Structures and management of the peasant community. Petr Smirnov Russian rural community: origin, main functions and values

Peasant communities are the lowest levels of an administrative unit. In Russia they appeared in the 16th century, transformed for state peasants during the reform of 1837-1841, for landowner serfs - after the reform of 1861. They were created on the initiative of the state, which pursued internal political goals. The reasons for the destruction of peasant communities were also created by him.

What is this peasant community, how did it appear?

Among the Russian people, communal ties between peasants existed even before the state period. In ancient times, the peasant community was the prototype of the state, since it was in it that the main prerequisites for its emergence arose. In the process of formation and establishment of the state, changes occurred in the community. At different stages of the history of our state, its meaning changed, which can be expressed in two points:

• The connection of peasants with the land (serf or not).
• The scope of tasks that the state assigned to the community.

Having analyzed, for example, the community of the 16th century from these positions, we will see that the peasant at that time was legally free and was recognized as a “householder,” which obligated him to pay taxes, that is, to pay quitrent and work off those duties that would be imposed on him by the “peasant peace."

In modern legal language, a peasant community is an institution of self-government for the peasants of Russia. Several neighboring communities made up an administrative unit - a volost. They were governed by assemblies (peace), at which the headman was elected.

Rural community under serfdom

With the spread of serfdom, the civil status of peasants decreased significantly. In the event that the peasants were state-owned, great importance In their lives, the community played a role, which controlled land plots. For the state, the peasant himself meant nothing; even taxes were collected and paid by the community.

The serfs belonged to the landowners, who were fully responsible for them; there was no state supervision over them. The peasant community is a pure formality (in in this case). All issues were decided by the feudal lord (landowner). The peasant community was dying out.

Reform 1837-1841

Under the leadership of Count P.D. Kiselev, the first minister of state property, a reform of the life of state peasants was carried out (1837-1841). Its main document was the law “Institutions of Rural Administration”, on its basis peasants belonging to the state were organized into rural societies. It was still a peasant community, since common land use was envisaged. It included 1500 souls. If the settlement was small, then several villages, hamlets or hamlets were united into a community.

Rural society

General management issues were decided by the village assembly, and with its help, elders were elected. To make decisions on minor matters between community members, there was a “village reprisal”. All significant cases were considered by the court. Taxes were paid by society, not by the individual peasant. The society was responsible for each of its members, that is, it bore mutual responsibility. The peasant could not freely leave society or sell his land plot. Even after going to work with permission from the gathering, he had to pay taxes. Otherwise, he was forcibly returned with the help of the police.

All land was in common use. There were two forms of land ownership:

• Community. Under this form, all the land was in the community, and it redistributed the land. Arable land was cut into plots, which were assigned to each yard. Forests and pastures were in common use.
• Podvornaya. This community was widespread in the western regions. The land was cut into permanent plots, which were assigned to the yard and passed on by inheritance. They couldn't be sold.

After the reform of 1861, associations into rural societies affected the landowner peasants. They united into communities, which included former serfs belonging to one landowner. The number of people in the society should have been from 300 to 2000.

Destruction of the peasant community

By decree of November 9, 1906, the Russian government consciously creates political preconditions leading to the collapse of rural societies. In addition, there were social reasons destruction of the peasant community, which can be stated as follows.

After the peasants were freed from serfdom, they did not receive freedom, since they were part of a community and could not take land from it. They had to pay tax. In essence, they were in serfdom, only not from the landowner, but from the state. Dissatisfaction with this situation of peasants in the country was growing. abandoned their plots and fled to the cities for a better life.

After the revolutionary events of 1905, the issue of leaving rural society not just a peasant, but a householder with his allotment of land, which he could dispose of at his own discretion and not depend on the community, became acute. This right was granted by decree of 01/09/1906.

The political reason for the destruction of the peasant community was the situation in the country, where revolutionary events were brewing, and to keep the disenfranchised rural population in large associations it was dangerous.

Stolypin reform

According to the reform project, it was necessary to divide rural society into two parts. The first part is the land society, it can be defined as a partnership that managed the land owned by peasants and landowners. The second part is the self-government society, which is a lower administrative unit; it should have included all residents and farmers of a given territory of all classes.

Social meaning Stolypin reform was to create many small peasant farms throughout the country that would be interested in the political stability of the state. But they all had to be part of territorial rural societies. The Stolypin reform was never adopted by the State Duma.

Rural societies survived until collectivization. The Bolsheviks, while maintaining communal use of land, took into account the positive aspects of the Stolypin reform and created local government, which was called village councils.

To manage the peasants, new bodies of peasant public administration were created, which, however, retained whole line features of the feudal serfdom. All householders of a rural society, which usually consisted of peasants belonging to one landowner, constituted a village assembly, which elected a village headman, a tax collector and other officials. In the volost, which included a number of adjacent rural communities, a volost assembly was assembled, consisting of representatives of rural communities and electing a volost government with a volost foreman at the head, and a volost court, which had jurisdiction over minor civil and criminal cases of the peasants of a given volost (persons of other estates were tried by the volost court only if they agreed to do so).

The peasant administration was extremely limited in its competence: the issues to be handled by the gatherings concerned mainly the distribution and collection of taxes and the procedure for serving all kinds of duties; in those societies where communal land ownership existed, this was supplemented by issues related to land regulations.

Officials of the village and volost administration carried out a number of police duties: the village headman had to monitor the correct execution of taxes and duties by the peasants - state, zemstvo, lay and landowners, and had to oversee the compilation of “revision tales”, i.e., the presentation of information to determine taxes, he had to monitor the serviceability of roads and bridges, manage the supply of assistance in emergency cases, for example, in case of fires, floods, etc.; The volost foreman had to announce laws and orders of various authorities, protect “decency” in public places and the safety of persons and property, prevent and suppress crimes, detain vagrants, fugitives, deserters and criminals, prevent the spread of “harmful rumors” among peasants, etc.

The peasant administration was made directly dependent on the administration. All officials of rural and volost administration had to unquestioningly carry out the orders and demands of judicial investigators, zemstvo police and all generally established authorities. In addition, a special official was placed over the peasant administration - a peace intermediary, all of whose orders had to be unquestioningly carried out by officials of the peasant administration.

The main function of the peace intermediaries was to facilitate agreement between peasants and landowners and draw up so-called “statutory charters”, which precisely determined the size of the allotment received by the peasants, its location and peasant duties. The statutory charters were required to be put into effect no later than two years after the publication of the “Regulations”; Before this, peasants had to fulfill duties at the same rate, with the exception of small fees. In addition, the functions of the conciliators included the approval of elected officials of the peasant government; they could cancel decisions of peasant assemblies, consider complaints against peasant government bodies, and could impose penalties on peasant elected officials: subject them to arrest or fine.

Peace mediators were appointed by the governor on the recommendation of the leaders of the nobility from local nobles who had a certain land qualification, and were approved by the Minister of Internal Affairs. Thus, the world mediator, on the one hand, was an organ of the central government, and on the other, was closely connected with the local nobility. Above the peace mediator stood the district congress of peace mediators, chaired by the district leader of the nobility, and above the congress was the provincial council. peasant affairs a presence chaired by the governor, consisting partly of officials, partly of local noble landowners.

Thus, the power of the individual noble landowner over the peasants was largely replaced by the power of representatives of the local noble society.

Rural society was bound by mutual responsibility; the entire society was responsible for the correct performance of government, zemstvo and worldly duties by each of its members, regardless of whether the society had communal or household land use. In those areas where there was communal use of land, mutual responsibility extended to duties in favor of the landowner. The community was of a compulsory nature, that is, the peasants did not have the right to leave it until they had finally bought out their allotment. Communal use of land was combined with periodic land redistributions.

Subordinate to the government authorities, the peasant administration was part of the system of the government apparatus, being its lowest cell, completely dependent on its higher levels. And the government itself viewed peasant “self-government” not as a right, but as a duty of the peasants; for example, peasants elected to any position did not have the right to refuse it without valid reasons, precisely specified in “ General position February 19."

The bulk of the people of Russia, the Russian people themselves, who carried within themselves what is called spiritual strength, are peasants. Even by 1917, their number exceeded 85% of the country's population. As a “techie”, I will say that 85% is a fairly significant value: if there is an 85% probability of obtaining some result, then in a number of cases they cease to control it - such a probability is enough.

Anyone who wants to understand Russia must understand the way of thinking of the peasants, for they are the essence of Russia. We all came from peasant backgrounds, at most in the second or third generation. And within us lies the peasant spirit, the Russian spirit. And when the poet says: “Here is the Russian spirit, here it smells of Russia,” it means here it “smells” of a peasant, since we have nothing more Russian.

Russian peasants never settled separately from each other, or rather, for many hundreds of years they lived together in communities, and it was these communities that they called “the world.” Not knowing the rules of the world and its fundamental principles, it makes no sense to talk about Russians. For we are all from there - from the community, from the world.

An ordinary Western person, when moving to another apartment, hires a car and movers to transport him for money. And 99% of Russians in a similar case invite friends, for whom they buy vodka and snacks for an amount exceeding what they would pay to the movers, and after the move they have a drinking party with their friends.

Everyone knows that the most stable currency in Russia remains a bottle, often drunk together. Why? After all, Russians don’t drink more than, say, the French.

Formally, the Russian world, the Russian community was destroyed in a hundred-year struggle against bureaucracy, but its spirit lives in us. It is still indestructible and cannot be ignored.

From the point of view of managing democracy, what are the main features of the Russian community? To understand this, you need to clearly imagine what is now and what was before.

Now legislators are regulating the smallest details of our inner life, and they do it equally (uniformly) for the entire population, and they are even proud of it. Chairman of the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR A.I. Lukyanov boasted that the congress adopted more than 200 legislative acts in two years of work, and the chairman of the Congress of People's Deputies R.I. Khazbulatov – because there are 700. And how many more will they accept?

These acts regulate everything that the bureaucracy can come up with: the size of the army, its expenses, the amount of taxes, teachers' salaries, the length of the working day, the number of doctors, sales rules, and so on, so on, so on. Everywhere you hear that we have people's power, but the people have nothing to do with it, since commands to the entire population are immediately given by a single bureaucracy from one center. The people are in laws and decrees, as if in a vice, but the bureaucracy is free.

The freedom-loving Russian people did not tolerate this and, united in communities, resisted the bureaucratic madness for a long time.

The governance scheme of Russia was initially built in this way. The Tsar, both legislator and executor, commanded seemingly unchallenged all of Russia. Outwardly this is so, but no one pays attention to the fact that from the point of view, from the position of the people, he commanded in narrow areas of public life. The peasants very rarely had to deal with his teams, the teams of the center. At first, the king was engaged only in external defense, for which he obliged the people to act in accordance with the royal will, and not as the people considered necessary, in three cases: when paying taxes, when working for a warrior, and later as a nobleman, and when supplying a recruit to the army . There was also criminal law: the tsar, with the help of his laws, prosecuted criminals throughout Russia, but if the peasant was not a criminal, then this did not concern him. Subsequently, the king’s power extended to industry and science: they built and maintained universities, encouraged the arts, etc. But this also affected the peasant only indirectly, through a tax - a tribute.

How many times a year did the peasant have to remember that he has a king, and the king has laws? How often has he encountered these laws? Three times a week with the tsarist law on corvee. What about the others? Two or three times a year, no more!

And we, living today, how many times do we have to deal with laws and decrees sent down from the capital? From the region?

Here is an example from the recent past. We woke up in the morning in an apartment, the size of which and the rent for which were determined in the capital; they put on clothes, the price of which “came down” from Moscow; ate foods whose quality was determined by the center; transport fares, the driver's salary, the width of bus seats - all this was also decided in the capital. Collective farmers sowed, planted, and harvested crops only according to instructions from above. We were entangled in bureaucratic chains, with officials declaring that all this was for our good, and it was impossible otherwise. Today these same bureaucrats are churning out more and more new laws and continue to convince everyone that it is impossible otherwise.

No, you can! And it was possible before, until the kings gave in to the bureaucrats and wise men. The Russian peasant community did not have any laws of higher power over itself, except for those given above, both in public and economic life managed independently. The people governed themselves. What else can you call this if not democracy? Yes, Russian peasants did not elect a deputy by universal and secret ballot so that he would supposedly broadcast something in parliament on their behalf, without even understanding what. But they did not need this, since they established their own laws, and each, let us emphasize, each had a direct influence on the formation of these laws.

The laws of self-government in communities were different. A Russian proverb of that time said: “As is the city, so is its temper; as is the village, so is its custom.” There were no written laws; laws were established in the form of customs that were remembered by the world. These customs were strictly followed by every member of the community. In this regard, each village, each community was a separate state - sovereign, as today's wise men would say.

However, there were several rules and customs common to all of Russia. For centuries, Russian people have noticed what it takes to live together in harmony, and in principle they are not far from orthodox Christianity or Islam. The main thing is universal justice, the Russians did not make any discovery here, but the ways in which they ensured this justice are interesting.

Of course, for Russia, which lived according to the family principle, the main law or custom was that the community was formed according to the family principle, but without its head (father). The “father” was the community meeting - a collective governing body, which was not a meeting of representatives, each member of the community was automatically a member of this meeting, and his voice had such weight that, for example, a deputy of the oldest parliament in the world - the English one - never dreamed of.

The following principle automatically followed from the principle of the Russian family: not a single member of the community could be excluded from it under any circumstances. If you were born in a community or were accepted into it - that’s it, there is no force capable of expelling you from there. True, in an ordinary family, the father could separate his son from himself by giving him part of the property. But in a community, on the contrary, its member could leave the community only voluntarily, but nothing from common property he wasn't supposed to. Both principles remained valid, only under different conditions. Both in the family and in the community, the person was calm: no matter what decisions his father or the community made, no one would allow any injustice towards him personally.

The family principle determined another feature: the community had a very disdainful attitude towards the sacred right of personal property in general and an extremely negative attitude towards personal ownership of land. A family member should not have personal ownership of something with the help of which the entire family exists. Non-recognition of personal ownership of land is a sacred Russian idea that has been carried through a millennium. Property is only common; the land must be at the disposal of the one who cultivates it.

Another Russian principle, common to all communities: a decision at a community meeting could only be made unanimously. The community did not bother counting the votes. If at least someone was against it, no decision was made.

The parliamentary wise men do not even suspect the possibility of the existence of such a principle. Indeed, how to implement this principle? After all, this is a dead end. Parliament will not make a single decision. This is impossible in parliaments, although hundreds of thousands of Russian communities have existed according to this principle for a millennium.

You need to understand the following. The Russian peasant, like Russian people in general, is a true democrat, that is, he always believed that public interest is higher than personal interest, and not only thought so, but was also guided by this principle. And at secular gatherings, the peasants proceeded precisely from the interests of the community, therefore, there could be no disagreements. And parliament is an arena for the struggle of personal interests, even if these are the personal interests of groups, parties or segments of the population. These interests are different, so it is impossible to achieve unanimity.

For a peasant, a community is the house in which he lives and his children will live. The ruin of the community is the ruin of him personally. The peasant was responsible with his fate for the decision he made. And in parliaments, especially Soviet and post-Soviet ones, deputies are not personally responsible for their decisions, so they can afford to vote for anything.

Peasant gatherings, especially on complicated issues, could last many evenings in a row and sometimes took a very rude (on the verge of a fight) form. They were not shy there, discussing any little things, even if they touched on delicate aspects of someone’s life that were not subject to discussion in normal times. The community problem was literally turned inside out, examined from absolutely all sides until each member of the community began to understand that the proposed solution was the only one, even if he personally was not satisfied with it. And the decision was made only when the last person arguing calmed down. (From these positions, today’s parliamentary vigils look extremely shameful. Deputies are going to discuss the most difficult state issues, but they begin by agreeing when to end their meeting. And who said that this time will be enough? After all, the issue has not yet begun to be discussed!)

Could it be that, despite the length of the discussion, some member of the community, pursuing personal interests, still did not agree? Yes, it could. In this case, tired of arguing, 200 or 300 people could give in to one and make a decision that benefits only that person. But the community is not an institution for noble maidens; its members are hard-working and quite determined people. No one forgave anything to the person who went against the world. He certainly paid for his insolence and was often forced to leave the community. He had troubles: a cow drowned in a swamp, hay burned, a cart wheel suddenly broke, and so on, until the person began to understand the meaning of the saying: “You can’t trample against the world.”

World-eating kulaks always built their houses in the center of the village, close to other houses, so that in the event of a fire, the flames from their burning house would spread to neighboring houses, knowing that only in this case they would not be set on fire.

What gave unanimity when making decisions? to an individual? The guarantee that no one will neglect your voice and your personal interests. Because it is in the interests of society to take into account the interests of everyone. No one will stop arguing without hearing your opinion. You can talk a lot about respect for each individual person, or you can introduce respect for it into law. One can argue that since a state has freedom of speech, it means it is a civilized state, forgetting that freedom of speech without the obligation to listen is fun for wise men. What's the point of talking if no one is going to listen to you? The peasant community of Russia, unlike the overwhelming majority of the Russian intelligentsia, who prefer to “philosophize” in the Western manner, understood this.

Another rule common to all peasant communities is the observance of justice in the distribution of their means of subsistence - land. Communities had different methods of distribution.

And finally, common to all communities was collective responsibility for external obligations, for the obligation to pay taxes and supply recruits to the army. If, for example, there were 200 people in a community obligated to pay taxes to the tsar, then none of them directly brought their required 12 rubles to the tax department; the community paid all 2,400 rubles, and then distributed this money to the community members.

The same goes for recruiting. If, for example, it was supposed to send one person out of 100 into the army, then the military department did not look for these people in villages and villages. The communities themselves determined who to serve, and often sought to buy a recruit on the side, that is, to find a healthy single man, so that he would agree to become a soldier for the enormous money collected by the world at that time. If one could not be found, the world decided which family to take the soldier from. And the money was paid to him. The decision of the community, the “sentence of peace,” in this case was not subject to appeal; the selected recruit could be taken to the recruiting station without his consent, bound.

The community fulfilled its obligations in good faith and demanded the same attitude. If landowners or officials, violating laws and customs, inflicted insults on the community, and it was not possible to achieve justice through legal means, then the community decided to take extreme measures. One of these measures was riot. Meanwhile, the kings also understood that the causes of rebellion often lie in the actions of the authorities; they understood that shed blood could cause a huge amount of response. Therefore, when a rebellion broke out, the state always tried to extinguish it without bloodshed, while this was still possible. It is characteristic that the Order of St. Vladimir, the fourth degree of which gave the right to hereditary nobility, was awarded to those officers and officials who could stop peasant unrest without resorting to weapons. This required courage, since the indignant community ceased to regret both its own and other people's blood.

Sometimes a community could do the following without resorting to rebellion.

Several men killed the hated landowner and his family, and set his house on fire. They then went and surrendered to the authorities. In Russia to death penalty sentenced in exceptional cases. Therefore, the court sentenced the peasants to a period of hard labor and exile to Siberia. Marriage bonds were considered sacred; then they believed that marriages were made in heaven, and it was not for people to break them. Therefore, according to the existing law, the families of convicts, if desired, were sent at state expense to the place of hard labor and exile, and they were also provided with maintenance at the expense of the treasury. In addition, the peasants regularly collected money and sent it to the convicts, since in their eyes these were not criminals, but heroes who suffered for peace.

So, the Russian people were united into self-governing communities, although they had obligations to the state, but on a small list of issues. The community in a number of cases was able to effectively defend its sovereignty before anyone else, as only a family can do.

The priority of such spiritual values ​​as devotion to society, readiness for self-sacrifice for its sake, a heightened sense of justice and disdain for the tenets of material values ​​such as inviolability private property, personal ownership of land was determined by differences in the behavior of Russian people and people of the Western worldview.

For many centuries in a row, Russians settled throughout the earth, exploring new uninhabited places. The British, French, and Germans did the same. They also moved to America, Africa, and Australia. But both did it differently. Let's say European settlers settled the North American prairies. On the plot of land allocated to them, they built a house and a farm, established friendly relations with neighbors for joint action against common adversities. They paid taxes depending on the amount of land they owned; over time, some of them went bankrupt, their land was bought up by more successful neighbors, and the less fortunate became urban and rural proletarians. This was in accordance with the way of thinking of Western man; there was nothing in it that bothered his conscience.

The Russians acted differently. The peasant community, having received land allocated to it (for everyone), first of all chose comfortable spot for a village or village. Each family was allocated a plot for the estate. The plots were cut next to each other, forming a street or streets of the future village. At the same time, the community took into account that families would grow and divide, and therefore they left a reserve for future development. The remaining land was divided into three parts: meadows, pastures and arable land. There could be a fourth part – the forest. The community used all this land together.

On the land allocated for estates, the whole world built houses for everyone. All the livestock of the village were released into pastures as a single herd. With arable land and meadows the situation was more complicated. Arable land, firstly, was divided according to quality: hillock or lowland, one has more clay, the other sand, etc. In different communities the land was divided into different quantities varieties, sometimes up to 15. Next, the land was divided into plots - allotments based on the following considerations. Among the peasants, taxes (taxes) were imposed only on males, but on everyone: both old and young. The population census was carried out every seven years. The number of males recorded in the census remained the same for taxes throughout this period. That is, in fact, it was not individual people who were subject to taxes, but the entire community. The number of men was simply a numerical estimate of the tax capacity of a given community.

If at the time of the census there were one hundred boys, men and old people in the community, and the tax per person was 12 rubles per year, then the total tax in the amount of 1,200 rubles had to be paid over seven years. The world itself had to sort out the collection of taxes within the community.

This happened differently in each community, but the principle was the same: the world did not require a person to pay a tax if it did not provide him with land in order to earn this tax. Most often, each type of arable land was divided according to the number of taxpayers. It was an allotment. Obviously, one plot could consist of up to 15 strips of land of different types. In addition, the strips were located on three fields: spring, winter and fallow. (The wise men made fun of this, first in St. Petersburg, and then in Moscow and Leningrad, but one must understand that, first of all, the peasants themselves understood the unreasonableness of such a division, but justice was higher for them than this inexpediency.)

Allotments were distributed among families, but not equally, but according to the “strength” of each family, that is, depending on how many workers it had to cultivate the land. Let's say there were four males in a family: a father and three young sons. Formally, she had the right to four plots or an plot of four times the size. But the community could only give them two, since in fact there was no one in this family to cultivate the land, and therefore there was little likelihood that the family would be able to contribute its share of taxes to the community treasury. And another family, in which there is only a father among men, but three adult unmarried daughters, could receive not one, but three plots.

In the intervals from census to census, the composition of families could change: boys grew up, daughters got married, old people died. The community responded quickly to these changes every year. Allotments were confiscated from weakened families and transferred to those families that were becoming stronger. There were no conditions imposed on those receiving the land, except to pay the previous owner for improvements, say, for a new fence. The principle was sacredly confessed: only those who cultivate it own the land.

In some provinces, a more accurate accounting of the strength of the family was kept: a boy at the age of 10 received the right to 0.25 plots, 12 years old - 0.5 plots, 14 years - 0.75 plots, a man from 20 to 55 years old could receive up to two plots , but from the age of 55 - only 0.5 allotments, and after 60 years the peasant was freed from both land and taxes. Very rarely, but it happened that communities divided the land according to the eaters, that is, in proportion to the composition of the family.

In other communities, in order to reduce the number of strips of land per plot, they carefully determined the profit that land of one quality or another could give one worker. In proportion to this profit, the length of the poles was measured, which were used to measure land of different types, that is, in one plot the land was worse, but there was more of it, and in another it was better, but less. To whom what allotment should be given was decided by lot; in general, in Russia it was used in almost any case when something had to be divided.

Many Russian researchers who lived in the countryside in the last century predicted the development of the community in the direction of collective farming, but, of course, not in such a bureaucratic form as collective farms in their final form. Indeed, in many communities special fields were allocated that were cultivated by the whole world. The harvest was sometimes divided, but more often it was used to pay taxes, to help the weak, and in general for social purposes. Sometimes, for this purpose, a field or the entire estate was rented from the landowner.

Of course, no one in the community could sell their plot, although they could rent it out. But the community could sell part of the land, or it could buy it, replenishing its land supply.

Mowing was also often carried out collectively, although in those years the meadows could be divided into strips so that everyone could mow for themselves. But some communities were divided into artels and divided the meadows according to the number of artels and people in them. Then the artel together mowed the entire meadow, set up and equalized the haystacks according to the number of people, and then divided the finished hay by lot.

The community provided each member with the right to work without any “ifs.” If a person wanted to work, the community provided him with equal conditions as everyone else. The community was also a social security agency. Usually, frail old people lived out their lives with children, and orphans grew up with close relatives. But it happened when both old people and children were left alone. Most often in this case they “walked around the world,” that is, they lived in each family of the community in turn certain time, say, a week, but they dressed with community money. (By the way, although this sounds cynical, before the abolition of recruitment, orphan boys were of particular value to the community; their health, and the health of future soldiers, was especially monitored.)

But there were other ways. The old people could receive food and feed for livestock collected “from around the world,” or they could simply live in their hut, and community members regularly brought them ready-made food. And this was not alms: the community was obliged to support its weak members, and the one who accepted help did not humiliate himself to beg for it.

The community collected more money than the state required. This money was used for the same purposes that the state is now pursuing by increasing taxes. The community stored bread, built schools and hired teachers, and if it was strong, then doctors or paramedics. In fact, the peasant spent more on taxes than was provided for by the government, but he established this difference himself and spent it himself. The central government received money for what only it could do. The rest remained in the community and did not fall into the hands of the bureaucracy. This is important to note in order to understand the ultimate goals of the struggle between the bureaucracy and the community.

All Russian communities had a system of mutual aid. Its peculiarity was that everyone who was asked for help provided it, but not out of spiritual generosity, but because he was obliged to help. This help (in the old way help) was divided into three categories.

In the first case, everyone who was invited to help helped without expecting any encouragement. Usually, we're talking about about difficult cases when a community member was in poverty due to force majeure circumstances, say, a house was demolished by a flood. Then those whom he asked, or the entire community, went to build a house, and no one had the right to demand anything for it.

In the second case, a community member called for help if he started a task that was beyond his strength: he decided to build a mill or plowed so much land that he was unable to harvest the crops, or the husband suddenly died, and the wife decided to harvest the crops from her plot herself and don't give up on it. In this case, everyone who was called was obliged to help, but the owner had to arrange a dinner with drinks (hence all our bottles in mutual settlements).

In the third case, it is more likely not about help, but about hiring in conditions where patriarchal relations did not allow giving and accepting money for work. For example, a kulak or landowner, when inviting someone to harvest the harvest, is obliged to stipulate what will happen at the end: dinner with drinks or even dancing. Anyone who didn't like this didn't have to go.

The peasants deceived God with the system of mutual aid. The fact is that during the harvest every day was precious, but on Sunday God forbade work; it was necessary to rest. But he forbade working, not helping! So they helped every Sunday from June to September, losing consciousness in the evening from fatigue.

Let us note the difference between the Russian peasant community and its parody copy - the collective farm.

First. Collective farms were built according to the Marxist dogma, according to which the peasant must become a proletarian - a hired worker: come to work at 7 o'clock in the morning, conscientiously do what his superiors ordered him to do, and, having received money for it, leave, and then the grass will not grow. This dogma turned the worker in industry and the peasant in agriculture into a beast. Marxism is based only on the laws of economics, without taking into account that people also need to be managed, that is, they must be asked to behave in a certain way.

The Russian peasant community, being more communist than Marx himself could have dreamed, took into account the laws of human behavior. A peasant, working in a community, on a plot of land owned by the community, received for his labor not a salary from the boss, but the final result of his labor in full and in kind.

Second. The community was sovereign and no one interfered in its affairs. A collective farm is an enterprise dominated by the bureaucracy; it is the penultimate victory of the bureaucracy in agriculture (the last victory will be the collapse of collective farms).

Otherwise, the ideas of the community and the collective farm coincide, and cannot but coincide, since the community moved towards collective work, and the collective farms were built on communal principles.

So, let’s summarize what has been said, allowing ourselves to repeat what has been said (repetition is the mother of learning).

The people are the population of the country and future generations. The state is the population, legislative and executive powers. The purpose of the state is to protect the people. The state protects itself with the hands and lives of the population. The legislative branch gives commands to the population to protect the people, and the executive branch organizes the population for this protection.

Initially, democracy in Russia was built according to the following scheme. The Tsar - the legislative power and the head of the executive power - took upon himself the responsibility to give the population commands to protect the people and organize the population to carry out these commands only in those cases where they could not give such commands to themselves: to protect the people from an external enemy, a criminal ( throughout Russia); to protect the intellect of the people - training scientific and engineering personnel, conducting scientific research; for economic protection - the creation of state industry; on the protection of Russian citizens abroad. In other cases, the population of Russia, united in communities, gave itself commands to protect itself.

One can dispute the appropriateness of certain elements of the structure of Russia (serfdom, monarchy, etc.). But there is no reason to assert that the Russian idea of ​​government was flawed in relation to the implementation of democracy (power of the people). She was absolutely correct. It is not enough to proclaim the power of the people; it is necessary to give the people ways to govern.

The population (peasants) did not interfere in management issues if they could not understand them (army management, foreign policy etc.), and did not elect deputies from among themselves to resolve these issues. And the government did not interfere in those issues in which it was incompetent: the management of communities, their economic and social affairs. At the same time, the state apparatus was minimal, and therefore the costs for it and the tax burden on the people. The vast majority of military and civilian officials were indeed responsible for what the people need The case, and the tax expenses on them were justified.

But two forces were already maturing in Russia for which democracy was in principle unacceptable: the bourgeoisie and the apparatus bureaucracy.

Here the author is ruled by Marxism, and although he himself does not like anything complicated, he nevertheless believes that Marx greatly simplified the issue of struggle in society. It is not enough to consider that we have only two antagonistic classes: workers and capitalists. According to Marxist theory, bureaucracy is a product of bourgeois relations and along the path to communism it will disappear. But we have seen from the example of the history of the USSR that this is far from the case. The fact is that these two forces are based on different foundations: the actions of the bourgeoisie are subject to the laws of economics, and the actions of the bureaucracy are subject to the laws of management. They have one object of robbery - the people, but the methods are different: the bourgeoisie takes away part of the worker’s labor in the form of surplus value, and the bureaucracy - in the form of taxes and bribes. But they are skinning one sheep.

They are enemies of each other, competitors in the object of robbery, but they can become allies for a while in order to break the resistance of those who are going to be robbed. When the resistance is broken and the robbery itself begins, they again become enemies and, oddly enough, can become allies of the people (according to the principle, the enemy of my enemy is my friend), destroying a competitor with his help. In this “classical” triangle, the people - bourgeoisie - bureaucracy everyone hates each other, but everyone tries to use each other in the fight against their enemy.

Let's take modern history. Yeltsin is the leader of the bureaucracy, who, in the name of its goals, destroyed the Soviet Union. At the same time, he promised a well-fed life for the bourgeoisie, and it acted as his faithful ally, although at its core the bourgeoisie is international. The bourgeoisie supported Yeltsin with money and fighters on the barricades of the White House and allowed his bureaucracy to be placed in the chairs of officials of the former allied departments. But the bureaucrats very quickly realized that taxes from the people and the salaries paid from them provide a very modest life. Then they started extorting (bribes) from the bourgeoisie. It howled, bourgeois parties and associations even found themselves in opposition to Yeltsin. However, as soon as the Supreme Council of Russia began to prepare the issue of Yeltsin’s release from office, the bourgeoisie again, without hesitation, rushed to his aid, buying television, demonstrators, and then militants for execution Supreme Council. The bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy hate each other, but most of all they hate the power of the people - democracy, realizing that they and democracy are incompatible.

Let's return to the peasant community, to the world. The growing bourgeoisie and the apparatus bureaucracy emerging among officials, not directly responsible for protecting the people, began military operations against the Russian world, and this is natural.

Why did the community not suit the bourgeoisie? In order for the bourgeoisie to collect its share of surplus value from the people, it is necessary to obtain ownership of the means of production, and for the peasants this is land. Consequently, the bourgeoisie needed the land of the communities to go on sale, but to do this it was necessary to destroy the communities.

Why did the bourgeoisie not suit the peasants? After all, the tsar took away their surplus value in the form of taxes, and the landowner in the form of quitrents! Why can't the bourgeoisie? The tsar took money to protect the peasants, and the nobleman, according to the original idea, took it for the same reason. But the bourgeois, kulak or capitalist took the money for himself personally and did not intend to spend it on protecting the people. This is robbery in its purest form.

With bureaucracy the issue is more complicated. The fact is that it multiplies, grows fat, robbing the people, exploiting ideas about their supposedly still better protection. Technically it's done like this. Some officials, desperate to make a quick career and not too burdened with the responsibilities of truly protecting the people, bring up the idea of ​​​​some kind of additional protection for them. For example, in Russia there are many fires, and the losses from them are enormous. The wise men actively prove that such an issue cannot be left without government intervention, organize a campaign and, pushing each other aside, rush to show their wisdom and knowledge of life. The king or the government, without delving into the essence of the issue, at the same time sincerely want to prevent people's losses. Therefore, with the money of the treasury, the money of the people, they hire officials and wise men to prepare the appropriate document, then they approve this document and again, with the money of the people, they hire a new bureaucracy to monitor the implementation of the rules laid down in the document. At the same time, no one thinks that losses from fires are borne not by the treasury, but by people; no one asks these people whether they need these rules, these officials and controllers. They take their money and pay a new detachment of apparatus bureaucracy, while claiming that everything is being done for their own good.

The king or other legislator needs to develop own understanding question, so as not to fall for bureaucratic provocation. To do this, you need to understand what bureaucracy is. But who understood and understands this? True, not all kings trusted their bureaucracy, but they could not oppose anything to its perfidy.

Let's digress a little from issues related to the community and look at how the bureaucracy operated in the depths of the community itself. state apparatus. The ease with which bureaucracy multiplies is especially characteristic of control organizations, which are able to veil the purpose of their activities even at the time of their creation. The paradox is that their meaninglessness for the Cause is clear, but a boss using a bureaucratic management mechanism cannot live without control.

Let's give an example. Nicholas I saw various shortcomings in the composition of officials and their promotion. In addition, various abuses associated with the appointments and transfers of officials in vast Russia, inherent in the bureaucratic mechanism itself, were obvious. Strictly speaking, the tsar should have demanded from the ministers the final results of their work, without interfering in matters of personnel selection. But he decided to improve matters in a different way: he ordered the development of rules for the selection of personnel and established control over the exact implementation of these rules. For this purpose, the Inspectorate Department was created in 1846, about which Nicholas I wrote: “The goal has been achieved: order and accountability have replaced carelessness and abuse of various kinds.” The department quickly grew and soon cheerfully reported to the tsar: “Four years of experience have proven that the highest idea of ​​taking your thread of control into the sovereign hand... brought benefits in many respects: a) everything that did not have a commonality, that was executed separately, came to a possible unity; b) The Charter on Civil Service received due force...; c) entry into service, dismissal from it, transfer from one department to another, promotion to rank... are now carried out on the positive principles of the central management system in the same general order.”

About how “effective” it turned out to be general order, the department was silent: they do not report losses. For honest people the service became sharply more complicated, and the scoundrels, as before, had freedom. After all, the department was not responsible for their absence, but for the correctness of passing and filling out the papers. So, filling out the column about sources of income, the impudent people made fun of: “The estate was acquired by his wife with gifts received in her youth from Count Benckendorff.” And nothing happened.

It is no wonder that after the death of Nicholas I, complaints flowed to his son. In 1857, Alexander II “deigned to order that all ministers and chief managers be given the opportunity to figure out by what means it would be possible to reduce and limit the enormous correspondence that arose with the establishment of the said department.”

At that time, not all types of activities in Russia were centralized, and against the backdrop of the clerical departments of private enterprises, the Inspection Department looked especially wretched. Therefore, the king agreed that the department was not needed, and it was abolished. But... the bureaucratic mechanism remained. And the son of Alexander II decides to revive this department. The ministers were alarmed, Minister of Justice N.V. Muravyov wrote a note to the Tsar asking him to delay the publication of the decree, to which the Tsar replied:

“If I wanted to receive a negative answer, then, of course, I would turn to the ministers” (the tsar involuntarily showed that he did not consider his closest assistants to be decent people and faithful servants, and could not imagine their work without control on his part). So, in 1894, the department arose like a phoenix from the ashes, called the Inspection Department, starting all over again, but in a worse form. Even people close to the tsar wrote: “With us, everything is done somehow by chance, without considering anything... In general, the arbitrariness of the ministers was not connected with anything, but now they have gone to the other extreme... It turns out that now for all the appointments of fools or swindlers, for which the minister or governor was previously responsible for, the king will be responsible!”

The groans of the ministers reached the ears of the son of Alexander III. Let us quote from a note that compared the work of the Inspectorate Department and the Inspectorate Division: “But the difficulties of that time, no matter how great they were, pale in comparison with those difficulties that arise now on the occasion of the establishment of the Inspectorate Department, and before the correspondence that has already reached to the limits of physical impossibility." Although the indecisive Nicholas II did not liquidate, like his grandfather, this controlling body, he was still forced to significantly limit it.

And note, this bureaucratic nest was formed before the eyes of the Tsar and operated in St. Petersburg, despite the opposition not of ordinary people, but of ministers! The bureaucracy did not stand on ceremony with ordinary people, with peasants, at all, and this was one of the reasons for the peasant’s fear of leaving not only the community, but even serfdom.

Russian writer Leskov, closely associated with the peasants, describes the mass similar examples; I will give some of them in my retelling.

After the liberation of the peasants, a new district chief arrived in the village. The peasants collect twenty kopecks for a “gift” for him. He indignantly rejects this money, declaring that he is an honest servant of the sovereign and will not take taxes from the peasants, but... will demand from the peasants strict compliance with all the laws and decrees of the sovereign. After that, he goes door-to-door. It happens in winter, the stoves are heated. The boss opens a thick volume of rules and reads that to prevent fires, stove beds must be covered with down blankets, cotton blankets, felt... Straw is not specified, but the peasant's stove bed is covered with straw. This is a violation of the law, and the law provides for a fine of 10 rubles for this. The boss demands payment of this fine. The peasants fall to their knees, begging not to ruin. Finally, the boss “had mercy”, put 3 rubles in his pocket and went to the next house. They already know about this rule, and the straw has been swept away from the bed. But the boss is not discouraged. He discovers that there is no barrel of water in the attic in case of fire, and the rules say that for this violation there is a fine of 50 rubles. The peasants are trying to explain to him that in the event of a fire in the village, a fire brigade has been created, and when there is an alarm, the vigilantes will come running from each yard with tools on a schedule: some with an ax, some with a hook, some with a pump, some with a barrel of water. And a barrel of water in the attic is stupid. After all, the water in the attic will freeze; what use will a block of ice in a frozen barrel have in a fire? The boss agrees with the peasants, but what can he do: he didn’t write these rules. The peasants beg him, and he finally agrees to take 10 rubles from each yard and leave. And the peasants are happy: what a good boss they got.

It’s all very simple: instructions written by wise men in St. Petersburg, plus the skillful application of it by local bureaucrats, and as a result, both of them had money, and both of them, under the guise of protecting the people, cleverly robbed them. But for this it was necessary to destroy the community, because in a traditional community the world simply would not allow itself to be checked, since it was only required to pay taxes and supply recruits, and the rest of the affairs of the community did not concern anyone.

The world, of course, respected the authorities. For example, there was a tradition according to which, when a chief of the same rank visited a village, he was given a special fried egg and a glass or two of vodka, while a chief of a higher rank was given chicken. But if the community did not consider itself guilty before the state (such guilt, for example, could be “a dead body of a person found on the territory of the community”), then it did not humiliate itself before government officials and did not allow them to interfere in its affairs.

Russian democracy (with its love of freedom, independence, non-recognition of private property as a means of robbing other people) stood as a powerful obstacle in the way of the “selfish” interests of the bourgeoisie and bureaucracy. And it would have survived if genetic “whims” had not manifested themselves in the Romanov dynasty, and wiser after wiser had not begun to come to the throne. In the past centuries, Peter the Great and even Catherine the Great remained, capable of understanding the matter on their own, who needed assistants only to participate in assessing the situation and developing a solution, and not to suggest a solution as a whole. There were no more kings who clearly understood the essence of their decrees and their effectiveness in protecting the people. The time had come for tsars, for whom decisions were first made by ministers, tsars - “bald dandies, enemies of labor,” and the Romanov dynasty ended with such misery on the throne, which did not hesitate to listen to the advice of the vile maniac Rasputin. The tsars betrayed the world, betrayed Russia, and the peasant community began to suffer one blow after another from the combined forces of the bourgeoisie and bureaucracy. The beginning of open hostilities can perhaps be considered 1861, the year of reforms, the year of the liberation of the peasants.

The wise men still rejoice at this liberation, they still scold the revolutionaries who killed Alexander II, the Tsar-Liberator. What, exactly, is there to be happy about? Before 1861, peasants were obliged to cultivate the landowner's fields, which, by the way, were smaller in area than after 1861. After the reform, they were no longer required to process them. So, are these fields left uncultivated? No, they were processed as before. Maybe they were processed by blacks or Chinese? No, all the same Russian peasants. Then what were they freed from? Did they work in the landowners' fields because they had nothing to do? Maybe they got so rich from working for the landowner that they began to live like a bar?

More than three decades after the liberation of the peasants, the Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedia gives such “joyful” figures for the state of the Russian people, happy with liberation and “free” work for the landowner. In 1896, Russia exported agricultural products abroad worth 534,865 thousand rubles. This money was taken from the peasants by land owners and taxes, taken away by private ownership of land, taken away by the bureaucracy, since the Russian peasants did not have any extra bread. At that time, there were 109.8 million rural residents in Russia, that is, per one rural resident, products worth 4 rubles 87 kopecks were exported. The average Russian family consisted of 6.6 people, therefore, per family the amount is 32 rubles 14 kopecks. Under serfdom, a peasant on quitrent had to pay the landowner no more than 20 rubles. If we assume that the grain sold to pay taxes remained in Russia, then what did the peasant gain from liberation? Previously he paid 20, but now 32. And how he “luxurized” in his hut! In the Moscow province there were 8.4 people per house. And 80% of such families lived in houses 6-8 arshins or less, that is, cut from logs with a length of 4.2 to 5.6 meters. And my health was so good! Out of 1,000 boys born, 490 lived to be 10 years old, and out of 1,000 girls, as many as 530. In England and Sweden, where Russia exported grain, the average life expectancy for men was 45.25 years, and for women 50.0 years; in Russia itself, men On average they lived 27.25 years, women 29.38 years.

Alexander II freed the peasants from the landowners and gave them into slavery to the land owners. But the bureaucracy also wanted its share. She began to energetically interfere in the affairs of the community, trying to subjugate everything to herself. We said that the community was led by a meeting, a meeting, but between meetings, current affairs were managed by the headman - the executive power of the community.

First of all, Russian democracy was replaced by Western parliamentarism. The decision of the meeting began to be considered valid not only with a unanimous vote, but also with two-thirds of the votes. A vote-buying fist has burst into the world.

Next, the bureaucracy took on the elders, trying to bureaucratize them, to subordinate them to themselves, and not to the world. The elders resisted, they were bribed with silver medals and personalized caftans, the obstinate were dealt with harshly - only in the year of reform and only in the Samara province were almost 70 village elders exiled to Siberia, who refused to obey the volost elders and remained faithful to worldly sentences.

Both the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy have taken the muzzles off their assholes and let them off their leashes. Those, having read books by Western scientists (written for Western conditions, and for smart people), with all their diligence began to criticize the community, Russian peasants and everything connected with it. (It’s not difficult for us to imagine, we saw what happened when Gorbachev unleashed his wise men.) Some, having heard that pea sausage was being introduced into the diet of soldiers in the German army, began to demand that the peasants sow and eat peas (how can one not remember Nikita Sergeevich with his corn). Others mocked communal holdings and the strength of tradition. Still others called the peasants drunkards and lazy people. By the way, about the laziness of the Russian peasant. The same Brockhaus and Efron report that the most “deadly” months in Russia, that is, the months when the mortality rate of the population sharply exceeded the annual average, are July and August, the months of suffering, the hardest peasant work. At this time, the weak suffered and died at work. But the following months, September and October, were the most prosperous of the year in terms of mortality.

Those Russian intellectuals who knew and understood the people, but could not convey their thoughts to the Tsar through the sage’s verbal diarrhea, despaired: “You know, I’m very afraid of your St. Petersburg concoction. How can you, gentlemen, officials, and also St. Petersburg residents, and scientists in addition, begin to legislate, truly, pure disaster can come out of this, and what a disaster! You know, both me and Khomyakov get chills from fear alone. We are afraid of you a lot, but in reality you will be worse and more terrible. Try to do it as incompletely, insufficiently, badly as possible: really, it will be better,” wrote A.I. more than a hundred years ago. Koshelev, but his words also apply to our lives today. The wise men have not become any wiser.

The book has already given many examples when an idea that seemed correct in the capital turned into a masterpiece of stupidity where it should have been implemented in life. However, the idea of ​​delocracy, unfortunately, is difficult to understand, and those who do not try to analyze, but prefer to believe, as a rule, see no reason to believe in this idea. Therefore, giving one more example is like adding butter to porridge.

Leskov describes such a case. He sat down as a fellow traveler in a cart with a man traveling to the volost, and talked with him about his business. The man said that the world had collected a bribe and now he was taking it to the volost authorities. The purpose of the bribe is to ensure that the volost does not send Dutch cows to this village. How would the town sage rate this episode? He heard that a cow gives milk, and he knows that peasant cows give little milk, barely 700-1500 liters per year, and of low fat content, and a Dutch cow gives 5000-7000 liters per year. One Dutch one replaces ten Russian ones. But keeping one is more profitable than ten, both in terms of labor costs and feed. And here the peasants are given Dutch cows for free, the tsar spent money, bought them with treasury money to improve the breed of Russian cattle, and the peasants collect money and give bribes so that these cows are not given to them! What does it mean?

Here we need to remember that Russia at that time did not know mineral fertilizers, its fields did not know Chilean nitrate. Advising the Tsar to import Dutch cows into Russia, the Tsar’s wise men had to ask themselves the question: how has bread been grown in Russia for centuries without fertilizing the fields? The wise men could not understand that for a peasant the most valuable thing in a cow is not milk or meat (these are all related products), but manure and only manure, since without manure he will not have bread. And Russia had its own breed of cattle - dung. The “value system” of livestock was completely different. Nobody fed grain to the cattle - it was stupid. In any village, the main value was not arable land, but land - meadows and pastures. It was from them that it was possible to determine how many livestock the village was capable of supporting. And the number of livestock determined the arable land and the area for grain. It was believed that one head of large livestock (horse or cow) or ten heads of small livestock (pig, sheep) give minimal amount manure for growing bread on one dessiatine. If there is no manure, there is no need to plow. Manure was the main value that livestock provided, and milk, meat, and wool were the accompanying goods.

At the dawn of the Russian state, Yaroslav the Wise wrote a code of law. It determined the fine for the destruction of other people's livestock. Based on the amount of the fine, one can determine which pet was especially valuable to the peasants. (By the way, in those days, both swans and cranes lived on the peasant farmstead as poultry.) It turns out that the largest fine was imposed not for the destruction of a breeding stallion or a milk cow, but an ox, since it performed the functions of a horse and produced a lot of manure. Milk was not of much importance to the peasants; the main thing was grain and bread. And the ox plowed and fertilized the field. And now it will no longer seem surprising that the same fine as for an ox (twice the fine for a horse) was taken for the destruction of... a cat: what the ox “raised”, the cat was obliged to protect from mice.

Cows of the Russian breed were distinguished by the fact that any food was suitable for them: from marsh sedge to straw from the roof of a hut during the prolonged winter. This was what made them valuable, not their milk. What should a man do with a Dutch cow? After all, she needs to be fed with clover, she needs to be fed with grain, which the peasant did not always have enough for his family. A Dutch cow on Russian grub will die immediately. And the bureaucrat will blame the guy for killing royal gift because of laziness, and will punish. Therefore, the men collected a bribe to the authorities so that they would hand over the royal gift to some other village.

This is not very difficult, and the actions of the peasants do not raise doubts about their expediency, but how many accusations of stupidity were brought down on their heads by the capital’s wise men, pitting against the peasants officials who were not too delving into the essence of the matter, but were enthusiastic and energetic. Such, for example, as Pyotr Stolypin.

It was Stolypin who threw the famous words into the faces of the revolutionaries: “You need great upheavals, but we need great Russia!». Beautiful words, but, probably, not a single revolutionary did as much for the great upheavals as Stolypin himself. And he was drawn to philosophize, he was drawn to reform agriculture. Having picked up information about farms in the USA and how they were doing, Stolypin decided to reorganize the peasant community of Russia into a society of individual farmers.

To a city dweller involved in any economic activity, Stolypin's idea should seem extremely attractive.

The situation in Russia was like this. According to the Brockhaus and Efron dictionary, in the European part of Russia the area of ​​land owned by the average village was 8.6 square versts, and 167 souls of both sexes lived in it. With 6.6 people per house in this part of Russia, the average village consisted of 25 households. Arable land in the European part of Russia occupied 26% of the land area, the rest was meadows, forests, and inconvenient lands. Consequently, per yard in this average village there were about 9 dessiatines of arable land, and of all land 34.4 dessiatines (a dessiatine is approximately equal to one hectare). An area of ​​8.6 square versts can be represented as a square with a side of approximately 3 km. But it was extremely rare that the plot had the shape of a square, and the village was located in the center of it. Consequently, we can assume that in the average Russian village there were almost certainly fields 3 km away from the estates. It was necessary to go to these fields to plow, sow, bring in manure (about 40 tons per tithe), and remove sheaves from the field. All this is associated with costs, inconveniences, and requires a lot of working time (and if the field was more than 2-3 km away, the peasants stopped transporting manure: it was unprofitable, they planted in such fields without fertilizers and called them field fields).

It’s another matter if the farm, house and farmstead are located right on the field that needs to be cultivated. After all, 9 dessiatines is a square plot with a side of 300 meters, therefore, from the threshold of the house to any extreme point is no more than 300 meters - ten times less than in the village. The peasant’s work in cultivating the field is made easier, perhaps 3-5 times.

In addition, the capital's wise men, like the current ones, stubbornly insisted that the peasant on the land that is his personal property will work better, will protect and cherish this land more. Of course, a city dweller will always find something to say to a peasant.

Despite such obvious advantages, the process of transforming Russian peasants into farmers, even with the help of the energetic Stolypin with his preferential loans and so on, was very slow: from 1861 to 1914, that is, in 53 years, barely 14 were able to be resettled from communities to farmsteads. % of peasants. Well, how can the city sage not assert that our peasants are extremely stupid and do not understand their benefits? He, the city guy, understands, but they, the rural people, don’t.

But let's call on our imagination to help and imagine that we are the same peasants who moved out of the village to their own personal farm. First of all, let’s estimate what the distance will be to our nearest neighbor? For one yard, we believed that in European Russia there were 34.4 dessiatines of common land, this is the area of ​​a square plot with a side of almost 600 m. That is, on average 600 meters to neighbors. This means that you won’t be able to reach them, and it will take 6-8 minutes to walk to them even on a good road at a brisk pace, and unless absolutely necessary, even in dry weather in summer, no one will go to their neighbor. And in winter, spring, autumn? And five months of waist-deep snowdrifts and three months of impassable mud! Moving to a farm means voluntarily dooming yourself to solitary confinement in a prison you built! The Arkhangelsk peasants said that Stolypin could not evict them to the farmsteads because the women resisted: they would have no one there to gossip with. Just kidding, but this is a reason that alone is enough not to be evicted from the village.

What about the Americans? American farmers have an incomparably easier job due to a climate that is not comparable to the Russian one. Incomparably better roads. They still had free time in the evening to ride 3-4 kilometers on horseback to a saloon and sit there with friends for a couple of hours over whiskey and cards.

But this is not accepted among Russians, and not because they do not like to drink, but their working days were filled with work until the evening. Even at youth gatherings, girls and boys were busy with some monotonous work that left their heads free, and not playing cards.

In a village where houses stand 20 meters apart from each other, the housewife will always find time to run to her neighbor for an hour and gossip with her, pour out her heart, listen to gossip, while at the same time not letting her house and yard, her children and her livestock out of sight. This is impossible on the farm.

But there were also purely economic considerations. The fact is that the most difficult, intense agricultural work occurred in the spring and July-August. In winter, peasants strove to work in the waste industry in order to add pennies earned by carting or in factories to the pennies they earned on the land. There was little work in winter, but there was some, and if only one man lived on a farm, it was difficult for him to leave the farm and go fishing. It was a different matter in the village; there were always men there who could bring firewood and hay not only to themselves, but also to their neighbors. In the villages, while losing in labor productivity due to travel to and from plots, they gained by receiving additional income from crafts, and in general it was more profitable for Russia for its residents to work all year round. Other problems also arose: how to send children to school 5-6 kilometers away, who will provide assistance in case of an accident, etc.

But the main thing, apparently, is not this. In our country, both now and in those days, the wise men preached the idea of ​​private ownership of land, not understanding that for the peasant the land itself, as a commodity, has no value. The value, the commodity, is the harvest. And land is one of the tools with which the harvest is obtained. The peasant’s income and his material interest are based on the harvest, and whose land, personal or state, is not important. It doesn’t matter to the worker who owns the machine on which he sharpens the bolts - him, the capitalist or the state. If he receives roughly 10 rubles for a bolt, he is interested in this work, but if it’s only a ruble, then what’s the point of the fact that the machine is his personal?

The Russian way of thinking, the Russian idea is as follows: you personally can only own what is made by your own hands. You didn't make the earth, God created it. Therefore, the idea of ​​personal ownership of land was seditious for Russians. Yes, over the years of propaganda, a layer of Russians with Western thinking has formed, who realized that although the earth is God’s creation, they can make good money on it, who realized that they can invest not only their labor, but also money in the land.

Yuri Mukhin

In essence, as before the 18th century, each community remained self-sufficient, although its connections with the outside world through primarily the market during the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. have increased. As before, the duality of the tasks facing the community - serving the peasantry and the state - determined the presence of two structures in it - official and unofficial. The official structure of the village community was intended to implement state tasks, the unofficial structure was intended to implement the group and class interests of the peasantry. The unofficial structure was not sanctioned by the state de jure, but it was not rejected by it either, since the state and landowners were not able to take on its many functions. Both structures could not be differentiated from each other, and accordingly there could not be a strict division of functions between them. Despite this, the peasants, the state and the landowners clearly separated them from each other, based on a simple criterion: what exists by law or by order of the authorities and satisfies their interests - that is state and landowner, what exists according to custom and tradition and satisfies the needs of the peasants - that worldly. Let’s try to separate and analyze both structures separately from the point of view of:

1) rights and morals that dictated the standards of life and behavior;

2) methods of influence by which the behavior of peasants was brought into conformity with law and morality;

3) management bodies and managers who carried out current management.

During the imperial period, official law applied mainly to non-peasants. In relation to peasants, the law was valid in three cases:

1) when they entered into relations with the state, for example, when paying taxes, performing recruitment, travel and other duties;

2) when they dealt with non-peasants, for example, entered into transactions with them, committed crimes against them, etc.;

3) when they themselves turned to the crown authorities for help, with complaints or to the crown court. Most civil and criminal cases affecting peasants were governed by customary law. It was not codified, there was no clarity and uniformity in the application of its norms, cases were decided ad hoc, i.e. in relation to a specific case. There were serious differences between law and custom, which was the main factor in frequent conflicts between peasants, on the one hand, and landowners and the state, on the other. In essence, all peasant revolts had a legal basis - a discrepancy between law and custom, since much of what seemed fair to the peasants and was in accordance with custom did not seem correct to the administration and landowners and did not correspond to the law, and vice versa. In the collection of V. I. Dahl, all the proverbs speak negatively about the law (“Where the law is, there is resentment”; “Even if all the laws disappeared, if only people lived by the truth”), on the contrary, custom is respected and placed above the law (“Custom is older , stronger than the law") and is considered as an expression of truth, as a guide to life (“It was not established by us, it will not be rearranged by us”; “The land will not stand for long, where the statutes will be taken into account. Despite this, until mid-19th V. the state managed to keep the conflict between law and custom within certain limits, and even used many norms of customary law to its advantage, for example, communal form of ownership, redistribution of land, mutual responsibility for taxes and unsolved crimes. It must be emphasized that the peasants’ negative assessment of the law does not at all indicate their nihilism towards legal regulation social relations, as is often thought and to prove what these proverbs are quoted. Negativism towards the law only indicates the presence of contradictions between it and custom.

Contradictions were also observed between the moral code of the peasantry and the code that operated among other classes. These contradictions concerned both the substance of these norms and their application. For example, from the point of view of a peasant, it was immoral not to feed a stranger passing by and not to provide him with lodging for the night, or to refuse help to a beggar and an orphan, or not to treat a guest; It was considered immoral to take interest on money borrowed and not to come to the aid of a fellow villager who was in trouble (fire, loss of livestock, etc.). From the point of view of a peasant, deceiving a neighbor or relative is immoral, but deceiving an official or master in the interests of the peasants was not considered immoral; stealing something from a neighbor, violating his boundary, chopping firewood in a community forest is immoral, but picking fruit in a landowner's garden, chopping firewood in his forest or plowing his land are not at all immoral acts. This resulted in inconsistency in the assessments of the moral foundations of the peasantry on the part of educated society. Some “rural people seem to be some kind of monster, the scum of the human race, devoid of any concept of law, morality, justice and duty,” others considered the peasants “almost Arcadian shepherdesses,” and the nobility of Slavophile convictions transferred “all the brightest and brightest thoughts to the peasants.” high ideals of human perfection," stated famous historian, publicist, part-time landowner, K. D. Kavelin.

In practice, the behavior of individual peasants often deviated from generally accepted norms in the community. Nevertheless, they were the core of real relationships; the community was oriented towards them, forcing the person who deviated from them to return to the right path with the help of a well-developed system of social control and punishment. The most effective were informal social sanctions. The offender was tormented by "spins", nicknames, disdainful attitude, laughter, making him look funny and overestimating his qualities with the help of gossip. Gossip, or rumor, was omnipresent, as the proverb said: “Rumor gets in the window; rumor spreads like wind; you can’t escape rumor.” She threatened the man with loss of respect, notoriety and the deterioration of his relations with his fellow villagers: “Getting a bad reputation is like asking for a drink; getting into good people is not easy.” The standards of the community were felt very strongly, and one had to conform to them with all seriousness, since violating the expectations of those with whom a person is accustomed to reckoning, with whom one identifies oneself, to whom one is emotionally attached, is psychologically very difficult and dangerous.

Few could endure the state of hostility with the community for long. After informal sanctions they were powerless against the violator, formal sanctions came into force - fines, canings, confiscation and sale of property, arrest, expulsion from the community, surrender out of turn to become a soldier, exile or prison. In rare cases, when it came to horse thieves, incorrigible malicious thieves, the peasants used lynching, which usually ended in death. Despite all the heaviness formal sanctions, informal control played more important role. Public opinion exerted strong and constant pressure on the peasants, nullifying deviations from accepted norms of behavior. “Everyone keeps their word; the word, that is, worldly disapproval, punishes most of all. Corporal punishment is used for the disobedient and intemperate. They are very afraid of a monetary fine, but even more so of public disapproval, which casts vice on the whole house.”46 Public opinion was sometimes formalized in writing or verbal verdicts of peasant gatherings, but most often it was expressed informally, orally - in ridicule, remarks, admiration. Public opinion not only condemned and ridiculed awkwardness, physical weakness, and the inability to do normal work for peasants, but also expressed approval for individuals who achieved success in farming, crafts, singing, etc.

For the peasant, the opinion of not only his fellow villagers mattered, but also the residents of the immediate surroundings, with whom he constantly communicated. Kavelin tells an indicative case in this regard. In 1861, as a landowner, he amicably drew up a charter with his peasants on the division of land and the conditions for its redemption. But according to the law, the charter came into force only after its approval by the authorities. Kavelin believed that until this moment the relationship between him and his peasants should have remained on the same basis. However, the peasants refused to go to corvee. “The rumor that we have gone free,” said the old men who came to him to explain, “has spread a hundred miles around us, but will we work? Everyone will laugh at us; and even then our workers, looking at our fees, They tease us: where is your pure will? We are ashamed to look them in the eyes. If we have to endure such a shame, then it would be better if the world mediator sorted us out and let the matter proceed according to the law, as it should be." Kavelin shared his fears with the peasants that, when the charter is approved, they may refuse the conditions reached, but they still will not agree to corvee, because corvee, once abolished, cannot be restored. The peasants asked Kavelin to draw a line on the ground and said: “Whoever agrees to sign the letter, let him stand on the right hand, and whoever does not agree, on the left. Look, old people! Whoever keeps silent now and then starts arguing, we will punish him with rods. Speak up.” now: who disagrees with what.” Every single one of them moved to the right side. “Give us your hands to make your word stronger,” said Kavelin. Every single one of them shook hands: shaking hands when concluding a deal was equivalent to an oath.

The presence of strong social control in the community, it seems to me, is explained by the fact that at the time in question the peasants did not yet have the ability for strong internal self-control. As is known, self-control can be based on the fear of punishment and expectation of reward (external self-control) or on conscious and voluntary adherence to existing rules and norms of behavior (internal self-control). When external self-control predominates, an apparatus of observation and coercion is necessary, because a person who does not act according to the rules does not “execute himself,” but, on the contrary, may be satisfied that his offense went unnoticed. This is how children behave, for example. Adult peasants in their circle, in their world, were generally distinguished by their moral behavior and, when committing offenses that were considered not only as a crime, but also as a sin, they suffered from remorse: “An evil conscience is worth an executioner”; “You can’t get past your conscience; your soul is not your neighbor—you can’t get around it.” However, the available data suggest that the behavior of the peasants was largely based on external control, on the belief that all human actions are taken into account by God, on the desire to avoid punishment in this or the other world, as well as on the desire to have a good reputation among fellow villagers, which was reflected in the proverb: “Sin is not a problem, rumor is not good. They will say something on the street.” Remorse, when it occurred, reflected not so much repentance before the inner conscience, but before God, to whom all sins are known: “Everything in the world is given according to our sins.”

If there is a shortage external control both Christian commandments and customs and laws were quite easily violated (“Without sin you cannot live through a century, without shame you cannot wear a face”; “Whoever is not a sinner to God is not guilty of the Tsar?”). There was even a moral justification for this: “If you don’t sin, you won’t repent; if you don’t repent, you won’t be saved.” The peasants easily appropriated the things they found, even if they knew exactly who they belonged to: “If it lies badly, your stomach hurts, if you walk by, they’ll call you a fool.” One contemporary noted: “Petty theft is the most common thing and is committed at every step, so you can’t even pursue it: you don’t have enough strength. The theft of food is something physiological, as irresistible and involuntary as a passion for wine,” which reflected in the proverb: “It is a sin to steal, but it cannot be avoided.” The famous writer V. G. Korolenko, who in his youth shared populist illusions and believed in the deepest morality of the peasants and their inability to violate moral laws, was deeply disappointed when, upon close acquaintance with the peasants, he did not discover this. “We generally associate the idea of ​​elementary, simple virtues with remote places. At first I thought the same thing, seeing, for example, how the owners left the huts without locks. This means, I thought, at least thefts are unknown here. But in this too I was mistaken Subsequently, I was struck by the abundance of verbs that denoted the concept of theft.<. >In general, one cannot count on the strength of this primitive morality. This is some strange state of unstable moral balance that can swing in any direction.”

There was a structure of positions in the community: headman, tax collector, clerk, ten's, sot's, etc. The crown administration in the state village and the landowners in their estates, as a rule, did not dare to appoint their own persons independent of the community to public positions - this would be expensive and ineffective. They used leaders nominated by the peasants themselves, controlling their choice. But, delegating power to elected officials, they at the same time strictly controlled their performance of police and tax duties. The activities of elected officials in organizing the daily life of the village were of little concern to the authorities, but they were of great concern to the community, and in this incarnation, the elected officials were under its vigilant control. For poor performance of official duties, elected officials faced punishment from the crown administration and the landowner, and for neglect of community interests, condemnation and sanctions from the peasants. As the practical activities of elected officials show, they extremely rarely escaped the control of the community and turned into a hostile force superior to the peasants. The reasons for this were that the electors were regularly re-elected, did not have any significant privileges (they were not even exempt from paying taxes and duties), continued to engage in peasant labor, were under the control of public opinion, and in case of abuse of power they were threatened with peasant lynching. In a word, the elected officials did not lose touch with the peasantry, and their interests coincided to a greater extent with the interests of the community than with the landowner or the crown administration. As a rule, elected officials acted as defenders of the community, its intercessors, and organizers. Despite the threat of punishment, it was often elected officials who led peasant revolts. Naturally, the position of elected officials, obliged to serve two masters at the same time, was not easy, and important public positions were considered by the peasants as an honorable, but difficult duty. “Sitting in the priests means porridge, and slaps in the sotskys. It’s not a petitioner against the headman, but he’s not averse to the world,” the peasants said.

When elected officials forgot about the interests of the peasantry - this sometimes happened on landowners' estates - retaliatory measures were taken against them. Such elected representatives were re-elected, and if the authorities defended them, the peasants did not hesitate to revolt. The most often separated from the peasants were clerks, whose position, due to the lack of literate people in the village, often turned into a hereditary one. Taking advantage of the illiteracy of the peasants, some of them abused power and used public positions for personal enrichment. But in the end, when the peasants became aware of the abuses of the elected officials, they sought their removal; if the authorities did not make concessions, lynching was used.

Thus, the elected officials were both official and unofficial leaders. Being approved by the authorities, they were official officials and were obliged to carry out official interests, but, as elected to public positions by the will of the peasants, they were supposed to express and in fact expressed peasant interests.

Worldly affairs were in the hands of the most respectable part of the peasantry, since important elected positions were occupied by “prosperous, decent and kind men”, “of honest behavior, preferably literate, sharp-witted, sensible, dexterous in all respects”, usually aged 40-60 years. When electing the elder to the most important position, the assembly made a decision, or choice, which included a formula of trust (“we trust him; since he is a kind and truthful person, his true work will be”) and the obligation of the peasants to be obedient to him (“and to us, worldly people , be obedient to him in everything"). At the end of the service, the elective received a certificate approved at the meeting, which assessed his work. Here is an excerpt from a typical certificate issued to the headman: “When he was in charge of this position, he behaved decently, treated his subordinates decently, kindly and condescendingly, observed the duty of the oath in the proceedings, did not prejudice anyone, and did not complain about him from anyone brought, which is why he has earned himself just gratitude from society, who will henceforth be accepted in worldly councils as a person worthy of honor.” The formulas for election and certification were similar everywhere, probably because they generalized the qualities that were required of an elected official. As evidenced by the certificates, only those activities that were aimed at satisfying peasant interests deserved a positive assessment.

The true informal leaders of the community were old men - men aged 60 years and older, who retained their ability to work, had a clear mind and were the heads of households. Old people who had extensive experience, who had served in elections in their time, and who enjoyed a reputation as honest, fair people, united in an informal organization - the “council of old people” and constituted the most influential group of people in the community. Any important matter was considered primarily by them, and their opinion when discussing the problem at the meeting was decisive. The high prestige of the elderly was explained by the fact that community life was built not according to science, not according to books, but according to oral tradition, passed from the older generation to the youth. In such a situation, the most competent were the old people, since they were the ones who knew the customs and traditions better than others and were, in the full sense, a living, walking encyclopedia. “In the social life of the local peasants, the ancient, Christian order is sacredly preserved. All authority is respected as given by God. The main basis of the social order is respect for the elderly and their general verdict. The headman, of course, does not decide on anything important that concerns the whole society , without old people. At worldly gatherings, rarely does a peasant under forty years of age raise his voice: the mutual trust in the elected authorities and the host of old people is so great that young people consider it reprehensible to say anything at a gathering,” testified one of his contemporaries, a landowner. Nizhny Novgorod province in 1848

The elected representatives were the executive branch of the community. From the point of view of the crown administration and landowners, in all matters relating to public order, taxes and duties, the elected officials had to carry out their will, and in other matters of peasant life - the will of the community. However, from the point of view of the peasants, the elected representatives had to always and in everything serve the community and carry out the will of the gathering - the general meeting of heads of farms. In essence, the gathering personified the community, so when we talk about the community, it is usually the gathering that is meant. In practice, it turned out that neither the elected officials nor the individual peasant could do anything without the decision of the gathering. Even the instructions of the administration and the landowner, before being implemented, had to receive secular consent at the gathering. The government and landowners were aware of the power of the gathering and therefore sought by any means to obtain from it approval of their instructions, especially those that were unpopular among the peasants. Thus, not only in a state-owned or appanage village, but also in a landowner's estate, the community had significant autonomy from the crown and landowner authorities, enjoyed self-government and had real means to defend its interests.

Did all peasants participate in self-government and to what extent? According to custom, decisions at gatherings were made only by male householders (who were also called heads of households, bolshaks or patriarchs), although the presence of any peasant at the gathering was not prohibited. In the XVIII-first half of the XIX century. the average population of the courtyard was 8-9 people, there were single people and widows with children, so the patriarchs made up no more than 10% of the total population of the community. Consequently, theoretically, only about 10% of peasants had the right to participate in assemblies, in peasant courts, and to be elected to various elective positions. And in fact, all householders used this right, although to varying degrees. When the agenda of the gathering included fundamental issues, such as redistribution of land, distribution of taxes and duties, discussion of some important crime, orders of the authorities, then all available healthy patriarchs gathered; when solving secondary issues, the most interested ones gathered. But no matter what issues were discussed at the gatherings, the influence of individual peasants on decision-making was different - proportional to their prestige. The patriarch's voice depended on the size and wealth of the family he represented. Since it was the size of the family that, as a rule, decisively determined its well-being, and it ranged from 3 to 50 or more people, the influence of the patriarchs varied accordingly.

In large communities, according to contemporaries, at the head of the world there was a not very numerous group of peasants who enjoyed special influence and respect - a kind of elite. It included the “best old people”, as well as some patriarchs of wealthy families aged 40-60 years. An analysis of signatures under secular verdicts reveals that the decisions of the assemblies and various commissions created by them were most often signed (for the illiterate - literate) by the same relatively narrow group of people. For example, in the Nikolsky estate of Count V.G. Orlov in 1806-1814. Two commissions operated annually - for the financial inspection of elders and for the allocation of land and duties. Over 9 years, 158 peasants were elected to both commissions, but 65 people took part in the work, of which 31 people - 1 time, 26 people - 2-4 times, 8 people - 5-12 times. However, the significantly different degree of participation of patriarchs in self-government bodies does not give reason to believe that oligarchic rather than democratic governance operated in the community. Firstly, the highest body of the community was still the meeting of all patriarchs, and not one of them could be excluded from decision-making, even if he himself wanted it: in order to avoid future misunderstandings, the community demanded from everyone personal participation in making fundamental decisions , since this guaranteed their implementation. And although there were few patriarchs, they represented all full-fledged households, which made it possible to take into account the interests of the entire community. Secondly, middle and lower positions in public administration were occupied in turn by all householders, without exception. Finally, elite governance was practiced mainly in large communities, of which there were few; The composition of the elite was constantly changing, and peasants usually held important elected positions for a year or two. Let us note, by the way, that more active participation in government by a relatively small part of the population is typical for any truly democratic regime.

The active participation in governance of some patriarchs and the weak participation of others was due to two circumstances. For the peasantry, “fair”, i.e. egalitarian, the distribution of material goods had higher value, than an equal distribution of power and influence, so they were extremely scrupulous regarding the distribution of land and taxes and rather indifferent regarding the distribution of power. The second circumstance was that active participation in public affairs required experience and time - it absorbed up to a third of working time - and received very little or no reward, and sometimes even brought losses. Salaries and minor benefits did not compensate for lost working time, especially for those holding the most important elected positions. Public service was a difficult responsibility. In view of this, they could and did actively engage in public affairs,

firstly, elderly and experienced people (elderly people could not particularly actively participate in the hard peasant work on their farm, and their distraction to public affairs caused the least damage to the farm),

secondly, people from a large family that could easily do without one worker; thirdly, wealthy people who could somehow compensate for their underemployment by running their household.

Large families, as a rule, were wealthier than small ones, and older people headed these families as big men. In view of this, it was the large families that mainly supplied the electors.

Thus, the uneven distribution of public responsibilities between various social groups of the peasantry led to the fact that power fell as a burden on the highest stratum of the peasantry. Wealthy peasants paid a kind of tax for prestige, respect and power, and therefore their more active participation in public affairs suited the rest of the peasants. It happened that peasants, under all sorts of pretexts, evaded public service, for example, they deliberately committed unimportant offenses so that they would be fined and deprived of the honor of holding a public position. Paradoxically, the uneven distribution of power supported economic equality, and the desire for economic equality led to the concentration of power in the hands of the wealthy peasantry. So, with an equal distribution of communal property among peasants, the burden of power was distributed unevenly between them. In this sense, the community resembled a patriarchal peasant family, where property belonged to all its members, and power was concentrated in the hands of the highway. To understand the nature of power and management in a community, the decision-making procedure is of great importance. According to customary law, the unanimity of the patriarchs at the gathering was an indispensable condition for making any decision. If at least one person disagreed, the decision could not be considered final and could not be implemented. How was unanimity achieved? The dissenting minority was either convinced by the arguments of the majority, or, not being convinced, voluntarily gave in in order to be at one with everyone, so as not to come into conflict with the world.

Coercion in the psychological, and especially in the physical sense, was not used, although it happened that the minority found itself forced to agree with the opinion of the majority against their wishes. On the other hand, it also happened that an entire peasant society at many meetings struggled to persuade one of its members to agree with everyone, and, without receiving his consent, postponed the matter. The requirement of unanimity actually gave each patriarch the right of veto, which, however, was not easy to implement. The right of veto was sometimes used by the most courageous peasants to confront the landowners or the crown administration, forcing the latter to either give in or take extreme measures against dissenters, which the authorities were always reluctant to do. The rule of unanimity was based on the belief that only the consent of all would make the decision lasting and fair, or divine. One illustration will illustrate this outdated view. V. G. Korolenko, who spent about 10 years in exile in remote places of Russia and knew people’s life well, tells a remarkable incident in his memoirs.

In 1879, he met in exile with two peasants who had been expelled for not signing an agreement between the community and the Ministry of Finance, which had seized the forest from the peasants. “Both of them were already old men. Both had large families, and life in exile responded to them very bitterly. But they were sure that the triumph of the villain could not be complete until they, the two Sannikov brothers, humbled themselves and “gave hands.” . But they decided not to humble themselves: it was better to die for peace in captivity. And they consciously carried the burden of their world on their old shoulders." Of course, the principle of unanimity in the peasant community could sometimes mask the power of the most influential persons, but, as a rule, this happened only in those few cases when the village was sharply differentiated in property terms, when there was a really rich peasant who enslaved the majority of his fellow villagers. Much more often, consensus covered the power of the “elite” in townsman communities in the 18th century, and in rural communities only after emancipation. It is worth adding that community ethics in pre-reform times negatively assessed the opposition, open disagreement , insistence on one's own opinion. Formally, the principle of “one patriarch - one vote” was in effect, but since no one counted the votes, in fact, the respected peasant “weighed” more, and the less influential one - less than one vote.

So, it was the unofficial structure of the community that bore the main burden of organizing the life of the peasants; the importance of the official structure was great, but still less important. The government managed to include elected officials in the public administration system, and the community in the public administration system. However, community self-government did not become a simple appendage of the state machine, and the community did not turn into an official organization. The crown administration recognized the autonomy of the community because it was the only effective method to ensure the cooperation of the peasants with the authorities, which had neither the financial resources nor the appropriate bureaucratic apparatus to control the incomes of the peasants and collect taxes from them, much less organize their economic and everyday life. Due to the fact that secular positions were not assigned to individuals or families for a long time, the assembly was a permanent body, and all patriarchs, to one degree or another, took part in management and were engaged in public affairs, power in the community was not alienated from its ordinary members and was democratic. character. However, this was not Western liberal, but a different form of democracy - it can be called community-type democracy (due to the fact that it could only operate in community-type organizations), or patriarchal democracy (due to the large role of patriarchs), or traditional democracy (due to the fact that her ideal was tradition).

Communal democracy existed only for the heads of households, implying the unconditional subordination of women, youth and men who were not Bolshaks; it was combined with admiration for antiquity, with a negative attitude towards dissent, personal freedom, social innovations, initiative and in general towards any deviant behavior; it was based on respect for the collective rather than the individual, giving preference to the interests of the majority over the interests of the minority and individuals. In contrast, liberal democracy, taking as its basis the opinion of the majority, does not prohibit or suppress minorities and the initiative of individuals and respects personal freedom and individual rights. The point of view of modern Slavophiles, according to which there was organic democracy in the community in the sense that the community was an organization bound by the complete unanimity of all its members, in which the individual was not absorbed by the collective, did not submit to its force, but voluntarily joined its decision, merged with it in love and brotherhood, is partly true for the pre-reform community, although, in my opinion, it idealizes it. In the community until the middle of the 19th century. there really was solidarity and a sense of unity among the peasants, but at the same time, she practiced violence against the rebellious, expelled from her midst those who did not meet her standard standards of behavior; in the community there were clashes between group interests and clans of relatives, contradictions were observed between elected representatives and peasants, and sometimes home-grown kulaks controlled public affairs. The organization of the community to some extent repeated in miniature the structure of the Moscow state of the 16th-17th centuries. (the headman is the king, the council of old people is the Boyar Duma, the gathering is the Zemsky Sobor, the heads of families are the ruling elite), which was called the patriarchal people's monarchy. Apparently, the peasantry of the 18th half of the 19th century V. stored political traditions XVI-XVII centuries and even more distant periods of Russian history.



The accession of the Chuvash people to Russia in 1551 “by petition”, peacefully, was a cardinal, turning point that determined the nature of its further development. It was a significant act for Russia and led to an increase in its power. Having become part of the Russian state, the Chuvash people forever linked their fate with the fate of the Russian people, preserved themselves as a nationality and received the opportunity for progressive development. Of course, the Chuvash themselves in those distant times could not imagine the full depth of the meaning of this the most important event. Their only desire was to get rid of the khan's yoke and ease their socio-economic and political situation. Of course, under the conditions of the exploitative system, the Chuvash labor masses, even as part of Russia, were under heavy oppression - under the social and national oppression of tsarism, Russian and local feudal lords, and later capitalists. Chuvash peasants paid cash and in-kind taxes to the royal treasury and carried out numerous duties. Part of their communal lands went to Russian landowners and monasteries. Tsarist government in early XVII century, forbade the Chuvash, like the Mari and Udmurts, to engage in blacksmithing and silversmithing. The reactionary national policy of tsarism hampered the development of the economy, social relations and culture of the Chuvash people. Tsarism did not allow any elements of statehood among the Chuvash and other non-Russian peoples. And yet, joining Russia had a progressive, positive meaning for the Chuvash people even in the pre-October period. The Russian centralized state in socio-economic, cultural and political terms stood much higher than the military-feudal Kazan Khanate with strongly pronounced features of eastern despotism. In the Russian state, the Chuvash found themselves in a highly developed feudal system. They were governed and judged according to the laws and legal norms of developed Russian feudal law. The conditions for the peaceful entry of the Chuvash and other peoples of the Mountain Side, set out in the charter of Ivan IV with a hanging gold seal, were basically fulfilled. The lands of the Chuvash were retained by them (in the territory of compact settlement of the Chuvash in the 16th-18th centuries, only about 4 percent of the land passed into the hands of Russian landowners and monasteries, as well as for urban settlements), the Chuvash labor masses were left in a state of tribute, and in the 18th century they became state-owned peasants, were not transferred into the hands of landowners, monasteries and the palace department, did not become privately owned (serfs. The people in legends explained in their own way why the Chuvash were not secured by boyars and nobles. Ivan the Terrible, driving through Chuvashia, was surprised at the good cultivation of the fields, the absence of weeds on them, high grain harvests. As if he brought his boyars to the Chuvash villages and, pointing to the earing fields, said: “Study!” The boyars asked to assign the Chuvash peasants to them, to which Ivan the Terrible replied: “No way! Let them be kings.” people." The period of peaceful annexation of Chuvashia to Russia, which took place during the reign of Ivan IV, is summarized in Chuvash folklore with the saying: Yavan empu chuknehi purnida men kalan - "What can we say about life under Tsar Ivan." The saying indicates that the years of the national liberation struggle of the Chuvash people, which culminated in the elimination of the yoke of the Kazan khans and feudal lords as a result of the annexation of Chuvashia to Russia, the years of the three-year tax exemption, were remembered by the people as the best years in their long-suffering history. As many historians have noted, the Russian people had a civilizing influence on the Chuvash, while at the same time receiving a lot of useful things from them. Already from the first decades after joining Russia, the working masses of Chuvash, Mari, Tatars, and Mordovians entered into friendly relations with Russian peasants. Many Russians, who were enslaved by the Kazan khans and feudal lords, did not return to the central regions of Russia after the liquidation of the Khanate and remained in the Tatar, Chuvash and Mari villages. Russian peasants from the former Polonyaniks lived “with both the Tatars and the Chuvash” together and plowed their arable land “not in a section with Tatar and Chuvash arable land, a mixture in strips,” reports the scribe book of the Sviyazhsk district of 1565-1567. In 1593, Kazan Metropolitan Hermogenes indignantly reported to Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich that “many Russian Polonyaniki and non-Polonyaniki live with the Tatars and the Cheremis and the Chuvash and drink with them and eat soda and marry with them.” Chuvash peasants always treated ordinary Russian people with respect and sympathy, “with whom they lived and worked nearby. "-says the Chuvash proverb. After the annexation of the Middle Volga region to Russia, the development of productive forces here accelerated somewhat, the development of new land spaces began in the former “wild field.” On the territory of Chuvashia, generally peaceful conditions of life, work and management were established, which contributed to the growth of the population population, expansion of acreage, increase in the number of working and productive livestock. Chuvash legends emphasize that after the annexation of the Kazan Khanate to Russia, a calm, peaceful life began. The improvement of the economic activities of the Chuvash peasants was also determined by the positive influence of the Russian people. The Chuvash adopted the best economic and cultural and everyday achievements. The Chuvash said about the best things made by their fellow tribesmen: “Made in the Russian way.” The most important of the progressive consequences of Chuvashia’s entry into the Russian state was the inclusion of Chuvash peasants in the class struggle of the Russian peasantry and the working masses of other peoples. With its entry into the Russian state, fundamental changes occurred in the management of the Chuvash region. In place of the Khan's administration, expelled from the territory of Chuvashia during the liberation struggle, the Russian system of governance was installed. To manage the Kazan land and other newly annexed territories, the Order of the Kazan Palace was created in Moscow. Almost a third of the territory of Chuvashia became part of the Sviyazhsk district. The tsarist government built the fortified cities of Cheboksary (1555), Alatyr (1550s), Kokshaysk (1574), Kozmodemyansk (1583), Tsivilsk (1589), Yadrin (1590), which became the centers of the districts of the Chuvash Territory. At the end of the 16th century, the Chuvash Yumachevsky volost became part of the Kurmysh district. Cities and districts began to be governed by governors subordinate to the tsar and the Order of the Kazan Palace, together with special “Tatar” heads in charge of the non-Russian population, and with a staff of clerks. In the fortresses, prisons were built, courtyards for keeping concubines from the local population, residential courtyards for storing yasak bread collected from peasants, etc. Armed forces were stationed in the cities (from 200 to 1000 soldiers in each), which served the purpose of governing the region, suppressing the class struggle of the working masses and protecting the region from attacks by nomadic Crimean and Nogai hordes, and later by detachments of Kalmyk feudal lords. The trade and craft population was concentrated in the town suburbs. Cities, as centers of trade, crafts and trades, played an important role in the economy of Chuvashia and connected it with the emerging all-Russian market.

The cities of the region, their foundation, and the origin of their names were uniquely reflected in Chuvash folklore. According to archaeological data, since the 14th century, on the site of Cheboksary there was a Chuvash urban-type settlement with brick buildings and handicraft production. On the Fra Mauro map of 1459, compiled on the basis of an earlier map, the city of Vede-Suar is placed on the site of Cheboksary10. Cheboksary was first mentioned in Russian chronicles in 1469. There are widespread legends that the founder of the settlement was the Chuvash Shebashkar. The legend, recorded in 1763-1765 by Lieutenant Colonel A.I. Svechin, says that “Shebashkar had a fair life kind person, why for his excellent life, among others, he received respect from his neighbors. For this reason, the river was named Cheboksary after him.” K. S. Milkovich wrote at the end of the 18th century: “The city of Cheboksary received its name, as the ancient inhabitants of this place say, from the Chuvash village of Shobaksar that was in this place in ancient times.” According to another legend, Chuvash fishermen Shubash and Kar first settled on the site of the city. The settlement began to grow due to fishermen arriving from other places. Over time, the fishermen at their meeting decided to name the settlement after the founders - Shubashkar. Subsequently, the settlement became a city. According to a record made by I. I. Yurkin in 1892, a wealthy Chuvash was the first to settle on the site of Cheboksary. Other Chuvash began to move in with him. Later the settlement grew into a city. A legend recorded in 1904 tells that Shubashkar was founded by a Chuvash owner who enjoyed good fame and respect from the ulbut (feudal lords) and Russian merchants. Because of the good attitude towards him, the Russians here respected all the Chuvash. In the city, the family line of the Chuvash owner was not interrupted. His descendants maintained connections with Chuvash peasants. The latter brought grain to the city for sale.

The second group of legends in explaining the founding of the city comes from the Russian urbonym Cheboksary. In the village Shiner (probably in the village of Shinerposi, Cheboksary district), ten miles from the future city of Cheboksary, lived the Chuvash Tsabak (Chebak) with his wife Sarah. He went to the site of the city to fish, then he set up a courtyard here. The settlement that arose later received its name from the names of Chebak and Sarah16. The legend recorded by A. A. Fuks in the 30s of the 19th century is somewhat different: “...I am very glad that I learned the legend about Cheboksary. Before the construction of the city, two main Chuvash yomsya lived in this place - Chebak and Sar. Where the cathedral church is now located, there was a large kiremet in which Chebak lived. Sar also lived in Kiremet, where the Vladimir Hermitage is now built. The Chuvash say that when the Russians began to build, a terrible storm arose, thunder, lightning, rain, hail. The wind broke the trees in the kiremet, and the evil spirit that lived in it flew out of it whistling and screaming. This is where the name Cheboksary comes from.” These legends agree that before the Russian authorities built a fortress in Cheboksary in 1555, the settlement that existed here was Chuvash. References to a wealthy Chuvash who was the first inhabitant of the settlement suggest that it was founded by a Bulgarian-Chuvash feudal lord. From the legend recorded by A. A. Fuks, it can be understood that the construction of a fortress by the Russians in Cheboksary was perceived by the Chuvash as a fundamental change in their history. What fate befell the Cheboksary Chuvash with the founding of a Russian fortress in 1555 - written sources are silent. K.S. At the end of the 18th century, Milkovich, with reference to the stories of old-timers, wrote that after the construction of the Russian city, the “Chuvash village of Shobaksar” was “removed and settled 12 versts from it, which name it has retained to this day.” Indeed, in the 17th-18th centuries, 12 kilometers west of Cheboksary, there existed the Chuvash village of Shebashkar, which was then divided into three settlements, now known as the villages of Oykasy, Varposi and Ongaposi of the current Vurman-Syuktersky village council of the Cheboksary region. In all likelihood, village. Shebashkar was founded by Cheboksary settlers. Apparently, it still exists in the said village council of the village. Shobashkarkasy is a settlement from the village. Shebashkar. According to legend, and village. The Chuvash Cheboksary (Chavash Shupashkaro) of the Novosheshminsky district of Tatarstan was founded in the first half of the 17th century by the descendants of the Cheboksary Chuvash from the village. Shebashkar. In explaining the names of the founders of the settlement, legends are based on methods of folk etymology. Such explanations are not reliable in most cases. Scientists have not yet come to a consensus on the etymology of the names Shupashkar (Shubashkar) and Cheboksary. Some believe that in the urbonym Shupashkar the word shupash represents the historical (stage-by-stage) form of the word Chavash (Chuvash), and the word kar in the ancient Chuvash language meant “fenced place”, “city”, that is, Shupashkar - “City of the Chuvash”. Others believe that shupash (shubash) comes from the Turkic term su bashi (shubashi) - “head of the army.” There is an opinion that Cheboksary (in XVI-XVII centuries usually written Cheboksary) is the Russian phonetic form of the word Shupashkar. N.I. Zolotnitsky argued back in 1875 that the word Cheboksary does not correspond to the Chuvash Shupashkar. In his opinion, the urbonym Cheboksary(s) comes from the Chuvash word dupakh (dopah) “bream, bream” and the postposition cap “area abundant (in something)” and means “area abundant in fish.” Wide use received a Russian legend about the founding of Alatyr by Ivan IV during his campaign against Kazan in 1552. Chuvash legend dates the emergence of this city to the time before the Russians captured Kazan. In the old days, on the site of the city, it says, stood the Tatar village of Ala Tu. Ivan the Terrible arrived there, drove away the Tatars and ordered the city to be built. He returned home himself. For two or three years, Ivan the Terrible did not receive news from the people left there. Then he moved many yards here from near Bryansk and built an oak fortress. And an army was stationed in it. After the capture of Kazan, Alatyr grew larger and a second fortress wall was built around it. As mentioned above, Alatyr was indeed founded under Ivan IV, but after the capture of Kazan, in the mid-50s of the 16th century (first mentioned in sources in 1555). The resettlement of 172 Starodub boyar children from Bryansk to Alatyr is a historical fact. However, it did not happen under Ivan IV, but in 162122.

Although Tsivilsk was founded during the reign of Fyodor Ivanovich in 1589, Chuvash legend dates its foundation to the time of Ivan IV. Back at the end of the 18th century, land surveyor K. S. Milkovich recorded the following legend about Tsivilsk: “...The original inhabitants of these places, known as the Chuvash, assure that according to a verbal tradition from their ancestors it is known that in ancient times their Chuvash prince lived here , called Pulat, who, not wanting to be under the jurisdiction of the city of Cheboksary, to cede his advantage to other princes, to travel often to this city and give an account, having asked permission from Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, built a city where His Majesty ordered to send a governor and establish zemstvo government there . Finally, Prince Pulat, having removed the inhabitants from the village of Syurbeeva, settled them 12 versts from the city. And he left the other Syurbeev villages, which did not interfere with the construction of the city, in their places, and from them this city in the Chuvash language received its name Syurbya Khola, which it has retained to this day.” The author of this book, a native of the village. New Surbeevo, which is 14 km from Tsivilsk, as a child I heard from fellow villager F.P. Petrov that Tsivilsk was founded on the site of the settlement of our ancestors, as a result of which the inhabitants of this village moved to the south. Several courtyards remain in the village. New Syurbeevo, the rest went to the steppe - to the territory of the present Komsomolsky district, where there are villages also called Syurbeevo. Parting between those remaining in the village. New Surbeevo and those leaving for the steppe were very touching, many cried, and one of those leaving, out of great excitement, threw his felt cap into a ravine. There is a legend that Tsivilsk was placed in another place, perhaps under the village. The second Toyzi, on the left side of the Shumashi river, or west of the village. Nyurshi, near the Kun tract they are blowing, or in the Kata Vedov field under the village. Signyal-Ubeevo (now in the Krasnoarmeysky district). It was as if a church had been built in the city, but its bell did not ring. Therefore, the city was moved to the area between the Greater and Lesser Civilizations.

The legend about the emergence of Yadrin says that three Chuvash elders: Togach, the founder of the village. Togach, Sarplat, founder of the village. Izvankino, and Azamat, who founded the village. Azamat (all three villages are now in the Alikovsky district), “argued among themselves over who should have a district town, designated by the tsar.” Togach received a charter from the royal governors for the right to found a district town. Sarplat and Azamat began to fight with him for the charter (according to another legend, Azamat was a rich and formidable Chuvash who subjugated the surrounding Chuvash villages). But “at night Togach’s house was attacked with the help of soldiers by another noble Chuvash named Eterne from the village. Yadrino" and awarded the diploma. So county town became Yadrin. The above Chuvash legends about the founding of Tsivilsk and Yadrina are very characteristic: according to them, it turns out that the Chuvash princes and elders themselves were interested in the construction of district towns. Of course, there is no doubt that Tsivilsk was founded on the site of the "settlement of the Chuvash hundredth prince - Derpu. However, it is impossible to believe the legend that it was built by Prince Pulat, on his initiative, with the permission of Ivan IV. It is documented that Yadrin was founded on the land Chuvash Yadrinskaya volost in 1590, but not through the efforts of the Chuvash elders. Both Tsivilsk and Yadrin were established by the Russian authorities to strengthen their position after the suppression of the uprising of Chuvash and Mari peasants in the 80s of the 16th century. The above legends, apparently, were generated feeling of national consciousness of the Chuvash of that distant era. Russian legend reports that during the last campaign of Ivan the Terrible to Kazan (in 1552), Russian troops poured cannonballs on the site of the future city, which was reflected in the name of the city. In fact, the route of Ivan IV’s troops was not ran through places close to the future Yadrin, there were no traces of foundry in the area of ​​the city.The legend owes its appearance only to the consonance of the words kernel and Yadrin. Another legend is recorded about the origin of the name of the city of Yadrina: in the old days, the Mari and Chuvash lived on the site of the city, and there were also Tatars there. From the Mari there was a rich man, the knight Chebak, and from the Chuvash there was a rich man, Yadry. From Chebak, the mountain near Yadrin received the name Chebakovskaya, and the city itself received its name from the name of the Chuvash Yadry. When the townspeople pushed out the previous inhabitants beyond the Sura, the Chuvash Yad-ry settled twenty-five versts from the city on the high road leading to the city of Kozmodemyansk, and this place is known to this day as the village of Yadrino. Chebak settled beyond Sura, and this place is now the village of Chebakovo (now both villages are in the Yadrinsky district). Until 1590, the Yadrinskaya volost, which existed long before the emergence of the city of Yadrina, was part of the Cheboksary district. From the Chuvash of this volost they took land for the city and for Streltsy arable land, in return giving them land “between the rivers Urga and Uronga and Migina.” There are many reasons to believe that the city got its name from the name of the Chuvash village Eterne (Yadrino), pronounced by the riding Chuvash in the form Yatarn. Cities were not only administrative centers. Soon after their foundation, settlements arose in them, where the trade and craft population was concentrated. Cities, as centers of trade, crafts and trades, played an important role in the economy of Chuvashia and connected it with the emerging all-Russian market. Peasants sold agricultural products in the cities, bought products and goods that were not produced in their mainly subsistence farming. Urban artisans produced specific products - some metal tools, women's jewelry, dishes and other household items, used only by the Chuvash. Metalworking, leather and shoe production were developed in the cities.

In a Chuvash song we find the following lines:

The boots that we wear

Sewn in Cheboksary by Russians.

The most important consequence of the entry of the Chuvash people into Russia was the expansion of their habitat. As already indicated, as a result of the Mongol-Tatar yoke, the Chuvash were forced to leave their Trans-Kama and Middle Volga lands, losing the absolute majority of their numbers. The Chuvash settlement area has narrowed several times. In the middle of the 16th century, one group of Chuvash lived in the central and northern regions of the territory of the modern Chuvash Republic (the southern border of their lands ran along the Kubna River), another - in Prikazanye and Zakazanye, where the Chuvash road stretched from Kazan east to the Middle Kama in a wide strip ( later Zureyskaya road of Kazan district). And the territories of modern Yalchik, Komsomolsky, Batyrevsky, Shemurshinsky districts of Chuvashia, the southwestern regions and the Trans-Kama part of Tatarstan, Ulyanovsk, Samara, Penza, Saratov regions were a “wild field” - a space without a settled population and settlements, where the Nogai spent the summer and other nomadic hordes, and from the 30s of the 17th century - Kalmyks. The outflow of population from the south-eastern and southern parts Chuvashia, the southwestern and trans-Kama parts of Tatarstan, from the territories of the Ulyanovsk and Samara regions began in the 13th century due to Mongol-Tatar pogroms. These areas were completely deserted in the second half of the 14th and early 15th centuries as a result of predatory attacks by detachments of Horde emirs, the invasion of Tamerlane in 1391 and 1395, and the campaigns of Russian princes until 1431. After becoming part of Russia, peaceful living and economic conditions were established in Chuvashia, as already indicated, and the ruinous military actions that often took place during the reign of the Kazan khans ceased. A developed system of feudal relations and rights, stable rules of yasak taxation were extended to the Chuvash peasants, the arbitrariness that prevailed under the khan during the collection of taxes and the predatory paramilitary expeditions carried out for these purposes were abolished. The conditions of peaceful life and quiet management and the legal order established in the region, the introduction of stable land relations and rent-taxation contributed to population growth, the expansion of arable land and the massive separation of daughter settlements from the mother villages. This process proceeded intensively from the middle of the 16th to the end of the 18th centuries, and continued in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. About a thousand villages arose in the northern and central parts of Chuvashia alone. The Russian government, with the involvement of the settled, including Chuvash, population of the Middle Volga region in the 16th-18th centuries, built the Kubninskaya, then Alatyr-Tetyushskaya, Simbirsk-Karsunskaya, Zakamskaya, Syzran-Penza and Second Zakamskaya defensive lines (zasechnye lines), which protected against invasion nomads large expanses of fertile lands. From the last quarter of the 16th century to the beginning of the 18th century, Chuvash peasants returned to the lands of the southeastern and southern parts of Chuvashia that they had abandoned in the 14th and early 15th centuries, and until the beginning of the 20th century, they intensively developed the forests of the present-day Ibresinsky, Shumerlinsky and Krasnochetaisky districts. In the 17th-18th centuries, the Chuvash peasants of the Right Bank of the Volga, the Trans-Kazan region and the Trans-Kazan region also moved to the Simbirsk region and Trans-Kama region - to the territories now included in Tatarstan, the Ulyanovsk and Samara regions, as well as areas of the Saratov and Penza regions. (True, a significant part of the Prikazan-Zakazan Chuvash were Otatars.) The Chuvash people were given the opportunity to return to their former lands inhabited by their great-grandfathers, forcedly abandoned in the 13th and early 15th centuries, and to re-develop these land areas. Hundreds have arisen here Chuvash villages. In the 17th-19th centuries, the Chuvash, together with the Russians, Tatars, Mordovians and Mari, participated in the colonization and development of the vast and fertile lands of Bashkiria and Orenburg. Over the four centuries after joining Russia, the Chuvash settlement area increased no less than fourfold.

In 1795, there were 352,000 Chuvash people of both sexes in Russia, of which 233,897 people (66.5 percent) lived in Chuvashia within the borders of the modern republic, 118,103 people (33.5 percent) lived outside the territory of the republic. In the 19th century, the migration of the Chuvash to the Urals continued, but the main destinations were Siberia and the Far East (up to Sakhalin). The All-Russian General Population Census of 1897 showed that out of 843,755 all Chuvash in Russia, 527,573 people (62.5 percent) lived on the territory of the modern Chuvash Republic, and 316,182 people (37.5 percent) lived outside its borders. In the 20th century, migration of the Chuvash to other regions of the country also continued. According to the 1989 census, there were 1 million 839 thousand 228 Chuvashes in the USSR, of which 905614 people, or 49.3 percent, lived in the Chuvash Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the rest lived in the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (134.2 thousand people), in Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (118.5 thousand), in the Kuibyshev region (about 115.0 thousand), Ulyanovsk region (more than 90 thousand). From 10 to 30 thousand Chuvash were numbered in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Kemerovo, Orenburg, Tyumen, Saratov, Chelyabinsk, Irkutsk, Perm, Volgograd regions, Ukrainian, Kazakh and Uzbek SSR, in Moscow.

This resettlement of the Chuvash, that is, the fact that more than half of their total number lives outside the Chuvash Republic, which adversely affects their national and cultural development, upsets us. However, the process of formation of such a diaspora was determined historically. The Chuvash population, which had increased in number more than 10 times in more than four centuries after joining Russia, could not accommodate itself on the territory of the republic. Currently, its population density is 73 people per 1 square kilometer. Among the autonomous republics, territories and regions of Russia, Chuvashia ranks one of the first in terms of population density. The resettlement of the Chuvash and the emergence of new settlements in the 16th-19th centuries was reflected both in documents and in numerous legends. Most of the works of non-fairy-tale prose that interest us are legends about villages and localities, that is, historical and toponymic. Many of them contain information about historical events and persons.

First, let's consider the issue and related legends about the expansion of arable areas due to the clearing of forests for arable land and the emergence of subsidiary villages (settlements) in the 16th - early 20th centuries in northern and central Chuvashia - in the territory now included in Kozlovsky, Mariinsko-Posadsky, Cheboksary , Morgaushsky, Urmarsky, Tsivilsky, Krasnoarmeysky, Alikovsky, Yadrinsky, Yantikovsky, Kanashsky, Vurnarsky, Krasnochetaisky and Sumerlinsky districts. In this territory in the middle of the 16th century there were over 300 Chuvash villages. From the end of the 16th century until 1780-1781, the Chuvash villages of the listed areas were included in the Yalchikovskaya, Chekurskaya, Andreevskaya, Aryanskaya, Temeshevskaya, Shigalevskaya, Karameevskaya, Aybechevskaya, Khozesanovskaya volosts of the Sviyazhsky district; Sundyr volost of Kokshay district; Kuvshinskaya, Chemurshinskaya, Sugutskaya, Ishakovskaya, Ishleyskaya, Sherdanskaya, Kinyarskaya, Turunovskaya, Algashinskaya volosts of the Cheboksary district; Syurbeevskaya, Bogatyrevskaya, Tugaevskaya, Vtoro-Tugaevskaya, Ubeevskaya, Koshkinskaya, Runginskaya volosts of Tsivilsky district; Yadrinskaya, Vylskaya and Sorminskaya volosts of Yadrinsky district; Alikovskaya, Tuvanovskaya, Shumatovskaya, Shumshevashskaya and Yandobinskaya hundreds of Yumachevo volosts of Kurmysh district; Aldyshevskaya, Kobyashevskaya and Tenyakov hundreds, Chigireev's fifty of Kozmodemyansk district. The volosts retained traces of the ancient tribal community. IN early XVIII century, Yadrinsky and Kurmysh districts were included in the Nizhny Novgorod province, the rest of the Chuvash districts - in the Kazan province. In 1780-1781, the Chuvash lands within the current republic were included in Kozmodemyansky, Tetyushsky, Tsivilsky, Cheboksary, Yadrinsky districts of the Kazan province, Buinsky and Kurmysh districts of the Simbirsk province. The mother villages of central and northern Chuvashia arose mainly in the XIII-XV centuries, but some of them were founded in the X-XII centuries. Their education was discussed in the first part of “Chuvash Historical Legends”. According to archaeological data, written sources and historical legends, in connection with the pogroms of the Mongol-Tatar feudal lords, the Chuvash arrived in the territory of central and northern Chuvashia - in a wooded area where a small number of Mari and Chuvash populations lived - in the 13th - early 15th centuries. From the territory of the modern Ulyanovsk region, the Chuvash ascended along the Sviyaga and Sura rivers, from the southeastern regions of Chuvashia - by dry route, from Trans-Kama region - along the Volga. Some of the Chuvash, who first moved from Trans-Kama to Prikazanye, also crossed to the right bank.