Under the terms of the emancipation, the peasants were obliged to pay redemption dues on the land transferred to them. These repayments, calculated by the gentry’s own land commissions, were to be repaid over a forty-nine-year period to the state, which recompensed the gentry in 1861. Thus, in effect, the serfs bought their freedom by paying off their masters’ debts. The redemption payments became increasingly difficult to collect, not least because the peasantry regarded them as unjust from the start. They were finally cancelled in 1905.
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Overall, perhaps half the farming land in European Russia was transferred from the gentry’s ownership to the communal tenure of the peasantry, although the precise proportion depended largely on the landowner’s will.
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Shamil was sent to St Petersburg for a meeting with the Tsar. There he was treated as a celebrity by the Russian public, which for years had lived on tales of his courage and daring. Exiled to Kaluga, Shamil suffered from the cold. In 1868 he was moved to the warmer climate of Kiev, where he was given a mansion and a pension, and placed under only loose surveillance by the authorities. In 1869 he was allowed to leave for a pilgrimage to Mecca on condition that he left his oldest sons in Russia as hostages. After completing his pilgrimage to Mecca, he died in Medina in 1871. Two of his sons became officers in the Russian army, but two others fought for the Turks against the Russians in 1877 – 8.
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Ermak Timofeevich, the sixteenth-century Cossack leader and folk hero who began the exploration and military conquest of Siberia.
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Including the character of Vronsky at the end of Tolstoy’s novel
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It has since been shown that the metal in fact came from antique Chinese guns (J. Glanfield,
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The Rumiantsev Library and Museum, opened in Moscow in 1862, was not a public collection in this sense. It was donated to the public by a single nobleman.
Copyright © 2010 by Orlando Figes
All rights reserved.
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Published simultaneously in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books, London, as
eISBN 9781429997249
First eBook Edition : April 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Figes, Orlando.
The Crimean War : a history / Orlando Figes.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“Published simultaneously in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books, London”—T.p. verso.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8050-7460-4
1. Crimean War, 1853 – 1856. I. Title.
DK214.F53 2010
947’.0738—dc22
2010023152
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7460-4
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First Edition 2010
