The Emancipation of the Serfs

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 May 2018

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 1861 declaration by Tsar Alexander II that serfs were now legally free of their landlords. Until then, over a third of Russians were tied to the land on which they lived and worked and in practice there was little to distinguish their condition from slavery. Russia had lost the Crimean War in 1855 and there had been hundreds of uprisings, prompting the Tsar to tell the nobles, "The existing condition of owning souls cannot remain unchanged. It is better to begin to destroy serfdom from above than to wait until that time when it begins to destroy itself from below." Reform was constrained by the Tsar's wish to keep the nobles on side and, for the serfs, tied by debt and law to the little land they were then allotted, the benefits were hard to see. With Sarah Hudspith Associate Professor in Russian at the University of Leeds Simon Dixon The Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History at UCL And Shane O'Rourke Senior Lecturer in History at the University of York Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:02.0	Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time.
0:05.0	There's a reading list to go with it on our website.
0:07.0	And you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time.
0:12.0	I hope you enjoyed the programs.
0:14.0	Hello, in March 1861 in St Petersburg, Tsar Alexander II proclaimed that Russian Serbs were now free.
0:21.0	Alexander's noble, so known tens of millions of slabs or serfs, effectively slaves
0:27.0	who worked their land and could be bought and sold, centipiting wars, flogged and even killed with impunity.
0:33.0	There was a catch in their freedom, though.
0:35.0	The former Serbs needed to grow land, needed land to grow their food.
0:39.0	The noble kept the best for themselves, and the Serbs had to pay for their allotted scraps of birth for decades, tied to servitude by debt.
0:46.0	More reforms were needed but non-came.
0:48.0	And the tensions, the scholars argue, helped pull Russia apart in 1917.
0:54.0	We need to discuss the emancipation of the Serbs, our Sarah Hotspith, associate professor in Russian at the University of Leeds, Simon Dixon, a subordinate,
1:03.0	Paz professor of Russian history at UCL, and Shane Oroch, senior lecturer in history at the University of York.
1:10.0	Simon Dixon, what were the origins of Serbs?
1:13.0	Well, the origins of Serfdom lay in a process that took best part of 200 years already between the 15th and the 17th centuries,
1:21.0	mid-15th and mid-17th centuries, and the logic there was driven partly by the need of the state to pluricate particular interest groups.
1:31.0	Because that, 200 year period, was a period of musk-right territorial expansion.
1:36.0	And so, in a free market, the price of labour would have gone up.
1:40.0	And indeed it did go up, and the logical consequence of that was that peasant started running away, from lords who couldn't pay them, to lords who could pay them more.
1:50.0	And that was a problem for the state, because the state needed the middle-ranking landlords to officer the cavalry.
	...

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