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elected by buying the most drinks for others. Nevertheless, by comparison to other rural
institutions, the mir represented “an institution of an extremely democratic character, its periodic
meetings providing an informal forum at which any villager could speak ... with the entire
commune participating in the making of most decisions.”
78
Thus, while the hierarchical character of Tsarist autocracy and the patriarchal household
have led some to suggest that the prerevolutionary inheritance consisted primarily of a deeply
entrenched authoritarian political culture,
79
the actual regulation of agricultural activities and
everyday village life suggests a relatively high degree of collective solidarity accompanied by a
persistent “[c]oncern for equality of burdens and obligations.”
80
This did not necessarily suggest
the absence of petty jealousies or self-interest; however, self-interest or envy towards better-off
households did not stand in the way of the widespread adherence to shared norms emphasizing
collective subsistence, communal solidarity, and an equality of material conditions among
members of the mir.
So What?
The Legacies of the Mura and Mir: A Tentative Appraisal
Thus far, the paper has presented two stylized accounts of the core norms and social
organization of typical village communities in two countries. However, for the purposes of a
comparative-historical study of wider development processes, what counts is the potential
influence the norms previously embedded in these two economies of affection these may have
exerted in new institutional environments. This section tentatively considers some indications
that core understandings governing the organization of work and authority in the mura and the
mir continued to shape the expectations and responses of the growing industrial workforce in the
newer institutions of production that accompanied the quest for industrialization in Japan and
Russia.
78
Stephen White, Political Culture and Soviet Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 58.
79
E.g., Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Soviet Politics: From the Future to the Past?” in Paul Cocks et al., eds. The Dynamics
of Soviet Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), esp. 340-2; and Pipes, “Did the Russian
Revolution Have to Happen?” In industrial relations, Bendix’s treatment of the early Soviet factory also attributes
its hierarchical features to preexisting hierarchical traditions in Tsarist Russia; see Work and Authority, 250.
80
Worobec, 20.
Convention