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 open fields. What the household had was the right, so long as it remained within the village community (`mir'), to a holding commensurate with its size. The mir's assembly, the skhod, periodically redistributed the arable land to allow for changes in the size of households, and for new (or extinguished) households.

History

Repartition was the concomitant of Tsarist tax policies; it ensured that every peasant family had the wherewithal to meet its tax obligations. It was almost unknown before the later 17th century, but thereafter became widespread. The introduction of the soul tax, Peter the Great's heavy equal poll tax on adult males, in 1724, encouraged its spread. In 1829 a decree required miry on State lands henceforth to carry out a general egalitarian repartition (chernyi peredel) following each new tax assessment or `revision'. By the mid-19th century repartition was, formally, almost universal in Slavonic Russia (the exception was the far west). After this time the law no longer required repartition, but by then it had become absorbed into peasant culture as a streak of egalitarianism.