Emancipation Reform of 1861 - Pre-reform Russia

Pre-reform Russia

There were two main categories of peasants, those living on state lands, under control of the Ministry of State Property, and those living on the land of private landowners, with only the privately-owned ones considered serfs. They were an estimated 38% of the population. As well as having obligations to the state, they also were obliged to the landowner, who had great power over their lives. By the mid-nineteenth century, less than half of Russian peasants were serfs.

The rural population lived in households (dvory, singular dvor), gathered as villages (derevni, villages with churches were called selo), run by a mir ('commune', or obshchina) — isolated, conservative, largely self-sufficient and self-governing units scattered across the land every 10 km (6.2 mi) or so. There were around 20 million dvory in Imperial Russia, forty percent containing six to ten people.

Intensely insular, the mir assembly, the skhod (sel'skii skhod), appointed an elder (starosta) and a 'clerk' (pisar) to deal with any external issues. Land and resources were shared within the mir. The fields were divided among the families as nadel ("allotment") — a complex of strip plots, distributed according to the quality of the soil. The strips were periodically redistributed within the villages to produce level economic conditions. Despite this the land was not owned by the mir; the land was the legal property of the 100,000 or so landowners (pomeshchiks, an equivalent "landed gentry") and the inhabitants, as serfs, were not allowed to leave the property where they were born. The peasants were duty bound to make regular payments in labor and goods. It has been estimated that landowners took at least one third of income and production by the first half of the nineteenth century.

The need for urgent reform was well understood in 19th-century Russia, and various projects of emancipation reforms were prepared by Mikhail Speransky, Nikolay Mordvinov, and Pavel Kiselev. Their efforts were, however, thwarted by conservative or reactionary nobility. In Western guberniyas serfdom was abolished early in the century. In Congress Poland, serfdom had been abolished before it became Russian (by Napoleon in 1807). Serfdom was abolished in the Governorate of Estonia in 1816, in Courland in 1817, and in Livonia in 1819.