ABSTRACT
The 1861 emancipation of over 23 million privately owned serfs was a political watershed in which Russians at all levels of society were invited for the first time to negotiate the terms of their social and political relationships in the villages. At mid-century, the “peasant question,” in one form or another, dominated the conversations of intellectuals, court dignitaries, provincial landowners, and even serfs. For most educated Russians, however, the emancipation was an intellectual puzzle, far removed from the muddy fields of the provinces. Not so for 33-year-old Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, who accepted the newly created position of peace arbitrator (mirovoi posrednik) “before his conscience,” in the spirit of what he called “service to the people.”1 As a consequence of the emancipation legislation, the imperial state charged Tolstoy and some 1,700 other fresh arbitrators with forging new rural relationships based on legal contracts and establishing institutional linkages between the imperial state, noble landlords, and their former peasant bondsmen. The tasks were daunting, given the conflicting interests and confounded
hopes that emancipation evoked. The emancipation, for all its years of careful preparation, pleased almost no one in the provinces. Although the serfs were freed with land, legal allotments fell far short of what they hoped for and believed they deserved. Landowners, forced to relinquish land and labor in the aggregate, scrambled for advantage by not-so-subtle manipulations of the law. They assumed the peace arbitrators, drawn from the nobility, would overlook such lapses in the spirit of estate solidarity. Landowners and serfs had virtually no experience in direct communication with one another, and still less in cooperation. For the arbitrators, elevating the peasantry to a free rural class meant reshaping centuries-old patterns of hierarchy, deference, and hostility. The drama was palpable. In assuming their official duties, arbitrators
found themselves under prolonged assault from former serfowners and serfs alike. Legally sworn to defend the goals of emancipation, but tied by birth and habit to the noble estate, the arbitrators earned the enmity of their landowning peers, who saw them as betrayers. “Despite the fact that I led matters conscientiously and impartially,” wrote Tolstoy in 1862, “I provoked
the intense anger of the nobility. They want to thrash me and bring me to court.”2 Nor were the peasants grateful for an arbitrator, who, to their way of thinking, was but a new stooge of the master. “Well, what can you expect from a peace arbitrator? The masters choose people under their thumbs,” one peasant complained.3 It was a dangerously narrow path between the “outraged pride” of the local nobility and the peasants’ “inability to limit their demands and hopes.”4
