Freeing the Serfs

On march 30, 1856, a young Tsar Alexander II, only recently ascended to the throne, appeared before the Moscow nobility. The ancient capital was in a state of agitation over rumors about the possible abolition of serfdom. The tsar, as usual, denied the rumors, but at the same time made the following statement: “Better to abolish serfdom from above than see a day when it will be abolished from below.”

This was an eventuality that struck fear in the hearts of Russian landowners. Memories of the Pugachyov Rebellion were deeply, almost genetically, ingrained in the Russian psyche – in the form of family legends of great grandmothers and grandfathers who had suffered at the hands of irate peasants, tales of grandmothers and grandfathers who still remembered the horrors they had seen in their eighteenth century childhoods, and Pushkin’s story The Captain’s Daughter. What could be worse than a peasant revolt? Could the mid-nineteenth century really see such an uprising?

During the Soviet era, historians made a great effort to prove the existence of a heated class struggle in Russia before the abolition of serfdom. Every serf who fled his master, every murder of a cruel landowner, was painstakingly documented and presented as evidence of “actions by the people.” Still, they were not able to paint a very impressive picture.

Peasants really did try to flee their villages, mostly to the army during the Crimean War, since there were rumors that the authorities were recruiting volunteers who would later be given their freedom. Entire districts decided to forsake alcohol and save up money to buy liberty. But peasant discontent never quite rose to the level of rebellion. Apparently, the tsar was intentionally trying to scare the nobility, in hopes of obtaining support for his reforms.

Almost five years later, on February 19, 1861, the great manifesto was finally signed and the peasants were given their freedom. Troops were brought to a state of readiness as the manifesto was made public, and for good reason. This is when peasant disturbances finally did erupt – by no means everywhere, and not to the extent revolutionaries would have liked, but nevertheless there were a lot more incidents than in previous years and more than in subsequent years as well, when villages had already reconciled themselves to the new order.

What was going on? Didn’t the peasants want freedom? Of course they did. But this was not the freedom they had envisioned.

Would it have been possible to implement the reform some other way? “Oh, yes,” the revolutionaries would have said. “The nobility’s lands should be handed over to the peasants.” After all, they were convinced that the land should belong to those who work it. What? The expropriation of gentry property? Surely not! This would be utterly impossible for the tsar, and thank goodness. A half century later, when the Bolsheviks took this step, Russia was instantaneously awash in blood.

But there was another possibility that came up repeatedly during the planning of reforms. Everyone – with the possible exception of the most pigheaded reactionaries and a few backward landowners in the wilds of the steppe –  understood that the peasants could not be liberated without land.

What the arguments were about was how much land the peasants should get and who would actually own it. When it came to the size of peasant plots, it was difficult, but possible, to find some sort of consensus, but then what? Would peasants really be allowed to do with their land what they wished? It was not at all uncommon to think of peasants as little children. Wouldn’t they just sell their allotment to the first swindler that came along? Or maybe they’d drink it away at the nearest tavern? Then what? Where would these thousands of landless vagrants go? To the cities? What would they do there? There were very few factories in Russia, and these bitter, unemployed people would surely bring nothing but misfortune with them. Naïve and inexperienced as they were, wouldn’t they then fall under the influence of the revolutionaries, who were just waiting to feed their propaganda to the masses? And now that their owners would no longer be keeping an eye on millions of peasants, who would? Wouldn’t it be a lot simpler to take a time-honored path, one that had proven itself over centuries of Russian history?

This was indeed the path that was chosen. The land that was allotted to peasants did not become the property of individuals, but of communities. The community divided the land, guided by their own ideas of fairness; the community paid money to the state for the allotments; the community made all decisions and arrangements – this was much simpler and more convenient. If some family fell on hard times and was not able to pay its taxes, the community helped out. True, if someone started becoming too prosperous, there was also a “safeguard” against that – he could not buy land from his poorer neighbors and he could not leave for the city without the permission of the entire village, which sometimes granted such permission and sometimes did not. Stay put on the little plot you were given and don’t raise a fuss – be like everyone else! Better not to stand out one way or the other.

How appealing this idea was for the government! The revolutionaries liked it too. The government felt that the community was a testament to the peasant’s adherence to the age-old foundations of Russian life, to their obedience to authority and faithfulness to the covenant of their forefathers. The revolutionaries felt that communal life turned the peasants into socialists, however unwitting. It presumably meant that they could be counted on in the struggle against the tsar. Neither the government nor the revolutionaries felt that the peasants needed to own private property. The government was afraid that some peasants would grow too rich, while others would grow too poor. The revolutionaries dreamed of a smooth transition from the peasant commune to socialism.

But what if….?

What if the other side had triumphed in the reform debate – those in favor of destroying the communal structure of villages by allotting families private plots of land? Admittedly, some people would have sold off their plots and others would have expanded their holdings and gone into commercial farming. Landless peasants would then have moved to the cities, and the influx of cheap labor would have promoted the emergence of new mills and factories. Undoubtedly this would not have been an easy process, but Russia would have avoided the terrible affliction that descended on its countryside toward the end of the nineteenth century – agrarian overpopulation.

The land that was allocated to peasants during the post-1861 reforms may have been more or less sufficient at the time, but there was no provision for expansion. The community did its best to see that each family had its proportional share, and every few decades the plots were redistributed based on the changing size of households, some of which would have had more births than deaths, while others fared less well. But the overall quantity of land did not change, which could not be said of the number of people. Overall, the birth rate in villages was high, and back then there was no way to control it. By the 1880s, children born after the reforms had grown up, married, and started their own families. They also needed plots of land, and the only solution was to break the original community lands into smaller and smaller parcels.

If the communal system had been abolished, this problem would never have arisen. Prosperous farmers would have bought plots from their neighbors, and less successful farmers would have gone to work on the more productive farms or set out for the city. And peasants would not have harbored an awful, festering hatred toward the landowners. They would not have burned their estates in 1905, and an entire way of life would not have come crashing down in 1917, when all the Bolsheviks had to do to open the floodgates was entice peasants with the opportunity to grab gentry lands. Without the communal system, it is unlikely the Bolsheviks would have attracted much of a following beyond a handful of students, and the party would never have come anywhere near capturing power.

If only the manifesto of February 19, 1861 had been a little bit different, today Russia might be an entirely different country with rich farmers and thriving industry. Words like “Bolshevik takeover,” “collectivization,” and “GULAG” might never have entered our lexicon.

Peasants made up about 80% of the population of Russia at the time of emancipation. About half of these were serfs (peasants on private land), and the other half lived on state lands.