Emancipation of the Serfs (1861): Alexander II's Great Reform

The emancipation of the serfs was the reform by which Tsar Alexander II abolished serfdom in the Russian Empire in 1861. His manifesto, dated 19 February 1861 in the old Russian calendar (3 March in the modern calendar), gave personal freedom to some 23 million privately owned serfs, about a third of the empire’s people. It was the largest single act of emancipation of the nineteenth century, but its terms left many peasants short of land and burdened with debt for decades.

What serfdom was

Serfs in Russia were peasants bound to the land and to the authority of a landowner. They owed their lords either labour on the lord’s fields (barshchina) or payments in cash or kind (obrok), and they could be punished, moved and, in practice, bought and sold with estates. Landowners also handled justice and recruitment for the army on their estates.

By the mid-nineteenth century most educated Russians, including many officials, regarded serfdom as morally indefensible and economically inefficient. Yet the nobility depended on it, and Nicholas I, though he set up secret committees on the question, did not act.

Causes

The decisive shock was the Crimean War. Defeat by Britain and France in 1853-1856 showed that Russia’s army of conscripted serfs and its lack of railways and industry could not match the Western powers. A modern army based on shorter service and reserves was hard to build while soldiers came from a bound population.

Fear of revolt also mattered. Peasant disturbances were frequent, and memories of the great Pugachev rebellion of the 1770s remained strong. In March 1856, soon after the Treaty of Paris, Alexander II told the nobility of Moscow that it was better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until it began to abolish itself from below.

Preparing the reform

In late 1857 the tsar issued a rescript to the governor-general of Vilna, Vladimir Nazimov, inviting the nobles of the Lithuanian provinces to form committees on reform; similar instructions followed for other provinces. This made the question public and committed the government to change.

The detailed work was done by Editing Commissions set up in 1859 under General Yakov Rostovtsev, who died in February 1860 and was replaced by the more conservative Count Viktor Panin. Reform-minded officials, above all Nikolai Milyutin, together with experts such as Yuri Samarin and the tsar’s brother Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, pushed the project through against strong noble resistance in the Main Committee and the State Council.

What the law provided

The manifesto and a long set of statutes were signed on 19 February 1861 (Old Style). The main provisions were:

• Personal freedom. Serfs became free rural inhabitants with rights to marry, own property, trade and go to court without their lord’s permission.
• Temporary obligation. For a transition period, at least two years and often much longer, peasants continued to owe labour or dues while charters setting out their land and obligations were drawn up.
• Land to the commune. Peasants received allotments, generally held collectively by the village commune (mir), which was responsible for taxes and payments and could restrict members’ movement.
• Redemption. The state paid landowners most of the value of the land, about 80 per cent, mainly in bonds, and peasants repaid the state over 49 years at 6 per cent interest, with the rest paid directly to the landowner.

About 1.5 million household serfs, who worked as servants rather than farmers, were freed without land.

How it worked in practice

Landowners kept the best land and often the woodland, meadows and water that peasants needed. In the fertile black-earth provinces, where land was valuable, peasants frequently received less than they had previously farmed; the lost portions became known as “cut-offs” (otrezki). In the less fertile north, where lords relied on cash dues, land was often valued well above its market price.

Many peasants believed the tsar had intended a fuller “real freedom” and that officials or nobles were hiding it. Disturbances followed in many provinces. The most serious took place in April 1861 at the village of Bezdna in Kazan province, where troops fired on a crowd following the peasant preacher Anton Petrov; the official death toll was 51, though some contemporaries claimed many more.

Reactions in educated society

Liberals and moderate reformers generally welcomed the emancipation as a historic step, and the tsar enjoyed great popularity in its immediate aftermath. In London, the exiled writer Alexander Herzen, who had long campaigned against serfdom in his journal The Bell (Kolokol), at first praised Alexander II warmly.

Radicals were far more critical. Writers associated with the journal The Contemporary (Sovremennik), including Nikolai Chernyshevsky, argued that the peasants had been cheated of land and burdened with unjust payments. Their criticism helped inspire the student and revolutionary movements of the 1860s and 1870s, among them the populists who later “went to the people” in the countryside.

Many landowners, for their part, resented the loss of free labour and authority. Some sold their estates in the following decades, and noble landholding declined steadily, while a new class of more prosperous peasants slowly emerged alongside the poor majority.

A gradual transition

Emancipation did not happen overnight. Charters fixing each estate’s land and obligations had to be drawn up, often amid disputes, by local “peace mediators” chosen from the nobility. Many peasants stayed in the “temporarily obligated” status for years, still owing labour or dues to their former lords.

Only in 1881 did the government make the switch to redemption compulsory for all remaining temporarily obligated peasants, from 1883. Even then, peasants remained subject to special courts, corporal punishment and a separate legal status until the early twentieth century.

By the numbers

Consequences and legacy

The emancipation began a period of “Great Reforms”: elected local councils (zemstvos) in 1864, a modern court system with juries in 1864, municipal reform in 1870, and universal military service in 1874. State peasants were reformed in 1866.

In the long run the settlement left a large, land-hungry and indebted peasantry tied to the commune. Arrears on redemption payments mounted, and the government cancelled the remaining payments from 1907 in response to the Revolution of 1905. Peasant demands for land remained a central issue until 1917.

Alexander II became known as the “Tsar Liberator”, yet he was assassinated by revolutionaries in 1881. The reform is often compared with the abolition of slavery in the United States, which followed in 1863-1865; unlike American freedpeople, Russian serfs received land, but on terms many felt were unjust.

Timeline

• 1856, March: Alexander II tells Moscow nobles serfdom should be abolished from above.
• 1857, November: Rescript to Governor-General Nazimov launches the reform process.
• 1859, March: The Editing Commissions begin work under Yakov Rostovtsev.
• 1861, 19 February (3 March New Style): Alexander II signs the Emancipation Manifesto.
• 1861, March: The manifesto is read in churches across the empire.
• 1861, April: Troops fire on peasants at Bezdna in Kazan province.
• 1866: State peasants receive land under separate legislation.
• 1907, 1 January: Remaining redemption payments are cancelled.

Why it matters

The emancipation ended a system of bondage that had shaped Russian society for centuries and made possible the wider modernisation of the empire. Its compromises, which protected the nobility at the peasants’ expense, also created many of the rural tensions that fed the revolutions of the early twentieth century.