The imperial emancipations: Ending non-russian serfdoms in nineteenth-century Russia

Abstract

Emancipation in nineteenth-century Russia was directed not only at the ethnic Russian peasantry of the empire’s core provinces, but at peasants, nomads, serfs, and slaves throughout European Russia, as well as in the Caucasus, parts of Central Asia and Siberia. This chapter tracks various sections of the imperial emancipation policy in the context of external commitments, resulting from the Congresses of Vienna and Aix-la-Chapelle, and internal developments, highlighting emancipations in the Baltics, Georgia, the Kazakh steppe, and Kalmykia. Given the transcontinental and multiethnic dimensions, this chapter argues that just as absorbing and modifying different serfdoms served as one of the devices of Russian ‘continental colonialism,' emancipation itself became a process for furthering imperial control.