Russia under the Old regime

14

from the central forest zone, mostly towards the east and south, causing them to inundate areas inhabited by nations of other races and cultures, and producing serious demographic dislocations in the path of their movement.* Having surveyed the economic and demographic consequences produced by Russia's environment, we can now turn to the consequences of a social character.

The first fact to note is that the geography of Russia discourages individual farming. A general rule seems to exist which holds that northern climates are conducive to collective farm work: 'Everything indicates that fields lying in the north have been cultivated by people who conceive agricultural exploitation as collective labour, and those in the south by people determined to safeguard the independence and the freedom of initiative of each cultivator on his land.'14 There are many reasons why this should be so, but in the ultimate analysis all of them have to do with the brevity of the agricultural season. Any job that requires x workersy days of full-time work to complete, will-ifitmustbe done in \\z y time - require 2x workers; and the same applies to the draught animals and agricultural implements used by these workers. The unalterable fact that all the field work in Russia must be completed between four and six months (instead of the eight to nine months available to the western farmer) calls for work being performed with great intensity, and induces the pooling of resources, human as well as animal and material. An individual Russian peasant, farming with his wife and minor children and a horse or two simply cannot manage under the climatic conditions prevailing in the forest zone; he needs help from his married children and neighbours. In the southern zone of Russia the pressure to work collectively diminishes somewhat, which explains why in pre-Revolutionary Russia most of the individual farmsteads, called khutora, were to be found in the Ukraine and the Cossack regions.

The collective character of farming in Russia influenced the structure of the peasant family and the village.

The traditional type of peasant family in Russia, prevalent until a century ago, was of the so-called joint type; it consisted of father, mother, minor children and married sons with their wives and offspring. The head of this group was called boVshak ('the big one' or 'boss'). He was most commonly the father. Upon his death the family usually broke up; but sometimes it happened that after the father had died or become

* Since the end of the Second World War, there has been significant Russian migration westward as well, into areas originally populated by Poles, Jews, Germans and the Baltic nationalities. This colonization, in contrast with those of the past, is heavily urban. It is occasionally accompanied by mass expulsions and deportations of the indigenous peoples on charges of 'nationalism'.