Russian Revolution · CHAPTER 1 ·
Great Reforms of Alexander II
Chapter 1 of The Russian Revolution, 1855–1924: “The Great Reforms”
Defeat in the Crimean War of 1853–56, when Britain and France took Sevastopol, convinced Tsar Alexander II that a serf empire could not keep up with industrial powers. The Emancipation Manifesto of 1861 freed the serfs, but their land went to the village commune and was repaid over 49 years.
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The map above is the world of The Russian Empire, July 1878 — The Congress of Berlin.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1880 · Europe in 1880.
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SHORT EXPLANATION
In the Crimean War of 1853–56, Britain and France captured Sevastopol on Russian soil. They could supply their forces by sea faster than Russia could bring supplies over land: no railway ran south of Moscow. The defeat raised a question for Alexander II: could an autocracy, in which the Tsar ruled without an elected parliament, keep pace with industrial powers while much of its army came from serfs? These peasants were legally bound to landlords who could sell or flog them or send them into military service. In 1856 Alexander told Moscow’s nobles that serfdom must end and that it would be “much better if this happens from above than from below.”
The Emancipation Manifesto of 1861 freed about 22 million serfs, more than a third of European Russia’s people; Lincoln’s proclamation would free American slaves in 1863. Russia’s settlement protected landlords and the treasury. Land went to village communes, and peasants had 49 years to pay for it. Elected local zemstvos, jury courts and a draft covering every class followed. The empire also expanded in Asia: charcoal on the map runs down the Amur to the Pacific and through Tashkent into Central Asia. These changes gave Russians new institutions, but no national parliament. Alexander had modernized society while keeping political power for the throne.
The full story
The Crimean War exposed weaknesses that reached far beyond the battlefield. Follow the arrow across the Black Sea to the British and French landing in 1854. Russia lost at least 450,000 soldiers, mostly to disease. About half its peasants were bound to landlords, and a serf became free upon completing military service. To avoid releasing men back to civilian life, the army kept conscripts for as long as twenty-five years. It consequently lacked a reserve of trained former soldiers to recall in an emergency. Serfdom tied up money as well: landlords had pledged two-thirds of their serfs as security for state-bank loans, and by 1857 the banks were short of funds. Emancipation was a calculation about state survival as well as a moral choice.
Personal freedom arrived in 1861; a settlement of the land question did not. The village commune, or mir, held fields collectively and paid taxes as a group. Since members shared debts, it could restrict their departure. The state paid landlords most of the price in bonds, while peasants repaid it over 49 years at six percent. Most estimates put that price above market value, partly because it compensated landlords for lost rents. In the fertile black-earth south, landlords’ cut-offs often removed a fifth or more of peasant plots. People who believed the land belonged to them were being asked to pay for less of it. Many doubted that these could be the Tsar’s true terms. At Bezdna in April 1861 troops fired on thousands who said so; the general counted 51 dead, while others gave higher figures.
Emancipation also left tasks that landlords had performed: judging and policing villagers and supplying conscripts. The state built new institutions to take their place. Elected zemstvos established in 1864 ran schools, roads and clinics; courts acquired independent judges, juries and trained defense lawyers. War Minister Dmitry Milyutin’s 1874 law made young men of every class liable for six years’ service and nine in reserve. Russian troops stormed the Ottoman fortress of Kars in 1877. Beyond these reforms lay an expanding empire. On the 1863 map hatching marks the Polish January Rising and Circassians resisting Russian rule; both were crushed. Arrows trace expansion along the Amur and toward Tashkent and Khiva. At home educated Russians had institutions but no national assembly for larger demands. By the late 1870s some radicals were killing officials to frighten the government into concessions.
FULL EXPLANATION
Why the Tsar freed the serfs
Crimea made serfdom a question the government could no longer put aside, but historians disagree about which pressure settled it. Soviet historians following Lenin, leader of the 1917 revolution, saw a “revolutionary situation” in 1859–61: peasant unrest forced the government’s hand. Disturbances did increase in the late 1850s. Daniel Field instead found the decisive pressure within the state. Most landlords resisted, while Alexander and the “enlightened bureaucrats” around Nikolai Milyutin, brother of War Minister Dmitry, carried the reform forward. W. Bruce Lincoln traced those officials’ careers back to the 1840s. Steven Hoch added the banking crisis of 1857–59: the state could no longer sustain loans against already mortgaged serfs. Larissa Zakharova’s archival work emphasizes Alexander’s persistence against nobles on his committees. These accounts illuminate different parts of the decision. Defeat exposed weakness, financial trouble added urgency, fear of unrest made action prudent, and the Tsar’s will enabled it.
Did emancipation impoverish the peasants?
Pyotr Zaionchkovsky, the Soviet historian, and economist Alexander Gerschenkron argued that emancipation impoverished peasants: they lost land, paid inflated prices and remained in communes that slowed labor’s movement to industry. Later evidence complicates that judgment. Paul Gregory found modest growth in peasant consumption and grain output before 1914, while Steven Hoch questioned the evidence for falling living standards and even for overpricing. More people also meant greater pressure on land: the empire grew from about 74 million around 1858 to 128 million in 1897. Conditions differed sharply. Zaionchkovsky’s figures show losses of two-fifths of peasant land in Saratov and Samara, against less than a tenth in Ryazan. In the infertile north, prices were calculated from dues paid out of outside earnings and could exceed what the land itself yielded. A single national verdict conceals those differences. Peasants’ belief that the land was theirs by right endured whatever the aggregate figures showed.
Institutions without a roof
Liberals hoped a national parliament would complete the new institutions. The zemstvos gave people a local voice: elections divided voters into landowners, townspeople and village communities, and in the first district assemblies of 1865–66 peasants held about 38 percent of seats and nobles about 42 percent. Peasants nevertheless outnumbered nobles many times over. Requests for a national voice failed. The nobles of Tver sought an assembly elected by the whole nation in 1862; projects in 1863 and 1866 would have added elected members to the State Council, the Tsar’s appointed law-reviewing body. All were refused or shelved. In 1878 a jury acquitted Vera Zasulich after she shot St Petersburg’s governor for having a political prisoner flogged. The government removed such cases from juries. Without a parliament to prevent it, the regime could narrow an institution when its decisions proved inconvenient, a practice repeated over the next forty years.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Defeat on home soil. Sevastopol fell in September 1855 after an eleven-month siege. Britain and France could supply their forces by sea, while Russia had to rely on carts: there was no railway south of Moscow. Losing on Russian soil damaged the prestige won when Russia drove Napoleon out in 1812 and pursued him to Paris. Modern military power required railways, rifles, money and trained reserves; the defeat showed Alexander how much his empire needed them.
Serfdom as a military and financial brake. Serfdom restricted the soldiers and money needed by a great power. Completing military service freed a serf, so releasing trained men into a reserve also meant releasing them from landlords’ control. Landowners had pledged about two-thirds of their serfs as security for state-bank loans. When the banks ran short of cash in 1857–59, the treasury could no longer support lending on that basis.
Fear of the village. The Pugachev rising of 1773–75 remained a warning: peasants and Cossacks, free frontier horsemen of the south, had burned estates across the Volga region. Disturbances increased again in the late 1850s as rumors of freedom spread. Alexander’s 1856 warning to Moscow’s nobles gave that fear a practical conclusion. If the throne decreed emancipation before peasants seized it, the state could determine its terms.
An autocrat and his reformers. Most landlords preferred delay or freedom without land. Alexander II supported a different settlement, and his authority could overcome resistance in a system without a parliament. Nikolai Milyutin and officials who had studied the problem for years drafted statutes in the Editing Commissions of 1859–60 under Yakov Rostovtsev. The concentrated power that made emancipation possible remained untouched by it.
THE TURNING POINT
The Emancipation Manifesto, 19 February / 3 March 1861. On 19 February / 3 March 1861 the Manifesto changed the legal status of more than a third of European Russia’s people. Landlords had governed and supplied conscripts from their villages; after emancipation the state needed courts, zemstvos and another way to raise an army. The settlement also shaped the land question for fifty years: land went to communes and repayment lasted 49 years. Russia’s Julian calendar was twelve days behind the Western calendar, so the Russian date comes first. The autocracy had shown that it could transform society while retaining political power. The tensions of that choice remained in 1905 and 1917.
What it changed
A free peasantry in debt. Peasants became free while owing redemption payments, annual installments repaying the state for land. Arrears accumulated in many provinces until the government canceled the payments during the 1905 revolution. Communes made members responsible for one another’s taxes and could restrict departures, slowing movement to towns. Land hunger—the conviction that a household had too little land to live on—became a deep grievance and a question every party had to answer in 1917.
A public with institutions and no voice. Zemstvos, courts, universities and a freer press helped form an educated public that expected to be consulted. Teachers, doctors, lawyers and statisticians were called the third element, alongside elected members and government officials. They could work in local institutions, but had no national assembly through which to press national demands. That frustration helped turn them toward opposition.
Revolution as a profession. Students who went to villages in 1874 to rouse peasants found little welcome; more than a thousand were arrested. Some who remained free concluded that killing officials to frighten the government into concessions—terror—was the way to break autocracy. In 1879 they founded the secret People’s Will and repeatedly attempted to kill Alexander. They succeeded in 1881, killing the Tsar who had freed the serfs.
An empire of many peoples. Expansion brought the Amur and Ussuri lands, roughly a million square kilometers, and Central Asian cities and oases with millions of Muslim subjects. Military governors ruled some territories; protectorates such as Bukhara and Khiva kept their own rulers but obeyed Russia. Alaska went the other way: too distant to defend after Crimea, it was sold to the United States for $7.2 million in 1867. The Polish rising and Circassian expulsion revealed the reforming state’s treatment of resistance. Borderlands held by force and never consulted were among the first to rebel or break away as the empire collapsed in 1917.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Did the Great Reforms make revolution in Russia less likely or more likely?
The answer depends partly on when we look. In the short run emancipation removed the danger of a Pugachev-style rising for a generation, the reformed army won the war of 1877–78, and zemstvo schools and clinics gradually improved village life. Yet peasants remained indebted and hungry for land, professionals acquired institutions without a national voice, and revolutionaries killed the reforming Tsar. Alexis de Tocqueville argued in 1856 that a bad government is often most vulnerable when it begins to reform, because it raises expectations faster than it meets them. Historians still differ over the balance: reform delayed revolution by decades while helping shape the form it took. On this evidence, reform from above buys time for a regime willing to keep reforming.
An interesting fact
On Forgiveness Sunday, 5/17 March 1861, Alexander II read the emancipation manifesto himself in the Mikhailovsky Manège, the vast riding hall used for guards’ parades. It was the last Sunday before Lent, when Orthodox Christians ask one another’s pardon; the manifesto was also read that morning in churches in St Petersburg and Moscow. Twenty years later, on Sunday 1/13 March 1881, Alexander watched guard battalions drill in the same hall, briefly visited his cousin and set off home. People’s Will bombs killed him on the Catherine Canal. The hall of his public announcement had hosted his last parade.
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