About: Repartition

Repartition (Russian: передел, romanized: peredel) was a practice in the Russian Empire of the periodic redistribution of the peasant's arable land by the village community. The traditional household did not permanently hold a particular allotment in the open fields. What the household had was the right, so long as it remained within the village community (`mir'), to a holding commensurate with its size. The mir's assembly, the skhod, periodically redistributed the arable land to allow for changes in the size of households, and for new (or extinguished) households.