SCRIPTA ARCHIVI HISTORICI ESTONIAE |
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Kersti LustPärisorjast päriskohaomanikuks. Talurahva emantsipatsioon eestikeelse Liivimaa kroonukülas 1819–1915375 lehekülge, kõvad kaaned, illustreeritud. 2005 |
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EMANCIPATION OF STATE PEASANTS IN THE ESTONIAN PART OF LIVLAND (1819-1915)
SUMMARY
The nineteenth century was a period of major social and economic change in rural Estonia. Since most Estonians were peasants and lived in the countryside, changes in the rural areas are usually considered to be more important than those in towns. Historians tend to relate the emergence of the Estonian state in 1918 to the modernisation of the countryside. Furthermore, the independent peasantry was the economic and social basis of the new nation.
The Estonian peasantry was emancipated from serfdom in 1816/1819. Although the tight ties that bound farms with large estates were not cut through at once, they gradually became looser. Immediately after the abolition of serfdom the peasants still had to till manor fields if they wanted to keep the farms in their hands. But in the ensuing decades they started to pay money rent instead of labour rent or rent in kind. When they became more prosperous, they bought their farms for perpetuity. The consolidated farms replaced strip fields and often also common pastures of villages. The peasants switched from customary methods to more rational tilling methods. The yields and overall agricultural output increased significantly. The peasants started to sell the produce on the market and it had to meet the market needs.
The study covers almost a hundred-year-long period from the abolition of serfdom until the emergence of peasant land ownership in the Estonian part of Livland (northern Livland and Saaremaa). The research focuses on state estates. It follows the changes in land use on state estates according to the most important phases of peasant emancipation: the abolition of serfdom, the land consolidation, the transition to money rent, and the emergence of a class of peasant landowners. Both the changing legal basis of the relationship between the peasantry and their lords as well as the practical realisation of the regulatory codes are examined. However, the emphasis is clearly upon the latter, upon social reality. The study presents a peasant-centred view of the emancipation as much as it is reflected in the historical records, either written by the peasants themselves or by the officials.
Two main issues are treated in the thesis. Agrarian reforms relating to noble estates have been studied extensively since the majority of peasants lived there. As a result, the role played by the Baltic-German nobility in the emancipation has been discussed a lot, whereas that of the tsarist government has often been underestimated or neglected. Therefore, the tsarist agrarian policy needs more thorough research. Another main issue is the attitude of peasants towards agricultural innovation. In Estonia, it has long been suggested that the peasantry was conservative and adhered to customary methods of farming. My thesis challenges this deeply entrenched assumption. The thesis follows the trend of modern scholarly literature on agrarian history increasingly interested in the role of the peasantry. On state estates, decisions about land enclosure, transition to money rent and many other matters were entrusted to the peasants. By contrast, on noble manors the peasant was more dependent on the landlord and often a mere recipient of reform. Therefore, investigation into the agrarian development on state estates would probably reveal more about the peasantry's real intentions. Inspiration has been drawn from recent studies on agricultural development in pre-industrial German and Russian societies. The studies on Germany stress the peasantry's determination to be part of capitalist market structures. The cautiousness of the peasants is explained with 'risk aversion' principle used by the peasants in these unfavourable environmental, social and economic conditions they lived in. ´Backwardness` of Russian peasantry is seen as evidence not of ignorance or innate hostility to change, but of common sense and pragmatism. Most of Russian peasants lacked the resources, not the ability or the initiative, to modernize farming (David Moon).
Although the proportion of state peasants among the peasantry in the Estonian part of Livland in the nineteenth century reached 25%, very little attention has been paid to them in our historiography. According to the prevailing viewpoint among Estonian authors, the legal and the economic position of state peasants was better than that of their counterparts living on private manors. Such a viewpoint is at least partly connected with the large-scale reduction of manors and the emancipation of serfs on crown estates under the Swedish rule in Estonia in the last decades of the seventeenth century. In Latvia, the situation is much different. The large proportion of state lands in Courland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has provoked the interest of historians.
The thesis is based on archival sources from different archives (the Estonian Historical Archives, the Estonian State Archives, the Latvian State Historical Archives, the Russian State Historical Archives and the Estonian Literary Museum).
Chapter 1 gives an overview of the state estates from the sixteenth until the nineteenth century. First manors emerged already in the first century after the German conquest. Network of manors was formed by the end of the seventeenth century. Due to the reduction of estates, the number of state estates reached its peak by that time, too. In northern Livland there were 218 state estates. Approximately 3/4 of agricultural land belonged to the state. In the eighteenth century, the area of state owned land decreased. By the 1850s, the number of state estates in the Estonian part of Livland had dropped to 97. Estate-system was developed during these centuries. Both state estates and private manors were developed into large-scale agricultural enterprises based on corvee labour. Until the 1840s manors profiting from the sale of grain and vodka extended their fields.
By the time, Livland fell under Polish rule in the 1580s, the peasantry had practically sunk to the status of serfs, deprived of legal protection and subject to arbitrary will of manor holder. On state estates, the Polish rulers sought to reduce the abuses of manor renters and ease the burden of the peasants. The efforts to modify the relationship between the peasants and the noblemen became much stronger during the last decades of the Swedish rule in Livland. Several decrees ensured legal protection for the state peasantry. The dues were assessed according to the quality of the land. Wackenbücher that fixed the amount of dues were drawn up. However, some authors maintain that the conditions of the seigniorial peasants were sometimes better than that of the state peasants. The dues and taxes were levied more rigidly on state estates, whereas on noble manors the peasants could negotiate with the feudal lord. In 1721, Livland became part of Russia. Decrees issued during the reign of the Empress Catherine II and the agrarian law of 1804 that set limits to serfdom gave all the peasants, irrespective of their legal belonging, rights quite similar to those the state peasants had acquired already at the end of the seventeenth century. The measures were not aimed at overcoming the feudal order so much as at modifying it.
Chapter 2 discusses the abolition of serfdom on state estates and its effects. The agrarian law, promulgated in 1819, declared both privately-owned peasants and state peasants to be personally free. However, the land they tilled belonged to the manor holders or the state, respectively. The law was met with strong peasant resistance. Many peasants all over the guberniya refused to agree on rent contracts that kept their labour dues for the time being at the same level as they had been before. The peasantry continued its struggle to reduce the dues.
According to the above-mentioned law labour dues as well as other obligations of the peasants were not fixed any more but were to be based on free agreement between the manor holder and the peasant. On state estates, however, wackenbücher remained in force. Rent contracts with manor renters prescribed that they were not allowed to extract from tenants more labour dues or rent in kind than it was laid down in wackenbücher. Moreover, Governor General Philippo Paulucci issued 11 May 1826 an instruction together with a contract sample according to which new contracts had to be made with the tenants. The instruction prescribed that the dues of the peasants had to be laid down in wackenbücher and the manor renter was not allowed to raise them. The peasants were also given the right to pay rent in money, provided that the manor renter agreed. With the beginning of 1820s, a large-scale land taxation commenced on state estates. After the work had been accomplished, the dues (resp. rent) of farms were fixed according to the results of the taxation. The peasants had the right to protest against the results of it, in case, they found them not to correspond with their economic capacities. In principle, the dues had to be in accordance with the real productivity and income of the respective farm.
The state peasants, however, could be evicted from farmsteads after the expiration of the rent contract, but the manor renters seldom made use of this right. They made use of the above-mentioned right, usually, only if they needed to extend manor fields, but even then they could not act without the consent of state officials in charge of state domains. Still, the officials eagerly accepted the creation of new dairy farms (Hoflage) on peasant land. On private manors, by contrast, the manor holders forced many farm heads to leave their farms. With the transfer of state estates to the Ministry of State Domains in 1838, the attitude of officials changed. In the early 1840s, only few new dairy farms were created on state estates. The share of land possessed by the state peasants started to grow, as parts of manor lands were used to provide with small plots of land cotters and former farmhands left without livelihood as the farms did not need their labour force after the corvee had been replaced with money rent.
The decrees concerning the cotters were on state estates and private manors similar until the 1840s. The decrees aimed either at turning the cotters into farm heads by forcing them to take over empty farms or at compelling them to work for the manor or the farm as labourers.
Estonian historians, as a rule, suggest that due to the 1819 law the economic status of peasants even deteriorated because the manor holder could now extract as much as he desired from tenants and he could evict tenants from farms even if the latter fulfilled properly all dues laid down in wackenbücher and did not mismanage the farm. The peasants, deprived of rights to the land they tilled, lost any motivation to improve and develop the farm. Tenants in arrears were either forced off their lands or gave up the farm themselves. According to some estimates, the proportion of empty or abandoned farms in the province of Estland reached in some places even 20%. On state estates in the Estonian part of Livland, there were also empty farms on several estates but their number was much smaller. In the first half of the 1840s successive crop failures and the resulting famine badly affected the countryside. In order to escape the misery, many Livonian peasants searched for the possibility to wander out to Russia. Thousands of peasants converted to Russian Orthodoxism or ´tsar's faith` hoping that it would result in an improvement of their status or at least bring them some relief. The form of peasant revolts had changed. Not the whole manors participated in the revolts but the peasants individually. This study reveals that despite the state peasants were by law as well as in practice still protected from the arbitrary will of the manor renter, they did not escape the crises of the 1840s. Consequently, the causes of the crises are not to be searched so much in failure of the new agrarian law to ´protect` the peasants but in still existing feudal constraints that hindered the development of capitalism in agriculture.
Chapter 3 examines the land settlement on state lands, its legal framework and institutional setting. Beginning in the mid-1830s the tsarist government focused its attention upon the state domains. Nicholas I, who could not bring him to take decisive action in relation to seigniorial peasants, hoped that the reforms of the state peasantry would serve as models for noble landowners to copy on their estates. Thus, reforms on state estates should be seen as the start of the reform era for the entire peasantry in Russia proper. The Ministry of State Domains took the initiative in elaborating reforms for the state peasants in Russia proper as well as in the Baltic provinces. The Law on State Estates' Management of 1841 marks the beginning of a new era in the agrarian legislation. A new system of land taxation similar to that in the western guberniyas was developed. This replaced the older one based on the principles of the Swedish cataster from the seventeenth century. The Provisional Law on Land Settlement and the respective Instruction were enacted in 1845. These were followed by the Law on Land Settlement in 1854 and subsequent Instructions in 1858, 1859, 1865 and 1866 (some of these and a number of other regulatory codes are published in the appendices of the thesis). The differences in the instructions reflected previous experiences as well as changing intentions of those in power. Minister of State Domains, Pavel Kiselev, aimed to improve the conditions of the peasants in order to increase the revenue raised from them, but without overburdening them. In 1857, the newly appointed minister Mihhail Muravjov changed the course of the reforms on state estates. Unlike with Kiselev, the primary concern of Muravjov was to increase state revenues. He ordered an overall increase in obrok rates. The Second Department within the Ministry of State Domains and an inspector for land settlement were given the task of overseeing the land settlement campaign. Land settlement commissions and the Administrations for State Domains in the guberiyas were in charge of administrating the land settlement as well as carrying through the changes in practice. They proceeded the applications for enclosure and protests against it. The land reorganisation on the state estates continued until the early twentieth century.
It is characteristic of state estates that manors held less rural land than the peasants did. In the 1870s, when the land reorganisation had not yet been carried through on all estates, there were 6307 farmsteads on state estates in Livland. The overall number of farmsteads in the nineteenth century grew, but the growth was uneven in different regions. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the settlement expanded especially intensively in formelly less densely settled areas, i.e in areas with extensive forest- and marshlands (the county of Pärnu, the Avinurme region) but also in coastal areas (particularly in the county of Pärnu). In Saaremaa, by contrast, most of the agricultural land had been taken under cultivation already by the end of the eighteenth century and there was almost no increase in the number of farmsteads in the nineteenth century. The general tendency on the mainland was that the number of farmsteads grew more than the amount of land under cultivation. The average size of farmsteads decreased. Many farms were partitioned. Besides this, many former cottagers became farm heads, provided that they managed to extend the fields up to a certain size. By the 1870s, the majority of farms on state estates were small (in the counties of Pärnu and Võru), middle-sized (in the counties of Viljandi- and Saaremaa) or big (in the county of Tartu). Farms with arables 3-6 dessatins are classified small, with 6-12 dessatins middle-sized and those with more than 12 dessatins big.
The land settlement campaign proceeded slowly. It was partly due to the large number of border disputes between different manors that needed to be settled. The enclosure required the consent of 2/3 of the farm heads of the village. The state supported those who had to relocate the farmhouses outside the village onto new parcels of land with building materials and parish governments organized help with labourers. The system of strip fields persisted also after the land settlement campaign to a large extent in Saaremaa and to some extent in northern Pärnumaa and Tartumaa. The natural conditions and traditional settlement patterns varied regionally to a great degree. Before the enclosure the percentage of dispersed farmsteads on state estates was highest in the counties of Pärnu and Viljandi (approximately 30%) and the lowest (less than 10%) in Saaremaa. The land consolidation was easy to accomplish in areas where there were two to three farmsteads in a village (for example, in the county of Viljandi). It was much more difficult in areas, where arable lands were not scattered but located in huge plots surrounded by many farmhouses. The regional differences can also be explained by the differences in soil fertility and in the size of farms. The peasants in poorer regions (particularly in Saaremaa) had fewer opportunities to make a profit from their farms and therefore were less interested in new rational farming methods or more advanced crop rotations. Social order also had a strong impact on the choices of the peasants. When the corvee still persisted and the dues or rent increased as the farms became more prosperous the peasants were hardly interested in such innovations. As long as the peasant surplus production was taken away by the manor renters or the state through feudal dues, the peasants had little interest in improving farming. In addition, the number of cottagers in a village could also have some influence. In regions with numerous cottagers, the system of strip fields and more often common pastures survived longer. The way in which the land was reorganized sometimes led to long-standing disputes. Generally, there were conflicts between different farmsteads over the way in which to consolidate the land behind divisions in the village over the enclosure. After the state-financed land settlement campaign had ended, the land consolidation became more difficult as all the farm heads of the village had to agree to it and pay for it themselves. Nevertheless, despite these unfavourable conditions, several villages managed to consolidate strip fields into united lots and divide common pastures.
According to the dominant opinion, the consolidation of the farmsteads into united lots created the basis for innovation on the peasant land. Only then it was possible to replace the traditional three-field system with much more intensive crop rotations without fallow and increase yields. Recently, however, some English and German scholars have questioned this traditional understanding and argued that agricultural productivity showed a continuous rise also when the system of strip fields still prevailed. The progress in agriculture was based on more efficient use of labour, more careful tilling and better manuring. Although farming scattered holdings was less productive than cultivating land in consolidated holdings, this supposedly irrational and ineffective system did not necessarily prevent the peasants from introducing new plants or tilling methods. It provided the villagers certain social security and stability. The persistence of strip fields, apparently, cannot be solely explained by the peasants' alleged stubborn resistance to change.
On private manors, peasant lands could be enclosed only with the consent of the manor holder. Therefore, usually, it was the manor holders willing to sell the farmsteads who started to enclose the peasant lands. The majority of the peasant farmsteads were consolidated into united lots in southern Estonia in the 1860s, in northern Estonia in the 1870s.
Chapter 3 deals with the ´cotters' issue`. The cotters (the peasants holding a minimal amount of land) emerged in the Estonian villages at latest already in the sixteenth century, but the ´cotters' issue` became acute only in the nineteenth century in response to the rapid population growth. In the late nineteenth century, the cotters and landless peasants accounted for more than half of the peasantry. The Ministry of State Domains and its local agencies in the Baltic provinces started to deal with the problem in connection with the transition to money rent already in the 1840s, when there was no need for farmers to keep the uneconomically large number of farmhands. The social structure of the peasantry had served the interests of the Baltic-German ruling class. The wages of farmhands had included some payland. The Ministry wished, in the 1860s, to impede the emergence of the landless since individual land tenure common in the Baltic provinces did not provide all villagers with a parcel of land. The Ministry sought the solution in ensuring the cotters the legal title to the land they tilled, protecting them in this way from eviction from cottages by farm heads or by manor renters. Many farm heads in more economically developed areas tried to drive the cotters out or to exploit them heavily. In less developed regions, farm heads were ready to give some parts of the farmland to the cotters. Another way to tackle the problem of land shortages was to parcel manor lands on state estates and divide it among the cotters and the landless. Such a practice further increased the land available to the peasants, but it also provided large estates with inexpensive labour force, while the small plots could not ensure the subsistence of its owners. As a result, the number of small land holdings exceeded that of farmsteads. The overwhelming majority of cotters with legal title to the land were located on peasant lands.
Both the cotters and the landless sought solution to their distress in getting land. In the 1850s, they had started to petition the authorities for partitioning the state lands among them. This demand became more widespread in the 1860s and at the beginning of 1870s. On some state estates, they even partitioned the manor lands without authority. At first, they enjoyed the implicit and explicit support of farm heads as parish governments often were involved in the petitions' campaign. In the 1870s, the situation started to change. In the county of Viljandi, parish governments dominated by rich farm heads refused their support to the village poor and sometimes even called for soldiers to disperse their meetings. In the beginning, the religion played no role in land partitioning, but in the mid-1860s when the parcelling became especially intensive the tsarist government started to prefer Russian Orthodox as settlers on manor land. Despite the intensive struggle for the partition of the manor lands among the peasants, the decision which manors to partition depended neither on the number of petitions sent to various state agencies nor on the number of Russian Orthodox peasants living on the respective state estate. The tsarist government could parcel only manors where rent contracts had expired or whose renters gave up their rights themselves. The Russian Orthodox Church had a dual role. On the one hand, large amounts of state lands the landless desired to acquire were given over to the churches. On the other hand, the tsarist government wanted to support the state church and to strengthen its position in the borderlands. Hence, it was more inclined to cancel manorial economy on state estates and to parcel manor land to the landless. On the whole, 22 manors in the Estonian part of Livland were partitioned among the settlers. New settlers were exempt from obrok for some years. Land shortages were partly remedied. The campaign strengthened the peasant understanding that manor lands on state estates should be parcelled. They continued to petition for land even after the land partitioning campaign had ended. Over time, the demands of the landless as well as the owners of small landholdings who had already got land but now wished to get some more became more resolute.
Chapter 7 examines the attempts of the tsarist government to solve the problem of land shortages after the revolution of 1905. After the revolution of 1905, the tsarist government again turned back to the proven measure of relieving the distress of the landless. Several manors were partitioned among the local cotters and landless and rented to them. In Estonia, on the whole 1718 peasants received land. The rental of state lands to the peasantry, however, provided no solution to the problem of peasant land hunger.
Chapters 5 and 6 explore how the transition to money rent and the purchase of peasant lands proceeded on state estates. Neither the transition to money rent nor the purchase of farms took place in the three Baltic guberniyas simultaneously nor did they follow the same pattern. Both the legislation and practice varied to a great degree. On state estates, the money rent was fixed. On private manors, the provisions of law allowing for payment of rent in money could be implemented only on the initiative of the manor owner. The terms of the rent contracts made with peasants were up to the manor owner to decide. Therefore, on private manors the transition to money rent crept forward considerably slower than on state estates. On state estates the purchase price was fixed according to the land taxation whilst on private manors landowners could extract from the peasants as much as they wished. No wonder that the obrok as well as the land prices on state estates were considerably lower than on private manors.
The Law on State Estates' Management in the Baltic guberniyas of 1841 allowed for payment of rent in money and prescribed that the transition required the peasants' consent. It could be effected either by individual households or by the whole commune. The Land Settlement Instruction of 1845 granted the peasants the right to switch to money rent after the expiration of the rent contract on the state estate. It prescribed that farms located far from the manor had to be transferred to money rent, too. The 31 October 1846 Instruction prescribed that after the expiration of the rent contract on the estate notwithstanding the results of the state-financed land settlement and taxation campaign, the consent of peasants was required to replace corvee with money rent. In cases, where the land settlement and taxation campaign had been accomplished rent was fixed according to the taxation results, if not, it was fixed in temporary wackenbücher. On other state estates, the form of rent was dependent on the agreement between the manor renter and the tenant. In the course of the transition, the collective responsibility of paying the obrok was imposed on the communes (all farm heads living on an estate). This principle, alien to the Estonian peasantry, persisted till the peasants got hereditary rights to their landholdings in the 1870s according to the 1869 law. On private manors, the agrarian law of 1849 paved the way for the transition to money rent.
The transition process on state estates became especially intensive in 1848. By 1855, farms on money rent made up 70% of all farms on state estates. Ten years later only very few farms on state estates fulfilled corvee dues. On peasant land of private manors the transition to a purely money rent began in earnest only in the mid-1860s. On state estates, the pace of the process of the transition to money rent in the most backward regions, like Saaremaa, was as rapid as in much more economically developed regions in Livland.
The replacement of corvee with money rent paid directly to the state increased state revenues. The policy of the tsarist government was to introduce money rent on state estates. In some cases officials even had to persuade reluctant peasants to switch to money rent. By contrast, landlords were usually not willing to give up corvee. The traditionally corvee-based manors could not do without an unpaid labour force. The rapid transfer would have reduced, at least temporarily, the revenues from the estates. In Livland the state peasants' response to the attempts of the tsarist government to transfer them to money rent was more cautious than in Courland. This does not necessarily indicate peasants' backwardness. They were just poorer than their counterparts in Courland.
Soviet historiography suggested that the driving force behind progress in the countryside was the anti-feudal struggle of peasantry. Landlords' inherent conservatism and resistance to innovations could be overcome only by the intrusion of the tsarist government. Research on the transition to money rent on state estates suggests that this explanatory scheme is simplistic but fundamentally correct.
The peasants living on state estates were granted the right to buy their land holdings for perpetuity in 1859. However, as the taxation of land had not yet been carried out by that time the peasants could not make much use of this right until 1875. By that time fewer than 100 farms had been bought in the Estonian part of Livland. In the next ten years the peasants could choose whether to buy their land holdings or remain tenants. According to the 10 March 1869 law, the rental rate for the next 20 years as well as the purchase price of land was fixed according to the results of the last land taxation. Although the rental rate as well as the purchase price based on it increased in Livland due to the above-mentioned law on average 40%, both remained considerably lower than that on private manors. The 12 June 1886 law made the redemption of farms compulsory for all state peasants and the purchase price could be paid during the subsequent 44 years. The redemption debt was reduced and cancelled by the 3 November 1905 decree.
On private manors in Livland, the first farms were bought to perpetuity already in the 1850s. By 1882, approximately half of the farm heads had become landowners. On state estates, the process started a decade later but proceeded quickly. As noted above, in 1886 the redemption of land was made compulsory. The peasants living on state estates that were not directly administered by the Ministry, could buy their land holdings only in the early twentieth century. The share of farms purchased until 1886 was high in the counties of Viljandi and Tartu (more than half of the farmsteads were bought) and very low in Saaremaa (10%). All over the guberniya, the number of farmsteads bought to perpetuity until 1886 exceeded that of small households. As a rule, it was the wealthier peasants, more prepared to deal with the market who bought their farms. Although the peasants bought more farms in regions with fertile soils or, in some cases, with good fishing opportunities, the economic position of the peasants was a necessary precondition though not the major factor that determined the speed of the process of buying land to perpetuity. It was not only in the less developed regions that peasants remained tenants. The conservative-mindedness of the peasants should also be taken into account. The majority of farm owners could cope with redemption payments. Consequently, they had raised the level of farming and made use of the opportunities to sell agricultural produce on the market.
In fact, this was modernisation from above. It was new government legislation that forced the peasants to start paying money rent instead of labour rent. The majority of peasants bought their farms to perpetuity after it had been made compulsory by law. On state estates the rights of the peasantry remained more protected and the transition to money rent was started earlier than on private manors. Only the law allowing the purchase of peasant landholdings to perpetuity on private manors was passed earlier than the state peasants acquired the respective opportunity. The divergence between legislation and practice should be stressed, however. Although the 1849 law encouraged replacing statute labour with more productive hired labour on private manors, its provisions were implemented in general only in the 1860s. In the 1850s, most noble landowners were still ardent supporters of corvee. Kiselev reforms of the state peasantry ought to have had more limited impact on the agrarian order than they actually had. An independent peasantry emerged. The conditions of the state peasantry improved and as the reformers intended, the state's income of its peasants increased. At the end of Kiselev's ministry, the state peasants in the Baltic guberniyas were significantly more prosperous than they had been before his administration.
Before the reform-minded Kiselev was appointed the head of the Ministry of State Domains, some reform efforts were undertaken by the local authorities. After the creation of the Ministry of State Domains, most legal acts regulating the land use on state estates were enforced in all three Baltic guberniyas. Since 1866, the administrative and economic order there had to resemble that on state estates in Great Russia. The 1886 law on compulsory redemption payments instead of obrok was enacted almost in the whole empire. The tsarist government aimed at integrating the Baltic provinces with the western provinces of Russia and Great Russia.
The increasing intrusion of the tsarist government in the agrarian politics in the Baltic provinces was not welcomed by the Baltic-German nobility, who feared that this would reduce their privileges and impact in political as well as economic respects and force them to concessions. It caused tensions between the central authorities and the local Baltic-German nobility that was used to administer ´local affairs` in the Baltic provinces. The nobility sought to influence the legislation on state estates and keep the legislation on private manors in their hands. Although their influence increased significantly during Muravjov's ministry, it was too short a period to reverse the course of the reforms on state estates. In the 1860s, they struggled against the partition of manor lands on state estates as well as redemption payments of the peasants supposedly far below the real market value of land but without much success.
The overall speed of the capitalist development on state estates in the Estonian part of Livland depended a lot on the policy of the tsarist government, but also on the will of the peasants. In some areas, the reforms proceeded slower (e.g, Saaremaa, some parts of northern Pärnumaa and south-east Võrumaa). The peasants living there were poor and often in arrears before the reforms as well as after them. Their response to the efforts to transform the existing social and economic order in the village was more cautious than elsewhere. Although they were against corvee, its replacement with money rent was not always met with enthusiasm. On some state estates, the farm heads even refused the transition because of poverty. In Saaremaa and northern Pärnumaa the system of strip fields persisted. In these areas as well as in south-east Võrumaa, most of the peasant lands were bought to perpetuity only then when it was made compulsory. In these areas, except for Saaremaa, the farms were often partitioned during the land settlement campaign and the average size of the farms dropped. The soils there were less fertile and if the size of the arables was small, the opportunities to sell the surplus produce on the market as well as to accumulate capital were limited. The soils of Saaremaa, it is argued, suited better customary farming techniques. When yields elsewhere increased considerably after the reforms, there was only a small increase in Saaremaa. On the other hand, in southern Viljandi- and Pärnumaa the wealthier strata within the peasantry eagerly accepted the changes. Therefore, the environmental and economic conditions should be seen as important factors influencing the peasantry's attitudes towards emancipation.