page_title: Russian Empire
section_title: Peasants
hierarchical_section_title: Russian Empire / Society / Peasants
caption_attribution_description: English: Original Description: Haying, near rest time. [Russian Empire]. Farm workers standing near their farm equipment, taking break from haying.Русский: Перерыв на сенокосе. Российская империя.
context_page_description: The Russian Empire was an empire that extended across Eurasia and North America from 1721, following the end of the Great Northern War, until the Republic was proclaimed by the Provisional Government that took power after the February Revolution of 1917. The third-largest empire in history, at its greatest extent stretching over three continents, Europe, Asia, and North America, the Russian Empire was surpassed in size only by the British and Mongol empires. The rise of the Russian Empire coincided with the decline of neighboring rival powers: the Swedish Empire, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Persia and the Ottoman Empire. It played a major role in 1812–1814 in defeating Napoleon's ambitions to control Europe and expanded to the west and south.
  The House of Romanov ruled the Russian Empire from 1721 until 1762. Its matrilineal branch of patrilineal German descent, the House of Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov, ruled from 1762 until the end of the empire. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Russian Empire extended from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Black Sea in the south, from the Baltic Sea on the west into Alaska and Northern California in America on the east.
context_section_description: The former serfs became peasants, joining the millions of farmers who were already in the peasant status. Were peasants living in tens of thousands of small villages and a highly patriarchal system. Hundreds of thousands of move to cities to work in factories, but they typically retained their village connections.
  After the Emancipation reform, one quarter of peasants received allotments of only 1.2 hectares (2.9 acres) per male, and one-half less than 3.4 to 4.6 hectares (8.5 to 11.4 acres); the normal size of the allotment necessary for the subsistence of a family under the three-fields system is estimated at 11 to 17 hectares (28 to 42 acres). Land must thus of necessity be rented from the landlords. The aggregate value of the redemption and land taxes often reached 185 to 275% of the normal rental value of the allotments, not to speak of taxes for recruiting purposes, the church, roads, local administration and so on, chiefly levied from the peasants. The areas increased every year; one-fifth of the inhabitants left their houses; cattle disappeared. Every year more than half the adult males (in some districts three-quarters of the men and one-third of the women) quit their homes and wandered throughout Russia in search of labor. In the governments of the Black Earth Area the state of matters was hardly better. Many peasants took "gratuitous allotments," whose amount was about one-eighth of the normal allotments.
  The average allotment in Kherson was only 0.36 hectares (0.90 acres), and for allotments from 1.2 to 2.3 hectares (2.9 to 5.8 acres) the peasants paid 5 to 10 rubles of redemption tax. The state peasants were better off, but still they were emigrating in masses. It was only in the steppe governments that the situation was more hopeful. In Ukraine, where the allotments were personal (the mir existing only among state peasants), the state of affairs does not differ for the better, on account of the high redemption taxes. In the western provinces, where the land was valued cheaper and the allotments somewhat increased after the Polish insurrection, the general situation was better. Finally, in the Baltic provinces nearly all the land belonged to the German landlords, who either farmed the land themselves, with hired laborers, or let it in small farms. Only one quarter of the peasants were farmers; the remainder were mere laborers.
caption: Peasants in Russia (photograph taken by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky in 1909)
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "early color photograph from the Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress)", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "505071/500", "Image YResolution": "505071/500", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2007:09:14 01:39:04", "Image Artist": "Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii", "Image Copyright": "copyright expired", "Image ExifOffset": "355", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "661", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6636", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3309", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2852"}