Serfdom and the Emancipation of 1861
Alexander II frees Russia's serfs, about half the peasantry, but on terms that leave many poor, indebted and bound to their village communes.
- Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom — Peter Kolchin, Harvard University Press (1987)
- Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 — Geoffrey Hosking, Harvard University Press (1997)
- A History of Russia — Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and Mark D. Steinberg, Oxford University Press
From the late sixteenth century Russian peasants were gradually bound to the land and to their lords; by the eighteenth century serfs could be bought, sold, flogged and sent into the army for 25 years at a lord’s whim. Defeat in the Crimean War (1853–56) convinced the new tsar, Alexander II, that Russia had to reform. “It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait for it to abolish itself from below,” he told Moscow nobles in 1856.
- Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom — Peter Kolchin, Harvard University Press (1987)
- Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 — Geoffrey Hosking, Harvard University Press (1997)
The Emancipation Manifesto of 1861 freed some 22–23 million privately owned serfs. But the land they received was often smaller and poorer than what they had farmed, they had to pay for it in “redemption payments” over 49 years, and it was held by the village commune (mir), not by individuals. Alexander also reformed the courts, the army and local government. He was assassinated by revolutionaries in 1881, and his successors rolled much of the reform back.
- A History of Russia — Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and Mark D. Steinberg, Oxford University Press
- Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom — Peter Kolchin, Harvard University Press (1987)
- Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 — Geoffrey Hosking, Harvard University Press (1997)
Why it matters today
Serfdom was abolished only two years before the United States ended slavery, and many Russians trace habits of deference to authority, and distrust of it, to centuries of bondage. The half-way reform and the land hunger it left behind fed the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.