Emancipation and the Great Reforms

The Crimean War, the curtain raiser to the era, highlighted Russia’s urgent problems, but it left the regime with enough strength to deal with them. Even before the treaty ending the war was signed in 1856, Alexander II made it clear that policies at home were going to change. He lifted restrictions from non-Orthodox religious sects, ended onerous restrictions on foreign travel, and liberalized censorship. The “thaw” intensified after the treaty was signed and Alexander was officially crowned: The czar cancelled millions of rubles of unpaid back taxes, issued an amnesty allowing the Decembrists still in Siberia and other political prisoners to return home, and suspended army recruiting for three years.

Serfdom was always a brutal system and had long hindered Russia’s development, but by the mid-1850s it was also a badly corroded institution.

It was totally unsuited to the capitalist money economy that was spreading in Russia. Illiterate and unskilled serfs were inefficient laborers, both on the small parcels they farmed for themselves and on the large fields of their landlords’ estates. Instead of using their serfs as farm laborers, many landlords let them work in factories or in industries such as transportation in return for a cash payment, a practice that yielded a higher income to both parties. By the 1840s and 1850s landlords were increasingly demanding cash payments in place of labor even from the serfs living and working on their estates. In some of the better agricultural regions, such as in the south along the Volga, landlords actually preferred free to serf labor. None of these practices helped nearly enough, and by the late 1850s most landlords were deeply in debt.

Serfdom was in relative and absolute decline. By the end of the 1850s serfs accounted for just under 40 percent of Russia’s total population, slightly less than the number of state peasants. The latter, of course, were also bonded to the land on which they lived and thus likewise required a fundamental change in their legal status. Despite the system’s growing difficulties, the nobles did not want to give up their serfs, fearing they could not survive without them. Alexander responded cogently and directly that it was better to abolish serfdom “from above than to wait until the serfs begin to liberate themselves from below”. The warning resonated strongly against the background of increasing peasant disturbances during the first six decades of the 19th century. The next noble line of defense was to accept emancipation but without granting the peasants land, a proposition the czar also categorically rejected. Slowly he pushed the bureaucratic wheels forward until on March 3, 1861, six years to the day after he ascended the throne, Alexander II, henceforth the “Tsar-Liberator,” at last issued his Emancipation Edict granting the serfs their freedom.

The Emancipation Edict did a great deal but left at least as much undone. It freed more than 20 million peasants from the authority of their landlords – about five times the number of slaves liberated after the American Civil War. And unlike the former slaves in the United States, the Russian serfs were liberated with land. The problem was how much land, at what price, and under what circumstances.

Although conditions varied from place to place, the peasants generally received about one-third of the land; the landlords retained the best land, including most of the woodlands and pasture. In a major disappointment the serfs had to pay their former landlords for the land, at a price, set by the government, generally higher than what the land was worth. Since peasants were in no position to pay for what they in effect were forced to buy, the government provided them with loans to be repaid over 49 years in installments called redemption payments.

Finally, in most parts of the empire title did not go to individual peasant households but to their communes, which the Emancipation Edict retained. As they did before the emancipation, the communes divided the land up among its member households. The whole system was disastrously inefficient because of two policies, both designed to insure equality. First, the allotments were periodically redistributed, thereby killing any incentive to improve one’s land. Second, instead of a unified plot of land, each household was given a series of strips of varying widths (from barely six to over 20 feet wide), scattered across the countryside. The obsession with equality, carried over from preemancipation days, was driven by a logical imperative: The commune was collectively responsible for monetary obligations, including taxes; it was crucial that each family be able to carry its own weight.

The commune system and its inherently inefficient system of land tenure was retained because it was the state’s proven method of controlling and taxing the peasants. That retention came at a high price. In the post-emancipation era, the system stifled most attempts by industrious or innovative peasants to increase their productivity and improve their lot. Having paid too much for their land to begin with, the peasants were unable to keep up with their redemption payments or with the high taxes the government continued to impose on them, and as a result they fell deep into debt.

Other factors also undermined the peasants’ precarious economic position. After emancipation they no longer had free access to the forests and pastureland of the nobles. The spread of industry wiped out many of their cottage industries, which in the past had provided a slim margin of survival to many families. Finally, rapid population growth put increasing stress on limited resources. Debt mounted and the standard of living in many regions declined. When in 1891 the harvest failed, Russia experienced one of the worst famines in its history. As the century drew to a close, the defects rather than the successes of emancipation dominated the rural landscape.

State peasants were freed under more favorable conditions according to a law issued in 1866. Their initial advantage over their ex-serf countrymen eroded over time under the relentless undertow of hard times. Ultimately Russia found itself with a single, hard-pressed, and often demoralized peasant class.