Overcoming Institutional Inertia: Serfdom, the State and Agrarian Reform in Prussia and Russia

Tracy Dennison Periods of radical reform are attractive to historians, for they are fascinatingly complex historical events. But they can also be misleading. What appears radical at a given moment may have been, in fact, the result of a series of smaller, incremental changes over a long period of time. Similarly, a radical plan for social and economic change may, once implemented, leave the existing institutional equilibrium largely unchanged, thus having a trivial impact on the lives of most people. These possibilities are explored here, through a comparison of two major agrarian reform efforts in the nineteenth century: the abolition of serfdom in Prussia (1807) and in Russia (1861) . It will be suggested that in both cases reform was far less radical than implied in the historiography. In Prussia, the institutional equilibrium was altered significantly, though over quite a long period of time, with the 'shock' of the French...