Communal institutions, resource allocation, and Russian economic development: 1861--1905

This dissertation addresses one of the critical questions in Russian economic history: how did the peasant land commune affect Russian economic development in the late 19th century? The measures that ended serfdom in the 1860s strengthened the communal organization of rural society by endowing peasant communities with collective property rights and making them jointly responsible for tax and land payments. These reforms created a unique institutional environment based on the communal village, which many economic historians argue had profound implications for Russian economic development into the 20th century. According to this viewpoint, most prominently articulated by Alexander Gerschenkron, the communal property rights regime reduced agricultural productivity, while the system of joint liability created ties to the commune that limited labor mobility. Scholars have concluded that these two factors slowed structural change and constrained aggregate growth.; However, these assertions about the commune's role in Russian economic history have never been tested. This dissertation draws on previously unexplored archival and published data sources from Moscow province to analyze how the post-reform peasant economy functioned at the micro-level. Utilizing theoretical and empirical insights drawn from development economics, I establish that the reforms did not eliminate institutional and endowment differences across villages. In particular, former serfs remained constrained in their ability to adjust to changing economic conditions until at least the end of the century (Chapter 2). I then provide evidence that internal, communal redistributions of property rights among members did little to undermine agricultural investment or productivity. This was because these "repartitions" were not exogenous expropriations of property rights. Rather, this practice reallocated land and shares in the commune's payment obligations as a substitution for costly transactions in imperfect land markets (Chapter 3). Finally, I show that households residing in communal villages had considerable flexibility in adjusting their land and labor holdings. Households exchanged land in rental markets and adjusted the allocation of labor on and off the land (Chapter 4). This implies that labor was not tied to the commune but was relatively mobile between the agricultural and industrial sectors. These findings suggest that the reforms and the institutional regime they created were more conducive to economic growth than the literature has considered.