Khutor or khutir is usually taken to refer to a single-homestead

Smallholding

A smallholding is a farm of small size.In third world countries, smallholdings are usually farms supporting a single family with a mixture of cash crops and subsistence farming. As a country becomes more affluent and farming practices become more efficient, smallholdings may persist as a legacy of...

 rural

Rural

Rural areas or the country or countryside are areas that are not urbanized, though when large areas are described, country towns and smaller cities will be included. They have a low population density, and typically much of the land is devoted to agriculture...

 settlement (farmstead) of Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...

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In Cossack

Cossack

Cossacks are a group of predominantly East Slavic people who originally were members of democratic, semi-military communities in what is today Ukraine and Southern Russia inhabiting sparsely populated areas and islands in the lower Dnieper and Don basins and who played an important role in the...

-settled lands that encompassed today's Ukraine

Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

, Kuban

Kuban

Kuban is a geographic region of Southern Russia surrounding the Kuban River, on the Black Sea between the Don Steppe, Volga Delta and the Caucasus...

, and the lower Don river

Don River

- Australia :* Don River , a tributary of the Fitzroy River * Don River in North Queensland* Don River - United Kingdom :* River Don, South Yorkshire, England...

 basin the word khutor was used to describe new settlements (irrespective of the number of homesteads) which had detached themselves from stanitsa

Stanitsa

Stanitsa is a village inside a Cossack host . Stanitsas were the primary unit of Cossack hosts.Historically, the stanitsa was a unit of economic and political organisation of the Cossack peoples primarily in the southern regions of the Russian Empire.Much of the land was held in common by the...

s. In some Cossack

Cossack

Cossacks are a group of predominantly East Slavic people who originally were members of democratic, semi-military communities in what is today Ukraine and Southern Russia inhabiting sparsely populated areas and islands in the lower Dnieper and Don basins and who played an important role in the...

 communities in Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

, these types of settlements were referred to as posyólok. In Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

 the term výselki (literally, "those who moved away") was also used.

During the Stolypin reform

Stolypin reform

The Stolypin agrarian reforms were a series of changes to Imperial Russia's agricultural sector instituted during the tenure of Pyotr Stolypin, Chairman of the Council of Ministers...

s in Russia, Peter Stolypin envisaged rich peasant

Peasant

A peasant is an agricultural worker who generally tend to be poor and homeless-Etymology:The word is derived from 15th century French païsant meaning one from the pays, or countryside, ultimately from the Latin pagus, or outlying administrative district.- Position in society :Peasants typically...

s "privatising" their share of the community (obshchina

Obshchina

Obshchina or Mir ) or Selskoye obshestvo were peasant communities, as opposed to individual farmsteads, or khutors, in Imperial Russia. The term derives from the word о́бщий, obshchiy ....

) lands, leaving the obshchinas, and settling in khutors on their now individually owned land. A less radical concept was that of an otrub (отруб): a section of formerly obshchina land, whose owner has left the obshchina but still continued to live in the village and to "commute" to his land. By 1910 the share of khutors and otrubs among all rural households in the European part of Russia was estimated at 10.5%. These were practically eliminated during the collectivisation in the USSR

Collectivisation in the USSR

Collectivization in the Soviet Union was a policy pursued under Stalin between 1928 and 1940. The goal of this policy was to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms...

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In literature

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...

's first major work is called Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka

Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka

Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka is a collection of short stories by Nikolai Gogol, written from 1831-1832. They appeared in various magazines and were published in book form when Gogol, who had spent his life in Ukraine up to the age of nineteen, was twenty two. He put his early impressions and...

, where 'farm' is a translation of 'khutor' (Russian: Вечера на хуторе близ Диканьки, Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan'ki).