The end of serfdom

Vasily Perov painted Troika in 1866: three apprentice children hauling water through winter, five years after the act that was supposed to make such labour a free person’s choice. Later genre, Tretyakov, not a reading of the manifesto. Do not confuse a sled with 19 February. The last article left Alexander taking an active part in labours that culminated on 19 February 1861, 3 March New Style. This page is that settlement. Defeat in Crimea had made Russia’s lack of modernisation clear, and the first step toward modernisation was the abolition of serfdom. It seemed to the new tsar that the dangers to public order of dismantling the existing system, which had deterred Nicholas I from action, were less than the dangers of leaving things as they were.

As the tsar said to the nobility of Moscow in March 1856, it is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until the serfs begin to liberate themselves from below. That sentence is Britannica’s quotation, not this site’s invention. It is the only imperial sentence this article needs. The main work of reform was carried out in the Ministry of the Interior, where the most able officials, headed by the deputy minister Nikolay Milyutin, were resolved to get the best possible terms for the peasants. In this they were assisted by a few progressive landowners, chief among them the Slavophile Yury Samarin. The bulk of the landowning class was determined, if it could not prevent abolition, to give the freed peasants as little as possible. The settlement proclaimed on 19 February was a compromise.

Peasants were freed from servile status, and a procedure was laid down by which they could become owners of land. The government paid the landowners compensation and recovered the cost in annual redemption payments from the peasants. The terms were unfavourable to the peasants in many, probably most, cases. In the north, where land was poor, the price of land on which the compensation was based was unduly high; in effect this served partly to compensate the landowners for the loss of their serfs and also for the loss of the share they had previously enjoyed of the peasants’ earnings from non-agricultural labour. In the south, where land was more valuable, the plots given to the peasants were very small, often less than they had been allowed for their own use when they were serfs. A map of soil is not a moral. It is why a single act felt like two different bargains.

Nikolay Kasatkin painted Orphaned in 1891: a household without a breadwinner, a generation after personal bondage ended. Later genre, not the paper of 19 February and not Perov’s winter sled that opened this page. Use it for the poverty the statute did not automatically lift, then return to redemption. A dim interior is not a north-south bargain over soil. It is how a later painter imagined the labouring poor the act left as persons who still had to live.

It is arguable, the same history says, that the main beneficiary of the reform was not the peasant and certainly not the landowner but the state. A new apparatus of government was established to replace the authority of the serf owner. From the ispravnik, the chief official of the district, who in 1862 ceased to be elected by the nobility and became an appointed official of the Ministry of the Interior, the official hierarchy now stretched down to the village notary, the most powerful person at this level, assisted by an elder elected by an assembly of householders. The lowest effective centre of power was the village commune, the obshchina, an institution of uncertain origin but great antiquity, which had long had the power to redistribute land for the use of its members and to determine the crop cycle, but which now also became responsible for collecting taxes on behalf of the government.

The emancipation was received with bitter disappointment by many peasants as well as by the radical intellectuals. The serfs’ view of their relationship to the landowners had been traditionally summed up in the phrase, we are yours, but the land is ours. Now they were being asked to pay for land they felt was theirs by right. That is Britannica’s pairing of a proverb and a statute, not a novel. The psychological impact of the act was still immense. Alexander’s life has called it the greatest social movement since the French Revolution and a major step in the freeing of labour in Russia. Yet at the same time it helped to undermine the already shaken economic foundations of Russia’s landowning class. Two truths can sit in one paragraph. Persons were no longer chattels. The land bargain was a compromise the village did not love.

Liberation from serfdom was a benefit that should not be underrated. The decades that followed brought a growth of prosperity and self-reliance to at least a substantial minority. In 1877, when about four-fifths of the land due to be transferred to the former serfs was actually in their possession, that allotment land constituted about half of the arable land in fifty provinces of European Russia. A further one-third of the arable land was still owned by the nobility. Those figures belong here as the act’s later arithmetic, not as a second emancipation. They also belong as a warning not to freeze 1861 as a single morning. Transfer took years. Redemption took longer. The commune remained the state’s convenient collector.

Keep zemstvo schools out of this page except as a later sequel. Keep judicial statutes out of it. Keep Chernyshevsky’s leaflets out of it. The end of serfdom here is a Moscow warning in March 1856, a ministry determined to get terms for peasants, a landowning class determined to give as little as possible, a compromise dated 19 February 1861, redemption, north and south, an obshchina asked to collect, and a proverb that did not match the bill. Readers who want elective assemblies and irremovable judges will find them under Reforms. Readers who want the bitterness turned into conspiracy will find it under Revolutionaries. This article’s last job is to hand them a countryside no longer owned as bodies, still bound as payers.

They were no longer anyone’s chattels. They were asked to redeem land they had believed was already theirs.

Catherine’s chapter ended with a charter that thickened serfdom. Nicholas’s chapter left nine committees and no statute. This page is the statute those chapters refused. It is not a feast. It is a compromise written so the autocracy would not wait for a war from below. Milyutin and Samarin pulled toward the peasant. The bulk of owners pulled the other way. The state took the middle and the new hierarchy. Nevrev’s bargain already hung in Catherine’s last article; do not hang it here. Perov’s children are the work that did not end with personal freedom. Kasatkin’s room is the poverty that outlived the legal status. The next assemblies would try to bring schools and medicine into villages still paying vykup. Those assemblies have another title.

Do not invent a peasant speech beyond the proverb Britannica gives. Do not invent a landlord’s toast. Do not invent the wording of the manifesto beyond freedom from servile status, a path to ownership, compensation, and redemption. Do not invent a number of persons freed beyond tens of millions in the emperor’s life. The north-south split and the state’s gain are already more than a legend of 19 February as a single kindness. A kindness that bills the village is still a transformation. It is not the transformation the proverb had expected.

The previous title’s railways moved grain. This title’s peasants were now, in law, persons who might own the strips that grew it. Ownership on unfavourable terms is still a legal revolution. The French comparison in Alexander’s life is a measure of scale, not a claim that Russia had become France. Autocracy remained. The landowner’s economic floor shook. The village commune became a tax office. That is 1861 as the sources allow it to be told. The next page will remodel courts and local government on the ruins of the landlord’s police power. This page should remain a bargain and a disappointment, honestly dated, with no invented reading in a barn.

Ilya Repin painted a religious procession in Kursk province in the early 1880s. Later crowd, not 19 February. Use it for the peasantry after bondage, then put it aside. Dust on a road is not a redemption book.

Stop this page before 1864. The next title is reforms: zemstvos, courts, a municipal statute, a military statute. The end of serfdom here is from above rather than from below, Milyutin against owners, 19 February, vykup, the obshchina, and a proverb that broke on the bill. Perov’s sled is the work that continued. Kasatkin’s room is the poverty that remained. Repin’s procession is the countryside that still had to walk. Alexander had promised Moscow he would not wait. He did not wait. The village paid for the speed. The state, Britannica argues, was the main beneficiary: a new hierarchy from the appointed ispravnik down to a commune that now collected for the treasury as well as rotating strips.

Paul’s serfs had been his mother’s thickened property. Nicholas had feared public order more than backwardness. This act chose backwardness as the greater danger and wrote a compromise that made the state the heir of the manor. Persons walked out of a legal status. Land walked slowly, and at a price. In 1877 about four-fifths of the land due to former serfs was already in their possession, and that allotment was about half the arable in fifty provinces — with a further third still noble. Those figures are the act’s later arithmetic, already named above, and they belong at the close as a warning not to freeze 1861 as a single kindness. That is enough for this title. The assemblies that would try to civilise the same villages are the next sentence of the chapter, not a secret ending of 1861.