"All right, take the people away!" Mikhail waved his hand and said to Giovanni.
"Sure, brother. Next time you've got goods, make sure to contact me first," Giovanni shouted to Mikhail from atop the carriage.
The goods Giovanni hauled away were peasants bankrupted after the collapse of Tsarist Russia. Although Alexander II's reforms had granted the serfs freedom.
The local nobles had no intention of doing business at a loss, however. They used every possible means to squeeze the peasants who had gained their freedom dry.
Take land, for example. As part of the compromise with the feudal conservative forces, the ownership of land by landlords and nobles naturally had to be guaranteed first, and they also had to be compensated.
After liberation, the serfs received allotments of land, for which they needed to pay redemption payments. The size of those allotments was determined by region. The noble landlords "discarded the coarse and selected the fine," keeping the fertile land, along with vast forests and pastures, for themselves while handing the most barren land to the serfs.
Even so, Tsarist Russia was vast and rich in resources. In terms of area alone, the land received by its serfs was still considerable, but much of it was utterly worthless.
For instance, the north of Tsarist Russia was a vast expanse of ice and snow where crops struggled to grow. The sandy steppes of Central Asia in the south, along with wasteland in other regions, were likewise distributed to the serfs. In the end, the land the serfs redeemed at three times the market price was all worthless desert, frigid terrain, saline-alkali soil, and the like.
Besides being small in area compared to the landlords' holdings and poor in quality, the peasants' land was deliberately scattered during distribution by landlords and nobles,