Emancipation

Today I’m going to be examining whether the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 caused more problems then it solved.

The first problem that emancipation caused a huge rush of violence all over the provinces from all kinds of social classes and ethnicities, there were 647 incidents of violence in the 4 months that followed the edict, one of those was in the Kazan region where 70 peasants were killed, this military influence is similar to 499 of these cases, which needed military intervention. This frustration from the people he was trying to help shows how the majority of the nation felt a short time after the edict in 1861.

Secondly the minority of Russia, the nobility, were not too pleased either.  The nobility were highly impacted, by 1905 they had solved off a third off land and the rest 50-6-0% were used to stay afloat with loans from the banks, this loss of trust through the nobility and the tsar shows how badly it went as he lost his allies.

One of the positives from the emancipation is the growth in Russia’s economy, its average growth from 1861 to 1900 was 4.6% this shows surprisingly that the emancipation had a positive effect on the economy as a whole.

So to conclude although Russia did develop and this would, in my opinion, not happened without the emancipation. But the problems in the short term and the ineffectiveness to solve the peasants’ problems shows that yes the emancipation caused more problems than it solved.