The Emancipation of the Serfs in Russia
Alexander II frees more than twenty million peasants; the same thaw opens a crack in the Pale of Settlement.
The manifesto of 19 February 1861 declared the serfs personally free—there were more than twenty million of them, nearly half the peasantry of the empire. They received land not as a gift but for a redemption paid over decades, and the village stayed poor; but a man ceased to be property. The manifesto was followed by the rest of Alexander II's "great reforms": local councils, open courts with juries, universal conscription in place of the recruit levy, a loosening of the press and the universities. The Tsar-Liberator would be killed by revolutionaries in 1881, and after him the reforms turned back.
The manifesto did not touch the Jews—they were not serfs. But the same authority in the same years opened a crack in the Pale of Settlement: merchants of the first guild, university graduates, artisans and discharged soldiers were allowed to live in the interior provinces. Jewish communities appeared in St Petersburg, Moscow and Kiev; a generation grew up in Russian secondary schools—it would write the Russian Haskalah, and after the pogroms of 1881, Pinsker's "Auto-Emancipation."
Sources
Documents of the period
- the Manifesto of 19 February 1861 and the Statutes on the Peasants — the emancipation and the terms of redemption
Scholarship
- history of the reforms of Alexander II — the number freed, the course of the reforms, the concessions to the Jews
Basis: documents and evidence.