Russia under the Old regime

166

every two acres of arable be matched by one acre of meadow, in Russia around 1900 the ratio was 3:1 and in places 4:1. Lumber and firewood were a constant bone of contention between peasants and landlords.

Common to all the human flaws in the Emancipation settlement was an excess of caution. The settlement was, if anything, too carefully thought out and therefore too rigid; it allowed too little scope for self-correction. A more liberal, more flexible arrangement might have caused more trouble at first but in the long run it would have been better able to absorb the kind of pressures outside human control which in the end undermined it altogether; little revolutions might have prevented the big one.

Of these natural pressures the most devastating was the sudden spurt in population; a phenomenon which affected not only the one-time serfs, but all who made their living off the land. In 1858, Russia had 68 million inhabitants; in 1897, I25 million. Its compounded annual rate of population growth in the second half of the nineteenth century was i-8 per cent; the corresponding figure in south-western Europe was 0-4-0-5 per cent and in north-western Europe, 0-7-1 -i per cent. The overwhelming majority of the new people, of course, was born in the rural districts of European Russia, where between 1858 and 1897 the population increased by some 50 per cent without a corresponding increase in resources, as yields remained pitifully low. At the turn of the century, the average net income from a desiatina (2-7 acres) of land (arable and meadow) in Russia was 3-77 rubles, or not quite $2.00 in the then US currency. In the province of Moscow in the closing decade of the nineteenth century, where the average net per desiatina was about 5.29 rubles and the average peasant holding 7.5 desiatinas (about 20 acres), the net income was just below 40 rubles a year, or 4 ($20.00). If one counts the peasant's labour as wages, and adds to it his outside earnings, the most generous estimate of a farming family's net income in the Moscow region in the 1890s would come to 130-190 rubles ( 13-20 in British currency of the time) which fell far short of its needs.24 The imperial government which alone had the capital to invest in the amelioration of Russian agriculture preferred to place it in railways and heavy industry, although it drew the bulk of its revenues from the countryside.

The combined pressure of excessive fiscal burdens, social and economic disabilities and an uncontrollable population growth created a situation which made it increasingly difficult for the Russian peasant to support himself from agriculture. In 1900, it was estimated, he covered only between a quarter and a half of his needs from farming; the remainder he had to make up in some other way. The solution readiest at hand was to hire himself out to landlords or rich peasants as a labourer,