The peasant rental area problem and creation of the first elimination mechanisms in Altai mountain district in 1861-1869

The article is devoted to the problem of peasant rental area in the Altai mountain district during the first years after the reform of 1861 in the context of the administrative and economic policy of the Cabinet of His Imperial Majesty (hereinafter - the Cabinet). The authors set a goal to reveal internal content and views evolution of Cabinet managers about the right of peasant societies to open leasing items, their reflection in the department normative space and agreement of adopted resolutions with current legislature. To reach a goal the authors involved departmental and legislative sources. The publication reveals the main cause of the problem with the peasant rental area. This was due to too long implementation period of the one item in the law of March 8, 1861, according to which the Altai lands were transferred to the population for temporary use until land settlement. Without waiting for the land reform peasant societies practiced the leasing some of their land to external persons mainly for commercial or industrial establishments. Uncertainty of the peasant land borderline and the absence of clear temporary rules for rural residents to exploit actually occupied lands very quickly made peasant rental area an object of acute and prolonged conflict between institutions defending the interests of peasants and the Cabinet. The Cabinet opposed the peasant societies' right to enter into lease relations with outsiders, regarding this as a law violation. The authors found that the legislation referred to by the Cabinet lacked clear legal mechanisms to solve the problem. So department management started the legislative language interpretation and began to create a number of rules that had a relative relationship with the law, but were suitable for regulating the situation in their own interests. As the authors established, most of these "conditional" norms, worked out from 1861 to 1869, were fixated in the department normative and legal space. Based on departmental materials, the authors came to the conclusion that the Cabinet policy towards peasant rental area in 1861-1869 was controversial. It is explained by the department desire to retain control over the peasants land in use, psychological attitudes from which the Cabinet bureaucracy did not escape after the bonded labor abolition and the general uncertainty of the situation when it was necessary to react spontaneously to the problem. As a result, in 1869, were established some rules to regulate the problem of the peasant rental area. However, they did not satisfy either side of the conflict, because the peasants were forbidden to organize the peasant rental area in their lands but the Cabinet could not collect information about them. The developed formal mechanism did not dislodge the informal methods of rural land leasing which were popular among the peasants and did not remove the acuteness of this problem, which increased its conflict potential in subsequent years. The revision of the created mechanism was inevitable.

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