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Episode 10.14: The Tsar Liberator

On a very superficial level, the Russian Empire got through the period between the Decemberist Revolt of 1825 and the Revolutions of 1848 in pretty good shape. The long reign of Nicholas the First had been book-ended by the easy smothering of liberal revolutionary aspirations. And in the case of 1848, this was accompanied by a rousing display of Russia’s final boss style military might in Hungary. So one might be tempted to think this was proof that the imperial regime was strong, both at home and abroad. Except if you scratch the surface even a little bit, you found the Russian Empire was its own Potemkin village. Politically, the appointment of military officers to run ministries they didn’t really understand led first to inefficiency and incompetence, then outright graft and corruption, because even with the Third Section running around out there, follow through on directives and oversight of lower officials could be appallingly bad, a fact taken advantage of at nearly every level of government.

Economically, Russia was not following the industrialization path being blazed in the west, and they were falling further behind by the day. Most of all, the Russian Empire was hampered by the archaic institution of serfdom, which defined the social, economic and legal slavery of something like a third of the population. This is what you would get a glimpse of if you scratched the surface of the Russian Empire around 1850. Now, what if you took a scrub brush and really went to town? Well, you would get to see the whole thing laid bare, and we call that scrub brush, the Crimean War.

 We touched on the Crimean War at the beginning of Series Eight, because it was now Emperor Napoleon the Third’s first big foray into international affairs after declaring himself Emperor Napoleon the Third. The proximate causes and blow by blow of the Crimean War are not important for us here today. What is important, is the consequences for Russia, because the Crimean War was a complete disaster and a humiliating defeat. The war itself began in 1853, and saw Britain and France supporting the Ottoman Empire against Russia, making this the first full blown great power conflict since the treaty of Vienna. And though the Russian soldiers themselves fought valiantly and the siege of Sevastopol was endured with a kind of grim courage, the Crimean War signaled the arrival of modern industrial warfare to Europe, and Russia found itself fatally unprepared to fight in this new world. As it turns out its military, government, economy, all were in an appalling state. When the Russian Empire came into direct conflict with the military and economic strength of Britain and France, a systemic stagnant rot was revealed. The scrub brush of the Crimean War exposed it for all to see.

The failure of the Russian army in the Crimean War was especially ironic given Tsar Nicholas’s own presentation of himself and his empire as essentially a military dictatorship. The army and navy occupied pride of place in the budget. The peacetime army was somewhere between 800,000 and a million men. Military officers were so trusted they ran the civilian government too. Nicholas insisted on smartly dressed, well-drilled and firmly disciplined regiments that were ready to show off their spit-polished sharpness and parades and demonstrations. But the army was a microcosm of the general problems of the empire. Yes, its budget was massive, but it was bloated. The officer corps had settled into lethargic corruption. They were skimming off the top, cooking the books, pocketing pay. There was graft and corruption on the supply chain, providing the food and clothes and boots and weapons for the soldiers. Expenditures were bled from a million little pinpricks. Meanwhile, the common soldiers were all unhappy conscripts serving twenty-five year hitches, often suffering the consequences of being badly supplied by corrupt agents. And then, when they finally got into a real fight with real great powers, they lacked for everything: their weapons were outdated; there were no railroads to speak of; the high command was stuck in the past strategically; the field officers were stuck in the past tactically; their parade drills counted for nothing when the shooting started. Tsar Nicholas lived just long enough to see his beloved army collapse under the weight of 25 years of corrupt stagnation. He died in February 1855, just before the final surrender in the Crimean War came, refusing treatment for what turned out to be fatal pneumonia. One can only guess why he refused treatment.

This left the Russian Empire to his 36 year old son Alexander, who now assumed the imperial throne as Emperor Alexander. The second Alexander was born in 1818 after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. So unlike his father, he was not forged in the furnace of desperate life and death, military campaigns. He grew up in a time of peace. Alexander was also seven years old when his father became tsar and he himself became heir to the throne. So again, unlike his father, Alexander was raised with the understanding that his education and life experience must be directed towards preparing him to one day assume command of the empire. This left him in a better position, I think, to evaluate the empire he was inheriting, to have already thought a lot about what he was going to do when he inherited the throne, the kinds of changes he would make, the kind of ruler he would like to be, the kind of ruler the empire needed him to be. The fact that he became emperor just as Russia was enduring a humiliation at the hands of Britain and France only confirmed ideas that were floating around in his head. Russia needed to grapple with reality at this moment, Russia was on the brink of not being a great power. So for the sake of national honor, the wellbeing of its people, the strength of the empire and the legitimacy of the Romanov dynasty, Russia was going to have to be dragged out of the past and into the present. Otherwise there would be no future. So Alexander came to power prepared to implement the largest and most consequential set of social and political reforms Russia had seen since Peter the Great and one could argue that these reforms would be even more consequential, because they would impact more than just the elite of that first Russia we talked about when we discussed the Decembrists, it would affect that other mass that was the other Russia: the majority of Russia. Alexander was going to do what no tsar before him had dared to do: he was going to free the serfs.

As we noted in Episode 10.9, serfdom had taken final, permanent legal route in Russia by the end of the 1500s. And since that day, reform minded ministers and intellectuals had pondered how to liberate them. Generation after generation concluded it was too difficult, too complicated, too dangerous. Serfdom is terrible, it’s frankly an embarrassment, but now is not the right time. Most recently, Alexander the First had considered emancipating the serfs early in his reign, but then dropped it. Nicholas the First was personally opposed to serfdom, but also judged emancipation to be too dangerous, a shock to the imperial order. For the enlightened leadership, the empire serfdom was one of those classic conundrums, you have a problem, you know what the solution is, but you are frankly more afraid of the solution than you are of the problem. The fear in this case was that emancipation would precipitate one of the two great types of rebellion Russian history is so familiar with: the palace coup and the peasant revolt. In these manifested fears, the palace coup would be led by reactionary nobles who did not want to lose their property. The peasant revolt would be led by a wild mob drunk on heretofore unknown liberty. But Alexander the Second now proposed that the problem was indeed scarier than any proposed solution. That unless Russia freed itself from these medieval shackles, they could no longer compete economically and politically and militarily with the west. And perhaps even scarier, emancipation was going to come eventually, it was inevitable. And the threat of revolution caused by freeing the serfs was nothing compared to the threat of revolution by not freeing the serfs. So in March of 1856, Alexander addressed the nobility in Moscow and told them, we have to do it. He said, “My intention is to abolish serfdom. You can yourself understand that the present order of owning souls cannot remain unchanged. It is better to abolish serfdom from above, than to wait for that time when it starts to abolish itself from below.”

This announcement, understandably caused an uproar amongst the nobility. But for the moment, all Alexander was saying is, this is what I want to do, this is what we’re going to do, now let’s figure out how to do it. So in January of 1857, Alexander created a committee staff by reformist ministers to study the question. Emancipation had the tsar’s personal blessing, but there were still a lot of conservative interference out there, so at the beginning these deliberations and in secret behind closed doors. But freeing the serfs could not be done entirely in secret behind closed doors. Opinion was going to have to be solicited. And so at the end of 1857, a memo went out to provincial governors asking them to make suggestions how to best implement emancipation in their own districts. The memo to the provincial governors was published out in the open, so educated members of the community debated the idea amongst themselves. And the government truly wanted to hear educated opinion on this matter, and so censorship was loosened up a bit to facilitate something resembling a public debate that would forge a national consensus about how to enact this great, but no doubt highly disruptive, reform.

So, what we’re looking at here is an empire between 60 and 70 million people, with maybe a hundred thousand of those owning pretty much all the land, and owning about a third of all the people. There were 23 million privately owned serfs. Now, unlike forms of ancient slavery, and modern western chattel slavery, where you take people from their homes and relocate them somewhere else, serfdom was a legal status that had fallen upon the population of Russian peasants who themselves had not moved. So the basic social and economic relations of production at the village level remained essentially unchanged. And those relations had a uniquely Russian character. For example, the village, called the mir, was not a collection of individuals who owned individual property. The village controlled property collectively, and they doled it out to be worked in strips to the families of the village. And this didn’t change with the arrival of serfdom. Now, of course, the landed gentry, the nobles, now owned the land, you just worked it, but the village was still the one doling out who worked what specific strip. What changed was everyone’s legal status. You could not leave your home without the lord’s permission. You couldn’t get married without the lord’s permission. You were obligated to provides all kinds of service for the lord. You were no longer a free person. You were a number in a ledger book of the lord’s personally owned property to be bought and sold along with the land upon which you lived. But the day to day rhythms of village life remained pretty much the same.

So if the emperor has just said, we’re going to abolish serfdom, what is that going to look like in practice? Are we just going to change the legal status of the people, but leave the land itself still owned by the nobility? Or when we free the serfs, do we also need to give them some land to legally own and work for themselves? Otherwise they might just become sharecroppers or day laborers, and you’ve hardly done anything for them at all. And if you do emancipate the serfs with land, how much land do they get? Who does the land go to? Are we going to keep the ancient form of collective ownership to have the village now own land as a whole collective? Or are we going to go a step further and wipe that out too, and hand out parcels to be owned by individuals? And if this all sounds a little bit familiar, it’s because we just talked all about these same issues when we talked about the Mexican Revolution, it’s the same deal. Every possible proposal had its defenders and critics, and five years were spent trying to come up with a plan that would both satisfy the gentry who were about to lose their serfs and maybe some of their land, and the serfs themselves who were about to be pushed out into the big world as free people and who would need the means to at least survive. And since the reformers in charge of pushing emancipation were not themselves social revolutionaries, how do we go about doing this while maintaining the basic social order intact? Because the main idea here is to head off a social revolution, not cause one.

Finally, after endless rounds of acrimonious fighting, Tsar Alexander felt he had a package in hand that he could take a chance on. The serfs would be freed. And when they were freed, they would also be given land. There was just no other way to do it. So the tsar sat down and signed an emancipation decree dated February the 19th, 1861. The government let this momentous proclamation sink in among the educated classes for a few weeks before it started being read aloud in churches across Russia to a bewildered and sometimes disbelieving population of now… freed serfs? Did, did he just say we’re free?

Depending on who you ask, the emancipation of the serfs was either the single most momentous piece of social legislation in the history of Russia, or it was not worth the paper it was printed on. So how do you have those two massively contrasting takes on this thing? Well, as always, the devil is in the details.

So what are the details of actual emancipation? First, despite all the fears in the corridors of power, emancipation came with some unrest, but in the grand scheme of things, the response was surprisingly muted. Emancipation did not automatically unleash the furies. But the abolition of serfdom did mean that the peasants were now free people, they were not anyone’s property, it meant what it said. They were no longer inked into the ledgers of an accounting of a lord’s personal wealth. They were free to marry without permission, conduct trade without permission, they could sue and be sued. They now enjoyed liberty and all the rights, such as they were, that went with personhood, not propertyhood. This is all great stuff. But Alexander had to balance this against the understandable anger of those who have just watched their property become people. There had to be some kind of balancing compensation, strings were going to have to be attached. The nobles were not going to swallow it any other way. Someone was going to have to pay the price for the serfs freedom, and as it turned out, that price was going to be paid by the now ex-serfs themselves.

So first starting in 1861, there would be a two-year transition period to ease everyone into this new legal arrangement, where the serfs would still owe essentially the same services to the nobles that they had been bound to provide for generations. So right off the bat, nothing changes for like two years. The second, while each individual now had legal freedom, the social and economic relations of production often changed very little. Because the tsar’s final decision was that it would be best to keep communal village ownership in place. That which had proceeded serfdom would continue after the demise of serfdom. And when the nobility handed over a portion of their estates, it went to the village collectively, who would continue to dole it out to be worked by individual families. Now, I am speaking broadly here, there were exceptions in status and rollout and implementation, and some free peasants were better off than others, and they did start building their own private portfolios of land, and there was private ownership of land, but generally speaking, post-emancipation life was very similar to pre-emancipation life, and it revolved around collective ownership by villages. The villages managed the land collectively, and as an individual or a family, you were still bound to adhere by their collective decisions.

But that’s not really bad. I mean, that was just their way of life. And if any of them thought about it at all, most peasants probably preferred it that way. It was at the very least the way it had always been done. But the worst part of emancipation was that to put through the mass transfer of so much land from the nobility to these villages, the tsar agreed that the landed gentry had to be compensated. Because on the one hand, Alexander is here trying to avoid peasant revolt and social revolution, but he also has to simultaneously avoid those pesky palace coups. And confiscating the nobility’s land at gunpoint and saying, thanks, see you later, was a good way to invite one of those pesky palace coups.

So part of the emancipation package was a thing called redemption payments. Redemption payments worked like this: the state determined an amount to be paid to compensate a noble for what they had just been ordered to surrender both in people and in land. Then, the state paid the noble one large lump sum that amounted to 75% of the agreed-to amount, right now, today, here you go.

Okay. You with me so far? Good.

But does the state want to be on the hook for that lump sum payment? Hell no, the empire’s financial situation is terrible. So what they decided was that the money should come from the freed serfs themselves. They were the ones benefiting, they should be the ones to pay. So this lump sum, the state paid out was put down in the books as a loan, provided by the state, for the villages, who would then repay this friendly loan in annual installments for the next 49 years at 6% interest.

But wait, there’s more. The state did not actually fork over a literal pile of money to each and every noble, because most of those nobles at this point were themselves deep in debt, thanks to decades and even centuries of profligate spendthriftery. So the lump sum quote unquote paid to the nobles often went towards paying down those debts that the nobles themselves had contracted from the state or from state connected banks. The money that changed hands was not money at all, it took the form of writing down existing loans. So, if you think about it, what is happening here is that the state is going to get paid back for the loans previously taken out by the nobles. It’s just that those loan payments have now been transferred to the peasants, and the loan would be paid off in annual installments for 49 years, at 6% interest.

It turns out you can put a price on freedom.

But still, it took everyone a little while to put all this together. Emancipation is still a huge and momentous moment in Russian history. Serfdom has been abolished forever and Alexander the Second gets to happily be hailed as the tsar liberator, long live the tsar liberator.

But this was only the beginning of Alexander’s reform project. Liberating the serfs was a huge deal, but it was not the whole ballgame. So a few years after emancipation came two more major reforms we need to talk about. The first was political. A decree in 1864 created a new assembly at the provincial and district level called the zemstvo. That’s probably right. Zemstvo. The function of the zemstvos was to act alongside and augment the work of agents of the central bureaucracy with a particular focus on local needs and infrastructure, right. Road, bridges, schools, doctors and hospitals, things of local concern. The big innovation here is that members of the zemstvo would be elected, introducing a heretofore practically unknown element of democracy into the administration of the Russian Empire. And it was meant, at least in part, to be an additional salve to the egos of the now massively dispossessed and de-surfed nobility, because these new assemblies would give them a voice, and a sense of being invited into the process.

But the zemstvo had administrative capacities, it had no real political power. If there was a conflict with the central bureaucracy, there was no conflict at all. The central bureaucracy had all the power. Nonetheless, the zemstvos, by virtue of their very existence, introduced elections, a representative body for discussion and debate among educated people, a forum for local civic engagement, and it thus brought together people who wanted to civically engage. And if you have a group of civic minded, educated professionals who want to debate local issues, you tended to be liberal in outlook. And so the zemstvos themselves tended to take on a general liberal flavor. Now they were never going to challenge the government for power — they had no power — but they were giving a generation some practice in democratic politics and maybe a sense of comradery if and when further down the road, further reforms decided to empower them further.

Now the other great reform we need to talk about was the complete overhauling of the court system. The laws of Russia had been compiled and recompiled over the years. Most recently in 1835 in a project overseen by a rehabilitated Mikhail Speransky. But the empire had never suffered from an excess of the rule of law. Lawyering was not a well-articulated profession, and the courts suffered from myriad problems. There were untrained judges, the trials were closed, they were not open to the public, they accepted written testimony only. There was no chance for an accused to confront witnesses, and at the end of the day the courts were subservient to the executive branch, they were not independent. The whole thing was kind of a bad joke.

So at the same moment in 1864, after years of study, the government rolled out a bold leap forward that gave Russia overnight practically the most progressive legal system in Europe. This new system would have adversarial trials, where the defendant would get a lawyer and could call witnesses. These trials would be open to the public to ensure accountability. There would be better training for judges who, once appointed, could only be removed for specific misconduct, not just, oh, you didn’t do what we wanted you to do. The state, meanwhile was now obligated to actually present a case, with evidence and everything, in order to secure a conviction.

But before we go too far, there are a couple of points we need to keep in mind. First, these reforms did not sink down to the village level where traditional village courts would still handle all civil cases and most minor criminal cases, and they used their own local traditions of justice, which were mostly based on comparing and contrasting the reputation of accuser and accused. So they’re not included in any of this. Second, state agents would very quickly find it frustrating that they had to bring people to trial in court because of the aforementioned case I have to make in evidence I have to produce, and they would soon discover that the Ministry of the Interior, for example, had the authority to just expel people from a city or province by fiat. And this was a practice that would soon become known as administrative exile, which got around the pesky courts, and still allowed the state to punish and exile those they just knew were guilty of something bad, even if they literally could not prove it in court

So the first decade of Tsar Alexander the Second’s reign goes down in the history books as the period of great reform, capital G capital R Great Reform. The serfs were emancipated, there are new elected assemblies, there’s an entirely new judicial apparatus. And Alexander was hailed as a visionary leader, a truly great father to his people. He was the Tsar Liberator. But in the years to come, discord began to creep in. When the expectations created by this era of great reform started to go unmet. When a village discovered that practically the whole produce of the land they now owned had to go to making redemption payments. When middle-class intellectuals who gathered in the zemstvo were let down by how little power they actually had. When the new progressive court system naturally led people to believe the rule of law was here to stay, and instead they found the state constantly skirting the rule of law, undermining it and outright ignoring it.

And there was a growing class of educated Russians, especially young educated Russians, who were disillusioned when the tsar stopped the process of Great Reform, rather than continuing on to what they thought was its logical conclusion, the promulgation of a constitution. If this is what the future looks like, they said, it looks a lot like the past. And among those who were disillusioned and disappointed by these unmet expectations, we find the first of a new generation of social revolutionaries who will propel events towards 1905 and then 1917. They said to themselves, long live the Tsar Liberator?

No.

For Russia to be free, truly free, the tsar must die.