Russia's Great Reforms, Revolution, and the Peasant Crisis

The Great Reforms and Their Failure for the Peasantry

The Great Reforms freed the serfs, but they did not truly ease the life of the peasant or make it much better. The social structure — that is, the class system — remained fundamentally the same, except now the landowning class was determined to give as little to the peasants as possible. Whereas prior to the Reforms the peasants had viewed the landowners much as Europeans viewed their lords in feudal Europe — as providers and protectors — the peasants were now regarded as autonomous and dependent upon themselves. The law was rigged against them, particularly regarding the land settlement act (Freeze). The actual beneficiary of the Reform was neither serf nor landowner, but the State, which expanded its bureaucracy from the Tsar down to the village level. The serfs, who had always operated under the expression "we are yours, but the land is ours," now had no land, or very little of it, because they were forced to pay high prices for land they had worked for free as serfs under the patronage of the landowners. The backlash to the reform was consequently headed by liberals after the European model (Dmytryshyn). Fyodor Dostoevsky captures the mood of this backlash and the rage of the socialists in several works of this period, including Demons, The Adolescent, and Crime and Punishment. The peasants were now on their own, but their so-called "emancipation" was no more a boon than poverty itself.

Revolutionary Backlash and the Radicalization of the Intelligentsia

The chief complaints of the peasants were that they now had neither the land nor the means to buy and work it. They were essentially worse off than before. They had their "freedom," but freedom does not put food on the table; it does not give one the opportunity to till the land and provide for one's family. In reality, the emancipation mattered very little in practical terms compared to the drudgery of existence that followed the Reforms. Peasants were now marginalized beyond their imaginations, fueling a revolutionary and chaotic backlash filled with intense political ideology and rage against the ruling regime. Leading revolutionaries called for blood.

Dostoevsky himself was arrested along with a handful of other liberal members of the literati and sent to Siberia. He converted to Orthodoxy while there, but the rest of Russia was bent on revolution — on further violent reforms, which were entirely the wrong approach, since "reform" was what had created the crisis in the first place. Russia had become spiritually weakened and materially dependent on European philosophies divorced from the Christianity that had sustained its communities for centuries. What the Great Reforms begat was not the catechism of the Church but rather the Catechism of the Revolutionary — a guide for the individual whose entire life was to be devoted to revolution. This revolution would achieve its most lasting impact in 1917, unleashing a wave of violence that left millions dead, including the kulaks, who were slaughtered in horrific acts of mass murder ("The Catechism of the Revolutionary"). The Revolution would prove to eat itself in the end — which is essentially what Russia was already beginning to do. One early expression of this self-destruction was the People's Will.

Corruption in the Mir and Zemstvo

The peasants now had the mir and the zemstvo, both of which were corrupt and inefficient. The mir gave the impression that old-world values regarding the peasants were still in place, but this was mere lip service to the days before the abolition of serfdom. In reality, the mir was simply a low-level instrument of the sprawling bureaucracy of mid-nineteenth-century Russian society. As for the zemstvo, it was essentially governed by the nobles, who exercised overwhelming influence over its elections. There was thus no real representation or efficiency of government at the local level (Cracraft 345). This failure of local administration was presciently satirized in Gogol's classic play The Inspector General, in which local officials bumble their way through their duties.

Works Cited

Freeze, "Reform and Counter-Reform," pp. 180–93.

Cracraft, pp. 344–58: MacKenzie-Wallace on mir and zemstvo (1877).

"The Catechism of a Revolutionary" (1868) and "Demands of Narodnaia Volia [People's Will]" (1879) in Dmytryshyn, ed. Imperial Russia, pp. 350–59.

Gibian, pp. 608–15: Saltykov-Shchedrin, "The Story of How One Peasant Fed Two Generals" (1869).