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The 'Emancipation Reform of 1861 in Russia' was the first and most important of liberal reforms effected during the reign of Alexander II. The reform amounted to the liquidation of serf dependence previously suffered by Russian peasants.
The legal basis of the reform was the Tsar's 'Emancipation Manifesto' of March 3 1861 (February 19, 1861 O.S.), accompanied by the set of legislative acts under the general name ''Regulations Concerning Peasants Leaving Serf Dependence'' (Положения о крестьянах выходящих из крепостной зависимости, ''Polozheniya o krestyanakh vykhodyashchikh iz krepostnoi zavisimosti''). The Manifesto granted the full rights of free citizens to serfs and prescribed that peasants would be able to buy the land from the landlords.

Contents

Pre-reform Russia

Emancipation Manifesto

Implementation

Outcome

See also

External links

References

Pre-reform Russia

Imperial Russia was a land of peasants, which made up 90% of the population. There were two main categories of peasants, those living on state lands and those living on the land of private landowners. Only the latter were serfs. As well as having obligations to the state, they also were obliged to the landowner, who had great power over their lives. By the mid-nineteenth century, less than half of Russian peasants were serfs.
The rural population lived in households (''dvory'', singular ''dvor''), gathered as villages (''derevni'', lit. 'wood', larger villages were called ''selo''), run by a ''mir'' ('commune', or ''obshchina'') — isolated, conservative, largely self-sufficient and self-governing units scattered across the land every 10 km (6 miles) or so. There were around 20 million ''dvory'' in Imperial Russia, four in ten numbering from six to ten people.
Intensely insular, the ''mir'' assembly, the ''skhod'' (''sel'skii skhod''), appointed an elder (''starosta'') and a 'clerk' (''pisar'') to deal with any external issues. Land and resources were shared within the ''mir''. The fields were divided among the families as ''nadel'' — a complex of strip plots, distributed according to the quality of the soil. The strips were periodically redistributed (''peredely'') within the ''derevni'' to produce level economic conditions, albeit at the expense of actual efficiency. Despite this the land was not owned by the ''mir''; the land was the legal property of the 100,000 or so land-owners (''dvoryanstvo'') and the inhabitants, as serfs, were not allowed to leave the property where they were born. The peasants were duty bound to make regular payments in labour and goods, usually working the land half-and-half for themselves and the land-owner.
The need for urgent reform was well understood in 19th-century Russia, and various projects of emancipation reforms were prepared by Mikhail Speransky, Nikolay Mordvinov, and Pavel Kiselev. Their efforts were, however, thwarted by conservative or reactionary nobility.
In Western ''guberniyas'' serfdom was abolished earlier. In Russian Poland, sefdom was abolished before it became Russian: by Napoleon in 1807. Serfdom was abolished in the Governorate of Estonia in 1816, in Courland in 1817, and in Livonia in 1819.^[1] However peasants were still subject to various limitations.

Emancipation Manifesto

The liberal politicians who stood behind the 1861 manifesto — Nikolay Milyutin and Yakov Rostovtsev — also recognised that their country was one of a few remaining feudal states in Europe. The pitiful display by Russian forces in the Crimean War left the government acutely aware of the empire's backwardness. Eager to grow and develop industrially, hence military and political strength, there were a number of economic reforms. As part of this the end of serfdom was considered. It was optimistically hoped that after the abolition the ''mir'' would dissolve into individual peasant land owners and the beginnings of a market economy.
Alexander, unlike his father, was willing to deal with this problem. Moving on from a petition from the Lithuanian provinces, a committee "for ameliorating the condition of the peasants" was founded and the principles of the abolition considered.
The main point at issue was whether the serfs should remain dependent on the landlords, or whether they should be transformed into a class of independent communal proprietors.
The land-owners initially pushed for granting the peasants freedom but not any land. The tsar and his advisers, mindful of 1848, were opposed to creating a proletariat and the instability this could bring. But giving the peasants freedom ''and'' land seemed to leave the existing land-owners without the large and cheap labour-force they needed to maintain their estates.
To 'balance' this, the legislation contained three measures to reduce the potential economic self-sufficiency of the peasants. Firstly a transition period of nine years was introduced, during which the peasant was obligated as before to the old land-owner. Additionally large parts of common land were passed to the major land-owners as ''otrezki'', making many forests, roads and rivers only accessible for a fee. The third measure was that the serfs must pay the land-owner for their allocation of land in a series of redemption payments, which in turn, were used to compensate the landowners with bonds. The total sum would be advanced by the government to the land-owner and then the peasants would repay the money, plus interest, to the government over forty-nine years. This was regarded as completely unacceptably by many reform minded peasants; "In many localities the peasants refused to believe that the manifesto was genuine. There were troubles, and troops had to be called in to disperse the angry crowds." ^[2] Redemption payments were finally cancelled in 1907.

Implementation

Although well planned in the legislation, the reform did not work smoothly.
The land-owners and nobility were paid in government bonds and their debts were removed from the money before it was handed over. The bonds soon fell in value, combined with the generally poor management skills of the land-owners as well as unfavorable weather conditions, Russia fell into the state of discontent and anarchism that Alexander II had worked so hard to avoid.

Outcome

The legislation neither freed the peasants from excessive external obligation nor greatly reordered their social and economic constraints. The uneven application of the legislation did leave many peasants in Congress Poland and northern Russia both free and landless (''batraks''), while in other areas peasants became the majority land owners in their province(s).

See also

★ Stolypin reform

★ Judicial reform of Alexander II

★ Bezdna Unrest

External links

★ Emancipation Manifesto, in Russian

References

1. Charles Wetherell, Andrejs Plakans, "Borders, ethnicity, and demographic patterns in the Russian Baltic provinces in the late nineteenth century", ''Continuity and Change'' (1999), 14: 33-56
2. Peasant Wars of the 20th Century, Eric Wolf, 1969