Decree on obligated peasants issued

A decree on obligated peasants, based on a draft by Count Pavel Dmitriyevich Kiselyov, finalized during discussions in the Secret Committee (1839-1842) and the State Council, was issued on April 2 (14), 1842. According to it, at the will of the landowner, the peasant could receive personal freedom and a land allotment for use, for which he had to fulfill “obligations” to the landowner – corvée and quitrent. In this condition, the decree of 1842 differed from the decree on free farmers adopted in the reign of Alexander I (1803), which allowed liberated peasants to buy land from landlords into ownership.

The decree on obligated peasants did not have much practical application and did not receive a lot of support from the nobility and large landowners, who saw in granting freedom to peasants a threat not only to their economic situation, but also to the state order. The Smolensk nobility, who expressed to Nicholas I their loyal readiness to actively contribute to the beneficial intentions of the government, at the same time noted that “the low moral and mental state of the people, who have no concept of freedom in the civil sense, but understand it as a liberty <...> of the people, who do not recognize that the land is the property of the landlords <...> but convinced that the earth is God’s; such beliefs threaten the destruction of the state”. The scientific literature provides data that out of the thirty-million mass of serfs, landlords released less than twenty-five thousand of “obligated peasants”.

Emperor Nicholas I himself considered it necessary to take measures to alleviate the serfdom of the peasants. At a meeting of the State Council on March 30 (April 11), 1842, when discussing the decree on obligated peasants, the sovereign made a speech in which he noted that the abolition of serfdom in the present era would be a disastrous evil, but there was a need to prepare means “for a gradual transition to a different order of things” and a cold-blooded discussion of the benefits and consequences of this change. During the reign of Nicholas I, a total of 9 secret committees on the peasant question were successively created, and more than 100 decrees and laws were issued, but the results of this activity were very modest. Nevertheless, the decree on obligated peasants, as well as the reform of the management of state peasants (1837-1841), which expanded local peasant self-government, and the “inventories” introduced in landlords’ farms since 1847, i.e. state inventories of “all aggregate things necessary for farming”, became the foundation of the future emancipation reform of 1861.

According to an active supporter of the abolition of serfdom and an associate of Nicholas I, Count Pavel Dmitriyevich Kiselyov, the decree on obligated peasants was “a preface or introduction to something better or more extensive later in time”. As Minister Alexander Yegorovich Timashev recalled, Emperor Alexander II inherited the idea of the liberation of the peasants from his “sovereign parent, who throughout his reign constantly had the abolition of serfdom in mind”.
 

Lit.: Дворниченко А. Ю. Российская история с древнейших времён до падения самодержавия. М., 2010. С. 589; Олейников Д. И. Николай I. М., 2012. С. 218–232; Орлов А. С., Георгиева Н. Г., Георгиев В.А. Исторический словарь. М., 2012. С. 526; Сборник Русского Исторического Общества. Т. 98. СПб., 1896. С. 114–116; Фёдоров В. А. Киселёва реформа, 1837–1841 // Большая российская энциклопедия.
 

Based on the Presidential Library's materials:

Nicholas I and Alexandra Feodorovna // State Authority: [digital collection]

Pavel Dmitriyevich Kiselyov (1788-1872) // Persons of Russia: [digital collection]

Emancipation Reform of 1861: [digital collection]