The Emancipation of the Serfs in Russia

Peace Arbitrators and the Development of Civil Society

Roxanne Easley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134001927
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the wake of the disastrous Crimean War, the Russian autocracy completely renovated its most basic social, political and economic systems by emancipating some 23 million privately-owned serfs. This had enormous consequences for all aspects of Russian life, and profound effects on the course of Russian history. This book examines the emancipation of the serfs, focusing on the mechanisms used to enact the reforms and the implications for Russian politics and society in the long term. Because the autocracy lacked the necessary resources for the reform, it created new institutions with real powers and autonomy, particularly the mirovoi posrednik, or 'peace arbitrator'. The results of this strategy differed in practice from the authorities' original intentions. The new institutions invigorated Russian political life, introduced norms that challenged centuries-old customs and traditions, and fostered a nascent civil society, allowing Russia to follow the basic trajectory of Western European socio-political development.

1 Introduction

The 1861 emancipation of over 23 million privately owned serfs was a political watershed in which Russians at all levels of society were invited for the first time to negotiate the terms of their social and political relationships in the villages. At mid-century, the “peasant question,” in one form or another, dominated the conversations of intellectuals, court dignitaries, provincial landowners, and even serfs. For most educated Russians, however, the emancipation was an intellectual puzzle, far removed from the muddy fields of the provinces. Not so for 33-year-old Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, who accepted the newly created position of peace arbitrator (mirovoi posrednik) “before his conscience,” in the spirit of what he called “service to the people.”¹ As a consequence of the emancipation legislation, the imperial state charged Tolstoy and some 1,700 other fresh arbitrators with forging new rural relationships based on legal contracts and establishing institutional linkages between the imperial state, noble landlords, and their former peasant bondsmen.

The tasks were daunting, given the conflicting interests and confounded hopes that emancipation evoked. The emancipation, for all its years of careful preparation, pleased almost no one in the provinces. Although the serfs were freed with land, legal allotments fell far short of what they hoped for and believed they deserved. Landowners, forced to relinquish land and labor in the aggregate, scrambled for advantage by not-so-subtle manipulations of the law. They assumed the peace arbitrators, drawn from the nobility, would overlook such lapses in the spirit of estate solidarity. Landowners and serfs had virtually no experience in direct communication with one another, and still less in cooperation. For the arbitrators, elevating the peasantry to a free rural class meant reshaping centuries-old patterns of hierarchy, deference, and hostility.

The drama was palpable. In assuming their official duties, arbitrators found themselves under prolonged assault from former serfowners and serfs alike. Legally sworn to defend the goals of emancipation, but tied by birth and habit to the noble estate, the arbitrators earned the enmity of their landowning peers, who saw them as betrayers. “Despite the fact that I led matters conscientiously and impartially,” wrote Tolstoy in 1862, “I provoked the intense anger of the nobility. They want to thrash me and bring me to court.”² Nor were the peasants grateful for an arbitrator, who, to their way of thinking, was but a new stooge of the master. “Well, what can you expect from a peace arbitrator? The masters choose people under their thumbs,” one peasant complained.³ It was a dangerously narrow path between the “outraged pride” of the local nobility and the peasants’ “inability to limit their demands and hopes.”⁴

The institution of peace arbitrator was central to the legislation of 1861.⁵ The arbitrator figured as the main administrative authority in the countryside during the implementation of emancipation. The legislation charged the institution with significant responsibilities: to supervise and verify land transfer charters (ustavnye gramoty), drafted in accordance with state-established norms; to convene and administer new organs of peasant self-administration; to investigate and resolve disputes arising from emancipation; to prosecute petty crime; and to maintain the peace. The legislation authorized the arbitrators to act independently and informally, supervised only by a district assembly (s″ezd) of their arbitrator peers and the state-organized Provincial Office of Peasant Affairs. Arbitrators performed all of their duties openly before the affected parties and, by means of published minutes and open deliberative sessions, before the whole of Russia. Far from the centers of state authority, the arbitrators met with the formerly isolated rural estates, encouraged them to articulate their political and economic interests, and finally found ways of reconciling these with state goals. In the process, the peace arbitrators established the necessary preconditions for self-administration, and indeed the construction of a Russian rural public.

Why had the autocratic state allowed this incursion into its political hegemony? It was, in effect, a calculated gamble. For raisons d’état, the state decided that its international strength and internal harmony depended on the elimination of the decaying institution of serfdom. But however economically, politically, and morally debilitating serfdom was, the state simply could not trust its human and financial resources to safely emancipate half of its population at a stroke. Serfdom was the economic mainstay of the nation’s elite estate, and the source of its political privilege. It also leashed the energies of the fearful and misunderstood masses of the peasantry, however tenuous this control seemed at times. The release of both sources of political energy that emancipation would generate was beyond the ability of the existing imperial bureaucracy to control.

There were few active defenders of serfdom remaining by the 1850s. The Russian state, by mid-century, had long been committed to emancipation, at least in principle. Its only concern was how to carry it off without bringing down the entire autocratic system. If emancipation could be accomplished without destroying their economic and social privilege, most noblemen, too, would have accepted the idea, even if they would not have embraced it outright. There was, however, a small minority who broke away from this passivity and openly advocated emancipation. As desultory discussions of the administrative problem continued in state circles, abolitionist sentiment grew into active calls for reform. After its long and uncomfortable slumber of the Nicolaevan years, Russian society was beginning to shake itself awake.

Now came the state’s gamble. If the activism of this eager minority could somehow be harnessed to state goals, the state could resolve the personnel dilemma. In addition, if society were called upon to participate in the abolition of serfdom, the state would be less likely to encounter resistance when the time came to actually implement the plan. The peace arbitrator was the fruit of this innovative strategy of co-optation. But how to draw the energies of the best part of society to the state’s side? In a peculiar mix of election and appointment, provincial governors chose the arbitrators from lists of local landowners qualified in terms of age, landholding, and education, prepared by the district noble assemblies.⁶ But lest the arbitrators become the exclusive partisans of their own noble estate, Minister of Internal Affairs S.S. Lanskoi demanded the exclusion of candidates who, “from their former social activity or generally by their way of thinking” appeared biased toward noble interests.⁷ As further insurance against noble hegemony, the statutes promised that peasants, too, would be given some role in electing arbitrators in future.⁸ The arbitrators were subordinate neither to the imperial bureaucracy nor to local corporative bodies. Enjoying equal rank and salary to the provincial marshals of the nobility, they were officially accountable only to the Imperial Senate.⁹ State legislators hoped that such unprecedented authority, independence, and glasnost′ would draw committed and able candidates to insure the peasants’ smooth transition into civil life.¹⁰

The gamble was not without serious risks. The tether binding society and the state would be a long one. The peace arbitrator’s daily connections with both rural estates placed him in an ideal position to foment rebellion. It wouldn’t do for the public, once mobilized, to break away from the close supervision of state authorities. Moreover, there was no guarantee that the arbitrators, drawn from the nobility but sympathetic to the peasantry, would not drift into the camp of one or the other of the two estates, exacerbating discord between them and thus compromising local political stability.

Despite these anxieties, the creation of arbitration institutions appeared fully vindicated by late 1863. The emancipation process was irrevocably underway, and no major social disruption hindered its progress. Still, at root, a permanent, fully institutionalized vehicle for mediating fluctuating public interests did not comfortably fit with the autocracy’s vision of orderly social change nor with its habitual compartmentalization of the social estates (sosloviia). Step by step, the state neutralized the unusual public principles that underlay the peace arbitrator, and the institution reverted to a minor cog in the bureaucratic machine. In 1874, the state eliminated the office of peace arbitrator with little fanfare. The dangerous moment of implementation thus passed peacefully, and the Russian state resumed its lurching and ambivalent pursuit of Western European modernization with new energy.

Scholarly literature on the emancipation of 1861 is extraordinarily rich, a testament to the obvious historical importance of the event. Pre-revolutionary literature, still very close to the events in question, primarily focused on the political meaning of the reform, its place in the evolution of Russian high politics, and its role in the life of the state. After 1917, Soviet historians drew research direction from V.I. Lenin’s few assessments of emancipation. According to Lenin, the nobility hampered the full realization of bourgeois goals by systematically stripping the legislation of any benefit it offered on behalf of the peasantry. With new access to the archives, Soviet studies often took a social and quantitative approach in identifying the transformation of the Russian countryside from a feudal to capitalist mode of production. They also explored the perceptions of the “revolutionary democrats,” who, for the most part, criticized rather than participated in the reform. The so-called “revolutionary situation school,” under the leadership of M.V. Nechkina, drew further on Lenin’s characterization of the emancipation as a bourgeois reform implemented by a feudal nobility. In the context of a revolutionary situation and plagued by internal strife, the state conceded reform but placed its implementation of it into the hands of its “ruling class.” In the 1960s, P.A. Zaionchkovskii meticulously collected archival data to reintegrate the autocratic state as a participant in the reforms, as both a generator and obstructer of wide-scale social change. What these approaches offer the present study, besides critical archival data frequently cited, is the conviction that the emancipation represented the intersection of national and local politics. To ignore alarming political activity from below or calculated policy-making from above is to compromise a thorough view of the unprecedented political situation that the reform generated.¹¹ Because it both shaped and was shaped by politics at both levels, the institution of peace arbitrator offers a central perspective on emancipation that cannot be achieved by the study of state policy or popular politics alone.

In the spirit of Zaionchkovskii, Larissa Zakharova clarified the long-term strategies of the autocratic state and its bureaucrats, which she termed “bourgeois.” W. Bruce Lincoln found the origins of these strategies in a cadre of “enlightened bureaucrats,” whose technical expertise and connections with educated elites from outside state circles enabled a stifling autocratic regime to enact social legislation. Alfred Rieber further contended that Alexander II’s own reformist impulses and commitment to emancipation were crucial in jump starting the reform process and breaking stalemates. Beyond studies of the state, Terence Emmons’ microstudy of noble liberalism in Tver′ and Daniel Field’s exploration of the reformers’ “engineering” of noble assent added significant studies of elite contributions and reactions to the emancipation. On the other hand, the peculiarly peasant politicization and organization surrounding emancipation appears at the center of studies by David Moon, Daniel Field, Peter Kolchin, and V.A. Fedorov. All of these works necessarily complicate the cause, course, and consequences of the emancipation and highlight the diversity and fluidity of interests, associations, and alliances in the late imperial period. It is also impossible to ignore the omnipresence and relative influence of the autocratic state on all political affairs in the Empire, no matter from what vantage point they are viewed.¹² While excellent monographs in English and in Russian on the abolition of serfdom from the perspectives of the central bureaucracy, the nobility, and the peasantry already exist, this study seeks to add a different perspective on the emancipation by examining the vehicle by which the interests of the nobility, peasantry, and the state met, clashed, and took new shapes: the institution of peace arbitrator. Such a vantage point uncovers the process of emancipation in the villages, the setting it was intended to transform, and reveals the compromises, ambiguities, obstacles, and opportunities inherent in implementing any reform at the local level. Politics is not just about intentions and outcomes, but also the process by which intentions are translated into outcomes.

Despite the centrality of the institution and its significance in the minds of its nineteenth-century contemporaries, the peace arbitrator has received relatively little specific attention from historians. In the pre-revolutionary period, the peace arbitrator made an appearance in the works of two state officials, I.M. Strakhovskii and M.M. Kataev. Both authors, however, limited their analysis of the institution to its creation through the state legislative process. The historian A.A. Kornilov attempted a more thorough study of the institution (1911), but the work suffered from a lack of perspective. Perhaps the emancipation and its disappointments were simply too close in memory. A spirit of nostalgia pervaded Kornilov’s analysis, and the deeper political significance of the institution was glossed over with a few words of praise about the heroic exploits of the arbitrators.¹³ Soviet scholars, on the other hand, identified the arbitrators as reactionary agents of the nobility, and set out to statistically identify the degree of economic exploitation suffered by the peasantry as a result. Even P.A. Zaionchkovskii wrote off the peace arbitrators, with few exceptions, as ardent defenders of noble interests alone. N.M. Druzhinin, while recognizing the importance of the peace arbitrator, associated it wholly with pre-reform institutions of gentry estate administration. V.G. Chernukha similarly evaluated the arbitrators in terms of concessions to the nobility forced on a not-so-unwilling state.¹⁴ Both pre-revolutionary and Soviet scholars, in other words, categorized the arbitrators as representatives of aggregate political associations or mentalities, whether liberal or reactionary. Such categorizations bury the range of ways that the arbitrators perceived themselves and their mandate. More than this, a focus on the outcomes of the arbitrators’ activities shifts attention away from the important political processes they set in motion in the villages, and the ways that rural people contributed to these changes.

The first book-length study devoted exclusively to the peace arbitrator was the doctoral dissertation of American scholar Jerman Rose. Rose happened on the topic of the peace arbitrator while researching local police administration. Struck by the repeated reference to the office of peace arbitrator in the police archives, Rose turned his attention to a focused study of the institution. The analysis was framed by a model of “changing institutional structure in a transitional society.” Rose highlighted the paradox inherent in the duties of the peace arbitrator, who was both the manifestation of autocratic police authority as well as the bearer of new liberal legal norms. To Rose, this was evidence of the hit-or-miss quality of administrative and police reform in modernizing societies.¹⁵ Rose rejected oversimplified views of the institution as reflective of noble or state interests alone, but his structural analysis did little to further our understanding of its place in the development of rural political culture.

L.G. Zakharova was the first to suggest that the institution of peace arbitrator was not simply a reformulation of feudal political principles. Emphasizing the novelty of the new institution, she associated the peace arbitrator with bourgeois bureaucratic norms of institutional irrevocability and public accountability of officials.¹⁶ Following Zakharova’s lead, a more through analysis—and archival research central to this study—was presented in N.F. Ust′iantseva’s doctoral dissertation and the two published articles drawn from it.¹⁷ Based on the extensive use of central archival data, the dissertation elucidated the principles underlying the institution of peace arbitrator, its position amongst other reform legislation, its statistical composition, and its evaluation in the periodical press. These investigations are an invaluable core resource for advanced research on the institution of the peace arbitrator. But Ust′iantseva’s argument for the arbitrators as the representatives of new state-defined bureaucratic norms still does little to explain how those norms were translated, challenged, or reshaped at ground level. In the “defining moment,” as Alan Wildman put it, the immediate period after emancipation, the arbitrators were effectively divorced from state power altogether, except for the normative guidelines crafted in St. Petersburg.¹⁸ Ust′iantseva is correct to conclude that once the state withdrew its unusual patronage from the institution, public interest in the arbitrators faded, along with the commitment and energy of new personnel. What did not disappear, however, were the new relationships, attitudes, and methods that emancipation generated and the arbitrators implemented. For all the studies that focus on the motives and goals of state legislators or of the arbitrators themselves, the process by which society ingested and implemented those messages on the ground remains blurry. Although the first levy of peace arbitrators served only three tension-filled years, the profound changes they set in motion had deep implications for the development of rural politics in the half-century ahead.

The present study assumes that a full analysis of the peace arbitrator requires not only an institutional study, as Rose and Ust′iantseva pioneered, but also a political, social, and cultural one. It is a political history, but in the widest sense of the word: the recognition, expression, and negotiation of interests at the local and national level. Even in an autocratic regime, the transmission of central directives filtered not only through a variety of bureaucratic channels, but also through the prism of conflicting interests and perceptions of the objects of the law. The historical crisis of emancipation—and its resolution—was the result of competing political decisions on the part of individuals who actively experienced it, in all its uncertainty. The peace arbitrator, as the precise point at which state, noble, and peasant interests met and mingled, exposes to our view a multilayered slice of Russian politics at this turbulent period of transition and crisis. The diversity, competition, and exchange of views emancipation exposed indicate that the peace arbitrators brought Russia one step closer to the development of a public sphere, without which there could be no genuine civil society.

Academic discussions about the origins, development, and ultimate fate of Russian civil society have, in many ways, reached an impasse.¹⁹ The slipperiness of the term itself, its close association with the Western European historical trajectory, the restraints imposed on it by an autocratic political paradigm, and its failures in the post-revolutionary period have rendered the concept of a civil society in Russia problematic. But for all the volumes and conference papers devoted to redefining civil society, the term still seems useful as a baseline for charting and complicating the profound changes set in motion by the Great Reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. Alan Kimball schematizes civil society as a constellation of three interlocking rings, representing social groups and formations (society itself), political power (the state), and production and distribution of commodities and services (the economy). Relationships among the three a...