This conception of the solution to the land question, albeit with several adjustments introduced into the drafts ofthe Editing Commissions atthe Main Committee on the Peasant Question and at the State Council, was embodied in the Statutes of 19 February 1861. As a consequence of the amendments, the peasants' position became more difficult as a result of the reduction in the size of the allotment of land (the so-called 'cut-offs') and the increase in dues, including redemption payments.[28] Emmons rightly considers that 'from the point of view of the state there were in practice no alternatives to this programme'.[29] The reformers understood the burden on the peasants of the economic terms of the emancipation. Even during the course of the preparation of the reform, Miliutin foresaw the land-hunger of the peasants and considered that the state would have to use a portion of the treasury's lands to counter this phenomenon. But for Miliutin the key here was the transformation of the financial system. He tried to take control of three key spheres: the peasant question, local self-government and finance. However, the attempts by his patrons - Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna and Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich - to get him appointed as minister of finance were not successful. At the beginning of May 1866 when Alexander II considered appointing Miliutin as minister of finance, P. A. Shuvalov managed to convince the monarch to reject this idea, partly by himself threatening to resign.[30]
M. D. Dolbilov in his article about the plans for redemption from 1857 to 1861 plausibly suggested that what the reformers had in mind was the fundamental restructuring of the redemption operation in the not too distant future, at the earliest stage ofthe implementation ofthe abolition of serfdom. Valuev's diary supports this interpretation.[31] It is hard now to establish how Nikolai Miliutin conceived of the financial reforms, but his brother and political ally Dmitrii Miliutin, evaluating the financial and economic situation of the country in the 1860s, wrote twenty years later, that it was impossible 'to increase endlessly the burden of taxes which almost exclusively fall on the working, poorest class of the people, who are already impoverished'. He considered that the 'fundamental revision of our whole taxation system was the main task'.[32] At the beginning of the 1880s N. A. Miliutin's colleague N. Kh. Bunge would begin the reform of the tax system. But this was already in a different era. Peter Gatrell is correct in saying that 'no significant changes took place in taxation policy in the decade following the reform',[33] with the exception of the important excise reform of 1863, which ended the farming-out system for spirits and deprived the nobility of privileges in distillation. At the same time the introduction of excise duty enriched the treasury and encouraged private capital investment in the economy.[34]
The reformers' programme did not envisage transformation of the higher organs of state power, the convocation of an Estates General (Zemskii sobor) or of all-Russian representative institutions. At the same time the liberal bureaucrats discussed among themselves those forces that would further advance the reforms. Already in a memorandum of 1856, Nikolai Miliutin pinned his hopes on the monarchy, which, having taken the initiative with the transformations, would find support in the liberal, enlightened nobility. The same hope was mentioned in 'The General Memorandum' of October i860. The very creation of the Editing Commissions, more than half of whose members were not officials (albeit appointed), an institution directly subordinate through its chairman to Alexander II, was to a certain degree the realisation of the ideas of the reformers about the new role of the autocratic monarchy. Moreover, as P. P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii has witnessed,
N. A. Miliutin was in no doubt that with the appropriate development of the activity of the local institutions under the patronage of a strong state power, the sovereign power itself would recognise the need to appeal to representatives of local interests and would share legislative functions with them in order further to develop its reforms, as it had now done for the first time with the convening of local committees and with the summoning of expert-members who were independent of the administrative structures of power.[35]
It is no coincidence that in 1880-1M. T. Loris-Melikov turned to the experience of the Editing Commissions and to the reforms of local self-government, linking his plans for comprehensive transformations with the experience of the Great Reforms. However, in i860 the reformers did not succeed in translating all their ideas into legislation. The sudden closure of the Editing Commissions in October i860, and the dismissal of N. A. Miliutin in April 1861 were testimony to the precariousness of their general calculations.
The world-view of the reformers was evidently not devoid of a utopian faith in the limitless possibility of the state to direct the course of historical development. Nikolai Miliutin with his characteristic perspicacity instantly understood the emerging danger. In December of that year he wrote to his brother, Dmitrii, the minister of war: 'It is necessary to fashion opinion, or perhaps a middle party, in parliamentary language "le centre", which we don't have here but the elements of which can evidently be found. Only the government can do this, and it would be the best means of consolidation for the government itself.' In April 1863 in another letter, returning to these thoughts once again, he wrote with alarm: 'There is no greater unhappiness for Russia than letting the initiative slip out of the hands of the government.'[36] The stake placed by the reformers on the initiating role of the monarch and the liberal public turned out to be unreliable, laying bare the enlightened illusions which were characteristic of their generation. But at the time in Russia there were no other guarantees apart from the irreversibility of the legislation that had been adopted.
Legislation and life: the fate of the Great Reforms and the fate of the reformers
The implementation of specific reforms cannot be examined in detail in this chapter.[37] But in order to have an adequate understanding of the problem presented here something must be said about the realisation of the great reforms in general. If one bears in mind the precise meaning of the 1861 legislation, it must be recognised that it did not anticipate the immediate transformation of gentry and peasant farming, let alone an immediate revolution in the economy as a whole. The final goal of the peasant reform was, however, quite definite: the creation of independent small, peasant farming alongside gentry farming. Until very recently, the prevailing view in the literature was that the reform was extortionate towards the peasantry, with inflated redemption payments for reduced plots, which led to land-hunger and ruination of peasant households on a mass scale. Modern methods of statistical analysis ofthe socioeconomic results of the peasant reform have allowed a number of historians to come to quite different conclusions. In reality, the abolition of serfdom by the terms of the statutes of 19 February led to the creation of self-sufficient peasant farming
28
P. A. Zaionchkovskii,
30
P. A. Valuev,
34
D. Christian, 'Zabytaia reforma: otmena vinnykh otkupovv Rossii', in Zakharova, Eklof and Bushnell,
37
For this the reader should consult the other chapters dealing with the peasantry, the economy, state finances, the legal system, local administration and the army.