EMANCIPATION.
On the day when Alexander the Second came to his crown (1855), both
lord and serf expected from his hands some great and healing act. The
peasants trusted him, the nobles feared him. A panic seized upon the
landlords. "What," they cried, "do you expect? The country is
disturbed; our property will be destroyed. Look at these louts whom
you talk of rendering free! They can neither read nor write; they have
no capital; they have no credit; they have no enterprise. When they
are not praying they are getting drunk. A change may do in the Polish
provinces; in the heart of Russia, never!" The Government met this
storm in the higher circles by pacific words and vigorous acts; the
Emperor saying to every one whom his voice could reach that the peril
lay in doing nothing, not in doing much. Slowly but surely his opinion
made its way.
Addresses from the several provinces came in. Committees of advice
were formed, and the Emperor sought to engage the most active and
liberal spirits in his task. When the public mind was opened to new
lights, a grand committee was named in St. Petersburg, consisting of
the ministers of state, and a few members of the imperial council,
over whom his majesty undertook to preside. A second body, called the
reporting committee, was also named, under the presidency of Count
Rostovtsef, one of the pardoned rebels of 1825. The grand committee
studied the principles which ought to govern emancipation; the
reporting committee studied and arranged the facts. A mighty heap of
papers was collected; eighteen volumes of facts and figures were
printed; and the net results were thrown into a draft.
The reporting committee having done their work, two bodies of
delegates from the provinces, elected by the lords, were invited to
meet in the capital and consider this draft. These provincial
delegates raised objections, which they sent in writing to the
committee; and the new articles drawn up by them were laid before the
Emperor and the grand committee in an amended draft.
Up to this point the draft was in the hands of nobles and land-owners;
who drew it up in their class-interests, and according to their
class-ideas. If it recognized the serf's right to personal freedom, it
denied him any rights in the soil. This principle of "liberty without
land" was the battle-cry of all parties in the upper ranks; and many
persons knew that such was the principle laid down in the late
Emperor's secret and abortive act. How could a committee of landlords,
trembling for their rents, do otherwise? "Emancipation, if we must,"
they sighed, "but emancipation without the land." The provincial
delegates stoutly urged this principle; the reporting committee
embodied it in their draft. Supported by these two bodies, it came
before the grand committee. England, France, and Germany were cited;
and as the villeins in those countries had received no grants of
lands, it was resolved that the emancipated serfs should have no
grants of land. The grand committee passed the amended draft.
Then, happily, the man was found. Whatever these scribes could say,
the Emperor knew that forty-eight millions of his people looked to him
for justice; and that every man in those forty-eight millions felt
that his right in the soil was just as good as that of the Emperor in
his crown. He saw that freedom without the means of living would be to
the peasant a fatal gift. Unwilling to see a popular revolution turned
into the movement of a class, he would not consent to make men paupers
by the act which pretended to make them free. "Liberty and land"--that
was the Alexandrine principle; a golden precept which he held against
the best and oldest councillors in his court.
The acts of his committees left him one course, and only one. He could
appeal to a higher court. Some members of the grand committee, knowing
their master's mind, had voted against the draft; and now the Emperor
laid that draft before the full council, on the ground that a measure
of such importance should not be settled in a lower assembly by a
divided vote. Again he met with selfish views. The full council
consists of princes, counts, and generals--old men mostly--who have
little more to expect from the crown, and every reason to look after
the estates they have acquired. They voted against the Emperor and the
serfs.
When all seemed lost, however, the fight was won. Not until the full
council had decided to adopt the draft, could the Emperor be persuaded
to use his power and to save his country; but on the morrow of their
vote, the prince, in his quality of autocrat, declared that the
principle of "Liberty and land" was the principle of his emancipation
act.
On the third of March, 1861 (Feb. 19, O.S.), the emancipation act was
signed.
The rustic population then consisted of twenty-two millions of common
serfs, three millions of appanage peasants, and twenty-three millions
of crown peasants. The first class were enfranchised by that act; and
a separate law has since been passed in favor of these crown peasants
and appanage peasants, who are now as free in fact as they formerly
were in name.
A certain portion of land, varying in different provinces according to
soil and climate, was affixed to every "soul;" and government aid was
promised to the peasants in buying their homesteads and allotments.
The serfs were not slow to take this hint. Down to January 1, 1869,
more than half the enfranchised male serfs have taken advantage of
this promise; and the debt now owing from the people to the crown
(that is, to the bondholders) is an enormous sum.
The Alexandrine principle of "liberty and land" being made the
governing rule of the emancipation act, all reasonable fear lest the
rustic, in receiving his freedom, might at once go wandering, was
taken into account. Nobody knew how far the serf had been broken of
those nomadic habits which led to serfage. Every one felt some doubt
as to whether he could live with liberty and law; and rules were
framed to prevent the return to those social anarchies which had
forced the crown to "settle" the country under Boris Godunof and Peter
the Great. These restrictive rules were nine in number: (1.) a peasant
was not to quit his village unless he gave up, once and forever, his
share of the communal lands; (2.) in case of the commune refusing to
accept his portion, he was to yield his plot to the general landlord;
(3.) he must have met his liabilities, if any, to the Emperor's
recruiting officers; (4.) he must have paid up all arrears of local
and imperial rates, and also paid in advance such taxes for the
current year; (5.) he must have satisfied all private claims,
fulfilled all personal contracts, under the authority of his cantonal
administration; (6.) he must be free from legal judgment and pursuit;
(7.) he must provide for the maintenance of all such members of his
family to be left in the commune, as from either youth or age might
become a burden to his village; (8.) he must make good any arrears of
rent which may be due on his allotment to the lord; (9.) he must
produce either a resolution passed by some other commune, admitting
him as a member, or a certificate, properly signed, that he has bought
the freehold of a plot of land, equal to two allotments, not above ten
miles distant from the commune named. These rules--which are
provisional only--are found to tie a peasant with enduring strictness
to his fields.
The question, whether the serf is so far cured of his Tartar habit
that he can live a settled life without being bound to his patch of
ground, is still unasked. The answer to that question must come with
time, province by province and town by town. Nature is slow, and habit
is a growth. Reform must wait on nature, and observe her laws.
As in all such grand reforms, the parties most affected by the change
were much dissatisfied at first. The serf had got too much; the lords
had kept too much. In many provinces the peasants refused to hear the
imperial rescript read in church. They said the priest was keeping
them in the dark; for, ruled by the nobles, and playing a false part
against the Emperor, he was holding back the real letters of
liberation, and reading them papers forged by their lords. Fanatics
and impostors took advantage of their discontent to excite sedition,
and these fanatics and impostors met with some success in provinces
occupied by the Poles and Malo-Russ.
Two of these risings were important. At the village of Bezdna,
province of Kazan, one Anton Petrof announced himself as a prophet of
God and an ambassador from the Tsar. He told the peasants that they
were now free men, and that their good Emperor had given them all the
land. Four thousand rustics followed him about; and when General Count
Apraxine, overtaking the mob and calling upon them to give up their
leader, and disperse under pain of being instantly shot down, the poor
fellows cried, "We shall not give him up; we are all for the Tsar."
Apraxine gave the word to fire; a hundred men dropped down with
bullets in their bodies--fifty-one dead, the others badly hurt. In
horror of this butchery, the people cried, "You are firing into
Alexander Nicolaivitch himself!" Petrof was taken, tried by
court-martial, and shot in the presence of his stupefied friends, who
could not understand that a soldier was doing his duty to the crown by
firing into masses of unarmed men.
A more singular and serious rising of serfs took place in the rich
province of Penza, where a strange personage proclaimed himself the
Grand Duke Constantine, brother of Nicolas, once a captive. Affecting
radical opinions, the "grand duke" raised a red flag, collected bands
of peasants, and alarmed the country far and near. A body of soldiers,
sent against them by General Dreniakine, were received with clubs and
stones, and forced to run away. Dreniakine marched against the rebels,
and in a smart action he dispersed them through the steppe, after
killing eight and seriously maiming twenty-six. The "grand duke" was
suffered to get away. The country was much excited by the rising, and
on Easter Sunday General Dreniakine telegraphed to St. Petersburg his
duty to the minister, and asked for power to punish the revolters by
martial law. The minister sent him orders to act according to his
judgment; and he began to flog and shoot the villagers until order was
restored within the limits of his command. The "grand duke" was
denounced as one Egortsof, a Milk-Drinker; and Dreniakine soon
afterwards spread a report that he was dead.
The agitation was not stilled until the Emperor himself appeared on
the scene. On his way to Yalta he convoked a meeting of elders, to
whom he addressed a few wise and solacing words: "I have given you all
the liberties defined by the statutes; I have given you no liberties
save those defined by the statutes." It was the very first time these
peasants had heard of their Emperor's will being limited by law.