The neighboring community of the Eastern Slavs lasted until. The meaning of the phrase "neighboring community", signs

COMMUNITY- a supra-family association of people, a self-governing economic and social collective; characteristic of the pre-industrial stage of development of human society.
The most ancient type of community was a consanguineous community that had developed among primitive peoples.
A consanguineous community existed for a long time among the Germans, Iranians, Finno-Ugric peoples and some other peoples. Archaeologists determine its presence by the existence of "large houses", up to 300 sq.m. In each of these houses lived one patronymic (pater - "father"; a group of close relatives on the paternal side). Blood ties among these peoples continued to play an important role in the transition to the neighboring community. All members of the patronymy erected themselves to a well-remembered ancestor. Sometimes the names of ancestors were remembered for ten or twelve generations. Foreigners were accepted into such a community only on the "rights" of a slave, since he did not descend from this ancestor. In the tribe, consisting of patronymic communities, there was a strict hierarchy of clans - from the ruling to the completely ignoble. A native of an humble family could not become the head of a tribe.
Over time, the consanguineous community turned into a neighboring (territorial) community. Among the agricultural tribes, the territorial community displaces the consanguineous community earlier than among the pastoral ones. The farmer had more opportunities to feed himself, his wife and children without the constant help of the family.
Among the Slavs, a neighborhood community arose very early. This is evidenced by the finds by archaeologists of "small houses", in which only one family could live. Foreigners quite easily joined the Slavic community. Slaves captured in wars eventually had the opportunity to either leave or become full members of the community. The community elected elders. The land belonged to the community, not to an individual family. A characteristic feature of the Slavic community was the redistribution of land.
Slavic cities served as centers of tribes and a place of refuge for communal peasants from external danger. Residents of the city and rural areas were divided into tens, hundreds, thousands. Perhaps there was also a council of elders - "the elders of the city", who led the people's assembly - veche.
The development of a neighboring or peasant community among the Slavs is associated with the gradual disintegration of tribal relations and the formation of the Old Russian state.

The nature and essence of the ancient Russian community, which was called the rope, is still insufficiently studied. Probably, at an early stage, it united several nearby settlements, each of which was inhabited by several (sometimes several dozen) families. Pastures, meadow and forest lands, places of hunting and fishing, as well as livestock were in communal ownership. The community ensured the stability of relations within a tribe or an alliance of tribes. Moreover, for a long time, the communal organization hampered the processes of property stratification and the separation of more prosperous families from the free community members.
Free community members ("people", in the terminology of Russian Pravda) remained the main population of Russia in the first centuries after the formation of the Old Russian state. As the community members were taxed with princely tribute (later - taxes), the community lost its ownership rights to the land, which led to the formation and expansion of patrimonial land ownership and the gradual enslavement of the peasantry.
Throughout the history of the Old Russian state and Muscovite Russia, up to the middle. 17th century the community, to a certain extent, guaranteed the peasants who were part of it a minimum of rights in their relations with the landowners and state power in exchange for the fulfillment by the community members of a certain amount of duties. Relations within the community were regulated by a mutual guarantee, which was recorded in the Russkaya Pravda and retained its significance for several centuries. Zemstvo reform ser. 16th century increased the role of community self-government, especially in areas with a predominance of the Black Sosh population. However, with the legalization of serfdom, the community increasingly fell under the control of state bodies.
Nevertheless, the community retained an important role in organizing economic and land relations in the countryside, in particular, in determining the principles for the use of communal lands - forests, rivers, meadows, etc., in the periodic redistribution of land that is in the hereditary possession of peasant farms, in the distribution between them taxes and taxes. The community retained these functions to one degree or another until the beginning. 20th century

In the first half of the X century. a social trend made itself felt, which, steadily gaining strength over the next century, eventually led to a complete degeneration of the social organization of the Eastern Slavs: a transition was laid from tribal to zemstvo (territorial-administrative) and political unions. In various regions of the Russian land (and beyond) this process occurred unevenly and with varying degrees of intensity. We will describe only its general scheme.

In the initial period of settlement by the Slavs of the East European Plain (VI-VII centuries), the basis of social organization was the patriarchal tribal community. Each such large group of relatives owned about 70-100 km2 of surrounding lands, since the slash-and-shift farming system required the development of a territory that was 10-15 times the area of ​​annual sowing.

The tribal community and the land it occupied were called horses. The conceptual facets of the Old Slavic word kon (from the Ind.-Heb. kon / ken - "to arise", "to begin") are extremely diverse: it is generally a frontier, a limit, a boundary, a limited place; and the beginning lost in time (hence the words "from time immemorial", "quiet" and expressions like "this is where the horse of our land came from"); and the completion of something ("the end", "finish", "his end has come", that is, turn, death, death); and sustainable order in nature and society ("law", "pokon"). The community was for the ancient man the beginning and the end, the owner of the land, the source of legal norms.

The military organization of the horse was called "hundred" and united ends or dozens - large patriarchal (three-generation) families that made up the tribal community. One of the ends was revered as the oldest, descending directly from the patron ancestor (usually legendary), who once gave life to the whole family. An elder of such an end, "owning his clans", led the con community by the right of seniority and was called "horse", "prince", that is, "the oldest in the family", "the ancestor of the horse." Ten kindred horses made up a "small tribe" that put up a "thousand" in the field. One of these horses, again, claimed to be of great antiquity of origin compared to others and was considered the first, "princely". All small tribes related to each other in their totality were covered by a common tribal name ("Radimichi", "Krivichi", etc.). The territory belonging to the union of small tribes was called the land, and the general tribal militia was called the regiment or darkness 1 . The tribal hierarchy of seniority was preserved at this level as well. In the union of small tribes, one "oldest" small tribe stood out with the oldest "princely" horse, in which the head of the oldest "princely" end reigned. It was he who was recognized by the rest of the small tribes as the prince of the earth.

1 In practice, the decimal principle of military organization among the ancient Slavs was very arbitrary and only approximately corresponded to the exact numerical concept of ten, hundreds, thousands, ten thousand ("darkness"). A thousand originally meant something like "big hundred". Other-glory, pulk ("multitude, people") are related to other Greek. polls ("a lot"), etc. German. Volk, folk ("crowd, army"). Darkness had the same meaning - "an innumerable (dark) multitude". Rapprochement of other Russian. darkness with a Turk, tu men, fog (10,000, 100,000) happened later.

Scheme of the location of archeological monuments of the IX-XV centuries. Zharovsky end of the Zhabensky volost:
a - settlement; b - settlements; c - barrow groups; settlements of the XIV-XVI centuries; e - toponyms;
e - accumulations of monuments; g - approximate boundaries of the Zharovsky end

Subsequently, natural population growth, accompanied by technological progress in the field of agriculture, led to the growth of the tribal community and, ultimately, to its transformation into a rural community. The ubiquitous distribution of the ral with a snake and the final transition during the 10th century. to steam farming system 2 eliminated the need for joint labor of the entire community for clearing and cultivating arable land and made possible the existence of individual farms. Large patriarchal families (“ends”) emerged from the kona community, which then themselves broke up into so-called undivided families consisting of a father and adult (married) sons. As a result, the number of settlements in some areas increased by five times (with m.: Timoshchuk B.A. East Slavic community VI-X centuries. n. e. M., 1990. S. 86 ) . Studies of monuments of material culture of the first half of the 10th century. revealed approximately the same picture of the structure of the rural community in different East Slavic lands.
The overwhelming majority of rural settlements of that time, concentrated in the Dnieper and Carpathian regions, are small clusters of dwellings (from two to six in a group) on the banks of large and small rivers; each dwelling (semi-dugout with a stove-heater) is designed to accommodate four to six people who are able to jointly conduct independent economic activities. Nearby are burial mounds with single burials, which replaced the collective burial tombs. About a dozen of these group settlements and individual estates usually make up, as it were, a "bunch" or "nest" of settlements, located on a plot of land ranging from 70 to 100 km2. Each "nest" is surrounded by a strip of uninhabited lands 20-30 km wide - a kind of border territory separating it from another "nest". A similar structure of Slavic settlements is usually considered as archaeological evidence of the growth of large patriarchal families and the separation of undivided families from them, in which for some time the tradition was preserved not to separate married sons, because "only this can explain the existence of an undivided, two-generation family consisting of a father and his adult sons "( There. S. 27). In the northern lands, large patriarchal families continued to exist in many places, the disintegration of which was delayed by unfavorable economic conditions.

2 The fallow system (two-field and three-field) "could get complete and final completion only in the presence of winter rye" ( Kiryanov A.V. The history of agriculture in the Novgorod land X-XV centuries. (According to archaeological data) // Materials and research on archeology of the USSR. 1959. No. 65. P. 333). The earliest finds of winter rye in the East Slavic lands date back to the 9th century. Steam farming developed mainly on old arable lands. When expanding arable fields, undercut and fallow were still used.

Having developed from a tribal community with its customs of cohabitation, mutual assistance and joint housekeeping, the rural community has retained many of its inherent features. The land remained in collective ownership, the use of reservoirs, forests, hayfields, and pastures was still carried out jointly. Community cohesion was manifested in the joint administration of religious rituals, household and calendar holidays, as well as in the collective financial responsibility of the community to the supreme authority for the fulfillment of duties and taxes, and before the law for the offenses of individual members of the community. Peasant family nests, which jointly owned land and jointly corrected duties, were preserved in individual Russian lands until the very end of the 18th century. Their existence is indicated, in particular, by the presence in Russia of many villages with endings in -ichi, -ovichi, -vtsy (after the name of the ancestor): Miryatichi, Dedich, Dedogostich, etc. It is no coincidence that Russian people are used to even addressing a stranger with words taken from the circle of family relations: uncle, mother, father, son, granddaughter, grandfather, grandmother, etc. Thus, the tribal consciousness reproduced tribal relations even in those tribal unions that were no longer properly tribal.

Since the undivided families that emerged from the extended family communities did not lose their sense of “original” (tribal, social, and territorial) unity, the ancient tribal terminology also remained in use, but its content was radically updated. The tribal principle of division (and association) of society was replaced by the territorial (zemstvo) principle. The East Slavic rural community of the 10th century, the heir to the ancestral horse, turned into a territorial association of undivided families, for the most part still connected by ties of kinship 3 , but already economically independent. The end has now become the main communal unit, but already as a territorial-administrative unit, a union of rural communities that arose on the site of a fragmented large family community. In ancient Russian sources, the Slavic rural community is often also referred to as a vervy. The meanings of both words - "end" and "rope" - almost completely coincide. "Rope" is a thread, a cord, a rope, usually used for measuring land, as well as the land measure itself 4 . The same is the "end": thread, yarn, measure of length (2 m 13 cm). Consequently, in both cases, the transformation into a social term took place on a similar semantic basis and according to the same scheme. "Rope", "end", taken in the social sense, meant the same thing - a rural community, consisting of relatives 5, and at the same time the land belonging to this community. Apparently, these were equivalent concepts in different Slavic dialects. The territorial-administrative term "end" was used mainly by the Slavs living in the upper reaches of the Dnieper and to the north, while the term "verv" was used in the southern Russian lands. "Kon" also did not disappear from the language. Article 38 of Russian Pravda contains the expression "to drive by horses", which certainly means a detour or a detour by the participants in the trial of neighboring communities. Thus, "con" here is equal to "end", "vervi".

3 In particular, this is evidenced by the fact that in the IX-XI centuries. families living in neighboring settlements continued to bury the dead in the common family cemetery (see: Sedov V.V. Rural settlements in the central regions of the Smolensk land (VIII-XV centuries) // Materials and research on archeology of the USSR. 1960. No. 92. P. 17).

4 "They took away, sir, a village from us ... and arable land, sir, there are five ropes in it."

5 Among the Serbs, a relative is called a vervnik. A similar East Slavic term uzik, "relative", comes from the word uz', which also means rope, among other things.

Corresponding changes have also been made to the military registration terms, which now began to be applied not to the military units of the tribal militia, but to the territories. The concept of "hundred" was transferred to the "end", which adopted the conditional decimal principle of the territorial-administrative structure. For example, the Livnsky end in Smolensk land (the basin of the Volost River, a tributary of the Dnieper) in the 10th century. consisted of eleven settlements (ten Krivichi and one belonging to the Vyatichi); there were nine settlements in the neighboring Moshninsky end (see: Sedov V.V. Rural settlements of the central regions of the Smolensk land (VIII-XV centuries). pp. 144-147, 151-153). According to the sources of the XII century. "Snovskaya Thousand" is known - a territorial-administrative formation on the river. Snovi, with a length of about 100 km, where two centuries earlier a dozen or hundreds of ends could well have been accommodated. "Darkness" began to mean "land" (principality) - "Kyiv darkness", "Chernigov darkness", etc.

The formation of the zemstvo principle of community organization introduced important innovations in the beginning of self-government of rural communities. Many tribal orders have sunk into the past. This primarily concerned the composition of the popular assemblies, which were previously attended by all the adult men of the Kona community. Now tribal democracy has given way to zemstvo democracy. There was, so to speak, a representative veche. The right to participate in meetings was delegated to the heads of undivided families. The removal (or rather self-elimination) of the majority of community members from participation in the political life of not only the “land” as a whole, but even their “hundreds” was due to the natural course of things, since with a significant territorial spread of community settlements within the end / vervi, regularly collect all the male population was not easy, and not always possible - say, in the midst of field work or in the event of a sudden external threat.

The chronicle mentions elders ( "foremen of hundreds 6) or sotsky, who led the detachments of the zemstvo militia - ends / hundreds. It must be that the elders belonged to the tribal aristocracy and during the war they performed the functions of communal governors, possibly on an elective basis. It is possible that the leaders of the oldest tribal nest-horses, who once let out their ends / ropes, were now called this way. Having ceased to be absolute masters over the life and death of the faithful, they, probably, for some time in the old manner were called "princes", that is, gentlemen, nobles, noble people. But the term "prince" in this sense was gradually replaced by the term "boyar". Gradually, under the "prince" in Russia began to understand mainly the political sovereign - "Russian prince" 7, a representative of the grand ducal dynasty of Kyiv. This, apparently, explains the fact that, while mentioning in passing the East Slavic "principalities" - the remnants of tribal administrations - the chronicle is silent about the East Slavic "princes" - elders who headed these archaic institutions.

6 The word "headman" is not directly related to age. The original meaning of the word "old" - "strongly standing, solid, durable" - reflected the social dignity of a person. In many Slavic languages ​​(Czech, Slovak, Upper Lusatian, etc.), the word "headman" has precisely the social meaning: "steward", "overseer", "head", "leader", "chief", "community elder" (cm.: Fasmer M. Etymological Dictionary. T. III. S. 747). The presence among the Slavs of the decimal principle of military, and later zemstvo organization and the leadership of the elders over the detachments of the zemstvo militia, testified by the annals, make the etymology of the word "starosta" as "senior hundred", "leader over a hundred" - first as a military unit, and then territorial-administrative districts.

7 Konstantin Porphyrogenitus ("On the management of the empire") contrasts the "autocratic archons" (princes) of the Slavs with their "elders-zhupans" (ancestral elders).

neighborhood community- these are several tribal communities (families) living in the same area. Each of these families has its own head. And each family manages its own economy, uses the produced product at its own discretion. Sometimes the neighboring community is also called rural, territorial. The fact is that its members usually lived in the same village.

The tribal community and the neighboring community are two successive stages in the development of society. The transition from a tribal community to a neighboring one became an inevitable and natural stage in the ancient peoples. And there were reasons for this:

The nomadic way of life began to change to a sedentary one. Agriculture became not slash-and-burn, but arable. The tools for cultivating the land became more sophisticated, and this, in turn, dramatically increased labor productivity. The emergence of social stratification and inequality among the population.

Thus, there was a gradual disintegration of tribal relations, which was replaced by family ones. Common property began to fade into the background, and private property came to the fore. However, for a long time they continued to exist in parallel: forests and reservoirs were common, and cattle, dwellings, tools, plots of land were individual goods. Now every person began to strive to do his own thing, earning them a living. This, of course, required the maximum unification of people so that the neighboring community continued to exist.

Differences between the neighboring community and the tribal

What is the difference between a tribal community and a neighboring one?

Firstly, the fact that in the first a prerequisite was the existence of family (blood) ties between people. This was not the case in the neighboring community. Secondly, the neighboring community consisted of several families. Moreover, each of the families owned their own property. Thirdly, the joint work that existed in the tribal community was forgotten. Now each family took care of its own plot. Fourthly, the so-called social stratification appeared in the neighboring community. More influential people stood out, classes were formed.

The person in the neighboring community became freer and more independent. But, on the other hand, he lost the powerful support that was in the tribal community.

When we talk about how the neighboring community differs from the tribal one, one very important fact should be noted. The neighboring community had a great advantage over the tribal community: it became not just a social, but
socio-economic organization. It gave a powerful impetus to the development of private property and economic relations.

Neighborhood community among the Eastern Slavs

Among the Eastern Slavs, the final transition to the neighboring community occurred in the seventh century (in some sources it is called "verv"). Moreover, this type of social organization has existed for a long time. The neighboring community did not allow the peasants to go bankrupt, mutual responsibility reigned in it: the richer rescued the poor. Also in such a community, the wealthy peasants always had to be guided by their neighbors. That is, social inequality was still somehow restrained, although it naturally progressed. A characteristic feature for the neighboring community of the Slavs was the circular responsibility for committed offenses and crimes. This also applied to military service.

Finally

The neighboring community and the tribal community are varieties of the social structure that existed at one time in every nation. Over time, there was a gradual transition to a class system, to private property, to social stratification. These events were inevitable. Therefore, communities have gone down in history and today are found only in some remote regions.

33. Socio-economic relations in the neighboring community.

Primitive neighborhood community.

By a primitive neighborhood community, we mean a socio-economic structure consisting of individual families leading an independent economy, united with each other by territorial-neighborly ties and joint ownership of the main means of production (land, pastures, fishing grounds). The combination of the private property of individual families with the collective property constitutes the dualism inherent in the neighboring community.

The characteristic features of the primitive neighborhood community are: the presence of a common territory, public property and communal land ownership with private land use, the presence of communal governing bodies, various forms of cooperation and mutual assistance between community members, their joint performance in wars and matters related to intercommunal relations, the presence of a certain ideological (religious) unity of community members, the interweaving of territorial ties with disintegrating consanguineous, in the public sphere - the coexistence of the community with late birth institutions.

Like any neighboring community, the intertwining and struggle of collective and private property are inherent in the primitive community.

The stage of formation of the neighboring community is characterized by replacement of ties based on kinship with neighboring-territorial ones, which at first are fancifully intertwined with them or even clothed in a consanguineous shell. Examples include the preservation of the totem name of the ancient tribal community for the neighboring community, the spread of blood relationship terms to fellow villagers, especially relatives, the use of tribal sanctuaries for rituals of communal significance among the Cheyenne, Crow, Tlingit, Iroquois, Hopi, Comanches and other tribes of North American Indians, or the institution of doha among the peoples of the Lower Amur (the extension of exogamous prohibitions to a group of unrelated clans connected by neighborly relations).

This is intertwining ancestral and neighborly ties, which is extremely diverse in specific societies, raises the question of the criteria that make it possible to distinguish a tribal community at a later stage of its development from a neighboring one and the nature of transitional forms between them.

The main features that characterize any neighboring community are the presence of separate family collectives that independently manage the economy and dispose of the produced product, so that each, on his own, cultivates the fields allotted to him and the harvest is assigned to them individually, and collective ownership of the main means of production. The families represented in the community may be related and unrelated - as long as they are economically isolated, this is of no fundamental importance.

One cannot agree with the researchers who resolutely oppose patronymy to the neighboring community and believe that the latter can exist only as a territorial association of unrelated families. The facts say otherwise. In the mountainous regions of Northern Albania at the beginning of the last century, all members of the neighboring community considered themselves descendants of one ancestor and avoided marrying each other. Neighboring communities, consisting of patronymic related families, were not uncommon in the Caucasus back in the 19th century, they are also known in Southeast Asia and other places.

At the initial stages of the formation of a neighboring community, communal ownership of land coexists with tribal ownership, sometimes even occupying a subordinate position. On some islands of the New Hebrides archipelago, villages, although they consist of subdivisions of several genera, do not yet form communities and do not have landed property. On the islands of Trobriand, Shortland, Florida, San Cristobal, Santa Anna, Vao, Fate and others, a neighboring community has already arisen and communal ownership of land coexists with tribal and individual loan land use, and on the island of Amrim the land belongs to the entire community as a whole, but distributed among the various clans.

In terms of stages, such a community is transitional from tribal to purely neighboring. It can be considered an early stage of the neighborhood community or a transitional type; we do not see much difference between these two points of view. The main criterion that makes it possible to distinguish it is not so much the coexistence of communal property with private property (this is natural for any neighboring community), but rather the intertwining of family ties with neighboring ones. The transition from such a community to a neighboring community depends to a large extent on the fate of the late generation, on the time when it finally ceases to exist. Since the genus most often survives to a class society, it is obviously this early stage of the neighborhood community that is most characteristic of its existence in a decaying primitive society, and the term "primitive neighborhood community" seems to be quite acceptable for its designation.

Such a community is neighborly, because it has its main feature - a combination of private and collective property. The fact that it is inherent in the era of the decomposition of primitive society is also evidenced by archaeological material. In Denmark, already in the settlements of the Bronze Age, within each village, the boundaries of individual plots and communal pastures are clearly visible. Something similar is observed even earlier in Neolithic Cyprus.

However, such a community is not just a neighbor, but a primitive neighbor, since collective property in it is represented by two forms: communal and tribal. Such a combination of two forms of collective property can persist for a very long time, and not only in decaying primitive societies, but even in early class societies, as can be seen from numerous African examples.

At present, the universal nature of not only the neighborhood community as a whole, but also its early stage - the primitive neighborhood community, which can be traced both in patriarchal and late maternal and non-clan societies can be considered proven. Thus, the late forms of tribal organization of the era of the decomposition of primitive society are basically simultaneous with the primitive neighboring community. They coexist, differing not only in their functions, but also in their structures: while the clan is based on the principle of consanguinity, the community rests on territorial-neighborly ties.

Although clan and community as forms of social organization complement each other, creating a double line of defense for the individual, there is a certain struggle between them for a sphere of influence. The final victory of the neighboring community over the clan is already determined by the fact that it is not only a social organization, which the late clan practically became, but organization of socio-economic, in which social ties are intertwined and determined by production ones.

The neighboring community perishes when collective property becomes an obstacle to the further development of private property. As a general rule, this occurs already in class societies, although there are known exceptions, usually associated with a lack of land (for example, in Micronesia and Polynesia). The main means of production are gradually being transferred into private ownership. The emergence of allod in agricultural societies is well traced on the example of early medieval Western Europe. However, even having lost its production functions, the community can be preserved as a social organization as an administrative-fiscal or territorial self-governing unit.

The neighborhood community can also persist for a long time in class societies based on subsistence farming. Sometimes it is deliberately conserved by the ruling classes. However, such a community, despite the similarities of internal structures, differs from the primitive one. In the primitive neighboring community, exploitation is only in its infancy, while in the class community it prevails. The community is either exploited as a whole, or singles out from its environment as exploiters. and exploited.