PEASANT SELF-GOVERNMENT IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE: COMMUNITY TRADITIONS UNDER THE TERMS OF MODERNIZATION (SECOND HALF OF XIX ? BEGINNING OF XX CENTURIES)

Abstract. The author analyzes use of community traditions in peasant self-government in the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth - early twentieth century. The factors that contributed to "dedication? of the Russian establishment leading representatives to the idea of using community traditions during the social and political modernization of the country are investigated in paper. The author believes that the use of the villagers government bodies by imperial power with punitive and repressive purpose while taming peasant uprisings in 1905-1907, against the activation of peasant gatherings and it`s organized effect for the rural protests, in fact, has made a split in the peasant self-government system and triggered civil strife in the villag. Parish institutions were now opposed with eternal representative of the peasant masses - community, which even in 1861 was a basic element of peasant self-government. This had disastrous consequences for the whole country in the future, when during the Stolypin agrarian reform and during the First World War it has given impulse for the activation of protective mechanisms elaborated in previous centuries by peasant communities.