The Peasants

• As a result of emancipation, the gap between richer and poorer peasants grew wider.
• The kulaks were the better off peasants who had taken advantage of the greater freedom that emancipation had created and who had invested in buying more land and using new methods of production sometimes with the help from the Peasant Land Bank.
• Kulaks often employed other poorer peasants as labourers.
• Kulaks also acted as "pawnbrokers" by buying grain from a poorer peasant in the autumn so that they had enough money to survive the winter and then selling it back to them in the spring at an inflated price or for some land.
• Most peasants did not do so well.
• Burdened with high taxation and redemption payments as well as small plots of land to farm on, many poorer peasants struggled to survive.
• Many peasants moved to the growing industrial towns and cities.
• Both those who stayed and those who left faced hardship.
• The forced selling of grain to the government in the late 1880s left many peasant families starving which culminated in the famine of 1891-92.
• Life expectancy was below 30 in the 1890s which made many unfit for military service.
• The zemstva tried to provide some healthcare and education to the peasants.
• In the Russian heartland between Moscow and St Petersburg, over-population led to very small landholdings.

  
  

  In other regions such as the Baltic States, Western Ukraine, the Northern Caucasus and Western Siberia where overpopulation was not a problem, commercial farming was able to make more progress.