There's one thing that seems strange to me: if the Russian aristocracy was finally rather weaker and was on the decline in the 19th century, then why the Tsars often hesitate to go against their interests?
It took Alexander II a lot of discussions, compromises and compensations to abolish serfdom, and even then many, if not the majority, peasants were de facto still under the control of the aristocracy for financial reasons, as they weren't given the opportunity to buy their own farmland.
You are making a typical mistake of confusing aristocracy with nobility. The first was a small part of the second and the second formed a bulk of the service class (actually, anyone who was reaching a certain, not too high, level in the civic or military service automatically became a noble). But your question is, indeed, a relevant one and much discussed. As a side note and don’t take it personally, the picture you painted is not fully connected to the reality but this is a common misconcept greatly based upon the liberal and then communist propaganda.
Actually, discussion of the emancipation process started much earlier: as a Grand Duke, Alexander was a chairman of the commission discussing this issue and during the reign of NI there was Kiselev reform dealing with the state peasants. The whole thing took so long because nobody could tell for sure how it should be done with a minimal harm. Should the serfs be released with or without a land? The first option would inevitably result in the massive revolts. The second involved numerous questions:
- What land? Agricultural only? With the forests? With other types of not agricultural land (ponds, river banks, etc.)?
- How much of each type of the land? All of it, an arbitrary chosen percentage?
- Who is owning what right now? This was a long going pain in everybody’s butt and a cause of the countless litigations because in an absence of a comprehensive cadaster (an attempt to conduct it was not an overwhelming success, to put it mildly) the precise borders of a specific estate were quite often not known and, to make life more interesting, due to the Russian inheritance laws, the estates had been regularly split between all the heirs and then, by the marriages and purchases, the families were getting disjointed pieces here and there so the pieces a single village could belong to the different owners and an issue of ownership of the specific parcel of land was a subject of the litigation.
- What compensation the owners are entitled to? After all, the land was their even if the peasants tended to think that the part which their were ploughing was their and so were the communal pastures. In a civilized state ruled by the written laws you can’t just take someone’s property away because you think that this is a good idea. Contrary to what more than one participant of this discussion seemingly thinks, the “authoritarian” monarch simply could not do that.
Now, the last item is quite relevant because “everybody knows” picture is rather detached from a reality. Contrary to the popular assumption, most of the noble class did not own any serfs even in the early XIX. And this was the most important, from the state’s perspective, part of the noble class, the service people or the state employees, military and civic. Now, what about those with the land? Here comes the funny part. Approximately 40% (don’t remember precise percentage and not going to look right now) did not own their land. Who did? Alexander II. How comes? Elementary, Watson: a big part of the estates had been used as collateral for the money loans in the state bank, which belonged to the government personified by an Emperor. Even worse, most of these estates had been used as a collateral on a collateral to get the new loans (the government did not care as long as the percentages had been paid and when they weren’t the estate was auctioned). So, and there was such proposal, the government could claim these lands and just pay the owners a balance between the assessed cost and remained loan. Quite easy? Yeah, sure. The only problem was that the state did not have needed amount of money and printing a worthless paper was not a solution because financial situation was already lousy.
So the process had to be conducted in a way, which would not screw the
government. Which was the OTL way. What about a presumably protected noble (lets use the right terminology) landowners? Contrary to the “everybody knows” perception, they were the first to be screwed. They had to give their ownership rights to the government which was to compensate them and pass these rights (freedom and land) to the peasants who will have to compensate the government. Seems fair but the estate owners did not get the money. They got certificates by which they could get money over time. But most of them wanted money now, either to waste them or to set up thing in the new framework, so they were selling them to the speculators at the discount prices. And what happens when a market is overflown with some commodity? Its cost goes down. So the noble landowners had been getting only a part of what they were expected to get and most of them kept selling the rest of their lands. Enough to say that by 1913 more than 80% of the agricultural lands were in the hands of the relatively small owners and this included the lands of the imperial family contributed to the distribution pool because population growth caused serious land crisis, which is a separate story. Class of the noble landowners shrunk and a big part of the major landowners were not nobles but the rural capitalists (especially in the sugar beets industry).
Now, what about the peasants? They were also screwed on two accounts:
- They had to pay their debt to the state and if the cute schema introduced by AII and his liberal advisors worked out at its full extent, in the 40 (?) years of a planned payoff period the government would get 200% profit.
- By the “mutual agreement”, all the way till Stolypin reforms the government was protecting the communal land ownership model. The peasants liked it because it was providing certain social protection and the government liked it because it was much more convenient for the tax collection and administrative purposes.
But there was a catch 22: within that model the technological progress of the agriculture was pretty much impossible because, with the annual redistribution of the individual parcels, nobody was interested in improving quality of the land and because the narrow strips of the land would not allow application of the advanced agricultural equipment. As a result, the productivity was low, the peasant were getting too few money and could not pay taxes and the ‘debt’ thus forcing the government to lower demands and eventually drop the remaining balance. So the government ended up being screwed in its plans as well.
And more broadly, why did the Russian Revolution broke out if there were so many private 'bourgeois', similarily to Western Europe, while it is often stated that this is precisely this supposed lack of bourgeois which allowed the communists to take over Russia?
Because there was a little thingy called “wwi” to which the Russian Empire was completely unprepared and which caused huge problems. RE was in a process of growing pretty much everything and needed years or even decades of peace to get on the same level as the most advanced European states. BTW, which “Russian Revolution” are you talking about? One of the February 1917 brought to power the liberal ‘bourgeoise’ but it stuck to the military course and was overthrown by the political demagogues promising peace (for quite a few years after the event the term accepted in the official
communist documents was “October Coup”). ‘Bourgeoise’ can do little against millions soldiers who don’t want to fight a war and the rest was a byproduct of a brilliant demagoguery and organizational skills on one side and ineptitude in both on the other. Actually ‘others’ because opponents of the Bolsheviks were numerous and fighting with each other.
BTW, as a result of WWI all four empires, Russian, German, AH and Ottoman, ceased to exist and at least the German Empire was quite developed one. And, while the communist revolutions failed in Germany in Hungary, in a reasonably short time Germany ended up with a regime that was not “liberal” at all and most of the continental Europe west of the SU got various versions of the authoritarian regimes.
I don't think this is a completely off topic question to ask because it would show what impeded Russia, OTL, to 'westernize' (if you consider Communism not being 'Western', which I disagree, but anyway) and then what are the characteristics to erase to make it western.
I’m sick and tired of this “western” stuff, which in my opinion is meaningless. If you want to discuss the Russian history, it is fine by me. If you want to discuss who is or is not “western”, please find somebody else.
