Confronting Serfdom in the Age of Revolution: Projects for Serf Reform in the Time of Alexander I

Abstract

During the Age of Revolution public-minded people both inside and outside governments across the European world took up the fundamental problem of human freedom. Of course, liberation meant different things in different countries. In the Russian Empire it meant peasant emancipation from serfdom. During the reign of Alexander I (1801-25) the emancipation question was addressed from a number of angles, often with the tsar's encouragement. Although the discussion only rarely appeared in open publication, peasants, policymakers, and political economists all advanced the debate about peasant emancipation. In fact, the record of this conversation that exists in projects for legal reform, in peasant complaints, and in economic treatises demonstrates that by the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century most of the key elements of the eventual emancipation legislation had been vetted. That the political and social consensus necessary to untie the knot of serfdom did not arise during Alexander's reign can be considered partly, but not entirely, his fault. Alexander I surely vacillated, as the complex matter elicited every kind of conflicting opinion, and his vacillation compares unfavorably with the determination of his nephew, Alexander II. But the second Alexander inherited a political landscape conditioned by six decades of semipublic discussion of how emancipation could be achieved, as well as a state bureaucracy that had vetted a number of schemes for full emancipation and digested the lessons of various partial reforms. While it is traditional to tell the story of the Russian road to emancipation as commencing in the 1840s, doing so produces a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Russian state, landowners, and peasants arrived at 19 February 1861. In fact, the