Emancipation reform of 1861

The emancipation reform of 1861 was the law that abolished serfdom on private estates in the Russian Empire. Its legal basis was a manifesto signed by Emperor Alexander II in St Petersburg on 19 February 1861 by the old Russian (Julian) calendar, which was 3 March in the calendar used in western Europe. Together with a large set of detailed statutes, it turned about 23 million privately owned serfs into legally free rural inhabitants.

In Russian it is usually called the “Peasant Reform of 1861.” It was the first and most important of the so-called Great Reforms of Alexander II’s reign, which also created new local councils, reformed the courts and changed the army. Because of it, Alexander II became known in Russian history as the “Tsar Liberator.”

The reform was a compromise. Serfs gained personal freedom immediately: they could no longer be bought or sold, they could marry without their landlord’s consent, own property, trade and go to court. But the land remained the landlords’ property until the peasants bought their allotments, with the state lending the money and the peasants repaying it over forty-nine years. That combination of real freedom and heavy burdens is why historians still argue about what the reform achieved.

Serfdom grew up in Russia in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when peasants were forbidden to leave the land they farmed. The Law Code of 1649 (the Sobornoye Ulozhenie) fixed this as a permanent rule. Over the next two centuries landlords gained almost unlimited power over their serfs. They could move them to other estates, sell them, punish them and demand either labour on the landlord’s fields (barshchina) or payments in money or goods (obrok).

Not every peasant was a serf in this sense. On the eve of reform there were three main groups: peasants on state lands, peasants on the lands of the imperial family, and peasants on private estates. Only the last group, owned by about 100,000 noble landowners, were serfs in the full sense. Most lived in villages governed by a commune, the mir, which shared out strips of land among households and was responsible for taxes.

Serfdom was concentrated in the central provinces of European Russia, in today’s Ukraine and Belarus and in parts of the western borderlands. In Siberia, the Far North, Finland and much of the Caucasus and Central Asia there were few or no serfs. Contrary to a common belief, serfs were not a majority of the empire’s population: a census of 1857–1859 counted about 23.1 million serfs out of some 67.1 million people.

Russian rulers had talked about reform for decades. Paul I tried to limit labour dues to three days a week in 1797; Alexander I allowed landlords to free serfs with land by agreement in 1803; serfdom was abolished in the Baltic provinces of Estonia, Courland and Livonia in 1816–1819, though without land. Nicholas I set up about a dozen secret committees on the peasant question, but powerful landlords blocked real change.

The shock that changed everything was the Crimean War of 1853–1856, in which Russia was defeated by Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire on its own soil. The war exposed how backward Russia’s economy, transport and army had become. Many officials concluded that a country of bound peasants could not compete with industrialising Western states. Peasant unrest was also rising: one count records 348 disturbances in 1845–1854 and 474 in 1855–1860.

In a speech to the Moscow nobility on 30 March 1856 the new tsar, Alexander II, said that the hostile feeling between peasants and landlords already existed and that it was much better for serfdom to be abolished from above than to wait until it began to abolish itself from below. Economic pressures helped too: by the 1850s about two-thirds of noble estates and serfs were mortgaged to state credit institutions, which weakened landlords’ ability to resist.

In January 1857 Alexander set up a Secret Committee on the peasant question, dominated by conservative grandees. The breakthrough came in November 1857 with the imperial rescript to V. I. Nazimov, governor-general of the western provinces around Vilna, which instructed local nobles to form committees to plan reform. The rescript was sent to every governor, and nobles across the empire found themselves obliged to discuss emancipation. From 1858 provincial committees of nobles began meeting, the Moscow nobility being among the most reluctant.

The government’s plans changed several times. Early programmes would have freed peasants personally while leaving all land to the landlords. Peasants feared such a “landless freedom,” and officials, mindful of the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, did not want to create a landless rural proletariat. At the end of 1858 a new programme, associated with General Yakov Rostovtsev, promised peasants allotments in permanent use with the right to buy them using state credit.

In 1859 so-called Editing Commissions were formed under Rostovtsev to turn the provincial proposals into law. The real driving force was the reforming official Nikolai Milyutin. After Rostovtsev’s death in 1860 the conservative Count Viktor Panin took over and allotments were somewhat reduced and dues increased. The commissions reviewed 82 provincial projects and filled 35 printed volumes with their materials. In January 1861 Alexander pressed the State Council to finish so that the reform could be announced before the spring field work.

The Manifesto was accompanied by the Statutes on Peasants Leaving Serf Dependence, a group of 17 legislative acts. Former serfs received the rights of “free rural inhabitants.” Their houses, buildings and movable property became their own. They received elected self-government through the village community and a larger unit, the volost. The sale of peasants ended, and landlords’ permission was no longer needed for marriages and family affairs.

The land question was handled very differently. Landlords kept ownership of their land but had to give peasants a house plot and a field allotment, which went not to individuals but to the village commune. Until they bought it, peasants were “temporarily obligated” and continued to owe labour or money dues, and at first they could not refuse their allotment for nine years. The size of each allotment and the dues were set in charters drawn up by landlords and checked by new officials called peace mediators. Maximum and minimum allotment norms were fixed for each region.

To buy their land, peasants entered a redemption operation. The state paid the landlords most of the price—typically about 75–80 per cent—in interest-bearing bonds, and the peasants repaid the state with 6 per cent annual interest over 49 years. Where allotments were larger than the local norm, landlords could cut off the excess; these “cut-offs” (otrezki) often included meadows, woods, pastures and paths to water. Peasants could instead accept a free “pauper’s allotment” of a quarter of the maximum. Household serfs, who had no land, received freedom only.

The government delayed publication by about two weeks to move troops and police into place, fearing unrest. The Manifesto was read in churches in St Petersburg and Moscow on 5 March 1861 (17 March by the Western calendar), and in other places over the following weeks. Its language, written in the elevated style of the Church, was hard for many peasants to follow.

Many peasants refused to believe that this was the freedom the tsar intended. They expected land without payment, and when they found that they still had to work for the landlord or pay him, rumours spread that the nobles and officials were hiding the tsar’s “real freedom.” The most famous clash came in April 1861 at the village of Bezdna in Kazan province, where a literate peasant, Anton Petrov, told his neighbours that the true law freed them from all obligations. Troops opened fire on the crowd. Official figures and later accounts differ widely on the casualties, from about 70 killed to between one and three hundred killed or wounded; Petrov was executed.

Educated opinion was divided too. Radical critics such as Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Ogarev argued that the people needed “land and liberty,” a phrase that would become the name of revolutionary organisations. Liberal nobles complained about their losses, while many officials hoped the reform would strengthen the autocracy by removing a source of rebellion.

For many peasants the immediate material situation did not improve, and in some places it worsened. The average allotment in central Russia was smaller than the land they had farmed before, and the cut-offs forced villages to rent meadows or woods from the landlord, often paying in labour. Redemption payments were high: historians such as Jerome Blum and Pyotr Zaionchkovsky calculated that the price of land in the non-black-earth provinces was on average far above its market value, which suggests that peasants were in effect also paying for their personal freedom.

The reform also locked peasants into the commune. Because land belonged collectively to the village and the commune was responsible for taxes and payments, individuals could not easily sell their share and leave for the city. Some communes stayed “temporarily obligated” for twenty years, until a decree of 1881 made redemption compulsory from 1883. As arrears grew, the government cut payments in 1883 and finally cancelled the remaining redemption payments from 1907, during the upheavals that followed the revolution of 1905.

Even so, the end of serfdom transformed Russian society over time. It made possible the other Great Reforms: elected zemstvo councils (from 1864), which built schools and clinics; independent courts with juries; and a modernised army. The share of land held by nobles fell sharply over the following decades while peasant ownership grew, and a mobile labour force emerged for the factories and railways of the late nineteenth century. State peasants were freed on better terms in 1866, and reforms followed later, on different terms, in Georgia and other borderlands.

The 1861 statutes were not applied uniformly. Separate local statutes covered Great Russian, “Little Russian” (Ukrainian), western and other provinces, with different allotment norms and payments. In the western provinces, where many landlords were Polish nobles and many peasants were Ukrainian, Belarusian or Lithuanian, the government after the Polish uprising of 1863 revised terms in the peasants’ favour, partly to weaken the rebellious Polish gentry.

In the Kingdom of Poland serfdom had been abolished by Napoleon’s rule in 1807 but had largely returned under Russia; the peasant question there was settled by a separate decree in 1864, again with political aims. In Georgia emancipation began in 1864 in Tiflis province and spread to other districts over the following years, on terms that historians describe as more favourable to the nobles than in Russia proper. In Armenia and Azerbaijan peasant reforms came in the 1870s and 1880s.

Seen from these borderlands, emancipation was not only a social reform but also a tool of imperial policy, used to bind peasants to the tsar against local elites. Historians of Ukraine, the Baltic states, Poland and the Caucasus therefore often tell the story differently from historians of central Russia.

The earliest scholarly account, by Alexander Skrebitsky, collected the documents of the reform’s preparation and was published in Bonn in the 1860s. Pre-revolutionary liberal historians generally celebrated the reform as a moral act of the state. Marxist and later Soviet historians, by contrast, called it a “serf-owners’ reform.” Mikhail Pokrovsky argued that for most peasants it merely changed their name from “serfs” to “obligated,” and Nikolai Rozhkov saw it as the starting point of the whole process leading to revolution. Pyotr Zaionchkovsky, the leading Soviet specialist, described the redemption terms as predatory, noting examples where total payments with interest were several times the market value of the land.

Later scholarship has refined these positions. Historians such as Larisa Zakharova and Boris Litvak argued that the laws of 1861 abolished serfdom as a legal status but set in motion, rather than completed, its disappearance as a social and economic institution; peasants remained tied to their allotments in practice until the Stolypin reforms of 1906. Zakharova also emphasised the role of a “liberal bureaucracy” around Milyutin that pursued emancipation as a moral goal, while concluding that the reform’s compromise character carried revolutionary risks. In English, Daniel Field examined how the autocracy imposed reform on a reluctant nobility, and Terence Emmons studied the gentry’s response.

Economic historians have recently tested old claims with new data. A study by Andrei Markevich (with Ekaterina Zhuravskaya) using provincial data found that emancipation raised agricultural productivity and improved peasant nutrition, measured by the height of army recruits. Others, such as V. T. Ryazanov, argue that growth in grain harvests in the first decade after the reform roughly continued earlier trends and accelerated only later. The debate continues over whether the commune and redemption system held back Russia’s development or cushioned a difficult transition.

Emancipation in Russia came almost at the same moment as the abolition of slavery in the United States: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was issued on 1 January 1863, and the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in 1865. Alexander II supported the Union in the American Civil War. Historians have long compared the two systems of unfree labour. Peter Kolchin’s Unfree Labor (1987) is a classic comparison, pointing to differences such as the Russian serfs’ own communities and the absence of racial division, as well as the far larger scale of Russian serfdom.

The ways in which the two systems ended also differed. American slavery was destroyed by a bloody civil war, and freed people received no land, despite hopes of “forty acres and a mule.” In Russia emancipation was imposed peacefully from above by an autocratic state, and peasants did receive land—but only by paying for it, and within a collective commune. In both countries former owners kept much of their economic power and freed people faced decades of poverty and restrictions.

Comparisons with other European emancipations are also illuminating. In Prussia and the Habsburg lands serfdom was dismantled between the Napoleonic era and 1848, often with peasants compensating lords through land or money. Russia’s reform came later and on a larger scale, and its combination of personal freedom, collective landholding and long redemption was distinctive. Jerome Blum’s broader study of the end of the old order in rural Europe places Russia within this European pattern.

The main sources include the Manifesto and Statutes themselves; the 35 printed volumes of the Editing Commissions’ materials; the records of the provincial noble committees, the Main Committee and the State Council; the reports of governors, peace mediators and military officers on the reaction in the villages; and the correspondence of officials such as Rostovtsev and Milyutin. Peasant voices are harder to hear. They survive in petitions, court and police records, and memoirs such as that of the former serf Savva Purlevskii, translated into English by Boris Gorshkov.

Numbers must be used carefully. Estimates of the serf population vary with the census or ‘revision’ used and with whether men only or both sexes are counted; figures for the proportion of serfs range from about a third to nearly 40 per cent of the population. Dates are also a trap: Russia used the Julian calendar, twelve days behind the Gregorian in the nineteenth century, so the same Manifesto is dated 19 February or 3 March.

Memory of the reform has changed with Russia’s politics. Imperial Russia honoured it with medals and monuments to the Tsar Liberator; Soviet historiography stressed its exploitative character and the peasant uprisings; and in post-Soviet Russia it has again been presented as a model of reform from above. Literature also shaped memory—from Turgenev’s earlier Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, which had made serfs’ humanity vivid to educated readers, to the satires of Saltykov-Shchedrin on landlords who used the cut-offs to trap their former serfs.