The Economics of the Russian Village

STUDIES IN HISTORY, ECONOMICS AND PUBLIC LAW.
EDITED BY THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE OF COLUMBIA COLLEGE.
BY Isaac A. Hourwich, Ph.D., Seligman Fellow in Political Science, Columbia College.
New York. 1892.


The awful famine which has lately been raging over an area as large as the territory of the Dreibund , and inhabited by a population as numerous as that of the “allied Republic,” has called the attention of the whole civilized world to the condition of the starving Russian peasant. A movement has been set on foot in this country to relieve the hard need of the sufferers. This has induced me to think that it would perhaps not be without some interest for the American student of economics to cast a glance at the rural conditions which have finally resulted in that tremendous calamity. I felt bound to improve the opportunity of having been educated in Russia, by introducing the American reader to some one portion of the vast Russian economic literature which, because of the language, remains as yet completely unknown to the scientific world at large.
Russians by education, though not by ethnical descent, who, in spite of having identified themselves with the cause of the Russian people, are now denied the honorable title of “Russian,” may find consolation in the fact that the first investigator of Russian history (Schlözer), the first grammarian who scientifically elaborated the laws of Russian grammar, our Brown (Vostokoff = von Osteneck), the best, if not the first Russian lexicographer, our Webster (Dahl), and finally the man who, it may be said, discovered for the Russian public the Russian village community, the mir (Freiherr August von Haxthausen), were all of foreign birth.
The last named discovery was destined to play a prominent part in the subsequent political history of Russia. Agrarian communism, spread throughout a vast country during an age of extreme economic individualism, when the last traces of such a form of possession were deeply buried in the past of European nations, gave rise for years to an erroneous theory both in Russia and in Western Europe, viz : that this was a specifically Russian or Slavic institution. In Russia it contributed greatly towards drawing the line between the two parties of the Russian educated class in “the epoch of the forties,” between the “occidentalists” ( zapadniki ) and the “slavophiles.”