leave them alone. But some of our brothers go away for a long time to hunt sable in the forests or trade in Mongolia. Then the commune has the right to say who shall have the land, whether they must still pay for it or whether others shall have it."
From this conversation it appeared that in this village a feeling had arisen against the redistribution of the land except under some special circumstances, such as immigration of new colonists or temporary emigration of fur hunters to Mongolia. Thus the land of peasant families, who lived in the village all the year and worked on their holdings, had not been disturbed for some time. The commune, however, as the peasants said, retained the right to control the distribution of all fresh land brought into the commune, so that no man should have more than his share. The system is therefore communal in its essence and tends towards the levelling down of individual enterprise, but signs were not wanting of a movement to secure a sort of vague security of tenure for those peasants who settle and confine themselves entirely to cultivation. On the other hand, I heard of other villages in this part of Southern Siberia where periodical redistributions had taken place during the previous five years. A majority of the commune could carry this out, thereby confiscating all improvements that had been made by the peasants on their holdings. This is the system of land tenure which used to be in vogue throughout European Russia and which is now fast disappearing. In Siberia it still has more force, for where the population is sparse, the land plentiful, and the system of agriculture primitive, this communal land tenure can be better tolerated. In fact, under such
