A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

contained a fairly comprehensive set of moral concepts. True, these were not always applied uniformly. The peasant-class courts often functioned in a random manner, deciding cases on the basis of the litigants' reputations and connections, or on the basis of which side was prepared to bribe the elected judges with the most vodka. Yet, amidst all this chaos, there could be discerned some pragmatic concepts of justice, arising from the peasants' daily lives, which had crystallized into more-or-less universal legal norms, albeit with minor regional variations.

Three legal ideas, in particular, shaped the peasant revolutionary mind. The first was the concept of family ownership. The assets of the peasant household (the livestock, the tools, the crops, the buildings and their contents, but not the land beneath them) were regarded as the common property of the family.* Every member of the household was deemed to have an equal right to use these assets, including those not yet born. The patriarch of the household, the bol'shak, it is true, had an authoritarian influence over the running of the farm and the disposal of its assets. But customary law made it clear that he was expected to act with the consent of the other adult members of the family and that, on his death, he could not bequeath any part of the household property, which was to remain in the common ownership of the family under a new bol'shak (usually the eldest son). If the bol'shak mismanaged the family farm, or was too often drunk and violent, the commune could replace him under customary law with another household member. The only way the family property could be divided was through the partition of an extended household into smaller units, according to the methods set out by local customary law. In all regions of Russia this stipulated that the property was to be divided on an equal basis between all the adult males, with provision being made for the elderly and unmarried women.²¹ The principles of family ownership and egalitarian partition were deeply ingrained in Russian peasant culture. This helps to explain the failure of the Stolypin land reforms (1906—17), which, as part of their programme to create a stratum of well-to-do capitalist farmers, attempted to convert the family property of the peasant household into the private property of the bol'shak, thus enabling him to bequeath it to one or more of his sons.f The peasant revolution of 1917 made a clean sweep of these reforms, returning to the traditional legal principles of family ownership.

The peasant family farm was organized and defined according to the

* The one major exception was the peasant wife's dowry and other personal effects (e.g. clothing and domestic utensils), which were regarded as her private property and could be passed on to her daughter.

f Whereas the partitioning of household property was entirely controlled by local customary law, Stolypin's new laws of inheritance came under the Civil Code. Cases concerning peasant inheritance of land were thus heard in the civil (i.e. non-peasant) courts — the first major instance of the peasantry being integrated into the national legal system.