Abstract: the authors in this article show that several generations of researchers carried out significant and fruitful work on the reconstruction of many aspects of socio-economic development and its administrative and political structure in the study of the rural community, which constitutes a whole direction in the history of Dagestan. It was noted that many positions in the community in the Soviet period were distorted or fitted to the dominant ideology, which distorted and did not contribute to the achievement of scientific objectivity. Among such questions, the authors cite quantitative indicators of the unions of rural societies, the language of the troops or militias – “bol mats1”, structural gradation of the rural community vertically, the territorial principle of unification of community unions and its economic expediency. The authors raise a question regarding the level of social development of the mountaineers of Dagestan, which Soviet historians interpreted as patriarchal.
The social level of the mountaineers of Dagestan should in no way be identified with the patriarchal system to please the formational research principle, as researchers in the Soviet era tried to do. Thus, the ideological and political attitudes adopted for historical research in the period of socialist construction do not meet modern scientific and methodological requirements, and therefore new interpretations are necessary to exclude the party-class approach.
Keywords: rural community, customary law, Jamat, Dagestan mountaineers, сonfederation, adat