Land Reform in Russia, 1906-1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin's Project of Rural Transformation 1280445297, 9781280445293

Table of contents :
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Contents
Plates
Figures
Tables
A Note on Archives
Glossary of Terms
INTRODUCTION
Modernization from above
Reform Theory and Practice
The 'New History' of the Russian Peasantry
Towards a Model of Peasant Interaction with the Stolypin Reform
The Structure of this Book
THE LAND REFORM AS ADMINISTRATIVE UTOPIA
The Institutional and Legal Setting
'A Liking for Squares'
Diverging Views at the Centre
Exhibiting the Reform
Post-1910 Reinterpretations of the Reform
OPEN FIELDS, SCATTERED STRIPS, AND REPARTITIONS
The Economic Utility of Fragmentation and Repartition in Russia's Land Communes
Repartition in Russia's Land Communes
Strip Widening and Land Consolidation in the Commune
Differentiation in the Commune
FREE RIDERS AND VILLAGE- WIDE CONSOLIDATIONS
The Reform takes off
Title Changes: Fixing Inequality in the Commune
'Pioneer Husbandmen' - Individual Separations from the Commune
The 'Free-Rider Problem' and the Development of Community-wide Enclosures
'THE GOVERNMENT IS FOR US, Otrubniki'
Land Settlement Officials in the Provinces
Capturing Peasants for the Reform
Over-Zealousness at the Local Level
Intimidation and Force
Land Settlement Commissions and the Quality of Enclosed Farms
EVERYDAY FORMS OF RESISTANCE TO THE STOLYPIN REFORM
Resistance in the Middle Ground
Everyday Means of Resisting Individual Separations
Peasant Collective Institutions and Resistance to Enclosure
Revealing the Hidden Transcript
Heroes and Villains
PEASANT MODIFICATION AND ADAPTATION OF THE REFORM
The Numerical Results
The Impact of Title Changes in the Commune
The Impact of Land Settlement Projects on Land-Holding Practices in the Commune
Fictitious Khutora
The Stability of the New Land-Holding Forms
FARMING IN THE IMMEDIATE POST-ENCLOSURE YEARS
The Costs of Consolidating Allotment Land
The Pasture Question.
Lessons from Pre-1906 Khutora
Arable Husbandry on Stolypin's Farms
Agricultural Aid to Enclosed Farmers
Conclusion
Index

Citation preview

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Land Reform in Russia 1906–1917

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Land Reform in Russia 1906–1917 Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation

JUDITH PALLOT

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD 1999

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Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Judith Pallot 1999 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First published 1999 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press. Within the UK, exceptions are allowed in respect of any fair dealing for the purpose of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of the licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms and in other countries should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Pallot, Judith. Land reform in Russia, 1906–1917 : peasant responses to Stolypin’s project of rural transformation / Judith Pallot. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Land reform—Russia—History. 2. Russia—Economic conditions—1861–1917. 3. Russia—Rural conditions. I. Title. HD1333.R9P36 1998 333.3′147—dc21 98–33244 ISBN 0 –19 – 820656 – 9 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset in 10/12pt Ehrhardt by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Bookcraft Ltd., Midsomer Norton Nr. Bath Somerset

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To My Parents

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 Research for this book was supported by the British Academy, the British Council, and Christ Church, the University of Oxford. I am grateful for the encouragement and assistance given me during my research visits to Russia by colleagues in the Institute of Geography, the Institute of History, and the Institute of Ethnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and to staff in the various archives in which I worked. I am, of course, also grateful to Jeremy and Julia for their support and tolerance during the writing of this book.

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 List of Plates List of Figures List of Tables A Note on Archives Glossary of Terms 1 Introduction Modernization from above Reform theory and practice The ‘new history’ of the Russian peasantry Towards a model of peasant interaction with the Stolypin Reform The structure of this book 2 The Land Reform as Administrative Utopia The institutional and legal setting ‘A liking for squares’ Diverging views at the centre Exhibiting the Reform Post-1910 reinterpretations of the Reform 3 Open Fields, Scattered Strips, and Repartitions The economic utility of fragmentation and repartition in Russia’s land communes Strip widening and land consolidation in the commune Differentiation in the commune 4 Free Riders and Village-Wide Consolidations The Reform takes off Title changes: fixing inequality in the commune ‘Pioneer husbandmen’—individual separations from the commune The ‘free-rider problem’ and the development of community-wide enclosures

ix x xi xiii xv 1 2 6 15 19 27 31 34 37 43 48 61 69 75 85 90 95 95 105 113 117

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viii

Contents

5 ‘The Government is for us, Otrubniki’ Land settlement officials in the provinces Capturing peasants for the reform Over-zealousness at the local level Intimidation and force Land settlement commissions and the quality of enclosed farms

127 127 133 138 143 146

6 Everyday Forms of Resistance to the Stolypin Reform

156

Resistance in the middle ground Everyday means of resisting individual separations Peasant collective institutions and resistance to enclosure Revealing the hidden transcript Heroes and villains

161 166 171 180 184

7 Peasant Modification and Adaptation of the Reform

189

The numerical results The impact of title changes in the commune The impact of land settlement projects on land-holding practices in the commune Fictitious khutora The stability of the new land-holding forms

190 194

8 Farming in the Immediate Post-Enclosure Years The costs of consolidating allotment land The pasture question Lessons from pre-1906 khutora Arable husbandry on Stolypin’s farms Agricultural aid to enclosed farmers

201 213 217 219 219 224 230 233 241

Conclusion

248

Index

253

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 I

A khutor in Vladimir province formed as a result of an individual separation in Kolesnia Village (from Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910gg. Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia, St Petersburg, 1911) 52

II

A khutor under construction in Sloboda village, Vitebsk province (from Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910gg. Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia, St Petersburg, 1911)

III A khutor in Mariupol’skii uezd, Ekaterinoslav province, formed in a whole-village consolidation (from Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910gg. Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia, St Petersburg, 1911) IV

Stone clearance on enclosed and unenclosed land in Luzhskii uezd, St Petersburg province (from Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910gg. Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia, St Petersburg, 1911)

53

54

55

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 1 Ground plan of Novosel’ka village, Toropetskii uezd, Pskov province, before enclosure

50

2 Ground plan of Novosel’ka Village, Toropetskii uezd, Pskov province, after enclosure

51

3 An example of inter-village land fragmentation in Tula and Riazan provinces involving the land of two peasant communes and one private landowner

70

4 An example of intra-village land fragmentation involving the land of nineteen households in Posol’che settlement, Vil’no province

71

5 The geographical distribution of enclosed farms in European Russia formed under the provisions of the 9 November 1906 Edict and subsequent land reform legislation

98

6 The geographical distribution of tenure changes in European Russia made under the provisions of the 9 November 1906 Edict and subsequent land reform legislation

99

7 The geographical distribution of whole-community enclosures as a percentage of all enclosures in European Russia, 1906 –1914

100

8 The geographical distribution of group land settlement as a percentage of all land settlement projects in European Russia, 1906–1914

101

9 The pattern of enclosure in Ustiuzhenskii uezd, Novgorod province, showing the distribution of individual separations, whole-community enclosures and group land settlement projects

102

10

11

Ground plan of the distribution of land belonging to five villages in Koz’modem’iamskii uezd, Kazan province, before group land settlement

202

Ground plan of the distribution of land belonging to five villages in Koz’modem’iamskii uezd, Kazan province, after group land settlement

203

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 1 Official statistics for tenure changes and land reorganizations

191

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    The following archives were used for this work: GARF Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Russkoi Federatsii RGIA Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv TsGIA SPb Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Sankt-Petersburga TsMAM Tsentral’nyi Munitsipal’nyi Arkhiv Moskvy

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   arshin desyatina

measurement of land equal to 71 cms measurement of land equal to 1.09 hectares or 2.7 acres gruppovoe zemleustroistvo group land settlement guberniia province (subdivided into uezdy and volosti) khutor unitary farm in which total consolidation achieved nadel peasant allotment land obshchina peasant land commune otrub unitary farm in which partial consolidation achieved peredel land repartition razverstanie enclosure of the land of all the members of a commune sazhen’ measurement of length equivalent to 2.13 ms. sel’skoe obshchestvo rural society skod village or commune assembly of heads of households uezd administrative subdivision of a province uchastkovoe zemleustroistvo unitary enclosure or land settlement versta measurement of distance equivalent to 0.66 miles volost’ administrative subdivision of a uezd vydelenie separation of one or more members from a commune zemleustroistvo land settlement or reorganization zemstvo elected assembly of local government

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1 INTRODUCTION During a brief period between 1906 and 1914 the tsarist state attempted to transform rural Russia and to implant in the countryside a new type of husbandman. Petr Stolypin described the new peasant and how he would emerge in the Russian countryside thus: if we were to provide the diligent farmer . . . with a separate plot of land taken from the state domains or the land fund of the Peasant Land Bank, making sure that there was adequate water and that it satisfied all the other requirements for proper cultivation, then . . . there would arise an independent, prosperous husbandman, a stable citizen of the land.1

This statement of hope encapsulates the essence of the ambitious project of social engineering known as the Stolypin Land Reform. Its central thesis was that ‘diligent farmers’ would be able to realize their full potential only when they were granted independence from the commune and a separate plot of land on which to farm. Once this had been achieved, all else would follow as a matter of course—a prosperous agriculture and the social integration of the Russian peasant. The image of Stolypin’s husbandman was radical and contrasted strongly with society’s existing understanding of the peasantry. In the nineteenth century the peasant had been the subject of a succession of different social constructions which have been described in Cathy Frierson’s pioneering book.2 The peasant appeared as a primordial being and the carrier of a ‘great truth’, as ‘judge’, as ‘man of the land’, and, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as a ‘grey mass’. It was in opposition to the last of these constructions—the grey peasant—that the independent husbandman began to enter the imaginative universe of some of Russia’s agrarian and social reformers. They shared with their contemporaries the belief that the peasants’ current state was one of backwardness and ‘benightedness’, but they were convinced that these deficiencies could be transcended under appropriate conditions. However, the peasants would need guidance; 1 Quoted in G. L. Yaney, ‘The Imperial Russian Government and the Stolypin Land Reform’, Ph.D. thesis (Princeton, 1961), 132. 2 C. A. Frierson, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York, 1993).

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Introduction

they would have to be coaxed into sharing the reformers’ vision of themselves as independent husbandmen and persuaded that it was possible to live outside the womb of village society and mir. With this aim in view, the state set about the task of educating Russian peasants in the need to become independent and of providing them with the means to realize this vision. This book is an exploration of how, nearly one hundred years on and at a time when a Russian government is again trying to create an ‘independent peasantry’ in rural Russia, we can understand the peasants’ response to this invitation.

Modernization from above The legislation that bears the name of the Stolypin Land Reform was introduced in response to the immediate crisis for the tsarist state of the 1905 Revolution and the longer-term crisis in rural Russia of poverty, famines, agrarian backwardness, and political instability.3 It was one of a series of measures introduced during the first decade of the century which in different ways addressed these problems, but for a while it was dominant. The purpose for which it became known was the creation of a new agrarian structure for Russia based upon individual ownership of land and enclosure. Under the terms of the reform, peasant households were given the right to leave their communes, taking their land with them, and to set up their own physically enclosed farms. The law allowed for this change to be effected in a variety of different ways, individually or collectively, and on the basis of existing peasant allotment land or on land made available for purchase through the Peasant Land Bank. The process of change envisioned in the laws was bound to be prolonged and difficult because a majority of peasant households in Russia belonged to communities in which land 3 There is an unresolved debate among historians about the extent of peasant poverty. The conventional view, that the nineteenth century was witness to a decline in peasant living standards, has been challenged in J. Y. Simms, ‘The Crisis in Russian Agriculture at the End of the Nineteenth Century. A Different View’, Slavic Review, 36 (1977), 377–98. There is support for the thesis that the peasants’ standard of living was on an upward curve in R. E. Smith and D. Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia (Cambridge, 1985) and P. Gregory, Russian National Income, 1885–1913 (Cambridge, 1982). But other scholars have drawn attention to regional differences in peasant standards of living. See S. Wheatcroft, ‘Crisis and the Condition of the Peasantry in Late Imperial Russia’, in E. Kingston-Mann and T. Mixter (eds.), Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921 (Princeton, 1991), 128–72; E. Wilbur, ‘Peasant Poverty in Theory and Practice: A View from the Impoverished Center at the end of the Nineteenth Century’. in Kingston-Mann and Mixter (eds.), Peasant Economy, 101–27. The debate is discussed in J. Bushnell, ‘Peasant Economy and Peasant Revolution at the Turn of the Century. Neither Immizeration nor Autonomy’, Russian Review, 47 (1988), 75–88.

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3

was held in communal tenure (obshchinnoe zemlevladenie). These communities were characterized by a complex mixture of land use rights and often by intense land fragmentation. The land commune, or obshchina, the name given in the nineteenth century by educated Russians to such communities, was analogous to the European open field village but, in Russia, it had been vested by the state with additional fiscal and administrative functions. The replacement of the commune would require far-reaching changes to be made in existing land-holding regimes in the countryside. The legal and physical aspects of these changes were provided for in the Imperial Edict of 9 November 1906, and laws of 14 June 1910 and 29 May 1911.4 The Ministry of Agriculture was restructured to become the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture (Glavnoe Upravlenie Zemleustroistva i Zemledeliia) and, within it, an inter-collegial committee was established to head the land reform, the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs (Komitet po Zemleustroitel’nym Delam). A network of provincial and county land settlement commissions, subordinate to the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs, was formed to administer the reform at the local level and a centralized inspectorate was set up to oversee their work.5 The land reform described above existed within the context of other legislative and organizational measures that Nicholas II’s government introduced in the first decade of the century, aiming to solve the agrarian problem. Those that most obviously supported the land reform were the abolition of joint responsibility for paying taxes (12 March 1903), the reduction and cancellation of the redemption debt (3 November 1905), and reforms to the administration of the Peasant Land Bank and the Ministry of Agriculture (4 March 1906) but there were also other measures, such as the resettlement programme in Siberia and the funding of agricultural extension services, which were aimed more generally at relieving peasant 4 For the politics surrounding the introduction of the reform and the debates about it in the Duma, see M. S. Conroy, Peter Arkad’evich Stolypin: Practical Politics in Late Tsarist Russia (Boulder, Colo., 1976); R. Hennessy, The Agrarian Question in Russia, 1905–1907: The Inception of the Stolypin Reform, Marburger Abhandlungen zur Geschichte und Kultur Osteuropas, Band 16 (Giessen, 1977); G. A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment. Government and Duma 1907–1914 (Cambridge, 1973); R. T. Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia. Gentry and Government (Princeton, 1982), G. Tokmakoff, P. A. Stolypin and the Third Duma: An Appraisal of Three Major Issues (Lanham, 1981), P. Waldron, Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia (London, 1998). 5 The most exhaustive account of the land reform administration and some discussion of the laws is to be found in G. Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia 1861–1930 (Urbana, Ill., 1982). The Ministry of Internal Affairs journal, Izvestiia Zemskogo Otdela, for the period 1906 to 1917 contains commentaries on the laws.

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Introduction

poverty.6 The land reform itself was the quintessence of a modernizing reform and it possessed many similarities with other state-directed attempts in the twentieth century to introduce private, ‘enclosed’ farming into preindustrial societies.7 It derived its rationale from an opposition that was supposed by its authors to exist between two land-holding systems. One, the ‘communal system’, was held to be backward because of its traditional association with extensive rotations, simple technologies, and subsistence production, and the other, ‘individualized farming’, was held to be progressive because of its association with intensive rotations, modern technologies, and commercially oriented production. These ideas, which one historian of English agriculture has termed ‘agrarian fundamentalism’, had first entered Russia from Europe during the reign of Catherine the Great.8 From that time on there was a steadily growing conviction among some educated Russians of the superiority of private over communal property as a stimulant to achievement. By the first decade of the twentieth century, and spurred on by events in 1905, a sufficient number of officials in Nicholas II’s government shared this conviction for it to find its way into official state policy. Theorists of the land reform believed that the transition from communal to individual farming would have taken place in Russia in the normal course of events had it not been for Russia’s special circumstances (most notably the provisions of the 1861 Emancipation) which had kept peasants bound to communal forms of land-holding. But it was the Russian peasantry’s destiny to move along the same path towards farm individualization as its West European counterpart. The main problem for the state in setting peasants off along this path was overcoming their ignorance of more rational alternatives to the traditional land-holding systems. Thus, the new bureaucracy created to administer the reform was charged with the task of ‘familiarizing’ the peasants with the advantages of enclosed farming and with helping any progressive individuals who came forward to make the legal and physical changes needed to become 6 The various legislative acts supporting and complementing the reform are discussed in Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, and J. T. Robinson, Rural Russia Under the Old Regime: A Study of the Landlord Peasant World and a Prologue to the Peasant Revolution of 1917 (Berkeley, Calif., 1967). On the migration policy see D. W. Treadgold, The Great Siberian Migration (Princeton, 1957). 7 T. Shanin, Defining Peasants: Essays Concerning Rural Societies, Expolar Economies, and Learning from them in the Contemporary World (Oxford, 1990), 126–36. 8 C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford, 1992). On the introduction of concepts of private property into Russia, see O. Crisp, ‘Peasant Land Tenure and Civil Rights Implications before 1906’, in O. Crisp and L. Edmondson (eds.), Civil Rights in Imperial Russia (Oxford, 1989) and W. G. Wagner, Marriage, Property and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford, 1994).

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individual farmers. Once enlightened through education and example to the possibilities of organizing their farms differently, it was thought that the majority of Russia’s peasants would greet the reform enthusiastically. It followed from the reform’s underlying assumptions that to make the conceptual leap needed to appreciate the superior rationality of individual farms the peasants had to turn their backs on the commune. The language of the Stolypin Land Reform was thus of peasants ‘escaping’ or ‘withdrawing’ from their communes. The initial expectation of the reform administration was that its local agents would be working primarily with small numbers of peasants. The reform allowed for the head of a peasant household to petition for sole ownership of the land to which the household was entitled in the commune (the procedure termed ukreplenie v lichnuiu sobstvennost’) and, in a separate act, to request that this land be consolidated into a single parcel to create a unitary farm. There was also provision for whole communities of peasants holding land in communal tenure to transfer their land into the private ownership of individual households and to enclose the strips belonging to each member, although in 1906 it was not expected that there would be many instances of such communal take-up of the reform. The legislators did not underestimate the difficulties individual peasants would have in persuading their parent communes to let them enclose land and they expected that a majority of requests for an enclosed farm would have to be satisfied by resettling the peasants on land purchased from the Peasant Land Bank with the proceeds from the sale of private strips.9 The initial provisions of the Stolypin Reform contained in the 9 November 1906 Edict were extended in the laws of 14 June 1910 and 29 May 1911 to reflect the experience of the previous years.10 Under these, tenure changes in some communes were made automatic, new provisions were introduced compelling communities to enclose their members’ land, and the types of physical land reorganization for which peasants could request help from land settlement commissions were clearly laid out and categorized. Group land settlement (gruppovoe zemleustroistvo), which rearranged land at the intercommunal level without changing its legal status, made its appearance in the 1911 Law on Land Settlement, carefully differentiated from unitary land settlement (uchastkovoe zemleustroistvo) which enclosed and changed title to individual households’ land. The different measures made possible 9

Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, 281–7. Key sections from the law are to be found in S. M. Sidelnikov, Agrarnia reforma Stolypina (Moscow, 1973). 10

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Introduction

in the land reform laws were intended to be interlinked; title changes were a preliminary step towards the consolidation of land into unitary farms, as was group land settlement, and individual separations where small groups of households or individuals enclosed land were supposed, through example, to lead on to village-wide enclosures. Preliminary stages could be skipped as the law provided for whole communities to change title to their land and enclose as a single act. Thus it was that individualized peasant farms could be arrived at by following a variety of different routes, but the legislators were convinced that whichever route was chosen the end result of engagement with the reform would always be same. In summary, the thinking behind the land reform was that Russian peasant farming was on a linear course of development taking it towards the type of farming system based upon private property and enclosure that existed in the West. It is not surprising that such a reform should have been the chosen solution to the agrarian crisis in Russia since the view that the country was a ‘backward version of the West’ had become the dominant paradigm among the educated elite by the turn of the century.11 This paradigm provided the analytical framework for the interpretation of the reform’s results by Nicholas II’s government and also by the majority of historians commenting on it during the next half-century.

Reform Theory and Practice The officials charged with administering the Stolypin Reform had to call upon all their resources of imagination to explain the reform’s results, because events unfolded in a manner at odds with their initial expectations. Most significantly, the sequence of individual separations leading on to village-wide enclosures did not take place. Instead, almost immediately its operations got under way, the land reform administration found itself having to deal with communes which voted en masse to form unitary farms without any apparent need for more progressive individuals to show the way. As a result, the enclosures that land settlement commissions were called upon to supervise far exceeded the number that had been planned for, and the administration had to respond by expanding its qualified agents in the field.12 Furthermore, enclosures did not cluster in obvious ‘diffusion centres’ as had been expected. Beyond a general tendency for above 11 E. Kingston-Mann, ‘Breaking the Silence: An Introduction’, in Kingston-Mann and Mixter, Peasant Economy, 3–19. 12 The recruitment and training of land reform agents is described in Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, 339.

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average numbers of petitions to originate in a broad belt of provinces in the north-west and an arc of provinces in the south and east of European Russia, there was no clear geographical pattern to enclosure and tenure change. At the local level, villages in which consolidation had taken place could be surrounded by other villages in which no moves had been made in that direction and this apparent randomness was repeated at the level of the county, or uezd.13 There were other respects in which the reform failed to perform to plan; the majority of households claiming title to land in the commune showed little inclination to request reorganization and enclosure of their now private strips into unitary farms, whilst the households that did petition for enclosure seemed content with an only partial gathering in of the land to which they were entitled. There was also a near universal failure in village-led enclosures for farmsteads physically to be dispersed and there was a tendency for resources in common use, such as pastures and meadows, to remain in common. In short, the reform did not realize its promise of creating fully individualized farms which had severed their ties with all elements of the traditional communal organization of land-holding. The departure of the reform from its predicted course did not cause those involved in its implementation to question the assumptions upon which the land reform policy was based or the belief that the legislative changes had unlocked a natural ‘evolutionary’ tendency away from communal towards independent husbandry. Village-wide enclosures were welcomed as evidence of the reform’s mass appeal and of the peasants’ readiness to quit the commune, even though these claims were contradicted by many of the other features of the peasants’ response. The official record of the reform did not encourage detailed interrogation of the discrepancies between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. Numerous statistical tables were produced in the period between 1906 and 1917 which carefully recorded the stages involved in processing applications for various types of land reorganization, but no systematic collection of socio-economic data relating to applicants for consolidation or their post-enclosure histories was made. It is unlikely that the administration was consciously seeking to conceal a difficult truth from the public; it was simply that, given its linear view of agrarian development, it seemed reasonable to count any engagement with the reform as evidence of a peasant having set out on the path leading towards individualization, even if many insisted on taking some 13 J. Pallot and D. J. B. Shaw, Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia (Oxford, 1990), ch. 7.

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of the baggage of the old order along with them. By the time the outbreak of World War I effectively brought the organization’s work to a halt, the land reform’s achievements could be presented in a positive light. With between a quarter and a half of all Russian peasant farms now holding their land in some form of individual tenure, serious inroads seem to have been made into the commune, and enclosure, albeit developing more slowly, had rearranged the land of some 8 to 10 per cent of all households. Considerably greater numbers had been exposed to the reform through group land settlement projects. All this had been achieved during an effective period of operation of about nine years between 1907 and 1915.14 The conclusions the administration reached about the achievements of the Stolypin Reform have been shared by historians of Russia working within a similar ‘modernization paradigm’. The most enthusiastic commentators have been émigré historians, who sought to demonstrate that Russia prior to the outbreak of war was indeed on a ‘Western’ path of development.15 Their assessments found favour with other historians.16 Latterly, post-Soviet Russia has also provided receptive ground for positive evaluations of the reform’s achievement, although this has been largely in the popular rather than the scholarly literature.17 Other historians have been critical of the reform or have doubted its ability to transform Russian agriculture in the twenty years Stolypin said it would require. However, as in 14 From the outbreak of the war the reform organization suspended much of its work in forming enclosed farms to concentrate instead on group land settlement projects. 15 Among the first generation of commentators who made a very positive assessment of the reform’s achievements were: A. D. Bilimovich, ‘The Land Settlement in Russia and the War’, in N. Antsiferov, et al. (eds.), Russian Agriculture during the War (New Haven, 1930; New York, 1968); B. Pares, ‘The New Land Settlement in Russia’, Russian Review, 1 (1912), 56–74; G. Pavlovsky, Agricultural Russia on the Eve of Revolution (London, 1930; New York, 1968); W. D. Preyer, Die Russische Agrarreform (Jena, 1914). The Soviet historian P. N. Pershin’s first book on the reform was also positive: P. N. Pershin, Uchastkovoe zemlepol’zovanie v Rossii. Khutora i otruba, ikh rasprostranenie za desiatiletie 1907–1916. Sud’by vo vremiia revoliutsii (1917–1920 gg.) (Moscow, 1922). 16 Positive assessments of the reform’s achievements are to be found in the following general histories: R. Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (London, 1974), 169; H. Seton-Watson, The Decline of Imperial Russia (Frome, 1964), 277; R. Charques, The Twilight of Imperial Russia (Oxford, 1965); N. V. Ryazanovsky, A History of Russia, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1984), 433; H. Willets, ‘The Agrarian Question’, in G. Katkov (ed.), Russia Enters the Twentieth Century 1894–1917 (London, 1971). 17 Since the collapse of the USSR Stolypin’s historiographic fortunes have changed. Under the Soviet regime Stolypin was castigated for his repressive policies; now he is heralded as the politician who could have saved Russia from Revolution. David Macey has analysed postSoviet works on Stolypin in D. Macey, ‘Stolypin is Risen! The Ideology of Agrarian Reform in Contemporary Russia’, in D. Van Atta (ed.), The Farmer Threat (Boulder, Colo., 1993),

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the works supportive of the reform’s aims and achievements, critics of the reform have not challenged its underlying assumptions. Soviet historians, for example, were critical of the reform, but their criticism was of the type of agrarian modernization it sought to impose on Russia. Following Lenin, they identified in the reform a conscious attempt on the part of Nicholas II’s government to protect the interests of the large landowners by propelling Russia along a Prussian path of agrarian capitalism.18 Soviet historians did not doubt that the reform was ‘progressive’, but they maintained that preferable alternatives were available which would have caused less pain to Russia’s poorest peasants. Much of the Soviet intellectual effort was devoted to analysing the impact of the reform on the evolving class structure of the Russian village. The conclusions reached were predictable; the reform accelerated the process of socio-economic differentiation in the village and intensified the class conflict that was finally to erupt in 1917.19 Unlike those writing exclusively for a popular audience, post-Soviet professional historians are still broadly critical of the Stolypin Reform, whilst 97–120. This includes a bibliography of recent works on Stolypin in the post-Soviet press. Among the Stolypin hagiographies are: M. P. Bok, P. A. Stolypin: vospominaniia o moem ottse (Moscow, 1992); I. Dia’kov, ‘Stolypin’, Literaturnaia rossiia, 14 July 1989, and subsequent correspondence on 8 September 1989; A. Stolypin, P. A. Stolypin 1862–1911 (Paris, 1991) and ‘Stolypinskaia reforma’, in V. Zheliagin and N. Rutych (eds.), Rossiia v epokhu reform. Sbornik statei (Posev, 1981), 236–57; A. V. Zenkovsky, Stolypin. Russia’s Last Great Reformer (Princeton, 1986); ‘Stolypin mezhdu levymi i pravami’, Rossiiskie Vesti, 18 (1991), 8–9. As Macey observes, much of the comment on the land reform is linked to debates about the future of post-Soviet agriculture. See, for example, Yu. M. Borodai, ‘Komu byt’ vladel’tsem zemli?’ Nash Sovremennik, 3 (1990), 113–23, and D. Macey, ‘Gorbachev and Stolypin: Soviet Agrarian Reform in Historical Perspective’, Comparative Economic Studies, 32 (1990), 7–28. 18 There are several discussions of Lenin’s concept of agrarian development in Russia. The most accessible are in E. Kingston-Mann, Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution (New York, 1983), and A. Hussein and K. Tribe, Marxism and the Agrarian Question: Russian Marxism and the Peasantry 1861–1930, vol. 2 (London, 1981). Theodor Shanin has also written at length on this topic. See T. Shanin, Russia as Developing Society: The Roots of Otherness: Russia’s Turn of Century, vol. 1 (Basingstoke, 1985) and T. Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road (New York, 1983). 19 The ‘classic’ Soviet texts on the Stolypin Land Reform are S. M. Dubrovskii, Stolypinskaia zemel’naia reforma. Iz istorii sel’skogo khoziaistva i krest’ianstva Rossii v nachale xx veka (Moscow, 1963); S. M. Dubrovskii, ‘K voprosu ob urovne razvitiia kapitalizma v sel’skom khoziaistve v Rossii i klassovoi bor’be v derevne v periode imperializma (dve sotsial’nye voini)’, in S. M. Dubrovskii, et al. (eds.), Osobennosti agrarnogo stroia Rossii v periode imperializma (Moscow, 1962); P. N. Efremov, Stolypinskaia agrarnaia politika (Moscow, 1941); G. A. Gerasimenko, ‘Vliianie posledstvii Stolypinskoi agrarnoi reformy na krest’ianskie organizatsiia 1917 g.’, Istoriia SSSR, 1 (1981), 37–54; G. A. Gerasimenko, ‘Obostrenie bor’by v derevne v gody Stolypinskoi reformy’, Voprosi Istorii, 4 (1983), 20–34; G. A. Gerasimenko, Bor’ba krest’ian protiv Stolypinskoi agrarnoi politiki (Saratov, 1985); S. M. Sidel’nikov, Agrarnaia politika samoderzhaviia v periode imperializma (Moscow, 1980).

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acknowledging its historically progressive character, and they continue to approach the analysis of its results from a class perspective.20 Some authors have taken issue with the Leninist identification of the reform as the ‘Prussian path’ and have suggested that, on the contrary, it represented an attempt to propel Russia to capitalism along the ‘American path’. Thus, a post-Soviet school text reads as follows: ‘In objective-historical terms, the Stolypin Land Reform was progressive. It was begun “from above” but it accorded with the natural processes taking place in the Russian village. The reform was designed to create efficient farms along American lines.’21 P. N. Zyrianov, the leading historian of the reform, on the other hand, maintains that its purpose was to create a class of cheap labourers for landowner estates in the latifundia/minifundia model of dependent capitalist countries.22 To this end, he maintains, it set out to destroy the land commune, the creation of the independent husbandman remaining a secondary concern. Needless to say, liberal Western historians have not been in sympathy with the strictly materialist approach of Soviet historians, but nor have they challenged the modernization tenets of the reform’s original theorists. Indeed, among historians in the West there has been a broad acceptance that the sort of transformations the Stolypin Reform sought to make in Russian peasant farming were needed. Their critique has principally consisted of doubting whether the measures introduced were sufficient to overcome the severity of the problems that existed in rural Russia, especially in the central farming regions where poverty and land-hunger were most acute. To the extent that it has addressed the question of the peasant reception of the reform, the Western critique has concentrated on identifying the structural, physical, and legal obstacles standing in the way of 20 A. M. Anfimov, ‘Ten’ Stolypina nad Rossii’, Istoriia SSSR, 4 (1991), 112–21; A. M. Anfimov, ‘On the History of the Russian Peasantry at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century’, Russian Review, 51 (1992), 396–407; V. V. Kabanov, ‘Puti i bezdorozhie agrarnogo razvitiia Rossii v xx veke’, Voprosi istorii, 2 (1993), 34–46; A. P. Korelin, ‘The Social Problem in Russia, 1906–1914: The Stolypin Agrarian Reform’, in T. Taranovski, Reform in Russian History: Progress or Cycle? (New York, 1995), 139–62; I. D. Kovalchenko, ‘Stolypinskaia agrarnaia reforma. Mify i real’nost’ ’, Istoriia SSSR, 2 (1991); P. N. Zyrianov, Stolypin bez legend (Moscow, 1991). See also David Macey’s discussion of recent Russian works: D. Meisi, ‘Zemel’naia reforma i politicheskie peremeny; fenomen Stolypina’ Voprosi Istorii, 4 (1993), 3–18. 21 S. V. Kuleshov (ed.), Nashe otechestvo. Opyt’ politicheskoi istorii (Moscow, 1991), 224. V. S. Dia’kin was among the few Soviet historians who prior to the USSR’s collapse contested Lenin’s analysis of the reform as the ‘Prussian path’: V. S. Diakin, Krizis samoderzhaviia v Rossii 1895–1917 (Leningrad, 1984) and ‘Byl li shans u Stolypina?’, Zvezda, 12 (1990). 22 See P. N. Zyrianov, ‘Petr Arkad’evich Stolypin’, Voprosi Istorii, 6 (1990).

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the peasants enclosing their land.23 This focus has left little room for serious discussion of the balance of advantage and disadvantage for households contemplating adopting the reform; enclosure, it has been assumed, was obviously desirable if only the tsarist government had moved to eliminate the obstacles frustrating its development. Another strand in the Western critique of the reform has questioned the reliability of the official statistics and concluded that less serious inroads were made into Russia’s traditional agrarian structure than previously thought.24 This finding has added grist to the mill of those who have preferred to sit on the fence where the reform’s results are concerned and to argue that it operated for too short a period for any reliable evaluation to be made of its potential for transforming rural Russia.25 There are two historians who, whilst not questioning the linear assumptions of the Stolypin Reform’s theorists, have taken the analysis of its results further than others and have not been content simply to overlook the divergence between the reform’s theory and practice. On the contrary, they have maintained that it is necessary to focus attention on these divergences in order properly to understand the evolving relationship between the state and peasants during the period of the reform. Their work serves as an important reminder that land reform is a social process involving complex interactions between people and agencies, each with agendas that might or might not coincide. Land reform, in other words, cannot be understood simply as a series of legislative acts which the intended recipients either accept or reject. Excluding situations in which coercion is used to impose measures on an unwilling population, there is usually room for negotiation, accommodation, and changing priorities on the part of those involved. This is exactly what David Macey and George Yaney, though 23 A. Moritsch, Landwirtschaft und agrarpolitik in Russland vor der revolution (Vienna, 1986); W. E. Mosse, ‘Stolypin’s Villages’, Slavonic and East European Review, 43 (1965), 257–74; J. Pallot, ‘Open Fields and Individual Farms: Land Reform in Pre-revolutionary Russia,’ Tidschrift voor ekonomische en socialie geografie, 75 (1984), 46–60; J. T. Robinson, Rural Russia Under the Old Regime. 24 D. Atkinson, ‘The Statistics on the Russian Land Commune, 1905–1917’, Slavic Review, 32 (1973), 773–87; D. Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune, 1905–1930 (Stanford, Calif., 1983); A. Jones, Late-Imperial Russia. An Interpretation: Three Visions, Two Cultures, One Peasantry (Berne, 1997). 25 Moritsch, Landwirtschaft und agrarpolitik. The majority of recent economic and political histories of the Russian Revolution give a cautious assessment of the reform’s achievements. See, for example, S. Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1994), 36; P. W. Gattrell, The Tsarist Economy, 1850–1917 (London, 1986), 124; G. Hosking, Russia. People and Empire 1552–1917 (London, 1997), 434–56.; R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution. 1899–1919 (London, 1992), 175–7; H. Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernization and Revolution 1881–1917 (London, 1983); R. Service, The Russian Revolution 1900–1927 (Basingstoke, 1986), 21.

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arguing from different standpoints, maintain happened during the course of the Stolypin Reform’s implementation in rural Russia. David Macey is principally known for his discussion of the intellectual history of the Stolypin Land Reform. In Government and Peasant in Russia 1861–1906: The Pre-History of the Stolypin Reforms, he charts the gestation of the idea of enclosure in discussions about the fate of the commune in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.26 This leads him to contest the view that it was the events of 1905 that convinced the government of the necessity of reform in the countryside.27 Macey contends that already in the decades preceding 1905 a ‘perceptual revolution’ had taken place among a critical number of government officials which had led them to reject the commune in favour of private peasant farms on grounds of economic efficiency and the needs of scientific agronomy. The 1905 Revolution, he argues, far from accelerating the adoption of enclosure in Russia, put the project back because it forced the government to elevate political over economic considerations in its response to the agrarian crisis. The pressure for speedy results meant that the land reform measures, rushed through in the 1906 Imperial Edict, lacked coherence and clear direction. A result of the ensuing confusion was that fertile ground was created for local anomalies to emerge in the reform’s development. Loopholes in the laws allowed peasants to exploit the land-reform legislation to prosecute long-standing disputes which had little to do with the original ideas of the agrarian modernizers. In the articles Macey has written since the publication of his major work, he has speculated about the nature of these disputes.28 He disagrees with Soviet authors that divisions in the village 26 D. J. Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia 1861–1906: The Prehistory of the Stolypin Reforms (De Kalb, Ill., 1987). The ideas in the book are also explored in: D. J. Macey, ‘Bureaucratic Solutions to the Peasant Problem: Before and After Stolypin’, Russian and East European History: Selected Papers from the Second World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), 73–95. A recent restatement of the thesis is in D. J. Macey, ‘Agricultural Reform and Political Change: the Case of Stolypin’, in T. Taranovski (ed.), Reform in Modern Russian History. Progress or Cycle (Cambridge, 1995), 163–89. 27 Statements of this view are to be found in: R. Hennessy, The Agrarian Question in Russia 1905–1907: The Inception of the Stolypin Reform (Giessen, 1977), 155; T. Shanin, Russia as a ‘Developing Society’. The Roots of Otherness: Russia’s Turn of the Century, vol. 1 (Basingstoke, 1985), 81; L. Volin, ‘The Russian Peasant: From Emancipation to Kolkhoz’, in C. Black (ed.), The Transformation of Russian Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 292–311. 28 D. J. Macey, ‘Government Actions and Peasant Reactions during the Stolypin Reforms’, in R. B. McKean (ed.), New Perspectives in Modern Russian History. Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, 1990 (Basingstoke, 1992), 133–73; D. J. Macey, ‘The Peasant Commune and the Stolypin Reforms: Peasant Attitudes, 1906–1914’, in R. Bartlett ( ed.), Land Commune and Peasant Community in Russia. Communal Forms in Imperial and Early Soviet Society (Basingstoke, 1990), 219–36.

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over the land reform were class-based or that where the reform was resisted this represented an opposition to the principle of enclosure.29 He believes the divisions the reform exposed in the village had more to do with intergenerational and inter-familial rivalries than with differences in households’ socio-economic status. In the decade following the promulgation of the reform, the administration struggled to contain these divisions and to put the reform ‘back on track’. This, Macey believes, it had succeeded in doing by the out-break of World War I. The reassertion of the reform’s economic aims, in Macey’s view, meant that by 1914 there was a genuine prospect of agrarian modernization; he draws attention to the large number of applications for enclosure and other forms of land settlement outstanding at the time the reform drew to an end as evidence that it had set in motion irreversible changes in the Russian countryside.30 If for David Macey the gulf between the some aspects of reform theory and practice was a temporary aberration brought about by inconsistencies in the 1906 Imperial Edict, George Yaney’s approach is to deny that any such gulf existed once the reform got properly under way from about 1908. It is important to recall that Yaney’s principal purpose is to comment upon the nature of changes in the Russian bureaucracy; he is interested in the peasants’ responses to the reform only to the extent that they illuminate for him the attitudes of the administration to the task before it.31 Yaney’s argument, which is developed in The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia: 1861–1930, is that the bureaucrats in charge of the Stolypin Reform initially subscribed to an abstract vision of reform, but when this was rejected by the peasants, they adjusted their aims to correspond to the sort of agrarian restructuring they did want. Instead of meeting objections to the reform proposals with force in the traditional manner of the tsarist state, according to Yaney’s thesis, the new administration responded by changing its priorities to meet peasant demands for a limited land reform.32 In the convergence between the reform administration and the peasants about the type of changes that were needed in the village it was 29

Macey, ‘Government Actions and Peasant Reactions’, 163. D. J. Macey, ‘A Wager on History: The Stolypin Agrarian Reforms as Process’, in J. Pallot (ed.) Transforming Peasants: Society, State and the Peasantry, 1861–1930. Selected Papers from the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies, Warsaw, 1995. (Basingstoke, 1998), 149–73. 31 Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, 1. 32 The thesis which sparked most controversy was Yaney’s explanation for the state’s willingness to reach accommodation with the peasants in officials’ ‘urge to mobilize’—a sort of modernization impulse. Yaney explains the concept in the introduction to The Urge to Mobilize, 3–9. 30

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thus the state, not the peasants, which travelled the greatest distance. Essentially, the state ‘made its peace’ with reorganizations that fell far short of completely consolidated farms and which left intact some features of communal land-holding. But Yaney is not arguing that the state had taken a decision to preserve the traditional ‘communal’ order in the countryside since he believes the peasants themselves were intent upon modernization; it was simply that the peasants knew better than St Petersburg officials how best to achieve this. For Yaney, the Russian village community was an ‘outmoded’ and ‘collapsing’ institution which, when confronted by unrealistic government plans to transform it, summoned sufficient residual energy to organize the destruction of its own traditions.33 ‘In short,’ argues Yaney, ‘the villagers modernized themselves by resisting capitalcity society’s muddled attempts to modernize them. The reform worked despite itself.’34 The peasants were not, he insists, engaged in a defence of the old order. By focusing on the organizational changes in peasant land-holding that took place after 1906, Macey and Yaney have changed the centre of gravity in the debate about the land reform’s achievements. Among other things, they have demonstrated the difficulty of agreeing upon a universally acceptable criterion for measuring the reform’s performance; the problem is not that eleven years was too short a period for evaluation of the reform’s achievement but that, during those eleven years, the reform evolved in such a way as to render the original criteria for success irrelevant. The insistence of both authors that the peasants were not just passive recipients of state attempts to change them but played an active role in determining how the reform unfolded on the ground is an especially valuable corrective to earlier interpretations. But this insight has implications for how the reform is studied which Macey and Yaney recognize only partially. Once it is acknowledged that peasant preferences had an impact on the reform, it becomes necessary to investigate what these were—to try to fathom the peasants’ hopes, beliefs, and fears in relation to the challenges of the reform. It is not sufficient, for example, to conclude from the fact that peasants were able to persuade the administration to modify some of its more radical plans for enclosure that the reorganizations that subsequently took place were changes peasants actively desired. Such modifications may, in fact, have represented the best compromise the peasants could achieve from a state determined to transform them. Alternatively, as Macey concedes, the peasants’ engagement with the reform might well have been a by-product 33

Ibid., 194.

34

Ibid., 280–1.

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of their pursuit of agendas quite unrelated to any commitment to become independent husbandmen. Or again, the changes that were effected in landholding may have been vested by the peasants with meanings quite different from those the reform administration supposed them to be; changes which for the government reformers were understood as a first step along a path of agrarian transformation might have been understood quite differently by the peasants. In short, the meeting of minds in favour of a programme of farm modernization, for which both Macey and Yaney argue, is not the only conclusion that can be drawn from the interactions that took place between the state and peasants during the reform’s implementation in the countryside.

The ‘New History’ of the Russian Peasantry Recent research on Russian peasant society at the turn of the century provides an entry into the exploration of peasant responses to the Stolypin Land Reform. This research has rediscovered the nineteenth-century studies of the peasant and has used them to analyse a variety of aspects of the peasants’ ‘everyday life’ during periods of relative stability, as well as in periods of crisis.35 It is possible to speak today of a new paradigm in the study of the Russian peasantry which draws its inspiration more from the anthropological studies of James C. Scott, Clifford Geertz, and Eric Wolf than from the class analyses of Karl Kautsky or Lenin, or the development theory of W. A. Lewis and W. W. Rostow. The new paradigm recognizes the existence of a separate peasant world, which was governed by different rules and informed by different values from those of educated society.36 ‘[F]ar from being stupid and irrational as many literate outsiders seem to have believed,’ writes one advocate of the new history, ‘peasants 35 A discussion of the range of this new research can be found in B. Eklof, ‘Ways of Seeing: Recent Anglo-American Studies of the Russian Peasant (1861–1914)’, Jahrbücher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, 36 (1988), 57–79. As Eklof notes, the groundwork for the new history of the peasantry was laid in the research of a small number of scholars from Europe and America, such as Michael Confino, Theodor Shanin, Moshe Lewin and, it should be added, the Soviet ethnographer V. A. Aleksandrov and the historian V. P. Danilov. There are three edited volumes of collected essays about the peasantry: R. Bartlett (ed.), Land Commune and Peasant Community in Russia. Communal Forms in Imperial and Early Soviet Society (Basingstoke, 1990); B. Eklof and S. P. Frank (eds.), The World of the Russian Peasant. Post-Emancipation Culture and Society (London, 1990), and E. Kingston-Mann and T. Mixter (eds.) Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia 1800–1921 (Princeton, 1991). 36 In Scott’s work the concept of ‘moral economy’ is developed to describe this world. See J. C. Scott, Moral Economy of the Peasant. Rebellion and Subsistence in South-East Asia (London, 1976). The concept is frequently referred to in the ‘new history’ of the Russian peasant. It is also from Scott that historians of the Russian peasantry have borrowed the

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were simply different with their own logic and rationality. Peasants used cautious and pragmatic means to pursue their own self interest.’37 Only a few years ago historians would commonly describe Russian peasants as backward, possessors of ‘primitive minds’, who were simply bewildered by the pace of change in the nineteenth century. There are those who still seem to hold this view.38 However, nowadays most historians of Russia view peasant behaviour as a rational response to problems arising within the context of the politically powerless and economically precarious position in which peasants found themselves.39 In the recent literature, the emphasis is upon survival strategies, risk minimization, and the primacy in peasant motivation of securing household and community reproduction. These contrast with the profit-maximizing, risk-taking behaviours that, with industrial advance, began to dominate urban society in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the recent research, historians are reminded of the breadth of the divide separating society (obshchestvo) from the people (narod) in Russia. The peasants’ world was one in which community and household interests, whilst often pitched against one another, could also be elevated above those of the individual, in which the social calendar was related to the seasons and in which myth and magic were an integral part of relationships between people and the natural world. ‘Peasant behaviour’, writes Esther KingstonMann, ‘reveals the existence of a moral economy rooted in filial loyalty, fertility, social support and a measure of opportunity with the norms established by the community. Peasant culture reflected aspirations towards continuity and control within a world that was often arbitrary and insecure.’ 40 Peasant society was introspective and sought legitimacy for its codes of behaviour from the past, but it was not immune to outside influence. Government officials, local landowners, the market, and the army were all points of contact with the world beyond the village. In the nineteenth century, these contacts threatened to subvert the peasants’ world. But the peasants did have means for fighting back either overtly, through insurrection, but more often covertly, using their ‘traditional’ forms of resistance such concept of ‘everyday forms of resistance’: J. C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985) and J. C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990). 37 D. Moon, Russian Peasants and Tsarist Legislation on the Eve of the Reform. (Basingstoke, 1992), 180. 38 See, for example, the mammoth recent work on the Russian revolution, O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 (London, 1996). 39 T. Shanin, Russia as a Developing Society, 144. 40 Kingston-Mann and Mixter, Peasant Economy, 16–17. See also V. P. Danilov and L. V. Lavrov, eds. Mentalitet i agrarnoe razvitie Rossii (Moscow, 1996).

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as foot-dragging, non-compliance, and moral pressure.41 However, these were the ‘weapons of the weak’ for, as the best of the recent research reminds us, a dominant theme in the peasants’ lives was their subordinate status in Russian society. The resistance strategies the peasants deployed were inextricably linked to their position as ‘objects of aggression and exploitation by superordinate institutions and individuals’.42 Although the recent research seeks to show the internal coherence of peasant society, it does not fall into the trap of portraying life in the community in terms of some rural idyll in which peasant households existed in a state of perpetual harmony with their neighbours. Authority in the village was patriarchal and systems of self-discipline harsh.43 Furthermore, there were groups that were especially disadvantaged, such as widows and the landless, and there were sharp distinctions preserved between insiders and outsiders and between those entitled and not entitled to land when it came to apportioning resources in the village.44 The egalitarianism of the peasants, by which populist theorists placed so much store, was not applied in an even-handed way. Furthermore, the peasants were far from always united in their dealings with patrician society; as Stephen Hoch has shown in his important study of pre-Emancipation Petrovskoe and James Hughes in relation to Siberian communities during the de-kulakization 41 The path-breaking study of Russian peasant resistance was D. Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (Boulder, Colo., 1976). In addition, see A. Kahan, ‘Forms of Social Protest by the Agrarian Population in Russia’, Russian Economic History (Chicago, 1989), ch. 5. Case studies of different types of peasant resistance include R. Edelman, Proletarian Peasants: The Revolution of 1905 in Russia’s Southwest (Ithaca, NY, 1987); O. Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (1917–1921) (Oxford, 1989); S. Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov (Chicago, 1986) and chapters by Maureen Perrie, Rodney Bohac, Timothy Mixter, and David Christian in the volume edited by Kingston-Mann and Mixter, Peasant Economy, 1991. 42 S. Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (Oxford, 1994), 5. 43 S. P. Frank, ‘Popular Justice, Community and Culture among the Russian Peasantry 1870–1900’, Russian Review, 46 (1987), 239–65, and in Eklof and Frank (eds.), The World of the Russian Peasant, (1990), 133–54. The seminal paper on peasant justice is P. Czap Jr., ‘Peasant Class Courts and Peasant Customary Justice in Russia’, Journal of Social History, 1 (1967–8), 149–79. The internal divisions in peasant villages are stressed in Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control. For family disputes see, in particular, C. Frierson, ‘Razdel, The Peasant Family Divided’, Russian Review, 46 (1987), 35–51, and C. Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (Princeton, 1991). 44 There is in particular a growing literature on Russian peasant women. See C. Worobec, Peasant Russia (1991); R. Glikman, ‘Women and the Peasant Commune’, in R. Bartlett, (ed.), Land Commune and Peasant Community, (1990), 321–38; B. Farnworth and L. Viola, Russian Peasant Women (New York, 1992); J. Pallot, ‘Women’s Domestic Industries in Moscow Province, 1880–1900’, in B. E. Clements, B. A. Engel and C. Worobec (eds.), Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation. (Berkeley, Calif., 1991), 163–84.

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campaign, peasants were quite prepared to connive with the authorities against their fellow villagers if it was in their interests to do so.45 The peasants’ ‘weapons of the weak’ were just as readily directed against each other as deployed in collective resistance to the authorities. Thus, on the evidence of the recent histories, communities throughout Russia were riven by disputes between individuals and households, and they were no strangers to the pursuit of self-interest by their members. The forces of division constantly pushed against the institutions that had evolved in the village to mediate and contain them.46 In the nineteenth century the balance that had been maintained in the village between individual and collective interests came under assault from a variety of different quarters. One of the more important themes in the recent histories examines how the peasants responded to these intrusions both by mounting a defence of their traditional institutions and by finding ways of adapting outside influences to suit their own agendas of change. David Moon’s investigation of peasant responses to pre-emancipation legislation and Ben Eklof’s study of rural education both reveal Russian peasants able to withstand and modify state attempts to transform them.47 The same applied under the most unpropitious of circumstances for the peasantry during the early years of the collective farms, as two recent studies have shown.48 A decade of research on the impact of market penetration on the rural economy and society has also shown that although market exchange changed social relationships in the village, it had not succeeded in tearing the peasantry asunder.49 Furthermore, it turns out that 45 Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control, 160; J. R. Hughes, Stalinism in a Russian Province: A Study of Collectivization and Dekulakization in Siberia (Basingstoke, 1996). 46 M. Confino, ‘Russian Customary Law and the Study of Peasant Mentalites’, Russian Review, 44 (1985), 35–43; M. Lewin, ‘Customary Law and Rural Society in the Postreform Era’, in Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (London, 1985), 72–87, Worobec, Peasant Russia. 47 B. Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture and Popular Pedagogy, 1861–1914 (Berkeley, Calif., 1987); D. Moon, Russian Peasants and Tsarist Legislation on the Eve of Reform (Basingstoke, 1992). See also B. Mironov, ‘The Russian Peasant Commune after the Reforms of the 1860s’, in Eklof and Frank (eds.), The World of the Russian Peasant, 7–43; C. Worobec, Peasant Russia, 18. 48 Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants; L. Viola, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York, 1996). 49 The literature on the impact of market penetration on the peasantry is vast but a taste of the various positions is to be found in T. Shanin (ed.), Peasants and Peasant Societies (Harmondsworth, 1971). See also T. Cox, Peasants, Class and Capitalism (Oxford, 1986) for a discussion of the methodological issues. Recent attempts empirically to discover the degree of class stratification in the countryside which come to different conclusions are D. Field, ‘Stratification and the Peasant Commune: A Statistical Enquiry’, in R. Bartlett (ed.), Land Commune and Peasant Community, 143–64, and H. D. Lowe, ‘Differentiation in Russian Peasant Society: Causes and Trends, 1880–1905’, in R. Bartlett (ed.), Land Commune and Peasant Community, 165–95.

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the peasants were engaged in more than simply a defence of their traditions; they were always on the lookout for possibilities to exploit situations to their own advantage in order to further their aims and aspirations. These themes of resistance and opportunism in the recent scholarship on the peasantry are directly relevant to understanding the interactions of peasants with the Stolypin Land Reform in the final decade of Imperial Russia.

Towards a Model of Peasant Interaction with the Stolypin Reform The principal arena of conflict between individual and collective peasant interests during the period of the Stolypin Reform concerned commune members’ access to, and management of, different types of land. Statutory law divided peasant communities into one of two classes according to their land-holding regimes, those with hereditary household tenure (podvornoe zemlevladenie) and those with communal tenure (obshchinnoe zemlevladenie), but in both much of the land upon which individual households depended for their subsistence was subject to some degree of community control.50 The precise degree of regulation to which land was subjected varied according to its legal status (for example, individually purchased land was outside community control regardless of whether village tenure was communal or hereditary, whilst in both land-tenure regimes, pastures could be subject to collectively determined stints), customary use norms, and the membership status of potential users. Peasant communities holding their land in communal (obshchinnoe) tenure were celebrated for the right they had to repartition the arable land of their member households, but repartition (peredel) was only one in a constellation of land regulatory mechanisms that communities might have at their disposal. These included the apportionment of land to existing and newly registered households, the allocation of rights between households in respect of common pastures and woodlands, the allocation of hunting and fishing rights, the securing for the benefit of the whole community of additional resources for use either in common or for redistribution, the defence of servitude rights, the distribution of products grown collectively such as the hay, and the organization of collective resource exploitation.51 Although there are differences of 50

Aleksandrov, V. A., Sel’skaia Obshchina v Rossii (XVII-nachalo XIXv.) (Moscow, 1976). Because of their preoccupation with repartition, nineteenth-century investigators of the village paid little attention to other aspects of communal resource management. For example, there is only one section on common pastures in Kacharovskii’s classic text on the commune: K. R. Kacharovskii, Russkaia Obshchina (St Petersburg, 1900). English-language sources are also scarce but see: R. Bircher, ‘The Defense of Peasant Servitudes in the South-West’, 51

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opinion about the origin of these controls, and of repartition in particular, by the nineteenth century one of their most important functions was to try to maintain a balance between individual households’ interests in acquiring resources for household reproduction, and the interests of the community of households at large in ensuring that this access was not disproportionate and was not exercised in such a way as to dissipate the communal resource. By the latter decades of the century the balance between competing interests in the commune was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain because of the pressure of rural population growth, rising taxation, and high land prices. These pressures on subsistence resources were exacerbated in many villages by the ambitions of some households to accumulate. The regulatory mechanisms of the community, which had in the past managed to keep ‘free riding’ under check, now began to fail. The most quoted example of this failure was the spiral of high fertility and frequent repartition to which some communities succumbed in the nineteenth century.52 Shortages of land pushed the peasants to maximize their fertility in an attempt to out-reproduce their neighbours so they could command a proportionately greater share of land at the next redistribution. Such breakdowns of regulatory mechanisms in the commune, leading to a classic ‘tragedy of the commons’ as described above, were probably overstated by Russia’s agrarian modernizers in order to strengthen the case for a radical approach to reform, but it cannot be denied that there were aspects of community land-holding in Russia that by the end of the nineteenth century had become dysfunctional for individual household reproduction whilst also putting the maintenance of collective interests under extreme stress. The Stolypin Land Reform further destabilized the balance. Indeed, the single most significant change the reform legislation brought about was to put in the hands of households in Russia’s thousands of villages an additional means for furthering their individual resource interests at their neighbours’ expense. Some communities were able to resist this onslaught, but others were not. Whenever the latter was the case, the outcome was a reshaping of land-holding arrangements that owed much more to the familiar resource rivalries of the ‘traditional’ village than to the conversion of the mass of peasants to the idea of individualized farming. D.Phil thesis (Oxford, 1996); O. Figes, ‘Collective Farming and the 19th Century Russian Land Commune: A Research Note’, Soviet Studies, 38 (1986), 89–97; Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control; J. Pallot, ‘The Northern Commune: Archangel Province in the Late Nineteenth century’, in R. Bartlett (ed.), Land Commune and Peasant Community, 45–65. 52 D. Atkinson, The End of the Russian Land Commune 1905–1930 (Stanford, Calif., 1983), 30–1.

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Analyses of the types of household responding positively to the Stolypin Land Reform have largely been made by Soviet historians. Consistent with a Leninist framework, they identified the village’s polar groups, the rich and the poor, as those most inclined to adopt the reform; the rich in order to commercialize their farm economies and the poor in order to sell up and migrate to the city, thereby completing the process of their proletarianization.53 The historian Korelin, for example, maintained in 1994 that ‘the social elements that left the commune were first and foremost those at its extremes: those few households that possessed additional lands and the numerically predominant poor peasants, who intended to sell their allotments.’54 Socio-economic data relating to the households that adopted the reform are, in fact, too fragmentary for much confidence to be placed in such statements, aside from the methodological doubts surrounding the identification of classes in the early twentieth-century peasantry. In any event, it seems inherently unlikely that class would be the sole, or even the most important, determinant of the reform’s adoption. Village politics were too complex and the provisions of the law too contradictory for things to have been that simple. But it is possible, given the nature of the reform legislation, to speculate about the constellation of households in a community that stood immediately to benefit from the reform, and those that were likely to be disadvantaged. For example, there must have been households for which adoption of the reform did indeed provide a previously denied freedom to pursue farming in new ways. Among the enclosed farm owners who came into being after 1906, there were some who adopted the reform for reasons of farm modernization or who did so as a prelude to migrating to the cities or to Siberia. But there were also many, probably the majority, who in adopting the reform were responding to other opportunities offered by the legislation or who were simply drawn in by the actions of others. Among the former, for example, there were households which, fearing a reduction in their land entitlement at a future repartition, found a means of hanging on to the land they were currently using in the new right the law gave them to take strips into hereditary ownership. The legislation contained safeguards against households claiming ownership of more land than their entitlement, but these turned out to be difficult to enforce or to involve only minor penalties against abuse. 53 The classic exposition is to be found in Dubrovskii, Stolypinskaia zemelnaia reforma. On land mobilization see M. S. Simonov, ‘Mobilizatsiia krest’ianskoi nadel’noi zemli v periode Stolypinskoi agrarnoi reformy’, in Materialy po istorii sel’skogo khoziaistva i Krestian’stva v SSSR (Moscow, 1962), 428–38. 54 Korelin, ‘The Social Problem in Russia’, 156.

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Similarly, households which sought to maximize their access to the best quality land in their village also found a means for doing this in the new laws. Once again, the safeguards intended to prevent this could be circumvented. A crucial role in helping peasants forward their individual resource ambitions was played by local officials who were motivated by an ideological or material self-interested desire to get the reform moving. The same complex of reasons for engagement with the reform could operate at a higher scale too, where the legal provisions for group land settlement allowed whole communities which had a temporary demographic advantage to secure in their permanent use an advantageous share of resources they held in joint ownership with other communities. Whatever motivated individual households to come forward to take up the reform, their actions provide the key to understanding some of the more ‘puzzling’ results of the reform, such as the upsurge of village-led consolidations which involved peasant communes apparently voting for their own dissolution. It has long been acknowledged that communes faced considerable disruption from peasants responding unilaterally to the reform; individual title changes to strips in the commune were inconvenient when it came to repartitioning the land, whilst requests for strips to be gathered in and enclosed could precipitate communes into repeated repartitions. Commenting in the 1940s on the reform, Sir John Maynard was among the first to observe that individual and village-wide adoptions of the reform might be connected: ‘It is easy to see’, he wrote, ‘that the right of one holder to divide out and consolidate his holding would come very near to the compulsion of another holder to accept an exchange.’55 George Yaney made a similar observation. He suggested that communities confronted with the prospect of repeated redivisions would take the decision to enclose all their members’ land in a one-off act in order to get ‘the whole business of land reform over with in one relatively concise operation’.56 That there was a link between individual and community-led enclosures is indisputable, but the fears to which communities were responding when they took the decision to adopt the reform ran much deeper than a desire to avoid the nuisance of repeated rearrangements of members’ strips of land. Every household in a peasant community had reason to feel threatened by unilateral title changes and consolidations because, if left unchecked, such separations would inevitably result in a quantitative and qualitative diminution of the collective resource from which every household received 55 56

Sir J. Maynard, The Russian Peasant and Other Studies (London, 1947), 59. Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, 279.

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its entitlement. Furthermore, separators who withdrew a portion, and possibly the best portion, of community arable could continue to make demands on the pastures, meadows, and forests remaining in communal ownership. Whenever a household or group of households in a community indicated an interest in enclosure, every other household in that community was forced to consider its own position vis-à-vis the reform in the light of the threat this posed to its resource security, and to determine a suitable strategy to minimize risk to itself. There were different strategies available. One was to follow the example of the separators and to petition for title change and/or consolidation in the hope of avoiding being left with the residue of the community’s resource. Another was to attempt to mobilize resistance to such threatened withdrawals in order to stop the process before it was too far advanced. A third was to pursue both strategies simultaneously, that is, to hope that the community at large could prevent separations whilst keeping open the option of following suit if this failed. When viewed from the perspective of peasant household survival, all three alternatives were rational, although they could have radically different outcomes for the community at large. In those villages in which peasants, through fear of losing out, decided that it was in their best interests to petition for an individual separation, the end result was often a village-wide enclosure; it would take only a few households to follow this course for the number of petitions for enclosure to snowball until a majority in the village were expressing the same desire. The intervention of land-reform agents would then secure a village-wide consolidation. The evidence is that local officials were often instrumental in helping to escalate the number of petitions for enclosure by playing on peasant fears of the consequences of being left behind in the division of the spoils. Of course, there was a contradiction in the process because, once enclosure became a community-wide project and the normal procedures for ensuring fairness in land distribution prevailed, the possibility for the pioneer separators stealing a march over their neighbours receded. The further contradiction, typically associated with such ‘free-riding’ scenarios, was that everyone could end up a loser from such induced enclosures since the community structures upon which households’ survival depended could be fatally undermined by the process. By stacking the deck in favour of individual household separations, the reform guaranteed that large numbers of households would be drawn in. Although misinterpreting the nature of the processes involved, the reform’s advocates were probably correct when they argued that, once begun, the reform was bound to spread. But it was not unstoppable; communes

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could and did mount resistance to it. To be effective, the resistance had to be directed at the immediate threat; that is, against those villagers who might be contemplating a visit to the local land settlement commission with a request for an enclosed farm. Compared with what could be achieved by focusing resistance on these potential defectors from the village community, there was little obviously to be gained from the peasants directing protest against the state, even though it was the state that ultimately was responsible for the difficulties they now faced. Some historians have taken the lack of ‘principled opposition’ to the reform as evidence that the peasants did not disapprove of its underlying concept.57 But the reality was that there was simply no point in the peasants attempting to taking on the whole reform organization, whereas there was a lot of point in trying to prevent the drip of individual separations becoming a flood. Peasant communities used the full panoply of internal disciplinary measures at their disposal to rein in any of their members contemplating separating. And their efforts did not stop if they failed to achieve the desired result; households that went ahead and enclosed their land were often treated as outsiders in their villages and subjected to further abuse which served as an example to others who might be contemplating following suit. The official record of the number of contested separations and organized protests against consolidation was merely the tip of a large iceberg. It is worth recalling Michael Confino’s observations about peasant–state relations in Russia: [T]he single most important feature of the Russian peasantry’s attitude to the state during two hundred years or so was their continuous and relentless opposition to it in all its forms and manifestations. It was an opposition expressed not only during the great peasant rebellions . . . but also during periods of relative social peace, always punctuated by flare-ups of peasant unrest. This opposition was not an episodic or conjunctural phenomenon, it was permanent and endemic, had deep roots in peasant life and mentality and expressed a fundamental, naive but powerful, spontaneous anarchistic attitude.58

The fact that the Stolypin Land Reform emanated from St Petersburg was sufficient for it to be opposed by the peasants, regardless of its supposed benefits or objective necessity. The methods the peasants used to oppose individual consolidations included relatively benign reminders about what could befall people who 57

Macey, ‘Government Actions and Peasant Reactions’, 161–2. M. Confino, ‘Traditions of Old and New: Aspects of Protest and Dissent in Modern Russia’, in S. N. Eisenstadt, (ed.), Patterns of Modernity. Book 2. Beyond the West (London, 1987), 23–4. 58

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stepped out of line, as well as more ‘active’ measures such as public shaming and physical attacks on people and property. Since much of the peasants’ effort opposing the reform was preventative and sought to restrain villagers from breaking ranks to petition for title and/or consolidation, successful resistance to the reform was often invisible to the authorities. Even when it did manifest itself, such as when individual petitions for consolidation were suddenly withdrawn, officials could rarely prove that this was the result of pressure from fellow villagers. Some of the means used by communes to defend themselves against individual separators were perfectly legal and left the authorities powerless to act. P. N. Zyrianov has shown, for example, that the publication of the 1906 Edict led to a spate of repartitions in communes which, he believes, were designed to remove surplus land (izlishki) from households so as to discourage petitions for title change.59 The obvious difficulty interpreters of the reform face is that there is no way of knowing whether the hundreds of thousands of villages that did not petition to adopt the Stolypin Reform were simply waiting in the wings to do so, as the reform’s champions maintained, or whether their failure to respond was the result of a successful containment of wouldbe separators. Inevitably, our knowledge of the peasants’ reception of the reform comes almost exclusively from those villages where an approach was made to the authorities to adopt the reform. By definition, these were villages in which attempts to resist individual separations had failed. There are hints of the depth of some peasant feelings against reform in the incidents that did result in violent confrontations with the authorities. These usually took place in the final stages of a project’s implementation as acts of symbolic ‘re-possessioning’ when land surveyors arrived to put in place boundary markers for the new farms. The state acted swiftly and decisively to defend its agents in the field whenever they were threatened and the result was usually defeat for the protesters. The occasional flare-up on the part of peasants normally came at the end of a sequence of other attempts to stop an unwelcome enclosure project and, more often than not, they were spontaneous, originating in heated discussions at the village assembly. Another, more organized means of resistance, which also had the character of a final desperate effort to frustrate individual households separating, was for the community at large to vote for a village-wide consolidation project. The advantage of a community voting to enclose under these circumstances was that it regained some 59 P. N. Zyrianov, ‘Zemel’no-raspredelitel’naia deiatel’nost’ krestianskoi obshchiny v 1907–1914’, Istoricheskie Zapiski (Moscow, 1988), 116.

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control over the allocation of land from the reform’s officials, including control over the allocation of land to the would-be separators. In respect of this, it is possible to agree with George Yaney when he writes that community-led enclosures were for many villages ‘the only permanently effective way to resist the awful alliance between government agencies and their own recalcitrant minorities’.60 The idea that whole village communities might have adopted the Stolypin Land Reform in order to resist its worst consequences is a less far-fetched proposition than might be thought when it is recalled that these same communities were able to negotiate for themselves partial consolidations of the land which left many community structures intact. It was the reform’s theorists, not the peasants, who insisted that any take-up of the reform signalled the demise of the peasant commune. The picture of peasant resistance to the reform was, of course, more complicated than is implied above. It was not simply a matter of communities of peasants being split into two opposing camps for and against the reform. The situation was fluid and involved all peasant households in a continuous process of re-evaluating their best strategy in the light of the success of unilateral separators or of the attempts on the part of the community to rein these free riders in. Furthermore, whilst the motivation of peasants who adopted the reform was largely economic in origin, the reasons for resisting it could be political, social, and spiritual. The task of weighing up the costs and benefits of alternative strategies cannot have been a simple matter for the peasants. Clearly, the dividing line between any individual’s acceptance or resistance of the reform was blurred, and the same was true at the community level, where majority decisions in favour of adopting the reform on the one hand and a categorical rejection of it on the other were often different sides of the same coin. In these circumstances, it is obviously unsafe for students of the reform to conclude that the upsurge in community enclosures constitutes evidence of a bedrock of peasant support for the reform’s broad aims. On the contrary, some village-wide consolidations might well be evidence of the depths of peasant disapproval. A further factor complicating the interpretation of the reform’s result was the geographical diversity of the Russian Empire. Attempts to discern a geographical pattern in the adoption of the reform have not met with much success, largely because of the failure of historians to agree upon a universal measure of the reform’s achievements. It was not simply a case, 60

Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, 279.

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as the theoreticians of the reform implied, of a universal process being played out on the stage of European Russia, some regions leading the way and others bringing up the rear, but of peasant communities adapted to specific environments and rooted in specific historical and societal settings responding to the reform in fundamentally different ways. What were apparently similar outcomes might have been brought about by entirely different combinations of factors. By extension, these similar outcomes had varying scope for further change and development. The reform administration’s conviction, for example, that partial consolidations would lead on in time to full enclosure might have been true for some parts of Russia but in others, to quote one researcher, ‘the reformers’ half-way was more likely than not the villagers’ end of journey.’ 61 It seems likely that it was only in the northwest of the country that the peasants’ response conformed in any way to the presuppositions of the drafters of the Stolypin laws. Outside that region, peasants interacted with the reform in a variety of ways to produce locally specific responses which in some places set off or intensified already existing involutionary processes in peasant land-holding, but in others led to a consolidation of the commune and, in still others, accelerated the process of socio-economic differentiation. Furthermore, a geography of the reform has to include an examination of its impact upon those communities which resisted the measures, as well as showing the nature of changes in those that did. The concentration on socio-economic differentiation in the historiography of the Russian peasantry, has resulted in a neglect of the analysis of the peasantry’s regional differentiation.62

The Structure of this Book The approach to the Stolypin Land Reform taken in this book attempts to give more recognition to the distinctiveness of the peasant world than has normally been possible in works informed by the universalizing assumptions of modernization theory. It does not seek to present a general theory of enclosure in Russia but rather to demonstrate the great diversity in peasant responses to the reform which, it is argued, can only be understood fully by reference to the rules of behaviour internal to the peasant 61 A. N. Jones, ‘The Peasants of Late Imperial Russia. Economy and Society in the Era of the Stolypin Land Reform’, Ph.D. thesis (Harvard University, 1988), 294. 62 Among the attempts to relate peasant institutions and behaviour to specific historical and environmental settings, the most noteworthy is E. Vinogradoff, ‘Peasantry and Elections to the Fourth Sate Duma’, in Leopold Haimson (ed.), The Politics of Rural Russia 1905–1914 (Bloomington, Ind., 1979), 219–49.

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world. The case studies presented in the chapters that follow are thus intended to illustrate how peasants in specific places, collectively and individually, received, digested, and, over a period of time, interacted with the reform. They are not intended to constitute a basis for generalizing about national trends. The aim in presenting them is to support the thesis that alternatives do exist to the received explanations for how the reform unfolded in the provinces. A problem in presenting what is essentially a peasant-centred view of the reform is the limitation of the sources. Despite an obsessive interest on the part of the Russian intelligentsia in peasant society in the nineteenth century and the tsarist bureaucracy’s penchant for collecting data, the historical record is silent on many of the central questions relating to the peasants’ reception of the reform. Furthermore, where the record does seem to provide insights into what the peasants were thinking it has to be remembered that the information was collected, processed, and committed to the historical record by people outside peasant society who were informed by their own conceptions of peasantry. These problems have not deterred other researchers from speculating about the inner world of the peasant, and they have not deterred this researcher. The conclusions in this book are speculative and they cannot be ‘proved’ in any rigorous scientific sense of that word. However, what can be claimed with some confidence is that familiar ‘facts’ about the Stolypin Land Reform’s adoption are consistent with an interpretation of events in the countryside which is substantially at odds with many previous interpretations. The analysis of the peasants’ responses to the reform in this book begins in Chapter 2 with an exploration of the vision that informed the land reform administration’s work in the provinces. It shows how the administration adhered to the blueprint it had developed for a landscape of independent enclosed farms, despite the fact that it was rejected by the peasants. One source of tension between the peasants and the authorities was in their respective understanding of the relative utility of different land-holding systems. As Chapter 3 argues, the reform’s authors overestimated the costs to the peasantry of land fragmentation and communal tenure and underestimated the economic and social costs that would be incurred by peasants who made the transition to individual farms. The result was that Russia’s peasants and the authorities failed to intepret the land reform in a universal way; farm individualization, understood at the centre as offering a long-term solution to the agrarian problem, was not able to dislodge the peasants’ conviction that the solution to their distress lay in the acquisition of more land.

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The majority of the subsequent chapters explore how the peasants interpreted the reform, what they expected to get out of it, how these expectations changed in the light of individual and collective experience of tenure changes and enclosure, and the strategies they deployed in order to realize these expectations. One feature of the peasants’ response to which attention has already been drawn was its fluidity; individual peasant households were involved in a continuous process of assessing their best course of action in the light of their neighbours’ decisions, or their assumed decisions. Alliances were forged and positions struck which would later collapse to be replaced by others. The shifting sands surrounding discussion of the reform in any community meant that outcomes were always difficult to predict. It is in the central chapters of the book, Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7, that empirical evidence is presented to support the view that village-wide consolidations could be the product of the struggles surrounding attempts by individual households to use the provisions of the reform to further their ambitions on community resources. It is also in these chapters that the different methods the peasants used to contest the reform and its consequences are explored. The final chapter is concerned with examining the immediate impact of adopting the reform on individual peasant households and how they tried to cope with the rigours of transition. The official position, it will be recalled, was that a rationalization of peasant land-holding would provide the basis for the modernization of the peasant farming economy. The purpose of the reform, after all, was to overcome the perceived backwardness of peasant farming, and in the process to transform the peasants into loyal citizens. In so far as the achievement of these twin aims was bound up with the rejection of the commune, the reform clearly missed its target. Conceived of in its broadest sense as a community of peasants, the commune usually did not disappear when enclosure took place, although it surrendered control over some important aspects of land management. The failure of the reform to liquidate the commune would have been of minor importance historically had the more limited changes it introduced really formed the basis for agrarian advance in Russia. This is the crux of George Yaney’s defence of the Stolypin Reform, which, as he correctly observes, could bring benefits to peasant farmers, especially when agricultural specialists were at hand to advise on new techniques. But, as the final chapter shows, these benefits were not automatic, nor were they without cost. The reform had its casualties in the form of households which became poorer as a result of enclosure, those which were forced to quit farming, and those for whom the prospect of modernizing farm practice was put

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back rather than advanced by enclosure. Even group land settlement, which George Yaney credits as one of its most significant achievements, could undermine the ability of communities to reproduce themselves.63 The conclusion to which these findings lead is that, notwithstanding the larger than expected numbers of peasant households coming forward to adopt the reform, the likelihood that an agricultural advance in Russia would be based on the farms formed under the Stolypin Reform’s provisions was limited. There were alternatives that might have done as much, or more, to increase peasant farm productivity, as has been observed by a number of historians. And, according to Yanni Kotsonis, this was also the view held by powerful forces at the centre by the 1910s.64 After 1910 the principal government effort in agriculture passed to agro-technological measures which reached numbers of peasant households far in excess of those who could be reached through programmes targeted solely on enclosed farms.65 As for the peasants, their preferred solution to their problems remained, as it always had been, the black repartition (chernii peredel), as was so obviously demonstrated in 1917.66 63 I have in mind here cases when the access peasants previously enjoyed to use gentry land was removed. 64 Y. Kotsonis, ‘Agricultural Co-operatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861–1914’, Ph.D. thesis (Columbia University, 1995). 65 Esther Kingston Mann, using the studies of the populist theorist V. V. (Vorontsov), has shown that there were considerable possibilities for farm improvement in the commune: E. Kingston-Mann, ‘Peasant Communes and Economic Innovation: A Preliminary Enquiry’, in Kingston-Mann and Mixter, Peasant Economy, 23–51. This is an important corrective to the works which assume that yield improvements after 1906 were the result of the Stolypin Reform. See also R. Bideleux, ‘Agricultural Advance Under the Russian Village Commune System’, in R. Bartlett (ed.), Land Commune and Peasant Community, 196–218. 66 For a discussion of the black repartition and its relationship to land reform see J. Channon, ‘The Bolsheviks and the Peasantry: The Land Question During the First Eight Months of Soviet Rule’, Slavonic and East European Review, 66 (1988), 593–624.

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2 THE LAND REFORM AS ADMINISTRATIVE UTOPIA Historians studying the Stolypin Land Reform are divided about the extent to which the abolition of the commune was its primary purpose. The argument for supposing that it did have this aim was the emphasis in the 9 November 1906 Edict and the law of 14 June 1910 on title changes which were clearly designed to deliver a blow to communal property rights and, by extension, to the commune itself. Those who deny that this was the reform’s primary purpose point instead to the provisions in the land-reform legislation for a wide variety of land reorganizations, some of which did not involve the abolition of communal tenure, and to the founding of a bureaucracy whose sole task was the physical reorganization of peasant land, both implying a much broader purpose for the reform than the purely negative aim of destroying the commune. These views of the reform’s purpose are not incompatible; the desire to abolish the commune and to modernize peasant farming were both driving forces shaping the reform and each dominated its activity at different times.1 In this chapter a different way of approaching the Stolypin Reform is offered. It is suggested that the reform was in essence a utopian project of rural transformation in which a desire to impose order on the ‘chaos’ of the countryside was the main leitmotif. The utopian aspect of the reform has tended to be obscured in the debate about its immediate aims, but even a superficial reading of reform rhetoric reveals a preoccupation among its authors with the idea of transformation—of both the physical character of the rural landscape and the psyche of the people inhabiting it—in accordance with an imaginary plan. The essence of this plan, whose realization required both a change in tenure and the physical reconfiguration 1 This is tacitly acknowledged by both David Macey and Pavel Zyrianov who have been locked in a dialogue about the reform’s purpose. For Macey the reform’s aim was primarily land consolidation—an agrarian measure—but Zyrianov disputes this. See D. J. Macey, ‘A Wager on History: The Stolypin Agrarian Reforms as Process’ in J. Pallot (ed.), Transforming Peasants: Society, State and the Peasantry, 1861–30. Selected Papers from the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies, Warsaw, 1995 (Basingstoke, 1998), 149–73 and P. N. Zyrianov, Krest’ianskaia obshchina evropeiskoi rossii 1907–1914 gg. (Moscow, 1992).

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of peasant farms, was the substitution of regularly shaped fields, preferably one per peasant proprietor, for the ‘haphazard’ strips of farms in the commune, and the peopling of this landscape with ‘rational farmers’ who had left the superstitions and practices of the ‘backward’ village behind them. Whilst in its statutory provisions the reform was narrowly focused on physical and legal restructuring of peasant farms, in its broader conception it constructed a new social identity for Russia’s peasants. Stolypin’s ‘peasants’ would be distinguished from other peasants in Russia not just by the fact they held title to their land or farmed enclosed fields, but by their sobriety, superior morality, their embrace of modern farming techniques, and their political reliability. In short, they would be people who had earned the right to be fully integrated into the mainstream of Russian society. The construction of a new social identity for the peasants was one of the ways in which the Stolypin Land Reform sought to impose order in the countryside and to make the previously incomprehensible peasant comprehensible. But the reform also sought to impose order in a more direct way by the physical reorganization of village lands and the repositioning of peasants in space. The Stolypin landscape was above all else to be a well-ordered landscape. A preoccupation with order was not new for Russia’s rulers, but the order the Stolypin Reform sought to impose was more concerned with the extension of ‘disciplinary’ authority over the peasants than with old-style opeka. In this respect the reform was true to the changes taking place more generally in how power was exercised in Russia; through its educational reforms, the collection of socio-economic statistics on the peasants, and the development of social agronomy, the state sought to make peasants more controllable. The Stolypin Reform was part of this process and its vision recalls Michel Foucault’s observations about the connection between discipline and the ‘principle of enclosure’ in Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison. Disciplinary space, Foucault maintained, avoids ‘collective dispositions’ and ‘analyses confusion’: Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual . . . Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed . . . Its aim was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at a moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess it, judge it, to calculate its qualities and merits.2

2

M. Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison (London, 1987), 143.

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The ‘collective disposition’ from which the Stolypin Land Reform sought to remove the peasant was the ‘typical’ Russian village with its mass of strip fields and common resources, communal assemblies, and traditions of mutual aid—all powerful symbols for some educated Russians of the peasants’ backwardness. And it sought to replace it with a landscape of physical partition and enclosure which, materially as well as symbolically, isolated peasants in space. The iconographic form of these arrangements was the khutor landscape. This was a landscape of enclosed farms, each as near as possible in the shape of a square, distributed evenly over the landscape and connected by a gridiron pattern of roads. The creation of this landscape, it was understood, would involve the physical relocation of the peasants’ dwellings and outbuildings from their villages onto new parcels of land. In this scheme the village as a unit of settlement would disappear from rural Russia; their sites would become little more than distant folk memories. Farmers in this imaginary landscape would have little ‘horizontal vision’ whilst being subject themselves to maximum ‘vertical visibility’— they would become easily identifiable targets for investigation, enumeration, and improvement. This was an arrangement which, following Foucault, was a guarantor of order. For earlier periods in Russian history, Richard Stites has referred to such state-directed attempts to impose order on society through ‘rationalism, geometry and militarization’ as the pursuit of ‘administrative utopia’. The utopian dream consisted of ‘a desired order, an extreme rationalism, an outlet for the constructive imagination of organizers who wished to build environments and move or control people like men on a chess board’.3 Stites cites as his examples of such administrative utopias the tsarist police state, the ‘militarization of the landed estates’, and Catherine II’s utopian town planning. In its obsession with order and geometrical shape, the Stolypin Land Reform was a direct heir of these often crude projects of control, but it was a more sophisticated version since it attempted to obtain the peasants’ consent to the transformations it wished to achieve. Compared with the constant drilling of peasant soldiers on Arakcheev’s estates, the Stolypin Reform’s methods of persuading peasants to participate in its vision were subtle and varied, employing persuasion and the old art of divide and rule. The reform administration made much of the fact that the reform was voluntary. In reality, there was more compulsion involved than the 3 R. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1989), 19. Alessandro Stanziani has also drawn attention to the utopian nature of much tsarist and Bolshevik economic policy-making. See A. Stanziani, L’économie en Révolution. Le Cas Russe, 1870–1930 (Paris, 1988).

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centre was prepared to acknowledge but, nevertheless, the degree of freedom given peasants in the decision to engage with the reform, along with ambiguities in the reform law, created a space for peasants to resist and modify the Stolypin utopia. The reorganization of village lands did indeed become ‘contested territory’, as later chapters will show. In this chapter the vision that informed the government’s side of the interaction in the countryside is explored. It is important to stress that what follows is a discussion of how the reform was officially represented both to itself and to the outside world. That the changes it effected in the countryside fell short of the ideal and that there were individuals in the reform organization who doubted its attainability and/or desirability cannot detract from the fact that it provided the framework within which those involved in bringing the reform to the peasants, and educated society at large, were supposed to understand the changes taking place in the countryside after 1906.

The Institutional and Legal Setting For the state to persuade the peasants to join in the utopian project of rural transformation changes were needed to the law, and an appropriate set of institutions had to be established to carry through the changes in practice. The legislation that created the framework for the reforms has been the subject of a number of studies, but its detailed provisions are less important to the argument here than its general shape. Although historians have disagreed about the intentions behind the land-reform laws, there is a consensus of sorts that there was a shift in the reform’s focus from an early emphasis on providing for changes to peasant land tenure and for the transfer of land to peasants via the Peasant Land Bank to a later emphasis on the physical reorganization of village lands. Under the provisions of the land-reform laws, individual heads of peasants’ households or the collectivity of heads of households of a commune could petition for a change in title to their land from communal to individual, the procedure termed ukreplenie v lichnuiu sobstvennost’. The administration of these changes, and of the automatic conferment of title provided for in the 14 June 1910 law in the case of communes which had not been repartitioned for twenty-four years, lay with the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Within the Ministry the land captains were responsible at the local level for encouraging peasants and communities to apply for title changes, checking their eligibility and supervising the progression of the applications through the legal and bureaucratic stages leading to the issuing of title deeds to the new peasant

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landowners. Ukreplenie v lichnuiu sobstvennost’ did not mean the peasants gained full private property rights to their land since they were not entitled to sell to anyone outside the peasant estate nor, so long as it remained in strips and unconsolidated, was land to which title had been taken protected from reorganization as part of a land settlement project. As far as the legislators were concerned, the important qualities tenure change imparted was that land on which title was conferred was protected from repartition, it could be conveyed to other peasants, and it was the property of an individual rather than being the joint property of a whole household. These were significant changes indeed, but, as a later chapter will show, the expectations projected onto them at the centre were exaggerated. Title changes were supposed to have a transformative influence on peasant attitudes to property, inculcating in them a greater respect for landlords and other peasants’ property rights, and to incline the new proprietors towards land improvement and consolidation. More than this though, the act of taking title to the land was almost universally understood at the centre as an act of disengagement from the commune or obshchina. Different aspects of the physical reorganization of the land, or zemleustroistvo, were provided for in the 9 November 1906 Edict and the Law on Land Settlement of 24 May 1911. The emphasis in the 9 November 1906 Edict was on the redistribution of landlord and state land to peasants via the agency of the Peasant Land Bank and on the consolidation of nadel land into unitary farms by individual households. These were the two channels through which khutora were expected to make their appearance in the Russian countryside, although there was provision under the law for groups of peasants or whole communes holding their land in either communal or household tenure to petition for the enclosure of all their members’ land. By the time of the publication of the 1911 Law on Land Settlement, which codified previous provisions relating to land reorganization, and added some more, the balance in the reform had shifted to the enclosure of their members’ land by whole communities, and this was reflected in the prominence given to this type of land-reform activity in the law. As of 1911 the types of land reorganization officially recognized in the countryside were of two fundamental types; unitary land reorganization, uchastkovoe zemleustroistvo, and group land reorganization, gruppovoe zemleustroistvo. The first was understood to be the enclosure of land belonging to peasant households and it could be effected either by individual households or groups of households as a unilateral act of withdrawal from the commune—vydelenie—or by the decision of a commune as a whole (which had voted for it by a two-thirds or simple majority, depending upon

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whether its land was in communal or hereditary tenure) to enclose the land of all its members, the process of community or village-wide enclosure— rasverstanie. Under group land reorganizations or group land settlement— gruppovoe zemleustroistvo—was included a variety of different processes involving the division and rearrangement of land in joint ownership or the joint use of whole peasant communities, individual peasant proprietors, and private non-peasant landowners. The types of reorganization that were included under this heading were listed in an addendum to the 1911 law, as indeed were the various types of unitary reorganization. The categorization of different types of land reorganization indicated that the task the land reform was engaged in went far beyond simply assisting peasants to improve their land-holding system. The fine distinctions that were made between types of land reorganization served to legitimize some changes in peasant land-holding but not others and, as will be shown below, their ranking reflected the teleology of agrarian development that informed the whole reform project. The task of overseeing the physical rearrangement of peasant land, as distinct from changing its legal title, was given to the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs within the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture, the reformed Ministry of Agriculture. The Committee brought together the heads of the appropriate departments of the various ministries involved in the reform under the chairmanship of the Minister of Agriculture. These included the head of the Land Section of the Ministry of the Interior, the head of the Land Survey Section of the Ministry of Justice, the head of the Peasant Land Bank in the Ministry of Finance, and the head of the Department of State Domains in the agricultural ministry, who became the executive head of the reform. Land settlement commissions subordinate to the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs were set up at the uezd and provincial level. These local commissions were composed of a combination of appointees, such as the land captains and representatives of the Peasant Land Bank, and elected representatives from among the peasants and zemstva, and they were serviced by the ‘permanent member’, a full-time official employed by the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture. As the centre of gravity in the work of the reform shifted from title changes to land reorganization, the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs and local land settlement commissions tightened their grip on the reform and assumed the principal role in defining its purpose. The shift was given additional force by the 1911 Law on Land Settlement which merged the process of title change, formerly the exclusive province of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, with

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land enclosure, although the Ministry of Internal Affairs retained responsibility for tenure changes where no land consolidations were in immediate prospect. Rivalry between the two ministries has probably been exaggerated in the historiography of the reform, but there is no doubt that the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture’s conception of the land reform was the one that came to dominate the reform’s operation within a relatively short time of the promulagation of the Imperial Edict of 9 November 1906. A more difficult relationship for the reform administration was with the Finance Ministry, which had doubts about the land reform’s ability to solve the agrarian crisis and resisted the attempts made by the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs to increase the land reform budget. The Ministry of Finance’s opposition put pressure on the various bureaucratic elements concerned with the reform to maintain a united front and to deliver results. This may be part of the explanation for the reform administration’s increasing blindness to the anomalies in the manner in which the reform unfolded. Certainly, it would have been difficult for it to argue the case for sustaining funding to the new bureaucracy set up to carry through a land reform if all that it was engaged in was making moderate adjustments to peasant land-holding. The reform administration had to demonstrate that it was engaged in making a new beginning for rural Russia. It was on this new beginning, symbolized by the khutor landscape, that the greater part of the reform rhetoric was focused in the years after 1906.

‘A Liking for Squares’ Among the texts that can be read for the utopian character of the Stolypin Land Reform are the circulars and memoranda that passed from the reform centre to its local agents (the permanent members, land captains, and land surveyors) charged with the task of familiarizing peasants with the reform and providing them with the technical and legal means to adopt it. In the memoranda the nature of the changes that were supposed to be promoted in the countryside were laid down. Local land-reform agents were left in no doubt that the physical separation of peasant from peasant was a priority of the reform. In a very detailed and precise way they were instructed in the sorts of changes they were permitted to introduce onto the holdings of peasants, what they had to avoid, and how they were to prioritize their efforts. These priorities were codified in an addendum to the 1911 law, but they had been communicated to local commissions in a succession of circulars and at conferences of permanent members convened to

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discuss the reform’s operating priorities from 1908. The addendum contained a description of the physical form of farms that local commissions were to fashion out of peasant land, ranked in order of priority, and rules for how local agents should deal with a range of difficulties that often arose with land enclosure, such as how to divide common resources. Whether the project at hand was the consolidation of individual peasant land involving whole communities, groups of peasants, or individuals, the priority schedule for the formation of enclosed farms was as follows: Type A khutor. This was a farm that approximated as nearly as possible to a square and consisted of a single parcel of land incorporating the house and garden plot and with no residual land, such as pastures and meadows, outside its boundaries; Type B khutor. This was similar to type A in all respects except that it was oblong in shape, with the length of its sides not exceeding the width by more than five times; Type C khutor. This was a farm that consisted of more than one parcel of land in which the house and garden plot was united with the arable, but some other types of land, such as wood and meadow, were enclosed in separate parcels; Type D otrub. This was a farm that consisted of a single parcel of land, the length of which did not exceed the width by more than five times, which was physically detached from the house and garden plot but located as near as possible to it; Type E otrub. This was similar to type D but consisted of several land parcels, one constituting all the farm’s arable, each detached from the house and garden plot.4 The meticulous detail with which these farms were distinguished one from another indicates the land reform organization’s preoccupation with classificatory order. Each of these farms was invested with certain qualities which were important to the land-reform project’s ultimate aim. The ranking of enclosed farms, for example, reveals the importance the reform administration placed on physical arrangements which involved the dispersal of peasants from their native villages. Thus, the ranking gave priority to khutora which failed to unite into a single parcel all types of farm land— meadow, pasture, and arable—over an otrub that did achieve such full integration. Arguably, the needs of ‘scientific agronomy’ could be better served 4 J. Pallot, ‘Khutora and Otruba in Stolypin’s Program of Farm Reorganization’, Slavic Review, 42 (1984), 242–5.

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by the latter than the former, but what made it less desirable from the point of view of the land-reform utopia was its failure to disperse peasants’ dwellings from their villages. Otruba, according to the instructions, were a last resort—to be consented to only when physical conditions made the formation of khutora difficult, and even then, they should be implanted in new settlements hived off from a parent village rather than fashioned around the existing settled area.5 In an early draft of the instructions the formation of otruba (except in conjunction with the founding of a new settlement) had been excluded from the list of acceptable enclosed farms—a remarkable omission considering that it was precisely this sort of reorganization in which the majority of commissions had become involved in the previous years. As the draft read, ‘[i]f it is impossible to form the first category (of khutor), then the second must be formed; but if the second is impossible then the third, and only when none of the enumerated categories of khutor can be adopted is it appropriate to resort to the otrub settlement system (posel’kaia sistema). With this latter system it is better to have as few households as possible in the settlement.’6 The priority accorded to khutora was also reflected in the provision that it was only this type of enclosed farm that was fully protected against further rearrangement of its lands in future land settlement projects. The instructions sent to land-reform agents in the localities did not stop at distinguishing between different general types of farm. Local agents were also apprised of the desirable shape and configuration of land on the new farms; no angle on a farm boundary, for example, should be more than forty-five degrees and the length-to-width ratio of each farm was not to exceed 5:1. The preferred position of the peasant’s hut was even a matter for recommendation; it was to be in the centre of the khutor ‘so that the farmer’s wife can call her husband for lunch’.7 This was social engineering on a grand scale; no longer were peasants to take lunch together in the fields, they were to return home to their wives. The author of this last recommendation was A. A. Kofod, a naturalized Dane, who headed the inspection section of the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture. Kofod’s appointment as the chief inspector for the reform and his unofficial role as its theoretician and principal publicist were important moments in cementing the reform organization’s commitment to its utopian vision of a khutor landscape. Kofod was a genuine believer in khutora. Before the Stolypin Land Reform was enacted, he had researched 5 7

RGIA, f. 408, 1909, opis’ 1, no. 116, 441. RGIA, f. 408, 1914, opis’ 1, no. 272, 61.

6

Ibid., 214.

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and written at length about consolidated farms in the western provinces of Russia, which he took credit for having ‘discovered’.8 Once appointed to a position in the land-reform administration he had the opportunity to present his ideas to a wide public, which he did with enthusiasm, and he was also able, through the reform inspectorate, to influence the direction of the reform on the ground. He was commissioned in 1907 by the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs to produce a short book on khutora for distribution to peasants interested in consolidating their land.9 Khutorskoe Razselenie (Khutor Resettlement), was produced in half a million copies in Russian, Lithuanian, and Tatar and was sent to all provincial and district land settlement commissions for free distribution to the peasants. References to the book in the press and a variety of popular publications about the reform, plus its frequent appearance in official bibliographies of land settlement, meant that it became a basic source book for the public and the organization’s officials. Kofod was also called upon to make frequent presentations about land settlement in public fora. Kofod’s influence on the reform was probably less than he claimed in his memoir, but he was in a position to influence the direction of the practical work of local commissions through his inspectorate.10 His oft-repeated and oft-quoted vision of the khutor landscape served as the touchstone against which reform practice was measured. One of the public occasions when Kofod was invited to discuss his views on land reorganization was a seminar organized by the Imperial Free Economic Society in 1909. It was on this occasion that the academic, B. D. Brutkus, remarked disparagingly that Kofod had an exaggerated ‘liking for squares’. At this seminar Kofod gave a paper outlining his beliefs about land reform, justifying the case for a ‘radical’ approach: We can be absolutely sure . . . that the more radical the land consolidation carried out, the more rapidly it will stimulate an improvement in the well-being of the population . . . the fewer the concessions we make to the demands of the masses to deviate from technically perfect enclosure, the more successful we ultimately will be, and the more the people will respect the activities of the land settlement commissions.11

Kofod would sanction a departure from the ideal khutor only under exceptional circumstances; a technically perfect village consolidation, as he made 8 9 10 11

A. A. Kofod, Krest’ianskie khutora na nadel’noi zemle. 2 vols. (St Petersburg, 1905). A. A. Kofod, Khutorskoe razselenie (St Petersburg, 1907). A. A. Kofod, My Share in the Stolypin Land Reform (Odense, 1985). Trudy vol’nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva, 1–2 (1909), 45.

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known, would leave no land in shared use or dwellings on the former village site. He demanded a complete gathering in of all strip-fields and the formation of ‘a perfectly square land unit . . . one for each farm’.12 The distinction between technically perfect and imperfect consolidations appears throughout Kofod’s numerous published works and reports for internal circulation in the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture. ‘Imperfect’ land settlement projects consisted of partial consolidations where land under meadow, pasture, and forest or scrub was gathered in separately from the arable, and also mixed consolidations which gathered in only a portion of a peasant’s land leaving some in joint use or communal ownership.13 Kofod included otruba in his list of the ‘lesser’ forms of consolidation, but he was also critical of certain ways of laying out land to form khutora, for example, when fields were joined to dwelling lots in an existing village to form a star shape, or when longitudinal parcels were laid out from the settled area. Kofod’s language of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ forms of consolidation was internalized by the land-reform organization so that it became taken for granted to refer to some types of land reorganization as ‘imperfect’, ‘defective’, or ‘inferior’ and others as ‘complete’, ‘correct’, and ‘superior’. Of course, it was no coincidence that the ‘imperfect’ enclosed farms originally identified by Kofod in a two-volume book on khutora in the western provinces had come about spontaneously, arranged by the peasants themselves.14 To Kofod and his peers, this confirmed the need for state intervention and for specialists to be involved in the reform—the peasants left to themselves could not be trusted to reorganize their land correctly. Kofod’s insistence on technical perfection was more than a whim. For him there were compelling practical reasons for avoiding ‘partial’ or ‘mixed’ consolidations. Like others involved in the reform, he believed that the peasants’ social psychology was influenced by their system of land-holding. Leaving any land in common was, according to this view, extremely dangerous as it could lead to the carry-over of ‘collectivist ideas’ to the new farms. A. S. Lykoshin, head of the Land Section of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, for example, argued strongly against otruba on the grounds that they encouraged the adoption of obligatory rotations and allowed otrub farmers ‘to use their land according to communal principles’.15 12 A. A. Kofod, Bor’ba s cherezpolositsei v rossii i za granitsei, 2nd ed. (St Petersburg, 1907), 12. 13 14 Trudy, 1909, 48. Kofod, Krest’ianskie khutora. 15 RGIA, f. 408, 1909, opis’ 1, no. 113, 3.

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N. D. Chaplin, head of the land-surveying section in the Ministry of Justice, made the same point in 1909 when he wrote critically about the retention of common land after enclosure in provinces he had recently inspected: [The practice] can only be looked upon as violating the technical demands of land settlement . . . omitting this or that piece of land from a project and leaving it in common ownership, preserves a breeding ground for ideas about communal use. In addition to the inconvenience this causes for farming, such incomplete consolidation can reinforce, or create, a current working against land reform.16

In order to avoid leaving land in common use, elaborate methods were devised by the reform administration for substituting one type of land use for another so that common land could be absorbed into the general reapportionment of village land into khutora. Where such substitutions proved to be impossible, local agents were instructed that it was preferable to divide the commons into as many parcels as there were khutora rather than leave them in collective use. When P. P. Zubovskii was promoted to head the reform in 1913, he reaffirmed this principle. It was better, he argued, to postpone a land settlement project than to allow peasants to keep any land in common use.17 A. A. Rittikh, Zubovskii’s predecessor, was more inclined to compromise with peasants if they resisted the division of pastures, but even so he urged local agents to divide the commons whenever circumstances dictated that this was possible. Kofod’s second objection to ‘partial’ and ‘incomplete’ enclosures was that they would have a negative impact on the longer-term development of the reform since farms that fell short of fully consolidated khutora would constitute a poor example for other peasants who were contemplating enclosing their land. Kofod was convinced that peasants who initially put pressure on land organization commissions to leave some of their land unconsolidated would in time return to the commissions with a request for its unification with the rest of their land into a single khutor. This would be costly, hence Kofod’s insistence that local agents strive for the ideal in all the enclosure projects they supervised. In 1914, on the eve of the reform’s demise, Kofod was still arguing the case for khutora, although in the light of the experience of the previous half-decade, he tempered his recommendations with a recognition that they might not be exactly what the peasants wanted from the land reform: ‘the land reform must aim to be as radical as possible taking the consolidation of each farm as near as 16 17

RGIA, f. 1291, 1909–1910, opis’ 120, no. 19, 97. RGIA, f. 408, 1914, opis’ 1, no. 518, 14.

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possible to a square as is allowed without a conflict arising between the preferences of the population and the . . . [necessary] . . .work of the land reorganisation institutions.’18

Diverging Views at the Centre It has been suggested by some historians that the pursuit of the khutor ideal did not command the support of top officials of the reform—that once reports from the provinces showed that peasants were reluctant to move onto khutora, the reform administration reoriented its priorities behind a more modest programme of rural transformation. If this were indeed the case, it is difficult to explain why the centre did not take the opportunity to signal a change in the technical instructions it attached to the 1911 Law on Land Settlement or in the internal circulars with which it bombarded its agents in the field. Internal memoranda passing between top and middleranking officials in the reform show that, whilst there was a recognition that the khutor landscape was not immediately attainable, there was no wavering of belief at the centre in the ultimate desirability of removing communal patterns of living and labour from the countryside, for which the symbol remained the physical dispersal of peasants onto khutora. In the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Lykoshin was most directly involved in the reform since it was the land captains under the ministry’s authority who, in the early years, had responsibility for tenure changes and, together with land settlement commission permanent members, were responsible for familiarizing the peasants with the possibility of enclosure. Lykoshin’s views of the reform’s aims were made known in two lengthy reports of tours he made to the provinces in 1908 and 1911. In the report of the first tour in 1908, Lykoshin expressed his deep dissatisfaction with the situation he had found.19 His complaints were strongest against local land settlement commissions in Khar’kov, Simbirsk, Nizhegorod, Penza, and Samara provinces, which were in the practice of making out each household’s arable in three or four separate parcels, and against the Peasant Land Bank for dividing its estates for sale to individual peasants in the form of elongated otruba, with a view to establishing a compulsory rotation among groups of purchasers. Lykoshin’s objection to the otrub-hamlet system was that it set a poor example for the peasants. More generally he expressed his dissatisfaction with otruba and with the widespread practice of leaving 18 19

A. A. Kofod, Russkoe zemleustroistvo, 2nd ed. (St Petersburg, 1914), 65. RGIA, f. 408, 1909, opis’ 1, no. 113.

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common pastures, meadows, and arable strips under intensive crops out of enclosure projects. His praise was reserved for the provincial land settlement commission in Nizhegorod province, which refused to accept plans for 206 (from a total of 207) projects from one uezd commission because they included no khutora.20 This sort of decisive action, for Lykoshin, was what was needed in the future. He was confident that it would become more common as local commissions’ experience in land reorganization work increased.21 Three years after his first tour, Lykoshin made a second one, this time exclusively to Ekaterinoslav and Khar’kov provinces, where the take-up of the reform was amongst the greatest in the Empire. His report showed him no less preoccupied than before with the degree of land consolidation local commissions were achieving in enclosing peasant land.22 And he was no less sparing in his criticisms. He noted that Ekaterinoslav provincial land settlement commission was still not working energetically enough to counter the peasants’ demands for common pastures to be excluded from enclosure projects, while Khar’kov province was praised for having corrected the earlier ‘technical’ shortcomings in its work.23 In the report of this second tour, Lykoshin did not complain directly about local commissions that failed to disperse peasants onto khutora. However, in an article he wrote for Novoe Vremia about the tour, Lykoshin made no mention at all of otruba, describing only the khutora and khutorskie poselki (settlements of khutor farms) that had impressed him.24 As far as the public transcript was concerned, the commitment to khutor was as firm as ever. The position of the administrative head of the land reform was occupied by A. A. Rittikh from 1906 to 1913, and by P. P. Zubovskii from 1913 to the end of the reform in 1917. Rittikh had authored the summary volumes dealing with peasant land-holding and customary law for Sergei Witte’s 1902 investigation of Russian agriculture, so he came to the reform with a reputation as someone knowledgeable about peasant farming.25 It was Rittikh who was responsible for bringing Kofod into the reform organization and promoting him through it, although their relationship was later to sour as their views diverged. Initially though, there is no reason to suppose that Rittikh did not share Kofod and Lykoshin’s optimism about the implantation of khutora in Russia. In 1907 Rittikh set Kofod the task of finding suitable people to act as land-reform instructors to teach 20

21 22 Ibid., 19. Ibid., 19–20. RGIA, f. 408, 1912, opis’ 1, no. 225. 24 Ibid., 13 and 28. Novoe vremia, 14 August 1911, 4. 25 A. A. Rittikh, Krest’ianskoe pravoporiadok (St Petersburg, 1904); Krest’ianskoe zemlepolzovanie (St Petersburg, 1904), and Zavisimost’ krest’ian ot obshchiny i mira (St Petersburg, 1903). 23

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reform officials about enclosure and, for the not insignificant sum of 1000 roubles, sent him on a tour of the provinces as a sort of roving enclosure consultant to work directly with local commissions.26 Rittikh explained his choice of Kofod in a letter to his superior Prince Vasilchikov, as the person who could instruct local land settlement officials in the methods of enclosing land ‘so that when they take their first steps in this difficult, important, and, for the majority of them, new business of land settlement, they will avoid those technical mistakes that usually accompany the early stages of an enclosure reform’.27 Later Kofod received a personal letter from the minister himself, instructing him to concentrate his attention on ‘teaching the peasants about the rules for the correct formation of khutora’.28 At one point during this tour, Rittikh sent a telegram to Kofod with an instruction to interrupt his itinerary to go immediately to Umanskii uezd, Kiev province, in order to ensure that four village enclosures there conformed to the ‘highest technical standards’.29 There can be no doubt of what Kofod’s message to local land settlement officials would have been or that it was endorsed at the highest level in the reform organization. Apart from Kofod being used to oversee the early enclosure undertaken by the land reform, Rittikh also encouraged him to continue his research into khutora in the western borderlands and appointed him to head the reform inspectorate. It was also under Rittikh that the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture launched a nation-wide survey of pre-1906 khutora which resulted in a number of published volumes to complement Kofod’s original study in the western borderlands. Rittikh was never an unreserved khutor enthusiast, however. Nor was he as opposed to the commune as his opposite number in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and some of his subordinates in the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture. He recognized that if the rural landscape were to be transformed, it would be necessary to move slowly with the peasants. For example, in the report of a visit he made to the Volga provinces with the Minister of Agriculture in 1908 he warned that khutora should be formed 26 A joint letter from Rittikh and Vasilchikov to provincial governors urged cooperation with Kofod. See RGIA, f. 408, 1907–10, opis’ 1, no. 1696, 5. 27 28 RGIA, f. 408, 1907–1910, opis’ 1, no. 1696, 1. Ibid., 141. 29 Ibid., 71. This instruction contradicts the view of some historians that Kofod’s role was simply to report back to the centre about the progress of the reform (see, for example, Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, 321–2). Kofod’s role was more active than this and his name frequently appeared in the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture records as being involved in directing land settlement projects on the ground. The Umanskii county consolidations turned out to be very controversial, as Chapter 5 will describe.

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only when there are especially favourable conditions—that is, when there is plenty of accessible subterranean water and, most important, when the population actively asks for them. In all other circumstances the formation of small groups of otruba must substitute for khutora as they . . . allow the transfer to new forms of farming to take place without destroying the old traditions of village social life.30

His direct observation of the work of land settlement agencies in the Volga provinces clearly left Rittikh with more general doubts about the reform’s ability to transform Russian agriculture in the desired direction: The reality about the current work of liquidating [Peasant Land Bank] land as khutora and otruba is that it has not yet progressed beyond the first stages in the introduction of independent farming. It is premature to say whether the new forms of land holding will lead to permanent and problem-free changes in agriculture, or whether the centuries-old communal farming traditions and way of life in the Volga will, for some time yet, be at odds with the new forms.31

Rittikh’s reserve marked him out from others at the apex of the reform, and also from Prime Minister Stolypin who, in an internal memorandum to N. P. Muratov in the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1909, wrote, ‘whilst not denying that there are circumstances when local conditions make otruba preferable to khutora, the spirit of statute 42 of the Law on Land Settlement and statute 17 on the technical instructions of 19 February 1908 . . . is that this question should be resolved in exactly the opposite way.’32 Rittikh’s reservations, in fact, had more to do with his reluctance to force the peasants out of their villages than doubts about the superior rationality of enclosed farms. Like others at the centre of the reform, he accepted without question the binary opposition of communal and independent farms, as his comments during his Volga tour made clear. He insisted on high ‘technical standards’, including ‘correct’ field layouts and the division of common resources. In May 1912, for example, he openly criticized one uezd board for approving a communal assembly resolution dividing village land into longitudinally shaped farms and leaving some land in strips.33 This was consistent with an earlier letter to the Vitebsk provincial governor issuing from his office which criticized the ‘significant development’ in the province of partial consolidations in which multiple-parcel otruba were made 30

31 RGIA, f. 408, 1908, opis’ 1, no. 90, 21–2. Ibid., 23. RGIA, f. 1291, 1909, opis’ 120, no. 91, 79. 33 RGIA, f. 408, 1912, opis’ 1, no. 332, 61. The uezd was Radomysl’skii, Kiev province. Rittikh’s letter was marked ‘secret’, no doubt because of the sensitive comments he made about the fact that the same village resolutions had allowed Jews some land, which was against the law. 32

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and land was left in shared use.34 Furthermore, it was under Rittikh’s leadership that the official anniversary volume celebrating the first four years of work of the committee for Land Settlement Affairs unambiguously endorsed khutora: ‘The most satisfactory enclosures result from the consolidation of the peasants’ allotment land in whole villages into khutora involving the physical removal of the house and garden plot onto the new holding made out for each household, and which includes the land formerly under the settled area in the redistribution.’35 Rittikh’s superior as Minister of Agriculture from 1908 was A. V. Krivoshein. His interest in the ‘technical’ side of enclosure was evident in a confidential circular to provincial governors in 1910 which urged them to counter the tendency on the part of local commissions to put numerical success in the reform ahead of the ‘quality’ of enclosed farms: ‘[T]he number of projects completed is less important than their quality . . . [it is incorrect for] . . . local commissions to try to satisfy as many [of the peasants’] requests for enclosure in as short a time as possible without taking into account whether the results will lead to a genuine improvement in farming conditions.’36 He was critical of projects which did not ‘answer the technical requirements’ of enclosure and would sometimes intervene personally in cases which came to his attention, such as when a local commission made out a farm in two places for a peasant widow in Vilno province. He reminded the governor that, ‘the aim of village consolidation into khutora and otruba is to form independent farms of a convenient form . . . Furthermore, it is absolutely forbidden to allow any scattering of land put under the same use . . . consolidations which leave even one household with land in such fragments cannot be regarded as satisfactory.’37 It seems safe to conclude that both Rittikh and Krivoshein endorsed the guidelines laid down in the circulars and the 1911 Law on Land Settlement about the priorities to be given different types of enclosures. It would have been extremely odd had they not done so. However, they did not insist that the pursuit of the first priority should override all other considerations. Rittikh’s successor, Zubovskii, took a more uncompromising line, arguing for a radical interpretation of the recommendations for enclosure 34 RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 150, 32. The letter also drew the attention of the land settlement agents in Vitebsk province to clause 2 of the Technical Instructions which stated that only under exceptional circumstances should deviations from fully consolidated farms be allowed. 35 Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910gg, Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia (St Petersburg, 1911), 41. 36 RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 153, 2. 37 RGIA, f. 408, 1911, opis’ 1, no. 196, 266.

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and describing changes falling short of khutora as ‘temporary half-measures’.38 Referring to the arguments in Kofod’s book, Russkoe Zemleustroistvo (Russian Land Settlement), Zubovskii further insisted that the fate of common lands, such as pasture, in enclosure projects was one of the fundamental technical questions of the reform in the countryside: Experience has shown how unsatisfactory it is when, during the first stages of a project some wavering is noticed and common land is left for groups of farms. Today our land settlement agents are obliged to strive for full consolidation. Opposition from the peasants is only proof of their poor understanding of enclosure and justifies the postponement of a project.39

In a letter to V. A. Savich in 1914, Zubovskii reaffirmed his view that enclosed farms should take the form of ‘well formed squares’.40

Exhibiting the Reform From the beginning of the reform the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs went to considerable lengths to demonstrate the success of its measures to the public. If within the reform administration there were some doubts about the possibility of attaining the goals it had set itself, none of this was allowed to spill into representations of the reform’s progress. Through exhibitions, special publications, and its annual reports, the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs sought to win public support for its activities and it was able to rely, in addition to its own publications, on the efforts of ‘independent’ commentators who could allow themselves to be less restrained in their praise of the reform’s achievements than the organization itself. The propaganda effort on behalf of the reform was directed simultaneously at the reform’s various critics inside and outside government and at its own activists and supporters, encouraging them to sustain their efforts on behalf of the reform. Additionally, the government had an eye to the foreign-relations impacts of its measures. Through publicizing the strides made in the reform, foreign powers (the Germans and French were particular targets) could be convinced of the progressive trajectory of Russian society as a whole. Official publicity paid special attention to highlighting the distance separating the ‘new’ from the ‘backward’ farms in the Russian countryside. But it was not just the implantation of modern farms in rural Russia that featured in the reform narratives; the whole land-reform structure, from the modern bureaucracy set up to 38 40

RGIA, f. 408, 1914-, opis’ 1, no. 518, 14. RGIA, f. 408, 1914–1915, opis’ 1, no. 494, 15.

39

Ibid., 13.

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oversee enclosure to the very latest scientific survey methods used to effect it, featured just as prominently and served to celebrate the reform’s modernity. The peasants, meanwhile, occupied a modest place in reform narratives and were invariably represented, if they figured at all, as the grateful recipients of enlightenment and progress. It was not they who were the principal agents of change in rural Russia. That role fell to specialists such as the permanent members, land surveyors, and agronomists, who were responsible for bringing enlightenment to the peasants, together with the legal and technical expertise needed to divide and partition the land. The first major volume celebrating the work of the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs was a report of the first four years of its operations, published under the title of Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910.41 The report contained statistical tables showing the numerical results for each type of land reorganization embarked upon in the provinces and the number of households which had reached each of the major bureaucratic landmarks in the transition from communal to independent farm. However, the centrepiece of the volume was a series of plans showing villages before and after enclosure (Figures 1–2) which were complemented in the appendix by photographs of enclosed farms (Plates I–IV). The plans and photographs in Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910 were the first visual representations the literate public had of the type of landscape that the reform was creating in the countryside, although in his two-volume work on the western provinces Kofod had used the same cartographic device to dramatize the differences between satisfactory and unsatisfactory enclosures of village lands. Examining the plans of villages visited by the land reform, readers of Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910 were able to contrast for themselves the chaos of unenclosed peasant villages with the order resulting from the land settlement commissions’ interventions. The comparisons were striking—before plans showed the multiplicity of strips dividing the open fields of the commune with the land of a single household shaded in, so the reader could count for him- or herself how many different locations the peasant had to visit to farm his land. The landscape of the after plan was altogether more orderly, showing the partition of land into nearly square farms, the farm belonging to the peasant proprietor of the before plan again shaded in, this time in a single block. The enclosure plans represented both otruba and khutora. The photographs were exclusively of the usad’ba area of khutora, depicting neat dwellings and outbuildings, some still under construction. There was one photograph included among the others of the arable land 41

Zemleustroistvo, 1911.

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Village settlement Arable land Arable strips of one household Meadow Woodland Roads Lake Bog

0

200

400

600

Sazhen'

Figure 1 Ground plan of Novosel’ka village, Toropetskii uezd, Pskov province, before enclosure. (Source: Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910 (St Petersburg, 1911) )

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1

17 2

16

3

14 15 4

13 10

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11 12

9 8 6

7

1-17 Newly formed khutora Boundaries of khutora Arable land Meadow Woodland Roads Lake Bog

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Figure 2 Ground plan of Novosel’ka village, Toropetskii uezd, Pskov province, after enclosure. (Source: Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910 (St Petersburg, 1911) )

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Plate I A khutor in Vladimir province formed as a result of an individual separation in Kolesnia Village

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Plate II A khutor under construction in Sloboda village, Vitebsk province

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Plate III A khutor in Mariupol’skii uezd, Ekaterinoslav province, formed in a whole-village consolidation

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Plate IV Stone clearance on enclosed and unenclosed land in Luzhskii uezd, St Petersburg province

attached to a khutor which was juxtaposed with a photograph of a ‘communal’ field. The neighbour’s land was strewn with boulders and the grass growing between was trampled down. On the khutor’s arable, in contrast, boulders were piled up ready for carting away and the grass, growing high,

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was being grazed by cows and sheep. Who the agent of change was the reader was left to conjecture, as the photograph came with only a simple caption to the effect that it belonged to a khutor in Luzhskii uezd— evidently the public understood the transcript sufficiently well to need no further explanations. Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910 gave little away about the peasant owners of the new farms it depicted so carefully in its plans and photographs, nor did it discuss the economic and social consequences of land consolidation for them. It was, above all, a celebration of the efficiency of the new bureaucracy and of physical order. The volume elicited the scorn of the reform’s critics. Russkoe Bogatstvo accused the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture of using the publication simply to show pictures of ‘perfect khutora’. It likened the photographs and plans to pictures in a child’s story book but with the following qualifier: [T]hey are, as a matter of fact, produced by a Ministry in charge of one of the most important branches of the national economy which purports to be giving an account of the results of four years’ hard work undertaken in order to effect a fullscale revolution in this branch of the economy . . . . But this publication looks as though it has been produced exclusively for government juveniles.42

Russkoe Bogatstvo was similarly scathing about another publication that made its appearance at this time in support of the reform. This was a collection of articles which originally had appeared in the newspaper Rossiia, written by Boris Iurevskii and S. N. Syromiatnikov.43 The authors’ purpose was to draw the public’s attention to the results of the land reform, and their conclusions, Iurevskii explained, were based on observations he had personally made during a tour of the western provinces and in conversations with a variety of people interested in land reform. Iurevskii took it upon himself to reassure his readers that any suggestion that the peasants were unenthusiastic about the reform was ‘laughable’. The peasants, he maintained, were ‘stampeding onto khutora’.44 He claimed that the advantages of khutora were already making themselves felt not just in the improvement of farming, but also in the demeanour of the peasants, who were less inclined to drink and more inclined to religious reflection once they had moved out of their villages. As Stephen Frank has shown, such sentiments would have confirmed the views of contemporary moral reformers of the necessity 42

Russkoe Bogatstvo, 11 (1911), 188. B. Iurevskii and S. N. Syromiatnikov, Chto dostignutno zemleustroistvom (St Petersburg, 1912). 44 Iurevskii, Chto dostignutno, 5 and 8. 43

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of a radical restructuring of peasant land-holding as a key to civilizing the countryside.45 Stolypin’s farmers were viewed in the temperance movement as a ‘social basis for cultural renewal, enlightenment and order’.46 One of the recurrent images in popular representations of the Stolypin Land Reform was of the awakening of the peasants from a deep slumber which had kept them in ignorance and barbarism. It was an image that figured in another popular publication describing the reform for the St Petersburg audience, New Agrarian Russia: Essays on Land Settlement. For the first essay in the collection the author, S. Bel’skii, chose the title, The Awakening Village.47 This title was, of course, a play on A. I. Shingarev’s well-known 1902 publication, The Dying Village, which had painted such an affecting and dismal portrait of the Russian village.48 In The Awakening Village one of the few peasant agents of change in popular representations of the reform is encountered. The narrator describes how in one village in Stavropol province a single progressive peasant won his neighbours over to enclosure by lecture and example: ‘[O]ne peasant, a clever and energetic muzhik, gets up at sunrise and, having led out his cattle to the fields, sits beside his hut and delivers whole lectures to his neighbours about land reform.’ 49 These were the sort of peasants Stolypin had in mind when he spoke of the reform as a wager on the ‘sober and strong’. Peasants like the ‘progressive muzhik’ in Stavropol province were invariably described in reform literature in terms of their personal attributes— their energy, independence of mind, or sobriety—but never in terms of their social or economic status. To have located peasants coming forward to take up the reform in a particular socio-economic class would have contradicted one of the Stolypin utopia’s central myths—that the reform measures were intended for all peasants, regardless of their current situation. The importance of this myth to the reform project was reflected in the classification of the peasantry which the administration tried to promote in its statistical record of the reform. The methodology of social classification hitherto employed by the zemstva, which grouped households by wealth indicators such as the area of land sown, number of horses, or farm 45 S. P. Frank, ‘Confronting the Domestic Other: Rural Popular Culture and its Enemies in Fin-de-Siècle Russia’, in S. P. Frank and M. D. Steinberg (eds.), Cultures in Flux: Lower Class Values, Practices and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, 1994), 74–107. 46 Ibid., 105. 47 S. Bel’skii, ‘Probudaiushchaia derevnia’, in Novaia zemledel’cheskaia rossiia—ocherki zemleustroista (St Petersburg, 1910). 48 A. I. Shingarev, Vymiriaushchaia derevnia. Opyt’ sanitarno-ekonomicheskogo issledovaniia dvukh selenii Voronezhskogo uezda (St Petersburg, 1902). 49 Bel’skii, ‘Probudaiushchaia derevnia’, 97–8.

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size, was rejected by the Stolypin Reform bureaucrats in favour of a classification that differentiated peasant households by the degree of spatial distance they put between themselves and their neighbours and the degree of land-use integration achieved on their farms. The clearest example of this was in a survey the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture made of enclosed farms in twelve uezdy which was published in 1915.50 The ‘twelve-uezd survey’ was the official response to a variety of publications analysing the reform’s consequences in individual provinces and districts compiled by the zemstva or appearing in opposition newspapers that began to make their appearance from about 1910. Some, but by no means all, of these revealed khutora and otruba to be in a sorry state. The Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture’s answer to these consisted of a colourful well-illustrated volume of graphs and diagrams, statistical tables, plans of enclosures, and location maps describing the current state of the farms included in the survey. Throughout, the volume sought to reaffirm two of the central tenets of the reform: that the configuration of land was the main determinant of economic success in peasant farming, and that of all the possible ways of holding land, the khutor was the best. It did this by adopting a method of classification for peasant households which displayed data according to the physical type of farm. Four categories of farm were identified against which data were arrayed relating to the movables and immovables owned by the farm, crop and livestock production, yields, and a variety of improvements. These were khutora which had involved peasant households moving out from their villages, khutora which had been formed by land being gathered in around a preexisting settlement site, otruba formed in newly created hamlets, and all other otruba. The tables consistently showed khutora to be out-performing otruba, and both to be out-performing farms in the commune, but the classification of the data made it impossible to determine whether any other variables could explain their relative success. The twelve-county survey was unequivocal in its message that it was the configuration of land, not the amount of land or the size of the labour force a farm possessed, that was the principal determinant of a household’s well-being. In addition to its publications, the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs displayed the reform’s achievements at exhibitions. From 1909 land-reform 50 Zemleustroennye khoziaistva. Svodnie danniia sploshnogo po 12 uezdam podvornogo obsledovaniia khoziaistvennykh izmenenii v pervye gody posle zemleustroistva, Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia (St Petersburg, 1915).

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exhibits began to be included in regional agricultural shows for which special grants were made by the centre to local commissions. A land-reform exhibit, consisting of a scale model of a khutor and before and after plans, was first displayed at the Umanskii uezd agricultural show in Kiev province, organized by the local commission’s enthusiastic permanent member, M. Maksimchik.51 At later shows ‘real’ khutor farmers and their produce were exhibited. At the 1910 agricultural show in Simbirsk province, for example, peasants were paid a rouble a day to attend and display their vegetables. According to Russkoe Bogatstvo, these latter consisted of various ‘exotics’ such as cauliflowers, tomatoes, French beans, and leeks, the seeds for which, the reporter alleged, had been distributed to khutora by the local land settlement commission specifically with an eye to the exhibit.52 Commenting on the Simbirsk show, Russkoe Slovo made the following observation: ‘[T]he most impressive “attraction”, if you please, was two bags of “khutor” apples. These grown in an orchard that in its first year of planting gives a crop. This is only possible on enclosed farms.’53 Such revelations were not confined to the activities of local commissions. The Committee for Land Settlement Affairs was itself embarrassed by a scandal surrounding what should have been its finest hour—its participation in the jubilee exhibition in August 1910 to celebrate the bicentenary of the founding of the tsar’s summer palace at Tsarskoe Selo. The Committee for Land Settlement Affairs was given a pavilion and an adjacent open space on which to build a life-size khutor. The pavilion contained exhibits assembled by the central administration and the St Petersburg provincial land settlement commission. They consisted of diagrams and charts, scale models of completed land settlement projects, photographs, pieces of surveyor’s equipment, and an exhibit of books, which naturally included Kofod’s Khutorskoe Razselenie.54 Officials of local commissions were on hand to answer the public’s questions. A Novoe Vremia reporter noted with satisfaction the quality of these men: they were ‘young, fresh, and strong with the sun-tanned faces of people who spend their working life 51 RGIA, f. 408, 1909, opis’ 1, no. 1428, 15. Maksimchik, who was one of Kofod’s protégés, asked for a grant of 2,000 roubles to cover the cost of the exhibit. This was considered too much by the centre but Maksimichik was encouraged to proceed. He was later to use the excuse that he was too tied up preparing the exhibit for the show to supervise ongoing land settlement projects in Umanskii uezd that year and thus could not be blamed for errors that were to precipitate serious anti-enclosure protests among the peasants. See Chapter 6. 52 53 Russkoe Bogatstvo, 10 (1910), 81. Quoted in Russkoe Bogatstvo, 10 (1910), 82. 54 Katalog sostoiashchei pod vysochaishom ego imperatorskogo velichestva pokrovitel’stvom Tsarskosel’skoi 1710 iubileinoe 1910 vystavki (St Petersburg, 1911).

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in the open air . . . and who . . . have the contented look of the pioneers of a great era’.55 The public was left in no doubt that it was these people together with their scientific instruments, rather than the peasants, who were the real agents of rural transformation in Russia. It was a peasant, in fact, who unwittingly was the cause of official embarrassment when a reporter for the newspaper Rech’ revealed that the pictures on display at the exhibition were of ‘Potemkin’ khutora. The newspaper’s proof was that a visit to one of the khutora displayed in the Tsarskosel’skii uezd exhibit revealed it to consist of a house with no roof, a half-dug well that had been abandoned, and no field rotation. Thus alerted, Rech’ had made further investigations and found other discrepancies between the exhibits and the ‘reality’ of the farms they depicted.56 The story of ‘Rokko’s khutor’ ran for some time in the newspapers. The Tsarskosel’skii land settlement commission’s defence was that the exhibit was only of its projected work with Rokko’s farm, an argument that was difficult to sustain as the exhibit had been labelled ‘completed’.57 A more imaginative defence was made in an editorial in Rossiia which argued that it was the land settlement commission’s modesty that was at fault: ‘Usually, at exhibitions the very best examples of things are shown off, but, in this case, the local commission decided against showing only the best khutor knowing that if it had included its best, other khutora in the exhibition would have no chance of winning the Emperor’s prize.’58 One final vehicle used to represent the reform, and particularly the commitment to khutora, was choreographed visits to real farms which were subsequently written up in the pro-reform press. One of the more extravagant examples was an excursion organized for a large party of German dignatories in 1911 as part of the government’s attempt to impress the Western powers. The party consisted of 104 people, including, on the Russian side, a provincial governor, twenty-four judges, three directors from the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture, nine professors, and thirteen district marshals. The party first visited Khar’kov province where, setting out in seventy-five carriages, it had a five-hour excursion to see khutora, the whole party being decanted from 55 Novoe vremia, 14 August 1911, 3. The author of the article also claimed that the khutor movement had assumed ‘gigantic proportions’ and was expanding ‘in geometrical sequence’. 56 Rech’, 21 September 1911, 2, and 8 October 1911, 5. 57 Rech’, 9 October 1911, 5. 58 Rossiia, 9 October 1911, 1. The prize referred to consisted of the livestock and equipment that had been used to stock the exhibition khutor.

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their carriages at various points to ask pertinent questions of the peasants and to feast in the fields. The next day took the party by train to Moscow and Tver provinces, the whole expedition being rounded off with a lecture from Kofod on the advantages of khutora, which he illustrated, in the most modern of ways, with a magic lantern show. Iurevskii, describing the expedition, wrote that the visitors ‘were besides themselves with wonder . . . [at the] . . . amazing results that had been achieved in three to four years’.59

Post-1910 Reinterpretations of the Reform Whilst in its publicity the reform organization maintained an air of confidence about its project to reorganize the farm landscape, developments in the provinces increasingly challenged its utopian vision. Instead of dealing with a small number of peasants petitioning to consolidate their strips of land or to buy a Peasant Land Bank khutor, the reform administration found itself having to respond to petitions for consolidation from whole village communities in numbers far greater than it had expected. This was a welcome development, confirmation in the reform advocates’ minds that the land reform, at least in broad outline, was well conceived. On the other hand, it soon became clear that there was a price to be paid for ‘numerical success’ in a decline in the ‘technical’ standards of the reorganizations effected. Rather than ‘stampeding onto khutora’, the peasants showed a distinct and stubborn preference for enclosures that fell short of complete consolidation and an equally stubborn reluctance to uproot themselves from their villages and disperse over the countryside. The enclosed farms formed after 1909 were predominantly of the otrub variety, many consisting of multiple parcels of land and bound to other farms by the continued use of common resources. The fact that the administration allowed such shortfalls from its ideal is evidence of its preparedness to compromise with the peasants, but this should not be read as indicating that it had modified its broad aim. By 1909 the administration had become a captive of its own rhetoric of radical transformation—it could not easily retreat from its commitment to khutora but nor could it insist upon their formation without sacrificing numbers. The years after 1910 therefore saw adjustments being made to the way the transition to the khutor landscape was officially represented so that any operation that fell short of khutora became an intermediary stage in their eventual formation. This allowed partial consolidations, including the formation of otruba, and land 59

B. Iurevskii, Zemleustroitel’nyi smotr (St Petersburg, 1912), 13.

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reorganizations falling into the category of group land settlement to be given a respectability they did not originally have, while tenure changes, which initially had an ‘autonomous’ status, were downgraded in importance. In its final form, the theory of enclosure to which the land-reform organization subscribed was a sequential process consisting of multiple stages. In the revised teleology of khutor formation, the earliest stages consisted of individual title changes to strips and the gathering in of land around whole villages. These changes were followed by the formation of individual farms as otruba within the framework of existing settlements, with some land being left in common ownership and use. The final stage was the dispersal of peasants from the villages onto their otruba (thus forming khutora) and a subdivision of residual common land. This sequence of change could not be reversed but stages could be bypassed or merged into one. Regardless of the peasant household’s point of entry into the process, its progression to the end was, at least as far as the official theory was concerned, more or less predetermined. It has already been observed that title change occupied a prominent place in the reform legislation, both as an end in itself as a ‘destroyer of the commune’ and as a necessary first step towards later land enclosure. Tenure changes and enclosure had been kept separate in the 1906 Edict because it was assumed by the reform’s authors that these two processes would take place at very different speeds, the former more rapidly than the latter. Indeed, it was expected that the task of rearranging peasant strips in the commune would be so complicated that enclosed farms would principally come into being on land sold to the peasants from the Peasant Land Bank’s estates. Title changes would assist this process by enabling peasants to quit their communes, allowing them to use the proceeds from the sale of their private strips for the down payment on a Peasant Land Bank khutor. In the event, there proved to be a serious tension between the processes of tenure change and land consolidation in the commune because many of the farmers who took out title to their land showed little interest in enclosure or in quitting their communes in order to settle on purchased khutora. The appearance in the open fields of ‘private’ strips soon came to be viewed as an obstacle to enclosure, since the consent of the new individual landowners was required if the remainder of the community wanted to enclose its land. The potential problems in obtaining such consent were exacerbated by the fact that tenure change and enclosure were handled separately by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture. Land settlement commissions complained that their land reorganization

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projects were held up by the length of time it took to issue title deeds to new peasant landowners.60 With the shift in the reform’s operations towards physical land reorganizations after 1910, support for title changes per se waned and title change began to be discussed more and more in its relationship to land consolidation. Thus, for Kofod the main role of title changes was that they ‘previsioned a future transfer to khutora’.61 Rittikh’s position was similar. Responding to critical articles in Rech’ which maintained that the only effect title changes had was that they forced the poor in villages to sell up, Rittikh defended the policy with reference to the broader land reform: ‘A change in title to the land leads to a strong desire among the peasants for economic independence, and in the majority of cases this leads on to the consolidation of whole villages . . . the provision in the1906 Edict for title changes awakens . . . an impulse towards economic independence in the new private land-owners.’62 Even so, as another of the reform’s supporters maintained, title changes could only ever be ‘an unstable, brief stage’ in the development of the enclosure movement.63 The retheorization of title changes was confirmed in a circular to provincial governors which stated that ‘title change is only a transitional phase, the final stage of which consists of the correction of strip fields and other defects of the existing land-holding system.’64 Some at the land-reform apex were particularly outspoken in their criticism of tenure changes. Returning from his first tour of the provinces, Lykoshin wrote that encouraging peasants to take out title to their land was ‘quite simply dangerous with respect to the progress of land enclosure’.65 By improving the farmer’s situation in the commune, he argued, further improvements would be delayed. Lykoshin recommended that permanent members of local land settlement commissions should intervene whenever peasants petitioned for title changes and persuade them to consolidate at the same time.66 A similar position was adopted by Iurevskii who maintained that tenure changes had ‘a very weak connection with land consolidation’ and could not bring any ‘benefit to the nation’.67 It was these types of reservations that prompted the merger of the process of title change 60 Despite the difficulties it created for enclosure, title change continued to be actively promoted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. A decline in the number of peasant households petitioning for tenure change from 1909 led to a special investigation by the ministry to discover the reasons why, with the aim of using the findings to reverse the decline: RGIA, f. 1291, 1912–1913, opis’ 120, no. 35. Delo o primenenii vysochaiiego ukaza 9 noiabria 1906 goda. 61 Trudy vol’nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva, 1–2 (1909), 46. 62 63 Rech’, 22 May 1911, 2. S. Bel’skii, ‘Probuzhdaiushchaia derevnia’ (1910), 106. 64 65 Rech’, 18 July 1911, 5. RGIA, f. 408, 1909, opis’ 1, no. 113, 25. 66 67 Ibid., 34. B. Iurevskii, Zemleustroistvo v 1913 (St Petersburg, 1914), 8.

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and land consolidation which was allowed under the 1911 Law on Land Settlement. The 14 June 1910 law automatically transferring communes which had ceased repartitioning to hereditary tenure was also a measure designed to help speed up enclosures. As tenure changes declined in importance in the reform, the enclosure of whole village communities into otruba was propelled to centre stage. This development challenged the original theorization of the reform not just because otruba had hitherto consistently been represented as a lesser form of enclosed farm but because the centre had expected that the enclosure movement would be led by individual progressive peasants leaving communes to set up new farms, not by whole communities voting to enclose as a single act. Now, in the face of these unexpected developments, further adjustments had to be made to reform theory to accommodate the enclosure of whole communes into otruba. In practical terms, the developments meant that an early commitment in the reform to meet the needs of peasants withdrawing their land unilaterally from communes was officially downgraded in 1909 and work with whole communities was prioritized.68 This shift was justified by Kofod with the explanation that unilateral enclosures had ‘played out their role’.69 Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910 explained how peasant ‘fears of the unknown’ had been dispelled quickly by the clear demonstration pioneer khutora gave of the advantages of gathering fields into a single lot around the farmstead.70 But some people had reservations about the change in priority. Ia. Ia. Litvinov, in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, continued to argue for priority being given to unilateral enclosure on the grounds that the peasants concerned were generally ‘the more energetic and stronger farmers . . . who . . . are a good example for other households to follow’ and had decided to enclose ‘not under the influence of the majority but individually [which means they] can see the advantages and fully understand the purpose of enclosure’.71 68 In 1909 individual separations were placed at number seven in the priority schedule for land settlement work. The exception was when the consolidations would have a useful demonstration effect. See Obzor deiatel’nosti glavnogo upravleniia zemleustroistva i zemledeliia za 1909, Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia (St Petersburg, 1910). By 1914 individual separations were allowed ‘only in extreme circumstances’ in order to familiarize the population with enclosure where the movement had not yet taken off: RGIA, f. 408, 1914–1915, no., 494, 14. Otruba and khutora made earlier in the reform were by now proving to be a serious obstacle to whole-village enclosures. 69 Kofod, Russkoe zemleustroistvo (1914), 132–5. 70 The Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture maintained that the peasants’ ‘fear of novelty’ disappeared when they grasped ‘the advantages for farming that proximity of land gives’. This came from observing the Peasant Land Bank’s first khutora: Zemleustroistvo, 1911, 28. 71 RGIA, f. 1291, 1910, opis’ 120, no. 19, 31.

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Although the formation of otruba was legitimized by giving them an intermediary status in relation to the final goal of khutorization, the reform advocates always felt bound to explain and excuse them. Thus, otruba invariably appeared in official reform literature accompanied by an explanation as to why, in the circumstances of the particular enclosure project, it had not been possible to form khutora. In the southern arid provinces, for example, otruba were explained away by the unsuitability of hydrological conditions for settlement dispersal. Elsewhere in European Russia, other explanations had to be found.72 In Smolensk province the formation of otruba was attributed by Iurevskii to the peasants’ involvement in subsidiary employment which had resulted in their lack of interest in farming.73 Had the peasants been more committed farmers, the implication was, they would have chosen khutora. There was a host of other reasons given for the failure to form khutora including the catch-all ‘cultural backwardness’, peasant women’s desire to gossip around the village well, and ‘unfounded’ fears of isolation. By blaming the peasants’ preferences for ‘lesser’ forms of enclosure on their backwardness, it was easy for the reform administration to provide itself with a justification for a continuation of its activities in rural Russia. Iurevskii claimed to have found proof of a progression from otrub to khutor among farmers in Khar’kov province who, a few years after the initial enclosure of their land, began moving their houses and farm buildings onto it. For Iurevskii this served ‘as the best indication of the point I have made several times: that, so long as there is sufficient water, otrub razverstanie is only a transitional stage towards full khutor dispersal’.74 Kofod similarly maintained the transitional nature of otruba: East of a Petersburg–Smolensk–Kiev line only a few villages divide immediately into khutora. All the remaining mass of villages divide into otruba. Khutora begin to appear in these only after the . . . land settlement official has left, when the households, settling down after all the upheavals of the enclosure, soberly and calmly being to evaluate the situation.75

By 1916 the representation of otruba and other departures from the model khutor as intermediary forms of enclosed farms was incorporated into the official land-reform report for the previous decade.76 The story with respect to the incorporation of group land settlement (gruppovoe zemleustroistvo) into the developing reform teleology was similar. Group land settlement referred to a very varied range of land-reform 72 73 75 76

See, for example, the long list given in Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910 (1911), 42. 74 Iurevskii, Chto dostignutno zemleustroistvom, 20. Ibid., 20. Kofod, Russkoe zemleustroistvo, 155. Kratkii ocherk za desiatiletie. Komitet po zemleustroitel’nym delam (St Petersburg, 1916), 22.

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projects which were rather different in character from one another, except that usually they did not result in the formation of unitary farms. Under the heading of group land settlement, for example, was included a number of procedures that were designed to simplify the organization of land at the inter-communal level and to separate landowner and peasant land where it was intermixed physically. Also included was the legal and physical separation of land which had been allotted to peasants in a single act to form ‘single-plan’ settlements (odnoplannovie seleniia). During the first years of the Stolypin Reform, much that was later defined as group land settlement was undertaken by land settlement commissions alongside individual enclosures with no distinctions being drawn between the two. It was only as the reform developed that the distinction between uchastkovoe or edinolichnoe zemleustroistvo, the formation of enclosed farms, and gruppovoe zemleustroistvo, all other types of work rearranging land, was drawn. The distinction facilitated the ranking of priorities in the work of local commissions so that the formation of unitary farms could be privileged above all other types of land reorganization. Group land settlement’s role was officially portrayed as being to tidy up land-holding arrangements at the inter-commune level in order to facilitate farm enclosures. It was never understood as an end in its own right. Thus in Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910 ‘group land settlement’ was described as having ‘a very important role to play in the future development of individual farm consolidation’.77 Landreform projects involving the division of large villages or the fashioning of small hamlets from parent settlements were presented as ‘a preliminary step, but a step that, not infrequently, is essential’ in the direction of later enclosures.78 And a 1914 official guide for land surveyors defined group land settlement’s aim as ‘to prepare the ground for future individual consolidations’.79 Like title changes, partial consolidations, and the formation of otruba, group land settlement was meant to be understood as a preliminary stage in a more ambitious project. The theorization of group land settlement as one of the transitional stages to individual farm enclosure came about rather slowly. During the initial years of the Stolypin Reform, group land settlement was discouraged by the centre. Lykoshin’s verdict reached during his 1908 tour of the provinces, for example, was that, ‘such work does not achieve any significant results for land settlement [because] . . . it does not introduce independent ownership. All that it achieves is a gathering-in of land in a 77 79

78 Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910 (1911), 46. Ibid., 48. S. P. Kavelin, Mezhevanie i zemleustroistvo (St Petersburg, 1914), 203.

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single block around a village . . . the peasants’ allotment land remains in communal ownership.’80 In the 1909 fieldwork schedule for the land reform the division of settlements and single-planned villages were placed fifth and sixth on the schedule of reform priorities.81 The low priority of group land settlement was sustained until the war years, even though more peasants were reached by group projects than by other types of land settlement work—in some of the northern provinces where the land relationships between communities and landowners were especially complicated, it came to dominate the work of local commissions. Then in 1914, in response to the departure of many heads of households for the front, group land settlement was elevated to the first priority in the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs’ schedule. As the 1916 annual report explained, Because of the special circumstances that have arisen in the agrarian life of our villages the character of land settlement work has changed. It has proved more useful this year to move group land settlement to first priority. The completion of large numbers of projects will create conditions for the mass transfer of peasant households to individual farming when the war is over.82

The change in priority, the report made clear, was a temporary measure brought about by the exigencies of war. The Committee for Land Settlement Affairs had not retreated from its original goal. The establishment of ‘group work’ as a separate category of land settlement did not give local commissions carte blanche to rearrange communal land in any way they or the peasants saw fit. Under the heading of group land settlement, a number of clearly defined operations were identified which allowed some types of reorganization but excluded others. The threat for the reform project this further subdivision of land-reform operations addressed was the possibility that by improving conditions for farming at inter-communal level, the life of the land commune might be prolonged. This was a prospect that ran entirely counter to the reform’s goal and, understandably, was viewed with misgivings by the reform’s advocates. Examples of types of land reorganization that were excluded from officially sanctioned group land settlement were the widening of strips in the open fields (achieved by reducing their number) and the restructuring of the open fields with a view to introducing a multiple-field rotation. In the 80

RGIA, f. 408, 1909, opis’ 1, no. 133, 39. Obzor deiatel’nosti glavnogo upravleniia zemleustroistva i zemledelia za 1909, Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia (St Petersburg, 1910), 48–9. 82 Otchetnye svedeniia o deiatel’nosti zemleustroitel’nykh kommisii na 1 ian. 1916 g. (St Petersburg, 1916), 17. 81

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first two years of the Stolypin Reform, local land settlement commissions had, in fact, helped peasant communes effect these types of changes, but once the centre began issuing instructions to guide the work of its local agents they were discouraged from continuing to do so. The final recommendations for individual and village-wide enclosures did not allow for any consolidations in which there was more than one parcel of land under any single use, while group land settlement did not include provision for merely reducing the number of strips in the peasants’ possession.83 The 1911 Law on Land Settlement gave the recommendations the force of law. Iurevskii drew attention to the fact that the redivision of commune land with the aim of introducing a multiple-field rotation does not even receive a mention in the law on Land Settlement of 29 May 1911 or in the new directives issued to land settlement commissions. Whereas [formerly] commissions were allowed to do this type of work if they had sufficient surplus land surveyors, now any request for it must be turned down.84

Fieldwork plans submitted by provincial commissions in 1910 for the forthcoming year still included some projects for strip widening and multiplefield rotations, but, on Rittikh’s personal instruction, they were deleted.85 With the onset of war and the new priority given to group land settlement, there was no relaxation of the rule.86 The firmness of the land reform administration’s opposition to improvements to the organization of land within the framework of the commune is further testimony, if any is needed, of the consistency in the authorities’ commitment to a radical transformation of rural Russia. 83

RGIA, f. 408, 1908–1909, opis’ 1, no. 116, 442. B. Iurevskii, ‘Pravitel’stvo i zemlia. II.’ Rossiia, 12 November 1911, 1. 85 RGIA, f. 408, 1908–1909, opis’ 1, no. 116, 2. Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, gives a different account of the centre’s attitude to group land settlement than the one given here. He maintains that the fact that the land settlement commissions were prohibited from doing work on strip widening does not indicate that the centre was opposed to it, because peasants could still apply though the Ministry of Internal Affairs for help in widening their strips. It is difficult to accept this argument because under a law of 29 May 1911 a single system of state survey was introduced—ogranichenie zemel’ pri zemleustroistve—which took all responsiblity for surveying away from the MVD. See Kavelin, Mezhevanie, for a full account of the changes. 86 In an inspector’s report for 1915, for example, Bronitskii uezd land settlement commission was criticized for including projects to reduce the number of strips in the open fields in its plan of work for the next year: RGIA, f. 408, 1914–1915, opis’ 1, no. 271, 56. 84

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3 OPEN FIELDS, SCATTERED STRIPS, AND REPARTITIONS Whatever were the Stolypin Reform’s broader aims, its detailed provisions were primarily technical in nature, providing for the physical rearrangement of peasant nadel land and the legal transfer of its title to specified individuals. These changes would liberate the peasant from the negative affects of the land-holding regime in the commune. Two particular features of communal land-holding had attracted the attention of the reform’s authors—fragmentation or land scattering (cherezpolositsa) and repartition (peredel). These now became the focus of the reform’s efforts and their elimination was the immediate objective of the measures contained in the acts of 1906, 1910, and 1911. Cherezpolositsa, the scattering of the peasants’ land into numerous parcels and strips, existed at two levels in Russian villages: inter-village or macrolevel scattering (vnenadel’naia cherezpolositsa) described a situation where a village or commune’s land was held in separate blocks which were physically mixed up with land belonging to other landowners (an example is shown in Figure 3), and intra-village or micro-level scattering (vnutrinadel’naia cherezpolositsa) which described a situation where the land of individual households was physically mixed up with the land of other peasant households (as in the example in Figure 4). The number of separate strips in which peasants held their land had been recorded in the zemstvo censuses from the 1880s, and it was through this record that the full ‘problem’ of land scattering in the commune became known. Public criticism of fragmentation grew in the last decades of the century in conjunction with debates about the abolition of servitudes in the south-western provinces, and Witte’s 1902 investigation into the needs of agriculture confirmed for educated Russians that land fragmentation caused difficulties for peasant farming. Thus, at the turn of the century there were few people who were prepared to defend land fragmentation, and those like V. V. Vorontsov, who did, argued the case on the grounds that strips were an ‘unfortunate necessity’, which helped the peasants achieve equality in the apportionment of land in the commune.1 1 V. V. Vorontsov, Progressivnie techeniia v krest’ianskom khoziaistve (St Petersburg, 1892), 404. Vorontsov admitted that there was not full equality of land-holding in the commune because to achieve this would require too great a sacrifice of efficiency.

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Figure 3 An example of inter-village land fragmentation in Tula and Riazan provinces involving the land of two peasant communes and one private landowner.

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Figure 4 An example of intra-village land fragmentation involving the land of nineteen households in Posol’che settlement, Vil’no province. (Source: A. A. Kofod, Russkoe Zemleustroistvo (St Petersburg, 1914) 94) By the time of the Stolypin Reform a comprehensive list of the problems in peasant farming directly ‘caused’ by land scattering had been compiled, backed up by scientific ‘proofs’. K. Ia Vorob’ev, addressing the Moscow Agricultural Society, for example, listed the ‘seven problems of

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strip farming’ in descending order of priority, substantiating his points with precise numerical calculations of the losses that scattering incurred in the peasant economy. He calculated, for example, that with thirty-three strips a household would lose 2.5 per cent of the arable land to which it was entitled in boundary furrows which, multiplied across Russia’s communes, came to a considerable loss of potential sowings.2 Professor A. Bilimovich, a well-respected agrarian scholar, produced a similar set of seven problems, and P. M. Lokhtin identified ten.3 First-order charges against land fragmentation were that it wasted the peasants’ time in needless journeys to work, consumed land in boundary furrows and headlands, resulted in fields that were too remote to cultivate properly, and prevented innovation (on the part of noble landowners as well as the peasants) because it forced everyone whose land was intermixed to conform to a universal cropping cycle. Second-order charges against strip fields included their ‘neighbourhood effects’ (the contamination of contiguous fields with weeds, compaction by trampling, and furrow stealing), their negative impact on social relations in the village (strip fields were thought to be a source of disputes between neighbours), their association with ridge-and-furrow (which was believed to lower yields), and their unsuitable shape for modern machines. A final catch-all charge was that land scattering forced peasants to live together in villages and thus increased fire risk and epidemics and contributed to the negative social pathology of collective living. The list was sufficiently long for no serious doubts to be admitted in the case against strip farming. So often, indeed, was the catalogue of defects repeated in learned and popular journals that it soon assumed the status of a canon. It is possible to conceive of a land reform that might have eliminated strip farming without undermining the principle of communal tenure. The same did not apply to the process of repartitioning—the second major defect of peasant land-holding—because it was the repartition right that defined the very essence of the land commune or obshchina, at least for educated Russians. An assault on the practice of repartitioning was necessarily an assault on the very foundation of the commune. Fortunately for those who wished to see the commune’s demise, the case against repartitioning was apparently strong. Repartitioning could be linked, for example, to poor soil husbandry because it had been observed that peasants stopped manuring 2 K. I. Vorob’ev, ‘Drobnost’ i chrezpolosnost’ zemel’ pri obshchinnom zemlevladenii’, in Trudy s”ezda deiatel’ei agronomicheskoi pomoshi mestnomu khoziaistvu, 10–19 Fev. 1901 (Moscow, 1901). 3 P. M. Lokhtin, Kak sdelat’sia krest’ianam bogache (Kiev, 1906), 5; A. Bilimovich, Zemleustroitel’nie zadachi i zemleustroitel’noe zakonodatel’stvo Rossii (Kiev, 1907), 10–11.

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their fields in the years immediately prior to a repartition. The following extract from a description of communal farming in Bakhmutskii uezd, Ekaterinoslav province, where repartitions took place at frequent intervals, was typical: In the first year after a repartition, the peasants sow maize and melons and weed the land well, and if they can put a little manure on it they do. But the next year nobody does this because they will not be using the same parcels after the next repartition. The land is again left to grow weeds, to go to waste, and it gives low yields.4

Repartition was also linked by its critics to land scattering. Although it was recognized that fragmentation existed in all types of communes, those with hereditary as well as communal tenure, and in those with a defunct as well as an active repartition mechanism, repartition was thought to be antithetical to the emergence of physically consolidated farms in Russia’s villages. In part, this assumption rested upon the widespread belief that the repartitional commune had originated in a primitive peasant socialism— so long as repartition was a possibility, the peasants would use the mechanism to try to achieve an egalitarian land redistribution which called for the scattering of each household’s entitlement in strips of differing land capabilities. Among those who argued this point was A. A. Rittikh who, though acknowledging that the repartition mechanism could theoretically be used to consolidate peasant land, insisted that the peasants would never put it to such a purpose because of their egalitarian instincts: As is well known, the obshchina striving for equality tries to achieve this by allocating small parcels in different parts of the open fields according to soil quality and location. The process causes scattering no less than does partible inheritance, and moreover, its influence is permanent, and systematic—every new repartition involving land equalization leads to ever greater fragmentation and scattering in strips.5

Peasant socialism was also implicated in the other ‘problems’ associated with farming in the commune which the land reform sought to ‘solve’, such as the collective pasturing of livestock on common land and communal labour during the hay harvest. But the argument about the peasants’ socialist instincts was double-edged for a reform based on the idea of a natural progression of one farming system to another; so long as 4 F. S. Solov’ev, O zemleustroistve krest’ian. Primenitel’no k ukazu 9 ogo noiabriia 1906 (Bakhmut, 1909). Official views of the negative impact of repartition on the standard of peasant farming are to be found in: Zemleustroistvo 1907–1910 (St Petersburg, 1911), 8, and A. A. Rittikh, Zavisimost’ krest’ian ot obshchini i mira (St Petersburg, 1903), 18 passim. 5 Rittikh, Zavisimost’ krest’ian, 38–9.

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the peasants remained wedded to the idea of egalitarianism, it could be argued that the reform’s time had not yet come. It was for this reason that much of the official literature justifying the reform maintained that the socialist principle was already in decline and drew attention to communes’ regular violations of egalitarian principles. Rittikh was among those to endorse this view, observing ‘how frequently and seriously the principle of equality is violated’ in Russia’s repartitional communes.6 In popular and scholarly representations of the commune, the ‘irrationalities’ of the peasant land-holding system were normally explained as the product of peasant ‘ignorance’. Professor Bilimovich, for example, wrote that ‘in many cases the peasants are simply unaware of the possibility of a more rational distribution of their land; even less frequently do they know how to achieve it.’7 O. Khauke, an expert on peasant land law, and Vorontsov both attributed to the peasants’ ‘incapacity’ their striving to achieve equality in the distribution of land through scattering rather than by the agronomically more useful means of adjusting the amount of land to which a household was entitled to its quality (effectively the alternative that the Stolypin Reform was to propose).8 Vorontsov made the further observation that since even German landowners had not had the wit to think of consolidating their land, there could be little hope that Russian peasants would do so.9 Harsh critics of the commune were even less flattering about the peasant’s intellectual capacities. Boris Iurevskii commented that the impression strip fields made on him was ‘the same as from a frivolous toy, if it is possible to refer to agriculture in this way’.10 R. A. Leman, another of the reform’s advocates, asked ‘what sort of idiot would a landowner be called if he decided to buy an estate that consisted of the same number of separate parcels as some of the peasants’ land—for the peasants this just seems to be in the order of things.’11 The conviction that one of the reform’s principal tasks was to open the peasants’ eyes to the irrationality of their existing land-holding system and to reveal to them a more rational alternative, was reflected in the early concentration in the reform’s activities on the task of ‘familiarization’. Familiarization involved local land-reform agents—permanent members, land captains, and land surveyors—explaining the benefits of enclosure 6

7 Ibid., 35. Bilimovich, Zemleustroitel’nie zadachi, 11. O. A. Khauke, Krest’ianskoe zemel’noe pravo. Podrobnoe sistematicheskoe posobie k izucheniiu deistvuiushchogo zakonodatel’stva i praktiki po voprosam krest’ianskogo zemlevladeniia (Moscow, 1914), 95; Vorontsov, Progressivnie techeniia, 398–9. 9 Vorontsov, Progressivnie techeniia, 398–9. 10 B. Iurevskii, Zemleustroitel’nii smotr (St Petersburg, 1912), 53. 11 R. A. Leman, Kniga dlia krest’ian nechernozemnykh gubernii Rossii (Moscow, 1908), 7. 8

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to peasants, distributing to them Kofod’s Khutorskoe Rasselenie and other reading materials prepared by the land settlement commissions, and the exposure of the peasants to ‘living examples’ of consolidated farms. During the first year of the reform, the administration organized visits to the western provinces to observe the khutora there, and it set about trying to identify pre-1906 khutora in other parts of Russia which could act as local models. The pioneer separators from the commune and Peasant Land Bank khutora were also supposed to perform the same function. The assumption of the reform organization was that observation of these models would lead to other peasants rejecting the commune in favour of enclosed farms as the superiority of independent, enclosed farming gradually dawned upon them. Furthermore, it was reasoned, the sharper the contrast between modernity and tradition, the more obvious would be the attraction of the former to the peasants. This reasoning reflected the utter confidence of the reform advocates in the strength of their case against the commune. Whilst it was understood that the peasants might be reluctant to dissolve their communes for social or cultural reasons, the economic argument for land consolidation was considered incontrovertible and ultimately bound to prevail—such was the belief in the power of ‘economics’ over ‘tradition’. It did not seem to occur to the reform’s authors that the peasants might have their own economic rationality and that this might underpin existing land-holding arrangements, and perhaps much more, in the commune. The lack of correspondence between the state and peasants’ calculation of the costs and benefits of different land-holding arrangements meant that they failed to interpet the reform in a universal way. This was bound to have an impact upon the way that the reform unfolded after 1906.

The Economic Utility of Fragmentation and Repartition in Russia’s Land Communes The ideas of the economic historian D. McClosky about the economic utility of land scattering in English open-field villages are familiar to students of the Russian commune. McClosky’s proposition, it will be recalled, was that the scattering of land in English open-field villages provided an insurance against risk; with scattered strips, individual households were less likely to suffer the loss of all their crops through storm damage, fire, or livestock trampling than was the case if all their land were held in a single parcel. McClosky’s much quoted reminder about the context within which peasant behaviour has to be understood is relevant to the situation that existed in much of European Russia in the early twentieth century, but

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particularly in the black-earth centre: ‘The inefficiencies of the open fields were premiums on an insurance policy in a milieu in which agricultural yields were low and unpredictable, and in which the costs of a shortfall— at best crushing debt or malnutrition and its associated diseases, at worst starvation—were high.’12 Similar notions about risk aversion had occurred to late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century observers of the Russian commune. The economist B. D. Brutskus, in a pamphlet arguing for the setting up of a state insurance scheme for the peasantry, observed that it was ‘a commonly held view’ that strip cultivation protected the peasants against the possible effects of hailstorm damage better than did consolidated plots.13 Vorontsov, in his seminal treatise on the land commune, quoted examples of peasants justifying the scattering of their land in riskaversion terms: scattering guaranteed that ‘the harvest will be more even’ in those provinces where localized hailstorms could inflict fatal damage on standing crops.14 A survey of peasant farmers conducted by the Imperial Free Economic Society a few years after the Stolypin Reform’s introduction recorded a number of instances of peasants explaining their reluctance to consolidate their strips into unitary plots of land by the fear that they could lose all their crop in a single hail storm. These fears were evidently justified. In one case reported in Russkoe Bogatstvo for July 1910 thirty enclosed farms lost their entire crop as a result of hail storm damage, but they were granted no compensation by the land settlement organisation.15 The words of one peasant interviewed in Saratov province is a clear statement of McClosky’s risk-aversion thesis: ‘Why do you not move onto an otrub?’ ‘I’m afraid.’ ‘What is there to be afraid of?’ ‘What to be afraid of? At present all my land is in six places. If we have a hailstorm or a fog some grain would be destroyed, but look—you can collect it from another strip.’16 Russia’s continental climate made crop production peculiarly vulnerable to the effects of storm damage as the summer maximum of precipitation, 12 D. N. McClosky, ‘The Persistence of the English Common Fields’, in W. N. Parker, and E. L. Jones, European Peasants and Their Markets: Essays in Agrarian Economic History (Princeton, 1985), 114–15. 13 B. D. Brutskus, Zemleustroistvo i rasselenie. Za granitsei i v Rossii (St Petersburg, 1909), 7. 14 15 Vorontsov, Progressivnie techeniia, 399. Russkoe bogatstvo, 10 (1910), 78. 16 S. Bel’skii, Novaia zemledel’cheskaia Rossiia (St Petersburg, 1910), 95.

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which fell in intense cloudbursts, came at the end of the growing season in the steppe when the standing crop was brittle. In Melitopolskii uezd a zemstvo publication observed that ‘the rain normally falls in bands. Not infrequently, therefore, one half of a commune’s fields suffer complete drought but the other half is engulfed by frequent rains.’17 Other risks, such as fire sweeping through a crop in late summer, locust swarms, gopher infestations, and trampling livestock were also everyday realities for the Russian peasant farmer. They all had localized effects and their consequences could be reduced by a judicious scattering of land. Land scattering against risk does not, of course, exhaust the list of possible ways in which open-field arrangements can be understood as rational, although it is the one with which economic historians are most familiar. Distributing land in strips also helped the operation of the internal land market in Russia’s villages. For individual households interested in selling some of their land it was advantageous to hold a ‘diversified portfolio’ of lots, scattered in such a way as to maximize the number of potential purchasers. Viewed from the perspective of the Chayanovian model of peasant social mobility, land fragmentation could thus be said to have helped smooth the process of the alternate shedding and drawing in of land by households progressing through their demographic cycle of growth and decline.18 At the community level, land scattering may also have helped communes to conserve the collective land resource. In this case, community level rationality could sometimes be in conflict with the short-term interests of individual households. N. Astyrev, writing about his three years as a scribe in one district in Voronezh province, described how communes would allocate land in widely scattered strips to bobyl’ households in receipt of some arable for the first time ‘so as to ensure that they would work the land themselves and could not rent it all to outsiders, or, if they did rent it out, that it would go desiatina by desiatina to their fellow villagers’.19 It was not uncommon for communes to vary their strip allocation practice in order to reward or penalize households for their past performance in managing the land, as examples discussed below will show. The best example of the way in which strips assisted communes in persuading peasants to act in the collective interest was in the right it gave 17

Quoted in Vorontsov, Progressivnie techeniia, 399. There is a vast literature on the Russian peasant economy discussing the debate between the Organization and Production School and their critics during the first decades of the century. They are summarized in T. Shanin, Peasants and Peasant Society: Selected Readings, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1971), and T. Cox, Peasants, Class and Capitalism: The Rural Research of L. N. Kritsman and his School (Oxford, 1986). 19 N. Astyrev, V volostnykh pisariakh, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1896), 109. 18

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communities to ‘establish the use of land as pasture’.20 As Khauke observed, in this respect scattering in many Russian communes had assumed a de jure as well as de facto character.21 The smooth transition from using the open fields for individual cultivation to collective livestock grazing was a particularly important function communes had to perform, especially in those parts of the country where the sustainability of the three-field system depended upon sufficient organic manure being generated from livestock husbandry for arable cultivation. Land scattering was functional to the process because it prevented any individual household from withdrawing its land from the common grazing cycle, thereby reducing the total amount of grazing land available for members of the commune at large— the cost of erecting fences around a multitude of strips was simply too great for most households. In some communes, extra insurance against such an action was made in formal prohibitions on individual members fencing their strips.22 The observation that strip fields could be used in a quasidisciplinary way to enforce participation in the annual round of common grazing is also suggested by the economic historian Carl Dahlman, who uses the insight to explain the longevity of the open-field system in Europe. Using a transaction costs argument, Dahlman argues that in extensive, mixed farming systems land scattering represented a lesser cost to a community than the cost of negotiating and enforcing all the agreements that would be necessary to ensure that every owner of a consolidated plot made his land available for fallow and stubble grazing by the common herd at a set day in the year.23 Dahlman bases his thesis on the assumption that, unless they were constrained, members of a community would take the opportunity to ‘free ride’ on collective resources since it was in every farmer’s interest to attempt to remove their arable from the annual round of common grazing, whilst preserving their right to run their livestock with the common herd on fellow villagers’ fallow and stubble. No doubt Dahlman 20 The existence of the right to convert individuals’ arable strips into pasture for common grazing was understood by the government to be a principal reason why more households had not redeemed and consolidated their land under clause 165 of the Emancipation Statute. See A. A. Rittikh, Zavisimost’ krest’ian, 111. Rittikh was quoting Vorontsov on this point. 21 O. A. Khauke, Russkoe zemleustroitel’noe zakonodatel’stvo (Moscow, 1910), 3. 22 For example, Dokumenty po istorii krest’ianskoi obshchiny, 1 (Moscow, 1983), 105 and 120 describe such prohibitions for two communes in Archangel province. The same was reported for communes in Riazan, Novgorod, and Pskov provinces. See Sbornik materialov dlia izucheniia sel’skoi pozemelnoi obshchiny, Imperiatorskoe vol’noe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo (St Petersburg, 1880), 134, 265, and 326. 23 C. Dahlman, The Open Field System and Beyond: a Property Rights Analysis of an Economic Institution (Cambridge, 1980).

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overestimated the role of individual self-interest in shaping the land-holding arrangements of the open-field village, but there can be no doubt that free riding was a potential problem in Russia’s communes, as the peasants’ response to the Stolypin Land Reform was to reveal after 1906. Demonstrating that land scattering can be rational, whether this rationality is located at the level of the peasant household or the community or both, is not, of course, to deny that alternative more efficient ways of holding the land may have existed for Russia’s peasants at the turn of the century. However, the comparative advantages of different land-holding arrangements were probably less clear-cut than was supposed by the authors of the Stolypin Reform. When they set out to familiarize the peasants with the advantages of land consolidation and private land ownership, the advocates of land reform overlooked many of the benefits the peasants derived from the existing disposition of their land while underestimating the peasants’ attachment to the familiar way of doing things. As path-dependence theorists have observed, so long as a set of institutional arrangements to which people have become habituated provides a satisfactory response to their livelihood needs, they often feel no strong complusion to abandon them, even though more rational alternatives may exist.24 It is possible that peasants in Russia’s communes were prepared to put up with the problems of strips because they were used to farming this way. Additionally, though, there is evidence that the ‘incontrovertible’ defects of strip fields could be put to good use. For example, although furrows, boundary verges, and headlands between strips did reduce the overall amount of land available for cultivation in the commune, they could nevertheless be put to some use in the context of open-field farming. Verges and headlands, for example, gave access to individuals’ strips, and they were places onto which stones cleared from the land could be deposited. They could also be used for occasional grazing of tethered livestock or be mown for hay. In the wetter provinces like Moscow, furrows served as drainage channels.25 Strips too remote to be well cultivated could always be used for grazing and mowing, and those that were sown yielded at least something. Remote strips performed other functions too. In Moscow province, where they were called the pustyri, they were selectively allocated to households that had given up or were in the process of giving up farming. The households thus 24 P. David, ‘Historical economics in the long run: Some implications of path dependence’, in G. D. Snooks, (ed.) Historical Analysis in Economics (London, 1993), 29–40. 25 Count V. Orlov, Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii po Moskovskoi gubernii. Krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo. 1 (Moscow, 1879), 68.

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banished to the outer reaches of the commune were called pustyrniki.26 No doubt the fate of the households treated this way was sealed by such ‘banishment’, but it did allow communes to concentrate their most accessible land in the hands of the stronger farmers. As a commune’s principal obligation with respect to outside authorities was to meet the annual tax levy, this was a perfectly rational means of ensuring the best use of its resources to benefit the majority. The end-point of the process in Moscow province was that the pustyri were converted to pasture or hay for use by the commune at large. The time wasted by peasant farmers visiting their scattered strips (if time wasting is an appropriate concept in a semi-natural peasant economy) may also have been overstated by the commune’s critics. Even allowing for cases where individual households held their strips in multiples of ten, it was extremely unlikely that more than a few would need to be visited in a single day. Furthermore, the precise loss to the household budget of long journeys to work would depend upon a variety of factors, including the size of the strip, the farm labour force, and the reason for the journey. Therefore, the extent to which a long journey to work was a problem must have varied very substantially between different regions of the country. For English open-field villages, McClosky has suggested that the size of strips was equivalent to the amount of land that could be ploughed in a day.27 Such adjustments of the size of strips to the performance of agricultural tasks was also known in Russia. According to surveys made of the commune in the 1880s, the peasants still measured strips out in standard sizes to which a variety of names were given in different parts of Russia: sotnia, sotennik, khoziaistvennaia desiatina, osminnik, ulezh, verevnaia sazhen’, luk, lekha. In right-bank Ukraine, strips were traditionally equivalent in size to a den’ zemli (‘a day of land’). In Iaroslavl province, the width of strips was set to allow ‘four revolutions of the scythe’, and in Kaluga province they were measured in units of three paces, which was the distance seeds could be broadcast.28 In Moscow province, the average width 26

Ibid., 55. McClosky, ‘The Persistence of the English Common Fields’, 78. The average size of a strip was two-thirds to one acre which could be ploughed in a day by a horse-drawn plough. Horses and ploughs would generally be returned to the village every night as, McClosky argued, they would in any case have been, regardless of how much land had been ploughed. McClosky argues that the costs associated with moving from strip to strip of other tasks such as harrowing, weeding, and carting manure were probably quite small and were outweighed by the benefits of land scattering. 28 These examples are taken from: Sbornik materialov dlia izucheniia sel’skoi pozemelnoi obshchiny, 1880, 18. 27

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of strip in the 1880s was eleven arshina. According to Count Orlov, who made a comprehensive survey of communes in the province, this was the peasants’ preferred width because it facilitated the practice of piling the clay soils into ridges (zagonami na sval’) to combat poor drainage.29 Of course, among critics of the commune ridge-and-furrow was thought to arise from peasants piling soil up on their strips to avoid it being stolen by neighbours—evidence of the negative social consequences of fragmentation.30 The alternative explanation is that ridge and furrow was one of the peasants’ many risk-aversion strategies, since it ensured there would be some crop in years of extreme wetness or dryness.31 If the existence of strip fields weighed less heavily on the peasants in Russia’s communes than the authors of the Stolypin Land Reform supposed, the same was even more true where the repartition right was concerned. In nineteenth-century Russia the principal, or even exclusive, function of repartitions was understood by outsiders to the commune to be the achievement of an egalitarian distribution of land between peasant households. However, as contemporary studies of the commune show, repartition was capable of solving a much broader range of land-management tasks than this. To be sure, repartitioning had an important welfare function in that it enabled communes to deliver to entitled households the minimum amount of land they needed to satisfy their subsistence requirements, including their contribution to the communal tax burden. But repartitions also allowed communities to respond to sudden and unexpected changes in their size brought about by epidemics or out-migrations, to recast the shape of the open fields in order to accommodate changes in rotations and the acquisition or loss of land, to bring order into strip fields by reducing their number, and to help sustain a high standard of farming in order to ensure the reproduction of the commune’s physical resources and the delivery of taxes to the state. These functions of repartitioning were lost on critics of the practice who, instead, concentrated in their analyses on demonstrating repartition’s harmful impact on peasant farming. As has already been observed, the principal charge against repartitioning was that, unlike private ownership, it removed from households any incentive to improve their land or to farm in such a way as to conserve the quality of the soil. The equation of repartitioning with ‘poor soil husbandry’ was, in fact, a false charge, as in some 29

Orlov, Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii, 66. B. Iurevskii, Zemleustroitel’nii smotr (St Petersburg, 1912), 52. In the dry years the crop would be collected from the furrow in which moisture collected in the soil, and in wet years on the ridges which were well-drained. 30 31

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communes the repartition mechanism was used in a quasi-disciplinary way to maintain farming standards at the level needed to reproduce the community’s land resource base. Two examples can serve as illustrations. The first is taken from an Imperial Free Economic Society investigation of Pakhmovo village in Orel province. The ‘correspondent’ for the village reported that strips manured by the peasants were regularly excluded from repartitions and left in the possession of their current users, but that ‘once the peasant stops using manure, the land is again included in repartitions.’32 The second example is taken from the investigations P. S. Efimenko made of the commune. In Alatarskii uezd, Simbirsk province, one rural society Efimenko visited ‘passed a resolution obliging every household to manure its land; if any household does not carry this out, then it has to receive its allotment in the same place as previously.’33 As these two examples show, repartition could be manipulated in order to reward or penalize households for manuring their land. References to similar practices entered the record for communes in other provinces.34 In Saratov province, land drainage and the elimination of the gopher were subject to a similar system of rewards and penalties.35 In his survey of the commune in Moscow province, Orlov also found widespread evidence that repartition could be used to help conserve resources. It was he who first noted the practice in communes in the province of allotting poor farmers strips in the pustyri. Unless improvements were made to these strips they would be returned to the same households at each repartition. In other communes overgrown strips had to be ploughed before a household would be permitted to take part in a new land redistribution. As in Pakhmovo village, some communes in Moscow province would allow households which manured their strips to retain them at a repartition, whilst others passed resolutions requiring member households to use specified quantities of manure on their land. Yet others outlawed the use of manure on rented land, or they insisted that households which farmed their strips negligently rent them to good farmers.36 The penalty for violating these agreements was the receipt of degraded strips 32 Sbornik materialov dlia izucheniia, 1880, 11. The same volume noted that in the central provinces some communes made a practice of allocating households small plots of land called navozniki which were excluded from repartitions and which the peasants were required to manure. 33 P. S. Efimenko, Programma dlia sobraniia svedenii ob obshchinnom zemlevladenii (St Petersburg, 1878), 18. 34 Vorontsov, Progressivniia techeniia, 113–33. Vorontsov complained that there was much mythology surrounding the question of the relationship between the peasants’ use of manure on their land and repartitioning. He maintained that repartition was only a problem when the date of the next one was unknown. 35 36 Ibid., 124. Orlov, Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii, 48 passim.

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at the next repartition. Communes in Moscow province seem to have been able to adapt repartition to the changing orientations in peasant farming, setting up separate repartitions for livestock and arable farmers. An investigation of Archangel province by the Imperial Free Economic Society and Imperial Geographical Society in the 1870s showed that communes had similar rules to those in Moscow; in order to prevent dissipation of the communal land resource, peasant households were prohibited from selling manure, on pain of land confiscation.37 These examples contradict the assertion that repartition necessarily discouraged individual households from improving their land. Wherever households were rewarded for good husbandry by being given extended stewardship of their strips, this must have had a positive impact on general standards of farming in a commune. Not all communes holding land in repartitional tenure did in fact repartition their land after 1861—as a general rule, repartitioning was more frequent in the black-earth than in the non-black-earth provinces, and in the three provinces of left-bank Ukraine the so-called hereditary, or podvornoe, communes had never repartitioned the arable land.38 Where active repartitional communes were concerned, the precise manner of distributing land could vary the length of time that strips remained in the use of the same household, whether or not systems of rewards and penalties were used, as in the examples above. In the non-black-earth provinces, for example, the most common means of exchanging land at repartitions was by the process of ‘shuffling repartition’, or ‘peredel v peredvizhku’, which seems to have been designed to maximize continuity in the possession of strips. Shuffling repartitions involved the simple widening or narrowing of existing strips in accordance with changes in households’ entitlement to land. Under the system, only those households whose strips lay at the perimeter of fields were likely to need relocation—for the majority repartition would simply involve a shift in the physical centre of gravity of their land so that households would retain a central core of strips that would migrate slowly backwards and forwards across a field. Vorontsov maintained that the use of such shuffling repartitions in Moscow, Tver, Novgorod, and Iaroslavl provinces had allowed their members to use some of the same strips for up to thirty years.39 General repartitions (obshchie or korennye peredely) in the sense popularly understood as involving a change in the number, size, and location 37

In Dokumenty po istorii krestianskoi obshchiny, 1 (Moscow, 1983), 105 and 196. A. M. Anfimov and P. N. Zyrianov, ‘Nekotorye cherty evoliutsii russkoi krest’ianskoi obshchiny v poreformennyi period: 1861–1914’, Istoriia SSSR, 4 (1980), 26–41. 39 Vorontsov, Progressivnie techeniia, 145–50. 38

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of strips for all members of a commune, were comparatively rare in the non-black-earth zone. In the black-earth provinces such general repartitions were more common and could take place as frequently as every three years.40 In these provinces the use of organic fertilizer in cereal cultivation was comparatively rare, so impermanence in the possession of strips posed less of a problem than in the less fertile provinces, at least as far as the maintenance of soil quality was concerned. Nevertheless, manure was applied to some strips in the south which were specially reserved for intensive crop cultivation—of tobacco, vegetables, and hemp—and to which the peasants gave a variety of names—levadi, konoplianiki, navozniki, bakhti, ogorodi. These strips were subject to special repartition rules which allowed them to be excluded from general repartitions. Just how prized the levadi were was to be demonstrated during the years of the Stolypin Reform when the peasants fought hard to keep them out of enclosure projects. De facto they were already in the permanent ownership of peasant households. Whether land fragmentation and repartition constituted a ‘problem’ for the peasants in the sense that the word was understood by critics of the commune clearly depended upon the roles they were called upon to perform in particular communes. However, it is undeniable that for certain of the advances in modern agronomy that were beginning to enter Russia in the nineteenth century the ‘classic’ arrangement of strip fields and open fields could be problematic and limited the scope for more forward-looking individuals to exercise their initiative. But even here, the case against the commune seems to have been exaggerated by its critics as there were opportunities for individual and collective experimentation within the framework of existing land-holding arrangements. New crops, for example, could be tried out on rented or purchased land, or on specially designated closes, or klini, separated from the main rotation (as happened in the first stages of the introduction of clover cultivation in the non-black-earth provinces). There was also a measure of flexibility allowed in ‘compulsory’ communal rotations.41 In many villages it was as much for practical reasons as because they were directed to do so by communal resolution that peasants followed a common cycle of winter, spring, and fallow on their strips, but they did have scope for varying the type of crops grown.42 For example, they 40 Repartitions did not generally take place on all a commune’s fields simultaneously but would involve one field at a time. This was usually the fallow field and repartition would take place after the period of grazing and before the fallow was treated with manure. 41 In Samara province in the 1870s, for example, every peasant was free to grow crops in any succession. See Efimenko, Programma dlia sobraniia, 23. 42 See J. Pallot, ‘Agrarian Modernization in the Era of Capitalism’, in J. Bater and R. A. French (eds.), Studies in Russian Historical Geography, vol. 2 (London, 1983), 423–49.

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could substitute flax and potatoes for oats in the spring field, and grow ‘inter-tillage’ crops on the fallow. Elsewhere, communes did not insist upon maintaining a set succession of crops; in Archangel province peasants were free to grow spring crops in the winter field so long as their strips were free for livestock grazing in August and September.43 For individuals who wanted to make more radical changes—for example, from a three-course to a multiple-field rotation with fodder crops and leys—there was always the option of trying to convince their fellow villagers at the commune assembly of the need for a new rotation. According to evidence marshalled by Esther Kingston-Mann, new rotations began to make their appearance in increasing numbers of Russian communes in the last decades of the nineteenth century.44 In repartition, communes had a mechanism for restructuring the open fields. Naturally, critics of the commune drew attention to the difficulties associated with reaching such collective agreements, and supporters produced evidence to the contrary.

Strip Widening and Land Consolidation in the Commune The argument developed in the previous section—that the extent to which peasants felt constrained by the existing land-holding arrangements in the Russian village may have been exaggerated by advocates of enclosure— is lent further force by the fact that the peasants possessed the means themselves to consolidate their strips and, moreover, had found ways of overcoming some of the technical problems involved. The failure of the peasants to use this knowledge and expertise to achieve fully consolidated enclosed farms was most likely because they had concluded, for whatever complex set of economic and non-economic reasons, that the costs of enclosure outweighed the benefits, rather than because they did not possess the imagination to recognize its advantages. This point was made by a contemporary critic of the Stolypin Land Reform, B. D. Brutskus: [O]ne of the most important internal functions of the land commune is, in fact, to wage the battle against excessive land fragmentation . . . if in the Russian commune the full consolidation of land into khutora has not assumed significant proportions, it is because the peasants do not feel an urgent need for it rather than because of its difficulty.45 43

Dokumenty po istorii, 1983, 199. E. Kingston-Mann, ‘Peasant Communes and Economic Innovation: A Preliminary Enquiry’, in E. Kingston-Mann, and T. Mixter (eds.), Peasant Economy, Culture and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921 (Princeton, 1991), 23–51. 45 B. D. Brutskus, Zemleustroistvo i razselenie, 26. 44

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The two principal means available to individual peasant households and communities of peasants of consolidating land were repartition and private land exchanges. In the majority of cases these means were used to reduce excessive land fragmentation and to widen strips but not to achieve full enclosure. The most common use of the repartition mechanism to reduce land scattering was when frequent household partitions and partial repartitions (that is, repartitions that did not involve all the households in a commune) led to a complicated spatial intermixture and multiplication of strips. A general repartition involving all the households in a commune could be used in such circumstances to re-establish some order. For Vorontsov this facility to regulate land scattering was the principal advantage the repartitional (obshchinnoe) commune had over the hereditary (podvornoe) commune.46 In his view, partial and general repartitions were complementary; the former fulfilled the role of equalizing the amount of land households held and was a more or less continuous process of response to year-on-year changes in household composition, and the latter fulfilled the role of undoing the undesirable side-effects of this process. Orlov noted that peasants in Moscow province commonly referred to repartitions as ‘bringing the land into order’ (privodia zemliu v poriadok).47 Evidence of repartition being used in this way was found in some of the zemstvo household censuses made in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Vladimir province, for example, frequent partial redistributions of land between households had resulted in intense land scattering: ‘In order to sort this out and to be able to make improvements, the commune practised . . . periodic general repartitions involving the destruction of existing boundaries. Instead of receiving a multitude of strips here and there in the fields, every household was given one per field.’48 The same was recorded in Tver province. The report from one village in Ostashkovskii uezd was typical: ‘[A]fter 1861 much land was exchanged in partial repartitions which had resulted in intense fragmentation which forced the commune to carry out a general repartition.’49 In addition to reducing duplication in the open fields, repartition was also used by communes to widen narrow strips. Narrowness was, of course, a relative concept in the peasant commune and it was likely to trouble the 46

Vorontsov, Progressivnie techeniia, 101–3. Orlov, Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii, 171. 48 V. S. Pugavin, Sel’skaia obshchina, kustarnie promysly i zemledel’cheskoe khoziaistvo Iurevskogo uezda, Vladimirskoi gubernii (Moscow, 1884), 28–9. 49 Sbornik statisticheskykh svedenii po Tverskoi gubernii. Ostashkovskii uezd 12 (Tver, 1896), 57. 47

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peasants only when it interfered with the way they wished to farm. The width of strips became a problem, for example, when new technologies like mechanical harvesters were introduced or where family partitions led to a multiplication of the total number of households entitled to land in a commune—small households were at a particular disadvantage in this situation. It is clear that repartition could be manipulated to widen the strips of all commune members or of individual households. One of the publicized examples was in Iaroslavl province where communes in two uezdy had adopted a new system of apportioning land in standard 4 by 100 sazhen’ (one-sixth of a desiatina) units or sotni. The system involved dividing the arable land permanently into sotni which were allocated to households in accordance with the number of entitled souls they possessed.50 The same system was observed for communes in Orenburg, Tver, and Moscow provinces.51 In Moscow province Orlov observed a variety of other methods used by peasants to reduce the number and increase the dimensions of strips. These included allocating land to small households collectively and allowing them to decide among themselves how to divide it, or allotting double-sized strips to small households in alternate fields.52 One consequence of these methods of strip widening was that they could compromise equality between households. In the sotni system a small household might find that its total land entitlement was insufficient for strips of each of the different qualitative types of land in the commune to be allocated to it. The same applied when households merged and reapportioned strips among themselves. However, the loss of some degree of equality in these instances does not seem to have troubled the peasants, and there were means for evening out discrepancies if they became too large, such as making additional land grants or compensating households in money or kind. In Moscow province, for example, households whose strips fell alongside roadways, meadows, or at the extremities of fields, and were thus vulnerable to trespass and compaction, were compensated with supplementary strips.53 A survey in Archangel province turned up many similar examples of compensation systems. It was customary in the province for communes to make adjustments to strip sizes to take account of their qualitative difference when allocating land to individual households. In Kekhotskaia commune, for example, arable land was divided into three 50 K. Ia Vorob’ev, Trudy s”ezda deiatel’ei agronomicheskoi pomoshchi mestnomu khoziaistvu, 10–19 fev. 1901 (Moscow, 1901), 9–10. 51 Rittikh, Krest’ianskoe zemlevladenie, 10–11. 52 Orlov, Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii, 32–3 and 57. 53 Vorontsov, Progressivnie techeniia, 399.

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categories according to its distance from the village; households which were not allotted land in the first category received twice as much in the second category and three times as much in the third.54 Similarly, it was reported for Zachech’evskaia commune that ‘prior to a reapportionment, the commune comes to an agreement that peasants receiving their strips on poor land will be given a supplement (nadmet), the size of which is predetermined.’55 In the 1880s, the land supplement was 250 sazhen’ per soul for every 500 sazhen’ of land to which each household was normally entitled. In some communes, conscientious farmers could gain long-term advantage from exploiting the compensation system by upgrading their poor land to the standard of the commune’s best. It was normal for such upgraded land to be left in the original user’s possession at the next repartition but still to be counted as grade three land for the purpose of calculating that household’s total entitlement.56 These examples show that the peasants did not lack the intellectual resources needed to devise schemes to reduce land fragmentation without the principle of equality being compromised. Furthermore, their surveying skills, even if they did use lapti rather than chain and compass, were equal to the complex task of translating theory into practice. That these skills were even equal to eliminating strips altogether was borne out by spontaneous enclosures effected in the Empire’s western provinces from the 1880s (although a minority of villages did hire professional land surveyors). In the western provinces, communities of peasants passed resolutions to consolidate their strips into unitary holdings, or voloki, analogous to the enclosed farms that the land reform tried to implant throughout Russia after 1906. According to Kofod, 952 villages were involved in ‘spontaneous enclosures’ in sixty-four districts of Grodno, Kovno, Mogilev, Vitebsk, and Volynia provinces and the Poles’e region of Kiev province. A variety of methods were used for evening out differences in the quality of holdings, which included making adjustments to the size of farms (otrezki-prirezki), making compensation payments in money or kind, and making adjustments to the level of households’ redemption debt. The agreement, in principle, to enclose and the details of how this should be effected were normally recorded in a formal resolution of the village assembly. Kofod insisted that there had been few cases of dissension from the final decision.57 54

Sel’skaia pozemel’naia obshchina v Arkhangel’skoi gubernii, 1/1 (Archangel, 1882), 1. Sel’skaia pozemel’naia obshchina v Arkhangel’skoi gubernii, 1/4 (Archangel, 1882), 34. 56 Sel’skaia pozemel’naia obshchina v Arkhangel’skoi gubernii, 1/3 (Archangel, 1882), 3. 57 A. A. Kofod, Krest’ianskie khutora na nadel’noi zemle, vols. 1 and 2 (St Petersburg, 1905). Kofod was not, in fact, the enclosed farms’ only ‘discoverer’. N. I. Korobka published a book entitled Novoe iavlenie v krest’ianskoi zhizni (St Petersburg, 1903), which described the khutor 55

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The other means of land consolidation available to the peasants were private sales and rent, land exchanges, and even the time-honoured judicious marriage settlement. Although statutory prohibitions existed on the private conveyance of land held in communal ownership, a land market of sorts did exist in the commune. This was confirmed by the findings of the Witte Commission on the Needs of Agriculture (1902): [E]ven though there are no legal provisions for the transfer of ownership, land sales take place both between obshchiniki and podvorniki. Where the first are concerned the transactions take the form of resolutions of the communal assembly which sanctions the transfer of rights in return for payment to the commune. Where the podvorniki are concerned a large number of private transactions are contracted which have no juridical force at all. This leads to repeated lawsuits and land confiscations.58

The majority of transactions were validated by ‘domestic registration’ (domashnii raspisok). Such agreements did not have force in statutory law, although they did in custom. The different forms of individual land transactions that could take place were described in the diary of one district starshina, C. Matveev. He noted that the peasants referred to all transactions as ‘purchases’ (pokupki), even though their closer resemblance was to rent or a simple land exchange. ‘In this manner,’ Matveev wrote, ‘land is “sold”, for example, until children come of age, or, in the case of a widow, until her sons return from the army, or, again, until better times for farming come around. It [can also take the form] of the exchange of different types of land.’59 Other sources record permanent transfers. In Belgorodskii uezd, Voronezh province, for example, peasants sold their strips for 40 to 50 roubles ‘in perpetual use’. So that there should be no doubt about the permanence of such sales, some communes passed resolutions prohibiting the alienation from the new owners of land thus transacted.60 Commenting upon the gulf between the peasants’ practice and the statutory ban on private sales, Khauke wrote that communes ‘do not prevent such conveyances and, not infrequently, even register them in their annual accounts on the grounds that individual commune members are the partial owners [polnopravnye sobstvenniki] of the allotment land.’61 These observations corresponded to the argument movement in Volynia. Another investigation was made by I. S. Shildaev, Khutorskoe razselenie v zapadnykh guberniiakh (Perm, 1908). 58 TsMAM, f. 586, opis’ 1, 1903, no. 322, 77 (rev). 59 C. Matveev, ‘V volostnykh starshinakh’, Russkoe bogatstvo (1912), 167. 60 Vorontsov, Progressivnie techeniia, 355. 61 Khauke, Krest’ianskoe zemel’noe pravo, 60.

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put forward by S. V. Pakhman in his treatise on customary law written in 1877 when he argued that although the peasants did not understand the meaning of sobstvennost (private ownership), they did clearly distinguish between their own and other people’s property.62 In the peasant conception ‘use’ (polzovanie) was equivalent to ownership (vladenie) so that when they referred to selling land they meant the transfer of use-rights. Olga Crisp has made a similar case for the peasants already having an understanding of individual property rights prior to the Stolypin Reform.63 The number of individual land transactions among commune members seems to have increased after 1893, when a law was passed prohibiting communes from undertaking general repartitions more frequently than at twelve-year intervals and permanently banning partial repartitions. According to V. Gurko, this law was circumvented by peasants disguising what were essentially partial repartitions as privately negotiated land ‘sales’.64 However defined, transfers of land between peasant households in the commune could be used to reduce strips and partially to consolidate land. This was recognized by contemporary observers. For Vorontsov, the existence of processes which seemed to contradict the ‘land-equalizing rationale’ of repartition was difficult to explain. Describing numerous examples of individually negotiated land transfers aimed at strip widening, Vorontsov was forced to admit that ‘in this way, individual members of the obshchina take part in a process directly contrary to that carried out by the whole collectively; the latter in repartition tries to scatter land, the former to unite it.’65 Vorontsov could take comfort from the fact that, in general, communes intervened to prevent peasants forming completely enclosed farms through private sales and land exchanges.

Differentiation in the Commune The government’s assault on the commune was an assault launched against a moving target, for throughout its history the commune had been changing. The nineteenth century, when communes were called upon to respond to the penetration of market relations into the village and the recasting of the peasants’ relationship with noble landowners and the tsarist state, was no exception. Although there was much in the external environment that seemed set to undermine the commune, the evidence from 62

S. V. Pakhman, Obychnoe grazhdanskoe pravo v Rossii (St Petersburg, 1877), 1–4. O. Crisp, ‘Peasant Land Tenure and Civil Rights Implications before 1906’, in O. Crisp and L. Edmondson (eds.), Civil Rights in Imperial Russia (Oxford, 1989), 33–64. 64 V. Gurko, Po agrarnomu voprosu (St Petersburg, 1906), 44. 65 Vorontsov, Progressivnie techeniia, 402. 63

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post-Emancipation surveys was that communes could respond and adapt to the challenges they faced in ways that both defended and re-created the traditions of communal life. But the commune’s ability to respond adaptatively was not the same everywhere—differences in the intensity of the pressures they faced and in their individual histories and geographies meant that some communes were more vulnerable than others to corrosion by outside forces. There were two pressures in the decades leading up to the Stolypin Land Reform that put the communality of the commune under particular stress. The first was an intensifying socio-economic differentiation of households, which threatened to undermine the redistributive systems of the commune, and the second was demographic pressure, which undermined the ability of peasant households to satisfy their subsistence requirements exclusively from the land they held in the commune. There has now been sufficient research on the commune in the nineteenth century to dispel narodnik notions of the peasant village as a rural idyll in which people lived harmoniously together. Taking their cue from Stephen Hoch’s portrait of social relations on the Petrovskoe estate, other researchers have shown that Russian village communities were places of conflict criss-crossed by multiple fault lines according to age, gender, ‘class’, ethnicity, and occupation.66 In the Marxist-Leninist view of prerevolutionary peasant social structure, the principal divisions ran along class lines—the Russian village, at the turn of the century, was being polarized into the rich and poor who were bound together by relationships of domination and subordination. Evidence from the various reworkings of the zemstvo budget and dynamic studies has confirmed that socio-economic differentiation between households was a fact of life in the pre-revolutionary village, although it was strongly dampened in some places by countervailing tendencies associated with the household demographic cycle.67 The important issue for understanding the peasants’ reception of the Stolypin Land Reform is the extent to which socio-economic differentiation, whatever its source, had led to the appearance of households in the Russian village with command over sufficient resources for them no longer to need the protective security the commune could offer. These were households which might, 66 S. L. Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control in Nineteenth Century Russia: Petrovskoe, A Village in Tambov (Chicago, 1986). 67 D. Field, ‘Stratification and the Russian Peasant Commune: A Statistical Enquiry’, in R. Bartlett, (ed.) Land Commune and Peasant Community in Russia: Communal Forms in Imperial Russia and Early Soviet Society (Basingstoke, 1990), 143–64; H.-D. Löwe, ‘Differentiation in Russian Peasant Society: Causes and Trends 1880–1905, in R. Bartlett (ed.) Land Commune and Peasant Community in Russia: Communal Forms in Imperial Russia and Early Soviet Society (Basingstoke, 1990), 165–95.

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indeed, be attracted by the prospect of disengagement from the commune, although there was no certainty that they would respond positively to the reform. Socio-economic differentiation did not automatically make a peasant commune vulnerable to disintegration, but it was a weak point. Wealth differences were by no means the only divisions in peasant villages making them vulnerable to the land reform. A number of authors have drawn attention to the acceleration in household partitions from the 1880s, which were indicative of growing tensions between generations in the village. In her article on the litigious daughter-in-law, Beatrice Farnsworth has highlighted the renegotiation of gender relations that was taking place in the village in the latter decades of tsarist rule.68 The increasing volume of labour migrations, some on a permanent or semi-permanent basis, was yet another source of tension in the village, blurring as it did the previously clear distinction between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. As population pressure ate away at the commons, converting them into arable fields, fault lines also appeared between the nadel (‘land entitled’) and non-nadel (non-land-holding) population in villages as the latter found their access to resources such as firewood, mushrooms, berries, and grazing land diminished.69 Again, these divisions were not necessarily fatal to communes as there were ways of mediating and containing disputes, but nevertheless tensions between the various elements of village society, especially in so far as they concerned access to an often diminishing resource base, undermined the stability of peasant communities. Land lay at the heart of the majority of disputes in the Russian village and it was land that figured above all else in the ever increasing volume of cases that peasants took to the volost’ courts for resolution. The problem in the latter decades of the nineteenth century was that relative to the size of the rural population, land became an increasingly scarce resource for Russian peasants. Even taking account of the large transfers to the peasants as a result of the liquidation of noble estates, the expansion of land in their use was not everywhere able to keep up with the growth in the 68 B. A. Engel, ‘The Woman’s Side: Male Out-Migration and the Family Economy in Kostroma Province’, Slavic Review, 45 (1986), 257–71; B. Farnsworth, ‘The Litigious Daughter-in-Law: Family Relations in Rural Russia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Slavic Review, 45 (1986), 49–64; C. Frierson, ‘Razdel: The Peasant Family Divided’, Russian Review, 46 (1987), 35–51; C. Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emanicipation Period (Princeton, 1991), 76–117. 69 On the whole, the non-land-holding inhabitants of villages have been neglected in the literature on the Russian peasantry. The main exception is in Orlando Figes’ study of the Revolution in the Volga where he shows the important role non-land-holding peasants played in village politics: O. Figes, Peasant Russia. Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (New York, 1989).

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peasant population. Whilst in some regions of Russia such as the northwest and the vicinity of large towns, peasants were able to compensate for declining land resources by diversifying and intensifying production, the evidence for Russia’s central regions was of the peasants suffering the negative consequences of land hunger.70 In the central black-earth regions the peasants had been forced to make a host of adjustments in their survival strategies. These included ‘hunger renting’, the conversion of pasture land into arable, continuous cropping, labour migrations, emigration, and domestic manufacturing. Where the ‘traditional’ land-holding practices of the commune were concerned, population pressure impacted both directly and indirectly, through increasing the frequency of household partitions and repartitions. Growing numbers of land-entitled households in both repartitional and non-repartitional communes could lead to an intensification of land fragmentation, unless measures were taken to counter this. Where repartition was still practised, population growth could set off a sort of involutionary spiral whereby each new repartition afforded households the opportunity to gain more land relative to their neighbours if they maximized the number of their entitled souls. The net effect was to sustain the pressure on households to keep birth rates high and on communes to repartition at ever shorter intervals. Competition for land could also be expressed in demands for ever finer distinctions between types of land to be made at repartitions, leading to a multiplication of the number of strips allocated to households. However, the response to population growth could work in the opposite direction with households currently in possession of sufficient land opposing repartition in the face of challenges from new or dynamically growing households. Contemporary investigators of the commune, principal among them K. R. Kacharovskii and A. A. Kaufman, attempted to theorize the changes demographic pressure made to repartition practices as a progressive transition from the ‘labour principle’ to the ‘consumer principle’ in the commune.71 In truth, the responses of communes to the relative contraction of their resource base were varied. Some communities managed better than others to use the means at their disposal to counteract the negative consequences for their land-holding regimes brought about by population pressures. 70 S. Wheatcroft, ‘Crisis and the Condition of the Peasantry in Late Imperial Russia’, in E. Kingston-Mann, and T. Mixter (eds.), Peasant Economy, Culture and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921 (Princeton, 1991), 128–72. 71 K. R. Kacharovskii, Russkaia obshchina, 2nd ed. (St Petersburg, 1900); A. A. Kaufman, Russkaia obshchina v protsesse ee zarozhdeniia i rosta (Moscow, 1908). For a discussion of their ideas, see J. Pallot, ‘Farming Regions of Russia in the Late Nineteenth Century, in J. Pallot and D. J. B. Shaw, Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia (Oxford, 1990), 112–35.

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The one universal consequence of the peasants’ relative land shortage was that it pitted commune against commune, household against household, and all peasants against private landowners in an ever more intense struggle to retain what they already possessed and to seek out new opportunities to secure subsistence resources. The Stolypin Land Reform was bound to draw into sharper relief the divisions that had been opening up in and between peasant communities. In so doing, the reform presented the institutions which had traditionally kept peasant self-interest in check with the most serious challenge they had faced in the forty-five years since the Emancipation.

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4 FREE RIDERS AND VILLAGEWIDE CONSOLIDATIONS The drama of the situation is that a question of such monumental importance on which the whole of the future of Russia depends is being decided not collectively, with the general good in mind, but individually, from the point of view of personal interests—and not with an eye to tomorrow, but according to the interests of today. A. Peshekhonov, 19081

The Reform takes off During the period between 1906 and 1915 approximately three million peasant households in Russia used the provisions of the land-reform legislation to change some aspect of how they held their land; some had applied for and been granted title to their strips in the commune, others were indirectly affected by their commune’s participation in a group land settlement project, and yet others had some or all of the land to which they were entitled in the commune reorganized into an ‘enclosed farm’.2 A further three million had petitioned to adopt the reform and had either had their applications turned down or were awaiting action when war broke out.3 Thus, the number of peasant households touched by the reform was not inconsiderable. However, as one leading Russian historian of the Stolypin Reform has observed, the changes in peasant land-holding these figures represent had an ‘unexpected’ character, as if a strong medicine had been prescribed for ‘the wrong disease’.4 1

Russkoe bogatstvo, 7 (1908), 145. The statistics for the reform have been discussed recently in A. P. Korelin, ‘The Social Problem in Russia, 1900–1914: Stolypin’s Agrarian Reform’, in T. Taranovski (ed.), Reform in Modern Russia. Progress or Cycle? (Cambridge 1995), 156; D. J. Macey, ‘A Wager on History: The Stolypin Agrarian Reforms as Process’, in J. Pallot (ed.), Transforming Peasants: Society, State and the Peasantry, 1861–1930. Selected Papers from the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies, Warsaw, 1995 (Basingstoke, 1997), 163–5. 3 Macey, ‘A Wager on History,’ 163. Macey puts the figure of peasants that engaged with the reform for the period 1906–15 at 6 174 000. 4 P. N. Zyrianov, Krest’ianskia obshchina Evropeiskoi Rossii 1907–1914 gg (Moscow, 1992), 101. 2

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One such unexpected feature of the peasants’ response to the reform was the rapid development of petitions from whole communes to enclose the land of their members. This was unexpected because, as will be recalled, the original assumption had been made that enclosures would be confined at first to a small number of ‘more progressive’ peasants who, having taken title to their strips in the commune, would sell these and use the proceeds to purchase Peasant Land Bank khutora. The refashioning of strips in the commune into enclosed farms, it was understood, would develop more slowly and would also be led by a minority of forward-looking peasants who might have to be helped to overcome their neighbours’ opposition. The conversion of whole communes to hereditary tenure and the enclosure of their members’ land was expected to develop at a later stage in the reform, after the example of the pioneer individual farmers had had time to be absorbed by the mass of less progressive peasants. Given the pressure on the new administration to justify itself, it was inevitable that when the reform unfolded in a different way this would be presented in a positive light. It was not at all difficult for the centre to argue that the development of whole-community enclosures was evidence of the reform having ‘found its mark’ with the peasants; if the reform’s authors had made a miscalculation, it was now argued, it was that they had underestimated the peasants’ readiness to quit their communes and to enclose their land. At the same time that the bureaucracy in charge of reorganizing peasant land in the reformed Ministry of Agriculture was growing in confidence, the land section of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was also claiming success for the rate of tenure changes on peasant land. In the first three years of the reform over one million conversions were effected under its aegis. However, from 1910 the number of peasants petitioning for tenure conversions began to fall off, prompting an internal investigation in the ministry to discover why.5 Numbers were, of course, boosted by the law of 14 June 1910 which automatically changed to hereditary tenure communes which had ceased repartitioning, but the early rates never recovered. As the land reform developed, the activities of the Ministry of Internal Affairs were subordinated to those of the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture, and the land reform became firmly associated in the popular imagination with enclosures, and, above all, with enclosures involving all the members of a peasant commune. The story of the peasants’ readiness to enclose was confirmed for the reform’s supporters by the analysis of the geographical pattern of peasant 5

RGIA, f. 1291, 1912–1913, opis’ 120, no. 35.

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response. Two macro-regions—the north-west and west and the arc of provinces stretching across southern Russia to the middle Volga—were identified as those in which the reform had caught on. These are shown in Figures 5–8. These were the regions of Russia in which commercial farming had made the greatest inroads into the peasant natural economy and where, it was now claimed, the commune was most in decline prior to the 1906 Edict. The greatest concentrations of the enclosed farms were in St Petersburg, Pskov, Smolensk, Kovno, Novgorod, Vilno, Vitebsk, and Mogilev provinces in the north-west and west, and in Ekaterinoslav, Khar’kov, Kherson, Samara, Saratov, Stavropol, and Taurida in the south and south-east.6 These provinces had above average numbers of enclosed farms, an above average number of title changes, and a high ratio of villagewide enclosures compared to individual separations. Taken together, these seemed to be proof of a positive reception of the reform among the peasantry. In the remaining regions of Russia, making up the greater part of the north, the central industrial region, and the central black-earth zones, the indicators told a different story. These regions were characterized by below average numbers of enclosed farms, a high ratio of ‘group’ to other types of land settlement work, a higher than average incidence of individual separations to community-wide enclosure projects, and a below average frequency of title changes. These were changes that corresponded in the ‘revised’ reform teleology to ‘transitional stages’ in the progression from communal to individualized farming and they were explained by the ‘lesser readiness’ of the population in these regions for the reform. In truth, there was rather less pattern and rather more in the way of ‘exceptions’ in the geography of the reform’s results than the centre was prepared to concede. Even among the successful provinces, there were those in which the overall percentage of enclosed farms was low and everywhere at the sub-provincial level the response was patchy, as Figure 9 of enclosure in a successful western uezd shows. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the century, the analytical division between successful regions, in which the reform had taken off, and laggard regions, which were waiting in the wings, became 6 Other ‘record’ provinces that fell outside these two geographical regions were Tambov, Voronezh, Kazan, and Moscow. See Zemleustroistvo 1907–1910, Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledelia (St Petersburg, 1911), 38. Oganovskii made a fourfold division of European Russia depending upon the number of consolidated farms formed: the south-east, Novorossiia, and the lower Volga, less than 10%; west, north-west, non-black-earth provinces, Baltic region, south-west and Malorossiia, 6–9%; the centre, Moscow province, Middle Volga, 3–6%; north and north-east, more than 1%: N. P. Oganovskii, ‘Zemleustroistvo’, in F. A. Brokgauz, and I. A. Efron, Novyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ 18 (St Petersburg, 1915), 554–70.

Ba ltic Sea

5.1– 10 > 10 No data Moscow

Samara

Black Sea

Ca

Kiev

s

a pi

nS

ea

Figure 5 The geographical distribution of enclosed farms in European Russia formed under the provisions of the 9 November 1906 Edict and subsequent land reform legislation. (Compiled by the author)

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30 No data

Samara

Kiev

a

sp

i

Se

Ca

Black Sea

an

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Distribution of households that secured title to their nadel land between 9 November 1906 and 1 May 1915 as a percentage of all households holding their land in communal tenure

99

Figure 6 The geographical distribution of tenure changes in European Russia made under the provisions of the 9 November 1906 Edict and subsequent land reform legislation. (Compiled by the author)

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Key

Ba ltic Sea

20.1–40 40.1–60 Moscow

60.1–80 > 80 Samara

No data

Kiev

Se

a

Ca

Black Sea

sp

i

an

Figure 7 The geographical distribution of whole-community enclosures as a percentage of all enclosures in European Russia, 1906–1914. (Compiled by the author)

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< 20

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St. Petersburg

100

Key Percentage number of enclosed farms formed through whole community enclosure (razverstanie)

Ba ltic Sea

< 20 20.1–40 40.1–60

Moscow

60.1–80 > 80

Samara

No data

Kiev

a

sp

i

Se

Ca

Black Sea

an

101

Figure 8 The geographical distribution of group land settlement as a percentage of all land settlement projects in European Russia, 1906–1914. (Compiled by the author)

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St Petersburg

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Key Group land settlement as a percentage of all land settlement projects completed between 1906 and 1914

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Figure 9 The pattern of enclosure in Ustiuzhenskii uezd, Novgorod province, showing the distribution of individual separations, whole-community enclosures, and group land settlement projects. (Compiled by the author) part of official discourse and was put to the service of the positive representations of the reform’s operations in the provinces. The feature of the reform’s pattern of adoption that, at the time, seemed to call for special explanation was its sluggishness in the central black-earth region. This was the region in which the agrarian crisis was most severe and where, according to the reform’s own logic, the demand for change among the peasantry should have been particularly strong. Indeed, it was the depth of the crisis in the provinces of the black-earth centre that had helped to place the reform of rural Russia on the government’s legislative agenda. Official explanations blamed a variety of ‘obstacles’ which prevented

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the reform’s development in these provinces. These included the spatial mingling at inter-commune level of peasant and landowner land which had to be disentangled prior to enclosure, the ‘complicated’ nature of soil and topographic conditions which, it was maintained, made the refashioning of strips into single farms difficult, the involvement of peasants in labour migrations which diverted their attention from farm improvement, and the absence of any model enclosed farms to help familiarize the peasants with the advantages of consolidation.7 The effect of land shortage and poverty on the peasants’ willingness to adopt the reform tended to be skirted over in such analyses, which was not surprising in view of the reform’s proposition that it was the property rights and the spatial arrangement of land in the commune, not the amount held, that was the source of the peasants’ distress. Reports from the black-earth centre, indicating that households clung to the security of the commune because they suffered a shortage of land, tended to be discounted. Households genuinely stretched for land, it was argued, always had the alternative under the reform of selling up and using the proceeds to begin farming in Russia’s land-abundant eastern provinces. The obstacles to the reform’s development in Russia’s heartland were contrasted with the favourable conditions in the successful provinces. In the north-west and west and the arc of southern provinces, the reasons for the reform’s success were presented as the mirror-image of the reasons for its failure elsewhere. The west and north-west provinces, for example, were home to many disparate groups of independent farmers, Balts and Germans, whose example, it was thought, had a potent impact on the surrounding Russian peasants. The southern and middle Volga provinces had the additional advantage of an ‘uncomplicated’ physical geography, although water shortage was considered an obstacle to the spread of khutora. An official report of land settlement activities in the period 1909–1913 noted that ‘the enclosure movement is developing most rapidly in the flat provinces where the constitution of the soil is most homogeneous.’8 These provinces were also more or less free of households with 7 See, for example, A. A. Kofod, Russkoe zemleustroistvo (St Petersburg, 1914); I. V. Mozzukhin, Zemleustroistvo v Bogoroditskom uezde Tul’skoi gubernii. Ocherki reformy krest’ianskogo zemlevladeniia (Moscow, 1917); Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910, 1911. The official explanations for variations in the uptake of the reform are discussed in J. Pallot, ‘Open Fields and Individual Farms. Land Reform in Pre-revolutionary Russia’, Tidschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 75 (1984), 46–60. 8 Itogi rabot za poslednie piatiletie, 1909–1913, Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia (St Petersburg, 1914), 18.

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secondary employment and, with the exception of the servitude provinces in the south-west, did not suffer the extreme fragmentation of landowner and peasant land that was characteristic of regions further to the north. Like the north-west, the southern arc of provinces were home to foreign colonists who could demonstrate enclosed farming to surrounding Russian villages. The pivotal role accorded German and Baltic settlers in the spread of the enclosure movement confirmed for the reform’s supporters the provenance of Russia’s enclosure movement in a Europe-wide process of agrarian transformation. The official analysis of the reform’s geography was, of course, fully consistent with the underlying assumption of the centre that, other things being equal, the peasants could be expected to enclose their land. In this chapter this assumption is inverted. Instead of asking what it was that prevented the peasants from adopting the reform, it asks why some peasants did adopt it. The justification for the inversion is the argument developed in the previous chapter that there may have been a positive utility to landholding arrangements in the commune which outweighed the advantages of enclosure for many of peasants. The clue to understanding the peasants’ engagement with the land reform seems to lie in the way the reform undermined mechanisms in the commune for preventing individual households appropriating for themselves a disproportionate share of communal resources. As the previous chapter showed, communes were no strangers to inter-household disputes over land or to some member households subordinating the collective interest to their own short-term individual gain. The principal formal restraints communes could exercise over these tendencies included their right to determine repartition rules, and their control over family partitions and the admission of households to land-entitled status. There were also the ‘informal controls’ of ‘moral pressure’ or ‘customary norms’ which communes could apply; these derived their authority from the peasants’ understanding of themselves as members of a moral community. The Stolypin Land Reform directly attacked these various restraints on the pursuit of self-interest by putting into individual households’ hands a new weapon with which to wage their quest to appropriate to their exclusive use a disproportionate share of their commune’s resources. The reform thus opened the door to free riding on an unprecedented scale; whereas in the past competition for land among peasants had been resolved by reference to customary practices which sought simultaneously to provide for short-term subsistence needs and the long-term reproduction of the resources upon which this depended, now resource competition was resolved by reference to laws, backed up by an administrative machine,

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which gave priority to the protection of individual interests. The outcome, this chapter argues, was to be seen in the pattern of tenure conversions, individual separations, and village-wide enclosures that evolved during the years after 1906.

Title Changes: Fixing Inequality in the Commune It has already been observed that in the original conceptualization of the Stolypin Reform, there was supposed to be a link between the transfer of title to the strips a peasant held in the open fields and their being gathered together to form a unitary farm. Confering title on their strips was supposed to act in a transformative way on the peasants’ consciousness, developing a respect for private property and an understanding of its economic potential. Title changes were also conceived of as contributing to the emergence of individualized farms because they allowed peasants to raise the capital to enable them to buy an enclosed farm from the Peasant Land Bank. However, the reform’s authors also recognized that title changes carried the threat of the emergence of a speculative land market. They took steps to prevent this occurring by prohibiting the sale of peasant allotment land to individuals outside the peasant estate and by limiting to six the number of allotments which any individual peasant could accumulate in his or her personal ownership. There seems little doubt of the intention in the provisions for title change in the 9 November 1906 Edict of keeping peasants on the land as small-scale farmers. Where the reform’s principal aim was concerned there turned out to be little direct connection between the process of securing title to land and its enclosure; the majority of enclosed farms that came into being did not arise at the end of a process beginning with title changes. Nevertheless, and despite a growing hostility on the part of reform officials in the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture towards tenure changes, the legal provisions in the 9 November 1906 Edict for tenure change were taken up by about two million peasant households in the period 1906–1915.9 To use the language of the official discourse, the provision, ‘answered the needs’ of some of Russia’s peasants. But the question is ‘what needs’? Peasant households taking title to their land fell into two principal groups according to what they subsequently did with their land; there were those 9 A further 3.5 million were deemed to have converted to private tenure by virtue of the provision in the 14 June 1910 law but, of these, only 13.4 per cent applied for title deeds. A more detailed discussion of the controversial statistics for the reform is contained in Chapter 7.

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which remained in their village farming all or some of their strips, and those which sold up or rented all their strips out. Among the latter, a majority was composed of households that migrated away from their commune to a variety of different destinations in European and Asiatic Russia with the intention of either resuming farming or finding work as urban or rural wage-labourers. The government went to considerable lengths to try counter opposition claims that the freedom the reform gave peasants to liquidate their land was hastening the downward social mobility of poor peasants. Indeed, the contribution the reform made to the proletarianization of the peasantry was the principal issue debated in the press in the first years of the reform; but whatever their impact on Russia’s evolving class structure, these households were not typical of those that took title to their land under the reform.10 More common was the first group of households: those that took title to their strips and continued to farm all or some of them. In the majority of cases, the motives driving such households to claim title to their strips were far removed from any intention to use the security of tenure they now had over their land as a platform for farm modernization (although the contemporary claim that this possibility might occur to them at some point in the future when ‘private ownership’ had an opportunity to work on their psyche cannot be discounted). The evidence available on peasant motivations for taking title to their land suggests, rather, that tenure changes were understood by the peasants as an end in themselves, not as a means to an end. That end, most commonly, was to secure a given quantity of land in their permanent ownership. Although not intended, the procedures for taking title under the 9 November Edict were framed in such a way as to allow any household which had a temporary advantage over its neighbours to be given the means to fix that advantage for all time. P. N. Zyrianov, in his recent monograph on the post-1906 commune, maintains that it was primarily marginal households in the commune— widows, the elderly, or couples with large numbers of daughters—that used the land reform to secure the strips they held in their permanent ownership.11 Additionally, in land-short and high-fertility provinces such as those in the black-earth centre it paid all households, marginal or not, to consider whether they should use the new law to protect the land they currently held from redistribution. The calculation that had to be made was complicated by the fact that the precise quantity of land that any household 10 The figures for the proportion that sold up after adopting the reform vary between 15 per cent (Zyrianov, Krest’ianskia obshchina, 1992, 111) and 40 per cent (Korelin, ‘The Social Problem in Russia’, 157). 11 Zyrianov, Krest’ianskia obshchina, 112–15.

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would secure was dependent upon factors which were not always in their control. One factor was the recent repartition history of the parent commune—when the last general repartition was carried out, whether the commune had made partial repartitions, the entitlement unit (razvertochnaia edinitsa) it used (and whether this would be changed at a forthcoming repartition)—and the commune’s recent demographic history. The 1906 Edict altered the rules of an already complicated game in repartitional communes which, in parts of Russia where competition for land was intense, had become a major issue of contention between households. Every household was now faced with a choice between fixing the land currently in their possession and as a consequence sacrificing any future claim they had on commune land, pressing for a repartition, or waiting to see how events would unfold. The 9 November 1906 Edict contained a variety of checks designed to combat households obtaining unfair advantage over their neighbours by adopting the reform, but it also contained numerous loopholes which could be exploited by self-interested peasants who were further assisted by the fact that the finer points of procedure were often poorly understood by the land captains and district boards responsible for administering this element of the reform. The law provided for the following: in communes which had not had a general repartition for twenty-four years, any household which petitioned for a change in title would receive all the land currently in its use. In communes in which there had been a general repartition within the last twenty-four years, any household which petitioned for tenure change would be granted the land it was due according to the entitlement unit that had been employed at the preceding repartition. If in this latter case, a household was found to be in possession of more land than it was due (according to the units used to calculate entitlement at the previous repartition), it could keep the surplus but had to pay for the difference at a rate per desiatina calculated as a proportion of the redemption debt remaining on the whole commune’s land.12 These provisions were supposed to accommodate the various states of the country’s repartitional communes —where the ‘equalizing principle’ was extant, this was respected in the 12 There was confusion at the local level about how the size of the compensation was arrived at, some district boards apparantly calculating it from the original redemption debt rather than from the amount that remained at the time that the petition for title change was received (and including the reduction made in 1881). This latter requirement was laid out in a Ministry of Internal Affairs circular, number 24, 12 April 1907, which also clarified other ambiguities that had arisen in the operation of the reform since 1906. The text of the Edict relating to title changes is to be found in: Izvestiia zemskogo otdela (St Petersburg, 1906), 392–5, and S. M. Sidel’nikov, Agrarniia reforma Stolypina (Moscow, 1973), 99–105.

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provision for compensatory payments for any surpluses of land households were found to hold, but where the ‘equalizing principle’ had been abandoned, the de facto individual property rights of households were to be respected. When it came to granting title, the numerous problems in operating these ‘protective measures’ became obvious, most notably the fact that the record of repartitions kept by land captains was incomplete and that, contrary to a prohibition made in 1893 against partial repartitions, many apparently non-repartitional communes had continued redistributing land among their members. It was not easy to classify communes in the manner the law required. One group of households which stood to gain by petitioning for title change were those that had been allocated additional land in a partial repartition in communes which, because of the absence of a general repartition in the preceding twenty-four years, were officially classified as non-repartitional. Households taking title to their land in these communes would not have to pay for their ‘surpluses’ because these were treated as if they had originated in the last general repartition. Meanwhile, in communes in which there had been a general repartition in the past twenty-four years, the provisions in the law for determining how much land to which a household was entitled contained some genuine grey areas. One concerned the respective timing of applications made by individual households for title change and a decision made by parent communes for a new repartition. The statutory position was that the amount of land to which a household could claim title without having to pay compensation was to be calculated according to ‘old souls’ (that is, according to the previous entitlement unit used by the commune) if the application had been submitted prior to a resolution being taken at the communal assembly for a new repartition, but it was to be according to ‘new souls’ if the application were made after such a resolution had been taken. The difference could be considerable; in one case that went to appeal in Samara province, peasants who petitioned for title prior to a communal resolution for a new repartition received land equivalent to ten desiatiny per soul, whilst those petitioning after the resolution were entitled to only seven desiatiny per soul.13 The idea behind this provision was to protect communes against ‘opportunistic’ petitions for title change by peasants who realized that the terms of a new repartition were not to their advantage. One difficulty in operating this rule arose because there was confusion among local officials about the precise moment at which a commune’s decision to repartition, or an individual household’s petition 13

RGIA, f. 1291, 1911, opis’ 120, no. 17, 35.

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for title, became valid.14 In Chernigov province, the Surazhskii uezd land settlement commission advised local officials in 1910 that a decision on repartition was only valid once it had been confirmed by the district board, not when the resolution was first passed at the communal assembly. As a result of this incorrect ruling, sixty-four households were able to petition for title change during the four months separating their commune’s decision to repartition and its confirmation by the district board. The amount of land to which they were granted was calculated according to the terms of a repartition favouring them carried out in 1893.15 As late as 1913, a congress of permanent members of provincial boards raised the question of the timing of applications for title change with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and sought clarification.16 The provisions about the timing of applications for title change meant that it made sense for households which believed they would lose land at a future repartition to petition for a change in title sooner rather than later, and certainly the moment there was the hint of an impending communal assembly to discuss repartition. B. Ia. Diukov, a land surveyor, described the process in Liuchka village, Moscow province, where discussions at the assembly about whether there should be a repartition using ‘new souls’ prompted ‘two households which had more than their fair share of communal land to take it into their personal ownership under the 9th November law’.17 Under their influence another eighteen households followed suit. An internal investigation made by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1913 confirms that the prospect of losing land at a repartition was the dominant force behind the early rush of households taking out title to their strips in the commune.18 The investigation sought to discover why, after the early successes, there was a decline in the number of applications for 14 The procedure for petitioning for title change was that the peasant in question had first to inform the starosta of the commune whose duty it was to summon an assembly at which a simple majority was needed to approve the request. If the assembly were not summoned, or a majority not achieved, the petitioning peasant could then ask the land captain to refer the case on to the district board for resolution. Officially, the first approach to the starosta counted as the moment of submission of the application but not all local authorities were aware of this. 15 RGIA, f. 1291, 1910, opis’ 120, no. 83, 2. 16 RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 428, 1–2. 17 B. Ia. Diukov, Perekhod tselogo seleniia k otrubnomu vladeniiu zemlei (Moscow, 1910), 5–6. This case ended when the whole community consolidated its land as this was the only way it had to stop the petitioners’ title changes from going ahead according to ‘old souls’. Whenever an application for whole-community consolidations was lodged with a land settlement commission, all pending applications for title changes were cancelled and everyone had to start from an equal position in the allocation of otruba. 18 RGIA, f. 1291, 1912–1913, opis’ 120, no. 35.

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title change from the end of 1909. All provincial governors were asked for an explanation and, almost without exception, they attributed the decline to the fact that all the households that could profit from tenure change had done so in the first few years of the reform. The Kostroma governor’s office, for example, explained that ‘small households, which currently have more land than they can expect to keep at an equalizing repartition, have used the right the Edict gives to take out title to their land.’19 From Nizhegorod province the explanation was that those households which ‘wanted to insure themselves against the possibility of losing land in the event of a sudden general repartition’ were those to have taken up the reform. These were mainly households ‘in which there has been a decline in the number of entitled souls since the last general repartition. [Their] main aim is to fix in their ownership their existing strips.’20 The explanation from Tambov province was the same: ‘[T]he people who wish to leave the commune are peasants who are interested in preserving the share of commune land previously assigned to their dead souls. They are the starodushniki where the number of souls has declined and which, if there is a repartition, will suffer a significant reduction in their share of land.’21 The Moscow province land settlement commission carried out its own investigation into the motives of peasants taking title to their strips in 1908.22 The permanent member of Zvenigorodskii uezd commission reported that ‘the majority of peasants are dissatisfied with the new law about leaving the commune but . . . those households with more land than their due compared with their neighbours do like it. They fear that part of their land will be taken from them at the next repartition.’23 The Klinskii uezd permanent member made a similar observation: The population does not really understand the advantages and economic significance of leaving the commune . . . It is possible to state with absolute certainty that the overwhelming proportion of title changes in Klinskii uezd have come about because of the peasants’ desire to protect themselves from possible repartitions, and to be able to pass land on to their heirs or, even, to sell it.24

There are some statistical data relating the amount of allotment land relative to household size which confirm the qualitative statements about the motivation behind title changes. P. A. Vikhliaev, statistician to the Moscow province zemstvo, collected data from a sample of households in three counties which showed that those which had taken title to their land 19 22

20 21 Ibid., 211. Ibid., 227. Ibid., 241. 23 TsMAM, f. 369, 1908, opis’ 4, no. 35. Ibid., 19.

24

Ibid., 14.

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were concentrated in the land-abundant/small family size groups, compared with households that did not claim title. He concluded that title changes among the households he investigated were the result of ‘the attempt to hang on to land that, given the prevailing economic conditions, would otherwise be passed on to other households’.25 A survey in Kazan province came to an identical conclusion: ‘The desire not to lose any land, however small the amount, in all probability, was one of the over-riding motives for peasants taking out title.’26 The survey compared the man-land ratios of households which took title to their land with those that did not, and found an advantage in favour of the former of up to half a desiatina for most size classes of farm. The provision in the 9 November 1906 Edict that households claiming title to surpluses of land should pay compensation to their parent commune was not much of an incentive for households to surrender their surpluses and was of marginal benefit to the recipient commune. The fixing of the compensation payment as a proportion of the remaining redemption debt meant that land was acquired at a price well below the current market rate. The proceeds from such compensatory payments were thus insufficient for the commune to make up the loss of land and, in any case, payments were supposed to be distributed between both title-holding and non-title-holding households of the original commune—title-holders could expect some of their money back, as well as getting land cheaply. The incidence of default on payments was inevitably high, as was revealed by the Imperial Free Economic Society investigation of the post-1906 commune. One peasant correspondent in Novgorod province, for example, complained that ‘no payments have been made whatsoever, and anybody who can, takes out title; one husband with his wife became owners of twenty desiatiny . . . and did not pay a thing.’27 Another group to benefit from the new ability to claim title to allotment land were absentee or ‘returnee’ households. The potential impact of the provision in the law which allowed households which had severed their links with their parent commune to return and claim a portion of commune land was far-reaching. The provinces clustering around Moscow and St Petersburg were particularly affected. Land of households which had 25 P. A. Vikhliaev, Vliianie travoseianiia na otdel’nie storony krest’ianskogo khoziaistva. Statisticheskoe otdelenie Moskovskoi gubernskoi zemskoi upravy, vypusk 6 (Moscow, 1914), 33. 26 Ukreplenie nadelov v lichnuiu sobstvennost’ v Kazanskoi gubernii. Otsenochno-statisticheskoe biuro Kazanskogo gubernskogo zemstva (Kazan, 1911), 24. Another motive the Kazan survey found for title changes was that household heads could leave land to their wives and daughters once it was their own, which had not been guaranteed in the commune: ibid., 79. 27 RGIA, f. 91, n.d., opis’ 2, no. 818, 72.

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quit their commune and migrated to the cities was usually reabsorbed into the communal pool. Now, it could be reclaimed into the private ownership of the absentees and sold on to any purchaser inside or outside the commune so long as the purchaser came from the peasant social estate. Russkoe Bogatstvo calculated that, if all the absentee households returned to claim their land in one village in Ekaterinoslav province, there would be a reduction in the size of a single repartitional unit from two desiatiny 1600 sazhen’ to one and a half desiatiny.28 Communes attempted to defend themselves against the claims of absentees by passing resolutions to the effect that this element in the 9 November 1906 Edict did not apply to them, but such resolutions did not have force in statutory law. A more effective defence was for resident members of a commune themselves to petition for title before the absentees turned up to stake their claims. In Podolskii uezd, Moscow province, it was reported that, ‘multiple-soul households . . . [take title to their land] . . . in order to prevent absentee villagers from getting part of the commune’s land.’29 Victor Chernov summed up the outcome of these changes: ‘Not infrequently there is panic in villages and all the resident households quickly change title to their land. Our land settlement officials with pleasure hail this as a sign that the concept of private property has begun to take root in the soul of the people. What an example of self-deception!’30 Recognizing the problems the law was causing resident villagers, the Senate eventually ruled that the only absentees who still retained land in their parent commune, renting it out during their absences, were eligible to claim title to the land under the 1906 Edict. For their part, the absentee households must have felt under pressure to return at the earliest opportunity to their village in order to stake their claim to a share of commune land before it all disappeared. Their actions must be seen in the light of the need urban migrants had for an insurance against the loss of their urban employment, infirmity, and old age. As Robert Johnson has shown in his study of Moscow’s workforce, even those migrants who spent many years in the city intended to return to their native village in their old age.31 The right to land was an important resource for Russia’s ‘worker-peasants’, just as it was for rural peasants. A peasant correspondent writing to Russkoe Bogatstvo described the new vulnerability affecting villages and their members, resident and absentee, after the promulgation of the 1906 Edict: ‘So long as no resident households petition for tenure change, the peasants who live elsewhere do not need to stake 28 30 31

29 Russkoe bogatstvo, 7 (1908), 112. TsMAM, f. 369, 1908, opis’ 4, no. 35, 36. V. Chernov, ‘V khaose sovremennoi derevne’, Sovremennik, 6 (St Petersburg, 1911), 173. R. E. Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian (New Brunswick, NJ, 1979).

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their claim on the land. They are content knowing that they have a right to it, which they can exercise at any time.’32 However, a single application for tenure change from either side could destroy this equilibrium and precipitate a tidal wave of applications for tenure changes. Vikhliaev made a similar observation, highlighting the mutually reinforcing effect of the threat posed by petitions for tenure change by resident and absentee households: ‘Under these conditions there is an urgency about preserving every piece of land, however insignificant in area. This urge is felt not just by the resident families, but by families who have left the village as well.’33 Clearly, the 9 November 1906 Edict imposed an additional pressure upon the already strained institutions in the commune for resolving competing claims on allotment land. If the intention of the Edict were simply to subvert the collective management of commune land, it undoubtedly went some way to achieve this end. But it did so in such a way as to cause confusion, chaos, and dissension in village after village in rural Russia, and moreover, without there being any firm guarantee that the changes would be translated into a qualitative improvement in the peasant economy. As a confidencebuilding measure with the peasants upon which the ‘real work’ of enclosing land would depend, these first steps in reforming peasant land holding were not propitious.

‘Pioneer Husbandmen’—Individual Separations from the Commune A proportion of the households that claimed title to their strips did proceed to the ‘next stage’ of gathering these into single, unitary farms. The precise number during the whole period of the reform cannot be calculated because from 1911 the act of the enclosure carried with it an automatic conferment of title, and because individual separations were often overtaken by the decision of a parent commune to enclose. Initially, individual separators who had taken title to their land were given a pivotal role in the enclosure movement. It was they who, by their example, were to show the way forward to the mass of the peasantry. Reform narratives emphasized the ‘pioneer’ qualities of these peasants; they were the ‘strong and sober’ farmers who long before the reform had singled themselves out 32

Russkoe bogatstvo, 7 (1908), 113–14. Vikhliaev, Vliianie travoseianiia, 8. In the three counties he investigated in Moscow province, Vikhliaev found that 26.2 per cent of resident households had taken title to their land compared with 34.5 per cent for absentee households. The percentage of enclosed farms compared with all peasant farms was only 0.4 per cent khutora and 1.5 per cent otruba. 33

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from the ‘general mass’ of muzhiki by virtue of their ‘energy’, ‘initiative’, and ‘imagination’, and it was they who would most readily understand that their future depended upon ‘escaping’ from the commune. One observer in Tver province described peasants separating from their parent commune as ‘different from the general mass . . . [who] while in the commune had attempted to improve their farming. In short, they were the intelligent, strong peasants and they did not waste time responding to the new law.’34 The emphasis on the pioneer and even loner qualities of peasants disengaging from their parent communes did not fully correspond to the realities of individual separations, which could involve comparatively large numbers of households acting together to withdraw their land from the commune. By joining forces with other like-minded peasants, groups of individual separators could better withstand the opposition of their fellow commune members. In 1910, individual separators acting collectively gained additional rights because under the 10 June law communes were required to satisfy requests for enclosure for individual separators if they constituted one-fifth of the land-entitled households in communes with a total membership of under 250 households or if they numbered fifty in communes with a membership of over 250.35 Peasants who really struck out alone constituted a subset of the households categorized as individual separators. Among separating households, there were some who were motivated by a desire for farm modernization. The most celebrated pioneer husbandman was Sergei Semenov, whose motives for enclosing corresponded precisely to those of the reform advocates. He was hardly a ‘typical’ peasant, but the pioneers were not supposed to be run-of-the-mill muzhiki.36 Peasant separators certainly understood how to use the rhetoric of the reform and they framed their petitions for separation accordingly, as is illustrated by the petition for enclosure from one peasant in Smolensk province: In the obshchina it is impossible to carry out a four-field rotation, to introduce ley grass cultivation, and to use good quality seeds. My land is equivalent to forty desiatiny and it is scattered in 275 strips in the three fields. I would like to see this gathered into one parcel for my seven sons . . . it is impossible to sow anything on these strips, not clover, buckwheat, barley, or wheat.37 34 Kratkii ocherk zemleustroistva i organizatsii pravitel’stvennoi agronomicheskoi pomoshchi edinolichnogo vladeniia v Rzhevskom uezde, Tverskoi gubernii (Tver, 1912), 8. 35 Sidel’nikov, Agrarnia reforma, 117. Prior to this, communes had been able to refuse to enclose individual separators’ land and offer them compensation instead, if they could show that this would cause remaining landholders serious inconvenience. 36 Semenov is one of the characters through which Orlando Figes views the Russian Revolution: O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 (London, 1996), 232–9. 37 RGIA, f. 408, 1910–13, opis’ 1, no. 468, 103.

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Phrases justifying the desire to enclose in terms understood by the land reform bureaucracy may have masked other motives the peasants had for wanting to gather in their strips. Among these other motives were emigration (rather than sell scattered strips, peasants consolidated their land in order to increase the price they could obtain on the market), securing the best land in their commune, escaping from the dominance of the village patriarchy, and freedom from communal restraints on multiple cropping.38 Peasants who enclosed for reasons other than agricultural improvement also included those who were forced by their communes to gather their strips into a single place during a general repartition under the provision of the 1906 Edict. There were also opportunistic motives; peasant separators were able to apply to their local land settlement commission for grants and loans to help with the cost of moving buildings or for land improvement. The offer of interest-free loans and grants to peasants who were used to money flowing in the opposite direction was a tempting novelty. An Orthodox minister respondent in the Imperial Free Economic Society’s survey of the post-1906 commune, described how thirteen poor households in his parish were persuaded to consolidate: ‘The deal was this—they received 150 roubles each (when and where have our poor muzhiki even seen such sums before?) . . . the money was granted for the removal of buildings but they were allowed 25 to 50 roubles to pay off debts, tax arrears, or to buy food or, as it turned out, to get drunk.’39 Matveev’s memoir as volost’ starshina describes how in one district neighbouring his, there were reports that the peasants who had agreed to take khutora were granted whatever they wanted in the way of seeds, tools, and livestock. The new khutor farmers were rumoured to have drunk half the seed and flour they had received and this, according to Matveev, ‘raised the appetite of the poor (in our parish)’.40 A survey of enclosure in Kazan province also found that many khutor and otrub owners had consolidated their strips in the expectation of receiving grants: ‘[S]ome peasants took out title to their land and gathered it into one place not for the purposes of improving farming but so they could 38 The small number of surveys on peasant motivation have been omitted from the text because of their unreliability, but even in the official surveys farm improvement is given as the motive for enclosure in under 50 per cent of cases, with the incidence recorded as higher among the individual separators than among peasants taking part in whole-village consolidations. To follow up the surveys, see I. V. Mozzhukhin, Zemleustroistvo v Bogoroditskom uezde (1917); I. S. Shildaev, Khutorskie rasseleniia v zapadnykh guberniakh (Perm, 1908); Ukreplenie nadelov (1911). A summary of the statistics collected on peasant motivation by the Imperial Free Economic Society is to be found in I. V. Chernyshev, Obshchina posle 9 noiabria 1906. Po ankete vol’nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva (Petrograd, 1917). 39 Chernyshev, Obshchina posle 9 noiabria 1906, 135. 40 S. Matveev, ‘V volostnykh starshinakh’, Russkoe bogatstvo, 5 (1912), 172.

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qualify for a subsidy.’41 In Ponginskaia volost’ such peasants included the very poor who had only ‘a horse and a few chickens’ between them, and they spent the money as soon as they received it. The story was the same in Novoshimkuskaia volost’ where ‘some peasants thought up the idea of moving onto khutora—not to farm properly, but in order to qualify for a removal grant.’42 Again, in Beledeevskaia volost’, Ufa province, the permanent member of the land settlement commission reported that the ‘general engine’ in the formation of enclosed farms was ‘the existence of grants and loans exclusively for farmers who have consolidated their land’.43 The papers of the St Petersburg province land settlement commission give some insights into how grants could be manipulated by local commissions to encourage enclosure. In Iamburgskii uezd, for example, the taxes of peasants agreeing to consolidate were paid by the local commission—until the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture, learning accidentally of the practice, put a stop to it. This occurred not during the early trial and error years of the reform but in 1913.44 Other uezd commissions were known to give grants to pioneer khutor farmers well in excess of the 150 roubles recommended by the centre.45 As was the case with title changes, individual separations gave peasants the opportunity to gain advantage over their neighbours. Critics at the time were quick to draw attention to this abuse of the reform, Russkoe Bogatstvo maintaining that ‘a competition for who can grab the most heavily manured and advantageous land has begun.’46 Individual households attempted, often successfully, to use the reform administration to help them in their quest. They could, for example, persuade the land settlement commission to exchange scattered strips for an otrub of above average quality land or some located in a prime site and, after 1911, they could use the land settlement commission to secure a maximum amount of land. One peasant in Chernigov province, for example, having had his application for a title change rejected by the uezd board because he claimed an amount equivalent to the number of revision souls in his household rather than of the ‘new’ souls now used by his commune, immediately petitioned the uezd land settlement commission for an identical amount of land as an otrub.47 41

42 Ukreplenie nadelov, 1911, 92. Ibid., 92. RGIA, f. 408, 1913–1914, opis’ 1, no. 287, 81. 44 TsGIA SPb., f. 297, 1913, opis’ 3, no. 490, 77. The only reason why the centre discovered the practice was that one peasant had approached the Peasant Land Bank with a request for his taxes to be paid quoting the Iamburg otrubniki. 45 TsGIA SPb., f. 297, 1909, opis’ 3, no. 186, 37–8 and 41–2, for example. 46 47 Russkoe bogatstvo, 1 (1911), 7. RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 481, 140. 43

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The land-reform bureaucracy thus constituted an alternative to the means already used by peasants to try to secure an advantageous share of commune land. Commissions differed in whether they would cooperate, as two similar cases which had different outcomes illustrate. Both involved the treatment by land settlement commissions of land acquired by households petitioning for enclosure through domestic conveyances (domashnie sdelki). In the first, a peasant in Vladimir province requested that four soulsworth of land, which included two souls-worth he had sold to another peasant in an informal conveyance, be allocated to him in an otrub. When his approach to the courts for an injunction returning the land failed, the peasant petitioned his land settlement commission for an otrub proportional in size to a four-souls entitlement. The land settlement commission turned down the application.48 The second case involved a peasant in Viatka province who applied for an otrub equivalent in size to three and a half souls. In this case, the application was approved by the local land settlement commission, despite the fact that the same peasant’s request for title to these strips had been refused by the uezd board on the grounds that he had sold some to another peasant in a customary sale.49 The downgrading of individual separations in the work of land settlement commissions that took place from 1909 was not a result of the reform administration’s disillusionment with its pioneer husbandmen; it was simply that commune-led enclosures represented a better use of the land reform’s resources. Nevertheless, individual households or groups of ‘individual households’ continued to petition for separations after that date and in numbers exceeding 100 000 per annum. Indeed, it was the pressure potential separators put on communes that proved to be the motor for many of the village-wide enclosures that took place after 1909.

The ‘Free-Rider Problem’ and the Development of Community-wide Enclosures Reports received at the centre from local land settlement commissions often commented upon the fact that community-wide enclosures had been triggered by applications from individual peasant households to consolidate their land. The reports came from all parts of European Russia and they concerned both small and large villages. Below are some examples from different provinces. In the six-household hamlet of Doletovo, 48 49

RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 468, 56. RGIA f. 408, 1913–1914, opis’ 1, no. 435, 1–4.

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St Petersburg province, one peasant petitioning for enclosure in 1913 precipitated similar petitions from his five neighbours. The permanent member of the provincial land settlement commission commenting on the situation noted that ‘the inclusion in the work plan of the compulsory individual separation . . . [had] . . . converted itself into the voluntary enclosure of the remaining households.’ He urged the Luzhskii uezd permanent member to ‘be quick in including this project in its work schedule and to carry it out this year’.50 Further south, in the larger village of Puchkan in Moscow province, the same sequence was observed. At first two households applied to gather in their land, and they were followed shortly after by a further eighteen, and finally by the whole community voting for enclosure.51 This sequence was so common in the province that the Governor wrote in a report that ‘in the majority of cases, individual separations provide the main impetus for a whole village deciding to enclose.’52 In the large steppe villages, the same sequence took place. For example, in Slavianskii village, Khar’kov province, which consisted of 625 households and 9000 desiatiny of land, a 1909 report noted that the decision of just eighteen households to enclose their land set in train a process leading to the enclosure of every household’s land.53 Local officials noted that a feature of land reorganizations in the province was that ‘individual separations are transformed into commune-led enclosures.’54 In the view of one permanent member of a land settlement commission in Tambov province, individual separations were essential if enclosure were to take off: ‘Without them, it would be impossible to count on the enclosure of whole villages ever taking place.’55 The chief land surveyor in the same province was equally certain, asserting that, were it not for individual separations, ‘there would be no work for our land surveyors to do.’56 Officials at the centre of the reform were thus made aware that there was some sort of link between individual and commune-led enclosures. Lykoshin, for one, had already observed this to be the case during his tours of the provinces, and an early report of the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs commented that individual petitions for enclosure ‘lead . . . 50

TsGIA SPb., f. 297, 1913, opis’ 3, no. 490, 27. 52 Diukov, Perekhod tselogo seleniia, 6. RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 696, 48. 53 RGIA, f. 408, 1909, opis’ 1, no. 113, 536. 54 RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 225, 22. 55 RGIA, f. 1291, 1909, opis’ 120, no. 91, 13. The permanent member, Rostovtsev, concluded that local commissions should concentrate all their efforts on stimulating individual separations. This idea was approved by the deputy governor but not all permanent members were in agreement with the strategy. 56 Ibid., 14. 51

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ultimately, to a whole village petitioning for razverstanie’.57 Even though the time that lapsed between an individual separation being carried out and a parent commune deciding to enclose could be quite short, the reform organization insisted that the process at work was the power of ‘good example’. Alternatively, individual separations were simply presented as catalysts for change in communes which were already defunct: ‘[I]t happens that the mass of the peasants little by little come to realize the benefits to be derived from changing their land-holding system but nobody does anything about it. Then one of them gives a small nudge . . . and everyone expresses the wish to move onto khutora.’58 In the north-west and west where communities had been considering consolidation prior to the Stolypin Reform, this explanation for the decision to enclose is quite plausible, but it is less applicable elsewhere. One feature of individual separations was that they disrupted the existing land arrangements in the parent commune. Wherever a succession of households asked for their land to be consolidated or the number of separators was large, communes were faced with the prospect of having to rearrange their members’ strips or to find the money to make compensatory payments if they were unable to provide for the enclosure. George Yaney, among the reform’s historians, recognized that individual separations were a causative factor in village-wide enclosures, the inconvenience of repeated reorganizations, in his view, persuading communes to bring forward the decision to enclose.59 However, ‘inconvenience’ was nothing compared to the more fundamental threat individual consolidations posed to the access other members would have to land in the commune and to its fair distribution. The consequence of individual separations that all commune members feared was the diminution of their access to good-quality land; in short, communes were faced with the prospect of a qualitative and quantitative diminution in the fund of land from which to make future allocations. As with title changes, there were supposed to be safeguards in the law against separating households gaining unfair advantages, but these worked imperfectly because the final burden for deciding which land went to whom lay with land settlement commissions which, since they had an interest in promoting the land reform, were not neutral parties. The next 57

RGIA. f. 408, 1912, opis’ 1, no. 225, 23; Sel’skii vestnik, 18 August 1911, 3. Shildaev, Khutorskoe razselenie, 5. 59 Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, 279–80. Yaney does not seem to realize that his acknowledgement that village-wide enclosures came about in this way contradicts his broader thesis that the reform corresponded to peasants’ wishes; if the peasants were forced into enclosure because of the incovenience of individual separators’ actions, this is hardly consistent with their enclosure being voluntary. 58

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chapter will show that permanent members of land settlement commissions, and some land captains, routinely favoured individual separators by acceding to their requests for enclosed farms fashioned out of prime-quality land. It only needed a few cases of this happening for the idea to take root among the peasantry at large that local commissions favoured the interests of individual separators. Thereafter, a rumour that someone in the village had approached the land settlement commission with a request to consolidate could be sufficient to make every household reappraise its own position in relation to enclosure. A. Petrishchev, in an article in Russkoe Bogatstvo, described the uncertainties into which the land settlement law had plunged villages: [A]ny day, any householder can demand that his land be transferred into his personal ownership . . . but that is not all. Tomorrow, or the day after, any householder might suddenly ask for his land to be consolidated into a single place as well. At this point a catastrophe can happen . . . In order to consolidate the land of even one household, everyone’s strips have to be moved. Nobody knows where his land will end up and, because the consolidation is done demonstratively with the help of the militia, the land often is trampled upon. For the obshchina the result is an unqualified disaster.60

The way in which unilateral separations constituted a threat to the integrity of the communal land resource varied geographically. Where there were large variations in the quality of land a succession of unilateral separations could very quickly make inroads into the overall quality of land left for distribution between households remaining in the commune. These conditions applied in Russia’s central and northern provinces occupying the forest-steppe and forest zones. Enclosure posed an additional threat in these regions from the right unilateral separators had to continue using their village’s common pastures. This provision in the law was widely interpreted by separating households as including the right to run their livestock with the common herd even during the period when it was on the fallow and stubble of the open fields. Inevitably, enclosed farmers’ access to common livestock grazing became a highly contested issue between unilateral separators and their parent communes; it was hardly fair that separators could prevent fellow villagers using their arable for grazing when the reverse did not apply. Among local commissions there seems to have been some uncertainty about the legal position in such disputes.61 60

A. Petrishchev, Russkoe bogatstvo, 4 (1911), 55. In fact, the law was vague on this particular point, although clear on the right of separating households to continue to use common permanent pastures, meadows, and woodlands 61

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The provision in the technical instructions for substituting one type of land for another when making enclosures posed a further threat when taken up by individual separators. Particularly in provinces such as those in the black-earth centre where there was land shortage, the substitution of arable for any other type of land, whether it was permanent pasture or meadow, could rebound adversely on a community; easing the pressure on meadows was little compensation for the reduction of the fund of arable land available for distribution. Outside the centre and north in provinces occupying the Black Sea and Volga steppes, where there was more land and greater uniformity in its quality, the principal advantages to be gained by individual separators were locational. The land of some steppe villages could extend for miles from the settled area so that distant fields and access to water caused problems. The intention of the land reform in addressing these problems had been to form khutora where the farmer was relocated to the distant lands and given the means to dig a well. This solution did not appeal to individual separators who demanded instead that their enclosed farms be laid out next to watercourses or in close proximity to their villages. In many cases their wishes were granted to the detriment of the remaining commune members, as the next chapter will show. These various threats to a commune’s resources provide the link between individual separations and the decision of whole communities to enclose. Whenever an individual separation was in prospect, every household in a community had to weigh up where its best interest lay; this might be in trying to grab a share of the common resource for itself before the general pool was diminished, or it might be in putting its trust in the commune to prevent further separations. In classic free-rider situations, the first of these would always be the alternative chosen because it corresponded to the instrumentally self-interested option but, in reality, people have more complex motives and make their decisions within a social context which allows other motives to be dominant. In the case of Russian peasants, their socialization into communities with traditions of collective decisionmaking meant that they did not approach the question of how to respond to the land reform with their individual self-interest inevitably uppermost in their minds. As a result, defectors from the commune did not always for grazing and other purposes. Commenting on one disputed case brought to his attention by a peasant whose fellow villagers had barred his cattle from their arable, the St Petersburg land settlement commission washed its hands of the question, ruling that ‘the resolution of this question does not lie in the competance of the land settlement organizations. The parties concerned should take their complaint to the relevant legal authorities’: TsGIA SPb., f. 297, 1915, opis’ 3, no. 490, 94.

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pull further defectors behind them, and where this was a possibility communes could and did mount a defence. Nevertheless, some communities did succumb to the pressure of individual separations and, after a more or less prolonged succession of defections, arrived at a point when the enclosure of the whole village became a foregone conclusion. The example of a village in Gdovskii uezd, St Petersburg province, can be used to illustrate the process in one of the northern provinces of variable soil quality. A peasant, Zakhar Bazakov, applied for an otrub in 1909 and was allowed by the land settlement commission to exchange all his entitlement to land in the commune, including his notional share of pasture and meadow, for a single parcel of arable. At first, Bazakov’s neighbours resisted the incursion into the arable that this represented and put up a united front against the projected enclosure. By making formal appeals against the separation to the land settlement commission, they successfully delayed the enclosure for two years, but in 1912 the resistance collapsed when eight households broke ranks and applied for their strips to be consolidated on the same terms as Bazakov’s (that is, taking extra arable in lieu of their share in the common pasture land). These applications were swiftly followed by others, so that by 1913 there was a sufficient number for the local land settlement commission to call for an assembly to vote for a commune-wide enclosure.62 The sequence of events in Bazakov’s village was not unique; similar accounts are found in the records for other provinces and the process was acknowledged, albeit often in passing, in official surveys of the enclosure movement. Mozzhukhin’s investigation of enclosure in Bogoroditskii uezd, Tula province, argued quite openly that the dominant process leading to community-wide consolidations in the uezd was the struggle to appropriate a preferential share of communes’ land resources. He further explained how the permanent member of the uezd land settlement commission assisted the process by agreeing to individual separators’ requests in respect of the location of their otruba.63 A. A. Klopov, in a report to the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs, came to much the same conclusion in Orel province: [H]aving expressed their desire to separate from the obshchina, the peasants do not wait for the resolution of the commune assembly but go directly to the land captain who agrees to give them their otrub on the best land. After a few cases like this the remaining peasants have no alternative but to petition to consolidate as well.64 62 63 64

TsGIA SPb., f. 297, opis’ 3, no. 588, 10–11. Mozzhukhin, Zemleustroistvo v Bogoroditskom uezde, 160. RGIA, f. 408, 1909, opis’ 1, no. 117, 25–6.

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The interval linking the first expression of the intention to enclose and the final succumbing of a whole community to enclosure did not have to be as drawn out as in the ‘Bazakov example’. Whilst the payoffs associated with being the first to enclose were considerable for Bazakov, the consequence of the dissolution of common pastures which would result from everyone pursuing this strategy would have been obvious to all. St Petersburg was one of the provinces where the maintenance of appropriate levels of organic manure was essential to the farm economy and it was a need that was met in peasant villages by common grazing. In the steppe provinces the situation was different because, although there were negative outcomes associated with village enclosures for everyone, the worst of these were likely to be felt only at some point in the more distant future. The lucrative foreign market for wheat and the rich black-earth soils of the steppe provinces meant that initially everyone could benefit from the freedom enclosure gave them from the commune to crop their land without a break, even though in the longer term this would increase every household’s vulnerability to drought, soil erosion, and the loss of the resource upon which the cereal economy depended. In these provinces individual separations were very rapidly translated into village-wide enclosures and these, not surprisingly, were the provinces with the highest recorded number of enclosures in the whole of European Russia. In addition to village enclosures developing in the manner described above, there was also an indeterminate number that resulted from communes taking the decision to enclose in order to neutralize applications for individual separations. Such decisions have to be understood as a lastditch means of resisting individual enclosures, resorted to when other resistance strategies failed. Two things could be achieved by pursuing this course: first, a commune could buy time, allowing it to put pressure on intending separators to change their minds; secondly, if this failed, it could return to a commune some of the responsibility for determining the terms upon which land was allocated, since village-wide enclosures normally proceeded according to customary rules governing households’ land entitlement and customary methods for deciding which household received which land. Fortunately for communes pursuing such wrecking strategies, the rules for dealing with situations when applications by individual households were overtaken by a community-wide decision to enclose gave local agents the option of recasting any plans they had already agreed upon with individual households. As this usually made for a more coherent enclosure than the alternative of leaving individual separations as originally projected,

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permanent members and surveyors were prepared to go along with communes’ preferences in this situation. Examples of village-wide consolidations where the suspicion must be that they arose as a result of a commune’s wrecking manoeuvres are to be found in the official record in a variety of provinces. In the Puchka village enclosure already referred to, the permanent member made the explicit admission that ‘a significant majority of households voted to enclose the village’s land in order to prohibit households from leaving the commune separately. It was in this spirit that the resolution to enclose was taken.’65 In Orchikova-Tsernetchina village, Poltava province, the outcome of a petition from twelve households for 100 desiatiny of commune land to be allocated to them for otruba was that ‘when the assembly met . . . it decided that the whole community should consolidate and on these grounds it refused to sign the resolution concerning the individual separations.’66 That land settlement officials were not above encouraging communes in the tactic is confirmed by an observation made in a report about enclosure in Novgorod province. The author of the survey explained the growth in the number of enclosed farms in the province thus: [T]he majority of households were afraid that they would lose the best land in the village to individual separators . . . the land settlement commission played a not insignificant role in resolving the situation by putting to the quarrelling parties the proposition that either everyone agree to consolidate their land, or the best land would be given to the households which first asked for otruba.67

A less direct, but equally clear, message was sent to Ianpol’ village in Chernigov province by the provincial governor who, in response to a complaint signed by 480 peasants against the separation of eight fellow villagers, sent a telegram to the village and later made a personal visit to it, to let the peasants know that ‘work on individual separations can only be stopped by the whole society signing a resolution to divide its land into enclosed farms.’68 The village followed this advice. The message of Tambov province’s deputy governor to permanent members in the province was also clear when he instructed them that ‘it is not difficult to get an agreement to enclose if the disadvantages to them of individual separations are explained carefully to peasants remaining in the commune.’69 65

66 Diukov, Perekhod tselogo seleniia, 6. RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 148, 48–9. Lichnoe vladenie nadelnogo zemleiu Cherepovetskogo, Ustiuzhenskogo i Kirillovskogo uezdov. Novgorodskaia gubernskaia zemskiia uprava: Otsenochno-statisticheskoe otdelenie (Novgorod, 1913), 68. 68 RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 488, 21. 69 RGIA, 1911, f. 1291, 1909, opis’ 120, no. 91, 119. 67

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It should come as no surprise that community-wide consolidations were often not welcomed by the individual separators whose actions had precipitated the vote for this at the communal assembly. Arnautovka village, Kherson province, was a case in point. Sixty-eight households whose application for individual separation had precipitated a communal vote for enclosure, tried to prevent the land settlement commission’s surveyors from dividing the whole village’s land. ‘It transpired,’ wrote the permanent member, ‘that the enclosure was taking place against [their] wishes . . . Individual separation was more to their advantage and so they tried to prevent the village at large from enclosing its lands.’70 An inspector’s report on the province had found that it was the practice locally for peasants to take ‘speedy decisions’ to enclose in order to neutralize the effects of individual separations. He blamed local land settlement officials for encouraging this by sanctioning individual separations which were on terms unfavourable to communes.71 One tactic intending separators tried to use against the commune was to petition secretly for enclosure in the hope that the local land settlement commission would do all the preparatory work on consolidating their land before their intentions were discovered by their neighbours. This was reported by the vice-governor of Kiev province as a reason for the rumours and violence accompanying the consolidation of land in Chernaia Kamenka from 1908 to 1910.72 In this chapter a variety of reasons have been suggested for why, individually and collectively, peasants took the decision to convert their land to individual tenure or to enclose it. The reasons that have been explored are far removed from the simple processes of the official analysis, and it has argued that the peasants’ actions can best be understood within the context of the atmosphere of mistrust and rumour which the reform created in communities all over Russia. In their individual responses to the reform, the peasants have been credited with a wide range of motives, while in the case of commune-led enclosures—the jewel in the reform’s crown—three different explanations for how they came about have been offered. One, the official explanation, was that they were the product of an evaluation made by the peasants of the relative merits of different methods of holding the land. Their exposure to the government’s programme of education, to examples of successful enclosed farms, and to the arguments of the ‘progressives’ in their midst, convinced peasants in communes throughout Russia that enclosure was a good course to follow. Another 70 72

RGIA, f. 408, 1910–1911, opis’ 1, no. 153, 31. Ibid., 122. This case is discussed in Chapter 5.

71

Ibid., 101.

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explanation, offered here as an alternative, is that village-wide enclosures were precipitated by the actions of individual separators whose claims on community resources led other peasants to follow their example in a desperate attempt not to lose out in the division of the spoils the land reform had made possible. The third explanation is that village-wide enclosures were one means by which communities of peasants could try to wrest back from the new bureaucracy control over the disposition of land which the law’s provisions for individual separations had taken from them. It is not being argued here that any of the three alternatives was dominant in the spread of enclosures in Russia, but it is suggested that the first of them, the official version, does not tell the whole story. It further seems likely that the reasons for the peasants’ engagement with the reform were geographically differentiated and that apparently similar outcomes, that is, the enclosure of whole villages, originated in widely different sets of local environmental, economic, and demographic circumstances. However, there was always a chance ingredient in the evolving pattern, provided by the reform’s local officials. Their contribution to the pattern of the reform’s adoption is discussed in the next chapter.

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5 ‘THE GOVERNMENT IS FOR US, OTRUBNIKI’ 1 Land Settlement Officials in the Provinces From the end of 1906, the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture began establishing a network of uezd- and provincial-level commissions to administer the land reform in the provinces. The commissions were ‘collegial’ bodies made up of representatives from central and local government, the zemstvo boards, and the peasantry. They were under the chairmanship of the marshal of the nobility in the case of the former, and the provincial governor in the latter case. The only commission member whose sole job it was to work for the land reform was the permanent member (nepremennyi chlen), an employee of the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture. The permanent member of the provincial land settlement commission was essentially an administrator, much of whose time was spent liaising with other organizations such as the Peasant Land Bank and the land survey section of the Governor’s office. Uezd-level permanent members, by contrast, were activists who were supposed to propagandize the reform among the peasants and supervise the various stages of the land reform projects that resulted. They were expected to fulfil these tasks by visiting villages and explaining the reform to the peasants, by responding to and processing requests for enclosure, by formulating detailed plans for consolidation, negotiating the various bureaucratic hurdles associated with a project, and generally acting as midwife in the realization of such plans.2 Projects drawn up by uezd-level permanent members had to be approved by their own land settlement commissions prior to being submitted to the provincial-level commission. In response to the projects submitted to them, provincial commissions formulated annual fieldwork plans and assigned the land surveyors and other resources needed to carry them out. After 1910 they also acquired a semi-judicial role adjudicating 1 RGIA, f. 408, 1911–1913, opis’ 1, no. 187. This is quoted from a peasant’s petition to the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture. 2 For a full account of the foundation of land settlement commissions and the development of their responsibilities see G. Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861–1930 (Urbana, Ill., 1982), 265–72.

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disputes between the various parties involved in land settlement. With this, the provincial land settlement commissions effectively became judge and jury of their own projects. In the early years of the reform’s operation in the provinces, the uezd permanent member’s responsibility for spreading knowledge about enclosure among the peasants was shared with land captains, who additionally had responsibility for administering the peasants’ requests for title changes. It is conventional wisdom that land captains were unenthusiastic about the reform and attempted to sabotage it because it represented a challenge to their authority in the village, but evidence of their systematic opposition is difficult to find. On his reading of contemporary reports, George Yaney maintains that land captains covered the spectrum from the enthusiastic and energetic to the hostile and casual in their attitudes to the reform and their willingness to work for it.3 Nevertheless, the reform’s shift in emphasis away from tenure changes as a single operation towards the physical reorganization of land did gradually diminish the land captains’ role from 1908–9, as did the general trend towards ‘professionalization’ among the reform’s employees. The new specialist cadres who were mobilized to work for the reform included the permanent members, land surveyors, and, later, agronomists, all with varying degrees of ‘training’ in land settlement. In 1913 official returns showed that permanent members and land surveyors were responsible for 88 per cent of all land settlement projects (45 per cent and 43 per cent respectively) in the countryside compared with 12 per cent for land captains.4 The post of permanent member especially grew in status; permanent members of land settlement commissions were increasingly described in positive terms and their distinction from the run-of-the-mill tsarist officials was stressed. These were not intended to be paper-pushing bureaucrats; rather, they were dedicated modernizers who were prepared to come out from behind their desks to debate the case for consolidation face-to-face with the peasants and who were equipped with the skills needed to solve the practical problems of land reorganization. They were the fresh, sun-tanned, and youthful young ‘men with a 3 Yaney has listed all the different descriptions of land captains he found in internal Ministry of the Interior reports. They were described as: ‘active’, ‘passive’, ‘corrupt’, ‘honest’, ‘educated’, ‘uneducated’, ‘doctrinaire’, ‘practical’, ‘indifferently formulistic’, ‘sincerely devoted to their duty’, ‘ignorant’, ‘informed’, ‘for’ or ‘against’ the reform, ‘friendly’ or ‘unfriendly’ toward the local zemstva, ‘submissive’ or ‘defiant’ towards the local gentry, willing to sacrifice peasant interests to their own careers, and determined to protect the interests of ‘their own’ against a blind bureaucracy. See Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, 289–90. 4 Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, 366–87 dicusses the shift in the reform operations and its implication for personel.

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mission’ the Rossiia correspondent encountered at the jubilee exhibition at Tsarskoe Selo. No doubt there were officials working for the reform in the provinces who lived up to such positive representations, but accounts of their activities at the local level also reveal among them people with variable degrees of commitment to the land reform and understanding of its purpose. At one extreme, there were permanent members whose crusading zeal for enclosure led them into excesses in their dealings with the peasantry, and at the other, there were those whose sensitivity to peasant preferences led them in the opposite direction, towards bending the rules on the peasants’ behalf. Yet others simply treated their job as they would any other in the bureaucracy, sticking firmly to their instructions and not often venturing far from their desk in the uezd office. The failure to ‘get out among the peasants’ was a cause for criticism from the reform centre, as was being ‘over formal’ with the peasants.5 To be fair to the permanent members, a lot was expected of them, not least because they had to digest the volume of circulars that came their way from the central ministries. Bel’skii reported that in Kherson province the provincial permanent member had to deal with an average of more than a hundred papers a day. In the four and a half months prior to his inspection, over 6000 papers had passed through the province’s land settlement commissions, constituting nothing less than a ‘paper sea’ which effectively prevented permanent members from visiting the villages.6 Kofod’s inspectors encountered some permanent members who, notwithstanding the excuse of being overburdened with paperwork, were by any standards incompetent. The permanent member for Ekaterinoslav province, for example, was described in an official memo as a ‘modest’ figure whose lack of familiarity with the geography of his region resulted in one inspector losing a week ‘on exhausting and useless journeys’.7 The permanent member of Aleksandrovskii uezd land settlement commission emulated his superior when, setting out for one village, he arrived at another. The exasperated inspector was forced to report to Kofod as follows: ‘We spent a whole day in such useless excursions, traversing nearly a hundred versty of the empty lands of an enormous estate . . . On my protest, Cheremusinov cheerily commented that “the last time the governor visited we made exactly the same mistake”.’ 8 Whatever their calibre, all permanent members were faced with a difficult task in reconciling the often contradictory pressures to which they 5 7

6 RGIA, f. 1291, 1909–1911, opis’ 120, no. 9, 15. Ibid., 58–9. 8 RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 425, 4. Ibid., 9.

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were subjected during the course of their work for the reform organization. On the one hand, they had to respond to the directives from above detailing the ways in which they were supposed to implement the reform, whilst on the other, they had to try to win the consent of the peasants for whatever they proposed. Especially in the early years after 1906, local commissions were subjected to a veritable deluge of circulars and instructions from the central ministries which defined and redefined, prioritized and reprioritized the objectives and operating practices of their work. The net effect of all of these was to narrow the latitude local commissions had for pursuing their own interpretation of the Stolypin Reform’s purpose.9 Whereas in 1907, when the reform was just getting under way, local commissions could help peasants with almost any type of land reorganization, from 1909 every project had to be fitted into one of the categories of land reorganization defined by the reform centre, and moreover, they had to be justified in terms of the centrally determined schedule of priorities for the forthcoming year’s fieldwork. The priority schedule remained more or less fixed until the outbreak of war. It was: 1 The completion of work left over from the previous year; 2 Commune-led enclosures (razverstanie); 3 Individual separations (vydelenie) which had a positive demonstration value in regions in which the enclosure movement had yet to catch on; 4 Other individual separations; 5 Group land settlement (gruppovoe zemleustroistvo). Where the reconfiguration of land within these broad types of land settlement was concerned, the priority remained the achievement of the greatest degree of separation and integration of land as possible, as detailed in the technical instructions. The increasing precision with which the priorities of local commissions were spelled out was matched by escalating demands from the centre for reporting back. From 1908, monthly reports had to be made by provincial land settlement commissions on the progress of work undertaken by their uezd commissions. This monitoring was supplemented by 9 This argument contradicts Yaney’s thesis that local commissions were given more, rather than less, autonomy by the centre as the reform developed. Yaney bases his case on the fact that there was relatively little direct central interference in the formulation of local fieldwork schedules and that these schedules increasingly contained projects, such as group land settlement, that were low on the centre’s priority schedule (Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, 340). Yaney misses the point that the limits of acceptable land settlement work were more tightly drawn after 1908 than they had been at the time of the reform’s enactment and that local commissions were bound by the centre’s priorities.

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other statistics the centre required relating to the broad range of activities covered by the land reform: numbers of title changes; applications for different types of land settlement; purchases of land from the Peasant Land Bank; grants and loans made to separating households; melioration work; complaints and contested title changes and enclosures; the sale and repurchase of allotment land; migration to Siberia.10 In most cases the information gathered consisted of numbers of households and areas of land, and the mountain of data received from the provinces allowed the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs to form a picture of the reform’s ‘progress’ and to monitor how one region was doing compared with others. However, as with all numerical records, the statistics on the Stolypin Reform only related to those operations that were amenable to quantification. More qualitative information relating to the peasants’ reception of the reform did not easily make its way into the official record, but nor did some types of quantifiable information, such as socio-economic data on the households involved in the reform and details of the configuration of land achieved on enclosure; they proved to be too cumbersome to record, or were considered unnecessary. Critics commented upon the failure of the administration to produce statistics on the reform’s qualitative results. A. A. Kaufman, an expert on the Siberian commune, conducted a public exchange of letters with Rittikh on the inadequacy of the information produced relating to the number of different types of farm being formed by local commissions.11 The suspicion of oppositionists was that the reform centre was trying to conceal from the public the truth about the reform’s results. In fact, the centre had made an initial attempt to record data relating to the degree of separation, integration, and symmetry achieved in land enclosures, but the task turned out to be too complex.12 To have imposed a universal requirement on local officials to compile data 10 D. J. Macey, ‘A Wager on History: The Stolypin Agrarian Reforms as Process’, in J. Pallot (ed.) Transforming Peasants: Society, State and the Peasantry, 1861–1930. Selected Papers from the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies, Warsaw, 1995 (Basingstoke, 1998), 161–2. 11 The exchange took place on the pages of the newspapers Rech’ and Rossiia in May and June of 1911 and was initiated by a highly critical review Kaufman wrote of the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs’ Zemleustroistvo 1907–1910 (St Petersburg, 1911). See Rech’ for 1911 nos. 108, 109, 110, 124, 132, 137, 260, 261, 265, and Rossiia nos. 1713, 1715, 1717, 1718, and 1721 for the same year. 12 Forms were distributed to the provinces with spaces for recording whether consolidated farms were in the form of khutora or otruba, the length-to-width ratio of fields, the total number of land parcels, and whether and in what proportion to the total any land remained in common ownership. The Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture archive contains completed forms for Iaroslavl, Perm, Viatka, and Nizhegorod provinces for a limited number of years. See RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 3, nos. 13, 14, 16, 21.

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on the configuration of land for each farm they enclosed would clearly have been an enormous bureaucratic exercise. Furthermore, it proved to be difficult to assign enclosed farms to the various categories of khutor and otrub identified in the technical instructions. Monitoring of the qualitative side of enclosure was left to Kofod’s inspectorate and the Ministry of Justice’s land survey section. Both institutions maintained pressure on local officials to aim for the highest possible degree of consolidation in their projects and both were quick to reprimand local agents whose work fell short of appropriate standards. It was, of course, fortuitous for local officials that the quantitative record of the number of peasants engaging with the reform came to be the measure by which the reform’s achievement was gauged, since it allowed them to reconcile one of the potentially disabling contradictions at the heart of the reform. The contradiction was the requirement local commissions were under simultaneously to achieve the dispersal of peasant farms from the commune (as symbolized by khutora) while obtaining the peasants’ voluntary consent to the reform. The failure of the centre to make a systematic record of how precisely land was being reconfigured in villages meant that, notwithstanding the cajoling of Kofod’s inspectors and the head of the land survey section in the Ministry of Justice, local officials had room for manoeuvre in their interactions with the peasants; in short, they could give in to peasant preferences for a minimal rearrangement of village lands. Meanwhile, precisely because the reform’s progress was measured in numbers, local agents could focus their attention upon maximizing the throughput of peasants in the reform process—a far less demanding task than creating enclosed farms that conformed to the model. Careers were to be made in the land settlement bureaucracy by those permanent members who could demonstrate that their efforts had encouraged an expansion in the numbers of peasants coming forward to adopt the reform, and that these numbers could be sustained through all the stages of project formulation to the final outcome represented by the inclusion of a land settlement project in the field plan for the forthcoming year. This led to an emphasis at the local level on the generation rather than execution of land settlement projects, even though local officials were constantly reminded that it was the quality of farms formed in the localities and not numbers which was the first priority. It was only the fortunate permanent members in the north-west who could really hope to satisfy the qualitative goals for land settlement set by the centre without sacrificing numbers. Elsewhere, and therefore for the majority of permanent members, a choice had to be made between the quantity and quality of enclosures. Since rewards were

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linked to the former, the inclination of local commissions to try to maximize numbers is understandable. To this end, permanent members developed a variety of strategies, both fair and foul, to bind as many peasants as possible into the reform process.

Capturing Peasants for the Reform When contemporary critics accused the government of using force to consolidate the peasants’ land, they were not being wholly just, since the centre’s commitment to voluntary enclosure was genuine. Had they instead been content to point to indirect pressure as a factor in securing the peasants’ consent to enclose, their criticisms would have been much nearer the mark and no less powerful for that. For the fact is that, while the government did indeed reject the open use of force and intimidation as a means of effecting its rural transformation, the local officials it employed had at their disposal a whole armoury of means which they could use to bribe, cajole, and encourage otherwise reluctant peasants into the reform. These means were not used universally, but they cannot be ignored as a factor in the reform’s development in the provinces. One of the most effective means permanent members had of persuading whole communities of peasants to consolidate was to play on their fears that they would lose the best of their land to pioneer separators. It was a fear that was easy to exploit since it was invariably the case that individual separators did demand that their new farms be fashioned out of their parent commune’s prime land. The Governor of Samara province was probably not exaggerating when he commented that, ‘the interests of the non-separators are almost always in conflict with those of the peasants wanting to consolidate their land . . . the voluntary amicable agreement between them on all questions relating to consolidation, especially when concerning the choice of location for otruba, is rarely achieved.’13 The Governor’s suspicions were borne out by the fact that the number of separations that had to be carried out using the ‘compulsory procedure’ (prinuditel’nyi poriadok)—that is, the imposition of a solution by the land settlement commission—was in the region of three-quarters of the total.14 Under the compulsory procedure the local land settlement commission 13

Pamiatnaia knizhka Samarskoi gubernii za 1911 (Samara, 1911), 20. Zyrianov maintains that the figure is meaningless because there was very little difference between voluntary and compulsory withdrawals—all involved interventions and pressure from the land reform agents and land captains. See P. N. Zyrianov, Krest’ianskaia obshchina Evropeiskoi Rossii: 1907–1914 (Moscow, 1992), 97. 14

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had to attempt to broker a solution. In theory, the permanent member or other official charged with the task was supposed in such cases to ensure that neither party’s interests was damaged by the outcome. However, by the very nature of the conflicts involved, mutually satisfactory compromises were difficult to achieve; communities would invariably want the farms of individual separators removed to the outer perimeters of the open fields and carved out of land of indifferent quality, while the separators naturally wanted accessible, good-quality farms. Faced with these competing claims, the temptation for local commissions was to veer on the side of the separators—after all, a commission’s performance would be judged by its success in spreading enclosures. There was a ready justification for favouring the separators since, as all local commissions had been told, the purpose of individual separations was to demonstrate the advantages of enclosure to fellow villagers so that they would follow suit—not something that was likely to happen if the pioneers were confined to the extremities of the village on poor land. The tendency for land settlement commissions to take the part of the individual separators was commented upon in numerous reports. As an example, a secret report into enclosure in Kherson province can be quoted. It noted that Elizavetgradskii uezd land settlement commission ‘usually inclines towards the interests of the separators, without investigating sufficiently circumstances on the ground and often ignoring the interests of the commune’.15 The author of the report, one of Kofod’s inspectors, had no illusions about the motives that lay behind this: ‘[T]he tendency is to try to make whole communities take a quick decision to enclose all their land as a result of such inconvenient individual separations.’16 The commitment of the reform centre to even-handedness in disputed enclosures was, at best, ambivalent. While there may be an implied criticism in the inspector’s comment on the practice in Kherson province, land reform officials in the field received some endorsement for such practices from their immediate superiors. Chaplin, whose word was law with the land surveyors, argued in a report of a summer visit to the provinces in 1909 that peasant communes should not be allowed to participate in decisions about the location of individual separators’ enclosed farms.17 And Kofod similarly maintained that ‘if the question is left to the initiative of the rural society, then no good will come of land settlement.’18 Kofod’s comments 15 17 18

RGIA, f. 408, 1910–1911, opis’ 1, no. 153, 87. RGIA, f. 1291, 1910, opis’ 120, no. 19. RGIA, f. 408, 1910–1911, opis’ 1, no. 153, 172.

16

Ibid., 101.

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suggest that not much action would have followed his inspector’s report on the Elizavetgradskii uezd commission. Provincial governors were not above entering the debate. The Governor of Kiev province circulated uezd commissions to the effect that, when the first otruba and khutora were being formed in any place, it was permissible for the interests of the parent commune to be ignored. His justification was the urgency of establishing successful enclosed farms as models for other peasants.19 The use of this justification was not peculiar to the Kiev Governor. The journal of Mogilev provincial land settlement commission for October 1910 recorded its members’ approval of a decision taken by a subordinate commission to locate individual separators’ otruba in the middle of a commune’s open fields on the grounds that ‘by making out the petitioners’ farms in this place the other villagers will realize the great advantages of eliminating strips and will ask for their land to be consolidated as well.’20 A similar argument was employed to justify the location of an otrub on prime arable land belonging to Zagredinskaia village, Viatka province. The separator in question pointed to the demonstration value his farm would have for the other peasants and was supported in this by the uezd land settlement commission.21 An extreme example of the manipulation of individual separations in order to elicit further applications for enclosure took place in Volotovo village, Tambov province, which was under the stewardship of permanent member G. N. Rostovtsov of the Lebedenskii uezd land settlement commission. Rostovtsov had been called in to settle a dispute between the commune and twenty-four prospective separators who wanted to enclose land on a prime site on the village side of the river Don. Although the separators’ preferred site dissected the village’s land into two halves and its withdrawal from the commune would obstruct access to the river for other peasants, Rostovtsov found in the separators’ favour. He had grounds for feeling confident about his actions because the plans for the first enclosures had been approved personally by Kofod.22 Rostovtsov’s reasoning was outlined in a subsequent report he wrote for the Committee of Land Settlement Affairs: 19 RGIA, f. 408, 1910–1911, opis’ 1, no. 147, 7. The governor did concede that once the enclosure movement had got under way, permanent members should revert to working ‘by the book’. 20 RGIA, f. 408, 1911, opis’ 1, no. 198, 86. This project was approved by the district board without any difficulty. The majority of peasants in the village who opposed the consolidation also complained that the permanent member had not allowed them to participate in discussions about the location of the otruba. 21 RGIA, f. 408, 1915, opis’ 1, no. 571, 2–3. 22 RGIA., f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 166, 20.

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To me is was obvious that if I did not manage to form some otruba in Volotovo then the whole business of land reorganization in the uezd would be postponed for a long time. That is why I concentrated all my attention on Volotovo. I visited the village tens of times through the spring, summer and autumn . . . and . . . concluded that it was necessary to make out the otruba for the first twenty-four households in one of the places they had themselves chosen. I came to this conclusion not only because I recognized that the result would be a good advertisement for otruba in the uezd but also because I did not see why people who were trying to respond to the government’s initiative should be disadvantaged compared to those who opposed it . . . I fully understand that enclosures of land near a village are, as a rule, less desirable from the commune’s point of view than if they are placed at a distance, but when my attempts to persuade the separators to accept otruba beyond the river failed, I decided that it was best to meet their wishes.23

Rostovtsov further explained that he tried to convince the commune that its only prospect for participating in decisions about the location of otruba was for it to decide on a community-wide enclosure, and that there were yet more applications for otruba in the pipeline. The commune did not succumb to this pressure, preferring to resist instead. When violence broke out leaving six people dead, the Volotovo consolidations were the subject of intense investigations. Rostovtsov was criticized for his dealings with the peasantry but, interestingly, all references to the adverse consequence of the enclosures for the commune at large were expunged from the final report on the incident that left Kofod’s department.24 The first draft of the report had admitted that the outcome of Rostovtsov’s project was that ‘privileged otrubniki closely encircled the village’ and commented that otruba located ‘exclusively in the fields the villagers’ prized most highly [was not] a satisfactory means of trying to persuade the whole community to consolidate’.25 Rostovtsov was an enthusiastic advocate of consolidation. At a conference of land settlement officials in Tambov, he recommended the compulsory consolidation of land taken into title under the 9 November 1906 Edict. He took his cue from a speech made by the province’s governor which urged permanent members to agitate for enclosure in the province by placing ‘a constant, firm, directing pressure’ on the peasants.26 This attitude to the reform was reflected in the final resolutions of the conference which included, among other means for spreading enclosures, the recommendation that communes should be forced to repartition their land in order to facilitate forming otruba for individual separators.27 This elicited a personal 23

24 25 Ibid., 126. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 41–2. RGIA, f. 1291, 1909, opis’ 120, no. 91, 27–34. The quotation cited is also on p. 13 of the vice-governor’s speech which was printed in full for publication. 27 Ibid., 15. 26

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letter to the governor from Rittikh, criticizing the recommendation, and reminding him that repartition was a commune’s right, not an obligation.28 There were other sorts of pressure local reform officials could bring to bear on the peasants. In the report of his 1909 tour, Lykoshin described one case which involved seven villages in Khar’kov province joined together in a single rural society (sel’skoe obshchestvo). In 1908 the villages petitioned the local land settlement commission to divide the rural society so that each village would hold its land in a compact block around the settlement. As Lykoshin recounted, arriving at the place the permanent member, Rosalion-Soshal’skii, explained to the peasants that . . . the land settlement commission was currently very busy and all its surveyors were engaged with the commission’s most important work of dividing villages into otruba . . . [the seven villages could be helped only if the peasants] . . . signed a resolution to form otruba out of their allotment once the division [between the seven villages] had taken place. After long and bitter discussions at the rural assembly, the peasants decided to go along with this proposition.29

A similar case came to light through a complaint about a group land settlement project involving two villages in Perm province. Seven peasants, who had previously taken title to their strips, found the total amount of land they held had been cut when the two villages were divided. On applying to the local land settlement commission for the restoration of the lost desiatiny, they were told that their request could be met only if they agreed to consolidate.30 Responding to their appeal, the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture restored to the peasants their full complement of land but it made no comment on the commission’s attempt to pressurize the peasants to enclose. Pressure to enclose was also exerted on the members of one commune in Bratslavskii uezd, Volynia, when they approached the local land settlement commission for a grant to purchase the private strips of twenty-two households emigrating to Siberia. The land settlement commission said it would agree to do this only if the commune consolidated its land into 162 otruba.31 In another case in St Petersburg province, the Gdovskii uezd land 28 Ibid., 4. Stolypin also took up the issue in a letter to Muratov in the land section of the Ministry of Internal Affairs; ibid., 79. In his speech the governor had quoted Ekaterinoslav province where communes had been forced to repartition by the land settlement commission precisely in order to facilitate the formation of enclosed farms. 29 RGIA, f. 408, 1909, opis’ 1, no. 113, 51. 30 RGIA, f. 408, 1911, opis’ 1, no. 196, 141. 31 RGIA, f. 408, 1911–1912, opis’ 1, no. 208, 8. The land settlement commission justified its action by the fact that there had been very few consolidations in the district and demonstration otruba were needed.

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settlement commission and Peasant Land Bank blocked the sale of 19.1 desiatiny of arable land to Sotka village because of the peasants’ refusal to enclose. The village had been renting the land for many years, using it as the third field in its three-course rotation. The uezd land settlement commission maintained that the prior rental agreement was ‘not sufficient reason for selling the land to a rural society which has made no moves in the direction of improving its system of land-holding, especially when, in this case, the soil conditions are fully suited to forming independent enclosed farms’.32 The commission recommended that the land be held in reserve for individual households who were prepared to purchase the land as enclosed farms. In Podolia a similar attempt to use land as a bargaining chip resulted in the local commission making a promise it was unable, in the event, to fulfil. The case concerned two villages in Iampolskii uezd which had agreed to enclose their members’ land in return for the land settlement commission helping them to purchase land from a local noble. The villagers enclosed their land, but the commission had to renege on its side of the agreement because the landowner chose to sell his land to a different party.33

Over-Zealousness at the Local Level In the history of the Stolypin Reform, there are some individuals who were so determined to capture peasant households for the reform that their bending of the rules precipitated open protests. Rostovtsov was one such official. Another was the permanent member of Umanskii uezd land settlement commission in Kiev province, V. P. Maksimchik. Under Maksimchik’s stewardship the uezd produced record numbers of enclosed farms which, furthermore, met the exacting criteria of the Technical Instructions for their degree of land use integration. But the uezd was also the scene of some of the more celebrated protests against land settlement commission activities. Contemporary investigations revealed that many community-wide enclosures in the uezd were achieved as a result of dubious practices on Maksimchik’s part. These included the withholding of the details of land settlement projects from villagers, gerrymandering with the resolutions passed at communal assemblies, vote rigging, and bypassing legal formalities. Umanskii uezd was not ‘typical’—it clearly stood at one end of land reform practice—but it reveals the range of means available to permanent members who were determined to kick-start enclosures in their uezd. 32 33

TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1909, opis’ 3, no. 186, 19. RGIA, f. 408, 1911, opis’ 1, no. 186, 112–15.

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Land was already the locus of conflict in Umanskii uezd before the Stolypin Reform; population growth had led to intense competition for land among the local peasants which, in turn, had resulted in frequent repartitions.34 Repartitions in the uezd were complicated by the existence of levadi in the open fields. These were intensively cultivated strips upon which the peasants lavished particular attention and concentrated their organic fertilizers. Communes had responded to their members’ understandable anxiety not to lose the fruits of their labours by excluding the levadi from repartitions. In addition to their levadi, households in Umanskii uezd generally held three arable strips in each of their commune’s open fields, and one additional strip in an outfield which was not rotated with the others.35 With the build-up of population on the land, communes had to respond to households with increased entitlement by making additional allotments in the outfield and, in this way, they had been able to leave the core arable undisturbed. This practice had led to inequality between households in the proportion of their allotment made up of good infield and inferior quality outfield land. It was a potentially volatile situation, one that provided fertile ground for land reform activists to find candidates for individual separation. The prospect of outfield land being traded in for core arable or, even worse, for levadi was bound to be a source of anxiety in communities. Requests for individual enclosures would require sensitive handling in the uezd—but sensitivity was not a quality that Maksimchik had in large measure. From the moment of taking up his post in the Umanskii uezd land settlement commission, permanent member Maksimchik was determined to press hard for the creation of khutora and otruba. And on paper his success was impressive: between 1907 and 1910, when he was moved to another uezd, Maximchik oversaw the creation of 14 201 otruba and khutora in forty-one village-wide projects on 30 per cent of the uezd’s allotment land. One of the means Maksimchik used to achieve this impressive record of enclosures in Umanskii uezd was described by Kofod in a 1910 report: The business starts with petitions from individual households which have taken title to their land requesting consolidation. The permanent member or land surveyor then goes to the village and . . . begins to survey the land in such a way that suggests the whole village is to be enclosed. In the course of this work, they try to persuade the peasants to consolidate their land and, when a sufficient number 34 Khutorskie khoziaistva Kievskoi gubernii, Kievskaia gubernskaia zemleustroitel’naia kommissiia (Kiev, 1911), 256–8. 35 Compared with other regions of Russia, land fragmentation was not particularly intense in Umanskii district, with households usually holding under ten arable strips each.

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has been persuaded, a resolution is drawn up to put to the village assembly for a community-wide consolidation.36

The persuasion to which Kofod referred involved secret approaches being made by the land reform agents to individual peasants with promises of farms in prime sites. Consenting peasants would be asked to sign a form requesting individual separation and when sufficient signatures had been gathered they would be collated and presented to a (usually unsuspecting) skhod for confirmation as a resolution for a commune-wide enclosure.37 The whole business thus became a fait accompli, presumably because even at this stage the individual separators believed the promise of their chosen otrub would be honoured. This expectation was, of course, mistaken since the consequence of the communal ‘decision’ to enclose meant that all households would have to take their chances against each other in the ballot for enclosed farms. Interestingly, Kofod did not criticize the secret deals or the irregularities in Maksimchik’s method of gaining community consent in his report, even though they involved violations of clearly laid-down procedures. Kofod’s principal concern was financial; in his view there was always a risk that a community might refuse to meet the survey costs of enclosure projects agreed in this manner. The irregularities perpetrated by the Umanskii uezd land settlement commission under the guidance of Maksimchik preyed on peasant fears of individual separations. This was bound to be the case, given the secrecy that surrounded meetings between peasants and the permanent member, and it was fertile ground for rumour. To try to forestall opposition when the question of enclosure was raised at village assemblies, Maksimchik would intentionally keep vague the finer details relating to the amount and location of the land households would receive and the costs of the project.38 Kofod had a defence for this: ‘All conscientious permanent members agree that . . . to overburden the application (for razverstanie) with too much detail is not appropriate in places where land settlement is still a novelty.’39 But he was hard pressed to defend another of Maksimchik’s practices which involved counting only the votes of lustration (liustratsionnie) households in enclosure votes. Lustration households were the equivalent in the southwest of revision households elsewhere in the Empire, and they formed the bulk of allotment-holders at the time of Emancipation. Since 1861, household divisions had multiplied the number of land-holding households 36 RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 153, 170. Kofod was not critical of this practice, although others condemned it, and he expressed surprise at all the criticism directed at Maksimchik. 37 38 39 Ibid., 120. Ibid., 121. Ibid, 170.

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in most villages, and in Umanskii uezd both the remaining lustration households and more recently formed households were included in repartitions. By counting only the votes of lustration households in the decision to enclose, the Umanskii uezd land settlement commission effectively disenfranchised large numbers of peasants. In Ksendzovka village, for example, 329 households were forced to accept otruba because of a vote by sixty households taken on this basis.40 In Tsibermanovka village the same result was achieved on the vote of 154 (out of a total of 244) lustration households in a village consisting of 568 resident households, and in Chernaia Kamenka the resolution to consolidate was taken by 256 (out of 364) lustration households in a village with 736 resident households.41 When the peasants’ protests brought the activities of the Umanskii land settlement commission into the public arena, Maksimchik received an official reprimand. However, it was tempered with an acknowledgement from the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs that the results of enclosure in Umanskii uezd were impressive and that ‘much that was good’ had been achieved. According to one official involved in the investigation, the real problem was that the Umanskii uezd land settlement commission had been trying too hard to achieve record numbers for consolidations, and it was this that had led it to ignore the procedures laid down in circulars.42 Maksimchik, for his part, explained the problems in the uezd by a combination of his involvement in organizing the land settlement exhibit at the local agricultural fair, which meant he could not supervise enclosures closely, his having a sore throat which prevented him from explaining things clearly to the peasants, and outside agitators.43 He was withdrawn from the uezd and redeployed as an adviser to other land settlement commissions in Kiev province, where the enclosure movement had made a slow start. Moving officials sideways was the normal punishment meted out during the years between 1906 and 1917 to officials against whom complaints were upheld. The majority of such cases never reached the central administration but were dealt with locally by provincial commissions. In St Petersburg province, for example, a land surveyor found guilty of using threats against the peasants, being drunk on duty, and moonlighting was also moved to a neighbouring uezd rather than being dismissed.44 The 40

RGIA, f. 408, 1910–1911, opis’ 1, no. 147, 8. The figures for Tsibermanovka were obtained from RGIA, f. 408, 1910–1911, opis’ 1, no. 147, 8, and for Chernaia Kamenka from RGIA, f. 408, 1911, opis’ 1, no. 198, 134. 42 RGIA, f. 408, 1910–11, opis’ 1, no. 147, 5. 43 RGIA, f. 408, opis’ 1, 1910, no. 153, 165–8. 44 TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1909, opis’ 3, no. 186, 191. 41

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relatively lenient treatment of reform agents whose work with peasants was found wanting must indicate that confidence-building in relation to the peasantry was not uppermost in the reform administration’s mind in 1910. In Umanskii uezd, the khutora and otruba made during Maksimchik’s tenure as permanent member were not reversed although they had been obtained by unfair means. Local officials knew that so long as they did not overplay their hand there was much to which the centre would be prepared to turn a blind eye in pursuit of success for the reform. Similar practices to those in Umanskii uezd were indeed used by permanent members elsewhere, albeit on a more modest scale. In Kursk province the permanent member tried to trick peasants opposed to enclosure into signing resolutions in its favour by informing them that without such a resolution, complaints could not be acted upon by the land settlement commission.45 The practice of surveying villages for whole-community enclosures (razverstanie) as soon as a request for an individual separation (vydelenie) had been made was commented upon by Litvinov after a tour to Taurida province.46 Rule-bending could originate at all levels in the bureaucracy. The interventions of the Tambov province governor and vicegovernor have already been commented upon. Another province in which the governor took a similarly active role was Ekaterinoslav, the province with the greatest numbers of enclosed farms in European Russia. In a circular dated 1 December 1908 the governor’s office instructed land captains to give the peasants’ elected representatives (starosti and starshiny) preferential treatment in applications for title change and consolidation. Peasant leaders who were reluctant to adopt the reform, the circular made clear, should be ‘asked to consider’ whether they were ‘suited for the posts they hold’.47 The circular elicited a response from the centre and a general circular to all governors (including a personal letter from Stolypin) reminding them that ‘[t]he whole essence of the 9 November 1906 Edict is the voluntary awareness of the population of the advantages of the transition to independent land ownership and it does not give any rights to the Administration to pressurize the population in this connection.’48 But the Governor of Ekaterinoslav was not to be deterred. He issued a new instruction, dated 12 January 1909, which contained a moderated version of his previous instruction. This time he suggested that land captains ‘make use of the reputations’ of the peasants’ elected representatives when trying to 45 46 47

RGIA, f. 408, 1911, opis’ 1, no. 196, 21. RGIA, f. 1291, 1908–1909, opis’ 1, no. 67, 4. RGIA, f. 1291, 1908–9, opis’ 120, no. 37, 2.

48

Ibid., 5.

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popularize the reform and that they investigate what underlay the reluctance of any of them to accept the reform, such as the possibility that the starosti had been subjected to intimidation or had left-wing sympathies: ‘If the first is the case, land captains should take all possible measures to protect the peasant officials from danger . . . if the second is the case, land captains must immediately investigate whether an individual consciously opposing the Imperial Decree on Land Settlement should continue to hold his post in peasant government.’49 The circular elicited another reprimand from the centre which led to the governor rescinding his instruction. By acting decisively in this case, the centre demonstrated its commitment to a voluntary reform. But the important issue for relations between the peasants and the reform was how far that commitment was shared and enforced by officials working for the reform at the local level. Although the available data do not allow statistical correlations to be made, it is striking that a relatively small group of provinces figured in reports of local commissions overstepping the mark. They were Tambov, Taurida, Samara, Kiev, and Ekaterinoslav, all ‘record’ provinces where the response to enclosure was above the national average.

Intimidation and Force There was a fine dividing line between the sort of pressures used in Umanskii uezd to persuade peasants to enclose their land and the open use of intimidation and force. In the face of constant reminders from the centre about the reform’s voluntary character, the use of force was not integral to the spread of enclosures. When the militia became involved in the reform it was because disturbances had broken out, usually at a late stage in the implementation of a project. Nevertheless, the use of intimidation in the early stages of the reform was not entirely absent and, as has already been observed, it required only a few instances of negative publicity for any trust that had been built up between the peasants and land reform to be undermined. Typically, the intimidation that could be used by local reform agents would involve them turning up in force at village assemblies convened to discuss enclosure, sometimes accompanied by the militia. An internal report on enclosure in Podolia included a reference to the fact that on six occasions Proskurovskii uezd land settlement commission had sent both a land captain and permanent member to explain about land reorganization to villagers in the uezd, a practice that was also commented upon in inspectors’ reports for Tambov and Khar’kov provinces. 49

Ibid., 11.

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The report commented that the simultaneous appearance of two officials in their midst would be interpreted by the peasants as an attempt ‘to influence the decision of the assembly’.50 The author of the report recommended that in the future only one official at a time should be sent to villages in the uezd and that they should be prepared to spend two to three days among the peasants discussing the latter’s concerns about enclosure. Intimidation might go further and involve threats against peasants who openly resisted enclosure or even their arrest. In one case a secret agent, code-named ‘Semenov’, recruited by the police to report on the mood of the peasants in Lebedinskii uezd, Khar’kov province, described the threats used by the permanent member against the peasants: The decision to enclose is not taken step by step with the peasants discussing the question and agreeing on a resolution, but in haste and under pressure because the officials want to ‘excel’ . . . the principal culprit is the permanent member of the land settlement commission, Plemiannikov. He assembles the village meeting, but then does not allow the peasants to discuss the matter. Instead he demands instant consent. Anyone who opposes the idea is arrested by the militia, whilst those who do agree are promised the best land. The result is that the peasants become dangerously angry.51

The idea that force was used as an integral part of the reform was developed in the liberal and opposition press. Russkoe Bogatstvo argued that land settlement commissions employed a network of spies to inform them of people who had negative attitudes to the reform.52 The government vigorously denied these allegations, but there is evidence from police archives that their help was engaged to check the reliability of some peasants involved in the reform and that the intelligence gathered was used to identify and remove possible agitators.53 In Khar’kov province, police intelligence that 50

RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 230, 6. GARF, f. 102, 1911, opis’ 12, no. 20 g.88-B, 161. Plemiannikov evidently continued to use these tactics, Semenov submitting another report in February 1912 describing how the permanent member would send in the land captain half an hour after he had left a village to drum home his message about enclosure. The provincial chief of police gave a different account of the permanent member’s activities in a separate report, arguing that there had been no legal violations and that Plemiannikov had responded to the genuine request of some peasants in the village for enclosure. See, GARF, f. 102, 1912, opis’ no. 13, no. 95 g.88-B, 5–6. It is quite possible, of course, that the secret agent himself opposed enclosure and that this coloured his report from the village. All other agents’ reports that were consulted in the archive concentrated their attention on identifying peasants who agitated against enclosure. 52 Russkoe bogatstvo, 1 (1911), 18–19. 53 In St Petersburg province, for example, the police were asked to check the political reliability of the people employed to gather data for the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture’s survey of the economy of enclosed farms. See TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1911, opis’ 6, no. 14, 48. 51

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the starosta of Uspenskii commune had spoken out against individual separations led to his arrest for five days and his removal from his post.54 The same fate awaited peasants who argued against title changes in Samara province.55 Police informers were also involved in weeding out unreliable elements from the groups of peasants sent from central Russia in the early years of the reform to look at khutora in the western provinces.56 In Novgorod province a 1910 circular from the governor’s office advised permanent members that peasants who spread rumours against individual separators were liable to a 500-rouble fine or three months in jail. The circular drew an immediate reminder from Krivoshein of the reform’s voluntary character.57 A not unexpectedly vigilant line towards anti-reform agitators was taken by the Tambov province governor. Permanent members and land captains were urged to report ‘cases of actual or suspected agitation . . . regardless of the wishes of the local police’.58 As this example illustrates, the police were not necessarily prepared to cooperate with local commissions. In a letter to his superiors naming peasants who opposed the formation of otruba in Sumskii uezd, the Assistant Chief of Police in Khar’kov province observed that none was a known political agitator and cautioned against exiling them because it would only turn them into ‘thieves and militants’.59 George Yaney may well be correct in arguing that the use of force and intimidation played a minor role in the Stolypin Reform. As is argued here, indirect pressure which exploited the divisions in villages could do the job just as well without provoking a confrontation between peasants and the state. Nevertheless, when peasants from Bakharevo village in Iaroslav province overheard a conversation between the uzed land surveyor and a landowner in a tea house to the effect that peasant title-holders who refused to consolidate their land would have the militia set onto them, they had no reason to doubt the truth of what they had heard. It would have been 54

GARF, f. 102, 1913, opis’ 13, no. 95 g.88g-B, 8. The Samara province police, for example, kept two peasants who tried to convince their fellow villagers to resist title changes ‘under observation’. See GARF, f. 102, 1911, opis’ 12, no. 32–68–5, 34. Two peasant representatives on the Akhturskii uezd land setttlement commission were kept under observation for the same reasons: GARF, f. 102, 1911, opis’ 12, no. 20 g.88-B, 150. 56 The Orel provincial land settlement commission, for example, had to explain to the local department of police a report published in Rech’ that few peasant volunteers had come forward for a planned expedition to Volynia. Of the ten who eventually did, two were excluded on the grounds of their ‘unreliability’. See, GARF, f. 102, 1907, opis’ 116, no. 48g9, 86. 57 RGIA, f. 408, 1910–1911, opis’ 1, no. 153, 116 and 176. 58 RGIA, f. 1291, 1911, opis’ 120, no. 91, 16. 59 GARF, f. 102, 1913, opis’ 13, no. 95 g.88g-B, 11. 55

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extreme folly for the tsarist state in the aftermath of 1905 to design a land reform that depended for its implementation upon force, so the repeated strictures against its use are not to be wondered at. However, it needed more than strictures to convince the peasants that force was no longer a factor in their relations with the state. The situation was well summed up by one peasant’s words, reported in the journal Zhizn’ dlia vsekh for 1911: ‘Where I live, the land captain has beaten many peasants; he tells us all that we should adopt the land reform; he says in will be good for us— that the authorities will help private farmers.’60

Land Settlement Commissions and the Quality of Enclosed Farms If the attempt to respond to pressure from the centre to deliver quantitative results led permanent members and other local activists, in their turn, to pressurize peasants to come forward and engage with the reform, the situation with regard to the qualitative side of enclosure was more complex. In theory, local commissions were supposed to put the drive for ‘technically correct’ enclosures ahead of numbers. Krivoshein made this plain in a personal circular to all provincial governors in 1910 which stated that ‘the number of projects completed is less important than their quality . . . it is a mistake [for local commissions] . . . to try to satisfy as many requests for enclosure in as short a time as possible, without taking into account whether the results will lead to a genuine improvement in farming conditions.’61 The point was reaffirmed in consecutive annual reports which stated that local commissions must give first priority to achieving the highest standards in consolidating land. But the reality for the majority of local commissions was that they ran the risk of a catastrophic fall-off in numbers if they refused to make some concessions to the peasants’ preferences for types of land reorganization that fell far below the ‘highest technical standards’. Only a small number of local commissions serving constituencies of peasants with a genuine desire to disperse from their villages onto khutora did not have to choose between priorities. In most places a choice had to be made, and normally it came down on the side of numbers at the expense of technical standards. But it was a choice that was not without costs to permanent members, land surveyors, and local commissions because it could pitch them into conflict with the officials in the reform hierarchy directly responsible for checking and approving their work. Local commissions had a difficult task mediating between 60

Zhizn’ dlia vsekh, 7 (1911), 940–2.

61

RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 153, 2.

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diametrically opposed expectations about the physical outcome of land reorganization on the part of peasants on the one hand, and their superiors on the other. Some managed the task better than others. When it came to the details of land settlement projects, land surveyors were as important as permanent members of land settlement commissions. The views of the director of the land survey department of the Ministry of Justice, to whom land surveyors were answerable, have already been referred to in relation to his opposition to common pastures. Chaplin was also an ardent advocate of khutora, insisting even in 1913 that land settlement commissions redouble their efforts to achieve the full integration of land: ‘In this respect,’ he wrote, ‘it seems that local officials have not yet fully understood that to have several separate parcels when consolidating land does not meet the basic technical requirements of land settlement.’62 In an earlier report, he had criticized the Peasant Land Bank for forming otruba rather than khutora.63 And he was among those who thought it better to delay any land settlement work rather than make piecemeal improvements: ‘If it transpires that the population, under the influence of agitation or for some other reason, cannot correctly understand the purpose of land settlement, it is preferable, in their own interests, to refuse to make any changes than to introduce a compromise form of land-holding.’64 By Chaplin’s own admission, not all the land surveyors in his department could be relied upon to meet his high standards. The reports of his annual inspection tours instructed surveyors to aim for as radical a change in landholding practices as possible. Meanwhile, he complained about the pressure local land settlement officials came under to achieve quantitative results, observing that all the commissions he visited in 1910 were trying to include as many projects as possible in their annual field schedules, regardless of viability. He attributed this tendency to their desire to make it look as if enclosure had caught on in their region.65 The inspectors of Kofod’s inspectorate inevitably took the same message about qualitative standards to the permanent members they met in the provincial and uezd commissions. Inspector K. E. German’s criticism of the Saratov land settlement commission was typical of the messages about the technical side of enclosure that inspectors sought to communicate downwards. The commission, German complained, failed to design farms as a square, exceeded the regulation 5:1 length to width ratio in making out 62 63 64 65

RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 174, 17. RGIA, f. 1291, 1909–1910, opis’ 120, no. 19, 10. RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 174, 97. RGIA, f. 1291, 1909–1910, opis’ 1, no. 19, 16.

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fields, allowed peasants to retain common pastures, and designated some land as a reserve fund for allotment to new households in the future.66 However nuanced their views in private exchanges, officials at the top of the reform supported the inspectors’ stance on their visits to the provinces. German recounts how Krivoshein and Rittikh, on an official tour of the Volga provinces, upbraided the local permanent member of the land settlement commission for poor technical work: ‘The Minister and A. A. Rittikh . . . in the most determined way made it clear that the retention of pasture, common ownership etc. is completely unacceptable. I happened to be present at this exchange and nearly danced for joy.’67 It can be assumed that, if through no other channel, local commissions were reminded of the criteria defining qualitatively superior land settlement work by the inspections to which they were periodically subjected. As far as Kofod’s inspectors were concerned, the criteria of good-quality work did not vary much during the course of the reform. Like German three years previously, G. P. Gnedich, the inspector of the five central Russian provinces, noted the failure in a 1914 report of some uezd commissions to keep to the 5:1 ratio rule, the practice of reserving land for future new households, making out multiple-parcel otruba, and failing to divide common pastures.68 In contrast, the Umanskii uezd consolidations, according to an inspection of 1911, were the model of ‘technical correctness’: in relation to the technical side of land settlement we could not expect anything better . . . the holdings are divided up correctly, often approaching a perfect square, there is hardly any land left in common use as pastures etc., the roads connecting the farms have been laid out according to the technical instructions, and even the smallest holdings have been consolidated into a single parcel.69

These comments did not save Maksimchik from a sideways move, but they may have helped stave off a worse punishment for his overenthusiastic attempt to satisfy the reform’s desire for both qualitative and quantitative results. Inspectors did not confine their interventions to comment; they also sought to modify or reverse land settlement projects. Gnedich, for example, made one uezd land settlement commission in Tver province revise its decision to include common pasture in a whole-village enclosure.70 It is difficult to generalize about the attitudes held by local reform activists to the preferences of their peasant constituents. It cannot have taken long 66 68 69 70

67 RGIA, f. 408, 1911, opis’ 1, no. 161, 12. Ibid., 13. RGIA, f. 408, 1914–1915, opis’ 1, no. 271, 56–100. RGIA, f. 1291, 1911, opis’ 120, no. 9, 8. RGIA, f. 408, 1914–1915, opis’ 1, no. 161, 91.

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after the onset of land settlement work in an uezd for it to become obvious to officials in the field that it would be difficult to persuade peasants to accept the centre’s radical plans for land reorganization; it was one thing to get the peasants’ consent in principle to the gathering in of their arable strips, but quite another to convince them that they should abandon their village for life on a khutor, or forgo a parcel of meadow, or cease to graze their livestock on permanent pastures. The vulnerability of communes to pressure to enclose contrasted with their relative strength when it came to negotiating the terms of enclosure. This strength derived from land settlement commissions’ fear of losing numbers once the initial engagement of peasants with the reform was secured. Commissions which insisted on the highest ‘technical standards’ ran the risk of projects floundering at the last minute, or of encountering strong resistance once the peasants understood the details of what was on offer.71 Among local level officials, permanent members in provincial land settlement commissions were more inclined than their uezd counterparts to take a hard line on standards. Some idea of the interplay between the reform administration at the uezd and provincial level can be illustrated by the example of St Petersburg province. St Petersburg land settlement commission took seriously the technical guidelines on consolidation, and under the direction of its permanent member, Smetannikov, issued a veritable barrage of reminders and circulars to uezd commissions in the province about the need to aim for the highest technical standards when enclosing peasants’ land. In the first circular, issued in March 1908, uezd permanent members were informed that their first priority was to strive for ‘the ideal form of land-holding, which, without doubt, is the gathering in of all a household’s strips into a single place’.72 This priority was reflected in the emphasis in the 1908 fieldwork campaign on the formation of a network of ‘khutor clusters’ consisting of groups of fully consolidated farms in each uezd. The circular warned that multiple-parcel khutora were to be permitted only if geographical conditions made full consolidation impossible. The following year, in 1909, Smetannikov issued a reminder: ‘[T]he principal aim of whole-village consolidations is to combine all types of land belonging to each household—arable, 71 The evidence for last-minute failures of whole-community enclosures and other forms of peasant resistance to enclosure are discussed in Chapter 6. Specific examples where disputes over the ‘qualitative’ side of land settlement were concerned were quite numerous and various authorities commented upon the peasants’ intransigence on the issue. 72 TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1908, opis’ 3, no. 62, 97.

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meadow, wood—in one place.’73 He was also concerned to reduce the amount of common pasture that was being left undivided in the province’s land settlement projects: ‘it is most undesirable, and where khutora are concerned, unacceptable [his emphasis] to leave common pasture undivided, even if it is little more than scrub.’74 Smetannikov’s strict line may have been a response to a visit by Kofod, who had found the standard of enclosures in the province wanting.75 Thereafter the provincial commission maintained a strict line, even directing uezd permanent members to include purchased land in village enclosure projects, for which there was no provision in the reform legislation. The St Petersburg governor supported the commission, intervening when the local branch of the Peasant Land Bank objected: Rational land settlement is not simply a case of making khutora and otruba on allotment land but requires all the land belonging to a household to be consolidated into a single parcel . . . making out two parcels in the same type of land is a violation of the general principles involved in the elimination of strip cultivation . . . I will not permit any departures from this rule of land settlement in my province.76

Even after the outbreak of World War I, the provincial land settlement commission was still criticizing Iamburgskii uezd commission for failing to divide pastures and for making multiple-parcel khutora.77 The Gdovskii uezd land settlement commission was on the receiving end of a similar criticism in 1917.78 Poltava was another province where the provincial land settlement commission maintained a strict line on the quality of enclosures. The issue that preoccupied the permanent member here was the fate of pidmety—strips scattered in the open fields which were analogous to the levadi in western Ukraine and were used by the peasants for the cultivation of intensive crops such as tobacco and melons. The peasants, supported by permanent 73 TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1909, opis’ 3, no. 199, 244. Smetannikov conveyed the importance he attached to the point by underlining the sentence in the circular, which also contained a reminder to all district permanent members to reread the earlier circulars sent on the issue by the provincial commission. 74 TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1909, opis’ 3, no. 199, 244. 75 Kofod inspected the fieldwork plan for 1909. He told Smetannikov that it was ‘unacceptable and irrational’ to give households 3–4 desiatiny-sized vegetable plots in addition to an arable otrub as was the practice in some districts. He also criticized one plan where the permanent member had allotted households two arable parcels, one on each side of a river dividing the village. See TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1909, opis’ 3, no. 199, 243. Kofod re-inspected St Petersburg province plans in 1910 and found that some of the same mistakes had been repeated. See TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1907–10, opis’ 3, no. 39, 42–3. 76 TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1909, opis’ 3, no. 199, 141. 77 TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1915, opis’ 3, no. 490, 13. 78 TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1917, opis’ 3, no. 591, 52.

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members of the uezd commissions, argued for these to be excluded from enclosure and for them to be held instead as a second, ‘supplementary’ parcel of arable. The provincial land settlement commission refused: ‘[T]he work of the land settlement agent must not be geared solely to meeting the peasants’ initial demands, which often do not correspond to the requirements of good land settlement . . . officials must be more consistent and unwavering in their attempts to turn communities towards the highest form of land-holding.’79 The permanent member of Staritskii uezd was singled out for special criticism for excluding pidmety from whole-community enclosures, for failing to divide common pastures, and making ‘incorrectly shaped’ otruba.80 Despite exhortations to improve the quality of their work, uezd permanent members in the province continued to be criticized for putting ‘insufficient effort into persuading communes to adopt the khutor form of land-holding’.81 In a 1910 circular the provincial commission instructed uezd permanent members to inform the peasants that anyone agreeing to khutora would be given priority in the fieldwork plan for the forthcoming year. The efforts of the Poltava provincial land settlement commission to maintain high standards in the quality of enclosed farms was singled out for praise in several inspection reports. In one, dated 1909/10, an inspector noted approvingly that the provincial commission ‘correctly understands the nature of the business and prefers to turn projects down than do work that does not meet the technical requirements of land settlement’.82 The attitude of the provincial land settlement commission in neighbouring Khar’kov province could not have contrasted more sharply with that of Poltava’s. Here the provincial permanent member defended the peasants’ right to exclude pidmety from enclosure projects, justifying his ruling thus: ‘[P]urely local conditions have forced the commission to respond to the wishes of the population and, where it has proved to be absolutely necessary, it has left vegetable strips in the form of “supplementary” arable parcels.’83 He also insisted, somewhat heretically, that the resulting fragmentation was not so very bad from the agronomic point of view. Uezd permanent members whose work brought them into more immediate contact with the peasants than their superiors in the provincial commissions tended to adopt a cautious approach to the qualitative side 79

80 81 RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 148, 43. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 126. RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 696, 150. The permanent members of Voronezh province were similarly congratulated. 83 RGIA, f. 1291, 1909, opis’ 120, 37, 6. 82

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of land settlement, while all the time paying lip service to the ultimate goal of khutorization. Under the circumstances they could do little else, although it took the experience of the first two or three years of the reform for moderation to become their modus operandi. When first established, the newly formed land settlement commissions pursued quite divergent policies with respect to reorganizing peasant land. In Moscow province, for example, a survey in 1908 revealed that all uezd permanent members, without exception, gave first priority to improving existing land-holding arrangements within the framework of the commune as a prelude to enclosure at a later date. The Klinskii uezd commission, for example, had decided to direct most of its efforts to group land settlement, the division of single-planned villages, and eliminating fragmentation between villages.84 This approach was endorsed by the province’s permanent member who confidently maintained in his summary report for 1908 that ‘the improvement of farming on communally owned land . . . does not act as an obstacle to the ultimate transition to enclosed farming; on the contrary, it creates fertile ground for spreading the new form of land-holding.’85 These statements contradicted the instructions that were soon to come from the centre, maintaining just the opposite. From 1908, uezd commissions in Moscow province, as elsewhere, had to work with the centrally determined priority schedule which elevated individual and village-wide enclosure above group work. Some of the reform’s local agents were clearly perplexed by the centre’s ordering of priorities that reached them in the form of the Technical Instructions. Even in Tambov province, land captains and uezd permanent members, who otherwise were robust in their dealings with the peasants, could muster little enthusiasm for khutora. When instructed by their governor to concentrate their resources on khutora on the grounds that they represented ‘the best type of farm and the government recommends them’, one uezd permanent member, Iu. V. Davydov, pointed out that if he were to try to encourage peasants onto khutora it would hold up the enclosure movement more generally in the province.86 The majority of permanent members agreed that the formation of otruba should be the first priority in Tambov and that khutora should be reserved for ‘exceptional circumstances’. There was a similar consensus that common pastures should not 84

85 TsMAM, f. 369, 1908, opis’ 4, no. 35, 8. Ibid., 53. RGIA, f. 1291, 1909, opis’ 120, no. 91, 15. He understood, he said, the peasants’ reluctance to move out of their villages: ‘Yes, it is understandable, because life alone is difficult. The peasants will not agree to move because of the absence of river and well water, and because they will be snowbound in the winter.’ 86

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be divided against the wishes of the peasants. The marshal of the nobility supported this position with the observation that ‘if even the landowners are not able to do without permanent pasture, it is senseless to expect the peasants to go over to the stall feeding of livestock.’87 The radical permanent member, Rostovtsov, was among those who concurred, admitting that there was ‘considerable inconvenience in the existing instructions prohibiting the formation of new areas of common pasture for groups of households separating from communes’.88 Local officials clearly did have some latitude in responding to the priorities outlined in the Technical Instructions, most concentrating their efforts on types of land settlement low down on the schedule. They had no scope, however, for venturing beyond the boundaries of officially sanctioned reorganizations. There were some provinces where land settlement commissions began their operations by offering peasant communities help with strip-widening, but they were later forced to abandon this work. The volteface forced on local commissions can be illustrated by two reports on strip-widening made by the permanent member of Iamburgskii uezd land settlement commission, St Petersburg province, both in 1908. In the first report, permanent member Romanov wrote with considerable pride of the land settlement commission’s programme for strip-widening, which was run jointly with the zemstvo. He recommended that it should be given the same priority as enclosure on the grounds that it ‘results in the maximum improvement of farming conditions within the commune’.89 The second report was written after the governor’s circular downgraded this type of work in line with the Technical Instructions.90 Now, reviewing the history of strip-widening projects in Iamburgskii uezd, Romanov drew a contrast between the priorities of the land settlement commission and the zemstvo: ‘[Whereas the] commission only directs its surveyors to do work on strip-widening after it has persuaded as many households as possible to agree to form otruba, the zemstvo undertakes such work without making any such attempts.’91 The differences in approach had forced Romanov to terminate cooperation with the zemstvo and to reorientate the land settlement commission’s efforts towards whole-village consolidations. Effectively, from this point work on strip-widening came to a halt 87 RGIA, f. 1291, 1909, opis’ 120, no. 91, 119. Stall feeding of livestock is discussed in Chapter 8. 88 RGIA, f. 1291, 1909, opis’ 120, no. 91, 119. 89 TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1908, opis’ 3, no. 62, 90. 90 Ibid., 97. Interestingly, the reason the governor gave for his instruction was that strip-widening ‘does not make a significant improvement in peasant land-holding’. 91 TsGIA SPb, f. 267, 1908, opis’ 3, no. 22, 46–7.

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in St Petersburg province. The zemstvo was persuaded to concentrate on establishing an agricultural extension service, whilst the land settlement commission appropriated for itself exclusive control over the task of reorganizing peasant land. Provincial and uezd commissions were not unpractised in disguising shortfalls in their work, especially when these related to the precise details of the enclosed farms they had a hand in forming. One common deception was to classify land use in such a way as to conceal the fact that peasants were being allocated farms consisting of more than one parcel of arable. It was a relatively safe deception to practise so long as the accuracy of the land-use surveys made prior to an enclosure was not checked by their superiors in situ. But some cases did come to light during chance inspections or as a result of peasants’ complaints. For example, one peasant, in a formal complaint about some other aspect of an enclosure project, inadvertently let slip that a land surveyor had given two arable parcels to each household in the village, labelling one of these as ‘meadow’ on his drawings ‘in order that it should fall within the law’.92 The village’s meadow, together with some woodland, was classified as common pasture in the plan and left undivided. In another case a routine inspection of a village enclosure discovered that four arable parcels, plus a large vegetable plot next to their household lot, had been allocated to each household in the village. In the fieldwork book the permanent member had described three of the arable parcels as ‘secondary’ meadow, ‘secondary’ pasture, and ‘pidmet’. The land surveyor for the project had colluded in this deception, the inspector believed, because his payment was pegged to the number of boundary markers used.93 Gnedich also came upon such mis-classification of land use during an inspection tour of Moscow province in 1915. The permanent member in Serpukhovskii uezd ‘divides up land exactly the way the peasants want; for example, in project number 701 a uniform area of meadow, for some reason, was divided into two halves and the peasants were given a parcel in each; moreover, the first was described as “meadow” and the other as “secondary” vegetable allotment.’94 92 RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 481, 16–17. The vigilant peasant complainant maintained that his fellow villagers had hoodwinked the land surveyor. It should come as no surprise that land surveyors, especially those fresh out of training college, should be open to manipulation by the peasants who would have had a superior knowledge of their own land. 93 RGIA, f. 408, 1910–1911, opis’ 1, no. 153, 196–9. He wrote: ‘the greater the number of plots, the greater the number of markers and the larger the payment they receive compared with surveying a single parcel . . . in this way land surveyors lend their assistance to dividing the land into several parcels.’ 94 RGIA, f. 408, 1915, opis’ 1, no. 271, 66.

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Sent to the provinces to familiarize peasants with the advantages of khutora and to assist relatively small numbers of peasants to consolidate their land, local officials of the land reform soon found themselves engaged in the task of assisting whole communities of peasants to enclose. This redirection of the reform towards mass enclosure probably had less to do with these officials’ activities than with the dynamic the legislative assault on communal institutions set in train: permanent members, land captains, and surveyors, like the peasants, were simply swept along by the changes. But there were those who were astute enough to recognize that the turmoil into which the Stolypin legislation had thrown communes could be exploited to the advantage of the reform and of their careers. Wherever such permanent members were posted, it is likely that the pattern of land settlement that developed was in part attributable to their interventions.

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6 EVERYDAY FORMS OF RESISTANCE TO THE STOLYPIN REFORM Peasant resistance to authority was not a new thing in Russia. Occasionally, peasant dissatisfaction had been expressed in outbursts of anger, such as during the Pugachev rebellion and the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions, when millenarian ideas brought the peasants into direct conflict with the tsarist authorities. More typically, peasant resistance in Russia assumed the everyday forms characteristic of a subaltern class and was aimed at defending patterns of livelihood that had guaranteed peasant survival in the past, and at taking any opportunities for ‘small advantages’ that might present themselves. Barrington Moore has described the interactions between such a subordinate class and those with authority over them as ‘a constant probing on the part of rulers and subjects to find out what they can get away with, to test and discover the limits of obedience and disobedience’.1 Peasant–state relations in nineteenth-century Russia assumed the character of just such a ‘constant probing’. It is to the work of the American social anthropologist James Scott that many researchers, including recent historians of the Russian peasantry, have turned for a discussion of everyday forms of peasant resistance, although most acknowledge a debt to E. P. Thompson.2 Basing his insights on his fieldwork in South-East Asia, Scott redefines such long-acknowledged traits of peasant behaviour as pilfering, foot-dragging, feigned ignorance, desertion, and poaching as forms of peasant resistance to authority—the ‘weapons of the weak’ or ‘small arms of the class war’.3 Peasants’ relative powerlessness means that in defending their interests they eschew open confrontations with those who have authority over them and hide their true feelings behind a façade of compliance, what Scott refers to as the ‘public transcript’.4 1

B. Moore, Jr., Injustice: The Social Basis of Obedience and Revolt (Basingstoke, 1978),

506. 2 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1991) and Customs in Common (London, 1991). 3 J. C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven, 1986). 4 J. C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990).

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In this way they can achieve their limited goals without risking the consequences of an open challenge to authority. Although under normal circumstances peasant–overlord relations are conducted according to the public transcript, occasionally the façade is allowed to drop and the true feelings of both sides are revealed. Where the peasantry is concerned these feelings can be expressed in relatively benign forms, such as during ‘carnival’ when in ‘world upside-down’ charades the underclasses symbolically take their revenge on their masters, but the revelation of the ‘hidden transcript’ can also take the form of open protest and a direct challenge to authority. The importance of Scott’s insights for the present work is twofold; first, forms of peasant resistance are conceptualized as the product of rational reflection, and not as essentially ‘intuitive’ and ‘unprogressive’, as has been the postulate of much liberal and Marxist history, which typically contrasted the ‘primordial’, ‘elemental’, ‘animal’ rage of the peasants with the ‘organized’ action of the working class. Even seemingly futile ‘acts of last resort’, it transpires, can be imbued with symbolic significance, reaffirming for the peasants the justice of their cause. Secondly, Scott insists that apparently different forms of resistance be understood as expressions of a common oppositional counter-culture; revolutionary and everyday resistance are simply two ends of a continuum. It follows that the absence of open protest does not necessarily prove the absence of opposition. Scott’s concepts have, in fact, been widely used by historians to revise some long-held views of peasant–state and peasant–landlord relations in Russia and, in particular, to challenge the idea that Russian peasants endured their lot in passive submission which was punctuated at roughly hundredyear intervals by short-lived and self-defeating outpourings of rage. David Moon, a strong critic of the traditional view, has argued that in preEmancipation Russia the serfs’ relationship with their landlords was characterized by continual and unremitting ‘small-scale’ resistance to any measures that threatened to undermine their survival strategies.5 Whenever subsistence was threatened, servile peasants protested against the elites, using non-violent and non-confrontational forms of resistance such as flight, petitioning to higher authorities, and ‘silent sabotage’. Peasants eschewed open confrontations with their masters, choosing the more effective course offered by everyday forms of resistance.6 This, he argues, was the more 5

D. Moon, Russian Peasants and Tsarist Legislation on the Eve of Reform (Basingstoke, 1992). D. Moon, ‘Peasant Protest in Russia: 17th–19th Centuries’, Paper presented to annual conference of BASEES (British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies), 12–14 April, 1997. In this paper Moon argues that the great peasant-led wars of Russian history —Razin, Bolotnikov, and Pugachev—were, in fact, frontier rebellions and not Peasant Wars 6

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rational choice for the peasants to make, given their relatively powerless position in the state. Moon is not the first historian to identify Russian peasants’ use of everyday resistance. G. T. Robinson, in his classic text on peasant Russia, referred to the ‘stubborn shirking and sabotage of the villagers’ and Richard Pipes recognized that, ‘when [the serf ] did not want to do something, he played stupid: when found out, he feigned contrition . . . Dissimulation was not so much part of peasant character as a weapon against those from whom he had no other defence.’7 Research on the postEmancipation peasantry has also uncovered a leitmotif of continuing resistance in peasant–state relations. Kahan, for example, places Russian peasant unrest on a spectrum from ‘everyday forms’ to open protests and attempts a classification.8 In his study of peasant resistance in Saratov province between 1902 and 1906, Timothy Mixter shows how the resistance strategies chosen by peasants varied according to specific historical, environmental, and demographic contexts; by the turn of the century old methods of resistance were being modified and new ones adopted in response to these changing environments.9 From the standpoint of the 1905 revolution, Shanin is able to look back on a tradition of continuing resistance in which peasants defied their masters and exploiters by all means imaginable in a neverending struggle to hang on to an extra sack of grain, an extra hour of leisure, an extra ‘ounce’ of self-respect. They usually faced the ‘unshakeably powerful regimes’ with a battery of cunning devices: by hiding, stealing and faking as much as by the Good Soldier Schweik type of respectful servility with a barb in it . . . At times they sneakily revenged themselves through undisclosed murders of nobles and their officials or the ‘red rooster’ . . . At other times, especially when those lines were crudely stamped on and the whole social system was shaken by famine, war or pestilence, the social control by fear and manipulation crumbled suddenly and the otherwise hidden fury exploded into bunt—an open, indeed demonstrative, mass disobedience, mob violence, destruction and/or murder, invariably followed by harsh pacification and symbolic shows of repentance.10 as they have often been understood. Moon’s ideas are further developed in his forthcoming book: D. Moon, The Russian Peasantry 1650–1900 (Longman, 1999). 7 G. T. Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime: A History of the Landlord-Peasant World and a Prologue to the Peasant Revolution of 1917, 3rd ed. (Berkeley, Calif., 1972), 49; R. Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, 3rd ed. (London, 1990), 156. 8 A. Kahan, ‘Forms of Social Protest by the Agrarian Population in Russia’, in R. Weiss (ed.), Russian Economic History: The Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1989), 160. 9 T. Mixter, ‘The Hiring Market as Turf: Migrant Agricultural Laborers and the Mobilization of Collective Action in the Steppe Grainbelt of European Russia, 1853–1913’, in E. Kingston-Mann and T. Mixter (eds.), Peasant Economy, Culture and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921 (Princeton, 1991), 294–340. 10 T. Shanin, Russia, 1905–7: Revolution as a Moment of Truth (Basingstoke, 1986), 80–1.

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The Stolypin Land Reform fell into the period between two moments when the peasants’ ‘hidden fury’ exploded in the particularly dramatic bunty of the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions. Peasant interactions with the reform have to be understood in this historical context. For example, it was unlikely that the peasants would readily express openly any negative feelings they had about the reform; their recent experience of the harsh pacification that followed open protest would have confirmed in them the greater wisdom of concealing their dissatisfaction. Another implication is that, with hindsight of events to come in 1917, it seems quite reasonable now to look in the period separating the two revolutions for evidence of a continuation ‘by other means’ of the peasants’ hostility to the state expressed in 1905. As this chapter will show, the counter-culture of opposition to authority did indeed continue during the period of the Stolypin Reform’s enactment and implementation, and was expressed in peasant resistance to the reform. Much of this resistance was masked by the public transcript in which the peasants and the state conducted their dialogue but, reflecting the general instability of the last decades of tsarist rule, much also occupied what some historians have referred to as the ‘middle ground’ of resistance, where opposition was open ‘but not openly declared’.11 However, opposition to the reform there was and it carried forward the centuries-long tradition in Russia of peasant resistance to authority’s attempts to meddle in their affairs. One feature of the Stolypin Reform’s impact, already observed, was that it exploited fault lines in the village. This complicated the patterns of resistance to the reform, focusing it inwards and undermining communal solidarity. But, even during serfdom, peasant communities did not always act as one in their opposition to landlords. Stephen Hoch has shown in his investigation of Petrovskoe that some peasants would themselves become targets for opposition through their cooperation with the serf-owners; conflict did not always take place across a simple two-way divide of elite outsiders on the one hand, and the peasant community in its entirety on the other.12 The dynamics of village life were usually more complicated and peasants’ relationships with authority more fluid than this would imply. Opposition to authority in the Russian village could sometimes take place by proxy against village members whose actions were perceived as furthering interests contrary to those of the community at large. This is what happened during the Stolypin Land Reform when, because the reform made 11 A. Turton, ‘Patrolling the Middle-Ground: Methodological Perspectives on “Everyday Peasant Resistance” ’ Journal of Peasant Studies, Special Issue, 13 (1986), 36–48. 12 S. L. Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, A Village in Tambov (Chicago, 1986).

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the peasants themselves the vehicles of the commune’s destruction, they also became the targets of resistance. The threat with which any community resisting its own dissolution had to contend originated with the actions of individual separators. By opposing them, peasants could indeed defend themselves against the full force of the Stolypin Reform while avoiding open confrontation with the state. During the period 1905–1914 Russian peasants were able to maintain a deferential front in their dealings with the authorities while working to prevent the reform happening in their village. That the relative peace in relations between the state and the peasantry at this time was illusory was demonstrated when, other methods having failed, the peasants abandoned their hidden transcript for a public expression of opposition to the reform. On these occasions angry batonwielding crowds would chase land surveyors and permanent members from the fields, destroying survey equipment and pulling out boundary markers in symbolic displays of ‘re-possessioning’ which, temporarily at least, returned land to the community. Such protests were invariably met with force; Cossacks or the gendarmes were brought in, peasant ‘leaders’ were arrested, and order was restored amid the customary shows of abject repentance on the part of the peasants. Land settlement work would be resumed, albeit under the protection of guards. Had the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs been less intent on justifying the reform to its critics at the centre, such incidents might have caused it to pause and consider whether the land reform measures were, in fact, bridging the gulf so obviously revealed in 1905 between peasant and state. Investigation of the peasants’ responses to the Stolypin reform within the framework described in the paragraphs above necessarily runs into evidential difficulties. The sources available include official statistics on peasants’ opposition to the reform and various internal reports of land settlement commissions, newspaper articles, and police reports. The peasants’ voice is absent from the majority of these and even when the peasants do speak, as in the numerous petitions of complaint sent to the centre, it is not clear that they are the authors of their words. Nevertheless, there is abundant evidence of a ‘counter-culture of opposition’ to the reform. Firstand second-hand reports, even though made by people with a vested interest in either minimizing or exaggerating peasant opposition, contain accounts of peasant actions, and it is actions that, in Scott’s approach, constitute the ‘text’ to be read. However, the invisibility of many forms of everyday resistance remains problematic and the peasants’ actions difficult to decode a century later. Furthermore, the most successful resistance— avoidance of any engagement with the reform—was also the least visible,

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leaving unanswerable the question of whether the inaction of the thousands of villages that remained outside the reform’s operations was evidence of their successful opposition or of the fact that they simply had not yet decided to enclose. There were three principal arenas of resistance, each associated with different stages of adopting the reform measures, which are considered in this and the next chapter. The first was the struggle to contain individual separations; the second, often following the failure of the first, was the collective struggle against whole-village enclosures, and the third, the struggle to retain communal management of resources in villages which, for whatever reasons, did adopt the reform.

Resistance in the Middle Ground In 1911 Rittikh wrote an open letter to the editor of the pro-government newspaper, Rossiia, challenging opposition claims that the Stolypin Reform was being imposed by force and was meeting with peasant resistance. He grounded his argument in an analysis of statistics recording the number of official complaints made against land settlement projects and the incidents of open protest involving the police and militia. The numbers he quoted were modest; on the evidence he presented resistance to the reform was limited: The isolated problems associated with land settlement which are reported in the press in reality constitute only a part and, moreover, a very small part of . . . this very extensive work taking place in all corners of Russia. The reasons for the misfortunes are, on the one hand, mistakes made by land settlement officials and, on the other, the fact that the rights given the majority under the laws on land settlement are not always acknowledged by the other members of a rural society, who not only express their dissatisfaction with the land settlement project by sending complaints to all institutions but, in rare cases, take direct action against the land settlement officials and individual separators . . . it is impossible to conclude that there is general opposition to the reform, as the following figures testify: during the four years of the commission’s work 1 970 053 applications have been received from peasants for land settlement, of which projects have been drawn up for 920 281, and 772 528 have been completed. Complaints have been made to uezd commissions and higher bodies in the case of 4.2 per cent of these. This means that more than 95 per cent of land settlement projects have not elicited any complaints or counter-petitions . . . [which] . . . disproves the charge that land settlement is being carried out compulsorily with the use of ‘pressure’ and ‘force’.13 13

Rossiia, 20 Sept. 1793 (1911), 1.

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Rittikh’s letter illustrates the narrowness of the centre’s understanding of peasant resistance—opposition to the reform was counted as such only if it revealed itself in the form of a written complaint or direct action. Even with respect to the use of formal channels, Rittikh’s figures underestimate the degree of the peasant challenge since they included only complaints that were made to the land reform administration. Complaints concerning title changes and problems arising in villages associated with the early stages of discussion surrounding the reform were dealt with through other channels, such as the volost’ courts, and by direct appeal. The volost’ courts, which were increasingly used by peasants from the late nineteenth century as the appropriate venue for conflict resolution in land disputes, became a forum for the resolution of a wide range of issues arising from the reform. This was evidenced by a Ministry of Internal Affairs survey conducted in 1911, which investigated the extent to which the new laws had led to an increase in the volume of litigation.14 The results showed that there had been a threefold increase in the number of disputes over land taken to the courts between 1908 and 1910.15 According to the governors’ returns, disputes arising from the new laws covered a broad range of issues to do with the legitimacy of claims to land made, for example, by absentee and separating households. There were also disputes over the inheritance and partition of land taken into hereditary ownership, questions about the legitimacy of communal resolutions on consolidation, and miscellaneous other cases including alleged defamation and obstruction arising from conflicts over the adoption of the reform. In Samara province between 1908 and 1910 no fewer than 443 cases of insult (oskorblenie) associated with the uptake of the 9 November 1906 Edict were heard in volost’ courts.16 Examination of the appeals dealt with by the State Senate underscores the point that the reform complicated the already troubled issue of land relations in the Russian village.17 On 14 March 1914 the First Department heard seventy-two appeals relating to the adoption of the Stolypin Reform. Of these, twenty-six were appeals made by communes against individual 14

RGIA, f. 1291, 1911, opis’ 120, no. 17. Some governors replying to the survey were of the view that it was the increased sensitivity of the peasants to the value of their land, brought about by the cancellation of the redemption debt rather than the Stolypin Reform, that was responsible for the increase. 16 RGIA, f. 1291, 1911, opis’ 120, no. 17, 133. 17 Senate rulings in respect of the land reform are to be found in the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture archive: for example, RGIA, f. 408, 1914, opis’ 1, no. 473; f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 475; f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 476; f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 477. 15

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separators who were accused of taking too much land or the best quality land into their personal ownership, ten were appeals about the reverse situation in which individual separators alleged that they had been deprived of their true entitlement to land, six were from households dissatisfied with the otrub allocated to them in a whole-community consolidation; a further five concerned disputes between communities and individual separators about the right to consolidate. The residue was an assortment of appeals about group land settlement projects. Complaints made to the land settlement commissions or cases taken to the volost’ courts were normally accompanied by petitions outlining the case of the aggrieved party. Although the majority of petitions came from peasants defending their collective interests against a minority of separators, they could also originate with individuals or groups of households alleging interference in their attempt to take up the reform. Such petitions occupied the middle ground of peasant resistance—they were public expressions of grievance but they were couched in a way that avoided direct criticism of the higher authorities. The majority were written to a set formula and were penned by scribes well-versed in the art of petitioning, and they generally represented the relationship between the state and peasants in the way official Russia wanted it understood. Thus, petitions rarely questioned the authority or motives of the tsar, attributing the peasants’ problems instead to bureaucrats or others lower in the hierarchy of power who were breaking the tsar’s laws or misleading him. The typical petition began with a salutation, followed by a narrative of grievances designed to arouse the addressee to anger and pity for the plight of the peasants, the claim, and the final prostration. Madhavan Palat, tracing the evolution of the petition from early times, has shown that by the latter decades of tsarist rule, peasant petitions were losing some of their formality—salutations and prostrations, for example, became less elaborate—and he argues that they were undergoing a transformation into political leaflets.18 Notwithstanding these general changes towards the end of tsarist rule, the petitions made during the Stolypin Land Reform retained all the traditional features, including the expressions of loyalty to the tsar and the tendency to blame lower-level officials for flouting his laws. Characteristically for the genre, the petitions against the Stolypin Reform did not normally contain open 18 M. Palat, ‘Petition, Demand, Leaflet: The Emergence of Class Society in Nineteenth Century Russia’, paper presented to the conference on ‘Transformation and Recognition of Social Identities in Russia: 19th and 20th Century’, Indira Gandhi Centre for the Arts, New Delhi, February, 1996.

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challenges to the state (although there was a small number that did). They remained part of the ‘public transcript’ behind which both peasants and authority hid their true feelings about each other. As Rittikh observed in his Rossiia letter, petitions concerning the reform were addressed to anyone the peasants believed was likely to listen to their grievances and to act upon them; these included officials at the apex of the reform organization, the prime minister, members of the nobility, Orthodox Church leaders, and now Duma deputies also. An extract taken from a petition sent to a variety of influential people in St Petersburg by peasants in Sobkovka village, Umanskii uezd, followed the standard formula, even though it came from the highly politicized south-west: On 14 May, the anniversary of His Imperial Majesty’s Coronation, we peasants from Sobkovka village, Umanskii uezd, who do not want to move onto otruba, at the instigation of the land settlement commission, were robbed of our food and provisions by the commander of police and his guards. The guards also robbed us of our clothes, ripped kerchiefs from our women’s heads, broke eggs, took flour milled from winter wheat to feed their horses, and they even went so far as, blasphemously, to seize two icons. All of this has been brought about by the land settlement commission which is trying to force us onto otruba. It sent a surveyor to divide our land and demanded 25 kopecks per desiatina to do it, but we 200 householders do not consent to otruba while 50 are in favour. We consider the actions of the authorities wrong and illegal. We prostrate ourselves before you . . . We ask you to stop the work of the commission.19

Another petition, this time from a village in Mogilev province and addressed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, prompted by the separation of four households, also followed the standard formula: [W]hen the permanent member came to divide the land, he did not invite us along and went ahead with the division in our absence. But as soon as our wives saw what was happening, they tried to stop it. In retaliation, the next day the militia came and they beat the women and other people with whips, and then arrested some for three months, only releasing them on our promise that we would let them take our land. This has left seventy-five families with no grain.20

The ‘narrative of grievances’ in these petitions included events that were thought likely to arouse the recipients to anger: violence against women, disrespect for Church property, the endangering of the peasants’ livelihood, and misconduct by the forces of law and order. Such claims were 19 20

RGIA, f. 408, 1909, opis’ 1, no. 127, 99–100. RGIA, f. 408, 1911, no. 198, 86.

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typical of petitions about the reform, with the ‘authors’ invariably describing themselves as the ‘poor’ or as ‘honest toilers’ and asserting that the unwelcome tenure changes or consolidations would result in their ‘impoverishment’. Similarly, the ‘claim’ in the two examples cited which laid the blame for the initial problem and for the escalation to violence firmly at the feet of the local land settlement commission, was also typical of Stolypin Reform petitions. By blaming local officials the peasants were able to avoid criticizing the centre, while at the same time absolving from responsibility the fellow villagers whose actions had led to the petition in the first place. The reform pitted peasant against peasant in Russia’s villages, but in the dialogue between state and peasant about its consequences, it suited both sides to attribute the problems that arose to the manner of lower officials’ interventions in village affairs; for the state it meant that the myth of the loyal peasant was left undisturbed, while for the peasants the same myth provided a cloak for their opposition to the principle of the reform. The prostrations in the petitions, such as those contained in the one below from the peasants of Kamenogorka involved in defence of servitude rights threatened by land reorganizations, have to be understood in this light: ‘prostrating ourselves at the Holy Feet of Your Imperial Majesty, with tearful prayers for forgiveness and for fitting punishment if we are still insufficiently disciplined in the eyes of Your Imperial Majesty’.21 The small number of petitions that contained direct warnings of complications (oslozhneniia) if the peasants’ demands were not met mostly originated from the south-west where the Union of Russian People was active in defending the peasants’ ‘interests’.22 Petitions against the outcome of the Stolypin Reform rarely elicited the response the petitioners wanted, but in the broader context of understanding peasant reception of the reform their importance lies more in the role they played in sustaining the idea of solidarity among Russia’s communal peasants. Verner has observed that, in general, petitioning ‘served to redefine the rural community from which a petition issued, much in the same way as communal violence did’.23 Petitions about the Stolypin Reform were a reminder to all signatories of their membership of the commune and of that body’s collective will in respect of the reform. They can thus be seen as acts of reaffirmation, a part of the repertoire of measures communities 21 Quoted in R. Bircher, ‘Peasant Resistance and the Defense of Servitude Rights in Russia’s South-West, 1890–1914’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford University, 1996), 307. 22 For example, RGIA, f. 408, opis’ 1, no. 129, 125. 23 A. Verner, ‘Discussive Strategies in the 1905 Revolution: Peasant Petitions from Vladimir Province’, Russian Review, 54 (1995), 90.

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had of controlling their membership. But, by the same token, petitions could also be transformative and could signal the emergence of new communities of peasants from the divisions opened up in villages by the reform. Thus, petitions did not just come from ‘communal peasants’ objecting to individual separations, but from groups of individual separators who by joining together to petition, as they had also done to apply for enclosure in the first place, defined themselves as a new community. This was reflected in their self-identification as ‘We otrubniki’ or ‘We khutoriani’. Ironically for a reform that was supposed to be signalling the arrival of an independent peasantry, the lists of signatures to the hundreds of petitions sent by ‘individual’ separators to St Petersburg were an indication of the continuing relevance of collective action to all Russia’s peasants.

Everyday Means of Resisting Individual Separations In order to resist individual separations villagers employed the full repertoire of methods normally used to enforce norms of behaviour in the commune.24 Apart from their primary purpose of trying to prevent individual peasants who had declared the intention of separating from doing so, they also served to reaffirm the principle of community management of land and to act as a warning to potential defectors from the commune of the perils of acting in ways that violated community norms. The methods used were also familiar in enclosure protests elsewhere in Europe; for example, the removal of boundary markers installed by land surveyors in Russian villages was a symbolic act of ‘re-possessioning’ analogous to the levelling of hedges in English enclosure protests. The destruction of fences, arson (krasnii petukh), pasturing of livestock on enclosers’ crops (potrava), and acts of intimidation and name-calling (peasants who took title to their land were called ‘pomeshchiki’ or ‘little barons’ by their fellow villagers) were also not unique to Russian enclosure protests. The symbolic and didactic nature of many of these acts means that they should not be judged only on their ability to achieve a cessation of an unwanted separation; like petitioning, direct action against separators served to define membership of the community. Acts of violence or discrimination against peasants who succeeded in withdrawing were similarly more than mere acts of revenge 24 There is a large literature on samosud and discipline in the commune. Among the more important papers are S. P. Frank, ‘Popular Justice, Community and Culture among the Russian Peasantry, 1870–1900’, Russian Review, 46 (1987), 139–65; M. M. Gromyko, Traditsionnye povedeniia i formy obshcheniia russkikh krest’ian XIXv. (Moscow, 1986); C. Worobec, ‘Horse Thieves and Peasant Justice in Post-Emancipation Imperial Russia’, Journal of Social History, 21 (1987), 281–93.

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or jealousy (as they were normally described by the reform administration); they too were integral to the process of definition and redefinition forced upon communities by the reform. There were, of course, aspects of the resistance strategies employed by communities that were tailored to the specific circumstances of the reform’s operating practices. Peasants opposing the reform quickly developed an acute understanding of its weak spots. Among these, the most easily exploited turned out to be the numerous bureaucratic hurdles that had to be negotiated before final approval for individual separations was achieved; even in uncontested cases, a two-year interval could elapse between the land settlement commission’s or land captain’s receipt of an application for enclosure or tenure change and the issuing of title deeds or the laying out of a new farm.25 Bureaucratization of the reform played into the hands of peasants opposing it by giving them the opportunity to develop strategies of resistance. While bureaucratic processes lumbered on, potential separators could be worked upon by their neighbours and subjected to a foretaste of what life as an outsider would be like. By far the most common sanction communities applied against potential and actual separators was to deny their livestock access to the common herd. This was an especially powerful weapon in Russia’s central provinces where forage land was in short supply and permanent pastures, fallow, and harvested fields were all needed to sustain livestock holdings. The continuing dependence of farms involved in the reform on common pasturage had been partially anticipated in the 9 November 1906 Edict and in the 1911 Law on Land Settlement which provided for individual separators to retain their legal right to use permanent pastures held in common, so long as they had not been allocated land in lieu. However, the law was silent on separators’ rights when the common herd moved onto the fallow and stubble in the open fields.26 Land settlement commissions were, in fact, reluctant to engage in battles over such access to the common herd during the period when it grazed on the open fields; if a community chose to 25 For example, the journal of the St Petersburg province land settlement commission contained many complaints from peasants about the length of time it took their local commissions to consolidate their land: TsGIA SPb: f. 297, 1909–1910, opis’ 3, no. 199, 260; TsGIA SPb: f. 297, 1909–1910, opis’ 3, no. 588, 11–12; TsGIA SPb: f. 297, 1909–1910, opis’ 3, no. 591, 39, 40, and 41. In part the delays were because, from 1909, individual separations had a low priority in local commissions’ work, but it was also to the advantage of local commissions to delay a bit in the hope that other peasants in the same community would come round to the idea of consolidation. 26 Separators did petition land settlement commissions asking them to enforce their ‘right’ to use their neighbours’ strips for livestock pasturage. See, TsGIA SPb, f. 297, opis’ 3, no. 490, 95.

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exclude separators’ livestock, it could do so without much fear of immediate redress. And the threat of such exclusions could prove to be an effective deterrent to potential separators. An undercover police agent working in Khar’kov province, for example, reported that ‘the resident population is unhappy about the law on leaving the commune in order to form otruba, because the small size of their holdings means that it would be impossible to support livestock . . . peasants remaining in the commune will not allow the separators to use the common pasture-lands.’27 The same was given as the reason for the slow uptake of the reform in a 1911 report on enclosure in Kazan province: ‘Often individual enclosure is considered impossible because the peasants cannot do without hay, pasture, and woodland; and communes will not give them these.’28 The difficulties they encountered caused some separators in the province to ask to be readmitted to their communes; for example, sixty-two who had separated from one village in Iurtkukskii uezd agreed to subject their land to a repartition using ‘new souls’ because ‘out of enmity [the commune] will not allow our livestock on the commons.’29 The land settlement commission refused the request. Although it was obviously a violation of their customary rights, access to the common herd could be withdrawn from potential separators long before their application received final approval. Conscious of the damage this could cause, the permanent member for Luzhskii uezd, St Petersburg province, urged his provincial land settlement commission to give top priority to applications for individual separations taking place under the compulsory procedures. As he explained, such applications ‘often bring about very strained relations with the community, as a consequence of which the separators’ use of the open fields and common pastures is made difficult’.30 Agents elsewhere in the province reported similarly. One peasant in Gdovskii uezd sought the intervention of his permanent member on the grounds that ever since the commune had learned of his intention to separate, ‘it will not take my cows into the community herd. I have had to hire a cowherd.’31 Pastures were not the only communal resources to which separators were denied access. A share of the rental income generated on communal land could be withheld from separators even though they continued to pay commune dues. This happened to one peasant in St Petersburg 27

GARF f. 102, 1911, opis’ 12, no. 20, 149. Ukreplenie nadelov v lichnuiu sobstvennost’ v Kazanskoi gubernii. Otsenochno-statisticheskoe biuro Kazanskoi gubernskoi zemstva (Kazan, 1911), 80. 29 RGIA, f. 408, 1914, opis’ 1, no. 529, 63. 30 31 TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1909–1910 opis’ 3, no. 199, 260. Ibid., 274. 28

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province who complained that he was ‘suffering every sort of unpleasantness’, including being deprived of his ‘rightful share’ of the commune’s rental income.32 Communes also contrived to deny separators access to especially prized resources by placing the latter beyond their reach. One village, on learning of the intention of fifteen households to separate, rented out all its top-quality land on a twelve-year lease to outsiders.33 In a variation on this strategy, villagers in Veshka, Vladimir province, felled all the trees on the woodland plot projected for individual separators’ use. The land settlement commission was forced to revise the plans it had made but when a new survey went ahead, the villagers removed the boundary markers to the new otruba in a continuing, now symbolic, protest against the separations.34 Peasants in Luzhskii uezd, St Petersburg province, employed similar tactics when, according to the permanent member’s report, they ‘use the delays in projects to cut down trees from the parts of the woodland designated for the otrubniki . . . [which] . . . results in a severe loss for the latter.’35 The range of difficulties separators could face once their intentions became known to their fellow villagers was summarized in the following way by Matveev: ‘The mir devises all sorts of difficulties for the new private landholders—it will not let them pasture their livestock with the common herd, it contrives to trample their crops and, as the separators complain, “the mir does not allow us to come or go.” ’36 An investigation of enclosure in Kazan province painted a similar picture: ‘If the peasants move onto khutora, the others become disgruntled and use every means to make life difficult for them. They deprive them of the pasture to which they [the separators] are entitled . . . they do not allow them to use roads in the commune, and do not give them access to water found on the village’s territory.’37 Difficulties were not confined to peasants enclosing their land. Those taking title to their land could also be treated as outsiders: ‘[T]he obshchiniki are very hostile towards peasants taking out title to their strips and treat them as the lowest of the low; they contrive all sorts of difficulties for them and will not elect them to any positions of responsibility— either as volost’ starshina, or to the district court, or even to the position 32

TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1913, opis’ 3, no. 490, p. 32 (rev.). RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 468, 110. The contract gave the lessors the right to build houses on the land. 34 RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 481, 99–101. 35 TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1909, opis’ 3, no. 186, 155. 36 S. I. Matveev, ‘V volostnykh starshinakh’, Russkoe bogatstvo, 5 (1912), 172. 37 Ukreplenie nadelov v lichnuiu sobstvennost’, 1911, 89. 33

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of community policeman.’38 In extreme cases, the symbolic exclusion translated into physical exclusion. In Shniaevskoe commune, Saratov province, [T]hree of us petitioned for the consolidation of our land but another two were too frightened to do so because the obshchiniki said that they would make us knuckle under and that they would make paupers of [us] . . . of course, now people have taken notice of this and are afraid to take up the laws of 9 November 1906 and 14 June 1910. We have been have been forced to abandon our homes and leave the village.39

Many of these exclusions had the practical effect of conserving community resources, as well as damaging the survival chances of the separators. But survival in the Russian village was not just a case of having access to economic resources; access to the social capital of the community was just as important and its withdrawal could be as serious for separators as the withdrawal of pasture rights. Petrishchev drew attention to the importance of this in an article in Russkoe Bogatstvo written four years into the reform: ‘Khutor farmers are deprived in their everyday life of that neighbourly help and support which it is difficult to translate into a monetary value, but which plays such a great role in the agrarian economy.’40 A community’s displeasure with separators was also expressed in acts of violence. The premeditated use of violence was routine during the years of the reform and included damaging separators’ beehives, maiming their livestock, smashing the windows and doors to their huts, and arson.41 The provincial governor of Novgorod province, in response to a survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, reported that during the first three years of the reform there had been twenty-two cases of arson associated with peasants taking title to their strips and two associated with the formation of khutora in the province.42 Violence resulting in deaths or serious injury was usually a by-product of other actions, such as arson, or it was associated with brawls that broke out when the subject of the reform was discussed, such as the one described by the governor of Chernigov province in a confidential report to the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs: ‘everywhere where compulsory separations take place two groups which are hostile to one another form in villages. Such hostility frequently erupts into brawls.’43 These acts of violence, whether premeditated or not, served 38 40 41 42 43

39 Ibid., 71. RGIA, f. 408, 1911, opis’ 1, no. 198. Russkoe bogatstvo, 10 (1910), 80. Ukreplenie nadelov v lichnuiu sobstvennost’, 1911, 71 and 72. RGIA, f. 1291, 1911, opis’ 120, no. 17, 119. RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 153, 18.

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to underline the outsider status of separators, and it was ultimately because separators were perceived as putting themselves beyond the community norms that their attempts to enclose or privatize their strips were opposed. Taking title to strips or physical consolidation of land was not a socially neutral act; it was a statement of disengagement from a nexus of mutual obligations and expectations upon which the Russian peasant community’s survival had been historically founded. For this reason, even communities which were unlikely to suffer great economic loss by the defection of some members, viewed separations as precisely that—defections —and reacted accordingly. When the assembly of peasants described by Matveev greeted the announcement by some households that they intended to take title to their strips with the immediate cry of ‘banish them to the marshland,’ this was as much a symbolic act of rejection as a practical response to having to accommodate private strips in the open fields.44 There are reports of communities carrying this rejection as far as passing resolutions prohibiting commune members from having any dealings with separators. Rech’, for example, reported one commune assembly as having passed a resolution forbidding members from doing business with khutor owners on pain of a 10-rouble fine.45 Such exclusions were evidently well understood by those on the receiving end. One peasant reported how his commune had always charged its own members 3 kopeks for the right to cross the river Sviaga, ‘but from me it is demanding 10 kopeks, just as if I were an outsider. They are saying “you are no longer one of us.” ’46 In an action saturated with symbolism another commune, on dividing land rented from a landowner among its members in its customary way of drawing tokens out of a hat, cast out those belonging to households which had taken title to their land with the words, ‘You have enough land, you—barons.’47

Peasant Collective Institutions and Resistance to Enclosure The procedures set in place to carry through the Stolypin Reform gave a role to the commune assembly (skhod) in approving various stages of land settlement projects and applications for tenure change. Although some historians have seen the provision for community involvement in the reform as evidence that the centre was not, in fact, set on undermining 44 46

Matveev, ‘V volostnykh starshinakh’, 1912, 175. Ukreplenie nadelov v lichnuiu sobstvennost’, 1911, 89.

45 47

Rech’, 138 (1911), 6. Ibid., 72–3.

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the commune, in reality the procedures were structured in such a way as to keep the balance of power on the side of the reform administration. Thus, although the law required that approval for individual tenure changes or physical separations had to be sought from communal assemblies, if approval were withheld the enclosures could, nevertheless, go ahead using the ‘compulsory procedures’. The compulsory procedures were used frequently and decisively in the early years of the reform. Whole community consolidations or tenure changes did not have provisions for land settlement commissions to impose ‘solutions’ because it was supposed by the authors of the reform that they would be embarked upon only when peasants had come to a collective agreement to change their system of land-holding. In the event, this reasoning was mistaken; community-wide enclosures and conversions to hereditary tenure could turn out to be highly contested and conflict-ridden processes, throwing into sharp relief some of the contradictions in the procedures set in place to effect them. Many local commissioners must have come to rue the extent to which the laws allowed existing communal institutions to participate in the reform process. The roles the skhod was supposed to perform in respect of the reform were quite numerous; it was the vehicle through which land captains and land settlement officials were supposed to bring news of the reform to the peasants, its approval had to be sought for individual separations and its agreement by a two-thirds or majority vote, depending on the type of commune, was needed for whole-village enclosures and tenure changes. Having voted to take up the reform, the commune assembly’s involvement continued through its participation in the working out of the details of projects with land settlement agents and in the final approval of them in a ‘model resolution’ (priemnyi prigovor). The peasants’ elected representatives acted as intermediaries between the land settlement officials and ordinary commune members at all stages in the process; they had to convene assemblies at appropriate times and, together with other peasant representatives elected for the purpose, advise land surveyors of the value of the land to be divided. These powers were considerable and meant that the skhod became an important forum for advancing the cause of the reform. But these same powers also enabled it to become the principal locus of resistance to it. Collective resistance to the reform was expressed first in the widespread boycott of elections to local land settlement commissions in the winter and spring of 1906–7. That these boycotts were relatively short-lived might be evidence that the peasants quickly overcame their suspicions of the government’s intentions, but the agreement to participate after an initial

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demonstration of opposition is also quite consistent with the patterns of subaltern behaviour described earlier in this chapter. The cynical explanation favoured by some at the time was that the ending of the election boycotts was related to the per diem allowances made to commission members. Officials in Moscow province, observing that the peasant members of the land settlement commission were more regular attenders at meetings than other commission members, attributed this commitment to duty to the 16 roubles 66 kopeks of expenses they received for each meeting.48 Whatever the explanation, most commissions had their full complement of members by the end of 1907. Boycotts of the reform were not confined to the election of members to land settlement commissions. The excursions organized for peasants in central Russia in order to visit ‘model’ khutora in the western provinces were also the subject of boycotts (and on the authorities’ side to police vetting of the peasants who did volunteer). In Malo-Arkhangelskii uezd, Orel province, for example, eleven of twentyone district assemblies refused ‘without explanation’ to send representatives to Volynia to look at khutora.49 Such open protests were a relatively rare form of resistance to the reform. More characteristically, communal resistance took indirect forms. It was manifest in the earliest stages of the reform process in the peasants’ attempts to avoid any engagement with the reform at all. When, for example, a land captain or permanent member called on commune officers to summon a skhod in order to discuss the new law, the peasants could simply fail to assemble at the appointed time. Non-assembly of skhody they were scheduled to address evidently dogged some land settlement officials; in Tambov province, it was such a problem that permanent members petitioned the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs with a request to be allowed to bypass communal assemblies and deal solely with the peasants’ elected representatives.50 Local officials had few doubts about what lay behind the peasants’ non-appearance at their assemblies, as an entry in the journal of the Poltava province land settlement commission reveals: [R]ural societies consider that such passive resistance to enclosure—manifest in their failure to turn up to the skhod—is the best way of fighting those households that want to separate from the commune . . . [They believe] that by doing this they will be able to hold things up because the permanent member is prevented from 48

TsMAM, f. 369, 1907-, opis’ 4, no. 35, 11. GARF, f. 102, 1907, opis’ 116, no. 48g9, 86. In the same uezd only seven of the twentyone districts would participate in the elections to land settlement commissions. 50 RGIA, f. 1291, 1909, opis’ 120, no. 91, 121. 49

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carrying out his obligation under the temporary land settlement rules of attempting to achieve a consensus among all parties.51

The problem was a significant one for reform officials for although they could evoke the ‘compulsory procedures’ (which passed the decision on applications for individual tenure changes and separation to the relevant authorities within one month of a community’s rejection), these procedures could not be activated unless a negative vote had been recorded; where there was no assembly, there was no vote, negative or positive. The Poltava province permanent members suggested that the way around this problem was to take the date at which the assembly failed to convene as the startingpoint for counting the month of grace. There are some accounts of how communities of peasants received the news of the new laws brought by the land captain or the permanent member. True to the peasant practice of dissembling, a common reaction was for the peasants to effect a demeanour of ignorance or respectful compliance. A survey conducted among permanent members in Moscow province in the early years of the reform had the majority reporting that they had found the peasants ‘very enthusiastic’, ‘positive’, or ‘expressing no reservations’ about the law, but these impressions were not borne out subsequently in petitions to enclose. The permanent member for Mozhaiskii uezd was probably nearer the mark when he observed that it was impossible to tell how the peasants viewed the reform because whenever they saw an official they concealed their true feelings from him. This opinion was echoed by the permanent member for Klinskii uezd who complained that ‘the peasants are very “liberal” with the truth about their views in the presence of an official.’ Both permanent members believed opposition to the reform was widespread in the province.52 Matveev’s record of his three years as starshina contains the following description of the land captain’s announcement of the Stolypin reform to the villagers of Ivanovskaia: The usually lively, scoffing, and clowning crowd now quietened and prepared itself to give the impression of compliance and stupidity; its slave-like demeanour reflected a passive resistance. ‘Of course we are ignorant, your worthiness,’ the crowd seemed to say to the official. The land captain looked over the crowd and began his speech . . . At the end he spoke at length about the procedures for taking out title to the land under the law of 9 November 1906 and about the formation of khutora, about

51 52

RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 148, 107. TsMAM, f. 369, 1907-, opis’ 3, no. 490, 23.

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the government’s help to separators . . . and he spoke well, with conviction—it was clear that he believed what he said. And the crowd all the time strove to keep its look of meek stupidity but, pricking up its ears, asked itself: ‘what new sort of oppression is this?’ As soon as the land captain left, the crowd came to life.53

The experience of discussing the reform could be frustrating for land settlement officials. There are various reports of land captains, surveyors, and permanent members losing their patience and resorting to violence and oaths against the peasantry. One case investigated by the police concerned the allegation made by peasants in Shlissel’burgskii uezd, St Petersburg province, that the land surveyor had called them ‘swine of swine’ at the assembly at which details of a land settlement project were being discussed. The provincial chief of police conducting an enquiry found that the surveyor had, indeed, used this oath but believed there were extenuating circumstances: ‘[L]and surveyor Kosatkin . . . driven to distraction by the behaviour of some peasants, who kept carping on about trivia and constantly prevaricated over the question of land settlement, in order to restore silence and in an outburst of temper, did . . . utter several swear words at the assembly on 3rd May.’54 The police chief’s report explained that such behaviour was uncharacteristic for Kosatkin, who was normally a mild-mannered man. Communes had at their disposal a variety of means which used official channels to delay enclosure and tenure changes. These covered a spectrum from lodging appeals against the terms of separations or tenure changes, to passing resolutions for (fictitious) community-wide consolidations. In Barskoe-Zalakhtovo village, St Petersburg province, a projected wholevillage enclosure was prolonged by successive appeals for five years. When, in 1914, the moment finally arrived for the community to sign the final resolution, the majority of peasants in the village simply failed to turn up for the assembly. The frustrated uezd permanent member arrived only to find that ‘all the men were out on the lake fishing.’55 In a report of the failed project, he admitted that the first vote for enclosure in 1909 had been precipitated by a project to make two otruba for separating households on the community’s best arable land. This and subsequent votes for a community-wide enclosure were, he was convinced, little more than an attempt to wreck plans for individual separations in the village. 53 54 55

Matveev, ‘V volostnykh starshinakh’, 1912, 142. TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1913, opis’ 3, no. 490, 81–3. TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1913–1914, opis’ 3, no. 588, 10.

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Among the tactics that could be pursued by communes to rein in potential separators, voting for a community-wide consolidation, as in the Barskoe-Zalakhtovo example above, carried the obvious risk of rebounding on the commune; unless solidarity were maintained, there was always the possibility that what started out as a fictitious enclosure project could become a real one. The example of Petrusha village, Gorodnaianskii uezd, Chernigov province, shows that acceptance and rejection of the Stolypin Reform were often two sides of the same coin.56 In Petrusha, a village of 298 households, fifteen applied for otruba in 1909. The assembly refused to cooperate and so the ‘compulsory procedures’ were evoked, with the result, so the commune alleged, that the best land in the village was assigned by the land settlement committee to the separators. The community filed an appeal and when this failed, the peasants’ representatives were sent by the skhod to inform the land settlement commission that a majority of peasants in Petrusha wanted a community-wide enclosure. Work on the individual separations was halted, but no formal application from the commune to enclose was now forthcoming. Through the autumn and spring of 1909–10 the land settlement commission received a succession of appeals from peasants in the village against the separations, but also an additional eighty-one applications for individual consolidation. Petitions of complaint, counter-complaint, and applications for separation continued to be filed with the commission throughout the autumn of 1910, until in November of that year there was indeed a majority of the community ‘in favour’ of enclosure. However, the outcome could go the community’s way and the resources of local land settlement commissions could be tied up for many months or years in a continuous process of devising and revising enclosure projects, only for the final project to fall at the last hurdle. In Kherson province officials complained of an ‘epidemic’ of failures due to ‘last-minute’ rejections of projects by the peasants. Bel’skii traced the ‘source’ to Elizavetgradskii uezd from whence, he maintained, the idea that it was acceptable to back out of enclosure projects spread to Khersonskii and Tiraspolskii uezdy.57 In one uezd seven out of eleven whole-community projects had to be abandoned by the local commission for this reason, and in a further two, fewer than the requisite two-thirds of commune members turned up to sign the final resolution.58 In Iaroslavl province 56 57 58

RGIA, f. 408, 1911, opis’ 1, no. 196, 12. RGIA, f. 1291, 1909–1911, opis’ 120, no. 9, 57. RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no., 153, 82.

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another investigation found a ‘significant portion’ of village enclosure projects which had been included in the fieldwork schedule for 1909 had been abandoned because of last-minute failures to sign the priemnyi prigovor.59 An inspection by Gnedich in Serpukhovskii uezd, Moscow province, found that ten of a total of forty-two projects were rejected in their final stages by the peasants.60 By 1910 the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs was acknowledging its concern about these reversals in internal memoranda. In that year Krivoshein wrote a confidential letter to provincial governors admitting that ‘after a more or less significant time and effort has been put into preparing projects, it transpires that the population is not yet ready for the land settlement measures planned and they, therefore, refuse to give their permission for the completion of the project, leaving it half finished.’61 He laid the blame at the feet of local officials for poor groundwork. Although reversals of decisions to consolidate were attributed to poor preparation by the centre, permanent members in the field had other explanations. In a letter to his superiors in the reform organization, explaining why a large project in Sosnits village had been abandoned, Count Ignat’ev wrote: ‘It has to be admitted that the application from Sosnits . . . did not reflect the true wishes of the commune and, most probably, had been used as a device to freeze work on individual separations.’62 The assembly’s resolution to enclose had included the condition that land assigned to individual separators had to be reabsorbed into the commune prior to division. An inspection in Nizhegorod province in 1913 gave a similar reason for the failure of several projects: ‘Sometimes communes sabotage individual separations with “fictitious” resolutions for whole-village consolidations which they subsequently rescind.’63 Even when a final resolution was signed and a new land division made, permanent members and land surveyors could find their efforts leading to nothing. Despite voting seventy-two against sixteen in favour of khutora, the members of Vorobevskoe commune, Podolia, simply removed the boundary markers put in place by the land surveyor and ploughed the land in strips as before.64 59

RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 696, 93. RGIA, f. 408, 1914–1915, opis’ 1, no. 271, 65. RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 153, 2. Also in RGIA, f. 1290, 1910, opis’ 120, no. 19, 16. Krivoshein announced that land settlement officials found guilty of insufficent preparation of the local population for land settlement would be disciplined. 62 RGIA, f. 408, 1913–1916, opis’ 1, no. 479, 17. 63 RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 3, no. 13, 10. 64 RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 230, 30. 60 61

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In Bogatyrovo village, Vladimir province, the permanent member discovered that ‘the commune intended to let the project [for otruba] be carried out but to go on using the land in strips as before.’65 Commenting on this case, Kofod’s inspector was perplexed that the ‘minority’ had been able to influence the ‘majority’ in this way. It evidently did not occur to him to enquire whether the vote had reflected the true intentions of the community in the first place. A vote for consolidation could sometimes be nothing more than a useful way of getting an unwelcome official to depart. This may have been the explanation for events in Malo-Rybinskoe rural society, Kursk province, in which the skhod, having only just voted in the presence of the land captain to enclose, as soon as the latter departed nominated representatives to go immediately to the local land settlement commission to rescind the vote.66 One of the more celebrated cases of the peasants’ last-minute rejection of a land settlement project took place in the village of Luganov in Bakhmutskii uezd, Ekaterinoslav province.67 The involvement of the land settlement commission in Luganov began in 1908 when the commune signed a resolution in favour of consolidating the land of all its members. Survey work began the following year but when, in August 1910, the skhod met to agree the model resolution, the required two-thirds majority was not obtained.68 Despite this, there was a vocal minority of peasants determined to begin farming on the otruba which they had been allocated according to the unsigned resolution. The other peasants in the commune responded by leaving the otruba they had been assigned unsown, allowing the land to revert to hay and pasture—in total some 10 000 desiatiny were involved. The same sowing boycott was repeated in the following year, at which point the commune was allowed to revert to the strip system. The case gained notoriety largely because the left opposition, describing the action as a ‘strike’, insisted it was evidence of the spread of organized, politically motivated resistance to the government (analogous to the strikes among sugar-estate workers in the south-west). In reality, the action of the Luganov peasants was not so much a strike as a symbolic reassertion of 65

RGIA, f. 1291, 1911, opis’ 120, no. 17, 22. RGIA, f. 408, 1912, opis’ 1, no. 196, 21. 67 RGIA, f. 408, 1912, opis’ 1, no. 225, 9–31. Petrishchev wrote about the incident in Russkoe bogatstvo, 4 (1911), 54–66. 68 Like many other cases of disputed consolidation, there is no consistency between the reports about Luganov village in the numbers of voting and non-voting households and in the size of the vote on different occasions. In 1908 the vote in favour of enclosure was given as 747 (out of a total of 954) and only three years later it was given as 1393 against consolidation from a total of 1663. 66

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the collective ownership of the land out of which the otruba had been carved; neither the scythes of the men sent out to harvest hay nor the cattle of the communal herd let loose after the harvest respected the boundaries of the new otruba, which effectively were sabotaged by the villagers’ action. Peasants interviewed in the aftermath of these protests typically gave what to the investigators were confused accounts of their participation in the action. For example, from one peasant: [I]n the past I was allocated four desiatiny of arable for just one soul, now I have been allocated the same amount of land for three souls. I have not asked the land surveyor where this land is and I do not want to know. I am not going to sow the land and I do not want to take up my otrub. I have not sent in any complaints to anyone . . . I think things are better in the commune. I signed the resolution for enclosure with my own hand.69

Backing out of projects was not, of course, the prerogative of whole communities; individual separators could also change their minds about title change or enclosure. Although these were attributed at the centre to peasant dissatisfaction with projected otruba and hence the fault of poor groundwork, another explanation is that they reflected the success of community resistance. Matveev’s resignation in the face of classic peasant prevarication when he arrived to check applications for title change in Ivanovskaia was no doubt shared by other officials charged with bringing the reform to Russia’s peasants: Half the peasants who had petitioned for ukreplenie announced that they had changed their minds even before I appeared on their land. Others were unable to hold out against the ‘yoke’, so to speak, of community opinion and shot through our work. All you had to do was go out to the fields or do a couple of measurements—and, suddenly, the peasant would declare, ‘I don’t want this survey, Stepan Ivanovich, I won’t agree to it. I’ve changed my mind’ . . . well, the devil take them! . . . And I’d depart from the fields.70

Although the examples given above of communally led resistance to the land reform mainly concern opposition to enclosures, group land settlement projects were also contested. The division of land used in common and the physical separation and consolidation into discrete blocks of land in the ownership of whole communities of peasants and landowners could contain similar threats to peasant livelihood as the erosion of access to land at the intra-commune level. Where several communes were united 69 70

RGIA, f. 1291, 1912, opis’ 120, no. 86, 39. Matveev, V volostnykh starshinnakh, 185.

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together in a single rural society holding their land in common, its division between them could be a source of tension. As with individual title changes, land held in common was supposed to be divided between communes in accordance with the number of land-entitled souls they possessed. There was therefore the same scope for differential advantage as with title changes; it all depended upon the recent demographic history of the communes concerned. By far the most controversial group projects were those involving peasants and non-peasant landowners where their land was intermixed physically or subject to joint grazing rights. No doubt having learned a lesson from the protests surrounding the attempts to eliminate peasant servitude rights on landowner land in the south-west, the Stolypin Reform did not make participation in a group project involving private landowners compulsory; neither party could force the other to exchange land or to divide pastures used in common.71 This gave the peasants the protection they needed against large landowners who might try to use the reform to abolish the peasants’ customary right to pasture their livestock on their land. Thus the peasants of Kukurik village had the law on their side when they contested the attempt by landowner Pivovarov in Volynia to use the land settlement commission to unravel his land from neighbouring communities; had it been successful they would have had to surrender their servitude rights over the landowner’s land.72

Revealing the Hidden Transcript It has already been suggested that peasants had little to gain from making public their opposition to the reform. Occasionally, however, their actions did enter a more perilous arena, bringing them into direct conflict with the state. Such conflicts were rarely resolved to their advantage, and moreover, they carried the risk of reprisal, so the question of why the peasants chose to breach the public transcript of compliance is an interesting one which can be answered only by reference to the particular circumstances of each case. Nevertheless, the open protests against the reform did have some common features. In most cases confrontation occurred at an advanced stage in a project when, for example, officials arrived to survey new boundaries, and it afflicted communes in which earlier stages had been dogged by problems. Typically, the decision to take direct action was taken at an impromptu meeting of the skhod. There is every reason 71 R. Bircher, ‘Peasant Resistance and the Defense of Servitude Rights in Russia’s SouthWest, 1890–1914’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford University, 1996). 72 RGIA, f. 408, 1913–1914, opis’ 1, no. 482.

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for assuming that most open conflicts over the reform were those of last resort, engaged in by peasants after other attempts to oppose an unwanted enclosure had failed, and that they had as much to do with the definition and reaffirmation of ‘community’ as with achieving a particular material end. When such actions were repressed by the authorities, as invariably they were, punishments were meted out to the ‘ringleaders’, peace was restored, and work on enclosure resumed. Probably the most successful of the open protests were in Umanskii uezd, where the peasants managed to bring a halt to 54 per cent of all work on enclosure in 1910. But even in this uezd, where a cluster of villages was involved so the protest was solid over a wide area, the most that was achieved by the peasants in the practical sphere was a postponement, not a reversal, of the enclosures. The accounts of the protest showed that it often assumed symbolic forms. In Sobkovka, Umanskii uezd, for example, ‘the crowd of obshchiniki did not let the workers do their work; they toppled over and broke the cart containing the boundary markers and one peasant attacked the worker.’73 As Roger Manning has explained in relation to English enclosure protests, ‘[b]y destroying an enclosing hedge, the dispossessed restored, if only momentarily, a sense of community and dramatized their own concept of justice. Thus, their actions carried a symbolism of its own and almost invariably proceeded according to prescribed rituals.’74 In Russia there were no hedges to level; violence was instead focused on their equivalents—the boundary markers, survey equipment, and enclosure plans of the professionals sent to partition the land. Land surveyors and their peasant helpers would also be expelled ritualistically from the commune’s territory by the crowd, often fronted by women with pitchforks. Although these actions rarely resulted in injury to any of the parties involved, they were a signal for the authorities to call in the militia in order to reimpose order. It was at this point that there was a danger of escalation into a more ugly conflict. The escalation of resistance into violence can be illustrated by the enclosure protest in Volotovo, Tambov province. Volotovo was in the uezd of permanent member Rostovtsov, who, it will be recalled, was an ardent land settlement enthusiast. When the majority in the village not only rejected his plan for a village-wide enclosure but also resisted individual separations, Rostovtsov took the precaution of calling in the police to protect land 73

RGIA, f. 408, 1909, opis’ 1, 129, 14. R. B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England 1509–1640 (Oxford, 1988), 27. 74

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surveyors during their work in the village. The survey began in the early spring of 1910 and the first twenty-four otruba were in place by May. The next fifty-seven otruba were scheduled to follow suit soon afterwards but in the interim the Volotovo skhod despatched representatives to Tambov with an appeal to the provincial land settlement commission and the governor to call a halt to the consolidations. The representatives returned with the news, which they may have intentionally misunderstood, that the separations could only be reversed if the peasants paid the separators a large sum of money. When next the land surveyor arrived, he was confronted by a crowd of angry women armed with pitchforks, who chased him off into the woods. The deputy chief of police was then despatched to the village to restore order, accompanied by twelve mounted and eight foot constables. They were reinforced the following day by a further ten mounted police. All the time, the peasants’ mood was becoming uglier and on 15 May the skhod assembled at which threats, such as ‘why has not Rostovtsov appeared, then we could cut him into pieces?’ and ‘let them shoot us but we will not accept otruba’ were uttered, according to subsequent accounts.75 It was when the police attempted to arrest twenty-seven peasants at this assembly that mayhem broke out. The police fired four rounds, two into the air and two into the crowd, killing six peasants and wounding ten. The prominent role of women in enclosure protests like those at Volotovo fuelled the conviction in St Petersburg that women constituted a distinctive subgroup who opposed the reform, and it is true that women had much to lose from enclosure because of the particular threat it posed to livestock husbandry, and therefore to household reproduction.76 However, women also were traditionally used to shield men who stood to attract more severe punishments if identified as ringleaders. One graphic account of women’s actions was contained in a report written by the governor of Kherson province about unrest in Koptevich village, Lepel’skii uezd, where a crowd ‘consisting mainly of women and children’ prevented the land captain and land surveyor from laying out an otrub for one peasant. When the police arrived, [t]he crowd fell on the constables—some of the women began throwing sticks and stones at them and casting sand in their eyes. Moreover, in one such attack a woman broke the butt of the constable’s rifle which was then seized by Pavlina Vosheva. 75

RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 166, 10. B. A. Engel, ‘Women, Men, and the Language of Peasant Resistance, 1870–1907’, in S. P. Frank and M. D. Steinberg, Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, 1994), 34–53. 76

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Other women broke the breech-block of another constable’s rifle and this was seized by Ekaterina Vosheva. On the order of the land captain the constables began to back off from the crowd, which all the while was throwing insults at them and crying ‘beat the constables’ . . . this stopped only when one of the constables fired a shot.77

Apart from incidents arising at the moment of the land survey, protest could also escalate into violence when the first ploughings and sowings were due to begin on contested otruba and khutora. The fact that some communities chose simply to ignore the division of land into otruba and continued sowing in strips as before (‘po staromu’) has already been noted. The authorities were powerless against such action so long as there was solidarity among the peasants. The situation was more complex where the peasants were divided among themselves about whether to start farming according to the new land divisions or to continue with the old. One of the more celebrated cases in which the authorities used a show of force to try to resolve the issue was in Udianskoe rural society, Khar’kov province, where for three consecutive years between 1914 and 1916 a majority of land-holding households, some 600 in number, tried to prevent 200 otrubniki from sowing according to the new land division. In 1914 the majority ‘went out to the otruba with shovels in their hands and having chased off the uezd headman and the constables, began to restore the former field divisions, declaring at the same time that they would not let the otrubniki on to the land and that they were going to use it under the old system’.78 The provincial governor sent in the police chief with thirty-five constables to enforce the peasants’ right to work their otruba. The confrontation escalated when in response to the constables’ expulsion from the village, the governor ordered in a Cossack regiment which remained until the otrubniki had finished ploughing their land. The peasants repeated their actions in each of the following two years until 1917, when the commune successfully reinstated the open fields. Overall, the number of incidents of open protest leading to police or military intervention associated with the reform was relatively small. A survey of unrest conducted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1911 elicited replies from nineteen provinces that there had been no serious unrest and from a further eleven that there had been disturbances, but that these 77 RGIA, f. 1291, 1910, opis’ 120, no. 97, 16. Most of the descriptions of the disturbances surrounding enclosure are similarly graphic and give detailed accounts of how events unfolded leading to the ‘unavoidable’ firing of shots. Women also spear-headed the protests in Umanskii uezd, Kiev province. 78 RGIA, f. 408, 1912–17, opis’ 1, no. 405, 66.

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were confined to a few villages or districts. A majority of cases occurred in Ekaterinoslav, Taurida, and Kiev provinces. The authorities’ response whenever unrest threatened was swift, and even when the summoning of police or militia clearly escalated a situation into violence, the centre supported these actions as being necessary ‘under the circumstances’. In the Volotovo case which left six peasants dead, Stolypin himself wrote to the Tambov governor endorsing his actions: ‘[I]n view of the open defiance of the peasants, the use by the police of arms was justified by the extremity of the circumstances and, as a result, the police’s actions must be considered correct.’79 State violence, it transpires, was justifiable against peasants who defied the law, even though what was at issue was their participation in a voluntary reform. When silent sabotage became open conflict, it was not only the peasants’ hidden transcript that was revealed.

Heroes and Villains The outbreaks of violence associated with land consolidations were an embarrassment to the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs. The opposition press made the most of each incident, milking it for all it could reveal about the revolutionary disposition of the peasants. The centre responded with detailed investigations which attempted to restore the public transcript of a benevolent state and childlike peasantry. The most common explanation in official discourse for disturbances associated with enclosure was that they had been engineered by agitators and provocateurs who misled the peasants by playing upon their ignorance and anxieties. Thus peasant backwardness, used to justify the reform, also provided the explanation for any opposition to it. The cast list of the reform’s agents provocateurs was predictable and included students, clerics, left revolutionaries, teachers, doctors, veterinary doctors, black-shirts, Jews, and the right nobility. Meanwhile, those in the village most susceptible to their arguments consisted of a diverse collection of the reform’s ‘natural opponents’—women, the elderly, children, miroedi and kulaks, the lower ranks of the police, commune officers, and the landless. These villains and their victims were contrasted in the reform literature with the heroes who pressed for change, peasants like Sergei Semenov, who overcame community resistance involving dreadful privations—his children were debarred from school, his livestock were denied access to communal 79

RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, 166, 155–9.

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woodland and pasture, and his wife was beaten—to set up an independent farm. Semenov’s principal opponent, the man responsible for playing on the ordinary villagers’ ‘fear of learning’ and ‘darkness’, was the village starosta, who, motivated by self-interest, was intent on maintaining his power over village affairs.80 In view of the denial of systematic peasant resistance to the reform in official discourse, investigations of failed projects and ‘disturbances’ concentrated on reconstructing the specific chain of events that had led up to the difficulties and on identifying the individual agitators or ringleaders in each particular case. Thus in Gorodnianskii uezd, Chernigov province, where a village of sixty-four peasants rejected a nearly completed project, the local commission blamed local doctors and a priest for turning the peasants against land settlement.81 In Tver province, the official in charge of the northern region could ‘only explain’ the failure of a project to form otruba in ten villages in Rybinskii uezd by the anti-reform agitation of a priest.82 In Khar’kov province, police agent ‘Fal’er’ reported that two students from St Petersburg and ‘several minor officials’ were responsible, in 1911, for the failure of the enclosure project in Lebedinskii and neighbouring uezdy.83 The Novgorod province governor attributed failures in his province to agitators ‘on the left’ who had spread propaganda among local peasants against the 9 November 1906 Edict, and in Mogilev province, the permanent member blamed disturbances in Khotimsko village on ‘a teacher from Smolensk’ aided and abetted by ‘Jews, journeymen, and workers’.84 All these reports drew attention to the problem of the peasants’ gullibility; were the peasants not so susceptible to rumour, the agitators would have made no headway and there would have been no opposition. In Ekaterinoslav province it was the peasants’ ‘simple-mindedness’ and ‘ignorance’ that led them to believe the rumour allegedly started by a deserter from the navy that any official not bearing a tattoo of the tsar’s emblem was an impostor who should be ignored, and that moving onto a khutor would ‘breach God’s laws’.85 80 Semenov’s ‘story’ is told in O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 (London, 1996), 233–9. 81 RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 153, 25. 82 RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 425, 57. 83 GARF, f. 102, 1911, opis’ 12, ed. khr. no. 20 g. 88-B. 47. 84 The Novgorod governor used the existence of agitators against the Stolypin Reform to justify the continued use of special measures under the Polozhenie ob okhrane, see RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 153, 116. The Mogilev extract is from RGIA, f. 408, 1909, opis’ 1, no. 129, 306. 85 RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 425, 8.

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Outside agitators were implicated in the reports of the major disturbances associated with land settlement in Bakhmutskii and Umanskii uezdy in Ekaterinoslav and Kiev provinces. In the south-west it was the Union of Russian People which was identified as the primary source of anti-reform agitation among the peasants. In Umanskii uezd two members, Serbinov and Nazarevskii, were held by the local police chief after the disturbances on the grounds that they had fomented the trouble by trying to recruit peasants to their cause with promises that they would defend the commune. In Bakhmutskii uezd, Ekaterinoslav province, ‘Gnatovskii’, also a member of the Union of Russian People, was alleged to have dressed up as an official and visited villages where there was unrest associated with the Stolypin Reform in order to find new recruits. According to official investigations of events, so impressed were the peasants with Gnatovskii’s appearance that they lodged their appeals against land settlement with him, rather than using the official channels. Similar gullibility led them to believe Gantovskii’s warning that if they adopted the reform they would have to convert to Catholicism and hand over part of their harvest to agronomists. He was also alleged to have promised to help the peasants ‘remain Russian’ if they joined the Union of Russian People, to which end he was said to have relieved them of 3000 roubles.86 The punishments meted out to outside agitators were not particularly severe. Professionals such as doctors, teachers, and clerics implicated in anti-reform protests were normally dismissed if employed locally or moved elsewhere. The Orthodox Church authorities cooperated in relocating priests involved in anti-reform agitation to new parishes. ‘Gnatovskii’ was expelled from Ekaterinoslav province for his part in the Bakhmutskii uezd disturbances, but ten peasants close to him were arrested and imprisoned. Nazarevskii, the school teacher involved in the Umanskii uezd disturbance, does not seem to have incurred any punishment. Where the peasants who took part in protests were concerned the authorities focused their disciplinary efforts on the ‘ringleaders’ who could find themselves subject to two to three months’ imprisonment or to exile. But in many cases, punishments were relatively lenient by the standards of the recent past. 86 For example, in the words of peasant Petr Marynenko in Luganov, ‘I want to stay in the commune, but I have not put in a complaint and I have not sent any telegrams. But Gnatovskii has invited me to join the Soiuz Russkogo Naroda so that I can stay in the commune’; and Emelian Nesterenko, ‘I want to live like my father and grandfathers did. I don’t want an otrub; I’ve not sent in a complaint but I did write to the Soiuz Russkogo Naroda to ask to remain Russian.’ RGIA, f. 1291, 1912, opis’ 1, no. 86, pps. 36, 42, and 43. The case was also reported in Rossiia, 1818 (1911), p. 1.

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This was consistent with the centre’s attempt to deny there was conscious opposition to the reform. The peasants, for their part, showed their acceptance of this myth in their subsequent ‘abject’ submission, as they had done in countless previous such encounters with the force of the state. The public transcript of compliant peasants and benevolent tsar was thus reinstated, at least for a while. In his open letter challenging the opposition’s pessimistic view of the reform’s progress, Rittikh gave a further explanation for why the reform sometimes ran into trouble—shortcomings in the work of local reform agents. He was not the only one to blame the reform’s own agents for problems that emerged in the provinces. Bel’skii, for example, attributed failed projects to poor planning and implementation at the local level, arguing that if agitators could so easily turn the peasants against enclosure, it had to be acknowledged that the reform was ‘built on sand’.87 Permanent members in charge of uezdy in which there was serious unrest or a high incidence of failed projects were invariably found by the land reform’s inspectors to be either ‘over-zealous’ or ‘over-bureaucratic’ spending too much time ‘behind their desks’ and too little ‘familiarizing’ the local peasantry with the reform. Land captains were also made to accept their share of the blame. According to the governor of Ekaterinoslav province, ‘[i]n at least a half of the unsuccessful projects, it is land captains . . . who are at fault. They do not know the law, they make numerous major mistakes, they listen to the peasants and some purposely hold up land settlement because they are opposed to it on principle.’88 The governor of Kursk province was convinced that there was an anti-reform ‘conspiracy’ in the province organized by Prince Dolgorukhov who had put like-minded men in strategic positions on land settlement commissions in order to sabotage the reform by approving poor projects. The same thing, he claimed, had happened in neighbouring Chernigov province.89 The reluctance of officials at the centre to acknowledge widespread peasant resistance to the reform affected their interpretation of the rise in the number of community-wide enclosures after 1909, when the volume of applications for village consolidations led the authorities to conclude that the reform had won the peasants’ approval. Had the centre understood the nature of forms of peasant resistance, it might have been able to recognize that the peasants’ responses to its measures were complex and contradictory. Whatever else it can be said to have been, the take-up by 87 88 89

RGIA, f. 1291, 1911, opis’ 120, no. 17, 57. RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 425, 4. RGIA, f. 408, 1912, opis’ 1, no. 408, 35.

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peasants either individually or collectively of one or more elements of the reform was not the unproblematic process of ‘enlightenment translated into action’ of the official representations. Rather, it was a process that involved complicated and often simultaneous interactions between peasants and land reform agents, and between the peasants themselves, which could lead in apparently different directions. The interaction did not stop with the decision to enclose or to transfer title, but went on to shape the subsequent changes in communes, as the next chapter will show.

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7 PEASANT MODIFICATION AND ADAPTATION OF THE REFORM In 1913 a peasant from Novotorskii uezd, Tver province, sent a petition to the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture, complaining about his commune’s decision to enclose its members’ land. Peasant Fedor Volkhov had already submitted an application to the local land settlement commission for his strips to be gathered into an otrub, but the separation had been overtaken by his commune’s decision to embark upon a community-wide enclosure. In making his complaint Volkhov pointed out that whereas the farm that had been projected for him under the procedures for individual separation would have conformed in all essentials to a proper unitary farm, the enclosures now in prospect fell far short of this; they would lead not to the reorganization of land in the commune but to its disorganization (ne zemleustroistvo, a rasstroistvo). He wrote of the land settlement projects he had witnessed in the uezd as follows: The peasants do not consider what the system of land-holding will be like after land settlement; they try to carry out the land division in such a way that the end result will resemble the obshchina. They make sure that every household will have a parcel of arable and a parcel of meadow . . . then woodland is left in common use and the equivalent of half a desiatina per soul, and sometimes more, of pasture is left in common for livestock grazing. This is not all. It can happen that the outfields are not included in the division because none of the peasants will willingly accept it . . . in this case, a separate strip is made in it for each household either in communal or individual ownership. So it ends up that each household receives land in two to three places. After a few years they sell off the wood or cut it down themselves, and the land beneath is ploughed up and divided into strips . . . the result of all this is not a reorganization of the land but its disorganization.1

The land-holding arrangements Volkhov describes and derides were not an unusual outcome for village-wide enclosure projects throughout 1

RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 481, 13.

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European Russia and it is clear that they represented a major concession to peasant preferences on the part of the authorities in charge of the reform. Previous chapters have located the apparent readiness of local land settlement commissions to make concessions in the system of incentives for land reform agents, which rewarded numbers over the quality of land settlement work, and in the bureaucratic procedures which, at a critical stage in the realization of a project, allowed peasants to influence the outcome. The peasants were in a position to modify the reform and to minimize its impact upon existing community structures, while positioning themselves to benefit individually or collectively from any ‘small advantages’ their engagement with it might bring. Whatever else the reform may have achieved, it was not the destruction of the commune, and this was as true for communities that adopted the reform as for those that did not.

The Numerical Results When he ventured that the land reform would need twenty years to transform the Russian countryside, Stolypin was referring to the legal and physical reorganization of peasant land that the 1906 Edict and subsequent legislation set in train. The transformation of farming systems and of the peasantry into a bulwark against revolution would obviously take longer to achieve. But it was on the statistics relating to the former, the legal and physical changes to peasant land, that the success of reform was judged by contemporaries. Among these the most important statistics were those relating to the number of households and the area of land upon which title was conferred, and the number of households and the area of land involved in the formation of unitary farms (khutora and otruba) and, towards the end of the reform, of other types of land reorganization. As the reform developed, patterns began to emerge from these data. Tenure changes got off to a good start but declined in frequency from 1910. The formation of unitary holdings, in contrast, began sluggishly but accelerated to a peak in 1911, fell back in 1912, and climbed again in 1913/14. These numerical patterns were subject to conflicting contemporary interpretations which reflected the different understanding people had of the reform’s purpose and their predisposition to view it in a favourable or unfavourable light. Some historians have questioned the accuracy of the statistics and concluded that they were probably exaggerated. Official calculations of title changes taking place under the provisions of the 14 June 1910 law and rates of adoption calculated against 1905 census of

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T 1. Official statistics for tenure changes and land reorganization. Year

Title changes1

Enclosures2

1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 Total

48 271 508 344 579 409 342 245 145 567 122 314 134 554 97 877 1 978 581

8 315 42 350 119 380 151 814 206 723 122 522 192 988 203 915 1 048 007

Group land settlements3 4 296 17 664 85 702 110 625 112 361 125 642 193 586 268 201 918 077

1

P. N. Zyrianov, Krest’ianskaia obshchina Evropeiskoi Rossii, 1907–1914 g.g. (Moscow, 1992), 94 D. Macey, ‘A Wager on History: The Stolypin Agrarian Reforms as Process’, in J. Pallot, Transforming Peasants (Basingstoke, 1998), 164 3 Ibid. 2

land-holding households have been found to be especially questionable, as Dorothy Atkinson and Victor P. Danilov have shown.2 That full confidence could not be placed in its statistics was, in fact, recognized at the centre. A Ministry of Internal Affairs circular to land captains in 1911, for example, drew their attention to inaccuracies that had been discovered in the numbers of peasant households taking title to their land.3 As an investigation of Orel province in 1913 revealed, the margin of error could be as much as 10 per cent.4 Some 10 000 applications for tenure change in the province were found on close inspection to be ‘fictitious’ due to mistakes made in filling in columns, inconsistencies in recording data, and double-counting as a result of the 14 June 1910 law. The identification of non-repartitional communes for the purposes of this law (which, it will be recalled, automatically conferred hereditary tenure on households in communes which had ceased repartitioning) was based upon insecure foundations because records of the frequency of general repartitions for the preceding two and a half decades were incomplete. Furthermore, households which had already taken title to their land in such communes were counted a second time when title was conferred under 2 D. Atkinson, ‘The Statistics on the Russian Land Commune’, Slavic Review, 32 (1973), 713–87, and V. P. Danilov, ‘Ob istoricheskikh sudbakh krest’ianskoi obshchiny v Rossii,’ in Ezhegodnik po agrarnoi istorii: problemy istorii russkoi obshchiny, 6 (Vologda, 1976), 103–6. 3 4 RGIA, f. 1291, 1913, opis’ 120, no. 12. Ibid., 15.

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the Act. Errors were made in counting the number of consolidated farms as well. The Committee for Land Settlement Affairs was sufficiently concerned about inaccuracies in the statistics relating to new farms to order a survey of ten uezdy in order to check ‘real existing’ numbers of unitary farms against the recorded number. The preamble to the survey, which remained confidential, noted that, ‘the statistical material we have of the activities of land settlement commissions is exaggerated, and in the future the statistics for the number of consolidated households could turn out significantly to exceed the number that really exist.’5 The double counting in this case arose when prior individual separations were counted again in whole-community enclosures. Some errors also arose as a result of local commissions inflating their results, as in the case of the Riazan province land settlement commission which included projects still in the planning stage in its returns for completed enclosures. By Kofod’s admission, such practices could inflate the totals for enclosed farms by as much as 25 per cent.6 For historians, as indeed for contemporaries, the question to be asked of the reform’s statistics is the extent to which the numbers do indeed tell a story of transformation in the Russian countryside. George Pavlovsky, and many of his generation, were confident that two million tenure changes, including over one million enclosed farms, spelled the end of the land commune.7 Others, using the same figures but observing in them different trends, have contested his conclusion. Certainly, given the authorities’ admission that there was a tendency to inflate results, a cautious approach to the figures is needed. The current consensus is that a majority of peasant land was still held in communal tenure on the eve of the 1917 Revolution and that unitary farms were comparatively rare. Adding households which already held their land in hereditary household tenure (podvornoe zemlevladenie) prior to the Stolypin Land Reform to those upon which title was conferred during the years of the reform gives a figure of somewhere between 27 to 33 per cent of peasant households holding their land in some form of hereditary tenure on the eve of the 1917 Revolution. Subsumed within these was a considerably smaller percentage, probably no more than 8 per cent of all peasant farms, which had undergone reorganization into some form of unitary farm under the terms of the 9 November 1906 Edict and the 1911 Law on Land Settlement, to which had to be added the unknown but small number of enclosed farms formed under a 5

RGIA, f. 408, 1914, opis’ 1, no. 894, 1. RGIA, f. 408, 1909, opis’ 1, no. 151, 89. 7 G. Pavlovsky, Agricultural Russia on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1968), 118 and 135. 6

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variety of different circumstances prior to the Stolypin Reform. No doubt refinements of these numbers will become possible as research in regional archives allows more accurate counts of peasant farms involved in the reform, but it is unlikely that they will lead to more than marginal adjustments in the overall picture. While there is some consensus about the extent to which inroads had been made into communal tenure by the time the Stolypin Reform ended in 1917, historians have not been content to leave the matter there but have gone on to speculate about the longer-term prospects of the reform effecting a transformation of rural Russia. The official statistics have again had a central role in the debate. The most recent example is in the work of David Macey who, having observed that by 1915 over two million households had been involved in some sort of land settlement procedure (both the formation of unitary farms and group land settlement) and that plans existed in 1914 to reorganize seven and three-quarter million desiatiny of peasant land, writes: ‘Indeed, given these kinds of numbers, it seems indisputable that not only was the shape of rural society in the process of being transformed but a critical mass of peasants had already been reached to ensure that the process could become self-sustaining.’8 Like George Yaney, Macey assumes that any engagement of a peasant household with the reform, whether or not it involved a redefinition of the household’s legal rights in respect of its land and regardless of the circumstances of that engagement, was a step in the direction of independent farming—hence the legitimacy of including all the procedures made possible by the land reform administration in the same analytical category. In the light of such claims it is important to try to discover how reliable an indicator the official statistics are of broader changes in rural society —to enquire to what extent engagement with the reform really did signal the beginning of the end of communal farming. The answer to the question rests upon how and by whom ‘commune’ is defined and upon the privilege accorded the repartition right in that definition. If repartition is accorded centrality in a de facto as well as de jure definition of the commune, a household taking title to its land or enclosing that part of it subject to repartition can be said to have disengaged from the commune. On the other hand, if the various land management functions of the commune are given equal weight in the definition, or if the commune is understood more broadly still as a nexus of social, cultural, and economic relationships, the cancellation of the right to repartition cannot be equated with the commune’s demise or with an individual’s exit from it. Commentators on the 8

Macey, ‘A Wager on History’, 165.

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reform, past and present, have tended to shift between narrow legal and broad sociological definitions of the commune to suit their varied purposes. An added confusion is that much of the reform legislation was framed not for the land commune but for rural societies (sel’skie obshchestva) which sometimes did, but often did not, correspond with it territorially. At the local level, in the villages, the peasants meanwhile brought their own interpretations to evaluating the impact of the reform upon the commune. As the previous chapter argued, peasant perceptions of what constituted a defection from the commune were shaped by the particular circumstances surrounding the decision of individual households or whole communities to engage with the reform. For example, an individual separation involving the physical consolidation of land in the commune could confer ‘outsider’ status on the household in the eyes of fellow commune members as the previous chapter showed, but it did not have to. Peasant communes were able to accommodate a variety of different landholding arrangements without feeling they had compromised their communal identity or undermined the collective interest. Similarly, although there were instances when a community-wide decision to enclose was a purposeful ‘act of dissolution’, it could also in some circumstances constitute an act of reaffirmation, such as when communes decided to adopt the reform as a wrecking strategy against individual separations. In short, tenure changes and enclosures could be vested with a variety of meanings by the peasants, depending upon local circumstances and the specific history of their engagement with the reform. This relativism means that conclusions, in particular about the extent to which the reform eroded communal thinking and nurtured individualism in the peasantry, must be approached extremely cautiously.

The Impact of Title Changes in the Commune Of all the changes made possible by the Stolypin Reform legislation, transfer of title to strips in the open fields was most widely adopted by peasant households. Yet it was the one change about which the authorities in the reform administration came to have the most ambivalent feelings. The point at issue was whether by taking title to their land peasant households could be said to have left the commune. Scepticism was expressed by contemporary commentators from among the reform’s supporters, as well as its detractors. The champion of enclosure, Boris Iurevskii, was among those who doubted that title changes achieved much: ‘[D]e facto the households which have taken title to their land do not differ in any way

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from obshchiniki because their strips are intermingled with those of other households in the village.’ 9 ‘Sergeevskii’, writing in Rech’, also held that, ‘the existence of two million individual owners does not indicate that the commune has been destroyed, as it might seem at first sight . . . Predominantly, these individual farmers hold their land in strips, and their “independence” is more a case of fine words than of fact.’10 Another commentator writing in Sovremennik of his impressions in Saratov province observed of the new peasant landowners that ‘they use common pastures and fallow grazing for their livestock, and they are considered to be members of their communes. They contribute to the communal tax levies and they do not even take into their personal ownership their share of meadow land.’11 For these three observers strip fields and the use of common lands imposed such constraints on household autonomy that changes in title had to be dismissed as largely irrelevant. All, of course, had their different reasons for adopting this position, which were consistent with their personal ambitions or lack of ambitions for the Stolypin Reform, but even the reputed legal expert on peasant land, O. A. Khauke, confirmed that it was difficult to argue in law that ukreplenie v lichnuiu sobstvennost’ meant a peasant had seceded from the land commune: The households taking title to their land do not leave their rural society (sel’skoe obshchestvo) as an administrative entity. They do not even truly leave their land commune, remaining tied to their neighbours by a whole host of conditions—first, by the fact that their land remains in strips, which necessitates the continuation of common farming practices with their neighbours; secondly, by virtue of their share in the jointly-owned ‘supplementary’ [osoboe] resources of the commune; and thirdly, by the rights the rural society retains to reabsorb land formerly taken into title if the owner dies with no heirs.12

The authors of the 9 November 1906 Edict were aware that arable land taken into personal ownership would remain in strips but assumed that, in time, the peasants would ask for these to be gathered into unitary farms. In the event this expectation was not fulfilled during the years that the reform operated. The majority of the enclosed farms that appeared in the countryside was largely drawn from a different constituency. Expectations about the division of other, non-arable resources to which peasants taking title to their land were entitled in the commune were 9 10 11 12

B. Iurevskii, Zemleustroistvo v 1913 (St Petersburg, 1914), 8. Rech’, 124 (1911), 2–3. A. Gusakov, ‘Dve poezdki v derevniu’, Sovremennik, 10 (1912), 231. O. A. Khauke, Krest’ianskoe zemel’noe pravo (Moscow, 1914), 7.

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also not realized. These resources included pastures, meadows, scrub, woodland, and certain types of arable such as strips used for intensive, cashcrop production (the levadi and pidmety) which were subject to special rules for repartition. These, the commune’s so-called supplementary resources (dopol’nitelnye ugod’ia), could constitute a sizeable portion of a community’s land and of individual households’ entitlement. The original intention had been that households taking out title would exchange their entitlement in the supplementary resources for an equivalent amount of arable land. But as a result of peasant opposition and practical difficulties comparing different types of land, such substitutions were rarely made.13 By 1910 the Ministry of Internal Affairs recognized that, ‘when secessions take place ties [with the commune] are maintained if the substitution of a household’s rights in common-use resources for an equivalent amount of land is not possible.’14 The consequence was that households on which title had been conferred under the 9 November 1906 Edict and 14 June 1910 law had individual property rights (pravo sobstvennost’) on only some of the land and servitude rights (pravo servitutov) on the rest.15 The individual rights over arable strips, of course, fell short of full private property rights because such strips could not be conveyed to non-peasants and they remained subject to compulsory consolidation by the community. In short, title changes secured for peasants an inalienable share of commune land, not a particular parcel or parcels.16 The retention of servitude rights in supplementary resources by households taking title to their land was a source of some initial confusion when it came to land conveyance; while some notaries were prepared to validate the sale of a household’s entitlement in common land, others refused to do so on the grounds that such land remained the property of the commune. The Ministry of Internal Affairs was forced to take a view on the issue, ruling in 1910 that households did have the right to sell their entitlement to use the commons as well as their arable strips but only as a ‘single package’.17 If a household chose to sell only a portion of its arable, it was obliged under this ruling to sell a proportional amount of its share in the communally used resources. This resulted in conveyances of the sort below which are reproduced from the Senate’s register of sales for 1909: 13 For example, it was quite difficult in communes in which it was the practice to divide the product of meadows, rather than the land itself, to determine the equivalence between arable and meadow land. Permanent pastures caused the same sorts of problems, as did parcels of woodland. 14 15 RGIA, f. 1291, 1910, opis’ 120, no. 106, 53. Ibid., 52. 16 P. N. Zyrianov, Kres’tianskaia obshchina (Moscow, 1992), 104. 17 RGIA, f. 1291, 1910-, opis’ 120, no. 106, 52–3.

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On 23 January 1909 peasant M. K. Kuzmichevym, for a sum of 200 roubles, sold to peasant F. I. Emel’ianov, 2 desiatiny 1340 square sazhen’ of land and the right to 1/177th share of 112 desiatiny 849 square sazhen’ of pasture land, 163 desiatiny 852 square sazhen’ of meadow and of 24 desiatiny 1000 square sazhen’ of waste, in Simbirskskii uezd, Semenovka village.18 In January peasant Tiagunov, for a sum of 140 roubles, sold to peasant P. P. Bykov, i. 5 desiatiny 1860 square sazhen’ of land and ii. the right to one of two shares out of a total of 712 in 100 desiatiny of meadow, in Simbirsk uezd, Tagao village.19 On 17 February 1909 peasant E. P. Shernenkov sold to peasant I. V. Makarov in Usmanskii uezd 15 desiatiny of land in Saltychkov village and the right to 20 desiatiny in land not subject to repartition and 1/368th share in land subject to repartition, for 180 roubles.20

Rittikh had doubts about the ruling. In a letter to the interior minister in August 1913 he drew attention to the anomalies that would arise, for example, when a commune decided to put land subject to servitude rights under the plough, and to the fact that outside purchasers would become subject to the authority of the commune without being a member of it.21 The archive does not reveal the Ministry’s response to these quite reasonable objections. Although some communes chose to ostracize households which had taken title to their strips, title-holders retained their right to attend and vote at the assemblies when the use of the commons and rotational cycles were being discussed. A host of administrative rights and obligations also remained unchanged for them by virtue of their continued membership of the informal village community and formal rural society (sel’skoe obshchestvo). These included the right to a share of accumulated capital, the right to vote at village and volost’ elections, and the right to part ownership of the communal granary, fire station, administrative buildings, and non-agricultural resources (such as quarries). Households which had taken title to their land also had to fulfil obligations along with other households to pay local taxes and give labour for a variety of collective endeavours, such as maintaining roads and bridges. Against the charge that, given these residual rights and obligations, peasants taking title to their land can hardly 18 B Senatskiia ob’iavleniia po kazannym pravitel’stvennym i sudebnym delam. Otdel III. Oglashenie o perekhode imushchestv, May (1909), conveyance no. 45334, Simbirsk province. 19 B Senatskiia ob’iavleniia po kazannym pravitel’stvennym i sudebnym delam. Otdel III. Oglashenie o perekhode imushchestv, May (1909), conveyance no. 45335, Simbirsk province. 20 B Senatskiia ob’iavleniia po kazannym pravitel’stvennym i sudebnym delam. Otdel III. Oglashenie o perekhode imushchestv, May (1909), conveyance no. 47262, Voronezh province. 21 RGIA, f. 1291, 1910, opis’ 120, no. 106, 49–50.

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be said to have quit their communes, the Ministry of Internal Affairs explained in a 1908 circular that departure from the obshchina is not the same as departure from a rural society; it only represents the substitution of the communal equalizing principle of landholding for personal private ownership of the land . . . supplementary resources are the property of rural societies to which, notwithstanding the fact of tenure change, the household still belongs, and not of the obshchina from which it has departed.22

This formulation would have been satisfactory had there been a clear-cut division of labour between the different levels of peasant self-government in the Russian countryside. In reality, the role of village, commune, and rural society in regulating peasant land-holding often overlapped. The peasants’ perception certainly does not seem to have been that a transfer of title to the land signified a household’s exit from the commune. The gulf in understanding between the St Petersburg view of the commune as obshchina and the peasants’ understanding of the commune as mir is illustrated by the questions and the responses contained in a questionnaire used by the Imperial Free Economic Society to investigate the fate of the commune after the 9 November 1906 Edict.23 The questionnaire contained the following question: How principally have withdrawals from the commune (vykhody iz obshchiny) been effected in your region? By peasants taking title to their former communal strips; by the consolidation of strips into one or more otruba or by the movement of farm buildings onto an otrub (khutor)?

The authors of the survey assumed that tenure changes, whether or not they were accompanied by consolidation, resulted in a peasant household’s exit from the commune. In their replies to the question, respondents from a variety of provinces denied that any peasants had withdrawn from the commune, while giving details of households that had taken title to their strips. In the returns for Samara province several respondents added an explanatory comment. For example, in Ivanovskaia volost’ one peasant respondent wrote: ‘In this region peasants all hold their land in strips and follow a three-course rotation whether the land is in communal ownership or has been taken into personal ownership. Nobody has given a thought to forming khutora or otruba because it is impossible to leave the commune.’24 22

RGIA, f. 1291, 1910, opis’ 120, no. 85, 1. The completed questionnaires are available in the Imperial Free Economic Society’s archive: RGIA, f. 91, opis’ 2, nos. 812–23. The results were discussed in I. V. Chernyshev, Obshchina posle 9 Noiabria 1906. Po ankete vol’nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva (Petrograd, 1917). 24 RGIA, f. 91, opis’ 2, no. 823, 31. 23

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One of the peasant deputies taking part in the Duma debates on the Stolypin Reform also observed that for the peasants title changes were not understood as leaving the commune: In the view of the peasants the 9 November 1906 Edict does not dissolve the commune. Where I come from there is this example: many peasants redeemed their land under statute 165 . . . twenty years ago, but they have continued up to today to hold their land in communal ownership, and have not gathered their land into a single place.25

For this peasant, like the respondents in the Imperial Free Economic Society survey, the physical separation of land was necessary before a household would be perceived as having left the commune. If this was indeed the popular understanding of the relationship between title change and the integrity of the commune, it may well explain why there was relatively less turmoil surrounding the uptake by peasants of this element of the Stolypin Reform than there was with individual enclosures. Peasant households and their parent communities did not always feel bound by the legal constraints that accompanied tenure changes. In the course of the Imperial Free Economic Society investigation, it was found that some title-holders had become beneficiaries of additional strips at subsequent repartitions in their parent commune.26 Khauke also observed that households taking title often expected to receive additional land from the commune: ‘[M]embers of communes who have taken title to their land continue to be governed by the principles of communal land-holding . . . they demand additional parcels of land for their growing sons from the commune land fund, and moreover, these demands are sometimes met by the village assemblies and peasant administration.’27 Russkoe Bogatstvo quoted one example in Taurida province where peasants having taken title to their land sold their strips, drank the proceeds, and then approached the commune for more land.28 This was not all. In Voronezh province a permanent member of a uezd land settlement commission reported several cases of communes moving hereditary strips in partial or ‘qualitative’ repartitions.29 The provincial commission directed land captains to be vigilant against this practice. 25 V. Ge’re, Vtoroe razkreposhchenie. Preniia ob ukaza 9 noiabria 1906 goda v gosudarstvennoi dume i gosudarstvennom sovete s tekstom ukaza 9 noiabria 1906 i zakona 14 Iiunia 1910 (Moscow, 1911), 19. 26 Chernyshev, Obshchina posle 9 noiabria 1906, 19. 27 28 Khauke, Krest’ianskoe zemel’noe pravo, 147. Russkoe bogatstvo, 10 (1912), 111. 29 RGIA, f. 1291, 1908, opis’ 120, no. 24, 24.

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Communes which under the 14 June 1910 law were automatically transferred to hereditary tenure were only slightly affected by their change in status. Even in the case of households in those communes that applied for confirmatory documents (udostovritel’nye akty), the Ministry of Internal Affairs admitted that there were ‘few significant changes in the economic life of the peasants or in the relationship of the individual peasants to the community’.30 This conclusion was confirmed by other authorities. In Kazan province communes covered by the 14 June 1910 law were excluded from a zemstvo survey of new farms because, ‘in many cases the transfer to hereditary tenure using this method is purely nominal.’31 A survey of Moscow province commissioned by the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture was forced to describe such communes as only ‘potentially’ holding their land in hereditary tenure because ‘neither collectively nor individually have households in them expressed any desire to receive confirmatory documents; they are simply banned, in the event of wanting to, from making an equalizing repartition of the land.’32 In Kaluga province a uezd permanent member went further to assert that ‘the peasants for the most part do not even know that they are the owners of their allotment land and, although it is illegal, continue to carry out repartitions.’33 Khauke was sure that even those communities that had voted under the 9 November 1906 Edict to transfer from communal to hereditary landownership made only small changes to the way that they managed the land: ‘In all else, peasants in these communes do not differ in any way from peasants in the obshchina. They retain the same obligatory rotation and common pasturage of livestock, they even carry out general repartitions, although only qualitative not quantitative ones; they retain strip fields which can become more fragmented through inheritance.’34 Conferment of title did impact in some ways on individual households and their parent communes. Wherever quantitative or equalizing repartitions were normally practised, households owning their strips could prevent a reduction in their land allotment. They also acquired the legal right to sell their land to whoever they chose so long as the purchasers belonged to the peasant class. These were important new rights which did alter the relationship of title-takers to other households in the community. 30

RGIA, f. 1291, 1913, opis’ 120, no. 12, 17. Ukreplenie nadelov v lichnuiu sobstvennost’ v Kazanskoi gubernii. Otsenochno-statisticheskoe biuro Kazanskogo gubernskogo zemstva (Kazan, 1911), 16. 32 Lichnoe krest’ianskoe zemlevladenie v Moskovskoi gubernii v 1907–1912 (Moscow, 1913), 33. 33 Chernyshev, Obshchina posle 9 noiabria 1906, 2. 34 Khauke, Krest’ianskoe zemel’noe pravo, 355. 31

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For the parent communes, meanwhile, title changes reduced the fund of land available for distribution and they could introduce outsiders into the village. In order to protect themselves against the latter, communes endeavoured to buy back any private strips that came onto the market. According to the opposition press, the amount of land thus reabsorbed by communes was quite substantial, although the Ministry of Internal Affairs denied that it exceeded 3.1 per cent of all the land upon which title had been conferred.35 However, of all the households that had taken title to their land just over 15 per cent had sold all or some of their strips back to their communes by May 1912. Peshekhonov’s verdict on the outcome of the new rights the Stolypin legislation gave peasant households may well have been secretly shared by many in the reform administration: It is indisputable that collective tenure is moving towards individual, but will it get there—that is the question? It might be that we get no further than podvornoe tenure, or even that the process will be arrested before it reaches that point. And we also do not know whose power over the land will grow in the meantime; the State’s (or, more accurately, the bureaucracy’s) or private (that is, the peasants’).36

The Impact of Land Settlement Projects on Land-Holding Practices in the Commune In official literature describing the achievements of the Stolypin Reform a line was drawn not only between tenure changes and the physical reorganization of the land, but a distinction was also made between land reorganizations that were accompanied by a change in the property rights of the households concerned and those that were not. This was the distinction between unitary land settlement (uchastkovoe zemleustroistvo) and group land settlement (gruppovoe zemleustroistvo) and its purpose was to draw attention to the fact that whereas the former resulted in a household’s exit from the land commune, the latter did not. Group land settlement was intended to simplify land relationships between communes, and between communes and private landowners. Its aim, ultimately, was for the land belonging to each class of owner to be gathered into a single block and for land currently in joint use between different classes of owner to be divided. Figures 10 and 11 show the changes that could be achieved in such a group land settlement project. It was never expected of group land 35 RGIA, f. 1291, 1912, opis’ 120, no. 19, 118. In total, the Ministry of Internal Affairs counted 320 323 cases of ‘buy-backs’, compared with the total number of households which had taken title by 1 May 1912 of 2 105 165. 36 Russkoe bogatstvo, 10 (1909), 12.

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Umet''eva Shadchikova Ershova

Sarakaeva Kotenova

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Figure 10 Ground plan of the distribution of land belonging to five villages in Koz’modem’iamskii uezd, Kazan province, before group land settlement. (Source: Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910 (St Petersburg, 1911) )

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1 3

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Land belonging to Ershova and Sarakaeva villages Land belonging to Kotenova village Land belonging to Shadchikova village Land belonging to Umet''eva village Village settlements Roads

Figure 11 Ground plan of the distribution of land belonging to five villages in Koz’modem’iamskii uezd, Kazan province, after group land settlement. (Source: Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910 (St Petersburg, 1911) )

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settlement that it would transform social and economic relationships within the village in the way that it was supposed the formation of khutora and otruba would. Its purpose was to create the preconditions for a later progression to unitary land settlement and, in this way, contribute to the dissolution of the commune in the longer term. Such reasoning underpins the argument that some historians have made for collapsing all types of land settlement work into a single category, an exercise which has much to commend it but which leaves unresolved the question of the impact of the reform on the commune.37 As the reform authorities were aware at the time, easing some of the difficulties that arose from shared or intermingled land at the commune level was just as likely to increase individual households’ satisfaction with the commune as it was to provide a stimulus for them to take land reorganization further. The spectre of ‘improved communes’ lay behind the reluctance of the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs to prioritize group land settlement, and its insistence that local commissions try their best to persuade households to accept unitary farms when embarking upon a group land settlement project. The impact of group land settlement varied according to the different types of procedures that could be carried out under this heading. Some types of group land settlement were contested by the peasants because they threatened to deprive them of access to resources they needed. Fortunately for communes in this situation, the law protected them from being forced into group land settlement projects where the land at issue was intermixed or used in common with private landowners. But it also protected estate owners from being forced by the peasants into a land exchange—and there were some communes which would have benefited from this, such as those deprived in 1861 of access to water sources or to pastures by landowner ‘cut-offs’, the otreski. Respect for the inviolability of private property had persuaded the Stolypin legislators against making participation in such group land settlement projects compulsory. Examples like the reorganization of land between Klishchino village and the local landowner shown above, were the exception rather than the rule in group projects. By far the greatest share of group land settlement in all regions of Russia involved something much less. The most common procedure (from 65.2 per cent to 77.4 per cent of households in group projects, and between 37 David Macey, for example, argues that the reform should be judged on the extent to which the government was able to win the peasants’ trust so it is irrelevant what type of land settlement the peasants applied for; their preparedness to seek help from the reform administration was proof of the reform’s success: Macey, ‘A Wager on History’, 163–5.

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67.1 per cent and 87.6 per cent of the allotment land) involved the legal separation of village land or private peasant land from higher-order administrative entities.38 It was a process somewhat akin to individual households taking title to their land in the commune, and it typically involved communes which in 1861 had been constituted together as a single rural society, or were part of a complex commune (slozhnaia obshchina), or had been jointly surveyed at the time of the General Survey. Under the Stolypin Reform, communities joined together in these various ways could vote to separate. Sometimes this legal disengagement was accompanied by the consolidation of land around the villages concerned and the division between them of any resources used in common, but if this took place it was recorded separately. The degree of benefit that accrued to the various parties from the legal disengagement is difficult to assess; obviously it simplified decisionmaking and some communities stood to gain relative to their former partners as a result of being able to fix their share of land for all time. But the reform administration was overly optimistic in arguing that a direct line ran from ‘group projects’ to the appearance in the countryside at some point in the future of a qualitatively new form of peasant land-holding based on individual rather than collective principles. However, the changes were important to peasant communes since prior to 1906 the courts had been overflowing with actions arising from disputes about the use of jointly owned resources which customary law sometimes had difficulty resolving. The Stolypin Reform broke the log-jam. As far as the reform administration was concerned, its hopes for individualized farming lay with the khutor, but these hopes were not to be realized. Instead of fully consolidated farms, it was normal for peasant land to emerge from enclosure projects partially consolidated, with peasant rights in a diverse range of communally owned lands preserved. The majority of owners of the new farms lived in villages as they had done before, alongside other otrubniki, while a small number of peasants moved out of their former villages to found new settlements. The departure these modifications in the government’s model represented was evidence of the peasants’ determination to keep farming on the same footing as before. There turned out to be striking continuity in the principles governing the use of different types of peasant land before and after enclosure; pastures 38 According to Pershin the figures in Russia’s regions for vydelenie seleniia as a proportion of all group land settlement were as follows: central black earth region, 65.2 per cent households and 67.1 per cent land; north-west, 77.4 per cent households and 87.6 per cent land; central industrial region, 65.2 per cent households and 87.6 per cent land. P. N. Pershin, Zemel’noe ustroistvo dorevoliutsionnoi derevni (Moscow, 1928).

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which were in collective use before enclosure continued in collective use afterwards, strips which had normally been excluded from repartitions were excluded from the redivision of land at the time of enclosure, arable which had been farmed individually before enclosure was farmed individually afterwards, and meadows which were mown collectively and their product distributed between households before enclosure were used in the same way afterwards. The total amount of land left out of enclosure projects was small compared with the area of arable enclosed, but it had a disproportional effect on how post-enclosure farming was organized. By preserving some common pasture here and a separate plot of meadow there, peasants carried forward the land-use complementarity that underpinned their traditional farming systems in the commune as well as the de facto use rights and rituals that went with them. There was a tendency for contemporaries to attribute the peasants’ insistence on keeping former land-use patterns to their ‘irrational’ fear of innovation, ignorance, or mere capriciousness. However, given the existing state of agro-technology, the modifications upon which the peasants insisted must be viewed as a rational means of defending their subsistence economy. The right to graze livestock on permanent pastures or to use woodland resources belonging to noble landlords was important to the peasant livelihood, hence the peasants’ defence of their servitude rights on the landed estates, and the same was true of village common land. It is important to remember that village commons were used not simply by land-holding households—access was normally extended to non-land-holding members as well, such as bobily, widows, old people, and soldiers’ families with no one at home entitled to land, and to non-member households, such as village artisans. All these households stood to lose a source of subsistence with the division of the commons and, even though they had no legal obligation to do so, communities were under a moral obligation to shoulder some of the burden of their support. The commons offered more than just grazing land; patches of scrub and woodland were a source of brushwood for heating and thatching, and of berries and mushrooms, honey and herbs, which were important to the health and diet of the rural community. It is not known how active non-land-holding households were in enclosure resistance, but Orlando Figes has shown that their importance in village affairs cannot be underestimated during the Civil War.39 The reform organization paid scant attention to their needs or to the impact of the loss of common resources on the rural community at large. 39 O. Figes, Peasant Russia: Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921 (Oxford, 1989), ch. 5.

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There were regional variations in the pattern of modifications in land settlement projects. In central and northern provinces where soil productivity depended upon the addition of organic fertilizers, it was the water meadows and various natural pastures that tended to receive separate treatment in enclosure projects. One report on enclosure in Moscow province explained that in the majority of cases, it has not been possible to include all the peasants’ allotment in the land division because of the variety of uses to which the land is put. The following are generally excluded from the consolidations: rented allotments used for vegetables and summer houses, water meadows, bogs, waste land, pasture and, sometimes, forest . . . the most difficult land to divide is permanent pasture because usually it is the village’s worst farm land and because the peasants cannot conceive of farming without it.40

Chernyshev’s analysis of the Imperial Free Economic Society’s survey of the post-1906 obshchina found that the same applied in other central provinces; the survey’s rural respondents reported that natural meadows and pastures were regularly excluded from enclosure. Surveys made well into the reform in Kaluga, Kostroma, and Moscow provinces showed that it was normal for otruba to be formed by consolidating arable land alone, with all other resources to which households were entitled being left in joint ownership and use. In Moscow province one investigator concluded that the majority of consolidations take the form of the division of arable land (and of land suitable for ploughing) into otruba, with pasture and sometimes woods and meadows remaining in communal ownership and the household lots being left in their former place. In this way, withdrawal from the commune in the province consists technically of the gathering into one place of just the arable land to which a household is entitled. This represents a peculiar kind of repartition with the arable land passing into inalienable ownership and other land remaining in common use.41

The amount of land left in common use could be considerable. In Solichal’shskii uezd, Kostroma province, the land retained in common ownership after the completion of all the whole-village consolidations scheduled for 1913 amounted to 39 per cent of all the land in the peasants’ possession.42 In the steppe provinces where access to pasture was less of an issue than in central and northern provinces, it was the highly valued pidmety used for the cultivation of hemp, fruit, and vegetables that were 40

RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 696, 48. Lichnoe krest’ianskoe zemlevladenie v Moskovskoi gubernii v 1907–1912, Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia (Moscow, 1913), 25. 42 Calculated from tables in RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 3, no. 15. 41

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generally excluded from enclosure projects, as were the vegetable plots of peasants who moved from their villages onto khutora.43 Ravines and areas of sandy soil were also treated separately in village enclosures in the southern steppe, being left either in communal ownership or divided into parcels, one per household.44 There was a tendency, therefore, for highly valued arable strips to be excluded from consolidations in the southern provinces of European Russia and for land suitable for pasture to be excluded in the central and northern provinces. In addition, in the extensive farming regions of the south-eastern steppe and on and beyond the River Volga, large areas of steppe suitable for grazing were excluded from enclosure projects. In Balashevskii uezd, Saratov province, 800 desiatiny from a total of 2800 desiatiny covered by whole-community enclosures was left in common, and in Atarskii uezd the same applied to 390 desiatiny out of a total of 1300. In addition to these regionally specific exclusions, everywhere in European Russia land that had been purchased by a commune prior to enclosure, ‘reserve lands’ earmarked for future distribution to newly formed households, land with uncertain ownership rights such as that in ‘seizure’ (zakhvatnoe) tenure, and land destined for improvement through drainage or irrigation were normally left out of enclosure projects. It was these types of land that made up the residuals that appeared in land settlement statistics as ‘unorganized’ (neustroiennoe) or communally owned (obshchinnoe) land. Community-wide enclosures that resulted in partial consolidations raised some difficult legal issues. Legal experts agreed that the farms that resulted had a mixed form of land tenure (smeshannoe zemlevladenie), although they were formally defined in law as otruba or khutora holding their land in otrub or khutor tenure (otrubnoe or khutorskoe zemlevladenie). The new farms differed from ‘normal’ peasant farms in the commune but they were obviously not fully independent or private farms. Khauke, in his large volume on peasant land law, was inclined to view otruba and khutora as ‘a variety of hereditary [ podvornoe] holding in which the “individual principle” has been taken to its furthest extent’.45 However, he was forced to conclude that otruba and khutora owed their distinctiveness more to the circumstances of their formation than to their status under existing land law. An otrub was an otrub by virtue of the fact that it was the product of an official land settlement project, and the same was true of khutora, although 43 45

RGIA, f. 1291, 1910, opis’ 120, no. 37, 5. Khauke, Krest’ianskoe zemel’noe pravo, 173.

44

Ibid., 6.

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in their case they were protected in a way that no other peasant farm was from further physical reorganization. Of course, the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs consistently maintained that khutora and otruba were qualitatively different from other peasant farms, but not everyone was convinced. Otruba came in for particular scrutiny. One critic reviewing the committee’s publication Zemleustroistvo: 1907–1910 demanded that the administration in future make a clear distinction between khutora and otruba: ‘It is obvious that our land surveyors are engaged in not one but two basic types of land settlement: independent khutor farms and collective otrub types . . . under the otrub system, the village and the village way of life, with all its strengths and weakness is preserved in full.’46 For Rech’ the significant fact was the failure to do away with the former divisions between pasture, meadow, and arable, each governed by its own principles of use, which would leave otrub farmers vulnerable to the re-emergence of the communal order.47 Victor Chernov was forthright in his comments: ‘Everywhere the picture is the same. A full break with the mir is extremely rare. The overwhelming majority of otruba retain the household lot their obshchina gave them, they run their livestock in a common herd, every year they distribute common meadows between the mir’s members, who also receive their due share of common woodland and so on.’48 It was to be expected that the reform’s critics would seek to minimize the real impact of the reform on the life of the village, but less partisan observers also commented upon the fact that whole-community consolidations resulted in a less than complete break with the past. The permanent member for Birskii uezd land settlement commission in Ufa province admitted that the attraction of the peasants to otruba was precisely that they could ‘stay in their villages . . . and [would] not have to experience anything new or unfamiliar’.49 A land captain in Tambov province, meanwhile, maintained that for the purposes of land management otrub hamlets had to be viewed as ‘types of obshchiny’.50 As these comments indicate, partial consolidations with the retention of the village system of settlement meant that many of the ties that bound peasants together in their communes survived land settlement. This was despite the contraction in the range of issues about which the peasants had to meet together to make joint decisions. In most cases, for example, the formation of otruba 46 47 48 49 50

Russkoe bogatstvo, 9 (1911), 188. ‘Sergeevskii’, ‘K itogam zemleustroistva’, Rech’, 108 (1911), 1. V. Chernov, ‘V khaose sovremennoi derevni’, Sovremennik, 6 (1911), 186. RGIA, f. 408, 1913–1914, opis’ 1, no. 284, 81. RGIA, f. 1291, 1909, opis’ 120, no. 91, 119.

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meant an end to equalizing repartitions of the arable land, to the interference of the commune at large in household partitions, and to the need for every farmer to conform to the same cycle of crops. However, set against these, there was a range of issues for which otrub farmers remained subject to joint decision-making and which required the convening of a village assembly. The issues were far from trivial. In the northern and central provinces, the question of how to manage permanent pastures remained and in places assumed an even greater significance than before because of the loss of fallow and stubble grazing. As before, decisions had to be made about the level of stocking, penalties set for households exceeding their stints, and terms agreed for hiring cowherds. The management of undivided meadows was similarly subject to community decision-making, as were the use of non-agricultural resources and proposals for land improvement work. So long as peasants met to decide questions like these, the commune continued to have relevance for the management of land. Even when a land settlement project did result in the division of common resources, peasant households did not necessarily cease cooperating in their use. Khutor farmers, for example, would occasionally negotiate agreements to use some resources jointly. In Kazan province, khutor farmers in Eryklinskaia volost’ pastured their animals together on their fallow fields and in collectively purchased woodland. The result, according to one observer, ‘bore a strong resemblance to the obshchina’.51 In Ufa province a study of khutora in 1913–14 also found that the farmers grazed their livestock collectively: ‘By mutual agreement each peasant gives up a parcel of land in proportion to the number of animals he has, from which a common pasture is fashioned. They also hire a cowherd together.’52 Lykoshin had observed the same during his 1909 tour. In Saranskii uezd, Penza province, he found khutora that ‘by agreement with neighbouring otrubniki pasture their livestock together on the fallow fields’ and in Kazanskii uezd, Kazan province, he found three khutor farmers who ‘as a hangover from the former communal system, pasture their livestock together on land rented from the nearby commune’.53 It would be stretching the argument to assert that in such cases the commune was being reconstituted, but it does indicate that, when faced with the challenge of organizing production on their new holdings, old habits died hard. 51 Ukreplenie nadelov v lichnuiu sobstvennost’ v Kazanskoi gubernii. Otsenochno statisticheskoe biuro Kazanskogo gubernskogo zemstva (Kazan, 1911), 95. 52 Khutora Ufimskoi gubernii. Statisticheskoe otdelenie Ufimskoi gubernskoi zemskoi upravy (Ufa, 1914), 49. 53 RGIA, f. 408, 1909, opis’ 1, no. 113, pp. 5 and 17.

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Chapter 8 will show that one reason for this was the difficulty new farmers faced in managing livestock on enclosed farms. The non-agricultural resources remaining in collective ownership provided another reason for otrub and khutor farmers to meet to make joint decisions. The most common types of non-agricultural resources in Russian peasant villages were lakes and ponds, gravel and stone quarries, various buildings such as the mill and the village grain store, and a variety of other plots designated for particular functions, such as the market square, retting pits, and cemeteries. Roads within the territory of villages needed to be maintained after enclosure as before, as did fences and hedges separating arable land from pastures, wells, and logging paths. In some communal resolutions about enclosure, the rights and obligations of households with respect to these resources were spelled out. For example, in the enclosure of Velikaia Derkachevka in Poltava province, every household was required ‘to maintain in good condition roads, streets and squares that already exist and, as it becomes necessary, to maintain new places, logging paths, thoroughfares, wells etc., for which every household has to pay its mir dues’.54 In a resolution for consolidation in Ivanovskoe commune it was stated that ‘in relation to the use of resources remaining in the common use of Ivanovskoe rural society . . . [the cemetery and grain store] . . . individual households must submit to the decision of a simple majority of their fellow owners.’55 The need to manage these resources jointly was not generally disputed by the land reform’s authorities, although there is not much evidence that serious forethought had been given to some of the problems that could arise. One inspector’s report late in the reform criticized local commissions for failing to leave land in enclosure projects for community buildings, animal burial grounds (important in view of the frequent epidemics), and for trading.56 The continued need for peasants to meet to deliberate on the management of these non-agricultural resources contributed to the continuing vitality of traditional collective assemblies. A survey of consolidated farms in St Petersburg province made by the provincial land settlement commission contained questions about peasants’ attendance at meetings.57 The results showed that the majority of households that had enclosed their land in community consolidations were regular attendees, once or 54 56 57

55 RGIA, f. 408, 1912–13, opis’ 1, no. 681, 178. Ibid., 181. RGIA, f. 408, 1914–15, opis’ 1, no. 271, pp. 57 and 77. TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1911, opis’ 6, nos. 1, 2, 14, and 22.

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twice monthly, of either their village or rural society assembly. Among the respondents there was a fair number of office-holders, including some from households which had physically left the village. One of the wholecommunity consolidations included in the survey was Novosel’e village in Gdovskii uezd which was enclosed in 1907. In the village the assembly met twice a month and all but four of the eighty-two household heads attended.58 Post-holders, including the starosta and representatives to the volost’ court, had been elected from among the otrubniki. The peasants paid their taxes to the starosta, as they had before land settlement. Another group of enclosed farms included in the survey were nine khutora near Borka village, Gdovskii uezd. They had created their own village assembly, which was convened ‘when necessary’ and took place in the hut of one of the participants. Whilst owners of otruba and khutora which had been fashioned out of peasant allotment land remained members of rural societies, and unofficially of their land commune, peasants who moved onto farms purchased from the Peasant Land Bank, liquidating their allotment, found themselves effectively disenfranchised from participating in local self-government. The intentions of the Stolypin Reform’s authors had been for khutor farmers to deal directly with the appropriate state organs. However, the reality was that the system of state administration was not geared to function in this way and the owners of purchased khutora and otruba were left in an administrative limbo. The same situation existed, de facto, for those households which were ostracized by their communities for adopting the reform. The problem was recognized by Lykoshin on one of his tours when he noted that khutor farmers felt ‘a certain degree of alienation . . . from the outside world’.59 Khutoriani, he claimed, had expressed the desire to have their own system of self-government with elected officials in order to administer matters of common interests, such as running a fire service and schooling. Lykoshin recommended allowing khutora to form their own rural societies for such purposes. In due course, the Ministry of Internal Affairs circulated governors with the advice that they could constitute khutora into rural societies. This, the circular stated, was because, ‘despite physical dispersal . . . such khutora have interests in common, such as the care of meadows, pastures, and woods and they need to build schools and manage grain stores.’60 58 The four exceptions were two households which had moved to St Petersburg and two which were resident but simply did not attend, for unknown reasons. 59 RGIA, f. 408, 1912, opis’ 1, no. 225, 57. 60 RGIA, f. 1291, 1910, opis’ 120, no. 87, 3.

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Kofod and other advocates of radical land settlement made a valid point when they argued that the complete physical dispersal of villages, involving the division of all common resources of the commune, was necessary if a complete break with the old order were to be achieved. But even with such dispersal the independence of farmers could not be achieved without a parallel administrative reform, since peasant land-holding and peasant self-government were integrally linked to the existing system of tsarist administration. As one report noted, ‘[a]ll local life derives from the fact of peasants living in nucleated villages and hamlets. In them are concentrated both state and secular administration . . . and also all the institutions serving the multifaceted spiritual and other needs of the population such as churches, schools, rural banks, and saving banks, etc.’61 The government took up the thorny issue of peasant self-government in the last years of Imperial rule, but it had made comparatively little progress by the time that World War I broke out. In the meantime, it was inevitable that peasants on enclosed farms should continue to use their familiar institutions in the absence of any real alternatives.

Fictitious Khutora In the list of priorities laid out in the Technical Instructions for land settlement commissions the definition of a khutor was unambiguous. It was a unit of land on which the farmer’s house and farm buildings were situated, the critical element being the unification of the household lot and the arable land. It was this that distinguished the khutor from the otrub. However, clarity on paper was not matched by clarity on the ground; identifying khutora turned out to be beset by problems. One problem was that khutora, even more than other enclosed farms, took time to be formed; peasants had to marshal the resources needed to move their farm buildings and domestic dwellings, wells had to be dug, and roads laid before the farm was habitable. The fully integrated unit of the official definition described an end state which could take some time to be realized. When land settlement commissions or local branches of the Peasant Land Bank recorded the creation of a khutor, in reality what was entered in the record book was a potential khutor, a promise from a peasant head of household that the land made out in a single parcel would be settled at some point in the future. The difficulty that soon emerged for the reform organization was that it had no effective means of determining whether the peasants’ promises were sincere or of enforcing them. Their principal 61

RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 696, 170.

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sanction against peasants who dragged their feet over moving onto their khutora was to demand repayment of any money paid over as grants for removals, whilst the Peasant Land Bank could repossess unsettled land on which outstanding mortgage payments remained. But these sanctions were difficult to operate because decisions about how soon a peasant should move onto the land and with what assemblage of buildings were subjective and therefore negotiable. As with so much else to do with the Stolypin Land Reform, this negotiability played into the hands of peasants intent upon ‘silent sabotage’. It is impossible to estimate how many of the khutora created by land settlement commissions and by the Peasant Land Bank remained unsettled in 1917. It is certain, however, that fewer ‘genuine’ khutora came into existence than were included in official publications at the time. Opponents of the reform made much of unsettled khutora, labelling them ‘fictitious’ ( fiktivnye khutora). The government, in contrast, insisted on labelling them as ‘not yet settled’. Chernyshev was one of the first to note the phenomenon of unsettled khutora. In Orel province, one of the correspondents replying to the Imperial Free Economic Society’s survey of the post-1906 commune reported that ‘the movement of the peasants onto Peasant Land Bank khutora has been nominal, because the Bank has sold land to the peasants simply on the promise to move. The new owners just put up a windowless hut on the land and continue to live in their villages.’62 Another correspondent in the province confirmed the report: ‘For the sake of appearances the peasants put up little huts, but they live in their former nucleated villages holding onto their allotment land and pasturing their livestock in the habitual way.’63 A report on enclosure in Voronezh province gave the following description of Peasant Land Bank khutora: ‘Some have been fully settled and equipped, on others a simple izba has been built, and on others some wooden buildings. On yet others, building materials have been amassed or building is under way, and finally, there is the majority on which no building has begun at all.’64 Lykoshin on his 1909 tour similarly encountered khutora which were unsettled, some two years after their formation. Peasant Land Bank khutora, according to Lykoshin, could have on them nothing more than a ‘mean’ hut and the ‘hint’ of future dwellings. In Simbirskii uezd, where Lykoshin found many such ‘khutora’, the Peasant Land Bank admitted that there was very little hope that future settlement would take place.65 62 63 65

I. V. Chernyshev, Obshchina posle 9 Noiabria 1906, 1917, 135. 64 Ibid., 135. This was reported in Rech’, 242 (1911), 6. RGIA, f. 408, 1909, opis’ 1, no. 113, 9–12.

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If some khutora remained unsettled, others on which buildings had been constructed were occupied for only part of the year, during the period of summer fieldwork. In Petrovskii uezd, Saratov province, the owners of some sixty Peasant Land Bank khutora occupied them during the summer but returned to their native villages in the winter, to avoid ‘freezing like moles’.66 In Orel province, local peasants who had purchased khutora in Livenskii uezd also showed little inclination to move onto them permanently. Only 160 out of 600 were occupied all year round.67 Whether a necessary condition of a khutor being a khutor was that it had to be the owner’s primary enterprise and in permanent occupation was one of the grey areas in the centre’s definition of its flagship individual farms. The Kherson branch of the Peasant Land Bank took the view that permanent occupation was a sine qua non of a khutor and repossessed any land belonging to peasants who were found to spend part of the year elsewhere. The Department of State Domains was critical of such ‘formalism’ and informed local branches of the Peasant Land Bank that ‘the fact of a temporary absence of the purchaser or his family is not a just cause for seizing land on which buildings have been constructed and on which farming has been properly established.’68 It ventured the further observation that whether or not buildings had been constructed on a purchased parcel ‘is, in itself, a “superficial index” of the existence of a khutor’. Superficial it may have been, but this was the criterion clearly laid down in every government circular about khutor formation sent to the provinces during the course of the reform. The centre’s view was represented in Litvinov’s reaction to temporarily occupied khutora in Taurida province; he feared that their owners would ‘not be able to develop the full feeling of attachment to the land and love for their new holding which leads to the urge to improve its productivity’.69 He recommended that the Peasant Land Bank should not sell land to peasants unless they agreed first to sell up their holdings in their parent village. Khutora which were purchased by peasants who continued to hold allotment land in the village were usually managed in close conjunction with the village farm. An article in Rech’ described khutora in Voronezh province which were ‘. . . closely connected with the obshchina. They are, as it were, an extension to the main farm, or, quite 66

67 Russkoe bogatstvo, 1 (1910), 35. Ibid., 58. RGIA, f. 408, 1911, opis’ 1, no. 198, 226. 69 RGIA, f. 1291, 1908–9, opis’ 120, no. 67, 7. Litvinov also drew attention to another problem: whether a peasant who took title to a single strip in the open fields could be said to have an otrub. The Taurida province land settlement commission was evidently prepared to count such strips in its totals for enclosed farms in the province. 68

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often, when a peasant family has an otrub or khutor it will run two enterprises, the father working the farm in the obshchina and a son or brother, the khutor or otrub.’ 70 Various explanations can be ventured as to why peasants apparently reneged on their promise to form khutora. In some cases, they may have intended to move but were unable to do so because of lack of funds or because the land lacked a water source. In other cases, it seems that the peasants never had the intention of quitting their village for their new khutor, and had made the promise in order to gain access to a removal grant from the land settlement commission, or to secure a good plot of land, or because they simply did not understand the full implications of accepting a khutor. One survey of khutora in Ufa province questioned peasants about their intentions with respect to settling the khutora they had been allocated. The survey was of 1435 khutora, both purchased and on former allotment land, formed before the winter of 1912/13.71 Although of the total, 74 per cent were settled, the frequency of settlement was much higher on Peasant Land Bank khutora than on those fashioned out of commune land. The zemstvo investigator attributed the difference to ‘the compulsory element . . . [in Bank sales which] . . . guarantees that to a significant extent khutora are settled. The situation is completely different where the peasants’ allotment land is concerned.’72 The survey found that wherever khutora were situated near to a peasant’s home village, peasants ‘tried with all their might’ to avoid moving onto the land. Among these was a significant number, some seventy households, to which 120-rouble grants had been made. Some of the money had been used to build a small summer hut on the land in order ‘to keep up appearances of being khutora’ and the rest put to other purposes.73 Some of the unsettled purchased khutora, meanwhile, had fallen into the hands of ‘speculators’.74 In Ufa province, as elsewhere, a majority (87 per cent) of khutora that appeared post-1906 were purchased from the Peasant Land Bank. Faced with peasant resistance which risked the collapse of community-wide projects, provincial and uezd land settlement commissions were not prepared to push for khutora. Thus it was that the Peasant Land Bank turned out to be the principal, and somewhat reluctant, agent of khutorization in 70

Rech’, 242 (1911), 6. Khutora Ufimskoi gubernii, Statisticheskoe otdelenie Ufimskoi gubernskoi zemskoi upravy (Ufa, 1914). 72 73 Ibid., 4. Ibid., 19. 74 One peasant, Zolotukhin, mentioned in the survey was the possessor of 435 desiatiny of purchased land and 100 desiatiny of rented land prior to the reform. After 1906 he purchased in his two sons’ names three khutora which he rented out. 71

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European Russia. The owners of Peasant Land Bank khutora were mainly drawn from among wealthier peasants who could afford the down-payment on a farm and who were able to maintain mortgage payments. The selection out of a small number of strong households to become khutor farmers predominantly on non-peasant land corresponded to the process the authors of the reform had initially assumed would spearhead the enclosure movement in the Russian countryside. They were the farms that most closely corresponded to the administration’s model, but they remained a minute share of all the new farms formed after 1906.

The Stability of the New Land-Holding Forms The continuity that characterized the conduct of affairs in the pre- and post-enclosure village was mirrored at household level, even though the ownership of strips and of newly consolidated farms was normally conferred under the terms of the reform laws on the head of the peasant household rather than remaining the joint property of all household members. The legislators’ purpose was to give the householder freedom to dispose of the farm as he or she wished, which might include the sale of all or part of it or willing it to a single heir. As most enclosed farms that existed when war broke out were of relatively recent origin, few households had worked through their demographic cycle by that time, with the result that only the outlines of their longer-term fate were beginning to emerge. But there were strong indications that there was some cause for concern for the reform’s enthusiasts. In 1912 the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs made a survey of enclosed farms in all provinces of Russia in order to discover what happened to enclosed farms on the death of the household head. The administration had by this time begun to be concerned at the possibility that recently consolidated farms would suffer subdivision on passing to the next generation. The fear turned out to be justified. In response to the centre’s enquiry about inheritance practices, the permanent member in Penza province wrote that ‘family partitions . . . are carried out by the owners of enclosed farms who, together with other household members, still adhere to the belief that every member is entitled to a preordained share of household property, just as they used to be in the commune, even though it is now privately owned.’75 From Ekaterinoslav province there was a similar report: ‘At the present time in Ekaterinoslav province there is a complete absence of any attempt on the part of the peasants to prevent the 75

RGIA, f. 408, 1912, opis’ 1, no. 346, 56.

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fragmentation of their individual holdings; quite the reverse, as in the obshchina, families take every opportunity to divide everything up.’76 And in Riazan province, so the permanent member observed, khutor and otrub owners were demonstrating how ‘deep-seated’ was the ‘habit’ of partitioning their land.77 The fate of subdivided enclosed farms varied. Some were large enough to make viable farms, but partitioned land more often had to be sold or leased out. Reunification could take place when joint inheritors sold or rented to each other or, alternatively, decided to farm their land together. In Vologda province, for example, enclosed farms were divided between heirs who would either farm all the land ‘jointly and undivided’ or, keeping the arable separate, nevertheless use pastures, meadows, and wood jointly.78 In Perm province a 1913 investigation turned up several instances of relatives joining forces to farm their otruba and khutora as a collective enterprise.79 The same survey revealed that strip fields, cherezpolositsa, had re-emerged among some otruba and khutora in provinces as far apart as Orel, St Petersburg, and Ekaterinoslav.80 Mozzhukhin’s study of enclosed farms in Bogoroditskii uezd, Tula province, also uncovered the same phenomenon.81 The authors of the Stolypin Reform had not given serious consideration to the fate of the enclosed farms when the first generation of owners passed away. The solution the centre lighted upon when it realized that time and the peasants’ attachment to existing inheritance practices could sabotage all its efforts, was to prepare a law prohibiting the subdivision of enclosed farms. The measure was never to enter the statute books and it is likely that, had it done so, it would have been extremely unpopular with peasants, with whatever consequences this would have had for their general attitudes to the land reform. The emerging pattern of fragmentation among second-generation enclosed farms was testimony, if further testimony is needed, to the gulf in understanding between the reform centre and peasants about the appropriate way to manage and hold land. 76

77 78 Ibid., 5. Ibid., 8. RGIA, f. 408, 1912, opis’ 1, no. 346, 9. RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 3, no. 8, 80. This happened even when the farms were not contiguous. 80 Ibid. 81 I. V. Mozzhukhin, Zemleustroistvo v Bogoroditskom uezde Tulskoi gubernii. Ocherki reformy krest’ianskogo zemlevladeniia. Ukaz 9 Noiabria 1906, 1910 i 1911 (Moscow, 1917). 79

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8 FARMING IN THE IMMEDIATE POST-ENCLOSURE YEARS The Costs of Consolidating Allotment Land The ultimate test of the Stolypin Land Reform was the contribution it made to overcoming the crisis in Russian agriculture, but it would be unreasonable to expect it to have been able to demonstrate its ability to transform peasant farming in the short period that most of Stolypin’s farms were in existence. The World War I mobilization stripped many Russian villages of their active male population, so that by February 1917 the reform had effectively ground to a halt. In the altered situation of revolutionary Russia a majority of enclosures were reversed. There had not been enough time for Stolypin’s peasants to show what they were capable of. Nevertheless, there were some indications of the problems and possibilities that lay ahead in the adjustments that peasants had to make in the immediate postenclosure years. Against a background of high expectations on the part of the supporters of the reform and low expectations on the part of its detractors, the million or so new peasant proprietors of Russia’s enclosed farms embarked upon the task of adjusting to the new circumstances. In doing so they showed much initiative, as well as demonstrating their confidence in ‘traditional’ ways of solving problems that arose. It is unlikely that any household involved in the land reform was immune to the need to adjust its farming routines, although the nature of the adjustments varied. One variable that influenced the immediate post-enclosure experiences of peasant households was the composition of the land making up their new farm. In radical consolidation projects involving the division of all a village’s land into self-contained farms, the difference in the landuse make-up of farms before and after enclosure could be very considerable. It was possible, for example, for a household to emerge from a land settlement project with a farm consisting exclusively of previously uncultivated land. In partial consolidations the changes were of a lesser order but, even so, the inevitable qualitative differences between otruba were bound to be a disadvantage to some peasants and an advantage to others however carefully

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the division had been made by the professional land surveyors. The principle followed in most enclosure projects was for peasants in receipt of poorquality land to be compensated by additional land, and for a subtraction to be made from the best-quality farms. Indeed, as Chapter 2 observed, much was made in the reform discourse of the greater ability of scientific instrumentation to achieve equality in peasant holdings over the roughand-ready traditional peasant methods. An example of official good practice was in Grachevka village, Samara province, where prior to enclosure the land was divided into four groups of descending quality from ‘A’ to ‘D’.1 Otruba were allocated to households in the following proportions: one allotment of group ‘B’ land was set at 5 per cent larger than one allotment of group ‘A’; one of group ‘C’ at 15 per cent larger; and one of group ‘D’ at 35 per cent larger. Unlike Grachevka, land valuation in most enclosure projects was poorly done, and Chaplin was forced to write to the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture complaining of the low standard of work on the part of its employees.2 Some land settlement commissions dispensed with land valuations altogether; an inspector in Poltava province reported, for example, that the commission was ‘inclined to ignore the need to make a valuation of peasant land’, maintaining instead that it was all of uniform quality and could be apportioned on a ‘desiatina by desiatina basis’.3 Elsewhere, sensibly, the task was handed over to the peasants, as in St Petersburg province, where the land settlement commission worked together with the peasants to make the valuation: ‘Because the peasants know their land better than anyone else, we leave them to make their own valuations either through the assembly of all households or through their representatives.’4 Kofod’s preferred method was to set up an auction with peasants bidding against each other for favoured plots, using their quantitative entitlements to land as currency.5 This found almost no favour among the peasants. 1 Pamiatnaia knizhka samarskoi gubernii za 1910 (Samara, 1911), 65–9. In Grachevka, it was the local land settlement commission, advised by land surveyors, which decided on the proportions. 2 It was not until 1910, when the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture received Chaplin’s complaint, that it began to grapple seriously with the problem of how to ensure at least some measure of equality between otruba. Stolypin himself became involved in the debate about how best to compensate peasants who received poorquality otruba: RGIA, f. 1291, 1910, opis’ 120, no. 19, 7–10. 3 RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 696, 154. 4 TsGIA SPb, f. 847, 1911, opis’ 4, no. 7, 19. 5 The various methods of apportioning khutora are described in A. A. Kofod, Khutorskoe razselenie (St Petersburg, 1907). The peasants preferred to use their traditional method of drawing lots (po zherebiam) to decide the distribution of consolidated farms and this method was used in most whole-village enclosure projects.

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The use of compensation systems such as the ones described above meant that the difference in the size of farm that a household might have before and after consolidation could be quite substantial. One peasant in Luganov village, Ekaterinoslav province, for example, reported the following: ‘[P]reviously, I held eight desiatiny, now I have twenty desiatiny because the land is so bad. I have put part of it under melons and the rest under grass. I am pleased with my farm.’6 Other peasants expressed less satisfaction. Yakov Shuzhenko, for example, complained that ‘previously, I had five desiatiny and now I have seven and a half because I gave up my kitchen plot . . . but the land is so bad that I do not want to accept it.’7 Dmitri Aleksin, another householder, complained of having too little land—three desiatiny instead of his former five and a half. In his view, ‘the households allotted second, third, and fourth quality land are given too much.’8 Complaints such as these were understandable because, despite the use of ‘scientific surveys’, the compensations made were often quite approximate, and furthermore, all peasants would have liked to receive farms fashioned out of the best land without suffering any diminution in the amount they held. There were bound to be disappointments. One source of inequality between otruba derived from the use to which arable land had been put immediately prior to consolidation—whether it had been sown or fallowed.9 Households receiving farms fashioned out of the fallow field were at an advantage because they could expect a normal harvest from their land the year after enclosure, but households receiving recently harvested land were, by comparison, at a disadvantage. Because of the timing of harvests in Russia, otruba made in the spring field of a three-field rotation often could not be sown to a winter crop before the onset of the autumn frosts. Farms in the winter field fared no better in Russia’s north and central provinces, since the peasants would be forced to sow ‘rye on rye’ which on the podzolic soils of the region would result in a poor harvest. Iurevskii acknowledged that it would be three years before a systematic rotation could be established on such winter field otruba.10 The reform administration acknowledged that some peasants might experience difficulties as a result, but it insisted that initial differences associated with the state of readiness for cultivation would fade as the general benefits of private ownership made themselves felt. But this optimism ignored the fact that for those peasants surviving on a subsistence margin, any interruption in production was potentially fatal to household reproduction. 6

7 8 RGIA, f. 1291, 1911, opis’ 120, no. 86, 44. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 40. RGIA, f. 408, 1910–1911, opis’ 1, no. 152. The bulk of this file is devoted to the question of the timing of consolidation. 10 B. Iurevskii, Chto dostignutno zemleustroistvom (St Petersburg, 1912), 12. 9

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At the local level the problem was, by contrast, well understood. As one uezd zemstvo in St Petersburg province commented, ‘the peasant does not look far into the future; indeed, given his vulnerable economic position he cannot plan ahead. He just knows very well that if he receives all his arable in a single parcel instead of in many strips he can end up in the first year without any harvest.’11 The problem for otrubniki was particularly acute in such a northerly province where the heavily leached soils needed the application of manure in late summer as a prerequisite for the next year’s harvest. If some households faced difficulties in establishing crop production on land that had already been put under the plough, the minority forced to accept an otrub of previously uncultivated land were in an even more challenging position. In Kostroma province, the Solichanskii uezd land settlement commission noted that the first years of life on khutora and otruba were ‘very difficult’ for households in receipt of farms located in ‘scrub, wetlands and similar places’.12 The same conclusion was reached by an agronomist in Moscow province who, noting that some otruba consisted of land ‘covered with bushes or bogs and therefore in need of fundamental improvement’ warned that ‘there can be no expectation in the near future of the proper organization of production on such farms.’13 An added burden on these households, which under the circumstances must have seemed particularly unjust, was they could face increased taxes due to the expansion in the size of their holding.14 The peasants did develop strategies to try to overcome these various problems which included leasing out the farm, deploying extra labour into subsidiary employment, or selling whatever produce was available from the land, but for some the receipt of a poor quality otrub was an important moment in the accumulation of disadvantage leading to their farm’s eventual failure. Whatever the state of the land, there were few new farms that did not require work on them. Paths had to be laid, wells and ponds dug, fences erected, drains laid, and, if a khutor were being formed, buildings moved. These changes cost money and peasants’ working time. A committee on credit provision for enclosed farms established by the Council of Ministers in 1908 estimated that the average cost of bringing an otrub or khutor into use was between 200 and 400 roubles, depending upon local 11 12 13 14

58.

TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1909, opis’ 3, no. 265. RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 3, no. 15, 23. RGIA, f. 408, 1911, opis’ 1, no. 1437, 38. This problem was highlighted in articles in Russkoe bogatstvo, 1 (1910), 56, and 4 (1911),

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conditions.15 The committee acknowledged that consolidation involved the peasants in ‘nothing but expenditure’ and that existing sources of credit in rural uezdy (such as the zemstvo, the Peasant Land Bank, and private moneylenders) were insufficient to meet the needs of the households that had enclosed.16 The cost of bringing otruba and khutora into use was particularly high in provinces with a difficult natural environment for farming. The Petersburg uezd land settlement commission, for example, calculated that the cost of drainage alone on farms in the uezd could be as much as 500 roubles. Requests from the new proprietors for financial assistance for land clearance, canal digging, and the purchase of working livestock and ploughs were regularly in the region of 400 to 800 roubles. The petition written by a uezd permanent member to the St Petersburg province land settlement commission on behalf of one peasant describes the plight of a typical khutor farmer in the province. V. Vasil’ev had already received 149 roubles 50 kopeks in loans and grants, but he now needed a further 100-rouble loan because, when he moved onto his khutor he spent all his grant on moving his dwelling, bringing four desiatiny into cultivation, and digging a well jointly with his neighbour. He farms energetically but he will not be able to move the rest of his farm buildings, including his granary, without a supplementary grant. He has to leave his livestock roaming the street. As a result of these unexpected costs he has not been able to make improvements to his arable husbandry.17

Initially, the policy of the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture was to confine its financial support to helping households with the removal of buildings but this was later extended to include grants for meliorative work such as irrigation and wells. In both cases an upper limit of 150 roubles was set.18 Both the limitations on the type of work for which grants could be made and the cap on them meant that the financial assistance available to farmers did not match their needs. The Novgorod province governor in 1911 complained on behalf of the land settlement commission that meeting requests for removal costs left no funds to help new farmers in other ways.19 The Smolensk governor made a similar complaint, observing that the budget constraint forced the land settlement commission to refuse requests for financial assistance to do hydrological 15

RGIA, f. 1291, 1908, opis’ 120, no. 117, 2. The committee was chaired by Lykoshin. RGIA, f. 1291, 1908, opis’ 120, no. 117, 20. 17 TsGIA, SPb., f. 297, opis’ 3, no. 186, 144. 18 Kratkii ocherk za 1906–1916, Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia (St Petersburg, 1916), 41. 19 RGIA, f. 408, 1911, opis’ 1, no. 196, 26. 16

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work on enclosed farms and to limit the loan for moving buildings to 70 roubles per household.20 Again, the Moscow province land settlement commission complained that the burden on its budget of meeting removal costs of khutora meant it was unable to spend money on ‘more productive ends’.21 These might have included helping the peasants to purchase the working livestock and equipment necessary to convert pasture, meadow, or waste areas into arable land, and manure to improve productivity on farms made up of depleted soils.22 In many provinces the 150-rouble threshold for removal grants fell well below the actual costs. In a study of khutora in Tambov province it was found that the average cost of moving the peasants’ dwellings and outbuildings was 350–400 roubles.23 The centre’s response was to encourage local commissions to investigate ways of economizing on removal costs. Local commissions were encouraged to copy the example of Kovno province land settlement commission, which pioneered the use of rollers to move peasant huts from one location to another, allowing considerable cost savings compared with the more common practice of using sledges to drag huts over the snow.24 Nevertheless, it would take between four and eight sledges, eight and sixteen horses, and fifteen and twenty people to move the average peasant hut one and a half versty. The number of peasant households that received grants or loans from their land settlement commissions turned out to be a minority of the total who engaged with the Reform in European Russia; by 1915 16 per cent of enclosed farms had been in receipt of loans and 4 per cent of an outright grant.

The Pasture Question. Among the adjustments peasants on enclosed farms had to make, coping without access to common grazing for their livestock was particularly difficult and it was an arena of conflict between the authorities and the peasants. For peasants across large swathes of Russia common pasturage was an essential pillar of the farm system, but for the reform’s authors it 20

21 Ibid., 27. RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 131, 29. It was not unknown for uezd commissions to make loans for purposes other than moving buildings and basic land improvement. The Tsarskosel’skii uezd commission in 1913, for example, awarded a supplementary grant to one khutor for ‘bringing the farm into cultivation’. The justification was that this was the pioneer khutor in the district. See TsGIA, SPb., f. 297, 1914, opis’ 3, no. 591, 42. 23 N. T. Iurin, Khutora i otruba v Tambovskoi gubernii (Tambov, 1912), 12–13. Iurin was the head of the Tambov Department of State Properties. 24 RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 131, 2–3. 22

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was a sign of its ‘backwardness’. Severing the peasants’ dependence upon natural sources of forage, ending fallow and stubble grazing, and dissolving the common herd were all objectives of the reform. What was at issue was not just the elimination of permanent pastures, as signified by the division of the commons, but the dissolution of a finely tuned system which had evolved over decades and enabled peasants to derive sufficient forage for their livestock through the complementary use of different types of land (arable, meadows, pastures, wood, and scrub) and the alternation of individual and collectively organized husbandry. The ‘choreography’ of livestock pasturage in the summer months had become an integral part of life in Russian villages. Perturbation of one element in the system had broad social and cultural as well as economic repercussions. The proposal made by the reform administration about how peasants should respond to the loss of traditional summer pastures was for them to make a change to year-round stall feeding of livestock, using fodder crops and feed grasses cultivated for the purpose in intensive field rotations on their enclosed farms. From being a collective enterprise in the summer, the winter practice, whereby each household took its own livestock into stalls, was to be extended throughout the year. The substitution of cultivated for natural forage was not a straightforward matter. Successful yearround stall feeding depended upon a variety of factors not all of which were in the immediate control of the peasants, such as the amount of land they owned, their access to purchased feed, the size of their labour force, and so on. A sense of the problems that households could face is conveyed in an appeal written to the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture by a peasant in Tersa village, Saratov province, in which he described the difficulty of stall feeding in his village: [T]he maintenance of between three and twenty animals including horses for the four to five extra months when normally they would be roaming on the pastures requires lots of fodder. For one horse alone . . . a large amount of feed has to be prepared for the summer months. To provide for cattle, which are two to three times more numerous than horses on peasant farms, much more has to be produced. The question we ask is ‘where is this to come from when already there is not enough fodder for overwintering and the peasants are forced to sell their animals at half-price, or have to buy fodder or feed them on old straw taken from thatched roofs?’ If otruba were given additional parcels of land on which to grow ley grasses, then perhaps there would be enough . . . but even then it is important to remember that the hay harvests . . . are not always good and depend upon there being enough rain at the right time.25 25

RGIA, f. 408, 1914, opis’ 1, no. 518, 8.

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This peasant’s words underline the fact that the substitution of cultivated forage crops for natural sources of livestock feed, especially in the climatic regime of the eastern steppe, could increase the risk factor in peasant farming. From a subsistence point of view, a low-level but reliable crop of natural grasses was preferable to a higher-yielding but fluctuating cultivated crop, especially if margins for error were small. Farmers in the central and northern provinces were better placed to respond to the centre’s suggestion; the climate was well-suited to fodder-crop and leygrass cultivation, roots and legumes had a role to play in improving soil fertility, and there was a developing market for dairy and meat products in the urban centres to make the venture worthwhile. However, even here there were problems in making the transition as few farms were sufficiently large to be able to graze livestock in summer while a multiplefield rotation with clover and fodder crops was being established. For this reason land settlement commissions were often persuaded to leave permanent pastures in temporary communal use. But where common pasture was retained, the peasants still had to make new provision for their livestock during the weeks when they would normally have been grazing on each other’s strips in the open fields. Contemporary sources show that peasants were able to devise strategies to overcome the problems they faced as a result of the dissolution of communal summer grazing. One survey of the arrangements enclosed farmers made was conducted by the St Petersburg land settlement commission. It revealed that outdoor grazing under the supervision of a herdsman remained the norm on enclosed farms. Of the 236 farms sampled 40.6 per cent used adult household labour to supervise livestock, 11.0 per cent used children, 24.5 hired a herdsman, 5.1 per cent made an agreement with a neighbour jointly to hire a herdsman, and the remainder still ran their cattle with the common herd.26 The tendency was for individual households to replicate the arrangements they had known in the commune for moving livestock between rough pasture, mown hay, fallow, and stubble through the summer, taking advantage, if it were available, of any common land to which they retained access. In other provinces the story was the same. In Khar’kov, it was observed that ‘livestock are grazed on various types of pasture from April or May and then they are transferred into stalls from the beginning or end of October exactly as on normal peasant farms. They spend the time in between on fallow, on mown hay, and, where available, on stubble or, more infrequently, in the 26

Figures calculated from RGIA, f. 297, 1911, opis’ 6, no. 1.

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woods.’27 In Bogoroditskii uezd, Mozzkhukhin found that while otrub farms continued to use common pasture, fallow, and mown hay for their animals, khutora which were deprived of access to common pastures either tethered their animals or kept them in paddocks in the summer.28 He acknowledged there were problems and that one-quarter of the khutora he investigated had insufficient hay to meet winter feed requirements, as well as suffering from shortages of summer pasture. When presented with the evidence of grazing problems, the reform administration responded by relaxing its early insistence on the division of common pastures, but it failed to develop a coherent strategy for helping peasants feed and supervise their animals. Officials were merely content to fall back on the well-tried argument that any difficulties were temporary and would pass once ley grasses and fodder-crop rotations had been introduced. The reduction in livestock numbers, especially in the number of sheep, which accompanied enclosure in nearly all provinces, was presented by the reform administration as a positive development. The loss of sheep from peasant farms was said not to be alarming because they were associated with the old extensive farming systems; on progressive farms cows and pigs would replace sheep.29 German, one of Kofod’s inspectors, put down the peasants’ continuing worries about livestock to their ‘lack of culture’: Surely, all the questions about pastures and commons, all the obstacles that land reform agents encounter in the course of their work derive solely from the peasants’ low cultural level and ignorance and from their not knowing about more rational ways of farming. Nearly all peasants want strip fields to be eliminated, but to them the loss of pasture and the ‘problem’ this creates for keeping animals seems insuperable.30

The conviction that the peasants’ worries about pasture were unfounded led the St Petersburg province land settlement commission to reject requests from peasants for help to rent or purchase pasture to compensate for the loss of common land. In one case, a recommendation from a uezd land settlement commission that a group of khutor farmers be allowed jointly to purchase an area of pasture land from state reserves was overturned by the provincial commission on the grounds that ‘with the development of 27 P. A. Pakhmonov, Obsledovanie khutorskikh khoziaistva Khar’kovskoi gubernii (Khar’kov, 1909), 30. 28 I. V. Mozzhukhin, Zemleustroistvo v Bogoroditskom uezde Tul’skoi gubernii. Ocherki reformy krest’ianskogo zemlevladeniia. Ukaz 9 noiabria 1906, 1910 i 1911 (Moscow, 1917), 267. 29 30 Kofod, Khutorskoe razselenie, 9. RGIA, f. 408, 1914, opis’ 1, no. 272, 15.

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ley grass cultivation on their own land the Moloskovskie khutora will soon realize that they do not need a common pasture.’31 The proposals for year-round stall feeding as a solution to the pasture problem is a particularly obvious example of how out of touch the reform centre was with the existing capabilities of peasant farms. But it stuck by its recommendation because it was needed in order to free peasant arable land to be ploughed and sown according to the dictates of scientific agronomy, rather than at times set by the grazing needs of the common herd. Among those who endorsed the idea of stall feeding were the chief agronomists advising the land settlement commissions in Tambov, Khar’kov, Ekaterinoslav, and Saratov provinces, even though the prospects of persuading the peasants to give up cereal land to sow grass and fodder crops in these provinces were particularly remote because of the emphasis on commercial wheat production.32 One agricultural instructor in Bakhmutskii uezd, Ekaterinoslav province, suggested the stalls should be mobile so that they could be placed in different fields each year to manure the soil, whilst to satisfy animals’ need for fresh air, another expert suggested that paddocks could be constructed adjacent to stalls into which livestock could be released once a day for a short run.33 Kofod was one of the officials at the apex of the reform who had reservations about year-round stall feeding. He recommended instead that farmers use tethers and fenced enclosures in the fields for summer feeding, as in his native Denmark, and he countenanced the use of harvested fields of perennial grasses as pasture.34 He was even prepared to agree to a small area of permanent pasture being laid out on an enclosed farm as a stop-gap measure while rotations were established on the main arable.35 31

TsGIA SPb., f. 297, 1913, opis’ 3, no. 490, 13. The chief agronomist for Tambov, for example, maintained that proof of the superiority of stall feeding was that the peasants’ cattle were in better condition after their period of overwintering than at the end of the summer grazing system; see RGIA, f. 408, 1908, opis’ 1, no. 1423, 20. For other endorsements of stall feeding by provincial agronomists see: RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 1428, 13; f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 1436, 5. 33 These recommendations are discussed in P. A. Leman, Kniga dlia krest’ian nechernozemnikh gubernii (St Petersburg, 1908), 39, and F. S. Solov’ev, O zemleustroistve kres’tian. Primenitel’no k ukazu 9-ogo noiabria 1906, Bakhmutskaia zemskaia uprava (Bakhmut, 1909), 16. 34 RGIA, f. 408, opis’ 1, no. 1428, 13. The practice was also endorsed in P. M. Lokhtin, (ed.), Kak sdelat’sia krest’ianam bogache (Kiev, 1906), 6. 35 This was not a practical suggestion for most peasant farms as they were too small to allow their land to be used in this way. In the report of his trip to the Volga provinces Rittikh acknowledged the difficulty of arranging for livestock pasturage in the region. He recommended that the Peasant Land Bank should give above average-sized farms to the peasants to allow them to put some to pasture; see RGIA, f. 408, 1908, opis’ 1, no. 90, 23. In the western provinces substantial portions of enclosed farm land were put to permanent pasture 32

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Rittikh also acknowledged that there were some parts of Russia where it might be necessary to form above average-sized enclosed farms in order to allow for some permanent pasture. The extensive livestock grazing regions of the steppe constituted one such region. But even these more measured proposals did not necessarily solve the pasture problem on peasant farms, and it remained a motive for the peasants’ rejection of enclosure. As the permanent member of the Moscow province land settlement commission observed, ‘[t]he transition to the new type of farm, when the peasant, used to common pasture even though of poor quality, has to feed livestock either by keeping them in the yard or by pasturing them on ropes, is alien and difficult for them. This problem alone can make them reject khutora and otruba.’36 Other sources confirm that new methods of feeding livestock made slow headway among the peasants on consolidated farms. Tethering did begin to be used in the non-black-earth provinces where livestock husbandry was more commercialized; in Mogilev province, for example, animals were kept on tethers in fields sown to ley grasses and moved twice daily.37 Similar practices were in use on khutora in Ufa and Pskov provinces and elsewhere.38 More typically, peasants enclosing their land simply tried to adapt their traditional methods of feeding livestock to the new circumstances. However, the fact remained that enclosure was incompatible with the traditional extensive grazing practices of the peasants so that almost everywhere it was accompanied by an immediate contraction in the number of livestock in the peasants’ possession.39 This was especially true in the southern provinces where enclosure was accompanied by sharp contractions in the area of fallow. One official observer reported that the majority of enclosed farms he had encountered on a tour of Taurida province had no cattle: ‘For the most part the otrub farmers do not own cattle. They usually have because of the commercial dairying orientation of farms. In Volynia, for example, an article in Rech’ (9 July 1910, 1) noted that one-tenth to one-quarter of the land on enclosed farms had been put down to permanent pasture. 36 RGIA, f. 408, 1911, opis’ 1, no. 1437, 3. 37 RGIA, f. 408, 1911, opis’ 1, no. 126, 73–4. 38 In Ufa 29 per cent of khutora included in a survey used tethers for their livestock: M. P. Krasil’nikov, Khutora Ufimskoi Gubernii, Otdelenie Ufimskoi gubernskoi zemskoi upravy (Ufa, 1914), 49 passim. In Pskov province, peasants on enclosed farms tied the front legs of their livestock to prevent them straying, but the majority used a family member (usually a young boy) to supervise the animals: Khutorskie razseleniia na nadel’nykh zemliakh Pskovskogo, Ostrovskogo i Kholmskogo uezdov. Po izsledovaniiu 1907 goda. Statisticheskoe otdelenie Pskovskoi gubernskoi zemskoi upravy (Pskov, 1914), 36. 39 In the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture’s survey of enclosed farms in twelve uezdy, the enclosed farms on former nadel land experienced a reduction in the total number of sheep in nine (out of eleven) uezdy; of working horses in six; of cows in six and bullocks in five. The twelfth uezd, Epifanskii, had no enclosed farms on allotment land.

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a pair or two pairs of horses because they need these to pull their ploughs.’40 As has been observed, sheep numbers suffered more than others because of their extensive grazing requirements. Even progressive farmers in the north-west and centre, who grew fodder crops, had to sell off their sheep after enclosure.41

Lessons from Pre-1906 Khutora The belief underpinning the land reform, that a change in property rights and the physical layout of peasant farms would lead to the adoption by Russian peasants of intensive farming methods, was largely an article of faith, supported by the observation of farms in Western Europe. The agrarian modernizers knew that it would be some years before their faith would be rewarded with improved agricultural returns. However, there existed in Russia some enclosed farms which had come into being during the decades preceding the reform’s promulgation which could be examined for any lessons they might hold. These farms became the objects of intense investigation during the early years of the Stolypin Reform. They included the khutora in the western borderlands and a variety of other enclosed farms which had been formed during the previous century as a result of government resettlement programmes (which included the various foreign colonies of the southern steppe and Volga provinces) or under the terms of the Emancipation Statute. There was also a small number of peasant farms that consisted of a single land parcel which were de facto in individual use and which had been formed within the structure of the commune, these mainly in the land-abundant provinces east of the River Volga.42 Although many of these farms had figured in the Witte Commission report on the condition of agriculture, it was only in 1908 that the land reform administration decided to make a systematic study of them with the aim of identifying among their number suitable models of successful khutora which could be used in the familiarization programme. There was apparently no doubt that suitable candidates would be found. The survey was begun in April 1908. Local commissions in provinces where such farms were thought to exist were circulated with instructions to make surveys 40

RGIA, f. 408, 1909, opis’ 1, no. 117, 17. In the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture’s investigation of enclosed farms in twelve uezdy, sheep numbers fell from 46 720 to 30 884 on enclosure. They declined on the farms investigated in Iaroslavl, Pskov, Tver, Smolensk, and Vil’no provinces which otherwise recorded increases in horses and cattle numbers. 42 For a description of some of the early enclosed farms and their origins see, J. Pallot, ‘The Development of Peasant Land Holding from Emancipation to Revolution’, in J. Bater and R. A. French (eds.), Studies in Russian Historical Geography, 1 (London, 1983), 83–107. 41

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of khutora. Results were collected for seven provinces and one uezd. These were Khar’kov, Kursk, Samara, Poltava, Saratov, Tambov, and Kherson provinces, and Verkhnedneprovskii uezd.43 An independent investigation made of the enclosed farms in the western provinces and in Pskov province were also published.44 Kofod’s two-volume work on the khutora of the western provinces made before the reform was not relevant to the current task, since its focus had been exclusively on farm structure and it had not addressed the question of farming practice in any detail. The findings of the surveys were to prove a disappointment. On some farms, it was true, there was evidence of intensification, and on a very small number, there had been an all-round improvement in farming leading to above average yields. However, the majority of pre-1906 enclosed farms turned out to be only marginally more productive than farms in the commune. The Saratov province investigation of sixty-nine farms, for example, reported that, ‘in the majority of cases we do not observe any changes in these farms compared with communal farming.’45 The Tambov survey similarly found that the majority of farms it investigated had ‘preserved the old methods of tilling the land under the traditional three-field rotation’.46 In Kursk province the author of the investigation found that only four enclosed farms from a total of 162 had introduced progressive rotations and he was forced to conclude that ‘in arable husbandry we have made only an insignificant step forward from the centuries’ old three-field rotation.’47 The investigator in Kherson province could not have painted a starker picture of failure: ‘They do not have fallow . . . or a correct rotation, or any sort of crop succession. They do not use manure or cultivate grass. They have not developed commercial livestock husbandry and 43 The Saratov, Tambov, and Kherson province studies were not published but they are to be found in the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture archive: RGIA, f. 408, 1908–9, opis’ 1, nos. 1422, 1423, and 1428 respectively. The others were published as the following: Podvornoe i khutorskoe khoziaistvo v Samarskoi gubernii. Opyt’ agronomicheskogo issledovaniia. Samarskoe gubernskoe zemstvo. (Samara, 1909); Khutorskie khoziaistva Kievskoi gubernii. Resul’taty obsledovaniia proizvedenno v 1908 –1909. Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia, 2 vols. (Kiev, 1911); Otchet po obsledovaniiu khutorksikh khoziaistv v Verkhnedneprovskom uezde v Sentabre i Oktabre 1908 (Verkhnedneprovsk, 1908); P. A. Pakhomov, Obsledovanie khutorskikh khoziaistv Khar’kovskoi gubernii (Khar’kov, 1909); A. I. Shakhnazarov, Resul’taty issledovaniia 162 khoziaistv melkogo edinolichnogo vladeniia Kurskoi gubernii (St Petersburg, 1910). 44 I. S. Shildaev, Khutorskoe rasselenie v zapadnykh guberniiakh, (Perm, 1908); Khutorskie rasseleniia na nadel’nykh zemliakh Pskovskogo, Ostrovskogo i Kholmskogo uezdov. Po issledovaniiu 1907 goda. Statisticheskoe otdelenie Pskovskoi gubernskoi zemskoi upravy (Pskov, 1907) and N. M. Kisliakov, Razdel oshchinnykh zemel’ v Kholskom uezde Pskovskoi gubernii. Pskovskoe gubernskoe zemstvo. (Pskov, 1907). 45 RGIA, f. 408, 1908–9, opis’ 1, no. 1422, 62. 46 47 RGIA, f. 408, 1908–9, opis’ 1, no. 1423, 14. Shakhnazarov, Resul’taty, 60.

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their working and productive stock are kept only to satisfy their subsistence needs.’48 The Kherson province investigations, more worryingly, found evidence of degeneration to the near monoculture of wheat. Enclosure in these cases seemed to be associated with ‘the most primitive’ and ‘most irrational’ forms of husbandry. Even the lauded khutora of the western provinces had a less than impressive record. Shildaev found that there had been no fundamental changes in the system of farming practised on the enclosed farms, the majority retaining the three-field system and introducing clover cultivation on separate extra-rotational plots of land. He concluded that ‘[t]he enclosed villages, in the majority of instances, do not give the impression that intensive husbandry is practised or that the peasants have any knowledge about it, although they do show the more basic advantages associated with farming on an otrub or a small number of strips.’49 Some of the investigators of the pre-1906 enclosed farms did try to explain why the farms they had discovered turned out not to be the shining examples of modern farming technique that had been expected. In Tambov province it was attributed to the peasant’s laziness, but the majority view was that the paucity in the Russian countryside of ‘agrotechnical knowledge’ was to blame. In Verkhnedneprovskii uezd, for example, where ‘the general mass of khutora do not differ much from communal farms,’ it was also found that ‘the owners of khutora suffer from a lack of knowledge about possible agricultural improvements and they do not have any examples which they could follow.’50 It seemed that farm size, rather than the physical organization of fields, was the principal determinant of yield among peasant farms in the uezd. The assertion in the report that ‘the reduction of fragmentation on khutora is far less beneficial than either increasing their size or educating their owners’ was not, of course, what the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs had hoped to hear.51 In the event, little use was made of the surveys of pre-1906 khutora because the upsurge in the number of enclosures through whole-community projects convinced the administration that model farms would not be needed in order to persuade peasants to enclose. However, the surveys had drawn to the attention of the administration the importance of complementing its measures on physical farm structure and ownership with agricultural extension; the long-term success of the land reform was not guaranteed outside the context of a broader-based agrarian reform. It was the rather 48 49 50 51

RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 1428, 163. Shildaev, Khutorskoe razselenie, 66. Otchet po obsledovaniiu khutorskikh khoziaistv v Verkhnedneprovskom uezde, 11. Ibid., 42.

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tardy dawning of this realization that prompted Stolypin’s approaches to the zemstva from 1908 with requests that they extend their agricultural extension services to enclosed farmers. The request met with a mixed response, as the final section of this chapter will show.

Arable Husbandry on Stolypin’s Farms Apologists for khutora say the greatest advantage these farms have is that they are free from the constraints imposed on individual initiative in the commune . . . the khutor farmer, it seems, should immediately adopt the most rational form of farming and, in order to achieve this, he has at his disposal the exclusive services of an agronomist and other specialists. But, so far, the strength of tradition . . . has meant that farming on khutora, in most cases, differs little from the ordinary peasant way.52

The survey of pre-1906 enclosed farms is instructive for the way in which the land reform administration understood agro-technical improvement. An improved farm was one on which a multiple-field rotation incorporating the cultivation of fodder crops and perennial grasses had been established, replacing an extensive, fallow-based rotation. This understanding was consistent with the reform administration’s radical approach to changes in peasant land-holding; just as the centre had no interest in creating ‘improved communes’ (such as could be achieved through stripwidening), nor was it interested in ‘merely’ improving the three-field system. Indeed, for many at the centre ‘commune’ and ‘three-field system’ were interchangeable and the epithets ‘centuries old’, ‘traditional’, and ‘backward’ were applied to both in equal measure. In reality, the equation was overdrawn. Farming systems in the commune had undergone far-reaching changes in the nineteenth century in response to population and market pressures. Some of these changes had negative environmental consequences, as in the steppe, where the reduction of fallow had resulted in soil depletion and uncertain yields, as well as increasing the risk of soil erosion. But the three-field system had also shown itself capable of accommodating progressive changes. Increases in production were possible within the context of existing extensive systems. Contemporary experts were divided on the extent to which the substitution of multiple-field for the three-field (or more extensive) rotations should be privileged in discussions about the improvement of peasant farming. There was a case, recently revived by Kimitako Matsuzato, for arguing that outside the relatively small area of the north-west, measures aimed at reducing labour input per hectare which 52

Krasil’nikov, Khutora Ufimskoi Gubernii, 40–1.

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were realizable within three-field agriculture were better suited to the needs of the peasant economy than was intensification.53 Whatever objectively constituted the best strategy for improving peasant farming in the various regions of Russia, the fact was that the reform administration equated agricultural progress with more intensive use of the land. This led it to search among the enclosed farmers for evidence of grass and fodder-crop cultivation which, in turn, resulted in a tendency for it to overvalue the achievement of some and undervalue the achievement of others simply on the basis of whether or not they had begun grass cultivation. In fact, all the evidence suggests that while productivity on enclosed farms did exceed that on ordinary peasant farms, farming systems on khutora and otruba were unremarkable in the sense that they simply reflected the general direction of peasant farming in their region, albeit sometimes to an exaggerated degree. As a result, geographical differences in the performance of enclosed farms turned out to be more significant than differences between enclosed farms and their immediate non-enclosed neighbours. Nevertheless, there were factors specific to the enclosed farms that could set them apart from ordinary peasant farms in their potential for future development—such as their access to agricultural extension services, their land and labour endowments, access to credit and to other resources. It is not surprising that the performance of Stolypin khutora and otruba was geographically differentiated since they were created in widely different environmental and economic settings. In the southern and eastern steppes of European Russia peasant farming was oriented towards the international cereals market, but the production of wheat in monocultural systems had increased its susceptibility to the effect of drought and weed infestations. In the north-west and centre, in contrast, the principal challenge was to overcome the infertility of the region’s heavily leached soils, which meant keeping livestock in numbers sufficient to generate adequate organic fertilizer for the land. In those parts of the region within the sphere of influence of the growing urban centres, farming had developed a commercial orientation and forage and industrial crops had begun to replace cereals in rotations. Elsewhere, few advances had been made and peasant farmers had to make good shortfalls in their agricultural earnings by working part of the year in industry or in other non-farm employment. In the central black-earth belt the challenges to peasant farming were different again. This 53 K. Matsuzato, ‘The Fate of Agronomists in Russia: Their Quantitative Dynamics from 1911 to 1916’, Russian Review, 55 (1996), 172–200.

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was the region par excellence of rural overpopulation. The combination of high rates of population growth, high land prices, and a landlorddominated local economy had put the three-field system of cultivation under severe pressure so that it was no longer able to meet the subsistence needs of households. Meanwhile, the region’s poor location relative to growing industrial towns to the north and international ports to the south meant that its farmers were comparatively disadvantaged in their access to agricultural markets. As the greatest number of enclosed farms was found in the steppe, it is appropriate to begin by examining the provinces south of the black-earth centre and in the middle Volga. Official figures show a rate of allotment land consolidation averaging between 15 and 33 per cent in an arc running from Kiev in the west to Samara in the east. In numerical terms, the reform can be said to have been a success in the region. From the agricultural point of view, as secret memoranda in the reform administration admitted, the results were disappointing. Of the system of cultivation employed on khutora in Khersonskii uezd, for example, one inspector confided that it was ‘primitive—they do not use fallow and many farmers continue to grow cereals on the same land year after year.’54 Another inspector, similarly in confidence, admitted that farming on khutora in Taurida province was ‘barbaric—for three years wheat sowings follow one another on the same parcel of land and then, in the fourth year, they sow oats.’55 During his excursion through Berdianskii and Melitopol’skii uezdy he encountered only the odnopol’e (single-field) ‘system’: There is no fallow field, everywhere wheat and barley are sown and they follow each other year after year on the same parcel of land. Fallow, a sign that at least some rotation system is being used, occurs as islands in a sea of cereals . . . A terrible game of chance is being played—all the moisture is being wrung from the soil in order to make as much money as possible from the cereal harvest.56

Even in the Crimea where physical conditions favoured the development of viticulture and market gardening, the author of the report found the same ‘primitive’ tendency to put as much land as possible to wheat on newly formed khutora. Further to the east the same picture of cereal monoculture was observed. Ekaterinoslav was ‘a clear example of the type of “record province” in which the high figures [for adoption] hide a much more modest achievement.’57 These pessimistic impressions were given partial 54 RGIA, f. 408, 1910–1911, opis’ 1, no. 153, 73. The inspector observed that the peasants were perfectly satisfied with their khutora. 55 56 57 RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 425, 18. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 4.

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confirmation in the official twelve uezdy survey which showed that between two-thirds and 98 per cent of enclosed farms investigated in the steppe uezdy had established no identifiable rotation on their land (pestropol’e). The same survey showed the dominance of cereals: in Nikolaevskii uezd they occupied 98 per cent of the sown area; in Berdianskii uezd, 94.7 per cent; in Bogodukhovskii uezd, 96.2 per cent, and Kremenchugskii uezd, 91.8 per cent. With the exception of Bogodukhovskii uezd, where the land under cereals was divided evenly between barley and wheat, wheat was the single most important cereal grown. On enclosed farms in Nikolaevskii uezd it occupied 70.5 per cent of the sown area.58 By indulging in wheat monoculture, the enclosed farmers in the southern provinces were behaving no differently from many other peasants in the region. In the decades prior to the reform, peasants had extended arable at the expense of long fallow (zalezh’) with the single purpose of maximizing their wheat sowings in order to respond to international market pressures. The potential effect on the ecological sustainability of the agricultural resources of the region was catastrophic. So long as sizeable portions of land had been left as long fallow, serving at the same time as livestock pasturage, the moisture content of the soil had an opportunity to be replenished, but now, when fallowing was sporadic and rarely lasted more than two or three years, soil moisture reserves could not build up and the annual cereal harvest had become unreliable. The vulnerability of cereal cultivation to drought was exacerbated by the peasants’ habit of delaying ploughing until as late as possible in the spring in order to use the fields for livestock grazing.59 This exposed the soil to the desiccating effects of the sukhovei winds blowing from the Eurasian deserts and to weed infestation: ‘It is a tragedy,’ wrote the chief agronomist of Samara province, ‘that whilst peasant farming is geared to meet the demands of the market it is out of balance with the soil and climate . . . the peasants have overrated the importance of wheat.’60 Although ecological considerations dictated a need to reduce wheat sowing there was little incentive for the peasants to do this because, in the words of another agronomist, ‘from their [the farmers’] point of view there is no advantage in persistent 58 Percentages calculated from tables in Zemleustroiennye khoziaistva. Svodnie danniia sploshnogo po 12 uezdam podvornogo obsledovaniia khoziaistvennogo izmeneniia v pervie godi posle zemleustroistva (St Petersburg, 1915). 59 The vicious circle into which steppe farming had descended is described in more detail in J. Pallot, ‘Agrarian Modernization on Peasant Farms in the Era of Capitalism’, in J. Bater and R. A. French (eds.), Studies in Russian Historical Geography, 2 (London, 1983), 424–49. 60 ‘Trudy III-ogo Samarskogo gubernskogo agronomicheskogo soveshchaniia. 10–14 Noiabria 1912’, Samarskii zemledelets, 4 (Samara, 1912).

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and systematic labour when one favourable harvest can cover all expenses for the next three years.’61 Any measures that agronomists suggested to overcome the ecological imbalance in peasant farming in the steppe and Volga provinces had to recognize the importance of wheat production in the peasant economy. The priority was therefore to stabilize yields through improving soil moisture conservation by the following: early spring ploughing, a greater use of short fallow (toloka), the introduction of modern machinery such as regulated seed drills, and crop diversification focused on the introduction of maize and inter-tillage (propashnye) crops that could take advantage of the midsummer maximum of rainfall and spread the risk of crop failure associated with cereal monoculture. On the subject of ley grasses, there was disagreement among the region’s agronomists. Perennial grasses such as alfalfa, favoured by some, were never likely to go down well with the peasants because they took up wheat land. The best that could be hoped for was the establishment of grass cultivation on extra-rotational (zapol’nye) land parcels currently under long fallow.62 The prospects for introducing multiple-field rotations in the near future were limited and, ironically for the land reform’s authors, the freedom peasants won from the commune was used in the case of the enclosed farmers to exploit the land more, not less, than when some collective restraint was exercised over land use. A sense of the panic this discovery provoked was expressed by the chief agronomist of Kherson province who, urging all involved in the land reform ‘seriously and systematically to struggle’ against the tendency, used the word ‘mania’ to describe the enclosed peasants’ relentless attempts to expand their cereal sowing.63 After the steppe provinces, those in the north-west and west of European Russia occupied second place for the number of consolidated farms formed after 1906. In St Petersburg, Vitebesk, Vilno, Smolensk, Pskov, and Novgorod provinces, and the western uezdy of Tver province consolidated farms averaged between 10 per cent and 20 per cent of the total number of all peasant farms with pockets rising to 30 or more per cent in parts of Vilno and St Petersburg provinces. Conditions for the development of farming in this region were different from those in the steppe. The market for agricultural products was more diversified, St Petersburg and the Baltic cities creating a demand for dairy and market-garden 61 62 63

RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 425, 31. RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 1426, 33. RGIA, f. 408, 1910, opis’ 1, no. 1428, 163.

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produce and industrial crops. Environmentally, the principal problem in the region was soil infertility. Unlike the steppe provinces, where market pressures were in conflict with the needs of soil conservation, the desire of agronomists to spread intensive rotations was reinforced in the northwest by the demand for dairy and livestock products. Peasants had already begun to modify the way they farmed in the commune before the Stolypin Reform’s advent. The changes included a broad spectrum from the simple substitution of industrial cash crops and fodder crops for cereals in existing rotations to the establishment in open fields of intensive, multiple-field rotations. For example, flax and potatoes were widely grown on peasant farms in the region, sometimes as part of a multiple-field rotation but more often displacing oats from the spring field in the three-field system. The most publicized positive development in peasant farming in the north-west was the introduction of clover and ley-grass cultivation. Whilst most grass and clover cultivation was confined to fields separated from the main rotation, it had been incorporated into four-field or multiplefield rotations in a minority of communes. Households that enclosed their land were already likely to be familiar with ley-grass cultivation and to know of the possibility of alternative rotations, and for some, enclosure undoubtedly did afford the opportunity to make a more rapid transition to intensive farming than was possible in the commune. Four north-western and western uezdy were included in the twelve-uezd survey conducted by the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture: Ostrovskii uezd, Pskov province; Rzhevskii uezd, Tver province; Sychevskii uezd, Smolensk province, and Trokskii uezd, Vilno province. A majority of enclosed farms in all four uezdy had adopted clover cultivation at the time of the investigation in 1913. In Sychevskii uezd the proportion of the sown area on enclosed farms under clover was 31.1 per cent and in Rzhevskii and Ostrovskii uezdy it occupied a quarter of the sown area. In Trokskii uezd where roots and legumes were the main intensive crops grown, clover was less important. Flax was the principal commercial crop in the first three uezdy, where it occupied 20 to 31.1 per cent of the sown area on the khutora and otruba investigated. Other surveys in the north-west confirmed the commercial and intensive nature of arable farming on the region’s enclosed farms. A zemstvo investigation of peasant farms in Rzhevskii uezd in 1912 showed that ley grasses occupied more land on enclosed than on nonenclosed farms, although the proportions recorded were less than in the government survey conducted a year later.64 64 Sbornik materialov dlia otsenki zemel’ Tverskoi gubernii, Tverskoe gubernskoe zemstvo, 3 (Tver, 1917).

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On enclosed farms, as in the commune, the cultivation of clover and ley grasses was not a reliable guide to the type of rotation practised because in many cases it was confined to extra-rotational fields. The twelve-uezd survey classified the rotations on such farms as ‘transitional’ to multiplefield forms even though they might still have a three-field rotation on the core arable. An agricultural conference held by the Tver provincial zemstvo in 1910 reported that ‘a considerable number’ of the enclosed farms in the province had continued to use three-field rotations and that some peasants who had begun to make a transition to new systems had abandoned the experiment: ‘Moving onto the khutora and otruba the peasants, who are used to the communal form of organization . . . are not in a position to adapt themselves to the new conditions of farming and, in the absence of agricultural advice and favourable credit terms, they return to the threefield system and are ruined.’65 Despite the fact that improved systems were not found on all the enclosed farms in the north-west and western provinces, there was not the picture of degeneration among them that characterized the farms in the south. The circumstances under which farming was established on khutora and otruba elsewhere in European Russia were different from both the steppe and the north-western provinces. One island of relatively successful enclosed farms, which showed similar developments to those in the north-west, was within the immediate sphere of influence of Moscow, where grass cultivated in both three-field and multiple-field systems was well developed before 1906. But the picture elsewhere was mostly of modest achievements. This was particularly true of the group of provinces making up the central agricultural region, where the crisis in peasant agriculture was most severe. In the region the shortage of land had cast many communities into a downward spiral of population growth and land subdivision. Enclosure could break this spiral but its costs to Russia’s poorest peasants meant that the starting-point for making progress on these farms was singularly unpropitious. The importance of the size of land-holding to the viability of farming on khutora and otruba was noted in most independent investigations of enclosed farms in the central provinces. I. V. Mozzhukhin, investigating Bogoroditskii uezd, Tula province, found a stratum of relatively landabundant and prosperous farmers among the owners of khutora who were in the process of intensifying their farming system.66 Intensification on 65 Trudy pervogo agronomicheskogo soveshchaniia pri gubernskoi uprave. Tverskoe gubernskoe zemstvo (Tver, 1910), 14. 66 I. V. Mozzhukhin, Zemleustroistvo v Bogoroditskom uezde Tul’skoi gubernii. Ocherki reformy krest’ianskogo zemlevladeniia. Ukaz 9 Noiabria 1906, 1910 i 1911 (Moscow, 1917).

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enclosed farms was exceptional, however, and on the majority of khutora and otruba the peasants continued to farm in the same way as they had done previously and to ‘suffer from the same problems as normal peasant farms in the commune’.67 These problems included shortfalls in livestock numbers, often made worse because of the loss of common pastures, degraded soils, the use of ‘primitive’ farm implements, and an exaggerated emphasis on cereals. Like their counterparts to the south, peasants in the black-earth centre were reluctant to reduce the area of land they put under cereals, although in this case the issue was subsistence staples, such as winter rye and spring oats, rather than commercial grains. After enclosure the majority of peasants either re-established a three-course rotation on their land or abandoned any systematic rotation. In the words of one inspector, ‘khutora for the most part use the normal three-field rotation . . . and farm in a primitive manner and rapaciously.’68 In Bogoroditskii uezd Mozzhukhin found pestropol’e on 28.6 per cent of the khutora he investigated and 32.5 per cent of the otruba, and in both Orlovskii and Epifanskii uezdy, in the twelve-uezdy survey, the majority of farms surveyed had made few apparent moves in the direction of adopting more complex rotations. Where peasants on enclosed farms in the black-earth provinces did take up the cultivation of intensive crops, these were normally inserted into existing rotations involving the least possible reduction in the area under cereals. The most advanced rotations simply added a fourth field for potatoes to the spring, winter, and fallow of the traditional threefield rotation. Alternatively, roots and ley grasses were sown in part of the fallow field. Mozzhukhin was convinced that these changes signalled the beginning of the end for the three-field system, although ‘for a variety of reasons we cannot expect an immediate improvement.’69 The author of a survey of enclosed farms in Tambov province was similarly confident that it was ‘simply a matter of time’ before improved rotations were introduced.70 It was premature in 1917 to draw any conclusions about the relative performance of enclosed farms compared with those of peasants remaining in communes. Many were still coping with the immediate stresses associated with enclosure when war broke out, taking able-bodied men off to the front. The one tendency that can be made out for the previous 67 These were the words of one of the zemstvo agronomists in Tula province. See Kratkii obzor meropriatii po agronomicheskoi pomoshchi khoziaistvam edinolichnykh vladenii v Tul’skoi gubernii. Tul’skaia gubernskaia zemleustroiennaia kommissiia (Tula, 1912). 68 Zemleustroistvo i zemlepol’zovanie. Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia, 13 (St Petersburg, 1909), 4. 69 Mozzhukhin, Zemleustroistvo v Bogoroditskom usezde. 70 Iurin, Khutora i otruba, 29.

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six or seven years was that the dominant trends in peasant farming in the principal regions of European Russia were magnified on the enclosed farms. Khutora and otruba in the progressive farming regions of the west and north-west took forward the intensification that was already happening on peasant farms in the commune, but in the farming regions in the impoverished centre and in the provinces of the southern and eastern cereal-producing rim, enclosure could be associated with the degeneration of farming to monocultural systems. No doubt, earlier and more generous provision of agricultural aid would have helped the peasants develop productive and sustainable ways of farming the land. However, it is unlikely that this would have altered the geographically differentiated pattern that was emerging in farming practice on the enclosed farms.

Agricultural Aid to Enclosed Farmers More and more local zemstvo personnel are showing an interest in land settlement and . . . as a consequence of their experience in giving agricultural assistance to both independent and communal farms, they are beginning to realize that it is precisely the independent farmers who are the best advertisements for agricultural knowledge and innovation, and that they provide the most fertile soil for zemstvo activities in this area . . . [Lykoshin to Krivoshein, 1912].71

Some of the most interesting recent work by Western historians on agrarian policy in late tsarist Russia has concerned the development of agricultural extension services in the Russian countryside. Yanni Kotsonis and Kimitako Matsuzato, although arguing from different perspectives, have both drawn attention to the shift in focus in tsarist agrarian policy after 1910 away from land reform to agrarian reform.72 For Kotsonis the shift represented reacceptance at the centre of the notion of a communal peasantry and a retreat from more radical views of the peasant as an independent proprietor with whom the state could have direct relations. The shift was manifest in the reorientation of the agricultural budget away from land settlement towards other programmes and, in particular, towards agronomy and agricultural extension. In just one year from 1910 to 1911 the agricultural budget was doubled from 7.5 million to 16.9 million roubles and one-third of this was transferred to the zemstva to support their agricultural extension work with the peasants. The zemstva allocated 71

RGIA, f. 408, 1912, opis’ 1, no. 225. Y. Kotsonis, ‘Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861–1914’, Ph.D. thesis (Columbia University, 1995) and K. Matsuzato, ‘Stolypinskaia reforma i rossiiskaia agrotekhnologicheskaia revoliutsiia’, Otechestvennaia istoriia, 6 (1992), 194–200. 72

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the bulk of this funding to projects which worked with peasant collective institutions. Kotsonis sees this development as a defeat for the land reform. Matsuzato, in contrast, views the shift towards agronomy less as a defeat than a broadening of the land reform to add a third layer—the agro-technical revolution—to the previous two layers of reform represented by individualization (that is, tenure changes) and land reorganization. The idea of extending agronomic aid to enclosed farms was certainly not part of the original plan of the land reform. The role of the model farms identified in the Committee for Land Settlement Affairs’ surveys in 1908 was to persuade peasants of the general superiority of enclosed farms over farms in the commune; they were not intended to teach peasants about scientific farming. The structure of grants made available for enclosed farmers reflected the centre’s narrow conception of the 9 November 1906 Edict as a strictly land reform with the result that permanent members did not always see agricultural improvement as part of their remit. In a confidential letter to the centre, one inspector described the attitude of the permanent member in Ekaterinoslav province to agricultural extension; on being asked about the provision of aid to enclosed farms in the province he replied, ‘I do not know anything about it. Surely once the land has been enclosed what happens afterwards is not my business?’73 Referring to land enclosure without agricultural assistance as a ‘building without a roof’, the inspector urged the centre to devote more resources to the development of agricultural extension services for khutora and otruba. The year was 1913.74 One argument that had some currency among local land-reform agents in the early years of the reform was that agricultural aid would be counter-productive to the spread of enclosure since this would distance enclosed farms from ordinary peasant farms, thereby lessening their utility as models; it was better to let things develop ‘at their own pace’. ‘The advantages of khutora are so substantial,’ insisted one permanent member, that ‘every farmer begins making improvements immediately after enclosure and some of these, moreover, have a useful demonstration effect.’75 The debate within the land reform organization was decisively turned towards expanding its brief to include agricultural assistance when Stolypin and Krivoshein attempted to gain the cooperation of zemstvo agronomists in helping enclosed farms to adopt modern farming methods. The deal zemstva were offered was that in return for their agreement to prioritize 73 75

RGIA, f. 408, 1913, opis’ 1, no. 425, 15. TsGIA SPb, f. 297, 1908, opis’ 3, no. 61, 35.

74

Ibid., 21.

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enclosed farms, the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture would subsidize their programmes of agricultural assistance by paying half the salary of zemstvo agronomists and half the acquisition and distribution costs of new equipment, seeds, and livestock. The zemstva’s responses to this offer varied. Some, as in Kazan, Kursk, and Pskov provinces, supported the idea but others, among them the zemstva in Ekaterinoslav, Khar’kov, Olonets, Riazan, and Iaroslavl provinces, were less enthusiastic. They objected that giving priority to one group of peasants over another was inconsistent with zemstvo taxation policy which treated everyone equally, and that there were practical difficulties privileging enclosed farms because of the district (uchastok) organization of zemstvo agronomic aid.76 The outcome was that the arrangements set in place for extending agricultural aid to enclosed farmers differed between provinces; in eleven, a single extension service run by the zemstvo for both enclosed and unenclosed farms was established, but in the remainder parallel services were set up in the zemstvo and land settlement commission with the degree of cooperation between them ranging from a situation in which the zemstvo refused any help to enclosed farms (two provinces) to those where zemstvo and land settlement commission services were closely integrated. According to Kotsonis, formal arrangements whereby zemstva shouldered much of the burden for enclosed farms, which qualified them to receive central subsidies, could often hide the fact that their commitment to enclosed farms was extremely weak. Poor checking on the part of the centre and/or a conscious decision on the part of Krivoshein to let the matter rest meant that in the years after 1910 the zemstva were able to get away with giving enclosed farms a low priority in their agricultural aid programmes. The sort of debate that led to the setting up of parallel services can be illustrated by the example of Moscow province, but the issues raised there were the same everywhere in Russia. Prior to Krivoshein’s circulars putting the question of aid for enclosed farms on zemstvo agendas, the Moscow province zemstva had included enclosed farms in their clover and grass-seed distribution programme, but they showed no enthusiasm for the prospect of singling out enclosed farms for special treatment, arguing that ‘the establishment for khutora and otruba of separate cooperatives, special machinery-hire stations, special seed-cleaning facilities, and so on . . . [was] . . . not only unnecessary but is also impossible.’77 The consensus 76 77

Matsuzato, ‘The Fate of Agronomists’, 182. RGIA, f. 408, 1911, opis’ 1, no. 1437, 195.

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view of the Moscow province zemstva was that their agronomists should assume sole responsibility for agricultural assistance to enclosed farms, for which they should receive a central subsidy, but that they should retain complete freedom to decide how best the subsidy was used to help all types of farm in the province.78 Needless to say, the provincial land settlement commission did not trust the zemstva. A meeting of permanent members in the province, meanwhile, agreed that it was ‘hardly possible to place much confidence in zemstvo agronomists, who are busy working with communes . . . being able to carry out projects with enclosed farms.’79 The permanent member of the provincial commission, Shlippe, and the recently appointed agronomist, Trudnikov, expressed their fear in a joint statement that any subsidies the zemstvo received from the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture for work with khutora and otruba would be siphoned off to support programmes designed for peasants in the commune.80 Although Shlippe and Trudnikov recognized that the development of a parallel agricultural extension service in land settlement commissions was ‘irrational’, they believed that this was unavoidable in the short term. They urged the Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture to allocate more funds directly to the land settlement commission in order to enable it to develop its own services further.81 This was done, with the result that from the summer of 1910 Moscow province had two agricultural extension services, one exclusively for enclosed farms and the other for both enclosed and non-enclosed ones. The central government allocation to the zemstvo for agricultural aid was 109 457 roubles (to which was added 96 022 from taxation revenues) and to the land settlement commission 50 610, but since enclosed farms constituted no more than 8 per cent of farms in the province, the subsidy was by no means insignificant. The debate in Moscow province was reproduced in provinces all over Russia. In Kherson province, for example, the governor warned the centre that the zemstvo could not be trusted to give the ‘active and positive support’ to enclosed farms that it had pledged. He quoted a recent meeting where the chairman of the provincial zemstvo had said that he could see no reason why enclosed farms should be helped at the expense of ordinary farms in the commune because ‘such preferential treatment will turn them into “hot-house plants” which will wither as soon as the golden rain ceases to fall upon them.’82 In Kherson, as elsewhere, it was 78 82

79 80 Ibid., 192. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 196. RGIA, f. 408, 1907, opis’ 1, no. 1426, 210.

81

Ibid., 3.

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the ‘third element’ that was identified as the source of zemstvo reluctance to cooperate. However, not all zemstvo agronomists were hostile to helping enclosed farms, some openly expressing the view that, ‘agricultural aid should first and foremost be directed towards the peasants on enclosed farms.’83 Underlying the rivalry between land settlement commissions and zemstvo for control over the agricultural aid budget and, more fundamentally, over the direction of tsarist agrarian policy, there were practical issues that the centre clearly had not adequately addressed when it made its approach to the zemstva. Zemstvo agricultural sections were used to working through peasant collective institutions and the types of improvements to farming they tried to introduce often required peasants to cooperate with each other. Modern machinery, for example, was introduced to villages through collective leasing arrangements, and seed-cleaning services were organized on a village basis, as was improved stock breeding. Also, as already observed, zemstvo agronomic aid was organized on a district, or uchastkovoe, basis which subdivided uezdy between agronomists according to the density of farms and similarity of geographical conditions. Through these arrangements extension services were able to reach large numbers of peasant farms simultaneously. But they were not particularly well-suited to serving enclosed farms which were distributed unevenly in relation to the existing uchastki. Among the list of the improvements to which land settlement commission agronomists gave priority, first place was accorded to the setting up of demonstration farms and the introduction of multiple-field rotations, incorporating the cultivation of forage crops and ley grass.84 In some provinces such as those in the north-west and the centre, the second aim, to introduce multiple-field rotations, was shared by zemstvo agronomists working with the mass of the peasantry. But elsewhere, in parts of the blackearth centre, for example, some zemstvo agronomists preferred to concentrate on introducing relatively minor adjustments to ploughing routines and on the improvement of seed stock which, they argued, could make substantial differences to the productivity of the land, whilst in some steppe or suburban locations they put most of their effort into developing specialist branches of production. Rittikh actively tried to discourage the introduction of similar programmes among enclosed farmers, arguing that they 83

Pamiatnaia knizhka Samarskoi gubernii, 1912, 340. As late as 1911, an official publication gave the formation of demonstration farms as the primary purpose of its agricultural aid programme to enclosed farms. See, Obzor deiatel’nost’ glavnogo upravleniia zemleustroistva i zemledeliia za 1911, Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia (St Petersburg, 1912), 53. 84

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would deflect attention from improving cereal cultivation, the priority of which constituted ‘a rule from which there can be no deviation’.85 The importance of improving stock breeding and market gardening, Rittikh maintained, had been over-exaggerated. However, land settlement commission agronomists were often forced to lower their sights and, following the lead of the zemstva, concentrate their efforts on trying to make modest improvements in farming on khutora and otruba. An article in Rossiia in 1911 described the aim of agricultural aid among enclosed farms as the introduction of ‘simple’ improvements, and in that year Selsk’ii Vestnik, another newspaper which supported the land reform, began to run a series of articles directed at khutor farmers, explaining a variety of simple technical improvements they could introduce.86 In Tula province, the extension service set up in the land settlement commission also began to give priority to the ‘simplest of measures’, such as assisting farmers in constructing fences and planting shelter belts, the improvement of natural meadows and better use of organic fertilizers. It had a network of seed-cleaning depots, and warehouses which reached an estimated 10 per cent of the enclosed farms in the province between 1910 and 1912.87 In Tver province the land settlement commission agronomist elevated to top priority assisting enclosed farmers to purchase machinery and to use improved seeds and fertilizers. Plans for setting up demonstration fields on enclosed farms in the province had remained largely unfulfilled by 1914, for lack of funds.88 No doubt it was a lack of funds that lay behind the reorientation of the work of some land settlement commissions, but they were also probably influenced by zemstvo practices and by peasant resistance to more radical proposals. Whatever the differences in their aims and methods, zemstvo and land settlement commission agronomists had reached an accommodation by the last peacetime years of the reform. In some cases the cooperation was close, land settlement commission agronomists performing a supervisory role over the zemstvo work with enclosed farms or alternatively taking responsibility for initiating programmes for enclosed farms within 85

RGIA, f. 408, 1908–9, no. 1422, 38–42. Prior to these there were remarkably few articles on land settlement in the progovernment press that dealt with agricultural practice. The Rossiia article and subsequent ones in a series on agricultural assistance to enclosed farms (nos. 1715, 1717, 1718, 1721) were written to counter the opposition press’s criticism of the reform’s record on agricultural assistance to enclosed farms. 87 Kratkii obzor meropriatii, 2. 88 Doklad zevediiushchogo agronomicheskoi pomoshchi v raionakh zemleustroistva osobomu agronomicheskomu soveshchaniiu v 1914 (Tver, 1915), 17–25. 86

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the zemstvo aid programmes. Whilst some uezd land settlement commissions set up their own agricultural machinery warehouses, seed-cleaning services, breeding stations, and credit banks, elsewhere these services were developed jointly with the zemstva. These differences, plus the likelihood, as Kotsonis has suggested, that some zemstva reneged on their promise to help enclosed farms, means that it is difficult to generalize about the access enclosed farms had to agricultural services. In Ekaterinoslav province, where there was a well-developed agricultural extension service consisting of fiftythree agronomists (eight on the land settlement commission’s pay-roll), twenty machinery hire agencies, 107 seed-cleaning and fifteen stockbreeding stations, fifty-six demonstration fields and 1000 demonstration plots, the indifference of both the land settlement commissions and the zemstva to making agricultural assistance available to enclosed farms meant that the latter were poorly served.89 In contrast, the agricultural extension provision for enclosed farms in the twelve uezdy chosen for the official survey was good.90 In George Yaney’s view, the recruitment of agronomists was an important moment in the evolution of the Stolypin Reform; agronomists were among the growing ranks of specialists working in the countryside whose brief it was ‘to mobilize’ the peasantry. But the recruitment of agronomists to the land reform can also be interpreted as an overdue realization at the centre that it could not deliver all it had promised; land reform without agrarian reform was a weak instrument of agrarian modernization. Stolypin’s peasants needed assistance if they were to establish modern farming systems, but this had not been costed into the reform so that when its need was finally acknowledged, hasty appeals had to be made to the zemstva for help. Viewed this way, the recruitment of the zemstvo was an attempt to rescue the land reform, but by bringing on board people who held radically different views of how peasants should be modernized it was a potentially dangerous path to pursue. Kotsonis is right to argue that the Stolypin Land Reform was undermined by the zemstvo agronomists ‘from below’ and the Ministry of Finance ‘from above’, but it also suffered from its own ideology of farm improvement which overdetermined the role physical farm restructuring plays in agrarian change. Conceived of as a broad measure to modernize peasant farming and create a loyal peasantry, the final verdict on the Stolypin Reform must be that it was too narrowly conceived to be able to deliver this result. 89

RGIA, f. 408, 1912, opis’ 1, no. 225. The existence of a dedicated extension service for enclosed farms was one of the criteria used in selecting counties for investigation. 90

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 The conclusion to this book is that in understanding the peasants’ responses to the Stolypin Land Reform both history and geography matter. The authors of the Stolypin Land Reform thought they had history on their side but it was the history of the modernizer’s dream—of a natural progression from a backward to a more advanced state along the linear path that all systems, given the right encouragement, are bound to tread. This was not the peasants’ history; theirs was more complicated and multilayered, an amalgam of each individual’s experiences and the experiences of others transmitted down the generations. The peasants’ personal and shared histories had taught them to be suspicious of people in authority and to put their trust in the institutions of village life. One of these institutions was the peasant commune which they now found under attack. When the state launched its assault on the commune it was not only striking at an institution central to the lives of most peasants, but it was also trying to hit a moving target. In the decades prior to the reform the commune was already a different creature from what it had been half a century before. The Statute of Emancipation had extended the commune’s formal powers and it had been forced to adapt to far-reaching changes in economy and society. Whilst legislators insisted on viewing the commune as a relic feature, the reality was that within the commune the peasants had been developing new ways of apportioning land among themselves; they had been recasting property rights and experimenting with new directions in farming. Just as it had been in the past, the post-Emancipation commune was engaged in a process of constantly reinventing itself. However, the commune was not infinitely plastic; some of the challenges it now faced were met using traditional means, not because these constituted the best possible response in the circumstances but because peasants sometimes did things simply because they were used to doing them a certain way. That there were features of the nineteenth-century commune for which the original raison d’être had long since disappeared and for which superior alternatives now existed cannot be denied. The mistake the enthusiasts of land reform made was to overestimate the ease with which such features could be dislodged. On the face of it, and because of the way the procedures for taking up the various measures included in the Stolypin Reform were designed, the immediate payoffs associated with adopting the reform—more land,

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the best-quality land, and/or the freedom to use it to maximize short-term needs—were such that every peasant household in Russia should have rushed to take it up. This expectation is based on the assumption that the peasants were motivated by ‘instrumental rationality’—that regardless of the consequences for others, an individual will always choose the self-interested option—and it is likely that a proportion of the enclosures that took place in Russia after 1906 were the outcome of the pursuit of such self-interest. But not all of Russia’s peasants were ‘instrumentally rational’; many, it transpires, put community interest before personal interest. This feature of peasant behaviour was demonstrated in a number of ways which have been discussed in the pages of this book. First, it was to be observed in the collective resistance that was mounted against ‘free riders’ in communities all over Russia when, instead of the defection of a single household precipitating a flood of petitions to enclose, it provided the stimulus for a community to close ranks and defend itself. Through this resistance, communes reaffirmed themselves and reinforced the identification of individual members with the community at large. One moment of such community reaffirmation was when, rather than surrender control over the distribution of land to the government bureaucracy or let a member defect, a commune took a strategic decision to enclose. Secondly, the strength of the community was demonstrated by the fact that, when they were pulled into enclosures, peasants collectively worked to salvage what they could of the situation by forcing modifications to be made to the landscape of dispersed farmsteads that so fired the legislators’ imagination. Thirdly, the strength of peasant attachment to collectivism was demonstrated by the fact that the defectors from the commune often chose communal forms to press forward their claims for enclosed farms. Despite a powerful law backed up by a new administration dedicated to fashioning individual citizens out of communal peasants, the peasants’ own history was not to be defeated. Geography matters in understanding the peasants’ responses to the reform because the processes of adoption, resistance, and modification were unevenly distributed in space. There was a distinctive ‘geography of enclosure’ but it was a geography that was far more complex than implied by the reform administration’s binary division of the country into ‘progressive’ and ‘laggard’ regions. Peasant Russia consisted of a mosaic of local and regional cultures which were differentiated from one another by the beliefs and customs of the people, local hierarchies of power, and different ways of making a living. It was only to be expected that these geographically specific peasant cultures would interact with the Stolypin Reform in different ways.

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At the highest spatial scale, the non-black-earth/black-earth division of European Russia was reflected in the relative importance of the ‘pasture question’ in the decision to adopt the reform. The centrality of livestock to farming in the non-black-earth regions meant that the fate of common pastures was never far below the surface when the peasants were considering enclosure because their harvests depended upon there being a sufficient input of organic fertilizers to the soil. In the commune, the need to provide feed for livestock had been solved collectively and the annual routine of moving herds between fallow, stubble, meadows, and permanent pastures, and between commune, landowners’ and state land had evolved into a finely tuned system which was linked to the annual round of holidays and feast days. Any threatened perturbation in this system was bound to be contested because it struck, far more than did any prohibition upon repartition, at the heart of the peasant community—in negotiating the continued use of common pastures, peasants adopting the reform in the non-black-earth zone were negotiating the preservation of the community of farmers. At a finer scale subregions can be made out in the non-chernozem zone characterized by different responses to the reform. Where commercial livestock farming had begun to develop under the influence of expanding urban markets and the pasture question was on the way to being solved by intensification, the fate of common pasturage was not a question that preoccupied communities when they were considering enclosure, and other factors came into play. It has been observed several times in this book that it was in the north-west and west and in Moscow province that the reform produced farms that more or less corresponded to the government’s expectations. Another subregion in the non-black-earth zone was the north, where state forests provided abundant forage for livestock with the result that here also the pasture question was not prominent in the peasants’ consideration of the reform. But the subsistence nature of cereal production here meant that peasants in the northern forests had no compelling reasons to respond to measures designed to ‘rationalize’ their use of the region’s arable resources. In the provinces lying in the black earths (roughly south of a line running east–west through Tula province), pasture was simply not the issue that it was in the centre and north. Here responses to the reform took place in a different physical context—one of naturally fertile soils but an environment that was extremely sensitive to changes in the annual balance of heat and water. Fluctuating harvests, on the one hand, but the possibility, at least in the steppe provinces, of large rewards from the wheat market, on the other, meant that peasants contemplating the

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Stolypin Reform faced contradictory pressures. Whilst insurance against environmental hazards could be best guaranteed by staying within the framework of the commune and diversifying farming, leaving the commune freed the peasant from any restraints in responding to the market. In the central black-earth provinces the former consideration tended to prevail, but in the provinces of the southern steppe and the middle Volga, the power of the market prevailed and large numbers of peasants did take the opportunity offered by the reform to farm independently. But the farms that were formed were very different from the independent farms in the north-west and around Moscow. In the southern steppe enclosure meant monoculture and, in the longer term, less rather than more stability in the agrarian economy. Students of Russia history have wanted to speculate about the Stolypin Reform’s future prospects had Revolution and Civil War not interrupted its progress. There can be little doubt that growing numbers of peasants would have engaged with the reform—the pressures for them to do so (both positive and negative) were too great for it simply to grind to a halt—but there is no reason to believe that the pattern of differentiated responses would have changed. Although time was too short for the post-enclosure history of the farms formed between 1906 and 1917 to be other than guessed at, what can be said for certain is that there would have been a variety of histories, not just one. Stolypin’s peasants were a varied group, and only some were likely to grow into the independent, prosperous husbandmen and loyal citizens of Stolypin’s imaginings.

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 absentee households 111–13 agricultural aid 241–7 agronomists: role in reform 49, 74, 128 arson 166, 170 boycotts: of elections 172 of sowing 178 Chaplin, N. D. 41–2, 134, 147 Chernov, V. 112 Chief Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture: budget of 241 funds for agricultural aid 244 organisation of 3 role of 36, 62, 116, 137 class analysis of the reform 9–10, 21, 106 clover cultivation 238 common pasturage 19, 73, 78, 148–9, 167–8, 169, 178, 180, 184–5 after enclosure 224–7 denial of access to 167–8, 169, 184–5 dissolution of rights to 123 rights of unilateral separators to take part in 120 common use rights 12, 23, 43–4, 48, 73 see also servitudes communal tenure 3, 19, 74, 86 see also repartition compulsory procedures 133, 136, 171, 174 enclosed farms: agricultural aid to 242–6 arable husbandry on 233–41 compared with farms in the commune 234, 240 costs of forming 223 land improvement on 223, 242 land use on 222 ley grass cultivation on 226–7, 232, 233, 237, 238, 240 loans and grants to 115, 131, 223–4, 242 see also khutora and otruba

enclosure: arguments for radical approach to 40–8, 147 delays in carrying out 122, 167, 175 expected sequence of 2, 61–6, 96 formal complaints against 161–2 ideas about 4, 12 obstacles to 10–11, 97, 102–3 open opposition to 145, 160, 161, 180 peasant motives for 23–6, 114–17 peasant preferences for 76–7, 133, 140, 170 reversals after 1917 219 force, use of 133, 143–4, 161 see also voluntary nature of reform geography of enclosure, see regional variations in reform group land settlement 5, 8, 35–6, 65–8, 130, 137, 152 opposition to 179 hereditary household tenure 19, 83, 86 Imperial Free Economic Society 40, 76, 82–3, 111, 115 individual separations (vydelenie) 6, 130 link to village-wide enclosures 25–6, 113, 117–21, 135–6, 140, 142, 175–6 resistance to 166–71 see also individual separators individual separators 25 collective actions by 114, 166 images of 113–14 motives of 114–15 objections to whole-village consolidations 125 inheritance 92, 217–18 inspectorate 3, 132, 134–5, 136, 147–8 Jews 184, 185

Khutora: agricultural progress on 58, 229, 239 classification of 38–9, 41, 58 images of 33, 40, 45, 49, 121 fictitious 213–17

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Khutora (cont.): joint grazing on 227–8 peasant farms, comparison with 232 pre-1906 40, 41, 45, 75, 88, 146, 230–3 problems living on 170, 171 Umanskii uezd 139 Kofod, A. A. 39–43, 44–5, 49, 59, 61, 63, 64, 75, 88, 134, 135, 140, 231 on auctions 220 on stall feeding 228 Krivoshein, A. V. 47, 145, 146, 242, 243 kulaks 184 land captains 34, 108, 128, 142, 143, 145, 146, 152, 174, 178 blamed for protests 187 land commune: agricultural improvements in 84–5 differentiation in 91–2, 139 joint decision-making in 25, 121 land holding practices in 75–85 theories about 72, 93 see also strip fields, repartition land conveyances 19, 77, 89–90, 115, 117, 138 land improvement 223–4 land settlement commissions 116, 127–8, 224 composition of 36 disguising shortfalls in reform 154–5 establishment of 127 land valuations by 220 pressures on 146 role in precipitating whole-village enclosures 116, 124, 125, 133–8, 153 uncertainties about the law 120, 167 land surveyors 127, 128 favouring individual separators 120 role of 49, 74, 118, 146, 147 targets of protest 160, 175, 177, 181, 182 legislation 2, 3, 5, 31, 34–5, 167 edict of 9 November 1906 12, 105–6, 107–8, 111, 142, 162 law of 10 June 1910 64, 96, 114 law on land settlement 43, 64 levadi, see strip fields Litvinov, Ia. Ia. 64, 142 livestock: decline in numbers 227 herdsmen 226 stall feeding of 153, 225–6, 228 see also common pasturage

Lykoshin, A. S. 41, 43–4, 63, 66, 118–19, 137, 241 Ministry of Finance 37, 247 Ministry of Internal Affairs 34–7, 62, 96, 109 investigation into decline in title changes 109–10 investigation into litigation concerning the reform 162, 170, 183 numerical results 95–6, 96–102, 105 obshchina, see land commune Orthodox church 186 otruba: criticisms of 43, 44 difficulties of 222, 229 inequalities between 221 protest against 169, 178, 183 as transitional form 64–5 types of 39 partial consolidations 7, 41, 42, 61 peasant farmers: egalitarianism 17, 73–4 ignorance amongst 3, 16, 57, 65, 74, 227 images of 1, 32, 49, 113, 184 moral economy 16 subsistence 19, 221–2 survival strategies 16, 23, 75–6, 81, 157, 158, 222, 226 Peasant Land Bank 1, 2, 5, 34–5, 43, 46, 62, 75, 105, 138, 147, 150 permanent members: agricultural aid, views on 242 calibre of 129–30 growth in importance of 128 attitudes to individual separations 149–54 pressure on 132–3, 141–2, 146 roles in reform 36, 49, 74, 127, 143–4, 145, 168 targets of protest 160, 164 petitions 157, 163–5 population pressure 20, 91–3, 139, 233, 235 provincial governors: on costs of enclosure 223 attitudes to reform 124, 135, 136, 142–3, 145, 150

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Index razverstanie, see whole-village enclosure regional variations in reform 7, 26, 96–104, 120, 126, 234, 241 repartition 19, 25, 83 chernii peredel 30 relationship to enclosure 107, 108, 168 frequency 83 1893 law 90 problems 72–3, 93 Umanskii uezd 139 revolution of 1905 158–9, 160 Rittikh, A. A. 44–7, 63, 68, 73, 74, 131, 137 views on market gardening 245–6 letter to Rossiia 161–2, 164, 187 doubts about stall feeding 229 rotations 85 compulsory 72 multiple-field 233, 237–8, 239, 245 pestropol’e 240 three-field 78, 231, 232, 233–4, 235, 238, 239 Semenov, Sergei 114, 184–5 Senate, first department 112, 162–3 servitudes 19 side-employment 103, 234 skhod 25 non-assembly of 173–4 role in reform 171–2, 178, 180 Stolypin, P. A. 8, 46, 142, 184, 242 strip fields: levadi 84, 139, 150–1 problems of 69–72, 79, 114 representations of 49–50 restoration of 183 scattering against risk 76–7, 79, 222 Technical Instructions 37, 43, 121, 138, 153

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title changes 5, 6 laws on 31, 34–5 motives for taking title 106–12 official attitudes towards 62, 63–4, 105–11 resistance to title holders 169, 172 ‘twelve-uezd survey’ 58, 236, 238, 239, 240 ukreplenie v lichnuiu sobstvennost’, see title changes unilateral separators, see individual separators Union of Russian People 165, 186 unitary land settlement: laws on 35 see also enclosure violence 125, 136, 164, 170, 181, 184 in Umanskii uezd 181–2 volost’ courts 92, 162, 169 voluntary nature of the reform 33, 132, 143 Vorontsov, V. V. 74, 83, 86, 90 whole-village enclosure 6, 22–3, 61, 69, 123–4, 130, 172 rejection of 176–80 in Umanskii uezd 138–42, 148, 164, 181, 186 Witte Commission 44, 89, 230 women’s resistance 65, 181, 182–3 zemstva: agricultural aid 153, 154, 241–2 attitudes to enclosed farms 243–5 land settlement commission, relationship with 245–7 method of social classification 57–8 Zubovskii, P. P. 42, 44, 47