The History of Liberalism in Russia

Chapter 11

133 The idea that it was the state’s duty to secure the peasants’ livelihood, and in general to care for them in the spirit of paternalism, became particularly entrenched during Alexander III’s reign. Accordingly, the idea, apparent in the 1861 statutes, of allowing the peasants to enjoy rights under civil law and making their allotment land into genuine private property receded progressively. The land allocated to the peasants was regarded more and more consistently as a special land bank, whose purpose was to secure the livelihood of the peasants as farming people. The survival of this resource therefore had to be secured in law. The fair distribution of this land bank among the peasants had to be—at least up to a point—given legal force. This reinforced the special nature of the peasants’ legal position concerning property, which inevitably deepened the peasants’ isolation as a social estate from the rest of the empire’s population. A series of important laws were enacted that embodied all these tendencies, while Senate interpretations of the law, as we have already seen, extensively and systematically further reinforced the special status of the peasant estate. Of these laws the following must by highlighted here: The law of March 18, 1886, making the division of farmstead property among the members of the farmstead more difficult The law of 1889, creating the office of zemskie nachal’niki and considerably increasing the powers of the volost’ courts chapter 11 The Peasant Question in the Reign of alexander iii alexander iii’s legislation—Limitation of the peasants’ property rights through this legislation and Senate rulings—consolidation of the view that peasant land allocations were a state resource— Reasons used by the government to justify the protection of agricultural communes—Spread of concepts of civil law among the peasants 134 • the peasant question in the reign of alexander iii The law of June 8, 1893, laying down regulations for the redistribution of land within the rural commune and, among other things, stipulating that the general repartition of land was meant to take place at intervals of no more than twelve years The law of December 14, 1893, making the sale of any land (even by the commune) extremely difficult (because of the repeal of Article 165 of the law on land buyouts) and making severance from the commune virtually impossible According to this last law, the restrictions on the peasant’s right of disposal over his land were not even removed on completion of his buyout payments. This resulted in these restrictions becoming a quasi-inescapable feature of peasant land ownership. As described above, the Senate often (but not always) defined peasant ownership of land as ownership by legal entities—the farmstead and the commune. This view was completely alien to the peasants, something that did not escape Witte’s attention. Witte told the Extraordinary Committee (dealt with below): “Research shows that the right to own communal land is held by the commune as a legal entity, but in the view of the peasants (who after all do not understand what a legal entity is), the real landowner is the state, which allocates to the members of the commune the land to cultivate for a set period of time.”1 This precisely reflected the views of the peasantry, except that Witte thought that the only reason the peasants had not themselves adopted the Senate’s view that land was the private property of the commune as a legal entity was that they did not understand what a legal entity was. Witte’s explanation is too superficial. There is no proof that the peasants were incapable of understanding a legal entity. The Russian peasant had never proved to be intellectually inferior, and the basic concepts of civil law are everywhere in accord with basic common sense. The foundations of civil law, law with over a thousand-year history, are like theological texts. They can be the subject of complex academic and theological debate, even though their fundamental content is accessible even to an uneducated person. The peasant’s view that the land allocated to him belonged to the state had much deeper roots than the inability to understand a legal entity. It derives from the legal ideology of serfdom and the legal consciousness, which was fostered in the peasantry under that system and which only slowly declined after the emancipation . This was, therefore, just at a time when the other social estates had developed a legal consciousness well...