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TheMahtra War (Estonian:Mahtra sõda) was a peasant insurgency atMahtra Manor (now inRapla County, 60 km or 37 mi fromTallinn) inEstonia in theRussian Empire from May to July 1858.
The revolt was suppressed. Fourteen peasants were wounded and seven killed in the conflict, and three later died from their wounds. The military casualties included 13 soldiers wounded and one officer killed. Sixty of 65 peasants were sentenced to death by a court martial in Tallinn. Baltic governor-generalAlexander Arkadyevich Suvorov later reduced the sentences of 44 peasants to corporal punishment, 35 of whom were sentenced to exile inSiberia, while the remaining 21 defendants were released.[1]
In theGovernorate of Estonia,serfdom was abolished in 1816 (in comparison, in the whole Russian Empireit was abolished in 1861); however, the land was not redistributed among the peasants andcorvée labor was preserved (until 1876). The March 19, 1856 manifesto of TsarAlexander II spoke about further agrarian reforms, but the implementation was slow, and this sparked unrest, including the Mahtra revolt.[2]
The events significantly influenced the work of the committees working on emancipation of the serfs in Russia.