thumb|upright=1.5|A 1907 painting by [[Boris Kustodiev depicting Russian serfs listening to the proclamation of the Emancipation Manifesto in 1861]]
The emancipation reform of 1861 in Russia, also known as the Edict of Emancipation of Russia, ( – "peasants' reform of 1861") was the first and most important of the liberal reforms enacted during the reign of Emperor Alexander II of Russia. The reform effectively abolished serfdom throughout the Russian Empire.
The 1861 Emancipation Manifesto proclaimed the emancipation of the serfs on private estates and of the domestic (household) serfs. By this edict more than 23 million people received their liberty. Serfs gained the full rights of free citizens, including rights to marry without having to gain consent, to own property and to own a business. The Manifesto prescribed that peasants would be able to buy the land from the landlords. Household serfs were the least affected: they gained only their freedom and no land.
The serfs were emancipated in 1861, a process which took place following a speech given by Tsar Alexander II on 30 March 1856. In Georgia, the emancipation took place later, in 1864, and on much better terms for the nobles than in Russia. State-owned serfs (those living on and working Imperial lands) were emancipated in 1866. As well as having obligations to the state, they also were obliged to the landowner, who had great power over their lives.
The rural population lived in households (dvory, singular dvor), gathered as villages (derevni; a derevnya with a church became a selo), run by a mir ('commune', or obshchina in official terms). Imperial Russia had around 20 million dvory, forty percent of them containing six to ten people.
The mir assembly, the skhod (sel'skii skhod), appointed an elder (starosta) and a 'clerk' (pisar) to deal with any external issues. Although there were many regional differences and customs, peasants within a mir in central Russia shared land and resources. The strips were periodically redistributed within the villages to produce level economic conditions. The land, however, was not owned by the mir; the land was the legal property of the 100,000 or so landowners (pomeshchiks, an equivalent of "landed gentry") and the inhabitants, as serfs, were typically not allowed to leave the property where they were born. The peasants were duty-bound to make regular payments in labor and goods. It has been estimated that landowners took at least one third of income and production by the first half of the nineteenth century.
Earlier reform moves
The need for urgent reform was well understood in 19th-century Russia. Much support for it emanated from universities, authors and other intellectual circles. Various projects of emancipation reforms were prepared by Mikhail Speransky, Nikolay Mordvinov, and Pavel Kiselyov. However, conservative or reactionary nobility thwarted their efforts. In Western guberniyas serfdom was abolished early in the century. In Congress Poland, serfdom had been abolished before it became Russian (by Napoleon in 1807), but it was largely restored once Russia took over in 1815. Serfdom was abolished in governorates of Estonia in 1816, in Courland in 1817, and in Livonia in 1819.
In 1797, Paul I of Russia decreed that corvee labor was limited to 3 days a week, and never on Sunday, but this law was not enforced. Beginning in 1801, Alexander I of Russia appointed a committee to study possible emancipation, but its only effect was to prohibit the sale of serfs without their families. Beginning in 1825, Nicholas I of Russia expressed his desire for emancipation on many occasions, and even improved the lives of serfs on state properties, but did not change the condition of serfs on private estates.