condition associated with the absence of a well-contrived political regulation of social life (this is not to say that ideas as to such regulation had never been considered); those associated with the impossibility of efficient centralisation, if only because the ruler has not sufficient servants, a modern might say not sufficient policemen, at his disposal; the conditions associated with the absence of suitable and firmly established traditions. The resulting freedom was that of the so-called state of nature, and it was characterised by the absence of the evil institutions, but likewise by the absence of the good institutions, of a more finished type of political governance.
On the whole, however, the development of the Old Russians and that of the Old Slavs in general may have been more closely akin to the development of the Teutons than many Slav authors are willing to admit.
In Kiev and in the oldest Russian cities we find, in addition to a free population, a servile and a semi-free population, both the last-named elements being likewise Slavic. In Kiev the peasantry was free.[1]
The existence of Old Slav and Old Russian democracy is by some deduced as an outcome of agrarian communism, being considered a corollary of the Russian institution known as the mir, the village community, and of the occasional existence of the family community (known among the Serbs as zadruga). This theory has been advanced by the slavophils and the narodniki.
The earliest historical data regarding Old Russia may be interpreted by the analogy of the primitive institutions obtaining among other Slav and Aryan nations, and by the analogy of the primitive conditions contemporarily existing in certain regions of Russia (Siberia, for instance) and among the so-called primitive peoples inhabiting various regions and belonging to divers races. By these considerations we are led to suppose that agrarian communism prevailed in Kievic Russia.
This communism was of a negative character. It must not be regarded as representing the communism demanded
- ↑ The semi-freeman (zakup), the man who offered himself for purchase or hire) was one who worked tor a peculium or for some service extended to him; the bondsman (holop) worked for his lord as a servile dependent. In the remoter ages of history the state of bondage originated mainly through capture in war, but the commission of certain crimes on the part of a freeman might lead to his becoming a bondsman; later, indebtedness became a cause. It need hardly be said that the condition was hereditary.
