The emancipation of the serfs in the sixth volume of the jubilee work "The great reform. Russian society and the peasant question in the past and the present"

The work «The great Reform» in six volumes was published in 1911 as a part of the commemoration of the 1861 Emancipation of the Serfs. Our research interest focuses on the 6 th volume, revealing the goals, programs and impact of the reform. It was a joint project which united many well-known Russian economists, historians, journalists. They created a whole picture of the emancipation of the Russian peasants, addressing to numerous aspects of the reform. In the conclusion the authors posed that «the Great Reform» had a negative impact on the Russian peasantry, its social and economic development. According to them, the main results of the reform were inflated payments for reduced plots, which led to land-hunger and ruination of peasant households, and the preservation of the agrarian relations between peasants and nobility. In fact, the ideas of this jubilee publication were influenced by the Russian liberal tradition, these statements also were developed by the Soviet historiography.