ABSTRACT
On 19 February 1861 Tsar Alexander II signed into law the Statutes abolishing serfdom in the Russian Empire. The reform directly affected around 22 million peasant men, women and children, and around 100,000 noble estate owners to whom they belonged as serfs. The magnitude of the reform is demonstrated by the fact that, on the eve of the reform, serfs of noble estate owners made up around 35 per cent of the Empire’s total population. The abolition of serfdom was not, however, a single ‘event’ that took place in early 1861 and led to the immediate ‘emancipation’ of the serfs. Rather, it was a process spread out over several decades (Kolchin, 1996: 52–5; Mironov, 1996: 335–46). It is argued in this book that the process of abolishing serfdom in the Russian Empire lasted almost a century and a half, from 1762 to 1907.
