The fathers: Russian liberals of the 1840s. Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century was just beginning to loosen the grip on a system of serf and peasant labor similar to ones that Western Europe had shaken off centuries earlier. Under the autocratic rule of the Russian tsar, or emperor, nearly all of the land was owned either by the state or by a small proportion of nobles and gentry. Amounting to about 1 percent of the population, the landowning upper class controlled slavelike serfs who lived on its land, peasants bound to an estate and its lord. Serfs made up about two-thirds of the population, the remainder of which consisted mostly of other peasants, who held a non-serf status. Russia’s middle class—primarily doctors, lawyers, and government officials—remained small; politically and economically, it was far less powerful than Western Europe’s. Limited reforms occurred during the eighteenth century, under Westernizing tsars such as Peter the Great (1682-1725) and Catherine the Great (1762-96), but by and large Russian society’s comparative isolation and stagnation continued until the beginning of the nineteenth century.
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