You're not wrong; the Czar abolished serfdom half a century before the October Revolution, as part of the general trend by Russian reformers to favor a shift of social and economic systems towards the (classically) liberal conception of Europe. That said, the immediate consequences in which serfdom was abolished can actually be compared to the legally-enforced abolition of slavery in the United States and Brazil. In particular, while the 1861 reforms made provisions for land to be granted to certain classes of serfs, house serfs remained landless, and the land they received was chosen by the primary landowners (who obviously preferred to keep the best land themselves), meaning that many who received land did not receive enough to live off of, and were also expected to pay for it if they wished to keep the entirety of it (else they would only receive half). Reforms of passport and taxation systems to allow them greater financial security and mobility never materialized, either. This led to tenancy issues very similar to, say, sharecropping in the US South, and a peasant class that, while nominally self-sovereign, was still effectively bound to the mir and, by extension, volost they lived in. The pressures behind this would not be solved until 1917 to the early 1920s, leading to the famous cry of "Land, bread, peace" during the Russian Revolution.
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Topic: Russia Watch Thread/Ветка о России (Read 257782 times)