Untitled - OUDL Home

trade in corn (1762). Contemporaries considered thatthis increase was due to serfdom, or at least was impossiblewithout serfdom. In any case it was true that there wasat one and the same time an extension and intensificationof serfdom and an increase in production.(iii) The working practice of the poll-tax system, inconjunction with the increase in population, was animportant cause in the development of the communeboth in its agricultural, economic aspect and its fiscal,administrative aspect.The origins and development of the commune, or mir,have been even more hotly debated by Russian historiansthan those of serfdom, ever since the issue of theemancipation of serfs made the commune of centralimportance. As has been emphasized earlier in thischapter (see pp. 136, 138), it was decided at the timeof emancipation (1861) to establish the commune legallyas an agricultural economic unit and as an institution forvarious fiscal and administrative purposes. The supportersof the commune belonged to various camps.Some, like the Slavophils (see p. 241), saw in it anoriginal Russian institution born of the people andcapable of fending off the evils of Western individualisticcompetition. Others, like the populist socialist-revolutionaries,saw in it a means of achieving an agrariansocialism without passing through a long period ofcapitalist development.At the time of emancipation most of the Russianpeasantry were grouped in communes, of varying sizes,composed sometimes of one village, sometimes of partsof one large village, sometimes of groups of scatteredsettlements. The most essential usual features of thecommune from the agricultural and economic standpointwere: (i) that its membership was hereditary, thoughnewcomers could be admitted; (ii) that its membersworked land by families, but (except in a minority ofcommunes where holdings were hereditary) periodicallyredistributed their strip holdings scattered in the (usuallythree-course) open fields, in accordance with eitherworking strength, or taxation and other obligations, orthe number of 'eaters' in each family; (iii) that the155