The Railroads and the Metamorphoses of the Mir: Westernizer and Slavophile Conceptions Revisited

The NIE/AEI model suggests complementarity between the Slavophile and Westernizers’ conception of the commune. The founder of the latter school, Boris Chicherin (1828–1904), emphasized the nineteenth-century bureaucratic origins of this institution. I suggest that the evolutionary advantage of the ever-present kinship-based organic collectivism conceived by the Slavophile school was transformed as it integrated into the Tsarist bureaucracy with its internalization of risk to subsistence (Mironov, 2000, p. 328). In this process, the kinship character of the commune “translated” (Boyer & Orlean, 1993, p. 22) into the structure of the skills and trades cooperative, the artel (Troyat, 1961, p. 98), and the obshchina. The latter, within the AEI framework, are assumed to have structured and mobilized migrating zemliachestva (landsman networks) that conduce toward the urbanization process (Johnson, 1979, p. 76). The voluntary formation of “institutionalized commitment” (Greif, 2006, p. 101) units of these kinds, legally recognized by the Tsarist bureaucracy, presented the autocracy with a “credible threat” from below that, paradoxically, challenged and weakened state-imposed hierarchical collectivism (Barzel, 2002). The artel ethos evolved endogenously into forerunners of labor unions. Below I propose that the Tsarist Russian “commitment devices” were of rural and kinship origin rather than of Marxian class rootedness.