Libmonster ID: UZ-1513
Author(s) of the publication: L. B. ALAEV

K. Marx and F. Engels laid the foundations of the scientific theory of community evolution. They proved the priority of communal property over private property and gave a scheme for the development of the community from the most primitive, primitive forms to the neighborhood stage. These stages of evolution were identified by the founders of scientific communism only in the most general terms. They did not consider their scheme final, as evidenced by the clarifications and changes they made throughout their lives in the wording concerning the clan, family, and community. Marxist scientists are faced with the task of creatively mastering the legacy of Marx and Engels in this field.

The scientific relevance of community problems has increased in recent years due to two interrelated circumstances. First of all, it is necessary to understand the evolution of the liberated countries of Asia and Africa, to assess the social transformations in these countries, in particular, attempts to use the community as one of the pillars of a non-capitalist path of development .1 Secondly, the further development of the problem of socio-economic formations in the Marxist literature, and in particular the discussion of the theory of the "Asian mode of production", in which a certain special Asian community occupies such an important place. 2
The ethnographic material collected over the past decades makes it possible to significantly refine and complicate our understanding of the stages of community development from ancestral to neighborly. Yu. V. Maretin, for example, introduces such "stadium types" as early ancestral, generic, neighbor-generic, neighbor-large-family, neighborly community 3 . The accumulation of data has made it necessary to further study the typology of the actual neighboring communities - those that have already passed these stages and reached the level characterized by the predominance of small families, independent family farms, and private ownership of the main means of production, including arable land. It is in this form that rural communities usually exist in many slave-owning and feudal societies, sometimes playing a significant role in the system of their social relations.

The main focus of this article is to show that the form of land ownership (a combination of collective and individual rights to land) as an indicator of the strength or weakness of a community as a social institution, and to show that its evolution in a class society is complex and non-linear.

The most common point of view on this problem comes down to

1 I. L. Andreev. Specifics of the non-capitalist development of peoples who have not completed the process of class formation. Volrosy istorii, 1972, No. 9.

2 " Common and special features in the historical development of the Eastern countries. Materials of the discussion on social formations in the East (the Asian method of production)", Moscow, 1966, p. 4. 93 - 98, 117 - 119, 132 - 133.

3 See Yu. V. Maretin. Main types of community in Indonesia. "Problems of the history of pre-capitalist formations", Book 1, Moscow, 1968.

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to the fact that the rural community, which is observed in a number of class societies, is a relic of primitive relations. In the course of socio-economic development, it inevitably dies - either under the influence of internal processes of decomposition, or as a result of external factors (the state, the ruling class, commodity relations). At the same time, the history of the community appears as a more or less prolonged agony. Accordingly, all concrete communal forms are considered as strung together on a single core: the more pronounced the "communal principle", the more ancient and primitive the community is, the more individualistic it is, the "newer" and more developed it is. Land redistribution is considered particularly vivid evidence of primitiveness, and its absence is perceived as an indicator of the development of private property and the community as an institution.

The overwhelming majority of historians and ethnographers are convinced that they know the general laws of the evolution of the community, and therefore, how it could have been formed in a particular society. Only this conviction can explain, in particular, the statements that appear in the works of major experts (who are not, however, specialists in the history of Russia) about the antiquity of repartitions in the Russian community. M. O. Obliquen, for example, wrote that equalizing land use is "an archaic feature of the Russian rural community", which has been preserved until the 20th century from some ancient times . 4 S. D. Skazkin was also sure that "the Russian community throughout its existence has preserved the principle of periodic equalizing redistribution" and, consequently, had "a very high level of development". archaic form " 5 . Opinions that contradict the one-line consideration of communal forms have long been considered deliberately incorrect, subject not to discussion, but only to strong condemnation. It is enough to recall the reaction of M. O. Obliquen to the thoughts expressed by I. M. Diakonov about the peculiarities of the structure and evolution of the community in the Ancient East .6
In P. F. Laptin's historiographical monograph, views that coincide with the prevailing concept are usually called "realistic", and those that deviate from it are called "anti - historical" and do not correspond to historical reality .7 M. M. Kovalevsky's opinion that redistricting in rural communities occurs relatively late, when there is a shortage of empty land, the author comments as follows: "It is quite clear that Kovalevsky's concept is fundamentally wrong, since it does not reflect the actual historical process." 8 However, this statement is not supported by facts. A. L. Shapiro, having analyzed the grounds on which the arguments about repartitions in the early Middle Ages are based, concluded: "In historiography, there is a paradoxical situation when historians of Western Europe fill in the lack of information about equalizing repartitions, drawing on later Russian material without sufficient grounds, and historians of the USSR fill in the lack of information on repartition in ancient Russia, drawing on Western European material without sufficient grounds " 9 .

4 M. O. Is indirect. Essay on the history of primitive culture, Moscow, 1953, p. 200.

5 S. D. Skazkin. Essays on the history of the Western European peasantry in the Middle Ages, Moscow, 1968, pp. 82, 86. This statement of S. D. Skazkin has already drawn the attention of A. L. Shapiro (A. L. Shapiro. Problems of the genesis and character of the Russian community in the light of new research by Soviet historians. "Yearbook on Agricultural history". Issue VI. Vologda. 1976, p. 46).

6 M. O. Is indirect. On the question of the Ancient Eastern community. "Bulletin of Ancient History", 1963, N 4, pp. 30-34.

7 P. F. Laptin. Community in Russian historiography. Kyiv. 1971, pp. 200-228.

8 Ibid., p. 212. P. F. Laptin's objections to similar views of I. V. Luchitsky are equally strong (see ibid., p. 216).

9 A. L. Shapiro. Op. ed., p. 46.

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If we accept as axioms that democracy, common ownership of land, the principle of equal rights, and other communal features are the legacy of primitive communism, then logically we must conclude that class societies with a strong and prominent community are more primitive than others where the community does not play a big role. Meanwhile, the historical literature contains many facts that show that there is no such direct connection between the strength of a community and the level of development of society. For example, in the Middle Ages, the community dominated land ownership and land use in the main areas of India, Java, late Medieval Japan, and Vietnam. In the same period, it is very weakly traced in China, Laos, Thailand, Iran, and Ottoman Turkey. Does this say anything about the degree of development of class relations and the degree of overcoming of primitiveness in the first and second groups of countries? Apparently not.

The German mark became the historiographic standard for the evolution of the rural community during the transition to class society and the formation of feudalism. It was on this basis that G. L. Maurer put forward the "communal" or "markov" theory, which later became the subject of one of the most fierce and lengthy discussions in medieval studies.

At one time, in the mid-nineteenth century, this theory played a major role, as its authors proclaimed the primordial nature of the community and the secondary nature of private land ownership. Marx and Engels had already reached the same conclusion before Maurer, and therefore saw in his writings a reinforcement of their point of view .11 However, they did not become supporters of the communal theory. Engels was the first to point out the most serious methodological and methodological weaknesses of Maurer - his inattention to chronology (the habit of " giving evidence... from all times one next to another and interspersed"), lack of understanding of the category of "development", the role of violence in history, primitive evolutionism 12 . From these theoretical premises emerged those features of community theory-ignoring changes within the community and contrasting it as a non-historical institution with the state and feudalism - which are particularly unsatisfactory for modern researchers .13 The issues of assessing Maurer's contribution have long been resolved in the specialized literature, and they are discussed here only because the difference between the Marxist understanding of historical development and Maurer's communal theory is not always sufficiently emphasized, and sometimes it is even proclaimed that the full protection of this theory is "the honorable mission of Soviet historiography"14 .

The factual basis of Maurer's books, in essence, was reduced to three groups of data: first, Tacitus ' mention of land redistribution among the Suevians; second, recorded in the XVIII-XIX centuries. in the Rhineland, communities with shared land distribution, called "Gehoferschaften" ("farmstead"); third, old boundaries in German villages, delineating equal areas. The validity of using these groups of data" interspersed " to reconstruct a hypothetical ancient Germanic community has always been questionable. Soon and

10 The main conclusions of Maurer were formulated already in his first paper: G. L. Maurer. Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark-, Hof-, Dorf- und Stadt verfassung und der offentlichen Gewalt. Munchen. 1854 (pyc. translated by G. L. Maurer. Introduction to the history of communal, farmstead, rural and urban structure and public power. Moscow, 1880).

11 See K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch. Vol. 32, pp. 36, 158, 541; vol. 35, pp. 349.

12 K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch. Vol. 35, p. 105.

13 A. I. Neusykhin. The emergence of dependent peasantry as a class of feudal society, Moscow, 1956, p. 36; A. I. Danilov. Problems of agrarian history of the Early Middle Ages in German historiography of the late XIX-early XX centuries, Moscow, 1958, p. 163.

14 P. F. Laptin. Op. ed., p. 4.

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the data itself has been reinterpreted. As early as the 19th century, Tacitus ' quotation was interpreted as referring to perestroika farming, rather than redevelopment. F. Engels, when preparing the 4th edition of The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State in 1891, made a corresponding addition to the text of work 15 . This interpretation of Tacitus ' message is well established in the literature .16 "Gehoferschaften" in the Rhineland, as proved by K. Lamprecht [17], did not appear earlier than the 13th century on the lands allocated by the feudal lords for new settlers. Redistribution in these communities was shared, that is, it had nothing to do with the ideas of property equality. "Lamprecht's interpretation of the origin of the Trier household communities was gradually accepted by most historians." 18 Finally, the equality of allotments of community members, traces of which have been preserved in the inter-centuries of the XIX century, has not yet been associated with the pre-feudal or early feudal period. Equality of land plots (not ownership sizes!) It can only be associated with feudal times, with the regulation of land use based on the regulation of feudal taxes.

A detailed review of the discussion that broke out in German and world historiography on these issues, all attempts to both refute Maurer and defend him, is given in the aforementioned book by A. I. Danilov. Critics of the communal theory, who did not agree with each other in everything, agreed on the following: in the early Middle Ages in Germany, the community was a weak and amorphous organization; only in the XI-XII centuries did the mark develop with its characteristic easements, forced crop rotation, interlacing, the system of "open fields" , etc. In modern Western European medieval studies The question of whether the medieval mark has a genetic connection with the early community continues to be debated, but the fact of the strengthening of the mark organization by the 12th century seems to be beyond doubt .19
Proponents of the opposite view - that the community is steadily weakening-also resorted to new arguments and materials. We will try to understand them using the example of A. I. Neusykhin's monograph, which is considered a classic in terms of substantiating this concept. A. I. Neusykhin put forward the following scheme of stages in the evolution of the German community: 1) blood-related community; 2) the first stage of the agricultural community, characterized by the redistribution of arable land and the emergence of private land use; 3) the second stage-the cessation of redistribution the emergence of an individual family along with a patriarchal one, a limited right to inherit land; 4) a rural community, "a mark in the narrow sense of the word", where arable land becomes a freely alienated allotment of a small family, and communal land becomes an appendage of private property. In this concept, the principle of the evolutionary transition from the general to the private, the gradual decomposition of communal land ownership and the maturation of private property is consistently maintained. However, this harmony is achieved by a specific interpretation of the material. In particular, the first two stages are introduced into the scheme based only on theoretical considerations, and not on specific historical data that could be attributed to the ancient Germans. As for the peredelnaya community stage, the author points out twice that there is no information about it.

A. I. Neusykhin connects the second stage of the agricultural community with the Salic Truth (V century). The problem boils down to this: when

15 See K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch. Vol. 21, pp. 139-140.

16 A. I. Neusykhin. Op. ed., p. 103.

17 K. Lamprecht. Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter. Bd. I. Leipzig. 1886, S. 449 - 453.

18 A. I. Danilov. Op. ed., p. 188.

19 For a brief overview of new works on this problem, see: Y. L. Bessmertny. Feudal village and market in Western Europe in the XII-XIII centuries. Moscow, 1969, pp. 163-166.

20 A. I. Neusykhin. Op. ed., pp. 10, 89.

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is the community stronger-in the fifth or twelfth century? A. I. Neusykhin believes that in the fifth century, since Salicheskaya Pravda, in his opinion, speaks of communal ownership of land, and later there is clearly a private one. He sees evidence of communal ownership of arable land in the fact that: a) members of the community did not have the right to dispose of the plot; b) there was a forced crop rotation; c) washed-out land passed into the possession of the community. But, first of all, the absence of private property does not in itself indicate the presence of communal property. Having justified the absence of the right to dispose of land for private individuals, the author does not even raise the question of whether the community had such a right. Secondly, the existence of forced crop rotation in Salic franks cannot yet be considered proven, since it is unclear whether there was a crop rotation at all: Salic Pravda does not contain direct references to two fields and even never mentions either fallow land or alternation of spring and winter crops .21 If we accept the indirect data provided by A. I. Ne-usykhin as sufficient, then even in this case, according to him, forced crop rotation in the fifth century was still undeveloped and reached full bloom later, at the stage of community-mark 22 . It turns out that the same communal institution in the undeveloped state represents communal ownership of arable land, but in the developed state it loses this meaning, does not detract from private property, and is only a manifestation of "communal supremacy over the entire territory of the village" and "the regulating role of the community in the production process" 23. The transfer of extortionate property into the hands of the community is based only on the omission of the Salic truth about who the land passed to if the deceased had no sons. According to A. I. Neusykhin, " it was self-evident that he (N. - L. A.) passed over to his relatives." With no less probability, it can be assumed that the land plot, which has no male heirs, did not pass to anyone at all, remained empty, and therefore its further fate did not represent an object of legal regulation.

The author's thoughts in this case follow the already familiar path: if there is no full private property, then, "of course," there is a communal one. The rights of the "agricultural community" to the wastelands are also not confirmed by the Salic truth. A. I. Neusykhin uses the chapter "De migrantibus"in this case. The author notes that the new settler took any land at his own discretion, without the approval of the community and without a contract with it. He may have been expelled as a result of individual actions of one of the residents of the villa, no collective action is provided in this regard. Finally, no matter how we assess the degree of communal rights to wastelands according to Salicheskaya Pravda, later this degree, as shown by A. I. Neusykhin, increases: a migrant can settle in a villa only with the prior consent of all neighbors, 24 and" at the community-brand stage "there is a" communal regulation of the order of their (land. - L. A.) individual use"25 .

Thus, if we carefully consider the material of A. I. Neusykhin's book, it turns out that in the early feudal period, private land ownership was weak, but communal ownership was even weaker, since no signs of it were noticeable. Later, no doubt, there was a process of maturation of private ownership (the emergence of the right of disposal) of arable land, but also of communal ownership not only of vacant land, but also of the entire village land. The concept of property as a whole developed, and from its two emerging forms, the communal form of ownership was transformed into a new one.

21 Ibid., p. 103.

22 Ibid., pp. 10, 18.

23 Ibid., p. 14.

24 Ibid., p. 118.

25 Ibid., p. 89.

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To some extent, it was ahead of the private one: the acquisition by individuals of the right of disposal did not restrict the community (because it had not previously had such a right), while the emergence and detailing of the rules of forced crop rotation (and related easements) narrowed the rights of individual use of the site in favor of the community.

Meanwhile, there is an opinion that A. I. Neusykhin proved the scheme of gradual decomposition of the community put forward by him, and this scheme is transferred as a standard to other early medieval societies of Europe and not only Europe. The concrete historical question of the evolution of the community in Germany in the V-XII centuries acquired a methodological sound from the very beginning, as a result of which it was believed that one or another answer to it predetermines the solution of the theoretical problem of the primordial nature of communal or private property. Hence the particular fierceness of the discussion, the mutual rejection of not only conceptual constructions, but also positive conclusions obtained through careful study of sources.

It seems to us that there is no reason to make the Germanic tribes of the first centuries AD a kind of standard in the study of the entire history of mankind. The universality of the community of the period of the tribal system and the tendency of its decomposition are proved on a huge amount of material. Germanic tribes appear in the historical arena when the community characteristic of the tribal system has already collapsed. In the future, they form a different community, characteristic of the feudal system.

The history of the community in Russia is better known. In addition, it is more revealing, because here the community has gone from a union of private owners to an organization that has subjugated and even abolished private ownership of land. Perhaps no Soviet historian who studies the Russian community will write that the per capita redistribution of the XVIII-XIX centuries. "preserved" in it from the ancient period.

Historians and sociologists of the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries made a major contribution to the study of the problem of community in Russia. Representatives of the "state school" in Russian historiography were the first to draw attention to the fact of the late appearance of repartitions. This is their great merit. But their proposed explanation (the introduction of redistricting "from above", through direct influence of the state and landlords) was immediately met with critical criticism by progressive Russian scientists and later rejected. A. A. Kaufman's works on Siberia played a certain role here26 , in which, in particular, it was shown that the decree of 1884 of the Russian Federation was signed by the President of the Russian Federation. on the introduction of per capita redistribution, only the process of equalization of land use, which went on without the participation of the state apparatus, on the initiative of the "world" ("society") itself, was formalized. The developed concept of the evolution of the Russian community was given by N. P. Pavlov-Silvansky. He believed that during the appanage period, the community in Russia existed and manifested itself in secular self-government and joint ownership of certain lands. The arable land was privately owned by the peasants. Land redistribution arose quite late as a result of a number of reasons, the most important of which were "land oppression" and the increase in feudal exploitation.

Slavic settlers moved to the northern and north-eastern regions of the country in groups, unions," clans "or"vatagami". This was necessary to protect against the local population and from attacks by other "gangs". From these unions, the power of the collective originates on the territory of the future community-volost, but the families settled separately. A significant part of the villages of the XV-XVI centuries consisted of a single courtyard. Over time, the power of the union (community, "world") increased. "At first, it does not restrict private owners in any way in their inheritance rights and in their personal property rights.

26 A. A. Kaufman. On the question of the origin of the Russian land community. "Russian Thought", 1907, books 10-12.

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their new zaimkah on the right of free capture. Then, in the name of the common good of the union, it restricts this right of seizure, increasing in relation to unoccupied land, and at the next stage of development imposes some restriction on occupied land, encroaching on the right of ownership"27 . Restrictions start with the prohibition of land grabbing without the community's approval ("allotments"), then the community proceeds to transfer some unoccupied land from one owner to another, later more detailed regulation of land use is introduced and, finally, complete redistribution.

This applies primarily to the black volosts, but the first redistribution appeared on private land, and here they had their own characteristics. "Redistricting on owner-owned land differs significantly from the redistricting in free communities discussed above, both in their grounds and in their goals. There, the main basis of redistribution is land crowding,.. here, as a rule, land crowding has nothing to do with it, and there is often a large supply of land. Here people are exhausted not by little land, but by the weight of taxes, and the main goal of redistribution is to achieve the most accurate correspondence between taxes and the labor forces of everyone. The poor are looking for land there. Here, the poor seek to get rid of the land. " 28 The oldest report known to Pavlov-Silvansky about the redistribution in the Moscow Principality dated back to 1500, in the XVII century. such information is becoming more frequent, but only from the second half of the XVIII century can we talk about the dominance of the peredelnaya community in the central regions. On the outskirts (Ukraine, Don, Kuban, Caucasus, North, Siberia), the transition to redistribution occurred much later - during the XIX century.

Apparently, the Pavlov-Silvansky constructions can be refined, since not all of them are based on actual historical material. In particular, he made extensive use of materials from the 19th century relating to the emergence of the peredelnaya community in Siberia to reconstruct the processes of the 17th and 18th centuries. However, his views on the community (as well as other Russian historians and sociologists) were not analyzed in detail in Soviet historiography. For example, in "Essays on the History of Historical Science in the USSR", only a few pages are devoted to the study of the problems of the community in the late XIX - early XX centuries. The opinion and conclusions of P. A. Sokolovsky and especially A. Ya. Efimenko are sparingly presented. Many researchers of the community did not find a place in the "Essays" at all. Pavlov-Sylvansky's point of view is so succinctly conveyed that it seems distorted.

In generalizing Soviet works on the history of Russia, the concept of community development in the period of feudalism is either absent or does not significantly differ from the Pavlov-Silvansky scheme given above. Thus, in the study of B. D. Grekov, 30 after a detailed analysis of the vervi according to Russkaya Pravda, the community disappears, so as not to appear again until the end of the XVII century, which ends the presentation of the material. In " Essays on the History of the USSR. The period of feudalism " rural commune from the 14th to the 17th centuries is celebrated only on the black-sown lands .31 On private land, the peasant community does not seem to exist. The volume of Essays devoted to the seventeenth century contains the phrase: "According to the petitions of individual peasants, the owner could give an order to turn over the land, reduce the tax, provide benefits, but did not remove responsibility from the "world" for

27 N. P. Pavlov-Silvansky. Feudalism in appanage Russia, St. Petersburg, 1910, pp. 114-115.

28 Ibid., p. 136.

29 "Essays on the history of Historical Science in the USSR", vol. III, Moscow, 1969, pp. 197-202, 300.

30 B. D. Grekov. Krestyany na Rus ' s drevneyshikh vremen do XVII v. Kn. I-II. M. 1952-1954.

31 " Essays on the history of the USSR. The period of feudalism. IX-XV centuries "Part I. M. 1953, pp. 117, 122, 277; part II. M. 1953, pp. 37, 40, 42-44;" Essays on the history of the USSR. The period of feudalism. The end of the XV century-the beginning of the XVII century. " Moscow, 1955, pp. 40, 43, 45, 142.

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the fact that "zbavoshnoe tax in vain was not" and that the total amount of duties is not reduced " 32 . However, the author of this text A. A. Novoselsky avoids the conclusion about the occurrence of inversions and partial repartitions in that period. In the first quarter of the 18th century, "the allotment of land to landlords and monastic peasants and the conversion of their land plots to small estates were carried out by the feudal lord himself or his clerk. In the larger estates in Great Russia, the lay community usually took part in the distribution and redistribution of allotment land."33 This observation is also not generalized into the thesis about the growing role of the "world", about the spread of inversions. Finally, the next volume of Essays contains a significant formulation: "Communal land use, associated with the redistribution of fields after a certain number of years, was predominant in central Russia already in the half of the XVIII century. It was a long-established fact here, and moreover not only among the landowner peasants, but also in the state, palace and monastery volosts. " 34 Here Pavlov-Silvansky's point of view is somewhat clarified : redistribution prevailed in the central regions not from the second half of the XVIII century, but "in the half of the XVIII century" and even "long ago" before that. In general, in this generalizing work, the authors follow the stated concept, although they do not refer to it.

Another typical example. The "History of the USSR from Ancient Times to the present day" first states that in the XI-XII centuries there was a verv - "initially a tribal, and later a neighboring community" 35 . In the next volume, it is stated that "in the Russian countryside of the XIV - XV centuries, communal orders were preserved", although this phrase is not deciphered. Private ownership of arable land in the black volosts is not denied: the community members "owned separate plots of manor and arable land, which was inherited within the peasant family. Forests, pastures, and water were shared by all community members. " 36 However, the purchase and sale of land, which is typical for these areas, is passed over in silence. In the following account, the community disappears for a long time, saying only that in the second half of the XV century in the Moscow Principality, villages from one or two courtyards began to "converge" and expand to 10-15 courtyards37 , and by the middle of the XVI century. "villages were small, in three or four yards"38. Only when it comes to the Petrine era is it noted that some landlords "introduced equalizing repartitions, which became widespread at a later time" 39 . In this case, the discrepancy with the Pavlov-Silvansky concept is more fundamental. For him, the emergence of redivision is a process of development of the community itself, which, however, proceeds under the influence of the ruling class. In the" History of the USSR from Ancient Times to the present day", the redistribution was simply "introduced" by the landlords.

The gaps in the presentation of the history of the rural community in generalizing works reflect the fact that Soviet historiography for a long period had almost no special works devoted to the community in Russia.

32 " Essays on the history of the USSR. The period of feudalism. XVII century.", Moscow, 1955, p. 174.

33 " Essays on the history of the USSR. The period of feudalism. Russia in the first quarter of the 18th century Transformations of Peter I". Moscow, 1954, p. 158 (the author of the chapter is A. L. Shapiro).

34 " Essays on the history of the USSR. The period of feudalism. Russia in the second quarter of the XVIII century. Peoples of the USSR in the first half of the XVIII century", Moscow, 1957, p. 63 (authors-K. V. Sivkov and S. I. Volkov).

35 "History of the USSR from ancient times to the present day", Vol. 1, Moscow, 1966, p. 535 (author-B. A. Rybakov).

36 Ibid., Vol. II, Moscow, 1966, p. 70 (the author of the chapter is L. V. Cherepnin).

37 Ibid., pp. 107-108 (by A. L. Khoroshkevich).

38 Ibid., p. 142 (by A. A. Zimin).

39 Ibid., Vol. III, Moscow, 1967, p. 213 (the author of the chapter is N. I. Pavlenko).

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A. L. Shapiro, in his 1939 article, showed the draught-like feudal character of the peasant community on private land in the first half of the XVIII century .40 Later, in another work, he revealed a direct dependence of the form of land distribution in the community on the system of taxation of peasants .41 At the same time, A. L. Shapiro was looking for, although, in our opinion, he did not find, "weak remnants of ancient communal land ownership" and such repartitions that "would not pursue tax purposes". D. I. Petrikeev, based on earlier material, confirmed A. L. Shapiro's conclusion that the community, "despite the well-known remnants of primitive communal land ownership". It was mainly of a "draught and police nature", and in the 17th century "the draught-serf character of the community was most pronounced" 42 . What were the "known remnants of primitive relations", remained unclear. A number of other works were published that dealt with the problems of the community in different regions of Russia .43 A significant step in the study of the community in the central districts on private land was made by V. A. Alexandrov44 . His monograph contains a lot of archival material, but the author refused to consider it chronologically, and this somewhat weakens the significance of his conclusions. The material is presented thematically, so that the entire period of the XVII-XIX centuries looks like a single moment, the community is devoid of dynamics. And since there is naturally much more material from the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than from the previous century and a half , 45 it is precisely the late peredelnaya community that becomes representative of the entire period indicated in the title.

V. A. Alexandrov's monograph no longer speaks of "remnants of primitiveness" 46. He considers the community as a feudal (estate peasant) institution, formed in the course of contradictory interaction between feudal lords and peasants. However, the author is clearly inconsistent. In some cases, he claims that the community in the fiefdoms was "based on private feudal law", which determined both "the status of the latter" and "its functions and norms of existence" 47. In other cases, he claims that "the communal principle of land ownership remained dominant" 48, that the community prevented serfs from becoming slaves, as if only the feudal lords dreamed of .49 The material in the book (perhaps due to the nature of the sources used, mainly the landowner's instructions for managing fiefdoms) clearly confirms the complete subordination of the community to the fiefdom and does not confirm that the community could seriously oppose the landowner.

40 A. L. Shapiro. Peasant community in large fiefdoms of the first half of the XVIII century. "Scientific Notes" of Saratov University. Series of the Faculty of History, vol. I (XIV), 1939.

41 A. L. Shapiro. Transition from the povytnaya to povenechnaya system of taxation of peasants with property duties. "Yearbook on the agricultural history of Eastern Europe. 1960". Kiev, 1962.

42 D. I. Petrikeev. Large serfdom of the XVII century (based on the patrimony of the boyar B. I. Morozov). L. 1967.

43 L. V. Danilova. Essays on the history of land ownership and economy in the Novgorod land in the XIV-XV centuries. Moscow, 1955; Yu. G. Alekseev. Agrarian and social history of North-Eastern Russia in the XV-XVI centuries. Pereyaslavsky uyezd. Moscow-L. 1966.

44 V. A. Aleksandrov. Rural community in Russia (XVII-beginning of the XIX century). Moscow, 1976; see also. Land-transfer type of rural community in late feudal Russia. Voprosy Istorii, 1975, No. 10.

45 The author acknowledges this on page 45.

46 It seems to us that the authors of the reviews of this monograph (Istoriya SSSR, 1975, No. 5) A. P. Okladnikov, N. N. Pokrovsky, and M. A. Barg did not mention this fundamental step taken by V. A. Alexandrov in their work.

47 V. A. Aleksandrov. Rural community in Russia (XVII-early XIX centuries), pp. 51, 81, 84, 111.

48 Ibid., p. 237.

49 Ibid., pp. 314-315.

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In recent years, most of the problems in the history of the Russian community50 have been discussed . Its periodization, the reasons for the emergence of equalization divisions, the attitude of the Chernaya volost to the pre - feudal free community, on the one hand, and to the community on private land, on the other, and the fate of the community after the Great October Socialist Revolution are discussed. However, the very fact of the late appearance of the peredelnaya community is not disputed by anyone, which allows us to draw a number of important conclusions.

The negative conclusion is that this fact in itself does not indicate the absence of a community in the previous period, since the community is not exhausted by redistribution, just as it is not exhausted by land ownership in general. However, it is still certain that the community in the XVII - XVIII centuries. It has been strengthened in relation to its members as an administrator of the land, and therefore as a social institution. It also follows that the equalization of land use and the features of "democracy" that are associated with it are new phenomena, not archaic, not directly inherited from primitive society, that between this redistribution and democracy based on the non-division of the collective, there lies a very long period when the foundations of democracy were much weaker and it itself was much weaker. also, apparently, was weaker.

The path that the Russian community took in the Middle Ages and modern times is unique, and therefore its explanations must be specific. They should be looked for in the peculiarities (social, economic, and maybe even political) of Russia. This does not mean that factors external to the community were necessarily decisive. The possibility of independent social creativity of the masses of the people, even under the political and economic domination of an alien force, should not be underestimated. At the same time, any general theory of the development of rural communities into communities in a class society cannot ignore the Russian version, however peculiar it may be. This theory should include as an integral part the provision on the possibility, under certain conditions, of strengthening the community, expanding its functions, and the triumph (albeit temporary) of communal land ownership over private land ownership.

The theoretical importance of the latter provision is also indicated by materials on a number of other countries. As mentioned above, the community of Western Europe experienced a period of strengthening of communal land rights. In some areas, for example, in the Pyrenees, this trend in the late XVIII - early XIX centuries led to the emergence of the institution of land redistribution .51 India in the Middle Ages was one of the indisputably "communal" countries.

50 S. M. Kashtanov, Yu. R. Klokman. Soviet literature of 1965-1966 on the history of Russia up to the XIX century. "History of the USSR", 1967, N 5; Yu. G. Alekseev. V. I. Lenin on some features of the Russian community of the late XIX century. "V. I. Lenin and problems of History", L. 1970; V. P. Danilov. On the question of the character and significance of the peasant land community in Russia. "Problemy sotsial'no-ekonomicheskoi istorii Rossii" (Problems of socio-economic History of Russia), Moscow, 1971. Community among the peoples of the USSR in the post-October period (On the question of the typology of the community in the territory of the Soviet republics). "Peoples of Asia and Africa", 1973, N 3; "Abstracts of reports and reports of the XIII session of the Inter-Republican Symposium on Agricultural History of Eastern Europe (Vilnius-Kaunas, September 1971)" (theses by D. I. Raskin, I. Ya.Froyanov, A. L. Shapiro). Moscow, 1971; " Theses of reports and reports of the XIV session of the Inter-Republican Symposium on Agricultural history of Eastern Europe (Minsk-Grodno, September 25-29, 1972) "(theses by L. B. Alaev, L. V. Danilova, S. D. Zak, A. P. Pyankov, Yu. G. Alekseev, E. A. Lutsky, V. P. Danilov). Issue II. M. 1972; " Problems of peasant land ownership and internal policy of Russia. Pre-October period". L. 1972; "Yearbook on agrarian history". Issue VI. Problems of the history of the Russian community. Vologda. 1976.

51 I. V. Luchitsky. A land community in the Pyrenees. Otechestvennye Zapiski, 1883, NN 9-10, 12,

page 107

The Indian community is generally regarded as the most archaic and stagnant. However, a closer examination showed that the underlying Jajmani system (a system of mutual service for members of different castes) "could not have originated in the bowels of a primitive community... It could only have developed under conditions of far-reaching property stratification and division of labor, which took the form of narrow professional specialization, that is, at a relatively high stage of social development. " 52 The available data on land ownership in the community show the predominance of private ownership, starting at least from antiquity, and the gradual restriction of private rights in favor of communal ones in the late Middle Ages. In the 17th and 18th centuries, in areas that were particularly heavily taxed (Andhra and Bundel-khand), there was a draft redistribution of land. The unit of taxation and simultaneously allotment of land was a team of oxen with a plow 53 . In Japan, the rural community was formed in the XV-XVI centuries under the influence of measures implemented by the ruling class, and redistribution in it resumed in the XVII century, and they were carried out by feudal lords .54 In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Afghan tribes of Afghanistan and present-day North-West Pakistan show a wide range of community forms with varying degrees of patronymic (clan) relations and the level of communal land ownership. A.D. Davydov showed that here various ways of dividing land were explained not by the level of socio-economic development of the tribes, but by geographical and historical conditions, where they lived. In particular, small-scale land ownership, which affected a number of tribes, had a great influence on the appearance of divisions to which each, even a small plot of land, was subjected, and periodic redistribution. The most equalizing form of redivision "by mouth" is observed in the Marwats, a group that has lost its tribal and patronymic community to the greatest extent .55
Some of the mentioned phenomena of the" revival " of the community received concrete confirmation from the material of the respective countries. Others, apparently, can also be explained. However, the very possibility and necessity of a concrete historical explanation of the evolution of communal institutions in a class society indicates that, firstly, this evolution cannot be understood on the basis of the idea of the steady disintegration and disintegration of the community alone, and, secondly, it is necessary to theoretically foresee different types of communal evolution depending on specific conditions.

The problem of including so-called "shared land ownership" in the theoretical understanding of a community is particularly complex. This form is recorded and studied (to varying degrees) in many peoples in different periods. On the territory of the USSR, these include shared and collective villages of the North and Northeast in the XIV-XVII centuries 56, quarter land ownership of the southern regions 57, Syabrin land ownership of the Criminal Code-

52 M. K. Kudryavtsev. Community and Caste in Hindustan, Moscow, 1971, p. 150.

53 L. B. Alaev. Some issues of development of the Indian rural community in the late XVIII-early XIX century. Voprosy Istorii, 1962, No. 8, pp. 91-96. Social structure of the Indian village (Uttar Pradesh territory, XIX century). Moscow, 1976, pp. 117-123.

54 I. G. Pozdnyakov. Some questions of the Japanese rural community of the XIII-XVI centuries. "Peoples of Asia and Africa", 1965, N 1, pp. 71, 74.

55 A. D. Davydov. The Afghan village (rural community and stratification of the peasantry), Moscow, 1969, pp. 176-195.

56 A. Y. Efimenko. Studies of folk life. Issue I. Customary Law, Moscow, 1884; L. V. Danilova. Edict. op.; A. P. Pyankov. Rural community of North-Eastern Russia in the XIV-XV centuries. "Yearbook on the agrarian history of Eastern Europe, 1961". Riga. 1963, pp. 100-107.

57 N. A. Blagoveshchenskiy. Quaternary law, Moscow, 1890; K. M. P[ankee] V. Quarter land ownership (according to Ryazan statistics). Russkaya Mysl, 1886, No. 2.

page 108

rainy 58, rezesh landowning of Moldavia 59 . Shared land ownership emerged in the Rhodope Region of Bulgaria in the 19th and 20th centuries .60 Sources of the X-XII centuries indicate the existence of shared villages in Burgundy 61 . We have already mentioned the "Gehoferschaften" - shared communities in the Rhineland in the XIII-XVIII centuries. In India, shared land ownership under various names (pattidari in Northern India, bhagdari in Gujarat, pasungarei in Tamil Nadu) is celebrated from the 11th to the 19th centuries .

Shared land ownership, on the one hand, is characterized by a high degree of communality. All land is considered to be a single entity belonging to the entire collective of community members, each of whom owns not a specific plot, but a fixed share of the common property. Sometimes this common law is even more pronounced in the form of redistricting (land swaps). On the other hand, the right to a share is a private right. The size of the share is determined not by the community, but by inheritance rules or documents (including bills of sale). The rights of individual disposal of shares are very broad, up to the right of alienation. In general, this form of land ownership cannot be placed in a series of successive stages of gradual weakening of communal and strengthening of private land rights, because it is based on a combination of developed private property rights and strong communal collective cohesion.

The spread of shared land ownership on the territory of Eurasia suggests some common causes that caused it to come to life. One of them, in all likelihood , is the development of broad structures based on family ties (patronymic or "clan"). However, the very formation of patronymic structures in each case requires an explanation based on specific material. The apparent independence of the share from economic and taxable possibilities suggests that shared land ownership could exist only in conditions of comparative mildness of feudal exploitation of community members. One of the recorded ways of the emergence of shared villages is their development from privileged private land ownership. This should include quarter land ownership, which came out of the possessions of odnodvortsy. The Rezeshs of Moldavia were largely descendants of the boyars-medium and small feudal landowners .63 It seems to us that the opinion expressed by B. H. Baden-Powell in the last century that Pattidari communities in Northern India were created, as a rule, as a result of the fragmentation of private fiefdoms was confirmed .64 Thus, the communal features observed in shared land ownership can in some cases be secondary, which have emerged on the basis of a specific evolution of the forms of private (and even feudal in content) property. Thus, the theoretical concepts of the evolution of the rural community, when it becomes an element of class society, need to be further developed. Comprehensive environmental impact

58 I. V. Luchitsky. Syabry and syabrinoe land ownership in Little Russia. "Severny Vestnik", 1889, NN 1, 2.

59 D. M. Dragnev, P. V. Sovetov. On Rezesh land ownership in Moldavia of the XVI-mid-XVIII centuries. "Yearbook on the agrarian history of Eastern Europe, 1962". Minsk. 1964.

60 L. V. Markov. Shared land ownership in the Rhodope Region of Bulgaria (XIX-the first quarter of the XX century). "Soviet Ethnography", 1963, N 5.

61 N. P. Gratsiansky. The Burgundian village in the X-XII centuries, Moscow, 1935, pp. 141-144.

62 L. B. Alaev. On the question of North Indian communities such as Zamindari, Pattidari and Bhaiyachara. "Peoples of Asia and Africa", 1962, N 5, pp. 105-106; "History of India in the Middle Ages", Moscow, 1968, pp. 167-169, 341-342.

63 P. V. Sovetov. Studies on the history of feudalism in Moldavia, Vol. I. Essays on the history of land ownership in the XV-XVIII centuries. Chisinau. 1972, pp. 456-466.

64 See L. B. Alaev. Social structure of the Indian Village, pp. 75-97.

page 109

the impact on the community often leads to a change in the trend of decomposition by the trend of strengthening the community and expanding its activities. At the same time, the community can acquire new functions that were previously unknown to it, or it can extend to groups of the rural population and territories that were not previously covered by the community. Such phenomena as the existence of a free peasantry, patronymic structures ("secondary clans "or" clans"), communal land ownership of various types, including land redistribution, etc., cannot be considered as obviously survivable, necessarily inherited from the pre-class past. The "experience method", or the method of retrospective study of the community, when a hypothetical earlier stage of the community is restored from the preserved" remnants", when applied to developed class structures at the current level of knowledge, it turns out to be untenable, because determining what exactly is a relic often depends on the subjective views of the researcher. Territorial and ethnic variants of rural neighbor communities may differ fundamentally from each other in their origin, social structure, and direction of evolution. The task is to create a typology of these variants based on a concrete study of the impact of natural, demographic, economic, social, legal and ethnic factors on the community.

page 110


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