ON THIS DAY ·
Emancipation Manifesto frees Russia’s serfs
Alexander II signs the manifesto that frees some 22 million serfs — with land they must buy back over 49 years. Freedom from above, debt from below.
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The moment in context
Russia’s emperor, Tsar Alexander II, began his reforms by diagnosing defeat, and the diagnosis pointed to serfdom, under which about half of Russia’s peasants belonged to landlords who could sell, flog or conscript them, as if a landlord owned his tenants too. The arrow across the Black Sea shows the British and French landing in the Crimea in 1854, and the Crimean War cost Russia at least 450,000 soldiers, mostly from disease. Serfdom lay behind the weakness because military service freed a serf for good. The army therefore kept conscripts for up to twenty-five years and had no reserve, the trained former soldiers whom modern armies recall in an emergency. Landowners had also pledged two-thirds of their serfs to state banks as security for loans, as a homeowner borrows against a house, and the banks were short of money by 1857. Freeing the serfs from above was a calculation about survival as much as a moral choice.
From Great Reforms of Alexander II, chapter 1 of The Russian Revolution, 1855–1924 (JUL 1878).
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Defeat on home soil. The Crimean War was fought on Russian territory, and Russia still lost it. Britain and France supplied their armies by sea faster than Russia could…
- The turn — The Emancipation Manifesto, 19 February / 3 March 1861. The Manifesto is the hinge of the reform era because it changed the legal status of more than a third of the people of European Russia in a single…
- What it changed — A free peasantry in debt. The former serfs entered freedom owing redemption payments, the yearly instalments that repaid the state for their land, and arrears, the unpaid…
Then ask the room: Did the Great Reforms make revolution in Russia less likely or more likely? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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