How many serfs were emancipated

Eager to grow and develop industrial and therefore military and political strength, they introduced a number of economic reforms, including the end of serfdom. It was optimistically hoped that after the abolition the mir peasant village communities would dissolve into individual peasant land owners and the beginnings of a market economy.

The main issue was whether the serfs should remain dependent on the landlords or be transformed into a class of independent communal proprietors. The land owners initially pushed for granting the peasants freedom but not land. The tsar and his advisers, mindful of revolutions in Western Europe, were opposed to creating a proletariat and the instability this could bring.

But giving the peasants freedom and land left existing land owners without the large and cheap labor force they needed to maintain their estates and lifestyles. By , however, a third of their estates and two -thirds of their serfs were mortgaged to the state or noble banks, so they had no choice but to accept the emancipation. To balance this, the legislation contained three measures to reduce the potential economic self-sufficiency of the peasants.

First, a transition period of two years was introduced, during which the peasant was obligated as before to the land owner. The serfs also had to pay the land owner for their allocation of land in a series of redemption payments, which in turn were used to compensate the land owners with bonds. 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. It was determined that hired laborers were more profitable than enslaved laborers. Despite the rationale behind emancipating the serfs, the nobility were still opposed to it. They believed that emancipation would negatively affect their social status and lead them to economic ruin.

Alexander II decided to implement the emancipation gradually, through several stages, so as not to incite a revolution through such abrupt changes. The first stage was a two-year waiting period. Estate owners still had judicial control over the peasants, but the peasants were granted personal freedom. During the 2nd stage, which began in , owners lost judicial control over the peasants and were expected to begin the redemption process.

Redemption was essentially the act in which an estate owner would allow peasants to purchase the title of their land. Until this right was granted though, peasants were forced to continue to pay feudal dues.

Since estate owners did not want to forfeit this form of income, this stage lasted until the government instated obligatory redemption. 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. Alexander declared that the basic aim of emancipation was to satisfy all those involved in serfdom, serfs and land owners alike:. Called by Divine Providence We vowed in our hearts to fulfil the mission which is entrusted to Us and to surround with Our affection and Our Imperial solicitude all Our faithful subjects of every rank and condition.

Impressive though these freedoms first looked, it soon became apparent that they had come at a heavy price for the peasants. It was not they, but the landlords, who were the beneficiaries.