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Reform, war and revolution

the process would end. That is why the sequence of measures leading to the

gradual broadening of the rights of the serfs and an improvement in their way

of life has virtually everywhere given rise to unforeseen social crises. In this

regard, Russia is luckier. By making use of the experience of other countries it

has been given the possibility...toembracestraightawaytheentire path that

lies ahead from the ﬁrst step to the full curtailment of obligatory relations by

means of the redemption of land.

It is clear why research on land redemption led B. G. Litvak to the following

evaluation of the 1861 reform: ‘In fact, this was a process, at the outset of which the

emancipation of the individual from the power of the landowner was proclaimed...

but whose ﬁnal stage was the creation of communal and household land-ownership’

(my emphasis).

Thelegal position of the peasantswas transformed radicallyand consistently

in the drafts of the Editing Commissions and in the Statutes of 19 February

1861. Personal dependence of peasants on the nobility ended immediately. The

former serfs acquired a civic status, although the peasantry remained subject

to certain speciﬁc estate (soslovie) obligations. Peasant self-government was

introduced – at the volost’ and village level (on the whole on the basis of the

obshchina) with ofﬁcials elected by the peasants, with assemblies and a peasant

district (volost’) court. In this part of the legislation much was borrowed from

Kiselev’s reform of the state peasantry. Peasant self-governing institutions were

placed under the supervision of the local state administration and performed

ﬁscal functions for the government, but they also served to defend the interests

of the peasants against the landowners. In addition, they provided the basis for

peasant participation in the new institutions for all the sosloviia – the zemstvo

(local elected assembly) and jury courts.

At the same time as the opening of the Editing Commissions in March 1859,

a commission for the preparation of the reform of local government under

the chairmanship of N. A. Miliutin was set up under the Ministry of Internal

Affairs. Its programme was co-ordinated with the peasant reform and laid the

foundation for the Zemstvo Statute of 1 January 1864. It was only thanks to

this co-ordination that the participation of the peasants in the zemstva was

secured, as at the time they were still not landowners and therefore did not have

a property qualiﬁcation. The link with the judicial reform consisted not only

of the participation of peasants in juries. The reformers created a completely

new institution for the realisation of the peasant reform – the Peace Mediators,

27 Pervoe izdanie materialov Redaktsionnykh komissii dlia sostavleniia polozhenii o krest’ianakh,

vykhodiashchikh iz krepostnoi zavisimosti (St Petersburg, 1860), part XVIII, pp. 3–6.

28 V. G. Litvak, Russkaia derevnia v reforme 1861 (Moscow: Nauka, 1972), p. 407.

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who were called upon to regulate the relations between the landowner and his

former serfs by means of drawing up charters and redemption acts for working

out the details of the land settlement on individual estates. Although nobles

themselves, the peace mediators were not selected by the noble assemblies but

were appointed by the state with the help of the local administration. In 1861

it was proposed that in three years’ time they would be selected jointly by the

nobility and the free peasantry. And although their exclusively noble status did

not correspond to the general ideology of the Great Reforms, other principles

surrounding their activity, such as openness and the fact that they could not be

removed, ensured their independence from the administration and the noble

assemblies and prepared the ground for the introduction of the justice of the

peace and the new court system in Russia under the Judicial Statutes of 1864.

If we add to the above the abolition of corporal punishment on 17 April

1863 (Alexander II’s birthday), the military service law of 1 January 1874 and

the reform of education, it becomes clear that the Great Reforms opened the

way to the creation of a civil society (although the reformers did not use this

terminology). They were indeed aimed at the development of the people’s

national and civic consciousness, at instilling in them feelings of dignity and at

overcoming traditions of servitude, which had been embedded in generations

of Russian peasants.

Solving the land question was more difﬁcult. It depended on gradualism and

amendments over time and was complicated by the critical ﬁnancial situation

of the country after the Crimean War. The reformers themselves clung ﬁrmly

to the idea of the emancipation of the peasants through the redemption of land.

This idea was deﬁned in 1855–6 in the memoranda of D. A. and N. A. Miliutin,

K. D. Kavelin and Iu. F. Samarin (the last-mentioned held a slightly different

position). However, the ﬁrst public document which began the preparation for

the reform – Alexander II’s rescript to General-Governor V. I. Nazimov of Vilno

of 20 November 1857 – did not contain a deﬁnite decision on the land question. It

wouldhave been possible to move fromit to emancipationbased on guaranteed

peasant usufract rather than outright property ownership by the peasants.

The signiﬁcance of the rescript was that it made public the government’s

intention to solve the peasant question, which had been discussed for so long

but in secret. Henceforth openness became an independent force on which

29 Here and below when speaking about the resolution of the peasant question in the 1861

reform, material from the following works is drawn on: L. G. Zakharova, Samoderzhavie

i otmena krepostnogo prava; ‘Samoderzhavie, biurokratia i reformy 60-kh godov XIX v. v

Rossii’, VI 10 (1989): 3–24; and ‘Samoderzhavie i reformy v Rossii 1861–1874’ in Zakharova,

Eklof and Bushnell, Velikie reformy v Rossii,pp.24–43.

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the reformers relied. In particular, 3,000 copies of the work of the Editing

Commissions were immediately published following its meetings.

Throughout 1858 in society, in the periodical press, in the noble provincial

committees and in government circles a struggle was waged over different

solutions to the peasant question – with land or without land. At the beginning

it seemed that the Baltic model (emancipation without land) was winning, the

more so because the tsar himself believed in this path which had been tried and

tested in the Baltic provinces. However, a series of circumstances (the serious

and protracted wave of peasant unrest in the province of Estonia, the rejection

by appanage peasants of emancipation without land, the struggles among the

fractions in the noble provincial committees) pushed Alexander by the end of

1858 towards the idea of land for the peasants and towards the adoption of the

programme of the liberal bureaucracy.

The liberal majority of the Editing Commissions believed that all peasant-

farmers must enjoy usufract rights over land from the start of the reform

process and ownership rights in time. They projected two types of landhold-

ing in Russia’s new agrarian sector: large gentry (noble) estates and small

peasant holdings. They proposed to attain this goal peacefully, avoiding the

revolutionary upheavals that had occurred in the countries of Western and

Central Europe, and this was considered one of the principal features of the

Russian reform. From the experience of European countries, they pointed to

the positive results in France (the creation of small private land-ownership),

and the methods of legislative measures in Prussia and Austria, which consisted

of redemption of land by the peasants while preserving gentry landholding,

yet avoiding the extremes of the Prussian variant – ‘concentration of landed

property in the hands of a few great landowners and big farmers’ and the pro-

liferation of landless agricultural labourers. As a result, the reform was built on

the basis of ‘existing realities’, that is the preservation of much arable land in

the hands of the nobility, and of the pre-reform plots in peasant ownership; the

calculation of initial obligations and subsequent redemption payments on the

basis of pre-reform dues (with a slight reduction); the participation of the state

in the redemption operations in the capacity of creditor. The acquisition of full

property rights to their plots through redemption payments by the peasants

was seen as the reform’s ﬁnal outcome. Redemption was not obligatory for

the gentry landowners. Alexander II said: ‘While even one noble is against

the redemption of peasant plots, I will not allow compulsory redemption.’ At

30 L. G. Zakharova, ‘Znachenie krest’ianskikh volnenii v 1858 v Estonii v istorii podgotovki

otmeny krepostnogo prava v Rossii’, in Izvestiia Akademii nauk Estonskoi SSR,no.33

(Tallinn, 1984): 24–46.

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the same time the adoption of ‘gradual’ and ‘voluntary redemption’, that is of

the principle of the ‘self-ﬁnancing’ of redemption operations, was explained

by the state’s difﬁcult ﬁnancial situation. The reformers recognised that it was

impossible at present for the treasury to subsidise the redemption operation,

although the longer-term possibility was recognised.

Though they had to

accept the limits dictated by the contemporary situation, the Editing Com-

missions created an internal mechanism for the reform whichguaranteed unin-

terrupted progression toward the projected results. The reform was a process:

perpetual peasant usufract at ﬁxed rents quite soon persuaded landowners

that redemption was in their own interests.

The peasants too had virtually no choice. Having set the aim of avoiding

mass proletarianisation, and recognising at the same time that the economic

conditions of emancipation were difﬁcult and that the landowners would strive

at all costs to crowd out the peasants, the reformers introduced into the law

an article which forbade peasants to repudiate the allotments for nine years

(this period was subsequently lengthened). The preservation of the obshchina

(commune) in its role as a landowner (in addition to its other above-mentioned

functions) served the same aim to a signiﬁcant degree. By preserving the

obshchina with its archaic rules about restrictions on peasant land and with

joint responsibility for dues, the reformers understood that this would hinder

the free development of an independent peasant economy. However, for the

start of the reform the preservation of this institution, which was embedded in

the organisation of the economy and in the consciousness and everyday life of

the peasants, was considered unavoidable. At the same time the idea was not

to conserve the obshchina forever. Leaving the obshchina was foreseen under

certain conditions and with time this was to be made easier. In the milieu of

the Editing Commissions the view predominated that with time obshchina

land-ownership would yield to individual ownership, and the administrative

functions of the village community would be concentrated in the volost’. Only

Iurii Samarin gave his unreserved support to the obshchina. Speaking before

the deciding vote about the fate of the obshchina, N. A. Miliutin said that

‘by mutual consent it had been decided to leave this question to time and to

the peasants themselves, . . . and that the legislation and the government had

always rejected the adoption of any artiﬁcial or imposed measures for such a

transition, and that this decision had been approved by the Emperor himself’.

31 M. D. Dolbilov, ‘Proekty vykupnoi operatsii’, Hoch ‘Bankovskii Krizis’, pp. 95–105.

32 P. P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, Memuary: Epokha osvobodzhdeniia krest’ian v Rossii, 1858–

1861, 4 vols. (Petersburg: priv. pub. 1915), vol. III, p. 231.

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This conception of the solution to the land question, albeit with several

adjustments introduced into the drafts of the Editing Commissions at the Main

Committee on the Peasant Question and at the State Council, was embodied

in the Statutes of 19 February 1861. As a consequence of the amendments,

the peasants’ position became more difﬁcult as a result of the reduction in

the size of the allotment of land (the so-called ‘cut-offs’) and the increase

in dues, including redemption payments.

Emmons rightly considers that

‘from the point of view of the state there were in practice no alternatives to

this programme’.

The reformers understood the burden on the peasants

of the economic terms of the emancipation. Even during the course of the

preparation of the reform, Miliutin foresaw the land-hunger of the peasants

and considered that the state would have to use a portion of the treasury’s

lands to counter this phenomenon. But for Miliutin the key here was the

transformation of the ﬁnancial system. He tried to take control of three key

spheres: the peasant question, local self-government and ﬁnance. However,

the attempts by his patrons – Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna and Grand Duke

Konstantin Nikolaevich – to get him appointed as minister of ﬁnance were

not successful. At the beginning of May 1866 when Alexander II considered

appointing Miliutin as minister of ﬁnance, P. A. Shuvalov managed to convince

the monarch to reject this idea, partly by himself threatening to resign.

M. D. Dolbilov in his article about the plans for redemption from 1857 to 1861

plausibly suggested that what the reformers had in mind was the fundamental

restructuring of the redemption operation in the not too distant future, at the

earliest stage of the implementation of the abolition of serfdom. Valuev’s diary

supports this interpretation.

It is hard now to establish how Nikolai Miliutin

conceived of the ﬁnancial reforms, but his brother and political ally Dmitrii

Miliutin, evaluating the ﬁnancial and economic situation of the country in the

1860s, wrote twenty years later, that it was impossible ‘to increase endlessly

the burden of taxes which almost exclusively fall on the working, poorest

class of the people, who are already impoverished’. He considered that the

‘fundamental revision of our whole taxation system was the main task’.

the beginning of the 1880s N. A. Miliutin’s colleague N. Kh. Bunge would

33 P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Otmena krepostnogoprava vRossii, 3rd edn (Moscow:Prosveshchenie,

1968), pp. 232–59.

34 Emmons, ‘“Revoliutsiia sverkhu” v Rossii’, p. 381.

35 P. A. Valuev, Dnevnik, 2 vols. (Moscow: Izd. AN SSSR, 1961), vol. II; GARF, Fond 583,

op. 1,d.19,l.173–6 (Material from the manuscript diary of A. A. Polovtsov Das provided

by A. V. Mamonov).

36 Dolbilov, Proekty vykupnoi operatsii,p.30;Valuev,Dnevnik, vol. I, p. 334.

37 Miliutin, Vospominaniia, 1865–1867,p.440.

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begin the reform of the tax system. But this was already in a different era.

Peter Gatrell is correct in saying that ‘no signiﬁcant changes took place in

taxation policy in the decade following the reform’,

with the exception of

the important excise reform of 1863, which ended the farming-out system for

spirits and deprived the nobility of privileges in distillation. At the same time

the introduction of excise duty enriched the treasury and encouraged private

capital investment in the economy.

The reformers’ programme did not envisage transformation of the higher

organs of state power, the convocation of an Estates General (Zemskii sobor) or

of all-Russian representative institutions. At the same time the liberal bureau-

crats discussed among themselves those forces that would further advance the

reforms. Already in a memorandum of 1856, Nikolai Miliutin pinned his hopes

on the monarchy, which, having taken the initiative with the transformations,

would ﬁnd support in the liberal, enlightened nobility. The same hope was

mentioned in ‘The General Memorandum’ of October 1860. The very cre-

ation of the Editing Commissions, more than half of whose members were

not ofﬁcials (albeit appointed), an institution directly subordinate through its

chairman to Alexander II, was to a certain degree the realisation of the ideas

of the reformers about the new role of the autocratic monarchy. Moreover, as

P. P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii has witnessed,

N. A. Miliutin was in no doubt that with the appropriate development of the

activityof the local institutions under the patronage of a strong state power, the

sovereign power itself would recognise the need to appeal to representatives

of local interests and would share legislative functions with them in order

further to develop its reforms, as it had now done for the ﬁrst time with the

convening of local committees and with the summoning of expert-members

who were independent of the administrative structures of power.

It is no coincidence that in 1880–1 M. T. Loris-Melikov turned to the experience

of the Editing Commissions and to the reforms of local self-government,

linking his plans for comprehensive transformations with the experience of the

Great Reforms. However, in 1860 the reformers did not succeed in translating

all their ideas into legislation. The sudden closure of the Editing Commissions

in October 1860, and the dismissal of N. A. Miliutin in April 1861 were testimony

to the precariousness of their general calculations.

38 P. Gatrell, ‘Znachenie velikikh reform’, p. 121.

39 D. Christian, ‘Zabytaia reforma: otmena vinnykh otkupov v Rossii’, in Zakharova, Eklof

and Bushnell, Velikie reformy v Rossii,pp.126–39.

40 P. Semenov-Tian-Shianskii, Memuary, vol. IV (1916), vol. 4,pp.197–8.

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The world-view of the reformers was evidently not devoid of a utopian

faith in the limitless possibility of the state to direct the course of historical

development. Nikolai Miliutin with his characteristic perspicacity instantly

understood the emerging danger. In December of that year he wrote to his

brother, Dmitrii, the minister of war: ‘It is necessary to fashion opinion,or

perhaps a middle party, in parliamentary language “le centre”, which we don’t

have here but the elements of which can evidently be found. Only the gov-

ernment can do this, and it would be the best means of consolidation for the

government itself.’ In April 1863 in another letter, returning to these thoughts

once again, he wrote with alarm: ‘There is no greater unhappiness for Russia

than letting the initiative slip out of the hands of the government.’

The stake

placed by the reformers on the initiating role of the monarch and the liberal

public turned out to be unreliable, laying bare the enlightened illusions which

were characteristic of their generation. But at the time in Russia there were

no other guarantees apart from the irreversibility of the legislation that had

been adopted.

Legislation and life: the fate of the Great Reforms

and the fate of the reformers

The implementation of speciﬁc reforms cannot be examined in detail in this

chapter.

But in order to have an adequate understanding of the problem pre-

sented here something must be said about the realisation of the great reforms

in general. If one bears in mind the precise meaning of the 1861 legislation, it

must be recognised that it did not anticipate the immediate transformation of

gentry and peasant farming, let alone an immediate revolution in the economy

as a whole. The ﬁnal goal of the peasant reform was, however, quite deﬁnite:

the creation of independent small, peasant farming alongside gentry farming.

Until very recently, the prevailing view in the literature was that the reform

wasextortionate towards the peasantry,with inﬂated redemption paymentsfor

reduced plots, which led to land-hunger and ruination of peasant households

on a mass scale. Modern methods of statistical analysis of the socioeconomic

results of the peasant reform have allowed a number of historians to come to

quite different conclusions. In reality, the abolition of serfdom by the terms of

the statutes of 19 February led to the creation of self-sufﬁcient peasant farming

41 OR RGB, Fond 169,kart.69, ed. khr. 11, ll. 9–11.

42 For this the reader should consult the other chapters dealing with the peasantry, the

economy, state ﬁnances, the legal system, local administration and the army.

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and the prospect of the predominance of the peasant family farm in Russian

agriculture.

In the legal sphere, the isolation of the peasant estate that was preserved

by the statutes of 19 February was overcome to a degree through the imple-

mentation of the zemstvo and judicial reforms. The proportion of peasant

deputies in the zemstva was signiﬁcant, although it was exceeded by noble

representation (38 and 43 per cent, respectively). In some regions (central-

industrial, southern-steppe, and southeastern) representation tended toward

predominance by peasants, speciﬁcally peasant landowners. Peasant represen-

tation was also signiﬁcant in juries – in the provinces it was even predominant

(over 50 per cent). At the same time, the existence of the volost’ peasant-estate

court created a dualism in the court system, preserving peasant isolation in this

respect. This does not, however, justify the general conclusion that the peasant

reform retarded the integration of the peasantry into civic life and fortiﬁed the

schism in Russia between ‘traditional’ and ‘westernized’ society.

Separate

peasant self-administration and the separate volost’ court were introduced in

the 1861 reform in connection with the termination of the hereditary power

of the gentry landowner, which explains their expediency. They were not the

ﬁnal goal of the legislators, only a temporary, inevitable structure on the road

to unitary citizenship.

Such an important measure as the abolition of the recruitment system for

manning the army militated in the same direction of integrating the peasantry

into the new, unitary organisation of Russian society. This last of Alexander

II’s reforms (the Statute of 1 January 1874) was considerably inﬂuenced by the

international situation and the experience of European wars. The personal role

of Alexander II was great in this reform: he stuck to his decision in the face of

strong pressure from the opposition. In all other spheres of state life, reform

activity from the 1860s onward continued by inertia, without the previous

energy.

Alexander II’s own disillusionment with the reforms and a major shift in his

own personal state of mind occurred almost simultaneously and for a number

of reasons. After the successful introduction of the reforms, the victorious

43 See S. G. Kashchenko, ‘Nekotorye voprosy metodiki izucheniia realizatsii reformy 19

fevralia 1861g. v issedovaniiakh P. A. Zaionchkovskogo’, Otechestvennaia istoriia 4 (2004):

81–92; S. L. Hoch, ‘Did Russia’s Emancipated Serfs really Pay Too Much for Too Little

Land? Statistical Anomalies and Long-tailed Distributions’, SR 63, 2 (2004): 247–74;D.V.

Kovalev, Agrarnye preobrazovaniia i krestianstvo stolichnogo regiona v pervoi chetverti XIXv.

(Moscow: Rosspen, 2004), pp. 258, 260–5.

44 W. Pintner, ‘Reformability in the Age of Reform and Counter-reform’, in Reform in Russia

and the USSR (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), pp. 83–106.

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Reform, war and revolution

conclusion in 1864 of the half-century war in the Caucasus, the suppression

of the Polish uprising of 1863–4 and the carrying out of the radical agrarian

and other transformations in the Polish Kingdom, the establishment of the

Sejm (assembly) and of the constitutional order in Finland in 1863, the Tsar-

liberator came up against some unexpected difﬁculties and deep personal

traumas. The Polish revolutionary response to his efforts at liberalisation was

no doubt itself a disappointment. Much more important for Alexander, the

Russian nobility, discontented with the emancipation of the serfs, voiced its

claims for political rights. The zemstvo assemblies whichhad just been opened,

especially the Petersburg zemstvo, showed a degree of independence which

the government disliked.

In April 1865 the heir to the throne, Tsarevich

Nicholas Alexandrovich, unexpectedly died at the age of twenty-one. A year

later Dmitrii Karakozov shot at Alexander II near the gates of the Summer

Garden. The news that Karakozov was a Russian shook Alexander II more

than the attack itself. The enthusiasm and inspiration which had sustained the

emperor in the ﬁrst, most unclouded and fruitful ten years of his reign was

dissipated.

In this depressed state, Alexander II gave in to the pressure from conser-

vative forces. The decree of 13 May 1866 bears witness to the shift towards a

conservative course. Karakozov’s shot, as one of his contemporaries put it,

‘favoured reaction’.

In the government the most inﬂuential ﬁgure became

Count Petr Shuvalov, who was appointed head of the gendarmes and given

overall responsibility for internal security straight after the attack. Shuvalov

was an opponent of the liberal bureaucracy and the reforms carried out by it.

The year 1866 was also a turning point in the personal life of the emperor. He

was consumed by his passion for the young Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukov,

which became stronger over time, often distracting him from affairs of state

and at the same time weighing him down with the burden of a double life.

In the Editing Commissions, the reformers had acknowledged that the

current legislation would require further development. They hoped that this

task would be carried out by an ‘enterprising monarchy’. Their hopes were

not realised.

45 I. A. Khristoforov, ‘Aristokraticheskaia’ oppozitsiia Velikim reformam. Konets 1850–seredina

1870kh gg. (Moscow: Russkoe slovo, 2002), pp. 172–6.

46 Khristoforov, ‘Aristokraticheskaia’ oppozitsiia. Prilozhenie, p. 333.

47 L. G. Zakharova, ‘Alexander II i mesto Rossii v mire’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia 4 (2005):

141.

48 See O. Trubetskaia, Materialy dlia biograﬁi kn. V. A.Cherkasskogo. vol. I. book 2,part3.

V. 1902,p.43.

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The reign of Alexander II: a watershed?

Though he accepted the legacy of Nikolai Miliutin in terms of the realisation

of the peasant reforms and the preparation and implementation of the zemstvo

reform, as minister of internal affairs, P. A. Valuev (Miliutin’s irreconcilable

opponent) immediately led the attack on the liberal peace mediators – a most

important link in the peasant reform.

While it was not within his powers

to infringe the Statutes of 19 February about the irremoveability and inde-

pendence of the peace mediators, he began to reduce their number. Valuev’s

policy transformed the position of peace mediator: from an honourable post,

which attracted intelligent and thoughtful people, into a mediocre adminis-

trative function. The same phenomenon was observed with the introduction

of other institutions created by the reforms – the zemstva and the new courts.

From the ﬁrst independent steps of the zemstva, the government displayed its

distrust in them. D. A. Miliutin wrote, ‘It was as if the government itself, having

just established socially inclusive (vsesoslovnoe) self-government, had a sudden

rethink – hadn’t it taken a rather imprudent step. From the very beginning of

the implementation of the new legislation it was considered necessary to fol-

low the new institutions vigilantly, to hold them in check, so to speak.’ Already

by the end of 1865 in government policy ‘instead of the gradual development

and broadening of the zemstva, a systematic squeezing and restraining of them

began’.

Even more importantly, the peasant question, which demanded special

attention and the development of the foundations which had been created in

the 1861 reform, found itself bythe end of the 1870s onthe fringes of government

policy. Serious problems which had emerged were not addressed. Already in

the middle of the 1860s, M. Kh. Reutern in his reports drew attention to the

burden of the dues and redemption payments for the emancipated peasants.

But neither the minister of ﬁnance himself, nor the government as a whole

took any measures to resolve the difﬁculties that had arisen in the course of

the implementation of the peasant reform and to achieve the ﬁnal goal of the

reform – the creation of an independent small peasant economy. The issue

of the obshchina was raised but not resolved. After quite a lengthy discussion

of the problems of peasant land-ownership the ministers of internal affairs,

ﬁnance and justice were entrusted with working out a set of measures to ease

the departure of peasants from the obshchina, that is the broadening of article

165 of the Statutes of 19 February. The minutes of the Council of Ministers

49 M.F. Ust’iantseva, ‘Institut mirovykh posrednikov v krest’ianskoi reforme’, in Zakharova,

Eklof and Bushnell, Velikie reformy v Rossii,pp.170–1.

50 Miliutin, Vospominaniia, 1865–1867,p.46.

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