Mir

Mir, Soviet and Russian space station

Mir, Soviet and Russian space station: see space exploration; space station.

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mir, former Russian peasant community

mir (mēr), former Russian peasant community. The mir, which antedated serfdom (16th cent.) in Russia, persisted in its primitive form until after the Russian Revolution of 1917. In a community of free peasants the land was owned jointly by the mir; in a community of serfs, lands reserved for serf use were assigned to the mir for allocation. The mir, like a corporate body, had an assembly, obligations, and rights; it was responsible for allocating the arable land to its members and for reallocating such lands periodically. Woodlands, pastures, and waters were used jointly. With the abolition of serfdom in 1861 (see Emancipation, Edict of) land was allotted, not to individual peasants, but to the mir. The amount of land allotted, however, was insufficient to support the number of people on the land. Also, retention of the mir perpetuated archaic agricultural methods. After the Revolution of 1905, Stolypin introduced reforms that he hoped would lead to the breakup of the mir. The reforms (1908) were not wholly effective, but many mirs were broken into individual holdings. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the mir remained the basis for local administration and tax collection in the rural areas. With the imposition of collectivization in 1928–9, the mir was abolished and the collective farm was introduced.

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Mir

Russian space station. It consists of a core module launched in 1986 and five additional modules launched separately over the next decade and attached to the core unit to create a large, versatile space laboratory. The third generation of Russian space stations (see Salyut), Mir featured six docking ports for modules and other spacecraft, expanded living quarters, more power, and modernized research equipment. It supported human habitation between 1986 and 2000, including an uninterrupted stretch of occupancy of almost 10 years, and it hosted a series of U.S. astronauts in 1995–98 as part of a Mir-space shuttle cooperative endeavour. In 1995, Valery Polyakov (b. 1942) set a world endurance record of nearly 438 days in space aboard Mir. In March 2001 the abandoned station was brought down in a controlled reentry, with the surviving pieces falling into the Pacific Ocean.