The concepts of "farm" and "cut" are practically not found in modern Russian speech today, but they can be found in classical literature. People used these outdated terms even in the time of Gogol, calling them small settlements and private peasant land holdings.
Khutor
The farm was a very small settlement or a separate peasant estate with a separate farm. Usually, a farm consisted of about ten houses, which were a separate group, which administratively belonged to larger settlements. Gradually, the farmsteads expanded, turning into a village or village, but their name often remained in the name of the settlement.
Estonians called their farmsteads manors, while Poles and residents of some countries in eastern and central Europe used the name "folwark".
Each farm could number from one to a hundred courtyards, but there was no church in it - that is how it differed from a village, where there could be only ten courtyards, but the church was always present. The Don and Kuban Cossacks called a settlement on the territory of the stanitsa a hamlet, which did not have a separate administrative management. Quite often the population of the village farms exceeded the population of the central settlement that had arisen before the farmstead. Large farmsteads often became autonomous villages with a separate communal territory and an assigned Cossack population.
Cut
The concept of “cut” appeared at the beginning of the 20th century in Russia. They were called a piece of land allocated from the communal land area, transferred to a peasant for individual use without transferring the main estate. Thus, the cut was an economic form of private land ownership with the most compact location. For the first time, legal distinctions between the farm and the cut were made in 1906 in a normative act, which indicated that village communities could switch to both the cut and the household form of land tenure.
The difference is that the farm could be inter-striped, and the cut completely united the allotment peasant plots into a common mass.
The owner, who received the newly formed plot, could independently decide what status to give to his land - allotment or non-allotment. This was an important point, since the allotment area somewhat limited its owner at his disposal. The restrictions made it possible to preserve the peasant land fund from non-agricultural elements penetrating into the villages. In addition, the recognition of allotment land freed it from loans, pledges and other financial encumbrances of private owners and creditors - except for the Peasant Land Bank.
