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the pressure of population, which was still intense in thecentral black-earth and the middle Volga provinces, wherethe land was almost the sole source of livelihood andwhere famine-relief records showed far the highestfigures of relief and indebtedness. As much as ever, thepeasants looked at the gentry's estates: "You havestolen our land."The land held by the nobility and the gentry in theRussian core of the empire had dwindled to two and ahalf times what it had been before emancipation (1861).Many of their estates were small; many heavilymortgaged. There had been far more peasant buyingof them in the ten years 1907-17 than in the previousthirty years. Yet big estates and latifundia still bulkedlarge, and the fact remained that the nobility and thegentry, perhaps rather over one million all told with theirfamilies, still owned about a hundred million acres incontrast with the peasants, nearly a hundred times morenumerous, but with not much more than four timesmore land. 1 Rightly or wrongly the peasants felt thatthe land was theirs and that they had been cheated ofthe fruits of emancipation.The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 was the firstof the great reforms under Alexander II which beganthe transformation of Russia into a modern state(cf. pp. 76-77). It meant the beginning of an economic,social, and psychological revolution, especially in thesolid Russian regions that were the heart of serfdom. 2At the time of emancipation about 50,000,000 of the60,000,000 inhabitants of European Russia, without thenon-Russian fringes, were peasants of one kind oranother. Of these just over 20,000,000 were the serfsof the nobility and gentry, the landlords' serfs. Ratherunder 20,000,000 were state peasants, whose positionvaried greatly but approximated to that of the former,1To realize the scale of the land and peasant problem in Russia bearin mind that the total acreage of Great Britain is only 57,000,000 andthat (1931) only 1,343,000 persons were classed as occupied in agriculture,though that does not include their families.2 The best introduction to emancipation and the peasants in thenineteenth century is Nekrasov's great poem Who can be Happy andFree in Russia? (1873), translated in the World's Classics series.'35