Household economies and communal conflicts on a Russian serf estate, 1800-1817

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1993 by Edgar Melton

Introduction

In serf Russia, as in other rural societies, the household and and the village community were the twin pillars of peasant life. (1) Both the household and the commune in serf Russia have been the focus of considerable research over the last two decades, and a new scholarly literature, based on intensive archival research, has begun to fill the gaps in our knowledge and understanding of Russian serfdom. Thanks primarily to the work of Steven Hoch, we now know that the serf household functioned not only as an economic and family unit, but also, in many cases, as a crucial center of authority, discipline, and social control in the village. (2) As several scholars have shown, moreover, the commune customarily supported inheritance strategies aimed at conserving the household as a unit, even if it came at the expense of individual members of the household. (3) Recent studies of the commune--largely the work of Soviet scholars have emphasized the broad scope of communal governance, and the surprising degree of autonomy the commune enjoyed, despite formal seigniorial control. (4)

One crucial aspect of peasant life, however, remains largely neglected--communal conflict. With the exception of Steven Hoch's recent book, most treatments of rural conflict in the Russian countryside have focused primarily on confrontations between the commune and the higher authorities, whether state or seigniorial. (5) This is in keeping with an interpretive approach taken by many scholars in "peasant studies." James C. Scott, for example, has discovered a "moral economy" in the peasant communities of Southeast Asia. Scott argues that the appeal to a moral economy (which recognized the right of even the poorest villager to a subsistence) provided a basis for collective action in the peasant communities of Southeast Asia. According to Scott, the claims of the state, or the landlord, to a share of the peasants' income lost "legitimacy" (in the eyes of the peasants) to the degree that they "infringed on what was judged to be the minimal culturally defined subsistence level." (6)

Scott does not impose his model wholesale on all peasant societies, and, indeed, he admits the relative weakness of the moral economy (and the corresponding weakness of collective action) in peasant communities with a high level of social stratification and economic differentiation. (7) At the same time, however, his is perhaps the most cogent argument in favor of the view that most rural conflicts pitted the peasant community against the higher authorities, e.g. state or landlord.

The problem with this view is that it tends to smooth over internal conflicts within the peasant community. As David Sabean writes,

Recent work on resistance in early modern society has concentrated

attention on the village community as a solitary organization

confronting demands from the outside.... By narrowly defining

resistance, by selecting a specific set of documents, and by

neglecting to look at the everyday practice of Herrschaft, the new

studies fail to examine how people at different levels of society

are implicated in the apparatus of domination. (8)

At one level, of course, the commune was an institution that indeed represented, and sometimes protected, the interests of its members against claims and threats from the outside world. As we shall see, however, the commune was also an arena in which individual households or factions clashed and competed over access to communal resources, or, more often, over distribution of collective obligations: taxes, rents, and military conscription.

In serf Russia, as in other "peasant states," the commune functioned as part of the administrative structure of both the state and the seignior. This created and perpetuated many conflicts within the village community. The Russian serf had to function in a dualistic environment in which economic production belonged in the sphere of the household, while obligations (to state and seignior) were the collective responsibility of the commune. Since the wealth and productive capacity of the individual household often depended on how much (or how little) of the aggregate state and seigniorial burdens it had to bear, the community was often shot through with hostility and distrust. In a system where the commune had to render a fixed amount of obligations (regardless of whether each household contributed its share), one household's gain (a reduction in its share of rents and taxes, or having its males spared from conscription) inevitably shifted the burden to another. (10)

While some recent scholars have cited cases of communal conflict, the problem as a whole has not been systematically studied. This neglect may stem, in part, from lack of a conceptual framework for analyzing the evidence that appears in estate records and other sources. In this article, I hope both to establish a conceptual framework, and to illustrate it with a case study of a serf commune in the early nineteenth century.

The Concept of the Peasant State