Russia under the Old regime

THE ENVIRONMENT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

always experienced an unusual amount of peasant movement. The rapid growth of population in modern times gave this tendency a powerful added stimulus.

In so far as imperfect demographic records allow one to judge, until the middle of the eighteenth century the population of Russia remained relatively small. The most generous estimates place it at 9-10 million in the middle of the sixteenth century, and 11-12 million towards its end; other, more conservative estimates, put it at 6 and 8 million, respectively. These figures compare with a sixteenth-century population of 20 million in Austria, 19 in France, and 11 in Spain; Poland in the seventeenth century had some 11 million inhabitants. In Russia, as in the rest of Europe, the demographic spurt began around i 750. Between 1750 and 1850, the population of the Russian Empire quadrupled (from 17-18 to 68 million). Some of this growth, perhaps as much as 10 million, can be accounted for by conquest; but even when allowance has been made for expansion, the natural growth remains impressive. After 1850, when territorial expansion virtually ceased (the only major area conquered after that date, Turkestan, did not have many inhabitants), the population of Russia increased at a staggering rate: from 68 million in 1850 to 124 million in 1897 and 170 million in 1914. If during the second half of the sixteenth century, Russia's population had increased perhaps by 20 per cent, in the second half of the nineteenth it doubled. Russia's rate of population growth during the second half of the nineteenth century was the highest in Europe - and this at the very time when its grain yields were Europe's lowest.11

Unless the population were to perish from mass starvation - which until the Communist regime it did not, despite recurrent harvest failures and occasional regional famines - the food to feed these additional mouths had to come from somewhere. Imports were out of the question, for Russia had little to sell abroad with the proceeds of which to buy food; and those who did the selling - the tsar and the richest landlords -preferred to import luxuries. Indeed, cereals constituted Russia's own largest export item: Russia kept on exporting cereals in the nineteenth century even when she had not enough for her own people. Intensification of productivity through heavier manuring, use of machinery, and other methods conducive to rationalization was not feasible either, partly because the returns were too meagre to justify the necessary investments, partly because the rigid social organization of the peasantry resisted innovation. Capital was invested in land mainly on those southern farms which grew food for export to England and Germany; but on this land improvements of production did not benefit the peasant. The solution therefore was to put more and more fresh land under cultivation, that is, to practise extensive, in lieu of intensive, agriculture.