They did so through craft production and occasional wage work in a factory or on another manor lord's property.
The serfs were freed in 1861 by Czar Alexander II. Their initial euphoria was outstripped only by the numbing realization that in actuality, little had changed. The options open to them were either agricultural wage work under similar conditions to the ones that had prevailed before emancipation or equally exploitive factory jobs in the burgeoning industrial sector.
As capitalism began to flourish in the 1880s and 1890s, however, freed serfs became increasingly aware of their power as a work force and considered going on strike. At the same time, a handful of hard-working, bright entrepreneurs like Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard found loopholes by which they might make a fortune and purchase the land on which their families had toiled for generations. At the other end of the spectrum, the gentry class who owned the land were unaccustomed to hard work, and often resisted change until it was too late.
Land ownership. Overwhelmed by mortgages and loans past due, the landed gentry lost millions of acres of property between 1877 and 1905.
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