Complaints were therefore made, and petitions addressed, in which the old division of the village area was declared to be obnoxious, and an equality of shares was demanded as a necessary condition for the regular fulfilment by each village of its financial obligations towards the State. An instance of such a request is that presented by the peasants of the village of Petrovsk in the year 1725, in which they ask to have an equal share of land allotted to each member of the commune, all other kinds of allotment being contrary to justice. Similar demands must have been made repeatedly before the members of the legislative commission, convened by Catherine the Second, received orders to protest against the requirements of those who wanted all the land of a village to be distributed in equal shares according to the number of souls, notwithstanding that these lands had been fertilised by the work and private industry of the first settlers.*For the reasons just mentioned, a redistribution of the land was made at least every time the Government revised its taxation returns; such revision occurring every nineteenth year. It was felt necessary to establish a direct relation between the number of persons living in a household, and the amount of land possessed by the household, and the fact, that the actual number of such persons did not correspond to those enumerated in the taxation returns, even after the lapse of a few years, led some communes to have recourse to more frequent divisions. It is in this way that we may explain how it was brought about, that redistributions came to be made every sixth or even every third year. We hear of no yearly distribution because the three field system, still prevailing in Russia, required at least a three years' rotation of the crops. It was not always the country people who took the initiative in an equal re-allotment of the soil according to the number of persons taxed. Mr Zabelin has brought forward instances, in which such allotments were made on the initiative of the lord of the manor, and Mr Schimanov has produced a curious case, in which such re-allotment was made by the direct order of a provincial Governor, who thought that justice required that the number of shares, owned by each household, should correspond to the number of souls composing it.
This happened not longer ago than the second half of the seventeenth century in the Government of Kharkov, where inequality of shares had been up to that time the general rule.
It is only by a general agreement between the people and the authorities that we can explain the rapid expansion of the present system. We do not find any trace of such redistributions before the end of the seventeenth century, when the borough of Schouia began to make new allotments of ground every ten years.*Having now finished with the past history of the Russian village commune, we shall proceed to the study of its modern arrangements. These have formed the subject of very curious investigations, which have been carried on during the last few years by a number of young Russian economists, employed by the elective councils or "zemstva" of our provinces. Their work will probably be as valuable to coming generations, as that performed in England a century ago by Messrs Sinclair and Marshall, or as that, which in our own day is still going on in India under the enlightened supervision of the Indian Settlement Commissioners. Ishall make free use of the rich material, which these skilful and untiring workers have accumulated, in order to present to you a picture of the prevailing system, the mir or village community of to-day.
According to the law of emancipation promulgated the 19th February 1861, the peasantry continue to possess an organisation quite distinct from that of the other classes of society. The ancient "volost" (or mark) is preserved or rather revived, and the villages are, as they were centuries ago, the administrative units of which it is formed. The volost and the village have alike their elected authorities, the right of election being based on a kind of universal suffrage, exercised by all the grown-up men of the community. But, differing in this from the French "commune," and the sections composing it, the Russian volost and village accord no right of suffrage to persons belonging to any other social position than that of peasant (krestianine, a word, the first meaning of which was Christian).
