Book Project

The Land of Discord: Rural Conflict, Development, and Legacies of Serfdom in the Late Russian Empire 

My book project explores the determinants of the rural conflict in the late Russian Empire. It addresses a major puzzle of why some countries managed to avoid large-scale agrarian conflict in the course of their development, and some did not. It offers novel theoretical explanations of conflict and clarifies the role of industrial development and land distribution, stressing the importance of the latter’s origins in provoking discontent.  

Persistent tensions between communal smallholders and large private owners haunted the Russian Empire in the last decades of its existence and facilitated the emergence of the revolutionary movement and the overthrow of the monarchy. The salience of the “land question” and extremely intensive and all-encompassing outbreaks of peasant unrest in 1905 and 1917 are all the more puzzling given that overall land inequality was not excessively high and three-fourths of land already belonged to the peasants at the turn of the 20th century.

I argue that an often-overlooked conflict-related legacy of forced labor institutions helps explain this puzzle. I develop a theory stating that unsettled and recurrent disputes regarding the distribution of land that had been occupied and utilized by forced laborers before their emancipation perpetuate discontent of formerly subjugated population and their attacks on the property of former beneficiaries of extractive institutions. In the Russian Empire, serfdom was abolished in 1861. During the emancipation, the land formerly owned by landlords and cultivated by serfs was divided between them. Emancipated peasants faced the shrinkage and quality deterioration of land allotments they used to hold, which did not just provoke an immediate wave of disturbances during the abolition of serfdom (Finkel, Gehlbach and Olsen 2015; Finkel and Gehlbach 2020), but also multiple long-standing and recurrent disputes and conflict in the post-emancipation period.

In order to identify the causal effect of past serfdom on rural conflict, I have collected novel fine-grained village- and district-level data on the dynamics of peasant unrest and various socio-economic and demographic characteristics. In my statistical analysis, I control for a battery of plausible confounding factors, match spatially proximate settlements, and apply a difference-in-differences strategy. I find that localities where serfdom had been prevalent before the emancipation tended to experience more intensive unrest in the next half a century. During the revolutionary periods, characterized by weaker state control and facilitated coordination of participants, the intensity of peasant unrest and the contrast between former serfs and other categories of peasants was particularly strong.

It turns out that neither land inequality per se nor disadvantaged economic position or cultural peculiarities of former serf villages are sufficient to explain such a strong impact of serfdom. I argue that the persistence of conflict can be attributed to the perceived unfairness of the post-emancipation land division between serf peasants and their former masters. Former serfs became aggrieved if they lost too much land as a result of the emancipation, and they tended to attack and seize land of the very estates to which they and their ancestors belonged before the reform. It should be stressed that many disputes were idiosyncratic, but the ground for them was prepared by serfdom and post-emancipation arrangements. Non-serf state peasants were in much better position, since they kept in full their landholdings and could afford to buy more private land.

In addition to the legacy of serfdom, I also explore the role of industrial development, which could have absorbed labor force from the agrarian sector, relieve “pressure” on land, and mitigate conflict. I initially developed this argument in my dissertation, which won the Ronald H. Coase Dissertation Award from the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics and the UW–Madison Political Science Department's award for the Best Dissertation in Comparative Politics. Using novel quantitative district-level data on industrial development in 1879–1908 and qualitative evidence, I show that the prevalence of industries heavily reliant on locally sourced raw materials (e.g., sugar refining) can provoke peasant unrest, whereas the opposite is true for externally sourced industries (e.g., textiles), which can provide local rural inhabitants with additional employment opportunities without competing with them for the use of agricultural assets.

Thus, the failure of the imperial authorities to implement a redistributive land reform that would have reduced the discontent of former serfs, coupled with the lack of mobility and outside employment opportunities for peasants, perpetuated rural conflict, which highly intensified during the periods of political instability. The expansion of peasant landholdings masked a stark disparity between former serf- and non-serf peasants, with the latter remaining in a highly disadvantaged position vis-à-vis private landlords and nurturing persistent grievances. Limited in its scope, ambivalent in terms of its impact on the countryside, heavily geographically concentrated and specialized industrialization was insufficient to put an end to rural conflicts.

In order to further reinforce my argument, I plan to additionally study peasant unrest in 1917, to conduct text analysis of official reports describing peasant disturbances in order to better understand the nature of their demands,  and put the Russian Empire in a broader European and global context in order to understand how similar challenges were overcome by other countries.

My related paper, titled “The Conflict Legacy of Forced Labor Institutions: Evidence from the Late Russian Empire,” is currently under review.