Local Autonomy in Russian Village Life Under the Soviets

Abstract

Russian life under the Tsars was a combination of democratic local government in the village commune and the most autocratic central government. In the days of serfdom the landlord and government dealt with the often remote commune as a unit. With the coming of emancipation a form of local government was instituted known as the Zemstvo, the peasants forming a sort of electoral college whose deputies selected district representatives from candidates proffered by the provincial governor. The October Revolution found the villages taking over the estates of the landlords, the land theoretically belonging to the state and being divided impartially by a local eommittee. The pyramidal structure of the Soviet state rests upon the peasant and worker but not equally. Suffrage is extended to every village worker over eighteen with few exceptions. Elections for representatives are held once a year; the slate is prepared by the party nucleus. Elections are very informal. The council elects delegates to the county soviet, and that body in turn to the state soviet, and so on to Moscow. The local group divides itself into commissions to deal with the village affairs. Informality holds in matters of the court, justice in local affairs moves corisideiately, and there are no subtleties of law. The center of the cultural and social activities of the village is the People's House, and practically every village boasts its public playground and football field. These social leavens have been set to work in the remotest villages. All village activities are based on local autonomy, but party members from the city volunteer to live in the villages and are expected to participate in all village affairs. Every student of Russian life and institutions under the Tsars, whether Russian or foreign, was forcibly struck by the apparent anomaly of the existence of the utmost democratic local government in the village commune in the midst of the most perfectly autocratic central government. Wallace, a British traveler, writing in I875, devotes pages to this astounding phenomenon as he witnessed it in the activities of the village mir. Stepniak, a prominent Russian nihilist, writing ten years later, finds in this far-flung ancient instinct for local autonomy evidence against the popular idea that Russians are constitutionally adapted for despotism. Lenin was always a defender of the villager against his more doctrinaire compatriots and insisted that even the Bolsheviki had much to learn from them. The physical characteristics of the Russian village have much 1 Paper read at meeting of National Community Center Association, Chicago,