Peter Kropótkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1861)
Largely engineered by French emperor Napoleon III to advance his territorial ambitions, the Crimean War (1853–1856) opened the door to a major shift in the distribution of European power. With the death toll mounting at the hands of France and its allies, Russia asked for peace. Russia’s defeat marked the end of its role as a mainstay of the concert of Europe, and also revealed the country’s inability to compete in the rapidly changing industrial world. Among Russia’s greatest liabilities was the institution of serfdom—binding the peasant population to the land—which inhibited the growth of a modern labor force and fostered widespread discontent. After years of discussion and debate, Russian tsar Alexander II (r. 1855–1881) chose a momentous solution to combat these problems: on March 3, 1861, he issued the Emancipation Manifesto officially abolishing serfdom. In the following excerpt from his memoirs published in 1899, Prince Peter Kropótkin (1842–1921) provides a firsthand glimpse of how people in St. Petersburg reacted to the emancipation decree and of its impact on one of his family estates. At the time, Kropótkin was a student at a select military school in St. Petersburg, the Corps of Pages, and he later gained fame as a revolutionary and anarchist.
From Peter Kropótkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (New York: Horizon Press, 1968), 133–36.
I was at the corps, having to take part in the military parade at the riding-school. I was still in bed, when my soldier servant, Ivánoff, dashed in with the tea tray, exclaiming, “Prince, freedom! The manifesto is posted on the Gostínoi Dvor” (the shops opposite the corps).
“Did you see it yourself?”
“Yes. People stand round; one reads, the others listen. It is freedom!”
In a couple of minutes I was dressed, and out. A comrade was coming in.
“Kropótkin, freedom!” he shouted. “Here is the manifesto. My uncle learned last night that it would be read at the early mass at the Isaac Cathedral; so we went. There were not many people there; peasants only. The manifesto was read and distributed after the mass. They well understood what it meant. When I came out of the church, two peasants, who stood in the gateway, said to me in such a droll way, ‘Well, sir? now—all gone?’” And he mimicked how they had shown him the way out. Years of expectation were in that gesture of sending away the master.
I read and re-read the manifesto. It was written in an elevated style by the old Metropolitan of Moscow, Philarète, but with a useless mixture of Russian and Old Slavonian which obscured the sense. . . . Notwithstanding all this, one thing was evident: serfdom was abolished, and the liberated serfs would get the land and their homesteads. They would have to pay for it, but the old stain of slavery was removed. They would be slaves no more; the reaction had not got the upper hand.
We went to the parade; and when all the military performances were over, Alexander II, remaining on horseback, loudly called out, “The officers to me!” They gathered round him, and he began, in a loud voice, a speech about the great event of the day.
“The officers . . . the representatives of the nobility in the army”—these scraps of sentences reached our ears—“an end has been put to centuries of injustice . . . I expect sacrifices from the nobility . . . the loyal nobility will gather round the throne” . . . and so on. Enthusiastic hurrahs resounded amongst the officers as he ended.
We ran rather than marched back on our way to the corps,—hurrying to be in time for the Italian opera, of which the last performance in the season was to be given that afternoon; some manifestation was sure to take place then. Our military attire was flung off with great haste, and several of us dashed, light-footed, to the sixth-story gallery. The house was crowded.
During the first entr’acte the smoking-room of the opera filled with excited young men, who all talked to one another, whether acquainted or not. We planned at once to return to the hall, and to sing, with the whole public in a mass choir, the hymn “God Save the Tsar.”
However, sounds of music reached our ears, and we all hurried back to the hall. The band of the opera was already playing the hymn, which was drowned immediately in enthusiastic hurrahs coming from all parts of the hall. I saw Bavéri, the conductor of the band, waving his stick, but not a sound could be heard from the powerful band. Then Bavéri stopped, but the hurrahs continued. I saw the stick waved again in the air; I saw the fiddle-bows moving, and musicians blowing the brass instruments, but again the sound of voices overwhelmed the band. Bavéri began conducting the hymn once more, and it was only by the end of that third repetition that isolated sounds of the brass instruments pierced through the clamor of human voices.
The same enthusiasm was in the streets. Crowds of peasants and educated men stood in front of the palace, shouting hurrahs, and the Tsar could not appear without being followed by demonstrative crowds running after his carriage. . . .
Where were the uprisings which had been predicted by the champions of slavery? Conditions more indefinite than those which had been created by the Polozhénie (the emancipation law) could not have been invented. If anything could have provoked revolts, it was precisely the perplexing vagueness of the conditions created by the new law. And yet, except in two places where there were insurrections, and a very few other spots where small disturbances entirely due to misunderstandings and immediately appeased took place, Russia remained quiet,—more quiet than ever. With their usual good sense, the peasants had understood that serfdom was done away with, that “freedom had come,” and they accepted the conditions imposed upon them, although these conditions were very heavy.
I was in Nikólskoye in August, 1861, and again in the summer of 1862, and I was struck with the quiet, intelligent way in which the peasants had accepted the new conditions. They knew perfectly well how difficult it would be to pay the redemption tax for the land, which was in reality an indemnity to the nobles in lieu of the obligations of serfdom. But they so much valued the abolition of their personal enslavement that they accepted the ruinous charges—not without murmuring, but as a hard necessity—the moment that personal freedom was obtained. For the first months they kept two holidays a week, saying that it was a sin to work on Friday; but when the summer came they resumed work with even more energy than before.
When I saw our Nikólskoye peasants, fifteen months after the liberation, I could not but admire them. Their inborn good nature and softness remained with them, but all traces of servility had disappeared. They talked to their masters as equals talk to equals, as if they never had stood in different relations.
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