The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia by David Moon

Author:David Moon [Moon, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Europe, General
ISBN: 9781317886150
Google: 9VGgBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-09-25T16:07:38+00:00

POPULAR MONARCHISM

The peasants’ responses to the abolition of serfdom – in particular the persistent hopes that the tsar would grant them ‘full freedom’ from the nobility and all the land – raise important questions about peasant attitudes to the tsar. The belief that the nobles and officials were concealing the ‘real freedom’ in the spring of 1861 was typical of a recurring popular belief that the tsar was on the side of the peasants, but the ‘boyars’ – in this case the nobles and officials – were preventing him from achieving his aim of helping them. Some historians, both Soviet and Western, have argued that this apparent peasant faith in the tsar was ‘naive’, as it was divorced from a reality in which successive tsars had actively supported the exploitation and oppression of generations of peasants. Moreover, the terms of the reform of 1861 did not, and any such reform was never likely to, meet the aspirations of the peasantry. Scholars taking this view of peasant attitudes to the tsar have tended to stress their ignorance, superstition, and very low level of awareness of the reality of the political structure of the autocracy.

More sophisticated analyses of peasant attitudes to the tsar, such as Field’s study of the Bezdna affair, have suggested that peasants may not have been as politically naive as they have sometimes been portrayed. Field suggested that the peasants at Bezdna and elsewhere may have been claiming their belief in the tsar’s benevolence in order to conform to the authorities’ perceptions of them as childlike and devoted to their ‘little father’ the tsar, but gullible and easily led astray. Thus, Field implied, the peasants at Bezdna were trying to put forward their ideas about the sort of reform they were expecting by presenting them as the alleged real wishes of the tsar. The peasants’ apparent intention was to try to attain some concessions from the authorities in their interests. Indeed, some highly educated nobles, for example those of Tver province in their address to the tsar in early 1862, adopted a similar strategy [Doc. 24]. In the case of the peasants, by claiming to be acting out of loyalty to the tsar they could plead they had been motivated by devotion to the tsar and had not rebelled against the authorities, hence the title of Field’s book: Rebels in the Name of the Tsar. The massacres at Bezdna and Kandeevka are examples where this strategy went badly wrong. In other cases, however, peasants did extract some, mostly limited, concessions (Field, 1976b: 92, 208–15; Perrie, 1999).

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