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organization continued for long to persist. In NewRussia (cf. pp. 46-47) the communal system was by nomeans general, and the frequent absence of the threefieldsystem of necessity prevented the growth of landredistribution in the manner practised in central Russia.Again, in the Far North and in Siberia conditions resultedin very different developments of the agricultural commune.Here, as elsewhere, it grew up on the original basis ofassociated labour and of landowning and working by thejoint family, usually composed of three generations; butthe northern communes, nearly all of which were composednot of serfs but of those who eventually becamestate peasants, developed from joint family workingthrough a complicated system of 'share' landowning toindividual private holdings, which in the eighteenthcentury led to wide variations in peasant wealth and aprolonged struggle between the poorer peasants andthe richer peasants and landowning burghers. In thestruggle the government, in its efforts to organize andensure the dues and services of these state peasants, ineffect took sides against the rich peasants, with the resultthat in the half-century or so following 1754 there cameinto being in the far northern provinces, under theinfluence of a series of measures taken by the state, anew form of equalitarian communal land system withperiodical redistribution, much as in central Russia.Thus, the agricultural commune, as far as it can betraced since the sixteenth century, developed in differentways and at different paces in different parts of theimmense land of the Russians. Gradually, in mostregions it became more and more influenced, directlyand indirectly, by state action (especially in regard totaxation) and by obligations to the serf-owners.Nevertheless, always behind this or that edict, thisor that ruling of officials, this or that action by the serfowners,there lay the reactions of the peasants themselvesto the measures imposed from above; reactions thatresulted in widely varying actual working practices intheir continual struggle for "and with the land. At thebasis of the agricultural commune lay age-old folkways,the deep sediment of peasant customary law and practice,158