History Spotlight, 3/3

Russia of the 19th Century was a backwards state. One of the very few (and the only one of any consequence) European powers to still practice feudalism, nearly 80 percent of the population were serfs. If you were to sit down and play a round of "Who Had It Worse" with the slaves of the antebellum South or the serfs of Russia, you'd be scratching your head. In a system that had existed without change for nearly a thousand years, serfs were bound to the land (and landowner) where they were born. They could not marry without the landowner's consent and they could not get and education or start a business.

By the time the 19th Century rolled around, the need for some kind of reform was apparent. There were frequent bloody uprisings and even more bloody reprisals. Russia's pathetic showing against the British during the Crimean War (what they considered to be their own back yard) only highlighted Russia's backwards nature. While Peter the Great had advanced Russia by light years during the 18th Century, he had made very little headway with the serf issue and in the hundred or so years since his death, many serf-related reforms had backslid to the old ways.

It was the uprisings, the lousy military, and the fact that every other Western nation on Earth was rolling their eyes at Russia's backwardness (and they were, of course, ignoring the Raj, slavery, and Algeria) that made Tsar Alexander II lend his formidable political weight to the reform movement. On his side: 80 million completely powerless serfs. Standing against him: 100,000 landowners who liked free labor.

Emancipation reform had been tried at various other times but, similar to civil rights reform in the US during Jim Crow, it had battered itself against a rock that refused to split. In the US, it was the Southern Coalition in the Senate and in Russia, it was a coalition between the Tsar and the landowners. Three gentlemen, Nikolay Milyutin, Alexei Strol'man, and Yakov Rostovtsev, worked with the Tsar on writing the Emancipation Manifesto.

The big issues was, of course, what to do with the serfs? Do they have to stay with their landlords? If not, where do they go? And who's going to work all that land? Stalin would have cut that Gordian Knot without a moment's hesitation but thankfully, Alexander II was no Stalin. The landlords wanted to give the serfs their freedom, but no land. This would have made having the right to leave meaningless because they would have nowhere to go and nothing to do when they got there. To assuage the landlord's fears, three measures were added to the proclamation: first, there was a transition period of two years. Second, landowners got huge tracts of state-owned land. Third, the landowner would be compensated for land lost by the government with low-interest loans.

In the end, nobody was very happy. The serfs found themselves free from bondage, but with out money or land they had nothing to do with it. It reminds me of the liberated slaves in the US who had nothing to do except keep working the same plot of land for the same guy.