Emancipation reform of 1861

The rural population lived in households (dvory, singular dvor), gathered as villages (derevni; a derevnya with a church became a selo), run by a mir ('commune', or obshchina in official terms).

[6] In 1797, Paul I of Russia decreed that corvee labor was limited to 3 days a week, and never on Sunday, but this law was not enforced.

Beginning in 1801, Alexander I of Russia appointed a committee to study possible emancipation, but its only effect was to prohibit the sale of serfs without their families.

I ask you to think about the best way to carry this outThe liberal politicians who stood behind the 1861 manifesto—Nikolay Milyutin, Alexei Strol'man and Yakov Rostovtsev—also recognized that their country was one of a few remaining feudal states in Europe.

The pitiful display by Russian forces in the Crimean War left the government acutely aware of the empire's weaknesses.

Eager to grow and develop industrial and therefore military and political strength, they introduced a number of economic reforms.

It was optimistically hoped that after the abolition the mir would dissolve into individual peasant land owners and the beginnings of a market economy.

Moving on from a petition from the Lithuanian provinces, a committee "for ameliorating the condition of the peasants" was founded and the principles of the abolition considered.

[citation needed] The main point at issue was whether the serfs should remain dependent on the landlords, or whether they should be transformed into a class of independent communal proprietors.

The tsar and his advisers, mindful of 1848 events in Western Europe, were opposed to creating a proletariat and the instability this could bring.

But giving the peasants freedom and land seemed to leave the existing land-owners without the large and cheap labour-force they needed to maintain their estates and lifestyles.

The third measure was that the serfs must pay the land-owner for their allocation of land in a series of redemption payments, which in turn, were used to compensate the landowners with bonds.

19 February] 1861,[9][10][11] accompanied by the set of legislative acts under the general name Regulations Concerning Peasants Leaving Serf Dependence (Russian: Положения о крестьянах, выходящих из крепостной зависимости Polozheniya o krestyanakh, vykhodyashchikh iz krepostnoi zavisimosti).

In 1883, concerned by rising levels of tax arrears, the government made a 13% cut (varying by commune, as a national average) to payment rates to combat the problem.

Many bureaucrats believed that these reforms would bring about drastic changes that would only affect the "lower stories" of society, strengthening the autocracy.

In reality, the reforms forced the monarch to coexist with an independent court, free press, and local governments—all operating differently and more freely than they had in the past.[15]: p.

While early in the reforms the creation of local government had not changed many things about Russian society, the rise in capitalism drastically affected not only the social structure of Russia, but the behaviors and activities of the self-government institutions.[15]: p.

If there was a positive of this movement towards localized government, from the autocracy's point of view; it was (as Petr Valuev put it): the zemstvo would "provide activity for the considerable portion of the press as well as those malcontents who currently stir up trouble because they have nothing to do".[15]: p.

Landowners also suffered because many of them were deeply in debt, and the forced selling of their land left them struggling to maintain their lavish lifestyle.

The individuals who led the reform favored an economic system similar to that in other European countries, which promoted the ideas of capitalism and free trade.

The reformers aimed to promote development and to encourage the ownership of private property, free competition, entrepreneurship, and hired labor.