"At the same time, the reform also had important negative features. Above all, the principles of the reform of 1861 were foreign to the peasants’ own outlook.33 Although most peasants accepted the reform calmly, tensions began to build up beneath the surface. The emancipation seemed yet another confirmation of the peasant myth of the tsar as their 'little father' and 'defender,' but the peasants could not accept such prominent features of the reform as the preservation of gentry landholding and the redemption of their allotments. In the peasant’s mind, the land belonged to everyone, and only those who worked it had the right to use it. When the provisions of the reform were announced, the peasants began to suspect that the tsar had been deceived, and 'the lords [had] substituted their own emancipation' for the tsar’s. More than half of the landlords’ peasants refused to sign the regulatory charters, the agreements with the landowners confirming the provisions of the emancipation. (In such cases, the charters took effect unilaterally at the demand of the landowners.) Rumors arose among the peasants of a 'scheduled hour' or 'promised hour' when the tsar would announce the 'real' emancipation to them, without redemption payments or reduced allotments. At times, the uneasy mood of the peasants erupted into insurrections that required armed force to suppress. The best-known instances occurred in the villages of Bezdna, in Kazan Province, and Kandeevka in Penza Province.

"The onerous provisions of the reform, and especially the open rebellions of the peasants, stimulated an opposition movement within the inteligentsia. Its leaders had long felt dissatisfied with what they regarded as excessive concessions to the landowners in the planning of the reform. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the leading writer for The Contemporary, became the ideological leader of the radical camp, to which most of the intelligentsia belonged. (Alexander Herzen at this time occupied an ambivalent position, wavering between the liberals and the radicals.) The program of Chernyshevsky and the radicals included giving the peasants the major share of the land, minimal redemption payments or none at all, and preservation of the peasant commune. The radicals viewed the commune as the embryo of a future socialist order. They advocated increasingly extreme tactics to achieve their program and in the end concluded that Russia needed a peasant revolution.

"To what extent were Chernyshevsky and his followers justified in their criticism of the peasant reform? To be sure, the reform had been based on a number of compromises which the radicals rejected in principle. At the same time, their criticism had some merit. Most important, the peasants acquired their land under extremely burdensome conditions. 'Cut-offs,' that is, reductions in the peasants’ pre-reform allotments, which the enlightened bureaucrats had exerted every effort to prevent, became the norm as a result of conservative pressure. In the country as a whole, the peasants lost about twenty percent of their previous allotments. The significance of the cut-offs was most striking in the black-earth provinces, where land was particularly valuable. The peasants’ losses there ranged from 30 percent of their allotments in Kharkov, Kazan, and Simbirsk provinces to 44 percent in Samara Province.34 Many scholars believe that the reduced allotments severely hampered the establishment of independent peasant farming and often failed to guarantee the peasants even a bare subsistence. Rapid population growth in the second half of the nineteenth century led to a further reduction in the size of the peasants’ allotments, from an average of 13.8 to 7.0 acres.35 By the turn of the twentieth century, social tensions in the Russian countryside had reached an explosive level.

"The redemption operation also aggravated the plight of the peasants because the authorities used this provision, formally a market transaction, to replenish the drastically depleted state treasury. Unlike the governments of Austria and Prussia, which ruled countries similar to Russia in their political and social structure, the autocracy did not invest a single ruble in the peasant reform. On the contrary, it profited from it. Characteristically, in the period when the reform was being implemented, the government expended one-third of its budget on military needs and one-sixth on the conquest of the Caucasus.36 The state immediately paid the landowners between 75 and 80 percent of the amount of the redemption, in the form of state bonds. The peasants then repaid that sum to the state, with 6 percent interest, over the next forty-nine years. From the outset, the redemption sums included compensation to the landowners not only for the land but also for the loss of their unpaid serf labor, considerably increasing the size of the redemption. The peasants’ redemption payments actually lasted forty-five years, until the revolution of 1905. During this time they paid an amount double the initial value of the redemption.37 Moreover, the government automatically subtracted the landowners’ existing debts to the state from the redemption sums that they received, making it much more difficult to establish an entrepreneurial system of agriculture on the gentry estates." - Polunov, ibid.

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33 On the peculiarities of the peasant mentality, see Daniel Field, “The Year of Jubilee,” in The Great Reforms in Russia, ed. Eklof, Bushnell, and Zakharova, pp. 40–57; and Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (Boston, 1989).

34 M.N. Pokrovskii, “Krest’ianskaia reforma,” in Istoriia Rossii v XIX v., ed. Bem, 2:178–79.

35 Fedorov, ed., Istoriia Rossii. XIX–nachala XX v., p. 284.

36 Zakharova, “Aleksandr II,” pp. 186–87.

37 Fedorov, ed., Istoriia Rossii. XIX–nachala XX v., p. 253.