Russian Peasants: Serfdom and Emancipation

More than most Eurasian societies, Russia long remained a land of small cities with limited manufacturing. Not only a majority, but a vast majority of its people were peasants well into the 19th century. Numbers alone, however, do not account for the omnipresence of peasant issues in Russian history. From a once-held position of substantial freedom and control of village lands, Russian peasants had been subjected to increasingly rigorous serfdom—by state or by noble landlords—from the 15th century onward. Their trend thus reversed that of Western Europe, where serfdom on the whole became lighter over time. The Russian economy relied on agricultural exports forced from peasant labor on the large estates, and Russian politics and society, which traded noble control over their peasants for docility to the Russian tsar, relied heavily on the subjection of the serfs.

Yet the peasants’ condition created increasingly visible problems. It violated standards of justice felt keenly by many Russians, including those open to Western ideas during the 18th and 19th centuries. Serfs rioted frequently, for peasants were quite aware of their own servitude. Furthermore, tight control of peasant labor limited Russia’s economic flexibility, making it hard to recruit urban labor and, at least in the eyes of some observers, reducing productivity on the land as well. Finally, prodded by its loss in the Crimean War, the Russian government took the step of emancipation, ending serfdom while trying to preserve the noble-dominated social hierarchy. This move redefined the peasant question but did not remove it.

The documents I would like you to read stem from two sources. The first document is an account by an early Russian intellectual, Alexander Radishchev, who wrote about the peasants’ condition in the book A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790), which was repressed by the government until 1905. His account reveals peasants’ suffering and reactions and also the reformist zeal of a segment of the educated upper class (you can read it by clicking here; just read under the heading "Lyubani"). The second document presents excerpts from the emancipation decree of 1861 (you can read it by clicking here). They reveal how a new tsar, Alexander II, tried to juggle reform interests with noble resistance. The document invites appraisal in terms of how much was changed and why peasants were so widely disappointed with the results.

After reading both documents, I would like you to think about and discuss the following: What are Radishchev’s main arguments against serfdom? Where did he derive his criteria for judgment? What kind of society would he find preferable to Russia’s? What aspects of serfdom persisted from earlier decades? Was the emancipation of the serfs a radical move? Why did it provoke renewed discontent among the peasants? How did the arguments and implementation relate to earlier critiques by Westernizers like Radishchev? What does the emancipation document suggest about the flexibility of Russia’s authoritarian politic structure? Do these two documents provide clues as to why Russia encountered less social protest than Western Europe did during the first half of the 19th century, but more fundamental protest movements by the century’s end? How does Russian Emancipation compare with the French Revolution's attack on manorialism? Your thoughts…