There are two, broad, interconnected reasons for the lack of a rebellion among the nobility during the Emancipation. Firstly, Russia's defeat in the Crimean War provided a pretext for Alexander II to enact somewhat sweeping reforms inside the empire. The defeat shocked many of Russia's elites as it was a defeat in the empire's own territory and had seemingly justified critiques of the empire that proliferated in elite circles during the reign of the conservative Nicholas I. Serfdom was one of the institutions that these critics and would-be reformers saw as one of the key factors in Russia's backwardness vis-à-vis the West. Such critiques dated back to the Napoleonic Wars and the Decemberists revolt, but serfdom was too entrenched to be removed without incurring a major political fight in the 1820s and 30s. Serfdom in these decades was the empire's political "third rail" with many reformers calling for emancipation, but being locked out of power under the Nikolavean state. Alexander II was much more amenable to reformist ideas and the Crimean defeat gave him an opportunity to staff men of a more liberal bent into positions of power. Moreover, the longstanding, but unresolved, issue of serfdom was one that many Russian elites were aware of; emancipation thus did not come as a political shock. Emancipation became one of several efforts by the state, termed by historians the Great Reforms, that sought to modernize the empire in light of defeat. Alexander II framed the Emancipation starkly in this context, alluding that if the state did not take care of matters above, then the serfs would eventually abolish the institution on their own.

The second major rationale for the lack of resistance was that the state's emancipation was neither very sudden nor radical in nature. Although the state forbid the sale of serfs and the rights of the nobility for corporal punishment, they did not give the newly emancipated serfs free land either. Most of the serfs had to repay their landlords for their land over a series of structured payments that lasted for up to 49 years. Although the state stressed redemption payments were at fair market value, they tended to be at inflated prices that favored the landlords. Emancipation decrees often stressed that the peasantry still owed their landlords rents and other dues, so it was not as much of a radical change in Russia's social structure as it first might appear. The nobility still dominated local political organs created by the Great Reforms such as the zemstvo and the peasantry still had to belong to a corporate estate, the obshchina (peasant commune), which controlled the redeemed land and was responsible for making restitution to the landlords. Thus the rural social order the Great Reforms created was still a somewhat conservative and structured one that was not so unfamiliar.