The
Emancipation of the Serfs of 1861, carried out by Russian Tsar Alexander II, is
often regarded as a rare act of liberalism and humanity by an autocratic
regime. However, in reality it was just another measure designed to preserve
the status quo.
The Emancipation
of 1861
Russia was one
of the last countries in Europe to be organized by a feudal system according to
which each class of society was “owned” by the class that was superior to it.
At the top of the tree was the Tsar, who ruled as an absolute monarch, and at
the bottom were a vast number of peasants, or serfs, who were tied to the land
and could be bought or sold together with the land. Their status was not far
removed from slavery.
The Crimean
War of 1854-6 had shown that this system was bankrupt and was hopelessly
inefficient as a means of feeding a growing population. Reform was desperately
needed and the Emancipation (or “Peasant Reform”) of 1861 was the result.
The Tsar who
instituted the reform was Alexander II (reigned 1855-81, pictured) who is
generally regarded as having been the most liberal Tsar of the 19th
century, but this was only by comparison with the extreme autocrats whom he
followed and who succeeded him. It is to be noted that even his reactionary
father, Nicholas I, had proposed to end serfdom, for purely economic reasons,
so it is misleading to regard the emancipation as having been motivated by a
genuine concern to improve the lot of those on the bottom rung of Russian
society.
The Emancipation
Manifesto was signed into law on 19th February 1861 (3rd
March according to the Julian calendar then in force in Russia). It granted
freedom to 23 million serfs on private estates and in domestic households. The
rights granted included that of marriage without the landlord’s consent and
that of ownership of land and business enterprises, although the right to buy
land only applied to agricultural serfs. Other decrees were signed in 1864 and
1866, the latter applying to serfs on estates owned directly by the Tsar.
One reason behind
the move towards emancipation was a desire to defuse revolutionary feelings,
but the way in which the reform was implemented led to complete failure in this
regard. Indeed, the emancipation could be regarded as having perpetrated a complete
swindle on the peasantry that was to have profound consequences in later
decades.
Why was it a
swindle?
For one
thing, the landlords came out of the deal better than did most of the peasants.
They were able to retain the best land and were compensated, at inflated
prices, for the land that they were forced to sell to the peasants. The
peasants could not buy land as individuals but only as village communities, and
village officials became responsible for raising taxes to pay for the land
purchases. These payments continued for more than 40 years in some places and
were responsible for most peasants continuing to live in dire poverty.
Peasant
families still had to farm land that was spread in small parcels over a wide
area, as their ancestors had done since the Middle Ages. They also had to
plough the landlord’s estate with their own equipment and horses, either for
wages, as rent for additional plots of land, or to pay off debts.
The result of
emancipation, therefore, was to leave the landlords with their economic
privileges undiminished, and with the peasants no longer being serfs but
wage-labourers. The other freedoms, such as that of being able to marry without
consent, hardly made up for the continuing economic dependence of the peasantry
on the landlord class, and the fact that the peasants were still tied to the
land.
The rise of
the kulak class
After the
first Russian Revolution of 1905 changes were made that did create extra
freedoms, particularly the freedom to leave the village community should a peasant
family so choose, and to consolidate their strips of land into single farms if
they chose to stay. Many peasants joined the move to the cities and became
workers in the vast new factories that were being established as part of Russia ’s much
delayed Industrial Revolution. They sold their land to more prosperous peasants
who became the class of “kulaks”.
The kulaks
comprised about a million families who employed their poorer neighbours under
conditions that were no better than those imposed by the former rich
landowners. The kulaks would later, in the 1920s and 1930s, become the chief victims
of Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture under the Communist system.
Alexander
II’s reform was therefore nothing like the liberal measure that it might at first
sight appear to have been. It benefited the landowners more than the peasantry,
and it did nothing to avert the ever-present threat of hunger and disease in
the Russian countryside. After more than half a century of emancipation,
Russian agriculture still showed the lowest yields in Europe
at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
© John
Welford
Good history would have been great if the reforms could HAVE continued,the old delimea of good versus bad and so many lives lost.
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