Russia under the Old regime

12

Statistical records indicate that the acreage under cultivation in Russia expanded steadily in response to this need, increasing between 1809 and 1887 by 60 per cent (from 197 to 317 million acres).12 The availability of virgin land discouraged efforts to raise productivity; it was cheaper and easier to put new land to use than to improve the old. But even this steady expansion of the sown area did not suffice, for rapid as it was the population grew faster while yields remained constant. In the 1880s, there was virtually no virgin land left in central and southern Russia, and agricultural rents rose spectacularly. At the same time (as noted) the growth of modern industry deprived the peasants of the main source of supplementary income by preempting the market for the simple products of his cottage industry. Here, in a nutshell, is the root of the celebrated 'agrarian crisis' which so convulsed Russia during the late imperial period and contributed so greatly to its collapse.

However, so long as the frontier remained infinitely expandable, the Russian peasant pressed outward, leaving behind him the exhausted soil and seeking soil that no human hand had touched. Colonization is so fundamental a feature of Russian life that Kliuchevskii considered it to be its very essence: 'The history of Russia', he wrote at the beginning of his celebrated Course, 'is the history of a country which colonizes itself.'13

Until the middle of the sixteenth century, Russian colonization had to be confined to the western portion of the forest zone. Attempts to gain a foothold in the black earth belt were invariably beaten back. The steppe, where the black earth lay, provided ideal conditions for livestock grazing, the principal occupation of the nomadic Turks, and they annihilated any agricultural settlements which tried to establish themselves on it. The road leading to the east, to Siberia, was barred first by the Golden Horde, and then, after its dissolution in the fifteenth century, by its successor states, the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan. The only area open to Russian colonization in the first six or seven centuries of Russian history was the far north. Some colonists, spearheaded by monasteries, did indeed venture beyond the upper Volga, but this inhospitable area could not absorb much population.

A dramatic change in the history of Russian colonization occurred after the conquest in 1552-6 of the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan. Russian settlers immediately began to pour towards the mid-Volga, ejecting the indigenous Turks from the best lands; others pushed beyond, crossing 'the Rock', as they called the Urals, into southern Siberia where lay large stretches of pure, virgin black earth. But the main migratory push then and subsequently proceeded in the southern and southeastern direction, towards the so-called Central Black Earth Zone. In the 1570s the government constructed a chain of stockades facing the steppe from the Donets to the Irtysh rivers, and under its protection, peasants ventured into what had been always a nomad preserve. The movement, once inaugurated, progressed with an elemental force. Each major economic or political upheaval in the centre of Russia produced migratory outpourings. In this colonist expansion sometimes the peasant preceded the government, sometimes the government led the way; sooner or later, however, the two elements were certain to meet and fuse. One of the basic reasons for the tenacity with which Russians have managed to hold on to conquered territories lies in the fact that their political absorption was and to this day continues to be accompanied by colonization.

It is estimated that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries more than two million settlers migrated southward from Russia's central regions, penetrating first the wooded steppe and then the steppe proper. During these two centuries, some 400,000 settlers also migrated into Siberia. The greatest migratory wave struck the black earth belt after 1783, the year the Russians annexed the Crimea and subjugated the raiders who from its territory for centuries had harassed their settlements. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 12-13 million migrants, most of them natives of the central provinces, moved south, with another four and a half or five million migrating into southern Siberia and the steppes of central Asia. The latter movement involved a wholesale dispossession and ejection of the Asian natives from their ancestral grazing lands.

In the earlier period (1552-1861), the mass of Russian migrants consisted either of free peasants or of runaway serfs, or else serfs forcibly transferred from the centre to work on the estates of military men serving on the frontier. After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the migrants were free peasants, now sometimes resettling with the assistance of the government which was eager to ease rural overpopulation in the central provinces. Over the centuries, the geographic pattern of Russian population distribution assumed the shape of a wedge, whose base has come to rest in the western part of the forest zone and the tip of which points south-east. This demographic wedge has continued to elongate over time, its changing shape reflecting a steady shift of the centre of the Russian population from its original homeland in the forest towards the steppe. In modern times, the heaviest concentration of the Russian population is in the black earth belt. The Revolution changed nothing in this respect. Between 1926 and 1939 over four million persons migrated eastward, mostly into the Kazakh steppe. The census of 1970 indicated that the movement has not ceased, the central regions continuing to lose population to the borderlands. A major secular process in progress for four hundred years has been carrying the Russian population outward