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in 1847–8 were obligatory for landowners and provided two models for the solution of the peasant problem which would be taken into account at the time of the preparation of the abolition of serfdom. The reform of the state peasantry, carried out by P. D. Kiselev in 1837 created the model of peasant self-government. The materials from the Secret Committees (particularly of 1835 and 1839), which in 1856 were transferred from the II Department of the Emperor’s Personal Chancellery to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, where the preparation of the emancipation of the serfs was started, also received some attention.16

How does the legislation of 1861 relate to the preconditions of the reform that were taking shape in the middle of the century? This is the main question of the next section of my work.

The programme and conception of the reformers, the legislation of 19 February 1861 and the other Great Reforms

Terence Emmons rightly observed that ‘recently historians have begun to pay particular attention to the interconnections among the reforms of the 1860–1870s’. The view that serfdom was the ‘cornerstone’ of the state structure (the army, laws, administration), and that it was impossible to leave them unchanged because they simply could not function as before, has been increasingly corroborated in the historiography and is virtually undisputed. However, Emmons stresses that this is only part of the truth and in concentrating too much attention on it we risk losing ‘sight of that “ideology” of reforms, which usually unites all large-scale transformations in one epoch and one system’.17 This important conclusion deserves close attention.

In order to analyse this question we need to consider the ideas of the reformers, their understanding of the aims of the reforms, their views on the interrelationships of all the transformations and the prospects for Russia’s development. Without research into this aspect of the history of the Great Reforms, it is impossible to appreciate their depth and scale. One must not forget that the reforms were carried out by an autocratic monarchy, and that the reformers could not clearly and openly state their final aims in the legislation.

16N. M. Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest’iane i reforma P. D. Kiseleva (Moscow: Izd. AN SSSR, 1946–58), vols. I and II; Also his Russkaia derevnia na perelome 1 861 –1 880 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1978); S. V. Mironenko, Samoderzhavie i reformy. Politicheskia bor’ba v Rossii v nachale XIX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1989), pp. 101–46; also his Tainye stranitsy istorii samoderzhaviia

(Moscow: Nauka, 1990), p. 238.

17Emmons, ‘“Revoliutsiia sverkhu” v Rossii’, p. 383.

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For this reason many fundamental aspects of the Statutes of 19 February 1861, of the Zemstvo Statute of 1864 and other legislative acts have been somewhat obscured.

Take one of the outstanding leaders of the Great Reforms, the minister of war under Alexander II, the historian, professor and brilliant memoirist D. A. Miliutin. In the middle of the 1880s, in retirement after the death of Alexander II and the change of course, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘The Law of 1 9 February 1 861 could not have been a separate, isolated act, it was the foundation-stone of the restructuring of the entire state system’ (my emphasis). Miliutin considered that in order to understand ‘our state regeneration’ which happened in the first ten years of the reign of Alexander II, it was necessary to examine ‘the course of the three main reforms – the peasant reform, the zemstvo reform and the judicial reform.’18 V. O. Kliuchevskii came to an even broader conclusion about the interconnections of the reforms: ‘The peasant reform was the starting point and at the same time the final aim of the whole transformation process. The process of reform had to begin with it, and all the other reforms flowed from it as inevitable consequences and were supposed to ensure that it was carried out successfully. These reforms would find support and justification in the peasant reform’s successful realisation.’19 Finally, in the contemporary research of Steven Hoch and M. D. Dolbilov the preparation of the draft of the redemption scheme in the Editing Commissions is examined in close connection with the work of the Banking Commission.20

Apart from memoirs and letters, the ideas of the reformers are most fully and openly revealed in the unofficial chronicle of the Editing Commissions, which prepared the codified drafts of the Statutes of 19 February. This detailed, lively (virtually a stenographic report) record of the journals of the 409 meetings which took place in the nineteen-month existence of this non-traditional institution in the history of autocracy contains the actual words of the participants – their remarks, jokes, quarrels, and the arguments between the sides.21 This chronicle was created at the initiative of the members of the Editing

18D. A. Miliutin, Vospominaniia, 1865 –1867 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2005), p. 202.

19V. O. Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia v deviati tomakh, vol. V (Moscow: Sotsekgiz, 1989), p. 430.

20M. D. Dolbilov, ‘Proekty vykupnoi operatsii 1857–1861 gg. K otsenke tvorchestva reformatorskoi komandy’, Otechestvennaia istoria 1 (2000): 15–33; Hoch, ‘Bankovskii Krizis’, pp. 95–105.

21Osvobozhdenie krest’ian v tsartstvovanie imperatora Alexandra II. Khronika deiatel’nosti Redaktsionnykh komissii po krest’ianskomu delu N. P. Sememova (henceforth Khronika H. P. Semenova) (St Petersburg: 1889–92), vols. I–III. The preparation of the peasant reform in the Editing Commissions has been analysed in the following works: D. Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1 85 5 –1 861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976); Zakharova, Samoderzhavie i otmena krepostnogo prava.

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Commissions, who recognised the scale of the tasks that lay before them and their responsibility ‘in the eyes of the people’, to ‘the public’ and the nobility of Russia, and in the face of Europe.22

The chairman and members of the Editing Commissions often stated that although currently engaged in the transformation of the private serfs’ world they were concerned with the fate of all categories of peasants – that is state peasants, appanage peasants and others, who exceeded the numbers of serfs (the peasantry as a whole made up 80 per cent of the population). V. A. Cherkasskii declared that the drafts of the Editing Commissions signified ‘a general revolution’ in land relations. The Chairman of the Commission Ia. I. Rostovstev formulated the task even more broadly: ‘It is our duty to sort out all the questions concerning the peasantry, because the statute on the emancipation of the serfs must change our entire Code of Laws.’23 N. A. Miliutin, straight after his dismissal on 2 May 1861, wrote to Cherkasskii expressing his concern about the fate of the peasant-reform initiative: ‘Now there is no longer that same internal mechanism which led inevitably to the decisive break – there are no Editing Commissions, which set the reform on its way’ (my emphasis).24 In general Rostovtsev considered that ‘the creation of the Russian narod (people, nation) began in 1859’.25 Here it is worth remembering the task that Speranskii laid down in his list of not yet completed projects at the beginning of the nineteenth century: ‘To create our own nation [of free people – L.Z.], in order to then give it a form of government.’26

The ‘General Memorandum Covering the Drafts of the Editing Commissions’, written by Samarin and signed by twenty-three members of the Commissions at the last meeting on 10 October 1860, revealed the concept underlying the legislation. These men saw Russia as a special case because it was possible to decide the question of the abolition of serfdom and the future arrangement of land relations in one legislative act – through peasant redemption of plots and the preservation of a significant portion of gentry, that is, noble, landholding. They noted:

In other states governments followed this path in several stages, and so to speak groped their way because such a reform had never been experienced before in practice, and at the beginning it was impossible to envisage how

22Khronika N. P. Semenova, vol. III, part 1, pp. 487, 119, 183, 273.

23Khronika N. P. Semenova, vol. III, part 1, pp. 487, 208.

24RGIA, Fond 869, op. 1, d. 1149, l. 246.

25M. Borodkin, Istoriia Finliandii. Vremia imperatora Alexandra II (St Petersburg, 1908), p.

152.

26M. M. Speranskii, Proekty i zapiski (Moscow and Leningrad: Izd. AN SSSR, 1961). M. M. Speranskii, Zapiski ‘O korennykh zakonakh gosudarstva’ (1802).

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the process would end. That is why the sequence of measures leading to the gradual broadening of the rights of the serfs and an improvement in their way of life has virtually everywhere given rise to unforeseen social crises. In this regard, Russia is luckier. By making use of the experience of other countries it has been given the possibility . . . to embrace straightaway the entire path that lies ahead from the first step to the full curtailment of obligatory relations by means of the redemption of land.27

It is clear why research on land redemption led B. G. Litvak to the following evaluation of the 1861 reform: ‘In fact, this was a process, at the outset of which the emancipation of the individual from the power of the landowner was proclaimed . . .

but whose final stage was the creation of communal and household land-ownership’

(my emphasis).28

The legal position of the peasants was transformed radically and consistently in the drafts of the Editing Commissions and in the Statutes of 19 February 1861. Personal dependence of peasants on the nobility ended immediately. The former serfs acquired a civic status, although the peasantry remained subject to certain specific estate (soslovie) obligations. Peasant self-government was introduced – at the volost’ and village level (on the whole on the basis of the obshchina) with officials elected by the peasants, with assemblies and a peasant district (volost’) court. In this part of the legislation much was borrowed from Kiselev’s reform of the state peasantry. Peasant self-governing institutions were placed under the supervision of the local state administration and performed fiscal functions for the government, but they also served to defend the interests of the peasants against the landowners. In addition, they provided the basis for peasant participation in the new institutions for all the sosloviia – the zemstvo (local elected assembly) and jury courts.

At the same time as the opening of the Editing Commissions in March 1859, a commission for the preparation of the reform of local government under the chairmanship of N. A. Miliutin was set up under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Its programme was co-ordinated with the peasant reform and laid the foundation for the Zemstvo Statute of 1 January 1864. It was only thanks to this co-ordination that the participation of the peasants in the zemstva was secured, as at the time they were still not landowners and therefore did not have a property qualification. The link with the judicial reform consisted not only of the participation of peasants in juries. The reformers created a completely new institution for the realisation of the peasant reform – the Peace Mediators,

27Pervoe izdanie materialov Redaktsionnykh komissii dlia sostavleniia polozhenii o krest’ianakh, vykhodiashchikh iz krepostnoi zavisimosti (St Petersburg, 1860), part XVIII, pp. 3–6.

28V. G. Litvak, Russkaia derevnia v reforme 1 861 (Moscow: Nauka, 1972), p. 407.

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who were called upon to regulate the relations between the landowner and his former serfs by means of drawing up charters and redemption acts for working out the details of the land settlement on individual estates. Although nobles themselves, the peace mediators were not selected by the noble assemblies but were appointed by the state with the help of the local administration. In 1861 it was proposed that in three years’ time they would be selected jointly by the nobility and the free peasantry. And although their exclusively noble status did not correspond to the general ideology of the Great Reforms, other principles surrounding their activity, such as openness and the fact that they could not be removed, ensured their independence from the administration and the noble assemblies and prepared the ground for the introduction of the justice of the peace and the new court system in Russia under the Judicial Statutes of 1864.29

If we add to the above the abolition of corporal punishment on 17 April 1863 (Alexander II’s birthday), the military service law of 1 January 1874 and the reform of education, it becomes clear that the Great Reforms opened the way to the creation of a civil society (although the reformers did not use this terminology). They were indeed aimed at the development of the people’s national and civic consciousness, at instilling in them feelings of dignity and at overcoming traditions of servitude, which had been embedded in generations of Russian peasants.

Solving the land question was more difficult. It depended on gradualism and amendments over time and was complicated by the critical financial situation of the country after the Crimean War. The reformers themselves clung firmly to the idea of the emancipation of the peasants through the redemption of land. This idea was defined in 1855–6 in the memoranda of D. A. and N. A. Miliutin, K. D. Kavelin and Iu. F. Samarin (the last-mentioned held a slightly different position). However, the first public document which began the preparation for the reform – Alexander II’s rescript to General-Governor V. I. Nazimov of Vilno of 20 November 1857 – did not contain a definite decision on the land question. It would have been possible to move from it to emancipation based on guaranteed peasant usufract rather than outright property ownership by the peasants. The significance of the rescript was that it made public the government’s intention to solve the peasant question, which had been discussed for so long but in secret. Henceforth openness became an independent force on which

29Here and below when speaking about the resolution of the peasant question in the 1861 reform, material from the following works is drawn on: L. G. Zakharova, Samoderzhavie i otmena krepostnogo prava; ‘Samoderzhavie, biurokratia i reformy 60-kh godov XIX v. v Rossii’, VI 10 (1989): 3–24; and ‘Samoderzhavie i reformy v Rossii 1861–1874’ in Zakharova, Eklof and Bushnell, Velikie reformy v Rossii, pp. 24–43.

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the reformers relied. In particular, 3,000 copies of the work of the Editing Commissions were immediately published following its meetings.

Throughout 1858 in society, in the periodical press, in the noble provincial committees and in government circles a struggle was waged over different solutions to the peasant question – with land or without land. At the beginning it seemed that the Baltic model (emancipation without land) was winning, the more so because the tsar himself believed in this path which had been tried and tested in the Baltic provinces. However, a series of circumstances (the serious and protracted wave of peasant unrest in the province of Estonia, the rejection by appanage peasants of emancipation without land, the struggles among the fractions in the noble provincial committees) pushed Alexander by the end of 1858 towards the idea of land for the peasants and towards the adoption of the programme of the liberal bureaucracy.30

The liberal majority of the Editing Commissions believed that all peasantfarmers must enjoy usufract rights over land from the start of the reform process and ownership rights in time. They projected two types of landholding in Russia’s new agrarian sector: large gentry (noble) estates and small peasant holdings. They proposed to attain this goal peacefully, avoiding the revolutionary upheavals that had occurred in the countries of Western and Central Europe, and this was considered one of the principal features of the Russian reform. From the experience of European countries, they pointed to the positive results in France (the creation of small private land-ownership), and the methods of legislative measures in Prussia and Austria, which consisted of redemption of land by the peasants while preserving gentry landholding, yet avoiding the extremes of the Prussian variant – ‘concentration of landed property in the hands of a few great landowners and big farmers’ and the proliferation of landless agricultural labourers. As a result, the reform was built on the basis of ‘existing realities’, that is the preservation of much arable land in the hands of the nobility, and of the pre-reform plots in peasant ownership; the calculation of initial obligations and subsequent redemption payments on the basis of pre-reform dues (with a slight reduction); the participation of the state in the redemption operations in the capacity of creditor. The acquisition of full property rights to their plots through redemption payments by the peasants was seen as the reform’s final outcome. Redemption was not obligatory for the gentry landowners. Alexander II said: ‘While even one noble is against the redemption of peasant plots, I will not allow compulsory redemption.’ At

30L. G. Zakharova, ‘Znachenie krest’ianskikh volnenii v 1858 v Estonii v istorii podgotovki otmeny krepostnogo prava v Rossii’, in Izvestiia Akademii nauk Estonskoi SSR, no. 33 (Tallinn, 1984): 24–46.

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the same time the adoption of ‘gradual’ and ‘voluntary redemption’, that is of the principle of the ‘self-financing’ of redemption operations, was explained by the state’s difficult financial situation. The reformers recognised that it was impossible at present for the treasury to subsidise the redemption operation, although the longer-term possibility was recognised.31 Though they had to accept the limits dictated by the contemporary situation, the Editing Commissions created an internal mechanism for the reform which guaranteed uninterrupted progression toward the projected results. The reform was a process: perpetual peasant usufract at fixed rents quite soon persuaded landowners that redemption was in their own interests.

The peasants too had virtually no choice. Having set the aim of avoiding mass proletarianisation, and recognising at the same time that the economic conditions of emancipation were difficult and that the landowners would strive at all costs to crowd out the peasants, the reformers introduced into the law an article which forbade peasants to repudiate the allotments for nine years (this period was subsequently lengthened). The preservation of the obshchina (commune) in its role as a landowner (in addition to its other above-mentioned functions) served the same aim to a significant degree. By preserving the obshchina with its archaic rules about restrictions on peasant land and with joint responsibility for dues, the reformers understood that this would hinder the free development of an independent peasant economy. However, for the start of the reform the preservation of this institution, which was embedded in the organisation of the economy and in the consciousness and everyday life of the peasants, was considered unavoidable. At the same time the idea was not to conserve the obshchina forever. Leaving the obshchina was foreseen under certain conditions and with time this was to be made easier. In the milieu of the Editing Commissions the view predominated that with time obshchina land-ownership would yield to individual ownership, and the administrative functions of the village community would be concentrated in the volost’. Only Iurii Samarin gave his unreserved support to the obshchina. Speaking before the deciding vote about the fate of the obshchina, N. A. Miliutin said that ‘by mutual consent it had been decided to leave this question to time and to the peasants themselves, . . . and that the legislation and the government had always rejected the adoption of any artificial or imposed measures for such a transition, and that this decision had been approved by the Emperor himself’.32

31	M. D. Dolbilov, ‘Proekty vykupnoi operatsii’, Hoch ‘Bankovskii Krizis’, pp. 95–105.
32	P. P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, Memuary: Epokha osvobodzhdeniia krest’ian v Rossii, 1 85 8–
	1 861, 4 vols. (Petersburg: priv. pub. 1915), vol. III, p. 231.

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This conception of the solution to the land question, albeit with several adjustments introduced into the drafts of the Editing Commissions at the Main Committee on the Peasant Question and at the State Council, was embodied in the Statutes of 19 February 1861. As a consequence of the amendments, the peasants’ position became more difficult as a result of the reduction in the size of the allotment of land (the so-called ‘cut-offs’) and the increase in dues, including redemption payments.33 Emmons rightly considers that ‘from the point of view of the state there were in practice no alternatives to this programme’.34 The reformers understood the burden on the peasants of the economic terms of the emancipation. Even during the course of the preparation of the reform, Miliutin foresaw the land-hunger of the peasants and considered that the state would have to use a portion of the treasury’s lands to counter this phenomenon. But for Miliutin the key here was the transformation of the financial system. He tried to take control of three key spheres: the peasant question, local self-government and finance. However, the attempts by his patrons – Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna and Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich – to get him appointed as minister of finance were not successful. At the beginning of May 1866 when Alexander II considered appointing Miliutin as minister of finance, P. A. Shuvalov managed to convince the monarch to reject this idea, partly by himself threatening to resign.35

M. D. Dolbilov in his article about the plans for redemption from 1857 to 1861 plausibly suggested that what the reformers had in mind was the fundamental restructuring of the redemption operation in the not too distant future, at the earliest stage of the implementation of the abolition of serfdom. Valuev’s diary supports this interpretation.36 It is hard now to establish how Nikolai Miliutin conceived of the financial reforms, but his brother and political ally Dmitrii Miliutin, evaluating the financial and economic situation of the country in the 1860s, wrote twenty years later, that it was impossible ‘to increase endlessly the burden of taxes which almost exclusively fall on the working, poorest class of the people, who are already impoverished’. He considered that the ‘fundamental revision of our whole taxation system was the main task’.37 At the beginning of the 1880s N. A. Miliutin’s colleague N. Kh. Bunge would

33P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Otmena krepostnogo prava v Rossii, 3rd edn (Moscow: Prosveshchenie,

1968), pp. 232–59.

34Emmons, ‘“Revoliutsiia sverkhu” v Rossii’, p. 381.

35P. A. Valuev, Dnevnik, 2 vols. (Moscow: Izd. AN SSSR, 1961), vol. II; GARF, Fond 583, op. 1, d. 19, l. 173–6 (Material from the manuscript diary of A. A. Polovtsov Das provided by A. V. Mamonov).

36Dolbilov, Proekty vykupnoi operatsii, p. 30; Valuev, Dnevnik, vol. I, p. 334.

37Miliutin, Vospominaniia, 1 865 –1 867 , p. 440.

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begin the reform of the tax system. But this was already in a different era. Peter Gatrell is correct in saying that ‘no significant changes took place in taxation policy in the decade following the reform’,38 with the exception of the important excise reform of 1863, which ended the farming-out system for spirits and deprived the nobility of privileges in distillation. At the same time the introduction of excise duty enriched the treasury and encouraged private capital investment in the economy.39

The reformers’ programme did not envisage transformation of the higher organs of state power, the convocation of an Estates General (Zemskii sobor) or of all-Russian representative institutions. At the same time the liberal bureaucrats discussed among themselves those forces that would further advance the reforms. Already in a memorandum of 1856, Nikolai Miliutin pinned his hopes on the monarchy, which, having taken the initiative with the transformations, would find support in the liberal, enlightened nobility. The same hope was mentioned in ‘The General Memorandum’ of October 1860. The very creation of the Editing Commissions, more than half of whose members were not officials (albeit appointed), an institution directly subordinate through its chairman to Alexander II, was to a certain degree the realisation of the ideas of the reformers about the new role of the autocratic monarchy. Moreover, as

P.P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii has witnessed,

N. A. Miliutin was in no doubt that with the appropriate development of the activity of the local institutions under the patronage of a strong state power, the sovereign power itself would recognise the need to appeal to representatives of local interests and would share legislative functions with them in order further to develop its reforms, as it had now done for the first time with the convening of local committees and with the summoning of expert-members who were independent of the administrative structures of power.40

It is no coincidence that in 1880–1 M. T. Loris-Melikov turned to the experience of the Editing Commissions and to the reforms of local self-government, linking his plans for comprehensive transformations with the experience of the Great Reforms. However, in 1860 the reformers did not succeed in translating all their ideas into legislation. The sudden closure of the Editing Commissions in October 1860, and the dismissal of N. A. Miliutin in April 1861 were testimony to the precariousness of their general calculations.

38P. Gatrell, ‘Znachenie velikikh reform’, p. 121.

39D. Christian, ‘Zabytaia reforma: otmena vinnykh otkupov v Rossii’, in Zakharova, Eklof and Bushnell, Velikie reformy v Rossii, pp. 126–39.

40P. Semenov-Tian-Shianskii, Memuary, vol. IV (1916), vol. 4, pp. 197–8.

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