An acute analysis of the dialectic between the state and the rural community, the two fulcrums of revolutionary ideology in Russia. The obcina was the specific form of farmers democracy which, up until the early decades of the 20th century, was in force in the rural communities of Russia. The base of the ob/ina was the village, whose life was governed by the assembly of heads of families who decided the main aspects of village life: the division of land, the material production and the social life. The diffusion of the community form perhaps also explains where the soviets originated, which seem to be born almost miraculously in the factories during the revolutions of 1905 and 1917: the urban workers of the factories, which mostly came from the villages, almost certainly remembered these democratic forms to the point of repurposing them in factories and cities.