The roots of the agricultural crisis clearly go back to the very terms of emancipation: emancipation transferred the land to the peasant commune, not the individual peasant. The system was partly designed so as to ensure payment, for communal ownership also meant communal (not individual) responsibility for tax and redemption payments. This arrangement greatly facilitated tax-collection (sparing the state the onus of tracking down individual defaulters); given collective accountability, the commune had a powerful motive for ensuring that land was apportioned according to the ability to use it (i.e. according to the number of able-bodied workers in a family). Since family composition naturally changed over time (through births, marriages, and deaths), the commune periodically redistributed land to take these changes into account. Communal landownership also had another appealing feature: it guaranteed each peasant the right to a fair share of land and therefore served to avoid creating a landless proletariat. Indeed, the statute made it virtually impossible for a peasant to alienate his land even if he so wished.
While this arrangement ensured tax-collection and averted the formation of a rural proletariat, it was nevertheless fraught with significant long-term consequences. First, it tied the peasant to the village: since he could not alienate the land, he could not relocate permanently to the city (but, at most, obtain seasonal passports from his commune). Because of this impediment to migration to the city and because of the high rate of demographic growth (the population nearly doubled between 1863 and 1913), the inevitable result was the shrinking average size of peasant allotments—from 5.1 dessiatines (1860) to 2.7 (1900). Although the peasantry did purchase and lease private lands, such acquisitions failed to compensate for the steady demographic growth in the peasantry. The result, heard all across the empire by the late nineteenth century, was the central battle-cry of rebellious peasants—‘Land! Land! Land!’
Apart from encouraging peasants to eye jealously the huge fields of the nobility, the individual utilization of small allotments meant that the peasantry (despite their aggregate holdings) could not take advantage of economies of size and afford new technology. Moreover, communal landholding also proved highly inefficient: to ensure that each peasant had a share of the different kinds and quality of communal land, to link land allotment with a family’s labour resources, the Russian commune divided its fields into tiny strips (sometimes a yard wide) and periodically redistributed these (taking strips from families with fewer workers and giving them to families with more). This system of land utilization may have been socially just, but it was also economically regressive: it wasted much land on pathways, discouraged individual peasants from improving their strips (which were only temporary allotments), and forced all the peasants to observe the traditional three-field system (to avoid cross-fertilization, no peasant could violate communal practices).
The nobility, at least in theory, were far more advantageously positioned: they retained at least one-third of their entire arable land and obtained capital as compensation for the land redeemed by peasants. While many did seek to modernize and rationalize their estates, they soon encountered serious problems. One was a dearth of investment capital: much of the compensation vanished to cover old debts, and venture capital was as yet difficult to obtain. Labour constituted an additional problem; emancipation had taken away the ‘free’ corvée and obliged landowners to hire peasant workers, who were exceedingly expensive and notoriously unproductive. Nor were most estates easily linked to the domestic or foreign grain markets; until the railway knitted the empire together and cut transportation costs, many landowners had little incentive to modernize their estates in hopes of increasing productivity and output.
Saddled with all these disadvantages, peasant and gentry agriculture were soon to experience the most devastating factor of all: the collapse of the world grain markets in the 1870s and 1880s. The key was a steady increase in supply, as the railway and new oceanic shipping enabled a massive influx of grain from North American and other grain-producing areas outside Europe. The result was a sharp drop in grain prices between 1870 and 1890—about 38 per cent for wheat, 29 per cent for rye, and 41 per cent for barley. By the late 1870s a noble official in the blackearth province of Orel wrote that ‘anyone who looks at [this district] might well think that it has been ravaged by a hostile army—so pitiful has its position become’. The steady rise in peasant arrears (overdue tax and redemption payments) and a sharp increase in noble bankruptcies signalled the emergence of a full-scale agrarian crisis.
