Without the police powers to coerce peasants to work their lands, without a complete monopoly on land, many nobles feared total ruin. As a ranking member of the ministry wrote, ‘the landlords fear both the government and the peasantry’. To consult and ostensibly to mollify the government invited representatives of the nobility to come to St Petersburg and express their views in August 1859 (from the non-blackearth provinces) and January 1860 (from the blackearth provinces). On both occasions the government encountered fierce criticism and, more shocking still, even audacious demands for political reform. Although the tsar officially rebuked such demands and protests, the Editorial Commission none the less made some gratuitous attempts to represent emancipation as an expression of the nobility’s collective will. The commission had completed the main work by October 1860; after a final review by the State Council (an extremely conservative body that inserted some last-minute, pro-noble provisions), Alexander signed the statute into law on 19 February 1861. Fearful of peasant protests, public announcement was delayed for another two weeks—when the onset of Lent (and the end of the merry-making of Shrovetide was past) promised to produce a more sober and docile peasantry.
The government had good reason for anxiety: the 360–page statute was mind-boggling in its complexity, but one thing was clear—it corresponded little to the expectations of the peasantry. Although they were granted ‘the status of free rural inhabitants’ (with the right to marry, acquire property, conduct trade, and the like), they were still second-class citizens. Emancipation did foresee a gradual integration of peasants into society, but for the present they remained separate, bound to their own local (volost′) administration and courts. To ensure police power over the former serfs, the government shifted authority from the squire to the commune and resorted to the traditional principle of ‘collective responsibility’ (krugovaia poruka), which made the ex-serfs collectively accountable for taxes or indeed all other social and financial responsibilities. For the next decades the peasantry were to be the subject of special disabilities and obligations—such as the poll-tax (until 1885), corporal punishment (until 1904), and passports to restrict movement (until 1906).
For the peasants, however, the most shocking part of their ‘emancipation’ was the land settlement. In the first place, it was not even immediate; for the next two years peasants were to continue their old obligations to the squire as the government compiled inventories on landholdings and the peasants’ obligations as serfs. Thereafter these ‘temporary obligations’ were to remain in force until both sides agreed to a final settlement, whereupon the peasants would acquire a portion of the land through government-financed redemption payments. Peasants who had customarily assumed that the land was theirs now discovered that they would have to make immense redemption payments over a forty-nine-year term. The redemption payments were, moreover, increased by inflated evaluations of the land (up to twice its market value before emancipation). And worst of all, the emancipation settlement had special provisions to ensure that the nobility retained at least a minimum part of their estate; as a result of ‘emancipation’, peasants suffered a loss of land that they had utilized before emancipation—from 10 per cent in the non-blackearth provinces to 26 per cent in the blackearth provinces.
The government itself wondered, with deep anxiety, ‘what will happen when the people’s expectations concerning freedom are not realized?’ The answer was not long in coming. Whereas the number of disorders had been low on the eve of emancipation (just 91 incidents in 1859 and 126 in 1860), the announcement of emancipation ignited a veritable explosion of discontent in 1861—some 1,889 disorders. The most serious confrontations took place in the blackearth provinces (about half of the disorders were concentrated in ten provinces) and, especially, on the larger estates. In many villages peasants—incredulous that these could have been the terms of the ‘tsar’s’ emancipation—adamantly refused to co-operate in compiling inventories. As a peasant in Vladimir province explained, ‘I will not sign the inventory, because soon there will be another manifesto—all the land and forests will be given to the peasantry; but if we sign this inventory, then the tsar will see this signature and say: “they’re satisfied, so let it be”’. In many cases military troops had to be summoned to pacify the unruly peasants; among the worst incidents was the bloody confrontation in a village called Bezdna in Kazan province, where the troops panicked and started to shoot, killing and wounding hundreds of unarmed peasants. Although the number of disorders gradually declined (849 in 1862, 509 in 1863, 156 in 1864), the village continued to seethe with resentment and discontent.
Not only peasants, however, would have cause to bemoan emancipation: the former serf-owners were also appalled by its terms. They lost all their police powers, effectively depriving them of any opportunity to force their former serfs to fulfil their old obligations. Nor could squires be certain that they would be able to secure, at reasonable prices, what had earlier been ‘free’ serf labour to cultivate their lands. Most important, the nobles lost a substantial portion of their land; although in theory they received compensation, much of this went to pay off old debts and mortgages (62 per cent of all serfs had already been mortgaged before emancipation). In short, nobles found themselves short of capital and uncertain of labour, hardly a formula for success in the coming decades. Not surprisingly, emancipation provided a new fillip for gentry liberalism and, especially, demands for the formation of a national assembly of notables to serve as a counterweight to the ‘reds’ in the state bureaucracy. In 1862, for example, the nobility of Tver issued an address to the emperor: ‘The convocation of delegates of all Russia is the sole means for achieving a satisfactory solution to the problems that the [emancipation] statutes of 19 February have posed but not resolved.’ Dismayed by the terms of emancipation and by their de facto exclusion from the decision-making process, even the socially conservative among the nobility could give their assent to the political programme of ‘gentry liberalism’.
The Other Great Reforms
Although emancipation was the most explosive and significant reform, the government also undertook to carry out reforms on many of the other fundamental institutions of the realm. In part, this reformist zeal derived from the general ‘Crimean syndrome’, which had seemed to demonstrate not only the evil consequences of serfdom, but the general bankruptcy of the old administrative and social order. In addition, many of the reforms derived from the consensus of liberal officials that not only serfs, but society more generally must be ‘emancipated’ from the shackles of state tutelage, that only this emancipation could liberate the vital forces of self-development and progress. The centralized state had clearly failed to ensure development; freedom thus must be accorded to society. But emancipation itself mandated some changes: abolition of serfdom had eliminated the squire’s authority (which had been virtually the only administrative and police organ in the countryside) and hence required the construction of new institutions.
One was a new set of local organs of self-government called the zemstvo. Because the pre-reform regime had been so heavily concentrated in the major cities (with only nominal representation in rural areas) and plainly lacked the human and material resources to construct an elaborate system of local administration, in 1864 the government elected to confer primary responsibility on society itself by establishing a new organ of local self-government, the zemstvo. The reform statute provided for the creation of elected assemblies at the district and provincial level; chosen from separate curiae (peasants, townspeople, and private landowners), the assemblies bore primary responsibility for the social and cultural development of society’s infrastructure. Specifically, by exercising powers of self-taxation of the zemstvo, ‘society’ in each province was to build and maintain key elements of the infrastructure (such as roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, asylums, and prisons), to provide essential social services (public health, poor relief, and assistance during famines), and to promote industry, commerce, and agriculture.