Russia under the Old regime

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lease or buy more land, they borrowed money, first at exorbitant rates from village usurers, and later, at more advantageous ones, from the Peasant Bank. This indebtedness, on top of their current obligations, caused them to fall into arrears. In 1881 the government reduced by a quarter the moneys due under the Emancipation settlement, but this measure did not suffice. In 1907 bowing to the inevitable, it abolished the Redemption Payments altogether and cancelled arrears. But the harm had been done. The radical critics of the settlement who had argued the land should have been given the peasants free of charge appear in retrospect to have been right not only on moral but also on practical grounds.

The retention of the commune also seems to have been a mistake although it is more difficult to see how that one could have been avoided, because the peasants cleaved to it. The commune inhibited the emergence in Russia of a vigorous farming class, in so far as the hard-working and enterprising commune members had to bear fiscal responsibility for the indolent, inept and alcoholic ones. The whole arrangement fostered routine at the expense of innovation. Peasants had little interest in investing in the land which they stood to lose in the next round of repartition; they had every reason to squeeze out of it all they could, mindless of the future. The Emancipation Edict contained provisions which permitted a peasant household to consolidate its strips and separate itself from the commune; but these arrangements were hedged with so many formalities that few took advantage of them. In any event, in 1893 the government revoked them. By retaining and strengthening the commune the government undoubtedly achieved a certain measure of social stability and fiscal control, but it did so at the expense of economic progress. The unwillingness of the authorities to entrust the peasant with full civil rights also represented an error of judgement. Understandably, it seemed more prudent to introduce the peasant to the obligations of full citizenship piecemeal. But the actual effect of the post-emancipation system which subjected peasants to so many separate laws and institutions was to perpetuate their peculiar status in society, and to postpone yet further the development in them of that civic sense which they so sadly lacked. The flaw was aggravated further by the creation in 1889 of rural officials called Land Commandants (zemskie nachal'niki). Chosen by the bureaucracy from among conservative landlords of the district, they were assigned a wide range of arbitrary powers over the peasantry, not unlike those the landlords had once enjoyed over their serfs.

Finally, the land settlement contained inequities which over the long run produced very pernicious economic consequences. The Emancipation settlement left in the hands of landlords the bulk of the meadow land and forest which under serfdom the peasants had freely shared with them. Whereas a well-balanced rural economy in Russia required that