The Tsar decided that the serfs must be emancipated. As Alexander commented in a famous speech to the nobility of Moscow on 30 March 1856, “…you yourselves realise that that the existing system of serf-owning cannot remain unchanged. It is better to begin abolishing serfdom from above than to wait for it to begin to abolish itself from below.”
Alexander issued his Emancipation Manifesto that proposed 17 legislative acts that would free the serfs in Russia. Alexander announced that personal serfdom would be abolished and all peasants would be able to buy land from their landlords. The State would advance the money to the landlords and would recover it from the peasants in 49 annual sums known as redemption payments.
The landowners opposed this idea. It was the serfs that brought them their income. It would also mean the partial end of the autocracy in Russia. Even so The Great Emancipation Statute was announced to the Russian people from pulpits throughout the country in February 1861.
The Statute was both praised and criticised. There was civil unrest due to the shortcomings of the deal. There was no doubt about the reactions of the peasants. They were grievously disappointed. They could not believe that their beloved Tsar had not given them land along with freedom, that they would have to pay for holdings they had used so long. That some of them would have less land than they had as serfs, and that they would not be freed immediately. The arable land which the freed peasantry had to rent or buy was valued at about double its real value (342 million roubles instead of 180 million); yesterday's serfs discovered that, in becoming free, they were now hopelessly in debt. There was also little incentive for a peasant family to invest in their land, if it could in part be taken from them reallocated when the village population expanded. Most peasants continued to farm in the same inefficient ways as before. Within a few days reports of unrest and rising began to come into St. Petersburg. There were riots and rebellions. In Bezdna a peasant, Anton Petrov, said he had found by examining the Emancipation Edict closely that the Tsar really had granted freedom for all the peasants, and he urged them to seize it for themselves. When thousands gathered to support him, the army was sent in. Soldiers fired repeatedly on the crowds, killing 70. Petrov was arrested and executed.
The landowners were also unhappy with the Emancipation Statute. Although they had received redemption money, almost two-thirds of the landowners were already mortgaged to the banks before emancipation. The redemption money therefore, in many cases, went to pay off existing debts. By 1905 the nobles owned 40 per cent less land than in 1861, mainly perhaps because they found their estates unprofitable and slowly sold off land to their peasants and others.
The limited success of the Emancipation Edict proved to many that the Tsar’s government was simply not capable of meeting the needs of ordinary Russians. It had in fact caused more revolutionary and terrorist activity. Agricultural methods were no more advanced and the nobles were no more financially well off, indeed it was frequently the opposite, than before. There was a strong reform in that the Emancipation set in motion an unforeseen and irreversible chain of events that forever altered the landscape of Russian life, but the actual immediate effects of the Emancipation and the way that the people received it, was not good. The freedom that the serfs had dreamed of was not realised and Russia did not achieve what it needed. Therefore, in general the Emancipation was not a success.
