Peasants and Serfs in the Russian Empire

It was not always so. In Kievan Russia (879 A.D. - 1240 A.D.), and under the Tartar occupations (11th century - 14th century), most peasants had been freedmen, though there were some who were simple slaves. Though the process of the establishment of serfdom in Russia is variously interpreted, it can be generally identified as resulting from three factors: peasant indebtedness, the fiscal needs of the rising imperial government, and the need for agricultural labor.

During the 15th century, the peasants became increasingly dependent on the nobles as tenants, paying them in money, barter or labor for the use of their land. The peasants also paid taxes to the nascent state being created in Moscow by Ivan the Terrible (died 1584) and his early successors. Increasing numbers of peasants borrowed money from landowners, and agreed to stay on the same land until they could repay their debts. As this was rarely possible, the end result was that a large portion of the p

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uld create a state commission to buy land and serfs from landowners - no action was ever taken on these good intentions. The succeeding quarter-century reign of Alexander's son, Nicholas I (died 1855), did not have the leisure of well-intentioned dawdling over the issue. Despite eventual defeat, the idealism of Napoleonic reform (if not always the reality) swept through western Europe and had reached Russia by Nicholas I's reign. The 1848 revolutionary turbulence rocking the neighboring Austro-Hungarian Empire also filtered into Imperial Russia. There was peasant unrest, a "Decembrist" plot against the Czar himself, and a general feeling that Russia must modernize - or, at least, it was a sentiment increasingly expressed among the urban nobility surrounding the Imperial court. The rhetoric of human suffrage had reached the Czar - albeit tempered by political consideration, as he would note in 1842: There is no doubt that serfdom in its present situation in our country is an evil, palpable and obvious for all, but to attack it now would be something still more harmful. [But freeing the serfs is] altogether premature and incapable of execution ... any thought of it at present would be no less than a criminal sacrilege agai
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Approximate Word count = 4474
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page)

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