Great Reforms in Russia
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The decade of the 1860s is considered the Era of Great Reforms in Russia, its beginning marked by the emancipation of the serfs. As Freeze writes, the era was as important to the eighteenth century as the reforms of Peter the Great in the seventeenth and the revolution of the early twentieth (Freeze 101). The sources generally agree that forces leading to reform include Western influences and the "public disgust with an often arbitrary, inefficient, and corrupt bureaucracy," but the shocking defeat of Russia in the Crimean War was the major cause, for it "persuaded Alexander II . . . that without basic internal change the Russian Empire could not hope to maintain its hard-won position as a major world power" (Cracraft 313). The reforms which followed the liberation of the serfs in 1861 included the new liberal censorship regulations (1865), the establishment of a new organ of self-government called the zemstvo (1864), reorganization of urban government (1870), the radical reconstruction of the judiciary after Western models (1864), and a complex series of measures to improve the army, church, police, education, and many other public and private institutions in the empire (Freeze 101). As Freeze adds, the reforms were significant not only for their direct impact on the lives of Russians and the fundamental institutions of Russian society, but also because of the process of those reforms: "Society, not just the bureaucracy, was summoned to help draft and implement these
. . .
on their estates" (Massie 289).
Still, in general there was a great gulf between the nobility and the serfs which emancipation was meant to ease. For many serfs, emancipation was a failure because although it brought them physical freedom it removed the minimal security previously guaranteed by serfdom. The nobility in part based its support for emancipation on a demand for more power in shaping the post-emancipation society and government (Freeze 103). At the same time, many of the reforms the nobility called for with respect to their dealings with freed serfs were reasonable: For example, the Moscow Noble Assembly called for "conferral of greater rights to peace mediators to make a final resolution of disputes between workers and employers" and "prompt assessment of fines from employers found guilt of selfish enticement of laborers" (Freeze 108).
Emancipation of the serfs had wide-ranging social, economic, political, legal, judicial and other consequences which inevitably led to other reforms which had been similarly delayed as long as possible. For example,
Reform of local administration (at the provincial, district, and town levels) soon followed, and was aimed at establishing new organs of representative government--pa
. . .
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Approximate Word count = 1983
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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