Talk:Mir (social)

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This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, now in the public domain.

I removed a bunch of original research about peasants as "primitive" people, "tribes" in 14th-century Russia, and other edits aimed at primitivization of medieval Russian history. --Ghirla ^-трёп- 14:32, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Interesting views on the mir

I wonder if this is appropriate for addition into the main article (Views on 'mir' as commune):

Russia is the sole European country where the “agricultural commune” has kept going on a nationwide scale up to the present day. It is not the prey of a foreign conqueror, as the East Indies, and neither does it lead a life cut off from the modern world. On the one hand, the common ownership of land allows it to transform individualist farming in parcels directly and gradually into collective farming, and the Russian peasants are already practising it in the undivided grasslands; the physical lie of the land invites mechanical cultivation on a large scale; the peasant’s familiarity with the contract of artel facilitates the transition from parcel labour to cooperative labour; and, finally, Russian society, which has so long lived at his expense, owes him the necessary advances for such a transition. On the other hand, the contemporaneity of western production, which dominates the world market, allows Russia to incorporate in the commune all the positive acquisitions devised by the capitalist system without passing through its Caudine Forks [i.e., undergo humiliation in defeat].

Karl Marx, First Draft of Letter To Vera Zasulich (1881)

Especially in the context of this article: Russians in the Soviet Union: rulers and victims

Darth Sidious 04:03, 7 May 2007 (UTC)