Russia and Germany got rid of serfdom at about the same time. Both countries were then on the periphery of European development. But unlike Russia, Germany was able to make progress by getting rid of serfdom. In Russia, the landlords devoured the redemption for the land, and the German ones created large farms, creating capitalism in the countryside.
In 1992, Moscow State University prepared a thematic collection of articles "Great Reforms in Russia 1856-1874", which included an article by the American researcher, professor at Iowa State University Stephen Hawk "Banking Crisis, Peasant Reform and the Buyout Operation in Russia 1857-1861". In it, Hawk showed from an economic point of view why the abolition of serfdom in Russia gave almost nothing for the development of capitalism in Russia.
Hawk draws attention to the following: “The role of the crisis in the banking system, which became the scourge of the reform, turned out to be underestimated. It was he who determined the conditions for liberation and thus weakened the subsequent economic development of the country."
The implementation of the reform during the period of the most severe financial crisis in Russia could not but leave an imprint on the conditions for the release of peasants in general, and especially on the redemption operation, and moreover, on the subsequent development of the Russian economy, primarily the agrarian
“In 1859,” Hawk noted, “when government officials began drafting legislation on peasant reform, they faced a crisis: growing government debt, inflation, a negative balance of payments, an unfavorable climate for foreign loans, the inability to restore the ruble's reversibility, and finally, collapse of state credit institutions. In these conditions the reform was being prepared”. And further: “The banking crisis necessitated a drastic reshuffle in the priorities of the government's financial policy. This did not allow him to subsidize the acquisition of land by peasants, as was done in Prussia and Austria. This burdened the peasants for many years with high interest rates on their redemption debts, which significantly increased the annual redemption payments. It turned out to be in the hands of thosewho sought to minimize the size of peasant land holdings. This was an additional argument in favor of the fact that the buyback should be gradual, rather than a one-off and mandatory. This made it necessary to restrict the circulation of credit securities issued for landowners, to the detriment of their holders."
It is interesting to observe S. Hock's observation regarding the composition of the Banking and Financial Commissions, which carried out the land reform: “Although historians often call these people enlightened bureaucrats, they had a narrow view of things, considering the solution of the problems facing Russia, mainly through the fiscal framework. They were caught up in the idea of railways and were no less hostile to the landlords' extravagance, which they despised. All of them advocated tax reform and stubbornly opposed deficit budget financing.”
The Financial Commission came to the conclusion about the need for long-term acts, first of all, the issue of perpetual bonds, which was one of the attempts to "restructure the structure of bank debt." This innovation caused extreme anxiety among the landowners who were trying to return their bank deposits.
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And on April 16, 1859, under a completely plausible, and moreover, a rational pretext, a decree was issued to stop the issuance of loans on the security of inhabited estates. Formally, the Decree signified the belated implementation of the long-overdue transition to the capitalist principle of evaluating landlord's land with its bank pledge. In fact, its significance went far beyond the purpose stated in the document. For example, the refusal to accept landlord estates as collateral by banks meant the preservation of funds that were so necessary in a crisis in the hands of the treasury.
The responses of the nobility to the publication of the 1859 Decree are very indicative. AI Koshelev, a prominent liberal leader of the Slavophil persuasion, wrote in his work “On Our Monetary Crisis” published in 1864: “To be in need of money, to be in extremes is natural for a person who has no capital; but it is regrettable, extremely difficult to be penniless for a man who has them in abundance; and yet nine-tenths of the wealthy are now in this position. How many people who enjoy general confidence need money and cannot get it as a loan because the loan offices are all closed …"
P. A. Zayonchkovsky, who for many years headed the scientific direction for the study of peasant reform, named the financial gain of the state - 700 million rubles, that is, it was the state that benefited financially from the reform. The losers were both the landlords and the peasants.
On some "stretches" the peasants lost 5 million acres of land, remaining until the redemption, which was legally extended for 49 years, "temporarily liable", with the status of "communal land users". The redemption payments fell on the shoulders of the peasantry, and what is more, all the organizational and administrative costs associated with the reform. "The tsarist government," wrote S. Hawk, "did not spend a dime on the great reform to transform more than 20 million former serfs into owners."
A close assessment of the reformist policy of the government of Alexander II on the peasant question is given by the historian L. G. Zakharova: “The impression remains about the priority of imperial interests in the concerns of the tsar-liberator. It was not the "improvement of life" of the former serfs, as was officially proclaimed, but the further expansion and strengthening of the empire was the goal of the policy of Alexander II. Otherwise, one cannot explain the fact that the state did not invest a single ruble in the peasant reform, that more than 1/3 of the budget went to military expenditures, that the redemption operation, ruinous for the peasants, was beneficial for the state."
For the years 1861-1906, the government collected over 1.6 billion rubles from the former landlord peasants. What happened to the proprietor landlord economy as a result of the reform?
According to the legislation, when settling with the landowners for the allotment land transferred to the peasants, estimated at 1,218 million rubles, the state was obliged to fully compensate this amount. However, the landlords received 902 million rubles from the government, that is, 316 million were deducted from the estimated amount in favor of the state as the landowners' debt to land banks and other state credit institutions. But the remaining amount was not paid to the landowners in real money, but in five percent bank notes and redemption certificates, which were quoted on the stock exchange at that time significantly below their nominal value.
Here is what Prince V. P. Meshchersky (grandson of N. M. Karamzin) wrote in his Memoirs, published in 1864: “Then the era of ransom certificates began … It was a kind of historical moment in the life of our great world. Then everyone understood how sad and fatal epoch it really was - then, when it was impossible to help grief, but then it was brilliant, this era of ransom certificates. Large thousandths of money fell from the sky into every family, into every house, in the form of redemption certificates, which were initially quoted on the stock exchange very low, almost 18% below the nominal value, and these redemptions were sold and turned into capital for which some threw themselves on trips abroad, while others began to live very luxuriously in St. Petersburg and Moscow. It was remarkable that only a minority of the then owners of the redemptionin view of their low prices, she decided to wait for the price increase; most of them rushed to implement them with amazing ease … In fact, after the ransom operation, the historical process of ruining the nobility began, everyone understood this.
The reform led to a decline in the economic potential of the landlord economy, and in the last third of the 19th century - to the so-called "impoverishment of the Great Russian center" - the main stronghold of noble land tenure.
In 1881, the government was forced to revise the legislation: from January 1, 1883, the mandatory redemption of peasant allotments was introduced. In the same 1881, the government reduced redemption payments in general by 27% of the annual salary for most peasant households and carried out a special reduction for peasant farms in provinces that had fallen into decay and desolation (Olonetskaya and others).
The conditions of the reform on February 19, 1861 sharply contrasted with the principles of the emancipation of peasants in the countries of Eastern Europe, which was close in terms of time, where the state accepted at its own expense the payment of the principal amount of the peasants' redemption debt through significant government subsidies. Germany, completing the peasant reform in the mid-1850s and choosing, like Russia, the "catching up" path of development, carried out the land management of the peasants in a rational way, separating the Junker land from the peasant land (in contrast to Russia, which retained the stripedness, the remoteness of peasant allotments from villages, etc. etc.), founded a network of credit institutions and other capitalist structures and created the conditions for the rapid growth of the middle agricultural class of the farming type. In the 1880s, in terms of the general economic potential of the economy, Germany ousted England,taking first place in Europe.
At the end of the 18th century, Germany was the agrarian periphery of Western Europe. Economically, it lagged significantly not only behind England, where the industrial revolution began in the middle of the 18th century, but also from France, where conditions for the transition to large-scale machine production were also formed at the end of the 18th century. The delay in the economic development of Germany was predetermined by many reasons, but above all by the dominance of serfdom, which delayed the formation of the labor market, without which the transition to factory production was impossible.
The relatively low rates of economic growth led to the slow formation of national entrepreneurship. Possessing a monopoly on land ownership, the nobility occupied all the dominant positions in the state apparatus, the army, and the judiciary. The German bourgeoisie practically did not have its representatives in the power structures, was not protected by law.
The only significant difference was in the forms of government. In contrast to the united Russian Empire, Germany in the middle of the 19th century was fragmented. The principalities and counties have tried repeatedly to unite, but without much success. At the beginning of the 19th century, as a result of the uniting activity of Prussia, the number of states on the territory of Germany was significantly reduced. After the Napoleonic Wars, in 1815, an act was signed establishing the German Confederation, which included 34 monarchies and four free cities. But this union could not solve the problem of fragmentation. This was the objective reason why the land reform here took a long time and did not go the same everywhere.
At the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, German agriculture employed more than 70% of the population. In agriculture, an outdated and ineffective three-field system remained. In this respect, there were no significant differences with Russia (adjusted for the fact that the share of the rural population in the Russian Empire reached more than 90%).
But there were certain differences in the ratio of the proportion of landlord and peasant economy in the economies of Germany and Russia.
The main land holdings in Germany were concentrated in the hands of landowners: 18 thousand cadets (feudal lords in the eastern and northeastern German principalities), who had at their disposal more than 600 morgen (1 morgen was equal to about 0.26 hectares) owned about 60% of the land, and 1.6 million small owners (half of them had allotments from 5 to 20 morgen, half - less than 5 morgen) had only 5% of the land. The remaining 40 thousand peasants had from 20 to 600 morgen.
The development of agrarian relations in the west and southwest of the country was markedly different from those processes that took place in the east. In the 18th century, under the influence of France, there was almost no corvee in these principalities, and the feudal lords transferred most of the peasants to censorship. At the beginning of the 19th century, Germany was strongly influenced by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, which dealt the first tangible blow to feudalism. In accordance with the Peace of Luneville (1801), the left bank of the Rhine ceded to France, and here the feudal privileges of landowners and serfdom of peasants were abolished, the monastery lands were sold. In the middle of the 19th century, an area was formed here where small peasant farms prevailed.
The reforms carried out in Germany "from above" were primarily related to the eastern and northeastern parts of Germany, where landowners' land tenure prevailed.
In Russia, the situation was different. Due to the presence of a large number of specific and state peasants, the role of the landlord economy was by no means the leading one. In the 1850s, peasants accounted for 78% of all crops. In the commodity production of grain, the role of landlords and peasants was approximately equal (landowners gave a little more). Only in the western regions of the country (the Baltic States, Lithuania, Western Belarus and Right-Bank Ukraine) the landlord's economy played a leading role.
The reasons that prompted the start of reforms were similar. After the defeat inflicted by France on Prussia in 1806, it became clear that agrarian reforms were inevitable. In Russia, such a reason was the defeat in the Crimean War.
In Prussia, the abolition of the personal dependence of the peasants on the landlords began by an edict adopted by the government of G. Stein in 1807. For hereditary owners of allotments, dependence was canceled immediately, and for non-hereditary holders and for landless peasants - from November 1810. At the same time, the peasants received the right to freely dispose of their property, the right to marry without the consent of the landowner. The peasants were freed from forced service with the landlords as household servants. However, according to this law, all duties in favor of the cadets related to land relations were preserved. The landowners were allowed to add to their estates those peasant plots that had remained ownerless during the war. In addition, it was possible to combine small plots of land into large ones, and this was often used by landowners in order to deprive peasants of land.
The abolition of serfdom took place along with the redemption process. So, according to the Edict on Regulation (1811), published by the government of K. Hardenberg, the peasants received the right to buy out the land in their use, but the size of the redemption payments was not within the power of every household. It was necessary to pay the landlord 25 times the value of the annual rent or give him from a third (for hereditary holders) to half (for non-hereditary holders) of his land allotment.
In 1812, an additional decree was issued, according to which horseless and one-horse peasants were generally deprived of the right to purchase land. Thus, the land holdings of the cadets increased, and most of the peasants became landless.
In 1816, after the addition of the Edict on Regulation by the Government Declaration, the provision on cashless ransom with the cession of land to landowners began to apply only to peasants who had a full team used in cultivating the fields, as well as to those who were entered in the cadastral books and belonged to households old origin. The lower categories of peasants (horseless, tenants, day laborers, gardeners), of whom there were many in the Prussian countryside, generally had no right to buy off their duties and receive land. In addition, the government decided to abolish the peasant community (stamp) so that landowners could fearlessly appropriate communal lands and pastures.
After the revolution of 1848, changes took place in the country. The cadets, fearing the robbery and ruin of their farms, went to weaken the conditions of the redemption. So, in 1850, ransom was allowed for almost all categories of peasants (except for gardeners and farm laborers). On the buyback, only 18 times the cash rent was assigned. Special rental banks were created to effect redemption payments. The volume of redemption payments in Prussia was enormous. In the regions east of the Elbe alone, the peasants paid the landlords over a fifty-year period (until the mid-1870s) about 1 billion marks. Gradually, the agrarian reforms, which began in Prussia, covered other German states - Bavaria, Nassau, Württemberg, Hesse-Darmstadt, Baden, etc.
Thus, the difference with Russia consisted in the liquidation of the community, as well as in a more significant amount of land, which remained in the hands of certain categories of peasants (2/3 of the total cultivated land with hereditary holders, and half with non-hereditary holders). As for the cash redemption of land, after the revolution of 1848, these conditions in Germany strongly resemble those of the redemption in Russia (almost the same amount of the ransom and the use of the banking system for redemption payments).
Based on the content of the reforms, it can be concluded that their goals are identical. Both in Russia and in Germany, the general meaning of the reforms came down to: 1) the liquidation of the feudal order "from above", which meant that the process of carrying out reforms in the agrarian sector was longer and painful for the peasants; 2) it was supposed, with the help of redemption payments, to extract funds for the landlord economy, which made it possible to rebuild this economy, improve agricultural technology and begin its technical re-equipment, that is, turn it into an agricultural enterprise of the capitalist type.
As a result of agrarian reforms in Germany, large (mainly landlord) land tenure increased. By the end of the 1860s, small farms (71.4% of all farms) owned 9% of the cultivated land, and medium and large farms (28.6%) owned 91% of all land. There was a sharp differentiation of the peasants into well-to-do, strong owners (grossbauers) and land-poor peasants, who were often hired as farm laborers on large farms. In the middle of the 19th century in East Prussia, landowners' estates with an area of over 100 hectares occupied more than a third of the used land, and in Pomerania, more than half. Grossbauer lands predominated in the north-west of the country, and in the south-west regions (in the basin of the Rhine, Main, Neckar) small peasant farms were more common. The liquidation of the community removed the last obstacles to the stratification of the peasantry and the landlessness of small farms.
As the agrarian reforms were completed in the 1860s and 1870s, great changes took place in German agriculture. In the middle of the 19th century, the efficiency of this sector of the economy increased significantly. The cadets' farms, replacing serfs with hired workers, sharply increased the productivity of agriculture and animal husbandry. In the 1850s and 1860s, German agriculture, amid favorable conditions on the world grain market, not only provided domestic demand for food for the growing urban population, but also exported it abroad.
In the 1830s and 1840s, complex crop rotations, grass sowing, and a fruit-changing system began to be introduced, which made it possible to improve the quality of land cultivation and increase the yield of agricultural crops. In the second half of the 19th century, Germany came out on top in the world in the production of potatoes and sugar beets. The industry for processing beets into sugar, and potatoes into starch and alcohol has become widespread. These products have featured prominently in German exports.
Masses of landless peasants poured into German cities, thereby creating a labor market. Juncker, however, created a demand for agricultural machinery, building materials, transport infrastructure, etc., agricultural processors - for engineering products. Land reform in Germany, unlike Russia, spun capitalism.
