Rural peasant community and court disputes of peasants on land ownership at the turn of XIX-XX centuries

The article considers on the most crucial stages in rural peasant community development in Russia in the process of bourgeois reforms of the XIX century. The contradictory nature of the situation is the following: changes in tenure of land in peasant environment, aspects of anew status «independent country inhabitant» and simultaneous preservation of specific framework of communal land tenure. This situation reveals peasant disputes on real right to land tenure and is the ground to access to a court. Empirical method of the article is the material of court cases in land tenure in Pskov province from 1896 to 1907.