Russian serfdom as it developed historically consisted of two disparate elements: the authority of the landlord over the serf, and the serf's attachment to the land. The Emancipation Edict, issued after prolonged deliberations of 19 February 1861, immediately abrogated the landlord's authority. The one-time serf now became a legal person allowed to own property, to sue in court and to participate in elections to local self-government boards. Traces of his previous inferior status, however, remained. In many crimes of a civil nature he came under the jurisdiction of special rural courts operating according to customary law which could impose corporal punishment. He continued to pay the soul tax from which the other estates were exempt; and he was required to petition his commune every time he wished to absent himself for a longer period of time.*
The government approached the second ingredient of serfdom, attachment to the land, very gingerly. In this respect the peasant became fully free only half a century later. The reasons for keeping the peasant bound to the land were partly political, partly fiscal. The authorities knew how ready the Russian peasant was to abandon the soil and roam the country in search of easier and more remunerative work. It feared that an uncontrolled mass movement of the peasantry would provoke social unrest and make it impossible to collect taxes. In the final settlement, therefore, the government attached the peasant to the community which, in addition to its traditional powers (e.g. the right to repartition land strips) acquired some of the authority previously enjoyed by the landlord. The commune was retained where it had already existed and introduced where it had been unknown.
The authorities resolved early that upon his emancipation the ex-serf would receive an adequate land allotment to support himself and his
* This disability survives in the USSR, where kolkhoz members are not issued regular internal passports and cannot move away without authorization.
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family. After hard bargaining with representatives of landed interests, minimum and maximum norms were set for the various regions of the country: landlords whose peasants tilled on their own behalf land in excess of the maximum norms could request to have it reduced; where the allotment fell below the minimum norm, they had to increase it. In the end, Russia's landlords retained approximately two-thirds of the land, including most of the pasture and woodland; the rest was distributed among the one-time proprietary peasants. Because in the eyes of the law both parts were property of the landlord, the peasants had to pay for their share. The government advanced to the landlords on the peasants' behalf 80 per cent of the price of the land, as determined by assessors, which the peasants had to repay over a period of forty-nine years in the form of'Redemption Payments'. The remaining 20 per cent of the purchase price the peasant paid the landlord directly: in money if he had it, in services if he did not. To assure that the 'Redemption Payments' were accurately delivered the government entrusted the property title to the peasant allotment to the commune rather than to die individual household.*
The Act of 19 February 1861 placed the peasant in an ambivalent situation. He was freed from the detested authority of the landlord; thus the single worst feature of serfdom was done away with. But at the same time, he remained in many respects separated from the rest of the population and continued to be attached to the land.
At the time of its promulgation, the Emancipation settlement appeared a success. Only a small group of radical critics found fault with it on the grounds that all the soil should have been turned over to the peasants and that they should not have been required to pay for their allotments. The Emperor of Russia achieved with one stroke of his pen the abolition of bondage which took the President of the United States four years of civil war. In retrospect, the achievement appears less impressive. In fact, after 1861 the economic situation of the Russian peasant deteriorated, and in 1900 he was, by and large, worse off than he had been in 1800. For the rural population, especially in the black earth belt, the second half of the nineteenth century turned out to be a period of progressive decline and demoralization. The crisis had several causes, some traceable to human error, some to factors beyond human control.
To begin with, the imposition of Redemption Payments on one-time serfs on top of their regular taxes placed on them unrealistic burdens. The peasants had extreme difficulty meeting their new fiscal obligations, especially in die areas where corvee had been the traditional method of paying rent and there were few opportunities for making money. To
* The Emancipation Edict left it up to the ex-serf to decide whether or not he wished to buy his share of land. Purchase became obligatory only in 1883.
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lease or buy more land, they borrowed money, first at exorbitant rates from village usurers, and later, at more advantageous ones, from the Peasant Bank. This indebtedness, on top of their current obligations, caused them to fall into arrears. In 1881 the government reduced by a quarter the moneys due under the Emancipation settlement, but this measure did not suffice. In 1907 bowing to the inevitable, it abolished the Redemption Payments altogether and cancelled arrears. But the harm had been done. The radical critics of the settlement who had argued the land should have been given the peasants free of charge appear in retrospect to have been right not only on moral but also on practical grounds.
The retention of the commune also seems to have been a mistake although it is more difficult to see how that one could have been avoided, because the peasants cleaved to it. The commune inhibited the emergence in Russia of a vigorous farming class, in so far as the hard-working and enterprising commune members had to bear fiscal responsibility for the indolent, inept and alcoholic ones. The whole arrangement fostered routine at the expense of innovation. Peasants had little interest in investing in the land which they stood to lose in the next round of repartition; they had every reason to squeeze out of it all they could, mindless of the future. The Emancipation Edict contained provisions which permitted a peasant household to consolidate its strips and separate itself from the commune; but these arrangements were hedged with so many formalities that few took advantage of them. In any event, in 1893 the government revoked them. By retaining and strengthening the commune the government undoubtedly achieved a certain measure of social stability and fiscal control, but it did so at the expense of economic progress. The unwillingness of the authorities to entrust the peasant with full civil rights also represented an error of judgement. Understandably, it seemed more prudent to introduce the peasant to the obligations of full citizenship piecemeal. But the actual effect of the post-emancipation system which subjected peasants to so many separate laws and institutions was to perpetuate their peculiar status in society, and to postpone yet further the development in them of that civic sense which they so sadly lacked. The flaw was aggravated further by the creation in 1889 of rural officials called Land Commandants (zemskie nachal'niki). Chosen by the bureaucracy from among conservative landlords of the district, they were assigned a wide range of arbitrary powers over the peasantry, not unlike those the landlords had once enjoyed over their serfs.