Why Did Alexander II Free the Serfs?
The 23.5 million privately-owned serfs of the Russian Empire — about 38 percent of the empire’s total population, and 54 percent of its European-Russian population — were freed in the forty-seven paragraphs of the Emancipation Manifesto, signed by Alexander II on 18 February 1861 (3 March N.S.) and read from the steps of the cathedrals in Lent. Alexander later told the Moscow nobility: “It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until the serfs begin to liberate themselves from below” (quoted in Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, 1974).
He was, on the day he signed it, replacing the krepostnoye pravo of 1649 with a system of peasant households burdened with redemption payments to the state, in lieu of compensation to the landlords. The terms of the 1861 settlement were not Alexander’s. They were the work of the Editing Commissions under the unambitious bureaucratic general Alexander Rovtsov and then the more ambitious Nikolai Milyutin. The reasons for the emancipation were a mix of long-running structural pressure and acute crisis (Zaionchkovsky, The Russian Autocracy in Reform, 1979; Moon, The Russian Peasantry 1600–1930, 1999).
Long-term structural pressure
The Russian army had fought the French and the Austrians in 1813–1814 with serf soldiers under a gentry officer corps, and the post-1815 generation of officers, the dekabristy of 1825, had made abolition a political program. The Ministry of Internal Affairs counted 1,487 peasant disturbances in 1826–1834 and 2,250 in 1835–1844; by 1856 the count was running at about 500 a year. Nicholas I told the State Council in 1842 that “there is no doubt that serfdom, in its present form, is a manifest evil” — and then did nothing (Moon, 1999).
The Crimean shock
Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, sealed by the fall of Sevastopol in September 1855, was the proximate cause. The war demonstrated that the Russian army — armed with smooth-bore muskets, supplied by serf-transport, commanded by officers who had bought their commissions — could not match a French or a British force using rifled barrels, railways, and steam. The 3,348 killed at the Alma, the 12,000 dead of the siege year, and the humiliation of the Black Sea clauses of the Treaty of Paris were visible in every European Russian province. Alexander told the King of Prussia’s envoy in 1856 that he intended to proceed by stages “to bring about a different state of things than that which has existed until now” (Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 6th ed., 2000; Figes, The Crimean War, 2010).
The process
Alexander set the question in motion with his speech to the Moscow nobles of 30 March 1856. Three secret committees followed. The first (1857) endorsed emancipation on the land, with the land remaining nominally in noble hands. The Editing Commissions worked from 1859 to 1860. Provincial committees of nobles produced 43 draft projects; the gentry of the black-earth provinces insisted on retention of the otrezki — the strips cut from peasant allotments to compensate the landlords. In the end, the peasant household received on average 3.4 desyatins (about 9.2 acres) in the black-earth region and 2.8 desyatins in the non-black-earth region — roughly half of what the customary land allotment had been. The state advanced the redemption money (about 1.7 billion silver roubles over forty-nine years), and the peasant household was to pay 6 percent interest in annual instalments until 1931, when the bonds would be redeemed (Zaionchkovsky, 1979; Moon, 1999).
The aftermath
The Manifesto was followed, in 1861–1874, by the great reforms: county (zemskoe) self-government (1864), judicial reform (1864), municipal self-government (1870), universal military conscription (1874), the Witte system of state-purchased peasant land (peasant bank, 1882), and a more restrictive censorship. The 1861 settlement left the land question — the central fact of nineteenth-century Russian politics — exactly where it had been. The next great wave of rural unrest, in 1905, and the Bolshevik land decree of October 1917, would each in their different way be settlement attempts on the 1861 compromise (Pipes, 1974; Freeze, Russia: A History, 3rd ed., 2009).