quote from a note in which the work of the Inspectorate Department and the Inspectorate Division was compared: “But the difficulties of that time, no matter how great they were, pale in comparison with those difficulties that arise now on the occasion of the establishment of the Inspectorate Department, and before the correspondence that has already reached to the limits of physical impossibility." Although the indecisive Nicholas II did not liquidate, like his grandfather, this controlling body, he was still forced to significantly limit it.
And note, this bureaucratic nest was formed before the eyes of the Tsar and operated in St. Petersburg, despite the opposition not of ordinary people, but of ministers! WITH ordinary people, with the peasants, the bureaucracy did not stand on ceremony at all, and this was one of the reasons for the peasant’s fear of leaving not only the community, but even serfdom.
The Russian writer Leskov, closely associated with the peasants, describes a lot of similar examples; I will give some of them in my retelling.
After the liberation of the peasants, a new district chief arrived in the village. The peasants collect twenty kopecks for a “gift” for him. He indignantly rejects this money, declaring that he is an honest servant of the sovereign and will not take taxes from the peasants, but... will demand from the peasants strict compliance with all the laws and decrees of the sovereign. After that, he goes door-to-door. It happens in winter, the stoves are heated. The boss opens a thick volume of rules and reads that to prevent fires, stove beds must be covered with down blankets, cotton blankets, felt... Straw is not specified, but the peasant's stove bed is covered with straw. This is a violation of the law, and the law provides for a fine of 10 rubles for this. The boss demands payment of this fine. The peasants fall to their knees, begging not to ruin. Finally, the boss “had mercy”, put 3 rubles in his pocket and went to the next house. They already know about this rule, and the straw has been swept away from the bed. But the boss is not discouraged. He discovers that there is no barrel of water in the attic in case of fire, and the rules say that for this violation there is a fine of 50 rubles. The peasants are trying to explain to him that in the event of a fire in the village, a fire brigade has been created, and when there is an alarm, the vigilantes will come running from each yard with tools according to a schedule: some with an ax, some with a hook, some with a pump, some with a barrel of water. And a barrel of water in the attic is stupid. After all, the water in the attic will freeze; what use will a block of ice in a frozen barrel have in a fire? The boss agrees with the peasants, but what can he do: he didn’t write these rules. The peasants beg him, and he finally agrees to take 10 rubles from each yard and leave. And the peasants are happy: what a good boss they got.
It’s all very simple: instructions written by wise men in St. Petersburg, plus the skillful application of it by local bureaucrats, and as a result, both of them had money, and both of them, under the guise of protecting the people, cleverly robbed them. But for this it was necessary to destroy the community, because in a traditional community the world simply would not allow itself to be checked, since it was only required to pay taxes and supply recruits, and the rest of the affairs of the community did not concern anyone.
The world, of course, respected the authorities. For example, there was a tradition according to which, when a chief of the same rank visited a village, he was given a special fried egg and a glass or two of vodka, while a chief of a higher rank was given chicken. But if the community did not consider itself guilty before the state (such guilt, for example, could be “a dead body of a person found on the territory of the community”), then it did not humiliate itself before government officials and did not allow them to interfere in its affairs.
Russian democracy (with its love of freedom, independence, non-recognition of private property as a means of robbing other people) stood as a powerful obstacle in the way of the “selfish” interests of the bourgeoisie and bureaucracy. And it would have survived if genetic “whims” had not manifested themselves in the Romanov dynasty, and wiser after wiser had not begun to come to the throne. In the past centuries, Peter the Great and even Catherine the Great remained, capable of understanding the matter on their own, who needed assistants only to participate in assessing the situation and developing a solution, and not to suggest a solution as a whole. There were no more kings who clearly understood the essence of their decrees and their effectiveness in protecting the people. The time had come for tsars, for whom decisions were first made by ministers, tsars - “bald dandies, enemies of labor,” and the Romanov dynasty ended with such misery on the throne, which did not hesitate to listen to the advice of the vile maniac Rasputin. The tsars betrayed the world, betrayed Russia, and the peasant community began to suffer one blow after another from the combined forces of the bourgeoisie and bureaucracy. The beginning of open hostilities can perhaps be considered 1861, the year of reforms, the year of the liberation of the peasants.
The wise men still rejoice at this liberation, they still scold the revolutionaries who killed Alexander II, the Tsar-Liberator. What, exactly, is there to be happy about? Before 1861, peasants were obliged to cultivate the landowner's fields, which, by the way, were smaller in area than after 1861. After the reform, they were no longer required to process them. So, are these fields left uncultivated? No, they were processed as before. Maybe they were processed by blacks or Chinese? No, all the same Russian peasants. Then what were they freed from? Did they work in the landowners' fields because they had nothing to do? Maybe they got so rich from working for the landowner that they began to live like a bar?
More than three decades after the liberation of the peasants, the Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedia gives such “joyful” figures for the state of the Russian people, happy with liberation and “free” work for the landowner. In 1896, Russia exported agricultural products abroad worth 534,865 thousand rubles. This money was taken from the peasants by land owners and taxes, taken away by private ownership of land, taken away by the bureaucracy, since the Russian peasants did not have any extra bread. At that time, there were 109.8 million rural residents in Russia, that is, per one rural resident, products worth 4 rubles 87 kopecks were exported. Average Russian family consisted of 6.6 people, therefore, per family the amount was 32 rubles 14 kopecks. Under serfdom, a peasant on quitrent had to pay the landowner no more than 20 rubles. If we assume that the grain sold to pay taxes remained in Russia, then what did the peasant gain from liberation? Previously he paid 20, but now 32. And how he “luxurized” in his hut! In the Moscow province there were 8.4 people per house. And 80% of such families lived in houses 6-8 arshins or less, that is, cut from logs with a length of 4.2 to 5.6 meters. And my health was so good! Out of 1,000 boys born, 490 lived to be 10 years old, and out of 1,000 girls, as many as 530. In England and Sweden, where Russia exported grain, the average life expectancy for men was 45.25 years, and for women 50.0 years; in Russia itself, men On average they lived 27.25 years, women 29.38 years.
Alexander II freed the peasants from the landowners and gave them into slavery to the land owners. But the bureaucracy also wanted its share. She began to energetically interfere in the affairs of the community, trying to subjugate everything to herself. We said that the community was led by a meeting, a meeting, but between meetings, current affairs were managed by the headman - the executive power of the community.
First of all, Russian democracy was replaced by Western parliamentarism. The decision of the meeting began to be considered valid not only with a unanimous vote, but also with two-thirds of the votes. A vote-buying fist has burst into the world.
Next, the bureaucracy took on the elders, trying to bureaucratize them, to subordinate them to themselves, and not to the world. The elders resisted, they were bribed with silver medals and personalized caftans, they dealt harshly with the obstinate - only in the year of reform and only in the Samara province were almost 70 village elders exiled to Siberia, who refused to obey the volost elders and remained faithful to worldly sentences.
Both the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy have taken the muzzles off their assholes and let them off their leashes. Those who have read books by Western scientists (written for Western conditions, and for smart people), with all their efforts they began to criticize the community, Russian peasants and everything connected with it. (It’s not difficult for us to imagine, we saw what happened when Gorbachev unleashed his wise men.) Some, having heard that pea sausage was being introduced into the diet of soldiers in the German army, began to demand that the peasants sow and eat peas (how can one not remember Nikita Sergeevich with his corn). Others mocked communal holdings and the strength of tradition. Still others called the peasants drunkards and lazy people. By the way, about the laziness of the Russian peasant. The same Brockhaus and Efron report that the most “deadly” months in Russia, that is, the months when the mortality rate of the population sharply exceeded the annual average, are July and August, the months of suffering, the hardest peasant work. At this time, the weak suffered and died at work. But the following months, September and October, were the most prosperous of the year in terms of mortality.
Those Russian intellectuals who knew and understood the people, but could not convey their thoughts to the Tsar through the sage’s verbal diarrhea, despaired: “You know, I’m very afraid of your St. Petersburg concoction. How can you, gentlemen, officials, and also St. Petersburg residents, and scientists in addition, begin to legislate, truly, pure disaster can come out of this, and what a disaster! You know, both me and Khomyakov get chills from fear alone. We are afraid of you a lot, but in reality you will be worse and more terrible. Try to do it as incompletely, insufficiently, badly as possible: really, it will be better,” wrote A.I. more than a hundred years ago. Koshelev, but his words also apply to our lives today. The wise men have not become any wiser.
The book has already given many examples when an idea that seemed correct in the capital turned into a masterpiece of stupidity where it should have been implemented in life. However, the idea of delocracy, unfortunately, is difficult to understand, and those who do not try to analyze, but prefer to believe, as a rule, see no reason to believe in this idea. Therefore, giving one more example is like adding butter to porridge.
Leskov describes such a case. He sat down as a fellow traveler in a cart with a man traveling to the volost, and talked with him about his business. The man said that the world had collected a bribe and now he was taking it to the authorities in the volost. The purpose of the bribe is to ensure that the volost does not send Dutch cows to this village. How would the town sage rate this episode? He heard that a cow gives milk, and he knows that peasant cows give little milk, barely 700-1500 liters per year, and of low fat content, and a Dutch cow gives 5000-7000 liters per year. One Dutch one replaces ten Russian ones. But keeping one is more profitable than ten, both in terms of labor costs and feed. And here the peasants are given Dutch cows for free, the tsar spent money, bought them with treasury money to improve the breed of Russian cattle, and the peasants collect money and give bribes so that these cows are not given to them! How to understand this?
Here we need to remember that Russia at that time did not know mineral fertilizers, its fields did not know Chilean nitrate. Advising the Tsar to import Dutch cows into Russia, the Tsar’s wise men had to ask themselves the question: how has bread been grown in Russia for centuries without fertilizing the fields? The wise men could not understand that for a peasant the most valuable thing in a cow is not milk or meat (these are all related products), but manure and only manure, since without manure he will not have bread. And Russia had its own breed of cattle - dung. The “value system” of livestock was completely different. Nobody fed grain to the cattle - it was stupid. In any village, the main value was not arable land, but land - meadows and pastures. It was from them that it was possible to determine how many livestock the village was capable of supporting. And the number of livestock determined the arable land and the area for grain. It was believed that one head of large livestock (horse or cow) or ten heads of small livestock (pig, sheep) give minimum quantity manure for growing bread on one dessiatine. No manure - no need to plow. Manure was the main value that livestock provided, and milk, meat, and wool were the accompanying goods.
At the dawn of the Russian state, Yaroslav the Wise wrote a code of law. It determined the fine for the destruction of other people's livestock. Based on the amount of the fine, one can determine which pet was especially valuable to the peasants. (By the way, in those days, both swans and cranes lived on the peasant farmstead as poultry.) It turns out that the largest fine was imposed not for the destruction of a breeding stallion or a milk cow, but an ox, since it performed the functions of a horse and produced a lot of manure. There was no milk for the peasants of great importance, the main thing was grain, bread. And the ox plowed and fertilized the field. And now it will no longer seem surprising that the same fine as for an ox (twice the fine for a horse) was taken for the destruction of... a cat: what the ox “raised”, the cat was obliged to protect from mice.
Cows of the Russian breed were distinguished by the fact that any food was suitable for them: from marsh sedge to straw from the roof of a hut during the prolonged winter. This was what made them valuable, not their milk. What should a man do with a Dutch cow? After all, she needs to be fed with clover, she needs to be fed with grain, which the peasant did not always have enough for his family. A Dutch cow on Russian grub will die immediately. And the bureaucrat will accuse the peasant of wasting the royal gift because of laziness, and will punish him. Therefore, the men collected a bribe to the authorities so that they would hand over the royal gift to some other village.
This is not very difficult, and the actions of the peasants do not raise doubts about the expediency, but how many accusations of stupidity were brought down on their heads by the capital’s wise men, pitting against the peasants officials who did not delve too deeply into the essence of the matter, but were enthusiastic and energetic. Such, for example, as Pyotr Stolypin.
It was Stolypin who threw the famous words into the faces of the revolutionaries: “You need great upheavals, but we need a great Russia!” Beautiful words, but probably not a single revolutionary did as much for the great upheavals as Stolypin himself. And he was drawn to philosophize, he was drawn to reform agriculture. Having picked up information about farms in the United States and how things were going with them, Stolypin decided to reorganize the peasant community of Russia into a society of individual farmers.
To a city dweller involved in any economic activity, Stolypin's idea should seem extremely attractive.
The situation in Russia was like this. According to the Brockhaus and Efron dictionary, in the European part of Russia the area of land owned by the average village was 8.6 square versts, and 167 souls of both sexes lived in it. With 6.6 people per house in this part of Russia, the average village consisted of 25 households. Arable land in the European part of Russia occupied 26% of the land area, the rest was meadows, forests, and inconvenient lands. Consequently, per yard in this average village there were about 9 dessiatines of arable land, and of all land 34.4 dessiatines (a dessiatine is approximately equal to one hectare). An area of 8.6 square versts can be represented as a square with a side of approximately 3 km. But it was extremely rare that the plot had the shape of a square, and the village was located in the center of it. Consequently, we can assume that in the average Russian village there were almost certainly fields 3 km away from the estates. It was necessary to go to these fields to plow, sow, bring in manure (about 40 tons per tithe), and remove sheaves from the field. All this is associated with costs, inconveniences, and requires a lot of working time (and if the field was more than 2-3 km away, the peasants stopped transporting manure: it was unprofitable, they planted in such fields without fertilizers and called them field fields).
It’s another matter if the farm, house and farmstead are located right on the field that needs to be cultivated. After all, 9 dessiatines is a square plot with a side of 300 meters, therefore, from the threshold of the house to any extreme point is no more than 300 meters - ten times less than in the village. The peasant’s work in cultivating the field is made easier, perhaps 3-5 times.
In addition, the capital's wise men, like the current ones, stubbornly insisted that the peasant on the land that is his personal property will work better, will protect and cherish this land more. Of course, a city dweller will always find something to say to a peasant.
Despite such obvious advantages, the process of transforming Russian peasants into farmers, even with the help of the energetic Stolypin with his preferential loans and so on, was very slow: from 1861 to 1914, that is, in 53 years, barely 14 were able to be resettled from communities to farmsteads. % of peasants. Well, how can the city sage not assert that our peasants are extremely stupid and do not understand their benefits? He, the city guy, understands, but they, the rural people, don’t.
But let's call on our imagination to help and imagine that we are the same peasants who moved out of the village to their own personal farm. First of all, let’s estimate what the distance will be to our nearest neighbor? For one yard, we believed that in European Russia there were 34.4 dessiatines of common land, this is the area of a square plot with a side of almost 600 m. That is, the neighbors are on average 600 meters away. And this means that you won’t be able to reach them, and even on a good road you can go to them briskly It will take 6-8 minutes, and no one will go to a neighbor unless absolutely necessary, even in dry weather in summer. And in winter, spring, autumn? And five months of waist-deep snowdrifts and three months of impassable mud! Moving to a farm means voluntarily dooming yourself to solitary confinement in a prison you built! The Arkhangelsk peasants said that Stolypin could not evict them to the farmsteads because the women resisted: they would have no one there to gossip with. Just kidding, but this is a reason that alone is enough not to be evicted from the village.
What about the Americans? American farmers have an incomparably easier job due to a climate that is not comparable to the Russian one. Incomparably better than the road. They still had free time in the evening to ride 3-4 kilometers on horseback to a saloon and sit there with friends for a couple of hours over whiskey and cards.
But this is not accepted among Russians, and not because they do not like to drink, but their working days were filled with work until the evening. Even at youth gatherings, girls and boys were busy with some monotonous work that left their heads free, and not playing cards.
In a village where houses stand 20 meters apart from each other, the housewife will always find time to run to her neighbor for an hour and gossip with her, pour out her heart, listen to gossip, while at the same time not letting her house and yard, her children and her livestock out of sight. This is impossible on the farm.
But there were also purely economic considerations. The fact is that the most difficult, intense agricultural work occurred in the spring and July-August. In winter, peasants strove to work in the waste industry in order to add pennies earned by carting or in factories to the pennies they earned on the land. There was little work in winter, but there was some, and if only one man lived on a farm, it was difficult for him to leave the farm and go fishing. It was a different matter in the village; there were always men there who could bring firewood and hay not only to themselves, but also to their neighbors. In the villages, while losing in labor productivity due to travel to and from plots, they gained by receiving additional income from crafts, and in general it was more profitable for Russia for its residents to work all year round. Other problems also arose: how to send children to school 5-6 kilometers away, who will provide assistance in case of an accident, etc.
But the main thing, apparently, is not this. In our country, both now and in those days, the wise men preached the idea of private ownership of land, not understanding that for the peasant the land itself, as a commodity, has no value. The value, the commodity, is the harvest. And land is one of the tools with which the harvest is obtained. The peasant’s income and his material interest are based on the harvest, and whose land, personal or state, is not important. It doesn’t matter to the worker who owns the machine on which he sharpens the bolts - him, the capitalist or the state. If he receives roughly 10 rubles for a bolt, he is interested in this work, but if it’s only a ruble, then what’s the point of the fact that the machine is his personal?
The Russian way of thinking, the Russian idea is as follows: you personally can only own what is made by your own hands. You didn't make the earth, God created it. Therefore, the idea of personal ownership of land was seditious for Russians. Yes, over the years of propaganda, a layer of Russians with Western thinking has formed, who realized that although the earth is God’s creation, they can make good money on it, who realized that they can invest not only their labor, but also money in the land.
Yuri Mukhin
PEASANT SELF-GOVERNMENT, in Russia, a system of class-based bodies of self-government of the peasantry. Communal peasant self-government arose with the advent of the neighboring community. The competence and functions of peasant self-government were regulated by customary law. Legislative regulation of the relationship between bodies of peasant self-government and state administration was first carried out during the zemstvo reform of 1555-56, which introduced zemstvo administration in the black soshnye lands. The administrative body in the peasant community was the rural assembly (secular assembly), consisting of householders (heads of families). He resolved issues of land allocation, taxation (the community was responsible for arrears of its members until 1903 on the principle of mutual responsibility), determination of secular expenses, disposed of secular quitrent articles, and since the 18th century, determined the order of priority in carrying out conscription duties. The gathering elected officials: the village headman, sots and tens to perform police functions within the community, tax collectors, recruit payers (accompanied recruits to the assembly point), kissers (certified the “sentences” adopted by the gathering, conducted investigations on land and other disputes). The consideration of intra-community litigation and minor offenses was carried out by the “court of old men” (the landowners usually removed judicial functions from the competence of peasant self-government).
To check the activities of the elders, “counters” were elected, and “salaries” were elected to distribute duties according to taxes. The performance of duties by officials of peasant self-government, as a rule, was not paid and was therefore limited to a certain period (1-2 years). Peasant self-government acquired its most developed forms in the Russian North.
In 1797, volost peasant self-government was also legislatively introduced among state-owned and appanage peasants. At the volost meeting, representatives of all communities of the volost inhabited by state-owned peasants decided general questions, elected a volost head and a volost clerk, who, together with the headman of the village - the center of the volost, constituted the volost board. The villages of appanage peasants were united into “orders” (corresponding to the volosts of state-owned peasants); their governing bodies were also called “orders” and consisted of 4 officials, initially elected for a period of 3 years at a general meeting by representatives of all villages of the order: an elected order, or head; state and administrative headman, clerk (in the absence of literate peasants, clerks were hired from among persons who did not belong to the population of the order). Since 1808, the head, the official and the clerk of the order (also called the order's assessors) were elected for an indefinite period through a complex procedure; the head was confirmed in office by the Department of Appanages, and the headmen - by the managers of appanage offices; clerks began to be appointed managers of appanage offices and were on the staff of the Department of Appanages, representing its interests. The volost head in state-owned volosts and the elected clerk in appanage orders were the highest officials of the volost (prikaz) peasant self-government; they were responsible for the timely collection of taxes in all villages of the volost or order, brought laws and orders to the attention of the peasants, dealt with minor offenses and controlled the activities of other officials of peasant self-government. In practice, the clerk, who knew the legislation and the procedure for office work, often had a predominant role in the volost government or order. In 1808, two positions of judges, or “conscientious” ones, were introduced in each specific village; judges were elected by peasants annually to deal with all peasant “litigations and disputes” in accordance with the norms of customary law, their main task was to persuade the litigants to reconcile; since 1827, two conscientious judges were elected for the entire order for an indefinite period, constituting one order court. During the implementation of Kiselyov's reform of 1837-41, similar lower elective judicial bodies were introduced in the villages of state peasants - rural and volost reprisals. The activities of community and volost (prikaz) bodies of peasant self-government were under the strict control of the landowner or government bodies of state-owned and appanage peasants.
After the peasant reform of 1861 and the publication of the Regulations on peasants settled on the lands of sovereign, palace and appanage estates, the system of self-government of state and appanage peasants was extended to the entire peasantry with minor changes. The main link of peasant self-government - the community - received the official name "rural society". For former state and former appanage peasants, it consisted of householders of one village, and for former landowner peasants, it consisted of householders “settled on the lands of one landowner” (often included one or more villages, or, conversely, several societies could be located in one village). Almost all economic, social and police affairs of the peasantry were decided at village gatherings (the importance of the volost gathering was small). The village assembly elected the village headman, clerk, tax collector, ten's and sot's (the latter, since 1903, were gradually replaced by hired police guards - one for 2 thousand inhabitants), as well as, if necessary, other officials - caretakers of spare bread stores, forest and field stores watchmen, etc. The volost head and the administrative head were called the volost foreman, the volost reprisal and the court of “conscientious” - the volost court [rural reprisals were abolished on December 22, 1866 (January 3, 1867)]. Officials of peasant self-government were re-elected after 3 years (tax collectors and members of the volost court - after 1 year; since 1889, judges were appointed by zemstvo leaders for a period of 3 years from among the candidates chosen by the peasants). They had no right to evade election.
The assignment of salaries to officials depended on the discretion of the village or volost assembly. Since 1861, peasant self-government was under the supervision of peace intermediaries, from 1874 - presences on peasant affairs, in 1889-1917 - zemstvo chiefs. Being subordinate to the local police and administration, officials of peasant self-government were actually part of the system of local government; their functions as representatives of state power became more and more extensive. Since 1864, peasant self-government coexisted with all-estate district and provincial zemstvo self-government (see the Zemstvo article).
After February Revolution In 1917, in connection with the creation of volost zemstvos, volost peasant self-government was abolished. After the October Revolution of 1917, volost peasant self-government again began to operate in modified forms and existed until the consolidation of volosts in 1918 - early 1920s. Despite the establishment of rural councils of peasant deputies (see the article Local Councils), real power at the rural level continued to belong to the traditional communal bodies of peasant self-government until the end of the 1920s. Village councils were actually executive bodies rural gatherings (still consisting of householders) and, at least in 1917 - early 1920s, were elected by them. Peasant self-government ceased to exist along with the liquidation of the community during collectivization.
Lit.: Proceedings of the Commission for the Transformation of Volost Courts. St. Petersburg, 1873-1874. T. 1-7; Leontyev A. A. Volost court and legal customs of peasants. St. Petersburg, 1895; History of destinies over a century of their existence. St. Petersburg, 1901. T. 2; Brzhesky N.K. Essays on the legal life of peasants. St. Petersburg, 1902; Strakhovsky I.M. Peasant rights and institutions. St. Petersburg, 1904; Druzhinin N. M. State peasants and the reform of P. D. Kiselev. M., 1946-1958. T. 1-2; Osokina E. A. Office documentation of peasant self-government bodies of post-reform Russia // Peasantry of the Central Industrial Region. Kalinin, 1984; Zyryanov P. N. Peasant community of European Russia, 1907-1914 M., 1992; Local self-government in Russia. Domestic historical experience. Sat. documents (1861-1917). M., 1998; Vronsky O. G. Peasant community at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries: Management structure, land relations, law and order. Tula, 1999; Frenkel 3. G. Volost self-government. M., 1999; Local government in Altai. 1747-1919: Sat. documents. Barnaul, 2003; Sokolova N.V. Peasant self-government in Central Russia in the 20s of the 18th century. // Historical notes. M., 2004. Issue. 7; Yakhshiyan O. Yu. Community self-government and councils: local government in a Russian village in the 1920s M., 2006.