The Revolutionary Masses
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On 19 February 1861 the Imperial order on the Emancipation of the
Peasants from Serfdom was decreed. From the political, legal and moral
points of view, a peaceful emancipation of 23 million peasants from the
condition of slavery was an event unprecedented in world history.
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This
tremendous work could be only compared with the abolition of slavery
in the United State which followed four years later. In the Russian
case, however, the emancipation was carried out on an infinitely
larger scale, and was achieved without civil war and without
devastation or armed coercion. It revealed a great paradox: only an
autocrat could achieve a ‘peaceful’ transformation like this; in a
democracy, which must compromise on such issues to satisfy pressure
groups, such bold actions are much more difficult!
The
essential features of the complex legislation were as follows.
First, the serfs were given their technical, legal liberty, that is
they were no longer the private property of their masters and were
free to trade, marry, litigate and acquire property. Second, the
serfs were freed with allotments of land, assigned to them from
their previous owner’s estate, for their own use. However, they were
to pay a series of ‘redemption payments’ to the government for these
land-allotments (the government paid the landowners for the loss of
some of their land at once). The high level of the redemption dues,
set at 6 percent interest over a period of forty-nine years, meant
that the peasants were forced to pay a price for their land which
was far in excess of its current market value, and represented a
‘hidden’ compensation to the nobility for the loss of their servile
labor.
In addition,
the landlords were able to cut off for themselves over one fifth, or
even two fifths, of peasants’ land, which they used to farm before
the emancipation. They retained possession of the best parts of the
peasants’ allotments, including woods, meadows, watering places and
grazing grounds, without which the peasants could not engage in
independent farming.
Another
crucial feature of the legislation was the fact that the land which
they received was granted not on an individual but on a collective
basis - to the village commune. The obshchina retained
extensive powers over its members, both of an economic and of a
quasi-judicial nature. Taxes, redemption payments and other dues
were communally collected and paid; the land was periodically
redivided among the members in the commune, as before; no peasant
was free to leave the commune without the permission of the village
elders; and the commune retained judicial powers to banish its
wayward members to exile in Siberia. The retention of the
obshchina as an official institution meant that although the
peasant had been freed from his bondage to the serf-owner, he
remained in bondage to the commune.
In addition,
peasants were still subject to corporal punishment, military
conscription, payment of the poll-tax and certain other obligations
from which other social classes were exempt. In other words, the
peasantry did not receive equal status with the other classes in
Russian society. It remained a separate ‘caste’ with its own
internal structures, procedures, laws and economic arrangements.
Bound to the commune, without individual land tenure, subjected to
heavy taxes and periodic redistribution of land to enforce complete
egalitarianism, the peasantry remained a rebellious and impoverished
neofeudal mass with a poorly developed sense of private property and
law. For decades it would continue to dream of a new partition of
land.