The Emancipation Decree was proclaimed on 19 February 1861. It was not read to the peasants until 7 March, the first day of Lent, when, it was assumed, they could be counted on to listen to their priests, charged with its communication, in a sober and submissive mood. Expectations had been running high. The peasantry believed that they would gain their freedom from the landowners: they would no longer have to work for them or pay them dues because they would be given all their land. As the authorities were well aware, the decree fell a long way short of such utopian hopes. The gentry had battled to limit the reform at every stage of its legislative journey from the Editing Commission of 1859 to its final passage through the State Council in January 1861. The result was a compromise, which satisfied no one, least of all the peasantry.
The decree removed the peasants from bondage to the landowners, but tied them legally to the commune, which received a share of the gentry’s land in communal ownership. The land did not come free, as the peasants had expected, but for a sum the commune had to pay through a sort of mortgage with the state. The commune’s household members were collectively responsible for these redemption payments, as they were for all taxes. For the next nine years, while the land to be transferred to the communes was determined by the local gentry committees, the status quo was not to change.
When the statutes were read out by the priests, the peasants scratched their heads in disbelief. Where was their land and freedom? In the village of Bezdna, near Kazan, the peasants reasoned, as they did in many villages, that the failure of the priest to mention them must mean either that he could not read correctly or that he had been instructed by the gentry to leave those provisions out. The peasants went in search of more reliable readers. They found one, a semi-literate peasant and Old Believer called Andrei Petrov. After studying the proclamation for three days, he managed to interpret the statutes in a way that told the peasants what they had wanted to hear all along. News of his discovery spread rapidly. Peasants came from all around to hear the long-awaited ‘golden charters’ in which their land and freedom were awarded to them by the tsar-batiushka, who in the popular imagination was still the same divine and paternal figure, the embodiment of their ideals of justice, invoked and impersonated by the Cossack rebel leaders of the past. The landowners were alarmed. Troops were sent to Bezdna, where they found 5,000 peasants, six times the population of the village, defending Petrov’s house to prevent his arrest. The peasants would not listen to the officer’s demands to give Petrov up. Chanting ‘volia, volia’ (freedom, freedom), they said they would rather die. After several warnings, the soldiers opened fire on the crowd: sixty-one people were killed and hundreds more were wounded before Petrov surrendered.