Neo-Serfdom: Its Origin and Nature in East Central Europe

The freeing of the serfs occurred in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. Although it ended the personal subjection of the peasantry and abolished the feudal obligations of deliveries in kind and services, bringing to a close the feudal and clearing the way for the capitalist form of landholding, this transformation allowed the ex-feudal lords to retain those lands that they had administered themselves in the past by converting into peasant holdings only the so-called rustical lands that had previously been cultivated on their own account by the serfs. The demesne lands, which the feudal owners had managed themselves, were for the greater part cultivated by robot (corvée) labor, and to a lesser extent by those who worked for wages, although some parts were worked by landless peasants to whom they were rented out in exchange for a great variety of obligations. These people received no land when the serfs were freed. The most serious socioeconomic problem of the capitalist century in Eastern Europe was the misery of the masses of landless .peasants as well as of the small and dwarf holders who lived in the shadow of the large estates whose origin was feudal and on which they worked as wage laborers. For this reason it is quite understandable that the origin of the land-tenure system that followed the freeing of the serfs had to become, sooner or later, one of the focal points of historical research.