The governmental policy towards the peasantry in the early 1880s

In the historical experience of Russia, the concept of modernization is inextricably linked with the notion of the state. At the turning points of the Russian history, for example, the reforms of Peter I, the abolition of serfdom, collectivization, and industrialization in the 20th century, the state ever played a role of an active transforming force. The government’s policy in the early 1880s could be viewed as a kind of transition from the Great Reforms’ epoch to the policy of «counter-reforms» which was more clearly developed in the second half of the reign of Alexander III.