http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 29 Mar 2009 IP address: 128.135.12.12 THE INVENTION OF THE RUSSIAN RURAL COMMUNE : HAXTHAUSEN AND THE EVIDENCE T. K. DENNISON Downing College, Cambridge and A. W. CARUS University of Chicago ABSTRACT. In the 1840s the German Romantic August von Haxthausen originated the idea, in a book reporting on his travels through Russia, that collective ownership of land and other assets was integral to the traditional culture of the Russian rural commune. Russian intellectuals accepted this idea and made it the basis for political ideals and social theories (even after 1917, as in the case of Aleksandr Chayanov). The 1861 Emancipation Act had brought collective ownership of land into existence by law, but Haxthausen’s own theory – which related to Yaroslavl’ province in the first half of the nineteenth century – has never been tested. This article does that, and finds that nearly all parts of Haxthausen’s theory, insofar as they are testable, are false. This does not mean that Haxthausen’s theory was false everywhere in Russia, but it was false for the place he advanced it about, and may therefore be false elsewhere. No cultural or ownership pattern of rural society, therefore, should be assumed a priori to hold for the whole of Russia. Only painstaking, detailed local studies will tell us which patterns held in which parts of this vast and hetero- geneous country. The impact of German Romanticism on the formation of the Russian intelli- gentsia in the early nineteenth century is well known. 1 So it is less shocking than it might seem that this largely urban group, closer to European books than to the Russian countryside, should have accepted a theory of their own rural society from a German Romantic, August Freiherr von Haxthausen (1792–1866), who travelled through Russia in 1843–4 at the invitation of Czar Nicholas I, and published his Studien u ¨ber die inneren Zusta ¨nde Rußlands in 1846. 2 Haxthausen’s theory 1 See, for instance, I. Berlin, ‘A remarkable decade’, in his Russian thinkers (Harmondsworth, 1978), esp. pp. 114–35 (‘The birth of the Russian intelligentsia’) and pp. 136–49 (‘German Romanticism in Petersburg and Moscow’). 2 Haxthausen’s career has been well documented by Wolfgang Bobke (‘August von Haxthausen : Eine Studie zur Ideengeschichte der politischen Romantik’ (PhD diss., Munich, 1954)), and in the catalogue of an exhibit on his life and works at the University of Mu ¨ nster, P. Heßelmann, August Freiherr The Historical Journal, 46, 3 (2003), pp. 561–582 f 2003 Cambridge University Press DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X03003145 Printed in the United Kingdom 561