Between the years 1861 and 1914, many Russians thought the treatment of peasants remained unjust despite their emancipation. There were an immense amount of peasants compared to the general population, yet they were treated with very little value. Many thought the peasants should receive education, resolve the conditions of the areas of their residence and receive more rights. Many Russians thought the peasants should receive education to increase their treatment. In a Russian government report, between seventy years of change there was only a nineteen percent increase in literacy rates of the rural population, whereas the general population increased that same nineteen percent in only seventeen years (Doc 12). If the peasants were educated, …show more content…
The main issue seemed to be that since the Socialist Revolutionary Party seemed to be handling things well in the early 1900s, the government did not seem to realize the severity of the issue. In 1906, Sakhno, a peasant representative to the Duma, expressed the hardships not having rights which led to many other problems in peasant society (Doc 10). He expressed that paying the landlords their compensation money was becoming too much because that meant they could not afford food for themselves. In that same year, a peasant petition was signed by 41 literate peasants and 599 illiterate peasants’ names which were listed. Education, land allotment and laws, among many other things, were asked for (Doc 11). Serge Witte, who was Minister of Finance from 1892 to 1903 wrote to Tsar Nicholas II in a private letter suggesting that to abolish serfdom was not enough. In order to have a harmonious country, the now free serfs were to be given an education, a legal system and to free him/her from despotism (Doc 8). There many reasons to fight for rights; one being that occasionally the land owners would take all the good land and give the serfs all of the bad land, as a petition from the peasants to Tsar Alexander II in 1863 stated (Doc 2). This made it impossible for the serfs to grow anything, which contributed to the famines and poor economy in these peasants infested areas. The fight for the rights was extremely successful because many peasants petitioned very