Obshchina
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Obshchina (Russian: ) is a term used in Imperial Russia to refer to peasant communities, as opposed to individual farmsteads, or khutors. The term derives from the word "obshchiy", i.e., "common". This institution was effectively destroyed by the Stolypin agrarian reforms (1906-1914) and the Russian Revolution followed by the collectivization of the USSR.
Even after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, a peasant in his everyday work normally had little independence from obshchina, governed at the village level (mir) by the full assembly of the community (skhod). Among its duties were control and redistribution of the common land and forest (if such existed), levying recruits for military service, and imposing punishments for minor crimes. Obshchina was also held responsible for taxes underpaid by members, as well as for their crimes. This type of shared responsibility was known as кругова́я пору́ка; (English transliteration: krugovaya poruka), although the exact meaning of this expression changed over the time.
The 19th-century Russian philosophers attached signal importance to obshchina as a unique feature distinguishing Russia from other countries. Alexander Herzen, for example, hailed this pre-capitalist institution as a germ of the future socialist society. His Slavophile opponent Aleksey Khomyakov regarded obshchina as symbolic of the spiritual unity and internal cooperation of the Russian society and worked out a sophisticated "philosophy of obshchina".
See also
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