However, there was increasing criticism of the institution of serfdom. The Russian empire had, since the reign of Ivan III, been a largely serf based rural nation. 85% of the populations at this time were peasants and most of those, serfs. A serf was someone who was owned by the Land lord, usually a member of the nobility, the serf would work there land until there death, with very little freedoms and certainly no education.…
1. Serfdom of Russia: Serfs were not given many rights, but were used for labor on the large lands the powerful leaders and people of the time had…
5: Russia began Industrialization by abolishing serfdom and using the peasants as a workforce to work in the factories to produce new technology. It only changed economics in society because the former serfs were still treated like serfs.…
The first way the Russian state was more stable in 1881 was the increased freedom of the serfs. Serfdom was abolished in 1861, and although the serfs were not completely free, this was a major step for Russia, and helped them catch up to the western countries. This made the state more stable, because it briefly caused a decrease in the number of occasions of peasant unrest, which had been increasing before the decree was passed. It was hoped that the emancipation of the serfs would mean the peasants were free to leave the land they had been previously bound to, but there were many rules that came with the emancipation decree, which made it hard for the peasants to leave, and also to increase their wealth, due to one rule saying they must pay the landlords labour service of two years before they were truly free.…
Instead peasants were transferred into working in factories due to the increase of industrialization in this period. The factories proved to need more labor in them to produce a significant amount of goods. The demand for peasant workers was not as high as it used to be because of slave labor. As more people began to own slaves, they did not find much use for indentured servants anymore. Some freedom of the peasants was also being taken away.…
Topic: Analyze the changes and continuities in labor systems between 1750 and 1914 in RUSSIA.…
Agriculture was a crucial area which needed to be reformed if Russia was to ever be modernised. At the root of the inherently backward Russia was the peasant workforce, who mainly worked in the agricultural sector, which left Russia a world away from other European Countries in terms of industry. ‘Out of the 60 million people in European Russia in 1855, 50 million were peasant serfs’1; this was a huge obstacle to modernisation as it limited. The goal of Emancipation was to release the peasants from the land that they were bound to in order to create an industrial workforce that would drive modernisation. The predominantly agricultural workforce would now work in factories thus changing Russia into an industrial juggernaut, which would be key in modernising Russia. The reform was also crucial as it was the first step in the deconstruction of the Ancien Regime within Russia. Emancipation was key in establishing support for the monarchy, ‘in other countries Serf emancipation took place as a consequence of social and organic change’2, this meant that in Russia the monarchy had…
Throughout this time period the ruling elite, who made up 1.1% of the population despite owning 25% of the land, maintained constant support of the Tsar. This support was based on reliance in the Tsars rule in order to ensure their own aristocracy. The nobles controlled the land Therefore through the nobility’s control of land and as a result the means of production, the Tsar had autocratic power over the majority who worked this land; the peasants, both of state (32.7%) and through the nobility 50.7% as despite the emancipation of serfs in 1861 the lives of these peasants were heavily restricted and reliant on the land owners through the Mir, censorship, tax and redemption payments, of which many could not pay for and so were forced into debt. the peasants themselves, being both restricted in the Mir and due to their traditional attitudes and acceptance of social situation, what Marx would call a lack of revolutionary consciousness, can be attributed to the Tsarist survival.…
He fuelled a period of massive industrialisation which ultimately lead to the emergence of a new social group; the urban proletariat. This group, who had little status in Russian society in the period 1854-1894, now played a major role in Russia, meaning a change in an average workers status. By 1914, there were 2.9 million workers employed in Russia working in 24,900 factories. However, this period comes with a degree of continuity in the level of status of workers; in 1910 only half of Russia’s national productivity was industrial. This points in the general direction that, as with the reigns of Alexander the II and III, the peasants were the social class with more power. The provisional government of February 1917 marked a change for the status of workers in Russia. It was formed with the Petrograd soviet, a council of workers and soldiers. They controlled the railway, postal and telegraph services; a level of status in which workers had previously never held. During Lenin’s rule, there were varying degrees of workers status: ‘While the peasantry suffered between 1918 and 1921, the urban workers became better off…The NEP clearly benefited the peasantry at the expense of urban workers’1. This quote from Lee can be challenged, as during war communism 1918 the populations of Moscow dropped by half. This shows that workers…
Serfdom and peasant conditions constituted burning issues in nineteenth century Russia because? The size of peasantry meant that economic change depended on new flexibility in rural life…
The social structure of 1800’s Russia was a rigid hierarchy. According to the 1879 census 82% of the population were peasants, 4% was the working class, 1.5% were the middle classes, and 12.5% were the upper classes. The peasants were small farmers that used outdated methods. They were mostly former serfs that were freed in the 1861 serf emancipation under Alexander II.…
The conditions of the peasantry varied within the period 1855-1964 as the rulers had different ways of dealing with the peasants. There were times when the communists treated the urban working classes far worse than the tsars did such as during the rule of Stalin. On the other hand, there were also occasions when the tsars carried out policies that benefited working people such as reducing working hours.…
With many social and political changes occurring during the 1800's, the Russian Intelligentsia's view on the peasantry also saw a shift. Recent emancipations in the country saw millions of former serfs and farmers with newfound rights and statuses but also saw exposed many faults in current labor practices and corruption within the bureaucratic levels of the Russian state. The current nobility took it upon themselves to decide how they handle the new working class problems and restructuring of the social hierarchy among themselves and the peasants without putting too much harm on their own social standings. While many of the nobility held the staunch belief that peasantry was incapable of life beyond simple farming, some believed to be rational…
The first reason for the revolution in 1905 was the developments in the Russian countryside and how they produced a general unhappiness among the landowners and even the peasants. A long-term social and economic cause was the continuing dissatisfaction of both these groups to the Emancipation reform of Alexander II in 1861. The Landowners did not approve of the act because it denied them the free labour they had access to before the emancipation of the serfs. They had lost their free labour and large amounts of their land. By 1905 many of the Landowners were facing large debts. Although the act did end serfdom in Russia, the peasants were still angry due to the redemption payments they were expected to pay and the poor quality of land they received. They also disliked the fact that they were still tied to the…
Eighteenth century Russia, peasants made up the majority of Russia’s population. Peasants are accounted for the industrial lands owned by merchants and the nobility. The peasants in Russia have been treated as animals where they were bought and sold by the nobility. With the abundant of peasants in Russia, orders had been placed and enforced by the tsar and state officials to maintain this population. Some of these orders describes the purchases and regulations of peasants.…