Figure 11. Russian Peasant Girls around 1900.
Russian peasant farms were much less productive than European and even less than American. Chemical fertilizer was unknown, natural fertilizer was inadequate, and machinery was a rarity confined to gentry estates. The peasantry was too poor and too burdened with the redemption payments and rent to accumulate the resources that would be necessary to modernize their farms, and the nobility, except for the great aristocracy, also was unable to move beyond the traditional routine. Only in a few favored areas, like the Ukraine and the south, did the presence of commercial crops like sugar beets and nearby export ports for grain allow more modern agriculture to develop. There machinery appeared on a few great estates together with more modern methods of crop rotation. In most of Russia the village community encouraged the maintenance of routine agriculture, and most of the crops stayed in the village to feed the peasants. Still the growing towns and railroad network provided a much greater market than existed before. In central and northern Russia the peasants turned to dairy farming and more profitable grains like oats to supply the new and growing markets. The Transsiberian Railroad turned the Siberian peasantry toward massive exports of butter and other dairy products to European Russia, and by 1914 the Siberian peasantry was so prosperous that American companies had opened dozens of stores in the region to sell agricultural machinery, something unimaginable west of the Urals. Market gardening spread around the big cities, and even remote regions eventually were pulled into the seemingly unlimited export market for grain. In these areas a thin layer of better-off peasants emerged with better ties to the market and slightly more modern practices, and were quickly dubbed kulaks (kulak meaning “fist”) by their neighbors. The black earth regions of southern Russia, however, potentially the country’s richest land, remained the domain of impoverished peasants working with ancient methods, consuming their own grain, and gazing longingly at the massive gentry estates that surrounded them.
Not surprisingly Russian villages, even the more prosperous ones, lived at a standard unknown for decades in Europe. Peasant houses were still small, usually one-room buildings without a chimney – the smoke went out a hole in the roof or the window – and the livestock shared the space in winter. Several generations shared the same house. Dirt, crowding, and simple ignorance were the basis of medieval levels of hygiene. Not surprisingly typhus, tuberculosis, dysentery, and in some areas even malaria flourished. In areas where many male peasants worked in the cities syphilis was endemic. Smallpox could not be eradicated because the number of trained vaccinators was tiny, and many peasants hid in the forest from the vaccinators, convinced that the vaccination was the mark of Antichrist. In the middle years of the nineteenth century child mortality was at forty percent, though it declined noticeably by 1914. Though homespun cloth increasingly gave way to industrially produced fabrics, clothing remained homemade and most peasants still wore the traditional shoes made of birch bark. Alcoholism and heavy drinking were the norm: on Sundays in many villages the township courts did not meet because the male population was too drunk for serious deliberations. Husbands routinely beat their wives. The traditional values, centering on religion and folk wisdom were unchallenged, and religion still meant only the Sunday liturgy, which was rarely supplemented by a brief homily from the priest. Little could change with the great majority of peasants being illiterate. Only around 1900 did the slow growth of rural education begin to have an effect, as the younger generation in the villages came to be literate in larger numbers. Small rural libraries came into existence, and soon acquired a noticeable readership. The zemstvos put scarce resources into health care as well as education, and by 1914 vaccination was beginning to make a modest dent in the high levels of disease and mortality.
The greatest change to peasant society was the enormous increase in migration out of the villages, both permanent and temporary. The factories of St. Petersburg and the Moscow region drew more and more workers, both men and women (many textile workers were women). The rapid expansion of the railroad and of the cities, large and small, meant a huge demand for construction workers and other seasonal laborers, and many areas of rural Russia by 1900 were virtual “women’s kingdoms” for much of the year, as the men went north for the factories and construction and south to work on the great estates. Though grain production per capita rose slowly after 1861, it was not enough to prevent periodic famines, like the catastrophic events of 1891. Official encouragement of grain exports did not help. The peasantry remained poor and convinced that its poverty was the result of the unequal distribution of land. Though noble landholding fell slowly but relentlessly after emancipation, by 1913 roughly half of the land still remained in the hands of a few tens of thousands of noble families. The other half was the property – burdened by redemption payments – of some 120 million peasants.
THE LAST DECADES
The 1890s witnessed an economic boom that went far to transform Russian industry, if not the whole of Russia. For the first time heavy industry began to catch up to textiles and other light industries. The Donbass came into its own as a major coal and steel area, while St. Petersburg acquired more and more plants that serviced a modern economy. This was the great age of metal technology, not just in Russia but throughout the world, and the St. Petersburg metal working plants were able to produce most of the innumerable metal parts that made up railroad engines and bicycles, samovars, and wood stoves. Newer technologies were mainly represented by branches of European or American companies, like the German Siemens-Halske electric plant that produced electric motors for the Russian market. The Nobel petroleum interests, producing kerosene from Baku oil, and the Nobel diesel engine factory in St. Petersburg, were other examples. In the traditional industries and banking, Russian entrepreneurs predominated, though the colorful pioneers of the 1860s were dying off and their replacements were more impersonal syndicates and trusts. Some of their sons continued in business, others became art patrons, and yet others gambled away their inheritance in Monte Carlo.
The boom of the 1890s was the product of the business cycle not government policy, but the Ministry of Finance under count Witte certainly helped it along. Witte was a commanding figure in the government, more far-sighted than his colleagues and energetic to a fault. He inherited a new protectionist tariff from his predecessor, and enforced it rigorously to the satisfaction of Russian businessmen. In 1897 he put Russia on the gold standard, a move that enormously strengthened its international economic position. At the same time Witte was not an advocate of unlimited free enterprise: in his tenure in office the government took over most of the private railroads, and indeed his greatest accomplishment was the state’s construction of the Transsiberian railroad, already begun in 1891. Witte’s contribution was to propose a comprehensive plan for the line, taking into account the whole region and the problems of supply and construction, with the result that the tsar quickly approved his plan. By 1905 it was largely complete, though with single track only on certain segments and one flaw that almost proved fataclass="underline" Witte ran the line through Manchuria rather than inside the Russian border and in doing so helped provoke Japan to attack in 1904.