What Was the Emancipation of the Serfs?
On 19 February 1861 (3 March new style) Tsar Alexander II signed the Emancipation Manifesto and seventeen accompanying legislative acts, freeing the privately owned serfs of the Russian Empire — about 22.5 million people in fifty great Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian provinces. The Manifesto was read from the pulpits of Orthodox churches throughout the empire on the following Sunday, 5 March, and the law took effect immediately. The reform was the centrepiece of Alexander’s reform programme after the Crimean War, and the most important social legislation of the imperial period (see Kolchin, Unfree Labor, 1987).
Background
The serf question had haunted Russian politics for at least a century. Catherine the Great’s 1785 Charter to the Nobility and Paul I’s 1797 decree on the three-day corvée had codified the institution, but the difficulty of working estates with bound labour in a competitive European economy was becoming more obvious with each decade. By the eve of emancipation, privately owned serfs made up roughly a third of the population of the European Russian provinces, and the revenues of state and crown peasants, who together amounted to another large fraction, were tied up in a parallel system. Alexander, who told the Moscow nobility in March 1856 that it was better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until it was abolished from below, drew on a decade of preparatory work by his brother Grand Duke Constantine, who had chaired the Secret Committee on the Peasant Question from 1857 (Field, The End of Serfdom, 1967).
The terms of the emancipation
The reform was a compromise between noble and government interests. The serfs received personal freedom, including the right to marry without the landlord’s consent, to own property, to enter contracts, and to sue in court. They also received, in most cases, allotment of land. The land allotments, however, were smaller than the lands the peasants had been working before emancipation — typically reduced by between a fifth and a third, with the better strips retained by the landlord. In the non-black-earth provinces of central Russia the reduction was sharper; in the black-earth south it was smaller.
The serfs also had to make redemption payments. The price of the land was calculated at about 80% of its market value, and the state paid the landlord in bonds; the peasant then reimbursed the state, with interest, over forty-nine years. The annual instalment was heavy — on average about 25% of a household’s cash income — and the indebtedness of the village commune (mir) was to dominate rural politics for the next half-century. The 1861 law, in other words, was a land reform as well as a personal-status reform, and the new village commune was given the legal status needed to enforce the redemption payments (Zakharova, Samoderzhavie i otmena krepostnogo prava, 1984).
The implementation
The actual implementation was delegated to provincial and district noble committees, where the landlords themselves drafted the local statutes (ustavnye gramoty) that defined the allotments and the obligations. Predictably, the landlords held the whip hand in the negotiations: the final terms, in many provinces, were less favourable to the peasants than the government had intended. The “temporarily obligated” peasants — those whose redemption agreement had not yet been signed — remained in a transitional status, partly free but still owing corvée labour to the landlord, until a separate 1881 law ended the system and obliged the peasant to begin making redemption payments regardless of whether an agreement had been signed. By 1906, when the redemption payments were finally abolished under Pyotr Stolypin, the peasantry had paid the state some 1.6 billion rubles on a debt of 0.9 billion — the system had been cancelled at a profit to the state (Druzhinin, Krepostnoe khoziaistvo i reforma 1861 goda, 1986).
The legacy
The reform created a class of free peasants who could, in theory, own land, sue in court, and migrate. In practice, the household commune, the redemption debt, and the chronic shortage of arable land held most peasants in the village, and the next half-century of Russian history was dominated by the question of whether the emancipation had been too cautious. Alexander’s government had intended the reform as the end of the question; instead, the land question was inherited by every subsequent Russian government, including the Soviet one. The emancipation of 1861 is therefore the natural starting point for the land problem that culminated in 1917 (Kolchin, 1987).