ELI5. Right. The village commune or 'land society' (mir or obshchina) was the base unit of social organisation in rural Russia. Predominating in Russia, as opposed to the western or Central Asian parts of the Empire, by the 20th C the vast majority of Russian peasant households were part of a commune. As such it's pretty central to late Tsarist and early Soviet history, particularly the revolutionary period.

Some of the key distinguishing features of the commune were:

• Common land ownership. Land was formally owned by commune and controlled by the village assembly (skhod). This is in contrast to Western individual household farms.

• Strip farming. The village's land was divided into strips (nadel), which were distributed by household. A family would have several strips scattered around the fields surrounding the village.

• Land distribution. One of the purposes of strips was to ensure that land within the commune was distributed equally across the member households. (Typically this was according to either the number of workers or mouths to feed per household.)

• Individual farming. In contrast to later collective farms, each family farmed their own strips independently (more or less). The land was held in common but production was individual.

• Self-governing. The big advantage of communes for the state is that they were effectively self-governing institutions that formed the link between government and peasantry. Taxes and obligations (eg feudal or grain contracts) could be passed down to the village assembly, which would in turn divide the load amongst its members.

There was a huge amount of discussion in turn of the century Russia around the 'backwardness' of the commune. The strip system just wasn't very efficient, when it came to grain production at least. Peasants had to walk several km to reach all their scattered holdings, paths between strips ate into productive land and the small plot sized precluded the use of mechanisation. 'How to reform the mir' was the key economic question of the late Tsardom.

A key set of reforms were launched by the Interior Minister Pyotr Stolypin in 1906, encouraging peasants to leave the commune and set out on their own private farms. (That is, they would still live in the village but their strips would be bundled together and taken out of communal ownership.) This had some success but the revolution of 1917 saw the 'Black Repartition': peasant households seized the noble estates and private farms and (re)incorporated them into the commune system. Village communes thus survived the Revolution and NEP, only being destroyed by the Stalinist collectivisation of 1929.

That's the short version. I also touch on the village commune here. There's a massive amount of literature on the subject and it's been a topic of controversy since the 19th C. For a ELI5 introduction to the subject, in the context of the 1917 Revolution, see James White's underrated Russian Revolution.

I don't have an answer, but I'm just wondering what book is it?