Emancipation reform of 1861

The Emancipation Reform of 1861 in Russia was the first and most important of liberal reforms affected during the reign of Alexander II of Russia. 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 (Julian Calendar), 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.

Pre-reform Russia

Imperial Russia was a land of peasants, which made up at least 80% 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, forty percent containing 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 labor and goods. It has been estimated that landowners took at least one third of income and production by the first half of the nineteenth century. [Waldron, P. (2007) "The Governing of Tsarist Russia" Palgrave Macmillan p.61 ISBN 978-0-333-71718-9]

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 early in the century. In Russian Poland, serfdom had been 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. [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] But even in these western parts of the Empire, peasants were still subject to various limitations.

Emancipation Manifesto

The liberal politicians who stood behind the 1861 manifesto - Nikolay Milyutin, Alexei Strol'man 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 two 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" ("cut off lands"), 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. 75% of 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. Redemption payments were finally cancelled in 1907.

Implementation

Although well planned in the legislation, the reform did not work smoothly. The conditions of the manifesto were regarded as unacceptable 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." [Peasant Wars of the 20th Century, Eric Wolf, 1969]

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; the management skills of the land-owners were generally poor.

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).

ee also

* Stolypin reform
* Judicial reform of Alexander II
* Bezdna Unrest

References

External links

* [http://schoolart.narod.ru/1861.html Emancipation Manifesto, in Russian]