Emancipation of the serfs in Russia

Date

3 March 1861 (19 February O.S.)

Category

Social & demographic

Region

Russian Empire

Era

Modern

Significance

On 3 March 1861 (19 February in the Russian Julian calendar) Tsar Alexander II issued the Emancipation Manifesto, freeing more than 23 million privately held serfs and inaugurating the most far-reaching reform of nineteenth-century Russia.

Defeat in the Crimean War had exposed the empire's economic and military backwardness, while mounting peasant unrest convinced the tsar that, in his words, it was better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait for it to be abolished from below. The manifesto and its accompanying statutes granted former serfs the legal status of free subjects, with rights to marry, own property and trade. Yet emancipation was deeply compromised: peasants had to purchase their land allotments through decades of 'redemption payments' to the state, often received less and poorer land than they had farmed, and remained bound to the village commune (the mir), which controlled landholding and movement. The reform thus failed to relieve rural poverty or satisfy peasant land hunger, fuelling the agrarian discontent that would help drive the revolutions of the early twentieth century. Even so, the abolition of serfdom dismantled the legal foundation of Russian society, spurred further 'Great Reforms' of the judiciary, local government and the army, and marked Russia's halting entry into the modern era.

Empires active in 3 March 1861 (19 February O.S.)

• French Colonial Empire (Second)
  1830 CE – 1962 CE
• Russian Empire
  1721 CE – 1917 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Qing Dynasty
  1636 CE – 1912 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE

Related social & demographic events

• The Great Irish Famine
  1845–1852
• Influenza pandemic of 1918–1920
  1918–1920
• The Holocaust and the 'Final Solution'
  1941–1945
• Bengal Famine of 1943
  1943–1944
• The Seneca Falls Convention launches the organised women's rights movement
  19–20 July 1848
• The Great Famine of 1876–1878 in British India
  1876–1878

Further reading

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

The wider story

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

Global best-seller on how our species, its populations and societies remade the world.

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