Turning from revolutionary France to Russia, the second subsection is titled "The Revolution of the Obshchinas: Peasant Radicalism in Russia" (128–139). In this section, the agrarian conditions after the emancipation (128–132), the impact of the political crises of 1905 and 1917 (133–136), and the leveling outcome in Russia (136–139) are discussed. The French and Russian Revolutions shared similar factors: rentier agriculture, peasant community structures, and the breakdown of the repressive machine. Serfdom was considered the basis of the Russian autocracy. Chained to estate lands, communities of peasants were held collectively responsible for payments and labor service to nobles. Once the Imperial regime was established, heavy taxes and provision of military recruits were added to the obligations of the serfs. Peasants could express no more than sporadic, localized resistance. The 1861 “Emancipation” of the serfs was initiated by the tsar and his bureaucrats. Its purpose was to improve the social stability and political spirit of the Imperial system. The Emancipation set the stage for the agrarian revolution that uprooted the pre-revolutionary social order in 1917. The institutional basis of the Emancipation was based on the "obshchina": a village commune that controlled property in land and distributed access to it among individual households. What the peasants wanted the most out of the Russian Revolution and what they immediately achieved was possession of the land and the available means for working it. It was the "obshchina’s" collective interest in expanding its landholdings, as well as its weakening of private property rights, that contributed to the Russian peasant revolution and its accomplishments.