The new Tsar believed that the liberation of the serfs was a necessary measure to prevent a revolution. ‘It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait for the time when it begins to abolish itself from below,’ he told a group of Moscow noblemen in 1856. The defeat in the Crimean War had persuaded Alexander that Russia could not compete with the Western powers until it swept aside its old serf economy and modernized itself. The gentry had very little idea how to make a profit from their estates. Most of them knew next to nothing about agriculture or accounting. Yet they went on spending in the same old lavish way as they had always done, mounting up enormous debts. By 1859 one-third of the estates and two-thirds of the serfs owned by the landed nobles had been mortgaged to the state and noble banks. The economic argument for emancipation was becoming irrefutable, and many landowners were shifting willy-nilly to the free labour system by contracting other people’s serfs. Since the peasantry’s redemption payments would cancel out the gentry’s debts, the economic rationale was becoming irresistible.bf
In 1858 the Tsar appointed a special commission to formulate proposals for the emancipation in consultation with provincial gentry committees. Under pressure from diehard squires to limit the reform or to fix the rules for the land transfers in their favour, the commission became bogged down in political wrangling for the best part of two years. In the end, the reactionary gentry were defeated and the moderate reformists got their way, thanks in no small measure to the personal intervention of the Tsar. The Edict of Emancipation was signed by Alexander on 19 February 1861 and read to the peasants by their parish priests. It was not as far-reaching as the peasantry had expected. The Edict allowed the landowners considerable leeway in choosing the bits of land for transfer to the peasantry, and in setting the redemption dues the peasant communes would have to pay for them, whereas the peasants had expected to be given all the land without payment.bg There were rebellions in many areas, sometimes after rumours circulated that the published law was not the one the Tsar had meant to sign but a forgery by nobles and officials who wanted to prevent the real emancipation, the long-awaited ‘Golden Manifesto’ in which the Tsar would liberate the peasants and give them all the land.
Despite the disappointment of the peasantry, the emancipation was a crucial watershed. Freedom of a sort, however limited it may have been in practice, had at last been granted to the mass of the people, and there were grounds to hope for a national rebirth. Writers compared the Edict to the conversion of Russia to Christianity in the tenth century. They spoke about the need for Young Russia to liberate itself from the sins of its past, whose riches had been purchased by the people’s sweat and blood, about the need for the landlord and the peasant to overcome their old divisions and become reconciled by nationality. For, as Fedor Dostoevsky wrote in 1861, ‘every Russian is a Russian first of all’.40
Along with the emancipation of the serfs, the defeat in the Crimean War accelerated the Tsar’s plans for a reform of the army. Tolstoy was not the only officer to advance proposals for reform during the Crimean War. In the summer of 1855, Count Fedor Ridiger, commander of the Guards and Grenadiers, endorsed many of Tolstoy’s criticisms of the officers corps in a memorandum to the Tsar. Blaming Russia’s imminent defeat on the gross incompetence of the senior command and the army’s administration, Ridiger advised that officers should be trained in military science rather than in parades and reviews, and that those with talent should be given wider scope to take responsibility on the battlefield. Shortly afterwards, similar ideas were put forward by another high-ranking member of the military establishment, Adjutant General V. A. Glinka, who also criticized the army’s system of supply. Proposals were advanced for the building of railways, the lack of which, it was agreed by everyone, had been a major reason for the supply problems of the military during the Crimean War.41
