ABSTRACT
WE KNOW WELL THE RÔLE played by the slavophils in the preparation and actual drafting of the Emancipation Act of 1861. The most prominent representative of the so-called "young slavophils," Yury Samarin, a very active and influential member of the Editorial Commission, has often been credited with the preservation of the commune as the basic unit of peasant life. 1 But if the views of the slavophils on emancipation and the commune in particular have been studied for the period preceding the great reform, very little, if anything, has been said concerning their opinions of the working out of the emancipation. Some of them lived long enough to evaluate the effects of the survival of the village commune, an economic and political institution which they had done so much to keep alive, or perhaps had even restored to life, if we are to believe some of their critics. Did the hard test of daily life and of "compromises with reality" in enforcing the emancipation settlement further or destroy their principles?
