Russian Village Communities
group · 2 works · 2 mentions · 3 anchored passages
Russian peasants · Russian village · Russian village-communities · Russian villages · the peasants
in the texts
Ancient Law
Russian peasant communities organized as agnatic village brotherhoods, distinguished by periodic repartition of land among families.
In the Russian villages, however, the substance of the property ceases to be looked upon as indivisible, and separate proprietary claims are allowed freely to grow up, but then the progress of separation is peremptorily arrested after it has continued a certain time.
In the assumption of an agnatic connection between the villagers, in the blending of personal rights with privileges of ownership, and in a variety of spontaneous provisions for internal administration, the Russian village appears to be a nearly exact repetition of the Indian Community;
Lectures on the Early History of Institutions
Village-communities of Russia, cited as retaining strong belief in common ancestry.
The Russian peasants of the same village really believe, we are told, in their common ancestry, and accordingly we find that in Russia the arable lands of the village are periodically re-distributed, and that the village artificer, even should he carry his tools to a distance, works for the profit of his co-villagers.
The secret of the comparatively slight departure of the Russian village-communities from what may be believed to have been the primitive type, appears to me to lie in the ancient Russian practice of colonisation, by which swarms were constantly thrown off from the older villages to settle somewhere in the enormous wastes;