Imperial Russia on the Eve of Revolution

At the start of the twentieth century the Russian Empire remained overwhelmingly agrarian: more than 80 percent of its population lived by subsistence farming carried out with technically backward methods. Society still bore the deep inequalities inherited from serfdom, formally abolished in 1861 but whose economic consequences continued to weigh on the peasantry. The peasants, or muzhiks, remained organized in rural communes known as the mir or obshchina, which collectively managed the periodic redistribution of land, a system that curbed individual initiative and blocked agricultural modernization. The "redemption payments" imposed after the 1861 emancipation kept countless peasant families in chronic debt until they were finally abolished in 1907.