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Without the police powers to coerce peasants to work their lands, without a complete monopoly on land, many nobles feared total ruin. As a ranking member of the ministry wrote, ‘the landlords fear both the government and the peasantry’. To consult and ostensibly to mollify the government invited representatives of the nobility to come to St Petersburg and express their views in August 1859 (from the non-blackearth provinces) and January 1860 (from the blackearth provinces). On both occasions the government encountered fierce criticism and, more shocking still, even audacious demands for political reform. Although the tsar officially rebuked such demands and protests, the Editorial Commission none the less made some gratuitous attempts to represent emancipation as an expression of the nobility’s collective will. The commission had completed the main work by October 1860; after a final review by the State Council (an extremely conservative body that inserted some last-minute, pro-noble provisions), Alexander signed the statute into law on 19 February 1861. Fearful of peasant protests, public announcement was delayed for another two weeks—when the onset of Lent (and the end of the merry-making of Shrovetide was past) promised to produce a more sober and docile peasantry.

The government had good reason for anxiety: the 360–page statute was mind-boggling in its complexity, but one thing was clear—it corresponded little to the expectations of the peasantry. Although they were granted ‘the status of free rural inhabitants’ (with the right to marry, acquire property, conduct trade, and the like), they were still second-class citizens. Emancipation did foresee a gradual integration of peasants into society, but for the present they remained separate, bound to their own local (volost′) administration and courts. To ensure police power over the former serfs, the government shifted authority from the squire to the commune and resorted to the traditional principle of ‘collective responsibility’ (krugovaia poruka), which made the ex-serfs collectively accountable for taxes or indeed all other social and financial responsibilities. For the next decades the peasantry were to be the subject of special disabilities and obligations—such as the poll-tax (until 1885), corporal punishment (until 1904), and passports to restrict movement (until 1906).

For the peasants, however, the most shocking part of their ‘emancipation’ was the land settlement. In the first place, it was not even immediate; for the next two years peasants were to continue their old obligations to the squire as the government compiled inventories on landholdings and the peasants’ obligations as serfs. Thereafter these ‘temporary obligations’ were to remain in force until both sides agreed to a final settlement, whereupon the peasants would acquire a portion of the land through government-financed redemption payments. Peasants who had customarily assumed that the land was theirs now discovered that they would have to make immense redemption payments over a forty-nine-year term. The redemption payments were, moreover, increased by inflated evaluations of the land (up to twice its market value before emancipation). And worst of all, the emancipation settlement had special provisions to ensure that the nobility retained at least a minimum part of their estate; as a result of ‘emancipation’, peasants suffered a loss of land that they had utilized before emancipation—from 10 per cent in the non-blackearth provinces to 26 per cent in the blackearth provinces.