Mir (village community)
Mir ( Russian мир ) or Obschtschina ( община ) is the name for the Russian village community. All the farmers in a village belonged to it. The land they used was periodically redistributed among them. In this way, the Mir differed fundamentally from the rural regional authorities of Western and Central Europe.
history
The village community dates back to the Old Slavic era and has been involved in the feudalization process of Russian society since the 10th century . In this system, the village was collectively liable to the feudal lord for all taxes and labor (fron).
Essentially, this field community was about the management of agricultural land. Every farmer should have enough land to use so that he could sustain himself and meet his obligations to the state and landowners. The arable land was divided into useful areas according to soil quality and other criteria. Each household could claim one or more strips of land according to the number of its adult members, with redistribution taking place at regular intervals.
With the reform carried out under Tsar Alexander II in 1861, which included the abolition of serfdom , the Mir acquired an even greater importance: in addition to the administrative function, he became the owner of the agricultural land ceded to the farmers, but in return was collectively liable for the financial services to the Country. In this way, the problem of state resource acquisition could be solved in a lean way, because the establishment of a sufficiently large tax administration would have overwhelmed the tsarist state apparatus in the vast empire.
From an economic point of view, the Mir stood in the way of a rational operation. The periodic redistribution largely ruled out a peasant interest in improving the soil through fertilization, amelioration or similar measures. Since the farmers always had to expect to lose the land they had improved after the next redistribution, they generally shied away from long-term measures. In addition, the constant reallocation favored the fragmentation of the land, which is detrimental to efficient management. Because it came to extreme mixed situations , which made it necessary to maintain the Flurzwange and the old three-field economy .
Due to numerous concessions to the aristocratic landowners, the wording and reality of the reform carried out in 1861 diverged widely: on the one hand, the farmers who had become “free” were not given enough cultivation area for their own cultivation, on the other hand, the farmers were burdened with high taxes and, depending on the case, interest on the debt State on. This fact, coupled with a growing peasant population with unchanged arable land, led to a deep agricultural crisis in the second half of the 19th century.
The rural community was considerably weakened by the Stolypin reforms of 1906, because the peasants now had the opportunity to leave it and manage the land as private property. This led to an increase in agricultural production, but also accelerated social differentiation in the village.
An analogy to the collective farms ( kolkhozes ), which were introduced by the Soviet government in 1928/32, was the joint tax obligation. The big difference was that the kolkhoz owned the harvest and paid the farmers for their work from the proceeds of the sale (at prices set by the state). The farmer living in Mir was the owner of the product of his labor and had to pay his share of the village taxes from his harvest or sales proceeds.
Slavophile thinkers saw the existence of the village Mir as proof that the Russian people allegedly do not strive for "bourgeois" gainful employment, but are chosen to solve the social problems of humanity. For this reason the Mir was also often idealized. The village community also played an important role in discussions between the Narodniks and Russian Marxists .
Individual evidence
- ^ Richard Lorenz: Social history of the Soviet Union 1: 1917-1945, Frankfurt am Main 1976, p. 307
literature
- Richard Lorenz : Social history of the Soviet Union 1: 1917-1945, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1976, ISBN 3-518-00654-1 .
- Richard Pipes : Russia before the revolution. State and society in the tsarist empire . Beck, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-406-06720-4 ; dtv, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-423-04423-3 .
- Berthold Krapp: Peasant Need in Russia and Bolshevik Revolution . Klett, Stuttgart 1957, 1994, ISBN 3-12-423300-X .
- Günther Stökl : Russian history. From the beginnings to the present (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 244). 4th enlarged edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-520-24404-7 .
