What must first of all be noted about the shape that peasant family life in Russia assumed in the last half of the 19th century is that in 1861 Tsar Alexander II formally emancipated the Russian serfs, whose labor and loyalty historically had been bound to the country's land-owning gentry as its labor force. Social change was implicit in the legitimation of individual freedom. But old habits die hard, and Russia from the time of its configuration as the Muscovite state in the 15th century cultivated a culture that was "autocratic, with absolute power in the hands of the grand duke (later the tsar), highly centralized [], and militaristic" (Suny 5) and that effectively enslaved the peasantry.
Thus the world really did change for the serfs in 1861, but as the action of The Cherry Orchard suggests, some effects of emancipation were more latent than manifest by the end of the century. The tsar's absolute authority vis-à-vis the nobility was less important to former serfs than the provincial nobility, which saw themselves as "the proper governing class of the empire" (Suny 12). At the Ranevskaya estate in The Cherry Orchard, serfs long in the habit of subservience and/or attachment to the master are not breaking out of customary practices or even rushing to a farm village. Lopahin breaks the cycle of dependence, but nobody else in the play sees that as an achievement.
The structure of the Russian peasant family appears to have been largely defined by labor-intensive and strongly inefficient agriculture. Suny cites the 50% level of infant mortality among peasants--and the continued procreation, plus enforced-starvation policies, that overcompensated for it and that drained resources to the point of famine. There were also endemic "poverty, disease, death, and ignorance" (Suny 7): "In 1905, 1 percent of families accounted for 15 percent of the total income of the empire" (Suny 6).
Even so, after emancipation some peasants managed to...