In February 1861 Tsar Alexander II issued the statutes abolishing the institution of serfdom in Russia. The procedures set in motion by Alexander II undid the ties that bound together 22 million serfs and 100,000 noble estate owners, and changed the face of Russia. Rather than presenting abolition as an 'event' that happened in February 1861, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia presents the reform as a process. It traces the origins of the abolition of serfdom back to reforms in related areas in 1762 and forward to the culmination of the process in 1907. Written in an engaging and accessible manner, the book shows how the reform process linked the old social, economic and political order of eighteenth-century Russia with the radical transformations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that culminated in revolution in 1917.

The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russian peasants and African Americans gained new rights as subjects and citizens. During the second half of the long nineteenth century, Americans and Russians responded to these societal transformations through a fascinating array of new cultural productions. Analyzing portrayals of African Americans and Russian serfs in oil paintings, advertisements, fiction, poetry, and ephemera housed in American and Russian archives, Amanda Brickell Bellows argues that these widely circulated depictions shaped collective memory of slavery and serfdom, affected the development of national consciousness, and influenced public opinion as peasants and freedpeople strove to exercise their newfound rights. While acknowledging the core differences between chattel slavery and serfdom, as well as the distinctions between each nation's post-emancipation era, Bellows highlights striking similarities between representations of slaves and serfs that were produced by elites in both nations as they sought to uphold a patriarchal vision of society. Russian peasants and African American freedpeople countered simplistic, paternalistic, and racist depictions by producing dignified self-representations of their traditions, communities, and accomplishments. This book provides an important reconsideration of post-emancipation assimilation, race, class, and political power.

Russian rural history has long been based on a 'Peasant Myth', originating with nineteenth-century Romantics and still accepted by many historians today. In this book, Tracy Dennison shows how Russian society looked from below, and finds nothing like the collective, redistributive and market-averse behaviour often attributed to Russian peasants. On the contrary, the Russian rural population was as integrated into regional and even national markets as many of its west European counterparts. Serfdom was a loose garment that enabled different landlords to shape economic institutions, especially property rights, in widely diverse ways. Highly coercive and backward regimes on some landlords' estates existed side-by-side with surprisingly liberal approximations to a rule of law. This book paints a vivid and colourful picture of the everyday reality of rural Russia before the 1861 abolition of serfdom.

"Gorshkov's introduction provides some basic knowledge about Russian serfdom and draws upon the most recent scholarship. Notes provide references and general information about events, places and people mentioned in the memoirs."--Jacket.

Kolchin compares the world of masters and the world of slaves in U.S. and Russian nonfree labor systems. He theorizes that while southern states in the U.S. existed as slaveowner's communities, the rural Russian communal landcape was severely influenced by the bargaining power of peasant bondsmen.

Offering a broad interpretive history of the Russian Empire from the time of serfdom's codification until its abolition following the Crimean War, Wirtschafter considers the institution of serfdom, official social categories, and Russia's development as a country of peasants ruled by nobles, military commanders and civil servants.

The various manifestations of coerced labour between the opening up of the Atlantic world and the formal creation of Haiti.

This volume explores the Russia where the great writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), was born and lived. It focuses not only on the Russia depicted in Dostoevsky's works, but also on the Russian life that he and his contemporaries experienced: on social practices and historical developments, political and cultural institutions, religious beliefs, ideological trends, artistic conventions and literary genres. Chapters by leading scholars illuminate this broad context, offer insights into Dostoevsky's reflections on his age, and examine the expression of those reflections in his writing. Each chapter investigates a specific context and suggests how we might understand Dostoevsky in relation to it. Since Russia took so much from Western Europe throughout the imperial period, the volume also locates the Russian experience within the context of Western thought and practices, thereby offering a multidimensional view of the unfolding drama of Russia versus the West in the nineteenth century.

With the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the tsarist past has caught up with Russia's present with a vengeance. Whether in reviving the name St. Petersburg, or reestablishing tsarist state symbols, or resurrecting a national assembly under the old name of State Duma, or arguing how best to honor the remains of the last tsarist family, the old regime is still very much with us. The process of rethinking the past is not without its pitfalls: the negative evaluations of tsarist Russia, obligatory in the former Soviet Union, have given way to uncritical romanticizing. There has never been a greater need for a fair, balanced interpretation of the tsarist record.This book reexamines Russia's imperial past from the reign of Peter the Great to the collapse of tsarism in 1917. It presents pre-revolutionary Russia as an empire of great internal contradictions. A colossus that extended over one-sixth the earth's landmass, it was ever vulnerable to foreign invasion. It possessed one of the world's largest populations, the majority of whom lived in poverty and discontent. It commanded the world's richest natural resources, yet its productive forces were constricted by the remnants of feudalism. It strove to cement its multiethnic population by systematic Russification, which only stimulated nationalist movements. It gloried in being a "people's autocracy" at a time when the regime was increasingly detached from its people. The empire of the tsars was becoming ever more vulnerable until it was shattered to pieces in the turmoil of war and revolution. Using the most recent Russian and Western research, the book provides the reader with a good historical basis on which tojudge Russia's Soviet experience and her current turbulent transition to democracy.

For the first time, this book provides the global history of labor in Central Eurasia, Russia, Europe, and the Indian Ocean between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. It contests common views on free and unfree labor, and compares the latter to many Western countries where wage conditions resembled those of domestic servants. This gave rise to extreme forms of dependency in the colonies, not only under slavery, but also afterwards in form of indentured labor in the Indian Ocean and obligatory labor in Africa. Stanziani shows that unfree labor and forms of economic coercion were perfectly compatible with market development and capitalism, proven by the consistent economic growth that took place all over Eurasia between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. This growth was labor intensive: commercial expansion, transformations in agriculture, and the first industrial revolution required more labor, not less. Finally, Stanziani demonstrates that this world did not collapse after the French Revolution or the British industrial revolution, as is commonly assumed, but instead between 1870 and 1914, with the second industrial revolution and the rise of the welfare state.