Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/72

 economic activity. As our first example, let us take agriculture. At the present day it may be taken as firmly established that the typical Russian village community, with its periodical redistribution of land to secure fair partition, is not an early or primitive institution, but a comparatively late adaptation of the peasant group on whose shoulders lay the burden of paying the taxes and performing the labour-services exacted by the landowner or the State. And if we are to assume that there was some spontaneous element in the life of the village community, the assumption can in general be admitted only for colonial conditions. But however that may be, there are two great facts in Russian economic history which, so to speak, lie side by side. On the one hand we have the colonial advance of the agricultural population ever seeking to reach 'free land. On the other, we have the institution of serfdom, the historical meaning of which consisted in part precisely in its binding to the land this mobile, continually escaping population. Russia is, too, the land where serfdom continued to exist after it had disappeared from all other European countries, and this in spite of the existence of free land to which the agricultural population could escape. Here we have an example of precisely that commixture of old with new which characterises the whole economic development of Russia. One naturally asks oneself the question: How could serfdom maintain its hold in Russia till 1861; serfdom, moreover, in the most extreme form known in Europe, in the form of slavery, existing within the confines of a single nation? In answering this question there is one fact which must be clearly