In the 1850s, Russia was a poor agrarian society with a rapidly growing population. Almost 90 percent of the people lived off the land, and industrialization developed slowly. Bound to the lord from birth, the peasant serf was little more than a slave, and by the 1840s, serfdom had become a central moral and political issue for the government. The slow pace of modernization encouraged the growth of protest movements. Then a humiliating Russian defeat in the Crimean War underscored the need for modernizing reforms.

The Crimean War (1853–1856) grew out of the breakdown of the European balance of power established at the Congress of Vienna (see "The European Balance of Power" in Chapter 21), general Great Power competition over the Middle East, and Russian desires to expand into the European territories of the Ottoman Empire. An immediate Russian-French dispute over the protection of Christian shrines in Jerusalem sparked the conflict. By 1856, France and Great Britain, aided by the Ottoman Empire and Sardinia, had decisively defeated Russia.

The war convinced Russia’s leaders that they had fallen behind the industrializing nations of western Europe. Thus, military disaster forced liberal-leaning Tsar Alexander II (r. 1855–1881) and his ministers along the path of rapid social change and modernization. In a bold move, Alexander II abolished serfdom in 1861. About 22 million emancipated peasants received citizenship rights and the chance to purchase, on average, about half of the land they cultivated. Yet they had to pay fairly high prices, and because the land was to be owned collectively, each peasant village was jointly responsible for the payments of all the families in the village. Collective ownership made it difficult for individual peasants to improve agricultural methods or leave their villages. Thus old patterns of behavior predominated, limiting the effects of reform.

Most of Alexander II’s later reforms were also halfway measures. In 1864, the government established new elected local assemblies, the zemstvos. The zemstvos, however, remained subordinate to the traditional bureaucracy and the local nobility. In addition, changes to the legal system established independent courts and equality before the law. The government relaxed but did not remove censorship, and it somewhat liberalized policies toward Russian Jews.

Russian efforts to promote economic modernization proved more successful. Transportation and industry, both vital to the military, were transformed in two industrial surges. The first came after 1860, when the government encouraged and subsidized private railway companies. The railroads enabled Russia to export grain and thus earn money to finance further development. Industrial suburbs grew around Moscow and St. Petersburg, and a class of modern factory workers began to take shape.

Strengthened by industrial development, Russia began seizing territory in far eastern Siberia, on the border with China; in Central Asia, north of Afghanistan; and in the Islamic lands of the Caucasus. The rapid expansion of the Russian empire to the south and east excited ardent Russian nationalists and superpatriots, who became some of the government’s most enthusiastic supporters.

In 1881, a member of the “People’s Will,” a small anarchist group, assassinated the tsar, and the era of reform came to an abrupt end. The new tsar, Alexander III (r. 1881–1894), was a determined reactionary. Nevertheless, from 1890 to 1900, economic modernization and industrialization surged ahead for the second time, led by finance minister Sergei Witte (suhr-GAY VIH-tuh).

Witte’s greatest innovation was to use Westerners to catch up with the West. He encouraged foreigners to build factories in Russia. His efforts were especially successful in southern Russia. There, foreign entrepreneurs and engineers built an enormous and very modern steel and coal industry. In 1900, peasants still constituted the great majority of the population, but Russia was catching up with the more industrialized West.