Traditionally, Russia had been a society with a rigid class system. From the seventeenth century through the middle of the nineteenth, this included a system under which most of the people were serfs, which meant that they were practically slaves of the people who owned the land on which they lived, and were at their mercy. Growing pressure throughout the first half of the 1800s, brought on by the international movement toward freedom that had already caused the American Revolution and the French Revolution, led to government reform, giving the serfs their freedom in 1861, soon before slavery was abolished in America. Not much changed when the serfs were freed. The arrangement was for them to inherit control of the land they worked, but they had to pay back the aristocrats that they.....
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