The "Emancipation Manifesto" signed by Czar Alexander II gave serfs land.
According to the manifesto, serfs obtained immediate personal freedom and the promise to own personal property. But the manifesto and the process in which it based the method of granting land to former serfs were slow and complicated. The peasants were granted the right to “redeem” (buy out) their houses and adjacent garden plots, but the fate of the much larger cultivated land plots depended on the landowners’ will.
