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the
russian nobility was mostly impoverished, with a few very rich
families. it lacked strong corporate spirit and could not prevent
the government from implementing hostile policies like the 1861
emancipation of the serfs. the peasant emancipation accelerated the
process of the economic decline of the nobility as it deprived them
of the basic privilege of serf ownership and a guaranteed income
gained through the exploitation of serf labor. many nobles found it
hard to adapt and to learn businesslike habits of mind. some
preferred to sell more of their land than to economize. by 1911
nobles owned only half of the land that was theirs in 1862.
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the
overwhelming majority of the russian population were peasants. they
were held in the condition of economic slavery by means of coercion,
arbitrary punishment, and sheer brutality. there were two main
groups of peasants條andlords?serfs and state peasants. the bigger
group was landlords?serfs: they belonged to individual members of
the nobility and lived on private estates. the remainder, state
peasants, belonged to the government, but their existence was not
far removed from the strict condition of serfdom. the serfs did not
have legally recognized personal rights. they were a medieval and
strongly anticapitalist element surviving into the modern era.
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the
peasant emancipation of 1861 gave russian peasants their personal
freedom. but the peasants were still kept socially segregated from
the rest of the population: they were subject to corporal
punishment, military conscription, payment of the poll tax, and
certain other obligations from which other social classes were
exempt. most importantly, the land that they received at
emancipation was granted not on an individual but on a collective
basis梩o the village commune. the commune had extensive powers over
its members: taxes were communally collected and paid; the land was
periodically redivided among the members in the commune; no peasant
was free to leave the commune without the permission of the village
elders. in other words, although the peasants had been freed from
their bondage to the serf owner抯, they remained in bondage to the
commune.
the
retention of the commune was arguably the chief stumbling block that
hindered the modernization of the agrarian sector and prevented
capitalist development in rural areas. the practice of periodical
equalization of landholdings between peasant households made it
difficult for successful peasants to accumulate land and become
small entrepreneurial farmers. the agrarian sector of the russian
economy more or less stagnated for the next forty years following
the emancipation.
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