Emancipation reform of 1861

In March 1861 Emperor Alexander II abolished serfdom on the private estates of the Russian Empire, giving personal freedom to more than 23 million people. The emancipation was the first and greatest of his reforms. It freed the serfs from their lords' authority but left most of them burdened with heavy payments for land that was often too small to live on.

Russia's peasants fell into three broad groups: those on state lands, those on the crown's own estates, and those on private estates. Only the last were serfs in the strict sense, an estimated 38 per cent of the population. They usually could not leave the estate where they were born and owed their owners labour and goods; landowners are thought to have taken at least a third of what peasants produced. Villages were run by a commune, the mir, which periodically redistributed strips of land among households, though the land itself belonged to some 100,000 noble landowners.

Reform had been discussed for decades. Paul I tried in 1797 to limit compulsory labour to three days a week, but the rule was not enforced. Alexander I's committee achieved only a ban on selling serfs apart from their families, and Nicholas I, though he spoke often of emancipation, improved conditions only on state lands. Serfdom was abolished in the Baltic provinces between 1816 and 1819, starting in Estonia, but the bulk of the nobility resisted any wider change.

Defeat in the Crimean War exposed the empire's backwardness, and reformers such as Nikolay Milyutin saw that Russia was one of the last feudal states in Europe. Alexander signalled his intentions in a speech on 30 March 1856, and a committee began drafting the principles. Landowners at first wanted to free the serfs without land, but the tsar and his advisers, mindful of the Revolutions of 1848, feared creating a landless proletariat. Many nobles were also deeply indebted: by 1859 a third of their estates and two-thirds of their serfs were mortgaged.

The Emancipation Manifesto of 3 March 1861 (19 February in the Russian calendar) granted former serfs the rights of free citizens, including the freedom to marry without permission, to own property and to run a business. Land, however, had to be bought. The state paid landowners 75 per cent of the price in bonds, and peasants were to repay the state, with interest, over 49 years. A two-year transition kept peasants bound to their old obligations, and landowners kept the best land as well as "cut-off" plots of forest, pasture and river access.

Many peasants refused to believe the manifesto was genuine, and troops were used to disperse crowds. At the village of Bezdna in April 1861, according to the official report, 70 peasants were killed and about 100 wounded. Household serfs received freedom but no land. Peasants typically could buy about half of the land they had farmed, and the redemption payments forced many to sell their whole harvest or rent land from their former masters. Payments were only cancelled in 1907.

State peasants were freed in 1866 on better terms. The emancipation was followed by other reforms, including elected local assemblies, the zemstvos, independent courts and a freer press. Grain production for sale rose, wage labour spread, and the peasant share of landownership grew from about 5 to 20 per cent while the gentry's fell from 80 to 50 per cent. The reform fulfilled a central demand of the Decembrist revolt of 1825, yet the shortage of land left many former serfs poor and resentful.

Our 1815 map shows the Russian Empire under serfdom, and the 1878 map shows it in the years after emancipation.