Why did the Russian government abolish serfdom in 1861?
On the 19th of February 1861 Tsar Alexander II signed into law the statues abolishing serfdom in the Russian Empire. This directly affected 22,557,748 peasant men, women and children, and around 100,000 noble estate owners. Answering the ‘peasant question’- how the Russian Empire should answer the increasingly anachronistic system of serfdom that tied 80% of its inhabitants to the land and nobility- became a key issue in the first half of the 19th century. In 1825, the abolition or modification of serfdom was one of the key demands of the radical Decembrists who were brutally suppressed by the new Tsar, Nicholas I. However, by 1842, the same Tsar admitted to his state council that ‘serfdom was an obvious evil keenly felt by everyone’. In 1856, his successor, Alexander II, was able to announce the decision to abolish serfdom, and five years of conflict and information collection separated this and the legal abolition in 1861. How did abolition develop from a radical desire to a conservative keystone in this time period? ln order to answer this question, we will first outline how abolition became seen as necessary, through the factors of the perception of economic stagnancy, the westernisation and promotion of the bureaucracy over the nobility, and the failure of other attempts at reform from within the structure. It will then show how the Crimean War accelerated this process,and then identify the key conflicts during the process between 1856 and 1861, and how abolition was finalised in 1861 rather than earlier or later.
By the 1850s serfdom was perceived as the chief obstacle to modernising Russia’s economy and society. Whether there indeed was an ‘economic crisis’ of serfdom, as proposed by Soviet historians, is less relevant to this question than the fact that those in power, starting with bureaucrats in the Ministry of State Domains in the 1840s, perceived that serfdom was economically redundant, could not be reformed from within, and therefore had to be abolished. As early as 1841 the senior civil servant Zablotskii-Desiatovskii (who became a member of the Editing Commissions that were responsible for shaping out the process of abolition) put forward a memorandum to Kiselev, the Minister of State Domains, outlining the economic redundancy of serfdom.In the end, this perception, combined with the pressing need to modernise Russia following their crushing defeat in the Crimean War, are what motivated the autocratic government to radically change it's position so quickly, rather than any sympathy with the serfs themselves. The Crimean War showed how the conscription of state and noble owned serfs was an incredibly inefficient and out-dated form of warfare, which were neatly defeated by the superior firepower and training of British and French volunteer soldiers. The Russian state therefore saw the great need of improving the stock of the soldiers to recruit from - rather than rebellious, nutritionally starved and unmotivated peasants who were resentful of being forced to spend up to 25 years in the army that they had relied on since the reforms of Peter the Great. The abolition of serfdom was therefore seen as a way to improve the Russian state's ability to project power across it's great landmass.
In the end, as stated before, abolition was taken up by the conservative and autocratic Russian state as a means to improve the state itself's ability to keep up with the economic and military revolutions that western Europe had been experiencing, rather than a moral campaign.
