Obshchina

= RUSSIAN PEASANT COMMUNES (MIR)

Description

Joris Leverink:

"In his final years, Karl Marx dedicated himself in part to the study of Russian peasant communes, the obshchina, in whose practice of common land ownership he recognized a “starting point for a communist development.” In the Russian countryside, the common land was divided among the different households of a village community. This centuries-old tradition came to an end with the state-driven collectivization of land under Stalin in the 1930s.

For anarchist thinkers like Kropotkin and Bakunin, the obshchina were an important source of inspiration too. In Mutual Aid, Kropotkin reflects positively on the advantages of community organization at the local level as opposed to centralized state authority." (https://roarmag.org/magazine/pirates-peasants-and-proletarians/)