If one had to choose a single characteristic that is most widely believed to have distinguished the Russian peasantry from others, it would be communal land tenure. Land in rural Russia is thought to have been held mainly by village communes, rather than by individuals through leases and private purchases, and allocated among member households according to their labour capabilities and consumption needs, with periodic adjustments made in response to demographic change. The private ownership of land by peasants, where it has been observed, is often assumed to have been a largely peripheral phenomenon, relevant only to the wealthiest peasant farmers.

The widespread practice of communal land tenure is supposed to have resulted in an ‘underdeveloped sense of private property’ among Russian peasants. The Russian peasantry, it has been argued, ‘was oblivious to the Western (ultimately Roman) concept of property in land’. Herzen himself wrote of ‘[t]he Russian peasant who has … a strong aversion to every form of landed property’. More recent expression is given to this view by Richard Pipes who argues, in his book Property and freedom, that many of Russia's current economic problems can be attributed to the weak development of property institutions in the pre-Soviet period. Pipes refers to imperial Russia's ‘antiproprietary culture’, a culture he sees very much rooted in the peasant mentality, since ‘to the peasant land was not a commodity but rather the material basis of life’.