Agrarian Reforms in the Baltic Region in the First Half of the 19th Century as the Prologue for the 1861 Reform

Activities of the government of the Russian Empire to transform the relationship between landowners and their serfs in the first half of the 19th century constitute various stages of theoretical and practical preparation of the 1861 peasant reform. A special place among them belongs to the agrarian reforms of emperors Alexander I and Nicholas I in the Baltic region. They had the most significant impact on the formation of the future reform concept, especially due to the fact that they took half a century to finalize: they began in 1804 and continued until 1860. At the first stage of the reform preparation in the Main Committee for Peasant Affairs, it was the Baltic model that became the primary one for the future arrangement of land relations in the empire.