In Our Time - The Emancipation of the Serfs

Episode Date: May 17, 2018

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 1861 declaration by Tsar Alexander II that serfs were now legally free of their landlords. Until then, over a third of Russians were tied to the land on which they lived and worked and in practice there was little to distinguish their condition from slavery. Russia had lost the Crimean War in 1855 and there had been hundreds of uprisings, prompting the Tsar to tell the nobles, "The existing condition of owning souls cannot remain unchanged. It is better to begin to destroy serfdom from above than to wait until that time when it begins to destroy itself from below." Reform was constrained by the Tsar's wish to keep the nobles on side and, for the serfs, tied by debt and law to the little land they were then allotted, the benefits were hard to see. With Sarah Hudspith Associate Professor in Russian at the University of LeedsSimon Dixon The Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History at UCLAndShane O'Rourke Senior Lecturer in History at the University of YorkProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, in March 1861 in St Petersburg, Tsar Alexander II proclaimed that Russian serfs were now free. Alexander's nobles had owned tens of millions of Slavs or serfs,

effectively slaves, who worked their land and could be bought and sold, sent to fight in wars, flogged and even killed with impunity. There was a catch in their freedom, though. The former serfs needed land to grow their food. The nobles kept the best for themselves, and the serfs had to pay for their allotted scraps of earth for decades, tied to servitude by debt. More reforms were needed, but none came.

And the tensions, the scholars argue, helped pull Russia apart in 1917. With me to discuss the emancipation of the serfs are, Sarah Hutzpitt, Associate Professor in Russian at the University of Leeds, Simon Dixon, the Sir Bernard Paz Professor of Russian History at UCL, and Shane O'Rourke, Senior Lecturing History at the University of York. Simon Dixon, what were the origins of serfdom in Russia? Well, the origins of serfdom lay in a process that took best part of 200 years, really, between the 15th and the 17th centuries, the mid-15th and mid-17th centuries.

And the logic there was driven partly by the... need of the state to placate particular interest groups, because that 200-year period was a period of Muscovite territorial expansion. And so in a free market, the price of labour would have gone up. And indeed it did go up, and the logical consequence of that was that peasants started running away from lords who couldn't pay them to lords who could pay them more. And that was a problem for the state, because the state needed the middle-ranking landlords to officer the cavalry. And in order to office the cavalry, of course, they needed some labour force at home. So the idea was to restrict peasant movement in order to keep peasants tied to the middle-ranking cavalry officers.

And peasant movement was restricted by a series of acts introduced at crisis points in the 1450s, in the 1590s, and finally again in 1649. And after that, serfdom is more or less in Russian legislation. Now, it's then consolidated in the 18th century largely for fiscal reasons because it's much easier to tax people when you know where they are. So the idea was to keep serfs tied down to their communes, to their estates, so that they could be taxed to pay for 18th century reforms. So what you have is a kind of paradox that in order to pay for modernising political institutions

and modernising military forces, you actually reinforced a far from modern, of social relations and a very large number of unfree serfs. Can you describe the restrictions that surrounded serfdom and perhaps compare them with slavery in the United States? Well, the restrictions for serfs were more or less total, that in one sense, legally they were totally unfree people. And secondly, of course, they had all sorts of marriage restrictions

that could be run by their landlords. But we can see a bit more about it by making the comparisons. the most obvious comparison, of course, is racial. In the states, serfs were Africans, West Africans, quite different race, visibly quite different from the native population, whereas in Russia, of course, it was Russians who were inserved. But I think perhaps there's a more important difference in some ways, and that's that the size of the plantations in the states was quite small.

So you had quite a personal relationship between the plantation owner and his slaves. in Russia that wasn't the case. Most serfs in Russia lived on very large estates run by bailiffs on behalf of absentee landlords who lived in Moscow or St Petersburg. Most Russian nobles had a very small number of serfs and we don't really know much about how they lived, but the majority of serfs lived on the estates owned by a comparatively small number of really wealthy aristocrats. And they were treated in a variety of ways. So I suppose that's the big thing to drive home that we can't really speak of a single servile experience. It varied quite a lot, depending on the bailiffs,

depending on the nature of the land that you were working, was it fertile land, in which case you probably have bigger labour services, or was it infertile land, in which case as a serf, you might go off into the town and make all sorts of products. So there's quite a wide variety of experience for the serfs. There's quite many reports of brutality and so on, is aristocratic woman who tortured and murdered 100 women and girls mostly and of course got away with it. And is that completely atypical?

It's certainly unusual, I think. This was Princess Salta Chica, who attracted a lot of tension by behaving exactly as a noble shouldn't behave. It's almost certainly true that house serfs were treated worse than serfs on the estate. But on the other hand, if you only had a few serfs, and they were your sole property and your soul property and your service, sole resource. It wasn't wise to mistreat them because they couldn't work on your behalf. So it looks as though there was quite a variety of treatment. Some landlords punished virtually all their serfs at some point. Some landlords punished only recidivists, as it were. So again, there's quite a lot of variety. Thank you. Sarah Hudson. How did they make a living? You mentioned paid.

I got the feeling they were paid in kind. So I'm a serf on this great estate. I go out and do the work I'm told to do. What do I get in return? I can't leave the land My marriage arrangements are interfered with And so and so forth But what do I get in return as far as subsistence goes? Typically a small area of land That the serf and his family

Would be allowed to farm for their own produce really And maybe the provision of somewhere to live And not a great deal else You know very little in the way of opportunities for education or or any other kind of social care or looking after. What were the religious

justifications for serfdom? Well, only really insofar as the serfs were at the bottom of a very hierarchical societal structure the top of which was the Tsar who was considered to be divinely ordained to have the authority of God. And this mainly came from the idea that Russia centered in Moscow was the last

bastion of Orthodox Christianity, the last defender of what they believed to be the original Christianity after the fall of Constantinople. And so the structure of the society was seen as a kind of enormous hierarchical family with the Tsar at the head. He was seen as the father and divinely ordained. And so the religious justification, I suppose, sort of trickled down through that structure. But of course, it was very hard to justify in Christian ethical terms,

the idea of serfdom. And I think that was one of the reasons that people began to question it and to think that it might be a system that really wasn't morally defensible. But the number 22, million, about 22 million serfs crops up, but there were more than that, weren't there?

Because these were the serfs on the line, but there was state slaves or state serfs. How many, who were a few years later, they too were emancipated. How many of those were there? To be honest, I think one of the others would be better answering that. We just need a number? 23 million. Another 23 million.

So we're talking about somewhere over 40 million one way than other serfs in Russia in the mid-late 19th century. Compared with the rest of Europe, How did that look? Pretty severe, really, yes. And what were the writers at the time make, what did the writers of the time make of it?

This is the time when the great Russian writers are bursting through and all saying what great Russian writers they are. What were they saying about the serfs? Well, this is something that began to be discussed as the 19th century progressed, because literature as a medium for discussing social issues, was starting to really take off in the 19th century. And so it became a platform where people could put forward their ideas

about possible changes to society. For example, we have the writer Nikolai Gorgul in his wonderful novel, Dead Souls, which is a story about a businessman who wants to try and establish himself, and he uses an interesting loophole in the tax system whereby serfs who had died were still on a census register, which was used for landowners to be taxed, but they were still featuring on that census until the next census point, and the hero of this story decides to buy up the dead souls.

The souls was how they referred to the serfs in order to try and make himself look like a wealthy businessman. And in this text, you see Gorgal writing about a whole range of different experiences of the relationship between landowner and serfs. It's quite a satirical novel. So he's very much mocking the attitudes of the landowners towards their serfs. But there was a second part which didn't get published in his lifetime where he showed himself to be a terrific conservative

and saying, well, let well be, this is fine. Indeed, it wasn't so much let well be. It was more that if land ownership and the ownership of the serfs was done properly, then it was a valid system. And this was what caused a great deal of controversy with some of his readers. This part, as I say, it wasn't published in his lifetime, but the second part of Dead Souls, which was hotly anticipated, was replaced instead by a kind of memoir and series of essays that he wrote instead

called selected passages from correspondence with friends. And his readership, and particularly the more progressive thinkers who'd begun to be influenced by socialism in France, were very upset at his reaction where he seemed to be defending serfdom. Thank you. Shain Arrog, other tars beforehand? Let's start with Catherine the Great in the late 18th century, had considered the emancipation of service.

We took 70 years for it to get done. Why did it take so long in that sense? Basically, because it was such an enormous task. We're talking millions of people. Nothing like that had ever been attempted before. There were no precedence, and no one had any conception of what the consequences might be. Catherine raised the issue, but it was made very clear to her,

by the nobles that her throne depended on leaving it well alone. Catherine's position was rather shaky. She was a usurper. Her husband had been murdered. And although she was a great empress, she decided she had to leave serfdom alone. Her son did actually interfere with serfdom. He restricted the number of days that could be worked to three days a week.

That was all the landlord could demand from you. And there was no working on Sunday. Couldn't be enforced, of course. And Paul, her son, was later strangled by the guards. been murdered too. Yes, yes, so the son was murdered as well. Depicism tempered by assassination. Yes, all.

I understand. Yes. So, I mean, so it was very clear that tampering with serfdom was extremely dangerous, that there was a real risk of a palace coup. Alexander I think was emotionally very against serfdom. He really wanted to do something about it. And he did actually introduce some minor reforms. There were reforms in the Baltic states in 1803.

and again in 1816 to 1819, but this reform turned out to be a disaster. There was, the peasants there were emancipated without land. And what ended up was creating a massive rural proletariat, who if anything were even more dependent on their landlords after the emancipation. So there was a recognition that if there was to be an emancipation in Russia itself, in the central territories, then they couldn't follow this path. And so you have that bubbling away under the surface. Were there any fears of a rebel to the purpose, rebellion of the serfs?

There were always those fears. I mean, there had been the great rebellion during the reign of Catherine of Pugachov, which sort of seared, was seared into the memory of the nobility. So that was there as a, still within living memory in the 19th century. In the sense that there was nothing like that in the 19th century, and although there was lots of unrest, there were riots, they all tended to be relatively localized, contained, and none of them really presented a threat to the system as a whole. So there wasn't that fear that there's an imminent threat that's going to overthrow the whole

system, but there's a recognition it was damaging in the long run to the stability of the regime. And there's a sense in which the serfs were bonded into the imperialistic mission to make Russia great, that their landowners would often take the serfs or give as part of their due, send them into the army, so it was a large army, which Simon Dix was all of the problems with Crimea. After Russia's great triumph against Napoleon, and they went to Crimea and were humiliated.

And a lot of them said because the serfs were uneducated, untrained and cynical. Yes, that's right. Alexander II, of course, came to the throne in February 1855, right in the middle of the Crimean War, at a very difficult stage for the Russians, and Russia's humiliation in Crimea was certainly, I think, the key incident that pushed this final reform. The reform is, of course, formulated in the bureaucracy,

and Alexander could draw on a range of people who've become known as the enlightened bureaucrats. This was a generation of bureaucrats who'd come to prominence in his father's reign, under Nicholas I. And they'd started not only collecting information about what was going on in the countryside, but analysing it and trying to use it. So there was a sort of ready-made body of reformist bureaucrats

prepared to introduce the reform. The question was how you could persuade the Tsar to do it. And we still don't know exactly how that was done because Alexander doesn't say very much. He's taciturned, like a lot of monarchs. He doesn't tell you what he's thinking. But we believe that three people were quite crucial in acting as a sort of link between the enlightened bureaucrats

and the court. And they were two of the Tsar's relatives, his brother, Constantine Nikolaig, who was very much a modernising naval reformer, so he knew what was necessary for a modern naval force, but at the same time, also a very strong orthodox believer. The Tsar's aunt, a Grand Duchess, Yelina Pavlana, who was, again, a very strong cultural figure,

interested in music and St. Petersburg and so on. And their salons and their activity helped to make a bridge between the Tsar and the bureaucrats. But the key figure is probably General Rufstofsov, who you might not have thought of as a reformer until this stage. He'd been a very conservative figure under Nicholas I. But in the late 1850s,

he began to study the work of the enlightened bureaucrats and convinced himself that this was what needed to be done. But by the time he died in February 1860, the reform legislation was more or less prepared and wasn't altered much after that. Sarah Hennett, Smith, What support was there for emancipation among the intelligentsia? Well, by the 1850s, there was indeed growing support,

and it was quite interesting to see that that was across the range of the political, ideological spectrum. For example, you had the progressive westernizing intellectuals who felt that emancipation was necessary for socioeconomic reasons and to modernize Russia. And then you have the more concerned, conservative, Slavophile intellectuals, who felt that, nevertheless, that serfdom was still necessary to, you know, it was necessary to emancipate the serfs. For the purposes of reuniting Russian society, the Slavophile thinkers felt very much that the gentry and the aristocracy had become deracinated. They'd become too detached from their original Russian heritage

through all the sort of the modernising reforms of Peter the Great, for example. And also, So it showed itself in what they wore, wasn't it, and what they didn't wear. They didn't wear long beards, and they did wear Western clothes, they didn't wear captains, and so on. For example, yes, yes. So all the sort of the cultural changes that had made the gentry look so different and behaved so differently, sort of the French salon culture that they had adopted, and quite often the French language as well.

It was as if there were two very, very different social groups who had nothing any more in common. and even the conservative thinkers felt that to get back to sort of the true authentic Russian heritage, it was necessary to reunite society by emancipating the serfs and getting in touch with some of what they felt to be the essential Russian values of community and simple brotherhood that they felt that the peasantry held. Simon's talked about influences at court, and I mentioned the intelligentsia, when they beginning to make themselves heard in pamphableness,

inside their books and so on. Absolutely, yes. So I think a good example that we could mention here of a literary portrayal that came out just prior to emancipation was Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead. This is his account of his time in a Siberian prison colony. And he was there, unfortunately, because of an early involvement with a progressive. circle in his youth. And the majority of the convict population were of peasant stock, of serf stock.

And Dostoevsky very keenly felt that he was unable to connect with his fellow prisoners because of his nobility background. He wasn't an aristocrat by any stretch, but he was technically of that class. And they shunned him. They really didn't want to have anything to do with him,

even though he was on the first. face of it, he'd been leveled by the idea of being sentenced to hard labour. And so his account of his experiences in the colony, you can see very much how he felt that there was this needs to somehow reconnect with the whole of the Russian population to understand what they had to offer and to learn from them as much as being able to teach them. Can we just talk about slip in about Tolstoy here because he's such a big figure in Russia and he he was on one side of the fence then he was on the other side of the fence can you describe those two positions for us now I think Tolstoy

was very interested in the moral values that he saw in the peasantry and in some of his early writings you will see peasant characters who offer some kind of wisdom to the main characters and of course a really well-known example of that is war and peace and listeners may have seen the recent adaptation and be familiar with this so there was a present prisoner of war that the main character Pierre meets when he's captured by the French in the Napoleonic Wars and this peasant character demonstrates that he is able to live

a fulfilling life because he has the attitude that he cannot control his life, he cannot control his fate and so he therefore acknowledges that his fate is in the hands of God and this is a message that he's able to try and pass on. And that prompted or went alongside Tolstoy's view of the, in a sense, you tell me if I'm wrong, idealisation of the serfs, he himself working on the land, they were the soul of Russia. Then that changed and we see that in Anna Karenina. In Anna Karenina, I think we still have the idea of the peasant as someone who can teach the nobility something. I don't think there's a dramatic shift really from war and peace to Anna Karenina. The main sort of shift there is actually more to do with Tolstoy himself and his personal feelings towards his own class and his own society.

and sort of his rejection of that. But what you also see from Anna Karenina onwards in Tolstoy's writing is the way in which the idea of trying to bridge that gulf becomes quite problematic. It's not something that's easily done. It's no pat answers to it. What does he call it? A divine problem or so.

An accursed question. And a cursive question. But the thing he adds, which is rather worrying, but a delightful one or something. September is an evil. very pleasant one. Can you say it again? Serfdom is an evil, but a very pleasant one. Yeah, I'd get you this right, doesn't it? Okay,

well, Shane, we'll stay with you for this very pleasant evil. What were the terms of the emancipation insofar as the serfs were directly affected? We're talking about 1861, and it was proclaimed in churches throughout the land, a large document, you're all free.

What happened then? What happened then is that there was a period of two years where things basically remain the same. It's a temporary period. After that, there was a transitional period in which the serfs and their masters would work out precisely which land would go to whom, how they would pay for it, and generally the terms of the settlement. After that period, what will begin then will be the payment back to the state, because the state advanced the money on behalf of the serfs to the gentry and then the serfs would have to pay the state back over the next 50 years,

49 years to be precise. The terms, on the one hand, were very generous in the sense that the peasants were actually emancipated with land, which was extremely unusual for any emancipation, no other emancipation in Europe, in the United States or in Brazil, for example, emancipated with land. The problem was the peasants wanted all of the land. They believed it was theirs.

They believed that only those who worked the land had a moral claim to land. And so they felt the gentry had no right to the land at all, whereas the gentry felt it was their land, and they had every right to it. So there were basically two irreconcilable views there. And of course, both sides were deeply embittered by the terms of the emancipation, both felt that they'd been betrayed, had been betrayed.

And so clearly nobody was very high. happy. So stick to the serfs. What did they do? They got this deal. It seemed on paper, when it was read out in the churches, to be a grand thing, but dissatisfaction instantly set in. So what did they do? Well, they didn't have a

great deal of choice. Did they still say on the estates, by and large? They did. They weren't allowed to move, you see, that although they... Still weren't allowed to move. They weren't allowed to move. The legal authority over them was transferred from the landlord to the commune, to the community, and they were all responsible.

for each other. So that made it, people just couldn't take off. They still had to pay taxes. The community still had to pay all their dues. They had to serve in the army. So in a sense, their bondage was transferred from the landlord to the commune. And that remained the same up until really after the 1905 revolution. So what could they say to each other, we're free? When they said we're free, what could they mean to each other? Well, the landlord couldn't flog us anymore, that the landlord couldn't exercise that power over us in the the way that, you know, he had exercised the power of a slave owner if he chose to exercise it over them. That was gone and that was, you know, indisputable change brought about by the

emancipation. What they lost was access to woods, forests, meadows, which had been an integral part of their economy and they now had to pay for that which they were furious about because they thought this is ours. Simon, can we then switch to the landowners? They won't please either. They weren't. I mean, this was a big psychological blow to the nobility. It had been the striking definition of nobility that you were allowed, and only nobles were allowed to own serfs. So removing that was a big problem for the nobles psychologically.

It gave them a sort of big gap. And it wasn't clear how they would respond to it. There were two possible responses, really. One, of course, nobles everywhere in Europe, including here, were quite adaptable and quite flexible. So one group of nobles, sells off lands that they don't want any longer to other nobles who turn them into big agricultural enterprises and then the nobles who sold the land

moved into the towns and start acting as urban Rontier they make money out of the property in the city so that's quite a flexible and adaptable option to take the alternative of course was to sink into a kind of stupor and not really develop anything and Chechhoff of course talks about that But either way, whichever group you take, the nobles did not become what the government had hoped that they would become, which was leaders of a new civic nation. Instead, they became a kind of pressure group acting for themselves because they weren't satisfied with the sort of compensation they got from the emancipation settlement.

The idea of the government was to say, look, we are going to create some new local authorities, the Zemstva in 1864, and new nobles will have a sort of political role in that that you've been. never had before. But in fact, the Emsva brought for the nobles really more responsibility than power, and the nobles had lost the essential compact that had kept Imperial Russia going in the previous two centuries, that the nobles would sacrifice

corporate political authority for total, or almost total control over their subject peasantry. They'd lost that, and they weren't quite sure how they were going to replace it. In fact, in one way, there'd be no local, let's say, local government, because the

The nobles did everything, didn't they were the nobles, and then there were the Serbs. There wasn't much in between, and they ran the Serbs, so we didn't need local government. They did it for the Tsar. That's absolutely right, and the same could be said of justice, of course. That had also been run largely by the nobles and their bailiff-sondy estates. So the emancipation of the serfs, as Shane said earlier on, was postponed because it was going to involve automatically the need for a very wide range of extra reforms totally to reconstitute the nature of Russian government in the 1860. Sarah, do we have a few wanted to concrete examples of what happened between the serfs and the landowners in the next five, ten years from 1861?

We can certainly see some examples illustrated in literature, and as Simon mentioned, Chekhov, his play The Cherry Orchard, which is a classic example of the nobility who sink into that kind of stupor of Nusuf. nostalgia for the old ways and who seem to be unable to move on to do anything different with their lives. And in this play you see a character who is the son of a former surf and who is developing himself as a businessman wanting to buy. Why does he get his money from? It's not quite clear in the chariotic. It isn't quite, it isn't really made clear. But there's this sense that he's part of a sort of an emerging rising social class that is able to sort of make money. and he wants to buy the estate from the aristocratic landowner, landlady who has fallen on hard times and has debts that she needs to pay.

And in this play, you sense that sort of tension between the hankering after tradition, the nostalgia for the old life and the, what is, I suppose, portrayed in the play is a kind of an insensitivity. towards that feeling of nostalgia and the heritage that might be lost by the people coming up wanting to make the changes. And so the play ends with the symbolic cutting down of the cherry orchard which represents the old way of life, the sort of the beautiful but not really very useful way of life.

And so this is sort of ripped down in the name of progress. Shane, was there any sense in which Alexander regretted this or I thought he could have done it better or once he got going it was unstoppable? I think pretty much it was. I mean, I think Alexander is the central figure in the emancipation. Although he takes a back seat, he doesn't involve himself with the nitty-gritty of it. At crucial times, he intervenes in the process to make sure it doesn't halt, to make sure it doesn't stall, which is what had always happened under his father, for example, nine times Nicholas tried to do something about serfdom, and nine times.

he failed. The difference under Alexander was that when the process stalled, he actually intervened. He gave a jolt to it. For example, when it broke down in the bureaucratic process, he established a committee outside the bureaucracy to actually drive it through. So I think Alexander is a central figure in it at all times. I don't think he regretted doing it. He recognized it had to be done. I think he was aware that the consequences of it would be difficult to deal with. And later on, he did become more conservative as disappointment set in, as people try to assassinate him several times. Yeah, assassination rures its head again. And they got him in the end, of course. They did, unfortunately. Yes. Simon Dixon,

let's talk about social mobility now. This was accelerated by the fact that Russia began to develop an industrial proletariat. It began, towards the end of the 19th century, developed industry, and by the beginning of the First World War, it was the fifth biggest economy in the world, it was pounding ahead. How did that play in?

Did a lot of the serfs, as they did in many parts of Europe and America, leave the land and go to these cities to work in industries? Yes, the big industrial developments came in the 1890s, but they came on the back of what was effectively a population on the move all the time. The problem was,

as Shane said earlier, that in principle, the peasants, freed peasants, remain tied to the commune. And that was an arrangement designed to make sure that Russia did not develop a kind of landless proletariat that had caused so much trouble in Russian eyes in Europe in the revolutions of 1848. But what the reformers did not see coming was a big demographic expansion,

a big expansion of the population in the 1860s and 70s, which meant there wasn't enough land for everybody to work. So what you got was a whole sort of flux of population, peasants moving from the countryside where they stayed in the summer for the harvest, into the cities in the winter, where they'd get all sorts of labouring jobs and so on, or in the female case they'd move into service. So you have an extraordinary sort of sense of population on the move and a sense of uncertainty, of identity. Are these people peasants still, or are they beginning to become a sort of proletariat? Some, of course, stay in the cities and become a residential proletariat, but most right through to the 1910s are still permanently on the move, and that created a big problem for the government keeping track of them. Can we bring back the 23 or 20 plus million state peasants who are like serfs,

and that turned the whole thing from 20 million to 40 million of them? Now, 40 million people on the move in those few decades the other night is enormous. So can you give us some idea of the enormity of it? It's one reason why the Russian police archives are so big. Of course, one tends to think of the Russian police archives as very sort of formal and despotic organizations, but they're mostly full of people, policemen, trying to find people. They were just sort of wandering about.

So this is a really serious problem for the Russian government, certainly, yes. But how did it affect, there must have been some infrastructures which were held together by this mass, these millions and millions of servants. If people were loosening their bonds and then changing however slowly, moving from the land to the cities, one of the great movements in history,

they're doing that. Can you think of any bigger effects than that you've said? Or is it slow accreting and doesn't affect itself until the First World War? Well, certainly it's slow in accretion. And certainly in industrial terms, of course, it doesn't really take off until the 1890s. But this movement had an effect on all sorts of things. Just think of marriage, for example. example, if priests are supposed to read out the bans on the basis of knowing their flock and

knowing where they've been, it's very difficult for them to do that. So on the one hand, you have a regime which is preaching virtues of marriage, and yet on the other hand, you have priests who are nervous of actually conducting marriages in case it later turns out that they've made some infraction of the regulations, a whole series of social consequences of people moving about in this way. Was there a sense that the landowners lost any in grip at all that they had? And I beg a pardon. And there was any grip at all on they had and controlling the mass tracts of Russia

which they'd control through their serfs? I think there was a sense of a lack of control. But it was, I think it was a sort of a gradual sense. They were still very much the idea that the educated classes wanted to try to capitalize on what it had. happened and reconnect with the people. And so we have a lot of, for example, in the 1870s, university students who wanted to try

and go and live on the land and get to know the peasants. This was called the populism movement. So that was, I think, a sense of trying to keep control of an idea of trying to sort of get a grip on and a better understanding of what was happening. Was there a sense, Shane, was there a sense that further reforms were needed, but people thought they'd gone far enough? Well, the original reformers did have a project for a whole series of reforms. Simon's already mentioned the Zemstra reform, the local government. What they tried to do was to turn these serfs into citizens.

There was a very important judicial reform as well, which, for the first and only time in Russian history, including today, created an independent judiciary. That was one of the major reforms. Later on, Alexander had a military reform which created a modern conscript army rather than the old surf-based one. But they recognised this was a long-term project. A single act wasn't going to accomplish it, that you're dealing with an illiterate population,

ones that have no notion of modern citizenship. And so they recognised it was a very long-term process. The tragedy was that the successors of Alexander, his son, Alexander III and Nicholas II, turned out to be so hopeless, so inadequate as Tsars, in that they led the country up a blind alley. They didn't continue to develop what Alexander had done. And I think that was where things started to go awry,

not because the act itself was fundamentally flawed, but simply because it was only the starting point, and it's unreasonable, I think, to expect that one act would solve all of Russia's problems for all time. Simon, Simon Dixon from the time of Peter the Great he'd said catch up with Europe and he'd done his best

and catching up with Europe become westernised or perished as it were on the outskirts and this had gone in a defeat way Europe suggested and has to be suggested in the nose but now it's becoming dynamic again

they're catching up with the industry and that sort of thing was this were they aware of of a big internal change to the whole society because they had lost the serfs, they were industrial, they were powering away, they were part of the economy. Did that have a big effect?

Yes, I mean the question really, ever since Peter, it'd been how to cope with westernisation, and Russians have never really felt wholly comfortable with it. There are those who wanted to take it further and faster, and ultimately, of course, their attempts were blown to Smitherines, along with Alexander the second when he was assassinated in 1881. And yet there were always those who could say, well, look, this westernizing attempt is fundamentally un-Russian.

It's foreign, it's alien. And this was the sort of thing that Dostoevsky argued, for example, in his diary of a writer in the 1870s. Classically, he's very clever, he took a lot of child abuse cases and said, well, how can you have a Western legal system which justifies a defence lawyer for someone who's abused their children? children. So there was a whole series of ways in which you could attack the westernizing attempts of the government in the 1860s.

Sarah, say 50 years on, say 1905, how far had the condition of the serfs improved? Not a great deal. This was the thing. For the former serfs, the peasants living in their communities, their peasant communities in the rural areas, very little in fact changed there was nothing done to sort of provide any kind of social development for them. The vast majority remained illiterate, ignorant, rooted in problems of alcoholism, domestic violence, barely just making a living on subsistence. So yes, the conditions really took a very long time to change at all. It was really didn't make a great deal of difference in.

practical terms. How do you look back, Shane, how do you look back on the effect of the emancipation of the Serbs? I think it was the greatest act of social engineering in the 19th century. It was a tremendous achievement. If you contrast with the United States to free 4 million slaves cost 700,000 lives. In the civil war? In the civil war, yes. In Russia, there were a few riots afterwards and a couple of hundred people died.

But 42 million and then 23,000. million people were freed with virtually no violence. That's unique. If you think of earlier Russian reformers like Ivan, Peter or Stalin later on, all their great reforms were accompanied by massive amounts of violence. This was done virtually entirely peacefully. It was a great act, a real achievement. How do they manage to it peacefully, Simon? Well, I think that everybody had been waiting for it effectively for such a long time that people saw it coming, really. And I entirely agree with Shane. It's an unusual thing in Russian history. On the whole we associate Russian history

with wild zigzacks from one to another. But this was a genuinely thoughtful, well-planned process, which on the whole work, the only thing that really upset it was the huge demographic expansion in the 60s, which the reformers couldn't have seen coming.

And in many ways, peasants did possibly become a little bit more prosperous. There's quite a debate about that towards the end of the 19th century. They certainly seem to have more money to spend by the end of the 19th century. So I don't think it's a all a bad thing to have done. Well, thank you very much. So, sorry for the cough. Thanks to Sarah Hutzpith, Simon Dixon and Shane O'Rourke. Next week we'll be talking about Margaret

at M'Hou, Queen of England, whose attempt to hold on to power people say spark the wars of the roses. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. One thing that we left out, we didn't talk very much about others' views of the peasants after the 18th. In a way, what happens after 1861 is suddenly all these millions of people who have been non-people until that point, they've not been mentioned in legislation, even though a lot of legislation affected them. All these peasants are suddenly the talking point for Russian culture and politics in the 1860s and 70s. And the crucial point was, are they really the salt of the earth? We should have mentioned the soul of Russia.

Yeah. Are these people the salt of the earth and therefore to be ruined? relied upon, or are they, on the contrary, a kind of sort of self-seeking, corrupt, self-dealing, twisting, bunch of sort of countercultural subversives? And there was a big discussion about that, not only in verbal terms, but also in pictures. The Russian wanderers, the great realist painters, Kramskoy and so on, have these marvellous paintings of peasants about which there was a huge debate. You know, are they painting someone who is very self-sacrificial in the manner of Plato and Karatayv, the peasant in war and peace,

or are they, you know, superstitious, the evil eye, all this kind of thing? That was a big debate. Of course they were both in many ways. Well, exactly. It would be artificial to suppose that one or the other is right. But that was a major sense of how little really educated society had any idea of what the peasantry really were. Well, there's a massive people listen to this, which is great,

because it means that I can make up for something that I should have said. I'm fascinated by the idea of the peasants, the serfs, carrying the soul of Russia. That had ramifications in the literature and in the psyche. I'd like you to talk about that. And you're pointing to Sir. Sarah, you're designated as the soul person. Right. Because there was this idea that originating from the sort of the Slavophile philosophers,

that the Russian peasants had been living in a sort of a common, type structure, which was inherently, had a sort of an inherent unity and level, sort of level society. It was a kind of an in in inate Christian model for life. And I so I think this is where that idea came from. Of course, that was, you know, quite idealised. But those writers, like, for example, Dostoevsky, who subscribed very much to those types of type of philosophies, believed that, yes, the Russian people, the Russian ordinary

peasant population were this repository of sort of innate brotherhood and togetherness and that this was what the nobility needed to learn from them. And he also felt very much that because of the suffering they had endured,

they provided a sort of a Christ-like model. But he also recognized, you know, their moments of brutality and their alcoholism and the issues with domestic violence and violent criminality as well. One of the things I think we need to mention as well is Russia's status as a great power. I think that was a critical factor in driving the reform through

because after the Crimean War, that status was in doubt. And for all the Russian elites, from Peter's time down to the present, that status is critically important that to see Russia fall down the ranks of a great power not to be treated as a great power was intolerable. For Alexander, I think personally, this was very, very important that he identified with the army, he identified with Russia as a great power,

and he'd seen what had happened to the Ottoman Empire and what would later happen to China as well. And I think it's that sense that Russia can't just, they could have sat back and done nothing and just let the system trundle on for another couple of decades. but that would have meant that Russia sort of inevitably declined as a great power so I think that's a very important factor

driving the emancipation as well you quite rightly said of course that by that point by 1855 by the time of the Crimea Serfdom seemed a backward sort of economic system in many ways but it's perhaps worth saying that that had happened quite recently because for most of Russia's early modern period of course serfdom made a lot of economic sense so long as people in the West, and particularly in this country,

wanted to buy so-called naval stores, let's say pitch, hemp, tar and all that kind of thing, masts, all the things you need to build a wooden navy. Serfdom was ideally prepared for that. It doesn't need an awful lot of skill so long as you've got all the natural resources. You just need a cheap labour force. The problem for the Russian economy came when the demand changed from a wooden navy to an ironclad navy, which is, of course, psychologically more sophisticated.

And at that point, a serf labour is not necessarily efficient. Well, in fact, it certainly wasn't efficient. So until that point, you couldn't necessarily say that free labour was economically better than unfree labor, or more efficient than unfree labor. But once the whole sort of demand in the West

turns for a different type of product, serfdom is outmoded and it's a problem. I'm surprised that you didn't take up more Tolstoy, returning more against the serps. It seems to me to be quite dramatic, but maybe my tendency to exaggeration run away with me. Turning against the serfs, I mean, I don't...

Well, having a much more cynical view of them. I certainly think that, that in Anna Karenina, by that point, he's had ten years of working with his own serfs, of course, on his own estate, and discovered that they're not quite so malleable as he thought they were going to be, and they don't want to take up all the sorts of reforms

that he'd hoped to introduce on his own estate, that they're much more cunning than he did, imagined. And so Anna Karenina gives a much more variegated view of the peasantry than the sort of cuddly peasant that you get in. Yes. Oh yes indeed. No, I agree with that. I mean I think but I think what Tolstoy sees in that kind of situation is not that the serfs are in any way problematic themselves. It's more of a problem of the relationship

you know that they're entrenched distrust of the gentry that has provoked this sort of quiet, stubborn resistance basically as a sort of a rebellion by non-action and by resistance. Last word. One of the problems, of course, is that many of those writing

about serfs didn't actually have much contact with them or peasants and so when they actually met them and dealt with them in the flesh, it was a bit of an eye-opener, and I think it's much easier to write nice things about them in the abstract than when you actually had to deal with them over business or over land or something. I suppose being beaten down for hundreds of years, not passing on from generation to generation in the same place.

They did that to my grandfather. They did that to your great-grandmother and so on and so forth. The carapace would be very strong, wouldn't it? We're going to get on with our lives, and as much as we can ignore them, in spite of them as well as alongside them. Is that something in that? I think definitely, yes.

Oh, gosh, we've got three absolutists. It's down to finish. Thank you very much. To your coffee. Oh, I'd love a cup of coffee. Coffee. Yes, yes. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.

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