“The Freeing and Freedom of the Russia Peasants”
A paper prepared for the Wepner Symposium at the
University of Illinois Springfield, 19-20 October 2012
by Heather Bailey, Associate Professor of History, UIS
On April 4, 1863, a peasant trying to catch a glimpse of Tsar Alexander II as the
tsar strolled through the Summer Gardens in St. Petersburg, reportedly saw a man near
him, pistol in hand, raise his arm to fire at the so-called Tsar Liberator. Reacting quickly,
the peasant bumped the arm of the would-be assassin; the pistol went off, but the bullet
missed the tsar. When the gunman was apprehended, he claimed to be a peasant but
further investigation revealed that he was a young radical of noble birth, Dmitry
Karakozov. Immediately after firing the shot, Karakozov was dragged before the tsar,
who asked Karakozov why he had tried to shoot him. The gun-man responded: “Look at
the freedom you gave the peasants!”1 For the next few minutes we will do precisely
that—we will look at the freedom that Alexander II gave 22 million Russian serfs. As we
evaluate the historical circumstances of emancipation in Russia we will gain insights into
the enormity of the accomplishment, while simultaneously understanding why the
Emancipation Acts tended to leave Russians of all social strata dissatisfied.2
Serfdom, which had developed into an institution indistinguishable from slavery
in Russia, came under fire among a handful of intellectuals, in part under the influence of
Enlightenment philosophers, in the late eighteenth century. Empress Catherine II toyed
with the idea abolishing it, but knowing her own claim to the Russian throne to be
precarious and dependent on the support of the landowning gentry, the institution
1
W. Bruce Lincoln, The Romanovs: Autocrats of All the Russias (New York: Anchor Books, 1981), 43739.
2
Lincoln, 437.
The Freedom of the Russian Peasants
2
survived her reign completely intact. In 1803 Alexander I passed the Law of the Free
Agriculturists, which allowed and set conditions for landowners to voluntarily free their
serfs. Only about one percent of serfs were freed in the approximately fifty-year period
that the law was in effect.3 In his monumental comparative study of U.S. slavery and
Russian serfdom, Peter Kolchin writes that there was almost no public defense of
serfdom in Russia after the 1820s and that by the middle of the nineteenth century,
everyone from noblemen to serfs expected its abolition, because it did not have long-term
economic viability.4 Historians do not all agree that the principle motivation behind
emancipation was economic. Rather, fear of peasant uprisings, which were numerous,
and moral considerations, were at the forefront of rationales for the policy.5 Among the
educated public, whether ecclesiastic or secular, there were moral condemnations of
serfdom as sinful. In fact, the rhetoric about serfdom and its abolition was completely
infused with religious terminology. Emancipation of the serfs was seen as a sacred,
salvific act, associated with Christ’s resurrection.6 While for much of the educated public
this sacralization of emancipation was understood metaphorically, some peasants took the
idea, the sacred and even apocalyptic character of emancipation, more literally.7 Serfdom
was associated with “the kingdom of the Anti-Christ” and emancipation with the triumph
3
Riasanovsky and Steinberg say that 115, 734 male serfs were freed under the law. Nicholas V.
Riasanovsky and Mark D. Steinberg, A History of Russia, eighth edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 302. For statistics on the number of male serfs in Russia, and serfs as a percentage
of the population and peasantry, see Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom
(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1987), 366.
4
Kolchin, Unfree Labor, 362-33.
5
Riasanovsky and Steinberg, 355-56.
6
Irina, Paperno, “The Liberation of the Serfs as a Cultural Symbol,” The Russian Review 50 (October
1991): 471-36. See especially 417, 425. Paperno argues that the common religious vocabulary among
different elements of the population and among opposing political and ideological camps was not “merely a
rhetorical system” but represents a deep “cultural consciousness,” 435.
7
Ibid., 429. Speaking of Anton Petrov, the peasant at the heart of the Bezdny rebellion of April 1861,
Paperno writes “Petrov and the peasants from his village understood the emancipation in the same symbolic
vein as other, more educated members of society. In the popular consciousness, however, these symbolic
connotations assumed absolute, mythological reality.”
Heather Bailey
of the true Christ or true faith.8 Since the intent to emancipate the serfs had been
announced and discussed in the press from the late 1850s on, by the time the
Emancipation Acts of 19 February 1861 were decreed, all elements of society had a sense
of the profound transformation that emancipation represented, and expectations were
extremely high.
The Emancipation Acts of February 1861 directly impacted the lives of about 52
million peasants, about 22 million of whom were privately-held serfs.9 In comparison
with the emancipation of slaves in the United States, the emancipation of the Russian
serfs involved a vastly greater number of people, about forty percent of the population of
Russia.10 While the legislation was signed in February, the announcement to the peasants
and the terms of the Acts were announced on 5 March, the first day of Lent.11 However,
the emancipation did not take effect until two years later.12 In the meantime, the
gradualist, conservative terms of emancipation that favored the nobility at the expense of
the peasantry had some serfs convinced that they were being deceived by tsarist officials
and members of the nobility.
8
Ibid., 423.
Riasanovsky and Steinberg, 368; Daniel Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1976), 33.
10
Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor, 51. Note, however, that Kolchin sees the emancipated slaves as forming
“roughly similar proportions of the total population,” though slaves in the U.S. constituted about one-third
of the population. For most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, privately-owned serfs constituted
about half of the Russian population. By 1858 the percentage of male serfs to population had dropped to
39.2 (p. 366), due to some combination of high mortality (cholera), decline in birth rates, and legal
reclassification as some landowners freed their serfs (367).
11
Victoria Frede, Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press), 156. Frede sees the coincidence with Lent as indicative of a sense of new life, an
expectation of resurrection in Russian society. The disillusionment that followed contributed to the
burgeoning revolutionary movement. During the Lenten period radicals were announcing the impending
collapse of the Romanov government and the transformation of the country by revolution, 156.
12
Ibid., 168.
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The Freedom of the Russian Peasants
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The legislation called for a two-year transition period, to be followed by a period
when peasants would be “temporarily obligated.”13 This status change, which took effect
on 19 February 1863 made peasants free agents, vis-à-vis their former lords, but
stipulated that peasants would have to pay for their land. As for the “temporary” nature of
the obligation, the term of these so-called “redemption payments” was 49 years. As
historian Daniel Field explains, freedom to the peasant did not mean freedom from
custom and from their peasant community, but it did mean freedom from obligations to
the landlord.14 While emancipation freed them from the arbitrary authority of the lords,
they expected to be provided with land. Redemption payments came as a harsh
disappointment.
Such terms make it easy to understand how social unrest and disillusionment
would set in almost immediately. In March, April, and May 1861, there were about 718
instances of troops being called in to deal with peasant disturbances related to peasant
dissatisfaction with the terms of emancipation, particularly the charters concerning
payment for land.15 Only rarely did disturbances lead to violence, however. In one of the
rare but renowned instances of violence, over a hundred peasants were massacred by
soldiers in the April 1861 Bezdna massacre. Peasants in that region were convinced that
the nobility and officials were lying about and suppressing key edicts of the emancipation
statutes, contrary to what they believed was the true will of the tsar.16 To make matter
13
Peter Kolchin, “Some Thoughts on Emancipation in Comparative Perspective: Russia and the United
States South,” Slavery and Abolition 11 (3) (1990): 353.
14
Field, 32-33.
15
Terence Emmons, “The Peasant and the Emancipation,” in Wayne Vucinich, ed., The Peasant in
Nineteenth-Century Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), 54-55.See also Sheila Fitzpatrick,
Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 4.
16
The Bezdna massacre is discussed at length in Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar. See also Paperno,
427-29 and Frede, 168-69.
Heather Bailey
worse, peasants paid inflated prices for the land, often far in excess of what the land was
worth.17 The steep redemption payments further contributed to widespread peasant
poverty.
Not surprisingly, the landowners, who had largely accepted abolition as inevitable
and played an active role in creating and implementing the terms of the emancipation, got
the better end of the deal. They retained ownership of more land than the legislation
entitled them to, and the best land at that. “The owners [former serf-owners], numbering
30,000 noblemen, retained ownership over some 95 million dessyatins of the better land
immediately after the Reform, compared with 116 million dessyatins of suitable land left
to the 20 million ‘emancipated’ peasants.”18
Besides the fact that the material terms of emancipation favored the nobility, it is
necessary to further qualify the freedom of the peasants. On one hand, the elimination of
serfdom required a whole infrastructure of supporting reforms, one of the most crucial of
which was a sweeping legal reform. The legal reforms of 1864 made Russian citizens, in
theory, equal before the law, with a single law code that applied to all social classes.
Despite this de jure equality, in Great Russia, Russian peasants did not become free,
autonomous agents upon emancipation. Peasant life post-emancipation was organized
communally, a fact that had tremendous implications for the short and long-term results
of emancipation, though for peasants, communal organization could have advantages as
well as disadvantages.
17
18
Kolchin, “Some Thoughts on Emancipation. . .,” 353-54.
Petr Liashchenko, cited in Riasanovsky and Steinberg, 368. A desyatina is about 2.7 acres.
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The Freedom of the Russian Peasants
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The commune was, of course, a centuries-old institution and a holdover from preemancipation society.19 Historically, Russian serfs were given land allotments from
which they were expected to support themselves, while simultaneously working for their
masters.20 Under serfdom, the commune was an intermediate institution between serf and
master. Post-emancipation, it was an intermediary between peasants and the government.
Peasants were tied to their communes and needed the consent of the elected elders
of the commune to leave.21 The communes had the responsibility for redemption
payments. Decisions about land allotments were made by majority vote of the male heads
of households.22 These elders also made the decisions about what crops to plant.
The communal organization of Russian agriculture perpetuated inefficiency and
subsistence-level production. Land belonged to the commune and the commune
determined how the land was distributed among the families in the commune. On the
death of a household patriarch, the strips were divided among his sons; there was no
tradition of primogeniture. Strips allotted to a household were not contiguous, and with
each generation and each division of plots among the children, a household could end up
with many small plots, miles apart, within the commune. Such an arrangement stifled
agricultural productivity. From time to time, the communes would repartition the
19
On the commune in the post-emancipation period see Christine Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family and
Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995).
According to Worobec, the Emancipation Act sanctioned “village communities” which, in central Russia,
coincided with pre-existing communes in many cases; even when they did not coincide precisely with preexisting communes, they carried out the same basic functions, 17-18.
20
As Kolchin notes, this arrangement was a major difference between serfdom in Russia and slavery in the
United States. See Kolchin, Unfree Labor, 45.
21
The communes’ collective responsibility for redemption payments was a hindrance to peasant mobility.
Despite these restrictions, the number of otkhodniks, those who remained residents of te commune but
worked as wage-laborers in villages and towns for part of the year, quintupled. See Fitzpatrick, 21.
22
Worobec, 3.
Heather Bailey
commune’s land, allocating plots to married males.23 There was a strong sense of equity
in the commune, and so households were each to receive shares of the best and worst
lands, since all contributed to the commune’s tax obligations.24 In most communes,
households held a certain amount of “farmstead” land that was not subject to repartition.
Peasants built their homes and might set up gardens or orchards on these lands.25
Where there was poverty on the Russian commune, it was shared. There was a
considerable degree of economic equality. In Ukraine, however, a different system of
land tenure perpetuated both poverty and economic inequality among peasants. There
peasants did have private plots, but there was no commune or other system for reallocating the land based on household size. So poor peasant households tended to remain
poor while richer households remained rich, contributing to a level of class antagonism
within the peasantry.26
The terms of emancipation and the communal organization of post-emancipation
peasant society tended to reinforce the divide between the peasant masses (narod) and
educated society (obshchestvo). For decades, western travelers and observers in Russia
had noted and commented on the widespread gulf that separated the nobility from the
peasantry. That gulf was evident in economic, but also cultural terms. Culturally, the
nobility dressed and spoke like western Europeans, and was well-educated, while the
peasantry was largely illiterate, wore Russian style of dress, and had minimal or no
formal education. A frequently repeated theme in western travelogues, newspapers, and
23
Ibid., 3.
Ibid., 19.
25
Ibid., 20. Worobec explains the types of and division of land on the communes. Besides these farmsteads,
households farmed strips of arable land partitioned by the commune among households; there were also
pastures, meadows, and woods that belonged to the commune as a whole and were used by all commune
members or divided equitably. Sometimes communes also leased additional land, 20-21.
26
Field, 116-17. The tension between rich and poor peasant households was particularly manifest in a
protracted struggle in the 1870s in Chigirin District of Kiev Province. See Field, 113-207.
24
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The Freedom of the Russian Peasants
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studies of Russia was the absence of a middle class, the absence of independent
organizations and agencies, in Russian society. This divide between the peasantry and
educated society was a constant source of frustration for the Russian intelligentsia, those
who took a critical stance vis-à-vis the regime and Russian institutions, and who wanted
to work for the improvement of social conditions. To a large extent, the peasantry saw
these people as outsiders. So while there was dissatisfaction with the terms of the
emancipation at all levels of society, and while the peasant question was central to the
burgeoning revolutionary movement, general dissatisfaction did not translate into a
strong, coordinated program of action uniting peasants and educated society.
To conclude our discussion, then, of the “freedom” that Alexander II, along with a
whole host of advisers, bureaucrats, and landowners, “gave the peasants,” we note that
the emancipation of the peasants did mean freedom from the arbitrary rule of landowners;
emancipated peasants were no longer property or “souls” to be counted as the measure of
the landowners’ wealth. They were citizens with legal rights. Freedom did mean a
considerable degree of non-interference by the government in peasants lives.27 On the
other hand, the freedom that the emancipation legislation gave the peasants did not mean
freedom from the commune or freedom to be autonomous agents, though the peasants did
not necessarily expect or seek such freedom. More significantly, freedom did not equate
to free land or freedom from poverty. The legacies of emancipation under the terms of the
1860s legislation were the continuation of subsistence-level agriculture, widespread
poverty, and land hunger, all of which were destabilizing factors in late-imperial Russia.
As Kolchin states: “New forms of dependency that provided the ex-bondsmen with at
27
Worobec, x-xi. Worobec notes, however, that it was the government that insisted peasants not be allowed
to desert communal lands.
Heather Bailey
best semifreedom became the rule. Exploitation, poverty, and bitterness endured, even as
the freedmen struggled to take advantage of changed conditions.”28 While the
emancipation was accomplished mostly peacefully, violence being the exception and not
the rule, subsequent decades were fraught with disillusionment and new waves of
revolutionary activity, much of which was directly concerned with the so-called “peasant
question,” and of which Karakozov’s assassination attempt is just one early example.
Thus, upon closer analysis of the terms of emancipation and social conditions in
post-emancipation Russia, it can be noted that the freeing of the Russian serfs—what is
generally regarded, for good reasons, as a profound social transformation, a watershed
moment in history—is, in certain respects, less impressive than it appears on the surface.
The emancipation of the serfs is another manifestation of the paradox of remarkable
historical continuity amidst significant change. While emancipation fundamentally
altered the legal status of the Russian peasant, it did not, in the immediate aftermath,
transform the peasant into an autonomous agent, alter the highly stratified nature of
Russian society, or revolutionize the means of production.29 Certainly an awareness of
what the freedom of the Russian peasant did and did not mean is integral to
understanding the subsequent course of Russian history.
28
Kolchin, Unfree Labor, 375.
See, for example, Francis M. Watters, “The Peasant and the Village Commune,” in Wayne Vucinich, ed.,
The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1968), 133-57.Watters
argues that the commune was a barrier to the rationalization of Russian agriculture, and that the
emancipation and subsequent legislation “in effect substituted the authority of the obshchina [commune]
for that of the former serf owner.” The Russian peasant attained “emancipation,” in the sense of the ability
“to rationalize his economic life,” only in the twentieth century, 157.
29
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