The beginning of the twentieth century ushered in a period of widespread social unrest in Russia. From the end of the 1890s there was a steady increase in student disorders in the universities, a growing strike movement in the industrial centres, and peasant disturbances in the countryside. All of these trends were to culminate in the revolutionary upheavals of 1905.

The underlying causes of the peasant movement which broke out in 1902 were economic. By the provisions of the Emancipation Act of 1861, the peasants received less land than they had previously used under serfdom, and an unprecedented increase in the size of the rural population in the second half of the nineteenth century intensified the problem of ‘land-hunger’. Heavy redemption payments on their communal holdings, in addition to an onerous burden of direct and indirect taxation, increased the impoverishment of the peasantry. The inadequacy of his allotment to meet his obligations forced the peasant either to rent or to purchase land from the gentry, or to seek off-farm wage-labour in agriculture or industry. The pressure of population increase, however, pushed land prices and rents up, and kept wages low. The economic dependence of the peasantry on the gentry landowners was therefore on the increase in the decades after Emancipation. Those of the gentry who retained their land at the end of the century either rented their estates to the neighbouring peasantry or went over to more capitalistic methods of farming.