Without contention the most important reform was the emancipation of the serfs. The major questions of this are whether or not the emancipation took into account the needs of the nobles or the serfs more when laying out how the reform would take form. Writing in 1968, Petr Zaionchkovsky in The Abolition of Serfdom made the ground breaking theory that the reforms were from a reforming autocracy, that was trying to address the need for change, but within the preexisting system. The serfs had to be emancipated with enough land to develop economically, while the nobles or rather the hierarchical social order had to be maintained. It was this fact that allowed the nobles to exploit the results the emancipation in their favor. As time progressed