The economic consequences of serfdom and emancipation in Tsarist Russia

"Serfdom has often been cited as a significant institutional constraint on Russian economic development in the late Tsarist period. Moreover, Alexander Gerschenkron and other scholars have long viewed emancipation and other peasant reforms of the 1860s as additional brakes on Russia’s economic growth. But this literature has seldom considered what the available empirical information actually says regarding these issues. This paper explores several types of empirical and legal sources to outline exactly what was meant by “serfdom,” how emancipation and land reforms changed factor endowments and the economic rights of the peasantry, and whether these changes resulted in different patterns of development across European Russia. These exercises are initial steps towards a causal evaluation of what serfdom and emancipation meant for Russia’s economic development in the century prior to 1917."