The Day Russia Freed The Serfs

Until serfdom was abolished, to be a peasant in Russia was to be a serf: to work the land for the profit of a master, with no chance of freedom. Unlike a slave, a serf is technically tied to the land, only to be traded or sold when a landowner changes, but in practice, there was little difference between the two.

Russian serfs were often policed, whipped, executed, governed and controlled much like any slave, bowing to a master, marrying only with their approval, and having children knowing their fate would also be a life of servitude and toil for no personal gain. For centuries the economy and stability of the Russian Empire rested on the serfs, and even as much of Europe changed it’s position on slavery and the owning of people, Russia wavered. It took until the 1861 Emancipation Reform for the peasantry to finally gain their freedom — decades after the rest of Europe had done so.

So what took so long? And what was the autocracy doing about it?

Origins

The exploitation of the peasantry and restrictions on their freedom had existed since states were formed and individuals began amassing wealth. Landlords would keep peasants on their land, who in turn would harvest the crops in exchange for housing, paying a fee when the season was up to be dismissed, free to choose a new place to set up shop for the next season. Early laws allowed the peasantry to only move between landowners around Yuri’s Day: a two week period of freedom.

But in the 16th century, with the nation struggling economically during the Time of Troubles, temporary limitations were put in place by Tsar Boris Godunov forbidding their movement altogether. This temporary law was never lifted, eventually being made permanent, and by the middle of the 17th century (now free from Russia’s Time of Troubles and in to the stability of the Romanov dynasty) their flight had been deemed a criminal offense. Landowners were allowed almost unlimited ownership to almost four fifths of the peasantry as a result.

The 43 year reign of Peter the Great saw the establishment of much of what made Russia a successful, modern powerhouse for the centuries to come. It saw the beginning and expansion of the Russian Empire, as Peter attempted to modernise and westernise the country. In 1723, slavery was officially abolished, but in practice little changed, with all slaves simply converted in to full serfs instead.

Indeed, the word serf derives from the old Latin servus, which means slave, highlighting that this difference was entirely arbitrary.

The dangers of reform

Some 37 years and five Tsars later, Peter the Great’s grandson took the throne for seven months in 1762 before he was deposed and murdered. Despite being wildly unpopular (or perhaps, because of this) Peter III planted the first seeds for a free Russian peasantry.

He made two key changes that would allow the emancipation of serfdom down the line, both of which are hard to explain, but which in essence took away state service pressures on the church and nobility, and thus created a rationale to end the reliance on the peasantry, and for the first time, open the door for possible freedom down the line. Russia was still a long way away from abolishing serfdom altogether, both culturally and economically, but these reforms were a start.

More notably, he also made it illegal for landowners to kill their serfs without going to court, establishing a right to life and justice (to some degree) for the serf: the first dent to the unlimited ownership rule established over a century prior.

But the ultimate fate of Peter III (his wife arranged for him to be arrested, deposed, and in murky circumstances, conveniently killed) also set the precedent for many (but certainly not all) Tsars who followed: meddling with serfdom and the wealth of the nobility was a dangerous game, and more cautious steps were needed.

Many Russian Tsars wanted to free the serfs, but many were wise enough to realise that doing so was far too dangerous.

Peter’s wife was Catherine II (to be known to history as Catherine the Great), and she undid a lot of her husbands more unpopular reforms, but with the serfdom, she went one step further and passed laws to prosecute landowners for the cruel treatment of their serfs. She created legislation that allowed serfs the right to formally complain if their masters treated them unkindly, or did not keep their side of the arrangement (for example, protection, health, and land to live and work on, in exchange for tax usually in the form of a percentage of their crops). She also deemed it illegal for a freed serf to be made a serf once again, and through her reign the overall condition of the serf somewhat improved.

However, while previously the serfs were allowed to petition the Tsar directly in extreme cases of mistreatment, Catherine moved to outlaw this, wanting the serfs to have a legal channel to go down but not wanting to be bothered by them herself. This, along with various other external factors such as famines and epidemics (a major one in 1771) led to the first major uprisings of the serfs for a century, with Pugachev’s Rebellion in 1774. The uprising ultimately failed, and had the opposite effect as intended, showing Catherine the dangers of disrupting the status quo, pushing her away from liberation ideas and in to a safer, more conservative approach for the rest of her reign.

Slow steps and eventual liberation

At the turn of the 19th century, Tsar Alexander was on the throne. Most famous in history for his involvement in the Napoleonic Wars against Bonaparte, he was a liberal at heart, and a product of the Age of Enlightenment. To him, serfdom was a national embarrassment, but like others, he recognised the pitfalls in moving too quickly. With internal and external sentiment changing, Alexander held talks with his key advisors through large portions of his reign to consider whether it was a possibility, how it could be done, and what the effects would be. Ultimately, it became clear that the country was not ready to part with serfdom and like Catherine, his liberal stance softened as he grew more paranoid and bitter in age, fearing revolt and uprising.

Despite that, he still made some steps. In 1801 he extended the rights to own land to most classes, including state owned serfs (admittedly a minority of total serfs) and in 1803 he created a new social class for those serfs who had been voluntarily freed by their masters. He further strengthened the laws set in place by Catherine the Great, in which landowners could be prosecuted for cruelty to their serfs, extending their rights and status. Between 1816–1819, Alexander went as far as to emancipate serfs in Estland, Courland and Livonia, however to put the effect of this in to context, this only accounted for approximately 0.5% of the population of the Russian Empire: it was a cautious start to say the least.

Nicholas succeeded his brother Alexander, and he was more cautious still. His reign is generally considered disastrous, but he made some efforts to change public opinion and state dependence on serfs, which has to be recognised. For example, in 1831 he passed legislature restricting the votes of nobles with more than 100 serfs, incentivising the aristocracy to limit their dependence on serfdom. A whole ten years later, the practice of selling serfs without land by landless nobles was banned (it had not officially been allowed since Peter the Great abolished slavery and converted all to serfs, but had still been done quite openly).

After Nicholas, the country needed a liberal or it was likely to head to revolution: Alexander II (known to history as Alexander the Liberator) was exactly that. Braver than his father Nicholas, he finally wrote in to law the Emancipation of Serfdom in 1861, something that had been a long time coming, with the last of the state owned serfs being freed in 1866. The political temperature in the Empire had been rising for some time, and with revolutionaries and uprisings growing internally, along with failure in war externally, the need for drastic modernisation was highlighted: now was the time, it couldn’t be put off any longer.

The act was partly one of good faith, and partly one to gain favour and avoid violence. Alexander himself said that it was somewhat inevitable that they would be free, and to give them their freedom was to avoid the peasantry simply taking it for themselves instead.

But regardless, the emancipation allowed the freedoms of some 23 million individuals, giving them the right to marry without permission, to own land and business, and travel freely. Some classes of serf were affected more significantly than others, and some areas of the Empire took several years more to put this in place, but this brought an end to the legal ownership of other people once and for all — a huge part of Russian and world history.

Of course, this all came far too late. Despite granting their freedom and being more open to change than any of his predecessors, Alexander II was still autocrat in a terribly outdated political system: serfdom was merely part of an overall problem that needed to be fixed. Alexander had the unfortunate honour of being a liberal Tsar at a time when his reforms should (through no fault of his own) have come a century before, and he was assassinated in 1881 by the revolutionaries he hoped his emancipation would avoid creating.

36 years later, the Russian population would earn their final freedom when Nicholas II abdicated, bringing an end to the autocratic rule of the Romanov family, giving political freedoms never seen in Russian history, and with the rise of the Soviet, the collapse of the Empire once and for all.

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Sources

• Sebag Montefiore, Simon, 2016. The Romanovs. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• Wikipedia contributors, “Serfdom in Russia,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Serfdom_in_Russia&oldid=1008743276
• Yegorov, O., 2021. From serfdom to freedom: The long and winding road. [online] Rbth.com. Available at: https://www.rbth.com/arts/history/2017/04/17/from-serfdom-to-freedom-the-long-and-winding-road_744333