Despite its odious reputation as the bulwark of brutal reaction, the Russia of Nicholas I had incessantly, if clandestinely, pondered the prospects and process of reform. From the very first years of his reign, and partly in response to the Decembrist uprising, Nicholas I (1825–55) did not fail to discern the fundamental problems afflicting his land—from its corrupt bureaucracy to the serfdom that seemed so similar to slavery. Although the state under Nicholas recognized the need for reform, even in the case of serfdom, it had resisted taking decisive and especially public measures and, instead, contented itself primarily with cautious and (above all) secret reforms. Fear of uncontrolled social disorders, an unquestioning belief in the power and omniscience of bureaucracy, a smug assurance of Russia’s military prowess despite its markedly un-Western system and economic backwardness—all this encouraged the conceit that Russia could be a great power
With Nicholas’s death, however, the regime soon embarked on wide-ranging reform, including the Gordian knot of serf emancipation. To explain why the Russian state finally embarked on reform, historians have advanced a number of theories. One explanation, popular among pre-revolutionary and Western historians, emphasized the triumph of liberal humanitarian ideas within the higher ranks of state and society: imbued with Western values and culture, these élites could not fail to recognize the contradiction to their own status as serf-owners. While the influence of Western ideas can hardly be denied for some parts of the élite, it certainly did not extend to the nobility as a whole; most, in fact, vehemently opposed emancipation. Some Marxist historians, chiefly Soviet, have emphasized the economic factor:as the nobility found their estates becoming less productive, as their debts and the spectre of bankruptcy increased, the serf-owners themselves supposedly came to recognize the inefficiency of serfdom and the validity of criticism by Western liberal economists. Again, although isolated expressions of these views can be found, such sentiments were hardly prevalent among most members of the government or the nobility. A third interpretation stresses fear of peasant unrest: cognizant of the statistics on murder and the incidence of peasant rebellion (which swelled from 990 disorders in 1796–1826 to 1,799 disorders in 1826–56), nobles and bureaucrats purportedly came to realize that emancipation alone, not procrastination, could ensure social stability in the countryside. While fear certainly did grip many members of the provincial nobility, it did not figure significantly in the calculations of the high-ranking state officials who actually engineered emancipation. The latter, the emperor concluded, were indeed wont to exploit noble fears, but they themselves did not evince real concern for their own safety.
Why, then, did the regime finally take the fateful step towards emancipation? Although the factors cited above to some degree did abet the process, the key linchpin in fact was the débâcle of the Crimean War. That foreign fiasco led to domestic reconstruction, for it exposed the real backwardness and weakness of the old servile order and all that it connoted. The Crimean War not only exacted a high cost in lives, resources, and prestige, but also vitiated the main impediment to reform—the belief that the existing order was consonant with stability and power. As a liberal Slavophile Iurii Samarin wrote in 1856: ‘We were vanquished not by the foreign armies of the Western alliances, but by our own internal weaknesses’. The same year a liberal Westernizer Boris Chicherin wrote that, without the abolition of serfdom, ‘no questions can be resolved—whether political, administrative, or social’. Even before the war had been irrevocably lost, conservatives as well as liberals had come to much the same conclusion.
Emancipation of the Serfs
