Promysly, however, vital as they were, could not of themselves support the national economy: the latter, in the end, depended on farming. The rapid exhaustion of the soil under conditions of Russian agriculture compelled the peasant to be continually on the move in search of virgin land or land which had regained its fertility from a long rest. Even had the population of the country remained constant, Russia would have
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.
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.