Agrarian Revolution
Prior to the revolution most Russian peasants were organized into repartitional communes called the Mir. Each household in the Mir was assigned land, which they farmed themselves and kept the product of for themselves (minus taxes, rent, etc.). A village assembly consisting of all the household heads called the skhod ran the commune. Except in times of rebellion or revolution, male elders dominated the skhod. It was patriarchal and ageist; women and the young were excluded. The land assigned to each household would be periodically repartitioned by the skhod, the intention being to maintain an egalitarian village as much as possible. Peasant villages were rather egalitarian, but there was some stratification between poor peasants, middle peasants and Kulaks on the top. A disproportionate amount of the land was owned by a landlord aristocracy, which had descended from the feudal nobility. The landlords exploited the peasants through rent or other means.
Many revolutionaries, including the populists, social revolutionaries (SRs) and many Russian anarchists, believed the Mir could play an important role in overthrowing the Tsar and, if democratized, in building a socialist society. They were right. During both the 1905 and 1917 revolutions the communes played a major role, serving as a ready-made organization through which the peasants rebelled against the landlords and the state. After the 1905 revolution reforms were implemented with the intention of staving off another revolution, including an attempt to undermine the Mir. Petr Arkadevich Stolypin, prime minister of Russia from 1906 until his assassination in 1911, in addition to using state terror to suppress all opposition to the Tsar implemented land reforms designed to weaken and destroy the Mir. He attempted to convert the peasantry into small holding farmers, each owning his own plot of land instead of living in the communes. It was hoped that doing this would generate a conservative class of farmers (as had arisen in many West European countries) and make it more difficult for peasants to organize against the regime. The Stolypin land reforms failed to achieve its goal. Only a tiny percentage of peasants became small holding farmers; the vast majority stayed in the Mir.
In 1917 the communes played a major role in the overthrow of the old order. The Volga region is not unusual in this regard. "During the second half of March 1917 news of the February revolution in Petrograd and the abdication of the Tsar filtered down to the villages ... During the following weeks open assemblies were held in almost every village to discuss the current situation and to formulate resolutions on a broad range of local and national issues." 1 These assemblies acted as a counter-power against the landlords and state in the villages and were used to organize against them. "The district and provincial peasant assemblies of 1917 served as an important focus for the articulation of peasant grievances and aspirations. ... As the power of the state collapsed in the provinces during 1917, the political initiative passed to these district and provincial assemblies." 2
These assemblies were not the same ageist and patriarchal assemblies that had previously run the communes. The revolution transformed not only the relationship of the commune to landlords and the state, but transformed relations within the communes as well:
"The village assemblies which met during the spring of 1917 marked a process of democratization within the peasant community. Whereas village politics before 1914 had been dominated by the communal gathering of peasant household elders, the village assemblies which came to dominate politics during 1917 comprised all the village inhabitants and were sometimes attended by several hundred people. The patriarchical domination of the peasant household elders was thus challenged by junior members of the peasant households (including the female members), landless laborers and craftsmen ... [and others] who had formerly been excluded from the communal gathering."3
After the February revolution the communes began expropriating the landlord's land and incorporating it into the communes. "It was very rare indeed for the [landlord] himself to be harmed during these proceedings."4 The peasants aimed to re-divide the land to give everyone a fair share. The landlord's land was added to the commune's land and then the land repartitioned, with each household assigned it's own plot of land by the (newly democratized) peasant assemblies. "The meadows and the pasture were usually left in communal use (i.e. were not partitioned), in accordance with traditional custom."5 The peasants' aim was:
"to restore the idealized 'good life' of the village commune, a life which had been irrevocably lost in the modern world. They appealed to the ancient peasant ideals of truth and justice which, since the Middle Ages, had been inextricably connected in the dreams of the peasants with land and freedom. The village commune ... provided the organizational structure and the ideological basis of the peasant revolution … Every family household, including those of the former landowners, was given the right to cultivate with its own labor a share of the land." 6
Most landlords who did not flee after the expropriations began were incorporated within the communes as equal peasants. They were usually given a portion of their former land to farm themselves, but no more than any other peasant and only an amount they could farm themselves (without hired labor). "Most of the peasant communities … recognized the right of the ex-landowner to farm a share of his former land with the labour of his family. ... A survey in Moscow province on the eve of the October revolution showed that 79% of the peasantry believed the landowners and their families should be allowed to farm a share of the land." 7
Returning peasant conscripts from the soldiers often played an important role in radicalizing the village and leading the revolution. "The return of the peasant-soldiers from the army during the winter and spring of 1917-18 had a profound effect on the course of the revolution. These young men presented themselves as the natural leaders of the revolution in the villages. ... The mood of the soldiers on their return from the army was radical and volatile." 8 Peasant conscripts who otherwise may never have left their village were placed in a situation (the army) very different from the villages where they learned about large-scale organization and came in contact with radical ideas.
The expropriation and repartitioning of land accelerated with the October revolution. Without the peasant rebellions bringing down the old order the insurrections in the cities would never have succeeded. For a while after the October revolution Bolshevik power was very weak and most villages were largely left to themselves. A kind of semi-anarchy prevailed in many villages, with the landlords expropriated and the Bolsheviks not yet imposing their authority on the village. The peasant assemblies and communes that prevailed in this period are quite similar to many of the institutions advocated by many anarchists but, as with the soviets, there were some small differences.
The democratized village assemblies are quite similar to the community assemblies (or "free communes") advocated by many anarchists since the early 19th century. However, while anarchists envision their community assemblies as being purely voluntary bodies that would respect the individual freedom of its members (and this was the case with the village assemblies during the Spanish revolution) in some cases the Russian village assemblies turned into a "tyranny of the majority." In Spain those who did not want to participate in the collectives were not coerced into doing so and were given some land but only as much as they could work themselves (without hired labor). In Russia there were instances of small holding farmers who had separated from the commune as a result of the Stolypin land reforms being forced to rejoin the commune, sometimes violently. Peasant assemblies were sometimes hostile towards people from outside the village, especially if they had no previous connection to the village.
Unlike Russia's repartitioned communes, peasants in agrarian collectives during the Spanish revolution generally cultivated the land in common rather than assigning each household it's own plot. What was produced was shared as well. In some cases money was abolished and things distributed on the basis of need. The Russian peasant's repartitional commune did not cultivate all land in common or share what was produced. Although quite different from the collectives advocated by anarcho-communists and anarcho-syndicalists (and set up during the Spanish revolution) these repartitional communes were similar to systems advocated by mutualist anarchists like Joseph Proudhon. In many mutualist schemes the land would be farmed by peasants who would work their own land (without wage-labor or collectives) and trade any surplus on the market with other peasants, self-employed artisans and/or cooperatives. This is quite similar to what prevailed in rural Russia during the high point of the revolution.
Villages often suffered from excessive parochialism and sometimes came into conflict with each other. Unlike in revolutionary Spain there was no confederations set up between communes to coordinate their actions or equalize the wealth of different communes. The closest thing was the peasant soviets, however these did not play as big a role in the countryside as they did in the cities and soon transformed into a hierarchical power over the villages.
As in the cities, the majority of peasants were not anarchists and so it should not be surprising that these revolutionary agrarian structures did not completely match the anarchist ideal. Despite this they came very close. The embryo of an anarchist society was created before and for a short while after October.
All of revolutionary Russia was covered with a vast network of workers' and peasant soviets, which began to function as organs of self-management. They developed, prolonged, and defended the Revolution. … a vast system of social and economic workers' self-management was being created … This regime of soviets and factory committees, by the very fact of its appearance, menaced the state system with death. 9
Notes:
1 Figes, Peasant Russia p. 32
2 Figes, Peasant Russia p. 40
3 Ibid, p. 33
4 Ibid, p. 52
5 Ibid, p. 111
6 Ibid, p. 101-102
7 Ibid, p. 132
8 Ibid, p. 144
9 Archinov, Two Octobers
