COMMUNISM.
Such cases of village justice are not rare. Should a man have the
misfortune, from any cause, to make himself odious to his neighbors,
they can "cry a meeting," summon him to appear, and find him worthy to
be expelled. They can pass a vote which may have the effect of sending
for the police, give the expelled member into custody, and send him up
to the nearest district town. He is now a waif and stray. Rejected
from his commune, he has no place in society; he can not live in a
town, he can not enter a village; he is simply a vagabond and an
outcast, living beyond the pale of human law. The provincial governor
can do little for him, even if he be minded to do any thing at all. He
has no means of forcing the commune to receive him back; in fact, he
has no choice, beyond that of sending such a waif to either the army
or the public works. If all the forms have been observed, the village
judgment is final, and the man expelled from it by such a vote is
pretty sure of passing the remainder of his days on earth in either a
Circassian regiment or a Siberian mine.
In the more serious cases dealt with by courts of law, a commune has
the power of reviewing the sentence passed, and even of setting it
aside.
Some lout (say) is suspected of setting a barn on fire. Seized by his
elder and given in charge to the police, he is carried up to the
assize town, where he is tried for his alleged offense, and after
proof being given on either side, he is acquitted by the jury and
discharged by the judge. It might be fancied that such a man would
return to his cabin and his field, protected by the courts. But no;
the commune, which has done him so much wrong already, may complete
the injury by refusing to receive him back. A meeting may review the
jurors and the judge, decline their verdict, try the man once more in
secret, and condemn him, in his absence, to the loss--not simply of
his house and land--but of his fame and caste.
The communes have other, and not less curious, rights. No member of a
commune can quit his village without the general leave, without a
passport signed by the elder, who can call him home without giving
reasons for his acts. The absent brother must obey, on penalty of
being expelled from his commune: that is to say--in a Russian village,
as in an Indian caste--being flung out of organized society into
infinite space.
Nor can the absent member escape from this tribunal by forfeiting his
personal rights. An elder grants him leave to travel in very rare
cases, and for very short terms; often for a month, now and then a
quarter, never for more than a year. That term, whether long or short,
is the limit of a man's freedom; when it expires, he must return to
his commune, under penalty of seizure by the police as a vagabond
living without a pass.
A village parliament is holden once a year, when every holder of house
and field has the right to be heard. The suffrage is general, the
voting by ballot. Any member can bring up a motion, which the elder is
compelled to put. An unpopular elder may be deposed, and some one else
elected in his stead. Subjects of contention are not lacking in these
peasant parliaments; but the fiercest battles are those fought over
roads, imperial taxes, conscripts, wood-rights, water-rights, whisky
licenses, and the choice of lots.
What may be termed the external affairs of the village--highways,
fisheries, and forest-rights--are settled, not with imperial officers,
but with their neighbors of the canton and the volost. The canton and
the volost treat with the general, governor, and police. A minister
looks for what he needs to the association, not to the separate
members, and when rates are levied and men are wanted, the canton and
the volost receive their orders and proceed to raise alike the money
and the men. The crown has only to send out orders; and the money is
paid, the men are raised. A system so effective and so cheap, is a
convenience to the ministers of finance and war so great that the
haughtiest despots and the wisest reformers have not dared to touch
the interior life of these peasant commonwealths.
Thus the village system remains a thing apart, not only from the outer
world, but from the neighboring town. The men who live in these sheds,
who plough these fields, who angle in this lake, are living by an
underived and original light. Their law is an oral law, their charter
bears no seat, their franchise knows no date. They vote their own
taxes, and they frame their own rules. Except in crimes of serious
dye, they act as an independent court. They fine, they punish, they
expel, they send unpopular men to Siberia; and even call up the civil
arm in execution of their will.
Friends of these rustic republics urge as merits in the village
system, that the men are peers, that public opinion governs, that no
one is exempt from the general law, that rich men find no privilege in
their wealth. All this sounds well in words; and probably in seven or
eight cases out of ten the peasants treat their brethren fairly;
though it will not be denied that in the other two or three cases
gross and comical burlesques of justice may be seen. I hear of a man
being flogged for writing a paragraph in a local paper, which half, at
least, of his judges could not read. Still worse, and still more
flagrant, is the abuse of extorting money from the rich. A charge is
made, a meeting cried, and evidence heard. If the offender falls on
his knees, admits his guilt, and offers to pay a fine, the charge is
dropped. The whole party marches to the whisky shop, and spends the
fine in drams. Now the villagers know pretty well the brother who is
rich enough to give his rubles in place of baring his back; and when
they thirst for a dram at some other man's cost, they have only to get
up some flimsy charge on which that yielding brother can be tried. The
man is sure to buy himself off. Then comes the farce of charge and
proof, admission and fine; followed by the drinking bout, in which
from policy the offender joins; until the virtuous villagers, warm
with the fiery demon, kiss and slobber upon each other's beards, and
darkness covers them up in their drunken sleep.
In Moscow I know a man, a clerk, a thrifty fellow, born in the
province of Tamboff, who has saved some money, and the fact coming
out, he has been thrice called home to his village, thrice accused of
trumpery offenses, thrice corrected by a fine. In every case, the man
was sentenced to be flogged; and he paid his money, as they knew he
would, to escape from suffering and disgrace. His fines were instantly
spent in drink. A member of a village republic who has prospered by
his thrift and genius finds no way of guarding himself from such
assaults, except by craftily lending sums of money to the heads of
houses, so as to get the leading men completely into his power.
In spite of some patent virtues, a rural system which compels the more
enterprising and successful men to take up such a position against
their fellows in actual self-defense, can hardly be said to serve the
higher purposes for which societies exist.
These village republics are an open question; one about which there is
daily strife in every office of Government, in every organ of the
press. Men who differ on every other point, agree in praising the
rural communes. Men who agree on every other point, part company on
the merits and vices of the rural communes.
Not a few of the ablest reformers wish to see them thrive; royalists,
like Samarin and Cherkaski, and republicans, like Herzen and Ogareff,
see in these village societies the germs of a new civilization for
East and West. Men of science, like Valouef, Bungay, and Besobrazof,
on the contrary, find in these communes nothing but evil, nothing but
a legacy from the dark ages, which must pass away as the light of
personal freedom dawns.
That the village communes have some virtues may be safely said. A
minister of war and a minister of finance are keenly alive to these
virtues, since a man who wishes to levy troops and taxes in a quick,
uncostly fashion, finds it easier to deal with fifty thousand elders,
than with fifty million peasants. A minister of justice thinks with
comfort of the host of watchful, unpaid eyes that are kept in
self-defense on such as are suspected of falling into evil ways. These
virtues are not all, not nearly all. A rural system, in which every
married man has a stake in the soil, produces a conservative and
pacific people. No race on earth either clings to old ways or prays
for peace so fervently as the Russ. Where each man is a landholder,
abject poverty is unknown; and Russia has scant need for poor-laws and
work-houses, since she has no such misery in her midst as a permanent
pauper class. Every body has a cabin, a field, a cow; perhaps a horse
and cart. Even when a fellow is lazy enough and base enough to ruin
himself, he can not ruin his sons. They hold their place in the
commune, as peers of all, and when they grow up to man's estate, they
will obtain their lots, and set up life on their own account. The bad
man dies, and leaves to his province no legacy of poverty and crime.
The communes cherish love for parents, and respect for age. They keep
alive the feeling of brotherhood and equality, and inspire the country
with a sentiment of mutual dependence and mutual help.
On the other side, they foster a parish spirit, tend to separate
village from town, strengthen the ideas of class and caste, and favor
that worst delusion in a country--of there being a state within a
state! Living in his own republic, a peasant is apt to consider the
burgher as a stranger living under a different and inferior rule. A
peasant hears little of the civil code, except in his relations with
the townsfolk; and he learns to despise the men who are bound by the
letter of that civil code. Between his own institutions and those of
his burgher neighbors there is a chasm, like that which separates
America from France.