Eager to grow and develop industrial and therefore military and political strength, they introduced a number of economic reforms, including the end of serfdom. It was optimistically hoped that after the abolition the mir peasant village communities would dissolve into individual peasant land owners and the beginnings of a market economy.
The main issue was whether the serfs should remain dependent on the landlords or be transformed into a class of independent communal proprietors. The land owners initially pushed for granting the peasants freedom but not land. The tsar and his advisers, mindful of revolutions in Western Europe, were opposed to creating a proletariat and the instability this could bring. But giving the peasants freedom and land left existing land owners without the large and cheap labor force they needed to maintain their estates and lifestyles.
By , however, a third of their estates and two -thirds of their serfs were mortgaged to the state or noble banks, so they had no choice but to accept the emancipation. To balance this, the legislation contained three measures to reduce the potential economic self-sufficiency of the peasants.
First, a transition period of two years was introduced, during which the peasant was obligated as before to the land owner. The serfs also had to pay the land owner for their allocation of land in a series of redemption payments, which in turn were used to compensate the land owners with bonds.
Three-quarters of the total sum would be advanced by the government to the land owner and then the peasants would repay the money plus interest to the government over 49 years. These redemption payments were finally canceled in Emancipation Reform of A painting by Boris Kustodiev depicting Russian serfs listening to the proclamation of the Emancipation Manifesto in In conclusion, it is clear that the emancipation of the serfs created negative social, economic and political conditions in Russia, with few tangible positive outcomes.
How successful was the emancipation of the serfs in Russia under Alexander II? Answered by Sam P. Need help with History? One to one online tuition can be a great way to brush up on your History knowledge.
Other reforms would ensue in higher education, land assemblies, urban affairs, and the military. Preparations for the emancipation of the serfs commenced as early as November , and by January a Chief Committee of Peasant Affairs had been established together with numerous provincial committees, charged with reporting to the Government on peasant reform.
Once the legislation had been prepared, the drafts were submitted to the State Council, which met on fourteen occasions to discuss them. Finally, on 19 February the Emperor signed and issued eighteen manifestos, edicts, statutes and rules to introduce and give effect to the emancipation. The book shown here contains the principal preparatory enactments adopted from to and all of the enactments of 19 February See: Alan P. Unsurprisingly, they kept the best land for themselves. The serfs got the leftovers.
The data shows that the landlords retained two-thirds of the land while the peasants received only one-third. So limited was the supply of affordable quality land to the peasants that they were reduced to buying narrow strips that proved difficult to maintain and which yielded little food or profit. Moreover, while the landowners were granted financial compensation for what they gave up, the peasants had to pay for their new property. Since they had no savings, they were advanced per cent mortgages, 80 per cent provided by the State bank and the remaining 20 by the landlords.
This appeared a generous offer, but as in any loan transaction the catch was in the repayments. The peasants found themselves saddled with redemption payments that became a lifelong burden that then had to be handed on to their children. The restrictions on the peasants did not end there. To prevent emancipation creating too much disruption, the government urged the peasants to remain in their localities.
This was easy to achieve since, for obvious reasons, the great majority of the ex-serfs bought their allotments of land from the estates where they were already living. It was also the case that the land available for purchase came from a stock of land granted to the village and was then sold on to individual peasants. A further aid to the authorities in maintaining control was the reorganisation of local government, which was one of the key reforms that followed in the wake of emancipation.
The motive was not cultural but administrative. The mir would provide an effective organisation for the collection of taxes to which the freed serfs were now liable; it would also be a controlling mechanism for keeping order in the countryside. Arguably, after , the freed Russian peasant was as restricted as he had been when a serf. Instead of being tied to the lord, the peasant was now tied to the village.
What all this denoted was the mixture of fear and deep distaste that the Russian establishment traditionally felt towards the peasantry. Beneath the generous words in which Emancipation had been couched was a belief that the common people of Russia, unless controlled and directed, were a very real threat to the existing order of things. Whatever emancipation may have offered to the peasants, it was not genuine liberty.
Emancipation proved the first in a series of measures that Alexander produced as a part of a programme that included legal and administrative reform and the extension of press and university freedoms. But behind all these reforms lay an ulterior motive. Alexander II was not being liberal for its own sake. According to official records kept by the Ministry of the Interior equivalent to the Home Office in Britain there had been peasant uprisings in Russia between and By granting some of the measures that the intelligentsia had called for, while in fact tightening control over the peasants, Alexander intended to lessen the social and political threat to the established system that those figures frighteningly represented.
There is a sense in which the details of Emancipation were less significant than the fact of the reform itself. Whatever its shortcomings, emancipation was the prelude to the most sustained programme of reform that imperial Russia had yet experienced see the Timeline.
There is also the irony that such a sweeping move could not have been introduced except by a ruler with absolute powers; it could not have been done in a democracy. Yet when that achievement has been duly noted and credited, hindsight suggests that emancipation was essentially a failure. It raised expectations and dashed them.
0コメント