Continued communities: the peasant self-government in the Russian empire in the conditions in the social-political strategies of the beginning of the XX centuries

In the early twentieth century. peasant self-government was a factor in the revolutionization of the village in the Russian Empire. His activity in 1906 – 1914 was not studied enough. The purpose of the study is to characterize the position of this institution during the period of the reforms of 1906- 1912. The subjectivization of rural societies and the retraditionalization of village management in the late nineteenth century. had as a result a considerable distance from each other bureaucratized volost and socially limited rural segments of peasant self-government. Against the backdrop of mass peasant attacks on gatherings for their speeches of 1902- 1907, the authorities began to implement a contradictory agrarian policy. On the one hand, it stimulated the peasants to leave the collective landownership of rural societies, and to individualize them in the form of a hamlet or bran farm. But on the other hand, it facilitated the transformation of rural societies into peasant republics, which were allowed to acquire land and exploit its subsoil in their collective ownership. The implementation of government initiatives was accompanied by confrontation in rural societies. Most of them resisted the new agrarian course. Against this background, the process of transforming rural societies into territorial communities began, and the rural municipality (boards and courts), which had previously been heavily criticized because of their corruptness, officially began to testify to peasant land ownership. As a result, the volost bureaucracy found itself in confrontation with the rural majority organized in rural and settlement communities. This intensified the crisis of peasant self-government and led to the separation of its upper (volost) segment from the lower (rural) segment. Along with this, there was a reorganization of the administrative structure of the village, which destroyed its established fiscal infrastructure. Since the volost was an intermediary between the power structures and the organs of peasant self-government, this led to a loss of the government's levers of influence on the village. Especially menacing to the authorities, this was on the eve of the First World War.