First thing, there were no serfs in Russia in 1914. The Emancipation Decrees of the "Tsar Liberator" Alexander II had abolished the institution of serfdom in 1861. So the idea of a mass of Russians in forced bondage conditions of unfree labor was something that had not existed for over fifty years for the Russia peasant facing the prospect of war in 1914.

Second, the idea that Russia's peasantry existed in a state of perpetual squalor because of the politics of the tsar was one of the major lines of attack against tsardom throughout the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, these attacks on the state coexisted with a simultaneous romanticization of the peasantry and transected Emancipation. The Revolution of 1917 added a further layer of confusion as the Bolsheviks, as good Marxists, would argue that the peasantry's debasement was an example of the contradictions of the unholy amalgamation of a feudal political system and an emerging bourgeois capitalist order. These politicized readings of the peasantry helped cement an image of peasant suppression intimately connected to an unjust political order that has proved to be quite lasting. The poverty of the Russian peasant emerged as one of the chief justifications of the 1917 Revolutions, even if the victor in 1917 launched policies that were quite inimical to the peasantry's well-being.

The life of the Russian peasant though was incredibly complex and belies such oversimplifications. Even under serfdom, the peasantry existed in its world. To invoke a cliche common in Russian studies, serfdom was much more than an economic system of unfree labor, but it was a social and political system for a largely agrarian country, it was also a social and political institution. The peasant mir (commune) organized the division of land and the institutions of serfdom provided the levies for the tsar's armies. Noble economic power was intertwined with serfdom and the peasant commune likewise structured various peasant families and local power. Abolishing the system meant not only attacking entrenched interests of peasantry, nobility, and the state, but also begged the question of what would appear in its place. Nicholas I outlined the dangers of abolition in a rare appearance before the Imperial Russian State Council in 1842. The Emperor acknowledged that serfdom was not a moral institution and its days were numbered, but that "to attack it at this point would be even more destructive," than abolishing the institution root and branch.

Research on Russian serfs shows that while it was not the ideal system for an agricultural economy, serfs did eat rather well and the institution was well-adapted to Russian climactic and geographic conditions. While the fear of serf rebellion was ever-present in the nineteenth century, actual serf participation in the rebellions of the eighteenth century like Pugachev's was the exception rather than the rule. Even though the serfs were in human bondage, it was a form of bondage in which they often regulated on a day to day basis. The future Decembrist Ivan Yakushkin offered his serfs the option of renting his land in 1819, but his serfs refused his offer claiming that while "we are yours, but the land is ours." Although tsarist law said otherwise, many serfs perceived that they were the true owners of the land. Few serfs elected to buy their freedom and those that did were typically serfs who were somewhat apart from the larger mir and had skills that put them in a different social estate.

The Great Reforms both simultaneously changed the the countryside, but also kept things in their place. While serfdom was abolished, there were new laws and regulations tried to control the movements of the peasantry and reified much of the local control of peasant communities by patriarchs of peasant families. The mirs' leadership still practiced a hybrid form of strip farming, individual plots, and collective land that strengthened certain households. The land use itself was often inefficient and slow, and while it was productive for the early nineteenth century, such a system looked increasingly archaic by the 1880s and 90s. The predominance of certain peasant families created major problems in the coming decades after 1861 as industrialization needed a new workforce and broke some of the power of these traditional institutions. Second sons and those on the outer edges of the mir tended to gravitate to these new professional lives. Just as serfdom was the third-rail question in Russian politics in the first half of the nineteenth century, the means to reform the mir became the question of the twentieth century.

The best way to describe the peasantry in this period is "in flux." Literacy among the peasantry was on the rise, as well as greater mobility, and the increasing presence of a cash economy. Yet, social changes did not lead to wider political changes and the peasantry was in a very anomalous position within the political hierarchy of the late Empire. The peasantry was allegedly the backbone of the Romanov state and Orthodoxy, yet the state's policies towards the peasantry typically treated the peasantry with a degree of suspicion. Populists and some intelligentsy like Tolstoy saw the peasant commune as the future of the Russian state, but such Populist politics had a tendency to drift into millenarian ideas of little direct relevance to the peasant. Nicholas II's chief minister Stolypin arguably had the most coherent plan for the peasantry in this period. Stolypin hoped to break up the mir by offering subsidized loans to peasants wishing to buy their own lands and convert the peasantry into a conservative class of free-holders. But this bet on the "strong and sober" found few takers among the peasantry and Nicholas II was always skeptical of Stolypin;s plan. Stolypin's land reforms, launched just a few years before 1914, had no chance to work out to their conclusions before the war intervened.

A peasant's life in 1913 would certainly not be one to envy from the vantage point of 2017, but much the same could be said of many humans on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale worldwide. The peasantry had made some strides in terms of quality of life since Emancipation, but its political development was in a form of artificial stasis, as was much of the rest of the Empire. Village institutions and older methods of farming were often quite inefficient and the severity of the famines of 1891-92 was a testimony to the vulnerabilities Russia's agricultural system for a modern population. Many across the political spectrum in Russia recognized the problems of the peasantry and the notion that the peasantry was in contention helped contribute to the volatility of Russian politics in the run-up to 1917.

Sources

Frank, Stephen, and Mark D. Steinberg. Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Lincoln, W. Bruce. Nicholas I, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.

_. In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia's Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-1861. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1982.

Moon, David. "Reassessing Russian Serfdom." European History Quarterly 26 (1996): 483-526.

_.The Russian Peasantry, 1600-1930: The World the Peasants Made. London: Longman, 1999.

_. The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, 1762-1907. Harlow: Longman, 2001.

For a comparison between serfdom and slavery, I recommend Peter Kolchin's Unfree Labor. This sort of comparison is now considered a little dated, but I find it a really useful source on the lives of serfs since it uses something about which you know a little more (slavery) to frame it.