THE INVENTION OF THE RUSSIAN RURAL COMMUNE: HAXTHAUSEN AND THE EVIDENCE

Abstract

In the 1840s the German Romantic August von Haxthausen originated the idea, in a book reporting on his travels through Russia, that collective ownership of land and other assets was integral to the traditional culture of the Russian rural commune. Russian intellectuals accepted this idea and made it the basis for political ideals and social theories (even after 1917, as in the case of Aleksandr Chayanov). The 1861 Emancipation Act had brought collective ownership of land into existence by law, but Haxthausen's own theory – which related to Yaroslavl' province in the first half of the nineteenth century – has never been tested. This article does that, and finds that nearly all parts of Haxthausen's theory, insofar as they are testable, are false. This does not mean that Haxthausen's theory was false everywhere in Russia, but it was false for the place he advanced it about, and may therefore be false elsewhere. No cultural or ownership pattern of rural society, therefore, should be assumed a priori to hold for the whole of Russia. Only painstaking, detailed local studies will tell us which patterns held in which parts of this vast and heterogeneous country.