Then in March on the same day that Abraham Lincoln took his oath of office Alexander issued his Emancipation Manifesto. In charge of the program of emancipation was the adjutant-general, Count Panin, who had owned 20, serfs. The lords were to receive compensation in the form of treasury bonds, and the freed serfs were to pay for their freedom not as individuals but collectively.
Except in the Ukraine and a few other areas, lands were distributed to communities of former serfs — communities called communes. Government officials hoped that a commune of freed serfs would be more responsible than scattered individuals, and that communes would prevent the creation of numerous isolated persons without property. It was the commune that was to be responsible for distributing land to the former serfs, for collecting taxes and providing recruits for the military and other obligations.
In Russia the traditional relationship between lord and serf was based on land. It was because he lived on his land that the serf was bound to the lord. The Russian system dated back to and the introduction of a legal code which had granted total authority to the landowner to control the life and work of the peasant serfs who lived on his land. Since this included the power to deny the serf the right to move elsewhere, the difference between slavery and serfdom in practice was so fine as to be indistinguishable.
The purpose behind the granting of such powers to the Russian dvoriane nobility of landowners in had been to make the nobles dependent on, and therefore loyal to, the tsar.
They were to express that loyalty in practical form by serving the tsar as military officers or public officials. The serfs made up just over a third of the population and formed half of the peasantry. They were most heavily concentrated in the central and western provinces of Russia. In a number of respects serfdom was not dissimilar to the feudalism that had operated in many parts of pre-modern Europe.
However, long before the 19th century, the feudal system had been abandoned in western Europe as it moved into the commercial and industrial age. Imperial Russia underwent no such transition. It remained economically and socially backward.
Nearly all Russians acknowledged this. Some, known as slavophiles, rejoiced, claiming that holy Russia was a unique God-inspired nation that had nothing to learn from the corrupt nations to the west. But many Russians, of all ranks and classes, had come to accept that reform of some kind was unavoidable if their nation was to progress. These were oversimplified explanations but there some truth in all of them: serfdom was symptomatic of the underlying difficulties that held Russia back from progress.
It was, therefore, a particularly easy target for the intelligentsia, those intellectuals who in their writings argued for the liberalising of Russian society, beginning with the emancipation of the exploited peasants.
As often happened in Russian history, it was war that forced the issue. The Russian state had entered the Crimean War in with high hopes of victory. Two years later it suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of the Allied armies of France, Britain and Turkey.
The shock to Russia was profound. The nation had always prided itself on its martial strength. Now it had been humiliated. By an odd twist of fate, defeat in the war proved of value to the new Tsar. Although he had been trained for government from an early age, foreign observers had remarked on how diffident and unsure he appeared. The war changed all that.
Coming to the throne in in the middle of the conflict, Alexander II was unable to save Russia from military failure, but the humiliation convinced him that, if his nation was to have stability and peace at home and be honoured abroad, military and domestic reforms were vitally necessary. The first step on that path would be the removal of serfdom, whose manifest inefficiency benefited neither lord, peasant, nor nation. Alexander was right in thinking the time was propitious.
It had long been appreciated that some land reform was necessary. To the social and economic arguments were now added powerful military ones. As long as its army remained strong Russia could afford to ignore its backwardness as a nation. Few now had reasoned objections to reform.
Serfdom was manifestly not working. It had failed to provide the calibre of soldier Russia needed. These words have often been quoted. This was evidence of the remarkable power and influence that the tsar exercised as absolute ruler. Over the next five years, thousands of officials sitting in a range of committees drafted plans for the abolition of serfdom.
When their work was done they presented their proposals to Alexander who then formally issued them in an Imperial Proclamation. When it was finally presented, in , the Emancipation statute, which accompanied the Proclamation, contained 22 separate measures whose details filled closely printed pages of a very large volume.
Three-quarters 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 49 years. These redemption payments were finally canceled in Emancipation Reform of A painting by Boris Kustodiev depicting Russian serfs listening to the proclamation of the Emancipation Manifesto in Household serfs were the worst affected as they gained only their freedom and no land.
Many of the more enlightened bureaucrats had an understanding that the freeing of the serfs would bring about drastic changes in both Russian society and government. In reality, the reforms created a new system in which the monarch had to coexist with an independent court, free press, and local governments that operated differently and more freely than in the past.
While early in the reforms the creation of local government changed few things about Russian society, the rise in capitalism drastically affected not only the social structure of Russia, but the behaviors and activities of the self-government institutions.
The serfs from private estates were given less land than they needed to survive, which led to civil unrest. The redemption tax was so high that the serfs had to sell all the grain they produced to pay the tax, which left nothing for their survival. Land owners also suffered because many of them were deeply in debt, and the forced selling of their land left them struggling to maintain their lavish lifestyles.
With little food and in a similar condition as when they were serfs, many peasants started to voice their disdain for the social system. Lastly, the reforms transformed the Russian economy.
The individuals who led the reform were in favor of an economic system similar to that of other European countries, which promoted the ideas of capitalism and free trade. The idea of the reformers was to promote development and encourage private property ownership, free competition, entrepreneurship, and hired labor. They hoped this would bring about an a more laissez-faire economic system with minimal regulations and tariffs.
Soon after the reforms, there was a substantial rise in the amount of grain production for sale. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content.
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