1797, for the benefit of the imperial family, certain appanage estates were separated from the crown estates. The peasants upon the appanage estates were in approximately the same position as the crown peasants.
Before 1861 many of the serfs were extremely poor, but not a few were well-to-do, and some were even wealthy. Of the landowners, again, some were rich and some were poor. Not infrequently a serf would become a wealthy merchant or manufacturer, his relationship to the lord, who might be a much poorer man than himself, being thereby rendered unstable. One landowner would have thousands of "souls," in some cases as many as a hundred thousand; others would have but a few hundred; others again would have but two or three serfs, or perhaps no more than one. Two-thirds of all the landowners were in debt to the banks, for serfdom had been ruinous to landlord as well as to peasant.
Prior to 1861 the relationships had been further complicated by the differences in status between the crown and appanage peasants on the one hand and the peasants on private estates on the other. The crown peasants paid obrok, and were in most cases assessed at a lower figure than the private estate peasants. But there were different categories among the crown peasants; and the peculiar position occupied by the odnodvorcy, or one-farm men, has already been described.
Nor must we forget that even before 1861 there existed a certain number of entirely free and independent peasants, men who had been liberated by the crown or by the landowner, men who had purchased their freedom, and so on.
In the year 1860, in the fifty administrative districts of European Russia, the number of male peasants was as follows:—
| Crown peasants | . . | . . | . . | . . | 10,340,000 |
| Private estate peasants | . . | . . | . . | 10,340,000 | |
| Appanage peasants | . . | . . | . . | 870,000 | |
Of the total population, 38·1 per cent were private estate peasants, 37·2 per cent were crown peasants and free peasants, and 3·4 per cent were appanage peasants.
The following table shows the percentage distribution of landed property before and after the liberation of 1861:—
| Before liberation. | After liberation. | |||||
| Crown estates | . . | . . | . . | . . | 64·4 | 45·6 |
| Private estates | . . | . . | . . | . . | 30·6 | 22·6 |
| Appanage | . . | . . | . . | . . | 3·3 | 1·8 |
| Free peasants and colonists | . . | . . | 1·7 | 30·0 | ||
