Repartition
Repartition (Russian: передел, romanized: peredel) was a practice in the Russian Empire and early Soviet Union of the periodic redistribution of the peasant's arable land by the village community.
The traditional household did not permanently hold a particular allotment in the
History
Repartition was the concomitant of
A law of 1893 sought to restrict repartition to every twelfth year, i.e. every four
Bases and methods
Land was awarded on the basis of the number of `economic units' a household contained. This unit could be variously the `tyaglo' (usually a man-and-wife unit), the `soul' (adult male), the worker (adult male or female), or the `eater' (mouth-to-feed, household member of any age). Before 1861 the tyaglo method tended to be used on private estates, the `soul' on State lands; these methods tended to continue on these former lands after the freeing of the serfs.[4] But since an adult male was counted as two souls,[5] these methods amounted to much the same thing. (Thus a man was compelled to marry to obtain a work-partner, not only to cope with agricultural work, but to fulfil his fiscal obligations as well.)
Repartition was usually carried out on the fallow land only, to avoid disrupting land under cultivation. Thus, under the 'three-field' system, a complete repartition would take three years. Actual measuring-out was done by pacing - there were few trained surveyors available for more sophisticated methods. The fields were broken up into blocks (yarusy) and strips made as nearly equal as possible with respect to quality (fertility, evenless of land etc.), and graded according to variations in these qualities and distance from the households. Allocation of plots was carried out by lot. Strips were allotted to each household so as to give them a weighted equality of land.
Notes
- Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century(Princeton University Press, 1961), p.512
- ^ W. S. Vucinich, ed., The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century History (Stanford University Press, California, 1968), p.138.
- ^ Vucinich, ed., The Peasant, p.141; *; Blum, Lord and Peasant, pp.525; ...*
- ^ Blum, Lord and Peasant, p.526.
- ^ Vucinich, ed., The Peasant, p.144.